Training to win an MX championship: Nutrition

The fifth and final instalment of the series focuses on what to fill your body with.

Author Aaron Hansel

Everyone knows that proper nutrition is an important component of general health, but for top athletes like Red Bull KTM’s Ryan Dungey and Marvin Musquin, it’s crucial. Not only do they demand more from their bodies, they also undergo a high level of physical stress, making getting the right nutrients essential. Aldon Baker explains how he helps Dungey, Musquin and the rest of his elite athletes keep their diets on the right track.

Eat This

“Eating right is more about a set of guidelines than it is a specific list of foods, and the glycemic index [a system that ranks foods on a scale from 1 to 100 based on their effect on blood-sugar levels] is a good nutritional tool. You want to know what foods are high and low in the glycemic index, and that will tell you basically how much nutritional value and calories a food has,” Baker says. “Anything that’s low in nutrients and high in calories is probably the basis of what the guys need to avoid. Foods with good nutritional value, such as good vegetables, fruits and proteins that have the lowest amount of saturated fat with regards to the highest amount of clean and natural protein are ideal.”

Not That

“Guidelines are also key when avoiding bad foods. You want to stay away from things like saturated fat, which does not help your body in any way. In fact, it makes recovery harder and stacks additional work on your body, and that’s not good. You want to stay away from sodium and sugar too. Another thing is portion sizes, which are just out of control in America. It’s also important to pay attention to how your body responds to certain things – foods that you can eat a lot of and never really get full for a while, that’s your body telling you that the nutritional value is pretty bad.”

“There are some specific things I like my athletes to say away from, such as red meat. For what the body is getting from red meat, and what it’s having to deal with, it doesn’t add up. If I need a guy to gain weight, I’ll tell him to eat it once in a while, as long as he knows what’s in it and where it came from – it should be grass fed and organic. Breads aren’t that great, it’s important to limit bread intake, and I’m not a fan of dairy either. Today’s dairy is not the dairy that grandpa and granny used to have. It’s being mass produced unfortunately, and there’s too many issues and junk that accompanies that. Fortunately there are better alternatives, such as almond milk and soy products, that weren’t available back in the day.”

Training to Win an MX Championship: Seat time

There’s no substitute for running ruts! It’s part four of our series on how to train like a pro.

6 July 2015 Author Aaron Hansel

Competing at the top tier of motocross and supercross is no joke. In addition to superlative talent, today’s top motocross athletes must also be extremely fit in order to weather the exhausting, physical storm that is modern racing. As a result, most pro racers have stringent off-the-bike fitness programs that would leave the average person wrecked and begging for mercy. However, as tough as the off-the-bike exercise is, it’s a small portion of the overall load. In this edition of Championship Form, Aldon Baker, trainer to Red Bull KTM’s Ryan Dungey, Marvin Musquin and many more, explains why there’s no replacement for actual seat time.

The Main Course

“Seat time is essential for maintaining and building bike skills, but it also fulfils a big part of their exercise requirements. There’s nothing that can directly duplicate what they do on the motorcycle,” Baker says. “That’s the main thing that they do, and it’s what everything hinges around. Everything else, all the other exercises, are designed to complement the riding. You want to duplicate that repetition to be so natural, and in order to do that you have to put in a lot of seat time.”

The Workload

“I would say 80 percent of Ryan and Marvin’s day is based around riding. They have to do a lot of riding to keep their skills and focus up, and while they’re doing that they’re also maintaining their fitness. Actual riding time varies depending on if they’re training for motocross or supercross, but for supercross it’s at least an hour every time they’re riding, and you’re looking at at least four days of riding.”

“If you count up how many laps, including on race weekend, it’s a lot, nearly 1000 laps in a month. It’s up there! It depends on the athlete too, and where they’re at with their fitness – you’ve got to build up to that. Of course, a 250 rider isn’t expected to do all that when training for supercross [250 supercross races are five laps shorter than their 450 counterparts], it just hinges on how much race time they have to have and what they’re preparing for. I don’t think people comprehend how much really goes into it.”

Exercise Makes You Smarter as You Age

 A new study finds that endurance sports like cycling may help prevent cognitive decline

By nelson rice

Here’s more reason to keep riding well after you’ve eclipsed 40 years old: Endurance exercise may keep your brain working at full-tilt as you age, according to a new study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin attempted to determine the correlation between a person’s cardio fitness and cognitive function in middle-aged adults.

The study drew from a sample of 59 adults between the ages of 43 and 65, with 32 participants classified as endurance-trained subjects and 27 as sedentary subjects. The exercising group had engaged in moderate or strenuous aerobic exercise for at least four days or seven hours a week, while the sedentary subjects exercised less than one hour a week.

The measurements used in the study consisted of an incremental treadmill test to measure cardio fitness, an ultrasound to measure blood flow velocity, and a series of cognitive tests that gauged a subject’s memory and attention.

Overall, the exercise group displayed a better performance on memory-related tests and had better cognitive composite scores. The possible link between exercise and staying sharp? People who exercised also displayed better vascular function, or blood flow in the brain, than the sedentary individuals.

The findings from this study suggest that middle-age endurance athletes “do not only have better cardiovascular function and health, but also enhanced cognitive performance particularly in the domains linked with age related cognitive decline and impairment,” said Dr. Martha Pyron, a coauthor of the study.

