As Winter makes way for Spring, a great way to boost your race season prep is do an MTB training camp. In this video, Coach Adam Walker walks you through exactly how to create your own!
With decades of experience as an athlete and coach at the highest levels of mountain biking, Adam brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. In this Coaches Corner video, he’ll dive into different approaches to structuring a focused training block or “DIY training camp” to help you maximize your preparation for the BC Bike Race.
Watch this webinar to learn from one of the best in the business and gain valuable insights to elevate your performance.
If this was valuable, check out our other Coaches Corner videos.
Below is an AI transcription of the call. Please forgive any errors in this unedited text.
Thank you. All right. To make sure that we have maximized time to take advantage of Coach Adam’s wisdom, we’ll get going. We’ve got it’s great to see such a big crew of people showing up to these calls and you are in for a treat today. So, Coach Adam is one of the, one of the experts in our coach’s corner and he’s been riding and coaching for like forever, decades.
I’ve benefited from his coaching. I can attest he knows what he’s talking about. And he just has a wealth of experience and so what we’re going to be covering today is building your own training camp. Because we know not everybody has the time, energy, money whatever is going on to make it out to a dedicated training camp.
So this is a way for you to create something on your own and I’m just going to let Adam take it from here. He can introduce himself and let you know why he’s awesome. And why you should listen to him.
Thanks, Carmel. Thanks for the great intro. Hello everybody. And welcome today. We’re talking about how to DIY your own mountain bike training camp. Dre reached out to me last week about doing this call. And immediately we had a bunch of ideas and and I’m super stoked to be here today to talk about this for some of athletes that I work with.
We did a similar presentation a couple of weeks back, but this is going to be even more in depth and provide it even a greater framework. So don’t, so if you’re thinking. Oh, I’ve already seen this, Adam. I I don’t want to hear you talk anymore. Stay tuned. Cause this is going to be awesome. And I’m sure that with with.
All the folks that are joining today. That’s going to lead to some excellent discussion. Lots of questions. If you do have questions during the slideshow, I’ve got a slideshow presentation for you all, you can type them in the chat. Just be aware that Manera and Carmel are going to keep track of those questions, and we’re going to have a question and answer period at the end of the presentation.
If if you do type a question in and I don’t answer, it’s not because I don’t think you’re awesome and I don’t want to answer your question. I do want to answer it, but we’re going to do that at the end. Without further ado, let’s jump in here. I’m just going to do a screen share so that we can Get this rolling.
Bear with me one sec.
Okay.
Okay, folks, are you seeing that? Give me a thumbs up if you’re seeing that. Yeah, okay, fantastic. This is our DIY training camp. I’m Coach Adam Walker. And my company is called The Cycling Co. It’s a coaching company that I started ten years ago. I’m based here on Vancouver Island. And I’ve been coaching for a long time prior to that.
I was an athlete, but I’m gonna get into that in just a sec. Here we go. Wow, there we go. So who am I? First and foremost, I am a mountain biker. I’ve been an athlete for my entire life. I started racing in 1990 or 1987. So next year will be my 40th year of bike racing. I can’t believe that. And I live in Cowichan Valley, right at the base of Mount Zuhalem.
For those of you who’ve done BC bike race in the past you’ve ridden in my backyard and if you’re going to be doing BC bike race for the first time this year, I’m really excited to welcome you to my neck of the woods. I honestly believe that we have some of the absolute best riding in the world here on Vancouver Island.
And I feel so fortunate to live here and I can’t wait to be there and ride the trails with you all. So as I said, I started racing in 1987. I was a national champion on the road way back in the day in the team time trial event. Unfortunately, it’s not a national championship or an Olympic event anymore.
But back in the day, it was a hundred kilometer team time trial. So basically the deal was you race a team of four and you go a hundred kilometers. As fast as you possibly can. And so winning times were usually about two hours. Think about riding 50 K an hour for two hours, not an easy event, but it did prepare me really well for the rigors of mountain bike racing.
And then in 1998, I was the Canada cup overall cross country champion, and it was national team member of the whole. Through that whole decade of the nineties moving from a junior on the road, shifting over to mountain biking and finding some success in there during that time.
That’s where I met Andreas Hessler. And some of you may have heard this story before, but Dre. Called me up and said, Hey, I’ve got a spare room in my house. Do you want to come out and train for the winter? And the next thing you knew I knew I was in 1995. Next thing, now it’s 2025 and I still live here on Vancouver Island.
I’ve coached athletes all across all mountain bike disciplines including world cup, cross country, downhill, and enduro. I was recently the athlete performance specialist for the Norco factory team. I’ve been Canadian National DH coach. I’ve also worked with the Canada Canadian National XC team.
Catherine Penderel is now coaching the national team and she’s invited me to help out on multiple camps. And. I was also BC provincial team coach for quite a long time. Yeah, got lots of experience in, in every mountain bike discipline. And so stoked to share that, some of that information with you a little bit about my coaching philosophy.
It’s gotta be fun. It’s gotta be fun. Whether you’re a pro, whether you’re a master’s athlete, whether you’re a junior, it’s gotta be fun or else you’re probably not going to do it for very long. I really believe that, really we’re riding bikes in our spare time. And. We can choose to do absolutely anything with our spare time.
We could play an instrument, we can do art. We could hike, we could ski, we could do whatever. And we’ve chosen a mountain bike. And so particularly with preparing for a big race, like the BC bike race. It’s an epic adventure and it’s going to be hard, but it has to be fun at the same time.
