physiology

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Recover Like A Pro (Podcast #50)

Have you ever heard that your body doesn't get stronger through training?  It's an odd thing to think about, but it's inherently true.  Training is the overloading stimulus that (hopefully) pushes your body beyond it's comfort zone.  Once you've pushed beyond the constraints of your fitness you need to allow the body to repair the damage that has been done to it and build it stronger for the next challenge.  But the recovery phase is something that many cyclists completely ignore, opting instead to sit on the sofa or worse, go for a recovery ride that turns into a workout.

In today's 50th episode of the Tailwind Coaching Podcast, I'll detail some of the do's and don'ts of recovery, including:

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Efficient Functional Threshold Power (FTP) – Podcast #47

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:

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Effective “Off Season” Training – Podcast #46

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:

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Strength Training For Cyclists – Part 2 (Podcast #43)

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.

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Biohacking Lactic Acid

Lactic acid.  The burn.  The chemical that Phil and Paul always talk about “filling up the legs” and “making the legs scream in agony.”  It gets a bad rap, one that it perhaps doesn't deserve.  Little do most athletes know, it can not only be a key way to enhance your performance, but it may very well be required by the body to fuel your brain and contribute to various chemical reactions within the body.  Biohacking lactic acid will help you improve your cycling performance.

How can this improve your cycling performance?

Easy.  For simplicity's sake (as an overview) here's the gist of it: The more time you spend creating lactic acid, the more your body will be forced to deal with.  That causes a cascade of metabolic changes in the body.  But how does dealing with lactic acid get you further?  How does your body do it?  How can we use those lactic acid idiosyncrasies to be faster cyclists?

We'll look at a couple of ways to hack lactic acid after the jump, and after we understand how it's produced and cleared.

Click through the jump to see how it works (warning, sciencey, geeky stuff ahead):

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