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The Midlife Cyclist: The Road Map for the +40 Rider Who Wants to Train Hard, Ride Fast and Stay Healthy

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Controversially, I’m going to suggest a few midlife amendments to current training orthodoxy. The first is that we drop all the other strata of training, other than low intensity (LIT) and high intensity (HIT) training. We'll define LIT as anything below aerobic threshold, which coach Fox recommends could be as high as 70-80 per cent of maximum heart rate, but thinks is actually better executed at around 60-70 per cent of maximum. Dr Baker agrees with this and adds the context that ‘it's almost impossible to go too low’ for LIT or oxidative training, meaning that the most important principle to observe is that you must actually be oxidative, which you won't be if you go too high.

Riding indoors has real benefits, especially when you have long UK winters! But a mix is important or exercise can become repetitive. T he Midlife Cyclist is entertaining, insightful, well researched and vital reading for all youngsters over forty who have a love affair with the bike ― Norman Foster It would say try and look at a broader basket of metrics other than just FTP, (functional threshold power). I would say enjoy your cycling, enjoy how you increase your performance: how you climb, how you descend, how pleased you feel on the bike, how much you enjoy cycling. My concern when my clients ride too much indoors is that they are going too hard too much of the time. If the client can afford a temperature-controlled workout space with a huge fan then that is much better. Controlling a fast-moving bicycle over any terrain is a complex synaptic juggling exercise that uses a huge amount of cognitive ability – I’m personally convinced that this is one of the reasons why cycling is so good for us, and why indoor cycling, though sometimes sensible, isn’t as mentally refreshing as outdoor cycling.”Considering how far we have come in the last two decades, as entertainingly told in “The Midlife Cyclist,” it is exciting to think what lies ahead for those wishing to push their athletic boundaries rather than push a walker. I would imagine even a pro or their coach has to do a certain amount of trial and error. There is enough information out there in books for amateurs to have enough knowledge to be able to produce a good quality training programme that can be tweaked further as we gain that experience. There is also good enough software available for free to be able to monitor progress and learn to judge how to come into form, peak and avoid over training. Robot fell in love with cycling watching the older neighborhood kids ride wheelies down the street. It was the early '70s, and Evel Knievel was jumping motorcycles over buses. Everything seemed possible. From that moment, the die was cast (iacta alia est). One of those being why midlife female athletes seem to be better protected against heart disease. Why is that? I hypothecate with the help of cardiologists, but it is still not fully known.

But this shouldn’t lead us to think that we’re redundant just because our genomes didn’t evolve to last past our late 20s. Paleoanthropologist Rachel Caspari points to an exponential boost in art, culture and civic activity in the Upper Paleolithic era 30,000 years ago, at the same time as a demographic deflection or a shift in lifespan took place, resulting in our ancestors actually living long enough to become invested and contributing grandparents. Initially, Caspari was unsure whether the lifespan uplift in adult survivorship was due to biological/genetic factors or behavioural shifts. After screening our older ancestors from the Middle Paleolithic era – between 140,000 and 40,000 years ago – it became clear that a cultural shift had helped Stone Age grandparents make their offsprings’ lives markedly less Hobbesian – i.e. ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Performance pioneers I know you shouldn't rely on anecdotes, but I'm sure you know, and many people I know who do bike racing at a more senior age – a significant number have problems with their heart or something develops with their heart. And that may be connected, or it may not be, but that is a worry, isn't it for a lot of people? Yes, saddle choice and position. When you ride a bike in the real world the bike is moving with you in three dimensions. In the virtual world, it is immobile and static.

