Worst training advice ever.

[biker72]

Some of these are pretty funny...Bicycling Magazine (tinyurl.com/yx5p5vl6)

[Dude]

This was not training advice per se, but one of my customers noticed all of these pros winning the post-tour crits. Being a crit racer himself, he figured that these guys must be flying and in perfect crit shape if they just raced the tour de france. So he goes on an insane 3 week training block of 100+ mile days with 2 rest days. He did not do well that season.

[Elefantino]

My favorite comment:

My family runs a mortuary and trust me, ALL of this advice is excellent. See ya!

[Drmojo]

The comment about fixed gear and small ring riding early in “the season”
Spinning is winning as many aficianadoes know!
Best advice I ever received

[ultraman6970]

Fix gear specially with a super light gear at the begining of the season is good for the legs... actually good for little kids getting in the sport because you dont over work the kid and you develop that stupid high cadence that they can keep for hours and hours w/o stop.

People doesnt do that anymore, well i havent done fixie in a very long time... miss it.

[smead]

The comment about fixed gear and small ring riding early in “the season”
Spinning is winning as many aficianadoes know!
Best advice I ever received

Yeah but you always mashed 78 winter gears inches pretty well as I recall.

Low 80 gear inches in the winter and mash climbs, then drop to mid-70s later in the spring. My backwards backwoods training regimen. Big gears for training, big gears for racing.., uh and yes, I'm not a trainer. :rolleyes:

[Drmojo]

Yeah but you always mashed 78 winter gears inches pretty well as I recall.

Low 80 gear inches in the winter and mash climbs, then drop to mid-70s later in the spring. My backwards backwoods training regimen. Big gears for training, big gears for racing.., uh and yes, I'm not a trainer. :rolleyes:

My first fixie, the Quickbeam I rode mostly 63” for the first year
Then mostly 49x18 or 49x17-/73-77 inches
Rarely mashed 80 “
Except the Inner Light 48x16=81 inches for flatter stuff—Solvang double, Camino alto double
Foxy’s etc
Had to walk once on the fixed Dart we did when pushing 81”!?!!

[marciero]

The thing about not drinking water was commonly held belief and played a significant role in the death of Tom Simpson.

[marciero]

Sort of related to the small ring/big ring advice was the LSD-"long slow distance" training regime, where that is all you did, and that alone was expected to prepare you to race.

[Ti Designs]

Advice about cycling is where cognitive bias lives. Everybody thinks they know everything, nobody questions what they really know. I have two questions for anyone who would comment on this thread.

1) how many good riders have you produced? Are your methods tested, or do you just somehow know how it's done?

2) have you ever been critical of your own riding? Would you be able to tell the difference between a good pedal stroke and a bad one?

[saab2000]

Best training advice I ever gave myself was to lose significant weight from 1987 to 1988, when I was riding at a pretty decent level. Don't know how much I lost but it was enough that my performance improved quite a bit. Less scientific. Just anecdotal. But it seemed to make a huge performance difference. I was in my young 20s and it allowed me to make the leap to Cat 2, which was very nice for me at the time.

Worst training advice has been things like never use the big ring. Ride a fixie all the time. Things of that nature. Old wive's tales.

One of the better things I learned over the years was to stay warm. Wearing thin tights or leg warmers into the 60s, even upper 60s, was a nice thing I've learned to do. I see guys and gals wearing shorts in the 40s or low 50s and I cringe.

[weisan]

Ti pal, let me ask you back....have you ever try and explain your working hypothesis to say a 6-yr-old learning how to ride a bike for the first time and were successful in doing it?

[Drmojo]

Sort of related to the small ring/big ring advice was the LSD-"long slow distance" training regime, where that is all you did, and that alone was expected to prepare you to race.

LSD training is not related to improving one’s spinning or “ suplesse”
(pardon my French)
All I know is that fixed gear riding improved my riding in everyway- fitness, bike handling, descending while spinning 160 rpm plus for a few minutes on long descents.
Alas, those days are gone...

[colker]

Ti pal, let me ask you back....have you ever try and explain your working hypothesis to say a 6-yr-old learning how to ride a bike for the first time and were successful in doing it?

Sorry... but this question has no link to race training. Your parable does not rhyme w/ racing.

[jimoots]

Riding 6-7 days a week is literally a cornerstone of getting fit. Recovery ON the bike helps consolidate gains.

[Ti Designs]

Ti pal, let me ask you back....have you ever try and explain your working hypothesis to say a 6-yr-old learning how to ride a bike for the first time and were successful in doing it?

Nope, never worked with anyone that young.

[unterhausen]

I used to listen to John Tesh sometimes while I was driving. He once talked about one of his coaches who had the philosopy that you should be at max for every workout. Tesh was pushing that idea on his show. Good way to get people to quit exercising and a horrible way to train.

[floxy1]

‘Hard days hard, easy days easy.’ BEST training advice ever

[Ti Designs]

Sort of related to the small ring/big ring advice was the LSD-"long slow distance" training regime, where that is all you did, and that alone was expected to prepare you to race.

People want simple answers when it's never that simple, so they hear what they want to hear. Training programs are sequences of training methods, each step prepares the athlete for the next step. This is where the concept of training advice falls flat - everybody wants one simple piece of training advice, independent of where that person is within their training.

