In this edition of our ErgVideo update newsletter, we take a look at base/tempo training options as well as new features and uses for the ErgVideo Coach tool. We'll do it by referring to a few specific and personal examples. If you are a new customer and would like to see our previous mailings, please click here.

Smeulders' own Training Plan for 2009

The development of the ErgVideo Company, products, and web tools certainly reduced the amount of time I could spend training on my bike. Perhaps for the first time since my teens, I had to begin my "restoration" (that's a word they use for antiques, so why not?) with an extended dose of low level base-endurance training.

I've never completely bought into the need to do extensive base endurance training at power levels restricted below some magic number often referred to as the Threshold power. In the days before power meters, we rode many miles, sometimes in restricted gears to manage the effort. We often did it in groups of like minded riders, equally cold, hungry, and eager to reach the warm waffle shop at the half way point. In these situations you could not avoid some hard work, whether pulling into the wind at the front of the group, keeping pace up a few steep hills, or catching up after the town sign sprints started by the guys that had spent their winter in warmer climates. Thankfully, the group was big enough that you could draft and put in a suitably low-level effort for most of the ride. You could work your skills in the group as well as spend some time working on high leg speed.

Speaking more technically, for a rider who is carrying a great deal of fitness from a previous season, and indeed year-over-year for the seasoned athlete, it really isn't necessary to specifically "de train" by spending unreasonable time riding slowly. Most of us cycle as a lifestyle sport, and we ride a great number of low-intensity miles simply enjoying it recreationally. We go for long rides on Saturday just because we like to. For many of these cyclists, much of the base "just stays". Sure, you need to go back to base riding, but the other reason to do that is to specifically back away from the really hard VO2max and anaerobic work inherent in the racing that has worn us down and made us so tired. Backing away doesn't necessarily mean stopping it altogether, just some managed moderation intended to limit losses.

So you shouldn't find it unusual to see some progressive coaches specify hard workouts peppered throughout the "base & build training" phase. These hard workouts may require power efforts above threshold. It is an attempt to avoid overdramatically de training your best race winning qualities while re-establishing and enhancing your aerobic endurance. The trick is to give the hard stuff in doses that will manage fatigue and bring you back stronger, making the transition back to the really hard stuff more effective. You will see lots of this sort of thing in, for example, Hunter Allen's ErgVideo training plans.

Alright, back to me. Like I said, for the first time since my teens (skinny guy seen here) I wasn't one of those carrying good fitness in from previous seasons. I rated myself "unfit" and certainly 20 pounds over fighting weight. On the topic of goal setting, let's just say my real racing days are over, but I'll hit some time trials and maybe a club crit here and there as fitness tests and for socializing, I will be most pleased to be able to ride with vigor in the massively difficult special-event club rides organized by our teams Ride with Rendall and the West of Quebec Wheelers. These are great when the provincial racing calendar for the "real racers" has only one hour long criteriums in places 4 hours away. Most of those guys show up to our events anyway. I also have a suspicion I'll be lost in the Pyrenees this summer, so you will notice hill intervals fairly often in my plan.

So for me to get back in the saddle, a good series of "just riding" workouts without specific hard intervals really are the ticket. Again, I stress that "just riding" doesn't at all mean to stay below XXX watts all the time. Real roady life isn't like that. I did make an effort to design a program that began with most riding within the Zone 2 Endurance and Zone 3 Tempo power zones. But all rides would have short stints in Zones 4 (Threshold), 5(VO2max or Max Aerobic Power) and even 6 (Anaerobic Lactic Capacity, Speed and beyond). The power profile shown on the left is for Capital City Club ride. It is realistically "just riding" on a challenging course with clubmates.

Unsurprisingly, I have the world's best collection of ErgVideos. So I set about designing an ErgVideo training plan that would use most of them. I used the ErgVideo Coach tool available to ErgVideo licensees at http://www.ergvideo.com/downloads.aspx . I am happy to share with you the complete training plan at http://www.ergvideo.com/Mailings/Smeulders2009Plan.html. You can click the picture below to get there as well.

As you can see, I make liberal use of the Base/Tempo style of ErgVideos at the very beginning of my plan. Beyond our classic Base3CoolRides and TempoClubRide titles, we released several Base/Tempo style ErgVideos in October 2008: California Spring Training, Club Ride to Quadville, Capital City Club Ride, Buddy Base Ride, Wheelers Club Ride, Trinidad and South Africa, Adirondacks Club Ride and Junior Team ride. By clicking the links in the training plan to view the power profiles, you will see that they are highly variable, very much like a real ride on the road in a group situation. You will also see that these rides are weighted toward efforts in Zones 2 and 3 when ridden with your "Threshold Setting" equal to your "Actual Threshold". True to my earlier statements, these rides also give some limited and challenging exposure to the higher zones.

These rides have particularly useful power zone distributions, since when you set the "Threshold Setting" higher than your "Actual Threshold power", you can easily focus the ride more heavily in Zone 3 or even Zone 4. Likewise, by making my "Threshold Setting" lower than my "Actual Threshold Power", I can weight the ride to be more Zone 1 and Zone 2. Try this in the ErgVideo Ride Designer or at the Profile toolbox http://www.intellicoach.ca/ProfileToolbox.aspx.

There is an excellent example in the entry for Nov 9, 2008, marked as "Easier Ride in Lake Placid". You may notice I have the Threshold setting=170W while my Actual Threshold is shown as 200W. The diagrams below show the substantial change in difficulty between when I ride this ErgVideo with threshold setting 170W vs. 200W.

