Endurance training is the base for every professional cyclist. Regardless of the discipline, professional riders spend hours and hours in the saddle. When it comes to Mountain Biking and especially Cross-Country, things have become slightly different. Athletes are now training at a higher frequency. This means that instead of one long training session they are doing several short sessions a day. For World Champion Nino Schurter, long rides are important, but as XC is super intense, shorter painful training sessions are a huge aspect of his training routine.

One important part of Nino Schurter’s workout is the annual training load per se. Since the last Olympics in 2012 Nino has completed around 950 hours of training per year. However this amount is slightly under the reference value for elite athletes (1000 h/y), which emphasizes the efficacy of his training program.

His training program is composed of 85% endurance and 15 % of strength training, which is conducted in a mixed training fashion. In an average week he does 12 training sessions and has one rest day. The overall intensity distribution is according to the polarized training model. That means 25% of the training sessions include high intensity workouts like interval sessions witch are rated as “hard.” A particular aspect in his endurance training program is the high portion of running workouts, which accounts on average for two sessions per week. With regard to target races he follows a peaking and tapering scheme.

Keep in mind that for racers the aim of all activities is to improve their sport specific performance. Thus the XCO performance is highly related to the athlete’s endurance capacity.  A major goal is therefore to maximise power output. An interval pattern enables the body to sustain a high rate of energy delivery over long durations of time. This high activity of the aerobic metabolism is the most effective way to improve limiting factors like VO2max, fractional utilisation of VO2max and efficiency. Additionally, during interval sessions the athlete learns on a mental level how tolerate these uncomfortable situations.

High intensity interval training (HIIT) is essential for elite athletes to make further improvements and Nino is really focused on getting this right. Last year he mixed training volume and intensity in the so called “Reversed Periodization” which means that he developed in a first phase his VO2max and in a second phase with longer intervals the anaerobic threshold power. Something special is that he also performs interval sessions by running. These forms are proven to be very time efficient and effective to develop the VO2max. By designing interval workouts Nino also considers the specific requirements of competitions and for example race speed. So in terms of inertial load it is not the same to pedal 400 Watts with 15 km/h or with 25 km/h as the race pace will be in Rio. During the season he’s also using a combination of anaerobic and aerobic intervals, the 1min all-out + 5min Patchwork, as his coach Nicolas says.

A main difference is that athletes are training with a higher frequency. That means instead of one long training session they are doing several short sessions a day. According to the polarized model they are focusing on the quality of their training and are conducting a higher portion of HIIT sessions, while a decade ago the intensity distribution was merging at the threshold intensity. There is also a change relating to the distribution of  HIIT sessions towards block periodization, which means that they conduct the sessions in a concentrated form. Finally the use of power meters enables exact monitoring of the load in the field. That means in practical terms that you can compare the power in every single training session with your reference values or even with benchmarks. So the competitors are always on board and the workouts are going to be harder and harder.

Photography: Jochen Haar I Gary Perkin I Gaudenz Danuser
Words: Beat Müller/Swiss Olympic