Hey Fellow Cyclists!

The last month has been busy with riding, trying to recover, sleeping in an elevation tent, and racing gravel in order to get ready as best I can for The Whiskey Off Road MTB Race.

Where to start. With the elevation tent, I have learned that my body cannot handle the same training load as normal and I have been struggling to recover for this big race coming up. It has been a good learning lesson for me as a coach to be able to understand better what the body is going through and better plan for clients that may try a similar approach. That being said, I am not 100% sure this is going to work out like I thought or wanted it too.

First, I have a few videos below, almost all of them are gravel races, you can watch these when you are stuck indoors on the trainer when it's crappy outside. Check them out below.

Just another reminder that I have a new website, bikelifewithrob.com. It has the same stuff that the old website had, but the name just makes more sense. We will no longer be using ur bike life . com! Check out the new website, let me know what you think! While you are there grab the newly designed fat bike t shirt, and high quality loud bells for your bike so you don't have to yell at people ahead of you on the trail!

I will put a video out in the future going over the elevation tent and my thoughts on how to maybe perfect training with it, how it works, and what you can expect.

I went on a gravel racing spree in hopes to get some gains by pushing hard in these races. I do think I made some gains, with better planning I could have made it even better. I raced the Melting Mann 60, Dirty 30's Filthy 50, and the Lowell 50 to help with the training. See below, I have videos on all of them.

I may do a couple more gravel races this year, but only if they have some singletrack involved! I think you can guess what those will be...

Over the month of March and into the first week of April I had roughly 9 to 10 hours on the bike and my body was not able to keep up with the load of training as I mentioned above because of the elevation tent and the added stress. My legs never felt recovered like they normally would, walking around they would hurt, post race they would hurt really bad and I never experienced this before. The second week of April I tried backing off and adding the Air-Relax compression system to speed up and try to get the body to feel recovered. It is helping, but I am still not where I want to be.

I switched the strength routine throughout March and the first week of April, I have stopped all strength training in order to help recover. This routine I was using dumbbells and Kettlebells for 3 reps with heavier weight and different exercises. I am using the PowerBlock Dumbbells as they allow me to go from a really low weight, all the way up to 90 pounds a dumbbell. As stated before, I always start my strength workouts with a dynamic warm up which includes walkouts, a variety of different lunges, leg swings, arm swings, and a few other things. You need to get the blood flowing, the muscles warmed up, and more of your muscle recruited for a safer experience. If you do not feel warmed up properly, or you are over 40 years old, do 10 minutes of cardio before the dynamic exercises to get it right.

Current Strength Exercise List: Bosu single leg balance squats x 5 reps

Depth jumps x 5 reps

Bench single leg step ups x 3 reps

Hip presses x 3 reps

Weighted chin-ups x 3 reps

Bench press x 3 reps

Single arm rows x 3 reps

Weight crunches 45 to sit-ups to one leg planks to supermans

The 3 ab exercises are all done in a row without stopping along with the supermans. As I move through this workout, I make sure to increase the weight when possible! Remember, you should change your strength routine up every 6-8 weeks for maximum benefit!

Body work continues, and this is what it looks like. Body work involves different things from static stretching later in the day after workouts, to the massage chair, to a foam roller, to a handheld rolling pin, and my favorite the gun! You know the new device everyone has, that hypervolt. I don't have one of those, but I do has a jig saw and you can buy all the attachments for under $20 here. I also do dynamic stretching before hard workouts to get the blood flowing better and more muscle fibers recruited to reduce the risk of injury. I have been keeping my Yoga practices on Wednesday's.

If you like YouTube, be sure you are subscribed to the Youtube channel so you don't miss all the epic MTB action! If you are stuck inside, find one of my longer fat or XC racing videos to watch will you train indoors. Check out some of the new videos below!

Check out the Melting MANN Gravel Race HERE:

Check out the Filthy 50 Gravel Race HERE:

Check out the Lowell 50 Gravel Race HERE:

Get the ebook now for free on Getting Started in Mountain Biking! It is great for the beginner to point them in the right direction, and also good for anyone on a bike as I take the guess work out of getting what you need to get riding!

Weather is starting to warm up, this gets me excited! May be time to get yourself a nice bike rack to haul the bikes around.

Enjoy Your Weekend Biking Adventures!

Bike Life with Rob on YouTube

Grab my $10...on sale for free ebook, Getting started in MTB - Your 1st 90 Days

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