In our latest racer Zoom call, Coach Karsten Madsen outlines the first of two complimentary 6-week training programs he developed for our 2025 Racers. He explains how the TrainingPeaks platform—where the program is hosted—works. He also addresses indoor vs outdoor training, riding cadence, strength building best practices and other training questions.
If you are a registered racer, the link to Karsten’s training program is in your email. If you can’t find it, email Moniera and she will send it to you.
If you haven’t signed up for the race yet because you’re concerned about training, this call gives you a peek into what’s available to support you on your journey as a BCBR Racer.
If you have questions about the race, contact Moniera in Racer Relations: [email protected].
To learn more about Coach Karsten, visit his website.
If you are ready to register, click here!
Below is an AI transcription of the call. Please forgive any errors in this unedited text.
Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us on a different day today. Our call today is we’ve got Karsten on the call, who’s going to walk us through basically the training program that he’s created for us. We’ve also got to see, you know, obviously do some Q and A we’ve also got Dre on the call to address any questions if anybody has, and then please remind me at the end, because I always forget, we need to do a prize draw.
And what we’re doing for a prize draw today. Is we’ve got this promotion going on right now for new people to sign up to the BC bike race, and they are able to score one of those cool bear hoodies. But since this is a racer call. We will do one of those for somebody on this call today. So without any further ado, I’m going to hand it over to Karsten.
Yeah, thanks Moniera. And yeah, for those who don’t maybe know me I’m Karsten Madsen. I used to do quite a bit of racing myself and have done BC bike race a number of times in the pro category and about, I guess this is our third year now doing this kind of created Coaches Corner with BCBR and we kind of, it started as just a training plan.
And it’s now grown out into a pretty intricate system in terms of, you know, there’s two other coaches, a part of it, strength and conditioning and skills. So, you know, we believe that, you know, we’ve got a pretty well rounded crew and I cannot forget as well, Dre’s wisdom that we also will always have that’s a part of that.
So. I think that’s what I wanted to start the call with is just letting everyone know that you have lots of different resources to utilize. And so think about where your strengths and weaknesses lie. So specifically this call today many of you have. Signed up for the training program, which I’ve provided via training peaks.
There was a crew of people that kind of in the last little bit that signed up. So check your training peaks again, cause I cleared out again, another batch of people and applied the plan in. And again, apologies that it’s not instant. There’s just a little bit of at times lag. So with all that being said we’ll kind of go into what we’re going to talk about today.
So first kind of point is what the plan is and what it’s not. How to best utilize the plan. And a little bit, I’m going to talk about how we can get the most out of it in terms of developing, like actually getting our zones, which is something that I’ve not discussed in year one and year two, I think nearly enough.
And so it’s great that we’ll get to dive into it today. Recovery, strength and conditioning, and then. Connect your devices to auto upload. So we’re going to discuss all these different topics. And again there is going to be a Q and a at the back end. So you can either put in the chat and maybe Manera can help with that.
And again, we can kind of have questions rolling through. And if we’re kind of starting to get slow or kind of long on time, we’re running out of time, then we’ll kind of save them to the end. Okay, so what the plan is and what it’s not it’s made to target everyone and no one kind of at the same time.
Again, writing for, you know, you think of how many racers show up to BC bike race. And everyone comes in with a very different, you know, where they started out what their background was. So, you know, for some people, you know, there is going to be a small sliver that this plan is actually going to fit them really well.
But there’s gonna be a lot of people that it’s either gonna be too much or it’s gonna be too little. And so, you know, that’s the thing is to recognize is that when I created this plan, I’m trying to hit the, like, how many racers can I hit where I think this will be useful. So, and again, we’ll, we’ll talk about it later in this call on how do you make decisions and you kind of, Self delegate or self increase workouts to help you get the most out of this plan.
And then we’ll go into you know, kind of, again, my, what I consider the true magic of coaching is. And again, there’s ways to, to do this self coaching wise. We’ll, we’ll crack on to this in the early bit because really to get the most out of this plan we have all these great tech now. You know, and I, I know Dre would probably be able to speak to this of, you know, he trained in the days where training plans were on, you know, an Excel.
And it wasn’t near as fancy and you wrote your workout out and you probably taped it on your top tube. And that’s how you followed sessions. Obviously since we have amazing devices that capture all sorts of data. Points for us. And so we really want to make sure we utilize these and the training software that I utilize training peaks.
Basically it will load in pretty well, every device I’ve yet to have a client, have a device that training peaks was not able to link to. So you can, you know, rest assured, you’ll be able to get your you know, your devices to load your workouts in and again, so why is, that important. It helps basically build out a few different metric numbers.
