{"id":3407,"date":"2025-08-20T08:53:36","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T07:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/?p=3407"},"modified":"2025-08-20T08:53:36","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T07:53:36","slug":"3-tips-for-a-fast-tt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/discussion\/3-tips-for-a-fast-tt\/","title":{"rendered":"3 tips for a fast TT"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Here at myWindsock we care about two things – predicting how the weather will impact your speed on the bike and riding fast time trials. That\u2019s it. Today we have three tips for you that will help you, backed with some myWindsock science, ride a faster TT without simply pedalling harder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Step 1: get aero.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hold your position\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Staying in the aero bars during a time trial sounds like a trivial piece of advice but it\u2019s something that was recently demonstrated by Red Bull Bora riders at the 2025 Tour de France – riding uphill in the aero bars during the mountain time trial to some pretty good success. Being more aerodynamic is typically faster even when speeds are pretty low.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much difference does it make? <\/h5>\n\n\n\n

For this we\u2019ll take the sort of segment you might find in a TT in the UK, a 3.3km drag of around 3%. For a 70kg rider on an 8kg bike with a typical \u201csat up\u201d cda of 0.35 doing 300W this gives us a ground speed of 26.4km\/h and time on the segment of 7:31.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What happens if we put that same rider in the TT bars and drop their cda to 0.23?\u00a0Good position discipline comes down to one thing, training. Ride your TT bike a lot, on hard days and easy days – if your time trialing is your primary goal then it shouldn\u2019t even matter if you can do less power, as you\u2019re training the muscles you\u2019re going to use on race day. One of our favourite sessions is to go and ride up the longest climb you can find in the TT bars at a low cadence to really practice recruiting all of those TT muscles. Let’s take a look at what happens on that climb if the rider stayed in the bars…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That same rider goes up the climb 30s faster, that\u2019s a huge saving on a 7.5 minute section of course. In fact, the time savings are so great that our rider would have to pedal at 30W less in the TT bars before it became slower on this particular segment.\u00a0
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Pacing\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The old adage of riding fast is about minimising the amount of time you\u2019re riding slowly for is as true now as it ever was. Efficient pacing is a game of energy investment – put more energy in when the resistive forces are lower and you\u2019ll get more seconds back for your power investment.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much difference does it make? <\/h5>\n\n\n\n

For this example we’ll use the world famous (well, moderately well known in Hampshire) P164 time trial course. It’s a rolling 10 in the New Forest with 130m of climbing over 16.1km. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A smooth power of 300W yields a time of 22:54. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This course doesn’t suit a smooth power output as we used in the example above, as you can see by the elevation profile… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We can even see the headwind into the finish makes the elevation feel much worse than it actually is, massively increasing the importance of pacing on this course. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Let’s input a series of pacing rules, that yields the same normalised power but distributing our power slightly differently. myWindsock settings allow us to do this and we’ll impose a series of pacing rules (like “if speed > 60kph, power goes to 0W”). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Suddenly, by pacing our ride properly rather than a smooth power, we’ve managed to save 10s over the course of the TT for 1W more – saving one Watt on our set up would not yield 10s worth of savings. This 10 seconds can easily be a margin of victory in an open 10. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
How to do it? <\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Make use of the \u201cWhere Power Matters Most\u201d graph on your event myWindsock forecast and avoid just doing a flat, smooth power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The shaded areas on this plot are where you should squeeze the pedals a little harder – the darker the shading, the harder you should squeeze the pedals.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Tyres, chains and gears<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A clean bike is a fast bike, and a bike with a waxed chain and ceramic bearings is a slightly faster bike on top of that.\u00a0This final tip is often marginal, but time trials often come down to small margins and that’s half the fun. Let’s delve into the myWindsock advanced settings and see how it impacts our TT on the P164 remembering our well paced effort yielded a time of 22:44, what happens if we fully optimise our tyres and chain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spending upward of \u00a3500 going from “good” to “great” with rolling resistance and drive train efficiency can save us 37 seconds over a 10 mile TT. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

That’s it then, riding a fast TT is simple – good pacing, good position discipline and spend money. The most efficient pound per second save expenditure you can make is a myWindsock subscription.<\/a> With this, you can test your pacing and equipment strategy on a given course to help you plan race day down to the second. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here at myWindsock we care about two things – predicting how the weather will impact your speed on the bike and riding fast time trials. That\u2019s it. Today we have three tips for you that will help you, backed with some myWindsock science, ride a faster TT without simply pedalling harder.  Hold your position\u00a0 Staying … Continue reading “3 tips for a fast TT”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3407"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3407"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3417,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3407\/revisions\/3417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mywindsock.com\/page\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}