The saga of the new disk wheel :

Wheel arrives on Friday last week.

I go and get some glue (thanks Steelie at Le Tour!)

I order a tyre from Bob Farleigh - Tufo S3 Pro if anyone's interested.

It arrives on Wednesday this week. Good-o.  We have a wheel to stretch it on, but it's an Ayara deep section and ... we've run out of valve extenders, and we don't have any disk wheel inflators either. Ok... order them from Bikesportz (sic - what's with the z?  Can't they spell?), they arrive on Friday.  Pop tyre on the Ayara and inflate in the morning to get it stretching.  In the evening on Friday, on with the first coats of glue on the wheel and tyre.

This morning (Saturday) - final coat of glue on wheel and tyre, and slap it on.  Scare the kiddies at the shop with 175psi.  Then off for a swim. It's a summery day today, two days in a row we've had hot northerlies blowing and it's only mid September.  Average rainfall in Sept, around 80 or so mm, and so far (almost half way through the month) we've had ... 8mm.  Hmmmm. Everyone still driving their cars when they could walk or ride most times ... smart animals, humans ... anyway ... the swim, 500m warmup, 8 x 25m sprint/25m RR, 30s rest (so roughly 1:3 intervals), 200m warmdown, then ride home again.

Tomorrow, try the new wheel out at DISC!

Following the idea of 'every session should set some sort of record' today in the Powerhaus ...

4 x 5 @ 147.5kg full squats

3 x 5 @ 102.5kg bench

The residual fatigue from the squats is pretty special.  I'm trying to recharge as quickly as possible, tonight after coaching in at the Mermet I've got clean pulls and clean & jerks to do.  The Powerhaus stuff is strength work, the olympic lifts are for power.  Explosive work!

Round one of the BSSS is getting close ...

Last night at the BBN committee meeting we decided to pop a flyer in a mailout to all BBN members, so I offered to put it together.

An hour with illustrator later, and here it is, click it for the full PDF :

I'm off out to the Powerhaus now (wasn't feeling crash hot this morning, so missed training with Dino at the velodrome), then the Mermet later to coach and do some explosive lifting. It's all good ... except these creatine loading headaches! Must drink more water ...

Part of me wants to cheer like a madman, part of me says 'punchdrunk boxers do this and it's never good'.

The story is on cyclingnews.com

llub tihs, Idaho

After the excitement of Lance 'Big Tex' announcing his comeback to the professional peloton with the aim of winning his 8th tour and 'Getting it up the French again', another shock annoucement; Raymond 'Pou-Pou' Poulidor has also signed up for the 2009 Tour de France.  His reason?  Cadel Evans.  Poulidor was heard muttering at the 2008 tour about the bland performance of Australia's beige jersey winner, and vowed to show the gutsy Aussie that his was the rightful name on the penultimate platform of the podium at Paris. 'No one steals my place in history', he was overheard saying at a smokey cafe in Amsterdam while on a training camp.

Further rumours of a Greg Lemond/Lance Armstrong 'superteam' are yet to be confirmed, but a Trek bicycle representative, makers of Lance's bikes and recently estranged from Lemond, did confirm that they had seen the two former champions riding a tandem during a recent charity event together, but could not confirm who was the captain and who was stoker.

Marco Pantani didn't return calls requesting his opinion, but Eddy Merckx was thrilled when told the news.

Not quite off-topic. I'm trying to work out how much energy gets burnt up doing strength training in the Powerhaus and the Mermet etc.

So, today, squats.

I did :

12 x 20kg (empty bar)

8 x 60kg

5 x 100kg

5 x 5 @ 145kg as my work sets. The prior sets were warmups.

Depth is I think ~0.8m, I'll take that as a good enough guess for now.

How much work is that.  in terms of tonnage it's really only worthwhile to look at the work sets, so I lifted 3,625kg as my working load.

That's one measure, but it's not all that useful really. My 1rm for these full squats is probably around 163kg if I use Brzycki's equation to extrapolate from my 5 rep sets, which isn't 100% accurate, but it'll do... So I'm lifting ~88% of 1RM 25 times.  Reasonably intense.  But still not what I'm interested in here.

Work is defined as force x distance

Force is mass x acceleration

Mass is easy! 145kg ... Acceleration is gravity, 9.8m/s^2 - we'll assume the weight is moved upwards slowly, it's too hard otherwise.

Distance is 0.8m

So our force is 145 x 9.8 : 1421 N, which gives work as 1421 x 0.8 : 1136.8 joules - roughly. Let's say 1100 as close enough (conservative estimate).  25 reps all up at that weight : 27,500 joules.  Roughly 27 Kilojoules. Is that much? Nope! The human body is around 25% efficient.  So to get 27 Kj the body will use around 4 times that, so roughly 100Kj. My BMR is around 11,000 kj per day. 100 kj isn't very much!

This lot of sums doesn't take into account the energy used to build muscle after the training session, the effect of extra muscle on RMR and BMR etc, it's purely a rough (very) estimate of how much energy gets used to do these lifts.  Have a look at wikipedia's brief summary of EPOC for more on post exercise energy use.

Power's another interesting measure.  If I assume I'm lifting the weight in ~1.5 seconds (pretty close, but I haven't timed it), let's see how many watts that is.

Power is work / time

So for a 145kg squat, lifting 0.8m in 1.5s, what's that in watts?

We already know work from above, each rep is about 1100 joules, divided by 1.5 seconds, that's about 733 watts.

