I have two sets, the VIS has heaps, the AIS, NSWIS, Cycing Vic and WAIS all own dozens of them. Hilton owns at least 4 sets, of the Minoura Action roller.  Why these rollers in particular?  They're not perfect, they have aluminium roller drums with 105mm diameter, which is good, but nasty plastic endcaps that fail with heavy use.  The big plus for us is the way they fold up into a small space and they have a reliable, simple bag to transport them.  I get to carry them around a lot, and the bag, and the trifoldability, is a BIG win.  This is why just about every state track team has heaps of them.  105mm metal roller drums and great transportability.  Got it?

Not that long ago they got discontinued.  Why? I don't know, the replacement is the Moz roller, same trifold frame, but smaller 80mm plastic roller drums (BAD!) and a fancier bag that has a zip instead of a flap.  This is bound to fail in our use-case.  We move lots of these rollers (Hilts' van may have a floor lined with 16 sets of rollers when we travel to championships etc) and anything with a zipper is bound to fail.

So, Minoura, please re-release the Action rollers.  If you want to make them better, replace the plastic roller endcaps with something more robust, but otherwise LEAVE THEM ALONE!

See how relaxed Michelle is on the start line? Stay loose and have fun!

Racking up the frequent flyer points ... I'm off to assist Hilts with the Vic sprint group this weekend in Adelaide.  Jayne and Nic will be able to run Friday and Sunday's DISC sessions so they will run as normal.

I'm going to show you two photos :

  Jae Castles and John Cochrane at the Junior Vics in 2011-2012.

Now look at this one :

Sagen and Greipel at the Tour de France, 2012.

Could Sagan have won?  If his throw was an instinct, if he practiced it every time he crossed a finish line ...

I've been pretty busy of late... Last weekend (no, sorry, the weekend before, June 23 and 24) I was looking after a bunch of VIS/Sprint Academy sprinters* at the Perth Speed-Dome on a flying visit to race a Grand Prix and the Westral, we flew in to Perth on Saturday morning, drove to the velodrome, trained, back to a motel, dinner, sleep, back to velodrome for a full day's racing, packed and drove back to the airport and flew home.  Phew!  I was so tired when I got back to Tullamarine I couldn't see straight, thank you Jayne for rescuing me! If I'd have tried to drive home it would have been a dangerous trip indeed.

We've also, in conjunction with Blackburn, started running Friday night training sessions at DISC.  So far they've had low attendances, but hopefully word will spread and we'll get more numbers - we run a sprint and enduro session, with each group getting roughly 20 minute time slices.  It's a format that works well and I've been using it for years with our Sunday sessions, but the Friday nights we have the luxury of three hours, not two on Sundays.  More time!  Sundays are chugging along well, it's been pretty cold in at DISC but we're doing good quality work and the guys are going faster (when they attend regularly!). Our program is always published in advance on this website, and I am more than willing to entertain requests and suggestions for additions and alterations to the program.

Also the Tuesday evening Spin sessions at Blackburn are trundling along - we've had some huge nights and some quiet ones - if you're not coming, I'd really like to know why, it will help me to improve the sessions if I know why you're choosing to do something else.

So that's Friday and Sunday and Tuesday evenings locked away.  What else?  Wednesdays I'm at DISC doing the Victorian Sprint Group coaching, assisting Hilton Clarke, and he's away in the US for a holiday until the 16th of July, so that's Wednesdays from ~11am 'til 7:30pm or so.  This also happens on Saturdays, from ~11:30 'til 5ish.  Lock away Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat and Sun.  Anything else?  Oh, yeah, coaching and lifting in the Powerhaus gym on Mondays and Thursdays from ~3pm 'til 8 or so.

That's, ahh ... pretty busy!

So if I've been a bit slow in getting back to anyone with emails etc, now you know why! I have to set dates for next summer's Summer Sprint Series, urgh ... Calendars ... Clash. clash clash ... Keep an eye here for dates.

* - No, I am not employed by the VIS, I was sitting in as a Sprint Academy coach for Sean Eadie while he's in Italy with the seniors in the leadup to the Olympics

Ok, many of you have heard the story by now, train/practice for 10,000 hours and you will be the best in the world, a champion, an outlier etc.  It's the stuff of dreams, you can be the best if you just work hard enough.  That's an idea that sells a lot of books.

Unfortunately, it's wrong. Or to be generous, it's incomplete.

I first read about this 10,000 hour thing in Dan Coyle's "The Talent Code".  A good book, with lots of things to learn from from a coaching perspective.  I've adopted a lot of what Coyle wrote about in my coaching practice, it's good stuff, but it's missing something fundamental.  It's also the fundamental argument made by Mathew Syed in "Bounce".  Notably, Syed is a table tennis player, perhaps not the most physical of sports.  In the recently published "The Secret Olympian" (anon, but it's a British rower, a bit of googling will tell you who wrote it), "anon" writes :

Syed's argument in Bounce - train enough and you'll be excellent at whatever you choose - is seductive.  It's probably true for table tennis.  But in general, it's wrong.  As Bas van de Goor neatly states, 'You can learn to play volleyball; you can't learn to be tall.  Genetics count'.

