I'm not training for olympic weightlifting or 'power'lifting, but for track sprinting - I do quite enjoy weight training and learning olympic lifts is challenging and fun and I've found I like lifting properly (after years of the wrong sort of training when playing rugby etc, if I'd known then what I know now .... ).  That being the case, the real goal is faster sprinting and a better jump.  Ie: peak watts and peak torque on the bike. Along the way I'm now qualifed as a strength & conditioning coach, and am working with athletes in at the Victorian weightlifting center (Mermet). It's been a lot of fun and very rewarding.

So just how strong is strong enough?  I just did 3 sets of 5 lifts squatting 150kg (proper full squats, or as full as I can on a rebuilt knee anyway).  I've built a lot of strength over the last 6 months, given that I started training in the Powerhaus way back in February or March and have been in it three times a week without interuption since, focussing on the big core lifts, mainly the squat.  My legs are bigger and stronger, that's for sure, and if you poke them they're rock-hard.  I'm also heavier by a few kilos, but not that much, about 108kg at the moment, I was around 100kg late last year I think.  I'm certainly not lean, but I don't think I'm carrying much more fat than I was then.  Just, bigger legs and upper body.

I think it'll be interesting to have a chat to some of the riders who come along to the sprint series and see what they're lifting, just to get a rough idea, I'm interested in Fast Eddie and Big Jeremy in particular, but it'll be worth talking to John Beasley and Rick Leonard if I get a chance in the not too distant future also, and next time I run into Brad Robins I'll pick his brains also.

Until then .. we're three weeks out from the first round, and it's time to really get into power and speed-endurance stuff - tonight we'll be doing one 10 second max sprint effort, then 5 30 second efforts.  Vomit-time!

In other news, I spoke to the concreters today, and assuming we get the go-ahead on Friday, they'll have the two big holes in the track fixed by round 1!

Check it out.

Out of curiosity, do they race at the Edithvale velodrome at all?

Nicko and I had a chat today with two people from the council and we gave them a bit of a look at the holes in the Blackburn velodrome - and we groveled a bit for council funding for the repairs.  They said they'd let us know by Friday if the council can or will pay for the repairs.

Here's hoping!

I started Sunday with a weights session, this time up to 5 x 5 @ 147.5kg squats, and some bench for balance (3 x 5 @ 102.5kg), then Alex picked me up and we tootled in to DISC for the evening training session.

I took the new wheel (a disk at DISC!) and slapped a 15 tooth sprocket on it, warmed up on the normal wheels (86.something inches) then swapped in the disk for the last bit of the warmup, where we have a baby scratch race.  I took off early knowing Dino was locked onto my wheel, at about 6 or so to go hoping that we'd get a gap and he'd have to work with me and I'd be able to set up the last lap, but Craig caught us and then surged off the front after my initial attack, with Karen in tow.  I had no choice but to bridge, I could feel Dino's grin as I pulled him up to a fading Craig, as Craig swung up with 2 to go I dived into the gap between him and Karen, but Dino was alert and must have been riding the virtual tandem by then, and although I backed off a little and then kicked again with 150m to go it wasn't enough and he got over the top to take the win by half a wheel - perfect timing by Dino and great race sense. I hit HRmax ... That's intense enough!

We then did a points race for the enduros, and then sprinters did match sprints - I was matched with Craig, who's normally an enduro pursuiter, but we're working on his sprinting as well, and we did a very slow first lap, but with about 300 to go Craig jumped from up the bank a bit and got a 20m gap on me, I had to burn every match I had to catch him, but it was enough and I got over by a few cm and HRmax again ... that hurt!

Then the enduros did motorpaced laps, and the sprinters standing 250's, before the usual 'take a lap grand prix' finish.

A very good session, I think everyone enjoyed it and got a good quality, high intensity hit out from it as we get closer to the summer track racing season.

Congrats to Shane 'teh Llama' Miller for winning the Hawthorn club champs and also to Camster for getting second in his masters division at the same club champs. All these old men! Heh!

