Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore. Today, we are joined by Empirical Cycling Coach Rory Porteous. Thank you, everybody, for listening, as always. And if you are new here, please consider subscribing to the podcast if you like what you're hearing. And if you are a returning listener, thanks so much for coming back. We appreciate having you. And if you want to support the podcast because you're coming back and you like it, just let people know about the podcast. Share it wherever you share podcasts. Recommend it by word of mouth to friends on rides. Appreciate all of that, been hearing a lot of that. Thank you so much, everybody. If you want to donate to the show with a couple bucks, empiricalcycling.com slash donate, because we are ad-free content, so we can not interrupt anything with ads. We are totally free. Share away and listen without interruption, because I... personally don't like ads either. So if you want to become a coaching or consultation client, please email me at empiricalcycling at gmail.com because we are a real life coaching company. That is how we actually make our money. And that's why the podcast is actually here. So if you are interested in working with any of us, we are always taking on athletes. And if you want to keep coaching yourself, like we're going to be talking about today. You can just come in for a consultation, and we'll just chat, and we'll kind of try to give you some tools to meet your own goals. So again, that's empiricalcyclingatgmail.com. And on Instagram, that's where we ask questions for our podcast listeners. So we've got some of those up right now, at empiricalcycling on my Instagram, and weekend AMAs up in the Instagram stories. I've been told those are the best things that we do. for content because they're really short. So as opposed to a two-hour long 10-minute tips episode of which there are many. But again, as usual, we've spent an entire 10 minutes preparing. So that's what the joke is, if you have not heard it before. So anyway, today, whether you are self-coached or you are working with a coach, work out feedback for your coach or for yourself. that's what we're going to be talking about and we're going to talk about why it's a necessary thing to do because every time I'm consulting with somebody and I'm sure Rory you do the same whenever we see somebody's not leaving feedback for themselves we recommend it every ride so we're going to talk about what do you leave what do you leave for yourself or for a coach and why do you leave it and what kind of things can you preempt also because Whenever something goes awry with a workout or something goes really, really well with a workout, we want to hear about it. You know, what makes this day bad? What makes this day special? And so let's get into this because Rory, well, this is actually your idea to do this for a podcast, but about a year ago, I do a monthly email for all of our clients just with a couple of brain droppings and some tips. And this was one of our tips. This was one of my emails. And, you know, we're talking about coach communication and workout feedback and, you know, kind of how this helps us coach the way that we do because we only do fully individualized plans. We adjust things as people's needs change and their schedule changes and all of that kind of stuff. So, Rory, tell me about workout feedback. Tell me what's so important about it to start with. Well, one of the things I think people wrongly assume about the job of a coach is that we can tell immediately when something's wrong. And in reality, I think that's maybe the case 10% of the time, because often it's going to be the case that something going wrong is an indication from a trend over a few days, but you maybe actually experienced it on day one, and we can only maybe see that, oh, something's not right on day three. And the only way we would have to be able to tell that something's wrong in that case is if the athlete tells us. Yeah, the athlete needs to tell you. So that can be something as simple as, you know, let's say it's an endurance ride and someone says, yeah, my legs just felt really sluggish the entire day or my heart rate just seemed weirdly high for most of the day. And then hopefully they give you a bit of context. for what the rest of their day has been like, since you can't take a lot of this in isolation. But one of the things we want to be able to do is adjust what the athlete is doing on a, basically on a rolling schedule. Most of, I believe most of the coaches at Empirical Cycling will operate on a week-to-week basis outside of like, like me, I'm going on holiday in two weeks, lucky me, and so that'll be a two-weekly basis. Yeah, but most of us do plan like about one to two weeks out and that's about it. For maximum flexibility, because it's not that like, we're not that we're not thinking beyond that, because we certainly are, it's just that when you, when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, rewriting Two months of training plans or even a month is a giant pain in the ass because, first of all, like if somebody gets sick, you don't know when they're going to get better. And so that's part of why we kind of work a little bit the way that we do. Except for just going on holiday. Yeah, so in order to be able to give ourselves that flexibility, we need to know what we're responding to. So sickness is a very good and obvious one. I was sick recently. If I practiced my own teaching and wrote everything out in Training Peaks, then what I would ideally have done is push all my workouts out by a week, at least to get them out of the way so I can give myself time to rest, get rid of any expectation around when I should be back to health. And when it comes to athletes that we coach, that's essentially what we do. We have an idea of where we want to get to, but there's no going to be, let's say it's like me and I got a head cold for a week and it kind of knocked me on the back. You want to be able to give people the rest that need and give people the onboarding ramp back that they need. And that's in the case of something like sickness. It could also be the case that you just had a bad day. You didn't sleep well. Again, these are the things that as coaches we really want to be able to know because we don't have magic insight into your entire life. We get more access to your life than you'd perhaps ever expect to give people, not just from things like write data, but also if you're connecting anything like sleep apps or nutrition tracking, et cetera, to your training peaks. But we're always going to pick up on that slower than if you said, I didn't sleep last night. Yeah. And so, because I think one of the things that we are kind of getting at here as an underlying theme with this is that we are teaching people the kinds of things that they should note. Because especially when we pick up... New clients who have not been coached before, or they've been coached where they only talk to their coach once a month on the phone, and that's all the communication they get, or it's an email once a month or something like that. We don't do any of that. We are in touch with people pretty much as needed, which for me is like, I'm in training peaks, and if I've got a busy day, I'll be in there once, but if I'm kind of slow, I'll be in there four or five times. And I'll just check everybody's rides, give feedback as needed. And with this, we are really trying to teach people what information we need. And when you're self-coaching, this is information that you need for yourself. And so it's difficult also to have coaching feedback for yourself if you've never been coached because you don't know. Does this matter? Does this not matter? Like, is my heart rate, my heart rate's a little low on my endurance ride today, but I feel good. Is this a sign of fitness? Is this fatigue? Should I rest? What do I do? So even making notes for yourself about these questions, like if you ever come like consult with a coach in the future, that's one of the things that you can go back and go, oh, I had this question. Let me stick this into my consult questions and then we can tackle this and I'll have information about what I can do going forward. And that's one of the things that that we always do consulting with people too, is we tell them, these are the tools that we use, this is the feedback we want, and this is how you should use it for yourself. To give an idea of how important the workout feedback is, my usual morning routine is a wake up. My lovely partner has usually made me a coffee right in time for my alarm to go off. and I get on my phone and open my emails and I go in through and look for every email that says Training Peaks and commented in the title. It's the first thing I look for and naturally being in Scotland and most of my clients being in the US, I tend to have a bunch of those but like the importance of what I'm doing is that It's the first thing, aside from drinking the coffee. I want to know exactly how things went. I want to be able to know before I sit down at training peaks to actually look at what the athlete has done. How did they feel about it? How did they feel it went? What did they feel went wrong? And like nine times out of ten. Things Go to Plan. This week has been a weird one, because it was yesterday, the day before, I had three or four athletes all in the same morning tell me I didn't feel good. And so that was suddenly like, oh, something's happened. Solar flare, presumably. Mars is in retrograde. Yeah, everyone suddenly had their legs fall off. But the value of the workout feedback is such that it's the thing I'm looking to most. I'm going to look at the data side of things eventually, but I'm almost less interested in what the shape of your power