These guys are not going to be successful volleyballers, not if they spend 20,000 hours of practice in the best hotbed in the world.  Genetics matter.  You can't be an elite athlete in most sports without winning the genetic lottery at birth.  Sure, if you train you will improve, but how good can you get?  Can you be the best at the world at whatever you choose to?  Only if you've got the right genes.  If you want to sprint, and you don't have working ACTN3, forget being elite.  It just won't happen.

A good article on some of the basic genetics behind sprint performance states :

ACTN3 is just one of many factors influencing athletic performance
At the highest levels of performance ACTN3 genotype certainly make a big difference: among Olympic-level sprinters the frequency of individuals carrying two disrupted ACTN3 copies is vanishingly low (less than 3%, compared to ~18% in the general population). However, this large effect is due to the exceptionally strong selection that occurs during the slow climb to the Olympic level. The vast majority of athletes who start that climb will never make it to the top; those who do will be the tiny minority who have nearly everything in their favour, including the right genes.

So super-elite athletes need to have the right ACTN3 combination, but they also have to have a whole host of other factors working in their favour – this one gene is just a minor ingredient in a large and complex recipe. In fact, most studies performed so far suggest that ACTN3 explains just 2-3% of the variation in muscle function in the general population. The rest of the variation is determined by a wide range of genetic and environmental factors, most of which (particularly the genetic factors) are very poorly understood.

 So what does that mean?

You can train your backside off, but unless you're gifted with the right genes, you're not going to be an Olympian.  You will improve, but your upper limits are genetic.  Having the right genes is not enough, not by a long shot, the world is littered with people with the genes to be superb who for whatever reason ended up couch potatoes, but it is a very important part of mix if you want to be an elite athlete.

With the co-operation of Blackburn, we're going to be at DISC on Friday nights as well as Sundays for a couple of months.  This is a three hour track session, from 7-10pm.  Mixed sprint & enduro, programs, as with all our training, published online in advance on this website.  It will either be $15 or $22 to attend and I am hoping to have an enduro coach to assist me, while I look after the sprinters.  So if you're an aspiring enduro coach and want some mentored time at DISC, or just some time at DISC, get in touch with me ASAP!

Well worth the 60 minutes it will take to watch all of it, or, just don't eat sugary stuff!

Monnas tells it better than I could ...

Cut the corners! 

Read this....

Last night at Spin, I set a new power PB of 1,597 watts.  I had a goal of 1,600, how close is that?  Given that it's a Powertap and not 100% accurate, I could stretch the truth and say I got it, but that's bollocks!  Anyway, power is going up reasonably consistently, it's amazing what a bit of unbroken training can do.  There's a hint - consistent training ... Keep working ...

Blackburn has a Friday slot at DISC that was used for a mixture of training and some random-ish racing, but it's lying fallow at the moment for reasons not 100% clear.

So ... I have asked the committee if they'd like us (aboc) to help/assist/share the time to try to make it viable for both BBN and us to use that time, it'd be 7-10pm on Fridays for nominally "winter".  More news as it comes to hand.  This would be as well as, not instead of, the Sunday evening sessions and would be a mix of sprint and enduro training like we do on Sundays.

Now, are you racing chairs around your office, padding?! Be honest ...

It's even got food in it ...

DISC will reopen this weekend (maybe Thursday night for Northcote racing?) - some trivia :

While it was closed we (me and some volunteer helpers) sanded the red line almost entirely off, and then the lines (black and red) were repainted with a matt acrylic paint, not the slippery gloss that it was. The duckboards are still slippery as is the blue line, but the red and black are a lot better.

We've sanded and filled a lot of divots, Hilton and I did the filling, myself, with Jayne and Nic did the sanding and a lot of vacuuming.

We've been busy!
(it still leaks ... but in different places ...)

Our DISC Sunday sessions start again this Sunday.  w00 h00!

A brief point on my philosophy.  Starting with something general :

If you do what everyone else does, you will never do better than them.

Caveat, genetic freaks will float to the top, sometimes coaches ride on the coat-tails of these freaks and take the credit for them, or use their success as proof that they know what they're doing, but the freaks will prosper almost no matter what, sometimes the freaks think how they did things was the only way, or the best way, and MAYBE it was, but they can't know that for sure, unless they have identical twins or clones to compare to, and that stuff went out with Nazi Germany ...

So?

Sometimes I discuss things that are challenging to many who sprint, coach sprint, or generally watch sprint.  By challenging I mean different to what they do, or did, or think should be done in the preparation of sprinters.

