Yesterday afternoon Wattbike were out in force at the Chelsea FC training centre in Cobham yesterday. The state of the art facility was opened in April 2008 and hosts the training centre for the First Team, Reserve Team, Academy and Community programme. We set up in the Academy Gym and introduced them to the capabilities of the Wattbike. They were especially interested in the ability to monitor fitness and balance in their players during recovery from injury. Some of the ways that they were wanting to use the Wattbike were new to us, including standing cycling, both facing forwards and backwards without holding onto anything. This would help to develop good balance whilst also developing the musculature around the injured areas. They were also very interested in the possibilities of demonstrating the impact of injuries on the ability to produce power, especially where a player may feel fine, but the underlying weakness is still there.
Of course there was also the obligatory power tests, Steve Hughes, pictured below had thet top score at over 1250 Watts.
Steve Hughes, Chelsea Academy Physio, testing the Wattbike
Alistair Campbell took delivery of his new Wattbike yesterday. As a keen cyclist Alistair was immediately taken by the data that the Wattbike can deliver about cycling efficiency and power outout. He tweeted about his new Wattbike immediately and in his own words he “had more response than my piece on the NHS the other day!! ”
Alistair Campbell Website | Alistair Campbell on Twitter
In the Wattbike we have built a product that accurately measures Watts. It was not as easy as it might sound to do, but we have created a product that accurately records power output, from which other useful data can be calculated – i.e. energy (work) in Joules and speed (based on a calculation from British Cycling). It displays heart rate from Polar, Garmin ANT Sport and Suunto ANT chestbelts. All of the data created is accurate, so should we be thinking about the adding an estimate of calories burned?
If you are riding on a Wattbike as part of an overall fitness regimen, rather than to improve performance then Calories would be a useful addition, but is it devaluing the product by adding an estimation of the calories burned to generate that amount of power? For me I think the value of calories out weighs the disadvantage, but the difficulty will be ensuring that users understand the difference between an estimation of Calories and the accurate measurement of Power. We will add it to the request list.
Being out of contact with the news for a week leads to some pretty interesting reading when you return. This week has seen some pretty crazy stuff…. Lance Armstrong had his time trial bike stolen, and as he says on twitter …
Whoa!! They just came to my room and said our truck was broken into and someone stole my time trial bike! Wtf?!? APB out to the twitterati.
Then posted a picture of the bike…. - there was only one in the world so it would be pretty hard to sell on, especially to anyone who had seen the news. Eventually the bike was handed in to the Sacramento Police, but not before Trek had produced another TT bike for Lance with a nice little inscription on it…
Even with a different bike Lance was on good form, 14th over all (but inside his target of 15th), but not strong enough to attack his team mate Levi Leipheimer who went on to win the Tour of California for the third successive year.
Also in the news was Chris Hoy’s crash in the Keirin at the World Cup, you can see the race and crash on Youtube or read about it on the BBC or on Cycling Weekly’s site
Lets hope Chris is able to get back to full fitness for next month’s World Championships in Poland.
Just back from a week of leave to find that there has been plenty of activity in my absence! Steve and Ben have travelled the country and Eddie has been working from home, even though he has had Pneumonia – get well soon Eddie!
bikeradar.com has produced a review of the wattbike on their website. It is always interesting to see what other people think about the bike, and to read some of the responses. It is clear that there are differing views of the value of the Wattbike to cyclists. Of course that is to be expected, and I am sure in time they will reaslise what a high quality of training can be done in a short period of time on the Wattbike – the sort of session that it is very hard to do on the road.
There has also been another installment of the success of Jakob Kelly on thisislichfield
The Ranking has also taken on a life of it’s own with over 500 people now registered and still growing! Time to get some schools involved so that we can add a few younger categories.
I headed down to the University of Plymouth who are taking part in the Everyday Cycling with Wattbike University Project. Everyday Cycling is the arm of British Cycling that is focused on increasing participation in cycling, not just in the form of elite competition, but as a great means of transport as well as a very efficient way of keeping fit. The project plan is to get as many people as possible involved in cycling through the Everyday Cycling site www.everydaycycling.com and the Wattbike Ranking site www.wattbikeranking.com. There are plenty of activities planned for the 5 Universities taking part in the project.
Today Boris Johnson has had to appologise to security at City Hall after riding his bike through the building. Now come on Boris, by now you should know that if you are going to be doing indoor cycling the only bike to be using is the Wattbike. It won’t get you in trouble, and it will give you some valuable data, and if that data is good enough it will get you a look in with British Cycling, so we might yet see you in the Scratch Race.
Yesterday started with a trip to visit Sir Steve Redgrave and drop him off a Wattbike. He is a long term friend of ours and was keen to see the finished bike and to have a go! After a long discussion, verging on rant (mostly by me) about the health of the nation, lack of impact of many of the Government funded projects and especially lack of progress on the legacy programme for the Olympics we got round to the key issue. How much power can Steve produce! Still being VERY competitive Steve nipped off to get his training shoes – we half expected him to come back in a full British Cycling Beijing Skin Suit, but apparently they have all been shredded, but just trainers and his normal clothes, and he still pushed over 1590Watts on his first attempt! That was not good enough so he had another go and turned out a very impressive 1788Watts (that would put him 3rd on the ranking at the moment – and the two people who beat him are 23 and 26)! He has promised us that he will have another go today and see if he can get a better score once he is warmed up!
After leaving Steve we headed up to the Sports College Conference to join Eddie and Steve – they had had a very busy day with lots of interest from schools, and a Peak Power test by Total Swimming Business Development Manager and Commonwealth Gold Medalist Alex Scotcher - his 1236 Watts was pretty good especially as he was wearing some pretty tight trousers!
The promotional literature for the Universities project arrived today (except for A2 posters and pop ups – coming soon). It looks great and should add to the professionalism of the display at the five universities. The T-shirts and printed materials will go out tomorrow, so expect to see some serious wattbike project marketing around the Universities very soon.
The rest of the day was meetings meetings meetings. Some good progress was made on the new Wattbike brochure and a lot of talk about the value of Watts/Kilo as a measurement, although once we stated working out our own it was a bit scarey – I had hoped to be better than that! We are going to add the watts/kilo as a measurement in the ranking so that we can see not only who is most powerfull (peak power test) but also who produces the most power relative to their weight. It should be quite interesting, especially when you look at the desire to lose weight to race in the summer, how much of that weight loss is an advantage, and how much is a disadvantage – it has been a question asked by weight category sports people across all sports, but this should tell cyclists for sure.
Off to the Sports College Conference tomorrow. It should be a good couple of days.
Friday was a busy day, Eddie and Ben were in Manchester running a session for British Cycling Go-Ride Coaches, Steve was setting up for the Tri Cycle Run show in Sandown, and I was in Rochdale delivering a session demonstrating developing technologies in Physical Education for Building Schools for the Future (BSF). The BSF day provided a great opportunity to demonstrate what the Wattbike has to offer to Education with the chance to run races and demonstrate the capacity of the Wattbike to impact on teaching and learning. The event was well run by Wayne Shingler (Partnership Development Manager from Rochdale) and the kids were all very interested, although I was surprised how few of them could name a cyclist, and how few knew what Power was or what Power is measured in!
Eddie and Ben’s day with the Go Ride coaches was very successful, although more attended than expected – lucky we created twice the number of packs that we thought we needed. The Go Ride coaches will be a good link for us to what is going on on the ground and both Eddie and Ben were very impressed with their enthusiasm and vision for an event that is entirely new for them.
Steve fought the snow and set up safely for the Tri Cycle Run show.
