Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore. Today, we are joined again by our Empirical Cycling Coach, Rory Porteous. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Please consider subscribing if you're new here, and if you like what you're hearing especially, and if you are not new here, thank you so much for coming back. We really appreciate having you. If you want to support the podcast because you're liking it so much, you can share the podcast. That always goes really well. Thank you so much for all of the sharing the podcast that I've seen. You can also donate to the podcast at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. 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And also on the weekends, I do a training AMA. And unlike these episodes, they are unusually concise. So if you would like to go give me a follow at Empirical Cycling, I'll see you over there and occasionally post some memes too. We have been coaching with memes since, when was my first meme? 2016 or something like that. I don't know. It doesn't matter. So today, let's get to the main thing. We're going to talk about endurance rides. So I promised this episode in our last Wattstock, where we dug into the Granada Bishop, and I always forget the other author, I'm so sorry to him, paper on endurance riding and intensity versus volume. And Rory, so you've listened to this episode recently. What was your very general takeaway from it? My general takeaway was I shouldn't have listened to it on the ride where I was doing 30-30s because that made it really difficult to take in. I mean, it's a lot of what we've talked about in the past in terms of, you know, that balance between intensity and duration, particularly like at or lower durations of lower durations. Lower Intensities of Intended Rides, so, once again, Cole's brought me on here to tell you all to slow the fuck down. But, as I said, I don't remember much of it, because I wasn't in the middle of a sufferfest as I listened to it. Things will click as I go through this episode. I remember you talked about time at one point, and I was like, oh, I've done some. We talked about time at many points. One of the ways that I... kind of thought that paper was really interesting, just to give it a quick review, is you should go listen to that episode. It's not as alphabet soupy as a lot of our other recent Wastock episodes have been. But the basic gist of it was they looked at a whole bunch of papers on endurance training in various groups. They compared it to high-intensity interval training. and they went through and defined that. And they also compared it to sprint interval training. And so what they did was they looked at citrate synthase, which is a marker of mitochondrial enzyme density in the muscle, and they compared it to, for volume, it was the combination of duration and intensity. So the kind of area under the curve that Kyle and I have been talking about in the Wastock episodes for quite a long time now. And they compared that to just the straight up intensity. So how much intensity is going to give you how much adaptation. And the cool thing was when they looked at just intensity versus citrate synthase, it was flat across the board pretty much, except for the handful of studies that did much higher volume at kind of like a middle slash low-ish intensity. And they had kind of an outsized bump. But if you kind of remove those outliers, like there were three or four studies that were way up there. If you kind of remove those outliers, for the most part, pretty much all the studies they looked at were pretty much flat across the board. for Duration and Intensity. And I included all of those figures from that paper in the episode notes for our last Wattstock. So go check out the Wattstock number 49 show notes to go see that. Although the paper, I believe, is open text. If it's not, then I'm not saying you should PsyHubbit, but you shouldn't not PsyHubbit also. So it's worth a checking out. I actually had one of my friends give me some criticisms on our interpretation of those things and the study itself, which I thought were somewhat valid. And so we're going to have him on our next episode to discuss exactly what we and they did wrong. And we're going to debate about that because it's not often that we get a really good debate on this podcast. But I thought it was really, really a cool study because it showed that there really is a trade-off between volume. and Intensity, and it kind of goes towards what we've been talking about, but it doesn't really go towards the programming considerations of duration versus intensity. So in terms of the adaptation, Rory, have I refreshed your memory enough to kind of, you know, get some thoughts on duration versus intensity and endurance? Because we're mostly talking about muscular endurance here, like what is your fatigue resistance in your muscles to push watts? Yeah, I remember a wee bit more now. So like one of the... Summations we came out of the last episode was you can do a little bit of everything and it's all going to help in its own way, but also is it going to help in the right way and is it going to help in a way that's going to be long-term sustainable? Is it going to be something that fits in with like your own personal training history? One of the things in there I think was the sprint interval training which had its own benefits sort of thing you'd probably do if you're a very, very time crunch person. It's the sort of thing that often gets advertised as the, was it, it's like, if you only do eight minutes of exercise a day, do this, on popular websites that we don't recommend. But like, there is a reason why like that sort of thing gets recommended to people, because even though it's short, even though it's extremely intense, it's going to have a beneficial effect in some way, it's just. Is it going to be the sort of thing that is going to drive the sort of endurance adaptations that we're looking for as cyclists? Well, I think for a little bit it does. I mean, according to all studies, for a little while it does. But it's infrequent that those studies go for a long enough duration where we can really see accumulated fatigue show up in the participants. And so that's one of the considerations that we're going to talk about in a little bit. But I wanted to stay on the adaptations that we get from endurance stuff. You know, one of the things that, um, that's in, remember the, uh, that training and racing with a power meter, the, I'm looking for my copy on my desk, it's a little buried right now, so I'm not going to grab it, but everybody knows that chart, uh, or, well, if you've been listening to this podcast long, and if you definitely know that chart, of adaptations versus different training zones, um, from Coggin. And it's pretty much like, everything does everything. Everything does everything to, to, to, um, to a greater or lesser degree. and the quote-unquote the best quote-unquote bang for your buck was like threshold sweet spot type but it's all the same adaptations as like endurance riding so one of the things that I think we should spend a minute on and we've done entire episodes on this previously but it's worth reiterating are there any special adaptations with any different intensities or zones and the answer According to my interpretation of the scientific literature, and the huge vast majority shows this, is that no, there's not anything special about like quote unquote zone two training. So, you know, burning fat doesn't make you better at burning fat. You know, if you do endurance riding or if you do threshold riding or whatever, like there's... There's a very similar adaptation, and one of the reasons for this, we spent many, many hours in the last couple of Wattstock episodes talking about the signals for endurance adaptation, and none of them have to do with substrate oxidation. It's not whether you're oxidizing fats or lactates, it's whether you are creating enough signaling to go through our main kind of quote-unquote bottleneck of aerobic adaptation signaling of PGC-1 alpha, PGC-1 beta, and PRC. There's a reason we talk about training load in general and not training load in terms of grams of carbohydrate intake. Well, that's why we do that. I know that some other places do that. And I am... Well, we're going to leave that open-ended. And so one of the things that's cool about this bottleneck that we've talked about previously is that it... Turns on an entire suite of genes. So it's not just that you're going to make more, you know, MCT transporters, it's not just that you're going to make more Krebs cycle enzymes or whatever. Because if you look at a study that says, okay, you do X training, you burn blah, blah, blah, and you turn on this one gene that we're looking at, that doesn't mean the other genes are not turned on and expressed. And we've also talked about, you know, mRNA versus translation and actual integration, then all the way up to performance, there's a lot of steps that you got to have. in between. And so my bottom line is, are we increasing performance? And that's really regardless of all the studies and whatever they say in terms of like mRNA or protein synthesis and whatever, did you get faster and can we see it in your performances? That's what I am most interested in. I mean, that's what... by some inside baseball here, which I'm not actually going to get very specific about. Cole and I, whilst we were ADHD-ing out for an hour before we started recording, we're talking about, you know, what are different ways we can actually tease out whether or not we see these benefits, and specifically, is there ways you can tease it out while trying to remove some of the noise of data to see, you know, does Field2Max go up, for instance? And like, that's quite difficult if you don't know what you're doing. It's relatively difficult if you do know what you're doing. But at the same time, did your power go up? That's an easy way to see if your VO2max intervals worked. Yeah, like, did the number at the end of the FTP test go up? Number go up is surprisingly a good way of just quantifying everything in the sport. It's why you definitely don't need a lactate testing meter. So, okay, so let's, yeah, so I think, yeah, time versus intensity, there's a trade-off, and we're going to talk about kind of how we program that kind of stuff and the considerations, the actual coaching considerations that papers like the Granada paper did not really get into. So I wanted to start with RPE because God, what was it? What, 2019 or 2020, we did a podcast on pacing RPE stuff for, you know, endurance rides. And my conclusion was, like, pace it to like a 4 out of 5 out of 10 RPE. Because to me, that's where I feel like my endurance pace is. Like, it's 4 out of 5 out of 10 RPE. context. I tell people two to three, which I think is what Cole is going to talk about in a moment. Yeah. Cause one of the things that happened was I was, I was saying, you know, cause I was using my personal scale for RPE and this is selection bias, right? Cause this worked for me, therefore it might work for everybody. And I pretty quickly realized that everybody, and I'm talking like within like a month or two of me starting to assign rise by RPE. Yeah, I guess arguably I kind of did before, but I think I just put down Z2 because that's what my coaches had done for me too, and I didn't really know how to pace that or what. So I pretty quickly realized that everybody's got a slightly different RPE scale. And the more experienced and the better diesel engine somebody has, we could say, typically the lower their RPE is. And so an example might be, I'm thinking of one particular client right now. She was always doing like between 200 to 230, 240 watts for her endurance rides for, you know, three, four, five, six hours. And I could tell that there was a lot of fatigue associated with this. And her harder intervals were, you know, not as good as I would like. And a lot of things were kind of inconsistent that should be consistent, like FTP intervals. Some days they were... X watts. Some days they were like X minus 10 watts. Some days they were X minus 20 watts. And I'm like, okay, X minus 20, you got to like not do these. But I was trying to figure out where's this fatigue coming from. And I said, please pace your endurance rides easier. She said, I don't feel like I'm doing anything. I said, that's kind of the point. So she had been putting down like a five out of 10 for like 230, 240 watts for like a five, six hour ride. And I'm like, okay, that, you know, that should be reasonable. I can tell that there's fatigue somewhere, and I think it's this. So what I want you to do is I want you to pull it down to 200 watts, 180 watts, 160 watts. And so 180 to 200 watts is still like a four. And then as soon as she gets to 160 watts, now we're at two. It's a massive drop-off. And it fixed all our problems. All of her harder efforts got a lot more consistent. and she actually got faster by doing those easy rides even easier to her own chagrin because she likes the hard work and I mean we all do, right? I mean it's kind of one of the nature of endurance training is you've got to kind of enjoy the suffering but you've got to enjoy the suffering strategically for it to be most effective, you know what I mean? Yeah, the problem with endurance rides is It's one of those situations where if you do something like an FTP interval, for instance, like I've talked about it in the past as being like there's a concentration gradient to like interval intensity. Such a science word, concentration gradient. That's part of the joke. But you've got to actually be thinking about it and maintaining that effort and endurance riding is sort of like similar but in an inverse way where you've got to really concentrate on not pushing too hard. Because, like, ultimately, the thing about endurance riding is it's just, you know, the simplest form is go for a ride and don't do it too hard. And the problem is, if you have a really good time, the legs just pick up themselves. You get that extra 20-30 watts, no problem. But you have to actually think about, you know, holding back a little. Something I struggle with, I get to, like, the final hour of an endurance ride, I'm like, okay, I need to get home. And that's where the watts suddenly start to creep up. Yeah, it's very much a case of do you want