I place a really high value on skill development. I feel like in the arena of endurance sports, athletes are typically primarily focused on the kind of physical key performance factors like training and building endurance, building their functional threshold power. And oftentimes, That means they place a lower value on skill development.
So I’ve really seek to flip that around and help riders develop their skills because that ultimately means they’re going to have more fun. Another big kind of tenant of my coaching philosophy is always thinking about the big picture. Whether yesterday’s workout went great or, the past week, maybe we had some snow and you couldn’t train.
Thinking about what we’ve done for the last six weeks of the last six months is really a critical piece to thinking about performance. And so always looking at the macro rather than focusing in on the micro. One of the biggest things, and this is probably the most important piece of my coaching philosophy is, and I learned this from one of my early coaches way, way back, is that there are many ways to bake a cake.
And what I mean by that is that there’s more than one path to get anywhere we go. So if you think of training or preparation for a race, like a roadmap, there’s usually more than one way to get where we’re going. We can take a very direct route. Which might get us there quickly, but we might miss out on some great scenery along the way.
We can take, the route over the hills and through the mountains and that might, be a little bit more enriching. So, if we think about that on the grand scheme, there’s more than one way to get fit. So today I’m going to share with you, one way to do a training camp.
There’s of course many other ways and we’ll talk about a little bit about how we could structure things differently as we go through the as we go through the slides here. Let’s get into it. So today we’re gonna talk about what we’re gonna do before the camp prior to camp.
What is a training camp first of all a couple of reasons why we might want to do a training camp then we’re gonna talk about key performance factors, so examining the physical the mental the tactical And the equipment aspects of your overall performance and particularly pertaining to a training camp and how we might be able to improve some of these factors, even in a brief training camp.
Then we’re going to talk about the plan itself. So first of all, we’ll go into the framework, the considerations that we might want to apply to, to, to a camp. And then we’re going to go into a three day block. After that, we’ll talk about some considerations and variables. If you, maybe you have more time, more than just three days, and you want to make it a week long camp, we’re going to talk about how to extend the basic three day plan into a week.
Let’s talk about monitoring metrics during the camp and what that means. And then, we’ll go into a question period. As I said, if you have questions, feel free to type them in the chat, but we’ll get to those at the very end of the presentation here today. Cool. So starting with before the cap, why training camp, what is a training camp?
So I really think that, a lot of times there’s both emotional reasons for training camp. Like sometimes we want to go somewhere warm or somewhere cool and ride bikes. But there’s also physiological reasons for the training camp. What kind of significant benefits can I achieve in a focused period, focused training block in a camp environment?
Many times I’ve seen athletes take a bit of time off work and, they get their bike dialed they get all the gear they book a sick vacation rental somewhere sweet, and then they get there and they have no plan. And they just go and they hammer themselves for a bunch of days and go, Oh yeah, that was a great camp.
Awesome. They just hope for the best and sure you’ll get some adaptation from that. But if we put a little bit more effort and a little bit more intention behind our planning, those few days or that week can be far more beneficial than just hammering ourselves on a bike. So why are we going to do this?
Okay. Why number one, is it recon for an upcoming race? Like maybe you want to come out to Vancouver Island and do a camp and tick off some of the BC bike race stages. Is it a vacation? Do you want to go down to Moab and smash out some miles and then, maybe do Moab rocks?
Or are you, is your family coming along? Are you trying to take a couple of boxes here? Are you going to take the whole family somewhere, get in some good training and kind of have part vacation? Or are you going to make it a true training camp where. You’re removing yourself from those distractions, those, the day to day stuff, and just really focus on training.
So if you can clearly define your goals and objectives, like what do you really want out of this? That’s going to govern all of your decisions moving forward as you plan this block of training. So the second big, why is the. The physiological side of it. So we’re going to talk about, functional overreaching or using progressive overload.
Those two terms often get used interchangeably, but there, there’s some nuances of some slight differences between the two. Basically what we’re talking about here is. Going a little bit beyond what we’re fit enough to do at any given time with that overreaching So we’re not going to go to the point of overtraining We’re just doing like a little bit outside of what’s maybe comfortable or what we’re adapted to at that time We’re talking progressive overload that would mean several weeks of continuous building to get to a point where we’re into that functional Reaching so the two are very similar Either way, in a training camp environment, we’re going to be doing one or the other, maybe both.
The biggest part, in my opinion the biggest advantage to going to a training camp is to improve your focus, decrease distractions, and most importantly, Give yourself the opportunity to improve your recovery. So I want to pose a question to you. If you it’s on the screen here, how many hours a day do you recover?
Okay. We all know how many hours a day we train. Maybe it’s an hour one day, maybe it’s four hours and another day. And so many athletes are just absolutely awesome at nailing their training. But how many of you are really great at nailing your recovery? So again, I’ll ask how many hours a day do you recover?
If you’re, if you are on planet earth and we operate in 24 hour days, really the answer to how many hours a day you recover is every hour that you’re not training. At least your body is trying to recover every hour that you’re not training. So in normal day to day life, we’ve got work, we’ve got family, we’ve got relationships, we’ve got all kinds of distractions that take up that bandwidth that prevents recovery.
Stress is the killer of recovery. Now, training itself is stress but also, all of those other, the day to day things, going grocery shopping, getting stuck in traffic, that, that kind of Cuts into our ability to recover as well. But when we’re in this training camp environment and we can reproduce or eliminate a lot of those other stressors, we have more bandwidth to recover.
