2024/2025 winter program

Requirements:

• A bike on a trainer

• A camera pointing at the bike

• Some way of joining a Zoom meeting and

• An open mind - we're gonna test everything.

If I run classes this year, they will start in January.  That gives us until then to figure out what isn't working. For now I will be running open Zoom sessions to go over the basics of my program. This is where the engineering of a pedal stroke meets critical thinking. Be warned, understanding of the ideal pedal stroke will involve math, and I will expect you to watch yourself pedal and be brutally honest about what you see.

Class times and Zoom links will show up on my calendar.

In past years I have run pedal stroke programs focused on two large muscle groups with the goal of getting riders to the point where they could do recovery intervals correctly.  Everything must be tested, my past program failed. There is this thing called biodiversity, it means that some athletes will respond well to high intensity intervals and others won't. Your own training program should be based on what you respond to. The end of this program will be focused on testing to see what people respond to.\

One last warning - I don't do pointless data. Lots of riders have power meters, few of them use the data to their advantage. Within my program there is this idea of getting the body weight on the pedals. At that point the cadence is based on resistance at the rear wheel, the gear you're in, and how much of your body weight is on the pedals. Getting the timing of when the body weight is on the pedals is what you should be focusing on. Instead people ask about watts. If you are trying to hit your wattage target by increasing your effort while your timing gets worse, you've spent a lot of money on a device that makes you worse.  I don't care what other programs use, if I can't explain the benefit of using it, I don't use it. I'll give you an example of a feedback device used well. In one of my classes we discussed weight transfer to the front wheel if the rider has no weight on their handlebars. In theory, a strain gauge under the front fork would show the timing of the force as the rider fell into the pedals. To my delight, the next week there was a bathroom scale under the front wheel of one of my riders. Measuring devices should show failure, it's the basis of learning.