Well, it’s midway through February, and there’s good news and bad news – the good news is that we are almost half way through the winter, the bad news is that if you haven’t started your Winter Training yet, you better get started or you will miss the best “Base Building” time of the year. if you haven’t started preparing for the Spring season, it’s not too late. There is plenty of crappy winter weather left (if you don’t enjoy winter sports that is), and so Indoor training should be your staple this time of year.

The first thing to do is establish your baselines, and commit yourself to keeping good records. If you don’t keep records of where you’ve been, how will you be able to chart a clear path to where you are going. Also, if you don’t have personal proof that your training methods work, you’re likely to waste a lot of time and energy assuming that what you are doing is making you stronger, faster, fitter, when they could be doing little more than maintaining the status quo.

There is another reason for doing baseline tests. It can provide a weekly or bi weekly goal for what can be an otherwise boring season of base building. While our Winter Training group logs a lot of hours in the saddle during the winter, we use the weekends for baselining and doing a variety of testing to keep us motivated, interested, and assured that our training is working. The weekdays are used for staying steady with our training plan.

Here is a list of all of the baselines we have tested ourselves on so far:

20 min Zone 2, and 30 min Zone 3 Decoupling & Power Slide tests
Explanation: This is Efficiency Testing. What is your maximum power you can sustain without leaving the specified heart zone. As you maintain a heart rate within the zone, does your power slide. In other words, do you have to lower your power to keep your heart rate from going higher and into the next heart zone. This is what we call a “Power slide”. Improve your ability to maintain power, and you improve stamina and your overall average power. The bottom line here is we want to produce as much power as possible, without deterioration, in every heart zone – making each heart zone efficient and sustainable.

2 X 20 Sustainable Power Test
Explanation: This is testing your “functional threshold power”. This should be the power you can sustain (within 5%) for actually an hour or so, but we test it in 20 minute increments since it is more convenient to manage. This is generally the most talked about power metric there is.

Climbing & Explosive Power Tests
Explanation: Testing these types of power is usually done on different days, but since we were just wanting to get a baseline, we testing them in the same 80 minute session. These represent the highest power we can generate for these two types of Power – Climbing (3 to 6 minute efforts), and Explosive (1 to 2 minute efforts).

60 min Zone 3 Decoupling & Power Slide tests
Explanation: This is Efficiency Testing at the highest level. We started at smaller levels (shorter time periods) as we were just establishing our base building routines. However, in Heart Zones 2 & 3, a full hour is customary as a real indicator of long term capability. This tests and trains the mind as well as the body.

Resting Heart Rate
Explanation: As we enter our 6th week of training, it was important to begin to look for signs of fatigue or overtraining. It is vital that we know when and how to increase our normal recovery or restoration time periods. A resting heart rate is an essential element to check, but one must have a “normal” baseline to know what to compare it to. When your body needs more rest than normal, it is quite common for your resting heart rate to be elevated 5 or more beats from its average.

Note: Most people confuse Resting HR with Ambient HR. Your RHR can only be measured while you are still in bed, before you rise in the morning. Your Ambient HR is what your heart rate is under normal, non exercise or physical labor conditions.

Threshold Heart Rate
It should also go without saying that the very first baseline we established was our Heart Rate Threshold (the cross over point between aerobic and anaerobic energy production) – in order to establish all of our heart zones, and set our training plan.

With these baselines set, we are ready to log a lot of hours in our first big phase of training, that of Heart Rate Training with an eye towards Power. This is not a focus on Power, but it is designed to raise our Limiters to better prepare ourselves for the targeted Power work we will work on later.

Finally, having the Keiser M3 power bikes to train on allow us a very convenient way to track every aspect of our development. Without Power on the bike, we could still raise our limiters in our heart zones, but could easily falter in improving our Power. With a class mix of experienced racers to those who have never ridden since they were in grade school, we will see just how effective this tool is at both ends of the spectrum.