Glen and I are joined today by Rich Voss of Voss on Track Coaching. Rich is a highly accomplished track cycling racer and coach. Rich is a 5x masters world champion, 14x masters national champion, and he has coached 5 masters world champions plus many masters national champions. And, Rich has set 5 masters world records over the years.
Yeah, Rich knows power: how to train with power, how to build and recruit fast-twitch muscle fibers, how to get the most out of what you got from “mom and dad”. But that’s not all, Rich is a master at athletic longevity….knowing how to stay in the athletic game for a long time by focusing on camaraderie and health as the basis for long-term high performance and enthusiasm for sports.
Be sure to listen to the entire episode as Rich offers his best advice for improving your sprint near the end of our talk. It is definitely worth your time.
In our talk with Rich, we discuss the following topics (in order):
- Genetics
- Muscle Fiber trainability
- VO2 Max training
- Goals vs. interests
- Time management
- Gym work
- Recovery
- Building a better sprint, even if you are not a sprinter.
- Camaraderie
I think you’ll find it interesting, and you might even pick-up a few tricks for getting stronger on the bike.
You can find Rich and the Hammer Racing Team at: http://hammerracing.club/
Hi, I would like to hear about gears , heavy gears vs light gears. There is a tendency lately to use super heavy gears. Any comments on that?
Hi Chris, I asked Rich to respond to your question, which he interpreted to be related to track cycling. Hope this helps. Thanks for asking.
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Yes bigger gears are being ridden these days. Back when I started a sprinter would ride a 92″ gear for a flying 200 and then a 90″ for sprints. If you couldn’t hold 190rpm or better in the flying 200 you weren’t competitive. Now things are vastly different as much, much larger gears are the norm. The training is much different as well, as you can’t just slap on a big gear and be faster. Otherwise everyone would be putting on a 200″ gear and be killing it! Plus how big you can go is also a muscle fiber type thing, how old are you, what is your strength training background, as well as doing the specific training for this. So one big gear may work for one rider and not another. In a general sense regardless of this, a bigger gear does work much better, how big is a personal thing.
Rich