to get fast or do you want to get fast faster? Because if you don't apply the extra intensity when you don't need to, you're leaving more opportunity to do your intervals correctly or potentially do more intervals throughout the week than you otherwise would have been able to. It can be the difference between someone who can do it like. Two sets of workouts a week versus potentially three is, are you actually giving yourself that opportunity to recover between those workouts? Yeah, and it's a massive jump. You're not going to manage them. It's a massive jump between like, you know, number of hard sessions you can do where, you know, in some ways you get, you can get different adaptations. You know, if you're looking, if you're looking to improve your sprints, you got to be nice and fresh for those sprints. You got to have all the all worldly manner or watch when you do those. Or if you're looking for VO2 max stuff, you can do potentially more VO2 max sessions. If you're looking for race prep, you can potentially do more race prep sessions, depending on how you manage your energy. And so I would even say it's not necessarily a case of getting fast or getting fast faster. I would say it's a case of potentially plateauing and burning out versus do you want consistent improvements? from hopefully month to month and hopefully year to year. And this also kind of depends on your personal genetics and how much time you have to train and all that kind of other stuff, which we'll get into in future podcasts, which is definitely worthy of really, really good scrutiny. It's also a reflection. I'm sure at some point today we're probably going to talk about... What you can do with, you know, different ranges of weekly volume available to you. But one of the questions you've got to ask as part of that is why is your weekly volume what it is? Are you sitting at a desk for seven hours at home each day and it's relatively low stress in your work life? Or are you doing manual labor for seven hours a day, but you've also got an hour commute at the beginning and end? And those people could both have 15 hours available to them after work. The situation in terms of total accumulated stress that people are under is very, very different. I wouldn't expect the person doing the really hard manual labor to manage three workouts a week, let alone any more than that. But the person that's just sitting at home all day, relatively relaxed, people that live the pro cyclist lifestyle almost. where you're able to devote more of the actual energy you have from day to day are obviously going to have much more of an opportunity to use that time well but that just means it's more important for them to make sure that when they get to the really important workouts they're able to do them fresh because they haven't overdone it in all the other days but also for the people that are already quite stressed possibly quite tired when they get to the end of the day before they even ride a bike even more important for them to chill out. You know, take it easy. Yeah. Use the bike as much as stress relief is for performance. Yeah. I mean, I had personal experience with this for years, where I was doing, you know, 40 hours a week of carpentry work in Boston. And, you know, that kind of manual labor, like constantly up and down on your knees, up and down stairs, lugging heavy stuff around. And it sucked. I was bad at fueling. I was bad at pacing those days. I would get home very, very tired a lot of the time, and I would go out for rides. And I didn't really know how to pace those. I didn't know what I was looking for. My coach at the time, I was not paying him much. I wouldn't expect much. And we're talking like 50 bucks a month. Was it less? 40. And he wasn't really kind of hands-on with me. And so I had a lot of just not getting faster for years. periods where we ran out of work, because that happens sometimes in the trades, where I would have a couple weeks to a month or two off at a time even. My training got really, really good, and I got a lot faster, and then it fell off a cliff again once I started working a lot again. And I didn't really know how to balance those two. And if I had known at the time about balancing those two, I think it would have been a lot more enjoyable of a process at the very least, to say that. So one of the things I also... wanted to touch on before we kind of get into kind of programming considerations is what I call fatigue burden and energy burden. And this is one of the costs of doing any ride at all is how much fatigue is it going to give you? And how's that going to affect your intervals afterwards? And how much energy have you spent during this ride? And for some considerations, you know, for a lot of people, it's not a concern at all. As long as you're eating enough, of course. There are some people who don't eat enough, in which case we can talk about that. But at some point, you've burned so many kilojoules where you literally cannot eat it back in a day. And depending on the intensity, for some of my clients who ride a lot, who do six, seven, eight-hour rides regularly, You know, sometimes, a lot of the time, we're looking at like 4,000 to 5,000 kilojoules, maybe up to 6 on a ride. But some days, when they're going hard, we're talking like 8. It's, and how many people can eat 8,000 calories in a day, plus what you like burn off the bike just to keep your body alive? You know, 2,000, 2,500, 2,800 for a lot of men. It's a huge amount of calories. How many people, I mean, it sounds glorious to stuff your face with, like, 10,000, 12,000 calories a day, but, you know, at some point, it just stops being enjoyable, and it's just a lot of chewing and swallowing. So, Rory's smirking at that. Well, one of the things, like, we come back to a lot is, obviously, like, how much food do you need to get in to be able to ride? And, obviously, As you start to have that greater availability of time to actually use, obviously, that goes up. But that's a consideration that people maybe don't think about enough when you are a, you know, right-hand side of the bell curve, strong athlete, particularly as you get to, like, either, like, world tour level or very strong amateur, you know, people at the top of the British time travelling scene, for instance. Very big watts available to them, potentially a lot of time to ride. If you're, especially if you're the sort of person who's doing your endurance rides too hard, like the energy demands of that are just catastrophic when it comes to like thinking about long-term training and like one of the things you mentioned last week about all these different training modalities and their effects on endurance is you It's basically impossible for any sort of scientific study to actually pull together and look at the effects of what happens if you're riding your endurance too hard versus doing endurance at a much more sustainable pace, because that sort of study is never going to have the time to work. You're never also going to get the availability of subjects to be able to do it. And it's only ever going to tell you things you kind of already know, which is ultimately the problem with a lot of these studies. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're right on about that. So actually, why don't we kind of focus on the fatigue side of things first? I was about to coin the term food max. Well, let's... Let's think about fatigue first, because I think this is the one that more people are concerned about, is fatigue and not necessarily energy management. I mean, if you're burning like 1,000, 2,000 kilojoules on your longer, harder rides, and you're having trouble getting that back in, well, we should talk. Mostly, we should talk over food. Let's have a lunch. But for the most part, I think it's just the acute fatigue of doing a ride Way more than zero for a lot of people for even a two, three-hour endurance ride. Because I am fairly convinced that if you're doing even like, you can kind of get away with it at some point, but after a little while, you've got to pay the piper on this stuff with the intensity. And so let's talk about that first threshold. We usually call it LT1, but even if you measure it with lactate, it's kind of decoupled from RPE a little bit. So I prefer to think about RPE. So that RPE threshold where you jump from like a 2 to a 4 or a 5, for most people, for me, it's where I jump from a 4 or 5 to a 6, that's where you really want to stay below. And so my clients who have the highest LT1, we're talking like in the mid 300 watt range, like 350, 360 watts. Typically, they do their endurance rides at 200 to 250. And they are perfectly capable of doing 6, 7, 8 hours at 300 watts if they want to. But that's one of those things where too much food. So they don't. But the... Food max. Food max. But you absolutely can do those rides. But like the fatigue that they accumulate is... Very small because they're used to doing those long rides. And so that accumulated fatigue for even a two or three hour endurance ride that you do just a little too hard for once a week, maybe it's okay if you know how to program the rest of your rides. Now, if you do this every single endurance ride because you just want to maximize the time or you don't want to feel like you did two hours of, oh, I barely did anything. I need to feel like I did a workout. That's the kind of thing where you do that, then the next day you've got intervals, those intervals may not be as good as they would have been otherwise. And so the first consideration that I have, and I'm sure Rory has as well, because we kind of talk about this a lot, is how many quality interval days can you do in a week? And then you've got to fill in around that with recovery and easy endurance rides. When you do that, when you consider how many quality hard days can you get during a week, and how do you not impact those hard rides with your endurance riding, I think that's actually a really good place to start rather than starting with, I need to do X amount of endurance riding per week. Because as that Bishop study showed, or Granada Bishop and Mr., I need to remember his name, the intensity is almost irrelevant as long as you get in the ride time. Nicholas Chapnick Thank you. Yeah, I think I've said this in a previous podcast, but when it comes to programming in people's weeks, I'm not thinking about it in terms of how do I fit as many good workouts in as possible? It's how do I, based on what we did last week and what we need to do in the next weeks or when an event's going to be, how can I make sure that you get to every workout feeling good? That's ultimately what decides whether or not someone's going to be like a two workouts a week versus a three workouts a week, sometimes one, depending on like the sort of intensities you're working with. Because I can't tell someone to do, say, three sweet spot workouts in a week, knowing that, oh, the third one they're just not going to be ready for. I give it to them because I know they're going to be able to do that. I program everything out with the understanding of like what time they have available. How stressful is their job normally? How good are they at eating really? Trying to take into account as much as I can to know, you know, what kind of athlete are you actually? What do I think you can cope with? And it's never about how do we just make sure that TT goes up three times this week? It doesn't work like that. It's how do we make sure that next week you're going to feel good to go again? Because it's... That thing of people doing all their rides too hard, whether it's a workout or not a workout, is that long-term sustained fatigue. Not overtraining, that's a very overused term for what we're talking about, but it can lead to overtraining. If you do that for a month, you'll be tired at the end of it, but you can probably recover from it and then get back to your workouts and learn your lesson well. If you do it for a season, in trouble. And you're going to notice throughout that season that all the workouts I should be able to do, I'm not able to do. And that's where people usually start to double down on their efforts too, rather than pulling it back and going, I'm tired. I must be able to do this. It must be a problem with me. It's not a, you know, I've got a client right now who is sort of midway through his target race series. Got through, like, the practice one at the start of the year pretty well. Some bad course marshalling caused him to come second in the series, I think. But fortunately, that wasn't his target, so we were able to, like, call that a productive use of our time. And then he's into his main series right now. He's in a sort of, like, in-between point between the start, the first half and the second half, and after his last race. legs kind of haven't been there and he's done one workout in like three weeks because you know there was two paths we could go down there one is that it's like a similar sort of thing you get at the end of a recovery week where it's like oh the legs have just switched off and they need woken up so you do some openers or it's I'm tired I'm fatigued I need recovery and what we're talking about with the people that just decide I'm going to try after is they think of option one and they never regard option two but I think it's always more valuable if you have the opportunity and the time to assume it's option two because if you take the recovery and then try and pick it back up again the worst case scenario there is that you rode your bike for a couple of weeks and didn't do anything intense whereas you know that scenario one is The worst case scenario is you just kept riding in tents. And that's actually something I think we need to dig into a little bit is that bit of recovery. Because a lot of the time, I get this question all the time, actually, where people say, how do I recover? Should I just not look at my bike for a week or two? And I think in the old school, coaches would say, yeah, don't look at your bike for a recovery week. I mean, I think that's a bad idea. Your muscles get stiff. You know, you start to, you start to detrain a little bit if you're not keeping the legs taking over just a tiny little bit. You always notice when you go to a work, into like a sweet spot workout and you didn't do anything the day before. Sometimes. You always notice like that. Sometimes. Yeah. Some