What your heart actually does
When you get back to the van after a session on the track, there is usually one thing that is very clear; you're knackered. Deep breathing, heavy shoulders and lots of sweat in the goggles and helmet all demonstrate that although all that is required in moving one of these two wheeled beasties is a twist of your right hand, keeping it within the tapes, in some manner of control and moving in the right direction is a darn sight more hard work. If you look to many other sports, success is normally measured purely by your fitness level. Road cycling, swimming and running disciplines are almost purely a test of fitness. Skill is obviously required for good technique, but put the most skilful professional runner on a track out of fitness against a well trained club runner and there will be no question as to the winner - the out of shape pro will be embarrassed. What I find so great about sports such as motocross is that skill plays such an integral part to this sport. Not just anyone can jump on a bike and even make it around a national calibre track. What's remembered by spectators, other riders and teams alike when the race is over is the skill, flair and talent of the front runners. It is a spectacle and the fun of the sport is its attraction, not necessarily how fit the rider is.
You can now see the importance of learning to ride a bike and get the skills up. However, let us get back to how you feel after a race. There is something pretty intense going on out there and it's not necessarily why you signed up to this! One lap all is going great, but after 15 minutes plus 2 laps, something has taken over and your once smooth and fun laps are now just challenges to purely hanging on and staying on two wheels. This is where the physical aspect of this sport rears its ugly head - There is no getting away from it and you cannot pretend that it is not important. Being physically fit and strong plays a major role in ones success on the track and it really does underpin your overall performance. Fitness also affects ones enjoyment of riding. If you are in good shape, you can last many more laps on the track, enjoy them and not come in because you are about to cough up a lung.
'So what kind of work out am I getting when I'm riding the bike?' You may ask. Motorcycle sports are generally an aerobic, endurance sports. Racing for 15-20 minutes or more up to three times in a day puts a big strain on your cardiovascular system and the ability of your body to transport oxygen saturated blood around your body to the working muscles (so most of them then!) and then for the muscles to use this oxygen efficiently to break down glucose into the energy currency of the muscle cell - ATP. This allows the muscles to continue contracting and therefore you to carry on banging out the laps. What I was interested to look into, and demonstrate for you was the extent to which a motorcyclist's heart is under a high workload. How would it compare to a cyclists heart rate, or to other sports?
With this in mind I enlisted the help of a top of the range heart rate monitor that could record data from a given session, store it on the watch and then allow me to download it onto my laptop to give a graph and see exactly what the rider had just been through. Throughout the course of this season I travelled the country to different events and with the help of some high class riders have been able to see how different disciplines compare.
I first wanted a bench mark to work from. A sport I know well, and where my background is, is Downhill Mountain biking. This sport takes many cues from motocross and the bikes on the race circuit are now looking more and more like motocrosser's with the engine removed. The event is relatively short, being anything from 2-5 minutes long and is a high intensity time trial down the hill. Fastest at the end of the day gets the champagne and the podium girl. Simple. The first round of the 2004 World Cup series was held at Fort William, Scotland on a tough, physical course that required flat out pedalling for two thirds of it and supreme skill and the ability to carry speed through the rest. Scott Beaumont, who rides for his own Beaumont racing team, is an established pro racing the Downhill and 4 cross disciplines and was to be my rider for this. Downhill is a bit of a one shot deal and the psychological aspect to this sport isn't to be underestimated. This normally manifests itself in an elevated heart rate before you've even turned a pedal. Scott wore the heart rate monitor for his qualifying run, and the graph shows just how hard he was working the bike. From the countdown beeps the heart rate rose to over 190 beats per minute and stayed at this high, stable level for the duration of the run. This represents an almost maximal workout and his heart was working at a rate that was higher than many people can even reach. It is possible to work out the heart rate as a percentage of a person's maximum to describe the workout. This is done from a straight forward equation and gives rough guide. It is however normally an underestimation in reality, so not an ideal by any means. The best way to work this figure out is to get an actual value for the maximum heart rate reached and then you can work out your percentages and thus training zones from this. For the sake of this article we will use the equation so we can give a comparison between the riders. Scott is 26 years old, so by this standard equation of MAX HEART RATE = 220 - AGE Scotts max heart rate would be 194 beats. So according to this he is working at 98% of his max effort for nearly 5 full minutes and his heart rate touched 200 beats per minute towards the end of the run - above his theoretical maximum! This feat alone is impressive if it was on a flat road, never mind a steep rocky track that was hard enough to walk down!
This had set the bar pretty high and I wondered how my next candidate, 21 year old Richard-Mike Jones from the London Diamond Drilling Services/Emberson team would compare on his Yamaha at the British Championship round at Wakes Colne.
