Be more Beth

Beth Shriever is Team GB’s BMX star who won a memorable gold medal at the Tokyo 2022 Olympic Games and then, just three weeks later won gold at the World Championships.

This was a young athlete who, until 2019, wasn’t even funded bu UK Sport to be on the British Cycling training programme. For a year, the athlete and her family did fundraising and crowd-funding activities to help get the cycling protégée to Olympic qualification events.

Training for muscle gain

Several things changed for Beth once she was accepted onto the programme. Working with a sports psychologist, she became mentally resilient and learnt to cope with all that life threw at her. She trained with the BMX men’s team to get strong and aggressive in her racing performances; she learnt how to match her nutritional intake with her energy needs. Most importantly, she learnt how to train in the gym so she was – in her words – ‘properly strong and powerful’. Continue reading

Variations in effective strength training

The first of these is the decidedly intimidating sounding German Volume Training. This is a method of strength training that was devised in the 1970s for the German weightlifting team. Centred around intense, structured strength training sessions, the method was adopted in the 1990s  by the Canadian strength coach Charles Poliquin. It is widely acknowledged as one of the most demanding methods of training there is. Continue reading