people feel great doing that. And that's, that's a little individualization there. So, Rory, watch your peripheral at John, Mr. Needing Openers all the time. I'm actually one of those people too. I've learned that lesson a couple of times. So like when you're talking recovery, because if you do 8, 10, 12, 16, whatever weeks of really good training and then you've got a goal event, you go well or you don't or whatever, at some point you need to kind of chill out and looking at that history of what have you been doing up to this point. is hugely impactful in terms of what the decision is, the coaching decision is moving forward of do you need rest or like why aren't we seeing the same watts? So like if you go do, if I just say give me like three 10-minute FTP intervals just as a legs check and your FTP previously was 300 watts and you're used to doing, you know, you could do 3x20 or 300 watts before all of your races and stuff and now you're feeling a little fatigued and you go do a 3x10 and you're at like 270, 280 watts. And this is like after, you know, four or five days, kind of easy riding, kind of chill. And you're thinking, am I here yet? Am I back? You do that ride and you're like, ugh, legs weren't good. Okay, what decision do we do now? Now it's either you are fatigued or you need openers. And so I would say the next day, do an easy endurance ride. Day after, try a couple more efforts. Do a couple sprints, do another FTP effort, maybe do a handful of efforts over FTP, not max. Just feel out the legs. Just kind of get a sense of the range of intensities and how your legs feel doing them. And if you're still not there, that's a sign of needing more rest. And this is one of the things that actually is very impactful during a week too, during a training block, where if your performance starts to drop, Your training, like, it's, your performance shouldn't be dropping while you're improving. And in some cases, okay, sure, like, we want to cluster some stuff together, get a little blah, blah, blah. Okay, sure, there's a handful of rare exceptions where that kind of thing is like, okay, well, we'll keep pushing. Handful, like, one in a hundred. For the most part, if we're seeing your performance decrease while you're training, that's actually a red flag that something is off. One of the things you often have to consider here, and it's something like when it comes to people that are either new to coaching or self-coaching, I think one of the hardest things for people to pick up on and actually really understand how it works for them or others is periodization, thinking about how a week comes together, several weeks come together, etc. And I think it's a mistake if a lot of people just lock themselves into a pure three weeks on, one weeks off, when in reality you can be significantly more fluid about that, especially when it comes to really hard workouts. If you're doing a bunch of anaerobic stuff and you're thinking, oh, I want to try two workouts a week, which may or may not be enough for you, then you could maybe do the two a week at the start. You know, you get a nice three days between them, properly recover, really send it the next one. You might need four days after that one, five days towards the end of the block. Like really loosen up in terms of like how you define what a quote unquote a week is in terms of like how you put together your training. And actually one of the things that I, I don't know if it was you, I don't think it was. Somebody told me, I think I was consulting with somebody and I said, you know, you're You know, you get to Tuesday and you're probably still tired from your weekend. And they said, oh, I thought your legs kind of reset every Monday. Because Monday is usually a rest day for most people. And then Tuesday you're good to go. And it didn't really occur to them that riding hard Saturday and Sunday, you could still be feeling fatigue on Tuesday. If you're the star person that races one weekend day and does a long ride the next. You're not going to turn up on Monday feeling good and all like that. And you're probably not on Tuesday. Right, but what we're really talking about is like, how big is the blast radius of the fatigue? Like, where is your next high-quality workout? Like, when are you clear from that fatigue? And that's one of the big considerations. And I mean, that's why we program the way we do, individualizing stuff for people, because everyone's different. Your off-bike considerations are different. Like, you know, you're at work and you can't. You know, you're doing a 12-hour shift at the hospital, and you can't eat, you can't drink, you've got to stay masked up, and you know, you get to the end of that, and you've got to take a day to like reconstitute just your friggin' your hydration, let alone everything else, just to get back on sleep and all that stuff. So there's a lot of considerations with this stuff, and as long as you're paying attention to like, where are my high-quality workouts, and am I progressing them, that alone can tell you where your fatigue is. So let's bring this back to our endurance rides. If you are doing your endurance rides too hard between your interval rides, that can be a sign that, you know, if your interval rides are not progressing, you've got fatigue somewhere. Like, if you're progressing things logically, and you're giving yourself enough space between workouts, like let's say you've got only one or two hard workouts a week, and it's not high quality, something's going on. And it's not always your endurance pace, but oftentimes it is. Yeah, in the private Empirical Cycling Coaches chat, Fabiano shared some interesting data about delayed recovery from someone after a VL2Max block, because they had an opportunity to do some extra high volume work before the athlete, I think, was going to have a total week off due to work. And he was able to see in the data the exact effect of recovery not being permitted to happen after like three good hard weeks. And that's a case where Fabiano has probably done a pretty good job already managing, you know, how hard is this person riding their endurance ride. So the endurance rides themselves in that case are actually being done right. You can see in the data that recovery is happening. It's just that when they switch to the recovery week the next week, you see it skyrocket in terms of... How well they do. But that's happening at a smaller scale between the hard workouts and the easy workouts, in terms of where the drift is going, in terms of you feeling good versus you feeling bad. Which is why, ultimately, that story there is why recovery weeks are themselves important, but it's also why pacing the endurance right well is important. If the athlete wasn't pacing endurance rides, first off, the high volume week would be an absolute disaster by the end of it. But also, you'd have seen it already in the endurance rides between all the via to max workouts that that athlete would have been in the toilet within two weeks, let alone three. Yeah, and the harder and more compact your hard training is, the more you can see the effect of anything that causes undue fatigue or impacts recovery. And doing your endurance paces, too hard, not eating enough, not sleeping enough, you know, getting a tiny little tickle in your throat, like you're fighting off a cold, like stress, anything can make that happen. And so you've always got to kind of account for all of those variables. But, you know, when it comes to recovery, also, like, you know, talking about food and eating, like, let's discuss The energy burden, because we just, you know, because that was like fatigue burden. Let's talk about energy burden for people who are doing ultras, people who do gravel races, people who do like a hard six, seven hour ride to prep for Unbound or Big Sugar or whatever it is, or, you know, take your pick. The calories you burn on that ride, I mean, and forget about just if it's carbohydrates or fats, because this is actually something that we've seen in forums recently. Or people are like, oh, well, I only want to replace the carbohydrates I burn on my ride. Okay, well, first of all, don't do that. Your body is an excellent energy accountant, and your fat cells, when they're empty, are like, hey, feed me. We've talked about that on the podcast before. So you've got to account for all of your energy. Otherwise, things are going to try to make themselves whole again, and if you're not eating enough, you are... You're keeping the account in the red, let's say, and that doesn't allow you to build back anything. I'm aiming for that two to two and a half thousand calorie deficit, thank you. I also recommend you don't do that. Go get some haggis, my friend. Yeah, don't do that. So, with those big rides, not only does it take time to eat back everything, you can't, well, first of all, you can't really do it all at once, because if you give your Self, an 8,000-calorie meal right after an 8,000-kilojoule workout. Well, first of all, you can distend your stomach like a boa constrictor in that case. But also, your body doesn't know what to – it's hard on the digestion. It's blah, blah, blah. And it takes time for your glycogen stores to restock no matter how well you're eating. And we're not just talking about like there'll be – Better the Next Day. We're talking sometimes it takes two, three, four days, sometimes five for just your glycogen stores to be restocked, and you may be feeling fatigue residually at that point anyway. And so if you're like, all right, I'm going to go do my, if you're doing Unbound 200 or whatever, the super, super long one at the X, what's the XL, like 300 something? And you're doing a prep ride for that, and you're like, all right, I'm going to ride for 14 hours overnight. and just to make sure that my lights all work and my gear is all good and I've got my nutrition dialed in and you go do your ride, I mean, you might be fucked for like five, six, seven days after that or more. And it's partly it's just because you spent so many kill jewels. If you're not used to that kind of thing, your body is like, holy shit, what just happened? Like, we got to fix this. And as you do it more and more, but you've got to recover first, you will get faster at the recovery. But it comes at a huge cost regardless. Yeah, I feel bad when I have to do it, but I do always do it. I've got a couple of people that do ultras, whether it be of 12 plus hour time trials and gravel races. I almost never give them anything tough until at least the weekend after. Because I'm going to, I'm going to, one, it's an event that's going to have happened at the weekend. So they're going to spend all the recovery time at work the next week. So you've got to also account for the, you know, everything you're doing off the bike again and your ability to recover. Like, uh, Colie, I think you've mentioned to me in the past that you will, you will often give out days off at the weekend because it's just the best time to... Make sure that someone's actually going to take it chill because there's no other responsibilities there. But if you're trying to get someone to recover midweek, like that's going to be, that's going to stretch out the process. Someone did the race on Friday and then they took, you know, if they did a 12-hour, 24-hour race on Friday and then were able to take two days off Saturday and Sunday, that's going to help a lot. It's not going to do all of it, but it's going to help a lot more than when it comes to Monday and Tuesday and you're sitting down at your desk again. Yeah, and actually one of the other considerations, you know, in terms of the life stuff and just general happiness is that, you know, if you always give somebody long rides on weekends, they're missing time with friends and family a lot of the time to get that stuff done. And that comes at its own cost of just missing those personal relationships. And that's something that when you can take a weekend day off and kind of spend that time with your spouse or with your family or with your friends or just kind of just fucking around doing some cross training. Like you go climbing, you go surfing, you go cross-country skiing, you go to the gym, you go to somebody's CrossFit class, please don't get hurt. Like these are things where it's so much more fun and you can actually feel like really energized and motivated to get back on the bike after. after having like a day off or even a whole weekend off. So especially with a lot of my clients who've got families, there are multiple of them who say, can I get like a weekend day off, either Saturday or Sunday? And then, you know, it means just two hours on the other day. I'm like, absolutely, yeah, no problem. In fact, if this is something that you're asking for, I mean, if I said no, I would be some kind of asshole. Get divorced. Yeah, that's the last thing I want. Yeah, I've got someone who, what feels like every other week, goes to Disneyland with his family. That's like, great, perfect. I know you're going to be walking around all day, but you're going to feel good after it. You're going to have a good time. That's like a very, as you say, it's a very, very common request when it comes to availability side of things. Yeah, like my job is to work around you and not the other way around. Yeah, for sure. And here's the thing is like people say, you know, is this going to cost me some kind of fitness? And I'm usually if you're kind of time crunch, like you're under like, you know, under 10 hours a week, or even some people consider time crunch under like 15 hours a week. You know, even if you're missing out an hour or two of riding to do this kind of stuff, I actually find most of the time the tradeoff is actually worth it. And I don't even. and also here's the thing is like sometimes it's not even a consideration like you got to spend that time with your family go spend the time with your family like it's like oh I've got 10 hours to ride but I need these two hours to spend time with my family it's no you've got eight hours to ride not 10 and and that's it's like 10 isn't even on the table at this point um so all right so we'll talk about more the the super high volume stuff and the energy burden uh and programming stuff in a minute but I also wanted to discuss whether you can overtrain on volume, because I've heard so many people say, and this is like athletes, this