Training Specificity Across Different Zones

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  • #28710
    Michael
    Participant

    I’ve decided to climb less after another pully injury so I’m going to be focused on mountain biking, and also thinking about ultralight backpacking and peak-bagging.

    I’ve realized that one of the biggest factors in how I train is convenience. e.g. I was able to build strength consistently lifting weights over past 9 months since I shower at a gym regardless.

    I need to build a base, and I know the mountain biking I’m doing might make that challenging since it pushes my into zone 3 and 4 even when I keep the pace within zone 2 when terrain allows. My intention was to supplement this with road riding to balance it out, but wondering how bad it would be to do majority of focused z1/2 work on an indoor treadmill walking with an incline?

    Putting on a kit, planning a route, considering weather all make me less likely to ride consistently, but I could walk on a treadmill consistently while sometime going on road rides. I can read a book while on treadmill.

    How effective would this be to build biking capacity? It seems that an incline treadmill could be more time efficient as well. I know that the other way around probably doesn’t work as well so if I do have foot based objectives in mind, does this approach give me a large boost with this with minimal loss on biking?

    Some objectives I have in mind: fast thru hike of Hayduke Route (800 miles, desert); henry coe hardcoere (mtb, 100 mi 20k ft, I did 100 km version a few years ago and less fit now); sierra challenge 10 peaks in 10 days averaging 5500 ft gain, 16 mi (I’ve never completed all official challenge peaks).

    Also, I’ll try to preserve upper body mass since I still want to be able to sport climb from time to time, but I’ll do it more for fun than with a training focus.

  • Inactive
    Anonymous on #28724

    You have a lot of conflicting training goals.

    If you want to perform at all three, you’ll need to train all three. That might best be done in phases. Train one while two of the three are in maintenance mode. Any way you slice it, it’ll be tricky to manage.

    Just as cycling is not as ideal for uphill running as running, the inverse is also true.

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