Are you a sprinter, time trialist, punchy climber, or something else?
How does your phenotype as a cyclist affect how you respond to training? And can you determine what type of athlete you are by analyzing your training data?
In this workshop, Dr. Stephen Cheung analyzes a single workout using Xert software to illustrate how that workout might impact athletes differently, depending on their phenotype. Based on an athlete’s fiber-type density, for example, they may not be able to complete the workout as prescribed.
This indicates that athlete’s should tailor their workouts to their individual characteristics, in order to reap the greatest reward from any single session.
For more on how fiber type affects how you should train, check out Exploring the Relationship Between Muscle Fiber Type, HIT, and Overtraining with Dr. Stephen Cheung.
In that workshop, Dr. Cheung discusses new research studies from Belgium and Australia that investigated the relationship between muscle fiber-type density, high-intensity training, and an athlete’s risk for overtraining. The findings have significant ramifications for endurance athletes.
First, it was shown that there are different fiber-type ranges among world-class cyclists across different disciplines (road, MTB, track, etc.).
Second, evidence indicated that athletes with more fast-twitch fibers seemed to have slower recovery from high-intensity interval training (in the case of this particular study, multiple Wingate tests).
Finally, fast-twitch athletes seemed more prone to overtraining from large volume increases.
Dr. Cheung discusses what impact this has on how consistent you can expect to be in your interval sessions, how much time you need to recover, and the affect it can have on overall training load in relation to overtraining.