is coaches of all levels, oh, so-and-so's volume isn't that high, so they can't be overtraining right now. Rory is looking dumbfounded. Oh, I didn't realize that was a question. I was just throwing it out there into the ether, just kind of getting your sense of, getting your reaction unvarnished as it is right now. Can you overtrain with too much volume? Or like a lot of volume? Yes. Is it automatic? No. Right. Is it like, oh, somebody's doing 20 hours, they're overtraining? No, that's ridiculous. I've got clients who regularly do 20 to 30 hours a week. Are they overtraining? No, they're actually getting a lot faster. And they're better for the volume. And sometimes we want to pull it down. There are other considerations along with that, that we don't have to get into, because there's... There are myriad. But really, the pacing on the volume, that's where you get the overtraining. That combination of energy expenditure and residual fatigue, that acute fatigue from going over that LT1 for extended periods of time, like if you do a five-hour ride, like let's say your LT1 is like 50% to 60% of your FTP, like it is for actually quite a lot of people. If it's higher and you're doing low volume, that's great. You're genetically gifted and lucky. Or you've got a very deep training history. But once you go over that, the fatigue goes up a lot and it decouples. It's a non-linear increase in fatigue for a linear increase in adaptation. And so your cost-to-benefit ratio changes quite a lot. And that's where I'm usually thinking about You know, if we, okay, so this person has like, you know, eight hours to ride, and this endurance ride, can this be a little, can this be paced a little hot, you know, over LT1, and this is going to be fine, you know, on eight hours a week, and if all the other training's going well, it's fine. If it's 15 hours a week, and it's a four or five hour ride, and somebody's logging and time trialing to get to the end of it at 70, 75% FTP, when their LT1's like 55%, that's not worth it to me. The fatigue is so high. And the adaptation you get would be better served by going easier, going longer, and then maybe even adding another hard day or adding intervals to that ride. Like doing FTP intervals on your long ride, it doesn't ruin the long ride. But not every long ride. Right. But like if you've got, like, you know, if you're a time crunch and you're like, man, I've got one four-hour ride on the weekend and during the week I've got an hour to an hour and a half on my rides. and you've been building out your TTE, you're doing long sweet spot efforts or whatever it is and you're like, man, I just don't have enough time during the week and I've got this four-hour ride but I've got a zone to it. You can easily add intervals. They just, they improve the adaptation you get and they improve it in such a way that you can, you can progress it very easily. You got your four-hour ride and you start with three by 10 FTP efforts and after, after like maybe two months, you're at like three by 20. Fucking awesome. That's great. and you've got definite improvement, the long ride definitely helps and you didn't ruin the long ride by doing intervals on it. Yeah, I think I've said this quite a few times but there is a point where you're not going to be able to do some interval sessions during the week if you're limited and that's not the sense that it's not that if you're not doing a 25-hour week you're not getting the benefits. and you shouldn't pack it in. It's that you have to think about how you are distributing the time you've got available and how the intensity you want to apply to that time actually works. So you can make, like I'm a perpetually eight to ten hour a week athlete for years and the way that my own training has gone has largely been I do all my intervals and longer rides. Effectively, I'm usually a once a week type person, simply because that's kind of what works for me, but like if I wanted to go out and do like an hour and a half a sweet spot, say, But I've only got an hour and a half available to me after work. I'm not going to jump on the bike and immediately get straight into a sweet spot interval. That's the sort of thing that's going to take a ride that's like two, two and a half hours of time. Yeah, you've got to open up another dimension to squeeze in extra time into the same time. How do I get in a 20-minute warm-up and 15 to 30 minutes of rest intervals between my sweet spot efforts? And now I've got to get on some kind of time cube, weird four-dimensional sphere of ride. So I can squeeze all this into an hour and a half. You need to get one of those under desk pedal things. There you go. I have clients who do that, and after some trial and error, they can actually ride while they work. It's not a lot of people. Some of them actually have done meetings while they're riding, and I think for most places of work, that's... Well, hats off to you if you can get that done. If you become an empirical cycling coach, chances are, when it comes to the muscle meeting, you're on the bike. If you're on the bike, I'm actually encouraging people to do that. So the big question is, what overtrains you on volume? And my answer is intensity. and just doing all your endurance rides too hard. And a lot of people who say, I can't do, because I had a client like this years ago, he got lactate testing done. He said, okay, my, he was a very, very strong guy. He said, my power at two millimoles is like 240 watts or 280 watts or something like that. And my threshold is like 360. I've gotten it up to like 400 before. And I'm like, okay, cool. I don't think that's going to be your actual where you should do your endurance rides. And he was like, yeah, I can't, I just can't get over 17 hours a week. I'm like, are you riding at your lactate measured 2 millimole? He's like, yeah, that's my LT1, right? And I'm like, no. Also, do you need to get over 17 hours a week is part of the question there as well. He could easily ride more. He could have ridden more. I mean, I showed him, if you just ease it back, ease it back a lot, do more easy volume, you know, do your interval workouts as high quality, he was getting faster, and he was actually impressed that he could actually ride more than 15, 17 hours a week without overtraining, because, you know, the fatigue and the kilojoules that he spent doing all those rides, he wasn't recovering fully from any of them. And so, I mean, I know people who will look at some of these training schedules and go, wow, they're doing 20 hours a week, they're over training. It's like, I don't think that some of these folks have considered the, you know, the trade-off between the volume and the intensity. And a lot of the time, if you want to push up that LT1, which is a huge factor in racing, by the way, especially high-level pro racing, having that high LT1 is a massive benefit. Not only just a high FTP and all men are big watts, but like having that. And how do you push it up? You do the same thing as threshold. You ride underneath it. Well, kind of how do you push it up for threshold? Okay, that's noob gains of FTP. Sorry, we need to clarify that. But for endurance riding, it works the same. The more you ride, the higher that pushes that up. And I've got some pretty good data showing that this is the case with just about anybody who can ride more. And my clients with the highest LT1s, they ride the most. And they ride under that threshold all the time. And when they don't, boy, they can feel it. And they certainly wouldn't come to you for coaching if they were suddenly going to start riding above it. Well, we would have a discussion on that, for sure. So I wanted to touch on one more thing before we talk about programming, these kind of low, medium, high volume weeks and endurance pacing. For sprinters, I hear this all the time. Where doing more volume is going to blunt your speed, quote unquote. And does it change your fiber type? And I think fiber type is actually a little overblown, especially in the course of considering a season. So I would say that's not really a consideration for me. It is kind of in the long term if we're looking on the very, very small margins. But for the most part, I'm not considering it. One of the things I'll say on fiber type, though, is I think it's the sort of thing that people bring up because they bought WKO and looked at it once. And I think the thing people should actually remember there is that fiber type measurement is largely just a reflection of the shape of your power curve anyway. Yeah, that's true. And there's so many things that go into sprint power that are not just fiber type. And we'll talk about that at some point in the future. The thing about endurance rides kind of, you know, quote unquote, blunting your speed is that if you're doing your endurance rides too hard, yeah, you're going to lose some top end because of fatigue, because you're tired. And I've got, I've got sprinters, you know, at the professional level, 18, 1900 watt sprints. They've got thresholds in the, you know, 400 watt range, 400 plus LT1. 300, 350 watts easily. They're doing 20, 30 hours a week, training volume, and their sprints are getting better every year. That's what the data says. And they're riding easy enough. We do an appropriate amount of proper sprinting, so that way they don't lose all their sprint ability. They race enough, and they rest enough. They eat enough. Doing volume isn't going to ruin your sprint, but it will if you are riding too hard or you're not recovering enough. Or a lot of people also will think about more endurance training, but they'll kind of forget to do sprint training. And a lot of the time for some sprinters, they've just naturally got it all the time. And for a lot of sprinters, it's the case where you need more practice. You need to actually keep the sprints into your program. on a somewhat regular basis, even if they're just short little bursts, in order to kind of maintain that neuromuscular pattern of being able to put out big power on the bike. No comment. I completely agree. Okay. One thing I'll say there, actually, I won't comment. I'll take back everything I just said, is when it comes to like a warm-up for your... like regular, you know, sweet spot, field to max, any other kind of workout. You're probably at some point going to do some sort of sprint as part of that just to like really wake the legs up. It doesn't even have to be like a fully maximal sprint, but like that's an opportunity to, you know, practice form, you know. Yeah, we're talking like five seconds. We're talking a handful of pedal strokes. We're not talking because I've talked to people before where they think a sprint is like 20, 30 seconds. And it can be, but now you are creating a lot of fatigue before a somewhat demanding workout, but a handful of really short sprints can actually, yeah, be a part of a really good warmup, especially if you're kind of time crunched, sometimes you don't want to do this, but if you've got more time, because, you know, sprints can cost a little bit of acute fatigue during your warmup, you know, do a couple sprints, spin around for 20, 30 minutes, and then get into your intervals, like, you know, at, well, do your sprints after your regular warmup. Uh, that can actually be a really, really good way to kind of keep them in your program without really having like a dedicated sprint day until you're ready to like get ready for proper racing. Okay. Let's get to what probably everybody's waiting for. Let's talk about the difference between pacing, endurance riding and programming short, uh, or let's call it low, medium and high volume weeks. So how do we want to define low, like about 10 hours or less? Yeah. All right. Uh, medium. Like about 15 hours average, maybe like 12 to 17, we'll call it. And high, we'll say like 20-ish or more. Over 15 is usually when I start to call it high. Actually, that's fair. I think the best results I ever saw personally was when I was training probably 17, 18 hours a week-ish. And so for me, that was actually fairly high volume. So yeah, I think that's reasonable. Endurance Pacing on low-volume weeks, under 10 hours. Is it, I would say it's kind of, well, here's the thing. I think the first thing you need to establish is why are you a low-volume athlete? And it comes down to the scenarios I suggested at the start of busy, difficult life versus relatively relaxed work life. Which camp are you falling into? Why are you a low-volume person? It could be by choice, obviously, but a lot of people, especially if you're thinking about training, there's going to be a reason why you're low. Yeah. Actually, I think that's probably a better place to start than I was going to, because we usually talk about the benefits of high-volume training, but I think that's also... Partly because of the way that we've kind of collected the audience so far. And I think there's a lot of folks out there who every time we talk about, you know, people regularly training 20, 30 hours a week, they're like, oh, come on, the fuck? And I think that's reasonable. So probably the best place to start is what are your personal priorities? And if your personal priorities are to have fun on the bike and you kind of want to get a little faster and that's fine, but it's mostly not that serious a pursuit or you'd rather spend more time enjoying it than really being 100% focused on adding more watts and adding more endurance, I think that's something that you need to acknowledge yourself first before you really start to make these considerations. Because if you're thinking, well, I don't want to stop my fun riding that's a little too hard. That's fine. Just be honest with yourself about it, about your trade-off and priorities between performance and fun. This time I actually have no comments. Two peas in a pod right here. And so once you have established that balance for yourself, and I usually... or actually almost always whenever people consult with me or they come on as one of my coaching clients, this is one of the first things I ask them is like, you know, what's your personal balance point between fun and performance? And some people say it's performance all the way. Some people say I'm way more on the fun side. A lot of people are in the middle and I try to give them recommendations or coach them in such a way that that meets their expectations and their set of