I had the pleasure of giving a talk at UCSF last week.  The talk was part of the “Cycling to Health” series, which is one of the UCSF Osher Mini Medical School programs offered to the general public.

The talk was videotaped and will be uploaded on the UCTV network in a few months, but I thought I would summarize here for you the main points that I addressed.

In the first part of the talk, I described the normal cardiac adaptions to high intensity cycling, and I made some comments to distinguish cycling from other sports and other endurance sports.

Cycling is considered a sport with high dynamic as well as high static stress.  This causes the cardiovascular system of cyclists to adapt in some major ways.  In fact, there is some data to show that cyclists have the biggest hearts among all athletes!Read more