Coffee reduce bloody flow
Drinking caffeine drinks appears to stifle the body's ability to boost blood flow to the heart during exercise, suggests new research out of Switzerland.Blood flow to the heart has to increase during exercise in order to match the increased need of oxygen. But when 18 healthy people were given the equivalent of two cups of coffee, scientists found that blood flow increase during exercise was much lower than when they exercised without having consumed coffee.This effect was even stronger when the participants were in a chamber simulating high altitude, said the scientists at the University Hospital in Zurich.They say that although caffeine drinks are known to stimulate the brain, their results show that caffeine is unlikely to boost athletic performance.
at Friday, May 30, 2008 0 comments
Coffee or Green Tea, Sir?
this sipp will boost your zziiippppp......
A study tested the effect of regularly taking green tea extract (GTE) and found that over 10 weeks, endurance exercise performance was boosted up to 24% with 0.5% GTE supplementation, and 8% with 0.2% by-weight addition to food.Reporting in the online edition of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology researchers at the Biological Sciences Laboratories of Kao Corp., Tochigi, Japan, said the 8-24% increase in swimming time-to-exhaustion was "accompanied by lower respiratory quotients and higher rates of fat oxidation."The results "indicate that GTE is beneficial for improving endurance capacity and support the hypothesis that the stimulation of fatty acid utilization is a promising strategy for improving endurance capacity," according to the study entitled, "Green tea extract improves endurance capacity and increases muscle lipid oxidation in mice."
Research was conducted by Takatoshi Murase, Satoshi Haramizu, Akira Shimotoyodome, Azumi Nagasawa and Ichiro Tokimitsu, working at Kao Corp., a Japanese maker of healthcare products, including green tea beverages
at Friday, May 30, 2008 0 comments
Cervelo Wolf SL defect
at Friday, May 30, 2008 0 comments
Machine down
Lost my AMD machine's hard-drive due to some virus . so i lost my resources. takes sometime to gain it back again.
at Saturday, May 24, 2008 0 comments
Ride Faster When You're Tired
Attention roadies who love longer events -- metric and full centuries, for instance -- and want to improve their finishing times. This column is for you.
Let's suppose you've ridden the 161 km in 6 hours and 20 minutes. Now your goal is to break 6 hours. That'll take a 26.9-km average speed.
You might find it relatively easy to average 27.3-kph during the first 2 hours of a 5-hour training ride. The third hour, it's tougher. The fourth hour, you're straining. The fifth hour -- well, you're finding out the hard way that you aren't able to sustain your goal pace.
It's obvious: Training with long, steady miles isn't producing sufficient late-ride strength.
Riding fast when you're fresh isn't the problem. The stumbling block is the ability to ride fast when you're fried. You need to train in a way that helps you overcome this "sticking point."
Here's how:
Do most of your next long ride (4-5 hours) at a steady and moderate pace that's slightly below your goal for the century. Keep something in the tank.
In the last hour, include 2 repeats of 20 minutes each. Ride at an intensity of about 85% of your max heart rate. The effort should feel "hard" -- at least 8 on 10-level scale of perceived exertion. Cruise moderately for about 10 minutes between the hard efforts.
Important! Be sure you're well hydrated and have been consuming enough calories on the ride before you start these intervals. Riding the last hour this way several times in training helps develop the ability to go fast when your body's tired. It'll help you overcome end-of-ride fatigue and get that personal record.
at Thursday, May 08, 2008 1 comments
Cycling's 10 Commandment
2. To achieve this stress/recovery equilibrium, consistency of training is key. Maintain a sense of proportion in your training, being careful to avoid large, rapid increases in training variables (frequency, duration, and intensity); overall training stress (the product of all three variables) needs to be increased in a measured, gradual way, and especially in the early season, it may be better to undertrain a bit than do too much. Avoid rapid fitness gains that you cannot consolidate, keeping in mind that sustainable progress comes incrementally more than in dramatic fashion, and so is best assessed, not from day-to-day, or even week-to-week, as from one training phase to the next, and even from year-to-year; a common pitfall of training by power is the expectation of higher wattage values for each workout. Patience is a virtue, and good things take time – these are not merely wise aphorisms that are ‘good for the soul,’ but an accurate qualitative description of physiological adaptation (i.e., years of intense, specific training correlate with improvement in lactate threshold).
3. Don’t confuse overtraining with underresting. Athletes commonly worry about the former, but most recreational competitors are more underrested and overstressed, than they are overtrained, since work schedules and other obligations do not allow true overtraining to occur. Professional riders, with few limits on their training time and opportunities, along with increased competitive demands, are much more prone to actual overtraining (i.e., chronic, or long-term fatigue), as opposed to the sort of overreaching (acute, or short-term fatigue) that typically occurs in recreational athletes, and in fact is a normal part of the training cycle.
4. Have a sense of who you are, where have you been, where are you now, and where are you going. Learn when to use a race for training as opposed to for a result, when to push hard in training, when ease off the intensity and/or volume, when to end a workout early, and when to take time off. For cyclists, this is where a power-measuring system is so valuable – you might feel good, but if power output decreases significantly, then you know it’s time for a break. If you do miss/skip a workout, it is usually best to just move on, rather than “make it up,” since some other training will have to be postponed or omitted later on, such that over a given period (say, the 3 months before an important race), you have still done less of something than you intended.
Whether you “bag it” based on how you feel in relation to power output (even if able to finish the workout) depends on any number of things: how early it is in the workout, your level of motivation, whether the day ahead will be restful or particularly hard, where you are in your present training cycle/year, what you have planned for the weekend, etc.