curve is for a ride than what are the words you decided to commit to text afterwards, because that is my feedback as much as it is your feedback. Yeah. So actually, one of the things that... that I think would be helpful too, because I think, especially if you are in a habit of not leaving feedback, even if you've got a coach and you're not in touch with your coach that often, leaving feedback for yourself helps a lot too. And one of the things that I've got in my notes here to kind of touch on is that leaving feedback makes something real. Writing it down makes it tangible. Like, for my workouts recently, like, I was having some knee pain because of, you know, a lot of hip PT lately and, like, it's been kind of exposing new issues and new areas of weakness. And for, like, three workouts, I didn't write a damn thing down about my knee pain. And then I got to my PT and I was like, oh, by the way, I've been having this knee pain. He was like, okay, well, we're going to do this new assessment. And until I said anything, it wasn't real. But if I had written it down before, I would have been like, okay, this week when I go to PT, I gotta say something, because I know this is an issue now. And the same thing happens if you are, if you're not feeling too good, or you're feeling really good, or whatever it is, these are notes that you need for yourself. If you are super stressed and your workouts aren't going very well, are you ignoring the stress? Or are you going to acknowledge the stress and be like, okay, look, this, like, work is fucked up this week. And I really need to go easy on myself. But otherwise, if you kind of try to ignore it, you kind of sweep it under the rug, it's all going to come crashing down sooner rather than later. Yeah, there's a difference between five days in a row of bad workouts. and five days in a row where you had to write about your bad workouts because of the latter you're actually thinking about what you did and hopefully picking up on a trend forming. Before I started seeing a therapist for some of my mental health, one of the things that would really creep up on me if I was unwell and thus busted out of my usual routine is that I just felt shit. Didn't have the usual routine I wanted to sit in. Something felt off. It happened this week when I was ill. I basically wandered around the flat wondering, what do I do if I don't ride a bike? But the difference now versus pre-therapy is that right now, because the therapy itself is a form of feedback because it's very much talky about me and how I felt. In the last week, it's been a case of, okay, I understand why I feel this way, and thus I feel less shit than I would have a year ago, whereas in the past, it's like soul destroying. I used to tell people that I'm very much the kind of person that if I take a day off the bike, I need to make sure that I ride the next day, because if I don't, mentally, I'm just going to be so unhinged from, like, normal, that it'll be a week or more before I ride, which is... A large part of why I was very inconsistent in my writing for like 10 years. Whereas nowadays, because I understand and I'm thinking about how I feel, which is again, like this is my own feedback to myself over the course of like six months, I'm able to process what's actually going on. When things are happening, rather than having to look back on it three months later and thinking, why didn't I just ride my bike? Well, now I understand that at that point in time, I was ill and I kind of felt rubbish, whereas before it was, I just felt rubbish. And the workout feedback that we want people to leave behind, either for us or for themselves, is very much trying to get you to think, what is it that's happened today? and what is the context of what happened from the moment you woke up and also from the past week. And we should probably state now that when we're talking about workout feedback, we're not talking about people having to write an essay to themselves. Most workout feedback we get is like two sentences. If you're lucky, as some of us are, and you get someone who writes a full essay as a race recap, that's fantastic. Love that. But most of the time, if someone says, I don't know, felt a wee bit sluggish at the start, but at the end of the ride I felt great, it's like perfect, great, don't need to worry about you as part of it. If someone says felt sluggish at the start, never really got going, felt a bit more tired than I expected to by the end, that's when like red flags start popping up, not in the sense that something's dramatically wrong, but in the sense that something's happened and getting people to think about why did I feel that way? Even before you let any coach you might have know that, is going to help you, the athlete, as well as helping the coach that's trying to help you. Yeah, so when something's off, when something's going wrong, it's good and healthy to speculate on why. And I think this is a big one. Like, oh, I think I was a little sick today, or I just wasn't motivated to ride. Like, I've got a lot of mental fatigue. There's some life stress. You don't have to write an essay about what the life stress is, but just that there's life stress. Cool. Got it. That's the information we need. I remember at one point I was coaching somebody who he hadn't been coached before, and things weren't going great after three or four weeks. It was okay for three weeks. Week four. Like, things started to get a little odd. I'm like, hey, man, are you okay? How come you haven't, like, uploaded a workout in two days? Or, like, you know, and this was after a workout went really poorly. I'm like, you okay? Are you alive? Are you there? And he was like, hey, you know, you've been such a good coach. I appreciate all the positive feedback and stuff. And so I wasn't going to tell you, but, yeah, I've actually been sick for the last three days. And I was like, Uh, yeah, you could have told me three days ago, and, you know, and I'm sure the guy was, like, beating himself up about not riding. I've got these workouts to do, but I'm sick. I just physically can't. And that's not something I want somebody to be, like, going through. I want somebody to tell me, I'm sick. I'm like, great, don't even work out. I'll, you know, if I think somebody's gonna be stressed about, like, seeing the workouts and training peaks that they're not doing, I'll just get rid of them. No problem. But it's one of those things where it's critical information and learning what critical information should be left. Because here are the big ones. There's really four key things that affect performance that's beyond residual workout fatigue. It's being sick, as we've mentioned 9,000 times. It's poor sleep. It's life stress. And it's nutrition. Those are the big ones because what we're talking about here is recovery, recovery. So like whenever anything, any one of these things starts to happen and things start to go off the rails, usually people get one, sometimes two good workouts before their legs don't come back to them. And that's what it is. You dig a hole and normally you would recover, but your sleeping is really bad. You're getting like two hours a night and they're very fitful hours or life stress or you're sick. This is your body allocating resources to other stuff. And it's not prioritizing your muscles getting back to normal because there's other stuff that's important for your body. Like getting your muscles back to normal after a hard workout, like it's the body's like what, 15th, 20th priority after all the other organs that are necessary to keep you alive and functioning. So speculating, even if you're not sure, maybe I didn't eat enough carbs last night. Or maybe my sleep has been a little disturbed. I'm not really sure. I had a little too much caffeine. That could be it. Things are kind of stressful at work. And if all of these things come to like a 4 out of 10, that's a lot of 4s out of 10. Then it's like, okay, well, we've got a lot of stuff to worry about and we can try to pull the levers on every one of them to kind of get this train back on the tracks. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, like, the sleep thing, sleep is such a, like, canary in the coal mine for a lot of this stuff, like, because bad sleep will usually tell you that you're ill also as well, I find. I had an athlete, and you'll know who he is, two weeks ago, who put a comment after his workout saying he'd been having trouble with sleep for months, and it culminated in that day where he said, I didn't sleep at all last night. And the first thing I did was say we deprioritized riding up through the rest of this week. It was like midweek. And I adjusted some workouts into his calendar that was essentially your workout today is nine hours of good sleep. And like that was the way that we managed to get him back on track. And I believe he slept like 10 and a half hours the first night. So plan successfully accomplished. But also that was the way it was the canary there was he got ill immediately afterwards. He had very little riding for the rest of that week. I think he did one really long ride because he had a day off. But otherwise the whole goal of that week was let's just get you sleeping again so you can feel good. And then we got him sleeping again and he felt ill. But those two things were probably connected at that very point in time. And it's a good thing that he told me when he did. that his sleep was bad. Ideally, he would have told me a wee bit beforehand. But it meant that we slowed down, made sure he got sleep, adjusted to compensate. He got ill, okay, we compensate for that, give him a few days off, ease him back in. He's now more or less back to what he should be. But the danger is if I never find that out, if that's something