What are the characteristics of ’Base Fitness’?

“I always hear people talking about ‘base fitness’, but what do they actually mean by this?”

By now, we have all experienced race/event delays and from what it seems, these events will now be rescheduled to around 12 weeks’ time. Therefore, we now need to focus on the fundamental skills and characteristics of base fitness to prepare for the event/race season which will eventually come. Here’s a quick summary of what we are talking about and looking to develop:

Aerobic Endurance (AE)

These are your standard endurance rides, steadily paced and are done at or below your aerobic threshold and they should not place a large training stress. This area of fitness is developed with workouts that are done as short, easy recovery rides or longer workouts which are intended to develop aerobic fitness.

This is the most important element of base fitness since the endurance races that most cyclist compete in, are highly aerobic.

Muscular Force (MF)

MF workouts are simply aiming to improve and increase the amount of force you can apply to the pedal. This applies to any endurance sport which involves using a muscle group to create force to propel yourself and create movement.

The most common way of developing this characteristic is strength movement which use high-load and low repetition which focuses on the propulsion of the leg muscles. Of course, if you have not been doing this kind of work before, you need to start with a lower weight and repetition band before you gradually increase the training load to move towards the high-weight, low-rep training. You can also use specific on-bike training sessions to bring about similar adaptations, these sessions try to replicate the same load that the S&C work out produce.

It is important to note that this type of training creates the most risk to injury so it must be done with consideration and the correct instruction.

Speed Skills (SS)

The speed skills that we are specifically talking about here are not about the speeds or power that you can reach, but instead about the movement skills you possess. This is crucial to have the skill to be able to reduce the amount of energy which is wasted and make you much more efficient on the bike. This is also the only skill which can be seen visibly, it’s seen by the way that someone interacts with the bike and how easily and fluid they move under both torque and velocity.

Muscular Endurance (ME)

This can be often misinterpreted and can actually be one of the hardest characteristics to develop. We are talking about the muscles to sustain repeated contractions for a sustained period of time, with resistance (torque in this case). This should have been well developed by this point in the year and should be done earlier in the plans, however we can now use this break as a chance to visit this area once again and get some further adaptations!

I hope this can be a short insight into some of the areas that you could now turn your attention to with the unexpected break to come back stronger than ever!

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