These types of distance rides, or ultra rides as some call it, are definitely not easy.
As a community of veteran endurance athletes, here are our top 5 tips to making sure you don't tire out doing your next ultra ride.
Include one ride a week where you train for intensity. This'll help you build power through your workout.
To help you get the most out of this workout, make sure you include both hard riding and light recovery spinning in your exercise.
Mixing up intensity levels is important in your routine. Structured interval rides, sprints and hill repeats should be incorporated into this type of workout.
You'll never last a century if you don't know what to consume before, after, and throughout the ride. A double century without getting your nutrition right is even more daunting.
To keep it simple: when you go on your century endeavor, you'll be burning both glycogen and fat to use as energy.
The problem is, glycogen from carbs will only last you a few hours during your hard rides - if not less.
We've all experienced it at least once. The feeling of dead legs and a tired mind.
To avoid this, you need to be replenishing your glycogen throughout your ride.
Think carbs and sports drinks. Fruit and low fat bars work great too.
Most importantly, you need to make sure that whatever you're eating and drinking sits well with your stomach during your ride.
If you're training to do a century or double century ride - you need to make sure you're comfortable with consuming foods and drink throughout your ride. Get to know what types of products work well for you and makes you feel energized.
This is an easy one - you need fuel to succeed in any endurance based workout, especially if you're going for a (double) century ride. Eat something once an hour. The sweet spot is around 300KCal of carbohydrates.
As a reminder - 60 minutes is the bare minimum and you shouldn't be consuming all of those calories in one go.
Instead, try refuel yourself throughout the hour, every 15 to 20 minutes. Consistency is key, and the last thing you want is to feel bloated on the bike.
You lose sodium whenever you sweat, and it's the core electrolyte you'll need to replenish during your bike ride. Without sufficient sodium levels you will experience cramps.
And let's face it - nobody wants a dreaded cramp when they're doing their century.
Have a little salty snack at the ready and find the amount that's right for you.
Keep in mind, salt can make you feel thirsty, so it's important you don't chomp on too many pretzels during your ride. Just have enough to keep you going.
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Regardless of your intensity, you're going to want to drink something. Make sure that your stream is consistent and as clear as possible once every few hours.
Make sure you satisfy your thirst without bloating yourself. Feeling thirsty during a ride is normal - your body is literally telling you to drink something. Don't ignore it!
There's no point dreaming about how you'll perform 50 rides from now. It's great to set yourself a target over the long run, but many riders forget that they need to focus on the short term.
To do this, set yourself little goals that you can achieve throughout your ride. Whether this means getting to the next leg within a certain timeframe, or giving yourself a generous amount of time in the tough middle section of the ride - go for it.
Breaking up your ride with smaller goals that are easier to achieve encourages you to keep going.
Steady riders win. Do you ever see a marathon runner start their race with a sprint? Ultra rides are the same. Use your energy conservatively throughout the ride, learn when to expel more energy in tougher legs of the ride, and if you're looking to hit a new PR during your ultra - push yourself with the extra energy you've saved in that final leg.
Biking regularly, especially after intensive workouts, leads to huge strains on your body. To keep your health in check, make sure you practice a few things religiously:
And if you want to increase your VO2 max and elevate your bragging rights among your peers, get ready with our FREE training plan to increase your VO2 max, prepared in cooperation with Dr. Tim Podlogar's Human Performance Center and VO2 max expert Simon Cirnski.
A great training plan to increase VO2 max also needs a proper supplement support. Learn the 3 supplements you must know to increase your VO2 max!
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Now let's talk about the key supplements for endurance and how they relate to your VO2 max. And, before all that, let's answer one "simple" question.
The VO2 max term is familiar to every endurance athlete - or at least they know that it must be as high as possible. This is the maximum oxygen consumption in the body, i.e., a kind of aerobic ability that the athlete can consume and is measured in volumetric units - the easiest in milliliters of oxygen per body weight (thus, we compare two individuals with different musculature). If we simplify, the highest VO2 max is evidence of a healthy and trained integration of cardiovascular and musculature-neurological function. VO2max is not a linear measure in terms of "the faster we are cycling, the higher the consumption of oxygen" - that is VO2. VO2 max is the point where an athlete can simply not process more oxygen (and, as a consequence, he/she needs to stop) during an incremental load test (where large muscle groups are involved).
