Guest Author - Michael Connolly

Getting Ready for Spring

Well I hope everyone has had time to decompress after the hectic holiday season and are now planning your 2006 cycling program or are you?

My plans have been affected by the fact that the fitness center that my company provided free as a benefit decided to close unexpectedly at the end of the year. Until this event I had made great strides in losing weight and getting my fitness levels higher than they have in the past few years.

Well that just means I have to be creative.

For those of you who have access to a fitness center and don’t live in a part of the US that provides for year round riding (read jealousy here) you can at a minimum maintain your current fitness levels.

If you, like me, really only ride as your main exercise activity, you run the risk of not providing your body with the total workout it so much requires. Don’t be fooled into thinking that upper body, lower back, etc.. strengths are not important, they are.

For example, years before I started training properly, I would end my cycling season in late September for the most part and not even look at my bike until the first warm spring day, which were I lived could have been early March or late April. When I started riding after such a long lay off, it wasn’t my legs that gave me problems, it was my neck and arms that were not up to task.

During this time of the year take some time to work on other parts of your body. If you are new to weights, don’t think you are trying to become a weight lifter, rather you are looking to build strength as it relates to endurance. One of the best defenses you can have on a long ride, especially in a racing situation, it an ability to dig deeper than the others around you. It’s often not the best rider who wins a race but the one who is least tired at the end of it. Fatigue is your enemy on long rides and the more your body is in shape the better you can handle longer rides.

Start with upper body workouts that focus on your shoulders and the back triceps. These are the muscles that will hold the bulk of your upper body weight as you ride. Remember that if you are riding properly on a road bike you are going to be moving up and down the handle bars in order to keep your body loose.

Another area of the body you want to work on is your lower back and gluts. The real power in your pedal stroke comes from these areas of your body. Most of us learn to ride a bike with an up and down pedal stroke which takes advantage of our strong quads, but results in a inefficient cycling stroke and cadence. You do use these muscles as well, especially uphills, however you must really think about the entire range of muscles you use in a proper cycling cadence.

So during this time of year I recommend that you focus on riding your stationary(preferably rollers) as part of perfecting your cycling cadence. Start out slowly, say 50rpms and really concentrate on the push/pull of your pedaling action. You want to train your body to synchronize the top and bottom areas so that as your leg is coming up to the apex of the pedal stroke you are both pushing and pulling at the same time. You will be amazed at the extra speed you can pick up without any additional increase in your current effort, in fact you will probably find that you don’t reach the same heart rate once for the same speed once you have perfected this effort.

This pedaling action, if you haven’t ever really focused on it, will feel entirely foreign to you at first, don’t give up. As you feel more comfortable increase your rpm’s until you finally are pedaling at your normal cadence.

Remember spring is really just around the corner.