This article is brought to you in partnership with A1 Coaching
A1 Coaching, which recently teamed with us to produce a series of blog posts discussing fitness and training goals, will be hosting a training webinar on Monday 25 January at 7pm GMT, where A1 staff will be joined by former Team Sky rider Michael Barry, Irish champion Damien Shaw, ex-Rapha JLT rider Aaron Buggle and sports nutritionist Maev Creaven.
The expert panel will be tutoring on maximising your training time and transforming your 2016 season, via some simple tips and tricks.
Here at BikeRadar we’ve been pleased to hook up with A1 Coaching at the start of the year – a time when cyclists, like much of the population, are looking to get fitter and set new training goals.
A1’s recent blog series ‘How To Get More Speed with Less Training’ has enabled us to bring to readers some of the latest thinking on how everyday riders can get the best bang for their buck. The author, Anthony Walsh, went back to basics when he retired from professional cycling to found A1 Coaching and continue as an elite amateur. He started questioning the norms, researching the science and examining what worked best for the time-pressured amateur riders.
Walsh has drawn on A1’s growing client base as a laboratory for testing the methods that grew from this questioning of established methods. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and A1 says the proof of its approach is in the results being achieved by coaches under Walsh’s leadership.
BikeRadar readers: sign up for the A1 Coaching webinar here
Do things differently
In the first blogpost Walsh made a big promise – to “explain how doing things differently may help transform you from the rider you are to the rider you could be”. The step-by-step guide that followed set out some key principles in plain English, explaining what ‘the numbers’ mean, and how we can test ourselves and set training zones to make optimum use of our time.
Walsh asked: are you the ‘headless chicken’ variety of rider, ‘just training’ with no target, no direction and no purpose? He discussed how to set goals and to break the year into particular periods of training with the aim of getting our different physiological systems in the best possible condition for our target events.
… and relax
As many of you probably were, we were fond of the final post on resting! A clear explanation of the necessity and value of serious recovery time is always welcome, and few riders will have much difficulty in taking that aspect of his advice.
We’ve had some positive initial reactions on social media and will look forward to hearing where A1’s advice takes readers during 2016.