That means we can do more work than we can normally do. One of the big pieces of that is having more downtime and sleep. So sleep is like sleep is magic. The, the best recovery tool out there is not, it’s not a potion, a powder pill. Although people seem to be obsessed with finding shortcuts to recovery.
The most beneficial thing that, that we have that can enhance recovery is sleep. It’s free, but it does take some discipline. So practicing good sleep hygiene, having a bedtime routine, these things will help you fall asleep more easily and help you sleep deeper for longer. And it’s during that sleep cycle where we have the growth hormone release.
We have that REM sleep. We have that really quality recovery. And this is not necessarily something you can, you only want to try and enhance on a training camp. We’re in that type of environment, but we can do, we can take steps daily to try and get better at sleeping. But I just want to say that it is the magic.
Okay, moving on, let’s talk about performance factors. So first of all, what do we mean by performance factors? These are the elements of athletic performance that we might want to refine. Okay. And we’re going to break them up into a couple of different categories and give some examples of each. So we’ve got physical performance factors.
So within that we have energy systems. We have fueling, hydration, nutrition, we have recovery, and then we’ve got skills on the bike. So if we want to break some of those down with energy systems if we look at a spectrum from very easy riding or zone one, if those of you who are familiar with zones, we’ve got kind of those oxidative energy systems, zone one, zone two, we move into kind of tempo or higher paced riding.
Should be typically known as zone three. Then we start to shift into different types of fuel or substrates being used. We have different types of muscle fiber recruitment. As we move the latter into anaerobic threshold or zone four and beyond. Again, different energy systems come into play there.
We don’t need to go crazy about those, but, for any of you that do have specific questions, we can talk specifically later on, but that’s the biggest, I think the biggest piece of the physical aspect of performance the fueling and hydration, nutrition, obviously those pieces are key. In, in conjunction with the energy system.
So we want to be thinking about those recovery. What are we doing for recovery? We just talked about sleep, how are we managing our energy? How are we refueling, rehydrating, applying those other pieces of the puzzle there to, to those to the day to day and training camp environment.
And then we’ve got skills. So I already mentioned that I think that skills is one of the biggest areas that so many endurance athletes can improve. That’s certainly a physical performance factor. And we’re going to talk about how to incorporate some skills into your training camp here as well. Then we’ve got the mental and emotional side of things.
For our purposes here in the training camp environment, we want to increase focus and reduce distraction. We want to develop some beliefs and self talk through this training block. Maybe use some visualization as well. From a tactical standpoint, Bottom line is here we’re talking about preparing for racing, so there’s certainly a tactical element.
We could throw the course recon and familiarization into this bucket here. Talk about energy management. While that’s also somewhat physical, there’s a tactical component to that as well. There’s skill development and refinement. Again, so some of, you’re seeing some of these There’s a little crossover between these performance factors.
We got skill development, refinement and skills under fatigue, critical for an event like BC bike race. And then we’ve got specific race preparation. So that would be things like maybe doing actual climbing workouts on some of the climbs. That you’ll actually be racing on or finding something similar.
And finally we’ve got equipment So it’s an it’s early in the year right now and a lot of people are buying new bikes People are getting new sets of wheels people are getting trying different tires I think Dre did a presentation on tires last week. So you’ve probably all got some ideas of what you might want to run.
You’re going to need to practice, try the different setups. Maybe you’ve just got a new helmet and glasses, it’s sometimes those things don’t. All jive as well as we’d like them to you know testing out Maybe it’s a new maybe it’s a new pair of shorts. You want to check out try the chamois Don’t wait till the race to try that stuff you guys use a training camp or longer training rides to test that new equipment Perhaps it’s just dialing in existing gear.
Maybe you just want to play with fork pressures, tire pressures, maybe it’s Dialing in your setup, like bike fit is a big thing that I noticed so many of the riders I’ve worked with whether it’s just in a one day coaching session or riders that I work with on a month to month basis, most people could use a bit of help dialing in their bike fit.
So whether that’s just bar width or stem height or saddle position, these are all things that we can tweak in a training camp.
Let’s get down to the actual plan. What are we going to do over the several days of the camp? We’re going to talk about the key performance factors and how we’re going to incorporate those on a daily basis. We’re going to talk about the day to day schedule and and protocols for what we’re doing here.
Okay. So here’s the vision. We’ve got a multi day training camp and we want to develop and refine skills as well as build aerobic capacity and endurance. Okay. So by building aerobic capacity, we’re talking about the ability to do work at a higher intensity. And then with the endurance, we’re talking about the ability to perform that for longer.
So we want to build out both. We want to build that base of endurance and we want to increase the rate that we can. Perform work. So on a daily basis, we’ve got some pieces of the puzzle here. So every day is going to have a focus. That might be an endurance focus. It might be a threshold focus.
It might be climbing and descending, and we want to make sure we know what we’re doing before we go out and just go we’re just going to go right. And maybe we’ll hammer a bit. Maybe we won’t be intentional. And we’re going to look at those performance factors that we just discussed. So we’re going to.
Incorporate these into each day of the camp. We’re going to talk about the nutrition and fueling requirements for these different types of workouts. Then we’re going to talk specifically about recovery and finally the actual timeline for these days. All right. So daily schedule. Now you can do it however you want.
This is just a suggestion. I’m usually awake before 7. A. m. I’m usually actually probably awake by six, but if you’re in a training camp environment, you might want a little extra sleep. So we’ll say, we’ll just say 7 a. m. wake up breakfast and morning routine. Now in this, that pre ride fueling, we want to make sure that this is a high carb breakfast.
