Whatever race goals you choose, it’s a good idea to start planning how your mountain bike training will get you there in the weeks prior to the event. Having a better understanding of the five components of training, and how you can adjust them will give you a better foundation for planning your next mountain bike race.
1. Repetition / Frequency – The number of hills or intervals you complete in a given mountain bike ride is an example of repetition. How often you mountain bike in a given week is an example of frequency. Repetition and frequency represent the components you can adjust in your training sessions to ensure quality results.
The primary purpose of intervals is to allow for repeated sessions of high intensive exercise followed by a specific recovery time. With proper rest and recovery, intervals can strengthen your mind and muscles to perform at a higher level. For mountain bikers, this can easily be done with hill climbing.
2. Terrain – Training on different terrains allows you to train all the muscles you may need on race day. For example, shifting your body weight or standing on your pedals can shift the workload more to your gluteus maxima and hamstring muscles and less on your quadriceps.
Nothing new on race day – the rule for all competitors applies here. If you’re interested in minimizing your physical and mental stress during your next mountain bike race, train on similar terrain and your race day performance will benefit.
3. Volume – Most coaches measure volume by hours or time training – workout, week, month or year – verses distance. As riding 15 miles on hilly terrain can take you much longer than mountain biking on a relatively flat fire road, time monitoring your workouts is usually a better performance gauge of your training.
You increase or decrease your training load by adjusting your training volume up or down. To improve your aerobic system, low intensity riding below your lactate threshold is recommended.
The components of intensity and volume are inversely related. When you add more volume to your training cycle, you will need to reduce your intensity to allow for additional recovery. With the addition of more high intensity intervals to your training cycle, you will need to reduce your volume to prevent overtraining.
4. Intensity – is the level of effort you put into your training workouts. Mountain biking for an easy 90 minute ride with your friends talking along the way is quite different then hammering up a steep mountain for 90 minutes.
The heart rate monitor is the tool of choice for most athletes seeking to measure intensity. With improvements and advanced features like GPS, heart rate monitors have become a valuable tool to the athlete over the last 20 plus years.
If there is extra cash under your mattress, the new standard in measuring intensity is the power meter. Although more popular with road cyclist and triathletes, a power meter provides very accurate results for measuring your intensity level, or power output.
5. Pedal Cadence – training your mind and muscles to pedal at different cadences allows you to handle different terrains more easily, and provides various rates of muscle contraction, or stimuli which will maximize your muscular strength.
Practicing pedal cadence training will develop your anaerobic and aerobic energy systems, pedal stroke efficiency, cadence, and MTB skills. Achieving an effective training program for pedal cadence will add additional human gears which will help maximize your MTB performance.
A solid mountain bike training plan is based on exercise science, but the best training plan for you requires testing and constant changing to find what works best for your unique physical and psychological make-up. Applying exercise science as a starting point then testing and adjusting these five training components to find your winning formula may be the best path for you.
Keith Rejino is a mountain biker, personal trainer, and sports photographer for Dreamscape Images. His Mountain Bike Racing website provides race coverage, XC MTB and nutrition tips. For more XC MTB tips, check it out.