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If there was one piece of advice you would give someone who wants to advance their cycling past the age of 40 or 50, what would it be? I think it was Sean Kelly who said "The difference between amateurs and Professionals is that when an amateur isn't going well he will train harder whereas a pro will rest."
Hip surgeons and physios love cycling and always prescribe it because it's not traumatic on your body if your bike is set up properly. But actually, your body needs a bit of trauma. It needs a bit of micro tear to try and generate it to heal stronger. So cycling, in some senses, when you get to my age, is too kind. You need to do your base with cycling and then challenge your body a little bit differently.
Co-founder, bike fitter and bike designer, author. Phil rides a Seven Axiom XX custom titanium bike and an Airnimal Joey folding bike. He wrote The Midlife Cyclist and enjoys walking his dog, reading, politics and the outdoors. Phil's specialism is working with clients who have complex and frequently chronic issues. Phil is most at home working in a collegiate, multi-disciplinary team, to help clients resolve intricate issues. The Midlife Cyclist offers a gold standard road-map for the mature cyclist who aims to train, perform and even race at the highest possible level. In Chapter Eight, entitled The Mindful Cyclist – the author urges the athlete to take great care of themselves as a whole to make themselves better cyclists, parents, and partners. Mr. Cavell, who espouses a pragmatic, open-minded, do what you feel approach to most cycling matters, writes that the cerebral cyclist must challenge every assumption to perform at a higher level as we grow older. Substitute ‘exercise’ for ‘therapeutic’ and that could be my ethos captured in one very short sentence. Change the terms of engagement by continuing to train into middle age and beyond – lean in on exercise as the panacea to adaptively change my body for the better; to load the dice in favour of better, not necessarily more.
The road to becoming a great cyclist in middle age and beyond may well involve doing less cycling in favour of other activities.” As an aside, it’s assumed that us lifelong exercisers do know our bodies exceptionally well. We monitor function and performance on an almost daily basis. We have decades of experience about our own health and performance, and that’s invaluable and should never be underestimated. We know how our bodies should feel when they are functioning well and conversely when they aren’t.” 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. 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. Time's arrow traditionally plots an incremental path into declining strength and speed for all of us. But we are different to every other generation of cyclists in human history. An ever-growing number of us are determined to scale the highest peaks of elite physical fitness into middle-age and beyond. Can the emerging medical and scientific research help us achieve the holy triumvirate of speed and health with age?In Chapter Two, It Is About the Bike, the author lays out a brilliant argument for how the UCI thwarted the evolution of the bicycle and credited it with its present state of suspended animation in Victorian design. The not-so-modern bicycle design, which Mr. Cavell contends, is a function of the ‘butterfly effect,’ much like the QWERTY keyboard. 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. I find it really difficult to stay in lower heartrate zones, it just saps all the fun and purpose out of most rides and is especially difficult on the gravel bike. It's causing a bit of a dilemma because I WANT to train properly for whatever the CX season throws at us, but training effectively just seems a bit joyless, sitting spinning gently up climbs or gently trundling along gravel sections when every instinct is to get on top of a big gear and smash it, etc. etc. 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. Ep. 27: indieVelo’s Dr. George Gilbert on the Innovation That Could Change the Future of Cycling Esports
Data from Dr Jon Baker, who was a coach with Team Dimension Data for four years, says that his amateur clients (that’s you and me) are closer to fatigue and nearer to being overtrained than the professionals who ride for a living and race nine months of the year all around the world! That statement was genuinely worthy of an exclamation mark. And underpinning this startling mismatch is a fundamental misunderstanding about how the human body works, and therefore improves. 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. In stark contrast, data was intrinsically dull when I was growing up. It was stored on mainframe computers in bunkers and sat in abstract to the real, vivid and actual world. ‘Data’ is even drab as a word. If you're going to exercise immoderately after certain ages, is cycling worse or better for you than something like running or swimming, or are there different advantages? But as we age our tolerance for error or injury inevitably reduces – throwing youth at any physical problem is normally the most successful strategy. But when you no longer have access to the elixir of youth, the next best strategy is being well informed about every aspect of your riding practice.
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.
Mr. Cavell asks himself and the reader as he lays the groundwork for the cerebral cornucopia to come, And it goes downhill even faster in your sixties and seventies. I'm 72 and like Andystow says below, I have two intensity levels. If I push harder it is only a matter of seconds before my puls hits the limit and I have to sit down/ease off.Many amateurs perpetually train and ride in what Dr Baker calls a ‘whirlwind of doom’ where an overestimation and obsession with an FTP (functional threshold power – the highest average power output you can sustain for an hour) means that we tend to set our training levels too high and, as a consequence, are training the wrong systems and incrementally embedding fatigue that we then struggle to shake off if we're older, because our hormonal responses are less responsive and dynamic — is this ringing any bells? I may start racing again, but then again I may try and not enjoy it or find that it is not for me anymore. My dad was a glider pilot and used to voice this old pilots law, With the help of medical experts, leading coaches, ex-professionals, and pro-team doctors, cycling biomechanics pioneer Phil Cavell produces a practical guide for mature cyclists who want to stay healthy, avoid injury, and maximize their achievement levels. This subject goes in layers, so let's deal with it in layers. Overall, yes, exercise is tremendously beneficial for you – tremendously. That's the overall, overarching message. But then, within that, it's more nuanced. If you exercise moderately into middle age and beyond, even into old age, it is unquestionably good for you: the cognitive benefits or cardiovascular benefits, the feel-good benefits, everything is positive. But to exercise moderately – and by that, I mean the kind of exercise that the people we know do – there are question marks. Now, probably when all this washes after longitudinal studies and I do the revision of this book in 20 years time, it will almost certainly be the case that that was good for you. That's my opinion, and I have no evidence of that right now. So the book is taking up the evidence that we do have, looking at all the research conducted, and then on every subject, making an informed judgment. Phil Cavell: author of The Midlife Cyclist There may well have been plenty of times when our human ancestors pushed themselves to the brink of physical collapse, fleeing predators or pursuing food. But until very recently, the chances of someone surviving to even 40 years old were vanishingly rare. Indeed, the life expectancy of pre-industrial humans was about 30 years, so for all but a handful of our 300,000 generations of evolution from the great ape, a 40-year-old human is genetically irrelevant, a selective aberration.
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