So things with lots of nutritional density. Okay. Oatmeal is a great one. A lot of really high performance athletes are eating rice for breakfast these days. There’s some pretty interesting things that they’re rice with maple syrup, rice with jam up to you, what you do here, but just think about.
Making sure that you’re fueling for the day, having a bit of fat and protein in there is also going to keep you feeling full for longer, but we don’t want to overload the gut with too much fat and protein. When we know we’re going to go do a bunch of hard work by 8 AM, we can be doing some muscle activation or other pre ride mobility work.
I like there’s a routine. Some of you might be familiar with called foundations. I think that is brilliant. There’s a great 12 minute routine that’s available online. If if anybody wants that, actually, I can throw it throw the link in the chat later on here, but that is an awesome routine for activating.
And we’re talking about, we’re talking about activation. Activation is really part of a bigger kind of concept in warming up. I like to use the. The ramp warmup R. A. M. P. So we want to raise our core temperature. We want to activate that typically is talking about muscle activation. We want to mobilize our joints and then we want to the P in ramp is for potentiates.
That means bringing our nervous system online, their musculoskeletal system and getting ready to do the work. So we’re going to focus on dynamic work here in this activation routine rather than static stretching. Too much static stretching is going to reduce. The muscles ability to contract really quickly.
It’s if you take a, take an elastic band and stretch it out a bunch of times, it starts to get limp, right? We don’t want that. We want awesome muscle tension so we can perform explosive work. Go get on the bike. Now, by all means, if you’re stiff, if you’ve been training hard for a couple of days, you need to do some static stretching so that you have that mobility by all means, just don’t be doing like big, long stretches the morning before.
Rigor right before getting on your bike. Okay, so enough about that by 830. We’re gonna check our bikes We’re getting ready to gear up. We’re gonna Do the ABCD check so that’s a really simple check that you can do before every ride We want to check air so air goes in our tires. Obviously it goes in our suspension Let’s check both want to check our axles make sure that The wheels are securely attached.
We want to check our brakes. So squeeze your brakes Grab, grab the front brake, push forward. Rear wheels come up off the ground. We want to know that break is going to stop us. I’ve been in situations in the past where I haven’t done this and maybe you have a little crash the day before and you pinched a brake line and didn’t notice and, wait until the first descent of the day to realize your brakes don’t work isn’t a really great position to be in.
Check your chain, check your drive train, check your dropper. So if you can just remember that A, B, C, D, you’re in pretty good shape there. By nine, we’re getting on the bikes to ride. Okay, we’re going to go into the details of what that ride’s going to look like in just a sec here. Then we’ll come home after the ride, lunch, maybe a nap, possibly a second workout, or maybe we’re in somewhere cool, going to do some sightseeing, whatever it might be, that afternoon activity.
By 7 p. m. we’re having dinner, and then nice early bedtime. I might want to do some stretching and mobility work in there somewhere as well. Moving on. All right, so here’s a possible outline for three, a three day camp here. Now, what I’ve done here is break the timeline into two separate slides. We’ve got first, we’re talking about the performance factors.
So these are the physical mental tactical pieces that we discussed, but now we’re going to break it into specifics. So pardon me, what are we doing each day and how are we being intentional with this training camp to maximize what we get out of it? So day one, we’re going to work on, we’re going to basically work on.
Descending level of intensity and increasing volume. So we’re going to start with higher intensity and the intensity is going to drop and the volume or the time we’re spending on the bike is going to increase by each day. This is gonna maximize things in a lot of different ways, but most importantly, we want to do the more intense training earlier in the cap.
The more intense riding is going to fry our fast twitch fibers. Whereas, that low intensity ride, we wanna leave some gas in the tank, so to speak, for the low intensity work later on. It’s pretty tough to do hard, hard climbing work or any kind of intensity after doing a big endurance day.
So we want to do the harder stuff while we’re fresher. So day one, we’re going to be say maybe three to four hours on the bike. From a physical standpoint, we’re working on skill development and threshold work. So for those of you who might not be familiar with the term threshold, that means that highest sustainable aerobic pace, or that, that would be known as like race pace or our climbing pace.
We’re going to talk again. We’ll talk specifics about the actual workouts in just a sec here But this is the overview from the performance factor side mental Side of things curiosity. Okay, so we’re going to maybe be thinking. Okay, what if I try and do x on the bike what if I try and Play with my setup.
What if I try different tire pressures, different suspension pressures? This is all it’s part equipment, but it’s also part mental. Okay, so just be curious. Just because you’ve had things set up a certain way, you’ve always done things a certain way. Doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the best way and the training camp environment’s a great place great opportunity to experiment from a tactical Standpoint we’re going to be working on technical skills today So that’s going to include the technical aspects of climbing and the technical aspects of descending so body position breaking cornering So to name a few, from equipment perspective and again some crossover here We might have new tires you might want to check You know, try out, maybe do we want to run an insert?
We want to run CushCore. Do we want to try a chunkier tread? Do we want a faster rolling tread? Do we want to try different, um, weights of casings? Maybe we’ve got a new bike. We’ve got new suspension. We’ve got, we’re going to try and dial in those suspension pressures. What’s going to, what’s going to be that?
Sweet spot between, supporting the rider and that comfort. And that’s going to be a little bit different for everybody, depending on kind of, the pro rider is going to think, have the suspension set up a lot more stiffly, a newer rider is probably going to go more on the comfort end of things.
