Miksi minä uskon Kaisa Lehtosen pyöräosuuteen tänä vuonna?

Ei tässä tarvitse olla Nostradamus sanoakseen luottavaisena, että Lehtosen Kaisa pärjää tänä vuonna. Pärjää jo. Tässä tekstissä tarkoitukseni on purkaa omia ajatuksiani syistä, jotka vievät Kaisan uudelle tasolle tänä vuonna pyöräilyssä:

Kona 2016

Port Elizabeth 2017

”Ohjaustanko on pikkaisen alempana. Sitä kautta ajoasento on aika paljon aerodynaamisempi kuin vaikka Havaijilla. Istun hiukan taaempana, jolloin pystyn paremmin käyttämään ajossa pakaroita ja takareisiä” (HS, 31.3.2017)

”Pyöritys on nyt taloudellisempaa, kun minulla on näin hirmu lyhyet koivet. Sitten ne lyhyet kammet avaavat vähän lantiokulmaa. Kun edestä on mennyt alas ja satulasta taakse, lonkan koukistajat menevät vähän suppuun. Mutta kun kammet ovat lyhyemmät, kulma aukeaa vähän takaisin päin.” (HS, 31.3.2017)

"Viime vuonna asentoni oli ehkä vähän hassuhko.” (HS, 31.3.2017)

Merkittävin muutos on tapahtunut Kaisan torsokulmassa, joka on pudonnut 8 astetta (22deg → 14 deg). Kun minulla ei ole tehodataa tai muita tarkempia tietoja käytettävissäni käytin kulmiin ja kokoon perustuvaa teoreettista laskentakaavaa (Heil et al., 2001), jossa muutin ainoastaan torsokulmaa ja vastaavaa PWR-SPD-mallinnusta:

	2016	2017
CdA	0.245	0.234
Parannus		4,55%
40kmh / teho	242W	233W
Tehosäästö		9W

Huomioidaan vielä, että Kaisa toteaa myös taloudellisuuden parantuneen, joten voimme olettaa että myös W/CdA suhde on parantunut ja ajo on parantunut silläkin saralla. Lupauksia herättää myös Kaisan ja Ivan O’Gormanin asteittainen lähestymistapa asennonmuutokseen – parempaa lienee siis vielä luvassa.

Asennossa on vielä paljon potentiaalia jäljellä. Visuaalisesti tarkastellen sekä otsapinta-alaan (A) että liukkauteen (Cd) voisi vielä vaikuttaa joa merkittävästi. Kaisa voisi hyvin päästä vielä huomattavasti lähemmäs 0.200 tasoa tai miksi ei jopa alle vaikuttamatta liikaa taloudellisuuteen tai juoksuun. Visuaalisen tarkastelun perusteella (akateeminen jargon-ilmaus joka tarkoittaa: “katsoin valokuvaa”) asun ja kypärän testaaminen toisi parannusta Cd-arvoon. Vaikuttamalla päänasentoon ja asennon kulmiin merkittävät muutokset A:n osalta voisivat realisoitua adaptaatio-jakson jälkeen.

Yhtä kaikki; hyvältä näyttää ja parempaa on luvassa.

Juuri näitä asioita ja muita käsittelemme HelTri:n jäsenillassa Toukokuussa ja pohdimme kuinka jokainen läsnäolija voi parantaa omaa vauhtiaan pyörällä lisäämättä tehoa. Toivottavasti nähdään siellä.

Planning for success - combining physiology and psychology

Time to get excited about your plan. Right?

I sincerely hope that every athlete reading this will have been successful with their winter training independent of their chosen way. What I mean is that there is actually no right or wrong way to train. It all depends on what works for you the best. Time after time that changes – and every so often athletes in media talk about changes in training, sometimes drastic ones, so it is commonplace to juggle and tweak. That is, because something hasn’t worked for them, something unexpected has come or they’ve plateaued with their current training. Time for change. However, this text isn’t about what is the best methodology or what my preference is. This is about choosing your methodology.

Training is something of cyclical model; define your purpose of training, prepare a plan, test, execute, perform, tweak and repeat – and along the way numerous changes can happen. However, the first two stages of the cycle do come with a huge opportunity and bit of threat. Keeping things familiar is the safer bet, it may not yield such rates of development as earlier. It works, and as the old wise words say “don’t fix, if it ain’t broken”. At some point comes the plateau and the rate of development diminishes and it is time for a change.

