Time to get wet and muddy!

It's that time of year that's disastrous for riding. The time when it's still chilly, but warm enough to melt the snow and get rain, resulting in lots of mud and nasty conditions.

Lots of fun but man it can wreak havoc on your bike! That's why I wrote "10 Tips to Ride in the Rain Without Ruining Your Bike" - it's about bike maintenance to get your bike through these wet rides without too much damage.

I also wrote "8 Safety Tips For Riding In The Rain" - this is for preventing damage to your body when you're riding in wet, slippery (plus low visibility) conditions.

Strength Training with weights or on your bike?

Weight lifting - always an interesting and controversial topic.

There is a short but good discussion in "Strength training on the bike?" over at Training4Cyclists.

It's not really in-depth but the advice is solid. Basically it tells you why you can't achieve the same strength gains by riding as you would in the weight room. Good stuff.

Six Pack Abs: Explained

I'd venture a guess that at least 95% of the US population has a fascination with six pack abs, even if they won't admit it.

These people may do 1000 crunches per day.

But they might not take the time to understand their abs.

So check that link, it has the info you need to train all your core muscles you get nice abs. It flies in the face of a lot of six pack ab guides out there, but that's fine.

Too much cardio forces you to burn muscle tissue?

Lately I've been seeing nearly everyone who promotes weight training telling you to avoid doing cardio workouts because you'll just break down all the muscle you just built.

I can see the point when you're talking about a cyclist doing 6 hour rides each day. At that point you probably don't consume enough calories to fuel your cycling and have a big enough surplus to pack on serious muscles.

But for most people with a 30-45 minute workout, 3x per week, it's probably not such a big deal.

A great reference for this is "Is it true that too much cardio will force the body to burn its own muscle tissue?"

Great answer there from Jeremy Likness (who also happens to be the author of a great book called Lose Fat, Not Faith.)

Anyone interested in building muscles, check out that info.

Coach Levi's Personal Blog

Welcome to the first post of my personal blog! If you found this chances are you already know about my site, CoachLevi.com, otherwise you probably never heard of me.

That's cool though, I'm not quite as popular as Lance Armstrong or Levi Leipheimer, and I don't mind staying out of the headlines and scandals.

Anyway, this will be my personal blog where I share cool stuff I find and rant about whatever I feel like.

Enjoy :)