Profile design is one of the areas of teaching classes that instructors find the most challenging, yet it is one of the keys to instructor success. We provide many different profiles on ICA; some are very detailed with lots of cueing suggestions; others are abbreviated profiles that just give you the basics on what to do to each song (as well as the bpm/rpm if you use it). While our profiles are always solid training sessions with music that matches the message of the profile based on years of experience—and we love that ICA members tell us that they (and their riders!) love our profiles—I think it’s very important for instructors to know how to create their own profiles, or at least, to know how to take an existing profile template and make changes that make sense from the point of view of proper cycling and training.
I want to help instructors so they don’t struggle as much when creating their own profiles. It’s like the famous adage:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.
By teaching you how to make and modify your own profiles, I hope to be feeding you for your entire instructing life! But, you are going to have to be willing to open your mind, do a little work at the front end so that later, putting your profiles together will be much quicker. The suggestions given in this series should work with most certifying programs. What follows is a way to create profiles that utilizes scientifically sound training principles and cycling specific techniques and riding positions, but it may run counter to some of the current (“popular”) ways that are employed.
This will be the first part of this series on profile design.