- 9 hours ago
Pro cycling looks great! The best road bikes and road bike wheels to race on, sunny bike rides on the worlds best cycling roads and quite literally getting paid to do what most of us choose to do for fun. However, is being a pro cyclist really as good as it looks from the outside and what does a pro cyclist actually get up to on a typical training day?
Thanks to Vision we got the chance to find out and spent a day with the Bahrain Victorious team on their winter cycling training camp in Denia, Spain.
Is there anything that we can copy off the pro cyclists to make us faster or more comfortable on the bike? We get to know the riders to find out...
Thanks to Vision we got the chance to find out and spent a day with the Bahrain Victorious team on their winter cycling training camp in Denia, Spain.
Is there anything that we can copy off the pro cyclists to make us faster or more comfortable on the bike? We get to know the riders to find out...
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00:11What is it like to be a pro cyclist? Is it as glamorous as everyone says it is? Is it
00:17all
00:17sun, sea and spokes? Well when Vision invited us to find out we headed on the first flight out here
00:26to join the team Bahrain Victorious on what an average training day might look like so we're
00:32going to be finding some riders we're going to be finding out what makes them tick what do they eat
00:37what do they do what do they do when they're not actually riding a bike even though for quite a
00:42lot
00:42of the day they're going to be riding a bike and what I want to find out is is it
00:46really a dream
00:47job is it what it's all cracked up to be because obviously we often see pro cyclists they're
00:53standing on the top of a podium it's all champagne and smiles but behind the scenes in January February
01:00is that the reality this is cycling weekly let's go and find some pro riders
01:10big rides need proper fueling but the Bahrain Victorious team don't eat in the same section of
01:15the hotel restaurant as everyone else they have their own team chef who's been up for a few hours
01:21preparing enough food to feed an army most of the riders were weighing out their food before eating
01:27each rider has macro goals it makes sense that a 52 kilo rider like Lenny Martinez isn't going to need
01:35as many calories as the sprinters as well as traditional breakfast items such as cereals and milk there's also
01:42loads of red fruits jams rice and pasta and porridge being consumed oh and more eggs and coffee than I've
01:50ever
01:50seen in my life I think in the comp I will wake up earlier but at home I think it
01:58will be around
01:58the 9 10 I wake up a bit late and I will go training maybe 11 30 and I think
02:06the average for the week is
02:07maybe three hour because sometimes it's two sometimes five it's mostly a lifestyle of training camp
02:15so you wake up usually me personally around seven have some easy breakfast and then prep for your
02:23ride I usually leave training between nine and ten and training takes quite some time
02:39so after breakfast it's time for the most important bit of the day obviously the bike ride so all the
02:45riders have just come out of a briefing in their separate ride groups they're all going to do different
02:50things and they've just been briefed on that so some are doing lactate or bicarb testing some are just
02:54doing some zone 2 endurance some are doing some team time trial training I thought it would be a good
02:59time to come and show you the setup that they've got at a team training camp so you've got various
03:04vans to help them get all the equipment and bikes and wheels and new helmets and they've just had all
03:11their new team kit delivered so they're all wearing that you've got two mechanics trucks so this one is
03:17for the development team actually so they're all training here together which means that there's a
03:22total of about 50 riders here just from Bahrain victorious so you've got the development team
03:27mechanics bus with all their bikes and wheels and then you've got the main team bus with all of their
03:32bikes and wheels
03:32including all their TT bikes that one's waiting for all the new livery so that one's going to have Bianchi
03:40written on it very soon
03:44the best thing about being a pro cyclist is that you always get to ride the best available equipment this
03:51I like the most those are the best things available to the market about yeah because I'm also a bike
03:57tech nerd so
03:58for me personally this is just how many bikes does the team actually have so overall we touching about 450
04:10bikes
04:10yeah so that is some money as well TT bikes or three teams yeah road bikes obviously so we have
04:17a
04:17Devo team like I said we have a junior team in Belgium and then it's my job to organize what
04:23frames and what
04:24material comes in who gets obviously the big team is the priority but how we arrange that is is a
04:31quite a
04:31complicated formula I would say I'm now slightly scared to ask how many wheel sets you have
04:36so wheel sets I would need to do a calculation I think it's about 400 again yeah yeah 400 carbon
04:44wheel sets if you could choose one wheel set depth to race for the rest of your life what depth
04:52would
04:52it be 45 I think 45 most definitely 45 mm-hmm and if you could only choose one steel spokes
04:59or carbon
05:00spokes no carbon spokes yeah for me all the way I think the new RS wheels especially the 45s are
05:06really top-notch and yeah it's the best wheels I was I ever rode so for me for sure carbon
05:12spokes
05:39after a good few hours through the 196 kilometer ride one of the groups understandably pulled into
05:45a filling station however it wasn't my usual order of a Lucas aid or Mars bar on the menu and
05:50rather
05:51today's mid-ride stop was for bicarb testing so while some riders stripped off layers other jumped
05:57into the back of the car pricked their fingers and provided blood samples to see whether their
06:02preloading of bicarb had worn off so bicarb is a lactate buffer with proven performance gains but
