Official Sprocket Rockets Training Thread

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

I got one as a gift ~2 years ago, wore it for a bit and found the HR readings to be pretty inaccurate for me while exercising. stopped wearing it after our kid was born premature and in the 5th percentile for weight and it was consistently telling me I was getting 8 hours of sleep and that my recovery was great. yeah, no effing way that was true. Maybe it's just me and I have weird shaped wrists or something.

Supposedly the latest one aka Whoop 4.0 is much more accurate etc. IDK.

[rod9301]

Bumping this up. Finally feeling like I can get back to structured training. Hopefully getting back into the gym a couple times a week for weight training and 3-4 gravel/indoor rides per week.

Whoop?

Is it a bunch of hype or actually a useful device?

Why gravel rides? Go mountain bike, you need fitness AND should l skills, which you will not improve on z gravel bike

Sent from my moto g 5G using Tapatalk

[climberevan]

Gravel rides will be much more conducive to large amounts of Z2 training and focused intervals, which is what makes people fitter. Most pro mountain bikers do the majority of their training on the road.

Whoop is hype. HRV (the basic metric it, Oura rings, and others use to come up with their readiness scores etc) is difficult to measure accurately outside of a clinical environment. Further, HRV interpretation is in its infancy.

You'll get a way better sense of where you stand by doing a careful daily assessment of your feel and a simple resting heart rate check every morning.

[XtrPickels]

Bumping this up. Finally feeling like I can get back to structured training. Hopefully getting back into the gym a couple times a week for weight training and 3-4 gravel/indoor rides per week.

Whoop?

Is it a bunch of hype or actually a useful device?

RE. Whoop
1. I have one and wear it only at night. I'll say that it trends correctly. E.g. a night of drinking tanks the score, etc. However, I wouldn't put the accuracy much beyond this
2. I do not wear it during the day as the HR readings during exercise are not accurate for me. (even the 4.0)
3. It's main benefit is that it's more comfortable to sleep with then a full-on watch.

I wouldn't recommend it as I don't think it's worth the money. If you were interested in HRV, I would get a watch that has that function; I don't think Whoop is doing anything overly unique that Garmin et al. aren't doing.

So, why do I have one? Because I'm an experimenter. I don't really use to it to drive training decisions, I use it because I want to learn about it.

[Dantheman]

Gravel rides will be much more conducive to large amounts of Z2 training and focused intervals, which is what makes people fitter. Most pro mountain bikers do the majority of their training on the road.

Also, probably not a lot of MTB available in Montana in the winter, LOL.

Whoop is hype. HRV (the basic metric it, Oura rings, and others use to come up with their readiness scores etc) is difficult to measure accurately outside of a clinical environment. Further, HRV interpretation is in its infancy.

You'll get a way better sense of where you stand by doing a careful daily assessment of your feel and a simple resting heart rate check every morning.

Even if the measurements are accurate, they extrapolate massively from just a few metrics. Their claim that they can differentiate stages of sleep is laughable. Also, IIRC Dylan Johnson tested a Whoop for a while and easy 2-hr Z2 rides maxed out the strain score so I really question the utility for endurance training.

[Johnny Utah]

Thanks for the reminder to cancel my subscription. I was excited about whoop as a very early beta tester but never really found the data to be anything beyond a little bit interesting or validating, which I can’t justify buying right now


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

Ok so I've continued to try to talk myself out of a watch of some sort, but I do have a TrainingPeaks Pro subscription that I think I could actually gain some useful data from.

I'm doing a mix of gym workouts, trainer bike riding (data gathered by Zwift) and backcountry skiing. Not really sure if there is any reasonable way to gather all that data. If there is one good watch for that etc...

[Iowagriz]

Don't you have a bike GPS? Garmin or similar? Thrown that in your pocket and get the info, or Strave via phone.

Hours of workout is the most important.
Vert and heart rate likely second must important.

Sent from my SM-S908U using Tapatalk

[kathleenturneroverdrive]

trainer bike riding (data gathered by Zwift)...

How are you tracking heart rate on Zwift? Strap?

Edit to add - what you want a watch to do is simple to get. It’s just heart rate, GPS, and activity tracking. Only thing to keep an eye on is if the watch you want can kick your heart rate to Zwift. If you don’t have a strap already then that’s a function you should research/make sure you get, and I think, getting it depends on the watch + what hardware you’re running Zwift on.

[rideit]

I have a basically new Garmin SQ Venu I would sell for seriously cheap.
Still have all of the packaging, HR Strap, etc.
I just never took to HR ‘training’. (Mostly, I don’t want to know how awfully undisciplined I am).