What’s going to feel right for you. This is a chance to experiment from the nutrition side of things. Today’s probably going to be a lot of stop and go. We’ve got some intensity, but it’s not going to be really sustained intensity. We’re going to be doing drills. And the fueling requirements aren’t going to be as high as they might be for the subsequent days.
So maybe 60 to 90 grams of carbs per hour is a good place to start. If we want to think about types of fuel that could be, it could fall into those categories. Typical gel or or energy bar is around. Is around 25 to 30 grams of carbs, large bananas, about 30 grams of carbs, a standard water bottle full of sport drink is about 30 grams of carbs.
So you can start to do the math and figure out, what your fueling requirements will be. If you’re at altitude or if you’re in the heat, those fueling requirements may be different than they are at home. Got something to investigate and talk to your coach. Talk to me about those things before you go.
And then for recovery, say today at the end of the day, we’re going to, we’re going to do some mobility work for recovery. Okay. Second day. Now we’re going to work on endurance and tempo. So again, three to four hours on the bike, perhaps this is going to vary for everybody, depending on where you’re at with your preparation at this time, but, we’re really focusing primarily on endurance work with some tempo. Okay. So from the physical side of things, in this case, we’re looking at aerobic adaptations or those endurance adaptations as well as some neuromuscular adaptations or time under tension from the tempo work from the mental side of things here, we’re going to shift from just being curious to starting to have some confidence or.
We’re forming new beliefs about our abilities, about our bike setup, whatever it might be. From a tactical side of things, we’re going to work on skills under fatigue. So it’s great to be able to do the skills when you’re fresh. But being able to execute high level skill work when you’re under fatigue is a completely different story.
And this is where I think, especially in a race like BC bike race, which is seven days, being able to perform that skill work in a fatigued state is critical. From the equipment side of things. Okay. We have some knowledge from yesterday. What worked? Let’s continue to dial that in. We’ve done a lot of the work already.
And so these will be more minor tweaks. That’s going to give us more bandwidth to focus on those the mental and the physical sides of things. With the tempo work, that’s going to cause our nutritional demands to increase. So we want to up that fueling maybe to somewhere around 90 grams per hour.
That’s where we’re starting to take on a lot of fuel. Now these training camps are a great opportunity to train your gut. So anybody who’s gone from under fueling to trying to, Fuel adequately too quickly, meaning say you’re used to like going for a three hour ride and having one cliff bar or one or one Hornby bar.
And then all of a sudden you start taking on gels and high carb mix and a ton of fuel. It’s really hard on your gut. Okay. It can be very uncomfortable because cramping it and cause gastrointestinal distress. So these training camps are a great opportunity to train our gut. Our gut can actually be trained to absorb more fuel while we’re riding from a recovery standpoint.
On day two here we’re really going to focus on post ride fueling. Okay. Now day three, this is the big day. That’s why I put it in green. Today is where we’re going to empty the tank. So whatever we’ve got left from left over from the first couple of days, we’re going to leave it all out there today.
So from a physical standpoint, we’re really focusing on endurance. Now, Endurance doesn’t mean. Go as hard as you can for as long as you can pay for endurance from, I guess this is where the, I guess the dictionary definition of endurance may be different from, and what endurance we refer to in endurance in the sporting world.
So really from a coach’s perspective. Developing endurance means riding easy for a long time. So for those of you that think in zones, this is, we’re talking primarily zone two, maybe a little bit of the rides, even in zone one, maybe some of it’s a little bit zone three, but for the most part it’s zone two, this is where we get those adaptations like.
Increased mitochondrial density, meaning that it’s a pretty fancy term, but that, that mitochondrial densities that those who can remember high school biology, the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. This is where in the cell we get adaptations where we’re able to clear lactate or muscles work better at high intensity.
Actually, those improvements happen from actually working at low intensity. Sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. From a mental perspective, this would be a great day to do course recon. So you want to knock off a big, long stage or some or replicate a huge stage with maybe some lots of climbing, maybe 40, 50 kilometers.
Like we’re going to be doing a BC bike race. Here’s a great opportunity to do that. The mental side of things, we’re going to have that confidence. We’re going to be like, Hey, yeah, I’ve ridden my bike 50 K. No problem. I can do that at BC bike race. From a tactical standpoint, we’re going to think about energy management.
So the tank’s already a little bit empty. Now we’ve got to manage what we have left. This is where fueling comes in. So we get a little crossover between the nutrition and the tactical side of things. The equipment side of things, this is a big day on the bike. This is like you played around for the first couple of days of the camp.
This is where. You’re really going to be like, okay, are these, are, is this new shammy really going to be good for a five hour ride? Am I going to be comfortable? Does my pack feel comfortable for five hours? Am I able to haul enough water, haul enough food, all of these kind of equipment tweaks that we can happen on the, on this last day of the camp.
From a nutrition standpoint, we’re really focusing on pushing the limits of our carbohydrate intake and our fluid intake. Making sure that those energy demands are met and then from a recovery standpoint. We’re being really hyper aware of our increased caloric needs at the end of the day today.
And that’s particularly important if you’re going to go on to do more days in your camp. Okay, cool. So now let’s talk about, let’s get into the actual on the bike. What are we doing on the bike? So day one, as we’ve mentioned in the last slide, we’re climbing and descending. So here’s some suggestions of things that you could work on or develop on this day.
So body position. I’ve worked with hundreds of athletes and I’ve been to countless races over, over decades. And I can honestly say that easily one of the biggest improvements that everyone can make on their bike is body position. Even when I worked with pro athletes at the world cup level, 90 percent of the time, what we’re coming back to is body position.
