Incorporate These Five Training Components Into Your Mountain Bike Workouts

Before you ride your mountain bike to the starting line of your next MTB race, you may want to ask yourself what your goal is. Is it to place in the top five of your age group, or beat your best time on that course? Maybe it's your first race and your goal is to finish.

After choosing your race day goals, planning how your mountain bike workouts in the weeks prior to the event will help your achieve your goals is highly recommended. A solid foundation on the five mountain bike training components and how to manipulate them will give you the tools necessary to reach your race day objectives.

1. Frequency /Repetition - How often you mountain bike during the week is an example of frequency. How many intervals or hill repeats you do during a given mountain bike ride is an example of repetition. Manipulating the components of frequency and repetition during your training sessions will help you ensure quality workouts.

The main purpose of interval training is to train through repeated, high intensive exercise followed by a recovery period. Done properly with rest, intervals can increase your muscular and mental strength to perform at a higher level. Hill climbing is a good example of interval training for the mountain biker.

2. Terrain - To mountain bike on different terrains allows all your muscles to strengthen and adapt to handle various course conditions on race day. Shifting your body or riding standing up on your pedals, for example, shifts the workload to different muscles groups in your body.

Nothing new on race day - the rule for all competitors applies here. If you're interested in minimizing your physical and mental stress during your next mountain bike race, train on similar terrain and your race day performance will benefit.

3. Volume - Most coaches measure volume by hours or time training - workout, week, month or year - verses distance. As riding 15 miles on hilly terrain can take you much longer than mountain biking on a relatively flat fire road, time monitoring your workouts is usually a better performance gauge of your training.

Adjust your training volume down or up to decrease or increase your training load. Your aerobic system efficiency is improved by mountain biking at low intensity below your lactate threshold.

Volume and intensity are inversely related. Most times, when you increase your volume, you will need to reduce your training session intensity. Intervals at high intensity usually require you to reduce your volume to allow for more rest and prevent overtraining.

4. Intensity - is the level of effort you put into your training workouts. Mountain biking for an easy 90 minute ride with your friends talking along the way is quite different then hammering up a steep mountain for 90 minutes.

Most athletes measure intensity through a heart rate monitor. Heart rate monitors have improved substantially since first introduced over twenty years ago. Most measure distance, speed, time, altitude climbed, and include a GPS amongst their many features.

If your bank account has some extra cash in it, the power meter has become the new tool for measuring intensity, or power output. Typically more popular with road cyclist and triathletes, the power meter measures power output, or intensity level with accurate results.

5. Pedal Cadence - training your mind and muscles to pedal at different cadences allows you to handle different terrains more easily, and provides various rates of muscle contraction, or stimuli which will maximize your muscular strength.

Spending a day or two a week practicing pedal cadence training will help you develop your aerobic and anaerobic energy systems, your MTB skills, pedal stroke efficiency, and cadence. Consistent pedal cadence training, will provide you with additional human gears to improve your mountain bike race times.

Mountain bike training is based on exercise science, but the best program for you is an art form. Each person has a different physical and psychological make-up. Using exercise science as a benchmark and testing and adjusting these five mountain bike training components may be the best path to finding your winning program.