priorities. So after you've established that, and you think about low volume programming. I am in the dubious position of not having a lot of clients who don't train that much volume. I have a handful who train under 10 hours a week. And well, first of all, I think this is good for me because it means that I'm not just in my ivory tower of coaching professional athletes. But I think it's actually really cool to see the differences between how People take their low-volume weeks differently. I've got one client where we're on two hard days a week, and I have one where we're anywhere from three to four, on like 10 hours-ish. And a lot of that was kind of like what you've talked about already, Rory, in terms of starting with like a conservative estimate, and then balancing your on-bike performance with how well you recover off the bike. because one of those clients I'm thinking of has had a lot of work stress and I mean for years, literally years and has just started to ease back this year and now we're starting to see the old legs that he had a couple of years ago before all this stress started and so we're seeing really good numbers or even personal bests and it's been a while and that's the impact that the off-bike stuff has and so So we started with like one or two hard days a week, and we're kind of stuck there right now. And sometimes I'll give him a third workout, like, hey, if everything's going well at work, try this. And I would say three times out of four, he skips it. So that's my kind of preferred approach. But for one of my athletes who's doing like four hard workouts sometimes, he's recovering really well. He also is very, very good at skipping the hard days when he knows he should. He knows it's like, we need to see progression or don't even bother. And he's kind of awesome at, you know, I'll give him like a, okay, this is my kind of idealized week for you. But when he gets there, he knows that he doesn't have to stick to it. You know what I mean? Yeah, like yesterday, I had someone, he had some like maintenance sweet spot stuff to do. He did one effort and then pulled the plug. Good. Something because he could feel like, Not the day. He just described it as feeling strange. But, you know, like the smart decision he made there, like I was asleep at the point in which he made this decision. But he knew, I don't want him to force himself through a workout that's not going to work out. Like he gave it a go, didn't pan out, and then just chilled and recovered for like the remaining. 20 minutes or so that he rode for, rather than completing something and just digging that hole even further. Yeah, actually, one of the things that I've noticed with the way that, with kind of the training philosophy that I slash we have developed here at Empirical Cycling, is that the way we program stuff and the way that we look at interval progression, it's a little bit different than I see sometimes when I'm consulting with other athletes who have coaches of their own or have programmed their own workouts, where a lot of the time they'll program stuff and it's very, very submaximal. They'll do the same four-by-10-minute FTP workout every single week for months as if that's going to be sufficient overload. Okay, like, sure, you're just getting off the couch, you get those nice noob gains, and then it's going to stop after not long at all. And when you're doing that kind of stuff, and you're not really pushing yourself to your limits and then recovering and push to the limits and recover, you don't have much objective criteria about either whether you're getting faster or whether you're fatigued. Yeah, an awful lot of, like, the guidance you have to end up giving to athletes, the guidance we give is, you know, like, Really think about how you feel. The reason we put on about RPE is it's not just about how do we make sure these intervals go to plan. It's also so that in future you know when they're not going to plan, when it should be. Also, the inverse of that is obviously you ride to RPE. There was someone at the weekend. He was riding to the RPE. like, wasn't looking at the byte computer, and then looked down, and he was doing like 20 watts more than he's ever managed, at that sort of intensity, and it's like, yes, it worked, but like, he's only able to recognize that properly, because he's got a good sense of how it should all feel, and like, felt it out, he's not chasing numbers, which I think people move way too far into sometimes, numbers definitely help, but like, understanding, it's the pro, There were years during, like, the Sky Dominance Aero, where people are like, we need to get rid of power meters from the pro peloton because it's just making, that's why they're racing like this. And it's like, no, they're going to race like this regardless. Like, come on. Like, they understand how this feels. Like, maybe Mikhail Kwiatkowski blows up five minutes earlier, but at the end of the day, Chris Froome is still going to end up winning that stage. Wow, what's the last Tour de France you watched, Rory? I was thinking about Kwiatkowski, like, the past week, and thinking about how he's, like, a Sagan-level athlete that's sold, like, himself to be a domestique. Very good one. Very justified in his decision, but very much a what-if if he doesn't go down that route. But, yeah, like, pro cyclists are very much into, you know, I'm told to go up the mountain at this wattage, and now I know what that is. How that feels, how hard it should be. And if you took the power meter away from them, they're only going to learn that even more. And that's kind of what we're talking about when it comes to like training is like understanding, you know, how are you meant to feel in an FTP workout, for instance? You know, what's the change from the beginning to the end? Ultimately, that's what the FTP test is testing. Yeah, for sure. Training you for. And that's one of the things that, you know, that. You know, we really do as coaches is like, we really drill into people like, how does this feel? Or how should this feel? We give a lot of different cues. We try to cue people differently according to what seems to work for them or not. And, you know, that should help a lot, like, especially, you know, for FTP efforts, for VO2s, for sprints, for whatever. You know, we tell people our objective criteria, like, if you're not feeling really good doing your 30 second max efforts. Please don't do them. You need to be feeling really good for this workout, and if you don't, skip it. And especially the closer we are to a race, the more I think that's the case. And especially when we're building, sometimes I'm a little fatigued, but I can definitely do the workout. Cool, go on. And there's only, you know, like I said, there's only like one exception out of 100 where it's like, oh, my watts aren't that good. I'm like, yeah, well, today, just keep going. Well, you got some recovery coming up or whatever it is. So on the low-volume weeks, my other thing, to really consider is don't fuck with your recovery days. Ever. Most people need two. Especially if you are stressed and busy, you might even need three. And so my client who does four hard days a week, a lot of the time, he's got two recovery days or three. Most of the time it's three. Because that's just, it seems to be the best way that it's working for him. And if I skip one of those VO2 efforts, or the over-unders, or whatever it is, in order to get in an endurance ride, I'm only going to do that because I think he needs that more space of not doing the intensity between his harder rides. And sometimes when he's going well, all right, cool, we get four in a week, it's awesome, but the next week I'm like, okay, well, he rode hard. Four days last week, he did three recovery days. Next week, I think I'm probably not going to have him do anything hard until we get to maybe on Wednesday. and so we'll do a three-ride, a hard-ride week and so we can kind of balance the two that way. I've got someone doing a VO2 block now and they're halfway through. It's been two weeks and they're halfway through because they did, I think they've done three or four workouts total but I was noticing, although I'm seeing the right things in the training. I think they just needed a bit more recovery, and that's really going to actually augment the output of this. So he had five days of just a recovery day, then just some endurance. Because that's how you modulate what the training block's going to end up being, rather than just sticking to these rigid patterns that people fall into. All right, well, so let's move into kind of medium volume weeks, like around, you know, kind of 12 to 15 hour range. So now we start adding in more volume pretty deliberately. Like, like, let's see, we got Monday off, let's say maybe Friday off too. So that's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you probably got two hours each day. So you're at six hours. And now in order to get up to 15, you're writing nine hours in the weekends, which means you're doing, you know, four to five hours each day. That's a pretty good training schedule. So like now we've got more energy expenditure. Presumably this person is better at recovering. And also, we've got potentially more fatigue if you are pacing everything too hard. And for a lot of folks who are doing all their endurance rides and all their between interval rides at 70 to 70-whatever percent FTP, which for most people at this volume is overall T1, now we're at the limit of their total volume. of what they can realistically recover from, kind of regardless of the intensity. So how do you start thinking about programming these kind of medium intensity weeks between the endurance rides and the hard rides? Well, first off, it's that thing of, you know, it's not so much when can we fit workouts in, but rather how do we fit everything else around them first? Usually when someone tells you their availability, it's going to be some effect of like, I have up to two hours on weekdays, and then I'm open on Saturdays, and it's like family day on Sunday, so it's like, okay, family day on Sunday is either day off or like 30 minutes, spending on legs out, which means that we're probably going to use Saturday to do something more productive, and it's also going to be the longest ride of the week. Okay, so coming out of that, that means that it's probably been the same schedule the previous week, so Monday they should be, maybe not completely fresh, but they're going to feel good, so we can probably just do an endurance ride. Tuesday's probably going to be your productive day, because it's like spaced nicely since the last workout, you've had a bit of recovery, you're also going to have a long tail before you get to that really long workout in the next Saturday, and then it's just going to be, what are those two days going to be if you're doing two a week, because maybe you'll think about using Thursday as well, but otherwise it's, you know, we're just going to take our time for a lot of those, the days where you're Otherwise not going to be available, obviously taking into account, you know, anything that might also be happening in those days. Not uncommon for people to say, I'm going out for drinks, and it's like, okay, that's two days, we're not doing much. But it's about fitting in the things that are important to your training plan. And the mistake people make is thinking the workouts are the important bit, and it's not. It's making sure that when it comes to the workout, you feel good. And so everything leading into a workout is important. The Workout is just like the outcome. If everything else goes right, the workout will go fine. If you're trying to make it so that the workouts are important, you're going to underestimate how important the recovery is and how much or rather how little you might need to do in those types of spaces. Yeah. And actually, and this is, and one of the other things I also consider here is, because this is kind of like the, kind of the middle between, you know, the low volume stuff where If you're recovering well, you might be able to squeeze in an extra hard ride per week. For most people on average, two hard rides per week, even if they're at 10 hours or less, is pretty average. Three hard rides per week at 10 hours per less, that's probably the top end of the middle of the bell curve. And then four hard rides per week, I'd say that's a very small minority of people who can really do that well and keep recovering and keep progressing. So now we're in the middle, where I would expect people would not be able to do four properly hard rides per week. I would say probably two to three is going to be more optimal if you're in this middle range. And now at this point, I'm actually thinking less about scheduling anything in terms of, what's the best way to put this? I'm not really thinking about interval days versus long rides. I'm thinking about hard days versus not so hard days and what's my fatigue burden and what's my energy burden from these. And especially when it comes to the super intense rides, I'm thinking about putting those in places during the week and figuring out what's the recovery and then I can manipulate those kind of regardless of what the other riding is. Does that make sense? So it's almost like you can have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are all two-hour rides. Saturday, Sunday are like four-hour rides. And whether we put the hard ride on like Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, or Saturday or Sunday, it might change every week. But having some kind of regular pattern is really nice. So if it's like Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever, or Saturday or Sunday, or I think most people default to like Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday as their hard days. And that's not a bad place to start. But I would say, depending on how hard some of those hard rides are, you want to move them around. So you might want to go Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday. Or you might want to do Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, or something like that. You don't necessarily have to. You've got to manipulate them in such a way where you can always see that progression and the recovery is what you need it to be. You can also, if you're trying to think about it in terms of... Spacing things throughout a