the iron-distance athlete.”


• “Zone 3 is sort of no-man’s land, don’t spend time in this zone.”


All of these statements have a tremendous amount of validity, and I will not attempt to argue them here. If you follow these traditional protocols your athletes will see improvement. Now for my own personal philosophy: I have raced a bike in every discipline possible. I have studied it through the educational process. I have observed other athletes and the athletes I have coached. I have come to this conclusion after many years – from a program design standpoint, cycling is a simple sport. There is one thing that governs cycling ability. There is one thing that determines the ability to climb a long gradual hill, to power into the wind, grind a short hill and time trial well. That one thing is maximum power ability. Maximum sustainable power governs cycling abilities.


Have you ever noticed how coaches


compare the ability to climb hills versus the ability to time trial well? Climbing performance is based upon power to weight ratio, while time-trialing performance is power vs. aerodynamics. Did you notice what the common theme here is? POWER.


Analyzing Results At Perception Multisport we have a 12- week cycling program we put our athletes through in the offseason. The program is heavily dependent upon interval based workouts completed in Zone 5. Last season, our athlete’s average double digit gains in both max power and threshold power variables. Let’s look at the specifics of two different athletes. The results will show data from the field tests both prior to the start of their program and after completion.


Athlete TT


Prior to 12 weeks max power 229 After 12 weeks max power 276


Prior to 12 weeks threshold power 165 After 12 weeks threshold power 210


Athlete RK (No power training available) Prior to 12 weeks maximum sustainable heart rate 168


After 12 weeks maximum sustainable heart rate 170


Prior to 12 weeks threshold heart rate 144 After 12 weeks threshold heart rate 156


page 10 | PERFORMANCECOACHING


As you can see, power and threshold abilities improved remarkably. Even though the program was built around max power workouts (Zone 5), both athletes saw a significant improvement in their threshold abilities. This is likely because of a couple of reasons. One, our threshold abilities are more responsive and trainable than our max power abilities. Second, as mentioned earlier, the ability to time trial (ride at threshold) well is highly dependent upon your overall power ability. Because time trialing well is reflective of strong threshold abilities, training max power obviously improves the athlete’s threshold as well. There is one important aspect regarding


the interpretation of RK’s field test results. They do not have a power meter. As you can see, we can see the improvement in the athlete’s threshold abilities. I often refer to this as the “push the pace ability.” The significant increase in heart rate that the athlete can hold over the 60 minutes is reflective of their


ability to “push the pace” significantly better than they could 12 weeks prior. This became evident when the athlete PR’d their 70.3 bike split this season by 14 minutes. The other figure, maximum sustainable heart rate, saw very little change. This is normal as this is not a variable that is heavily trainable. Its only importance is in establishing the zones for the heart rate based athlete. One of the best aspects of the Perception Multisport Cycling Program is that it is only three workouts per week. These athletes saw huge improvement in their cycling by focusing on improving maximum sustainable power ability, and were left with plenty of time to work on swimming and running.


Ryan Ross is a USA Triathlon Level II certified coach. He is the owner of Perception Multisport, a multisport coaching business located in Overland Park, Kan.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16