- What type of cyclist are you?
You might be a mountain biker, or a cyclocross rider,
you might be a track rider, you might be a unicyclist,
you could even be a bicycle gymnast.
Or you could be, like most of us, a road rider.
- Yeah, but road riding is a big category, isn't it?
I mean, within that, you've got sprinters,
and climbers, and puncheurs, rouleurs, I mean,
the list probably goes on,
just my French isn't quite good enough.
Question is, though, do you know where your strength lies?
Which one of those are you? To find out is really quite simple.
You will need a power meter on your bike
and you'll then need to do a few tests.
And it's not just about finding out
what your functional threshold power or power to weight is
because whilst that is a decent gage of what level
of cyclist you are it certainly doesn't give
the whole story, it's not the be all and end all.
- No, absolutely not. Mark Cavendish, prime example,
now his FTP is obviously very high considering
the general spectrum of cyclists.
But yet his sprint power is truly exceptional,
and that's what has made him
one of the greatest cyclists of all time.
- Right then. To find out what type of cyclist you are,
you're going to need to do four tests
to find out your maximum power over five seconds,
one minute, five minutes, and an hour.
- I tell you what, mate, I've just remembered,
I've actually gotta be somewhere so just, uh, so yeah,
you finish this one yourself mate.
We know what type of cyclist Richardson is.
He is a wimp cyclist.
- Aren't you interesting.
- Let's start, then, with the shortest test,
which is probably the least painful, your five second test.
Now this one is really very simple,
all you need to do after a decent warm up
is sprint as hard as you possibly can for
a little bit more than five seconds
and take the highest average power over five seconds.
And make sure you do it over a range of cadences
and also speed and gradients until you've achieved
your highest five second power.
You got over triple figures, didn't it?
- Try again.
- Coming up next we've got our one minute test
where we will be finding out the average power
we can sustain for 60 seconds.
And most people are probably gonna find
if you're doing this on a climb, particularly a steep one,
it's gonna yield the best results.
Now, in terms of technique, you need to be mentally prepared
for this as much as anything.
Because it hurts, you're gonna need to be totally committed.
The last thing you want is to then at the end of it
feel like you need to do it all over again,
'cause if nothing else you're gonna
have to wait quite a while
until you're in good enough shape.
Okay, you ready? Three, two, one, okay!
Now the technique is to go pretty much full gas
from the start and then try and hold on
for as long as possible.
You will fade but that doesn't matter.
- I'm sure you're all getting the hang of this now
and so it won't come as a huge surprise when I inform you
that the five minute test involves putting as much power out
as you can over the course of five minutes.
This one, though, does require a degree of pacing,
because if you start out too fast, you will pay for it
and fade significantly, and therefore you won't achieve
the highest power of which you are capable.
And once again you'll probably find
this test easiest to do on a climb.
- Lastly we have the hour.
Now you can ride as hard as you can for an hour,
that would definitely give you the most accurate result,
but it's hard. Like, really hard,
psychologically particularly,
to actually get a full hour of power.
And so we'd recommend that you cheat a little bit.
I'm not really cheating but there's a very good estimation
that you can do.
So instead of an hour, do twenty minutes
as hard as you possibly can
and then multiply the result by null point nine five.
Now you may find that it technically overestimates,
you may find that it underestimates.
But as long as you keep it consistent,
test after test, it's a pretty good gauge.
- Now since all of these tests are so bloomin' hard,
you can't really do them all on the same day
and expect to get accurate results.
- What? Well now you tell me.
- Yeah, sorry. Because you need to be as fresh as possible
for each one to put out your maximum power.
So what you might want to do is your five second
and your five minute tests separated by half an hour
so it'll be you're riding on one day,
and then a day or two later
you can do your one minute and 20 minute tests.
- That does sound like a better idea, doesn't it?
There is a possible alternative as well, actually.
If you have a good amount of historical training
or even racing data, you may well find that at some point
in the last couple of seasons
you will have set a record five seconds, one minute,
five minute all-hour power, in which case you can use that.
- Then you just need to put all of this historical data
in some good training software such as TrainingPeaks,
for example, and it will then regurgitate
a critical power curve for you, which gives you
a maximum power at all durations that you want.
Now you are probably wondering how on Earth you decipher
what type of rider that you are from the tests
that you have just done. And we're about to tell you.
Firstly though you will need to work out your power
to weight ratio for each of those test durations.
That is simply the power
that you produced divided by your weight.
And make sure you're honest with your weight.
- Heh, yeah. Then you need to check out the following table.
Now you can get ahold of it on TrainingPeaks.com.
What you will see there is a rank of power to weight ratios
from the very best cyclists in the world
to complete novices.
More likely you will find yourself probably
in one of the seven categories between those two.
- It's important to note actually with that table
at the very top line that's there in red is for the best
in the world at those specific durations.
