The Best and Worst Ways to Spend Money on Cycling Performance

​​Free Cycling Training Assessment What would a professional cycling coach change about your training if he could see everything you've been doing? In the first episode of RATE MY TRAINING, CTS Head Cycling Coach Adam Pulford takes a deep dive into the training history of a real amateur cyclist: Willy B, a 67-year-old gravel racer preparing for another shot at Unbound 200. Willy trains 10–15 hours per week, has experience racing demanding gravel events across Europe and the United States, a...

​​Free Cycling Training Assessment Preparing for your first gravel race can quickly become more complicated than it needs to be. What bike do you need? How wide should your tires be? What pressure should you run? What happens if you flat? How much should you eat? And how fit do you actually need to be? CTS Head Cycling Coach Adam Pulford strips gravel racing back to the essentials. He covers the bike and equipment you actually need, fueling strategy, flat repair, tire selection and pressure...

Your wearable gives you a recovery score every morning, but how much should that number influence your training? Adam Pulford breaks down the information coaches actually use when evaluating readiness, including subjective feel, life stress, recent training load, sleep, resting heart rate, and HRV. He also explains why he pays far less attention to proprietary readiness scores and detailed wearable sleep metrics, and why trends are often more useful than one morning’s score. HOST Adam Pulfo...

Strength training has a place in a cyclist’s program year-round, but that doesn’t mean doing the same lifts, loads, and routines for 52 weeks. Adam Pulford explains how he periodizes strength training alongside cycling throughout an athlete’s season. He covers annual planning, how strength priorities change as racing approaches, the anatomy of a well-designed gym session, and why tracking your lifting matters even when you’re not chasing PRs. The takeaway: treat strength training like your ri...

Self-coaching gives you freedom, but it also makes it remarkably easy to reinforce your own biases. Coach Adam Pulford breaks down five mistakes he repeatedly sees in self-coached cyclists, from avoiding field testing and inflating FTP to under-recovering, failing to plan long-term, and chasing equipment gains before training gains. HOST Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for...