As the days get shorter and the weather outside worsens, many of us neglect our
bike training during the winter months and get less fit and in my case being
constantly surrounded by tins of Quality Street and plates of mince pies
certainly doesn't help. However coach Ken has come up with a
session that'll hopefully help us maintain fitness over the winter. So what
are the benefits of this session Ken? Okay lots of benefits to this session
other than just helping you burn off your mince pies, we're going to be
helping you maintain your power at VO2 Max over the course of the winter
because it's easy to let that element of fitness slip away if you're just doing
slow and steady traditional winter training. This is far
more time efficient, far more interesting and fun and it will keep you getting
back on the bike and keep you trying to up your power and
up your threshold all the way through the winter so that when you get to
spring you're in much better condition than you would be than if you just sat
at home nibbling away at Quality Streets instead of getting out on your bike.
It also means you'll have plenty of time to watch all the Christmas TV and the
Queen's Speech. And do all your stretching foam rolling and core exercise. Oh
yeah, yeah, oh yeah, definitely will be doing that. So Ken, describe for us
this session. Okay, so this is a really fun session after a short 15 to 20
minute warm-up we're going to be doing two 20 minute blocks of really hard work.
So the bulk of that 20 minutes is going to be done at 85% of your functional
threshold power and then once every five minutes there's going to be a 30 second
burst as hard as you can go without stopping your ability to come straight
back onto that 85% power. So there is a target of a hundred and twenty percent
of your FTP but if you feel like you can do more than that without having to have
a complete rest afterwards then go for it. And there's a
short rest in between the two main blocks, for about five minutes and then a
nice long cooldown to flush out all of that hard work we've done. So how best to
perform this session? Well a smart trainer is gonna be really beneficial
for a number of reasons. So firstly you're doing quite long intervals here
sort of 20 minutes and they're quite it can be quite boring if you don't have
any form of entertainment and a smart trainer it's going to enable you to
either perform this workout in a virtual world or ride up a famous climb if
you use the Tacx software which is just going to make the time pass a lot
faster I'd say. But also you can pre-program the workout into Tacx's app
or other third-party apps such as Zwift and Trainerroad and that just basically
takes a lot of thinking away for you and enables you to just concentrate on the
effort, something I find really useful. Because what then that does is it just
changes the resistance depending on which interval you are on.
Yeah, it does make life a lot easier, you can just focus on the effort and focus
on delivering the session that you intend to do, because when they get
really difficult it takes a lot of energy and a lot of concentration just
to keep pushing the pedals that hard so it is a big advantage and this
particular session for maintaining form over winter there's a lot of turbo
trainers that you could do this workout on. Something like the Tacx Flux, the
big heavy flywheel there makes it feel a lot more realistic and a lot more like
riding out on the road which is a real advantage if you enjoy being on a turbo
trainer and it feels good then you're more likely to keep getting back on
there several times a week. From a coach's point of view as well it's a
huge advantage if it's got an after a power meter in there because you can
then track changes to your fitness over time by comparing your power versus your
heart rate and seeing how the two interact and how they change from one
session to the next so it really helps motivate you if you know for sure that
you're getting fitter. So if you enjoyed this video and found it useful and are
now less worried about eating all those mince pies over Christmas then be sure
to check out the other videos with Ken's training sessions in this
series and subscribe to the Cycling Weekly channel. We're encouraging people to eat
mince pies... I love mince pies.