I've never been particularly competitive and just ridden cos I enjoy it. I'm not far off 40 now but fitter than I've ever been and although I know I'll never be as fast as a lot of the people I ride with I'm trying to push myself harder and am actually enjoying it.
The thing is I've noticed recently that on sections of trail that I ride regularly, although I feel faster and I'm giving it everything, I'm not actually getting any quicker.
I don't have much time to dedicate to training so looking for any tips or advice on how to incorporate simple training techniques into normal rides, particularly for shortish sprinty sections of trail.
Cheers
sections of trail that I ride regularly, although I feel faster and I'm giving it everything
Descents?
Wind it in a bit, focus on improving pumping, cornering, not breaking & riding smoothly - the speed will come.
In essence slow down to go faster 🙂
Edit:
I'm afraid the answer is probly: intervalsshortish sprinty sections of trail
Or singlespeeding - which is pretty much the same thing.
Intervals are probably what I was thinking of. Something to improve power and speed. Not sure my knees could cope with single speeding 😐
It's as simple as you want to make it. Just find a short hill and batter yourself up it 8 times.
Or find a route with short climbs, take the rest of it easy but try and make yourself puke on the ups.
Not sure my knees could cope with single speeding
As it happens mine cope way better with SS (clipped in - rarely seated) than riding on flats. That could well be because they're now much more used to that approach as I rarely ride any distance otherwise; it's defnly a good way to build power, and short-sprint ability though. My longer sprinting ability (>20 seconds) OTOH is crap 😉
Generally it's better to isolate specific training rides to get the most benefit from them. The biggest bang for buck are interval sessions but you need to do them at an intensity that makes you feel like puking. (The BC track team actually have buckets at the track side during training for that eventuality!)
Only do one session a week, warm up with ten to fifteen minutes of tempo riding then do sets of four efforts with rest between efforts of 1-2x the time it takes for each effort and about five minutes easy riding between sets. Finish with a steady cool down.
If your efforts are on hills then coast back down to the start as your rest, if they are on the flat then roll out and back in a loop for the resting part.
Use different gears for different sessions so spin in a low(ish) gear for one session, lower cadence in a higher gear for another. Also use different gradients and length of efforts so that you don't become really good at 10% hills 100 metres long and nothing else.
If you are looking at using your normal rides as training then fartlek sessions are the easiest to fit in: they aren't structured in the same way as intervals and are simply random efforts - the word fartlek is Swedish for "speed play" - so you just say "sprint to the track junction" or "big effort to the top of this hill". Recovery is just whatever you want until the next effort.
Just work at whatever you feel is your weakest point. Once that's up to scratch start work on your new weakest point.
Thanks for all the advice, can't wait to give it a go this evening 😉