Do you ever find yourself with a burning question you’d like to directly ask a cycling coach? Well, now is your chance to ask away! In this series, we’ll be putting your questions to expert coaches – send them in to Cycling Weekly’s Fitness Features Editor at anna.abram@futurenet.com
Busy athletes are often balancing work and family whilst still trying to get their training in. Thanks to the best smart trainers we can now train and ride with others on the best indoor training apps for cycling at any time of day.
However, this also inevitably leads to those late-night turbo sessions we all love to hate. Although these sessions are important for improving fitness, they can impact adversely impact the recovery side of the equation – all too often athletes report that they struggle to sleep after training intensively in the evening.
Clearly, missing these sessions is not a good idea if you want to improve your fitness, so what might you be able to do to improve sleep afterwards?
Well, they do say that good coaching is a little like parenting… most of it is telling athletes to go to sleep and eat their greens! So here are a few tips from sports scientist James Spragg to help you fall asleep after those late-night turbo sessions.
Sports scientist and coach James Spragg is one of the experts who will be answering your questions in Cycling Weekly’s ASK A CYCLING COACH series which comes out every Wednesday. Working both in research and applied settings, he currently runs Intercept Performance Consultancy.
1. No caffeine
(Image credit: Future)
It seems a no brainer, but you would be surprised how many times I have heard athletes having a coffee just before a late night session, or using caffeine supplements during.
If you use caffeine to help you perform in those sessions, don’t be surprised if you can’t sleep afterwards. While there is little evidence that chronic caffeine supplementation will affect the boost you get from using it on race day, it might be best to leave the caffiene filled energy gels in the cupboard when training in the evening.
2. Sleep hygiene
When coaches talk about sleep hygiene, they don’t mean washing your bed sheets although please do wash your bed sheets – what they mean is improving all those little habits around bedtime. We all know that excessive screen time in the evening is not conducive to getting good sleep. Spending time on your computer or phone after a session checking out exactly how many watts you were producing…