Learn These Five XC Mountain Bike Training Components
Before you ride your mountain bike to the starting line of your next XC MTB race, you may want to ask yourself what your goal is. Is it to place in the top five in your age group, or beat your best time on that course? Maybe it’s your first race and your goal is to finish.
Whatever race goal you choose, it’s a good idea to start planning how your xc mountain bike training will get you there in the weeks prior to the event. Having a better understanding of the five components of training, and how you can adjust them will give you a better foundation for planning your next mountain bike race,
1. Frequency /Repetition – How many times you mountain bike in a week is an example of frequency while repetition is the number of intervals or hills you do in a given mountain bike ride. Frequency and repetition are the components you can manipulate to ensure the quality of your training sessions.
The primary purpose of intervals is to allow for repeated sessions of high intensive exercise followed by a specific recovery time. With proper rest and recovery, intervals will strengthen your mind and muscles to perform at a higher level. For mountain bikers, this can easily be done with hill climbing.
2. Terrain – Training on different terrains allows you to train all the muscles you may need on race day. For example, shifting your body weight or standing on your pedals can shift the workload more to your gluteus maxima and hamstring muscles and less on your quadriceps.
The rule – nothing new on race day equally applies here. Preparing for the mountain bike race by training on similar terrain will keep your muscles and mental stress level to a sustainable amount.
3. Volume – Training volume is the measure of miles or hours you train in a given workout, week, month or year. Most coaches focus on time spent in the saddle. 15 miles on a relatively flat mountain bike ride could take you 60 minutes as compared to two hours for a ride on hilly terrain.
Adjusting your training volume up or down will increase or decrease your training load. Improvement to your aerobic system is best done with low intensity riding below your lactate threshold.
Intensity and volume are usually inversely related. Many times increasing your volume requires you to reduce the intensity of your training sessions. High intense intervals usually require a reduction in volume to prevent overtraining.
4. Intensity – is the measure of your training effort. Going for an easy 60 minute mountain bike ride with your buddies and talking it up is a different workout compared to hammering up steep hills for 60 minutes.
Most athletes measure intensity through a heart rate monitor. Heart rate monitors have improved substantially since first introduced over twenty years ago. Most measure distance, speed, time, altitude climbed, and include a GPS amongst their many features.
If you have extra cash lying around, a power meter is becoming the new standard for measuring power output. Although more prevalent with triathletes and road cyclists, a power meter is very accurate in measuring your power output.
5. Pedal Cadence – training at difference pedal cadences develops your mind and muscles to handle various terrains, and provides your muscles with different stimulus, which is necessary to maximize muscular strength.
Pedal cadence training can help develop your aerobic and anaerobic energy systems, cadence and pedal stroke efficiency, and cycling skill set. Effective pedal cadence training adds the human gears necessary to maximize your mountain bike performance.
Mountain bike training is based on exercise science, but the best program for you is an art form. Each person has a different physical and psychological make-up. Using exercise science as a benchmark and testing and adjusting these five mountain bike training components may be the best path to finding your winning program.
Tagged with: mountain bike • Mountain Bike Training • MTB • xc mountain bike training • xc mtb training
Filed under: Mountain Bike Training
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These are some great tips, thank you! I am just starting to train to do my first big ride. I never really put much thought into the training but with these steps I have a set goal now. I’ve got my goal and my training schedule with something to work towards.
Thanks!!
I definitely agree with the article. I would like to add something here though. We need to have the determination in our training. We should discipline ourselves to continue on the training however hard it may be. Let’s try to think of each training session as the race itself and we will not be disappointed when the race day comes.
This post is right on for anyone who wants to ride, either regularly or for endurance. I was especially interested in the remarks on frequency and pedal cadence, but all of the points presented are important and should be taken into consideration by the serious rider.
I think you just about covered it all. Good job!! All good pointers and advice that if taken step by step, will make anyone a better mountain biker. I’m a novice ans i’m definatly bookmarking this. Thank you.
Frequency and terrain are the two things that I focus the most on as it helps boost my confidence which is highly essential for me as I tend to get nervous in semi-competitive situations so I need to make sure that I’m well prepared. I’ll also be looking into purchasing one of those meters you mentioned, hopefully it’s not too much.