Favorite workouts of Olympic medalists Mike Day and Jill Kintner:
With his personal trainer Greg Romero
When I was training and preparing Mike and Jill together for the 12 months leading up to the games, we just had fun every day. Either way, my goal with their training was to keep it interesting and for them to feel good about it. This month I’m going to mention some protocols that both Jill and Mike liked and that led to their winning medals at the Olympics!
I’ll touch on one off the bike and one on the bike training protocol for each athlete!
Jill Kintner exercises off the bike: Dynamic warm-up.
If any of you have had the chance to see Jill at a race, you may have seen her in the parking lot doing lots of fun calisthenics near the pits or rental car. What she’s doing is what we like to call a dynamic warm-up. First of all, she will need some regular sports shoes. The first thing we like to do is open up the hips, so we start with a knee walk to her chest. You step forward and with both hands grab below the knee and bring it to your chest and then immediately repeat on the next step.
This opens up the hip extensors and lower back. The forward lunge is the next exercise that targets the antagonist muscles of the hip. This time it’s the hip flexors. Just take a big step (about 5 shoe lengths in front of you) and while keeping your upper torso vertically straight, bend your back knee and follow through with your front knee, doing this slowly. This is a nice dynamic hip flexor stretch that will allow you to pedal efficiently! Jill says, “If I can only do 2 warm-up exercises, I would focus on the hip muscles so I can pedal uninhibited.”
Mike Day off the bike exercises: plyometric exercises
Let’s face it, BMX is about power and if you can pick one exercise that can affect all components of power then it would be plyometrics. Plyometric exercises are basically jumping on your feet using only your body weight. The best exercises for children are simply jumping rope or jumping and jumping. This is perfectly fine and safe and they do this kind of thing all day during recess at school. As long as they don’t jump off 4-foot-high boxes or ladders, their joints and tendons will be fine. They can first start by jumping rope for 10 to 20 quick jumps. Mike’s favorite is jumping rope because he warms it up, hitting the ankle joints, knee joints, and warming up the wrists, elbows, and shoulders. Then once he’s ready, he likes to move on to jump squats.
Simply place both feet shoulder-width apart, keeping your upper torso vertically straight, push your hips back followed by a knee flex, lower yourself to about 45 degrees, and simply counter with an explosive jump as high as you can. . The key is to take off on the balls of your feet and land on the balls of your feet with a slight bend in your knees and hips. You can do this one at a time or quickly. Mike likes to do them one at a time, reset and focus on the height. Mike says, “I’ll do 3 sets of 20 jump rope jumps and then 3 sets of 5 squat jumps and then I’ll be ready to hit the gym or ride my bike.”
Jill Kintner on the bike: Stand Start, easy sprints with gear.
In the past 5 years while racing mountain bikes, Jill has never worked on explosive sprint power from a standstill. In BMX she realized that it was necessary to give herself a chance on the first stretch in order to have a chance of winning a medal. Her favorite sprint session was doing standing start easy gait sprints. I designed this drill with an emphasis on programming pure sprint acceleration out of the gate. We used flat pedals so she was 100% focused on the downstroke and we used a soft gear so she was forced to accelerate fast. “I love these so much that I installed a dedicated flat-pedal easy-shift bike at the Olympics that I would use as a warm-up between qualifying rounds,” says Jill.
What you do is drop 1 or 2 teeth easier than the race gear and change the pedals to flat. In a flat open parking lot with no cars, take 2 cones, one for the starting point and one for the point of need. You can mark the distance by placing one down and then pedaling from the start cone to the end cone. Jill liked to do this with about 7 full cranks. How to do the sprint: Standing in the gate start position with your cranks level, approach the starting cone slowly, then explode keeping your front wheel down and straight.
Be sure to minimize flexion at the hips and try to stay upright, focusing on extending each pedal stroke through your feet. “It’s not a hard workout, it’s a quality workout, and I love it because when I hit the court I feel explosive from the start,” says Jill. Do 1 series of 8-10 efforts and rest 3-4 minutes between them to recover the ATP energy system. This speed training is about neurological programming, not muscle breakdown. In fact, we almost never do any training that has an emphasis on muscle breakdown because BMX is all about quality power.
Mike Day on the bike: Complete laps.
If you don’t have gas to go a full lap without getting tired, then you’re not specifically suited for BMX. “There seems to be an impression that it takes a lot of stamina work on a road bike to get fit for BMX, and I haven’t touched a road bike all year, I do full laps,” says Mike. I say why not? It’s very specific, you get the dynamic power component of the jump and the lactic build up towards the end. This is the perfect training protocol for those who find themselves struggling to finish.
The key to this exercise is to keep the intensity just below “full.” What makes this workout work is that it is training your ability to repeat motos at your maximum physical ability. “Greg always talks about how repeatability is the limiting factor to a good day of racing,” Mike laughs, “At first I hated them, but then I started to see my racing improve towards the final and at the Olympics, I never I felt better.” says the silver medalist. The key is intensity, rest between efforts and how many. Mike likes to go out and do 5 full lapses at 90% intensity with 10 minutes of rest in between. For children under 16, I would recommend a shorter rest interval of 6-8 minutes, as they do not produce lactate acid like older people.
