March and April are the bona fide salad days of living along the Wasatch Front when mountain snow conditions are still stellar and the valley’s foothill singletrack is all smooth, tacky fun. But before you dust off your knobby wheels and hit the dirt, investing in a little mountain-bike specific spring strength training can help ease the transition from sliding down mountains to peddling up them. So says two former professional mountain bike racers and now coaches, WUKAR Fit’s Art O’Connor, who focuses on gym-specific strength training for cyclists, and K Cycling Coaching’s Sarah Kaufmann, a specialist in helping elite mountain bikers build both endurance and speed.
Getting Strong
Coming out of ski season most mountain bikers’ leg strength is pretty much up to snuff, O’Connor explained. “Where most people, alpine skiers especially, lack strength in the spring,” he says, “is in the upper body.” To prepare your arms, shoulders, upper back and core for the demands of climbing and descending on a mountain bike, O’Connor recommends adding push-pull exercises to your fitness routine.
Push-ups:Not surprisingly, the good ole push-up remains the standard-bearer of developing upper-body pushing strength. To achieve the perfect-form push-up, begin in a plank position with your hands slightly wider than shoulder-width and your feet at hip-width. Tighten your core and then lower your body until your elbows are at a 45-degree angle. Pause for a beat and then push back up the starting position. Your body should remain in a straight line from head to heels the entire time, no sagging or rising hips allowed. “And you don’t get better at push-ups by doing them on your knees, but rather doing them with your hands elevated, ideally in a stairwell,” O’Connor says. “Start on the highest stair you can reach,” he says. “When you can do three sets of 10 in perfect form, then you’re ready to move down to the next step.”
Plank Pulls:To increase pull strength, used by mountain bikers as they pull on the handlebars to apply pressure to their back wheel as they ascend hills, O’Connor recommends plank pulls, or pulling your upper body up while in an inverted or upward-facing plank position. The farther you place your feet out in front of you, decreasing the angle of your body in relation to the floor, the more difficult the plank pull will be. This exercise can be done in the gym by pulling yourself up on a pair of TRX bands suspended from a ceiling or by pulling yourself up to a barbell placed on a squat rack. A plank pull can also be performed at home by crawling under a dining room table and pulling yourself up by holding onto the edge of the table.
Greasing the Groove:For athletes looking to get strong without bulking up, O’Connor recommends “greasing the groove,” a training technique that increases neuromuscular efficiency through minimal repetitions and plenty of rest time in between sets. An example of this training technique would be doing three sets of three to five push-ups spread throughout the day: one set after getting up in the morning, another at midday, and a final set in the evening. “It’s not necessary to follow that exact schedule,” he says, “the key is keeping the reps low and making sure the time in between sets is at least an hour.”
How to Last All Day
The best way to maintain endurance-related fitness, says Kaufmann, is by regularly engaging in an activity that challenges your cardiovascular system. “For athletes who put away their bike for the winter, that can look like ski touring, snowshoeing, hiking or running—anything that gets your heart rate up and keeps it up for a while,” she says. “The more you do over the winter, the more you can absorb when you get back on the bike in the spring.” Of those activities, Kaufmann says that ski touring translates particularly well to mountain biking. “The motion of dragging your ski uphill uses many of the same muscles used in a pedal stroke, and then skiing downhill is very similar to the skills of spatial perception and maintaining your body at a speed that is required in mountain biking.”
For those of us, like me, who tend to let the chairlifts do most of the work during the winter, Kaufmann says that cadence workouts are a great way to kick-start your cycling endurance in the spring. A simple example that can be done on a gym bike, trainer or on the road is performing three to five sets of pedaling at a high cadence for one minute and then backing it down to a normal cadence for five minutes. “You don’t need a computer to tell you what your cadence is,” she says. “A high cadence is when you’re pedaling at an uncomfortably fast pace but below the point that you’re bouncing out of the saddle.”
Another workout, more focused on neuromuscular power, can be done by repeating a gradual climb that takes about three to five minutes to complete one time. Ride the climb once in a moderate gear and then repeat, shifting the gears up one cog harder each time, until you fail. Whenever you do get back on the bike, Kaufmann warns, resist the urge to ramp up too quickly. “Even if you feel good, always take it easy when restarting an activity you haven’t done for a while, even one you’ve done for years,” she says. “Doing too much too soon is a sure-fire recipe for starting the season with an injury.”
More from the Pros
WUKAR Fit | wukar.com
K Cycling Coaching | kcyclingcoaching.com
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