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Principles of program design

Thursday, 13 August 2009 18:36 Matt Vickers Training

'Fitness' is often generalised to mean endurance, or Aerobic Fitness. However, fitness truly means 'fit for a specified task'. So, in relation to this article, fitness is about training to be good at the various aspects that improve BMX racing. Here are some of the main fitness variables required in BMX.

Muscular Strength:

Quite simply, this is the ability of our muscles to push against resistance. It is about how much force we generate and does not specify anything to do with how fast we do it.

Speed:

Being able to move your muscles quickly.

Last Updated on Thursday, 20 August 2009 14:34 Read more...

Training for power, and more on recovery

Thursday, 20 December 2007 19:43 Matt Vickers Journal News

Following on from the first research news post, we have some more findings on ways to maximise recovery and a study on training protocols for power.

Article 1

Here's a novel approach to clearing the lactate from your legs after training, engage your core stabilising muscles. Navalta and Hrncir looked into whether standard core body exercises would speed up recovery (through lactate metabolism) after an intense 30 s sprint on an exercise bike.¹ They found that when compared to quiet resting, lactate removal was significantly quickened by five minutes of simple core body exercises. We can't show you the images of the three exercises from the article, so here are some we're allowed* to use, demonstrating 2 of the exercises.

Recovery and warm-Up

Tuesday, 18 December 2007 21:41 Matt Vickers Journal News

I have decided to start reporting on some of the scientific literature available in exercise science, hopefully in a way that doesn't require you to decipher it too much. To get you started, I have a couple of related articles to report on. If there are any specific topics you would like recent information on, feel free to use the Contact Us page to send an email.

Article 1

A team of researchers in Brazil have discovered that along with the liver, heart, brain and limb muscles, the muscles that help you breath can help clear lactate from your blood after intense exercise.¹ Chiappa and associates found that participants' blood lactate was approximately 16% lower after 9 minutes of recovery when a load (resistance) was applied to their chest to make breathing harder. They concluded that the lung muscles are very good at metabolising lactate during below-maximal exercise.

For BMXers, this provides more evidence that we need to do a gradual warm-down after each race, as this keeps our breathing rate up and our slow-twitch fibres working to remove the lactate from our legs more quickly.