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- [Neil] As mountain bikers, we understand that our sport is really hard.
- [Mark] Like really hard, yeah.
- But have you actually considered how hard it is?
- Yep.
- You have?
Well, compare it to roadies, they have it easy. It's true.
- So, we're going to actually test it out. Go beyond the perception of effort and use
a heart rate monitor and crucially, a power meter to measure our ride.
- So, a power meter's been around for a little while within mountain biking.
I used to use one from time to time when I was racing downhill,
just to make my training a little bit more effective. This Rex M Power from Rotor is
super accessible and nice and simple for everyday riding.
- So, we've got our hands on a couple of pairs. I'm going to go for a trial ride,
a normal trial ride, quite hard and record my heart rate and power data and compare
that to a road ride of the same duration. But what we need is a road rider.
Where do you think we're going to find one of those?
- Who's that?
- It's Dan Lloyd.
- [Dan] Hi, boys. Good luck going out right then.
Let's get some wheelies going good.
- Oh, no. Not Dan Lloyd.
- I've never really liked Dan Lloyd. Matt Stephens is my favorite.
♪ [music] ♪
- How was that?
- Steady.
- All right. Let's see the data, compare the two.
Let's have a look at the results.
So this graph can look a little bit confusing to begin with. But it's just
showing you the power I'm putting out at any one time. And as you can see these are
my results. It's really spiky, the power's fluctuating massively over the ride.
- One thing that you can draw from the graph is obviously as you say,
the spikes actually right up here, they're getting on to what's your max power,
so you're putting out multiple max power efforts.
- Interesting that you can also see there's quite a few times when I'm not
putting out any power at all, not because I was being lazy, it's because I'm mostly
coasting on the downhills. But you quite often see after these long parts with
no power at all, there's some really big peaks where I'm actually putting the power
down to get out of slow turns and short shock climbs.
- Good points there, Neil. Let's compare this to Dan's graph and you can see that
his power average jumps out at you is higher than yours.
Now, the reason for this is he can sustain his effort for the whole ride.
He doesn't have any descent where he can't pedal. He can keep that power up,
so he gets a nice average. Although, there is no spikes in the graph,
like your graph.
- Far fewer spikes on a mountain bike, right?
- Yes, he doesn't have to get on the pedals and power up short sharp stops.
He can carry his cadence into them. Do you think it's harder, Neil?
- Yeah. I'm spending much more time at an elevated heart rate and also those short
sharp sprints are doing quite a bit of muscle damage.
- It's worth saying that when you do a cross country ride, it's hard to be mellow
and ride at a low tempo because simply you can't get around the course.
- You can also see that even at those points where I'm not putting any power to
the pedals, my heart rate is still really high because I'm having to pump the bike,
turn, do all these technical riding skills that actually keeps my heart
pumping pretty hard. Okay, there's the data, but what are we actually going to do
with this knowledge?
- Well, it's clear that every mountain biker wants to get fitter,
ride faster and make it easier. The truth is, it's never going to get easier.
But from looking at the graph, you can see that long endurance rides at low tempo
will really be detrimental to what it shows with the particular lap that we've
done today.
- Yeah, I'd actually be much faster to work on my five seconds,
say two minute sprints and actually as well as that, try and get my body
to recover as quickly as possible because the downhills are much shorter in duration
than the climbs are. So the great thing about power meters really are they show
you the exact demands of that particular ride, so maybe if you live somewhere
more mountainous than where we ride, you maybe are riding 20, 30 minute
climbs where the demands are going to be a lot different to the short punchy climbs
you've got here. And you can use that data to train effectively.
- Yeah, that's a good point, Neil, and one thing that I found really useful when
using the power meter is you can actually work out if you're putting yourself into
the red, i.e. your power's too high when you've set out and if you're going for an
hour, you can't sustain that power all the way through, so then you end up struggling
towards the end. It helps you to learn your body and realize where your
weaknesses are.
- If you want to see more videos from GMBN, you can click up here for my how to
train for Enduro video, that's the first of a series of training videos.
- And another useful video is down here, how to survive a climb,
click down there.
- Also, you can just click on my power meter to just subscribe to GMBN.
I'm off, put some power down.
- Go on.
- Oh, no, not Dan Lloyd.
- I've never really liked Dan Lloyd. Matt Stephens is my favorite.