The Concept of the Limiter

Motocross racers are a tough breed: when they fall short there is usually no lack of energy to put your helmet back on, get on the gas and work harder to achieve training and racing goals. I have worked with lots of different athletes and believe me, motocross racers are among the hardest working athletes in the world. Hard work alone can get you pretty darn far but my goal in this magazine is to give the racer some tools so they can work smarter instead of working just harder. Smart training combined with hard work will optimize your time and improve your results.

Do you have a training plan? When I entered the motocross world I was shocked that so many racers did not employ a training plan of any sort. “I just ride and man I ride hard and I ride as much as I can!” is a pretty common “training plan” in the MX world. Hopefully with a little help this can be vastly improved. Over the next few issues of Holeshot I will outline in broad terms how go come up with a training plan of your own and how to execute this plan.

One of the first things you need to create your training plan is an understanding of something called a limiter. There are several ingredients that make up a successful MX racer: riding technique, fitness, and general health are a few main ones. For each of these areas of MX each rider has a limiter or weak link. Your ability in each of these areas is pretty much dictated by your weak link in that area. Let’s say that you have a chronic problem with right handed turns. This means that your overall ability in technique is limited by right handed turns. Then let’s say that your endurance is poor making that your limiter in fitness. For the health area, let’s say that you never get enough sleep so that is your limiter for general health. This means that the main objective of technique training needs to be right handed corners so that you can bring your overall technique up to the level of your other technique items like starts. You may have killer starts but if your right handed turns are bad, you are only as good as your right handed turns overall. Your fitness training needs to be focused on getting your endurance up to the level of say your strength and your sleeping hours need to be increased to match say your healthy eating habits. These will bring the areas of fitness and health up. This is the concept of the limiter applied to the three ingredients of motocross used in this example.

Now, to go up one level: which one of the areas of technique, fitness and health is the limiter for you in the grand scheme of overall MX ability? Using the above example let’s say that your health is actually the limiter that is keeping you from improving as an MX racer as a whole. This means in the big picture that improving your lifestyle to increase your level of health will do more to bring up your total MX ability than working on either technique or fitness. Practicing turns until dark and running every other day will not matter if you have horrible overall health that keeps you starting half the races due to illness or recovering fully from training efforts. Health can then be called the big picture limiter or the grand limiter.

Now that you have been introduced to the concept of the limiter in the next issue we will go over how to apply these limiters to your season goals. The limiters you come up with after careful self evaluation will determine the direction and focus of your training. This leads to something called Training Objectives which if completed allow you to reach your season goals.

– Originally Published in Holeshot Magazine