2014 Fitness Training Discussion

  • Thread starter drspeedy
  • 46 comments
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So true about the diet, it's amazing really how much it affects you. It's also a good idea to make sure water is definitely on there!! Water helps the metabolism and as you know if your not hydrated you can't exercise properly at all. So make sure your hydrated!
 
iamsupernasty
My only thoughts are don't kill yourself getting fit. Yes it's important, but speed behind the wheel is more important.

If you're fast in a car, they don't care how unfit you are.

If you are slow in a car, being the most fit guy won't be enough to keep you from being eliminated.

In GT Academy, it seems to me that fitness level is only used as a tie breaker for two or more people who may otherwise be equal.
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( I know it is off topic .... ) can you tell us what did you do to improve your driving skills in real life please ?
I agree with you and I think the fitness challenges are made to see how bad you wannna win ... Am I right ?
 
DckCheney
This is some good discussion on training and a hat tip to the guys posting relevant and good advice on PT. Lets not also forget about half the battle which is your diet.
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Pretty much everything on this thread is relevant to the fitness section of GT Academy with the occasional person telling you to do what NOT to do (erhem @Dhalism ;) ) which is actually not a bad thing since people will point out the joke; keep the thread somewhat light-hearted and possibly raise some important issues related to the general topic 👍
 
drspeedy
( I know it is off topic .... ) can you tell us what did you do to improve your driving skills in real life please ?
I agree with you and I think the fitness challenges are made to see how bad you wannna win ... Am I right ?
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Like I said before, if you want to discuss that please make a new thread for it, don't mix up the discussion here.
 
I will write a part of my fitness related racing experience here, maybe some of you will find it helpful.

Some years ago I stared racing motorcycles and observed that the fastest racers were all with high fitness levels, way beyond the norm. As my fitness level increased my performance also increased with a pretty steep line.
If you look up any fast racer in any type of motorsport you will find that all are very well fit. You can not be a fast racer with no fitness because racing is a sport practiced by athletes.
GT Academy looks for a "fast out of the box" pilot with all these parts (fitness, nutrition, rest) at a high competitive level. That's one of the reasons the GT Academy winners are so fast so quickly.
Back to the story now, looking for as many advises I could get I stumbled upon a former Iron Man winner and told me something that will eventually help a lot. He said that one of the biggest problems he observed in the Iron Man competition were some guys, who finished the swim or bicycle part, going the wrong way for the next part of the race. What was happening was that they were extremely exhausted and their brains were not capable to lead them in the right direction. The way to improve your lucid way of thinking when you're very exhausted is to train your brain to be as sharp as possible anytime. You can play a videogame or a any kind of puzzle or whatever keeps your mind alert while doing static cycling or treadmill or whatever. I used to play Tourist Trophy and Gran Turismo while doing static cycling and it helped me very much.
 
drspeedy
( I know it is off topic .... ) can you tell us what did you do to improve your driving skills in real life please ?
I agree with you and I think the fitness challenges are made to see how bad you wannna win ... Am I right ?
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I agree about the your point about fitness.

I don't want to derail the thread, but anything you can do to drive a car on a track will benefit you. HPDE, AutoX, skip barber, LeMons, Go karts, etc. I did all of the above.
 
I am slightly concerned by my fitness reigeme because it consists of a 2 and a bit kilometer newspaper round and a 2 and a bit kilometer walk to college and yet, I still weigh about 8 stone 6 (53.5kg). What is worse for me is that I am 5,11 to 6 foot and I don't have the healthiest diet ever. So, should I focus on putting weight on or changing my diet and do more exercise at home (like weights, situps, pressups ect)?

Many thanks.
 
I have been training hard ever since the rumors of the Aussie GT academy started, i started at 108kg(im 6 foot) and im now down to 90kg.

I've gone from riding 5km a day to 30km a day, running 1km a session to 10km a session.

im now going the next step and getting a personal trainer to push me beyond whats required.

my aim isn't just to be fit, my aim to be fittest period.
 
I'm training to do a couple of 10K runs this summer, and going all the way back to GT2 I've used the load screens as time to do a few reps of pushups, squats, lunges, situps, etc.
 
thehobnob97
I am slightly concerned by my fitness reigeme because it consists of a 2 and a bit kilometer newspaper round and a 2 and a bit kilometer walk to college and yet, I still weigh about 8 stone 6 (53.5kg). What is worse for me is that I am 5,11 to 6 foot and I don't have the healthiest diet ever. So, should I focus on putting weight on or changing my diet and do more exercise at home (like weights, situps, pressups ect)?

Many thanks.
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Try to focus on strengthening your upper body and core muscles mainly. You should try and get more protein into your diet if you want to build some muscles. I was in a similar position to you several years ago, I was 55kg and 5'9", but I started training pretty hard. I got into road cycling and I started regularly doing exercises on my core and upper body.
I would recommend getting one these ( http://powerballs.com/? ) as a great thing to train your arms. I got one in 2010 to help with my karting and it has been great. Most people get aching in their arms when doing karting, and this really helps to train your wrists and grip strength so you don't have to worry about not being able to hold onto it going around corners. I think fitness is a very important part, obviously the more fit you are the more you'll be able to concentrate on driving the car! The judges were very impressed with how fit I was, and they saw my determination in the fitness tests as a big plus point. Even if you're not the fittest there, giving your all will show them how much it means for you to win it.
 
TRC Scooty
What kind of logic is this? GT Academy has been around since 2008, you've known about it since AT LEAST last year. If you haven't made it a priority to get/stay fit, that's your fault - not theirs. Just sayin'.
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In my case I dropped GT off the radar because they didn't allow Canada until 2014

Quick question, are you able to attend regional finals multiple times?
 
Thnx for the reply guys

Definitely not in the shape I'd want to be in for the competition

But hopefully get to see what it will require if I make it =)
 
Tidgney
Last year I prep'd really hard for fitness as I knew it would be better than it's ever been regarding it! I trained on my own for months before also doing a Manchester 10k run and also some really physically and mentally draining challenges (UK National 3 peaks challenge). When the actual competition got announced last year I wanted to make sure I was training right, hired a personal trainer and he pushed me to the limit (Slightly beyond in a few cases nearly fainted twice in 2 sessions)! Now to be honest that helped me more than anything, but I'd be careful about overtraining, there was a point in my training where I got a slight injury which effected my training for 1-2 weeks. That was a knee/muscle injury and so training had to move to non impact with also injury treatment.

Fortunately that did pay off as the UK National final as I think it was 3rd to 7th was separated by 1/2 points or something like that which is literally like 1 level on the bleep test (I'm not sure of the actual scoring system but trust me it's close).

I have seen a few people training for GT Academy already and I've had a few questions regarding it to. If you really want this there's quite a few people not pushing themselves fitness wise. Doing a set number of pressups or situps is pretty useless that extra 1% you give at the end is where the reward is for getting stronger or running faster so rounding to 10/20/30 is really really useless. That number on the last set should be as high as you can possibly go, you should be collapsing on that final pressup, not counting 30 and saying done... O and i did say set so you should be doing more than 1 set of anything :)!

Anyway I'm not saying get a personal trainer, what I will say is that it's very important to train right, just exercising in most cases won't cut it! You have to be pushing yourself so that when you exercise saying 1 more after you've already said 1 more 3 times already is still happening (This is also how you can push yourself mentally, as usually your body is saying give up but you can do more!).
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Since this is a Virtual Academy, Here is a Virtual Trainer I use, take it with a grain of salt.

Push when you think you cant push anymore.

http://www.racerxvt.com/pages/workouts
 

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