Empirical Cycling Podcast

Erica Zaveta, a retired professional road and cyclocross racer with two decades of competition and coaching experience, shares invaluable insights on individualizing training for high-intensity cycling. She discusses the importance of mid-season breaks and incorporating skills work for crits, cyclocross, and mountain biking. Erica highlights how to balance group rides with personal goals and manage fatigue across multiple disciplines. Plus, she answers listener questions, offering tailored strategies for athletes at all levels.

Kolie and Rory discuss their lists of the best things to do or avoid to maintain fitness in race season, and balance with appropriate rest. Also touched on are race prioritization, training and progression expectations, methods to estimate and manage fatigue, openers, volume vs intensity, and much more including your listener questions.

Coach Marinus Petersen discusses quantifying training volume in cycling, comparing TSS, hours, and kilojoules. Topics include balancing endurance with intervals, muscle fiber recruitment, stress vs. strain, and the relationship between TSS and FTP. The conversation explores optimizing training intensity, individualized approaches, and managing stress for optimal performance in cycling.

Professor Patrick Smith joins to discuss performance psychology, its role in cycling performance and everyday life, and some of the underlying themes and tools he uses in practice. We also discuss race nerves, negative spirals, some of the stigma around psychology in sports and overcoming it, defining the metrics of success, and more.

For this episode, Kolie and CTS coach Adam Pulford made lists of their most impactful coaching mistakes, how they recognized them, and their fixes. Lists include high intensity, training zones, communication, and more, plus things still ongoing. Also discussed is what makes a good coach, as well as your listener questions on the best coaching mistakes, fatigue management, trusting your coaching clients, and more.

In this podcast, they discuss pacing and programming endurance rides, answer listener questions on HR zones and fueling, and explore low, medium, and high volume week considerations. They focus on balancing intensity and duration in training, optimizing endurance rides through effective pacing, and maximizing cycling opportunities during trips.

The podcast delves into the difference in muscular adaptations between training intensity and volume, focusing on continuous moderate intensity, HIIT, and sprint interval training. It explores the intricate network of mitochondria in muscle cells, highlighting challenges in quantifying their numbers accurately. The discussion also covers the impact of training variables on mitochondrial function, individual variations in response to training, and the importance of balancing volume and intensity in endurance performance.

Whether you have a coach or are self-coached, leaving workout feedback helps to ensure you're getting the most out of your training plan and coaching. In this episode we discuss what kind of feedback to leave on what topics (like RPE, nutrition, sickness, sleep, etc), appropriate level of detail, and how we as coaches find it useful plus what we do with the information. We also answer your listener questions.

This is an in depth discussion on the upsides and downsides of always training to raise FTP vs holding it longer. After defining terms, we discuss the training required, adaptation timelines, fatigue, long term development, plus coaching and event specific considerations. We also consider a few counterpoints for each kind of training, individual response and needs, whether or not this is an actual debate, and answer your listener questions.

Dive into the intriguing role of PGC-1α in aerobic adaptation and endurance performance. Surprisingly, recent studies reveal unexpected outcomes from gene knockout experiments. Learn about the significance of structured training and balancing intensity with recovery. The conversation also unravels myths around metabolic adaptations from different training methods, emphasizing the need for personalized workout plans. Plus, discover how to interpret research on PGC-1α to optimize your training and performance.