Downhill Is Easy Right?

How hard is downhill riding? It's technically challenging, it's fast, it's scary, it's dangerous, but physically, actually, how hard is it? I know that doing a full day of downhill runs is draining. Thinking fast, changing my lines is mentally draining, but also you're pedaling, you're pumping, you're moving the bike around, I guess your heart rate really high, but actually, if you put a measurement to it, how hard is it? Can it be compared to a cross-country or a trail ride? I'm riding today at Derby Bike Park, and like most gravity-based bike parks, it's uplift service, so I'm not really pedaling up the hill at all. Jumping the Land Rovers and then bomb down the tracks, putting in a good amount of effort. I'm not going to go crazy, but a decent effort to ride as fast as I can to the bottom. Physically, probably quite hard. I'm going to do as many runs as the daylight and my body will let me do. I'm going to track my data to see how hard it is. I'm going to do that using my Garmin Fenix 7 watch. I thought I'd use my watch rather than the head unit just because I'll be jumping into the van and potentially losing connection with a head unit. Also, probably going to stop for lunch sometime, so my watch can keep recording my riding all day. I've actually paired some sensors with my watch because this is a day-to-day fitness tracker, but it does way more than that as well. I can pretty much use this as much as a head unit for tracking your riding. Also, I've got my GPS on there, so that's going to tell me how far I've been, how many runs, how many meters, all that. I've got an external chest heart rate monitor to make that super accurate for riding, and that's paired to this as well. Most of the tracks here are about two and a half kilometers long, probably about five minutes in length. I know from my downhill racing days that as much as they're not that peddly, it's a decent gradient here. You're peddling, you're pumping, and when you're not doing that, you're basically doing squats and throwing the bike around. I think I'm going to be pretty much max heart rate most of the way down these, but that will be interesting to find out if I look at my average and maximum heart rate at the end of the day and see how that compares to a normal ride. Also, I've got some Garmin Rally power pedals that I'm going to ride with so I can take a look at my max and average powers and all that stuff as well to see how much effort I'm putting in and how weak my numbers are, but also just how hard it is. All right, four runs, one coffee, and I'm heading back towards the uplift to crack on. Feels like it's pretty steady effort. I'm not going nuts on the downhills. Maybe I could be going harder, but it's kind of realistic to how I would normally ride a bike park, I suppose. Anyway, let's see how many runs I can do. There you go. There's a mega train of riders at WSUL. Ask them how hard downhill is. Got Charlie Hatton, your current downhill world champion, Andreas Cole, Ronan Dunne, riding a top-secret bike, David Truma. Those are World Cup racers here today. All right, the day is almost coming to the end. Actually, the uplift still runs for another half an hour now, but I think I'm going to do the last run, have a chiller down, turns in the ferns to finish on, then back to the shed and I'll have a look at actually how much effort I've put in today. With the downhill day at Dovey in the books and my arms feeling it, the next day I headed to my local woods, Eastridge, for a trail ride. Okay, so I'm out in the local woods now on the same bike riding my Orbea Rallon, got the Garmin rally pedals on. This time I'm using my AirJake 40 Solar to record the ride, so I've got it all in front of me. I'm going to go on a normal trail bike ride. For me, it's about an hour and a half. Tricky conditions at the moment. January in the low. I'm also riding to my potential. I'm looking at my stamina and my potential on my head unit. It's telling me I'm about halfway through probably, but my potential left is actually 59%. Stamina, 48%. This is dropping, dropping quick. I'll go for a normal ride. I might see if I can drop those numbers to zero so I know that I've emptied the tank and then we can compare that to the downhill day. All right, so two actually very different days, two different rides. I loved it on the Orbea Rallon. It reminded me how versatile that thing is. I'm going to dig into the recorded day to see how hard I worked on both rides. Obviously, like I said, at Dovey, I could have gone harder. I stopped for two coffees and lunch, but it was a typical day out. On the trail ride as well, I rode for an hour and a half, which is typical for me. Actually, my Garmin, it gives you your starting potential and stamina. I finished on 17% potential. You can see it dip down. Stamina was 5% at the end. I could have gone harder, but two normal rides for me. I wasn't up at five in the morning doing anything