FTL Free Member Content

Understanding your sources of motivation can be key to achieving your athletic potential, yet it’s a topic that can also be surprisingly complex. We talk with mental performance expert Sonya Looney on how to find your motivation.

Our hosts continue their potluck discussion and talk about what’s the ideal mental state for performance, whether we should be consistent with our intervals or not, and why failure is so important for an athlete to experience.

We’re joined by coach and athlete Julie Young who helps us field questions on how to build an annual training plan, coping with race stress, and overcoming body image issues.

We revisit our favorite Fast Talk conversations from 2021 with a variety of fascinating guests.

Knowing how a race or workout feels—aka RPE—is an extremely important sense for endurance athletes. With the help of top cycling coaches, athletes, and researchers, we explore why RPE may be more important than power, heart rate, and other metrics.

Coach Rebecca Gross of 3six0 Performance helps us field questions on polarized training, closing out your season, if you can “ruin” workouts, spin classes, and more.

Is it better to focus on one big race a year, or have several targets? Is performance or process more important when it comes to goal setting? Two Olympians help us tackle these complex questions.

Janis Musins helps us answer questions on time trial pacing, TT position, INSCYD testing, and the coach-athlete relationship.

We discuss the underlying principles of an athlete’s psychological welfare, and why our thoughts and feelings are simply emergent properties of brain and nervous system physiology.

We address questions on how to train grit for race situations, if you can safely override the central governor, and training for a five-day stage race.

We explore how athletes can evolve and find more fulfillment from their sport with pro cyclist Lachlan Morton

Concussions and traumatic brain injuries are far too common in cycling. We define the causes, effects, management, and preventative measures.

Pick a flat or mostly flat terrain, start biking, then listen to Colby Pearce’s moving meditation podcast to relax and think deeply as you ride.

What’s better: a bigger engine or one that’s tuned for a specific goal race? USA Cycling’s performance director Jim Miller shares his training philosophy.

Colby and his former athlete Lydia Tanner discuss her eating disorder and how it affected her training, then her recovery.

We provide the psychological tools that will help both with uncertain circumstances in life (like a pandemic) and with addressing the emotional rollercoaster that is bike racing.

What is confidence? What is resiliency? What is pressure, and how can we better handle it? These are some of the questions we tackle in today’s episode.

Mindset in cycling, especially racing, is an important and frequently neglected side of our training. Mindset is often all that separates the best from second best and can be the difference between reaching the podium or finishing a race.