he hides, like your guy hates that he's been sick. Well, he just didn't know it was a piece of information I needed, to be fair. Wow. Well, like, my guy was about to do, like, some extremely hard anaerobic intervals, and guess how that would go if you have no sleep. So, I find, for the most part, 99% of people are very, very good about being upfront about things like, I think I'm getting sick. Because, like, sickness is something that's very in front of you. It's something that you can't help but confront, because it's how you feel. I think people are... Bad at talking about, oh, my sleep hygiene's not great, I'm not getting the full seven, eight, nine hours, depending on what kind of person you are. 10, 11. I've gradually become the kind of person that only needed six hours to now I need a full nine, and I feel like that's been a major disadvantage to my nightlife. What nightlife? I'm chronically sick of the thought of a nightclub. But a lot of the things that coaches want as feedback are often going to be things that you're either very aware of or perhaps unaware of. Sickness and sleep you're perhaps more aware of. I didn't eat during the day because it was busy at work. You're more aware of that. I'm dehydrated, more aware of that. is when those things are like very, like a sudden change is quite noticeable. If you find that over a period of like a month or so, you're getting an hour less sleep a night, an hour and a half less sleep going onwards. Yeah, that's the frog in the boiling water. Yeah, that's exactly. And the people that track their sleep doesn't matter if it's like a very high quality measurement, like you don't need anything like an, or is that an Oura ring? or anything like that, you can do it with like a phone app and that'll be fine. As long as you're doing something to measure that sort of thing, then it's something that, you know, as coaches, we have a way of like looking, taking that data out of training peaks and, you know, seeing is the trend line nice and flat and high or is the trend lines low and going down lower? Again, that's one of those things where as coaches we have the way to pull that data out. Things we don't have the ability to pull out is I didn't sleep well or I didn't eat fully during the day, I'm not hydrated, we don't have any way of really pulling that data. You can use things like MyFitnessPal or Chronometer, although that doesn't go into training peaks as far as I'm aware, to pull data on nutrition in, but that's very much going to be the sort of thing you look at. At the end of the day, and perhaps only reflects what you did over the last couple of days, it's not going to tell you what went into that workout to cause something. So again, there's no way to information overload a coach, really, in this sense. It's just going to be about, you know, taking back the excess. I think you can information overload some coaches, but only if you are asking the coach to interpret every single piece of data. Like, this is my HRV, this is my stress level, this is my, like, and, because you can track, like, 25 things a day in TrainingPeaks for your metrics, and, and which ones matter, and, and pulling the signal from the noise is part of what, at least we think good coaching entails. Because, because, you know, you can, you can lean on, like, you know, algorithms or AI or motor learning or machine learning or, Any of that kind of stuff, as much as you want. But like Toto Wolff said, data doesn't make decisions. Rory's laughing because I'm wearing a Williams F1 shirt. I absolutely love interviews with team principals, by the way. They're all fantastic. But that's also something like Tim said in one of the podcasts he did with you. There's probably a lot of interesting stuff you could do on the machine learning front, but ultimately it's never going to have enough of the data it actually needs. It's never going to have any of the intuition that it actually needs to be able to react in the same sort of way that a coach would. And I think attempts to do that are interesting, but I think they're also going to be a bit misguided because ultimately if you can't make the right decision Most of the time, then it's probably never going to be a good enough tool to rely on. And also, I think when people need to self-report on this stuff, like self-reporting motivation or like, you know, how's your nutrition? Like a lot of the time, like when I've got a new client, I'll say, how's your nutrition? And sometimes they'll say, oh, it's great. And I'll be like, describe to me how it's great. And I'd say half the time, it actually is great. And the other half of the time, I'm like, yeah, we got some stuff to tweak. And I'm by no means an expert nutritionist or dietician. I'm not even a real amateur one. I wouldn't want to plan anybody's meals or anything. But there are some pretty basic guidelines for nutrition that are pretty universally understandable. And so with that kind of stuff, a lot of the time when people self-report, it's unreliable. Like I'd say half the time. And I would say it's unreliable. Sometimes it's like 10% off. Sometimes it's like 80% off. And so... Can I just say, one of the things Cole is getting at here is if you try and sum up your nutrition, having never thought about it, it will be 50% reliable. But if you're one of these people that... Is commenting on Training Peaks just say, this is how many carbs I eat on this ride? It will actually get you to think about it in the way we just talked about. And you're the reliable people that he's talking about. The mostly reliable people. But one of the things that it doesn't track, and this is a dicey thing to get into to recommend it universally, and so we cannot, obviously, is tracking food off the bike. For some people, it's too much mental stress. For some people, there's eating disorder stuff that's going on. We definitely don't want to exacerbate that. or cause it or even start it with that kind of stuff, that kind of behavior. And so tracking food off the bike, though, it matters because this was actually just the monthly email I sent out like, you know, what, two weeks ago or something like that? Basically that is that like fuel on the bike won't save bad legs. Because when you're exercising, you're not restocking your glycogen stores, especially if you've got hard intervals. Like if you're behind, you're staying behind. I don't care how much you eat on the bike. That was the point. And so when you are commenting, oh, I had 100 grams an hour of carbs across glucose, fructose, yada, yada, and everything looks fine. And you're like, man, I still have bad legs, but I should have been okay. I haven't had a hard workout for four days. I should be okay. And it's like, how's your stress? How's your sleep? Are you sick? No. It's like, okay, now we've got one thing left. How's your fueling off the bike? Eat more, especially if it's like an early morning workout or you were hungry all night. I had a client a couple weeks ago in Europe, middle of the night for them, was like, I'm really hungry. What do I do? Eat. Why would you not eat right now? I don't know. It's late. So what? You're hungry. This is a signal. It's an actual signal that your body is needing fuel. I remember you talking about Corey in one of our monthly coaching calls and saying you were staying with him for a national championship or something. And he literally just never didn't have a bowl of rice and chicken out of his hands. He'd come down every hour, like have a little bowl of rice and chicken, a couple spices and stuff, and like you just sit there and eat it and hang out. Then he would go back, take a nap, relax, come back down 45 minutes, an hour later, have another bowl. And it's like... It was a fantastic thing to see because he's like a Zen master with nutrition and pacing and sleep. He's somebody that I don't really need to worry about with all that stuff because he's so experienced and he's dialed it in for himself so well. Not to say that there's not a couple of things that can't be tweaked, but that's the case for literally everybody. So that's one of the things about nutrition that helps if you... Like, I've got a couple clients who do this. I had 80 grams an hour on this ride. I had 60 grams an hour. I had this much in gels and this much in solid food and this much in, like, liquid food and all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, and I just sit there, calculate it out. Okay, about this many grams an hour. Great. Good job. And so, it's a pretty easy piece of information to track. But it's not like... It's not going to be the difference between, you know, changing a training plan that's not going as you want it to, to changing a training plan that is going as you want it to, because that's part of a very larger picture of, you know, many, well, a thousand things. So I think we've kind of touched on sickness and sleep and nutrition, but let's talk about stress for a second, too, because this is something that I think A lot of people don't realize just how much it impacts a workout or recovery. So I don't know if I've told this story in the podcast before, but a while ago, many years ago, what, 2016 or 17 or something like that, I had a client, I was working with him for maybe a year and a half, two years. And at one point in like, I think year two, He was just not getting faster. And I couldn't figure it out. And I look back, I compared the two training plans, this year versus last year, and it was roughly the same plan. And the year before, he was improving. This year, he was not. Just flat out not improving. All the workouts felt hard. And I was trying to adjust as much as I could. But there was not much I could do. And I was like, dude, give me a call. So we talked for a little bit. And then