"I thought I had to do everything — and then I'd be defeated by that and do nothing. A 15-minute routine is far better than a two-hour effort once a week. Consistency is everything."

Michael Woods has spent 20 years at the highest level of professional cycling. Tour de France stage winner. Third at the 2018 World Championships. Three-time Olympian. He's also had a broken clavicle — twice — a broken femur with a post still in it, multiple rib fractures, knee issues, back issues, and a navicular stress fracture that required surgery on his foot.

Most of those injuries came from crashes. But the ones that crept up quietly — the knee, the IT band, the lower back — those came from something else. From being locked in one position for 30 hours a week. From a tight shoe that never lets the foot move. From ignoring, for years, the foundation the whole thing sits on.

He's entering his 40s now, still racing — gravel, mountain bike, triathlon, whatever's on the calendar. The laundry list of injuries taught him one thing above everything else: you don't need a two-hour recovery program. You need 15 minutes. Every day. No exceptions.

The most common overuse injury among cyclists, by a distance, is the knee. That's where failure tends to show up first. After that, lower back. But here's the thing people miss: a lot of those lower back issues stem directly from foot and ankle flexibility problems. The foot is the pillar. When the pillar is weak, or locked up, or immobile, everything above it compensates.

On the bike you're pedalling thousands of rotations a day. Little differences in how your foot moves — or doesn't move — have a massive compounding effect over months and years. Your knee tracks slightly wrong on every stroke because your ankle can't flex properly. That's not a knee problem. It's a foot problem that shows up in the knee. Having good flexibility in your ankle, good mobility, good strength in your foot just creates a pillar for the rest of the body. It enables the knee to track correctly through the pedal stroke. And it reduces power loss from instability — which is something most cyclists don't even think about until something hurts.

I ignored my foot in my early years as a pro. Long term, that meant being more prone to significant overuse injury. It's a common mistake.

I've used other balance boards. They're okay for general stability work. But I found that with a standard wobble board, you can cheat — you use your hips more, your knees more, and you end up not really targeting what you're after, which is the foot itself. The split base design of the AxisBoard is what stood out immediately. No other tool I'd used had that.

For me specifically — having had a navicular stress fracture in the past, having had multiple surgeries on my foot — getting mobility through the arch was something most tools couldn't address. The AxisBoard mobilises the talus, the navicular, the cuneiformis, that whole chain through the midfoot. It loosens up the plantar fascia. Those aren't things a foam pad or a wobble board can do with any precision.

The pegs are the other thing. Being able to reconfigure them in different formations means you can target very specific parts of the foot and do drills that are actually dynamic — not just standing still trying to balance. My favourite is simple: just stand on it for 30 seconds to a minute and work on straight balance. Then I change the peg configuration and really work on mobilising the arch. Sometimes I'm doing this while making breakfast. It's a couple of minutes. That's the point.

The mistake most athletes make with knee pain is two things: not being consistent, and not addressing little things early. Knee pain is almost always a product of a lot of minor things that accumulated. A little exercise here, a little stretch there, done regularly — that pays dividends down the road. Skip it for long enough and there's eventually a breaking point. In cycling, it almost always ends up being the knee.

Single-leg work is what I was missing. Knee raises, step ups, step downs, eccentric calf raises — these are the exercises that build the coordination foundation most cyclists never touch. They're also the exercises that translate directly to power output. Step ups specifically strengthen the glutes, hamstrings, and quads — the three muscles that matter most for maintaining strength in the knee and producing force through the pedal stroke. Doing those exercises consistently does translate to faster speeds. If you can produce more power in a seated position, you're at a better likelihood of winning a race. That's not a recovery argument. That's a performance argument.

Before the LadderPod, I was using a bench or a box at home. The limitation is always the same — you're stuck at one height, and every exercise has a different optimal height. If you're starting box jumps, you can't start at the highest height. To do the full range you end up needing multiple pieces of kit, which takes up a lot of space. I've lived in apartments where storing a bench was just not possible. The LadderPod's 12 adjustable heights solve that. I can drop it low for eccentric calf raises, bring it right up for jumps. It fits in a closet. I also use it pre-ride for activation — that's something my team was always big on. It helps with injury prevention but it also just improves performance from the start of the session.

If I only have five to ten minutes, I'm doing eccentric calf raises, step ups, step downs. And probably some box jumps — as I'm getting older, I'm finding that explosivity is the first thing to deteriorate. The plyometric work makes a real difference to that.

You finish a seven-hour ride and you have maybe an hour before school pickup. That's the reality. Going to see an osteo or a physio — getting in the car, driving, waiting, driving back — that's not an option. It has to happen at home, on the couch, in the time you actually have.

So that's the window: fifteen minutes. The IT band is always first. More stiffness accumulates there than almost anywhere else as a cyclist — it's one of the direct causes of knee issues, and after a long day in the saddle it's obvious. Scraping through the IT band and around the quad, you feel the release. Then the Achilles and calf if I've been running. And one that surprises people — the hands. In a grand tour, the thing that can hurt the most is actually your hands. The bars are a constant contact point. I've broken several bones in my hand. Getting into the palm, loosening up the wrist — it genuinely matters.

The kids actually changed how I think about all of this. Before, I thought recovery had to be a full programme — two hours, properly structured — or it wasn't worth doing. And then I'd be defeated by that and do nothing. Having an hour between a ride and school pickup forces you to figure out what actually moves the needle in fifteen minutes. Turns out that's enough. Consistency with a short routine is worth more than occasional two-hour sessions. That took me a long time to learn.