Richard-Mike wore the monitor for the day so he could get used to it and we monitored his heart rate for the qualifying session and for both the Motos. Now this is where things get interesting and you realise how physical it is to fight a bike around a track. In qualifying you can clearly see the periods of 'rest' as Richard-Mike cruised the lap waiting for a clear track, and then the high peaks as he pushed hard for that ideal qualifying lap. In the race (this graph taken from race 1) Richard-Mike's heart rate was again a steady state 'platform' for a full 40 minutes and was at a steady 185 beats per minute! Now using our age adjusted equation this works out to be 93% of his max - just under Scott's, but it was sustained for 40 minutes! And again, this physical activity wasn't the reason he was out on his bike, he was too busy thinking about putting the next pass in and sucking up all that dust.
This is right up there at the top of ones physical performance boundary and is the kind of heart rate an athlete (of a similar age, level of fitness etc) may hope to try and sustain during a 10km race - This would lead to a pretty impressive performance too.
My third candidate was Enduro rider was Tony Dinham, who rides a John Deacon Racing KTM 4 stroke, who I met down in Liphook for the season ending Enduro race there. This event is very different to motocross in that it is over a much longer period - up to 6 hours on the bike. However, its profile is different too, it intersperses steady paced riding with high speed special stages where flat out riding is what is required. As you can see from Tony's heart rate trace, it is very different to the previous two. Tony did not have to work at high levels for large periods, but his heart rate rose for the stages and still peaked at 179 beats per minute. Now although Tony's heart rate didn't reach the dizzy heights of Scott's or Rich-Mike's, Tony is quite a lot older than them, being 40 years old (Not that you look it Tony!). Now although as I mentioned before the method I'm using to quantify percentage heart rates is anything but ideal, it is a way to compare and contrast, and with Tony's age adjusted heart rate maximum of 180 beats per minute, he is at full revs at one stage and sits in the 170's (over 90% effort) for periods of 5-8 minutes, 6 times in his gruelling 6 hour race. Also, with an average heart rate during the non- special stage sections of 130-140 BPM he is still working at around 75% max effort as a base line for the full the 6 hours. This kind of endurance is more than is required by a footballer or rugby player, with these sports being of a similar profile with periods of lower intensity exercise and also short periods of high acceleration and effort. A road cyclist would also train for a similar kind of competition effort with their races lasting a similar period of time. If you think of the focus these sports pay to training and fitness, it gives a good indication of the importance that an Enduro rider should put on his training too.
These heart rate graphs just go to show how hard a rider must work and how sustained it is in motocross, and for Enduros, just think about having to keep your heart rate elevated for 6 hours - and then have to put bursts of high intensity exercise into this work out! I think this really shows the importance of fitness training in motorcycle sports, as even though the challenge at first is to ride the bike at speed, because of the durations of the races, fitness will really be the deciding factor.
Endurance training helps the body become more effective at taking in, transporting, and using oxygen and provides muscle that is better adapted to perform under prolonged, medium-high intensity efforts. As you get fitter your heart gets bigger and stronger (it is after all a muscle) and this means that for every heart beat, more blood is pumped around the body. So as fitness increases, for a given workload, heart rate falls. This therefore means for a given heart rate work load can be increased so you can go faster. This can also be monitored by taking heart rates first thing in the morning to get an accurate resting heart rate. An average male would rest at somewhere around 70 beats per minute, with those who train regularly getting down to 60 beats and below. The tope, elite endurance athletes of this world have such strong hearts that they can rest at quite ridiculously low levels and Miguel Indurain the legendary Tour de France cyclist is famed for having a resting heart rate of just 27 beats per minute.
We can use this info for training too and it goes to show how different sports require different training. They all require training to first prepare the body for the duration of exercise, and a lot of motocross riders I work with came to me with a background of training that at no stage actually reached a similar duration to their races. After building a suitable base you must work into any training plan periods of work that actually replicate what you will be going through on the bike. So be prepared for some hard work! 40 minutes at 185 beats is not something that is easy at all and if you try this on the treadmill you will just realise how hard you are having to work when you're on the bike. Enduro riders have to adapt in a different way, and the duration of the race is the biggest challenge. Be prepared for some long sessions at steady states and then add some intervals to these. 6 hours isn't the most practical of training sessions, but a 10 minute run and a 10 minute row aren't really going to be of much help to you so you need to re-think your plans and understand that after about an hour and a half, carbohydrate stores are pretty much exhausted, so you need to train over this threshold and practice carbohydrate feeding during exercise to prepare for an Enduro. Fitness plans need to be specific to the rider and the sport and getting into periods of high intensity work before your body is suitably fit will not give the results you want. Do your research or talk to a trainer about this.
These results do go to show the extent to which riders rely on their fitness whilst riding the bike, and help explain how hard a weekends riding will feel if you have done nothing in the week to prepare your cardiovascular system for this exercise. I also hope that is dispels some ignorant views from those not in the sport who think the engine somehow makes your life too easy!
The off season is the ideal time to put together a suitable training programme that will prepare you for when the sun comes back out and the big series' start back up. The hard work done now really will be worth it in a few months! So think about the kind of challenges your body is going through on the bike and look to try to adapt to these through appropriate training.
I must take a minute to thank all the riders I worked with for this, as they were very accommodating and happy to help me with what I was doing and also interested themselves in the results.
