More talent and versatility than needed; ChainReactionCycles/PayPal rider Joe Smith has been on the Point1 Program for over 2 years now. In that time Joe has won British Nationals, had World Cup DH top 10’s, given ‘er full pipe at events like the RedBull Hardline, pulled top 20’s at his one and only EWS (enduro) event and in general stomped his way to being respected as a World Class weapon!
An absolute pleasure to work with, Joe’s bike skills blow minds in seconds and his latest British national DH win at Bala (Rhyd e Felin) and top 20 WC performances have him set for the second half of a wild season so far!
Get to know Joe a little better below!
1) Favourite meal after a tough day of training gainzzz
At the moment it would be chicken wrapped in Parma ham and stuffed with pesto, potatoes and loads of veg.
2) The training sessions you are most and least happy to see on the weekly plan?
Any training which involves riding a bike im happy to see, i’m not the biggest gym fan really
3) Favourite race track/s?
Schladming all the way, that place is unbeatable
Photo: Duncan Philpott
4) Number 1 interest away from the world of bike riding and racing?
Most of what I do is on two wheels of some kind but I like 4 wheels too, Offroading, Rally etc.
5) Happiest when…….?
Riding a really fun flowy track with jumps and drifty corners.
Check out Joe giving her full wavin below, followed by friend and rival Matt Simmonds!
No introduction needed you could say. Storming off the back of double second place finishes at the two most recent UCI DH World Cups. Miss Tahnée Seagrave is set to climb the final spot sooner rather than later!
Charity Awesome
Working with Point1 since 2013 her growth and maturation as an all round athlete, ambassador and DH weapon is coming to fruition as I type!
She loves Jo’s cooking (her mother, we all love her cooking) and is a girly girl at heart! Exactly what the DH World Cup scene needs!
Copyright – @maddogboris
Here’s her Quick Fire 5
1) Favourite meal after a tough day of training gainzzz
Mum’s chicken and rice mmmmmh
2) The training sessions you are most and least happy to see on the weekly plan?
Happy DH and pump track, least happy… Intervals….
3) Favourite race track/s?
hmmmmm Champery! Bring it back!
Copyright – triridemtb.com
4) Number 1 interest away from the world of bike riding and racing?
CLOTHES
5) Happiest when…….?
I eat carrot cake and that the moisture is just perfect.
Our second round of quick fire 5 questions is with another Scot, Scotty Laughland. One of the newest athletes on the Point1 roster of weapons; he’s just come off his best ever EWS result (33rd) at Tweedlove.
Mature in word, fresh in the face, downhiller turned Enduro shredder Scotty Laughland has, at 25 years young, bags of experience on a push bike, an undergraduate degree in Engineering and some serious coconut sugar based baking skills!
The first in a new series of short articles giving you guys the fans & readers of all things Point1 some insight to what makes some of our well known athletes tick! First up is the angriest man in Scottish downhill, 24th place at the first stop of this years DH World Cup in Lourdes, 2nd at the recent SDA in Glencoe, Fraser McGlone, from Oban in Scotland is aiming to plant his large Trek Session firmly in the top 15 at next week’s Fort William World Cup!
Angry wee man!
1) Favourite meal after a tough day of training gainzzz
Favourite meal recently has probably been tuna steak, sweet potatoes and veg (lots of veg to keep coach happy)
2) The training sessions you are most and least happy to see on the weekly plan?
Most happy – When there’s lots of DH and moto involved!
Least happy- When there’s gym on the programme I really get fed up of the gym!
3) Favourite race track/s?
Thats a hard question, you get a lot of tracks that are fun in practice but a mission to race on. Lourdes was good fun to ride but bloody scary to race on! But one track I’m really looking forward to this year is Val di Sole, always have a really good time riding my bike there!
4) Number 1 interest away from the world of bike riding and racing?
Can moto be classed as away from bike riding? If so that. But if not I do like blasting about in my old VW mk2 Scirocco, always puts a smile on my face whenever I get in it and give it full noise.
