21 Effective MTB Training Tips
In this post, we'll look through a selection of effective MTB-specific training tips to help you prepare for the tough racing demands of modern cross-country competition.
So, without further hesitation, let's get straight into the first tip...
1. Create a race-like circuit
If you want to feel more confident on race day, design a loop in your local mountain bike spot that has a “concentrated” collection of features that you’d find in a race.
Include a few corners or berms, a steep climb and a rooty or rocky descent.
You can then ride loops at race pace to dial in the sensation of riding fast on this terrain to prepare you for off-road racing.
2. Use big gear accelerations
Producing lots of force and overcoming high amounts of torque is critical to going fast off-road, and is quite different to general road riding.
Mountain bikers produce power off-road in a low cadence and high force manner when racing and or riding hard.
On the road though, most of the pedalling time will be at a higher cadence, whether high or low force (climbing compared to coasting in the bunch)
This places unique demands on the muscles of MTBers and therefore this type of muscle fibre recruitment needs to be trained appropriately.
You can work on this within road rides, or schedule specific MTB rides for this purpose, using big gear interval drills to do so.
3. Lower intensity, longer duration
Increasing training volume rather than average intensity is a sustainable way to improve fitness long-term.
What’s the best way to increase volume? More low intensity time.
Low intensity allows you to ride for longer and is relatively less stressful mentally and physically, promoting sustainable and consistent training.
Try dialling back the intensity of your long rides in favour of a bit of extra duration.
4. Run in the off-season
Running can help develop the strength of your fast twitch muscles due to the more ‘explosive’ movement pattern.
Another key benefit is that running can help fill “strength leaks” from muscles that get neglected by cycling alone. I’m talking about the glutes and hamstrings. This can lead to better efficiency on the bike, and may also help reduce the risk of injury caused by muscle imbalances.
Try adding running to your plan conservatively initially, as you may notice you experience quite a bit of muscle soreness over the first few weeks.
5. Vary your workouts
Making sure you have a bunch of training sessions in your arsenal is key for two reasons:
Motivation and training stimulus.
There’s always more than one way to target a specific ability, so vary up your training with a few workout designs for each type of training session you do.
For example, VO2Max can be trained with longer intervals (e.g. 5x 6-mins with ~4-5-min recoveries) or by using microburst workouts, such as 3x 9-min blocks alternating between 30S hard, 15S easy).
Changing things up week on week can help keep your plan fresh and exciting. It also provides a variation in training stimulus, which can help develop your fitness in a more well-rounded way and help avoid stagnation.
For example, there’s some evidence to suggest that longer VO2max intervals are particularly beneficial for improving cardiac output (the amount of blood the heart can pump, which contributes to VO2max), whereas microbusrst seem to be good for developing mitochondrial efficiency (another factor impacting VO2max).
By including some variation in workout design, you are making sure you’re working on VO2max in a more holistic way.
6. Try out block periodisation
Block periodisation (also known as ‘block overload’) is the concept of developing one specific ability by blocking multiple sessions together to create a greater specific stress and then maintaining those gains.
In practice, this might look like 5 interval sessions in the first week of a 4-week block, and then 1 maintenance workout per week in the remaining 3 weeks.
This is in contrast to a more traditional organisation where you’d train 2 interval sessions per week for each of the 4 weeks.
As the MTB season is quite long, this block periodisation strategy can be a useful way to include a concentrated dose of training between blocks of racing, where you should ideally focus on developing an aspect of fitness that is your biggest performance limiter.
Here’s a great block periodisation paper on the benefits and how it’s been used in practice.
It’s worth noting though that there is a risk of overtraining with this block periodisation strategy, and we’d recommend that you test this strategy out early in the year, when any racing is still quite far away.
7. More time on the MTB
Do you periodise your mountain bike training?
If you don’t, there are quite a few ways you can do it.