06:10there is a very fine line between riding faster and getting some quite bad gastro intestinal issues so
06:18these camps are all about finding what works best for each individual rider next stop some harder efforts
06:37in the mountains what do you think is the most overlooked aspect of being a pro cyclist I think
06:43it's quite hard to comprehend the sacrifice the biggest sacrifice is probably the actual needs to
06:50to live as a weird lonely guy who needs to ride his bike all day yeah so that's the time
06:58spent away
06:59from from your loved ones and all the social gatherings that you need to say no to and all those
07:03things
07:04are probably the biggest sacrifice if you could change one thing about being a pro cyclist what would
07:10it be I think maybe less stress in the bunch when we race more respect and less stress and like
07:19this less
07:19crash and uh yeah just this I think
07:35right well the riders are back from their ride and while some of the world tour team have gone out
07:40to try their TT bikes because they've got to make sure they're all right before tomorrow's team time trial
07:45practice I've seen quite a lot of the development team going into here so let's go and see what
07:50they're up to some of this I assume
08:00so over in the far corner they're doing some physiological testing and then here they've got
08:05a bike fitting setup with a full retool setup so they're putting little tabs on all the joints and
08:11important bits and then they measure the positions of the bike so that hopefully they can be comfortable
08:17and fast so this one's about to get going
08:25now you might be asking why are the riders having a bike fit when they've just got back from riding
08:31said
08:31bikes and yeah fair enough good question the truth is the riding just doesn't stop and there's a lot of
08:38riders to get fitted so the team staff managed to get all the world tour team fitted during the
08:43December camp on both their road bikes and their time trial bikes but now it's time for the development
08:49team riders so this is particularly important this year as the teams have new bikes for the season
08:54they've moved from Merida to Bianchi the contact points of the bike are transferred onto the computer
09:00using this tool and then these patches on each joint log the movement of the rider as they ride
09:07the physiologists and sport scientists and then look at all the angles the knee flexion the toe
09:12dip the hip angle for example and combine this with rider input to get not only as efficient as possible
09:19but also comfortable because it turns out that is quite important when you're riding 30 hours a week
09:29the biggest change that has happened with the bike tech and wheel tech in particular is probably these
09:35brakes that enabled wheel manufacturers to have more freedom in designing the rim i think
09:42it's enabled the rim to be wider more aero also lighter because there's no need to be able to take
09:48in the
09:49the demands of the actual braking i think yeah wheels now are incomparable to what they were just a few
09:55years ago even with vision the sl wheels were good but now this year with the rs wheels they are
10:03even lighter even stiffer you really feel feel a huge difference between the old and the new wheels
10:09it's really evolved and i think it will continue evolving in the future i think we're still not quite
10:14sure how white is the best balance between rolling resistance comfort and weight so uh it's an ongoing
10:22research and i think yeah a lot of time and effort and money has been put into it and i
10:27think uh yeah
10:28it's still uh it's still a race that's ongoing
10:35these camps are all about trialing new tech and the next day we spotted mohoric using a different vision
10:41wheelset to every other rider on the team it turns out that these are the gravel wheels with a wider
10:4725 millimeter internal width on which he's got 32 millimeter tires he's going to be trialing those
10:54before the spring classics anyway we got distracted by the bikes whilst the team had a strength and
11:00conditioning session and before you knew it it was time for dinner once again there was a team only
11:05buffet and lots of food weighing an abundance of rice and whilst there was no alcohol the riders were
11:11allowed pudd actually everyone was very well behaved even the team staff the visiting sponsors and team
11:17guests refrained from a beer it really is amazing that you're going to have such a high performance
11:22environment just down the coast from benedorm i aim to have dinner uh quite early before eight if
11:29possible and then it's time to wind down before sleep i aim to go sleep um yeah before 10 o
11:36'clock if
11:37possible and how many hours sleep to try and get there to be okay usually i need nine hours of
11:43sleep
11:43but uh if i can get more than the better if i get less than nine hours then it's not
11:48gonna be i need
11:49to get more sleep the tour de france is often called a traveling circus but we forget that the
11:55show doesn't just happen behind every otherworldly performance are years of silent preparation
12:02for a team like bahrain victorious the logistics don't stop when the finish line is crossed
12:07it's a 365 day grind by hundreds of riders and staff winter camps and a relentless calendar that
12:14demands months away from home we're all too familiar with seeing the victory salutes we don't see
12:20the sacrifice that it takes to earn the right to stand there i think after spending this time with
12:25the team i certainly have a newfound appreciation of the scale of a world tour team and for
12:30professional cyclists well i don't think the greatest challenge are the mountains in front of
12:35them and rather the discipline that it takes to show up day in day out before the world is even
12:41watching
12:42a big thanks to vision for making this happen and to the bahrain victorious team for giving us
12:47access if you like this kind of content then please give it a like subscribe to the channel
12:52for lots more bike stuff and we'll see you next time
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