As many athletes wrap up their competitive seasons, there’s a tremendous opportunity to comb through the year’s achievements and shortcomings. It’s an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. Each fall I set aside time for comprehensive season reviews with my athletes. This guided reflection process creates an historical reference, and it’s a key tool for really …
By Chris Carmichael, Founder and Chief Endurance Officer Being a strong athlete and being a fast athlete are not necessarily the same thing. There are a lot of athletes who have great endurance and can maintain a hard and steady pace hour after hour. This is especially true late in the summer when athletes …
Table of Contents PART 1: Preparing for Exercise in Hot Weather PART 2: Optimizing Performance During Hot Weather PART 3: Recovery Strategies After Exercise in Hot Weather Introduction: Heat is the enemy of endurance performance and an underlying cause for diminished performance, dehydration, heat stress, gastrointestinal distress, and impaired recovery. This guide will provide you …
We are all aware that exercise is beneficial to our health, but exposure to air pollution isn’t. Harmful particles end up in your lungs causing irritation, inflammation, and can microscopic particulates can potentially enter the bloodstream. This can cause an increased risk for serious medical issues, including heart attack and stroke. What are athletes …
In an era when algorithms amplify gimmicks and 7-second soundbites, athletes are inundated with contradicting and confusing messages about how coaching works. Some athletes fail to see the difference between a professional coach and a hobbyist whose main qualifications are their own competitive results. As of this year, I have worked for CTS for half …
Catching up with gravel and mountain bike pro Russell Finsterwald is no easy feat. He even goes on vacation fast. The day after winning the final major gravel cycling race of the 2022 season, Big Sugar in Bentonville, Arkansas, and finishing third overall in the Lifetime Gran Prix, Finsterwald flew directly to Mexico for some …
Middle-aged athletes – men and women – are used to facing criticism or skepticism from our sedentary peers. It’s a midlife crisis, vanity, an attempt to recapture our youth, a way of denying that we’re getting older, and the list goes on. What they fail to understand is that we don’t train to hold on …
Accomplishing ambitious goals in endurance sports requires planning. CTS Coaches prepare elite athletes for success at the world’s premier events, as well as first-timers to take on challenging personal goals, and all athletes between these two extremes. The specific workouts and plans vary widely, but the underlying process is rooted in the same fundamentals of …
Communication is important. In fact, it may be the single most important part of any coach-athlete relationship. Years of data and race reports only tell a part of the story. The rest of the narrative, the most important parts, are found in an athlete’s words and subjective descriptions. Coaches gain access to a trove of …
By Jim Rutberg, CTS Pro Coach, co-author “The Time-Crunched Cyclist” and “Training Essentials for Ultrarunning” As summer turns to fall, many cyclists shift their attention from road, gravel, and mountain bike events to cyclocross. Held on closed courses in local parks, cyclocross is a perfect way to get a great workout, satisfy your competitive drive, and …