- Welcome to Ask GC Anything, coming up this week,
I answer your questions on drafting, fasting, and cadence
when climbing.
If you do have a question that you would liked answered
on the show, drop it in the comments below
with the hashtag #TORQUEBACK, or to be in with a chance
of winning a free three month subscription to Zwift
use the hashtag #ASKGCNTRAINING.
And you can put this on Twitter as well if you like.
Right then, the first question is from Alan Crawford.
I've noticed a few times in a medium to large group
of 10 to 12 people and up to 50 people,
that when you're in the middle of the group
you seem to get drawn into the slipstream nicely.
But once you start getting towards the back or being dropped
it seems like the slipstream turns quite turbulent
and starts to work against you.
Is there any factual evidence or is it just me
being weak, tired, and my mind coming up with excuses
for why my group is leaving me in the dust?
Right, I had a quick look across the internet actually,
to find a good bit of research on this
and there is a company called Swiss Side
who have done a study on this.
And this answer is, that actually you do get a drafting
at even as far as 20 meters behind
the group in front of you.
So even at 10 meters behind the group,
I'm just reading the numbers off the screen,
10 meters behind the group you'll be saving 30 watts
at 45 kilometers an hour.
Obviously if you're doing 30 kilometers an hour
you would expect the wattage saving
to be a little bit lower.
But actually, you could even notice at that speed
an effect of drafting right up until 20 meters,
and then after that point it starts to disappear completely.
What I think you're experiencing is that constant surge
and relax, surge and relax, the further you are back
in a group the more of an elastic effect that the speed of
the group in front of you is going to have on your legs.
You're constantly playing catch up
and then you're having to back off
and that's not going to help your tired legs.
Hopefully that's a suitable answer for your question.
The second question this week is from Somhairle MacCormick.
Hi guys, I love the show, I've recently invested
a power meter and noticed that my power zones
and heart rate zones don't match.
I'm either going full gas or easy with my heart rate zones
and there's not much in between.
Previously I tried training in heart rate zones
but I found them either too easy or too difficult
as a result.
Now with the power meter I can train in defined power zones
but there was still a mismatch with the heart rate.
For example, zone one heart power
is zone three heart rate etc.
So what I think is going on here is that perhaps
your zones aren't calculated in the same way.
Maybe you've got more zones for your heart rate
than you have for your power or visa versa.
So instead of trying to get them both to match up
I would go with just using the power meter for the minute.
It's your new tool and you can get used to using that
and you can use your heart rate as an observational tool.
Keep using it in the background and you'll start to
grow this catalog of information that you can then refer to
over a few weeks time.
Do this for around three to six weeks,
you'll start to understand how your heart responds
to certain power numbers,
and you'll start to gain better information.
If your zones don't match up for whatever reason
or they've been calculated slightly differently,
they are never going to match up.
So, build this new bank of knowledge and hopefully
you'll get on well with that.
Good luck.
This week's Zwift winning question goes to Andrew Gorrie.
Hi GCN, I love the videos.
I have a 105 mile sportive in the Scottish borders in August
with 7000 feet of climbing.
I've been trying to structure a training plan.
What sort of sessions should I be working on?
The weather has got a lot better
and I would enjoy doing my training outdoors rather than
in the pain cave.
I try to do around four hours of training each week
so fitting it in around that would be good.
Right then, we sent your question off to Zwift,
the coaches over there have answered it.
And it comes with this.
The key demands of your event are going to be endurance
and climbing, so your training should focus around
developing those attributes.
Endurance training first up.
Right, generally, to improve our extended endurance
we need to go long and low intensity.
So the endurance gains are going to come after riding
for around two to three hours or more.
However though, with your limited time to train
you're going to want to stimulate your endurance system
with a different method.
To do this, continue those low intensity rides
that we just spoke about, start out with a ride of around
90 minutes but then include surges that go up towards
your threshold power.
Start off, you want to do 30 second surges
with two minute recoveries, and you want to do those
10 times in a ride.
And the idea is to build them up to
20 times one minute surges with one minute recoveries.
So you're going on, off, on, off, throughout the ride.
The effect that these efforts have on your body
is that they trigger an increase in the demand for oxygen
and increased rate of breathing.