So going back to our example of Mark Cavendish,
although he's a sprinter he wouldn't rank right at the top
of the five second chart because that is the domain
of track sprinters or perhaps even BMX riders
who incidentally have produced
some of the highest powers ever recorded.
- Yeah, and similarly with the one minute power
that is also likely to be a track rider.
A kilo rider like Chris Hoy for example
who specialises in one minute power.
- Now you've done the power-to-weight ratios for each test.
So you want to find the number that is closest
to what you've worked out on the chart and circle it.
And after you've circled it, draw a line between each one
and the shape of that line is gonna tell you
what type of rider you are.
- At last we got there.
- We finally got there.
You've probably got a lot of perseverance
if you're still here.
- Yeah. Yeah, hello to whoever's left.
Right, first up then, the horizontal line.
- Ooo, purely at a guess, Dan,
I'd say it's probably an all-rounder.
Somebody who's rubbish at everything.
- It's reasonably obvious, his guess was not that good.
- Uh, yeah, somebody that doesn't have any weaknesses
but likewise doesn't have a particular speciality either.
It is quite rare though to have that horizontal line
mainly because this chart does include those specialists
such as track sprinters or Tour de France climbers.
Right then, next up what do we have
in terms of rider if you've got an upwards slope?
- Well you are most likely to be a time trialist
or an exceptionally good steady-state climber
because you are not gonna have
any neuromuscular sprint power to speak of
and you're not gonna be all that much cop
at one minute power either,
so this is probably gonna leave you in road races
feeling a little bit frustrated
because you will no doubt feel like you're stronger
than everyone else, you probably are,
you just can't get rid of them
because you can't accelerate for toffee.
So that is why you will look forward
to the time trial stages and stage races perhaps,
and also anything with those big, long climbs.
- Yeah, the complete opposite, then of course,
is the gradually descending slope on the chart
and that means you're a sprinter, in effect.
You've got a great neuromuscular power,
you're pretty good anaerobically,
but you do start to struggle
once you get to the longer climbs.
You're an anaerobic monster, really.
So in a road race, you are going to struggle
to keep up with the time trialist and steady climber
from before, but if you do manage to stay on their wheel,
you're easily going to out-sprint them at the finish.
- I'd call those people pesky, yeah.
If I'm completely honest.
What, then, if you have an inverse V as your profile?
- Ah, well this was my profile actually
when I was racing professionally, so I,
so my five second power was at the top end of "very good".
- Was it really?
- Yeah.
- My one minute power was exceptional
and my five minute power was almost,
it was almost world class and it dropped off slightly
for the sprint afterwards.
So what that meant was that I was okay at the long climbs
but I struggled a bit, I was pretty good at the short,
sharp climbs, and then but a little bit
off the pace in sprints.
- A little bit off the pace?
- Yeah I was, yeah quite a long way
off the pace in the sprints.
So I was what you could call a puncheur.
- Alright then, and if you are the opposite of that.
So you have a genuine V- shape, well you're a rare breed.
Highly, really. So rare, in fact, that we would suggest
you might just want to go and retake the test.
Because having a great sprint power
and a great aerobic engine but not very much in between
doesn't make a great deal of sense.
- Physiologically speaking.
- Does it? So why don't we just head out the front door
and have another pop at it.
- I know that our viewers will want to know
what shape your line is in in this chart though.
- Oh, well, I will tell you.
It's not dissimilar to yours, Dan,
except annoyingly my sprint power is even lower than yours.
I couldn't even out-sprint myself most days.
But on the flip side my FTP was a smidge higher,
so I'm kind of an inverted V but with a,
you know, more of a plateau.
- Yeah, I would be interested to know what the demographic
of GCN viewers is in terms of type of rider.
Let us know what line shape you came out with
in the comment section just down below.
The question though, now, is once you found out
what type of rider you are, what on Earth do you do?
- Wow, this is quite a philosophical question, isn't it?
And we perhaps don't have time to go into
all that much detail right now,
but having discussed it a little bit beforehand,
we think that your strength needs to be a weapon
in order to help you win races.
So you need to work on that strength
until it is a truly race-winning capability,
but then you also need to make sure
that your weaknesses don't hold you back.
So if you are a superstrong sprinter, but you can never get
to the finish line with the front group
then clearly the important thing
is to work on your weaknesses.
However if you are a superstrong time trialist,
but you are an absolutely lousy sprinter,
then maybe it's worth developing that time trialling ability
until that becomes your weapon.
- Yeah, I think like you say this is quite
an in-depth topic, isn't it?
What on Earth do you do once you've found out
what type of rider you are?
- Oh I know what we need to do,
we need to read some philosophy. Such as the Art of War.
- Yeah, and once we have,
I think we should revisit this in a future video.
- Yeah.
- Right, well that's the end of this particular video.
If you have enjoyed it, please give us the thumbs up
just down below, and if you would like to find out
what type of rider you are
from a psychological point of view,
we've got that covered too. Just down here.