Mountain Biking Training with a Heart-rate Monitor

You've been thrashing around the woods on you mountain bike for the last few months, but now feel that you are getting left behind. What to do? What to do indeed...

To get the most out of your biking you need to be a bit fitter, but before you can look at designing a training program you need to understand the demands that mountain biking makes on your body. One way to do this is to wear a heart-rate monitor (HRM) to tell you how hard your heart is working. This instrument is used by most road-riders, although the intensity of exercise can vary quite considerably off-road, and generally your heart rate is quite slow to respond to such rapid changes and stays fairly high throughout. While this may tell us that you're working fairly hard most of the time, it doesn't tell the whole story.

Recent, researchers have been able to accurately measure the power being produced by a rider out on the trail, and this has shown more clearly the demands of mountain biking, included in these demands were some short bursts of very high power outpost – up to 500 Watts – but there was also plenty of low power outputs, registering less than 50 Watts (during downhill sections).

In conclusion to be physically prepared for XC mountain biking you need a good base level of aerobic fitness and endurance and to be able to cope with the constantly changing-demands of the course. So how do you improve your aerobic fitness? Quite easy, really: you need to reach an exercise intensity that works your heart and lungs quite hard and keep it there for a while. And how hard is quite hard? Well, there's a minimum intensity required to have a marked effect but generally you are looking at a heart rate of about 70 percent of your maximum (maximum is about 220)

If you don't have a heart-rate monitor it should feel like your breathing rate has increased considerably from rest but you're still just able to hold a conversation, should you need to. Initially, you should try to maintain this intensity for 20 minutes. As your fitness improves, increase the time spent exercising to two 40-minutes intervals per week.

You should soon start to feel the improvements, and after four weeks your respiratory muscles and heart should be stronger, and your muscles more efficient at utilizing their improved oxygen supply.