day, you can have like a block structure of three weeks that ends up being, okay, this week's three hard workouts, then two hard workouts, then three hard workouts again, simply because that might just be what offers you the ability to get that work in, because if you're the sort of person that does two a week normally, and you do something like a 3-2-3, then all of a sudden in the space of like one training block, you've managed to get more in, it's just that You offered yourself that opportunity to do it by taking that middle week a wee bit more relaxed than the two on the other side of it. Again, don't be rigid about how you think your training should be unless there's something within your normal schedule that demands it. Yeah, I completely agree. There's nothing wrong with skipping a hard day because as long as whatever you're doing is not a slog and you're seeing the progression, it's probably fine. Come to high volume weeks, like 20 plus. And I would say for 20 plus, getting to three hard days is actually a rarity. Because usually when we go to 20 plus, there's two ways to do it. And I prefer one way. And I see a lot of coaches, to good success, by the way. I'm not saying my approach is typically better. But it's like the two approaches are you do a handful of much longer days or you do a bunch more kind of medium volume days. Medium volume, I'm talking like three to four or five hours. Whereas a lot of the time when I'm... Remember that's medium volume by the standard of someone doing 20 hours, not medium volume by my standard of I do 10 hours. Right, exactly. I'm saying like medium volume for somebody who's doing super long rides where an average long ride is like six to eight. Or it might be five to six. or might be three to four, but they're doing a lot of them during the week. So it would be like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are all four hours, right? And now you've got 12 hours a week and to get up to 20, Saturday, Sunday, four hours each. Now we're at 20. So like that's a pretty typical way to program that kind of stuff. Personally, I would rather do two days of harder rides and four days of much longer rides and then three days of recovery. That's where I come down on this. And for those much longer rides, I usually will kind of default to like one or two hard days per week, and that's it. Occasionally we'll sneak in a third, but it's more of an exception than a rule. And part of this is because the energy burden of the longer rides is very, very high. And it's not the fatigue so much if you're used to this kind of stuff. If you're well-trained, it comes down to like eating your energy back. and Recovering in that aspect much more than it is like acute fatigue from an eight-hour endurance ride. Because all my clients who could do eight-hour endurance rides regularly, they're really not that fatigued by the end of it. They're hungry because they've spent a lot of energy in eating even 100, 120 grams an hour. you're still going to be in a deficit at the end and that's the bigger consideration for me and so when you've got a long ride that's also a hard ride a lot of the time I'm going to put in a couple easy days before that so that way you can actually kind of like top back up before your hard day and a lot of the times once people start doing those very high volume rides that recovery Like, unlike kind of what your experience has been, Rory, of like, oh, I need kind of like a day to open up, a lot of the time people doing that kind of volume will feel the most fresh after three or four easy days, rather than like needing openers. They'll be like, wow, I'm feeling topped up, I'm good to go, let's do this. Yeah. Sometimes there are exceptions, but like, that seems to be more the case. The bit about reducing intensity, I think, is very true. I've got an athlete who... at the start of this year did 53 hours, I think, over two weeks. That's a lot. He was programmed for 20 and opted to do more, so it's not my fault. But his sum total of intense days in that, excluding times where he might have ridden too hard, which he was actually pretty good. I'm guessing three. Not doing. Or two. Programmed one. Which was like, a temple ride to try and help open things up a bit. But that's, that was a high volume block for two weeks in which it was largely defined by his sort of normal weekly ride ends up being three to three and a half hours. But he did, I think it was eight and 10 hour rides each Sunday because he's an ultra cyclist. like going along is his thing. But like the consideration there was, okay, he's doing really long rides at the weekend. I don't want him to go into those rides with fatigue because he's going to come out of them with fatigue. Even if he's riding them like a steady, you know, desirable intensity because It's the nature of 8 or 10 hours of riding, like, even when you are well below LT1. Well, let me just pull up. He did 6,000 kilojoules of work for the 8-hour ride, and he did 6,800 for the 10-hour ride. That's going to carry a bit of fatigue. Like, there's no way to avoid it in those instances. That's the energy burden. Yeah. Like, you are at food max at that stage. Yeah, it sounds glorious, and in some ways it is, but in other ways, like, you cannot just, like, get home and just eat an entire birthday cake. If you are proper fucked, I actually recommend ice cream over cake. Stuck to the bottom. Ew. All right, so do we have any more thoughts on all of that before we get to listener questions? Yeah. I think a lot of what we talked about is obviously like the balance of getting the intensity right. And if you are a lower volume athlete out of choice, that's something where you can get away with it if you're not doing it well. If you're a lower volume athlete, not by choice, you're playing with fire. And as you start to add volume, regardless of what's causing the limit in volume, that's only going to get worse and worse and worse all the way up to when we talk about like high volume athletes. Like, you can do, you know, a few weeks of riding too hard with a lot of volume, and it's going to do good things for your fitness, but you need to recover after it, and you need to recognise what you've actually done was, you know, beyond what is normally recommended. You know, you've basically done a purpose training block of slightly too hard, rather than, you know, a repeatable training block of, you know, well-managed intensity. That's not to say everyone should go out and do a 25-hour week too hard every so often. But, you know, it's the thing of, like, you go on holiday for a week or more, if you're, like, being lucky. And you take that opportunity to, like, do 10, 15 more hours than you would normally do. And, like, it'll do great things for your fitness, provided you let it do good things for your fitness. Just chill. Afterwards, you know, don't go overboard on the climbs, like I did. You've got to really look after yourself and understand what you're doing is out of the norm of what you normally do. But equally, there's no expectation that that's the reason, that that's the sort of thing that's going to transform your fitness, because you're going to revert to your normal volume after that. You'll see the benefits. Here's another question I've gotten over the years. Whether or not if you regularly cannot do the high volume, is it worth doing that one high volume week when you get a chance? And I think the answer, if everybody can tell, that you and I have is absolutely it is. And I've, from our clients, or well, from my clients personally, I'm sure you've had similar ones where they can feel the improvement in fitness and endurance for months afterwards sometimes. So like usually it's weeks, a lot of the time it's proper months. And also like... Who doesn't want to just go ride their bike more for a week? How fucking awesome is that? Just on the face of it, just for fun value, you should definitely do that. And also, then you get to ride longer. It's like, oh, I got two hours today, but I'm in the Dolomites, and I really want to do these three big climbs, but it's going to take six hours today, and that's going to be most of my volume for the week. It's like, so what? Go do more. It's going to be awesome. And then go eat pasta. I often get asked by clients, what should I do on this trip I'm doing? And I'm like, have fun, do as much as you can, take the opportunity. I've got two clients right now that have just gone off to Girona, and my advice to them was, ride your bike as much as you can, you know, take advantage of that opportunity. You've paid the money to go and do that. So go and do it, like really do it. I have someone that just came back from... South of France, and while he was there, he did a four-hour ride, two eight-hour rides, and another four-hour ride. It's like great, had a great time, great weather, took advantage of it. He'll rest now, he'll get a bit of rest, and then we're back to normal, but he's had a good time, and he's also gotten that training benefit out of it. He's occasionally ridden hard, because you're on holiday, it's what you do. I did two exceptionally ill-advised efforts. when I was in Mallorca a few weeks ago. One of which, Cole told me, is physiologically impossible. Well, actually, I kind of looked at your data a little bit and I was like, yeah, edge case. Very much an edge case. Yeah, 117% of FTP for 25 minutes. But like, I was having fun there. I keep telling Rory's FTP is actually 10 watts higher than it is, which affects this calculation quite a bit. WKO is stuck into thinking that it's 30 watts higher than it is, which is why I don't look at the WKO. Incomplete data, Mr. Porteous, you know this. All right. I have a more important topic to get to, which is our listener questions, because the first one is, and I think this is something we are probably going to spend too much time on again. How do you find the right heart rate zones? I don't. Same. Okay, moving on. So here's the thing about the heart rate and endurance pace rides is it's a good piece of data to have. I definitely want people to track it, but there's a lot of stuff that can affect your heart rate day to day. And some days it might overpace you and a lot of days, you know, might underpace you. And either way, the heart rate itself is really just a reflection of the total cardiac demand. Cardiac demand is not just what work are your muscles doing. It's also how much do you need to vent. Vent Heat from your body because it's warm out. Or are you dehydrating? Is that why it's rising? It doesn't necessarily reflect anything internally other than you are either recruiting larger motor units, probably. Well, all other stuff the same. I mean, that's almost definitely what it is. Does that mean that you're riding too hard? No, it just means you're recruiting larger motor units and they're a little less efficient, so what? Who cares? So heart rate zones are something where I think, yeah, it's a piece of information I want, but I usually don't want people riding to heart rate. I want them really riding to RPE kind of exclusively. The thing that I will look at with heart rate in someone's workout is what is the actual pattern of the trace? Because that's usually a good insight into how the body has responded at that moment in time. I talked about this before, you do an FTP interval and you expect a sudden spike as you come from the start of the interval and then it just sort of plateaus for a very long period of time until you either stop the interval or you hit the limits of TTE. And what I'm looking for there is, does the heart rate do that during it? Or does it start to, like, wobble a lot more? Maybe you had a little bit more in you. Maybe it's higher than it would normally be expected in terms of the absolute value, but the trace is right, in which case that probably suggests something else is going on. You know, it's that thing of if you were to go and do an FTP interval on the turbo and turned your fans off, you notice in a lot of different ways how horrible that is. But you see that directly in heart rate data as absolute values just skyrocket above what you'd expect. I've got people who say, guess where I turned the fan off? And I see that in their comments. Then I go look at the trace for the ride. And heart rate's nice and steady with power. And then in the last hour, it just shoots up. And it's like, oh. Yeah, I definitely see it. Yeah, okay. So yeah, so heart rate is, it's a useful thing to track, but it's not as, it's not like some magical piece of physiologic insight. So our next question is, how much do power spikes, oh God, I love the direction of this question. I love the framing of this. How much do power spikes influence fatigue in endurance pace rides? So most people would say, does going beyond my zone affect my adaptation? This listener of the podcast, who shall remain nameless, knows better and is saying, is framing it in terms of fatigue, which is exactly how I think of it. It adds to fatigue. It doesn't detract from adaptation. Because that review that we're talking about, If you add more power, you add more adaptation. The signaling gets stronger, but when it's intermittent through a ride, it's not really – it's adding a little bit, sure, but it's adding more fatigue, and that's actually the bigger cost of it. Usually with my clients, especially those who live in hilly areas who can't really just get into a steady rhythm, I just tell them, I know that the normalized power and the average power is going to be a little different. Have a little too much power, but as long as you get back feeling like it was a pretty chill endurance ride, you did it right, kind of regardless of how much you kind of stray outside of the zone, quote unquote. It's the thing of what we were saying earlier in terms of sometimes when your endurance rides, you should just add some sprints because you might need to. Technique Practice, that occasional bit of stimulus, and that's going to be a very different ride in terms of the expected fatigue during it compared to just a bog-standard endurance ride. A normal endurance ride, you should feel good most of the way through. When you add the sprints in, if you're doing them fully maximally, maybe not to time, but to effort, you're going to notice that you did some sprints, and that's part of the difference there. So our next question is, how bad are coffee stops