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Co-founder, bike fitter and bike designer, author. Phil rides a Seven Axiom XX custom titanium bike and an Airnimal Joey folding bike. He wrote The Midlife Cyclist and enjoys walking his dog, reading, politics and the outdoors. Phil's specialism is working with clients who have complex and frequently chronic issues. Phil is most at home working in a collegiate, multi-disciplinary team, to help clients resolve intricate issues.
Phil Cavell cofounder of Cyclefit the bike fitting and custom bike company explores the growing trend of middle-aged and older cyclists seeking to achieve high-level performance. 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. We older and less fit midlife cyclists are, as a group, riding harder and faster, relative to our maximum, than the top-ranked professionals in the world. And we're holding down jobs and trying to be great parents and partners. Many amateurs perpetually train and ride in what Dr Baker calls a ‘whirlwind of doom’ where an overestimation and obsession with an FTP (functional threshold power – the highest average power output you can sustain for an hour) means that we tend to set our training levels too high and, as a consequence, are training the wrong systems and incrementally embedding fatigue that we then struggle to shake off if we're older, because our hormonal responses are less responsive and dynamic — is this ringing any bells? Phil Cavell is co-founder at Cyclefit in London. His book The Midlife Cyclist is published by BloomsburyConsidering how far we have come in the last two decades, as entertainingly told in “The Midlife Cyclist,” it is exciting to think what lies ahead for those wishing to push their athletic boundaries rather than push a walker.
Is it hard to work out whether exercising past 40 is good for you? Everyone assumes that within certain parameters, it is, but we don't actually know, do we? FTP became the unabashed god. And we had become the crash-test dummies for future generations who wanted to explore elite physical fitness into middle-age and beyond. What would be interesting to know is whether, if you have limited time- say 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, it is better to go hard more often, or have 3 easy hours and 2 hard hours each week.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. This is where I think virtual cycling could have a huge advantage over real-world cycling. It is massive potential. It is a virtually clean sheet. The virtual ‘bike’ only has to be a perfect exponent of physical potential. But just because we can, does that mean we necessarily should? Using contributions from cardiologists, pro-team physicians, coaches and nutritionists, this book evaluates the newest research, and where that research is missing, adds informed opinion, to formulate the gold-standard paradigm for the midlife cyclist, who wants to ride fast but also live long and stay healthy. 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 As a parent, I look at my 11-year old daughter and encourage her to revel in her youth and energy. To run and jump and cycle with glee whenever she can.
Both coach Fox and Dr Baker agree that the majority of riding should be steady-state to increase our oxidative capacity — as much as 80-90 per cent of our training load. We have to learn to be efficient before we can learn to be fast. But even as midlife cyclists we can gain a huge amount of benefit from the correct dose of intense interval training. You talk to Nigel Stephens, a leading cardiologist and an extremely good masters racer in the book. And to paraphrase him, he broadly says that cycling, even at a high level, will give you improved heart and lung capacity at the risk of broken bones. But that's something that you have to weigh up yourself. Which, I guess, is a pretty good summary of it, isn't it?But what constitutes endurance? Dr Baker says: “Endurance has to mean aerobic — which is determined by the strength and ability of the heart, and then the ability of the blood, to transport fuel to the muscles, and the muscles to then use that fuel.” There are breaks in virtual cycling. I’ve been in many. The chess game is still there. To take it a step further, I am able to discuss my next move with my mates in real-time as it is unfolding. 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. 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?
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