And training peaks does have an algorithm and creates numbers. Which I’ll get to. I just want to also finish my point of the, you know, you might see this bullet of don’t double record. So again, when you’re linking devices, just make sure that when you do a workout, you have one file going like some people will sometimes Have like an apple watch and they’ve got that hooked up to training peaks and they’re recording a session there And they’re also recording a session on their garmin or whatever device that they use on the bike and then all of a sudden two files go in training peaks isn’t smart enough to know and merge them together.
It’s gonna think you did two rides and it really puts your metrics quite out of whack. And so let’s talk about quickly, like what are these metrics that are being built? So training peaks obviously works with thousands and thousands of athletes and gets to collect all this data. From that, they’ve used a lot of that data to build these algorithms.
And one of them, and you’ll see it in other devices, your Garmin will tell you this and your Wahoo and whatever, you know, brand you, you, you use. But TSS is a pretty well known term and that stands for training stress score. So basically that is a number that gets valued to how hard your session was.
And from that, there’s other two other numbers that TrainingPeaks will display. And again if you have a basic account, you won’t see these numbers. If you have a premium account, you will. So again it’s one of those things, but as a coach, you know, in a coaching account, you always see these numbers.
Form is kind of the idea of your readiness to train and that’s valued off the fatigue. So if we think of training every time you’re going to do a workout, your fitness is going to increase. So if we’re drawing a line up a graph, you’re going to do a hard workout. Your fitness is going to increase.
The other thing that’s going to increase at the same time is your fatigue. And that line eventually will cross over your fitness line where you’ll be. I’m kind of more tired than fit in a way, if you can picture these lines moving. And so this is where these plans are built to try and basically allow for your fitness to climb.
Your fatigue will climb, but then we’re going to have recovery periods where we bring our fatigue down. But you know, when our fatigue comes down, also our fitness will come down cause it’s we’re resting. So it’s that again, simplistically put, it’s trying to take kind of three steps forward and one step back and kind of systematically going back and forth between that.
Now, these TSS form fatigue, they only work if you go and actually apply proper zones. So on training peaks, And in in your account, you’ll be able to see in your profile, you’ll have a part that is all about zones. And, you know, you know, one of the gold standard tests in bike racing is an FTP test. So functional threshold power.
Basically, it’s accomplishing a 20 minute. kind of best effort and taking a number from that 20 minutes of your power. And then from there you can input it into training peaks and it will auto populate your zones. So when I say zones, that zones one through five. So zone one being easy, easy, easy. Zone two being base or aerobic.
You may hear it. Zone three being tempo zone four threshold and then zone five is like full gas, all out VO two max, like all sorts of verbiage. So that again paints that picture. And so I would 100 percent recommend that everyone go and do an FTP test. If you’re riding on Zwift, it will, there’s literally, you can click and it will run you through one.
Right in Zwift. If you search FTP, it’s going to come out with a bunch. Generally, I just, I would pick the 20 minute best effort. I think it fits into BCDR kind of style of racing well anyways of, you know, you’ll have longer climb and efforts. So again, if you don’t know Like I say, Google is your best friend.
All you got to do is Google your device and connecting to training peaks. And it will have a page of simple linking instructions. Cause again, there’s too many devices to try and show everyone. So do a little homework Google that phrase and you’ll find it. Okay. So you’re gonna, I’m going to coach myself and how do I get the most out of this plan?
So again, I’ll preface fitness testing. It’s not in the free plan because again, it’s one of those things of, you know, I suggest doing it. And all I would say is remove, you know, if you’re like, I need to do fitness testing, look at the hard workout. in the week and maybe say, okay, I’m going to remove that hard workout and instead I’m going to put an FTP test cause I need to retest my zones.
And I would suggest you can kind of look at retesting your zones kind of once every two to three months and maybe a little more frequently as you get a little bit closer to things. So again I definitely would say getting your zones in line, it will help you. And probably again, one of the other big questions that I get a lot is I got sick or work got really crazy and I missed a bunch of workouts.
When should I try and make them up? Gold standard is don’t ever try to make up workouts. Just get slot yourself into the next day and what it’s written. So even if you missed a really hard session and you have an easy day, the next day, just slot into that and move forward. I think a lot of athletes will get into, okay, now I’m going to do this hard session cause I missed it.
And ultimately it just predicates kind of jumping around.
So I would recommend just making sure you know, if you are getting sick, take the time you need. I always like, as soon as an athlete says they’re getting sick, it’s like three days of full rest right off the hop. And, you know, from there, then we can kind of start reintroducing training as needed.
But don’t, don’t try to make up the sessions you missed. Again, you’ll slot back into the plan. You know, best as possible. Another one that I like to coin in terms of if you’re self coaching yourself, the rule of 15 as kind of this thing that I started to utilize when I was self coaching myself for a bit and basically it’s, it’s a way to, you know, as you’re training, you’re going to build this fatigue and at times you’re going to, it’s going to get really muddy and blurry to be like, Oh, you know, I have all this training written and but I’m feeling really crappy and I don’t know.
