Throughout 2021, Verve Cycling’s CEO Bryan Taylor is hosting a series of webinars designed to help you get the most out of your training. The final webinar in the series will look at the five key things all coaches and riders should know, as Bryan explains.
One of the parts of our jobs at Verve Cycling that we enjoy the most is getting to speak regularly to our riders and coaches. We make sure to ask lots of questions, but generally we will deviate from the subject being discussed.
This is quite deliberate! Our aim is to provoke views and responses that haven’t been pre-conditioned. We particularly ask questions where someone might not necessarily know what answer we’d like to hear. We ask simple, non-leading questions, where both a positive and a negative response might be appropriate. This approach produces some really interesting and informative information.
In the webinar, we plan to expand on our general findings and explain why they matter.
For instance, there is not necessarily a link between whether someone has bought an InfoCrank and if they use the services of a coach. This is quite surprising to us – we would have thought that those who bought the most accurate power meter in the world would be more likely to be coached, but this is not necessarily the case.
We also have found a huge majority of our respondents have higher expectations of the accuracy of their power meters than actually occurs. In other words, they have believed the marketing from the other brands available. When products are marketed with misleading promises, the consumer eventually has adverse reactions.
We’ve found that our previous webinar attendees have found our simple rules for training to be helpful. It makes us wonder if the amount of conflicting information out there from other organisations isn’t all that useful.
We often hear talk of the ‘plateau of mediocrity’ – that plenty of riders, whether coached or not, are always trying to find ways to improve.
Finally, we also know from the literature and our experience in elite sport that the only way to improve is to purposely push out boundaries. In every sport those boundaries are able to be defined and the aim of training is to put the mind, body and spirit in such a place that those limits can be overcome.
All of the things that I mention above are interlinked and knowing them about us (normal people who ride bikes) makes it much easier to provide the right service to those who are aiming to improve.
At Verve Cycling, we are committed to those people, whether they are starting out, are the absolute elites of the sport or whether they are our health patients seeking to recover from joint replacements.
So tune into the next webinar where we finish off the ‘Five Things’ series with succinct points on what we know and what it means to you and your riding.
The Five things all coaches and riders should know webinar will take place on Thursday 10 June 2021. View the available sessions and register.
