Stronger, Fitter, Faster

Stronger

Twelve years behind a desk does things to your body. For the first time in ten years I've started hitting a gym 3x a week but that doesn't mean I can muster too many pushups just yet.

Fitter

Lose a serious amount of weight. This is definitely key to making everything else work, so I'll be focusing on dropping pounds to get not only into a healthy range of BMI, but to also increase my endurance and fitness.

« Good initial progress | Main | A cyclists' best friend in Winter »

My first round of testing

Monday I had my first meeting with Seth at HPchiro to kick off our coaching for 2009 and I decided to do some lactic acid testing to show what kinds of baseline fitness I had going into it. I'm hoping for a retest in 4-6 months and another 4-6 months after that to see how I improve through training.

Overall, the testing wasn't too bad. You ride on a trainer for 10min to warm up, then start riding in 4min stages that get increasingly hard until the last stage feels like an 80% effort. We did some quick pin-prick blood tests after the first ramp up, then went back down to easy pedaling and repeated the sequence back up to where I stopped before, doing more pin-prick blood samples through the sequence.

Here's what I looked like doing the test, and what it looked like from my perspective on the bike:

My results are shown below and are pretty low which is what I was expecting for my untrained body at this time of year. My muscles can flush lactic acid up to about 205 watts of output with a heart rate of around 148bpm. Seth went ahead and created a set of training zones I'll be doing the next couple months of base mileage with, and I picked up an old powertap hub to stick with watts going forward when I'm riding.

Overall, it was a pretty painless experience and I'll have some good numbers to check against several months from now after I start getting into much better shape (hopefully I can start moving from a 2 watt/kg output to something more in the 3-4 watt/kg range by year's end).

Posted on January 6, 2009 in coaching, testing

Comments

My first round of testing

Monday I had my first meeting with Seth at HPchiro to kick off our coaching for 2009 and I decided to do some lactic acid testing to show what kinds of baseline fitness I had going into it. I'm hoping for a retest in 4-6 months and another 4-6 months after that to see how I improve through training.

Overall, the testing wasn't too bad. You ride on a trainer for 10min to warm up, then start riding in 4min stages that get increasingly hard until the last stage feels like an 80% effort. We did some quick pin-prick blood tests after the first ramp up, then went back down to easy pedaling and repeated the sequence back up to where I stopped before, doing more pin-prick blood samples through the sequence.

Here's what I looked like doing the test, and what it looked like from my perspective on the bike:

My results are shown below and are pretty low which is what I was expecting for my untrained body at this time of year. My muscles can flush lactic acid up to about 205 watts of output with a heart rate of around 148bpm. Seth went ahead and created a set of training zones I'll be doing the next couple months of base mileage with, and I picked up an old powertap hub to stick with watts going forward when I'm riding.

Overall, it was a pretty painless experience and I'll have some good numbers to check against several months from now after I start getting into much better shape (hopefully I can start moving from a 2 watt/kg output to something more in the 3-4 watt/kg range by year's end).