This constant turning on and off of the oxygen demand
has the effect of improving your aerobic efficiency,
and therefore also your endurance.
As we said, start out with a smaller, shorter efforts,
and build up until you can do the
20 time one minute efforts.
When it comes to the climbing side of the event,
it's going to involve long periods of around tempo effort.
So to target this sort of training
you're going to want to do some strength endurance
style of riding.
Doesn't work for everyone but I think for this event
and for you it's going to work really well.
So four times five minutes on a climb
with a cadence of 50 to 60 revs per minute,
and done at a threshold power of 80 percent,
sorry, 80 percent of your threshold power.
If you do these efforts seated and your hands relaxed
on the bars, that'll really help you make sure that
all the effort is coming from your legs and you're not
wrenching around on the bike trying to force
any extra effort through those pedals.
And then finally, the climbs in this event are long
and if you don't have any long climbs available to you,
you can now use your free Zwift subscription
to use the Alpe du Zwift, and I think there's one here
called the radio tower.
Both of these over an hour in duration
and will be great training for you.
Good luck with your quest in August, and enjoy.
Neil Simpson apologizes for the next question
because it's about his undercarriage.
I commute to work which results in an eight or nine hour gap
in shorts wearing.
What can be for chamois hygiene during this time
to help me look after my undercarriage?
Well, I would look for a really good quality chamois cream,
something that has some form of antibacterial quality.
I'd smear a little bit on in the morning and then when
you go to get back in those shorts
I'd smear a little bit on again.
Probably best smearing straight onto your undercarriage
rather than into the shorts.
Hopefully that will help prevent the spread of bacteria
too far.
Oliver Hiroz up next.
Hi gang, thanks a lot for your pieces of advice,
really useful.
Two questions, one's pretty clever,
and the other one less so.
How can you keep a high pedaling cadence without bobbing
up and down on your saddle?
And then second, the less serious one,
how high do you shave your legs.
Do you keep the bear shorts?
No, never ever, no one should ever have bear shorts.
I mean why would you?
If you fall on your hips it's the same issue as falling
on your legs then, isn't it?
Just shave all the way up,
I just thought that's what everyone did.
The first question though, probably best to try and lower
your saddle a little bit if you are bobbing up and down.
You could try working on your flexibility
and your souplesse on the bike.
Practice does make perfect when it comes to
high cadence drills.
So maybe consider doing some cadence efforts around
150 revs per minute for one to two minutes at a time,
that will help you get more comfortable
at those high cadences.
Timothy Dobson.
If my average power on a hilly route that takes me
one hour is 190, does that mean my FTP is 190 or higher?
Well, yes and no.
Did you hold a steady consistent power output?
Then absolutely that is theoretically your FTP.
If you surged on every single climb and then
recovered on the descents then you can't use that number
at all I'm afraid, because that is just not how that
equation works.
iGameOver.
A question for next time.
I'm 40, I'm a bit overweight and I haven't cycled
in 25 years but I started again a few months back
and it feels great.
I really like the idea of downhill racing.
Do you think it's too late for me to still get into it?
No, why would it be too late.
You're only as old as you tell yourself you are.
If you really want to go and race downhill
you can absolutely start learning now.
Practice makes perfect, lots of training,
and if you can, get a little bit of coaching,
that'll really give you a bit of a leg up in that sport.
Ondra Stehlik the second, up next.
I've heard a lot about intermittent fasting,
should I give it a try?
Well, I've come up with the clever answer of saying,
you could, but I only recommend doing it intermittently.
And that I fast after my evening meal
before breakfast in the morning.
Personally, to be really honest, when it comes to
messing around with your body's natural rhythm,
I'm not a huge fan.
Because it kind of has these delayed reactions later.
So, yes, if you believe in what you've read
and you want to try it, absolutely give it a go
for a couple of weeks and see how you get on.
But in the long term I really believe that your body should
be able to self regulate it's own hunger,
and if you start messing around with those signals
you just create problems for yourself later on.
Brann Mac Finnchad Matsukaze Workshops.
I bet you were popular with the teacher
when she had to do the register.
After last night's mountain climb I found I have issues
spinning up hills in low gears.
