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10 Devastating Cycling Mistakes I’ve Made (So You Don’t Have To)

Everyone makes cycling mistakes when they're starting out.  Even the best riders, the most experienced racers, and the best coaches make mistakes too.  Sometimes those mistakes are small hiccups in your training and sometimes they can be dangerous or hazardous to your health.  I've made a ton of cycling mistakes in my journey from beginner to racer to coach.  Each one has been a learning experience, and each one has formed my training, racing and coaching strategy.

In today's Tailwind Coaching Podcast, I'm going to share the 10 most devastating cycling mistakes I've ever made.  I'll tell you how they happened, how they can ruin your cycling fitness and how you can prevent them from happening to you.

If you like the podcast, don't forget to head over to iTunes and rate the podcast 5 stars to help me reach a few more cyclists each episode!

Click through the jump to listen and check out the podcast show notes, which contain all the links I've mentioned in the podcast.

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Warming Up for Cycling In The Heat

Every time summer rolls around, I get a lot of questions about warming up in the heat.  People are riding, racing and training in the heat and find their performance suffering.  Even though it's hot, you can't skip your warm up, because much of your performance depends on priming your body properly.  These tips will help you optimize your performance during a warm weather warm up.

The importance of warming up

Warming up is a key to a high-quality performance.  Your body needs time to activate it's “aerobic machinery” before competing.  Until you really get the enzymes and pathways going, you'll be running on more anaerobic systems.  This means you'll burn matches faster and have less energy available when it counts.  By warming up, your body is prepped to produce energy through the electron transport system.  It starts oxidizing fats, giving you (nearly) limitless aerobic energy.  I'm sure you know from experience that a poor warmup will leave you feeling tired and weak during the beginning of your ride.

So warming up is really important, but what kind of warming up should you do?  In “The Pre-Race Warmup” I said the length of time you warm up is dependent upon the activity you're warming up for.  The longer the activity, the shorter the warm-up, and visa versa.  What I didn't talk about in that article were the factors that temperature and weather play in your warm up.

Check out the tips after the break to stay cool while warming up:

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Evaluating Ride Data and Race Data

With the huge number of electronic gadgets attached to a bike these days, it's inevitable that cyclists will be inundated with data.  From speed, cadence and heart rate to power data (and even new technologies such as muscle oxygenation data), there's a mind-boggling collection of numbers to consider. But why even bother collecting data? Evaluating ride data is one of the biggest reasons most cyclists collect data and it can tell you a lot about your ride if you know how to look at it the right way.

In this video, I'll walk through evaluating ride data from several race performances.  I'll describe what I look for and how you can use that information to improve your training and riding.

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Skyrocket Your Fitness With These Mountain Biking Tips

After crashing out of my road racing season last spring, I've been expanding my cycling horizons a little bit.  I've taken up track cycling as my racing fix, not really looking forward to the press of a criterium peloton in the future.  I've also begun to return to my roots: mountain biking.  When I first climbed aboard a bike a number of years ago, it was a fat tire mountain bike.  I cut my teeth on the rocky, rooty, twisty trails of the Hudson Valley.  I voraciously read about mountain biking tips and practiced my skills at every chance I had.  I was hooked on riding and places like the Taconic 909, Stewart Buffer Zone and Blue Mountain Reservation were places that I knew better than my own home.

Almost.

Then I found road riding and racing.  I spent the past 5 years ignoring those fat tires, cruising around the roads of New Jersey.  I raced Battenkill, time trials, stage races, crits and road races, spending countless hours pursuing fitness on skinny tires and super light bikes.

Then I spent 3 months injured because of those road races.

After I got back in the saddle this past summer, I walked into my garage, looked up at my 10-year-old Kona Dawg Primo hanging from the wall and mused about how much fun it might be to get back on the trails.  A couple weeks later I climbed aboard a bike that once felt so familiar but now felt completely foreign to me.  Thankfully, all of the training I had done meant that only a couple of miles in the saddle would bring back all of those old memories again.

But being out on the trails isn't all fun and games.  It's also a great training tool to build strength on the roads.  Click through to read some mountain biking tips and training advice.  Learn how to use fat tires to make yourself faster in races, on group rides or on your own!

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Put Massive Power and Staggering Snap in your Sprint

In cycling, sprinting is more than just “pedal really hard a bunch of times.”  If you've ever watched a professional sprint, you may realize that there's a certain absolute beauty in the type of activity they excel at.  While they may be boring on TV, field sprints are perhaps the hardest parts of any race.   Yes, a mountaintop finish requires power to weight ratio, the ability to suffer and some amount of tactical prowess, but sprinting well is a combination of massive tactical brainpower as well as leg power.  Cycling sprint training is the bridge between getting strong and actually knowing how to execute a proper sprint out on the road.

Today, we'll talk about building leg power, neuromuscular fitness and technique and finesse that you'll need to succeed.  You'll learn that a sprinter needs more than the ability to go fast.  I'll explain how cycling sprint training should be broken down into the composite parts so that you can effectively train all parts of the system together.  If you ignore one part of the equation, you may wonder why you're not getting faster, you may wonder why others are beating you, and you might even end up with an injury.

Click through to the show notes and make your cycling sprint training more effective.  Don't forget to check out our podcast show sponsor Stages Cycling: any purchases through this link will contribute a few dollars to supporting the show.  You can also rate the podcast on iTunes, share this post and download my free Sprint Training Tune Up plan!

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