BIKE FOR LIFE How to Ride to 100 — and Beyond
Want to Ride a Century When You Turn a Century ?
Fit/Skills/Flexibility + the game-changing Maximum Overload plan
Want to be faster, stronger and fatigue-proof in the second half? This radical new training concept ups your speed as it cuts your time
Chapter 7
Get a Perfect Bike Fit
The ideal position for power and comfort: Slight leg bend with a level foot at the bottom of the pedal troke; hands on hoods with upper arm at 90-degree angle to the torso and slight bend at the elbows to absorb shock.
The Four-Step Fitting Process
1. Ideal Shoe interface: Clete at the Ball of the Foot, with a forward bias to increase the lever arm
2. Ideal Saddle Height: Hips don't rock, legs don't straighten.
3. Ideal Saddle Position: Little to no tilt, with the seat slid back for greater power
4. Ideal Upper Body Position: Always put comfort before aerodynamics.
Chapter 3 PerfectTechnique
2. CORNERING: JAM IT DOWN!
At the John Howard Cycling School of Champions, a superb resource for cyclists of all levels, one of the most valuable skills taught was one that will make you faster and safer almost instantly: Learning how to "stick" the wheels on a turn. Here's what to do to make yourself feel as stable and speedy as a slot car on a track as you slalom down twisty mountain roads (and trails, too — it works just as well for mountain biking).
1. Push your butt back.
2. Raise the inside foot.
3. Keep one finger over the brakes at all times
4. Drift to the outside before the turn to enter it wide, then cut in at the apex
5. Jam the outside pedal down with all your weight — and you'll stick like glue to the pavement.
More Chapter 3 skills ...
3. HOW TO CLIMB
Don’t dread the hills—relish them. With proper hill-climbing technique and strategy, climbing can actually be relaxing. In fact, climbing can be a
time-efficient staple of training, providing superb conditioning in an hour or less. It can even help you make a name for yourself, as it did for Tom Resh, one of the best-ever American climbers.
At one time, Resh, now retired, held records at three of the toughest hill-climb competitions in North America: Mt. Baldy in Southern California (4,700 feet of elevation gain in 12.7 miles; Resh’s time: 56:15); Mt. Charleston, Nevada
(5,700 feet in 17 miles; time: 1:16:05); and the world’s longest-known-climb event with the greatest elevation gain, Maui’s Mt. Haleakala (10,000 feet in 38 miles; time: 2:45:32). Here’s
how Resh rushed ’em.
1. Big gear, fast spin. Generally, be in the biggest possible gear that will allow you to keep the pedals spinning above 85 percent of your flatland rate. That would be above 76 rpm in the hills if you pedaled 90 rpm on the flats. Any
slower than 60 to 70 rpm and your heart rate, energy use, and perceived exertion jack up.
2. Beware high-RPM spinning. A
super-fast spin rate isn’t the answer if you’re not trained for it. Spinning may save your legs, but it leads to a high heart rate and heavy breathing.
“The key to climbing is to achieve a cadence which balances the pain in your chest with the pain in your legs,” said.... (con't)..
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Chapter 8 Prehab
Secret Training Ritual: Play Tennis.
Lateral movement builds the weak gluteus medius and minumus muscles, which stabilize the pedal stroke, increase power, and protect your back from injury.
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Chapter 2
Maximum Overload's sustainable power will stop you from slowing down
Want to be faster — on half the training time? Climb the fifth and sixth hills of the day as fast as you did the first hill? Speed up in a race or century ride by avoiding the fatigue and weakness that compromises your form, power, and velocity? And, at the same time, rebuild your age-battered muscle mass and thinning bone density?
Meet Maximum Overload, a brutal 40-minute strength session, debuting in Bike for Life, that will re-write the rules of endurtance training. The 6 exercises on the pages below, done with low reps and progressively heavier weights, do something that the hardest riding simply cannot do: Make you immune to the second-half deterioration that hits everyone of all ages and abilities in long events. "After all, it isn't your lung power that gives out in the last half of a race," says MO inventor Jacques DeVore, a top Los Angeles training of elite triathletes and cyclists like Tour rider and time-trialist David Zabriskie, "it's your muscular strength. Deeply strengthen the mover muscles (legs, butt, hips) and stabilizers (back and shoulders), and they can handle abuse on the road without fatigue. The result: you naturally get faster — because you simply don't slow down anymore." Targeted correctly, strength training can overload the mover muscles in minutes for more than hours in the saddle. Done once or twice a week, Maximum Overload replaces —and improves upon — long hours on the road that most of us don't have, leaves you less wasted after the ride is done, and greatly speeds up recovery.
Don't like weights or have time to go to the gym? Get over it — you have to do it anyway! It's a fact: Aging bodies MUST LIFT WEIGHTS TO STAY YOUNG AND FUNCTIONAL. Why not do it in a way that saves you time, virtually bonk-proofs you, and makes you faster than ever? Below, See pages 57-60 of the new BIKE FOR LIFE.
