By Chris Carmichael CEO/Head Coach of CTS One of the most persistent questions throughout the 2018 Tour de France was: ‘Who is the leader of Team Sky?’ It is not that uncommon for a team to bring more than one rider capable of challenging for the yellow jersey, but it is uncommon for both general …
By Chris Carmichael CEO and Head Coach of CTS The Tour de France tried something new this year, in the form of two very short, very hard mountain stages, both ending with summit finishes. The first was Stage 11 in the Alps, a 108-kilometer race with four categorized climbs and virtually no flat valley roads. …
There are a lot of frustrated cyclists out there. It’s summer and maybe your fitness and performance aren’t where you expected them to be by this time of the year. We hear this scenario every summer from new athletes signing up for coaching. The year hasn’t gone as planned up to this point and …
I had a long conversation with a coaching colleague who gained a significant amount of belly fat and is working to regain his fitness and fit back into his normal cycling gear. I can commiserate. About 15 years ago I went through the same process, and having a belly for a while completely changed …
Checking on your assumptions is one of the best things you can do with data. Many experienced athletes, myself included, are confident their training, recovery, and nutrition routines are solid because they were solid the last time they checked and they haven’t changed anything since. But everything has changed, maybe not in major ways, …
Even though I am not fast enough to set KOMs in Colorado Springs, I still upload all my rides and off-bike activities to Strava. I like it. I rarely pin on a race number or even go on aggressive group rides, but I still have a competitive streak. Strava allows me to compete against …
It’s been a great week riding the Ride the Rockies cycling event in Colorado. The weather was great for riding and the people were incredible. Cyclists of all ages, shapes, sizes and skill levels rode together, helped each other out, and made new friends. As a coach I tend to pay attention to how …
I was talking with an athlete earlier this week and our conversation turned to the issue of weight, as it has during nearly every coaching conversation we’ve had in the past year. The athlete I was talking to is probably not that different from you. He has worked hard and improved significantly. His power at lactate …
Choking on a cherry tomato wasn’t the way I wanted to go out. One night at the Amgen Tour of California Race Experience I got a cherry tomato lodged in my throat at the team dinner. I tried to swallow hard to get it down. I tried to cough. I tried to talk. Nothing worked. …
Intermittent fasting is worthless for endurance athletes. There, I said it (donning flak jacket…). You can keep doing it if you want to, just stop doing it because you think it’s going to make you faster. It’s no better or worse than other forms of caloric restriction There are three mainstream version of intermittent …