5) Happiest when…….?
The suns out with a good bunch of guys riding any kind of bikes!
Tough day in the saddle or better yet standing on the pedals slappin’ turns and berms? – Feeling like a treat straight after riding or something sweet after your main meal but don’t want to stop the Gainzzz (yes 3 Z’s) train?
Well here’s the simplest tastiest treat going and “functional” to boot.
Chocolate Mousse that helps you Recover! – Voodoo magic surely!?
Ingredients
200g of Fromage Frais – (why Fromage Frais – because it’s “alive” with cultures and a nutritional
powerhouse)
40g of High 5 Recovery Protein Powder (I used chocolate flavour)
1 Egg White – whisked
Optional Vanilla Essence to taste
How To
1. Whisk the Egg White so she’s “peaky”!
2. In a separate bowl mix together your two scoops (more if you’ve had a wild day) of High5 RP
3. Slowly combine your egg whites with your Fromage Frais/RP mix and boooom you’re done
Optional extras: Add some vanilla essence, dark chocolate flakes/shavings, coconut pieces or top with frozen or fresh berries! All depends on your nutritional needs and energy expenditure for the day not to mention your current goals!
The Finished Product
Here’s the exact nutritional breakdown of a 100g Serving! – Multiple by 2 if you eat the whole lot in one – easy do!
Final Top Tip:If you are looking for or are in need of a lower calorie option then use the same recipe but just add a Whey Protein Isolate powder in whatever flavor you want! Similar taste, less calories per serving! But if you have genuinely had a tough day behind the bars or barbell then the “RP” Verison is your best bet!
Sounds to good to be true I suppose – Ice-Cream that helps you recover from hard training and racing?
Well fear not sometimes in life the “to good” stuff comes true! This is about the simplest Point1 recipe yet and kicks off a series of blogs I’ll be doing using the awesome products from the folks at High 5.
1 pot of Natural Yogurt – (I used a full fat one, makes nutritional “density” sense!)
1 tsp of Vanilla Essence
Small pinch of sea-salt
How To
Place all ingredients in a bowl – I used a Tupperware with lid so I could transfer direct to freezer, no waste, no messing!
Mix with a blender until smooth
Freeze for a few hours – DONE!
Oh and make sure to enjoy it with some dark chocolate shavings, dried coconut flakes or just on it’s own! I’ll update this post ASAP with the full nutritional breakdown from www.nutritics.com once they add the High5 Protein Recovery Powder to their database.
Like always this recipe can be modified as needed and to be honest using the Chocolate flavour powder with raspberries tastes even better!
Go anywhere do anything snacking! A cookie type thing that does it all! Breakfast, snacks, riding, racing…..bulking for those #gainzzz
Pictures, nutritional breakdown and “how-to” below!
Mix all your dry ingredients in a big bowl – well! You can substitute the flour types, seeds and nuts for whatever you fancy! But the oats are crucial to hold these “cookies” together and give them there texture.
In a separate bowl mix all the wet ingredients and Almond or peanut butter! If you want a sugary cookie add in 1 to 4 Tbs of honey. I wouldn’t recommend the added honey for a breakfast or snack cookie, but it would be perfect if these were to be used as a snack on a very long ride or training session!
Combine wet and dry ingredients until you get a nice consistent batter!
Plonk some dollops of batter onto parchment paper on your oven tray and bake at 180 c in a fan oven for about 15 mins!
And by all means sprinkle whatever seeds/nuts you want on top or add cacao and some 75% + dark chocolate if you want some chocolate in your life!
These “All in 1” cookies are packed with vitamins, minerals and fibre, so they fill you up and take some time to digest, so certainly not a pre-ride snack, but are perfect as part of a breakfast 2 hrs before training or riding or after the 3 hr mark on an epic trail ride or race!
