Shutt Sportstest Seminar: Creating your Training Programme – 23rd November ’11

I thought I’d write up and share my notes from the seminar with Garry Palmer at Shutt VR’s new Southern office. Please note, before I ignite the inevitable debate on training philosophies, that these are just my impressions of what Garry says. It’s highly likely that I have misunderstood some things, oversimplified others, and got some of them plain wrong – so don’t take this as “Garry’s way” or criticise his approach from what I write here – any errors are almost certainly mine. Full disclosure: this was a seminar by a professional physiologist/coach at a clothing manufacturer’s office, so of course there were mentions of how useful coaches are and how the right clothing is important – but these were often delivered tongue-in-cheek and there was no particular hard-sell. We’d all paid money to be there, after all.

To start with Garry told us a bit about his background – he studied under Peter Keen at University College Chichester and was lucky enough to have as his dissertation test subjects the Team GB squad for the Barcelona Olympics. He then went to South Africa to gain his Ph.D. and returned to the UK to do teaching and research, first at Kingston University and then the University of Wolverhampton. Since 2004 he’s been running Sportstest and has found that his initial role as a sports physiologist has evolved to include coaching as well, largely because many traditional coaches don’t really get the implications of recent advances in exercise science.

The meat of the seminar covered similar ground to the science and training chapters in Garry’s book, but with the audience being a small group of riders it gave plenty of opportunity to dig into some of the details, ask questions, discuss goals (sportives, racing, LeJogLe) and share war stories.

Garry started the seminar by discussing the various determinants of performance in a cycling event, including efficiency, aerodynamics, muscle mass, technique and so on, using the metaphor of the cyclist as a Formula 1 car. Next he covered the classic training pyramid, starting with a base phase of 3-9 months of longer, less intense riding, going through a transitional phase of 6-12 weeks primarily focussed on building threshold power and finally to a sharpening phase of shorter more intense rides focussing on speed and power. Recovery is as important as training though and the next section looked at recovery influencers such as quanity & quality of sleep, mood & stress, nutrition. Garry recommends alternating high- and low-stress training days so as to give the type IIa muscle fibres associated with higher-stress threshold power more time to recover (this is a gross oversimplification, but is based on some of Garry’s research). When it came to monthly periodisation (i.e. 3 weeks of increasing stress followed by a rest week) he did have some criticism of Friel’s approach noting that it worked OK for full-time athletes but that for the rest of us it made more sense to adapt the training plan to real life on a week-by-week basis instead of sticking rigidly to the 3+1 formula.

Given that effective training is all about overload & recovery, with greater overload leading to greater gains with adequate recovery, it’s also important to spot the signs of overtraining/under-recovery (the latter being more likely with the amateur athlete). Garry recommended tracking resting heart rate on waking as a good indicator – if the RHR shows a significant deviation then rest until it returns to normal, then rest another few days and ramp back up to normal training intensity over 2-3 days.
Training is also about specificity – as you get towards your goal event, training should reflect more and more the needs of that event. This also applies to the bike: if your training and race bikes are not set up identically then at best your performance will be suboptimal; at worst you could be looking at injury.

In terms of training sessions themselves there was some good information on duration: ideally threshold sessions should be 20-40 minutes of work (i.e. total duration of active intervals); endurance sessions 90-120 minutes, occasionally 3-4 hours. Any more than this gives little additional training benefit but requires more recovery time.
The actual balance of training/recovery, as well as being affected by the factors above is also specific to each rider. We all respond as in the curve below:

The challenge is to figure out the numbers on the axes that fit your physiology so you can do the optimum levels of training & recovery and make the best gains. A couple of attendees at the seminar were riders who were coached by Garry who backed this up: they have been putting in great performances on very normal amounts of training by using this precision-based approach. One of them was the 4th-placed female in the famous Quebrantahuesos sportive on just 6 hours a week of training.

Continuing on the topic of physiology there was a general summary point that power output (apart from sprinting) is linked to oxygen intake by the lungs & muscles, and this in turn drives heart rate. There was a summary of the main muscle fibres used:

* Type IIb – fast twitch – used for speed & power, sprinting, energy produced by glycolysis (uses masses of glycogen)
* Type IIa – fast twitch – used for threshold/TT levels of power, energy produced by oxidation of glycogen
* Type Ia – slow twitch – used for endurance pace, resistant to fatigue, energy produced by oxidation of glycogen

Practical tips continued with brief diversions into nutrition (although that has its own seminar) and power (the third and final seminar). Key takeaways for me here were:
(1) if you’re training late into the evening then don’t have a full meal and go to bed. Better to eat more earlier in the day and then have a recovery drink after training before hitting the sack
(2) the rise in heart rate of ~10-15bpm that I see between the start and end of a training session (for the same power output) should ideally not be happening. There are multiple possible causes, including dehydration, overheating, eating too much on the bike (blood -> stomach = extra heart pumping) and working too hard for my level of fitness.

As a general guide to the recovery side of things, Garry recommends around 2 recovery days a week, about 1 easy week per month and about 1 rest month per year along with a need to keep the training regime both interesting and challenging, to avoid plateaus and burnout. Tapering should only be done for major goal events, reducing volume & duration while maintaining intensity.

With all the questions and feedback it was now 9pm instead of the planned 8pm end time, and Pete Bragg finished the evening off nicely by giving us all a Shutt VR musette filled with various goodies. It was a fantiastic evening, and I’m really looking forward to the next seminars in the series.

P.S. In case you’re wondering why there’s been no “Newbie Veteran Racer” blog for a few months, it’s because I’ve barely been on the bike because of work commitments so there’s simply been nothing to write about.