All it means is that training characteristics change depending on the time or “period” of the season…
One way that world class athletes across endurance sports periodise is though the training mode, i.e. the type of activity itself.
For MTBers, try spending more time on the MTB and off-road as you get closer to the competition period, dedicating more training time to specific activities and less to non-specific.
8. MTB recovery riding on tarmac
Recovery rides are often best done on the road, thanks to the consistent surface, gradients etc.
You don’t have to ride your road bike though…
Try getting more time on your MTB simply by riding it on the road for an hour or so on a recovery ride.
Different riding positions result in recruitment of different muscle fibres. Doing your recovery rides on the MTB will help you get used to pedalling in the exact position you’d race in, optimising your muscles and conditioning your body to your MTB’s geometry.
You can also test that the gears, brakes etc are all working right before racing.
9. Work on your starts
Ever got a bad start in a MTB XC race because of a slipped pedal? I know I have…
Even World Cup front row pros miss their pedal and it makes a big difference to where you enter the first section of singletrack.
Practice your starts throughout the build up to the season, starting stationary, clipping in and sprinting.
This will develop your muscle memory and reaction times, so you’ll know exactly where to put your foot in a flash when racing comes around.
10. Ride more corners
Getting better at cornering is “free speed”.
Free speed is where you have the ability to get faster without much extra effort and cornering is certainly an area you can capitalise on.
Practice your line choice, entrance speed, exit speed and body position across a range of different turns and berms to dial in your technique.
You should find you’re more confident, faster and can make up lots of time you’d otherwise lose over the duration of a race.
11. Practice looking further ahead
Another tactic to get free speed is to develop your ability to look ahead and scan the trail.
This is something that we all know we should do, but many don’t actively practice. Try scheduling some technical skills rides on the MTB and include some drills where you focus on looking further down the track.
Use your peripheral vision to alert yourself to obstacles in close proximity, and then use your central vision to assess what’s further ahead.
You’d be surprised how much faster you can go the more you practice:
12. Incorporate plyometrics
Cross-country racing is becoming shorter and more explosive year-on-year...
This demands different abilities than in year’s past.
How do we adapt to these changes?
Try adding explosive jumping and hopping to your training to develop your fast twitch muscles. Hopping up stairs works well and adds something a bit different to your training.
13. Work on jump skills
MTB XC racing is also becoming more technical each year and one type of feature that's becoming more common are jumps.
In order to make sure you can negotiate jumps both safely and whilst carrying speed, it's important to practice this skill in a training environment.
Start off small if jumping isn't something you're too familiar with and develop the correct technique before moving onto larger features. For instance, using tabletop jumps is a good way to start before moving onto doubles, i.e. where there's a gap between the take off and landing.
Try riding with someone else when doing this kind of training too, both from a safety and from an encouragement point of view.
14. Ride on the road
Now this might seem counterintuitive in a post specifically aimed at mountain bikers, but stay with me…
Riding on the road is almost always going to present a more consistent platform with which to train on. Essentially, you’re able to perform an effort without dodging a tree, freewheeling over roots or having to slow down into a berm.
Therefore, when it’s time to train some very specific intervals, tarmac can be the best setting for these precise intensity goals.
Of course, as an XC racer, you need to balance time on the trails (specific training) with your road riding (less specific), but there’s certainly a place for both.
15. Periodise high intensity
As mentioned, periodisation simply means to alter the characteristics of your training depending on what time or “period” of the season you’re in.
Periodising the intensity and duration of specific sessions can go a long way to helping you prepare for the XC season successfully.
Try approaching it like a funnel, where the further out you are from your goal, the less specific your training is, i.e. work more on your peripheral or ‘base’ fitness, and then hone in on your specific performance limiters, as it comes time to peak. Sometimes this is conceptualised as first ‘training to train’ (i.e. building abilities that you need in order to train effectively), and then ‘training to race’ (building abilities that you need specifically for racing).
We discuss periodisation in our article here.