Now it doesn’t sound fancy. It’s not the sexiest thing to work on, but. When we are in good body position, we’re able to manage all of the forces that are coming upwards at us through the bike. And then we can also apply forces downwards through the bike. So we can have better pressure control. We can get, we can be better at braking, better at cornering by having good body position.
And by practicing this and training, we have that kind of default body position. We develop those muscle memory passes those motor unit pathways so that we know what position we need to be in for certain circumstances. Now there’s four key parts to body position. Hey, we’ve got, we can go into a really lengthy description, but I’m going to give you like the most effective way to think about it.
I want you to think about these four body parts. Okay, they all start with H. Heels, hips, head, and hands. Now by shifting your heel position, you can actually shift your fore aft position on the bike. So for some people it might mean you need to ride the heel down. Certainly you don’t want to be up on your tiptoes.
That’s going to cause you to shift forward under any braking forces. So you’ll either heels down or level a lot of people. There’s a, some downhillers out there that have popularized the flying V or the front foot has healed down and the back foot has healed up. Then they can adjust their fore aft using that back foot.
That’s something I work on with riders a lot. It’s very effective. You may see a video on my Instagram about body position sometime soon. Breaking with better body position, we can refine our breaking. So using independent use of front and rear break, understanding breaking points, breaking sequences and corners critical to performance, particularly on, on long descents, when we’re under fatigue.
If we have those breaking patterns, those movements, those breaking points. ingrained in us through practice will be much more effective to do that in a racing environment. Cornering skills. I think that is one thing that so many athletes come to me and they want help with cornering from, world cup athletes, world cup downhillers to, to down to beginners.
Everybody wants to get better at cornering. We work so hard to get up the hill. And it’s so easy to start losing time descending if we don’t have our cornering skills dialed. So it all starts with good body position, and then we can layer on skills from there. From the climbing standpoint and work on some climbing today, too.
So we may, we all have inherent strengths and weaknesses. Some of us are better at the super techie climbs. Some of us are better at maybe like gradual road times that require more power. Don’t just work on what you’re already good at. Okay. I think as humans, we all have this tendency to do what we’re already good at.
And that, that makes sense. It feels good to do what you’re good at, right? It builds more confidence. You’re like, I love doing this. You can do more work that way. But it seems that there’s so much to be gained from focusing on those gaps, identifying those gaps, focusing on them. And maybe for you, that’s technical climbing.
Maybe for your buddy, you might be at the same camp with, it might be working on power. You can work on a little bit of both, but really focus on whatever your weaker area is. I have a workout that I prescribe for a lot of my athletes. I call it five by four plus one. So finding a four minute climb.
With a one minute descent and basically doing five laps working on threshold work or that highest climbing pace that you can sustain. It’s a great workout. You could include something like that or some other type of threshold work into this ride and then use the descent to focus on the body position, breaking, cornering drills that you might’ve done earlier in the ride.
And later that afternoon, maybe we’re going to do a second ride, maybe a gym session, do that. Some mobility work. I wouldn’t say do a ton of strength work knowing what’s coming the next couple of days, but you could do some here in this camp day two. Okay. Now we’re going to get into a little bit more of an endurance focus.
Maybe some include some tempo. So on this day, we’re talking about aerobic development, right? We want to build that aerobic engine so that we’re able to produce power for long periods of time on the bike. And there’s going to be some neuromuscular adaptation with some of the tempo work that we’re going to do.
So we’re talking about tempo. That could also be referred to as zone three. It’s what you’ll be spending a lot of time at. And BC bike race. So we need to make sure that we’re doing that in these, in our training environment, whether it’s a daily training environment or in a camp environment, the body’s only going to adapt to the stress that is imposed on it.
So keep that in mind. We can’t just go out and do. A certain type of training that we love to do and then hope to perform at BC bike race. If we haven’t been doing something similar. I know there’s a lot of kind of gravel road and even some pavement climbs in BC bike race. It makes sense in the training environment to go and do some tempo work, do some higher intensity endurance, maybe even varying cadences.
There’s a lot of controversy lately. Online about, about the benefit of high torque low cadence work. I’m a huge believer in it. It’s worked really well for me in the past. Either way, we’re going to vary some some tempo work with climbing. Here’s again, great opportunity to work on the skills or refine the skills that we worked on yesterday and build them into the descents of, on on day two here pick one skill at a time when you’re doing your descents.
It’s impossible for the brain to think about doing multiple things. For an advanced rider, we’ll we might talk about having a primary skill and a secondary skill but when we break things down into chunks and are more focused on certain elements, say, okay, I’m really going to focus on my heel position.
On this lap, next lap, I’m really going to focus on my hip hinge third lap. I’m going to focus on where my chin is over my stem. These kinds of things, or maybe that focuses, I’m going to really focus on angulation or leaning the bike through the turns, whatever you do, pick one skill at a time, the brain is going to like you a lot better moving on to day three.
So you’re back to this kind of empty the tank day. Fueling is going to be critical. Okay. Do not be under the impression that, Hey, I want to lose some weight. So I’m going to under fuel. It doesn’t work like that. We have limitless fat stores, essentially all of us do. However. There’s a term in the sport world or exercise physiology world that fat burns in the flame of carbohydrate So you need to have that carbohydrate that glycogen in your system For your body to be able to effectively utilize fat a lot of the fat usage that happens actually happens at rest I don’t want to go too deep down that rabbit hole, but on this day, fueling is going to be critical.
