One of the nicest things about being a triathlete is all the
time you get to spend outdoors. There’s nothing like a long
run or ride on a beautiful sunny day, when you get to enjoy
the scenery and, if you’re lucky, some great fresh air.
In terms of improving your performance, though, you might
want to consider spending a bit of your bicycle training
time indoors … no matter how nice things might be outside.
Yes, I know … if you’re like me, and have to endure far too
many hours training indoors through a tough winter, the
thought of going indoors during the summer is, well,
painful. If you really want to improve your cycling, though,
it might be in your best interest to do at least one workout
a week on some sort of an indoor trainer.
Kate Major does, and it certainly doesn’t appear to have
hurt her results over the last year. In addition to a win at
Ironman USA Lake Placid last year, she finished an
impressive third at the Ironman World Championship last
October, and then recently won the inaugural Ironman Arizona
race.
Despite the fact that she spends her life bouncing between
Australia’s and Southern California’s summers, Major does
two of her five weekly rides indoors on a CompuTrainer.
“I do two rides on my CompuTrainer a week, and three outside
rides,” she said in an interview before her win in Arizona.
“I ride on the CompuTrainer because I can keep track of the
wattage and what I’m doing, and I can control it all more
than if I was outside.”
Major is hardly the only Ironman champ who utilizes her
CompuTrainer for indoor work … already this season
CompuTrainer users have won three Ironman races. Lisa
Bentley won Australia (for the 4th year in a row! ), Raynard
Tissink and Natascha Badmann won in South Africa, and Major
won her second Ironman title in Arizona. Over the last four
years, CompuTrainer users have won seven or more Ironman
races a year.
“With this consistent winning pattern year after year it is
apparent that training on CompuTrainer makes an important
performance difference,” says CompuTrainer’s Chuck Wurster.
As a coach, I like to see the athletes I work with do at
least one workout every week on a CompuTrainer, rollers, or
windtrainer. I have found it’s a great way to monitor how
training is going, and it’s also a very efficient way to get
some high-intensity workouts done. I have found that without
these indoor sessions, people tend to gravitate to
“steady-state” type efforts when they’re outside, especially
if they ride with other people. Those workouts are great,
but all-too-often I find the triathletes I work with have
far too many of those kind of workouts in their program, and
not enough of the really high-intensity work that will help
them improve their performance.
As we come into the North American race season, the focus of
the indoor workouts is on intensity, and, more specifically,
working on your ability to maintain a hard effort for an
extended period of time. A set that worked very well for me
during my last year of racing was what I called the
“20-minute drill.” After a 10- to 15-minute warm up, I would
do a series of intervals with a minute or two of recovery.
During the recovery, though, I never let my heart rate get
too low – never more than 20 beats below the level I reached
during the interval. The set was: three minutes hard/ 1MRI
(minutes rest interval), four minutes hard/ 2MRI, five
minutes hard/ 1MRI, followed by one last set of four minutes
hard riding.
Done hard enough, I would literally be ready to fall off my
bike by the end of the 20 minutes. I did that set at least
once a week throughout the entire summer, and had one of the
best half-Ironman races of my career!
While a set like that focuses on your ability to maintain a
hard pace for a longer period of time, using a trainer can
help with pretty much any aspect of your training. For
athletes who struggle on hills, we focus their indoor
training on strength. Their intervals are much shorter,
involve lots of resistance, and lots of recovery time. This
is where a CompuTrainer really works well. Once we have an
idea of the athlete’s maximum power output, we try to do
intervals at various percentages of that maximum. Say, for
example, the athlete can push 400 watts for a short period
of time. We’ll start with a series of four- to eight-30
second intervals with the CompuTrainer set at 250 watts, and
then recover for two minutes at 100 watts of resistance. (I
like to do these intervals with the CompuTrainer set in
manual mode, so we can adjust the wattage accordingly.)
As the summer progresses, we try to move intensity up. We
can gauge if we’re getting the results we’re looking for
based on the athlete’s ability to push more resistance.
While using a CompuTrainer can make your indoor training
much more enjoyable, and provide you with much more
feedback, you can also achieve many of the same results on a
regular windtrainer. Over the years I developed a whole
series of different windtrainer workouts to help my athletes
work on specific areas of their training. Each set has a
specific focus: strength, anaerobic threshold training,
cardiovascular efficiency, spinning efficiency, or
technique. During the cold Canadian winter, we’ll work on
all of those areas every week – it keeps all the indoor
training a little easier to handle! In the summer, though,
the sets are geared to work on each athlete’s weakness –
some might focus more on strength, others on speed, etc.
Recently one of my victims … I mean athletes … has taken
many of those sets and adapted them into CompuTrainer
courses, which will make my life much easier as
more-and-more of the athletes I work use a CompuTrainer for
their indoor training.
So, as you’re planning your summer’s workout schedule, don’t
be afraid to do at least one of your cycling workouts each
week indoors. You’ll be amazed at how much you’ll get
accomplished, and how much you can improve!
