My colleague Jake Stephenitch is a strength and conditioningcoach based in the Chicago area who specializes in programs for BMX riders. Asa BMX rider himself he came across the power of strength training to improvehis riding and decided that he wanted to help his fellow riders by becoming acoach himself.

I’ve known Jake for a few years through email and socialmedia but had never had the chance to talk to him and pick his brain on hisapproach to training. After writing a great article on When Should Kid’s StartUsing Clipless Pedals I figured it was time to get him on the BikeJames Podcast.

Which is exactly what I did. I had a great conversation with Jake, covering a lot of topics like…

- Why would a mountain biker care about what a BMX coach hasto say?

- Advice on training kids

- Thoughts on flats and clipless pedals for BMX racing.

- How the PRI system has influenced his training programs.

- Why breathing is the most important thing for you totrain.

- His favorite exercises for improving core strength andoverall power

You can find out more about Jake at his blog www.sparkbmxtraining.com. And if youlive in the Sandwich IL area you can learn more about training with Jake athis gym by visiting www.sparkmovementfit.com.

I hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast and get somegood takeaways from our conversation. If you have any thoughts or questions besure to sure them in the comments section on my blog.

Until next time…

Ride Strong,

Sports training is a delicate balancing act between several

For example, specificity and health - while you need your

You also have high and low intensity training - you need

For us as mountain bikers it is important to keep this

Enter our old friend running.

Running is something that most riders would really benefit

Why is this? What makes running so helpful for us as

In this new edition of the BikeJames Podcast I go over why

Here are the notes from this episode:

- This podcast is about running and how it can help you

- Running is probably one of the best types of cardio

- For most riders it would actually be better to add in a

- Running is an inherent human gift and when we lose it

- Easier to get a workout in (15-60 minutes of running vs. 1

- It helps improve your posture and feel for standing

- It uses a contra-lateral movement vs. the ipsa-lateral

- It is a great way to introduce true low intensity training

- Important to build aerobic engine to improve your anaerobic

- You can get low intensity cardio through riding on the

- To keep running low intensity you need to either focus on

- Use the Maffetone formula of 180 - your

As a kid I remember that I could see myself being 30-something but 40 seemed pretty old, almost like life was pretty much over at that point. I laugh looking back on it now because one day I woke up and I’m the “old guy”.

And while life is far from being over, at the same time I have to admit to myself that things certainly aren’t the same.

By the time we hit 40 a lot of us have some wear and tear going on. Maybe it is from a previous injury or maybe it’s just time catching up with us but either way, making sure that we can improve our strength and power on the trail without blowing ourselves up in the process is important.

Over time I’ve found that there some important things you can do as you get older to keep riding strong while staying healthy and durable. These include:

- Find ways to improve your strength and fitness without having to place a lot of load on the body.

- Learn how to work with your body and focus on expanding your 80%, not hammering against your 100%.

- Focus on skills training and not excessive on-bike cardio training.

- Work on maintaining and improving your mobility.

- You’ve got to crawl like a baby to ride like a man (or woman).

In this webinar replay I go over these tips in a lot more detail. I’m basically going to share everything I’ve learned up to this point about how to keep the 40+ rider training and riding strong.

Now, I’d also like to point out that these tips are not about trying to win your age group or achieve a KOM on STRAVA. While you may get faster, this webinar is more about teaching you how to improve your durability and health while enjoying riding more.

Until next time…

Ride Strong,

James Wilson

MTB Strength Training Systems

p.s. You can now get the only program made for the 40+mountain bike rider for just $19. Click below to learn more about the 40+ MTBRider Program and how it can help you enjoy riding even more.

Click here to learnmore and get your copy for just $19

One of the things I love about mountain biking is the blending of fitness and skill it requires. I’ve often described mountain biking as the love child between an endurance sport like distance running and an action sport like surfing, making it a unique sport to both participate in and train for.

This is one of the reasons that skills training is such apopular subject among riders. While some riders try to “out-fitness” their way through everything, a lot of riders recognize the need to improve their trail specific skills.

And so every year thousands of riders invest countless hours and money in attending skills camps, watching videos and reading articles and books in an attempt to improve their fundamental skills on the trail.

But what if some of the most popular advice that is being given isn’t really the best way to teach someone the desired skill?

Worse yet, what if some of this advice was actually holding you back on the trail?

Well, unfortunately that is exactly what I’ve found to be the case. After spending years trying to apply the normal skills training advice to execute basic skills like Body Position and Cornering, I came to realize that a lot of what we are taught has us focused on the wrong things.

The problem that I found was that most of this skills training advice was either blindly applied from another sport (usually motorcycle riding) or it sounded good in theory but it actually went against how the human body is designed to optimally move.

By focusing on the specifics of our sport and respecting the human body in the process I found I was able to improve my skills much faster and, better yet, I was better able to apply those improved skills to new trails and situations.

Over the years I’ve had the chance to work with hundreds of riders and I’ve found that there are 3 pieces of skills training advice that are pure myth. These 3 things actually hold back a lot of riders who try to apply them.

And while I’ve talked about them all at one point or another on my blog and podcasts, I wanted to put on a free webinar that goes over these Top 3 MTB Skills Training Myths all together.  Here’s what you’ll learn in this free webinar:

- Why "elbowsout" is the wrong way to get your arms in the right position...and what simple cue can get your elbows in the right place every time.

- Why "lightlights, heavy feet" can result in an unbalanced position that robs you of braking

One of the things that gets lost in the “cardio training” conversation is that cardio is very specific to how you train it.

This is why tri-athletes need to run, ride and swim – the cardio from one isn’t going to help in the other areas. They need to spend time training their cardio system to support the specific demands of each discipline.

While this extreme example is pretty obvious, things get a little murkier when we try to look at the cardio demands for mountain biking.

The problem is that we keep running into the basic pedaling = cardio equation.

You know, the one that tells us that if we aren’t pedaling we aren’t really working on our mountain bike specific cardio.

This simplistic equation – which actually works pretty well for road riders – is the reason that mountain bikers are told to focus cardio training almost exclusively on the lower body.

Here’s the problem, though.

Cardio built through the lower body has little transfer to the upper body.

Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if we were road riders and the upper body wasn’t used as much.

However, on the trail we use the upper body. A lot.

This is one of the big things that separates mountain biking from road riding as a sport – the upper body demands on the trail are many, many times higher than on the road.

In fact, despite many looks at it there is no direct connection between your VO2Max (which is primarily measured using lower body dominant methods like running or cycling) and performance as a mountain biker.

However, one study found that there was a connection between how fast you could ride downhill and your grip strength endurance, which ties in directly to what I call “upper body cardio”.

To me, this means that complete cardio training for the mountain biker includes both upper and lower body cardio training methods. In fact, most riders have pretty decent lower body cardio,