or short-ish sprints efforts slash hills? So we already kind of talked about the efforts and stuff like that, especially with intervals on longer rides. They're great. How bad are coffee stops? I would say the worst thing about coffee stops is when... You go to a place that burns their espresso beans. Too long. Yeah. Like, it's just, you're there in line, and you're looking at all the pastries, and you're like, oh, I'm going to have one of these, I'm going to have one of these, and you get a latte, and you start drinking it, and you're like, oh my god, these people, I think I'm drinking charcoal. Did they put charcoal in their espresso grinder? What is wrong with these coffee beans? So, check out George Howell Coffee. That's my preferred brand. Not sponsored. Not sponsored. I actually, I've been buying George Howell, I mean, they're a Boston company, they used to have Coffee Connection in Cambridge, anyway, that's local news, anyway, so, yeah, I mean, the worst part about a coffee stop in a ride, realistically, is when you sit there, when you start again, you get, you're there a little too long, because you should stop, it doesn't ruin anything, you should stop, you should get food, you should hang out, you should sit there in the sunshine, it's going to be awesome. Same for your turbo rides. Yes, turbo rides, go get food, go take a piss, refill your water bottles like the one I just dropped. Stretch, yeah, it's great. It doesn't ruin the ride to stop. It does not. It absolutely does not. And this is why when I think about total volume in somebody's plan, I look at the hours per week regardless of the intensity, and I'm not necessarily thinking about How many of these hours were zone two? How many of these hours were zone four? Like, that's not the way that I think about it. I'm like, how many hours total? Great. That's the only piece of information I need. And so, yeah. Oh, yeah. So what happens is if you stop and you have a ton of carbs and you sit there for like maybe 30, 40 minutes, something like that, and you get going again, your body has actually started to create insulin. Because when we are exercising, we have glucose uptake that's not insulin mediated. Like our body's not making insulin when we are riding and eating carbs. It just gets taken up because we're exercising. When we sit down and have a pile of carbs and our body starts making insulin after, you know, what, 20, 30 minutes, gets into the bloodstream, then you start exercising. You now have insulin and exercise pulling on your glucose in your bloodstream, and that can actually cause a bit of a bonk. And then it takes some time to get back to normal. And I've experienced this many, many, many times. And a lot of my ride buddies did not experience that ever. I think I maybe just had – I get it bad. Yeah, I get it real bad too. So that's the only real thing to consider. And it's not like bad. It's not fucking up your adaptations. It doesn't feel great for like 20 minutes. Looking back now, I see that I was perpetually under-fueled, and that I was fueling up on these rides, and that I would feel amazing for the rest of the ride. Yeah, so it's great to stop. Yeah, it doesn't hurt anything. But still, find a good place with good beans for espresso. Absolutely critical. Good cake. Good cake too, sure. Let's see. Next question is, low-end, as in 55-60%, Z2, but more volume? Or, high-end, 70-75%, Z2, but less volume? Stop penning a specific number. Yes. Stop it. Please stop. RPE is your king-slash-queen-slash-monarch of everything. So, if you're LT1... is 50% of your FTP. You're riding at 60%, that's too hard. And if you are really trying to peg it at 70%, I mean, okay, but the fatigue cost is more important to me than the trade-off exactly of the equivalence between intensity and volume. And I'd rather somebody ride easier. and not accumulate that fatigue and then have really quality intervals. That's where I come down on that. And so as long as you kind of obey your RPE, it's just kind of irrelevant to me how hard or easy or where you are in your quote unquote zone two. I've got people who ride fucking 40% of their FTP for their endurance rides a lot of the time. And you know what happens to them? Nothing. They get faster. That's all there is to it. There's nothing special. Sorry. Oh, sorry. Was that all the thoughts? Okay. Rory's nodding at me like he's got nothing. I emptied his brain out of ideas as he was listening. Once again, no comment. Let's see. Oh, for a 68-year-old, any ideas on how to manage two times long endurance rides? Four hours plus per week with an intervals day. Yeah, eat and recover. That's it. And if you want to put your intervals day on a longer ride, yeah, that's cool too. Yeah, especially for older athletes, the same principles apply. But realistically, we just start recovering slower as we get older. And I'm in my very early 40s. And man, I'm feeling it already. So yeah, when I'm 68, should I live that long? I'm sure I'm going to be complaining endlessly about the, oh my god, right, my adaptations aren't coming, I can't recover to do more training, I'm so old, did anybody see my teeth? So, that's... No, you think your hip's bad. Oh my god, dude. My hip is so fucked. Alright, how to determine your quote-unquote easy pace? What's your field test for LT1? How easy is too easy? Okay, so... This is just an RPE thing, and like I mentioned before, I want to see that decoupling of RPE. Like if you're at 200 watts for most of your endurance rides, and you're at like a 5, and you pull it down to 180 or 170, and suddenly you're at a 2, I want you at that 170 watts, or even a little less is fine. That's where it is. Feeling good in the hours after your ride is usually a good marker as well, because It's an indication that, oh, the body hasn't collapsed after it gets out that one hour the endorphins have gone. It's also an indication that you hate enough too. The body realizes what it's done. Yeah. And a field test for LT1 is just that it's not only that RPE, but your breathing should be like fully untaxed. Like, yeah, you should pass the talk test. You should be able to... Get on a Zoom meeting with your video off and nobody should be able to tell that you're exercising. That's... You should be able to do that. Apart from the background noise of just... Yes, except for the background noise. Oh, no, it's my fan. It's really hot in here, yes. And how easy is too easy? Let me put it this way. Most of my clients... do most of their endurance riding between 60 and 80% of their LT1. That's it. So if your LT1 is 50%, do the math. So like right now, mine, I've said this on the podcast a million times, mine is like about 100, 110 watts-ish. And I spend most of my endurance, easy endurance riding around like 70 to 90 watts. It's pretty simple. And it's, I'm getting a little more fit. It's cool. I can't ride that hard anymore, but yeah, it's still totally fine. So stop thinking in terms of your FTP with all this stuff and start thinking in terms of fatigue management and total volume and things will get a lot easier. I've got a client who just started with me a few weeks ago and he's been able to keep up. The Volume Back-to-Back-to-Back Recovery Week next week, I think. But his comment on his four-hour Sunday ride was something to the effect of, I never imagined that after four hours of riding I'd feel better than I did after the first one. And that's like poster for having, you know, he's got his, he's dialed in exactly how he should feel in his endurance rides. Yeah, that's great. All right. Oh, next question is a doozy. Fasted or not? And he follows up with, why not? I believe I did an entire podcast with you about this. Oh, I've done so many podcasts now, I don't remember. Fasted training, the reason it's supposed to work is because it's supposed to, in one interpretation, it's supposed to allow you to burn more fat. Is fat burning a signal for adaptation? The answer is no, it's not. So that's a big reason why not. Another thing in terms of low-carb riding, which I've done some experiments with, which also don't really seem to have that much more benefit in terms of riding fully fueled with carbs, is the MAPK P38 pathway. What stock 46? Yeah, it's the mitogen signaling pathway, and mitogens are just things that signal for mitochondrial fusion and fission and things like that. They're a marker of stress, and it's not that powerful, if you ask me, a signal, and it's way better to fuel up and get in more riding and be better recovered, and that's that. And in my coaching experience, it's a thousand times better. Ask yourself, if you were to sign up to get an empirical cycling coach, and you thought, maybe I should try fasted rides, what are the chances that they also would agree? Or find a million other things that are going to help you a lot more? That sort of fasted ride thing is a pro tour, looking for that. Fraction of a percent more type thing. And it doesn't even work that well for them. Yeah. You're scraping the barrel on potential improvements. There's a lot more you can do, even within restricted time availability. And here's the thing. If you're doing these things looking for improvements, you better be able to see them and measure them. And you've also better be able to say it's definitely because of this thing. Because a lot of time when people start doing this stuff, they start writing more. and so like regardless of or they start riding easier on their easy rides because you're under fueled and you absolutely have to so there's a lot of things in that context that can actually change the outcome and so you've better you better have to control all your variables is what I'm saying that like as a you know somebody who's been trained in the arts of the sciences that's a turn of phrase if ever there was one geez You know, controlling variables is high on my priority list, even for coaching. Actually, next question is, I usually do Z2 on lower carbohydrates, about 45 grams an hour. Is this good, bad, or it depends? So, for somebody as poorly trained as I am, aerobically speaking, I'm going to say it's, well, Let's put it this way. If you are doing, if you're eating 40 grams an hour, you should probably be averaging about 50 watts to make it energetically neutral. That's fine. But if you're doing 100 watts to stay energetically neutral, you need like 80 grams an hour. And if you're doing 150 watts to stay neutral, you need like 120 grams an hour. It sounds ridiculous. You don't necessarily need to feel like that. But this is actually a future podcast I want to do is fueling recommendations and considerations about how much you should eat and why versus like, you know, your glycogen stores and fat versus carbohydrate burning and stuff like that. I think there's a lot of detail in here and nuance that we could get into that I think would be very informative for people. I suggest trying to stay energetically neutral as much as possible, and within restrictions of like how comfortable your gut is with your fueling. So if having 120 grams an hour makes you bloated and fart a lot, then probably drop it if you can. Oh my god, I farted so much in Majorca. That's how it propelled myself off hills, it was just constant. Poor lady, oh my goodness. Oh, she was as well. Oh boy. Couples that fart together, something else together. Stay together. Or on opposite sides of the house for a little while. Okay, is it okay to do Z2 around 70 RPM? Does this cause too much fatigue if it's comfortable? Yeah, you don't, I don't think people should be big braining the cadence. I think you should just ride it yourself, select the cadence, and that's it. Nothing else to it. I made someone do high cadence endurance during my early coaching years. Oh, I've done it myself, yeah. He did not have a good time. I did two hours at 110 RPM. I think that's what I said. Yeah, it sucked. I mean, I could do it. It didn't benefit me. My breathing was higher. That's the only thing I noticed. I wasn't like extra fit afterwards. I was actually a little tired. Anyway, so yeah, don't worry about it. Ways to combat boredom slash drop in perceived fun when spending 80% in Z2. Route selection. Rory, I'm going to, actually, I know you coached this guy, so I'm going to tell you when we're done recording who that is. And you two should have a chat. FTP intervals during long endurance, like six plus hour rides. Pros and cons? I don't see a lot of cons unless you're not eating enough. I see a lot of pros. I definitely have people do this stuff. Like we talked about earlier, doing intervals on longer rides is actually great training. It enhances the adaptation you get rather than detracts from it. It adds fatigue and kilojoules, but overall, I'd say it's the no one. The only thing I'd maybe highlight there is make sure you can do the six-hour ride first before you do the six-hour plus intervals. One thing we maybe didn't talk about is how do you add volume, which has been talked about in the podcast before, and ideally it's relatively steady, but I think most people can add more than they think, provided they are getting the intensity side of things right. But when you're trying to transition, you know, your long ride each week into long ride plus intervals, just make sure you can do the long ride first. Because if you can do the long ride, as long as you're feeling well and you're being smart about it, you'll probably be okay doing the intervals. Yeah, I actually, yeah, I think on a conservative side of things, I'd say add an hour a week and don't do it on your recovery days. Those are sacred. Fuck not with the recovery days. Leave them alone. Actually recover. Let's see, is it, oh god, is it better to do two big Z2 rides spread, or spread the volume across the week? My answer, and I, this is more true the longer I coach, do whatever is least stressful for you. The stress that you get from trying to nickel and dime little volume bits here and there, or to rearrange things to get in one long ride, like That amount of stress is not worth it, and it's more impactful than whether or not you're doing three two-hour rides or one six-hour ride or whatever. Just make sure that your intervals are good and that you're keeping the stress low. There's a reason when I ask people for their availability, I ask them for the least amount of hours they think they'll have each day, because then they've got a plan they know they'll be able