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wattage Trainning and DH

Slider

Monkey
May 23, 2004
167
0
Moscow, ID
I see the points of wattage trainning and it looks alot more sound than traditional methods but I can't find any sprint oriented work outs can some one point me in the right direction where i can find a bunch of info on watage trainning preferbly physiology sights

Thanks
 

SuspectDevice

Turbo Monkey
Aug 23, 2002
4,171
380
Roanoke, VA
Downhill is an aerobic sport that requires solid sprinting skills, not just purely sprinting.

The energy systems you need to develop are the aerobic system, Aerobic power (I.e. Vo2max or whatever you want to call it), anaerobic capacity, and neruomuscular power, in that order.
The best repository for information on training with power is the "Wattage" list at Topica.com. Probally the best way to search it is to do a defined search on Googlegroups. Honestly though, most of the good, cutting edge information about using power telemetry is in the heads of coaching practitioners who aren't willing to share it. Especially for DH. I mean hell Stephan Girard doesn't even use power telemetry (or so he claims), which blew me away.
The more "sprint" oriented stuff is rarely featured on Topica because most of the crowd there is road-oriented.
Track riders almost all universally train and race with powermeters these days, and they do some very, very interesting stuff.
Power telemetry is good for measuring your progress and assesing what you can do to improve your peak power, for instance I ended up improving one kids sprint by 300 watts just by getting him to change his gearing to something that better suited his individual abilites, and alter his cadence.
 

Slider

Monkey
May 23, 2004
167
0
Moscow, ID
right now I am doin lactic threshold trainning, Phosho-Creatine Recovery, Aerobic Power, and High intensity endurance trainning in 6 day mix. It is all Heart Rate based and I wanna push it to the next level and deal directly with my Power Output. HR is show Shotty for hard core trainning I can stare at my HR monitor and make it go up or down 2-5 beats by using simple imagery techniques.
 

SuspectDevice

Turbo Monkey
Aug 23, 2002
4,171
380
Roanoke, VA
Slider said:
right now I am doin lactic threshold trainning, Phosho-Creatine Recovery, Aerobic Power, and High intensity endurance trainning in 6 day mix. It is all Heart Rate based and I wanna push it to the next level and deal directly with my Power Output. HR is show Shotty for hard core trainning I can stare at my HR monitor and make it go up or down 2-5 beats by using simple imagery techniques.
The nomenclature of "Phosho-Creatine Recovery" doesn't quite jive in my head. The PCR system is what fuels 8-12 second efforts, so do you mean you are doing sprints with limited recovery to try to decrease the refractory period of the PCR system? If so, whille effective, you probally can save that kind of effort until you are closer to the season.

It looks like you are definetly covering the basics with the program, and of course a Powermeter would be sweet. My favorite right now is the Power-Tap. Cheapest to buy, cheapest to maintain, and accurate enough. It doesn't hurt that Graber offers great discounts to coaches to sweeten the deal. The other piece of advice I'd offer is that it seems like you are doing too much with too little rest. Ideally I'd still do everything you are doing, but break it down over the course of the entire pre-season, doing only 2-3 high intensity workouts over the week and devoting the rest of your time to recovery or general preperation. I'd structure it in blocks focusing on just one energy system at a time until you stop seeing improvements, and then moving on.
It might save you a few months down the road from a nasty bout of overtraining.