Chelmer Cycling Club

All riders have different needs. A common mistake made by cyclists is to think ‘if it’s good enough for Lance Armstrong, then it must be good enough for me’. Nothing could be more wrong; unless you have exactly the same ability, physiology and lifestyle as Lance Armstrong, then his program will be quite wrong for you.

Coaches are experienced in assessing the needs of individuals; they work with top riders who have an excess of natural ability and with average riders who have many other commitments that compete with their training time. Your coach should identify your personal strengths and weaknesses, encouraging you to concentrate on improving your weaknesses, as these are where you can gain the most.

How can coaching help me?

A good coach will start with lots of questions. You could call it a ‘self-assessment’ program, as you will be supplying the answers. You must be completely honest about what you have done in the past and what you hope to do in the future. Family and work commitments should be taken into account. If you work 72 hours a week at a heavy manual job, then you will not achieve as much as if you have short hours and light office work, but you can still train and achieve a big improvement in your fitness.

The problem is the same for all cyclists from Lance Armstrong to a novice; there are never enough hours in a day. Your coach will take work commitments into account and will help you make the most of whatever time you have.

What will the coach do?

After the questionnaire, your coach will want to establish your present level of fitness. Without knowing where you are before you start, it would be impossible to set goals for future achievements, to monitor your progress, or to know at what level to start your program. Your heart-rate training zones must be established accurately, as they will be used to prescribe future training. For this purpose a heart rate monitor is really useful, preferably a recording one.

The next stage will be to draw up a training plan. This will be a personal training program just for you. It will take into account your ambitions for the next season and beyond, making the best use of your available time.

When you first use your new training plan, things may seem a little strange. Your coach will be deliberately taking you right out of your comfort zone! This is where difficulties often occur when experienced cyclists are coached for the first time. There’s a tendency for people to carry out the same program from year to year. But as all good coaches know, most of the value of a training program is lost after about four of five repetitions. Yet as a coach I often see riders whose training program consists of just riding lots of miles, usually at a fairly steady pace. Then after a few winter months of this, they head for their first race and wonder why it feels a bit hard.

Your coach will try to proportion your training time so that you have the right balance of speed and endurance work. The emphasis will be on quality rather then quantity

So what’s a Scientific Training Program all about?

The word ‘Science’ comes from the Latin word ‘Scio’, which means ‘I Know’. Science should be a discipline based on knowledge.

That’s the basis of good coaching, start with a basic plan, try it out, monitoring your fitness as you go along and in the light of the knowledge gained from the observations, modify the plan to improve it.

The scientific method needs working at; you will probably need some time before you understand every-thing that’s going on. Before we had pulse monitors and other methods of monitoring our performance, riders would say ‘listen to your body’, it was good advice! Pulse monitors and other tools for coaching need to be respected and used with care. The wrong information can be worse than no information! All this means you have to 'train' to train, all successful riders are good at understanding their own capabilities and limitations.

So how do we tell fact from fiction when there’s so much information in books and magazines?

We need to start by looking at who is paying for the information. A road test of a disc wheel for example. Is it by a truly independent expert, or a newspaper hack who’s trying to please the publishers, who benefit from the advertising they get! It’s often very hard to test a piece of equipment. Wind tunnel tests are more expensive than the total annual sales of many cycle-part manufacturers and streamlining does not always follow the ‘visual rules’ we might expect!

So how do I consult a coach?

That's easy, just pick up the phone or send me an e-mail! It may not cost anything, but if it does, it will be far better value than fancy wheels or carbon gizmos.

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Chelmer Cycling Club

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