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.

All I have to do is fax in my completed practical coaching record sheet (completed last Thursday in at the Mermet center with Anthony Dove and Peter Cayley) and I've got my Level 1 AS&C ticket.  Good-o

And I set a PB in a flying 100 last night at DISC not long after a hard gym session - clean & jerks take a lot out of your legs, that's for sure! Round 1 of the BSSS is only a month away....

Just as we did for the Bontrager Summer Sprint Series, I've made up some business-card handouts for the 2008-2009 Blackburn 'Summer of Track' track racing program.

Here it is

We'll start handing these out at all the local bike shops etc, and hopefully it'll help make the '08-'09 track season at Blackburn better than ever!

I expect they'll be back from the printers mid next week (early September). If you want some to help hand out, let me know and I'll get some to you.

It was mum's birthday yesterday, and I usually get her a book, by convenience, the same book each year, she's a fan of James Halliday's wine review, which is an annual release. I'd get her something requiring a little more imagination, but this is what she wants .. According to the book they taste 5700-odd wines.  Think about it ... that's 15.6 wines a day every day of the year.  Even if Halliday farms out 50% of the tasting to an assistant that's still 8 wines a day every day - that's only tasting, not drinking, but it trips my skeptical senses as to the reliability of the process. We know that it's not done every day, he has to have days off, holidays etc .. how it's done and he keeps a clear head and palate?

But this is a cycling blog, not one for winers.

I took the Truck (Trek 7.2 FX) in to the local megaplex (Forrest Hill Chase) - something about these places leaves a distinctly unpleasant taste in my mouth - is it the listless, bored vandals skateboarding around the carpark looking for things to break, paint or steal or the slobs lazing away the day in the eatery stuffing their faces with festering junk food?  Or just the general desperation of the people in the place trying forlornly to placate themselves by buying worthless junk and trinkets? Mallrats isn't a pinch on the reality of suburban shopping complexes. Mallrats is funny. Megaplexes are the pits. At least people addicted to the weekend credit card binge in at Bunnings are likely to be doing something constructive with the stuff they buy.

They do have a bookshop there, thus the journey - I found the book for mum, and had a quick glance at the sporting book section - under the usual bios of yesterday's local football stars there's a couple of cycling books - interestingly not just the usual Lance Armstrong bios, there's also Racing Tactics for Cyclists (if you don't have this, you should have it, it's the best book I've found on the subject of bike racing tactics), and Bad Blood. I already have RTfC, but Bad Blood is new.  I'll have that!

On the way out and no-one had stolen the Truck! Quick .. ride home!

A good friend of mine just got off the phone to me, we made a little bit of a fuss over Emily here on the aboc website (she's an aboc rider) and I passed on the news of her success and the others that I knew of at the time (two of the Dundas girls and Bridget Thomas) to Blackburn.  The news got put up quickly on the Blackburn website, which is great.  The club should be making a fuss over the achievements of its riders and it did. Good!

But aparently this started some sort of storm.  If you're reading this and you have taken umbrage at the publishing of news about some riders on the Blackburn website but not others and along the way questioned the integrity of the people who put the news up that they receive, promptly and enthusiastically, then maybe, rather than getting stuck into club volunteers, you can send news to them yourself so it gets published.  There's no bias at Blackburn towards aboc riders, I just took the time to send an email to the club to let them know what I knew and they published what they had, as they should.

They publish what they have, but they're not mind readers. The onus is on you if you want your kids made a fuss of.  Tell the club yourself if you have news and support the club people who are giving their time and effort to the club and to help your kids.  Show up at the next committee meeting and apologise to them, while you're at it. Many of us from aboc go and help at junior races, road races we're not competing in etc, some of us have no kids there racing but we help out because we're committed to helping the club and all its members.

I wrote an article in the tips & hints section of the site today. summarising some stuff I've been reading and asking people about here and there about the effects that aerobic training has on strength and power training. In short, strength training doesn't hurt enduros, but enduro training has a negative impact on sprinting.

The article is here.