Home

How It Works

TORQ’s coaching and consultancy service is comprehensive and flexible. Our facility is equipped with state of the art fitness testing equipment and to top it all, we are located in two sites, one in the heart of the beautiful unspoilt Shropshire countryside and the other about 10 miles away just across the Shropshire/Powys boarder.

Individual Fitness Testing and Consultancy

Whether it’s an exercise program you’re interested in, or just some advice on how to increase the impact of your current training plan, initially we insist on booking you in for a full day’s consultation. If geography prevents us from doing this, we can arrange a series of consultations over the phone, but we would prefer to meet you face-to-face. Why do we insist on a full day’s consultation? To us it’s simple, because we must be able to assume that we’ve got you to a certain level of understanding, so that any advice we give after the initial day has passed has maximum impact. For instance, we could set you the best training program in the world (and probably will do), but if you don’t understand the fundamentals of nutrition, you’re not going to respond to the training we prescribe. The same would be true if you entered into your training plan with the wrong mindset or didn’t understand the training techniques properly.

The amazing versatility of the Powertap hub (a power measuring device located in the rear hub of a bicycle wheel) allows precise training zones to be established in the lab environment, which can then be transferred to a real-life situation out on the road/trail. You can borrow the hub while you’re at TORQ, ride with it - and if you really like what it does, you can purchase it from us.

After an information gathering session, we will conduct our first fitness test in the lab. During these tests, the lactate levels in your blood will be analysed using the most reliable and accurate hand held lactate-testing device on the market, the ‘Lactate Pro’. Analysis of blood lactate levels offers an incredibly clear indication of the amount of stress your body is under when you are exercising and most importantly ‘where your power is coming from’, so using the Lactate Pro in conjunction with Powertap and Heart Rate monitoring provides some of the information necessary to accurately assess your fitness and prescribe your training zones. One of the great things about this test is that we’re looking for changes in blood lactate at relatively low exercise intensities, so it’s a really easy test.

The rest of the information we need comes from a second test, which isn’t quite so easy. We have been testing riders for years up the ‘Col de Westbury’ a seven-mile climb out of the Shropshire village where TORQ is based and this ‘Time Trial’ effort will generate data that can be used in combination with the lab test data to provide ALL the information necessary to accurately assess your fitness and prescribe your training zones.

After a shower and home-cooked lunch, we then discuss the following topics:

  • Training Theory
  • Energy Systems
  • Performance Nutrition
  • Periodization & Peaking

Once we have covered these topics and related them to your personal test data, we are then in a position to prescribe your training. This could be a verbal description and general guidelines on what to do next, or you may decide to sign-up for one of our formalised training plans.
Once you have completed your initial day with us, a whole host of future options become available. Please see the next section of this website for details of these options.

Group Fitness Testing and Consultancy

If you are arranging a group consultation day with friends/club mates, we can deviate from the set structure above and tailor a day to your needs. If it’s your first trip up to see us, we would still insist on using the first half of the day to educate and empower you with training knowledge, but by skipping the fitness testing on the initial visit, we could run some Mountain Bike skills training or bike-fitting procedures instead in the afternoon. Group consultations can either be conducted at TORQ, or we can travel to you, you just need to organise a venue for us to meet at. To make full sense of all the options available, please consult the next section of this website.