Coach Steve Ilg, USCF/RYT/CPT
Helping set a new course record in the 2004 Furnace Creek
508-mile Race through Death Valley, CA
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"Yoga is the only training discipline that complements all sports
yet contraindicates none of them."
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Let's forget about all the cycling equipment and expensive tweaks you've purchased over the past, say 3 years.
Let's trade ALL of it for something that is endlessly more vital to your enjoyment, performance, and spiritual transformation through cycling: a flat spine while riding.
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A flat spine? Uh...yeah...a flat spine? Did I stutter or something?
Riding a bicycle with your elbows soft and low, and your spine flat - like your kitchen table instead of hunched over like a sad sack of potatoes - will achieve at least 1-2 mph more speed to your riding instead of the idiotic fractions of seconds presumed to save you by pencil-necked bicycling engineers with stocks in their company urging you to buy fancy wheelsets, cranks, and of course seat stems. Thank God I have an integrated carbon seat stem!
I recall a Los Angeles Times reporter interviewing me after my team's record-setting effort through the supra-heat and heights of the Furnace Creek 508-mile Race through Death Valley, CA.
"I was in your support van cruising along side you. When I reviewed the video of you a couple weeks later, I was so fascinated by your low body position, that I freeze-framed the DVD and the Ilg’s cycling form became a zen-koan, “How does he do that?” I kept saying to myself."
The reason why my flat back was at issue is that many of the cycling world’s top experts on positioning talk about achieving a flat back is key to good cycling. Yet few attain it.
Why is a flat back key to cycling performance?
One reason is more power; A flat back lets you ride faster because it provides an ideal platform for quads and glutes to push-off against, almost like a wall.
Another reason, probably the most important, is injury prevention. As cyclists have aged-up over the last couple of decades with the sport’s continued popularity, back pain has replaced knee pain as cycling’s number-one injury. And the cause of a cyclist’s back pain, many experts say, typically can be traced directly to the bent-over riding position, which flexes your spine in the exact opposite way that it was meant to flex. While a young body can recover from this position, decades of of riding with a rounded back eventually can cause “creep” — a stretching of the ligaments that string the vertebrae and the discs between them together. As the ligaments weaken, so does their ability to keep the back aligned. Result: A high incidence of back pain for cyclists.
It’s great to tell people to ride with a flat back. Yet, it’s obvious that very few actually achieve this position. What good is focusing on proper pedaling cadence and lactate thresholds when you can’t ride because your back’s out or that your pelvic horizontality is 60/40 in favor of your dominant leg? Where are the tools —the instructions—we need to get our backs and aligned hip power and other key elements of our cycling
foundtions!?
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I can answer those questions with one word: "Yoga."
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Yoga is an ideal compliment to all sports — especially for the limited motion and odd positioning of cycling. My deep involvment in both bike racing (i edited the USCF Cycling Manual) and yoga at high levels as led me to develop a number of cycling-specific yoga routines that simultaneously serve as antidote and supercharger. One class with me and you will ride better the moment you hop on the bike.
Oh, like you have something MORE important to work on over the winter than getting a flatter back, more open, powerful hips, and a stronger core?
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Hope to see you this winter in the Practice Cave...
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Hope to see you this winter in the Practice Cave...
head bowed,
coach steve ilg
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Coach Ilg teaches his High Performance Yoga™ classes 3x weekly at The HUB (which he calls, 'The Cave of Champions'): Mondays; 5:30 - 7:00pm, Wednesdays; 10-11 am, and his infamous Secret Weapon of All Athletes; his HP PROP Workout™ Wednesday evenings from 5:30 - 7:00 pm. Ilg has competed in 7 World Championships in 5 Different Sports and was named, "America's MultiSport Mutant" by OUTSIDE Magazine. He has authored 5 books in 13 different languages.