[Falcon3]

I don’t care enough to wear a chest strap when I’m mountain biking, so my COROS watch is good enough for me. Gets me fairly accurate HR numbers and the GPS tends to be more accurate than my phone, too. It will also connect to Zwift for HRM purposes.

I just never took to HR ‘training’

Yeah it’s depressing when I’m trying to do a ton of Zone 2 (80%+ ideally my of weekly training time) but then doing two 90 min MTB rides blows it all up. I’m not willing to give up actually riding outdoors for the sake of training though.

[kathleenturneroverdrive]

Hours of workout is the most important.
Vert and heart rate likely second must important.

FWIW I saw my fitness plummet on TrainingPeaks when I did a very strenuous 6 day ski tour without a heart rate monitor. Even though I was out for hours of uphill each day it seemed like TrainingPeaks didn’t know how to give me “credit” for it. Obviously, this is VERY nerdy, but I think that fitness tracking is what WRG is after.

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

Ok not gonna respond to everyone individually, but good responses. Thanks. Yes I use a Wahoo Bolt on my gravel and MTB and always wear a heart rate strap.

From my understanding it's not wise to wear a HR strap when ski touring and wearing a beacon......thus a watch that can track HR?

FWIW I saw my fitness plummet on TrainingPeaks when I did a very strenuous 6 day ski tour without a heart rate monitor. Even though I was out for hours of uphill each day it seemed like TrainingPeaks didn’t know how to give me “credit” for it. Obviously, this is VERY nerdy, but I think that fitness tracking is what WRG is after.

Curious I was reading up on the TrainingPeaks "algorithm" and I guess they will dock you on "Form" aka Fitness when you have been going hard for multiple days in a row.....possibly if you rested for a few days you would see your fitness number go back up to a high number again. Basically their whole system to meant to prep the athlete for races and they weight heavily on rest/recovery.

[sethschmautz]

WG,

I have a Coros Apex that I would also sell cheap. Great watch. Seriously long GPS battery life and I'm in your state so shipping should be reasonable. Has wrist-based HR.

Seth

Sent from my SM-S908U using Tapatalk

[bean]

From my understanding it's not wise to wear a HR strap when ski touring and wearing a beacon......thus a watch that can track HR?

Not something I worry about at all. HR straps are in the 2.4GHz range, beacons at 457kHz, and HR straps are sending a weak signal.

Curious I was reading up on the TrainingPeaks "algorithm" and I guess they will dock you on "Form" aka Fitness when you have been going hard for multiple days in a row.....possibly if you rested for a few days you would see your fitness number go back up to a high number again. Basically their whole system to meant to prep the athlete for races and they weight heavily on rest/recovery.

"Form" is calculated by subtracting your ATL (acute training load) aka "Fatigue" from your CTL (chronic training load) aka "Fitness." Fatigue/ATL is taken from the TSS scores of the last seven days, while Fitness/CTL decays over 42 days.

So if your "form" is low (i.e. strongly negative) you have put on a lot of training stress over the last 7 days compared to your baseline fitness, and are adding fitness - but are more likely to be fatigued.

If your "form" is high then you're well rested and have been putting in less work than baseline, and may be able to put in a strong performance.

[climberevan]

I use Intervals.icu to track everything. Various activities all go through Strava to get to intervals. I use a HR chest strap, optical HR strap, and powermeters on the bikes. FWIW I've tracked HR and power for the same ride multiple times and the TSS is always about 10-15% low using HR.

You can also just manually enter stuff to keep your chart making sense. For example, an hour of high Z2 is 40 TSS for me, so I can make a good guess for any activities that don't have a valid metric.

For the real geeks, here's my GF's PMC from the last few weeks. We've been bikepacking in New Zealand for the last week, and her ramp rate is like 30+. I keep telling her not to be alarmed and that the PMC is not super useful for touring cyclists, but it's quite a thing to see. Mine is a less dramatic version, but it's still not what I'd want to see if I were training.

[Tailwind]

How many hours of base training do you need to do over the winter?

I’ve been reading training for the new alpinism and it’s big on a lot of hours of Aerobic training. It has helped me piece together a lot of the chatter on here about zone 2 training. I bought a power meter and quickly realized I am never doing zone 2 rides…

My typical pattern has been to not ride at all, then spent about 14-15 hours per week riding training for an event over the course of a few months. Last year I didn’t ride until May for a July event… I’ve typically done 100 mile MTB races. I’m hovering in the mid 8 hour range and I’d love to get into the 7’s if possible.

is 6-8 hours of zone 2 riding per week enough over the winter to help build a better aerobic base? Or do I need to get 10+ hours in to really make a difference. Training for the New Alpinism seems to think you need to hit a bunch of hours or Aerobic training really doesn’t help…. But that’s running and skiing oriented.

