by CycleOps Power Master Trainer, Charles "Joey" Adams

Are you a slow twitcher, a fast twitcher or do you just twitch when you get on your bike? It comes down to the specificity of how you train and knowing your power zones. Cycling is primarily an aerobic sport. The longer you use and develop your aerobic engine the stronger you will ride, unless you are trying to become a track sprinter. As you take a close look at the physiology of muscle fiber types you discover the keys to zone training and your power zones. In a very simplistic sense the Fast Twitch IIb fibers are your sprint fibers (the Phosphogen or PCr system below), the Fast Twitch IIa fibers are your Anaerobic Glycolysis fibers, and the Slow Twitch fibers are the Aerobic fibers. You can see in the graph below how these fibers might play out in the land of track and field (source ACSM).

By Kristin Hilger

Race ready and taken down by a bug.... Base is built, climbing skills have been honed, and you've got your pacing down. You've seen your Threshold Power rise as a result of your hard work, and then it hits.

The flu and similar illnesses have swept our country this season. Have you seen your watts get stripped away as a result of picking up that nasty strain? Acute viral infections decrease muscle strength, endurance performance, and can impair pulmonary gas exchange- so expect a decrease in power. It comes with the bug.

by CycleOps Power Master Trainer, Charles "Joey" Adams

The “off-season” is almost behind us and the “in-season” is just on the horizon. Chances are you spent a fair amount of time honing your aerobic base, and you spent some time in the gym lifting some weights. While you were lifting weights, you likely saw increases in the amount you were able to lift and the reps you were able to pump out. You did this by (hopefully) manipulating the F.I.T.T. rule of training. F is for frequency, I is for Intensity, and T is for the amount of training time, and the last T is for Type of training.

You can now use this knowledge of the F.I.T.T. principle and apply it to mountain biking. Sure, you could do it the old way of going out and hammering a few days a week. That would take care of all the variables at once – and quickly get you the same old results. This may or may not be to your liking, or worse may or may not help you realize your full potential. We all have a limited amount of time, and we all want the most from our training time. The key in creating your training plan is to generally manipulate one variable at a time to create optimal stress. Manipulate too many, too little, or too much at once, and the system rebels or stagnates. You get less out of more! Ouch!

Training with the PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Brake Hub System has been a powerful tool for me to target my training in ways like never before.

Because of the explosive nature of mountain bike racing, using a power meter is the best way to gauge and focus my efforts. Training with a PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Brake Hub System on my mountain bike has allowed me to target specific training goals that were never possible with a heart rate monitor or even with a road PowerTap.

The PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Brake Hub System is now available. The product has been tested extensively by our Engineering team as well as several pro athletes like Jeremiah Bishop, Julian Absalon, Conrad Stoltz, Melanie McQuaid, Wendy Simms, Manual Prado, Danny Pate and Rocky Reifenstuhl.

What went into bringing this product to market? We got the inside scoop from PowerTap Product Manager Jesse Bartholomew and one of CycleOps Power's engineers who worked extensively on the project, Jordan Roessingh.

Why did CycleOps Power decide to create a disc brake PowerTap hub?

JESSE: CycleOps Power has the benefit of having very passionate customers that aren't afraid to let us know what they want. We do our best to develop products that meet those needs, and the PowerTap SL 2.4 Disc Brake Hub is a result of that. In addition, the benefits of using a PowerTap only increase with the more data you collect, so it only makes sense to allow our customers do so in any discipline of cycling they choose.

I wanted to give you all a race report from my first race of the year, as well as my first-ever multi-sport event. This weekend I raced in the White Sands Duathlon, held at the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico. It is a race in the Southwest Triathlon Racing Series, the oldest series of multi-sport racing events in the US. The race had a wide range of age and ability categories, and there were some strong early-season racers to contend with. Racers from El Paso and western Texas, Albuquerque, and southern New Mexico participated in the event. The race consisted of a 5K run on a rough dirt road with some sandy sections, followed by a 30K bike on nice paved military base roads: flat to rolling terrain. and some crosswinds.

The use of heart rate monitors to gauge training intensity is not new to the cyclist. Since there is a linear correlation to an increased/decreased heart rate with an increase/decrease in effort, many cyclists use the rate at which their heart is beating as a measurement of their workload.

By Kristin Hilger

by CycleOps Power Master Trainer, Charles "Joey" Adams

Exercise is like opening a metabolic window. It is always easier to open the window from the top which is equivalent to pushing the training window up by training in Zone 1 and Zone 2. It is common to see my clients trying to open their metabolic window by pushing on the glass (training in the gray zone – the point where slow twitch fibers and fast twitch fibers are not working to their full potential, or both aerobic and anaerobic systems are not fully involved) or worse pulling on the latch (training too much in Zone 4 and Zone 5). Training from the top down leads to frustration, injury, plateau, or illness – undeveloped potential.

