He’s back! After the whirlwind start to 2015 – EWS win at home, EWS Podium; sitting 2nd in the world overall rankings and a season’s start gone 100% to plan after a winter’s work it all came crashing to an abrupt stop, literally and figuratively, in lovely Leogang, Austria. Bikepark’s beware – Greg Callaghan is back on the his Cube and ready to wind things up again.
So it’s a perfect time to learn a bit more about Ireland’s finest Pro Mountain Biker! Garlic Bread aside this man loves bikes, loves Barry’s Gold Blend and absolutely loves training hard and smart in equal measures. A coach’s dream to work with, read on!
1) Favourite meal after a tough day of training gainzzz a good Chile full of heaps of goodness with rice, bit of a fan of some garlic bread on the side too.
2) The training sessions you are most and least happy to see on the weekly plan? My favourite would have to be the Tactical repeats which involves doing laps of a track with a big sprint before dropping in. Riding a track flat out while absolutely knackered is an awesome feeling when you get it right!
I enjoy pretty much all my sessions so can’t say there is a least favourite… If I had to pick one it would probably be the long road spins.
Copyright – Cube Action Team
3) Favourite race track/s?
Its hard to pick just one but Stage 3 in the TweedLove EWS this year was pretty magical
4) Number 1 interest away from the world of bike riding and racing? Eating… so that I can rode my bike more faster!
5) Happiest when…….?
Having one of “those” runs/spins where you seem to hit everything perfectly and feel invincible on the bike. best. feeling. ever.
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!
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!
Even though there is more than one way to corner a push-bikes, when we talk “cornering” it’s frequently the classic outside foot down image that hits peoples mind…and rightly so!
The “classic” application of foot down technique requires the ability to move the hips laterally, drive the inside bar down, eyes forward and pelvis and shoulders square! And it’s this technique that many lesser riders struggle with regardless of terrain, bike and tyre choices.
This “hips out – bike over” technique allows you to get the bikes tyres “on-edge” which is real important when we are hitting longer turns with a mixed or not so grippy surface, when we want to carry big speeds or if the turn is beyond 80 degrees or so!
Point1 Athletic Development trained Neil Stewart does a mighty job of demonstrating here!
You’ll see that inside shoulder (head of the humerus), outside knee and ankle almost always line up in any rider with good technique!
How you arrive at a point to be able to apply this technique usual needs a multi-faceted approach and may very well form a indepth blog post in the future!
Like a flapjack but designed to maintain or maybe, who knows, even improve performance during your training rides or sessions! Between DH runs, on the lift when partaking in Broduro laps or trail side on a trail ride, these PowerJacks are simple to make, quick to cook, tasty, moist and portable! Get on the program my friends.
Ingredients:
Dry
150g rolled oats – (soaked overnight in a small amount of yogurt/water/milk if you wish – adjust wet ingredients accordingly)
2 scoops (abut 120g) of your favourite “Recovery Mix” – I used Kinetica’s Complete (Chocolate Flavour) this time but have used similar products from High 5 and Optimum Nutrition.
Sunflower seeds and hazelnuts (or similar) to taste
1tsp of cinnamon
Wet
1 ripe banana
150ml of Milk of choice (Cow’s, almond, hazelnut, rice etc… – not Soya, soya milk is filth!)
1 tsp of Vanilla extract
35-50 g of honey or maple syrup (Optional)
How To
Pre-Heat a fan-oven to 180c. Mix all wet ingredients together until well combined; add to dry until a nice consistent mixture is obtained. Spoon mixture out into a rectangle about 1.5cm thick on a parchment paper lined oven tray. Top with Sunflower seeds for added texture and awesomeness!
Cook for 12-15mins in the oven, just enough so its slightly browned, to long and you’ll have some dry Jacks!
Remove from oven and immediately, but gently, cut into “bars” – this mixture will make 12-15 small bars. Let cool and BOOM you’ve got yourself some PowerJacks!
Make sure to eat with water/fluids and reap the benefits! Finished product below. Store them in some Tupperware for up to 3 days!
Performance Bread, Perf Cake…I wasn’t really sure what to call this creation but once I tasted it I knew it was more cake than bread and overall as it’s packed FULL of nutrients, vitamins and minerals it’s really a perfect mid-Ride snack, but too calorie dense to just snack on all day everyday! So Point1 Ride-Cake™ it has become!
Based on a Point1 Athlete only bread I call Bulk-Bread™ this cake is easy to make, requires 2 bowls only and one cake tin. One of the main ingredients is almond flour/meal so while very high in fat the mineral content is high and as such a perfect snack item to have for rides or epic trips that are going over the 2hr mark. It has a soft tasty texture, provides a variety of multi-transportable sugars/carbohydrates, is high in magnesium, phosphorus, potassium and has small amounts of sodium! All very important for muscle function and contraction. Due to the eggs protein content is high too so in theory and based on some limited research it may help you recover quicker and lead to less muscle soreness post ride, but that is debatable for now!
So here it goes:
Dry Ingredients
1 Cup Almond flour/meal (blanched or not your choice)
Half cup of buckwheat flour, Quarter cup wholewheat flour(ahh gluten), 3-4 tbps cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder or bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp cinnamon (ground
Wet Ingredients
4 eggs (free-range) lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla essence
6 or more tbps honey (melted)
50g-75g 70%+ dark chocolate (melted)
1 very-ripe banana
Combine all wet ingredients in a bowl, until well mixed. In a large, separate bowl combine all dry ingredients until you get a nice smooth “flour”. Add wet to dry, mix well but not overly well.
Transfer everything to a baking paper lined “cake-tin”, through it in an pre-heated oven at 180c for 31mins. Take it out, cool, enjoy!
Top Tips:
If you are eating this while riding you must sip plenty of water. This is a “real-food” snack for riding so ideally only consumed after the 2hr 30min mark. Over consumption will lead to bad things mainly due to osmolity issues and subsequent stomach cramps. So be smart. 2 thickish slices with a small amount of jam between is perfect. Especially if you have had a gel, chew, fruit or other simpler carbohydrate source at the 1hr + mark into your ride.
Finally after a big days training or riding if you are searching for a simple dessert than Ride-Cake™ covered in Natural or Greek yogurt with some seeds and fruit is amazing!
And finally, finally – Feel free to remove the Wheat flour and replace with a gluten free alternative or just 1 full cup of buckwheat flour. The cocoa and half the flours could easily be replaced with your favorite protein powder to increase protein content. The cake would then become less “Ride” focused though. Likewise playing with extra honey, bananas or adding in a maltodextrin powder or other carbohydrate source to increase it’s “energy” content is fine. Possibilities are endless so go get animal in the kitchen.
