 Rider: Ben Komar Photo: Zachary C. Bako Joel YounkinsHigh Performance Coach Just a little heads up...This blog isn’t about action steps or specific protocols — it’s about shifting your perspective.
This is going to be a reality shift blog and one that is strictly about perspective. When it comes to preparing for racing, there's only so much cardio that you need to do. I'm not saying that it's overrated or that it's not needed, but I can promise you that your "cardio" needs to be only good enough, and more is certainly not better. In fact, I do find it to be very important. But in the sport, people love to associate certain particulars with cardiovascular training with motocross conditioning. There's many racers who have a reputation of "being an animal" on a mountain bike or road bike, or they do marathons for fun. That's great and all, but that doesn't mean they're becoming better racers. A former champ who returned to racing the outdoors and is known for being one of those people came into the motocross series ill-prepared. Not because he didn't do enough "cardio" but because preparing to go to war to win races and training to improve your marathon time or VO2 Max are very different things... Preparing for racing is about preparing for racing your dirt bike, that's it, no need to make a complicated sport more complicated. Sometimes you got to do more cardio, sometimes you need to get stronger, sometimes you need to do more motos, and sometimes you just need to take a couple days off in order to come in prepared to race. There's many really great racers who do a lot of endurance work off of the bike. They get in groups and literally trade their sport of motocross or off road racing and replace it with cycling for the day. Many top racers log tons of cycling hours — and they make it work. But they’d likely benefit more by shifting some of that training time toward skills or recovery work. Volume alone doesn’t make a better racer. Cardiovascular training is really good for developing work capacity (your body's ability to do work). We touched on this in the last blog Just Not Race Shape. Once you have built up that work capacity to handle the workload of your specific sport practice (riding the bike), from there you can fine tune your conditioning by building aerobic power, anaerobic threshold, heart rate recovery, etc. What you have to be aware of, and why it's a balancing act, is that when you keep doing more and more cardio, that the low intensity high volume work can be very fatiguing to the body. Too much long-duration, low-intensity cardio can leave your body stuck in parasympathetic dominance — a slowed-down state where it becomes harder to fire up and compete at high intensity. Not ideal when you’re lining up for a gate drop. Over and over again, we spend as much time as we need to build up proper race conditioning levels. But building the ultimate racer comes down to creating the whole pie, just not focusing heavily on a couple slices of it. When you pour more and more into the cup once it's filled, things just spill over and it gets everything else messy. If you're in great aerobic shape, you don't need to do more of it to become a racer. To become a better racer, you build the complete athlete — not just the endurance monster.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |