Want some free watts? Your legs are fighting themselves, and we want them to stop.
Episode 8 is all about neuromuscular training, decreasing what is called coactivation, which is when your muscles actually work against each other. Neuromuscular training can provide big gains without requiring any increase in fitness.
We are joined by neuromuscular training expert Grant Holicky of Apex Coaching for insight into how this type of training works and how exactly to implement it in your own training.
Episode Transcript
The Paleo Diet Team 00:00
Welcome to Fast Talk, the VeloNews podcast and everything you need to know to ride like a pro.
Grant Holicky 00:11
We’re going to talk about pedal stroke with our athletes, but at a period of time, if somebody’s been doing this for 10 to 15 years, that gets a little redundant, they’re gonna tune you out on that. A lot of what we end up doing is specific workouts and training in order to develop that neuromuscular recruitment, in order to lay down those patterns. You know, the studies that are out on how our nerves work and how those things go on, is the more that we use the pathway the more of myelin we lay over those neuron sheets and the faster that signal is going to travel to the muscle musculature. If you’re doing the wrong thing over and over again, you’re gonna lay a really efficient pathway through that neuromuscular system the wrong way.
Caley Fretz 00:54
Hello, and welcome to Fast Talk the VeloNews training podcast I’m Caley Fretz and in today’s episode, we’ll explain how to ‘teach your legs to stop fighting themselves’. We spent a lot of time focusing on VO2 Max, lactate threshold and bodyweight, but there’s a way to get better on a bike that doesn’t show up on tests. How? By training proper muscle firing patterns. It’s called neuromuscular training and it is vitally important, but often misunderstood. With me today is Coach Trevor Connor, as always and a special guest Grant Holicky, a coach at Apex coaching, an expert in neuromuscular training. Let’s make you fast.
Defining Neuromuscular Training – H2
Caley Fretz 01:34
Alright, so in my in my usual role as village idiot, I’m going to be particularly idiotic today because this is a subject matter that flies way, way over my head and my understanding of physiology. So we’re going to be leaning heavily on Trevor and Grant for this particular episode and we’re going to start with the basics. So Grant, let’s turn to you first. Can you provide a definition that I will understand of neuromuscular training?
Grant Holicky 01:59
So in neuromuscular training, what we’re trying to do is increase the economy, or for lack of a better way to say at the efficiency of your legs and how they’re pedaling bike. So this is one of those things that’s going to show up year after year, despite how you’re training in that particular season, the ability to turn the lights over well with high economy quickly and all those things on the bike are going to be able to give you an opportunity to increase power output and hold that power for a longer period of time.
Trevor Connor 02:35
So we covered this very first podcast, we talked about what separates an amateur from a pro and if you’ve listened to that or if you remember back to that podcast, we pointed out that things like VO2 Max don’t really improve, you don’t really see that big an improvement in max power, but one of the places where you really saw pros differentiate themselves from amateurs is in this neuromuscular recruitment. As Grant said, if you become more economical or efficient, we’re going to use them interchangeably here.
Grant Holicky 03:10
Which apparently we shouldn’t.
Caley Fretz 03:15
There was some off mic debate before this podcast again, well not really debate, just Trevor being Trevor.
Trevor Connor 03:24
There not the same!
Caley Fretz 03:26
Economy and efficiency are not the same thing, Trevor, if it’ll make you feel better, why don’t you tell us what the difference is, before we continue on.
Trevor Connor 03:33
And we will cut this out.
Difference between Efficiency and Economy – H3
Caley Fretz 03:34
No, we’re not cutting this out, Trevor explain to us what the difference is so that we can then use them interchangeably.
Trevor Connor 03:41
Specifically, efficiency is the degree to which internal energy is converted to external energy. So we only use about 25% of the energy we actually generate, where only about 25% of it goes into the bike. The more of it that you can put into the bike, the less that you lose as heat, the more efficient you are. Economy is the actual movement itself. Being able to do the work with a movement pattern that requires less energy. So if any of you are big Monty Python fans like me, you might have seen that skit where they had the ‘Center for Unusual Walking’ and you watch them do all these crazy walks to move across the floor, those are very uneconomical walks. Where if you watch people who are much older who say have a hip injury, they actually learned to become very economical and kind of slide their feets in their movement because they’ve lost a lot of strength, so they really don’t have a lot of energy to put into their walks. So that’s economy. When we’re talking about neuromuscular training, using your muscles better actually improving your your pedal stroke, there is some efficiency involved there, but it’s actually more economy improving your economy.
Caley Fretz 04:59
Okay with that behind us, we will continue to use them mostly interchangeably. For the purposes of this discussion…
Trevor Connor 05:09
We will use them interchangeably.
Caley Fretz 05:11
We will use them interchangeably. I hope that doesn’t bother any of the, you know, PhD physiologists out there too much.
Trevor Connor 05:18
But the key point here is when they compare amateurs and pros, one of the biggest things to differentiate pros is far, far better neuromuscular recruitment patterns.
Caley Fretz 05:29
Can you expand on that? Did you look for a study?
Trevor Connor 05:34
I’m the analyable retentive around here.
Grant Holicky 05:36
I might sort of… It makes me feel comfortable because that’s Neil’s role in apex and when he’s not here, I feel kind of lost. If somebody’s not lecturing me on efficiency versus economy.
Trevor Connor 05:51
So don’t tell Neil this, but when I was managing Reo, three of our athletes were being coached by Neil and they nicknamed me ‘Neil with heartrate’. They were like “you are just like, Neil, except he gives everything and why did you give everything in heartrate?”
Grant Holicky 06:06
That’s fantastic.
Caley Fretz 06:08
This is all going into thought,
Grant Holicky 06:09
Oh, God, I hope so. I hope so.
Importance of Neuromuscular Training – H2
Caley Fretz 06:12
Okay, so we know what it is. Can you guys explain to me as to the village idiot as you do, why this is important?
Grant Holicky 06:20
For what I do and especially in the season that we’re in, talking about cyclocross and talking about cycling training, the ability to have that smooth, quick-reacting pedal stroke, the ability to bring the cadence up quickly, and the ability to pedal at a high cadence. One of the big things that I tend to notice as a coach is that newer cyclists tend to pedal in that lower cadence range. They’re mashing the pedals a little bit. It feels like you’re putting more power out, it feels like there’s more resistance on your legs, but the fatigue in your legs is high. So riding that higher cadence allows us to react quicker to what goes on around, us accelerate faster, things along those lines and having that ability in high economy of neuromuscular recruitment allows us to pedal a little bit of that higher cadence and it’s going to really help our writing dramatically.
Co-Activation: When our Muscles Fight Themselves – H3
Trevor Connor 07:17
So looking at it from a physiological standpoint and this is actually one of my favorite analogies to give because people really like this one. The way I like to think of it is picture doing a bicep curl because this is really simple motion, there’s really just one muscle involved. Imagine you have a bicep that is strong enough to curl 40 pounds. Now imagine every time you try to curl a weight, your triceps activate and basically fight that motion. So you might be strong enough to curl 40, but your max lift is only going to be 20 pounds because your triceps is actually fighting you. That fighting, when muscles fight one another, that effect is called ‘co-activation’. In a simple motion like that, that sounds ridiculous and that isn’t going to happen. When you’re thinking about the pedal stroke on a bike, we have over a dozen muscles that are involved, often having to fire more than once through the the the full circle of the pedal stroke, you have a lot of co-activation. So you have a lot of your muscles actually fighting one another and one really interesting study that they did a few years ago, they compared the level of co-activation in amateur cyclists to professional cyclists and you actually saw six times as much coactivation or six times longer coactivation in amateurs than in pros. So essentially, their own muscles are fighting themselves and they’re losing probably 20,30 watts, just from all that co-activation. If you can train your muscles to fire in a better pattern and not fight each other, you don’t have to get any stronger and your wattage is going to go up. That’s why it’s so valuable.
Caley Fretz 08:54
This is what I was referring to in the intro when I said your legs fighting themselves, basically.
Grant Holicky 08:59
Yeah, and and not only that ability to produce more watts, your ability to hold that wattage for longer and that may even come into it as a bigger effect. The more you’re fighting against yourself and that co-activation is going on, the quicker we’re going to break down because we’re just not going to be able to hold that for as long.
Trevor Connor 09:18
Right. That’s a really good point because when you have two muscles fighting one another, one is being forcefully lengthened and you start getting tearing and that’s going to cause you to fatigue very rapidly.
Caley Fretz 09:29
Is that the source of well, for example, if I do my one annual run and I go and I run three miles and I can’t move for like a week and a half afterwards. Is that some of the source of that pain that my legs are essentially not particularly economical?
Neuromuscular Training vs Just Riding More – H2
Grant Holicky 09:46
Well, you definitely have some of that going on. You know, it might be that offseason 10 to 15 pounds you gained as well, a lot of those things. Yeah, well anytime you’re not doing a movement with regularity, you’re going to lose that muscle economy and especially for somebody who hasn’t ever run a lot, say. Somebody’s background is triathlon or they grew up running, they’re going to be able to go out for a run and have less of that soreness less of that breakdown than somebody who doesn’t run very often and never did and this one of the great things about neuromuscular training that I’m sure we’ll touch on more, is that it is something you can retain from year to year. It’s funny, coaches will and athletes especially get into this mindset, if they take two weeks off, they’ve lost everything, but at the same time, they’re going to turn and look at the seasoned athlete and go, “Well, they’ve got all that years of base, years of base, years of base.” Years of base doesn’t really exist. If you lose your fitness, you lose your fitness, but you can retain the efficiency of movement, the economy of movement and that pedal stroke and that ability to have the pedal stroke is going to serve you year after year after year, especially early season.
Trevor Connor 11:01
So really important thing though, with the neuromuscular side is a lot of people just think, Okay well, if I do a lot of riding, I’m going to learn that that firing pattern, I’m going to improve the neuromuscular side. So back in 2008, there was this great study out of Brazil, where they address that question. So they took high level elite or even pro level cyclists and compare them to triathletes. So they found very high level triathletes who are putting in about the same number of hours per week on the bike as the these high level cyclists. The difference is, you don’t see a ton of neuromuscular training in a lot of triathletes, it’s just not something they focus on because they have so many other things they work on. Where all these cyclists, we’re doing a lot of neuromuscular work, specific neuromuscular work and then compare them again for the co-activation and what you saw was, yes, the cyclists look very much like the pros from the study I told you about a couple minutes ago. The triathletes looked like the amateur cyclists. They had very high levels of co-activation, you really saw poor neuromuscular recruitment patterns. So just doing time on the bike, didn’t teach it.
Grant Holicky 12:12
Yeah, it’s similar to technical ability. You know, that’s been something we’ve talked about, not to disparage the triathletes out there.
Caley Fretz 12:19
We don’t really mind.
Grant Holicky 12:22
Well, I coach them I don’t want, but you know, triathletes do spend a lot of time in the aero bars and they they spend a ton of time on the bike. Time on the bike doesn’t make you necessarily technically sound, it doesn’t make your ability to accelerate quickly inherent, those are the things that you have to focus on, put effort and time into and consistently train.
Pedal Stroke vs High Cadence Exercises – H2
Caley Fretz 12:43
So my, I have an old school bike racing dad and when he was teaching me how to ride when I was, you know, 10, 11, 12 years old and starting to race a little bit. He would always tell me, you kick over the top of the stroke and you pretend that you’re scraping mud off your shoe across the bottom. Is that the sort of thing that we’re talking about here or is this a little bit more specific work and more than just thinking about a good pedal stroke?