To do these workouts correctly, you'll also want to correctly set your cycling training zones.
16. Label your rides
One tactic that has really helped me when it comes to being focused and disciplined with my training?
A simple labelling system. All it involves is labelling a day as “training” or “recovery”.
When a day is labelled as “training” in your training plan, it means that whatever I do that day has to be sufficiently challenging to cause a strong adaptive response. That could be a long ride where the duration is the challenge, it could be a very intense session, or it could mean training twice in that day to induce a greater training stimulus. This is a day where you’re allowed and in fact encouraged to get tired.
On the flip side, if a day is labelled as “recovery” then the goal is clear: I do everything I can to make sure my recovery is as high quality as possible and I shouldn’t try to build fitness through inducing stress.
By being very clear and asking the question of what today’s label is before every workout, I can be very clear on what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.
If you can’t assign a label like this to a ride or a particular day, it may be that your plan isn’t focused enough and you might be slipping into a grey area of mediocre training.
17. Train with a dropper seatpost
This one is a bit of an equipment tip, but relates to skills training too.
More and more top racers are using the benefits of dropper seat posts in both training and racing, and it’s an evolution that will continue going forward.
They're especially useful when you're doing track reconnaissance, allowing you to ride steep and technical sections for the first time with greater confidence.
You can then get comfortable with tricky parts of the course and decide whether to use a dropper post in the race, or go for the lower-weight standard seat post option once you're comfortable with everything on track.
18. Train heavy, race light
A tactic I’ve seen a few top XC racers use is to train on a bike that is far heavier than the one they race on.
Obviously, this is a luxury, but even if you don’t have two bikes, there are ways around it.
The idea is that when you then hop on your race-ready setup on the day of competition, you feel agile, fast and generally have a better mental experience.
A lighter bike will mean you’ll be climbing faster, able to manoeuvre the bike around more easily and use less energy for a given task that you’re used to in training.
This can be done simply by using heavier wheels on your race bike (greater rotational weight is easily the best way to add more resistance in this manner) or just using heavier tyres with greater rolling resistance.
19. Include sprints in your training
Sprinting is something which I and a lot of XC racers forget about or at least don’t do enough of in training, but it’s to our detriment not to train this ability fairly regularly.
MTB XC racing has been described as a series of sprints out of corners, and it’s a huge advantage to be able to lay down a lot of power from a low start speed.
Try to work in some maximal sprints on both your road and your MTB rides. Experiment with high cadence and low cadence accelerations.
Far from just improving your absolute maximum power, it’ll also be very effective training for your muscles when it comes to overcoming high levels of torque.
This is something very specific to off-road riding and racing.
20. Train different terrain
Like the very first tip of creating a loop designed to make you feel more confident on race day, ensuring you ride on a multitude of different surfaces regularly is also key.
I realised this after spending the year racing across Europe, and coming into contact with a wide variety of different climates and types of dirt, and it’s something I’m incorporating more into my mountain bike training to the best of my ability.
Making sure you know how to ride in everything from mud, to sand, to gravel will put you in a better frame of mind come race day, but obviously increase your speed and competitive advantage too.
Turning up the day before a race and trying to learn how to tackle an alien surface from scratch is far from ideal, and can have a large negative impact on your stress levels.
21. Use longer intervals
Mountain bike racing is characterised by many repetitions of short, intense intervals, but that doesn't mean you have to train like this all the time...
What you'll notice looking at a MTB race file is that even though there are short bursts of power and short recoveries, your heart rate actually stays elevated for minutes at a time, sometimes the entire first lap!
As far as your body is concerned here, it's doing a 8-15minute interval, and your training needs to reflect this. You need to get used to the idea of sustained intensity, rather than always training your body to expect a recovery interval after only 1-2 minutes of work.
Try using some longer intervals in your mountain bike training plan, taking advantage of the potent training zone between threshold and VO2Max.
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