Session Information | Cyclone 60

Cyclone 60 is a 1 hour indoor cycling session bought to you by Macclesfield Performance. Designed to complement our existing Cyclone 30 sessions held on Mondays and Fridays. Cyclone 60 is an endurance engine session. 

The sessions work on an 8 week structured programme cycle, building muscular endurance, pedalling efficiency, developing your ability to produce force in an encouraging and enjoyable environment. 

Led by MP coach Sam Yarwood. Sam is an all round bike-nut. Cyclone 60 sessions are without a doubt hard work, but Sam will make sure that you learn lots and make big gains in your endurance.  Calories will be burned, technique will be improved, guidance and motivation will be provided and results will be seen!

Those who attended our regular indoor cycling sessions have seen measurable improvements in:

• Cardiovascular fitness.

• Reduced body fat.

• Personal progression.

• Improved power & performance. 

• Confidence and direction with their training.

Each session applies structure and teaches consistency, to gain the best possible results. Participants become efficient at tapping into different energy systems and maintaining power effectively as they work hard each week to meet their own benchmarks. At Cyclone you don’t just assume the workout is doing you good, you see yourself get better as the group regularly sets goals be be achieved.

We lead our Cyclone 60 sessions from Hulleys Spin Studio, Club AZ, AstraZeneca, Macclesfield. Tuesdays: 18.30-19.30

STARTING TUESDAY 1ST OCTOBER!

News | Meet Sam

I am really excited to be joining Macclesfield Performance. I am a strength and conditioning coach and a personal trainer.  I specialise in strength and conditioning for outdoor athletes – anyone who enjoys the great outdoors, either competitively or purely for fun. 

Although there can be some old-school thinking/reluctance around strength training in outdoor athlete communities, the bottom line is that if you’re a cyclist (road or MTB), climber, mountaineer, runner, triathlete, wild swimmer, skier, snowboarder or even paraglider, targeted, individualised strength training can make you faster, stronger and more injury-resistant. All of which mean that you can perform at a higher level, train more consistently and enjoy your sport more.  Strength can help you keep you racking up those great adventures for many years to come!

Having spent many years in a busy, stressful, time-poor (non-fitness) job I know how hard it is to keep fit and strong in and around the other pressures of life.  Because of this, I also provide personal training for anyone who would simply like to get stronger and fitter, but who might not know where to start or how to fit it into a busy life.  There is a lot of confusing information out there and sometimes we all just need someone who knows what they’re talking about to point us in the right direction.  

I have a life-long love of sport, exercise and the outdoors.  Previously a county- and university-level badminton player and coach, most of my 20s and 30s were focussed on outdoor sports, in particular climbing, cycling and winter sports.  I’ve been cycling (including competitively) for 30 years, climbing for 11 years and snowboarding for 20 years, and they’re just my 3 favourite ones!  

Although sport and exercise has always been central to my personal life, it hasn’t always been my professional life.  After originally starting a sport science degree at Glasgow University, my interests evolved a little, and I eventually gained a PhD in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from The University of Bristol, via a couple of stints living in Japan.  I worked for a number of years researching the molecular mechanisms behind cancer and other diseases, and later I moved into medical, scientific and health communications here in Macclesfield.

Multiple injuries over the years led me to explore and become passionate about focussed, science-based strength training, and I came to view strength as the absolute foundation for long-term athletic performance, injury resistance, recovery and health, both physical and mental.  Over time I decided to leave my career in science and communications to pursue a new career providing strength coaching and personal fitness training.  

It is my mission to provide highly personalised, evidence-driven training and coaching to athletes and non-athletes alike, blending my own athletic-, scientific-, life- and career-experience to help people meet their own sporting, health and life goals as efficiently, effectively and sustainably as possible.  

If you’d like to explore getting stronger, whatever your sport or motivation, please come and chat to me on the MP gym floor, or contact me via my website for more information.

I look forward to meeting you!  

Testimonial | Client Cristy

I have always fancied myself as a mountain biker and a bit of an adventurer. I have big dreams and love a challenge.  

When my friend coerced me into signing up for the Joberg2C, a 9 day 900km mountain bike race across South Africa, I had little hesitation in signing up. It was absolutely aligned with my dreams.

Fast forward a few months to September 2018. I had an impending sense of dread: “what I was thinking?”. I had been trying to follow an extremely complicated online training plan, with little improvement. My approach (just ride & ride) was not working, and… winter was coming! I was frustrated, unfit, overweight and totally overwhelmed. Self-doubt becomes a slippery-slope!

I had just started thinking that a cycling coach / trainer of sorts may be what I needed when I met Dom in her Cyclone class one Friday afternoon. I consider it a moment of divine intervention that our paths crossed and that I asked her if she knew of anyone who could help me to prepare for the event. That is how I ended up at Macclesfield Performance. At the risk of sounding dramatic, this was a turning point not only for my training, but emotionally and physically too.

It was very overwhelming for me (a “recreational cyclist”) to start a new training program with a completely different approach to anything that I had done before. I was strength training 2-3 times a week and following a bespoke cycling program that Natalie put together for me. The stress and chronic sense of failure I had endured while trying to follow the unmanageable online program disappeared as I started with their joined-up approach. They did the thinking and the planning, all I had to do was put in the time!

I was always dismissive about my status as a “Recreational Cyclist”, Dom and Nat made me feel like an “Elite” and were so committed to helping me smash my goals! Having this level of interest, care, support and, of course, challenge was something that I had not experienced before.

Encouragement for getting a squat right, or having a good Wattbike session, or improving on a Strava segment meant so much to me, at a time when I had been feeling so lost and low. Bit by bit, session by session, my strength, endurance and confidence grew. My countdown app to the event started to excite and no longer scare me.