The point of LSD training, otherwise known as the polarized training plan, is to spend long periods of time at low intensity, taxing the system's reserves. The body's response is to improve it's recovery rate. That in itself doesn't make you faster. Later in the training season there will be more intense efforts. The smart athlete will start to track their TSS or training stress score to prevent overtraining. At that point your training load becomes limited by your recovery from efforts - the thing you worked on while doing LSD training...


My best piece of advice is to UNDERSTAND the whole training sequence. If you want to take that to the next level, spend some time to figure out what type of training you respond to. If you search the internet for training methods, you'll find the HIIT method comes up a lot - High Intensity Interval Training is the fastest way to fitness IF YOU RESPOND TO IT. That response curve isn't a standard bell curve. Less than 10 percent of the average population respond well to high intensity intervals and it gets worse as age goes up. What's worse, chances of injury go way up without a program of work leading up to doing intervals. I teach a 16 week pedal stroke class, I spend the first 14 weeks getting them ready to do intervals.

[Dead Man]

similar to some already posted, "big gear in the hills pre race season, compact gears on season." blew out my it-tfl pushing a 54/42 in the hills where i used to live - and so often rode

didnt race road that season, but did manage to pull off a decent CX season after spending all spring and summer spinning super easy gears recovering

[weisan]

Nope, never worked with anyone that young.

Do you think it can be done for someone that young or do we have to wait until they are at a certain age?

[bigbill]

The fixed, small ring, then bigger gears was preached by the old coaches like Mike Walden. I did his school in Florida in 1993 and rode around 350 miles that week including a century, in the small ring.

Back in the early '90s, I'd host riders at my house for early season stuff in South Carolina. The advice I got from Greg Oravetz was to go as hard as possible on hard days, easy spin on easy days, and don't break your plan just because someone takes off from the group on an easy day. And when you're off the bike, stay off your feet and rest. I got home from work one time on a Friday and there was Saab in the driveway with bike racks. Dave Mann was asleep on my couch and Declan Lonergan was rummaging through my fridge. They had great stories even if the accent was a little hard to follow.

[djg21]

Best training advice I ever gave myself was to lose significant weight from 1987 to 1988, when I was riding at a pretty decent level. Don't know how much I lost but it was enough that my performance improved quite a bit. Less scientific. Just anecdotal. But it seemed to make a huge performance difference. I was in my young 20s and it allowed me to make the leap to Cat 2, which was very nice for me at the time.

Worst training advice has been things like never use the big ring. Ride a fixie all the time. Things of that nature. Old wive's tales.

One of the better things I learned over the years was to stay warm. Wearing thin tights or leg warmers into the 60s, even upper 60s, was a nice thing I've learned to do. I see guys and gals wearing shorts in the 40s or low 50s and I cringe.

It was the first nice day here in the Saratoga area. Went out this afternoon for a few hours when the temperature hit 50 degrees. I was in tights, long sleeves, a vest, etc. I crossed pasts with three other cyclists coming in the opposition direction. Each was wearing short sleeves and shorts. They had to be miserable.

[jimoots]

‘Hard days hard, easy days easy.’ BEST training advice ever

Yes to this.

Also note that hard is really really f-in hard. You should be crying.

Easy needs to be super easy and that generally means slow.

It’s very easy to lie to yourself about both of the above!

[Ti Designs]

Do you think it can be done for someone that young or do we have to wait until they are at a certain age?

That depends on how you define learning. Most people mistake vocabulary for knowledge and data for understanding. Children these days aren't leaning how to think critically (which really isn't accepted in social media), they are learning sequences to use apps, which is to say that they are learning not to think.

Social media works because confirmation bias is a warm, fuzzy feeling. Critical thinking on the other hand is downright uncomfortable. That's why I'm an asshole, I tell people that there's a very good chance that they're pedaling wrong. That pisses people off, how can they be wrong? Children can pedal a bike, nobody has every forgotten how to pedal a bike. Look, the pedals go around in circles! That just means that your efficiency > 0. When talking about pedaling a bike, maybe .1% of the riding population questions how they pedal and even fewer figure out what to do about it. For every person who has figured out that their quads can't push down from a seated cycling position there are a million Peloton owners feeling the burn without questioning what they're doing.

In marketing my pedal stroke program I've come to one conclusion. 99.99% of the people on bikes don't want to improve, they want to belong. Critical thinking takes you out of the mainstream, which goes against human nature. The question isn't can children learn to do this, it's should they?

So, my best advice for 99.99% of the population, and my worst advice for the other .01% is to go ahead and suck at what you do - you'll fit right in.

[Mikej]

Guy at work to me - “Why don’t you just pedal faster, then you could win”

[JohnnyBoston]

Guy at work to me - “Why don’t you just pedal faster, then you could win”

Classic :)

[Tandem Rider]

Yes to this.

Also note that hard is really really f-in hard. You should be crying.

Easy needs to be super easy and that generally means slow.

It’s very easy to lie to yourself about both of the above!

This^^

I spent one summer riding off and on with a guy on the National Team. Hard days were as hard or harder than racing. 3+ hours of pure torture, I sometimes puked from the effort, almost to the point of hating them. Easy days seemed like a waste of time until I started to see my performance shoot up. When he wasn't around I rode easy days with my GF, it forced me to ride super easy.

[floxy1]

yes to this.

Also note that hard is really really f-in hard. You should be crying.

Easy needs to be super easy and that generally means slow.

It’s very easy to lie to yourself about both of the above!

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