On the flat or lower gradients I'm comfortable spinning at
105 to 110 revs in the saddle.
When it gets steeper and I drop down to smaller gears
I find it uncomfortable or awkward to get much above 85
yet I don't have the strength to stay in a higher gear.
Well, I did some research with Si last year
and it turns out this is all to do with
inertia and muscle movement pattern.
Basically our muscles will fire differently
when we're on the flat to when we're on climbs.
Trying to accelerate your legs through the dead spot
on a climb is going to take longer than it is on the flat
so it's normal that actually your cadence is going to drop
a little bit on a climb.
To be really honest, a cadence of 85 on a climb
is actually not that bad at all.
But if you do want to improve this what you could do,
is do some intervals of around 90 to 95 revs for around,
well, anywhere between 5 and 12 minutes basically,
this will really help your ability to maintain
a higher cadence on those climbs.
Jan Kroken up next with a question about aerodynamics.
From what I understand, the aerodynamics of the wheel
is most important for the front wheel.
While the responsiveness would be more beneficial
in the rear.
So how come no one rides around with only a deep section
in the front, for example, a Shimano C60 in the front,
and a C24 in the rear?
Well, Jan, when it comes to aerodynamics
I really think that a lot of people fail to recognize
the fact that actually a bike still has to handle well.
If you were to ride with a shallow wheel in the rear,
so for example you started out with 80 mil wheels,
and you punctured the rear and you got a 35 or a 40
as a replacement, it's going to feel really weird.
To the point that you'll drop back to the team car
a second time to get a matching front wheel.
When you've got a deep front wheel and a shallow rear one,
the bike feels really reluctant to turn in
and when you're racing this is really important.
But also for example, if you're on a bike and you're doing
a time trial, it would again feel like the front of the bike
was just kind of being led and the back was following it
more keenly.
It's always more comfortable to ride with a deeper wheel
in the back than it is in the front.
Hopefully that answers your question.
The final question this week comes from Ecudielle,
hopefully I'm saying that right.
I'm a 50 year old woman struggling to come back
after three months off following an injury.
A non-displaced patella fracture, that sounds awful.
Pre-injury I was doing around 250 kilometers a week
and I had an FTP of 220 watts, which is really good.
I've been back three weeks doing four to five
one hour sessions each week of sweet spot or threshold
but I can't hit any good numbers or speeds.
Will I get back to where I was before?
When?
How?
I've got a goal of two weeks in the mountains in August.
P.S., please bring more women into the show,
you know, we ride bikes too.
Right, Ecudielle, you will absolutely get your fitness back.
You've only been training again for three weeks
and you would expect it to take a lot longer
than your off period to get back to full fitness.
So after an injury like that you would expect around
12 to 16 weeks of good consistent work to get back to
the level that you're looking for.
Which will just about get you back to where you want to be
in time for August.
Something else though that when I looked through
what you said, was you focused on the sweet spot
and threshold side of things.
Don't be afraid to do one session each week
which goes above and beyond your threshold.
So something like a VO2/anaerobic effort,
so that 30 second to 3 minute window.
Doing efforts like that with a really short recovery
in between them will really give you an absolute,
well, it would be like hitting your fitness
with a big heavy hammer.
It's going to really boost your fitness faster than you
would expect.
And then something else that you mustn't neglect
when you're trying to get back to fitness
is actually your recovery.
We focus so much on, I have to do more,
I have to do more to get fitter.
We only get fitter if we give ourself enough time
to adapt to the training that we're putting our body under.
The stress that we're putting our body under.
Do two weeks of progressive build followed by
a third week as an adaptation week.
As your fitness progresses you could then potentially
increase that to three weeks of building and then
a fourth week as an adaptation week.
This will absolutely help you get fitter
and faster in time for August.
And then on your final note, yes, we do absolutely need
more women here on the channel.
So if you do have a question and you are a female
then drop it in the comments box below
along with everyone else that writes in every single week.
The hashtag is #TORQUEBACK for all of your normal questions,
and to be in with a chance of winning a free
three month's subscription to Zwift,
the hashtag is #ASKGCNTRAINING.
And that brings us to the end of the show.
Hopefully you found this useful and you enjoyed it.
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