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Today we have a guest blog from Andy Blow, Founder of Precision Hydration and a sports scientist with extensive experience working with endurance athletes and in motorsport. As an athlete Andy competed at international level in triathlon, duathlon and Ironman. He is co-author of 'The Motorsport Fitness Manual' and is a regular contributor to 220 Triathlon and Running Fitness magazines. To keep fit he now competes in ocean surf ski and adventure races.
This is an extensive blog to help guide you through the world of improving your climbing ability on a Wattbike.
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By Andy Blow
Something that often gets asked by riders looking into buying a Wattbike is ‘Can you train to improve your climbing performance using an indoor bike?’ It’s a very valid question if you’re limited by the amount of free time you have to ride outdoors on real hills, and equally important if you live in a flat area but are training for a hilly event.
The only slight problem is there’s not a simple yes or no answer. Certainly there are many significant ways in which you can use an indoor trainer to help improve key aspects of your climbing. However, clearly there are also limitations imposed by the fact that you cannot precisely replicate the specific demands of riding your bike up a hill without actually doing so (for example gear selection on your bike, bike handling skills, dealing with different road surfaces and so on), so indoor riding can never totally hope to replace training outdoors. However, below I’ve attempted to highlight the main performance factors that limit climbing ability and explain how you can definitely improve them by training on an Wattbike.
Watts per Kilo
When talking about climbing there is one factor that has significantly more influence on your performance than any other. It is your ‘Power to Weight ratio’ and the longer or steeper the climb, the more this matters. Thankfully for mathematically challenged individuals like myself working this magic number out does not require a complicated equation. All you do is divide the amount of power measured in Watts you can sustain for a given time period (in this case the length of the climb) and divide it by your weight in kilograms and the resulting number (expressed as W/kg) is your power to weight ratio. The 2013 Wattbike Performance Computer will automatically work out your w/kg at the end of a test session.
E.g. The power a rider can sustain for 30 min climb = 310w with body mass = 81kg , therefore Power-to-Weight ratio is 310/81 = 3.83 W/kg
W/kg is such an important factor for climbing because you are effectively doing battle with gravity (and this exerts a force proportional to mass) as well as overcoming wind and rolling resistance. This contrasts sharply with riding on the flat where most of your power goes into basically overcoming wind resistance. For this reason heavier riders with very high absolute sustainable power outputs can often outperform lighter ones with slightly better Power to Weight ratios on flat courses, whereas the reverse is true on the hills.
The evidence that Power to Weight ratio is most critical on long climbs in particular can be seen when you watch the Grand Tours as the best climbers in these events are nearly always very small and skinny, but these guys are often challenged (or beaten) in flat TT stages by bigger and stronger riders who have higher absolute sustainable power outputs. Incidentally the top climbers in the Tour De France are calculated to be able to hold figures of around 6.2 W/kg for the duration of the longer climbs in the Alps and Pyrenees. (Plug some numbers into a calculator based on body weights of around 60kg and you will see some incredible power figures are needed to generate that kind of ratio!)
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Improving your Power to Weight ratio
So it’s clear that the number one priority if you want to improve your climbing is to increase your Power to Weight ratio. Rather obviously there are 3 main ways to do this; firstly by increasing the power output you can sustain, secondly by losing weight and thirdly by doing a bit of both.
The magnitude of improvement you can achieve with weight loss vs increasing power depends a lot on what kind of body shape and size you are already and how fit you are. Clearly if you are carrying a few extra kilos of body fat you can have a decent impact by shedding some of this through sensible eating and increasing training volume. This is going to be a lot more effective for someone who is overweight than for someone who is already pretty lean. However delving into the topic of weight loss in detail is way beyond the scope of this article…in addition any benefit you can ascribe to using a Wattbike in this area is probably down to the simple fact that if by having access to one you’re able to train more often and more efficiently which will probably help you to lose some weight.
Increasing your sustainable power output on the other hand is definitely something that you can do very effectively with the help of an indoor trainer. The big advantage of the Wattbike in this area (over only riding outdoors) lies in having lots of real time feedback on your output and efficiency in a controlled environment as well as the ability to log and review training on the Wattbike Performance Computer. By utilising the Polar View on the Wattbike you can work on improving your overall pedaling technique, which will ultimately result in you producing more wattage for a given level of fitness. All in all these features enable you to quantify your performances, test yourself regularly, improve your pedaling efficiency and measure improvement over time very accurately.
The easiest way to test your own Power to Weight ratio is to pick a specific time period (many riders use 20 minutes for example) and to do an all out time trial effort for this length of time, aiming to sustain the highest average wattage you can for the entire duration. If, for example this turns out to be 280w and you weigh 75kg then your Power to Weight ratio for a 20 min TT is 280/75 = 3.73 W/kg.
If you re-test yourself every 6 to 10 weeks you can assess the impact of your training and be reasonably assured that if your W/kg figure is on the up, the same will be true for your basic climbing ability in the real world. And don’t forget to adjust your training zones with your improving fitness.
