The chain whirs quietly, the sports child trailer with a baby that has been slumbering peacefully for hours rolls gently and silently behind the racing bike, the speedometer reads almost a hundred kilometres - you're about to complete the lap around the house. A dream? Not necessarily. Cycling-enthusiastic parents don't have to miss out on training if they keep a few things in mind.
Every parent knows: The birth of a child turns all areas of life upside down. Many activities have to be put on the back burner for the time being, and sporting goals that you previously had your sights set on become a distant memory. The most important thing is to really adjust to the new circumstances that children bring with them. And not to assume that everything will remain as it was before the children. Bernd Ebler, mountain bike coach at the Olympic Training Centre in Freiburg and himself the father of two children of baby and pre-school age, knows this from his own experience: "New situations require flexibility and creativity; this is precisely what many, even ambitious amateur cyclists, lack," says Ebler. He advises adapting the new goals to the new situation. Then the highlight of the season is not the extreme bike marathon or the crossing of the Alps.
Ebler also doesn't see the fact that you have to organise your training differently as a constraint, but rather as an opportunity to try out new and unusual things - and even improve as a result. "Hobby cyclists often reel off their kilometres for years with similar sequences and speeds," says Ebler. "They usually maintain the status quo, but they don't really improve because the muscles only ever get the same stimuli."
Riding with a child trailer is different: TOUR's measurements with a power measurement hub showed that the required power increases remarkably when starting off and on inclines - especially on flat, fast climbs: The test rider had to exert around 80 per cent more power on an easy climb ridden at a brisk pace in order to be just as fast with a child as alone.
Trailers make you fit
"With such an increased intensity, intermuscular coordination in particular improves much more than with extensive endurance training, as most cyclists normally do," says Ebler. "This should have similar effects to track training: more and sometimes completely different muscles are addressed, the leg muscles work more efficiently and the strength endurance aspect is significantly increased." Even the breaks that children urgently need - for playing, changing nappies, breastfeeding, eating, drinking, changing clothes - make perfect sense from the trainer's point of view: this almost automatically results in the breaks required for regeneration, which would be advisable anyway given the intensive workload. In terms of training methodology, this is a type of extensive interval training.
You can find everything about technology and safety, how to make it fun for children and an introduction to the following trailers and tandems in the PDF download:
- Pino the rabbit
- Santana-Tandem Arriva
- Tout Terrain Singletrailer
- Chariot Cougar (two-seater)
Downloads:
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