 Rider: Ben Komar Photo: Zachary C. Bako Joel YounkinsHigh Performance Coach When you think about getting prepared for a year of racing, whether it's Supercross, Motocross, Off Road Racing, or Hard Enduro, there's a lot of areas that you'll want to check off to have your best year of racing. When you really begin to think of everything that you'll need to be prepared for, it can feel daunting to get it all covered, especially as the season is dragging on.
You know that you want to be fast, you'll want to have good technique, you'll want to have endurance, you'll need strength, after reading my Shock Training Blog, you'll now need to incorporate this ability too, can't forget flexibility/mobility, and somehow you're supposed to recover from it all...I believe this is where a lot of racers adopt the "I just ride and cycle" mentality for their preparation. Because it's easier to follow and manage; and I don't actually believe that thought process is a bad thing if that's your only tool to work with. Simple > Complexity in training. I also believe this is where a lot of racers (even A Class & Pros) drop off during the season on their training because they don't know how to plan for this. What I want to help provide you with it however, is giving you more tools in your toolbox; but still operating in the window of simplicity. This is my goal for this blog. Because if you want to push yourself to do better than good, you're not going to be able to take this broad approach of winging it and simply just trying to do as much as you can fit in. If you attempt this, you won't truly ever really improve in any area. Enter Phasic Training In the world of training, things happen in phases. It's not just balls out, go as hard as you can for as long as you can. That type of thought process leaves talented racers burnt out after just a couple months. You want to have certain periods of time where you push harder in certain areas than others. This is phasic training and being able to piece together a program will determine how smoothly you can progress and how high your ceiling can be raised. If you don't follow this, and you're just winging it, trying to go as hard as you can all of the time in every direction, you'll soon get to a point where you have nothing left to give and blow yourself up :( Within each phase of the competitive year, there are certain qualities that we want to emphasize to push and get the most out of. Other qualities we can drop them off a bit, and leave just enough focus on them to simply not detrain them. This is what I do in my programming for my racers. I use a block focused style of training to dictate the phase we're in, but I also incorporate a concept known as Vertical Integration so that we don't completely abandon any fitness qualities altogether at any point. It's like keeping all the plates spinning at once but some are spinning faster than others... Training Abilities For the sake of this blog, I'm going to over simplify different training qualities to essentially give you an "introduction" to this whole concept. The abilities that I will be covering in the rest of this blog are labeled below.
The Phases If you're a competitive racer, your year should be broken up into different phases that require certain areas of focus and work. This allows for certain windows to be open to really hone in and work on things at the right time of the year. Your year should be broken up into a Post Season, Off Season, Pre Season, and In-Season phases. The Post Season This can be anywhere from a 2 week to an 8 week time frame all depending on how your year looks. In this phase of the year, you want to prioritize recovery work to address any lingering issues from the previous season. I advise to take 1 to 2 weeks off completely off of everything (besides addressing injuries). After that, you can begin to prioritize low intensity physical preparation work, focusing on strength, shock, and conditioning. Again, emphasizing low intensity work, but driving up training volume. Recovery and Flexibility/Moblitiy should also be increased as you're coming off of a grueling season. During this phase you can and should decrease riding time on the bike. If you'd like to ride, I would recommend play riding or riding a different discipline of racing than you compete in. An example would be a motocross racer going trail riding. Off Season This phase of the year will most likely be a solid 4-8 week time period considering the length of racing seasons. I selfishly would love to be able to have longer off seasons in racing as it's the perfect time to raise the ceiling for any athlete. So with typical fast turnaround times, during this time, you will not focus as much on recovery and can begin to really start developing and pushing yourself in the gym. This is a time where you should build overall volume and begin to increase training intensity. You can get back into riding, but the riding should still be at a lower to middle level priority, addressing weaknesses from last year, testing new parts, trying new techniques or skills. But pounding away sprints and long motos during this time would be premature. Pre-Season This is a phase that can last 8-12 weeks. If you do it right, it can be less than 8 weeks but you really need to know what you're doing and be in a great place to properly accomplish that. This is that one time of the year where it's almost all systems go. You want to maximize your conditioning, strength, shock, and riding. Your post season and off-season work in the gym should allow you to push both in the gym and on the practice track. And without racing on the weekends, the decreased competition stress will be lifted so this means you can ride with more volume and intensity during this phase. An overall emphasis on recovery will drop off, but it should be maintained through sleep, hydration, nutrition, and proper weekly planning. This isn't a time where you want to feel extra recovered and fresh as you want to accumulate as much volume and intensity as possible. Stretching/Mobility will also take a bit of a backseat during this phase as well. In-Season When the season kicks off, it can take many forms on how it will look and how long it will go. Some have long grueling seasons, some have breaks where they can even get back into off-season and pre-season phases, or some have a straight week of racing in what their pre-season leads to. So the interpretation to what your season actually looks like can heavily vary rider to rider. However, during this time, you want to prioritize recovery work and strength training. Riding, you can take into a low to medium priority just depending on if you're racing every weekend. If you're riding and racing a lot, you can lower the priority of shock and conditioning methods since your body is being exposed to these abilities while on the bike. Flexibility/Mobility should begin to return to a moderate to higher degree of focus to maintain quality movement. And lastly you will want to heavily prioritize recovery. Whoever can get to the next race the most improved but also the most recovered, the better chance for a better result. Playing Chess We covered a lot of ground with some very general concepts. But I do know that most racers (even ones with coaches and trainers) don't operate like this. It's just a show up and do what you can do for day and week mentality. If there's a lack of a daily/weekly plan in the micro, I know there's a big lack of a long term plan in the macro. Training isn't a day to day plan or even a week to week plan. It's a month to month and year to year plan. Every move you make in training should be made already knowing what the next move is going to be. If you don't know that, then you're simply winging it. Is your racing important enough to you to be winging it? You should feel like Bradley Cooper at the end of the movie Limitless, when he says, "I see everything Carl, I'm 50 moves ahead of you and everyone else."
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