The kind of sessions that increase your sustainable power output are longer interval sessions or time trial test sets where you push just below, at or just above your current maximum sustainable power for varied amounts of time, with modest recovery periods that are less than or equal to the length of the efforts. Using the example above of a rider pushing 280w for at 20 min TT this would mean doing something along the lines of sets of 5 x 5 minute intervals between 280 and 300w with 3 minute recoveries, as well as some longer sustained rides of 30-60 minutes at around 250-270w.
If you see these sessions increasing your Power to Weight ratio over time when training indoors then it is not a stretch to assume you are likely to be improving your hill climbing ability on longer outdoor ascents too, even if you don’t get the chance to get out and test that on something like Alpe d’Huez all that often. However, you can potentially make these sessions even more climbing specific by playing around with the set-up of the bike.
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Setting up the Wattbike to simulate climbing indoors
When tackling a long climb out on the road most riders tend to do a number of things:
- 1) Sit back in the saddle and adopt a more upright posture, holding onto the top of the bars rather than the drops
- 2) Drop down into a slightly lower gear to increase cadence and reduce the load on the legs
- 3) Periodically get out of the saddle, especially when the gradient gets very steep or when coming out of a tight corner
All of this affects on the way you recruit muscles and you can simulate some of these changes indoors, and therefore increase the specificity of the training adaptations you get by doing the following:
1) Either prop the front end of the bike up on something solid (an old telephone directory is about the right sort of thickness) or set the seat and bars a few millimeters further back than they are normally.
This puts you into a more similar biomechanical position to that you will adopt on a road climb (i.e. upright and sat a more behind the bottom bracket) and means your muscle recruitment patterns will be more similar too. You will probably find you can feel your glutes (muscles in your backside) working harder for example.
2) Reduce the resistance slightly so you have to increase the cadence to keep the power output up.
Whilst optimal cadence is quite an individual factor most riders tend to benefit from spinning slightly faster on a climb than they would on the flat. This reduces the amount of power required per revolution and therefore should lead to less local muscular fatigue than if you push a higher gear. However you do need to become comfortable with this increased cadence so need to practice it in training.
3) Turn up the resistance and stand up out of the saddle from time to time.
Out on the road standing on the pedals tends to be more costly in terms of oxygen uptake for a given power output (partly because the upper body is recruited much more) so tends to be most effective only when the gradient of a climb gets very steep and there is some mechanical advantage to be gained by using your body weight to turn the pedals over. On very long climbs it can be advantageous sometimes to just to get out of the saddle to change the patterns of loading on the legs for a few seconds and give the main muscles that have been working a brief respite.
On the indoor bike if you crank up the resistance a couple of notches and stand up for a few seconds from time to time during a set you can partially simulate these effects, with the only notable difference being that the bike won’t swing from side to side underneath you. This is not a big issue however, as the main effect swinging the bike has is to create more muscle activation in the upper body rather than fundamentally altering the way you in which you pedal. Also, above all else, as you are likely to spend most of your time climbing in the saddle on long ascents the contribution these short periods spent out of the saddle make are pretty small anyway.
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Training for short, sharp climbs
Of course out in the real world not all climbs are long and continuous alpine passes; many are short and sharp so becoming good at these requires a slightly different training approach. It is worth pointing out though that even on relatively short climbs Power to Weight ratio is still the main factor that dictates your level of performance, however bigger riders with a higher absolute power output can definitely compete more equally with lighter climbing specialists on short ascents.
Basically – to be good at short climbs the main requirement is to be able to hold a high level of wattage for a short period of time and then to recovery quickly and do it again, as often you will be required to do lots of short climbs back to back in an event on rolling terrain.
To train for this indoors doing interval sessions with very hard but short efforts (30 seconds to 2 minutes) with varied amounts of recovery can be highly effective. Bear in mind that these kind of sessions are very fatiguing though, especially when you first start doing them, so they should probably not be done more than once a week, with a relatively easy day either side for recovery.
Of course to make these sessions more climbing specific you can set the bike up as per the methods above (elevate the front end or set the bars and set back) and you may feel the need to get out of the saddle a little more and keep the gearing slightly higher as loading up the legs is less of an issue for these short reps.
Summary
Climbing ability on a bike predominantly comes down to having an excellent Power to Weight ratio over the time period that it takes to get over the hills you are aiming to tackle. Training regularly on an indoor bike like the Wattbike that gives accurate feedback on your W/kg figure means you can do controlled training sessions at and around the power output you think you can hold for the duration of key climbs to stimulate adaptations that will eventually allow you to hold a higher output on these.
With simple TT style tests of a set duration once every few weeks you can monitor your progress over time very easily. By using the Polar view you can also work on increasing your pedaling efficiency that will, in turn, help you produce slightly more power for the same level of effort.
Finally, you can make indoor training more climbing specific by subtly changing your riding position on the bike (elevating the front end, setting the seat and bars back and standing up on the pedals for brief periods) as this places similar biomechanical demands on the body as those you encounter when ascending a real hill.
Happy climbing….
[Images from The Alpine Challenge by HotChillee. Taken by Matt Alexander]