The study concluded, “Habitual aerobic exercise ameliorates vascular health, an effect which may further translate into improved cognitive performance.”

Although the majority of the endurance trained participants in the study were runners, Pyron said results imply that other forms of aerobic exercise, such as swimming or bicycling, can also have a positive impact on vascular health, and, in turn, cognitive function.

This article originally appeared on Runners World. 

Training to win a SX championship: Resting up

By Aaron Hansel

The latest instalment in the Red Bull series looks at the vital importance of letting your body recover.

The importance of rest in fitness programs is often overlooked. After all, if you’re not working hard, your body isn’t gaining any benefits, right? Wrong. Aldon Baker, trainer to Red Bull KTM superstars Ryan Dungey and Marvin Musquin, explains why.

 Making it Count

“Fitness is all about recovery. If you don’t recover quickly, your fitness is useless. It’s the only time the body can really learn how to recover and do its job. If you don’t have that balanced out well, you’re just hammering on the body constantly, which can work against you. You can start to see negative results because your body hasn’t had the time to learn how to deal with, and recover from, that stress,” Baker says. “It goes hand in hand with nutrition too. If you don’t treat your body right, if it doesn’t have the right ingredients, it won’t recover in the right way. You train hard, but you also recover hard. When you’re not training you should be resting and letting the body do what it naturally does. You have to train that ability too.”

Disciplined Relaxation© Ray Archer/Red Bull Content Pool

Disciplined Relaxation

“It’s a constant battle in a way because you don’t want the athlete to have a boring life, but you can’t lose sight of what your goals are. Resting instead of having fun recreating takes discipline—it’s not easy. Especially with these guys. The way they have to train and live, they’re constantly on the move and when you’re not doing that, you have to understand that you have to recover. You have to be able to keep that balance. It’s tough, and I get that, but part of my job is to monitor that and to get the athlete to understand why you need to be doing that.”

The Balance

“Finding a balance is a constant battle with racing’s brutal travel schedule and sponsor obligations. There’s nothing you can do about the travel, you just have to make that work. It’s the same with sponsor obligations too, you just have to make that part work. It’s a matter of prioritizing, weeding out what you have to do and what doesn’t really have to be done. That constantly changes too. The sponsors are a very important part of racing, but they want a lot in return too – these guys have a lot of people pulling on them. It comes down to trying to keep that balance and focusing on what the priorities really are. And normally, you can get the whole system to gel. The sponsors can usually be pretty understanding. You just have to keep it all in balance.”

Training to win an MX championship: Strength

Continuing our series, with advice and inside knowledge from star trainer Aldon Baker...

Date 22 June 2015AuthorAaron Hansel

James Stewart: Strength Training© Red Bull Content Pool

Strength training is a matter of debate in motocross. Some competitors build serious muscle, while others believe weight training can have unwanted effects, such as arm pump. To get to the bottom of it, we asked star trainer Aldon Baker, who has trained racers like James Stewart, Ricky Carmichael, Ryan Villopoto and many more, and currently works with Red Bull KTM’s Ryan Dungey and Marvin Musquin.

The Methods

Strength training is an important component to any racer’s fitness program. If you want to wrestle a motorcycle while smashing over extremely rough terrain at high speed you can’t be weak! It has to be usable strength though, which has a directly affects how Baker trains Dungey and Musquin.

“We work a lot on combination strength. If you look at the way a rider has to work the motorcycle, it’s never in one dimension—there’s multiple angles and directions that require multiple muscles to work at the same time,” Baker says. “With that in mind, I’m always challenging the guys to do combination workouts, like lifting while lunging—things like that. We’re challenging the body to be better in multiple areas at the same time.”

“We focus a lot on improving form, and we also do fatigue training to combat the stresses of racing a motorcycle. I utilize dumbbells a lot and a few barbells here and there, but I’m not a big fan of kettlebells—I think they can sometimes get a little out of control and do more harm than good. Controlled weight training is the best. A lot of the workouts are done just using the rider’s own weight. Plyometrics are a big component, as are core workouts—the hinge between the upper and lower has to be strong so the connection is right.”

Ryan Dungey: High Speed© Red Bull Content Pool

The Workload

“Just like with everything else, strength training depends on the individual—each guy has strengths and weaknesses. When I first start with an athlete, we test his strength to determine what I call a power-to-weight ratio. You want a guy to be as lean as possible so that he’s efficient, but you also want him to be as strong as possible for his size and weight,” Baker explains. “I’m not a big believer in heavy weights, I don’t think it’s necessary. I’m also don’t like exercises that affect an individual muscle. You’ve got to be careful with exercises that cause your biceps and forearms to get big—you need to spread the force throughout your entire arm and upper body in a linear motion. When you target a single muscle its memory gets messed up. You’re not trying to be a body builder. You’re not trying to pump a muscle up. That looks good on the beach, but for motorcycle racing it’s really not that good.”

The Balance

It’s important to switch up the routine from time to time. Doing the same exercises over and over not only leads to disinterest, but doesn’t produce well-balanced athletes.

“I like to change things up. The guys need be challenged in different areas and different combinations,” Baker explains. “It’s such a long year for them that I want to retain their interest and keep it fun, while getting them fitter and stronger.”