You’ve been doing your training and now you want to convert it to performance! A good target is to try to PR (set a personal record) one of your favorite segments you train on, or beat a past race time.
While most think of “going hard” when setting a personal best, this mindset does not usually work the best. Instead, we have found focusing on the details you need to execute to go your fastest.
In this blog we are going to share with you four tips to ride FASTER!
Tip 1: “Start fast, finish faster.” Yes, it’s simple but thinking this way works. You need to mentally be ready to go out hard, but prepared to increase the perceived effort in the second half. Power wise, this ends up being an even effort, but physically it feels like you are going much harder in the end.
Tip 2: Break your effort into three parts: TheOpen, The Flow, and The Close. In the Open, you use your explosive zones for one minute to get the speed up as quickly as possible. Then in the meat of the effort (the Flow), you settle into a rhythm. Here you alternate between your three threshold zones, grabbing momentum with the upper ones, and then holding that soles with the lower ones. Finally, in the Close, you go ALL IN going into the explosive zones leaving nothing left on the table. This is in the last eight minutes of the effort.
Tip 3: Shift, shift, shift! Shift like you are a Formula One driver. Change your cadence using high cadence to gain speed and low cadence to maintain speed. Your shifting needs to be on point so that you always have full chain tension, no matter the effort.
Tip 4: Try and load your pre and during ride nutrition with high carbohydrate foods. Make sure you FINISH your high carb meal three hours before your effort. This meal is critical to getting the most out of your effort by having topped off glycogen storages. On the bike, if the effort is one hour or more make sure you eat something high-carb every 30 mins.