Maybe I’m getting sick. Maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m just tired from other things like mentally tired. And so what I used to do is no matter what, if the session was written and I didn’t feel like doing it, I would get dressed. I would get all my stuff sorted, go out on the bike or run or whatever activity I was doing, and I would do it for 15 minutes.
And if after 15 minutes, I still didn’t feel like doing the session, I would pull the pin. And again, this only works if you’re generally a kind of type A based person. Because type A based people don’t want an easy way out. We all can whinge about a hard session coming up a bit for sure. But ultimately, You’re going to do that 15 minutes.
And I can honestly think in my professional career, I maybe pulled that, like where I pulled the session two or three times. So, you know, and I can tell you how many times I felt like the rule of 15 is probably hundreds. Like that’s the reality of training for hard events. Fatigue is just, you kind of have to learn to have it be your friend.
So that’s again, I can’t stress that one enough. It really does help you be your own driver of this plan. Because again, obviously, this is a bit of a self guided plan. And you’re going to have to make the calls on, you know when you need to pull a session, et cetera. And then another one. What if you dislike Zwift and riding indoors or you can ride out all year round?
I’ll say I’m a big advocate for, for getting outside and, and doing your sessions outside. Because ultimately we don’t race BCBR on Zwift. We race it on the trails and in all sorts of conditions. We can have piping hot weather, super dry, dusty. You can have, you know, cold, raining crazy mud. Like truly the island will throw everything at us and it just depends.
excuse me, what we get on the year. So I am a big advocate for go outside. And kind of, again, speaking back to the whole, doing your own fitness testing that’s an area where when you do your power, your functional threshold power, if you’re also wearing like a chest heart rate strap, while you do it, you also gives you an opportunity to get.
a heart rate file and that same thing you’ll find your 20 minute max like kind of average heart rate And from there you can also have a heart rate zones one through five. So if say you don’t have a power meter on your mountain bike, you only have a smart trainer. Well, now you’ve got an option. If, if I’ve written for you to do a threshold base set, which is zone four, you can basically go and say, okay, this is my zone for power.
Let me go look at what my zone for heart rate is. And it’s going to put you in the ballpark and you’re going to process wise, get a really great session. And ultimately you, you learn quickly on, you know, how much harder actually heart rate can be to control. So again, I’m quite pro going outside and doing some of these workouts outside.
There does have to be a little bit more forward thinking on the idea of like, what trails am I going to use? Like if I say you’re doing a, you know, eight minute. threshold interval, you’re gonna want to think of a piece of trail that allows you to kind of pedal at pretty good attention for about eight minutes.
You know, they can have a few undulating things, but we don’t want any major downhills where now we’re not pedaling. We want to try find a piece of trail that would give us the ability to climb for eight minutes or, you know, false flat climb. Like whatever can keep that tension on the pedals where you don’t think you’re letting off.
So that’s just one example of it. So again, be creative, think outside the box. There’s not only one way to, to do these plans. And if you don’t have a smart trainer, you can’t. You know, you can still get a lot of really great quality out of this. And again, I’ll, I’ll always say like, you should go outside and get some of the sessions.
Again, if you’re in certain parts of the world that’s not going to happen. And Peter, it looks like you have a beautiful background. I don’t know if that’s a zoom one or if that’s real, but. I think you could ride outdoors right now. So so yeah next thing I wanted to talk about is rest. And you know, it kind of goes back a bit into that idea of, you know, when, when we miss a session, we don’t want to make it up, it can just predicate us into kind of getting or building too much fatigue and overloading.
So one of the expressions I’ve always really liked is don’t be a plastic plant. What I mean by that is you can water a plastic plant and it won’t grow. But you know, you become a plastic plant when you don’t actually allow your body time to rest and absorb the work that you’ve done. And honestly, like I think there’s a ton of research really pushing this to the forefront.
But what is the best performance enhancing thing that you can do that as well is 100 percent legal is get sleep. Sleep is your number one, like. if there’s, you know, one thing to really kind of think to yourself, like I’m not really great at recovering. I’m not great. It’s sitting still this or that nail your sleep.
You know, work on being consistent at the time you go to bed and the time you wake up. You know, some people do have to wake up early for their work or early for their training. All I would say is be consistent at waking up early and it makes your life a lot easier. Your body does really work. Kind of on that they call it like chrono timing or whatever where basically You’ll get a better sleep.
The more consistent your bedtime and wake ups stay and shoot for, you know, obviously as you start training, you are going to need a little bit more sleep. And again, sometimes easier said than done. There might be people on this call that have young families and again, different commitments that can be hard.
