People use cycling to achieve various goals, including health, fitness, competition, fun and adventure. Weight loss often occurs naturally as a consequence of increased hours and miles on the bike. CTS typically approaches weight management from the perspective of improving endurance sport performance, like increasing power-to-weight ratio. However, we recognize weight loss is a primary …
Some workouts just don’t go like you planned. Maybe you visualized pushing the pace at the front of the group ride, or crushing that set of intervals, or spinning along smoothly for hours on end. Instead, you felt sluggish, like you were pedaling squares, or like you couldn’t get out of your own way. Crappy …
Indoor cycling is great for packing a lot of effective training into a short period of time. You don’t need to get dressed in multiple layers or navigate to safe roads for interval training. You can just get on, warm up, and open the throttle. But effective interval training requires fuel, and there are special …
There is an entire generation of cyclists that views VO2 max as a genetically pre-determined performance ceiling. A more modern and nuanced take shows it to be quite responsive to training. With different types of workouts we can increase VO2 max itself, as well as peak power, fractional utilization, and power duration at VO2 max. That’s …
By Chris Carmichael, Founder and Head Coach of CTS In exercise science and coaching there are long and passionate debates about the structure of interval workouts, the intensities that should be used, the duration of efforts and recoveries, and the total amount of work performed during a training session or a block of training. …
By Chris Carmichael, Founder and Head Coach of CTS There is no shortage of endurance challenges spanning the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Although the “Festive 500” – 500 kilometers between December 25-31 – remains one of the most popular, you can also find other distance-, duration-, and elevation-based challenges for the coming …
By Chris Carmichael, Founder and Head Coach of CTS My coaches and I work with many athletes leading high-pressure careers, including C-suite executives, entrepreneurs, first responders, and medical professionals. Others are experiencing life-altering levels of stress from failing relationships, long-term caregiving for sick loved ones or aging parents, or grief from losing loved ones. There …
By Chris Carmichael, Founder and Head Coach of CTS If you want to get a sense for the quality, durability, and versatility of a bicycle, you need to get feedback from cyclists with a range of body sizes, experience levels, and riding styles. I can tell you I love a certain bike, but that’s the …
By Chris Carmichael, Founder and Head Coach of CTS “What’s the best cycling workout I can do?” That’s a question I get all the time, and it’s not easy to answer. If you’ve been training for an appreciable amount of time, you realize there is no single best workout, but rather, it’s best to personalize …
By Chris Carmichael, Founder and Head Coach of CTS When you tally up all the workouts and rest days, Time-Crunched Athletes spend more than 95% of their time NOT exercising. Even cyclists on high-volume training plans rarely spend more than 10% of the total hours in a week training. What you do – or don’t …