As you can see in the 100g nutritional breakdown they have a pretty perfect ratio of fats to carbohydrate and protein to form a great snack or part of a meal!
Busy times at Point1 HQ, off-season training has kicked of again for most athletes, so fine-tuning, getting back into the training mindset, managing the process and implementing past lessons and experiences learned!
Here’s a pretty simple but deadly effective exercise to add to your strength training arsenal! Borrowed from a well know strength coach called Dean Somerset. I couldn’t help but think of the myriad of benefits for the mountain biker.
It’s an All in One bang for your buck type move. Torso Anti-Flexion, Hip stability and mobility, scapular and general shoulder stability, anti lateral flexion and a unilateral hip extension emphasis so crucial for MTBers. Not to mention the overall neuro-muscular, intra and inter-muscular co-ordination.
Load it up with dumbbells or kettle-bells (bottoms up KB would be challenge). Use at the end of session as part of a core circuit or with lighter loads early in a session as an “activation”m exercise, to get all systems trucking.
Enjoy and let me know how it goes for you guys and girls!
It’s early/mid October. Your race/riding season if you live in the Northern Hemisphere is pretty much over and doesn’t kick off again for a good few months…
So how did things go? Goals achieved? New benchmarks set, personal bests on Strava, race wins, got through a week in the alps without arm-pump or alcohol poisoning?
Taking some time to reflect on the riding season just gone, review your approaches and execution of training, riding, planning and nutrition and asking yourself or your coach some tough questions is a must if you want to plan better, improve and grow for 2015!
Do the worthwhile things better, avoid repeating the same mistakes as last year and generally just improve the whole process. So how do you go about doing it? Well I’m gonna give you a few “top-tips” below and hopefully some ideas to start the mental juices flowing so you too can review your season just gone!
1) Question Time
Sit down or stand up…pen and paper, voice recorder or chalk board! It doesn’t really matter. Just answer, honestly, some key questions about your race season and preparation period (off-season) just gone. Some examples to get the ball rolling!
– Did I achieve my goals?
– What was my best result?
– What gave me the most satisfaction this year?
– Biggest disappointment and why?
– What training did I enjoy the most/least?
– How was my mental approach to riding and racing? Nervous, relaxed, focused etc…?
– Did my coach listen to my needs, questions, demands etc…?
– What physical qualities did I lack during riding racing the most?
– Did I complete all training as prescribed most of the time?
– Did I diligently fill in training diaries?
– Did you enjoy training/riding/racing/the process?**
– Was I too sore from training to race well?
– How was my technique, freshness and FGF during the critical race periods?
The list of meaningful questions is endless, you could ask yourself or work together with your coach to ask all the key questions to cover all areas of performance planning. If you have a coach and a “post-season” review is not something they do then maybe there’s something up! Because it really is an invaluable process.
**that’s a very important question right there
2) Data Review and reflection
Keeping track of performance parameters is something both athlete and coach should do! It’s a team/joint effort. Interpreting the data and implementing change is up to the well educated athlete that coaches themselves or a coach if they employ a coach. But if there is no data to interpret then there are no changes to be made!
Same goes with a post-season review. Reviewing all the data you canto see how things really panned out is a very constructive way to make changes for the next year. So where would we get this data from? Well hopefully from a variety of sources, but valid reliable and measurable ones…because remember if you can’t measure it it’s awfully hard to change it.
First up is a training log or Training Tracker as we like to call it here at Point1 – It’s simple way to keep track of progress, see patterns in adaptation to training and recovery loads but also a great way to keep athlete and coach honest with a mix of objective and subjective scores and data! What does it provide post season, well it provides a deeper insight into each training week, block or period. You can then use it lined up against other data, results or memories to join some dots and see what did and didn’t work right from week 1 of the Off-Season to the final day of the “In-Season”.