I don't always implement what I discuss, this blog, and the book, are to a certain extent my musings as much as any sort of a "fact" or prescription.  There isn't a "right" way to prepare sprinters, if there was, there'd be no room for improvement, everyone would be at the same level and things would stagnate, the guys with the right mix of ACTN3 would win all the time and things would be very boring.  For what it's worth I have very little scope to implement much anyway, I don't write much of the programmes for the Victorian sprint group, I did have the responsibility (overseen by Hilts) to program for most of last year's J17's, but I didn't do anything too whacky, and certainly nothing Hilts didn't approve of.  I help Hilton by riding the motorbike, carrying heavy things and generally getting underfoot, I don't lay any claim to being responsible for any part of his programme and I don't take any credit for his successes.

Martin Barras was very different to Gary West (in both incarnations), as was Charlie Walsh, as is Hilton, Sean Eadie, David Short, John Beasley, Clay Worthington and David Willmott, over the ditch Hamish Ferguson has something interesting to say which is quite challenging.  They all have different methods, different uses of track, road and gym work.  This is good - it means that hopefully different riders can have a chance to shop around to find the right coach for them.  As an assistant to Hilts I know a fair bit about his program, but not all of it and certainly I don't have his intuition or decades of experience but I am learning a lot from the old master. I've had a lot of time to spend with Sean over the last couple of years and a little bit with Clay and Shorty, I've peered under the covers of their programmes too.  We discuss, sometimes quite passionately, our ideas about training (that's what happens when a bunch of sprint coaches get together, we argue, discuss and rant, and it's great!). it's all different.  We're all trying to improve on what has been done in the past, not just repeat it because that's how it's always been done or that's what everyone else is doing.

One thing is for sure, everyone's always trying new things, because if we don't, we don't go any faster.

No fights, which was good!

Anyway .. Brian Harwood fed me a Dorothy Dixer, to which I replied, or at least the gist of my reply was :

"If a kid wants to specialise, or anyone, for that matter, let them.  Sprint, hills, TTs, whatever - let them make their own choices and try to provide pathways to support those choices."

Not everyone agrees, that's fine.  This is a big world and it would be very boring if we all agreed.  BUT we have to disagree without being disagreeable.

I'd like to thank, in particular, Rob Montheath who stepped into the club secretary role and did it for four years at Blackburn.  It's a monster job and Rob did it very well, thank you Rob.

Check this out :

http://paleo.com.au/

worth a poke around at least.

Why do we put sprint cyclists in the gym? There's a couple of reasons, some more or less valid than others.

My reason is to make them generally stronger. 

What does that mean?  It means muscle growth - bigger muscles (myofibilar, not so much sarcoplasmic, hypertrophy) are stronger.  Cycling is a skill, pedaling is a skill, building big strength needs to take place outside the realm of riding, you just can't make a ride hard enough to trigger a response similar to a 1RM or 5RM squat, deadlift or power clean on the bike, ie: to make you seriously strong you need to get off the bike.   To get real strength gains outside of novice effects, you need big overloads and that can only be done effectively in the gym under a barbell doing big compound lifts.

If we take that as given (and not everyone will, and that's ok), then we're interested in muscle growth, which means overload, which means maximal loading on the muscles we care about.  You can't do maximal loads on single leg lifts.  You can get some benefits from it, but not as much as you can from a double-leg lift.  Bulgarians, single leg press etc just aren't as hard on the triple extension muscles as their two-legged bigger brothers are. If anyone gets close to half of their squat with a one legged squat, they're wussing out on their squats.

So why would you do single leg work?  Good question.  Some would say because pedaling is one legged, we should train one legged, maybe, but that's the skill part of the equation and we have a very specific, very effective way to display our strength in a relevant fashion, and that is .. to ride a bike.  To build the skill of holding hips stable etc, do very short, big gear efforts - standing 1/4 laps etc on big gears - 4-8 pedal strokes at maximal effort.  I don't buy into the whole one legged thing and my riders who train in my gym never do one legged stuff (or any "core" mumbo jumbo, because all the Big 5 are core exercises anyway, but they're useful core exercises, not circus tricks) are as strong in the core and as stable on a bike as anyone you'll ever see. There's a lot of circus tricks and just plain silly bullshit done in the name of strength training, most of which is just wasting a trainees time.

Personally, I want my guys to be brutally strong, and to be highly skilled at displaying that strength - so we squat, we deadlift, we power clean, we press and we deadlift, and we do very short, high intensity work on our bikes in big gears. The guys at the AIS, the VIS etc, they love their one legged stuff, and that's fine, maybe at elite level you need it?  I don't know, my guys are developing juniors and masters, not elites on the whole, but I think, at least for the guys I work with, one legged stuff is a sub-optimal use of their time for questionable returns.  I also don't like legpress, I think it's a risky exercise and the removal of the trunk muscles to control the hips in a leg press is, I think, sub optimal, if in doubt, use more body rather than less (compound, not isolation, exercises).  Yes, benchpress is similar to legpress in this regard, but it's a compromise exercise and is included for reasons other than developing relevant strength for sprint cycling.  Your mileage may vary. Your opinions may differ.  That's good!