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. It provides sensible guidance on training and for those of us in the U.K, on utilising the strengths of the NHS should we have an accident on our bikes or other wise. The author puts himself in our shoes as he talks to the relevant health experts and condenses their advice to make it relevant and easy to understand 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 ‘Food for Sport’, we ponder how our nutritional requirements alter as we get older, but as we still endeavour to exercise at the highest level possible. We also review how we might change our dietary strategies to both maximise performance and maintain long-term health. Would I push myself to that brink of physical shutdown, either in training or competition, at my current age of 58? That’s the main question behind this book. If the answer is ‘no’, then where is the line that I will not cross and what is its intellectual underpinning? If the answer is ‘yes’, and I should push the performance envelope without regard to age, then am I risking injury or even death?

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. Cycling has seen a participation uplift unprecedented in any sport, especially in the 40, 50 and 60-year-old age groups. These athletes are the first statistically significant cohort to maintain, or even begin, genuine athletic performance beyond middle-age. But, just because we can continue to tune the engine into old age, does that mean that we should ? And, what do these training efforts do to the aging human chassis? This book answers those questions and offers a guide to those elongating their performance window. short bouts of high intensity interval training - anaerobic sessions which may be hard work but will (and this is from Lieberman again) “make us not only stronger and faster but also fitter and healthier”. This book looks widely and informatively at the impacts of cycling on the health of mid life cyclists and although there is nothing to suggest my condition is cycling related, the book’s discussions on the heart , was incredibly useful in understanding my own position.I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. As a mid life cyclist myself, it is a subject of interest, but it is delivered in a readable and enjoyable manner by an author who exudes a love of cycling and does so with good humour. RENOWNED CYCLING BIOMECHANICS PIONEER, PHIL CAVELL, EXPLORES THE GROWING TREND OF MIDDLE-AGED AND OLDER CYCLISTS SEEKING TO ACHIEVE HIGH-LEVEL PERFORMANCE. I think the answer is counterintuitive. The better cyclist you want to be past 50, the more you probably have to drop cycling sessions out and put something else in to compensate. So you probably need to drop a cycling session now and put in a gym session, or a running session, or some other sport to work on bone density and muscle fibre loss. So it's a counterintuitive thing. The more you cycle and the more you seek cycling performance, the more you probably need to cast your net a bit wider in terms of activity base.

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. 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.”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. 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. One of the slightly depressing things about the book is that you detail exactly what goes wrong with your body and what stops working as you get older. And there's a sense that it's almost inevitable, isn't it?. You know, bits are going to stop working or slow down or not be as good. bike fitting makes good sense for every regular cyclist because the body adapts in potentially damaging ways to an unsuitable bike;