Compare that to a 50kg clean, where the weight moves from the ground to the shoulders (in me, that's about 1.5 meters), in a second (a clean is very quick).  Work : (50kg x 9.8m/s^2) x 1.5 : ~735 joules - not much compared to the squat at 145kg, but it is a lot less weight (to get the same work, the clean would have to be ~75kg), power is, assuming 1 second for the lift : 735 watts. That's more than the squat at 145kg. It's no wonder that 5 reps at 50kg doing cleans feels as hard as 5 squats at 145kg!

It's so much easier to do these sums on a bike, Powertaps and SRMs make it a doddle ... They just tell you the numbers. For weights work, one of these does, but it's not cheap and it ties you to their website where they store your data - no thanks.

 We had a good night at DISC tonight, everyone did sprints! Fun!

My new disk wheel has arrived - a Shimano 'pro' track disk.  1185g with no tyre or sprocket (measured on digital scales by me just now!). It's a lenticular disk, and I'll be putting a Tufo S3 Pro tyre on it and making it availabe for hire.

The Blackburn velodrome is quite old, and the concrete is cracking in places.  Bad enough that it's dangerous to wheels, tyres etc ... and of course, people.

I organised a concrete repair company to have a look at it today, and to patch it they think around $2,000 ... We had a bit of a walk around and the cracks will require some decent concrete cutting and patching to plug the major ones.  Hopefully that's something the council will pay for, but we have a deadline of Oct 5th (round 1 of the BSSS!), and these things are notorious for taking ages ...

I'm now a fully qualified level 1 strength & conditioning coach, the bits of paper confirming it all arrived today in the mail.

Good-o.

Yesterday, the powerhaus and I rip out 4 sets of 5 @ 145kg deep squats, not bad.  Then some bench, 102.5kg, 3 sets; 4, 3 and 3 reps - that extra 2.5kg is a lot! I was doing 5,5,5,3 at 100kg last week.  Thursday is power day, squats in the morning then olympic lifts in the afternoon at the Mermet center in Hawthorn.

Then Nath takes me to spin and we run the session together as usual this year - 3 x 10s big gear sprints and then 3 x 30s sprints.  I manage a peak output of 1,375 watts. Ok, I wanted 1,400+ but was tired from the squats, that'll do, I've been consistantly improving over the last few weeks and am about to start focussing on more power than strength - the Powertap says around 180nm of crank torque which I'm happy with.  Nath swaps in and rips off a big PB on the watt-o-meter, top stuff Nath!  The bolla sauce was noticed to be a bit bland (I ran out of chilli) - so I promised the troops I'd double it up next week.  I think they thought I was joking ...

My clothing order's going to be delayed (again!) - Rowbust, who make them, get their printing done by Giramondo, and apparently there's a problem with the digital printer.  It's supposed to be being looked at today.  I hope it's a quick fix, one of the lads wants his skin suit for an ITT coming up soon and everyone wants them for the first round of the Bontrager Summer Sprint Series.  Speaking of which we're going to do a practice day the weekend before it, on the Saturday 27th Sept.  Details are at the website, as usual.  Free BBQ courtesy of aboc for all that come and have a go...

The Blackburn Summer of Track promo cards arrived yesterday too, so I started handing them out last night at Spin.  Congrats to Jamie Goddard for winning the Blackburn elite road championship out at Modella. Thankyou to Carnegie-Caulfield for running the event. CCCC really do set the standard for quality and number of road races in our combine.

Finally, I'm ordering a lenticular disc wheel, a Shimano 'Pro' wheel for track use - it'll be available to hire and borrow for selected events soon.

In short, stretching statically before sport will reduce your performance and does not reduce injury risk. Dynamic/full range of motion and mobility stretching is ok, but the old school 'stretch static before you train/play' is out!

This is why we don't do static stretching during our training sessions.

Extract here from one study :

Duration of stretch does not influence the degree of force loss following static stretching.
Brandenburg, J.P., Journal of Sports Medicine & Physical Fitness Dec 2006: Vol. 46 Issue 4. p. 526-534

Abstract: Aim. There is an emerging body of knowledge indicating static stretching (SS) acutely and adversely affects muscle performance.

The practical value of this research is limited considering the lengthy stretch durations under investigation. It is unclear if stretch durations typical of those used pre-exercise similarly affect muscle performance.

The purpose of this study was to determine if SS using more representative stretch durations affects
muscle performance and to establish if changes in muscle performance were influenced by the duration of stretch.

Methods. Following 2 familiarization sessions, 16 recreationally trained males and females participated in 2 randomly ordered experimental sessions. In each session maximal effort hamstring performance was assessed prior to and immediately after 1 of 2 stretching protocols.

During one of the protocols participants were required to hold each stretch for 15 s while stretch duration in the second protocol was 30 s. Both protocols consisted of 3 repetitions of 2 stretching exercises. A Kincom isokinetic dynamometer was used to assess hamstring performance during isometric, concentric, and eccentric actions.

Results. For each of the three muscle actions a repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of time (pre- vs poststretch, P < 0.05) but no interaction effect (time x SS protocol). Furthermore, the stretch-induced deficits in muscle performance were consistent across muscle action type.

Conclusions. SS incorporating stretch durations typical of those employed pre-exercise were sufficient to impair muscle performance and the duration of stretch did not influence the degree of force loss. Inclusion of SS, even with short stretch durations, in preparation for
strength activities is not appropriate.