#topcyclingtips

Hi there! How are you today? Looking forward to the weekend? This weekend I am having a quick weekend in Ireland. It is the first time that I have seen the Irish family since I got married so I am literally about to head out for a meal in a minute so thought I would get a quick e-mail in before heading out. I am lucky that I don’t have an event on this weekend because I always find travel takes it out of me, whichever direction I go and it doesn’t matter how small the time difference! When you go to an event and you have to travel it is really important to make sure that you plan and prepare for this part of the event because it can be psychologically and physically tiring. Use the below tips to help you when you need to travel to an event or click on the infographic below for more information! Here are my top tips in making sure that travel doesn’t get the best of you when you head abroad for a cycling event: 1. Try and sleep in line with the times that the country you are visiting. Sometimes easier said than done! 2. If the event is abroad, try and arrive a couple days in advance if you can to adjust the body clock and to get used to any changes in temperature/elevation. If it is in the same country, arrive in plenty of time to get prepared and sort all of your equipment out and to register. 3. Research what the weather will be like to help determine your hydration, nutrition and clothing strategies. Stay hydrated at all times. Drink lots of water and eat lots of vegetables! 4. Try and maintain a neck position that doesn’t cause tightness 5. Try and get a massage or use a foam roller to loosen off the muscles in tight areas on arrival 6. If you don’t have a masseuse or foam roller handy, a lacrosse ball, stretching or yoga can be beneficial 7. Bring a Book to read to help you get to sleep if you are suffering from jet lag 8. Make sure you get your bike serviced and looked at before you go. Also check it over again when you get to the event. 9. Having a check list can help to keep you focused and not lose sight of what you are doing/where you are supposed to be 10. If coming from high elevation to sea level, try and leave your arrival as late as possible to make the most of the increased blood cells you will have gained at altitude! Those are my top tips for managing your travel when heading to a cycling event but check out this awesome infographic which shows how to travel like an athlete! Hope that helps over the coming months if you have to head off somewhere for a cycling event. Have a great weekend and enjoy the heat wave!!! Graham   P.S. If you would like help training for a cycling event or want some cycle coaching we can help you. Our services include: 1. Training from our indoor studios. Fully kitted out gyms to help improve your strength, power and endurance. 2. We can train you at home using Zwift or Trainer Road 3. We can do remote coaching using Training Peaks Coaching Software If you would like some help with your cycling and training, then let us know by replying to this e-mail or visiting our Manchester (graham 07791060451) or Southampton (Andy 07770908030) websites.  Facebook   |   YouTube   |   Twitter   |   Instagram   |   Beam.Pro Click to Post

Hi Guys! I hope you are all good today as we are now half way through the week! So I have always thought I was pretty on top of things with food. I thought I had a good understanding of how much I was putting in, both portion size and calorie wise. I have dabbled in tracking, but have always failed in keeping it up because it took a while to add all the foods and drinks I was taking in. I essentially wasn’t committed enough to keep it going or figure it out myself. However, MyFitness Pal - the number 1 food tracking app has come on leaps and bounds. With extra features such as barcode scanning and portion size automation, it takes care of everything so easily. All you have to do is enter what portion of the food you ate and BOOM, your done. You can carry on with your day. It literally takes me a maximum of 1 minute to enter the foods that I am eating to get a clearer (I say clearer because it can’t always be 100% accurate) understanding of what is going into my body. Tracking food was frustrating because I probably knew that I was eating stuff that I shouldn’t have done and as soon as I started to add it in, I felt guilty and packed it in. However, that is the whole point of tracking food. It makes you make better decisions and helps you question whether you need it because if you go over your target calories for the day, then you aren’t going to hit your goals as quickly as you would if you stayed under. The goal is to stick to this for 6 weeks, just like anything to do with fitness, you have to give it time. You can’t expect quick fixes and you can’t expect miracles. You need to commit to what you do and stick to it. We have the ability to calculate your calorie count and macronutrients and put that into a plan in line with your training. Let me know if this could be something you are interested in. Have a great day. Graham P.S. I’ve also found that you can now integrate my fitness pal with Training Peaks so we can check on your daily calorie count with your training to make our coaching decisions even more informed! They update in real time as well, which is super cool! P.S. Remember that you can buy all of your turbo and cycling needs from our online store. CLICK HERE to see our latest offers on turbos, accessories and coaching. Facebook   |   YouTube   |   Twitter   |   Instagram   Click to Post