I was like, all right, now. What's your work take-home stress, last year versus this year? He said last year was like, you know, a two to a four, the occasional eight. And he's like, this year, just about every day, it's like an eight, but more often, it's like a nine or a ten. I'm like, well, there you go. He's like, is it really that big of a factor? I was like, have you seen your legs lately? Neither have I. Good way to put it. Yeah. And it was like, that's one of the things is like when you are super stressed about something, like especially if you stress before a race, like I'll tell you how badly I used to stress before races, before I started to get it under control. One of the first races I ever did, I was so hyped up for it. I trained all winter, still wasn't very fast, but I was so hyped up. My heart rate on the start line was like 170. I was that amped up. And I didn't know how bad that was for me until I blew up about 10 miles in, completely exploded and dropped. And, you know, I think I was in the bottom, like 25% of riders to come in that day. And I was like, well, that sucked. I got to calm myself down because I clearly used up all of my energy before the gun even went off. So that's the kind of thing. That's an extreme example. If you're somebody who's super stressed for like, here's a good one, testing. I've had a bunch of clients who get so stressed for an FTP test, like you're not taking the bar exam, dude. Like it's an FTP test and there's literally no way to fail it. But the stress level is such that you're not even going to have good legs or even okay legs. And so that really changes the approach to. Testing and Coaching that kind of person. And so it's not like I'm going to try to get, I'll try a little bit, but I'm also not a psychologist or anything like that. So I'm not really going to be excellent at, oh, just don't stress about it. Okay, is it that easy, guy? Calm down. The call of everyone that just needs to calm down. Yeah. Everyone loves that. Yeah. And I found it doesn't really work. Even just saying breathe, that helps. Calm down does not. It's like, fuck you. I'm not calming down for shit. My version of that was I get so stressed at the thought of turning up to a race that I just never would. But that was a great way to educate fear. So, yeah, so those are a bunch of the stuff that you should, you know, preempt. in your comments, sickness, sleep, nutrition, stress, because once we've crossed out all those variables, once they are all accounted for and things are going really well, if you still have bad legs, now maybe we think about the training. Well, I mean, you know, if I'm like consulting for somebody or I'm, you know, et cetera, et cetera, like, you know, it's not, you know, the way that we coach is not normally the first thing I think about is, oh, like, I've given this person five sweet spot workouts a week. Like, we don't do that. And so that's one of those things where, oh, maybe that's a little much. So once you've crossed out all these other variables, you can start thinking about workout content. Like, am I actually recovering at a normal rate and my last super hard ride was too close to this ride? You know, like maybe you need five days after that super hard ride, just kind of chilling before your next... Even moderately hard ride. And maybe that's normal for you. Or in the case of one of my athletes right now, you did 27 hours of racing in the past four weeks. Maybe your legs shouldn't feel good. Yeah. Or that. Yeah. Like a lot of racing can also take time away from training and also necessitates a lot of recovery, depending on how hard the racing is too. So travel. Travel. Travel is a big one. If you're somebody who travels, who doesn't travel easy, I don't travel easy, I know a lot of people who do, a lot of people love traveling and it's like just another day for them. For me, it is not just another day, I hate waking up early, I can't sleep on a plane, I can barely sleep in a car, I am stressed when it comes to travel. Don't want to catch COVID while I'm traveling. Yep, masked up. That's my thing. Not touching eyes, washing the hands constantly, sanitizer, like I am paranoid about germs when I travel. It's one of the reasons I don't usually get sick when I travel. But, of course, a lot of people do sometimes, and that's something to, you know, that's another discussion on travel hygiene. But, but so then we're thinking about, well, but that would also fall under the category of stress. But that's information that you need. Like, because if you're like, okay, well, I can usually recover from this workout to this workout, something like. Like, you've got a workout pattern, right? Like, you do a hard ride on, like, Saturday, long, easy Sunday, then Monday is chill, then Tuesday, usually you're good to go. And this Tuesday, you're not good to go. Well, maybe it's been four weeks since you took a rest week. Maybe it's been five. Okay, maybe it's time for a rest week. Or maybe you, like, ran out of your favorite snacks and you just didn't snack on Sunday. That'll do it. Or maybe you're, even this happens a lot, you're a healthcare professional and it's difficult to eat. You're all masked up, or you've got PPE on all the time. And so it's difficult to eat, it's difficult to drink, and this affects how you structure your workouts in your day. Maybe you need to do it before work. Sometimes that's ridiculously early, so that's not possible. Sometimes you can't take a break. And so all these issues compound, but these are things that are necessary to note for yourself. Or for your coach. So I think, have we kind of driven this one into the ground already? Or do we have a couple more things to... Yeah, I would add on the work stress side of things. I think everything you said there around like how work impacts all the other parts, like it will impact the fact that you have to wake up early or the fact that you don't get home till late or, you know, not being able to eat and drink properly when I go into work used to be something I really struggled with. And the way I learned from that is just for the love of God. Don't have six coffees a day because it's trying to get you through the workday. But the thing I would say on that front is that things like work stress in particular is 50% of the time something you can probably anticipate a little bit. Not necessarily that you're going to have a bad day, but a lot of people, you know, you have an idea of what your week's going to be in work beforehand. And ideally when your coach is coming to make your... Plan Out, or when you yourself are thinking about your training for the coming week, make sure that that is taken into account. I tell all my athletes in the initial call that when you're giving me your availability for the week, alongside that, I want to know, are you anticipating a hard day at work? Are you going out for drinks that night? Is it your anniversary and you're probably going to not get to bed until very late? I want to know the things that are going to impact training from that point, and I'm going to take that into account when I build a plan out, because I don't want to give you VO2 max intervals on the day where you think you could fit an hour and a half into your total riding, because that's just not going to work for you or me. I've got one guy who's really good about telling me, you know, here's how many hours I've got on this day. and here's roughly what I think I'm going to be capable of doing in that day and so usually my response as a coach to that is all right the days where it's extremely stressful you're either doing a recovery ride or not riding at all because I just want to try and you know if if we can reduce the amount of stress you're feeling that day by just making it so you don't have to think about riding a bike as well. Then that's a win. If we can keep it at least level, then that in itself can be a win. But all of that's going to be taken into account for a few weeks, because if you have two really stressful days in the office, you're hopefully not going to go into that third day that's maybe a bit better in the office and immediately have to pound yourself with a hard workout. You're hopefully going to get a bit of space in there to allow yourself to breathe. I try not to give people workouts on Fridays unless they tell me that's a good day for them because it's the end of the work week and 90% of us just kind of want to relax a little bit maybe you're one of these lucky people where that is like your good day but I think for most people they get to a Friday and they say I'm a bit tired and it's usually not as we've talked about here it's usually not the training that's been responsible for that it's You know, a 40-hour workweek is a lot. And, you know, that's something you need to take into account. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and actually, one of the things that I like to think about, and this is just how I consider it graphically in my head, is that, or, you know, conceptually in my head, is I'll think about, if somebody has a hard workout on, like, Tuesday, and you've got Wednesday, Thursday are really stressful days at work, I'll think about, okay. Tuesday, you're at 100%, and the workout brings you down to like 30%. And you've got two hard days at work. They're really stressful. Even if you're sleeping well and your nutrition is on point, the stress is going to have an impact on how quickly you're recovering. So you're starting at 30% after Tuesday. So like Tuesday night, maybe you get to like 60%. But you've got two stressful days at work, and instead of normally being at... 90% by the time you get to Thursday, now you're at 70% because you've only recovered like let's say 5% a day. And so now you get to Friday, you're still only at 70%. And now, so taking that extra day to breathe, I think it's about that day as like your first real actual recovery day. So now you've come up to 90, 100%. So Saturday you should be good to go. Anybody, I don't know that anybody will get this reference, but all I can think about, as you said, that was the Scott Steiner math bit that he did. Cole is looking at me like he hasn't a clue there, but I'm sure a lot of people will also get exactly what I mean there, with you just rambling about percentages that I can't see in my way in the head. Anyway! I'll show you after this. Okay. Alright, fine. So, I'd say there's one other thing to consider before we get to listener questions. And this is, even if you're not sure what's going on, if you're getting any signs that things aren't going well, off the bike, on the bike, usually we can kind of scope it out in a workout. We can see it pretty easily between power, heart rate, like RPE. If you're not logging RPE, by the way, like if you're using training peaks, there's like a, how strong did you feel? Like the emojis. And then there's like a one to 10. How hard was this workout? That makes a massive difference, even if you're self-coached. Being able to see, okay, this two by 20, let's say it was like a seven out of 10. Next week, I'm going to do a two by 22, but it's a nine out of 10. Progression does not square. That should still be like a seven. And so being able to track that gives you something objective, like something you can visually see and compare workout to workout, especially for apples to apples, workouts like that. But besides that, always record signs that things aren't going well. Motivation, low motivation, brain fog, stress, that kind of stuff. If you're irritable or grumpy. I mean, some of us are just like that all the time. I'm so sorry to everybody in my life for that, by the way. If you are sluggish off the bike, if you've got really low sex drive, if you are just kind of lethargic and you don't move around, if you've got a step tracker and your steps drop by like 70%, sorry about the percentages, if your steps are 10,000 and they drop to 3,000, there you go. That always signals a problem or a potential problem. And even if you don't know what's going on, that's always a sign like, hey, something's off. And if you've got a coach, this is a sign to the coach, especially if the coach is paying attention, that something's off. And of course, sometimes we miss things like that, especially if it's a snippet of a very long set of paragraphs. Unless one entire paragraph is dedicated to, I had really low motivation today, it's easy to miss if you've got like a thousand word essay. So, like, that's one of the things that also what we try to do is we try to go through those essays and pick out, okay, this is the information that I need here. You know, it's nice that it was drizzling. It didn't seem to affect your workout. Maybe it kept you a little cooler. Okay, that's cool. But, you know, you got 800 words on the drizzle and you got 10 words on, yeah, I wasn't really feeling it with the motivation because it was rainy, but the workout was great. Okay, cool. But now I've got a sign. Maybe gray weather is affecting this person's motivation. It happens to a lot of us. So unless you're in the UK, in which case it's just gray all the time. I'm so sorry, Rory, for your lack of sunshine. Do they even sell sunscreen in stores? I'm pretty sure I've got a bottle of it somewhere, but it might be out of date. What you just said there goes back to what I said at the start, is that it's not just about communicating how you feel in that moment, how everything you felt went going into a workout. It's about getting you to think in the grand scheme, why did you feel this way and how does that fit together with the narrative of the past week or two? like getting you thinking about more than just watts because I find that people that only think about the watts for the ride are missing the forest for the trees because the watts are an indication at least the way I think about it the watts are an indication of you're getting stronger or you're getting fitter but it's not telling you why that's happening it's not telling you how you're coping with what that's happening and you want Even if you're a coached athlete, to think for yourself about how you got to the stage where you're actually at, and even simple things like, have you been enjoying the training? is something that's valuable. Especially if you're a coach-athlete and you're enjoying your training, please tell me, because I don't get it. If you're dropping a load of the sad smiley faces, that might suggest you're not. But it might also just suggest that you thought it was very hard. But think about how all that's going. Think about how you feel about the process that you're on. Do you feel it's been productive? Do you have doubts about what you're doing? There's maybe a communication aspect there in terms of like, what's your coach trying to get you ready for? And maybe they've not explained it sufficiently. And the thing that would actually help you most for the next few weeks is just the confidence of saying to the coach is like, hey, how do you feel I'm getting on? And then they give you the answer. Yeah, I get that question all the time is like, what can I do better as an athlete? What can I do better to make the coaching I'm getting more effective? And sometimes I've got feedback, but a lot of the time, especially if I've been working with somebody for a couple months, I mean, it's just like, keep doing what you're doing. But if somebody's, you know, and for instance, I've got a couple clients where they are perpetually working on one issue. I've got a couple clients who don't eat enough. I've got a couple clients who don't rest enough or who don't, or also know if I, if they tell me that they're tired, I'm going to give them rest and they don't want to do that. They don't tell me that they're tired. First of all, no, don't do that. Second of all, that's fucked up. Third of all, what was my point with this? I don't know, but I would like to give a shout out to whoever it was that did a second best all time one minute power on their easy endurance ride that you assigned the other day. A very, very big fan. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So that was the other one, is there's some people who always are perpetually riding just a little bit too hard. And to use one of your phrases, Rory, or was it one of your client's phrases? I've put one of my clients in 100-watt jail where he's not allowed to do his recovery rides harder than 100 watts. And he's not a fan. when he does them three or four days in a row and he says, I'm feeling really good. I'm like, fucking finally. Yeah, it's nice when people take your advice. It is. And it's like, especially if you've been trying to give somebody the same piece of feedback for months or potentially years, you know, that it's nice to see it finally get through because sometimes people have to like try it. Because I know a lot of people have a problem. They don't feel like they're riding if they're just going too easy. And I think that's silly, first of all. How are you recovering at your endurance pace? Anyway, that's another discussion. So I think we've kind of covered most of it, unless you want to get into race reports, because I think that's potentially actually a very long podcast discussion. All I'd say on race reports is, like, as a coach, I go, I see athletes go into races, and my position as a coach is, I hope they feel like they were able to do the best they can each race. Like, they felt good, they felt like they had the legs. So, from my perspective, on the feedback front, I want to hear about how the race went, because ultimately, like, one of the reasons I do this is to live vicariously through you all. So, like, I had a guy at the weekend there who gave me, like, a six-paragraph essay, and I loved it. I had a client that, unfortunately, had to stop with me last year who did the exact same thing for all his crits, and, like, fantastic, love reading it. No expectations on my part that people write their 500-word lines on why race went well. But, you know... Anything that can help your coach understand, you know, here's why it went well, and anything that you felt, you know, here's what didn't go well, or what I thought I was missing, that can help inform things further down the line. Yeah, and it's one of those things where, especially with races, you know, they're less objective in terms of... in terms of their analysis that we can do because it comes down to following the people in front of you a lot of the time or making moves or trying things and trying new race tactics. Sometimes, especially if somebody's been training really hard and let's say they've leveled up to Cat 2 or something like that and their first race is a hard road race and they get dropped. They're like, man, I just suck at this. I don't think I had good luck today. It's like, well, you hit a 20-minute PR. up the climb in the middle of the race and you still got dropped. I'd say objectively, your legs are really good. We just need to make you stronger. So let's see more 20-minute PRs over the next couple months and get you used to this. Or it's even like you were very active in the first half of this race trying to make a brake stick and you used up all your energy or you weren't eating enough. This is all stuff that... helps too. And so like sussing out what's going on with a race report, like all the workout stuff, all the workout feedback for yourself or for your coach, all this stuff still applies, but now we've got another dimension of it's not, it's usually not an objective race unless it's like a 4K pursuit, in which