Grant Holicky 13:11
We definitely, we’re going to talk about pedal stroke with our athletes, but at a period of time, if somebody’s been doing this for 10 to 15 years, that gets a little redundant, they’re gonna tune you out on that. A lot of what we end up doing is specific workouts and training, in order to develop that neuromuscular recruitment, in order to lay down those patterns. You know, the studies that are out on how our nerves work and how those things go on is, the more that we use the pathway, the more myelin we lay over those neuron sheets, and the faster that signal is going to travel to the muscle musculature and this goes back even to what Trevor was saying before about just time on the bike. If you’re doing the wrong thing over and over again, you’re gonna lay a really efficient pathway through that neuromuscular system the wrong way. So we have to really go out and get out of what we’re used to, for some people and create workouts and create sessions that are built around specifically training this from a physiological standpoint, not just from a mental standpoint.
Trevor Connor 14:14
So I’ll just quickly add to that, one of the ways I actually identify somebody who has really bad neuromuscular recruitment patterns is not so much trying to look at where they’re applying the power through the pedal stroke, but I especially look at when they try to do high cadence. So I was running a trainer session last winter and I had a lot of athletes at very different levels come in and I would do cadence drills with them and I would see the the people had the bad neuromuscular recruitment. A: they couldn’t hit very high cadences and even just that 110 hundred and 20 RPM, you just see them bouncing all over their bike because that’s basically the neuromuscular system saying I can’t keep up with this. I can’t fire the muscles in a good pattern even at this low cadence, so when I started having them do a lot of cadence work, really try to hit those higher cadences and do it will stay smooth on the bike not bouncing all over the saddle, they actually started seeing a lot of improvements.
Identifying your Neuromuscular Recruitment Level – H3
Grant Holicky 15:15
Yeah and one of the things you can look at that single leg, especially on the trainer inside, you know at Rally Sport where our studios, we have the Wahoo kickers in there and we’ll do single leg stuff at a at a certain wattage and you just hear the clunk clunk, clunk clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk around the pedal stroke or we get 10 seconds of smooth and then there’s just sound all over of people ramming an edge of the pedal stroke. So it’s quite simple to identify that whether in yourself or in an athlete, as Trevor said, look at your power meter, see where your cadence is, how much trouble you’re having 120 cadence? How much trouble are you having with 30 seconds, single leg drill. These are great identifiers of where your neuromuscular patterns are and how economical you are on the bike.
Caley Fretz 16:00
I mean, how high should a sort of a normal road athlete I mean, we’re not talking track race stars, how fast should a normal road athlete be able to pedal? I mean, are we talking like if you can’t comfortably pedal 125 rpm and you probably have an issue?
Grant Holicky 16:18
Well, great trackies can hit over 200.
Caley Fretz 16:22
No problem.
Grant Holicky 16:23
That ain’t happening in this room. Well, actually, maybe it is. I don’t know how you two pedal. We tend to look at trying, you know, for some of the workouts we’re doing, we’re looking at sustained cadences for a minute to a minute and a half at 120 or over and that to me, 120 RPMs is a bit of a magic number. Can you sustain that for a period of time? We can all hit it, but like Trevor said, we’re bouncing all over the bike and your legs can’t keep up. We look with a lot of our, I’d say our high level elites not even really in the pros looking for cadence builds up into the 150 to 160 range. That’s what we’re trying to find and sustain cadences in 110 to 120.
Starting Your Season Strong with Neuromuscular Training – H2
Trevor Connor 17:06
I think this is a fantastic thing to do at the beginning of the year. I think this is true with all cyclists, one of the things you’re always trying to prevent is injuries later on, overuse injury, knee problems and I think neuromuscular work, which is training the muscles to fire right combined with some off the bike work like some core work and some weight work is a really great way right at the start of the season to get your legs ready for the harder work you’re going to do later and prevent you from developing injuries.
Grant Holicky 17:34
A lot of how we tend to look at this is almost to an extent and Trevor and I spoke about this a year ago, a reverse periodization and how you look at your season. So many riders early season, just gotta get in the miles, just got to get in the miles, just got to get in the miles and as we talked about earlier, just getting in the miles doesn’t increase economy, it doesn’t help efficiency. So if we can create something that began the season, where we’re forced to be at high cadence, forced to be at high effort, forced to be at high power, even if it’s for short periods of time, we’re raising that ceiling of what we’re going to be capable of from a cadence point of view, from strength point of view, and from a power point of view and always having that in the training, I think and we believe is going to develop the threshold, it’s going to develop VO2 Max and develop all those things because as we discussed at the beginning, you’re going to be able to hold that longer. You’re going to be able to reach at 20 or 30 watt higher threshold and you’re going to be able to maintain that threshold for a longer period of time
Is Neuromuscular Training Beneficial for all Cyclist Types? – H2
Caley Fretz 18:34
That 20 or 30 watts, is that sort of assuming that a rider is coming off pretty poor economy or do you think most riders if they’ve never done work like this before and they’re not track racers or something, could probably expect that kind of range?
Grant Holicky 18:49
Well listen, I mean the simple fact that we have professional cyclocross athletes that we coach at Apex that are in the top 10 in the country that are doing this neuromuscular workout in November mid cyclocross season because we expect to see some sort of gain from them now. Yeah, this is something that all the population could gain from and you know, I don’t know that any of us are ever going to target “well yes, you’ll get 20 watts.” That sounds like an infomercial and the only thing that might guarantee you 20 watts is you’re in bike motor, but this is one of those things definitely that you’re going to see return on this investment, especially if it’s regular and focused.
Trevor Connor 19:37
So back in 2015, in the spring VeloNews had me review a bike trainer that had this nice screen that showed your spin scan, how smooth your pedal stroke is and I was sitting there thinking I focus on all this stuff, I raced in the pro ranks for God knows how long. I’m going to crush this. So I got on it, I launched that spin scan for my first workout and I had this great figure eight. I’m like, ooh, what does that mean and then looked at the instruction manual just to see what the different shapes mean. It went figure eight: ‘amateur rider just getting on’. I didn’t like that at all. So now, forget the review for VeloNews, I was dedicated. I’m now going to get that nice doughnut shape and I really worked on it and did a lot of neuromuscular work. So this is after 20 plus years of racing, got that doughnut shape and I had the best spring I had had in years and I hadn’t changed anything else about my training, it was that. So even after 20 years, I could still see gains.
Specific Neuromuscular Workouts and How Often to do Them – H2
Caley Fretz 20:41
I think Trevor, that’s a pretty perfect little transition into how do we learn these things? What are things that people can be doing on a weekly basis or a daily basis? Is this the type of thing you can do at the end of every ride? What do these workouts look like?
Trevor Connor 20:57
I’m not gonna lie to you here. I spoke to grant about this a year ago and he gave me a whole ton of workouts that I’m now giving to my athletes. So I’m just gonna say, Grant, you had the best workouts I’ve ever heard. So please.
Grant Holicky 21:09
Fair enough. So you know, when we’re approaching this, we’ve talked a lot about the high cadence work and it’s easy to focus on the high cadence work. There’s two pieces to this. One of the pieces to this is how do we put power into the pedals? So what we tend to do at Apex and a lot of these to be, you know, completely forthright our Neil Henderson’s workouts, he’s the mad scientist, the Geek in the apex team. I won’t say he taught me everything I know because I don’t want to sound like Caley and the village idiot, but so the workouts we tend to put out there early and I’d say early season, but especially right now in cross when we get a weekend break and we’re not racing, cadence drills, power drills, all these things. So we’re building from both sides, we want to look at how we can get power into the pedal stroke. So one of the workouts we do are bigger sprints, something that track riders are absolutely fluent in, putting the bike and you’re 53 in the front and you’re 11, 12 or 13 in the back on a flat road and start from almost a standstill. As slow as you can be. You’re probably not gonna bust out a track stand, but what you’re doing there is you’re pulling and pushing with the arms on the bike, you’re pulling and pushing on the pedals with the bike and driving that cadence from super low and high power all the way up to that high cadence pedal stroke up at 100 to 110 that we’re looking for. We’ll do a little workout with six to eight of those sprints. It’s one of those workouts that people walk out of afterwards and go well it was you know, it was kind of hard, but wasn’t really that hard and then they go try to go upstairs later and they can’t really walk up the stairs. So, theres those sneaky hard workouts. On the other side of the coin is high cadence stuff. So what Trevor was talking about what some of the cadence pyramids and one of my favorite sessions to do is to go 30 seconds with the right leg only, 30 seconds easy riding, 30 seconds with the left leg only. Repeat that two to three times. So, six 30 second effort single leg and then immediately into a high cadence hold, one minute at 120 RPM.