Again, if you can get 20 percent better at your sleep, 10 percent better at your sleep, like. And so I think whatever you can do to just move that needle forward, it’s going to be beneficial in a really good way. So yeah, that’s really what I want to preface. And as well, on recovery days, You know, like I say, it’s not, we don’t want to get into, well, I, I, I feel good.
So, you know, why I don’t feel like I need a recovery day. I’m going to, I’m going to just add this extra little session in. And all I would say is like, you know, cause again, this plan, I get it. Like, there’s going to be some people that are going to be, I already trained, you know, I train typically 15 hours a week.
And this plan is well under 15 hours a week of training. You know, you might stack up the other days. I’m still. A big believer and having that set day of just rest where and I don’t mean like, you know, you got to lay around and do nothing all day. I just mean, you know, have rest, do some stuff in terms of like if your physio is giving you things to do, go get a massage, do some things that make your body feel good.
Just have it not be something that’s going to add fatigue to the system. So yeah strength and conditioning. So yeah, it’s something that’s not in the free plan. But it is something that again, at BCBR, we have a resource for that. And you know, I am a big believer in strength and conditioning and believe that you should start if you haven’t started lifting, start lifting now.
And Jason is the guy that we, we have at BCBR and there’s a ton of really great info that he can provide. And so again, I’m going to generally say you should start it as soon as possible, be progressive. And when to stop it would be, you know, and I, I say, stay in, you’re doing the movements and I, and.
You just take the weight away as we get closer to the race. We keep then decreasing the weight like we do, we decrease the load of the sessions. And again, some common like just kind of blanket statements that I’ll kind of hear at times. And I think it’s becoming less because more people are understanding that the, the backing behind injury prevention.
And if we think of BCBR, I think the number one complaint is people just feel like they broke their lower back by the end of the race. Thanks. So we’re going to want to do a lot of RDLs to strengthen that. But ultimately you’re not going to gain too much muscle. You’re doing way too much. You know, if you’re following the plan and doing all this aerobic exercise, you’re not going to all of a sudden look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.
You know, you’re gonna stay in that lean, but you’re going to become incredibly functionally strong. And that’s what we want is Ken on day six, you’d be like, you know what? Yeah, my back is a little bit sore, but I’m managing it versus Like my back is so sore. I don’t know if I can ride tomorrow. So if that was maybe if you, you know, did the race previously, and that was kind of a sensation that you felt, I would say it’s your invitation to really add strength and conditioning into the program.
And again, the program has holes to be able to add it in and. Again, I’m happy to kind of give advice on where to put it at times. So that’s strength and conditioning. And I do, again, I do really want to leave a long kind of Q and A cause I can see, I think the chat has a fair bit. And so as well, if you kind of think to yourself that, you know, maybe I just want something a little more involved.
Again, myself and Kirsten and then as well, a nutritionist that’s on kind of a part of my group we’re, we’re definitely, we all have open slots and again, as well, reach out to the other two coaches, a part of Coaches Corner. And stuff as well, like whether it’s skills or it strength and conditioning we want to make sure that you get exactly what you need and you might just sit and say, I want something more tailored to me.
And that’s where that’s what we all specialize in. And between all these different coaches, we all have, you know, a lot of different experience of races that went really well and also races that went really bad. And so learn from our mistakes and whatnot. So, yeah, I do really want to dive into questions that people might have.
So that way we can kind of just keep steering it into the information you actually want. So I’ll open up the chat myself. We don’t actually have a lot of questions in there. It was a lot of Basically, mostly sort of around what some of the things you were saying. Early on, someone did ask about the free version of training piece working with their wahoo kicker.
I know it works with lots of other devices, but I don’t actually have experience with a wahoo kicker. So does anyone know the answer to that? The answer is yes, because I have a coaching account, but I have my old athlete account that I. I have it as basic because with my coaching account, I can see all the premium features into my own, but I’ll still put my own sessions into my profile, which is basic and it’s linked to Zwift and I can still see that session in Zwift and ride it.
Okay. But what if you’re using your wahoo kicker on something else like the wahoo platform or. One of the other platforms and not Zwift. Hey Manera, it’s Rich here. Yeah, I’ve got a kicker. I use a free program of trail training peaks and it works. No problem. Perfect. Yeah. Training, trainer, trainer road, Zwift, training peaks, virtual, like it all works.
No problem. Yeah. I wonder why I’ll kick a wonder when I grow up. Yeah. There’s a nice plug from Alan saying that his best piece of bike race was last year when he worked with you, Karsten. Yeah. I appreciate that, Alan. Yeah, you definitely did have a good one. But yeah, so I feel like there’s some areas I glossed over because I wanted to make sure there was time. So There’s a question in there about bike commuting, Karsten.