case you should be fairly consistent every single time and hopefully this day you get another 10 or 20 watts like, you know, PR and you go even faster depending on. Indoor, Outdoor Conditions, yada, yada. So all this stuff is important, but yeah, race reports are, yeah, let's just jot that down as another podcast to do. Hey, marketing. Just very quickly, though, before we record a second podcast. Well, we got some listener questions before we do that. Yeah, but always important to note that coaches are not therapists. However, if you felt like you had a bad race, ask your coach what they think, and we will give you a fairly honest appraisal of usually here's why it wasn't that bad, or here's what maybe led up to it. But we need the context to be able to do that. We need to understand how you felt, how the race went, how you or your team were racing it. We're never going to be there to completely... You know, massage out how you felt about everything, but we can at least tell you, you know, here's what went right, here's why we should be happy with this. Or here's all the context of things in the last few weeks. Things I'll keep quiet to myself right now. All right, so let's get to some listener questions. So first one is, from your perspective, what do you want slash need slash dream of seeing to get the best rider feedback? Actually, you know what's funny is recently I saw somebody who I had worked with for a while post on a forum that like, yeah, he had worked with me and here's, because somebody was asking what should I leave for my coach for feedback? And this was probably, I don't know, like six months ago or something like that, a year. And he pretty much said, Cole never really asked me for a lot of stuff. until something went wrong, in which case he would ask me about sleep, nutrition, stress, hydration. Rory, there's a cat that's about to jump in your lap, I see. Unfortunately, she's not a very meowing cat. Anyway, go follow Rory on Instagram if you want to see his cats. Me and my one post. Which was an idea you stole from me, and I'm suing, by the way. So basically what he said was he learned to preempt all the questions I was going to ask. So if he knew that he didn't drink enough, or if he didn't eat enough, or his sleep was really bad, or he was tired from cross-training or something like that, he would mention it even before I could ask. And that was very great. So that's the kind of stuff that I want, especially after we've been working with somebody for a while. I want them to get into a routine of preempting. If something went wrong, Here's why I think it went wrong. And again, this goes for self-coach people too, because later, when you go and look back at your past workouts to think, this is what I did last year, and this is what I'm going to try to do better next year, you now have objective pieces of data. You've got breadcrumbs for yourself about, oh, I shouldn't do this. And especially when you're looking back at stuff, you have a very different perspective than what you did in the moment. A lot of the time in the moment. You know, it's the heat of the moment, you know, you're lacking objectivity, and hindsight being 20-20, kind of like with, you know, kind of like a cool level head, it makes a huge difference. Yeah, like simple things I tell people that started with me that I'm wanting is, I want to know how much you ate, I want to know if you're not recording it, how well did you sleep last night? How was the stress going in? How did you feel about it afterwards? That's like my minimum. And that's also like two sentences worth of writing. I'm not, I don't want a screed from everyone. Yeah, and I usually tell people if it's no news, it's good news. Like if you don't tell me how your sleep was, I assume it was great. Yep. So, okay, next question is that, by the way, there's a lot of stuff that's kind of off topic. Like we're not going to talk about rest between intervals. Sorry, guys. And it's all guys, by the way. So here's a good one. RPE. Should I record average RPE, max RPE, RPE during intervals, during first, end of, last interval? So, and this is actually a really, really fair question. I had someone ask me this this week. Yeah, I get asked this with new clients all the time, or even people who have been training for a long time, and this is the first time they've thought about RPE. So I usually tell people, when you put the number into training peaks, If, let's say you've got like a one-minute max test on like a six-hour ride, and like it's just easy riding besides that, you don't have to put in like 10 slash four, like, because you really can't. It's like, I'm sure that it normally would have been like a three or four, maybe your one-minute test brought the RPE up a notch, but like, how did you feel when you get home? What's your total fatigue level? How hard do you think that ride was when you got off your bike at the end? That's... where I, that's what I usually suggest personally. That's what I want to see people put into training peaks. But in the comments, if you've got like a three by 20 threshold workout and it started getting hard in the last five minutes, you're like, okay, last five minutes, my RP went to like an 8.5, but it was like a seven before that. Cool. That's all I need to know. So Rory, what do you think? I would lean towards people telling me, you know, If you were doing like the 3x20 workout, I want to know how the 3x20 workout. I anticipate you will be tired at the end of that workout if you then went on and did another one hour of endurance or another four hours of endurance. I don't think that actually should play too much into your thinking. But did the work period that you were recommended to do as part of your workout go the way you expected, essentially? Was it as hard as you expected? Was it easier? That's the actual interesting thing, because if you went into the 3x20 and then came back and said, that was kind of a 4 out of 10 ride, that's not really helping me much at all. Yeah, that's fair. For instance, I had a client just this week, I gave him like a 3x10 at threshold, just to kind of get his legs moving again after some rest, and he said it stung a little more than he expected it to normally. And he also did a couple more watts than usual, but also he mentioned, yeah, it's been stressful at work. And so, you know, so we've got now we've got two things. Is it because he did like five more watts or is it because he was a little behind on because of work stress? And so he probably didn't get to eat enough or drink very well during the day. And so these are all kind of kind of coaching kind of decisions that you need to make about, okay, is this going to be an issue? the rest of the week, or what do we do? And for him, I was like, well, sounds like it's mostly work stress, but, you know, workout looks good. The heart rate doesn't look too off for normal. And so, probably fine. And I think today he had some stuff that was, you know, kind of fun riding and then an easy day. And then, like, I think Saturday is the first, like, really hard day back. And so, I'm like, I'm prepared to nix the Saturday workout. Based on that feedback. But I'm not really sure if I am yet. So we're, you know, kind of going through the week and seeing how things develop. So that's, that's one of those things where, you know, you got, well, I don't know. What was I going with? I think we already got to the point of that one. All right, moving on. Sorry. Is the Training Peaks, Smiley Face, and RPE, etc. Sufficient Feedback for Training, More In-Depth for Races? Rory, you are muted. Can I just say that the smiley faces are one of the best tools that you as a coached athlete can use, as long as you don't abuse them. As long as you're honest with the smiley faces. Yeah, like did workout go good and did you feel good versus there's a lot of ways you can obviously interpret feeling good. I would say if you have a saddle sore but the workout goes to plan and feels good. Saddle sore should add two points to your RP. Yeah, but from the workout perspective, I don't think those numbers or the smiley faces should factor in. I think that's something that should be explicitly brought up in your comments to say, workout went well, felt good legs-wise, but I have a saddle sore that was dogging me the entire time. Because that's something that ideally a coach is going to help you. Manage by reducing the ride volume, giving you an extra day off or two just to help you recover so you can then resume training because that sort of... Muddying the water, I think, becomes a bit of an issue in terms of, like, I was just uncomfortable, but the workout went well, versus something like, I didn't sleep at all last night, and as a result, the workout didn't go well, in which case, yes, you record that as part of, but no, I wouldn't say it's good enough. Yeah, because if the workout goes fine, and you're like, smiley face, RPE 7 for a threshold workout, that's great, but, you know, if you do frowny face and RPE 10, Just because you felt like you had a Lego in your chamois, that doesn't necessarily like, you know, it's not helpful because now it's like, oh, I mean, well, basically the adjustment would be the same. Okay, give you some easy riding, like take care of that thing, put some antibiotics on it and et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, it's, yeah, a little more detail. And also, don't ever offer to send pictures of your saddle sores ever, please. I've had a handful of people be like, do you want to see it? And I'm like, no, and I will block you and fire you as an athlete if you send me anything like that. Anyway, so next question is, is there such thing as too much feedback? Or are you muted? I can. See previous comments about