Originally Posted by koffee brown
One more bit of advice- if you are looking to build up endurance for your cycling, you should be doing the majority of your work on CYCLING, not the stairmaster, not running, and not kickboxing.... just cycling. You need to build up your endurance for the muscles that are specific to cycling. And to add on to that, you should not be comparing heart rates from stairmaster to cycling. Cycling will have different heart rate ranges for you than running or using a stairmaster. So while you're visiting your kinisiology department, ask them if they can do a performance fitness test for you while CYCLING. Then you'll have a good idea of what your true heart rate ranges are for cycling. From there, you can accurately train your weaknesses.
I'm going to ask for a heart rate monitor for christmas
Then I can go from there. I spoke to a personal trainer for half an hour today, and she gave me some good advice, along with the name of an excellent coach at my universisty
::snip::
Originally Posted by koffee brown
Now, if you spent a lot of time training base as you claimed you had, then you shouldn't get out of breath when you're doing the long rides, and you shouldn't have any problem with recovery. As it stands now, I do think that either you are not training base and you think you are, or you are training at too high a heart rate or too low a heart rate. This is why it is so important to find your heart rate ranges- training at heart rate ranges that are off can throw off your results. You may claim to have a low VO2 max, but maybe you just aren't able to train it properly because you don't have the correct heart rate ranges to train with! Don't sell yourself short... you could be just as strong as your buddy with some good training.
I love those all day epic rides. I can easily go for 4 hours at a pretty hard pace and not to be really out of breath. Even when I run, the first 10 minutes or so, which is my warm up, I am barely breathing hard.
From the litlte research I did last night, I think I should be training around 70-80% HR. Things will be easier once I get that heart monitor.
Hopefully, I will be at the same level as my friend after this winter. After exams are over, I can get back into traning. It will be a lot of work, but I am quite certain that I will enjoy the journey to be ultra fit
Originally Posted by koffee brown
Dude, you're about as skinny as you can get. Focus on the strength training and the cardiovascular, make sure you're eating right, get some accurate testing done for performance, train hard, and report back in June.
Koffee
That's definitely good to hear. I've hit a plateau in terms of my weight/body fat since early July. I am still going to try to get a little bit leaner (6 pack), but I don't think my body type will allow me to decrease my body fat much further without some drastic changes in my life style (counting calories, only eat tofu).
I don't count calories as of now, and I am very conscious of my diet. I have been working on that since late last year
I will dedicate my first race win to you, and the friendly people on this forum. How does that sound?
Sincerely
Ming