Hey everyone, We are now in full swing of the Summer holidays and you are no doubt half way out the door with your swimmers, flip flops and Hawaiian shirt! This is a period of time where all that good training that you’ve done over the year can slide a little. However, This isn’t a bad thing. The holiday period is a good time to reset, unwind and relax. Use this time to have some fun and don’t worry about the training, just make sure that you don’t leave it too long before getting back on the bike. So here are my top tips to stay cycle fit during the holiday season! 1. Have a group of friends or a club that go out regularly. Make sure it is pencilled into the diary so that you stay accountable. 2. You can do shorter but more intense sessions so the volume can be dropped. You then don’t have to do as much to maintain your level of fitness. 3. If you aren’t training as much, don’t eat as many carbohydrates or overindulge on the naughty things. This will help to maintain the waistline. 4. Do some cross training. Add some variation into the training. Play tennis, go swimming, hiking, kayaking, paddle boarding. Add something else into the exercise plan to stay fresh psychologically. 5. Add some light gym work into the plan. See professional advice before doing this but gym work can be a fun way to add strength into your body before going back into winter training. The most important thing is to have fun! Enjoy the time off with the family or friends and make the most of it. Don’t worry about having time off as rest can be as much a part of training as the training itself. Have a great day! Graham P.S. Remember that you can buy all of your turbo and cycling needs from our online store. CLICK HERE to see our latest offers on turbos, accessories and coaching. Facebook   |   YouTube   |   Twitter   |   Instagram   Click to Post

Sometimes it’s ok to have a binge. In this day and age, we get told that to lose weight or look perfect we have to be the perfect dieters and eat nothing but lettuce and drink smoothies. Well, this isn’t true and definitely doesn’t sit right with my style of coaching. If you are busy with work and family, then diet isn’t always going to go perfectly. Plus we all have a social life right! This weekend, I had a bit of a binge. I have been on top of my diet eating mainly a pescatarian/vegetarian diet recently but this was my last weekend where I could really do nothing and I had a bit of a binge with pizzas and scones with jam and cream. If you are looking to lose weight, you are better to do it over the course of the year, slowly and safely rather than trying to leave it last minute and go on crazy diets with huge Calorie deficits. The best way to lose weight is: 1. set yourself targets every 8-12 weeks. 2. Then also have a target each month so it becomes 4 week goals 3. Then have a weekly target so it is only 7 days. 4. Have a qualified nutritionist or PT look after your needs to do this safely and in the right way. 5. Become accountable. Have a group of like minded people to help you. This way you start to take each day step by step rather than think how far away 12 weeks is and suddenly the goal becomes unattainable. To put the right practices in place we have qualified nutritionists on hand to look after your nutrition needs. Remember, It is ok to have a little binge every once and a while, as long as your nutrition stays on course 80% of the time. Have a great day! Graham     P.S. If you would like help training for an event or want some coaching we can help you. Our services include: 1. Training from our indoor studios. Fully kitted out gyms to help improve your strength, power and endurance. 2. We can train you at home using Zwift or Trainer Road 3. We can do remote coaching using Training Peaks Coaching Software If you would like some help with your cycling and training, then let us know by replying to this e-mail or visiting our Manchester (graham 07791060451) or Southampton (Andy 07770908030) websites.  Facebook   |   YouTube   |   Twitter   |   Instagram   |   Beam.Pro Click to Post

