Anatomy of speed
iNSCYD is a piece of coaching software that’s making significant in-roads into professional sport. It’s currently used by Bora-Hansgrohe, Lotto-NL-Jumbo plus the German Triathlon Federation and France’s National Institute of Sport (INSEP).
INSCYD’s selling point is that it paints a detailed physiological model of the rider. “It achieves this by taking into account many metrics,” sports scientist and creator Sebastian Weber told us. “These include body composition, efficiency, fuel combustion, and aerobic and anaerobic energy metabolism. It allows a coach to quantify the effect of each of those metrics on the performance of the athlete, and then to manipulate them to predict future performances. For example, if a rider is aiming to climb the Kwaremont at the Tour of Flanders in 4mins, we’ll know whether they need to work on aerobic or anaerobic capacity, decrease body weight, increase muscle mass, improve efficiency… Training becomes much more focused and targeted.”
INSCYD’s myriad metrics derive from algorithms and power profiles. Nothing new there but the breadth of actionable information is arguably what sets it apart from its contemporaries. Take the metric that focuses on fuel combustion. “Not only can we calculate the exact split of fats and carbohydrates at different intensities, we’re currently working on a beta version that allows the coach to segment a stage or race or training ride in to segments and calculate the carbohydrate combustion for each segment,” Weber explained. “It just makes things more precise and that’ll benefit the rider and team.”
Bora-Hansgrohe coach Dan Lorang also extolled the benefits of the software on an unnamed rider who we took to be Sam Bennett. “This data is from a sprinter,” Lorang said, pointing to his PowerPoint, “and this is his profile six weeks out from the Giro. We see that his VO max (a 2 measurement of endurance) and lactate-building rate – a low rate is a positive sign – are good but from our data we observed that he needed to be fresher at the end of a sprint. So we designed intervals and training with that focus and it was pretty successful.” Very successful. Bennett would go onto win three stages to break his Grand-Tour duck.
The main stumbling block for more widespread use of INSCYD is that currently you need a coach to dissect the info it provides and prescribe practical sessions based on it. But a ‘non-expert’ version will almost inevitably appear in the future .