Feature

Fri 21 Aug, 2:00 pm BST

Stealth training: Get fit on the sly

By Nik Cook, Cycling Plus

We all know him and, if we’re being honest, we all resent him. He’s the guy who never appears to do any training but, when he does turn up to ride, cruises effortlessly up climbs and, more annoyingly, feigns complete surprise at his ability.

Don’t be fooled though. He has been training. But he’s been training smart, training subtly and training with stealth. Here's how you can do the same...

1 Never take the lift or escalator

Climbing stairs uses similar muscle groups to riding, and can significantly increase your daily calorie expenditure. Jogging up stairs or taking two at a time is even better. According to a study at the UK's Birmingham University, seven minutes a day climbing stairs can decrease your risk of coronary heart disease by almost two-thirds.

2 Perfect press-ups

An ‘old-skool’ exercise, but this is the perfect upper body and core tonic for cyclists that can be done secretly at home. Head trainer Ayo Williams from Matt Roberts Personal Training says: “Chest, shoulder and arm strength can make all the difference on a long out-of-the-saddle climb, and greater core strength can mean a more powerful pedal stroke and less lower back pain.” Set yourself the challenge of 100 consecutive press-ups in six weeks.

3 Purposeful commuting

If you ride to or from work, fit in some secret quality training. Find a route that extends your commute to about 40 minutes. After 10 minutes of easy spinning, ride as hard but consistently as you can for 20 minutes. Cruise in for the final 10 minutes to cool down. This will give you a quality ‘sweet spot’ interval. Hunter Allen, coach and author of Training and Racing with a Power Meter, says: “The sweet spot is sweet because it’s the zone where you’ll get the greatest return on your investment. We all have limited time to train and want to use it wisely.”

4 Cut out the caffeine…

… until you need it. A recent meta-analysis of over 32 individual studies performed by the University of Auckland in New Zealand found that by abstaining from caffeine for seven days and then taking 6mg/kg of body weight one or two hours before an event, power output increased by as much as 3.5 percent. Even better news for coffee addicts is that just abstaining for two days gave a power increase of three percent.

5 Pre-breakfast training

Getting out for a surreptitious 30- or 60-minute easy-paced ride before breakfast is an excellent way to control your weight, enhance your ability to burn fat as a fuel and improve your riding economy. So-called ‘bonk training’ is a tried and tested method. Dr Andy Pruitt, clinical director of the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine in Colorado, has seen plenty of cyclists shed their guts doing it: “If I have a cyclist who’s trying to lose weight, I have him ride for 20 to 30 minutes before breakfast at about 60 percent max heart rate. This ignites fat-burning metabolism, and it stays lit during the day. If you have an extra 5-10lb to lose, empty-stomach exercise first thing in the morning is ideal.”

6 Go for an off-road hilly run

By hammering the hills, you can improve your ability to recover from a hard effort. Nick Craig, Olympic road and mountain bike rider, and multiple national champion in both mountain biking and cyclo-cross, says hill running is a regular part of his training: “Uphill running uses similar muscles to cycling. If you’re short of time, a 30-minute run can be a great workout. Be careful though – if your legs aren’t conditioned to the downhill you’ll wake up sore the next day.”

7 Sit Swiss

You might get some funny looks in the office, but sitting on a Swiss/stability ball while working will improve both your posture and your fitness. Top sports physio Tim Deykin says: “Although they are to all intents and purposes sitting still, most people do tend to move the load forwards and backwards through the pelvis, and side to side through the ischial tuberosities – they are the sit-on bones that touch the bike saddle. The key is to experiment with a variation in pressures of air in the ball so it’s not so hard that it’s very stable, and not so low that you sink into it like a bean bag. The other benefit is that you’re consciously occupied with your work and not the task of balancing, so it offers a higher level of rehabilitation and training potential, as this work has to be managed by the sub-conscious.”

8 Recovery is key

What you do in the privacy of your own home after a ride can have as much impact on your fitness as what you did during it. Make sure you have a recovery drink pre-made, spend 10-20 minutes with your legs elevated and put on a pair of compression tights. The pros riding multi-day stage races know this better than anyone. Lance Armstrong is quoted as saying: “Recovery. That’s the name of the game in cycling. Whoever recovers the fastest does the best.”

9 Sneaky stretching

Make the most of time alone spent in front of the TV by doing some long-hold sustained stretching. Tim Deykin again: “Some of the top cyclists I worked with really got into the deep release you can achieve by holding, breathing into and developing a stretch for five to 10 minutes.”

10 Make life hard

When you do train on your own, do so on your old heavy winter bike, slow tyres and full water bottles. Save your best bike and lightweight kit for your big race or when you want to see your mates grimace. You’ll feel like you’re flying! Famed Russian General Suvorov had the right idea: “Hard training, easy combat; easy training, hard combat.”

User Comments

There are 17 comments on this post

Showing 1 - 17 of 17 comments

  • 5 pre-breakfast training. Is linked to frm this article, as a myth debunked:

    http://www.bikeradar.com/fitness/article/fitness-10-cycling-myths-busted-21925

    So which is it ?

  • Don't believe the hype I say!!! Different authors, different studies, different point of views. It's all crap if you ask me, just take the version that pleases you.

    I used to do pre breakfast rides and the major benefit to me was that it woke me up! I got up from bed, dressed and rode. So basically 5 minutes after waking up I was riding in a morning mist along the St-Lawrence river. It was a great wake-up call and this article has given me the will to start it again.

