Performance Tips

At Contender Bicycles, we hope to give you every advantage to pursue your cycling goals. We want to highlight some of the most important performance tips that we have used throughout all of our years in cycling. Whether the tip is on nutrition, training, the rules of the road or racing, we hope to provide valuable insight to increase your performance and help you reach your goals.

• Banking Sleep — New research indicates that just as the loss of sleep is cumulative, so is getting extra sleep. Napping can be an effective way to make up the defecit of sleep if you are not able to get sufficient sleep overnight. Plus extra sleep pays dividends if you take a nap prior to sleep loss. Research indicates that naps as short as ten to fifteen minutes and as long as two hours offer biological benefits; a forty-five minute nap is most effective when exercising.
• Burning Fat — You burn the highest percentage of fat when you do moderate-intensity aerobic exercise. At rest, you burn approximately 50 percent sugar and 50 percent fat. When you run a 10k, you burn primarily glucose or sugar (about 99 percent). When you walk, you burn a higher ratio of fat (60 percent fat to 40 percent sugar). You burn the most calories when you go fast, but most of those calories are from sugar, and you cannot sustain the effort very long. When you exercise at moderate intensity, you burn the highest percentage of fat and you can go for a long time; however, moderate-intensity exercise does not burn as many total calories unless you go for a long time. If you want to burn fat, the trick is to find the balance of the greatest percentage of fat burning with the highest number of total calories burned for the amount of time you exercise.
• Consistency — Consistency is important, but not one ride will make your season. It is okay to miss an occasional planned ride. Work demands, family obligations and inclement weather can cause a missed day. If the workout was a key workout, consider swapping it to another day. By the same token, one-off big training weeks do not pay big dividends. It is tempting to pile on the miles during the holiday period. But one week of super high volume training is not going to positively affect your peak and it may even lead to injuries if the increase in volume is too dramatic.