Hey everyone, In the news today: - How you get results with a lack of training - Lo-Dough…the new revolutionary bread - I got given a Mark Cavendish Team Sky World Champ Jersey! I hope you are well today on this awesome Friday! Result 1 So this week, it was another FTP testing time for a client and on the back of her messaging me with PB’s galore on Strava, it is fair to say that the pressure was on! Thankfully she has improved 10% in the last 8 weeks!!! Her sessions changed between coming in once a week and twice a week, so not a great deal of volume in her training, yet she improved 10%…How is that even possible? Well folks, Many cyclists or triathletes will think that they are doing everything that they can to challenge their cycling, when actually they are just doing the same repetitive thing over and over. You can get on Zwift or Trainer road as much as you like, but if you aren’t directly challenging the aerobic systems and the muscular systems that need work, then you aren’t going to improve your cycling fitness or get any faster. I have one client who came to see me because he is going away on a holiday and wanted to show his friends that he has improved his speed and hill climbing pace, yet he avoids the hills because he struggled on them. You won’t get better on hills if you don’t challenge the system to get up them. I even took him through a 1-2-1 on Zwift and pushed him in a way that he never usually does to show him what he is capable of and also how he needs to train. As we get older two things happen: 1. We don’t usually have as much time to train 2. We need more time to recover because our muscles don’t repair as quickly. Therefore, we need to move to a lower volume of work but maintain or increase the level of intensity that we ride at but it might take a professional like myself to assess this and understand what levels of intensity that is to create adaptations and change. Result 2: I heard from a gentleman called Ben last night who runs a company called Lo-Dough in Manchester. He is taking the bread world by storm after creating a bread that has more health claims than any other product on the market! One of them being 39kcal per slice!!! WHAAAAAT! You can make a pizza with his product and it is only 2 sins on slimming world when the usual pizza slice is about 15!!! His product is sold online HERE at 10am every day and usually sells out within 30 minutes of going live, so if you want some, make sure you get in quick! Result 3: I also got given a Team Sky Mark Cavendish World Champ Jersey yesterday. However I am going to have to get into the lo-dough diet to squeeze into it and make it look a little less like two pigs fighting under a blanket!!! Well that about ‘wraps’ things up!!! Have a great Weekend. Graham P.S. If you would like help training for a cycling event or want some cycle coaching we can help you. Our services include: 1. Training from our indoor studios. Fully kitted out gyms to help improve your strength, power and endurance. 2. We can train you at home using Zwift or Trainer Road 3. We can do remote coaching using Training Peaks Coaching Software If you would like some help with your cycling and training, then let us know by replying to this e-mail or visiting our Manchester (graham 07791060451) or Southampton (Andy 07770908030) websites.  Facebook   |   YouTube   |   Twitter   |   Instagram  Click to Post

Hey Everyone! I hope you are doing well today. BOY OH BOY wasn’t yesterday’s Tour de France good?! What a day in the saddle that was. They go so fast up those mountain climbs. They did 3 mountain climbs in the time that it takes me to do 1!!! What I loved the most was watching the GC contenders all sprint for the line! Not every day you get to see that! So how do they get up hills so fast? Essentially we are looking at turning over the pedals faster to increase the number of revolutions the wheel spins on the back. Think of your bike like a car, when you hit a hill in a car, you don’t ease off the accelerator, you push down a bit harder to get yourself over the top. You want to do exactly the same with your bike. 1. Accelerate your cadence and you will increase your speed. 2. You need to increase the duration that you can pedal faster cadences so that you build up your endurance. If you get a computer that tells you cadence, heart rate and potentially gradient, you will be able to start training like a pro by understanding the basic of metrics. This is a very simple way to boost your speed on a hill when cycling. If you want to watch the video where I explain it all, click here! Have a great day! Graham   P.S. If you would like help training for a cycling event or want some cycle coaching we can help you. Our services include: 1. Training from our indoor studios. Fully kitted out gyms to help improve your strength, power and endurance. 2. We can train you at home using Zwift or Trainer Road 3. We can do remote coaching using Training Peaks Coaching Software If you would like some help with your cycling and training, then let us know by replying to this e-mail or visiting our Manchester (graham 07791060451) or Southampton (Andy 07770908030) websites.  Facebook   |   YouTube   |   Twitter   |   Instagram   |   Beam.Pro   Click to Post

