Training Tip: Approaching Raceday
[ September 5th, 2008 ] By: Charles Smith Posted in » Tips and Tricks
Motor sports are a lot like most sports in that they require training to be good at. One part of race training is conditioning your body. Exercise like weightlifting, running, biking and swimming are great ways to get in shape for raceday. However, training like mad in the days preceeding a race can have its downside. One of which is DOMS: Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness.
Being sore is a good sign in the day or two after weightlifting or a new workout. It means you were tearing your muscle fibers (small tears, dont worry), and your body will respond by growing more (psst…you’re getting stronger). But those sore muscles wont react the same way your ‘fresh’ muscles would.
In order to be well rested and relaxed for raceday (or weekend) you should start tapering your exercise down during the week before the race. The beginning of the week may start out just like normal, but you should be stepping the intensity of your workouts down daily. So by the day before the race your exercise is light. Light enough just to keep the blood flowing to your muscles nicely (this actually helps recover you). Not much tearing should be happening then.
Why taper for motor sports? You should taper so that when it comes down to the races your body will do what you want it to. Tired and sore triceps will make turning laborsome and this will fatigue you faster. Fatigue is what your workouts are, hopefully, aimed at combatting. Because it is one of the largest reasons for slower than normal performances and more notably crashes.
Much of race engineering is aimed at reducing the annoyances for the driver(s). One of the annoyances you can easily eliminate from raceday are sore muscles. So please, for your time’s sake, taper your workouts. If you aren’t exercising, also for your time’s sake, you should start.
September 5th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Hydrate and increase your potassium intake - this helps.
People will spend tons of money to increase the performance of their car by just a couple HP, but consider that 7 pounds requires 1 hp to move (as a rule of thumb) so if a driver is able to slim down 20-30 pounds (many of us can stand to do that (myself included)) we can increase the effective HP of our cars by 3-4 hp! :-)