to do, and if they have 30 an hour... More available to them, they can just keep going riding or they can use it to relax. But if people were saying, oh, I think I've got four hours after work every day, one, I know you do not. And two, if I tell you, okay, here's all your workouts for the week, it's just going to stress you out trying to make sure you fit them all in. Whereas if you tell me, I've got two hours every week, day, you know, you'll... Have no trouble fitting that in. Be on the conservative side when it comes to trying to work out what you can do. Yeah, for sure. Is Z2 Watts target the same at the start versus at the end of a Z2 ride or decreasing? Oh, you don't ever want to be decreasing power through a ride. That usually says that you started too hard or you're not eating or drinking enough. So, yeah, I... My usual guideline for this, and we haven't talked about how to pace the rides themselves in terms of the long ones, so I figure most people are decent at this, but my actual advice I give to my clients is let the watts come to you. Don't go looking for the watts. So like when I start my rides, I'm usually at 50 watts because my legs don't feel like they can turn any harder. And if I tried to make them, I would actually be costing myself later on in the ride, or usually for me, because I'm going to lift weights right afterwards, it's going to cost me when I go to lift weights, and that's a problem. So let the watts come to you, let your legs open up at their own pace, and if it takes you forever to open up, then you're too tired to be out riding and go home. Is there an approximate amount you should drop your... How do these questions get clustered together? I did not actually rearrange these questions. These are as they were asked in chronological order. Is there an approximate amount you should drop your target zone to power for rides over two hours? No, just pace to feel. And if you're doing a super, super long ride, obviously you've got to have that consideration in your head. It is actually one of the ways to probably know whether you are getting the intensity right is that you come back from a two-hour ride and you come back from a five-hour ride and you feel just as good after both. Assuming that you are doing the five-hour rides regularly. Because the first time, if you've never done a five-hour ride before and you're doing two mostly, and you go out and you do five, you're going to be fucking tired at the end of that five-hour ride, even if you pace it right. If it's a regular thing. If it's a regular thing, yeah, for sure. And especially if you're increasing the volume. kind of linearly and progressively, like an hour a week or something like that. That's a super easy way to pace it. And as long as you're fueling right, you're going to be great. So if you're, again, if your watts are dropping off, oof, bad. But if you want to like, if you want to PR some watts, you start easy, you eat well, and like, and you push at the end of the ride like Rory does because he wants to get home to pee or something. See my cats. And see your cats. I also want to see your cats. If they meow on microphone, nobody's going to be upset. One of them's right here, but she is asleep and has been asleep the entire day. Well, hopefully our listeners are not asleep. We are pretty late into this podcast, but we're almost done. So, ad hoc ride more Z2 as time permits within plan or stick to plan and its periodized volume. I see we're looking confused. Okay, so the question is, can you add more endurance riding kind of as you feel it, or should you stick to the plan's prescribed volume? I tell all my clients, if you have more time to ride, and you know it's not going to impact what you've got coming up in the week, then you can ride more. And especially if you bring the right amount of fuel for it, like food, hydration, or you know how to stop and bring your... Bring your stores back up in your pockets and your bottles, then absolutely you can do that. But if you're having trouble stopping and refilling water, I don't want you riding more if you can't drink enough. I don't want you riding more if you can't eat enough on those rides. Go home. But if you've got all the supplies, yeah, please do. And especially if you know it's not going to screw up what we've got coming up in the week. Is it ever bad to do more 45-minute Z1-2 rides? Yes, it is, actually. Especially if you do them on recovery days. If you are, if you're doing like, I've, Rory, I'll tell you who this is after we're done recording. I've consulted for a couple people, one of them who Rory and I both know, where they would squeeze in an hour ride at many, many, many points through the day. Every Day. Oh, okay, yeah, I figured, I got an hour, I can ride an hour zone two. I would not recommend doing this because of two things. First of all, like where we're saying in the pacing, a lot of the times, if you pace, you can pace an hour ride way harder than you can do for like a five hour ride. And With an hour, unless you're super dialed in, you're super experienced, you can easily overpace it, which is going to add a lot of fatigue that you don't even know is there. Yeah, you'll overdo it before you realize the RPE is decoupled. Yeah, and the person I'm thinking of who you know was doing this on recovery days too because he figured it wasn't that bad. But when you are doing that perpetually for months on end, It adds up. It really adds up because you are basically not letting your body ever get a full day of recovery. Then you pace it a little too hard and now you've got more fatigue and yada yada. And he was just kind of like, it wasn't getting worse, but he certainly wasn't getting better. And that's the kind of danger that you face if you start to pepper these things in. So if, for the most part, like I would say, if like you do like maybe an hour recovery ride in the morning or something like that. Then you've got a, if you've got time for that, then you've got time for like intervals in the evening. That's totally fine as long as you actually pace it right, but keep your recovery days, your recovery. So those are my big warnings with that. I've got a question I've spotted. Yes. If you do high volume, if you do high volume amount of hours one season. Would it be possible to keep the gains if you go back to a more normal amount the next one, or will it slowly die out? Depends on what you mean by gains. So for some people, and actually this depends on your genetic propensity to keep these adaptations around too, and the depth and quality of your training history. So if you are typically doing like 20 hour weeks or more, and you get to a really high level and then you put cycling on the back burner and you have a family or whatever and it's just like you're not training as much. Odds are if you're still training kind of hard, you're probably going to keep your FTP around. You might lose a handful of watts or you might lose none. Your muscular endurance might stay as good as it was but this is kind of a rarity. It's more likely that you are probably going to lose some endurance especially if your long rides go from like five, six hours down to like And you'll probably feel it, especially after a couple years, as those kind of adaptations start to go away, you'll probably feel it in your longer road races, or your longer rides whenever you go do them. But like I said, it depends on your genetic propensity and the quality and depth of your training. Something that's probably, in terms of how that sort of situation comes about, a wee bit more applicable to women as well, especially if they get pregnant. Which is why, like, keeping fitness while pregnant is actually quite difficult, but it doesn't mean that women suddenly are incapable of holding the highs they were previously at, just because they had potentially nine months of not being able to ride from, you know, the point where the pregnancy becomes too much into, you know, childcare, continuing on for a year. But then Ellen Van Dyke came fourth, fifth, sixth at Paris-Roubaix, and she just had a baby. Granted, she's in the wonderful world of pro cycling, where she can do whatever she want. But that's an extreme example of where someone's ability to ride and train consistently can be significantly impacted. But their fitness, not necessarily. Yeah, and that's part of a larger conversation on that aspect of training and having children and stuff like that. And I actually do want to have that on the podcast at some point, but I want to have a real expert on to discuss that kind of stuff. Um, so, uh, so we're going to give that a pass for now, but, uh, yeah, it's definitely on the list of things to consider, because there's a, there's a lot of individual variation on that stuff, too, even. So, um, okay, we'll do, like, two more questions, I think, because we got a couple longer ones, some of these are a little big brainy, uh, but I think I want to tackle, will I see any benefits by doubling my volume from 15 hours a week to 30 hours a week for two weeks by mostly riding Z2? We kind of just talked about this. Provided you enough, yeah. Yeah. I would say yes, but you've got to make sure you recover enough. And afterwards, or even beforehand, you do some training. Well, without overdoing it, you still got to make sure you get all the right recovery. But you might want to do some training that where you are going to benefit from those extra hours. So you might want to either after you recover or before you do this. Try some VO2s, and you might see some extra benefit from the hours, because that's what most people think about in terms of, I'm going to do more volume, so therefore I should get more FTP. And that happens sometimes, but you can't just be riding endurance pace all the time and expect that your FTP to blow up. For a handful of people, that happens. For most people, that does not happen at all. So you've got to be careful about what you're looking for in terms of your adaptation. I would say your endurance capacity. is going to skyrocket for sure, especially after recovering. You're going to hang on to that for a little while. Also, it's just fun to do that. If your typical week is 15 hours a week, I would say your first week of big volume, do 20 to 25. If you handle that okay, maybe do 30 the next week, but be very careful about it. What's a good rule of thumb to... For a zone split on low volume, 10 hours a week, one hour rides a week, max two on weekend, more sweet spot or threshold? Whoa. So like, I think this person is asking, how should I distribute my energy and my training volume for the time I've got to train? Because a lot of people are thinking, I've got 10 hours a week. If I 80-20 this shit, I'm not going to have that much time. Like, it's mostly going to be like just easy riding. And I bet I can get more out of it. And you're right about that. We did an episode about this a long time, long, long time ago, like maybe two or three years now, where I was saying don't pre-plan your training distribution. That is a post-hoc analytic tool, not a, what's the other, proctor, proctor hoc? No, not, I don't know, I don't speak Latin anymore, never mind, I'm trying to big brain Latin. Just, like, don't plan it out ahead of time. Plan how many high-quality interval days you can get, and then, you know, plan around that mostly, and then just do kind of chill riding other than that, and figure out how many recovery rides you need, or recovery days off the bike. So, I hope that answers everybody's questions. So do we have any kind of wrap-up thoughts on all this? And I know we've kind of really hammered this one a long time, but do we have any real good take-home thoughts? Kind of like endurance training versus intensity and volume and Rory is distracted by a cattail in his face again. I think it's feeding time. As evidenced by her currently eating a sandwich bag. For me too. Yeah, so my recommendation is really focus on RPE, focus on high-quality interval days and not carrying too much fatigue from your endurance riding, and really watch that RPE in terms of that decoupling point, because tracking that over time can actually be really hugely beneficial. And so if you're at 150 watts for your LT1, and you're like, I want to ride more and then you recover more and then you find, oh, now it's 170 watts. That's awesome. You've got progression. That's probably going to be a good thing for you in the future. So I'd say watch for that. And Rory, what do you got? Quick tips. Understand why your weekly volume is what it is and understand what your weekly volume does and doesn't give you. So manage you're off by stress. Yeah, there are advantages to being a low-volume athlete. There are also advantages to being a high-volume athlete. And understanding why you fall in any particular camp is going to do a lot more for how you assemble a training plan than looking at a bog-standard training plan and trying to make it fit you rather than trying to force yourself into it rather than... making it fit you. Yeah, and not only fit you in terms of your physiologic profile about like, you know, how well you recover and before he's trying to do this with a cattail on his face, how will you recover and all that kind of stuff, but just like, yeah, you're off by stress. because when it all comes down to the first thing that you should think about when programming, on-bike versus off-bike stress. So I think we should leave it there because Rory is being very, very cat-distracted right now. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Again, please share the podcast if you want. If you want to shoot us a donation because we are ad-free and we kind of live on your donations and people signing up for coaching and consultations. So donations can be at empiricalcycling.com slash donate and shoot me an email at empiricalcycling at gmail.com. That cat is ridiculous. And if you want to reach out for coaching or consultations or anything like that, or if you just want a picture of a cat, go find Rory's Instagram. I'll probably tag him on our memes that I put up for this. If you want to ask a question for future episodes, give me a follow at Empirical Cycling on Instagram and check out the weekend AMAs up there if you want to get your question answered in extreme brief rather than in a two-hour epic again. So thanks everybody for listening. We'll catch you next time.