Tweaking and trying new things out may open you complete new ways for your training. Talking about opportunity. Mixing things up may boost you, but trying out new things is always surrounded by uncertainty, I’ve come across this a lot. I’ve devised something that looks purely awesome, but it frickin’ doesn’t work and backed off to the drawing board. It isn’t that you’ve done something utterly wrong and failed. It is that you’ve learned and then tweaked. Gaining knowledge of your body as a response to different training is essential.

But here is the kicker: nothing is going to work unless you are excited about it. If I would show you all the training plans, I’ve created and demolished along the years I think It would add to fair few spreadsheets, docs, notebooks and the list goes on. Sometimes the plan looks a bit off one way and you scrap (or rather modify) it only to find it is off another way, that’s part of the process. It may take a fair few attempts to find your plan for success. But once you’ve found, who is there to stop you from succeeding. So even planning has a lot to do with excitement, motivation and belief.

It is important to bear in mind that longevity and patience are virtues in training to perform, so whether something works instantly is not the question. Asking for gains in longer term is more important. For example, an athlete has trained trained based on volume and plateaued and decides it is time to go for more intense model to mix things up. It pretty certain that the athlete actually feels crap and the respective performance drops for a while due to the change in routines. Now, patience is a virtue like in learning to play guitar (admittedly, I never had the patience for that though); the change doesn’t happen overnight.

Nonetheless, whether you are planning to stick to your guns, adding volume, tweaking the intensity, adding strength and conditioning – give your experiment some time. It is said that the body really adapts to new stimulus in 6-8 weeks of exposure. But still, now that you have your plan for the racing season ask: Am I excited about this?

The take home message here: A plan that gets you excited has all the likelihood to work.

N=1 experiment

I've been conducting a specific experiment in terms of my training periodization and content – an evolved model of polarized training some might say. First, it is important to notice that this is an N=1 experiment at this stage. Thus, the results are inconclusive even if, in my mind, they are promising and have yielded gains for me.

This experiment is to find out whether something I’ve worked on has actually potential in real world. Reading about the countless optional training methods is mind-boggling and there is always another reference available, and even this is continuous working in progress.

Having used the traditional linear model for periodization and a polarized methodology for the shorter term, I came out with this idea of multidimensional polarization, where macrocycle lasts from 3-5 weeks and a microcycles are 6-8 days long. The idea is in the three different types of microcycles: recovery, normal and load (significantly tougher than a normal one). At typical four week macrocycle would consists a recovery, two normal and a load cycle:

That idea hails from personal experiences and my lengthy discussion with other endurance athletes. In essence, I've experienced the following cycle many enough times: adding training load progressively lead me to fade on the final week before recovery block. However, not enough and I was too eager to train already before midweek during recovery period. So, I trained and faded again. I think many can relate to this experience.

Here we soon begin to suffer from too monotonous, invariable training and thus, not getting the benefits out. Training stalls and becomes routinely and dull.

What I've done is created a training cycle where I have a steady program for two weeks leading to a week that aims to overload for a short and controlled – in a sense periodical crash cycles. After reaching the load, I rest for the following week – and quite happily so. Essentially polarizing not only the session content, but also in bigger picture. However, how the training is distributed, finding the balance between the microcycles and identifying balance between volume and intensity is highly individual.

Here are some thoughts upon my experience during these three months:

General

• This has made the normal weeks feel easy, even if the training load is there
• Training is variable and thus, the training stimulus is variable
• I've really learned to enjoy the hard cycles and easy cycles
• The system is highly adaptable (e.g. cold, missed sessions etc.)

Physiology

• I've taken 15s of my kilometre pace in my running test (*)
• I’ve cut 12s from CSS pace in swimming (*)
• The stimulus is variable
• I'm starting to feel like my old self on bike
• I’ve adapted my body to handle tough sessions even with severe fatigue and not compromising long term recovery

Psychology

• I'm more confident now.
• I know I can go beyond my own expectations
• I've learned to control my fatigue emotionally
• I've lost my anxiousness for going really hard
• I'm more relaxed when it comes to single sessions and able to look at the big picture

Recovery

• Having trashed myself through a cycle has not been blind loading only
• I have monitored my recovery status and kept eye on certain HRV indicators
• Nutrition plays a role in successfull adaptation to this system

After a period of recovery, I can’t wait to get goin' again tomorrow or day after. I will also publish a Finnish version once it is ready.

(*) The gains are not only subject to training stimulus, but also technical development in terms of efficiency and ability