Empirical Cycling Podcast

This podcast discusses common mistakes people make on rest and recovery days, the importance of individualizing these days, and the benefits of active recovery. It emphasizes the need to replenish calories on rest days and the significance of sleep and establishing a bedtime routine. The hosts also explore the importance of athlete feedback, adjusting training, and the benefits of rest days and recovery weeks. Overall, the podcast highlights the significance of rest and recovery in training for optimal performance.

In this episode, 20+ year bike racing veteran Giancarlo Bianchi discusses the tactics of bike racing, and the process of honing racecraft and why people thought his FTP was significantly higher than it is. We cover the chess-game aspects of bike racing like positioning, aerodynamics, wind, reading the competition and body language, course and competitor recon, and a lot of stories from his own race career. We also answer your listener questions like how to practice with few racing opportunities, tactics that might annoy other racers, and much more.

The podcast discusses common strength training mistakes made by cyclists, including tracking load and fatigue, impact on the bike, recovery, session frequency and timing, and max testing. They also answer listener questions on explosive lifting, hypertrophy vs strength phases, expected fitness impacts, alternatives to strength, and water weight.

Delving into glycogen depletion in training, the podcast questions the efficacy of 'train low' methods. From molecular pathways to substrate use, it dissects training with low muscle glycogen levels and its impact on performance. Emphasizing the need for a holistic training approach, it warns against the limitations of low glycogen training and its potential downsides. Gender differences, mitochondrial ATP production pathways, and the ineffectiveness of this approach are also discussed.

Pro cyclist and coach Taylor Warren joins for a wide ranging discussion, including how he still finds fitness improvements after a decade of training and racing, balancing rest and workouts mid season, the value of the basics, RPE, and if American racing has gotten easier or harder. We also answer your listener questions on Legion's tactics, the most important power durations for domestic US racing, racing the course vs racing the people, training regrets, how much pros train, and more.

This is a wide ranging conversation with professional cyclist and Empirical Cycling coach Maeghan Easler. We discuss her successful race season domestically and with the national team, American vs European racing, and how improving fitness changed her training needs, along with more training and coaching topics like volume, recovery, intensity, nutrition and bodyweight, individualizing, and why she prefers 7 hour rides to 8. Instead of listener questions to finish the episode, we react to your controversial training takes submitted for a now forever-lost episode.

This episode takes a long look at the mechanisms behind aerobic adaptations from high intensity exercise, starting with an early study showing how AMPK activation leads directly to mitochondrial biogenesis, followed by a recent meta-analysis showing when high intensity exercise does and doesn't lead to adaptation. We provide guidelines in terms of exercise intensity, duration, and how well trained you are. Then we give some practical takeaways, plus debunk all the ways "hacking" this adaptive signal chain don't work. Marinus Petersen of KiloWatt Coaching steps in as a guest co-host for Kyle and provides an additional perspective from his coaching experience, and his formal exercise physiology education.

Empirical Cycling coach Rory Porteous discusses common reasons for fitness plateaus and their fixes. Topics include fatigue management, overcoming plateaus, motivation, training methodologies, understanding workout purposes, expectation mismatch, and the importance of consulting with an expert for improvements.

Former pro cyclist and successful lobbyist for the Tour de France Femmes, Kathryn Bertine joins the podcast to discuss her new memoir about these efforts, STAND, which details what it took, and what it cost. We discuss the writing and publishing process, activism and slacktivism, what people can do to effect change at every level, the financial structure of the TdF and sponsorships in cycling, what the Homestretch Foundation is and its purpose, an unlikely friendship with a raunchy comedian, and much more.

This episode discusses (and debunks) five training myths regarding training volume, and your listener questions asked on Kolie's Instagram. Myths addressed: -You can overtrain on volume but not intensity -Women can’t do as much volume as men -You can replace high volume with high intensity -Easy spinning is junk miles -You don’t need to train many hours to be fast