Caley Fretz 23:16
Are those single legs done at 90, 100 RPM, what’s the?
Grant Holicky 23:20
Well by nature, you’re going to be fairly high cadence with those in order to have a smooth pedal stroke. If you’re at you know, 80 RPM, the load on it’s probably so high, you’re gonna break down, you’re not gonna make it through 30 seconds anyway. This is one of those beautiful sweet spot things. When you find the right load and typically that load on the high cadence holds his tempo probably 70 to 80%, maybe even up to 90% of LT, we want a little bit of pressure off the pedals so that we can continue to spin. So yeah, you’ll tend to be at 90 to 100, that sweet spot and again, maintaining through the tail end of that 32nd effort. Another one that we do with a lot of athletes is just straight up one minute cadence buids. Starting at whatever your self selected cadence is and then building that cadence up to as high as you can possibly get it over the course of a minute and having an eye on the clock so that we know that it’s not 100 for 30 seconds, 110 for the next 15, 112 for the next 10 and we blast five seconds of 160. How do we slowly, but surely over the sweep of the clock, lift that up and hold each next segment as we go up?
Caley Fretz 24:36
How often are we doing this?
Grant Holicky 24:38
Early season we’re tend to be doing some sort of neuromuscular work two days a week. Tuesdays tend to be more of a session based, less drill based, neuromuscular effort, high gear Sprint’s, short sharp 10 seconds to 15 seconds high cadence sprints, cresting hills 30 seconds just big huge efforts with tons of rest and then Fridays often we’re doing drill work. Single leg cadence work, cadence builds. Things of that nature on Friday
Caley Fretz 25:11
Is the kind of thing you can throw into the end of a normal ride?
Grant Holicky 25:14
Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think it’s just like anything. It’s one of those things that, to me though, it’s best done a little bit fresh. If you’ve already broken down at the end of the ride, this is one of those things that maybe you can do a little bit at the end of the ride to remind yourself and your body of what this is supposed to feel like, but if you have fresher legs, you’re going to be able to move through the workout with a little bit better progress and probably get a higher return out of it.
Trevor Connor 25:41
One of the workouts I really love to give athletes to both identify issues and to help them improve is exactly work in that sort of sustained cadences. So anybody, almost anybody can hop on a bike and hit 150 RPM, which they don’t care about form and you just don’t want to watch them because it looks like they’re gonna hit the ground, but it’s all about that control. So I love doing what are called cadence pyramids, where you started either 90 or 100 RPM and you do a minute at exactly that cadence, then you go up to 110 and do a minute trying to hold that exact cadence. Initially I’ll start with athletes going up to 120, but as they get better and better go up to 130, 140 because you really have to learn those neuromuscular firing patterns to be able to hold that exact cadence.
Trevor Connor 26:29
When it comes to neuromuscular training, there’s a lot of ways to skin that cat. So we caught up with Carter Jones, a recently retired pro tour rider who has a physiology degree from the University of Colorado and asked him some of the things he does to train the neuromuscular side. Forgive the quality of the audio, we had to talk with Carter while he was training over in Europe.