Training zones are best determined through metabolic testing or a power test using a Power Tap/CycleOps Power test. The results of these tests are the basis for effectively scheduling your training. Yes, there is a time and place for all training – it is called Periodization, or planned change. By identifying your unique training zones you will know how to raise your own metabolic window safely and effectively. Knowing your threshold is the best way to open your window (by increasing mitochondrial density, neuromuscular connections, and capillary perfusion for substrate delivery and waste removal). This means you become more efficient while at play or work.

A recent article in Women's Health Magazine recommended that it is not important to pay attention to watts while exercising and that power output is only relevant for professional athletes. We disagree and wanted to explain why paying attention to watts, when the option is available, is the best metric to track.

Read the article in Women's Health Magazine.

Danielle Foster is one of our CycleOps Master Training Specialists. She is also the CycleOps Power Cycling Coordinator at The Natatorium training facility, one of the first fitness clubs in the nation to carry a full fleet of power-measuring CycleOps Club 300PT Indoor Cycles. Read on to hear how training with power is transforming her students...

Power, for the past three years, it has been invisible to us. We’ve always been creating it, but we were never able to see it, let alone measure it!

Our facility was savvy enough to realize the value in training with power. We knew it would take our IDC (indoor cycling) classes to a whole new level. We invested in the bikes hoping the ability to measure so many factors (actual work done, heart rate response, cadence and exact caloric expenditure) would enhance our riders’ ability to see fitness progression.

To keep the pedals turning, focus on boosting your threshold power and VO2max. These markers are the major predictors of endurance and performance and needed markers to determine accurate training zones.

Maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) is the maximum amount of oxygen that can be used by the body for maximal sustained power output, and is determined by gas analysis assessment. Oxygen consumption is your ability to extract oxygen from the air, ability to ventilate, ability of heart to pump out blood and ability of tissues to extract oxygen from the blood. The body uses oxygen to convert nutrients into energy. Therefore the more oxygen you can consume, the more energy you can produce (the more power, speed, and work you can do). VO2max is your fitness ceiling, or like a car, it is the size of your engine.

In any training session, we tend to overlook the warm-up and the cool down. Either we are anxious to start hammering with the rest of the group or we are rushing to get home after our workout. The warm-up and the cool down are just as important as the workout itself. They are essential components to improving our performance and executing each workout effectively.

To ensure your success as an endurance athlete, it is critical that you know your limits. In this sense, “knowing your limits” refers to knowing when you are helping yourself by pushing harder and when you are damaging your body by going over your limits in training or racing. There is often a fine balancing act between these two extremes to maximize the training benefits and racing results.

This summer, 10 cyclists each travelled almost 2,000 miles to take part in a study to determine how sustained fatigue affects the human body. Normally, experiments of this type are performed in a laboratory to provide a controlled environment for studying the results of the stimuli applied to the test subjects. However, thanks to the help of the PowerTap and a 25-foot Airstream trailer, Professor Brent Ruby, Dustin Slivka, John Cuddy, and Walter Hailes of the University of Montana were able to take their study to the streets, literally.

Nearly 2500 athletes lined the shore of Lake Monona on the morning of the 6th annual Ironman Wisconsin. Scattered among them were the eight teammates of RaceAthlete anxiously awaiting their command to take the water--each one among them having followed a different journey to get to this point and each one having a different goal--some to finish, one to qualify for Kona.

Triathlon transition areas can be challenging to navigate. The pressure to switch gears while catching a breath makes for an intense scene, and in the scramble to change clothing, it’s not uncommon to misplace a shoe, a helmet, an energy bar. But a leg?

During this year's Tour de France, CycleOps Power is doing something new. We've asked our experts to give an inside look on how the top athletes train and how everyday athletes can use these strategies to get fitter and faster.

CycleOps Power is proudly supporting the Madison, Wisconsin chapter of Team In Training (TNT) for 2007. One dedicated Team in Training athlete set out to do her first century and brought PowerTap with her every step of the way. Her training started in April and culminated this June with a century ride around Lake Tahoe in Nevada.

Anyone who has seen pictures of the dust bowl days, or read Grapes of Wrath might imagine Tulsa Oklahoma to be a dusty, ex-oil boom, ghost town. They couldn’t be more wrong. Tulsa is a lush green, hilly, modern and diverse city that is now making its mark in the world of professional cycling. On the weekend of June 1st, 2nd, and 3rd the city of Tulsa hosted the second annual Tulsa Tough Criterium Stage Race and The Saris Cycling Group was there.

The eight team members of RaceAthlete united at the 2007 Wildflower triathlon. The weekend served as a team training camp of sorts giving the blogging athletes an opportinuty meet face-to-face instead of over the internet. They put their new epuipment and training to the test on a very difficult and unforgiving race course. The race served as a prooving grounds for all the new epuipment and training they have received over the last several months.