coaching, cycling, victoria, masters, olympics, houshang amiri

“Houshang has proven time and again that he can take any athlete from the novice level to World Class calibre.”
- Erinne Willock

Mountain Biking

One thing that many athletes new to the sport don’t realize is that the base fitness for mountain biking still comes from the road. While beginners should spend a significant amount of time mountain biking to develop their skills, elite athletes will actually spend about 60% of their time on the road and the remaining 40% honing their technical skills on the trail. The technical component is developed entirely on the mountain bike, but athletes can’t compete at high levels if they don’t have the fitness first.

Top Mountain Bike Form Requires Three Components:

First, aerobic endurance and aerobic power are developed through long rides on the road. Athletes will spend almost all of their time in the winter on the road bike. Bear in mind, to ensure proper specificity of training it is essential that your road bike position is set up as close to your mountain bike as possible.
Second, athletes need to develop short explosive power through interval training
Finally, mountain bikers need good core strength to control their bikes

Some Mountain Bikers We’ve Worked with...

Max Plaxton

Silver Medalist, U23 World Championships
Max was genetically gifted with an enormous aerobic capacity. Right from the start though, he understood that that was not enough. As a very good technical rider, he still spends 70% of his time on the road.

Roland Greene

Two-Time World Cross Country Champion.
To reach the highest levels, Roland understood that what he did off the bike was as important as what he did on the bike. When he was World Champion, Roland said that he spent any spare moment he had doing core exercises. As he put it , he was always doing one of four things “riding, eating, sleeping, or core.”