Empirical Cycling Podcas‪t‬ Empirical Cycling

This episode is Kolie's practical view on integrating physiology into a pragmatic training philosophy. Focused on coaches and self-coached athletes who are applying scientific learning to their coaching.

In the first episode of the Perspectives series, Empirical Cycling coaches Kolie and Alex discuss self coaching, the challenges of training and motivation during COVID, the value of knowing thyself, among many other topics.

This episode takes a wide angle view of the chain of events between starting exercise and successfully burning fat, and where the main bottlenecks are in that process. Nuances discussed are the differences between adipose tissue and intramuscular fats, energy demand rates, diet, and potential training strategies to improve fat utilization at most exercise intensities.

This episode begins a series on metabolism with the process of oxidizing fatty acids for energy, and why the process is anaerobic. We also discuss fats vs lipids, different types of fatty acids, and take a deep dive into the periodic table to explain why oxygen loves electrons so much.

To wrap up 2020, we went through all the questions asked for Kolie's weekend story AMAs and picked our favorites to expand on. The list of questions are in the show notes at empiricalcycling.com, in order of appearance.

In this first extended Ten Minute Tips, Kyle uses the extra time well to review his strategies to effectively read, digest, and understand any scientific paper. If you read papers along with us for the Watts Doc episodes, this may be a good playbook to pull from.

Cover art on this is an example of "data massage" as mentioned in the episode.