Imagine sitting down with someone and having a coaching discussion at your dining room table. That’s basically what my “coaching discussion” archives are. These archives are a repository for all the coaching discussion I’ve penned in the past few years.
Browse through the archives of my coaching discussion and learn how to be a stronger cyclist. Don’t forget you can contact me with questions or check out the Tailwind Coaching Newsletter for more great coaching discussion.
In this age of power meters and quantified training, athletes spend hours upon hours, days upon days poring over power files and searching for a way to get ahead of the competition. They hope against hope that there's a magic bullet out there that will suddenly catapult them to the front of the pack. And all too often, they believe that magic bullet is raising their functional threshold power (abbreviated as FTP.) But is a simple number the key to destroying your rivals on the Sunday group ride, the Saturday criterium or the Tuesday Night Worlds?
In today's podcast I discuss the concept of efficiency as it relates to FTP or what I refer to as “Efficient Threshold Power”. I'll talk about some of the following concepts:
With the onset of cold and damp weather many cyclists abandon outdoor riding in favor of sitting on the sofa. Granted, with the NFL season half way done and the drama heating up like an episode of “The League”, it may sound really fun to just kick your heels back for a few months and give in to holiday laziness. But should you really just back completely off activity for a few months to recover? Should you spend it doing nothing but 12 ounce curls (I.E. drinking copious amounts of beer?) Should you throttle your activity back so much that you put on 10 pounds of insulation? Well, I'm going to say, unequivocally…
NO!
You should be spending your off season (or “not so” off season, as I talked about back in podcast #27) doing something that will ensure your success in the coming months. This could be cross training, this could be hitting the gym and lifting some big heavy things, or it could mean sitting on the indoor trainer. But which of those things will help you create an effective off season?
In today's podcast I'll talk about building a solid base of fitness during the cold months. I'll cover:
Everyone loves a group ride, right? Group rides are chances to catch up with friends, get in a good workout, chase a few stronger riders or tear the legs off your riding buddies. But a group ride is as much a dance as it is a ride, and there are a number of things you SHOULD have learned along your journey as a cyclist. Whether you are a group riding sage or a newly minted rookie, you should observe the rules, the etiquette and the sanctity of the holiest of Sunday cycling practices (aside from watching the pros on Eurosport, of course…)
In today's episode of the Tailwind Coaching Podcast, I'll wax poetic on those things that you need to have learned in order to execute the perfect group ride, and I'll cover a couple of things in the cycling news sphere that caught my attention.
That said, today's podcast will include:
Power: it's the ultimate in training metrics. Nothing beats the pinpoint accuracy of training with an output measurement such as power. You can know at each moment of each ride how hard you are working, if you're burning matches and if you're going to be paying for this effort later in the day. The question most people end up asking themselves is “which power meter should I choose?” And rightly so.
With the myriad of power meter options on the market, offering tons of different features at different price points, where should you start looking in your quest for technological bliss? And when it comes time to plunk down your hard earned cash on (arguably) the biggest training tool you'll have (aside from a coach), which one should you choose?
In this episode of the Tailwind Coaching Podcast, I talk about some of the ins and outs of choosing a power meter, from considering how much mechanical ability you have to how much money is in your bank account. As you listen, you'll hear me discuss:
In part 1 of “Strength Training For Cyclists” I talked about how your body adapts to different kinds of exercise. We learned about the concept of different pathways that create physiological adaptation and a touched on a couple of ways these pathways interact with one another, turning you into a sharp physical specimen where there used to be couch potato.
But there was a problem: I covered all these concepts about how your body uses some common physiological mechanisms to build fitness in different muscle types, that's true. But the one thing not talked about was how to put all that sciency stuff together. I'll tackle that in detail in today's podcast, so click through the break and check out the show notes.
