MTB
Want to up your speed, stamina and flow to chase down those podium positions? Follow this training plan from pro coach Alan Milway to go from cross-country novice to a proper racer.
Cross-country (XCO) mountain bike racing requires a great mix of skill and fitness. Where some disciplines focus on the gravity aspects of mountain biking, cross-country races are based on undulating courses that have both steep uphill and downhill sections, and riders are faced with tough challenges working with and against gravity.
A Mercedes-Benz UCI Mountain Bike World Cup cross-country race is usually around one-and-a-half hours in duration, with racing held at a frenetic pace throughout over multiple laps of an off-road course. It’s tough on the cardiovascular system. Then add technical features such as rollers, drops, rock features, roots and muddy uphill switchbacks, and it’s easy to see why most cross-country athletes like Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Lars Forster and Henrique Avancini spend a lot of time honing their riding skills as well as their overall fitness.
Alan Milway is a professional coach and has trained some of the biggest names in the mountain biking world, including Rachel Atherton, Manon Carpenter and Brendan Fairclough. Here he shares his expertise to provide a guide to getting yourself race-ready, with advice on skills development, nutrition and a 5-step training plan that will ensure you’re in peak physical condition come race day.
01
What skills do you need?
Cross-country racers need to have it all: endurance, power and bike handling skills.
Aerobic endurance is the ability to hold and sustain an effort for prolonged periods of time. Alongside this, you need to have a powerful ‘punch’ to get up steep hills and attack the front. These areas can be trained on the road.
But an area that mustn’t be forgotten is bike handling skills; the top racers are fantastic at descending at speed and maximising time-saving when the terrain gets tricky. Nino Schurter, Kate Courtney and Jolanda Neff are great examples of this.
02
Nailing nutrition
As with any endurance discipline, nutrition is key. Long training rides require carbohydrates to fuel them, and you should take on one litre of water per hour’s activity and an energy drink if you’re riding for more than two hours.
There are cases where low carb rides can be useful for improving fat burning efficiency, but if you want to train in this way, be clear as to the effort level, duration and post-ride fuelling required. Done right this can very useful, but done wrong can leave you fatigued and possibly ill.
03
The cross-country training plan
The programme set out below, which consists of five steps or blocks, ideally runs for around four months, leading into the first ‘prep’ races. If you’re short on time you can reduce the sections proportionately but don’t skip any – especially not the ones you find the most challenging!
04
Build a strong fitness base
- Duration: 4 weeks
- Key Activity: long steady rides for aerobic development.
- Focus: keep rides fully aerobic, predominantly at an easy pace. These rides breakdown fuel fully and efficiently, and have little accumulation of lactic acid or fatigue.
- Tips: these rides improve the efficiency with which the body burns fat as a fuel, allowing you to ride further and longer, but also increase the effort you can put in before lactic acid builds. This block builds the all-important foundation for the rest of the training.
- Action plan: aim for two or three rides a week, each of which last a minimum of two hours, longer if possible. These rides should feel ‘easy’!
05
Increase your climbing power and stamina
- Duration: 4 weeks
- Key activity: interval training to increase anaerobic threshold.
- Focus: increase the power you can hold during climbs before you go into the ‘red’ zone - the effort at which your legs start to burn with lactic acid, and you want to slow the pace.
- Tips: these intervals should be at your anaerobic threshold, which is essentially the tipping point between sustainable effort and rapid fatigue due to lactic acid buildup in the muscles. This is not the same as Functional Threshold Power (FTP) which takes a maximum effort over 20 minutes (or one hour) and scales this back to a pace for intervals and is generally at a higher level and anaerobic threshold.
- Action plan: do four to 5-minute intervals at a moderate-to-hard pace with three to five minutes rest between each one. Ideally a fitness test would be carried out in a lab fit to determine the perfect zones, but you can go on ‘feel’ and perceived effort. Aim to complete 4-5 intervals of 5 minutes with each one being at a consistent pace between the first and last — don’t set a pace you can’t continue during the last interval! These sessions are hard but should be ‘manageable’.
06
Get ready for race pace
- Duration: 4 weeks
- Key activity: sustained fast pace efforts of 10-15 minutes.
- Focus: building race-level efforts by repeating high-tempo efforts.
- Tips: the temptation is to go all-out in the first lap and then be too tired to get anywhere near that time on the next lap, so pacing is key and FTP can be a useful guide.
- Action plan: pick an off-road course and aim to do one lap hard before resting and repeating. Rest can be a very easy pace to get your breath back, or an easy pace with a break to sit before coming back to attach the next lap.
07
Develop race-winning sprint power
- Duration: 2-4 weeks
- Key activity: explosive efforts to make the break on a climb.
- Focus: these efforts will take you into the red zone (as mentioned in block two) but with previous training, you will hopefully be able to recover and then repeat. Think about a high-power burst followed by a sustained effort before backing right off, repeated. You can link these in with longer, steadier road or off-road rides.
- Tips: quality over quantity is what’s needed here. You want to hit these efforts hard, so four to six of these per session is usually enough to start with.
- Action plan: short, high-power efforts with equal rest intervals, for example a 30-second burst followed by a 30-second recovery. These are known as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) efforts where power is much higher and recovery much less, so your body gets used to lactic acid build up in your legs. HIIT trains the body to adapt to this.
Practise your race-craft
- Duration: 2-4 weeks
- Key activity: race preparation – race simulation, other events and bike set-up.
- Focus: get ready to race by simulating race day.
- Tips: it’s easy to train hard but then forget the key components of a race such as the warm-up, maximum effort sprint starts with one foot on the floor at the start line, and race duration. This is a good time to plan for this by entering an event as a ‘warm-up’ race before a key event, and get used to going hard for 90 minutes or more.
- Action plan: find some events that you can practise key race skills in and hone your race-day planning, preparation and execution. After each event, review, work out what worked and what didn’t, refine and try again.
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