Juul Achten, who works as a post doctoral research fellow at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Birmingham (main fields of interest are cycling, fat metabolism and overtraining), is looking for some well trained female cyclists.

In an email to me here at britishcycling.org.uk, Juul says in the field of overtraining/overreaching, most research is performed with male subjects but that the problems of training too much and having too little recovery does however also occur in female athletes and Juul is very interested to see whether men and women react differently to a large training stimulus. Over the next few months, Juul is going to conduct a study looking at the effects of one week of very intensive training on performance and a variety of physiological markers in 10 well trained male and 10 well-trained female cyclists.

The study will be very intense and will be fairly time-consuming, but the subjects will gain an awful lot of information from it. During the study we will do a whole series of different tests (VO2 maxtests, simulated time-trials, sprint tests, muscle strength tests) and the results will be available to the participants and they will be able to ask me (and Dr Asker Jeukendrup, nutritional advisor of the Rabobank Cycling Team) anything about training and nutrition.

Contact details for Dr Juul Achten are: School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, B15 2TT, Birmingham, UK (telephone 0121 4147242 (tel) or email J.Achten@bham.ac.uk.

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