Cul de sac kung fu: Eights of ignominy

Lee, besides off-season training/crosstraining, can you recommend some winter time bike related training that can be done so that we don’t lose skills? Considering that we have 18″ of snow on the ground?
Rob

Rob!

Thanks for reaching out. It was go great riding with you at the LLB spring Moab camp. Stoked you’re still working the kung fu.

Some day soon you’ll have a RipRow™ for your endurance, strength, speed, power and skills training. We have patent pending and a final design, and right now we’re figuring out production.

I’ve been using versions of the RipRow™ with myself and clients for several years now. When I teach people on the RipRow™ they gain skills insanely quickly. I swear 10 minutes on this thing is worth a week on a pump track. Questions? Want one? Email me.

Here’s the latest design (v7).

Here’s a video of me deep into a very hard workout on v5. You can see my form breaking down … but better here than on the Whole Enchilada. I’m telling you man, when I’m on trail I’m so much stronger and faster than ever. It’s because I get thousands of loaded cycles every week — in the winter too.

Password is “LetsRipRow2017!”

Until you have your RipRow™ …

… it’s all about Cul-De-Sac Kung Fu

Shoveled driveways work too.

The big skills to hit in your driveway are:

• Sprinting (which ties to technical climbing)
• Braking
• Cornering including pumping corners
• Hopping (which ties directly to pumping and jumping)
• Combinations of the above

In the beginning it’s best to focus on one of these skills at a time. The LLBMTB online mountain bike school shows you these skills in detail. Check out LLBMTB >>>

Since you’re an advanced rider, I’ll suggest you do my favorite:

Eights of Ignominy

1. Shovel your driveway by hand. That’s your warmup.

2. Place a thing in the middle of your area. This can be a log, a box, a LandWave ramp or whatever. It should be something you can hop over without too much trouble. It’ll get hard late in the workout, I promise. I like the LandWave ramps because you can roll ’em, hop ’em or jump ’em. You can also make them bigger.

3. Near the ends of your area, place some kind of target to turn around. Cones, piles of snow, whatever.

The simplest pattern is a figure eight. If you have space, you can add more turns and make some crazy cloverleaf.

Each lap consists of sprint, pump/hop/jump, brake, turn one way, sprint, pump/hop/jump, brake and turn the other way. This gets very tricky, especially as you get tired. Over time you’ll start to overlap the skills — which will help you shred natural terrain harder/faster.

Because most of us are busy, and we need to get the most we can out of our training, I suggest you treat this like a Pump Up the Base workout. For example, in week one, PUTB calls for 6 sets of 3 minutes at Sweet Spot intensity. Eights of Ignominity for 3 minutes x 6 is really, really hard. But it’s fun. And you get both fitness and skills training. And … it’s not a trainer!

Show us how it goes. Watch this site for more Cul-De-Sac Kung Fu.

Lee

Know more. Have more fun!

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