LakePlacid at 85% of my Actual threshold (170W)

Lake Placid at 100% of my Actual threshold (200W)

Digging more deeply into the trends within my training plan, you should notice performance testing using the Threshold Test ErgVideo every 4 weeks during a lower-volume week. A four week period of training should be enough to see some change in fitness that is clearly outside of statistical accuracy of measurement. For example, if I measured once a 300W threshold and days later measured again and saw a 1% increase to 303W, I wouldn't hang my hat on claims of a real improvement. It's rather inconclusive, as our CT is only 2.5% accurate, with all things set-up perfectly (and that is hard to achieve). Hopefully over 4 weeks and some decent rest we can see larger, more meaningful changes.

Another trend you will see is that volume (training time in this case) varies over a 4-week cycle, but the volume from cycle to cycle actually doesn't change much. This is the reality of a middle aged (but youngish!) entrepreneur's available free-time schedule. Instead, the intensity is varied progressively higher from cycle to cycle. After the base period of mostly Base/Tempo Club rides, it clearly builds through the next cycles by focusing on the threshold and endurance power zones with specific intervals sessions. As time progresses, you will see more work in higher power zones. Intervals get shorter and harder, working up to anaerobic capacity zones. You may notice that race simulations are left for the last phase before the dates when I hope I'll be riding outside again. Normally I'd do the race simulations much, much earlier (in the last three 4-week cycles), but this time around, I'll be mindful that I came from a rather unfit beginning. Most regular riders could stand to do race sims much sooner than I have done for myself. Fewer race sims were also a way to make the plan more palatable to my training partners.

I suppose I should speak about that aspect as well, because training partners are an important motivator for me. I've had to make some changes to my habits and time-management to ensure I rode my bike 5 times a week. Having the luxury of a few CompuTrainers and a big screen projector, I invite friends to ride with me. I sent out an invitation with the training plan to 30 of my closest friends, and wow, I got a great response. When someone comes over it ensures that I will drop the work, be a gracious host, and get our workout completed in good company. This has proven to be a great little scheme. I think the coaching lesson here is not to go and buy two CompuTrainers and a big screen, make friends and influence people, but more importantly set yourself up with whatever mind games and pleasant situations you may need to ensure you are motivated to start your workout. This probably explains why ErgVideo exists at all, since I think it is a "pleasant mind game" in and of itself. Scheduling my training like an appointment when someone else has scheduled their day similarly is a great way for me to easily drop the work at a reasonable time. We all work too much anyway. Let's ride our bikes more and enjoy it!

You can use the ErgVideo Coach Tool to design your own training plan based on your own ErgVideos, just as I have done, if you feel so inclined. Otherwise, take your plan from the experts, have a look at Hunter Allen's or Richard Wharton's programs highlighted at our website.

We've found a secondary use for the Coach tool in building a "My Favorite Rides" reference file, which requires really no coaching skill or qualifications to enjoy. It was so cool that I issued an update to the tool to present it as a special case of the "Training Plan" format. The next section describes it.

Cool New Application of the ErgVideo Coach Tool: Favorite Rides

An interesting thread appeared on the Slowtwitch Forum (http://forum.slowtwitch.com) where questions were posed and discussed about the ease with which ErgVideo rides could be setup. One poster whom I recognized (we'll use her forum name of "PC") said she used the ride designer to build workouts of specific length and sometimes used the looping features to extend the rides as well. She kept a little notebook near her training station and referred to it when setting up a ride of length appropriate to her time constraints. It listed the timing settings for start, end, rep start and rep end, and number of reps. This meant she was manipulating the ride designer each time, spending a few extra clicks in ride setup time. While the Ride Designer is not complicated, I saw yet another way that the "Select ride from training plan" feature could be exploited to ease this whole process, and eliminate the notebook.

I offered to transcribe her notebook of favorite workouts into a special sort of ErgVideo Training Plan that is now directly supported by our ErgVideo Coach tool. In essence, you create a simple list of favorite rides using the Coach tool, in exactly the same way you might create a time sequenced training plan. The list is accessible by ErgVideo and enables one-click ride set-up, just like with a training plan.

To design each workout, you interact with the online web-tools. You design the ride, and each is encoded by ErgVideo Coach into a simple hyperlink. When you are finished building your list, you save the document as an .html formatted file,  selecting the new "Show no dates" option. This will format the output into a simple list of workouts with description, Video title, Duration, and Preview link, without specific dates or weekly volumes shown (as it is in a sequenced training plan).

The result of the work I did for PC, who agreed to its publication, can seen by clicking on the picture above or this link http://www.ergvideo.com/Mailings/PcFavorites.html.

This file can be used exactly as with any ErgVideo Training Plan file. Suppose you named the file "My Favorite Rides.html" and save it on your system. When you go to ride your ErgVideos, you simply follow these quick steps, assuming your pc has an active internet connection:

File->Open->Select ErgVideo from Training Plan. Navigate to the file My Favorite rides.html, and open it.

Select a ride by clicking its link. The profile and ride stats will be shown. Click Ok.

Pre-ride Config->Ride designer->Build it.

If you have the ErgVideo licensed in your collection, it will load and all of the timing and power parameters will be configured. You continue as usual to launch your RacerMate software and get riding!

So have another look at the ErgVideo Coach tool and build your own "Favorite Rides" list. Or, refer your own coach to it so that he or she can integrate your ErgVideos into your training program or a "Favorite Rides" reference library. One customer has set-up a program for his wife. He demands $20/month more "allowance" and she must call him "coach" at least once a week!

Until next time,
Keep the rubber tight to the roller,
Paul Smeulders and David Stevenson
ErgVideo.com