Saddlesource. Yeah, so, well, that aside, I think there's too much in the sense that if you're giving us information that isn't going to help us make a decision, that's maybe too much. So, like, telling us all the information about the workout, great. Telling us it was a beautiful day and that helped with morale, that's great. Saying... Michael started tap dancing at work, and that really put me off my workout because it was all I could think about for it. That's not useful to me. Somebody started tap dancing at work? What? I was the best example I could come up with. Usually you're really good with the metaphors. All right. I've had some weak ones too. It's okay. So I actually think that, I mean, yes, there is such thing as too much feedback, but I think a lot of People don't realize what's important and what's not, so they'd rather brain dump and give you too much and let you pick out what you think is important. And I think that's actually way more common than a lot of people realize. Because sometimes somebody would be like, well, I had to coast for five seconds through this interval, I hope you don't mind. And I'm like, if you hadn't told me, I wouldn't have even seen it. Because people will coast for five seconds for a lot of reasons during an effort. And if it's like 30 seconds long. That's going to make a difference. You can easily find a 30-second stretch of road. Make a better choice next time. But if it's 30 seconds during a 30-minute interval, I mean, it happens. Don't worry about it. I had to let off the pedals to go around the hairpin is a pretty good reason to stop pedaling. Milan-San Remo this weekend. You will see them go up a hill and have to fully lean in and stop pedaling at points. And that's when the race is good. So there's always good reasons to not pedal. Don't pedal straight because you thought your coach was proud of you. Yeah, crashing is something that we discourage fairly actively. All right, so let's see. Next question is, incompatibility of the RPE with the relationship of power and heart rate, like decoupling, like big decoupling, but low RPE. So this is something where I've always thought about it as triangulating. And you need all three pieces of data. You need RPE, you need power, and you need heart rate. All of them. Because you could be feeling really good and have a good amount of decoupling because it's the first hot day outside. Or a humid day outside, and that's dehydrating you, or your body's just not used to the heat and venting heat, and that's okay. But, especially if your computer doesn't record temperature, comment, it was a hot day outside. You might see some decoupling. I didn't feel like I was dehydrated, but I was pretty warm nonetheless. That's an important piece of context. And so RPE's relationship with power and heart rate is, I mean, You know, at least the way we coach, it's absolutely a necessity to have all those pieces of information. And especially like if somebody doesn't wear a heart rate monitor when they're riding, I keep needling them. Hey, where's your heart rate monitor? Oh, it's broken. Well, are you getting a new one soon? Is it next week? Is it in the next two days? You've got a race coming up. You may need to use this, or you're doing heat training and heart rate decoupling for this is something that we're blah, blah, blah. And so it's all important. So when RPE is not necessarily quote-unquote incompatible, I would say it's contextual. It adds valuable context to your objective power and heart rate metrics. Yeah, I think there's maybe something to be said here around When you are giving feedback to yourself or to your coach, how much do you as an athlete have to look at your data to give that feedback? And I'd say 99% of the time it should be given without having to consider that, because it should be that mental feeling of this is how I felt it went. And maybe while you were riding you noticed heart rate was higher, maybe you noticed watts were lower or higher, ideally higher. I think when it comes to your subjective thoughts about how a workout went, I'm very specifically saying this because it was mentioned, I don't think people should look at the heart rate decoupling, HRPW or whatever it is, in training peaks and then making a decision based on what they saw there. Because I've tried to use that metric in productive ways and I just, I think it's... Too dependent on what a workout is or how it's been ridden to ever be of any, like, use as a there-and-then feedback mechanism. So I always just go by how you feel. Don't look at any of the numbers beforehand. Yeah, and everybody's got their own RPE scale, too. And so, because I had a new client recently asked me, like, hey, can you re-explain the RPE thing to me? And I did, and he's like, and then he asked some really good follow-up questions, and I'm like, well, you know, this is kind of your scale. And so, because I've learned that where for me, like an easy endurance ride can be like a 4, 5 out of 10 RPE, for a lot of people, it's like a 2 or a 3. And that's something that we need to know about that person. Like if 180 watts, if you've got like a 300 watt threshold and 180 watts feels like a 5, but 160 watts feels like a 2, like that's a really important piece of information. and so I'm going to notice that and use it to my advantage. Give me a 2 out of 10 RPE on this ride or you can go up to a 3 or a 4 on this ride if I, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So that kind of stuff is necessary but there's also stuff that doesn't come through an RPE at all. Feeling snappy, soreness, you know, because you can do an easy endurance ride and not feel sore but then you can start to push like you can get on the mountain bike, start to push up some steep stuff and suddenly Oh my God, my legs aren't feeling this. And that's a very distinct line between large motor unit recruitment and not, and easy riding and not. And so that's the kind of stuff that doesn't have a number associated with it, that you need comments, you need actual verbiage. And the same thing goes with snappiness. If somebody's not feeling snappy, even though they're doing a bunch of sprints, good to know. Not Feeling Snappy. What's going on? Like, that's something that you should be feeling at this point, or maybe not. It's been a little while since you did a sprint workout. Like, these are all other pieces of feedback that are super, super helpful that don't get a number attached to them. Yeah, all the sort of, like, built-in feedback mechanisms in something like Training Peaks are very much a snapshot of, like, the average of how you felt things went. But you're, as I said, Literally, the first thing I do in the morning is read the notifications through my emails. So, like, that's where I'm interested. I'll see the smiley face and I'll be like, yeah, it went well. It can be a smiley face and it can be the, I felt really crap at the start of my workout, but as I got towards the end, I felt like I really opened up and I felt good. And that's one of those cases where you might give that workout the 3 out of 10, but also that 3 out of 10 isn't telling me any of that, as Cole just said. Or here's another one, you see a smiley face and a 3 out of 10 RPE, but they skipped the intervals you gave them. Yeah. Yeah, always make sure to go in and actually check that the blue line goes up when it should. So, I mean, and that's another thing to watch out for, too, is because I'm not very strict about people with intervals like that. If you're not feeling it, tell me why, at least when you skip them. Like, uh, didn't get sleep last night. I figured I should move this to tomorrow. And I'm like, okay, well, this workout, you shouldn't move to tomorrow because the day after that is a more key workout for you. So like skip this one entirely and just maybe ride a little longer tomorrow. Stuff like that happens constantly, all the time. And that's, that's the kind of thing that that's, that's how we use feedback too. If you want, and that's how you can use feedback for coaching yourself. Like, I skipped these workouts, but like, this workout's not an important one, this one later is, and if I can readjust it, maybe our schedule doesn't allow for the readjustment, so now I've got to prioritize which workout do I pick, because I cannot do these two back-to-back. And maybe you can. Maybe you want to fuck around and find out. Maybe it goes badly. Write that down, too, for yourself. Yeah, like, in some ways, pre-workout feedback helps athletes with that as well, because If you are lining up for, you know, the workout you've got to do and you've realized before it's like, I don't have the legs or I don't have the motivation to do this, like my advice I give to everyone in like the intro call is your order of priorities when that happens, in part because like the nature of like the detached relationship due to time zones of how I have to coach is one, you don't need to ask permission from me to not do the hard thing. Two, try an endurance ride. Three, try a recovery ride if an endurance ride seems like too much. Try and get on the bike if a recovery ride seems like too much. And after that, if you don't want to ride your bike, don't ride your bike. Don't ask permission. I'll deal with the calendar afterwards. But make sure I know that that's something I'm going to have to adjust and change beforehand. And that in itself, telling me all that is a form of feedback because we've talked a lot about workout feedback here, but also just like... Sending me the WhatsApp message to say, hey, I've had a bad day at work and I really don't think I can do this is enough for me to take action that you need. So making sure I'm always aware as aware as you can reasonably be on what's going on is important. One of the best compliments