Carter Jones 26:50
Yeah, and I’d always do that and kind of peppered in my rides throughout the year. You know, endurance drives, apparently it’s like a lipid metabolism and it just kind of gets you feeling fresh again. If you have been riding its a nice endurance for all day, you kind of get a dull feeling in your legs, but you become to start feel good again. So yeah, it is definetly something I enjoy.
Trevor Connor 27:19
How big are your spreads? Is it just a quick effort or do you kill yourself?
Carter Jones 27:25
No. Usually when I work on my turning, I actually just work on really high cadence stuff. So like starting with like 110 RPM and seeing how high I can get up to, you know, 5, 10 seconds. It’s just really working on the legs speed or if I do like a full max sprint, no more than 10 seconds. It’s more just as you said, activation rather than fatigue. Yeah, something Brad has showed me last year, I really struggle with quick acceleration. So if I can work on, like high cadence, getting that jump, that could really benefit me. Sprinting is not important for a climber, until it’s really important. Sprinting doesn’t matter until you find yourself, you know, at the top of the climb in a group of three sprinting for the win of the stage is really important. So it’s definitely something to keep in mind. It’s like, obviously, you have to be able to climb to get there, but then being able to sprint is definetly still good to have. It can really make the difference in results. I know I’ve missed out on results in the past or haven’t done as well as I liked to because I had a poor sprint.
Trevor Connor 28:53
Are there any other tricks are things that you do for neurological training and stability?
Carter Jones 29:03
No, for me it’s all just about keeping it as simple as possible. I really like lunges, like bodyweight exercises. Even the extra step of going to a gym like that for the winner. If I could just do it at home in 10 minutes before I ride, that’s the key. It’s all about motivation for me and that’s when I’ll actually do something.
Placing this Regiment into the Season for Racers – H3
Trevor Connor 29:31
What about during the season?
Grant Holicky 29:32
As I noted before, this is something that we go through mid season a lot. With our athletes, we tend to look at the big picture and what their schedule looks like. If we have a weekend we’re not racing, I love the three day block of a neuromuscular training day onn day one. Some sort of a VO2 Max or sprinty sort of day onn day two and then into threshold day or tempo day on day three. Those blocks moving from high intensity to lower intensity and often, also shorter duration, a longer duration have proven a we get nice return on that, the muscles can handle that and so it’s a great thing to work in throughout your season. If you race Saturday, you know Sunday tends to be a down day, maybe some neuromuscular work Monday, some sprint work Tuesday, wednesday your into your hard session of the week. If those three day blocks tend to seem too big and for a lot of amateur races they are. We race Saturday, we race Sunday, Monday is an easy day, spin day.Tuesday becomes a neuromuscular day, Wednesday becomes our hard session. Thursday we rest, Friday we pre race, Saturday we get at it again and bang our heads against our friends.
Final Questions from Trevor – H2
Trevor Connor 30:43
So Grant two other questions for atleast in the research they’ve shown that you do get some neuromuscular gains on the bike from both weightlifting and also from doing some big gear work like those five minute low cadence up a climb type work. Do you agree with that and do you feel they’re useful?
Grant Holicky 31:00
Yeah, we often do workouts called ‘over unders’, five minute threshold or tempo efforts a minute below self-selected cadence and self-selected cadence, you’re gonna hear us say this a lot. So this is what you tend to ride at. If I asked you a five minute threshold effort, if you look down to three minutes and this would be where your cadences. Ideally, we want to see that 90 to 100, but different people are different places. So if this workout in an over under session, that first minute might be low cadence work 60 RPMs, that’s hard. That’s a big load and then having that shift for the second minute to be at it and above 100 to 105 RPMs and again, still holding that same wattage. So under, over, under, over under over we’d like to do a lot of those. The three minute big gear threshold efforts, just above threshold efforts are a great early season staple for us. 60 to 70 RPMs again, really over geared, sport specific strength on the bike really, really again broadening that strength base for what you’re doing on the bike. Off the bike, our athletes are doing some sort of a strength session, usually once a week, all throughout the season, often twice a week. We have riders that really have responded, saying they feel stronger, they feel more in contact with the bike, they feel better structured. All of those things. A simple way to look at what we’re trying to do there, our strength specialists we use Erin Carson at Rally Sport and Erin takes us through lots of single leg work.