A sample Point1 Training Tracker
Like mentioned above reviewing data from the year gone past can come from many sources, the more the merrier aslong as you know what to look for and where to make conclusions from! Other great sources of data would be;
HR data from training sessions – session totals, Trimp scores, HRrecovery (HRr), resting HR’s pre/post session etc…
Power Metre Data – average powers, peaks, normalised powers over rides or weeks of training, power profiles of your event, best events, worst events, fatigue, freshness, cardiac drift (need HR data for that) and 1,000 other things!
Race results and split times – www.rootsandrain.com is every MTB races best friend; % time behind winner, faster at split 1/2 or 3, lap times, stage times – faster early on, late on, need to work on fatigue, energy management, efficiency or mental arousal etc…
Strava or other such nightmares – comparing times, climbs and duration from many years, rides, weeks or months. Overall “on the bike volume”.
Gym based results – weights lifted, exercises selected, injury prevention or pre-hab volumes, specific testing, transfer of training.
Video analysis – races, training, go-pro etc…
It’s a pretty comprehensive list really, so many ways to look back and reflect on your work done and results acheived. Did they match your goals, what was good, what needs to be changed?
Comparing HR data from two similar sessions!
3) In-Season Planning
I always find it funny when people say, “ohh you don’t need a coach during the season”; “it’s off-season that counts”, “just ride your bike” etc… Well put very simply, 6 weeks of just riding your bike with no real plan can very easily un-do much of your hard work during the off-season.
So with that in mind an excellent area to “review” post-season is how your training loads and planning where during the racing or riding heaviest part of the year!
Did you train, maintain or just ride your brains out? What worked and what didn’t (training tracker is very handy here). How was your balance of fitness, freshness and fatigue?
Honestly to think that you’ll get away with just 6 months+ of racing with no plan and come out “on-top” is crazy! Some athletes come in to their race or riding season hot and fat and burn out, others come in cold and build some sort of specific fitness on the bike slowly, others get it all just right and last the whole season of racing or riding in pretty much tip-top shape!
What you should be looking to review from your “in-season” planning is individual and sport/discipline specific but here are some good places to start.
1) Training load, type, timing and volumes:The idea of Residual Effects comes mainly from “Block Periodisation” made popular by coaches like Issurin, Verkhoshansky and Bondarchuk. Using the “half-life” of the key physical qualities of your discipline to decide when and what to train and in what volumes is a great place to start for your in-season planning and like-wise a perfect place to start reviewing your in-season plan.
Did you leave weeks and weeks without training your Max Strength or Speed? How important are these qualities to the outcome of your event? How often does your tech training or riding target certain qualities, if it does is the load sufficient to maintain or improve that physical quality? I’ll let the Table below explain the rest.
Training Residuals – Use it or Lose it?
2) Race week! The one time when many things go “tits-up” for racers. What can you improve on for next year? The good, bad and VERY UGLY? The questions you need to ask?
– What training did I do mid-week?
– Did I recover fully from last weekends riding/racing?
– What active recovery modalities did I use? Did they work?
– Di I reduce or maintain training volumes in week of race? Why?
– Did I come into race day fresh both mentally and physically?
– Was there enough or too much physical, technical or tactical training during the week?
– What was my mental state like during the week, race, weekend etc…?
Two very different “In-Season” Race weeks
Train hard in the off-season and then get the fine-tuning in-season right and you’re on to a winner!
3)Recovery – What strategies did you use for recovery? Why? When? What worked, what didn’t? Too much of a good thing is always a bad thing. So planning your recovery in-season is key and as such reflecting on what worked pos-season will help you make far better decisions for next year.
The key is to promote recovery both mentally and physically but not to reduce or blunt our windows of opportunity to train and adapt.
Fitness – Fatigue + Freshness = Form
Remember that the mental state is just as important as the physical one, so plan recovery accordingly!
How do you scale your recovery? – McGuigan
So there you have it three key areas to review after your riding or racing season. There are certainly other areas and avenues to pursue, but the above is a good start.
Feel free to add your own thoughts and ideas in the comments below!