Do you want to take that one? Yes. Is there anything you can say of the value of commuting? Yeah. So bike commuting. That is a great question. And I used to do it myself before I owned a car. When I would work, I’d bike to work and I’d bike home from work. And then I would kind of interlay other workouts around it.
So yeah, it just comes down to kind of valuing that. Yeah, like 15 to 20 K is not nothing and that’s going to add fatigue. So generally speaking on a coaching standpoint, I wouldn’t want to view that as like, Oh, it’s just whatever riding. Like if you’re on a ball or e bike where you’re not breaking a sweat, well then, I don’t know, there’s a discussion to be had there.
But if it’s your own power I would say you can kind of utilize. Especially as we get a little bit more daylight coming back into our world, you can kind of utilize your afternoon ride home or your if you’re more of an early morning person and utilize the front end to kind of like interlay a bit of a workout with into it as as you see fit.
But ultimately, like, you know, you might just sit and say, Hey, I’m riding 15 to 20 K each day. I’m going to cut out a lot of the zone 2 stuff that Karsten writes in this plan, because I’m already doing that just to get back and forth to work. And then you might kind of sit and say, I got to rejig. to kind of make sure I can do my own kind of maybe, maybe it’s removing the long ride on the weekend and then putting in the quality that you might be missing because you’ve been commuting, you know, five days a week to work.
So hopefully that kind of helps on, on that front, but I, to kind of expand on that a bit more as well. It comes into other things, too. Like, it’s not just commuting to work. We do want to think through, like, other, even sometimes household activities. Like, say if you’re doing something that’s very physical, laborious around the house, like, that is something you’re going to want to think about, that it’s going to have maybe a stress score associated to it.
And so, sometimes, like, I don’t know, I’ll, I’ll use chopping wood as a good example. A lot of us do have wood burning stoves, You know, you’re gonna kind of do that sweat equity and chop a bunch of logs like I might, you know, I would happily have any client where a chest heart rate strap and record while they’re chopping wood.
Cause I can bet you any money, they’re going to be high zone one, low zone two doing it. And you’ll, you’ll kind of have this pretty big kind of big chunk of work that it’s going to make you super tired and super sore. And we want to value that into the, into a plan. So again, it’s sometimes thinking about the things that you do that aren’t actually a part of the plan or part of training, but had.
Yeah. Serious fatiguing effect. And I’ll put ski touring in that. And actually that does jog my memory on another point of that. It doesn’t always have to be biking. Again, for a lot of us in Canada, We are kind of in that winter months and I’m quite big on ski touring myself. And you know, you can utilize ski touring, you know, instead of doing that long ride on Zwift for two and a half, three hours you know, wherever you are within the week, you can go out and do a ski tour instead, just record it.
And, you know, you’ll kind of get that similar. I actually really like ski touring. Cause generally you have a pretty heavy pack. It’s very much like a functional strength based thing. And so that can be applied to cross country skiing and other different activities. So again, it’s not one of these things where, you know, all I’m doing BC bike race and now all I, I can only mountain bike until the race.
It’s like, You know, if anyone follows Jeff kibosh online, I think recently him and a cat Nash just did like 50 K across country skiing before they went back to pedal on their bikes and stuff. So again, Jeff’s a big advocate for it. He calls it his outdoor gym. Cause you know, you get the upper body work and stuff.
So again, that’s where you can be creative with your training and your plan. It doesn’t have to be super rigid. And so fluidity is a good thing. I just want to make sure I’m not missing any of the questions that are going on in the chat. Yes. Oh, this is something as well. The two parter. So what could you do?
Well, you’re in this in between because again, we have this first kind of eight weeks of program that’s written and then we’ll go through a bit of a gap kind of starting around. I think it’s March 3rd where you’re kind of a bit on your own. My invitation to you is is build out a theme of what was above so it’s like it ends with a recovery week So it’s the idea of you can see what you did the week prior and you kind of rebuild You know, again, if you’re if you’re kind of wanting to do the self coach method, you’re then going to kind of rebuild and maybe expand out on some of those themes of the workouts.
And it’s a chance for you to trial things and see what works and what doesn’t. Because again, like I think sometimes we all forget that Training is truly just trials of miles. You try something, you see how it works. And again, you’re trying to relate it to your A races. And that’s an important piece.
So a question from Scott is technical how technical should our rides be? So. Kind of one again. It’s kind of written with the idea that you’re going to be indoors a fair bit. But if you are in a location of the world that you can bike outside, I would recommend that it’s a good time to start systematically kind of challenging yourself on the technical side.
And again, coach Adam Walker, who is a BCBR coach, he on Instagram gives tons and tons of tips for things that you can practice well out. And so my invitation to you is when you see an easy skills ride, that’s where I’m sitting and saying, go see what Adam is kind of have on his Instagram on some tech tips and tricks.