We could be even going more than 90 grams per hour. It’s not uncommon for performance athletes to be doing 120 grams of carbs per hour now. So if you think about that that’s a lot of fuel. That’s a lot of eating. If you’re relying on solid food, it’s a lot of, it’s a lot of nutrition products if you’re relying on other sources, but either way, get it.
And you feeling is critical training. Your gut is critical. Also apply the skills that you refined over the last few days. So now you’re going to be fatigued. It’s a great opportunity to just continue to. Work on those things and most of all remember to have fun. It’s a big day Like it’s okay to take your time.
It can be a little bit cruisy with the pace enjoy the scenery have fun out there. Okay, cool So here’s some considerations and variables. I’m, just keeping an eye on the clock here We’ve got some more stuff to move through but we’re almost at the end So we’ll get to your questions really soon there folks.
Okay So big things to overarching principles to consider here close the gaps enhance your strengths so I think too often we can get so focused on working on our weaknesses that we forget to Do things that are going to strengthen our strengths or we want to enhance those You know if you if you’re a great climber Yeah, for sure.
By all means, do climbing work. But remember to just address those things that you need to improve. Analyze the requirements of key events and train each area independently. I was just mentioning this a second ago. It can be really tempting to just say, okay BC bike race.
It’s seven days. I like this stage looks like this and this stage look like this and this stage looks like this. So I’m just going to go out and I’m going to, I’m going to ride like. Similar distance or elevation every day and do that on repeat, don’t do that. Okay. It’s really important to break each element of performance into pieces.
And focus on training each of those individually as you get closer To your big event to bc bike race. Yeah for sure You can go out and do more race simulation stuff, you know knock out 60k rides with 2 000 meters of vertical go for it at race pace But here, particularly if you’re doing this training camp somewhere in the near future, whether it’s a long weekend or a spring break You’re probably not quite ready for that yet.
So think about bite sized chunks in terms of overall volume or like hours on the bike, probably advisable to not increase your weekly volume by more than 50 percent in a training camp environment, right? If you do, you might be able to get through it, but. It’s unlikely that you’re, it’s, or it’s likely that you’ll take so long to recover.
You’ll end up actually with lower overall training volume. So we don’t, first of the camp is not to absolutely destroy ourselves. It’s just to keep it, keep in that functional range of a little bit of overreaching. So if you normally do 10 to 12 hours in a week, aiming for 15 to 18 might be reasonable.
Remember, we’ve got greater capacity to work and fewer distractions. And maybe we’re somewhere. Warmer. It’s always easier to do more volume when it’s, when you’re in a warmer environment than you might be used to. The fatigue will catch up with you. If you go crazy. It’s so often I’ve seen athletes.
They go whether it’s a weekend camp or a week long camp You know you go somewhere new you get somewhere warm and you are stoked like it happens to the best of us Don’t go nuts reign it in on the first day. Okay, it’s exciting to write a new places, but use some restraint Nobody wants to be that rider that destroys themselves on the first day of a camp because it makes for a really long week Okay So what if you want to do a full week training camp?
Okay. Here’s a couple of suggestions. You could take the protocol that we’ve done, do day one, day two, day three, then take a rest day or an easier day, and then repeat day one over again. That’s the climbing and technical skills day two, the tempo day, and day three, the endurance day. Or if you’re a more advanced rider, you might want to even take those and make blocks out of each of those.
You might go day one, two days in a row back to back. So you’ve got like a, really focused kind of work block of threshold work and skill work. Then do day two, that, that endurance, that tempo day that would be actually be your third day. Then take an easier day, then do day two again. And then day three, that long four to five hour ride on back to back days.
So there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that endurance work done on back to back days. Has a greater impact, but, again, figure out what works for you. Be smart about where you’re at. I think, being a little conservative, if you’re there, if you’re going to do a full week camp, be conservative in the first three days, and then you can really go for it on the back half of the week.
Okay, cool. Metrics and monitoring. So keep track of your daily metrics during the camp. Okay, but don’t be ruled by your wearable device, whether that’s a Garmin watch or whatever you might wear. Listen to your, listening to your body is far more important than whatever your wearable tells you. Okay, like the data can help us make more educated decisions.
But I can probably guarantee you your HRV is going to drop and your resting heart rate is going to be a little higher. With so much training stimulus. Okay. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t perform quality training just because you’re carrying some fatigue. Really the, these devices are trying to quantify so many different things and some of them have these proprietary algorithms that can be really misleading.
Listen to your body. Your body is going to tell you everything you need to know. But like that said, if you feel cracked early, if you really overdid it, take an easier day. And try and bounce back. It’s not about digging a hole here. It’s about overreaching in a functional manner and fatigue. It might be the result of these days, but it’s not, the fatigue is not the ultimate goal.
Okay. So we’re creating a stress response situation that’s going to prepare us for the upcoming season. Keep that in mind, right? That adaptation, we want adaptation. If there’s too much stress, there’s going to be minimized response or minimized recovery. The magic happens in the recovery.
So let’s get to some questions. I
think, Minera, there are a few questions in the chat. Did you want to? I’m just going back up to them. Adam, the first one came in was saying you mentioned 90 grams of fuel per hour. Which fuels are you recommending? Testing as far as individualized plans go. And are you, what are your thoughts on solids versus liquid fuels?
Wow. Okay. Awesome question. Who answered, who asked that? That was Jeroen. Jeroen 2, Coach Adam. Okay, awesome. Hey, how are you doing? Good, how are you? Thank you for this, by the way. Yeah, you’re welcome. I hope you’re finding some value here. Yes. In terms of fuels, man, there are so many available on the market now.
