FasCat Cycling Training Tips Podcast

Getting better and faster on the bike just got a whole lot better and a whole lot faster. We are proud to announce CoachCat, an AI technology driven tool inside the FasCat App that delivers interactive workout analysis and guidance immediately upon upload of your workout. Based on decades of our coaching experience and the cutting edge of both sports science and AI technology, CoachCat analyses your workout file and provides detailed, supportive and actionable text feedback - just like a FasCat Coach.  Further, you can ask CoachCat questions about the workout you just did, or a workout you have coming up. Things like, 'I only have an hour tomorrow but am feeling good, what should I do?'  CoachCat provides workout guidance and workout suggestions regardless of whether you are following a plan. Say you want to just ride most days in the week, but then want a suggestion of a workout for one day. CoachCat will offer you a workout based on your parameters and even location, and then once you approve the workout, CoachCat will add it to your calendar so you can view the details and send it to your bike computer. This podcast is all about CoachCat and the future of training. Give it a listen! Better yet, go chat with CoachCat yourself! Use the coach IMAFASCAT to get a free month of the FasCat App, which includes unlimited training plans, the Optimize training-to-recovery balance technology, meal plans, access to FasCat Coaches and, now, CoachCat!    

One of the new hot topics in training is a concept dubbed ‘durability.’ It’s being talked about by WorldTour coaches and being written about in cycling media.  But what is durability really? Is it a new concept? Is it a metric? And most importantly, how do you train durability and test for it so that you can improve as a cyclist?  On this podcast, Coaches Christian Parrett and Andrew Giniat dig into what it is, why it matters, and how you can improve it. -- Have you been enjoying the FasCat Podcast? Please leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks! You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.

Be your best. It’s a simple concept, and hard to achieve. So here, we’re going to keep it simple and straightforward, with five easy-to-remember mantras that will help you be your best in tangible ways.  Leading you in this is our new FasCat Coach Justin Bowes, an experienced coaching veteran across various disciplines.  -- Have you been enjoying the FasCat Podcast? Please leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks! You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.  

Coach Jake Rytlewski shares 9 tips for maximizing Zwift training and racing, including lining up early, staying in the draft, and knowing the course and power-ups. He also discusses the importance of limiting Zwift racing to once a week, incorporating Zwift into your training plan, and the benefits of Swift OTS rides. The hosts also talk about balancing training with a busy schedule, flexible scheduling of training days, and the advantages of the team format in racing.

It’s January and many of us are in the thick of new year’s resolutions that may or may not last. Here to help us become better cyclists - with 10 easy-to-form habits that can last and only take 10 minutes or less - is Coach Sierra Sims. Coach Sierra holds a Master's Degree in exercise physiology, and she did graduate work on the physiology of master’s cyclists and bone health in female road cyclists, mountain bikers, and runners. This woman is an expert, folks! Sierra has also won a national MTB championship, and raced at the national level in road and ’cross as well, along with racing in Europe for the USA national team. Suffice it to say, you're in good hands here, folks. Listen in so you can pick up 10 good habits that will improve your cycling in 10 minutes or less. You see what you are looking for - Awareness Test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4 *Sierra's 4-way charging cable: http://tinyurl.com/yc25z349* -- Have you been enjoying the FasCat Podcast? Please leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks! You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.

Sweet Spot training is great for a number of things, and today we’re talking about how it’s highly effective for racking up Training Load - a key metric for any cyclist’s training plan. Training Load is the forest view of your fitness, a weighted 42-day rolling average of your recent workouts. The higher the load, the more potential fitness you have at your disposal. On a daily perspective, you might be familiar with TSS from your Garmin or Wahoo - TSS stands for Training Stress Score. FasCat founder Frank Overton helped create this metric back in the day! Now at FasCat we use OTS, or Optimized Training Score, which is a more refined metric that accounts for things like coasting during a ride or weighting the power output at the end of four-hour rides higher than the same output in hour one. On this podcast, Frank and Ben Delaney talk about doing OTS workouts - where the objective is to rack up a prescribed amount of work, not to follow a bar-graph set of intervals. -- Have you been enjoying the FasCat Podcast? Please leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks! You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.

Goals are great to have, but a specific plan to reach your goals is where the rubber meets the road - or trail.  In this podcast Coach Elliott Baring walks you through the three steps to achieve your cycling goals: determine your goals determine the demands of your goals build the training timeline to reach your goals As a precursor, the nine talented athletes who comprise the Optimize Collective tell us what they are training for, and how they are working with their coach to get there. Then, Coach Elliott breaks down how you can set your training to achieve your goals, using some examples of two-time Unbound Gravel winner Lauren De Crescenzo, whom he is coaching this year, as well as his own goals, like Belgian Waffle Ride North Carolina and the Leadville Trail 100. -- Have you been enjoying the FasCat Podcast? Please leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks! You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.

Group Rides and Sweet Spot - two things we love here at FasCat. This podcast puts the two together.  If you’re new to the pod, welcome! And if you’re new to the concept of Sweet Spot, know that it’s a training zone and a training technique. As a zone, it's between 84% to 97% of your functional threshold power.  At FasCat, we have Sweet Spot training baked into many of our training plans, especially at this time of the year. And yes, you can do Sweet Spot workouts on the trainer or by yourself. But cycling is often more fun with others, and the real jedi magic for training is when you can incorporate specific training into either the landscape - like hills or wind - or group rides or even races! So, how to Sweet Spot in the group ride? The answer, as always is: IT DEPENDS. So we discuss a few scenarios: Hard group rides, medium hard group rides, and then the all-important post-ride analysis. This is the fourth episode in an eight-pod series on Sweet Spot. -- Have you been enjoying the FasCat Podcast? Please leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks! You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.  

There are so many rad races available for us in 2024, and here, the FasCat Coaches walk you through 40 events that we're excited about. We’ve got recommendations for road events, gravel events, stages races, mountain bike events, gran fondo events, and more. While most of the races we suggest are in the United States (as this is our area of expertise), we do have a trio of recommendations in Europe. When you’ve picked out an event or events you want to train for, we have two great ways to help you get there: -an Optimize subscription with unlimited training plans -personal coaching with one of the experts you hear on this podcast Happy New Year and all the best in 2024! -- Have you been enjoying the FasCat Podcast? Please leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks! You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.

Riding too hard, too often. Bonking. Not having fun! As cyclists, we have some bad habits, and this podcast is about a few common ailments, and how to avoid them. Today we have Coach Ricky Arnopol joining us to talk about 6 Bad Habits he often sees in his coached athletes, his pro teammates on the UCI Continental Team Project Echelon, and cyclists in general. --- Have you been enjoying the FasCat Podcast? Please leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks! You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.