[XtrPickels]

Training is just a stimulus for change within your body. So, the amount of training needed is relative to where you are today.
Given your situation that you typically do not train over the winter... well any training is going to cause you to come out ahead in the spring.

8 hours of total training per week is a great baseline. Each time you ramp up for an event, you will be doing so from a better level of fitness which means your performance ought to improve.

I do not believe, however, in focusing solely on the base zone at any point during the year. Out of 6 days a week of training, you'd be better off with 1 session of intensity.

[Tailwind]

Thanks!

I’ve been reading a bit about mixing in some intensity and that seems to be a consensus for bicycling. I think I’ve mainly realized that I’ve almost never done true base miles, so I’m going to add some blocks of that. I identified strongly with the symptoms of ‘Aerobic Deficiency’ that Training for the New Alpinism breaks down. I think on the average year I’m likely only doing true zone 2 rides when I go with my wife.

i also relocated from Conifer Co to Grand Junction, so winter riding feels easier than it used to.

Training is just a stimulus for change within your body. So, the amount of training needed is relative to where you are today.
Given your situation that you typically do not train over the winter... well any training is going to cause you to come out ahead in the spring.

8 hours of total training per week is a great baseline. Each time you ramp up for an event, you will be doing so from a better level of fitness which means your performance ought to improve.

I do not believe, however, in focusing solely on the base zone at any point during the year. Out of 6 days a week of training, you'd be better off with 1 session of intensity.

[fool]

I use Intervals.icu to track everything. Various activities all go through Strava to get to intervals. I use a HR chest strap, optical HR strap, and powermeters on the bikes. FWIW I've tracked HR and power for the same ride multiple times and the TSS is always about 10-15% low using HR.

There is also Strava Elevate, a Chrome extension that has since turned into a desktop app, that provides similar features.

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

Ever "lock up" your back? Been back into the weight training with the other enduro guys 2x/week. About a month in now so not fresh back into the gym. Sumo Squats, Devil Presses, etc last night.....about 2/3 of the way into a 45 minute lift and my lower back decided to lock up. I was walking around like an old man. My PT tried some stretches/adjustments on the table before I left the gym. Seeing him again today. Was supposed to be my regular shoulder PT appt but he thinks we need to switch gears and do a lower back consult.

Slightly better today but can barely move. Slept on the couch cause it's much firmer than the GFs super soft bed. I either have to be bent over or have a far shoulders back posture. Ugggh, I guess I'm finally getting old-ish.

[fool]

interesting new article from Alex Hutchinson regarding carbs, veggies, fiber, and iron. One piece on carb consumption:

The day before a 10K, fill up your muscles with glycogen by aiming for 7 to 12 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight (g/kg). On race day, take in 1 to 4 g/kg between one and four hours before the race. [...]

For a marathon, increase the pre-race loading to 10 to 12 g/kg for 36 for 48 hours beforehand. That’s an enormous amount, which you’ll probably only achieve by drinking some juice or sports drink in addition to carb-heavy meals. Top up in the morning, and again after your warm-up, and then aim for somewhere between 30 and 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour during the race. (I’ll add that some pro cyclists—and scientists—are now pushing closer to 120 g/hour, but I’m not sure how well that would translate to running.

[Canada1]

Two years ago I woke up with low back pain so bad I couldn’t walk. My wife sent me to a pt guy who did a message and then taught me a new stretch. I walked out of the place. Never had a problem before or since, but I thought I was going into the hospital. That PT is a god, and my respect for people who live with that went way up.

[Shredeagle]

What’s the new stretch you were taught Canada1?

I’ve had lower back pain for a while. Stretching never made it better for me. I do these exercises 2 days on one day off. It’s pretty much got my back to where I’m no longer limited. Backs are weird though so just keep talking to people and plugging away until u figure out what works for you. It’s gotta be something you don’t mind doing for the rest of your life….

10 pull-ups
20 squats
20 deadlifts
5 minute exercise consisting of 2.5 minute plank, 1 minute bird dog on each side, and 25 push-ups

You might have just pulled something too and hopefully it’s nothing long term.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[buttahflake]

Motion is Lotion, pull-ups are great for the back.