Kit Frustration
I had an interesting discussion on my Facebook Wall with Richard Davies yesterday. Richard is a qualified cycle coach and did the ride last year. He has confirmed that I am right to concentrate on cadence and has given me a daily run that concetrates on getting the legs moving, power doesn't matter as one needs to train the nervous system controlling the legs to go faster. He suggests doing it once a week.
I would strongly suggest you get a heart rate strap, will help with monitoring progress. For example, every few weeks do the same session, try and maintain the same average power and you should find your average heart rate will come down. Or the other way round, try to maintain the same average heart rate and your average power should go up. Also you are correct, it is good to work on cadence. Your power is a combination of force applied and cadence. Less force but higher cadence can produce the same power as more force and lower cadence. When Lance Armstrong was coming back after cancer he had lost so much muscle that he was not as strong as before. What his coach did to compensate for the lack of strength was to get Lance to ride with a much higher cadence, and we saw the results of that. While other elite riders had a cadence around 80 rpm Lance had a cadence closer to 100 rpm. Higher cadence stresses the cardio-vascular system more than lower cadence, but doesn't require the same level of leg strength for same power output.
A good way to improve cadence is a session like this once a week:
Assume you are happy riding with a cadence of 60rpm, but want to increase it to 70rpm, start off with a 10 min ride at 60 rpm, don't worry about power and resistance, keep it easy. After the warmup increase your cadence to 80rpm over a period of about 10secs, hold at 80rpm of 10secs then drop back to 60rpm over 10secs. Repeat as many times as you can and try a build up for 5mins, then cycle easy at 60rpm for 10mins and repeat. You will find that your cadence will naturally increase over time with a session like this. It is important to keep the resistance light as this is more of a nervous system training session than physical, although you will find you will work quite hard physically as well.
Another suggestion, have a fan handy. Don't forget if you were outside riding at 20kph that the wind will help keep you cool.
Today's run was disappointing from the equipment point of view as halfway through I lost cadence monitoring.I tried adjusting the magnet and the sensor until they are practically touching-no joy. I unplugged the jack plug connecting the sensor to the brake unit and reconnected it-nothing, nada. While it was working I was running at about 66 which is an improvement on yesterday. Here are the stats that I can give:
Performance stats-2009-01-21StatisticAverage MaximumSpeed (kph)2235.2Power (watts)60.9172Distance travelled (Km)18.36 Energy used (Kcal)176
The energy used is interesting. According to a slimming site I found, consuming 500kcal per day would lead to a weight loss of .5-1Kg per week. That's 3500Kcal per week, at my current rate I'm looking at about a third of that. However, exercise and the feel good fact of the endorphins produced by exercise should men that y appetite goes down over time so I would expect that rate of weight loss to increase. I was 103Kg last Sunday.