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An amazing accomplishment... a simple-to-understand précis of your midlife as a cyclist - you won't want to put it down. ― Phil Liggett, TV cycling commentator 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 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. 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. The conscious part of me wants to exercise because it’s good for me – the benefits are proven, uncontroversial and listed in various forms in nearly every chapter of this book. I’m also fairly sure that I’m compelled to exercise unrestrainedly and push myself physically as an unconscious death-avoidance strategy. I’m trying to pedal or run away from the inexorable pull of an unyielding rope that’s attached to all of us and extends an unknown distance across into the horizon. Getting old and dying is as much a part of our psychological DNA as it is our physical DNA – kids are aware of dying from a young age and talk about it openly. Their natural inquisitiveness is ameliorated by the fact that it tends to happen around them to fragile animals and elderly relatives.
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 In the vast majority of cases, exercise in middle and old age will do you good, mitigating the effects of the infirmities noted above, and significantly reducing your risk of copping cardiovascular diseases (40%), strokes (25-30%), diabetes (40%) and even cancers (20%). Mental health gets some useful coverage which fits in really well with the press coverage this important issue is getting. Good mental health is one of the reasons I’ve always ridden, in fact if I haven’t ridden for a few days my other half bundles me out of the door and tells me to do a couple of hours on the bike so that I’m more bearable to live with. It’s interesting what he says about indoor cycling, in that while it’s convenient and effective, it doesn’t have the same mental health benefits as riding outdoors, so we should all try to ride outdoors as often as possible. 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 Renowned cycling biomechanics pioneer, Phil Cavell, explores the growing trend of middle-aged and older cyclists seeking to achieve high-level performance.
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But this shouldn’t lead us to think that we’re redundant just because our genomes didn’t evolve to last past our late 20s. Paleoanthropologist Rachel Caspari points to an exponential boost in art, culture and civic activity in the Upper Paleolithic era 30,000 years ago, at the same time as a demographic deflection or a shift in lifespan took place, resulting in our ancestors actually living long enough to become invested and contributing grandparents. Initially, Caspari was unsure whether the lifespan uplift in adult survivorship was due to biological/genetic factors or behavioural shifts. After screening our older ancestors from the Middle Paleolithic era – between 140,000 and 40,000 years ago – it became clear that a cultural shift had helped Stone Age grandparents make their offsprings’ lives markedly less Hobbesian – i.e. ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Performance pioneers The MidLife Cyclist‘s discussion of heart health was particularly timely for me. I had a serious dehydration experience about a month ago, literally while I was reading the chapter on heart conditions. Getting some depth of understanding about what might be going on in my chest helped me feel more at ease. It also motivated me to make a doctor’s appointment. Why worry, when you can get answers and move on with your life? Accessibility - the cover and marketing makes it appear tailored to midlife cyclist MAMILs like me who are just trying to live their best life. But the text itself was tailored to the tiny minority who are actually trying to win races. Currently, there’s a quiet revolution occurring in the ranks of middle-aged and older sportsmen and women. Virtually nothing happened in several hundred thousand generations, in terms of mass participation of veteran athletes in structured training, and now for the first time, in the space of just two generations, we are seeing a fitness surge at scale. Most of our parents and grandparents wouldn’t have participated in hard training post-marriage and certainly not after the birth of their first child, as soccer and netball were inevitably replaced with fondue parties and trips to the pub. At the very most, our parents may just have embraced (probably way too late) the ’70s and ’80s keep-fit crazes – jogging or aerobics. As our middle-aged generation ages, we’ve decided to plant our flag on the more distant but brighter star of elite performance, achieved through the application of quasi-professional sports science and technology.
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. cleats are only for keeping a firm connection to the pedal in a pre-adjusted stance to suit the user’s feet; We ran the Midlife Cyclist Lecture Series in 2017 and 2018 at the Cyclefit store in Covent Garden, London. We had wonderful, warm and generous speakers who contributed for free in the spirit of joint exploration and education – many are featured elsewhere in this book. The lecture slots filled up as soon as they were launched online and then we let people in so they could listen and ask questions. Men, women, mums, dads, grandparents and concerned grown-up children all in search of enlightenment on that key question – can we use the bicycle to simultaneously get fitter and healthier as we get older? Indeed, it’s the humble aim of this book to square that troublesome triangle. 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. bike fitting makes good sense for every regular cyclist because the body adapts in potentially damaging ways to an unsuitable bike;
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This seems to be suggesting a polarised training approach although he doesn't name it as such, which generally works on a 3 zone model rather than the more regular 7 zone model but whichever is used I agree with much of what is said with the odd caveat. I have had the pleasure of knowing Phil for a bit over a decade. We collaborated on hundreds of custom bikes for Cyclefit clients, and during that time he shared volumes of experience with me. When he told me he was writing a book, I was eager to read it. 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.” This subject goes in layers, so let's deal with it in layers. Overall, yes, exercise is tremendously beneficial for you – tremendously. That's the overall, overarching message. But then, within that, it's more nuanced. If you exercise moderately into middle age and beyond, even into old age, it is unquestionably good for you: the cognitive benefits or cardiovascular benefits, the feel-good benefits, everything is positive. But to exercise moderately – and by that, I mean the kind of exercise that the people we know do – there are question marks. Now, probably when all this washes after longitudinal studies and I do the revision of this book in 20 years time, it will almost certainly be the case that that was good for you. That's my opinion, and I have no evidence of that right now. So the book is taking up the evidence that we do have, looking at all the research conducted, and then on every subject, making an informed judgment. Phil Cavell: author of The Midlife Cyclist 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.
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