Riding Faster And Further By
Using Your Brain
Imagine riding up a hill, but your muscles are in pain and you don’t know what to do. Well, everything about that is situated around the brain. You’ll learn how to prevent, but also to deal with exhaustion. Most sporters want to achieve high results by training their figure, but not even half of all sporters know that for those results you need a good and trained mind.
Motivation
Training the mind is as important as building your body. Your body could be very fit while your mind already left the ride. That has a very strong impact on the rest of your cycling performance. There are some very interesting aspects that have a lot to do with having control over your own mind. Not even one cyclist is constantly motivated to get on the bike or do another after another excercise. Motivation is a deeply personal thing. Everyone has a part of it in them, but even better: you use it with everything you do. From going out of bed to going to the dentist. So motivation is the foundation of everything. A couple of tools that could help keeping that motivation is:
- Setting goals, thriving towards a particular goal is something that can keep us having focus and helps to find motivation. The beauty is that you probably already know that something is going to make you satisfied.
- Having training buddy’s, this is important because you’ll feel part of a team. Even on days when you don’t feel like biking they can help you out of your bed, especially when the weather is bad. When cycling with others you’ll notice that your average speed increases, because you constantly want to top each other. Another thing that will notice you is when you’ve set a date and a time to go biking and you tend to quit, someone else will help you get back in the game. And this obviously works two-ways.
Confidence
Another aspect of using your brain when cycling is building up confidence. One of the things you want to have is being prepared. You actually want to feel like you’ve done everything before going on a long or short cycling trip. Because you’re preparing like you’re going to get succesfull, your mind is going to believe you’re accually succesfull. Besides being prepared, talking to yourself matters a lot in your confidence. When you put on your cycling suit and say to yourself ‘I can’t do it’, you probably won’t be able to do it as well as possible. Instead try using this sentence: ‘I can and will do it’. This is an aspect you’ll find when climbing up a hill. You don’t think: ‘this is hard, I cant do this.’ No, you’ll register ‘this is the thing I’m going to remember’.
Imagery and visualisation
The third aspect is imagery or visualisation. Before the ride you need to close your eyes and visualise yourself concuering a steep hill. That encourages the feeling that you can actually do it. Even on your bike you can apply this method. I wouldn’t recommend closing your eyes on your bike, but you could still try to visualise about the place you’re heading towards.
Dealing with pain
The hardest part for your brain is when you’re in pain during your cycling training. It is so very hard, but here are some tips to deal with that pain. First one is breath, when you breath you’re body absorbs more oxcygen, so because of that your body is able to function better. Of that breath the exhale is much more important when it comes to lowering your stress level. The second tip is relaxing your body. When relaxing your muscles and lowering your shoulders your body will be able to reduce the pain much quicker. Understand how your body form is on the bike and anticipate when you need it. Another tip is connecting positive thoughts and emotions with your pain. You’ll actually feel more pain when thinking negative thoughts. Meanwhile, when thinking positive thoughts and happy emotions you instantly will adapt to those thoughts.
Keep your focus
Then another aspect of using your brain when cycling is knowing how to stay focused. As we’ve also discussed in the part about dealing with pain, positive thoughts will give you the feeling that you’re able to reach the end. That doesn’t especially mean that you need tob e happy all the time, but rather about focusing on the thing you came to do, focusing on your goal. Secondly you need tot hink about what you need to do when you ride your best rather than focusing on your destination. Especially endurance riders can apply this, because a long track sometimes can’t seem to be finished.
Negative emotions
When you’re start to experience negative emotions it’s really beginning to get hard. First you need to accept the fact that they’re there. Second you need to figure out the cause, so you can start to find for a solution. Sometimes it helps to zoom out a little bit so that you’re being able to see the bigger picture. It will surely give you another kind of insight of the situation. The three most powerful bad emotions on a bike are fear, frustration and despair. When you made it to deal with these emotions you’re bike performance will increase very much.
