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. In addition, because of the more favorable dynamic of virtual cycling, the team unity and willingness to work as a team and sacrifice for the common goal is greater than any I have ever experienced in real life. 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. Reading this book, you sometimes feel that Cavell doesn’t really buy into his recipe of sensibly balanced training for the midlifer. “I’m the last person you should listen to when it comes to structured training”, he says. Another subtitle says “Lord save us from moderation.” I am blown away by the level of detail Phil Cavell brings to his work.' – Elinor Barker MBE, multiple world champion and Olympic gold medallist

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. 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. The Midlife Cyclist has been in gestation for a long time. The book examines first principles about the challenges of exercising and even competing as we move into middle-age and beyond. If you’ve read this far, let me tell you, before I get into the weeds, this is a brilliant book. I am a skeptical person, a cynic, but I can tell you honestly that The MidLife Cyclist changed my behavior on the bike (and off), and even improved my relationship with cycling (read: less burn out efforts, more fun). What I want after all is fun. I want health too, and I want longevity. I want to be able to do the things I enjoy doing as long as I possibly can. oxidative (sorry, aerobic) training to build endurance where the heart beats below 80% of its capacity - as hunter gatherers we evolved for many thousands of years as an endurance species, and

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The MidLife Cyclist taught me how to get those things with less pain, fewer injuries and most importantly, with a better attitude. Nigel is a friend, a client, and I'm a patient of his. So our relationship is quite multilayered. And he's in the book because one, he is a superb cardiologist and second, he's a superb cyclist. And thirdly, he comes out with the best pithy one-liners I've ever heard. The one you're alluding to, I think, is that we trade cardiovascular and cognitive protection for the occasional orthopaedic incident, which is just beautiful. The heart of the matter is that if you cycle hard or moderately, you're almost certainly going to be cognitively protected and have cardiovascular protection. But you are occasionally going to fall off and hurt something. That's the proposition. Alejandro Valverde, aged 41 and thriving in the pro peloton (Image: Getty) As veteran athletes, we’re completely unique in evolutionary terms– around 6.3 million adults are using cycling for sport and leisure in the UK – with a particularly steep increase in the number of female cyclists. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about what happens when you race-tune the engine of a 50- or 60-year-old to as close to Olympic levels as is currently humanly and scientifically possible. As the clinicians and sports scientists scrabble to catch up with newly commissioned research and data, this exponentially expanding group of women and men relentlessly push themselves further away from the shadow of generations before them, and towards the performance levels associated with professional athletes. I have clients in their late 50s (and even early 60s) who can ride at an average of 50km/h for 16km or more. This requires sustained power outputs significantly north of 300 watts (depending on the individual’s aero efficiency), which is over double the level produced by an average untrained 20-year-old. Mr. Cavell asks himself and the reader as he lays the groundwork for the cerebral cornucopia to come, 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.

It appears that female midlife athletes have some very real advantages over male athletes. Not only with heart health but other areas of general health resilience.Remember that we’re genetically almost identical to our modern human ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago. It’s true that the process of evolution is continual, but it’s also true that there has been simply too little time and too few generations for substantive changes to the human genome.

We’re almost certainly the first cohort, in a great enough number, to be statistically relevant, to push our bodies into and beyond middle age, towards peak performance. We’re the virtual crash-test dummies for future generations who refuse to succumb to evolutionary stereotyping. How many of our parents were interested in structured training for the sake of pure performance, past the age of 40 or 50? So, nobody really knows for sure what happens if you try to tune your engine to racing performance, at an age when at any other time in history you would have been dead for years if not decades. This is a critical time and we’re the pathfinder generation for those that follow us. Cyclefit continues to work with male and female pro-tour athletes, helping them control the process of building resilience to training and racing in their bike set-up. I’ll finish with my usual caveat. I don’t know the author (although I did have a shoe fitting at his company many years ago) and bought The Midlife Cyclist myself. Neither the publisher nor the author know I’ve written this, but maybe I’ll tell them now it’s done.Phil is eminently qualified to write the Midlife Cyclist. Well, he is certainly old enough ― Fabian Cancellara, Tour de France rider and two-time Olympic champion You could use a heart rate monitor and use a percentage of your highest recent recorded heart rate or you could use the RPE/Borg Scale and the ‘sing-a-verse’ methodology (which I prefer, incidentally). It’s important to note that riding in an oxidative state involves metabolising fatty acids as a fuel source, which could be important if you’re also trying to manage weight as well as gain fitness.

They opened Cyclefit bike-fitting classes in 2009 and went on to work with Trek Bicycles a little while later to help create their worldwide bike-fitting educational program. Cyclefit’s educational DNA is in almost every fitting studio in the UK and many around the world. They worked with Trek’s professional racing teams for many years. There’s useful stuff about getting comfortable on the bike. People like me don’t adjust their positions to take account of aging, and newbies might be tempted to follow the fashion for slamming their stems or simply need some guidance and the book is pretty good for that. But fitting you to a bike needs to be done in person and no book can substitute for that.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. I should start by saying I really like The Midlife Cyclist. It’s quirky and has a few issues, but is invaluable for anyone, male or female who wants to make the most of bike riding over the age of 40.