High Altitude Mountaineer to Elite Cyclist – Ben Treble – SquareOne Athlete Spotlight
Ben Treble is a SquareOne patient who has an interesting story to tell. He’s gone from scaling the world’s highest peaks to a journey of pedalling his bike as hard as he can. Here we continue his story and a look at the work he has been doing with Mitch at SquareOne.
“Whilst my expedition to Manaslu was a success, I also stress fractured my ankle on the trek out from base camp. This was the fourth time I’d fractured my right ankle and on my return to Sydney I had surgery to reconstruct it. Part of my rehab was cycling, not unfamiliar as I had raced mountain bikes as a teenager but never tried road racing. I quickly fell in love with competitive road cycling and its parallels of pushing your limits – just in a much more structured and measurable environment. It was through an old friend, Nicho from my mountain biking days that I was first introduced to the SquareOne Physio weekly Thursday ride. I definitely credit my accelerated success in road cycling to being able to learn from the more experienced riders such as Campbell and Owain on the SQ1 ride”
– Ben Treble.
Cycling is a unique sport and when initially planning for Ben, I broke down the requirements into three different components that we can improve to complement his training and racing. Now Bens’ training is in 3 parts – mobility, strength, and past injury management.
Secondly, we focused on strength. Overall strength in an athlete is extremely important, especially in a sport like cycling that requires a huge amount of power output. To create power, we must initially build up a good strength base. Lifting heavy weights can also help keep his soft tissue healthy and reduce injury risk and will start to introduce Ben to movement patterns needed later on in our training that can be transferred into improving his efficiency on the bike – Mitch Lockley, SquareOne Physio.
Lateral Hip Strength Drills
Crab walks/ Half side plank + hip Abduction/ RDL at wall + T-spine – are all working on improving lateral hip strength which is a very important area for a cyclist to be robust. It is also a key area that Ben needs to improve as part of his low back rehabilitation.
Crab Walks
Half side plank + hip Abduction
RDL at wall + T-spine
Kettlebell Dead Bug
A great exercise for improving trunk strength but is also very useful in educating Ben on the different ways his back can move and how he can control these movements depending on his environment.