  • "After 10 minutes of easy spinning, ride as hard but consistently as you can for 20 minutes."

    Are you promoting RLJing?

  • Agreed half a hour before breakfast.

  • I believe that if you go training pre breakfast for 30 mins at a steady pace nothing too hard then eat your matabolism will be quicker for the rest of the day - however you need to be carefull as training on an empty stomach can be very dangerous !!!

  • This may as well be one of those "10 reasons why your man is cheating on you" from those stupid girls magazines! someones just made this up in about 30 seconds!

  • sbatty3313 youre quite right, in fact there is a link on this very page to Fitness: 10 cycling myths busted, and guess what it says about fat burning and an empty stomach, that it is a myth.

    If you ask me (which I have to acknowledge you don't) most of this is rubbish, stick to cycling, always take the lift, don't do pressups! No stretching!!!!

    I could go on but I wont

  • I agree that core muscle power is key, and that's the reason i highly recommend martial arts as an alternative training, especially if you are a mountain biker as it increases your agility and explosive power dramatically.

    I ride on my mtb about 5 to 10 hours a week, and since i started (about 5 months now) doing 6 hours a week of taekuondo, i started to really leave behind my mates on the woods, the climbs and even the downhill!! My bunnyhps are huge now, and i started to land bigger stuff as i am able to manage my wheight a lot better. Now i am going to start swimming a couple hours a week to improve my cardio.

  • Pre-breakfast isnt quite a myth!

    It's just that authors without much knowledge take a line or two from published research, normally by just reading the abstract and get it sorta wrong.

    Chinese whispers I think its called

  • i think the pre breakfast training is rubbish but this is mostly just common sense like if u want to be fitter take the stairs instead of the lift duh!!! this is the same basic idea as 10; make everyday stuff harder and u will find a race easier. except for the pre breakfast which i dont believe its all just common sense.

  • No. 5 Pre-breakfast training:

    Fact - When l was commuting everday to work and eating breakfast after l got to work, l lost weight progressively.

    Fact - Now l only cycle after work and weight loss has plateau at a level higher than l expected. No amount of cycling has been able to shift it.

    I guess for some, it is true, but for the cycling gurus on this forum (with little or no guts) it makes no diference. They are probably burning at optimal levels anyway.

  • I don't like riding before breakfast as i find i run out of energy quickly and can't wake up, but my mate does it all the time with swimming and he likes it. He swims for 30mins before work, and i go for 3-4hr rides after work. I like going after work as i find i have more time and it is a relaxing thing to do at the end of the day.

    The fat burning and weight loss theories mentioned above might work for some but i'm a believer in the fact that calories are calories and fat is fat and exercise is exercise it doesn't matter when you eat or do them to a certain extent. IMO of course..!

  • Regards tip no.5: If you add a couple of rides per week that you wouldn't have previously done then of course that's liable to result in extra calories burned, whether done at brekkie time or not. And as for raised metabolism, just about any intense exercise will keep your metabolic rate topped up for quite some time afterward. Apparantly there's a big fall-off of metabolic rate shortly after training, but it remains slightly elevated for hours afterward.

    I'm not too sure though that riding for up to an hour on a totally empty stomach is such a good idea. when I worked nights many years ago I used to get up and do weights straight away, then eat. I progressed, but would get hunger pangs during my workout. There weren't many energy drinks about then but I started using a some Weider product that was mostly just maltodextrin with a few vitamins thrown in to make it look good. I'd neck it down as soon as I woke up and it helped. Even though I was fairly lean anyway, I got leaner as I got stronger and bigger. So my belief is that the energy boost for my workout allowed me to train harder, improved my results generally, and an unlooked for side-effect of increasing my metabolism, which is slightly askew to the tip given here.

  • That last bit wasn't very clear was it! What I was trying to say regarding fat loss was that the calories in the energy drink allowed a more intense workout, which in turn enabled a higher elevated metabolism for longer. This is more in line with general advice that eating breakfast, will boost energy levels throughout the day as eating early in the day is a metabolism booster in itself.

  • That last bit wasn't very clear was it! What I was trying to say regarding fat loss was that the calories in the energy drink allowed a more intense workout, which in turn enabled a higher elevated metabolism for longer. This is more in line with general advice that eating breakfast, will boost energy levels throughout the day as eating early in the day is a metabolism booster in itself.

  • That last bit wasn't very clear was it! What I was trying to say regarding fat loss was that the calories in the energy drink allowed a more intense workout, which in turn enabled a higher elevated metabolism for longer. This is more in line with general advice that eating breakfast, will boost energy levels throughout the day as eating early in the day is a metabolism booster in itself.

  • Regarding tip nr. 5; i used to do 6am morning runs before breakfast. You can do about an hour on flat roads on an empty stomach, but you can't do any major climbing; you won't have the energy and you bonk out.

    for tough hills like we have here it is best to have something inside you, preferably a light meal consumed 1-2 hrs before the run.

    The best thing I found for loosing your waist; eat as little as possible in the evening and especially 1-2 hours before going to bed. A few crackers or a toast work fine and actually you sleep much better on an empty stomach. Most of the stuff we eat in the evening ends up stored around our waist cos in the evening the metabolic rate is slower, so the body stores the excess carbs consumed.

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