crazy. Right, to the data. Distance to start with. On the downhill day, I did 60 kilometers, but actually, of course, a lot of that was in the uplift. Actually, I rode 26. Trail, I rode 13. That surprised me. Quite a lot more on the downhill day. Total time was five and a half hours pretty much on downhill. Trail was one hour 27. Ride time, actually really similar. An hour 24 downhill day, one hour 19 on the trail. Obviously, it's way more direct. You do it all in one go. Meters descended. I am shocked. I did 3,226 at Dovey. That's why I guess you feel tired at the end of the day, which I'll dig into the numbers, obviously. That was way more than I thought I'd do on an uplift day. I rode 648 at Eastridge on the trail bike ride, which is about normal. It doesn't sound much, but it's hard, that place, to get many meters. It's really physical. Even the flat is really hard work there. Max speed, 96. Not sure I completely believe that. At Dovey, 41 trail ride. How many runs? I did 10 downhill runs at Dovey. Seven from the top of the mountain, three from mid. I did three and a half runs on the trail bike ride, but obviously much smaller in a sense. Maximum power, pretty similar, 762. Wow. Not massive, but that's me. Average power, this is hard to compare. My average over a run was about 56 watts at Dovey because if you look at the graph, it's just spikes here and there. There isn't that much pedaling. On the trail bike ride, obviously, I'm sat down pedaling a lot more and then doing those spikes on the downhill sections. 174 watts average. Heart rate's maximum about the same. A bit lower than my max. I didn't go fully, fully hard, but 174 on the other. Average heart rate, 101 for downhill day, 155. That's where you see the difference in a minute. Active calories burned, 881 downhill day, 909, so much shorter, more intense ride, I suppose. This is where we get into it. The primary training benefit, my Garmin tells me, downhill day was anaerobic capacity, trail day was VO2 max. That's where you see it in the numbers. It was 2.9 aerobic downhill compared to five, a lot more on the trail ride. Anaerobic, really similar, 2.9 and 2.8. The exercise load was 313 on the trail bike ride compared to 117 on the downhill day, so much higher exercise load on the trail bike. That is explained by average respiration rate. I averaged 21 breaths per minute on the downhill bike and then 38 on the trail bike. Obviously, I'm pedaling, I'm working harder. This is where we're going to look at anaerobic versus aerobic. Anaerobic involves short, fast, high-ensity exercises that don't make your body use oxygen like it does for the aerobic. Downhill sprints, squatting, moving the bike around, really working hard on the bike on the downhill day, whereas on the trail bike ride, you're spinning. When you're not moving around the bike, you're sat down spinning, so your heart rate stays way higher for more of the time. Aerobic exercises are easier to do for longer times, depending on your physical abilities. There's a gray area there, obviously, where your aerobic exercise may turn into anaerobic if you raise the intensity. That's where on the trail bike ride, it crosses the boundaries a bit because I'm not stopping much, a little bit. Between getting to the top of the hill and then going back down, I did it a couple of times just to have a wee or whatever. Most of the time, I'm carrying on with the ride. That's the interesting part. Obviously, with that exercise load being much higher for the trail bike ride, that is something that Garmin use. It's really good for keeping track of your daily steps, your exercises, and it will tell you how much to rest or how well-trained you are. That's what they use this thing called EPOC, so E-P-O-C. Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption. Basically, it gives you a good calculation of what it takes to get back to where you were before the exercise. Therefore, I know from the trail bike ride, it's harder because it's going to take me longer to get back to my rested state after. There we go. Interesting to see the difference between anaerobic, aerobic. Actually, if you're there for burning calories, then go for a hard one-and-a-half-hour trail bike ride. However, I guess what I was doing, the point of this video was to see how much a downhill day takes out of you. Obviously, you go home, you feel tired, and you have done quite a lot. It particularly surprised me how many meters I descended. Actually, that anaerobic training I got from the downhill day is not inconsiderable. Super interesting. Let me know what you think down below. Should I have tried harder and actually sprinted a bit more on the downhill bike? Maybe that would have raised those numbers a bit more. Actually, if you want your bang for buck, get out on your trail bike ride, and that's going to burn some calories. Plus, avoid the cafe at Dovey if you don't want to take in the calories you've just burned off.