Hi Everyone! Last night I drove 45mins South (it’s not actually that far, just traffic!) to go for a ride with some of my clients. This is the first time that I had been out with them for a while (maybe a year?!) and it’s been a few months since they were last consistently in the gym. It was interesting to see where they were at and what progressions they had made as they have recently been posting about their PB’s on strava. As you know I am a big advocate of indoor training because it: - develops muscle memory quicker - increases the intensity of the workout - decreases the amount of time needed to train One thing that always surprises me when I am out is how much I peddle. This for me comes down to erg training on a turbo where you have to constantly peddle. It is very similar to a track bike where you can’t stop pedalling otherwise your knees go backwards and it does more harm than good! I find a lot of people will coast around their route, but if you keep pedalling, this can be one of the first things to help you bring your time down. To be able to continually peddle, you need to make sure you have the endurance to do this. This doesn’t have to be complicated, just continuous pedalling on a turbo will quickly develop your endurance. It doesn’t have to be at a hard intensity, but the critical thing is not stopping for the whole duration that you ride. Start doing a couple of these training sessions a week and you will quickly see a change in your rides outdoors. Have a great day! Graham P.S. Remember that you can buy all of your turbo and cycling needs from our online store. CLICK HERE to see our latest offers on turbos, accessories and coaching. Facebook   |   YouTube   |   Twitter   |   Instagram   Click to Post

Hi everyone, It’s Wednesday and I am a little tired today after staying up quite late doing some work so I am not quite in the right gear this morning to get started! Which, funnily enough, brings me on to todays topic…Gears! I was at my in-laws at the weekend and to get up to their house you go up a hill which is 1.6km long with 48m of climbing. You have to stop at a small roundabout before starting the climb, which can take some of the speed out of you, but there is enough flat after to gain that momentum again. About half way up the hill, there was a cyclist, but he was holding up quite a bit of car traffic because he was going VERY slowly. Sometimes going too slow can actually be a hazard because it can cause all sorts of other traffic issues. Eventually I managed to drive past him and as doing so, I can’t help but be nosey and have a look at what is happening with the rider. What I saw was the riders bike gears were in the top gear on the front and quite low down on the back. No wonder he was going so slow, he was in the wrong gear! To get up a hill, you want to accelerate into it with some speed and force through the pedals and then continue that momentum up the hill, which may mean changing gears if the gradient becomes too steep for you to continue at a faster paced cadence. Just think of a car going up a hill. You would never change gear from 3rd to 4th to go up a hill. You would change from 3rd to 2nd and give it a little acceleration. Getting your bike up a hill is no different. Get into an easier gear, but maintain the pressure and cadence you had before to maintain or increase power. This will take some time to test, but with indoor training you can practice this to gain confidence and experience without causing any potential traffic issues. Remember, if you want to get a PB up hills when you are cycling: 1. Accelerate into it it 2. Change to an easier gear to keep a high cadence, 80-90rpm is suitable 3. Don’t change into a harder gear - remember to ride like you drive 4. Don’t give up, keep pedalling and don’t stop until the top! We love to hear your feedback so let us know how you get on with this! Thank you, Graham     P.S. If you would like help training for a cycling event or want some cycle coaching we can help you. Our services include: 1. Training from our indoor studios. Fully kitted out gyms to help improve your strength, power and endurance. 2. We can train you at home using Zwift or Trainer Road 3. We can do remote coaching using Training Peaks Coaching Software If you would like some help with your cycling and training, then let us know by replying to this e-mail or visiting our Manchester (graham 07791060451) or Southampton (Andy 07770908030) websites.  Facebook   |   YouTube   |   Twitter   |   Instagram   |   Beam.Pro Click to Post