Whether it’s learning how to pump the bike or body position on top of the bike into turns. That’s a great time to kind of build those skills. So utilizing, you know, either really easy zone one aerobic rides or kind of straight up skills based rides, which interlaid in between the two plans. There’s a couple of questions, Karsten, about when, how to fit the strength training in and Dean, who’s here with us all the way from Australia is asking about doing his core work on days off.
Do you want days off to be rest rest or can days off be strength days? Yeah, so that can be very individualized. There are going to be some people that them just getting back out on a mountain bike is going to destroy them physically. And I would say it’s like, you probably don’t need to add a whole lot because you’re actually, your body’s getting a ton just from starting to mountain bike and be more intricate that way.
If you are someone that, you know, it’s like I do tons of, you know, I’m doing Pilates already. And, you know, again, a 10 hour training week, I’ve been doing it for years. Like that’s, you know, nothing new to me. I would sit and have no problem adding a strength and conditioning session. When I put a day of rest, I wouldn’t have a big issue with it.
Is on that rest day is you’re just trying to not get your heart rate high. And again, my general belief of if you’re doing strength and conditioning, I it’s not circuit training. It’s not bootcamp or a P 90 X. We’re looking to do like a solid strength and conditioning, slow movement. High weight, lower reps like we’re not looking to try because we’re working that cardiovascular system enough with the biking and mountain biking.
We’re getting tons of that kind of dynamic, fast strength and conditioning component. We want now just the heavier kind of style. But again, if we’re talking on that day off, like core work that does fit in the idea of like, it’s kind of that taking care of the body. So yeah, I think that’s no issue at all.
And then in terms of the days, yeah, so that’s kind of, I guess the question, the days to add it. So yeah, on the rest day, And again, you might sit and say, you know, Carson’s written an easy active recovery day. That might be another good day to add in strength and conditioning. All I generally say is, and this is more of maybe a personal preference is I used to always like to do strength and then I would like to do easy flush ride after.
So if I have a zone one, very easy ride, it’s a good idea to maybe put your strength in the morning, ride in the afternoon, help flush kind of the legs out. If that makes sense. We have a question from Morton Hanson all the way from Denmark asking about ABC races and how many of those races should be getting in in the next six months?
Yeah, great question. So ABC races for people that might not know or wonder what we’re talking about. An A race is kind of your high priority. A B race is kind of your more mid, mid priority, like you are taking it pretty serious. Great question. And a C race might be something that you don’t even actually taper for.
You don’t even really rest for it. You just kind of do it. A race, you’re going to have a full taper. So again, BCBR, like the plans that I’ve written, it’s the idea that BCBR is your A race. And, I mean, I’ll give you a tip. If it’s not your A race, you should make it your A race. Because what it’s going to take from you is going to be large.
If you don’t treat it like an A race, You’ll, you’ll suffer quite drastically. So there’s not, you know you know, you’re going to need a full taper. In terms of the quantity, again, that kind of comes back to a bit of an all depends, depends on how much, how used to racing you are for people that haven’t raced a lot racing can actually be quite a energy, overwhelming, draining kind of thing.
But if you’re someone who like typically in past has, you know, kind of done a calendar of, you know, five to six events in the summer, you know, I would say like, you know, you might do kind of two races. I think having one race before BCDR is great. It’s just one little like kind of at minimum one dress rehearsal where it’s like, I can practice the hydration bag I bought in a race scenario and I can practice.
You know, kind of organizing all my gear the night before a race, because yeah, BCBR, you’re gonna have to do it seven days in a row, have your stuff sorted, be organized. So I think in a perfect world, I would say having to be races prior to BCBR would be fantastic. And I would say the cutoff line where I wouldn’t have a race kind of in the no fly zone would be about.
At about the 14 day mark out from BCBR, I wouldn’t do any more racing. I you’d want to be kind of now I’m refocused on making sure I get the recovery component going for BCBR. Because again, if you want to come in, like the tank is full and that’s, you know, mentally, physically. Nutritionally we want to be topped up on everything.
So great question there. Another question, how many strength sessions per week? One, two, or three? Generally speaking, I used to do anywhere between two to three times a week. And again, that was speaking as someone who spent a number of years doing only training. I would say again, if you can get one, like kind of back to that sleep idea, if you can get one training session in a week, if you can sleep, you know, 30 minutes more each night, like whatever you can get is sometimes going to be good.
And you’re gonna again, kind of play around with it. You might do one week where you do, you try to kind of swing for the fence and you build yourself up, you know, you do one strength session one week, then you kind of like, Hey, I can do maybe two this week and you feel good. Then that following week you try for three.