I’m always experimenting with new stuff, with different stuff. When I’m doing more intense workouts. So if I’m in this training camp environment and I’m doing like the threshold day, I probably rely primarily on. On liquids and gels those are going to be absorbed fast. When you’re doing the high intensity work, you need the fuel, but your digestive system can get turned in knots when you’re doing intensive.
You want something that’s going to be easy to absorb. I would stay with something you’re familiar with. Again there’s so many good products out there. I’ve had great success with honey stinger gels that there, I really liked those ones. The Morton products are fantastic. When you’re doing lower intensity stuff, longer rides, then you can do, then you can do solid food or a mix of liquids and solids.
Hornby bars are my hands down favorite. They’re. They’re made locally here in BC they’re organic and they are very nutrient dense. So they’re a fantastic choice.
Appreciate that. I’ll give it, I’ll give us some shot. Yeah, sure. Okay. And then there were two separate people asking the same question about timing. If somebody’s wanting to do one or two training camps between now and, of course, race week at the end of June, when would you recommend they plan for these?
Oh, that’s an awesome question. There’s no bad time for a training camp. But I wouldn’t try and make every weekend into a training. So if we look at, if we think about the principle progressive overload, we want most of our training to feel quite manageable. And that’s going to vary depending on your own individual schedule, your work schedule, family schedule how much time you have to train right now, so many of us are limited by daylight.
So our training might be indoor. And in that case, it’s tends to be a little bit more intensity focused and not as much duration because we’re on the trainer. But as, as the snow starts melting, even here on the Island, we’ve had to deal with snow recently, and I know pretty much most of Canada is under a blanket of snow, but as the snow starts to melt and you get an opportunity to go outside, maybe these opportunities arise.
In terms of timing, I would separate training camps by five to six weeks. Depending on, what your training cycles look like, if you’re on a, if you’re on a two week cycle, three week cycle, four week cycle separate them so that you have, you’re able to have a recovery week.
Following the camp or at least, several days of lower volume, lower intensity, and then do a few more weeks of quote, unquote, regular training before you go back into a camp environment. Does that answer your question? Eric, does that answer your question then about what the next week looks like after training camp?
Have a good friend.
Yes, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, make sure that make sure you schedule some easy days like I’d say minimum three easy days. You might still do some mobility or some light spinning on the bike. But we want to really allow the body to for lack of a better term, just absorb the training load that we’ve done in that camp and it’s going to vary, if a three day camp is going to look a lot different in terms of recovery than a seven day or a 10 day camp again we can, use the, use our kind of sense, our subjective sense of how we’re feeling as well as some monitoring metrics to determine, when is a good time to resume Regular training following a camp like that and then I know we’re running out of time But I want to just squeeze us question in here.
She is asking for five to seven day training camp how many gym sessions would still be okay to do? Oh, that is a great question. I would reduce the intensity of the gym work and you could still incorporate some strength work, but it’s such, it’s so individual, it would really hinge on a couple of key things, okay? Where are you at with your strength training? How many days of strength work do you do on a regular basis?
Are you in this I do a little bit of micro dosing strength work on a daily basis? Or are you like, I do two big strength work, workouts a week with kind of one accessory day? It’s really, it’s a really tricky question to answer, but I would say that if you’re going to have a training camp environment, really taking advantage of, if you’re going somewhere warm, for example, you want to take advantage of the warm weather, right?
The strength adaptations that you’ve achieved are probably not going to diminish too much over a week long training camp. But I think some of us, we need some, we have we have a routine. So we want to do whether it’s some body weight strength work or that activation mobility work.
Yeah. If you’re thinking about doing something like this and you would like some specific help with that, I’d love to answer some specific questions for you. So feel free to reach out. Yeah. Okay. And then, sorry. One more one squeeze in Dion. Dean, sorry not Dion, Dean all the way from Australia is asking how long before BC bike race should we be looking at doing a training camp?
I would say to probably BC bike race starts at the end of June, or basically first week of July, I would make sure that, any big training block is done about a month beforehand, so that then we can taper our focus just really on intensity and kind of sharpening the spear, so to speak moving into moving into that last period before BC bike race.
Just before, I just want to let, give everybody one last thing before I go. I just want to thank everybody for listening to me ramble for an hour. And If you would if you’d like to reach out if you want help, specific help with your training I do have space for some more, for a couple of more athletes this year, moving into BC bike race you can reach me.
On Instagram, my Instagram handle is @coachAdamWalker. Or if you are like, Hey, I want to work together. You can go to thecyclingco.com/coachme and there’s an application form right there. I’ll type it in the chat here as well. And please. Feel free to to reach out. And if you’ve got some specific questions, just Hey, I want to have a chat we can also, you can also book a consultation call as well.
I’ll make that link available maybe in the email that goes out with the recording of this. Great. Awesome. Thank you, Adam. That’s awesome. Thank you. Thanks. Okay. And we’re on to the Wheel of Names, and just to remind everyone what we’re giving away today is the M19 multitool from Crankbrothers.
Thank you everybody for staying a little bit longer. Thank you, Adam, for joining us today.
That was a lot of information and I’m really grateful that we recorded it so that certainly I can go back and watch it again. Ha. And I think you were saying that also we’ll have an option for people to get the slides. So we’re going to work that out and we’ll provide that information in the email that we send out.
So yeah, we’ll make the slide presentation as a PDF that, that everyone here and anyone who missed the call will have access to. So be tuned for that. Thank you everyone. Thanks everybody. Thank you. That was awesome.