Colby Pearce has been a Steve Hogg Certified expert bike fitter for the past 10 years and has worked with elite athletes and WorldTour teams, including EF Education First. He is also an elite cycling coach and has been passing along his wisdom to the riders he coaches for decades. Pearce’s repertoire of knowledge spans 30 years, five continents, hundreds of races, and countless miles in the saddle. The minutiae of cycling and riding technique are just part of the story that Colby shares. Alignment with nature, foundational principles of health, and treating the sport as a practice are some of the philosophies he shares. Cycling in Alignment features a diverse guest list, including those who may or may not be familiar names in the cycling world. Prepare to have your belief systems shattered.
Episodes
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
So many of my clients have questions and run into issues related to saddle sores, and man, when you get a bad one, it can be really bad. I have actually had a couple clients that suffered so severely, they had to have surgery.
When you sit on a saddle, that’s a lot of weight on a very small surface area. There’s the weight of the torso, the weight of the helmet, the weight of the upper body, the arms — it’s all focused into this relatively small point. Then we add friction generated by the movement of the legs. With so many moving parts there is so much that can go wrong which can lead to undercarriage issues for the rider.
Today, I’ve also got a special guest that we’ll get to in the second part of the podcast. Don Powell is the creator and owner of Panache Cyclewear. He’s been designing and creating his own cycling gear there for 12 years. We’ll hear a bit from Don about the construction of chamois and fabrics and technical details in the second part.
RESOURCES:
Panache Cyclewear: 20% discount code: Alignment
Kaerwell store for Liposomal Glutathione: 10% discount code: Pearce10
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Group rides are dead. Unpopular opinion number one. Even in ostensibly safe scenarios, group rides are dangerous. Rides are too big; riders are too brash; vehicles are too numerous, and drivers are too distracted.
Other potentially unpopular opinions of Colby’s are related to indoor riding. He outlines some of the pros and cons of Zwifting, including the benefits of riding with extremely controlled and focused training, as well as increased blood volume versus the compounding effects of poor posture that the monotony of riding inside can foster.
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
My friend and colleague, Julie Young, sent me an email asking some deep, thoughtful questions about fitting riders properly on their mountain bikes. The central theme was around steeper seat tube angles on many modern mountain bikes and how that it is challenging and sometimes impossible to get a rider’s saddle offset far enough back behind the bottom bracket on a mountain bike to match their road position.
This question has a lot of nuance and detail. I asked Julie if she would come back onto the pod to do a sort of Q&A style episode, inspired by her thoughtful question. Then, after laboring over these questions even further, I realized that I needed to bring in mountain bike geek-extraordinaire, Travis Brown, also a previous podcast guest (Travis Brown: Mountain Biking Olympian and Hall of Famer.) It is time to unpack bike geometry and rider weight distribution in great detail.
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
In the first installment of this two-part series on How to Pedal a Bike, you learned the basics of my philosophy of how to pedal a bike.
Humans are meant to push down so we need to understand how to optimize that motion for cycling.
We’re going to break down how to pedal in different conditions:
- We will look at the demands of the event that will help us decipher what disciplines have what requirements for the type of pedaling you must do.
- Then, I will break cyclists down into pedaling phenotypes. When we talk about cycling phenotypes (sprinter, time trialist, etc.) in terms of pedaling, understand that it is a spectrum.
I hope these thoughts lead to insight in your own training and spur you to think more critically about how you ride.
Bradley Wiggins hour record
Vittoria Bussi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNctC8NnCI&t=50s
Alex Dowsett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkfkMTEqQak
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Daniel Holloway is a professional cyclist who races for Texas Roadhouse and is a 20-time U.S. National Champion, a Pan Am Games gold medalist, and a member of the U.S. National long team for the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo.
I met Daniel when he was a junior racing on the track, sometime around 2004. Years later, when I had the opportunity to race some of the European six days, I needed a partner, and Daniel ended up being the man for the job. He was one of the youngest riders in the field at our first Six Day in Dortmund, and I was one of the older riders in the peloton. I think it is quite accurate to say we really had no idea what the hell we were doing.
Together, we stumbled our way through four seasons of racing Sixes, World Cups, and World Championships together. We had wins, crashes, DNFs, lots of laughs, and one moment that was pretty close to a fistfight.