In April I set off to South Africa to participate in the event. I was excited for it. I took a lot of confidence in the fact that my coaches were confident in me smashing it! Also, I had seen so much progress in my strength and endurance while on the program. Having cycled in snow, rain and mud (mostly on my own) I had built a good amount of mental resilience too. Somewhere along the way I started to believe in myself again.

The Joberg2C experience was incredible, and incredibly tough. Cyclists bikes and bodies take a massive hammering on the trails, some of which are very technical. 9 days and 65 odd hours in the saddle is significant, with little opportunity to recover in between. I was ready though. I can honestly say that I had been perfectly prepared for this kind of event!

Because of the strength training, I could keep form over hours on long smashing descents. Because of the bike sessions to specifically build endurance, I could get to the top of long climbs without my heart rate going out of control. Oh, there were plenty of them (a few days were in an area called “the valley of a 1000 hills”)!

I am deeply grateful to Dom and Nat for their help and thoughtful programming. I would never have managed this ambitious goal without them. As much as I loved the ride itself, it was the journey getting there that made it the so satisfying.

Testimonial | Client Maddie

MADDIE

I guess when thinking of my time at MP, we need to rewind a little further for the work Dom has done to really make sense.

Due to a number of (at the time) undiagnosed medical issues, I’d been unable to consistently exercise for a number of years without my shoulder, knee or hip subluxing.   Finally after seeing the right consultant, I was diagnosed with hypermobility, Polar 3 instability (abnormal muscle patterning, leading to inactive muscle groups) and multi directional instability.  I was referred to the best physio I have ever come across (and I’ve had a few!) as the combination of issues meant that I wasn’t a good candidate for surgery.  After about 18 months of working with him, I decided to jump back in the pool in October 2017 and swam 200m (8 lengths), with no subluxations.  I don’t think I’d ever been so happy to swim 200m!  Over the course of the next 4 months, I gradually increased the distances and joined a swimming club.  It was at that point that I considered I might be able to swim competitively, and that’s where Dom came in.  

I showed up to my initial consultation with her in February 2018, with a white board completely full of aims, goals, questions and a very long list of medical issues.  To my surprise, the goals I had put down for a few years time, Dom seemed confident that they not only could be achieved, but some could be achieved this year.  Now I am sure Dom will forgive me for saying, I was very excited, but I did not believe her!

Now to get to work…

Dom programmed my gym and swim work on cycles of 3-4 weeks.  Every single programme took my instabilities in to account, focused on the requests from my physio, and worked to get my inactive areas switching on.  The work Dom did went completely hand in hand with the physio work I’d been given.  What made me even happier is when the physio reviewed the programmes, his response was: “I’ve never seen a coach ditch big ego-lifts in favour of working with bands, nor have I ever seen a coach take so much notice of what a physio has said and worked with me, not against me”.  So much so, that I’d been seeing my physio every 2-3 weeks for 18 months, and within a couple of months of following Dom’s programming, my sessions with him had dropped down to every 5 weeks.

Dom’s focus was not only to get the right muscle groups working though strength sessions, but to increase my speed and endurance in the water.  I followed a mixture of speed and endurance sessions that Dom had planned for me, sending her the results after each one ready for her to calculate what my next session would be, ensuring they were always progressive.  We also included a couple of tests to measure any improvement in speed – within just 7 weeks of following her programming, we saw a 15% improvement on my 1km baseline test.

Within a couple of months of working with Dom, I’d bought a wetsuit and trained in open water for the first time in my life (note to anyone wanting to try it – don’t do it in 6 degree water. It hurts. A lot…) and event #1 came round – a 1 mile open water swim.  The original goal was to complete the event with no injury, however after seeing the improvements in speed, it was hard not to change the goal to “I want to finish within 30 minutes”.  The big day rolled around and despite a bit of a panic in the water, I’d finished the event in 29:38!  I was so incredibly happy, but I wanted to see what I could have done had I not had a panic attack and stopped.  And so on to event #2.  I gave Dom 2 weeks to get me ready for the next event (sorry Dom!), the Big Bala swim in Wales.  Well, it’s safe to say, it went well!  I had no panics, I finished 4th lady out of 50, and more importantly, I came away injury free!

And finally on to the third – the Salford Triathlon relay with fellow MP members, Dawn and Nat.  Anyone that trains at MP will know how incredible these two ladies are, so I was very excited and nervous that they asked me to compete with them!  The shorter distance meant that Dom’s focus turned more to speed, which was hard (06:30am sprint session anyone?) but so much fun!  Again, thanks to Dom’s programming, this resulted in a PB for me in the swim leg, coming out of the water 3rdin my wave and coming in the top 15% of all 300+ male and female competitors that day.  Dawn and Nat smashed the bike and run and as a team we came away with 3rd place in the relay!

So over the course of 5 months of working with Dom, I’ve gone from seeing my physio every 3 weeks to being discharged (yes, that really just happened, today!), I’ve been able to train consistently both in the gym and in the water and competed in 3 open water events!  And it doesn’t stop there, we’ve already sat and planned goals for 2019 and 2020 – work towards those goals start next week!

Training with Dom has completely changed my life.  It’s enabled me to work towards goals I thought could only be dreams a year ago.  She listens to your goals, hopes and concerns, sits with you to devise a plan that you feel comfortable with, goes away and makes it happen.  She’s not afraid to change the plan if it’s not working (or in my case, if my shoulder decides it doesn’t feel like working that day) and is always at the end of the phone for a bit of reassurance and guidance when needed.

Training at Macclesfield Performance opens the door to meet so many incredible athletes that become your friends.  You couldn’t ask for a more inspiring, motivational bunch of people around you.

If you have a goal that’s been at the back of your mind but you think you couldn’t possibly achieve it – speak to Dom, it might not be as far out of reach as you think!