On the other hand, it is inevitable that you will have to push yourself through a workout sooner or later, no matter how well your plan is designed/executed, and sometimes even when you’re well-rested. While advocates of coaching are quick claim that a coach is needed to make adjustments to a training plan, there comes a time when nothing can make much of a difference. You just have to go out and do it.
5. Learn to pace yourself. This is greatly aided by the use of a power-measuring system, to the point of being nearly essential for interval training and flat time trials, since it allows you to maximize the work you are able to accomplish in a given period, while avoiding the fatigue that results from an uneven effort. The integration of power and perceived exertion determines pacing: the former provides an objective standard by which the latter can be ‘calibrated,’ while PE, in turn, modulates power, since it incorporates more physiological information than heart rate, and in particular, correlates more closely with lactate threshold.
Several factors conspire to induce too fast of a start, including the anticipation of hard effort (‘intervals should hurt,’ the reasoning goes, and you should ‘leave everything on the course’), plus the fact that PE takes ~5 minutes to catch up to effort. Starting too quickly becomes habituated over time, but can be unlearned, and eventually proper pacing becomes just as deeply ingrained. Be more concerned with how you finish, than with how you start – the sign of a well-paced workout is whether you can keep from fading towards the end of each interval, as well as across the workout as a whole. To quote an old and fundamentally useful maxim, train, don’t strain, or, put another way, work, but don’t suffer.
6. Balance periods of competition with structured training. Racing (especially criteriums) and group rides impose specific neuromuscular demands as well as wide, rapid variations of intensity that structured training does not normally replicate, leading some to place excessive emphasis on the notion that ‘the best training is racing,’ however, it is not as effective as 2-3 hour steady-state tempo training and long (40-60 minute) intervals at lactate threshold in creating consistent aerobic demand, and increasing muscle respiratory capacity through a process known as mitochondrial biogenesis. After a period of racing, aerobic endurance and lactate threshold need rebuilding through structured workouts, which are usually best performed alone, but many riders make the mistake of neglecting any this sort of training beyond their pre-season preparation period, if they do it at all.
7. Maintain a level of fitness during off-periods that is specific to your sport. Just as large increases in training stress should be avoided, neither should you let yourself fall too far out of condition; an off-season maintenance program should include some intensity which stabilizes fitness of the three energy systems. A friend recently remarked to me, “but I thought the off-season was the time to drink beer and smoke cigars.” NOT! Once again, consistency is truly the key.
8. Watch the transitions. Be careful when moving from one form of activity to another, such as from cycling to running in the off-season. Start slowly, perhaps alternating the two activities. Keep things easy and short at first, as muscles, tendons, ligaments, and even bones need time to adjust to new demands, stresses, and patterns of recruitment. If in doubt, do less, not more.
9. Have a plan, for the whole season as well as each workout. All the preceding points underscore the importance of this; training programs should be divided into and organized by periods of time, each with a specific purpose. The aim of such ‘periodization’ is to make performance consistent and predictable, while preventing overtraining and injury, by applying the appropriate training stress in the proper amount, thereby avoiding excessive and rapid changes in the three aforementioned training variables. Typical designations in the pre-season preparation period are “Base” (or “Foundation”), “Build,” and “Specialization,” followed by periods of competition and recuperation/ rebuilding, then finally off-season phases of “Stabilization” and “Maintenance.” Training principles such as progression, overload, specificity, and tapering/peaking are the themes woven in to any training program.
Similarly, each workout must be carefully planned in relation to selected goals, and care should be taken not to ad-lib. All too frequently, for instance, a couple hours of ‘just riding around’ get tacked on to an interval workout. This accomplishes practically nothing, while stealing time that could be spent recovering.
10. Keep a record. Many riders dutifully record training information, but seem to make little use of it. Pertinent workout details (particularly power data), if organized and analyzed, can help spot trends over the course of weeks, months, and seasons, allowing progress to be quantified, and training to be objectively evaluated.
11. Keep it fun. Unless you are one of the less than one-half of one per cent of competitive riders who is truly a professional, this is a sport – not a job. Since you’re not racing to provide for a family or for yourself, you’ll need to find motivation simply in the enjoyment of training and competing, and even most professionals will tell you that in the end, they race because they enjoy it.Well, that makes 11, but training makes you fast – not necessarily smart!
at Saturday, May 03, 2008 0 comments
BASTARD CYCLING
at Thursday, May 01, 2008 1 comments
Labels: Humour
Puncture of the month
imagine.....on your 3000++ wheelset.at Thursday, May 01, 2008 1 comments
Keep Up in Corners
You're out with the local training bunch and hanging fine on the rolling hills and windy sections. But every time the group goes around a corner, you get gapped by a few feet. Then you need to ride harder to catch up. Cyclists tend to go fast out of corners. Cynics would say it's mob mentality. Some riders are fit enough to sprint away and so they do, simply to dole out some hurt. Well, that's not the only reason, or the best one. There is a benefit -- conserving momentum, which is at risk every time you come to a turn. Cornering scrubs speed. Standing and accelerating smoothly is the way to limit the loss.
at Thursday, May 01, 2008 0 comments
Negative is Positive
Despite good intentions, you may find it hard to control the pace when riding a long event such as a half century, metric or full century. For one thing, you're amped up. For another, when brisk pacelines pass it's tempting to jump on. A good defense is to schedule a negative split. This means riding the last half of the distance faster than the first half. It's an effective way to manage early energy and give a much better chance of finishing strong. When resisting going with the rabbits and stick to your personal pace, looking forward to reeling in many of those riders before the end.
at Thursday, May 01, 2008 0 comments
Labels: Thoughts