I thought having Daniel on the show would be the perfect excuse to tell some entertaining stories, and also to help my audience understand the archaic and iconic world of European Six Day racing.
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Many riders come into the fit studio struggling with their bicycle saddles.
In this aspect of bike fitting, the end goal is to have a saddle disappear, where you don’t think about it for one hour, you don’t think about it for three hours, you don’t think about it for five hours, you don’t even think about it when you get home. There’s no chafing, there’s no scarring, there are no saddle sores, there are no little pebble-sized cysts growing in your nether regions, which is unfortunately quite common.
We’re going to talk about the anatomy of the human undercarriage, and then we’re going to talk about the shapes of saddles and how those two things go together. How do they fit together? What are the design concepts of different types of saddles? How do they support the weight of the torso?
All this and much more this week on Cycling in Alignment.
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
In a continuation in our two-part series about wellness, Dr. Scott Storrie continues to dissect a myriad of elements that go into making a well-rounded athlete. Scott is a medical practitioner with over three decades of experience specializing in naturopathic endocrinology, utilizing diet, supplementation, balancing neurotransmitters, with the synergism of manual medicines, energetic & emotional healing arts.
Knudson Recharge fruit juice sports drink: https://www.rwknudsenfamily.com/products/recharge
Dental Herb Company mouth wash: https://www.dentalherb.com/
Skratch Labs Cook Book: https://www.skratchlabs.com/pages/cookbooks
EMF Harmony EMF reduction devices: https://www.emf-harmony.com/collections/emf-harmony
Rogue Fitness Supernova for pelvic floor work: https://www.roguefitness.com/mobilitywod-super-nova-2-0
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Trevor Connor, Host of Fast Talk, and Rocco Orlando, U.S. Army veteran and athlete, are here to discuss their respective journeys into the dark world of overtraining. Each of these men has a poignant story to tell. The idea behind sharing these stories is that you, the listener, will get a feel for what happens if you decide to overtrain your body. As you’ll discover there are extraneous factors that play into each of these athlete’s downward spirals. There are powerful insights here into what makes the mind of the athlete tick.
This is a clear demonstration of what happens if you do decide to ‘just keep training.’ If you adopt the ‘more is always better’ mindset and ignore the signals of the body this is what can happen. Sticking to the training plan relentlessly or over-doing miles, intensity, and general time on the bike. This will eventually lead to some dark outcomes. Both of these guys have taken that downward spiral to the extreme. It’s very useful for us to hear their stories. Understand the elements that were at play for them to adopt this mindset and to keep going in spite of the warning signals from their bodies. This is where the power in the lesson lies.
Rocco’s Story: https://cyclingtips.com/2020/08/bikes-of-the-bunch-saved-by-the-bike-a-former-soldiers-custom-venge/
Where we first heard Trevor’s story: https://www.fasttalklabs.com/fasttalk127/
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Steve Hogg is a veteran bike fitter known for his expertise and attention to detail throughout the cycling world. Steve stopped counting bike fit customers after he reached 10,000 over a decade ago but is always fine-tuning and improving his methods for helping riders have the healthiest physiological relationship with their bikes to reduce injury and increase performance. This holistic approach and attention to detail has informed Steve’s evolution and helped him tackle some of the most intimidating and difficult bike fits imaginable, some of which you’ll hear about in this episode. Colby’s own fit technique and approach stem from his study under Steve in Australia. Please check out the IBFI website link in the resources to find a quality bike fitter near you.
Steve’s website: https://www.stevehoggbikefitting.com
Spinacci Bars: https://www.ebay.com/itm/324057816576
Bike Fit Resource: https://ibfi-certification.com/
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Thursday Apr 22, 2021
Physical therapist, Ron Kochevar, joins Colby to deconstruct belief systems around your individual capabilities. This relates to pain and being able to bring yourself into the right mental space to help your body with the healing process. Ron emphasizes the importance of stopping in the moment in order to work on retraining your brain to have a new or different response to certain stimuli, like pain. Ron delves into some of the most common asymmetries and challenges he sees in the athletes he works with and addresses some of the contributors to these common maladies.