The 3 Steps to Achieving Your Cycling Goals

‘Know thyself,’ Plato said. ‘And know thy course,’ Coach Allie says. 

With years of professional racing around the glove under her belt plus years of working with all levels of athletes, Coach Allie Legg knows what it takes to have a successful race. Here are her top 5 tips for having your best race.

Know the course, make (and use!) a pre-race checklist, prepare your nutrition the night before, be smart with your efforts, and take a chance!

Listen to your body, know the variables, don’t treat travel as rest, go with the flow, don’t diet on the bike!

Maddy Ward is a UCLA grad, a former pro with Tibco and InstaFund, and a new FasCat Coach who on this episode delivers her Top 5 Training & Racing Tips.

To start training for your best year yet, get on the FasCat App, which includes unlimited training plans, the Optimize training-to-recovery balance technology, meal plans, access to FasCat Coaches like Maddy Ward and now the new AI-powered technology CoachCat!

 Use the code IMAFASCAT to get a free month of FasCat at FasCatCoaching.com.

Getting better and faster on the bike just got a whole lot better and a whole lot faster.

We are proud to announce CoachCat, an AI technology driven tool inside the FasCat App that delivers interactive workout analysis and guidance immediately upon upload of your workout.

Based on decades of our coaching experience and the cutting edge of both sports science and AI technology, CoachCat analyses your workout file and provides detailed, supportive and actionable text feedback - just like a FasCat Coach. 

Further, you can ask CoachCat questions about the workout you just did, or a workout you have coming up. Things like, 'I only have an hour tomorrow but am feeling good, what should I do?' 

CoachCat provides workout guidance and workout suggestions regardless of whether you are following a plan. Say you want to just ride most days in the week, but then want a suggestion of a workout for one day. CoachCat will offer you a workout based on your parameters and even location, and then once you approve the workout, CoachCat will add it to your calendar so you can view the details and send it to your bike computer.

This podcast is all about CoachCat and the future of training. Give it a listen!

Better yet, go chat with CoachCat yourself! Use the coach IMAFASCAT to get a free month of the FasCat App, which includes unlimited training plans, the Optimize training-to-recovery balance technology, meal plans, access to FasCat Coaches and, now, CoachCat!

One of the new hot topics in training is a concept dubbed ‘durability.’ It’s being talked about by WorldTour coaches and being written about in cycling media. 

But what is durability really? Is it a new concept? Is it a metric? And most importantly, how do you train durability and test for it so that you can improve as a cyclist? 

On this podcast, Coaches Christian Parrett and Andrew Giniat dig into what it is, why it matters, and how you can improve it.

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You can save 25% off a subscription to Optimize — your year-round training solution with unlimited training plans, meal plans, and strength and conditioning videos — with the code 25podcast.

Be your best. It’s a simple concept, and hard to achieve. So here, we’re going to keep it simple and straightforward, with five easy-to-remember mantras that will help you be your best in tangible ways. 

Leading you in this is our new FasCat Coach Justin Bowes, an experienced coaching veteran across various disciplines. 

Following a prescribed training plan is the most effective way to improve as a cyclist, and yet… riding and racing in Zwift can be super fun. Can you do both? Yes, yes you can.

Here to help us on our digital and IRL training journey is Coach Jake Rytlewski, our in-house Zwift master and father of five - because you know those two things are related. (Jake also raced professionally for years, so Zwift isn't the only trick in his bag.)

Coach Jake breaks down Three Ways to Maximize your Zwift Training and Racing —  with 9 tips for racing, instructions on how to do OTS rides on Zwift, and how to best incorporate Zwift into your training plan, whether you work with a coach or are self-guided.

Are you racing on Zwift? How many of these nine things are you doing?

9. Line up early 

8. Be ready for a fast start 

7. Stay in the draft 

6. Don’t coast 

5. Know the course 

4. Know the Power Ups 

3. Know the finish 

2. Don’t judge your fitness based on a Zwift result

1. Limit Zwift racing to once a week, twice at the most

Coach Jake raced for years as a pro, in Europe, Asia and in the US, before starting his now-12-year career as a Coach. You can learn more and hire him here: https://fascatcoaching.com/collections/coaches/products/jake-rytlewski

It’s January and many of us are in the thick of new year’s resolutions that may or may not last. Here to help us become better cyclists - with 10 easy-to-form habits that can last and only take 10 minutes or less - is Coach Sierra Sims.

Coach Sierra holds a Master's Degree in exercise physiology, and she did graduate work on the physiology of master’s cyclists and bone health in female road cyclists, mountain bikers, and runners.

This woman is an expert, folks!

Sierra has also won a national MTB championship, and raced at the national level in road and ’cross as well, along with racing in Europe for the USA national team.

Suffice it to say, you're in good hands here, folks. Listen in so you can pick up 10 good habits that will improve your cycling in 10 minutes or less.

You see what you are looking for - Awareness Test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

*Sierra's 4-way charging cable: http://tinyurl.com/yc25z349*

Sweet Spot training is great for a number of things, and today we’re talking about how it’s highly effective for racking up Training Load - a key metric for any cyclist’s training plan.

Training Load is the forest view of your fitness, a weighted 42-day rolling average of your recent workouts. The higher the load, the more potential fitness you have at your disposal.

On a daily perspective, you might be familiar with TSS from your Garmin or Wahoo - TSS stands for Training Stress Score. FasCat founder Frank Overton helped create this metric back in the day! Now at FasCat we use OTS, or Optimized Training Score, which is a more refined metric that accounts for things like coasting during a ride or weighting the power output at the end of four-hour rides higher than the same output in hour one.

On this podcast, Frank and Ben Delaney talk about doing OTS workouts - where the objective is to rack up a prescribed amount of work, not to follow a bar-graph set of intervals.

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Goals are great to have, but a specific plan to reach your goals is where the rubber meets the road - or trail. 

In this podcast Coach Elliott Baring walks you through the three steps to achieve your cycling goals:

1. determine your goals
2. determine the demands of your goals
3. build the training timeline to reach your goals

As a precursor, the nine talented athletes who comprise the Optimize Collective tell us what they are training for, and how they are working with their coach to get there.

Then, Coach Elliott breaks down how you can set your training to achieve your goals, using some examples of two-time Unbound Gravel winner Lauren De Crescenzo, whom he is coaching this year, as well as his own goals, like Belgian Waffle Ride North Carolina and the Leadville Trail 100.

Group Rides and Sweet Spot - two things we love here at FasCat. This podcast puts the two together. 

If you’re new to the pod, welcome! And if you’re new to the concept of Sweet Spot, know that it’s a training zone and a training technique. As a zone, it's between 84% to 97% of your functional threshold power. 

At FasCat, we have Sweet Spot training baked into many of our training plans, especially at this time of the year.

And yes, you can do Sweet Spot workouts on the trainer or by yourself. But cycling is often more fun with others, and the real jedi magic for training is when you can incorporate specific training into either the landscape - like hills or wind - or group rides or even races!

So, how to Sweet Spot in the group ride? The answer, as always is: IT DEPENDS. So we discuss a few scenarios: Hard group rides, medium hard group rides, and then the all-important post-ride analysis.

This is the fourth episode in an eight-pod series on Sweet Spot.