Part 2 of this Strategies for Strength provides ways to use the concepts of benchmarks and rewards in your indoor cycling classes, including specific visualizations and cues.Read more…
How Big is Your Why? is a motivational ride to help inspire your students to set a big goal and to understand the steps needed to successfully accomplish that goal. It is one of the signature inspirational profiles at ICA, one you can do any time of the year. Read more…
This is a post I wrote back in 2008 on my former blog Reach Your Peak. It explains why New Year’s resolutions generally don’t work and examines the best ways to achieve success by retraining the brain and overcoming the doubts and fears that plague us. My New Year’s profile “How Big is Your Why?” references some of the concepts I wrote about here, so I am resurrecting it from the archives. Read more…
Creating benchmarks and rewarding yourself for completing them is a classic strategy to get through a long and challenging event. I bet you have used a version of this outdoors, whether on a bike or in a 10K running race or triathlon. I use it all the time when on long climbs as it helps break up the distance or length of time into bite-size chunks. Here are some photos to use to inspire your students to break up the challenge into manageable segments.Read more…
The Buffalo Athletic Club has created a series of fun videos to educate their members about etiquette. The group fitness director has given me permission to share this video with you—hopefully, it will give you ideas to create some humorous videos of your own!Read more…
This strategy is a mind game you play with yourself. But it works, and it takes your mind off of the current discomfort you are feeling and allows you to experience the joy of accomplishment even before it’s completed.Read more…
Many of us have seen professional riders climbing the famed ascents of the Tour de France. One observation is the speed at which they climb. Not just how fast their bikes are going, but how fast their legs are spinning. This faster climbing cadence is often referred to as “climbing at tempo.” For those of us that ride outside, this is not climbing in one’s granny gear (no offense, Mom), but pushing a relatively hard gear at a fast cadence.Read more…
Heart rate training has been a source of confusion for a long time in the indoor cycling world. The good news is that there IS an easy way to create meaningful training zones by performing an assessment known as a talk test. This detailed PDF will teach you the physiology of this assessment and provide everything you need to know to conduct a talk test in total confidence. This test should be done as a precursor to every FTP field test, as it also is an excellent means of reinforcing riders’ understanding of perceived exertion.Read more…
What if there weren’t any other options? This famous character has a very important lesson we can tell our students: listen to the man! This article also gives you some tips on knowing whether or not you might be pushing your students beyond their limits (hint: you probably aren’t)!Read more…
Have you used mantras to inspire your students up epic climbs? Do you know how they work? Here are the reasons behind why mantras help focus athletes on the task at hand, as well as 85 different mantras you can use in your coaching, and tips on how to personalize them and to inspire your students to create their own.Read more…