The weapon of choice for this new genus of veteran athlete is often the bicycle. There are many reasons for this (which we will explore in this book) – cycling is generally gentle on ageing joints, every ride carries a sense of adventure, it’s innately sociable and there are lots of measurable metrics. The preferred playgrounds are very varied, too – anywhere from epic Tour de France stages and days in the Serra de Tramuntana mountain ranges in Mallorca, to the now iconic Box Hill in Surrey or even Zwift(ing) in your own spare room. Very useful article for people of any age. Unfortunately the images were mostly decorative and an opportunity was missed to match and interplay more usefully with the text content. Ageing is scientifically one of the least understood areas of human health. Is that possibly because scientists are also human and therefore have a cognitive bias towards the holy grail of arresting, or even reversing, ageing instead of explaining the mechanisms at work? Dr Baker thinks that most amateur riders function at only 60 per cent of their theoretical aerobic (oxidative) capacity due to training incorrectly — mostly from riding too much at too high a level. You need to be a fast tortoise before you can become even a slow hare. Aerobic, as we know, is a cipher for functioning within an oxidative state — using fatty acids and glucose as fuel with oxygen, which is metabolised in our muscle’s mitochondria to produce energy. It’s our long-burn, sustainable state. Our most important goal as endurance athletes surely has to be to increase our oxidative or aerobic performance window, to become better at producing more power but at the same time staying oxidative/aerobic.

I agree that the majority of training should be endurance and that should be Z1 in a 3 zone model or Z2 in the 7 zone model and going above this can lead to fatigue so that may leave you too tired to carry out the HIIT intervals on another day in the week. There is nothing like competing with your support system within inches. In addition, with technological advances in the virtual cycling game, I communicate with my teammates via Discord. Much the same applies.A 30-year lifespan seemed to be the upper end of the age spectrum for hundreds of thousands of generations of our ancestors for a very good reason. It allowed the individual to mature, breed and parent offspring to maturity. So, while there’s certainly evolutionary pressure for Homo sapiens to survive to 30 years old, that still leaves me very unlikely to win an all-out sprint against my 29-year-old self, whether on a bicycle at Eastway or running away from a hungry leopard. I’ll almost certainly lose because there’s plainly no selective imperative for me to win. Indeed, if you take a strictly gene-centric view, there’s actually a selective advantage to me losing a sprint for survival against a younger close family member, so they can survive and propagate shared genes through their offspring. Yes, there is. Many of our clients came to cycling a bit late, from another sport they couldn't do anymore, or from being sedentary. If you are coming to cycling as a middle-aged person, and you've largely been sedentary for the last 30-40 years, this is when you should take a medically-based trajectory. On the other hand, if you're somebody who's always cycled hard or ran hard, and you're just seeking to preserve it, I do think it's a different stream. Neither one's necessarily riskier than the other. But I think the advice is different. If you've been sedentary for all these years, you don't know what your body is or how your body's going to react if you start challenging it quite hard. So rather than challenge it hard and then find out, why not find out and then challenge it hard. An amazing accomplishment... a simple-to-understand précis of your midlife as a cyclist – you won't want to put it down.' – Phil Liggett, TV cycling commentator The author offers an alternative to the data-driven cyclist afflicted with ‘paralysis by analysis.’ Mr. Cavell believes the midlife cyclist will benefit from training by feel rather than a rigid structure. The individual will take more responsibility for their development and accountability for their growth and self-expression as aging athletes.

Renowned cycling biomechanics pioneer, Phil Cavell, explores the growing trend of middle-aged and older cyclists seeking to achieve high-level performance. Using contributions from leading coaches, ex-professionals and pro-team doctors, he produces the ultimate manifesto for mature riders who want to stay healthy, avoid injury – and maximise their achievement levels. FTP became the unabashed god. And we had become the crash-test dummies for future generations who wanted to explore elite physical fitness into middle-age and beyond. In Chapter One, The Ageing Cyclist – Growing Old Disgracefully, the author skillfully dissects and disseminates cutting-edge research and interviews of prominent authorities in genetics, metabolism, orthopedics, physiology, endocrinology, pulmonology, and cognition.I didn’t fall victim to coming to the defense of virtual cycling when thoroughly enjoying Mr. Cavell’s book, either. As I enter my 6th decade of ‘Midlife’ I have evolved, finding greater merit in the virtues of education over instigation.

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