Caley Fretz 32:43
That’s Jimmy here in Boulder for everyone listening.
Grant Holicky 32:45
Yes and it was where our Apex offices are based out of. So single leg work, her mindset behind it is mobility, strength, flexibility, having that ability to load single leg works and allow us to activate the musculature and really find it in our bodies.
Caley Fretz 33:05
Well, even this village idiot is now I think, quite convinced of this. This is not work that I have done in quite a long time, but even for the semi racer like myself, sounds like the kind of thing that could make my bike life little bit easier. Trevor, can you just run us through just to remind everybody why we care about this?
Recap of Neuromuscular Training and its Benefit – H2
Trevor Connor 33:26
Okay, so try not to sound like that infomercial and saying you’re gonna instantly gain 20 watts. We’re really looking at at five benefits that I think Grant is explained really well to neuromuscular training, just to quickly sum them up. The first is you improve your economy and efficiency. You’re going to last longer on the bike because you’re going to have less muscle tearing and other issues that are associated with the co-activation we talked about. So the third one is because you have your muscles firing in the right patterns, you’re going to see less overuse injury and that’s going to allow you to do bigger work later on and the last one, which we touched on, but this is a really great point that Grant has made in the past is if the neuromuscular firing patterns aren’t there, you’re going to be very unstable on the bike and that’s going to lead to a real, what you call the leak of power, which I love that term.
Grant Holicky 34:22
Yeah, and I am just to expand on that a tiny little bit here as we finish up. So much of what we’re doing when we’re riding is, is benefited by riding with a bit of a higher cadence and holding that higher cadence, you know, the old expression of spin to win and all those things. Higher cadence is going to allow you to respond quicker to attacks, change speeds faster, get in and out of corners with more explosiveness and neuromuscular training does so much in order to benefit that high cadence riding. It sets you up to ride at that place, much, much easier and that leak of power that Trevor just mentioned, tends to diminish. We can get on the pedals quicker, we can turn them faster, we can respond to attacks, we can go then attack. That’s what we’re looking for on the bike is that ability to change speeds on a dime. That’s what makes great racers.
Trevor Connor 35:23
The other really important takeaway here is time on the bike is not going to do it. You have to do dedicated work to improve that neuromuscular side and that’s a combination of single leg work, cadence work, both high cadence and trying to control that high cadence and some low cadence work and just some short sprint work and the really nice thing about the neuromuscular work is with a few exceptions, it’s generally not fatiguing. It doesn’t beat you up the way a VO2 workouts gonna beat you up. So here’s a way of improving without having to worry about burning yourself out.
Grant Holicky 35:57
As every coach will tell every athlete remember that just because it doesn’t beat you up, doesn’t mean it’s not helping you. So this is a great way to get a big return without destroying you and a great way to piggyback on a hard session maybe the next day and really increase your return on your investment.
Caley Fretz 36:17
This is sort of the rough equivalent of Rocky chasing the chickens versus going for a run right?
Grant Holicky 36:23
Sure, sure. Doesn’t beat you up, but it’s very important. Speak for the chicken
Caley Fretz 36:31
All right, that was another episode of Fast Talk. As always, we’d love your feedback. Email us at Webbletters@group.com. Subscribe to Fast Talk on iTunes, stitcher at Google Play and be sure to leave us a rating and a comment. While you’re there, be sure to check out our sister podcast the VeloNews podcast that’s a news and banter and other things. I’m also on that one become a fan of VeloNews on facebook atfacebook.com/velonews and follow us on twitter at twitter.com/velonews. Fast Talk is produced by VeloNews which is owned by competitor group. The thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those of the individual and are brilliant for Trevor Connor and special guest Grant Holicky of Apex Coaching, I’m Caley Fretz. Thanks for listening!