I ever got in coaching is I had an athlete tell me, thank you for helping me realize just how much agency I have. And I thought that that was... Really, really sweet, because, you know, you as an athlete, like, a lot of the time, you know, if you're just not feeling good, you don't need to ask me, should I still do my workout? If you're not feeling good, the answer is like, you know what I'm going to say, don't do your workout. One of my rules of thumb, especially... During a time of year when you want to be going well, like during a race block or when you're like in the middle of an important build, you know, depending on the structure of what we're doing, most of the time, I don't want anybody pedaling any harder than feels good. So if you can do a hard workout and that feels good, great. Of course, there's going to be some pain, you know, 30-30s and whatnot, that's expected. If it feels unusually like pulling teeth and you're not getting a lot of wants, don't do it. Just stop. If you feel like you could do an endurance ride and that's okay, sure, do an endurance ride. But at the same time, make a wise decision about the volume too. Because if you're somebody who's got a lot of time to ride, and if you're not feeling good to do threshold efforts, but you're okay to do endurance riding, don't go endurance ride for eight hours. Even if you think you can, you've got time. You need to recover. And riding that long is time away from recovering. And it's also energetic expenditure that you need to cover on the back end. And then if you go out and you do eight hours when you probably should have done two, now I've got to add more rest and now we're going to push even more key workouts further down the line. And sometimes that's fine and sometimes that's absolutely not fine. So it makes a big difference to like... to help people with workout feedback about helping them make decisions in the moment. And that's one of the things that I think we, to toot our own horn a little bit, because I'm usually just tooting my own horn about metabolism and science and shit like that. But I think this is something that we do well as coaches, is helping people make good and better and better kind of workout day decisions. Yeah, I think describing it as like an agency thing is like a very good way of putting it because if you take the example of like your guy you mentioned earlier who didn't feel like they could say they were sick because they just wanted to make sure the training procedure they hadn't, part of that is they want the gains to keep on rolling but also it's potentially a bit of didn't realize they could be that up front and didn't realize that what they were doing didn't realize that them admitting they were sick. Was an acceptable part of this whole process. But it is, it's like the most basic ground level, being honest that you're sick is one of the most important things. But yeah, being honest with your coach and also again, being honest with yourself is going to be a very big part of how much you're able to improve. Yeah. One of the things about this is that A lot of the time people think a training plan is written in stone and that like the workouts are the thing you're paying for. The workouts are like 40% of the thing you're paying for. Mostly what you're paying for is the coach experience and the coach feedback and that feedback loop of helping you become a better decision maker day of, helping you become better in tune with your body, helping you become a better bike racer or a bike trainer or whatever your goals are. Like that's where you know that that's a lot of the time is you're you know you're it's like mental mental load is a good way to put it because we spend a lot of time thinking about people and trying to make good decisions and guiding them properly and so so a training plan is not written in stone but you know people like you and me Rory for us a training plan is basically written in water and in reality a training stone is written in sand where you can It'll stay for a while, but after time, it kind of wears away, and you're like, oh, well, especially if you plan out like two months, that stuff in the future, it'll get eroded by what happens right now. And so a lot of the time, if something's not going to plan, great, we're just going to scratch it out, and we're going to do something else. So I think that's a, yeah, sorry. It's worth noting that if anyone's worried about how difficult it is for their coach to adjust things, it's the only difficult part is working out, you know, what am I going to rearrange this into? The actual part where we rearrange it is a five-minute process. It's four minutes waiting for training piece to load and then one minute actually doing it. And then refreshing and making sure that it didn't delete anything on the way. Again. But like, yeah. You're never actually inconveniencing us more than we would actually expect to be as part of what our job is. Because although, I'm sure, Cole, you're probably saying, I do all my plans on a Monday morning. Actually, for me, it's like Thursday and Friday. Weird. Well, I do everything Monday morning because usually that's a quiet time before Monday morning meetings in my real job. I will usually end up adjusting things in response to what people are saying throughout the week, and that's just something I expect to do. I'll spend like several hours on a Monday thinking about it a lot, and then throughout the week in response to people just telling me little things like, oh, I didn't really sleep well last night, or I'm anticipating that I'll be out for drinks now on Friday, and I'll just like... Even without telling them, I'll adjust the error counts on some workouts to reflect. Here's what's going to be happening next. I might move a workout a day forward. And that's all like the fine tuning of coaching that I can do because people have spoken to me or have just left the note in a Training Peaks comment box. Like that's normal. That's what coaches should be doing. And like, as I think I've said in this podcast, but I've certainly said elsewhere, I think Any coaches that are setting something in granite in your training peaks plan for a month and then looking at it a month later and putting a new block of granite in or they don't understand the job. It's got to be the case of you've got to allow that free flow of things around because if you get sick at the start of that month that's been planned out, then All of a sudden that full month has to shift and adjust and if it doesn't because someone doesn't have enough care to actually do that then they're not really serving your needs as a client either from like the fitness perspective but also from like the You know, whole body health, mental health aspect, like all of this needs to be in tune. And often people will apologize to me when they adjust the calendar. And like, I tell them every single time, it takes me five minutes. It's not an issue. I'm happy to do it because I want you to feel good. Or as the UK folks would say, it's no bother. It is no bother. Yeah, so those are the kind of things that we think that, or these are things that we In our coaching practice, are always looking for, you know, we're looking for preemptive things about what went wrong and why, did you feel good, the honest kind of feedback, using the emojis in Training Peaks if you're in Training Peaks, like leaving RPE feedback, leaving good notes on how the workout felt, if things were good, if things were a little off, if you managed some big time, like all time PRs, you're feeling good, or I felt a little off today, but still managed to PR, okay, well. Objectively, your legs were really good. And so that kind of stuff, talking about sickness and sleep and motivation and any kinds of signs of all that stuff, it's all good stuff. And if you are working with a coach, And you are not getting this kind of service. I mean, that's fine. A lot of coaches work like that. We don't. We are open communication coaching. We do a lot of it asynchronously through text, but, you know, calls, emails, all that kind of stuff is always on the table. So this is how we operate. And we're not here to try to tell other people how to work. But if you are working with a coach where this stuff is an option or you're coaching yourself, we highly recommend all of this. Don't pay people more to get the service that you deserve, is one thing I'd say. Like, if someone's saying, for $100 more a month, I will talk to you weekly. That's one of my personal philosophies, is that I don't think people should pay more to be treated like a human. Yeah. Can I also say, just for my benefit here, To all my clients that are listening, I promise I'm not subtweeting any of you. with this podcast. There's none of you that I'm actually particularly worried about. So don't think any of this is a reflection on what you're doing. Please just keep commenting. Likewise. Yeah. All right. So thanks, everybody, for listening. If you'd like to reach out for a consultation or for a coaching inquiry, please email me empiricalcycling at gmail.com. And if you would like to ask a question for future episodes or if you want to just check out the weekend AMAs or ask a question there, please go give me a follow at empiricalcycling on Instagram. And if you want to donate to the podcast because you're liking it, empiricalcycling.com slash donate. We are, of course, ad-free. We are free content. And please share the podcast because, well, not just because we're free, but because we genuinely want to help everybody train better and get faster and all that good stuff. So, yeah, with that, we will see you in the next episode, which I think is going to be a lot stuck. So stay tuned for the nerdy shit. Yeah, thanks, everybody. Take care.