And you kind of like by the time you get to that third strength session, you’re kind of not lifting under very good form. And you know, that’s, I’d say the invitation to pull the pin on that session. And it does kind of jog my memory on another useful point is if you as a well are in a session and you’re not accomplishing, you know, if you got your zone set and you’re just kind of feeling hollow, tired, faint, and you’re not hitting the objectives, of that session, it’s a good idea to pull the pin.
I, you know, again, there’s going to be a balance between sometimes you got a tough stuff out, but if you’re like trying to do a zone four kind of effort and you’re hitting zone two power, it’s like pull the pin. That session’s not going well. And it’s like, Stop it, you know, get some good sleep, get some food in, sleep, get back on the plan and nail the next time you get back to it.
So sorry, sometimes as I’m answering questions, I think of other useful nuggets. So lower rep weight training is what we want as cyclists. Yeah. Generally speaking I would avoid, again, I’m just saying avoid things that are, Strength based, but high heart rate. I just think again, and when we take into consideration mountain biking, like that is incredibly physical.
And we’re getting a lot of that hard work. That way that when we are lifting, we want it to be really focused on the strength component and good functional movement and targeting the specific muscle groups. And again, January. The hint is that I would be, you know, RDLs, reverse deadlifts are, are your friend.
Um, do you recommend for tapering for an A race? Yeah. So for tapering for an A race, generally two weeks would be what I would suggest if it’s a B race, you’re probably taking maybe a week, five days, depends on what kind of fatigue level you have kind of coming in. And then if it’s a C race, like I said, maybe you take, you know, one little extra recovery day, or maybe you’re not resting at all for it.
So those are just, you know, general guidelines that I like to kind of play by. And what not where does 5 to 10 K run fit in considering your points about cardio? So yeah, for the people that can run that, you know, like running and stuff I’m quite pro. Obviously coming from a triathlon background, that is what I specialized in was cross training.
But generally like trail running, you’ll see a lot of professional cross country mountain bikers utilize trail running. Where you’ll see it is earlier in their training plans. And kind of, so in the fall winter months, you’ll see it more as you kind of get into you know, like race season you’re not going to see those people running anymore.
There’s a lot of good data showing how running impacts maximal power output. So again, that’s an earlier. Early season thing into winter. And then I would back off as you get closer to racing with running. But again, I think it’s, it’s, it’s a great form of cardio and exercise. And I, I still firmly believe a 30 minute run is one of the best bang for buck pieces of exercise you can do.
And if you’re say not even a runner, if 30 minute, very brisk walk, same check Mark coming. So. So not so another question here, I’ll be flying in from Sweden probably two days before any tips on how to handle jet lag. Yeah. Good question there. And you’ll see again, like a lot of professional athletes sometimes.
Yeah. You don’t get to have the perfect travel schedule because whatever commitments you have, and sometimes, yeah, you fly. You know, across, I at least say you’re going the right direction. I always found it easier coming from Europe to North America than going North America to Europe. Generally speaking, how I always did jet lag was I just slept whenever I felt like sleeping.
I didn’t get too hung up on, you know, especially, you know, if you’re not staying very long, like, It’s just, sometimes you’re just better to get the rest when you need it. And obviously, you know, you’re going to have to train in the daylight and, you know, there’s a few different tasks and check ins you got to do with BCBR before the race, but all in around it, just sleep whenever you can.
Especially on that kind of tighter timeline. Basically, it’s like an hour per day is I think the rough rule for, you know, all the travelers, jet setters out there, you know, that if you’re kind of doing a six, seven hour time change, it’s going to take you six or seven days, if not eight or nine to actually kind of crossover.
But you know, that is something to factor into in your in your taper and stuff of, of your travel days. Generally, I am quite big on making sure people don’t send it the day before traveling. What I mean by that is like high intensity training and then sitting on an airplane. That’s a recipe for picking up a bug.
Generally speaking, very light, zone one work. If not a full rest day, even before traveling, cause you’re stressed out enough, making sure you packed everything and then throwing a workout into it just adds to, to the stress. So again, avoiding stress before the race at any. Costs that you can is going to be great.
So any other burning questions? I have a question, Carson. What about cadence? Tell me about how we work, like what cadence are we looking for when we’re doing these workouts you’re giving us? Great question. Cause there are, there is a session in there that works on kind of over cadence. Generally speaking from, you know, coaching over the last 10 years, what I see out of most amateur athletes is that their cadence is actually quite low, especially mountain bikers, road bikers, they’re a little bit better with it.
but still a lot of people tend to like to mash. You know, we want to change that load again. We’re trying to not tax our muscular system as much and put it onto our heart and lungs. So, you know, on some of these workouts, like especially the higher zone stuff, like if you can sit at 90 RPM, I gots a big gold star.
