Winter is coming.  This means less road miles and more hiding under a bridge attempting to keep warm, dry and fit.  Turbo with Toby is back on starting this Monday.

I’ve had a few people ask over the last couple of weeks if this is an open session that anyone can come and enjoy.  The answer is ‘Yes!’, anyone from SPR is welcome to come down and enjoy the sweaty vomitty fun.

Most of the sessions I run revolve around LTHR intervals.  This stands for Lactic Threshold Heart Rate.  We stress the body to a specified level for a pre-determined amount of time.  The underlying training theory being that we are attempting to improve the body’s ability to perform at a high output without producing so much blood lactate that the muscles need to stop working.  Basically we practice riding just below our threshold – as hard as you can without popping.

It all makes sense when you do it.

Other sessions include LTT intervals which stands for Lactate Tolerance Training – in which we deliberately ride over threshold to induce that all to familiar burn, in an attempt to become more familiar with the sensation of ouchy.  We learn to make pain out friend.

To do these workouts it important to establish what your ‘threshold’ is.  For those lucky enough to have a power meter threshold is typically expressed in watts.  Ie – someone may say “My threshold is 250 watts”.  This means that they believe they can produce 250 watts for an entended period of time before blowing up.  No for those of us who don’t run power meters we use heart rate to approximate our threshold.

There is a well established protocol to determine what your lactate threshold heart rate is.  It is basically a time trial effort where you ride as hard as you can for 20 minutes and then average your heart rate.  x 2.

I will be administering this protocol for anyone who is interested in jumping on the Turbo bandwagon this Monday, and the following Monday.  So if you want to be a bit more informed about your own physiology and to train a little smarter this winter then come on down.

Where and When – Under the narrows bridge.  South side. 6pm on Mondays.

What to bring – bike, turbo trainer (ergo/wind trainer etc whatever you call it), shoes, heart rate monitor, towel, water.

Click the link below for a testimonial I extracted during a recent session.

Ballam TTT