VO2 depends on different factors, ranging from anaerobic physical practice (i.e. type of training or load) to age, sex and genetic factors. Naturally, the structure and construction of the body, which we can influence to a certain degree, is also important. The biochemical structure of our blood, plasma and various hormones is also influenced by the transfer of oxygen. Here, the situation is the most complex and, just for better understanding, we will list a few examples of why a headless "filing" with iron supplements is not the right way to increase VO2max.
First, we need to mention the amount of iron in the blood, and with it also the amount of hemoglobin to which oxygen is bound. The thing with iron is - if you do not have enough of it, you will be breathless, listless, pale, and especially tired. However, if you have too much of it, it will accumulate in the liver causing life-threatening problems. Iron uptake is also affected by transferrin, which freely transmits iron to the organs, as well as the condition of our gastric mucosa, and in particular the observance of certain simple rules. We need to consume enough vitamins and minerals (A, B12, folic acid, C, zinc) and at the same time avoid certain factors that destroy our efforts. This is often seen in young athletes with low iron levels, which they can not fill up in any way. Minerals namely compete for the uptake of iron, and some are stronger than others - if, for example, when a spirulina is used for raising low iron levels, you take a hydration drink, the latter will "supplant" iron. It is also not advisable to consume two different sources of iron (for example, green leafy vegetables and meat at the same time) or to add sources of iron without the addition of vitamin C. To conclude, we can mention something that you would never have thought - a strenuous exercise (even overtraining) itself lowers iron levels in the blood or the ability of oxygen binding to the blood cells. The more we train, the faster we eliminate it from the body.
The second oxygen transfer promoter is erythropoietin (EPO), which is involved in the production of red blood cells in the body. It determines the density of blood or the percentage of red blood cells in the body - the more we have it, the denser the blood is, while at the same time the transfer of oxygen is higher. This is called hematocrit - we all want to have as high values of it as possible in a natural way. Dense blood does mean less heavy breathing in a 19% slope, but also a greater chance of clots formation. Therefore, athletes are engaged in natural ways of hematocrit level elevation (and hence increasing the size of erythrocytes), such as sleeping in an elevation tent (by gradually simulating high-mountain conditions with gradual reduction of oxygen).
Another option is the use of plant adaptogens – these are plants and mushrooms that grow in harsh conditions (height, frost) and produce active substances that have a benevolent effect on our organs, above all on the glands. They grow in the Manchurian mountains (Ginseng), Tibet (Cordyceps) and the Altai mountains (Rhodiola) - they were first used by the Sherpa, as they saw increased energy during the climbs of Everest. This energy was nothing more than an increased oxygen transfer and reduced cortisol stress hormone. If cortisol is unnecessarily increased, our athletic ability is truncated, which is first observed in decreased breathing capacity. While Cordyceps has proven to be excellent for increasing the lactate threshold, high-quality Rhodiola reduces inflammation (C-reactive protein), lactate and muscle damage - and is an excellent prevention against hypoxia (altitude sickness). In addition to anti-cancerous properties, Ginseng also increases blood flow, reduces inflammation and minimally elevated testosterone levels (by reducing stress).
Adaptogens are now populistically sold as a means of reducing adrenal exhaustion, however, you need to know two things - adaptogens only work at maximum efforts (after multi-week use) and only if they are produced under similar conditions as if they were harvested in nature. This means that if the root of ginseng grows in the soil for 5-7 years, it can not be cultivated within two months and sold for 2 € per kg. When purchasing an adaptogenic VO2 formula, it must be proven to be of good quality, because it is not a cheap extract precisely because of its long-term cultivation.
In the natural products for increasing the VO2 max, there are also support elements that you would not even think about. Certain amino acids (e.g. beta-alanine) work indirectly when they recycle produced lactate into a source of energy, thereby reducing the body's load by removing lactate. Chromium (in the form of chelates) is involved in a glucose tolerance factor that regulates the level of insulin in the blood (everyone knows what happens when sugar falls). Coneflowers (Echinacea), which we often drink added in tea to fight the cold, is a plant that, according to research, increases the number of newly created erythrocytes (erythrogenesis) most effectively.
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