If you can get it up to a hundred, you get two gold stars. Anything kind of North of a hundred. And I would say, you know, like that’s kind of maybe a little bit not needed for in the mountain biking realm. But again, there’s going to be some sessions where you’re better to go kind of on the extreme end and work on trying to push 120 cadence for a while because it will start to make 90 cadence feel pretty good.
What we really want to avoid is staying in sustained periods of like 60 RPM. There’s gonna, and a hundred percent can tell you there are climbs in BCBR that will, you’ll be sometimes 55 RPM, just trying to get them cranks around. And you’ll see that, you know, overgear sessions have their place.
But generally speaking, We want to spin whenever we can. There’s lots of transit in between different parts of single track in the race or shallower climbs where it’s like, that’s your, your kind of invitation to try and get that RPM up to kind of that 80, 90. And again, like it’s that idea of like, Whatever we can move your needle to before the race, it’s going to be beneficial for you having a good race throughout.
So yeah. And again, cadence during the race, it’s again, it’s mountain biking, it’s dynamic. You’re in all sorts of different terrain. There’s no real target. It’s just more when you get a flat bit, it’s like have that thought in your head would be like, am I still mashing? Cause I’m on a flat ground right now.
I can, I can kind of spin my cranks a bit more instead of just trying to still kind of push it around. So hopefully that helps there. Um, can you maybe just tell everyone how they can reach you directly if they have any further questions, please? Yes. So if you go on to BC bike race, the website you’ll see a link right at the top called coach’s corner.
If you scroll down, you’ll see this, I think this photo of me still, and then a little blur, and there’s a, I think you can click on a few different links there, which will take you to my website and then you can fill out excuse me, a Just a submission request and and I, yeah, happily answer as well.
And I’m kind of periodically posting in that Facebook group. So you can reach out to me on Facebook too, like whatever your. Kind of thing is I do my best to try and look for everything. So but yeah, happy to answer questions. And again, yeah, we’ve got a full team of people looking to kind of.
I kind of say like, we’re looking to get you to that finish line, feeling like you thrived and not survived, if that makes sense. That’s really, you know, cause everyone’s going to have different narratives, different goals within, and again, you know, we’ve, we had a whole thing about goal setting. And, you know, process goals are really good goals to focus on.
And again, one that I would kind of challenge people to think about is how do you want to come across that finish line? And, you know, that idea of thriving is, I think a really good thing to shoot for. Thank you. That was really great. And I, you know, I think we’ve sort of started to wrap up here in terms of questions, which means we can move over to our prize drawer.
So Carmel, you don’t by any chance have a picture of our very fun, bare hoodie handy, do you? Oh. Hang on, and Karsten, can I get you to stop sharing?
Let me see. Oh, hang on. Okay, here we go.
So much pressure. So much pressure. So hopefully you can all see that. That’s the hoodie. And there’s a bigger version of the picture. We did those on t shirts last year and had Yeah, people love them. So now we’ve got them on a hoodie and we’re currently running a promotion on this for people who are signing up in a two week window.
We’ll get this hoodie, but all of you have already signed up, which means you, you know, already have access to a lot of these things that people are still coming on. Later we’ll not be having, you know, won’t have the same access to, but as applies for today, we are going to put a name and one of you will get the hoodie and Carmel is going to do that right now.
Yeah, and can you see my little wheel of names? I want to make sure it’s switched. Okay, great. Okay, here we go.
Alan! Hahaha, how fun. Alan gets the hoodie. Alan, I will talk to you about that separately to make sure you get your prize. Thank you all so much for Joining us today. I know it was a different day, so I really appreciate you all accommodating our different schedule. We hope you got some value from this. I know I certainly did.
Thank you, Karsten, for making the time to do this and we will see you on the next call. Kamal, do you have anything to wrap up with? Yeah, I just wanted to add that if you know anybody who has been on the fence about coming to the race, maybe just let them know about our Bear hoodie promo. So maybe that will nudge them towards joining you on the start line.
So No, I just say, you know Thanks carson. That was awesome. So many questions You know, questions lead to more questions, and cycling is turning your body into an efficient peddler in little circles that are totally not natural. So, time in the saddle, time working on those cadences, and then that feedback loop of having a coach or a club is really, it’s a learning experience for all of us.
So, you know, dig in, ask questions. Use the internet, do some training, and look inside yourself at what you’re learning and how your body’s changing. It’s a beautiful journey, and thanks, Karsten, for taking us down this eye opening experience. This is great. And just one final thing, on our Facebook group, Karsten is on that group, so again, you know, share your wins.
We’ve, you know, we’re there for your questions, but we also want to celebrate your wins, so share your wins, use that as a resource, and thank you, everyone.