Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore, joined as always by my co-host, Kyle Helson. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And if you are new here, please consider subscribing to the podcast if you have not yet already. And if you are not new, you're a returning listener. Thanks so much for coming back. And if you want to support us, you can always give us a nice review or rating wherever you listen to podcasts. You can always share us on forums and with friends. And also, because we are ad-free, if you'd like to donate to the show, you can do so at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. We're always taking on athletes. We have negotiable rates for students and professional athletes and extenuating circumstances, of course. Yeah, just shoot me an email and get a conversation started. We're currently late July, and we usually get a big influx of inquiries sometime around August, September, October. So if you want to get ahead of that and secure a spot on our roster, you can always reach out soon. We also do a weekend Q&A up on my Instagram at Empirical Cycling, and we also ask questions for the podcast. And so we'll get to a couple listener questions at the end of this one. So go give me a follow on Instagram if you would like to participate in that. I don't have any show notes for this one, because it's 10-minute tips, which some people have not heard this before, but we literally spend 10 minutes getting ready for the podcast. I have an idea. Hey, let's do this. Okay, cool. 10 minutes, sit down, take some notes. All right, let's roll. So today, this is a podcast I've actually had on the list for a while to do, which is training mistakes that beginners make. And for beginner, let's define it as less than... What do you think? A year or two? Yeah. Someone where you're, you know, I was gonna first say something related to racing, but, you know, you can be a beginner cyclist and not be interested in racing, but, you know, something where you've spent less than a couple years and you'd still consider yourself, you know, learning more information, like, pretty much every day or every time you, like, Get on a bike or go for a ride or whatever. You learn something new about yourself or your relationship with the sport. Not that experienced people don't do that, but I feel like when you're new, you have this learning curve that is much, much steeper. Yeah, actually, that gets right into one of my lists here. So I said, let's both make a list because those seem to... go pretty quickly and pretty punchy episodes. So is that related to something on your list, Kyle? A little bit, but maybe not as explicitly as your list. Yeah, we have not seen each other's lists, by the way, which is why we're like beating around the bush here. All right, well, why don't you go first with the closest related and I'll kind of follow up with that. I would say a big one is you're new. and you don't know a lot about the sport or you're just learning a lot about the sport and you hear a lot of people handing out free advice and free advice can be good except when a lot of this old wisdom perhaps we should call it will come across extremely dogmatic and very very like put in terms of absolutes where the I think of those like dumb you know sort of satirical like Voluminati rules and things like that, where it's like, oh, you only ride in the Little Ring during the month, the winter months. They've got clothing rules too. Yeah, and it's just, it's just like, why? Right? Like, there's just, this, what, why is this a Universal Truth that has just been handed down throughout the ages. And as if you're any less of a cyclist for not obeying any of those things. Because it's straight up just gatekeeping. And it's not even good gatekeeping. We should gatekeep keeping absolute assholes out of the sport. I'm all for that. But we shouldn't gatekeep somebody who wants to wear their sunglasses under their helmet straps. Who gives an absolute fuck? Yeah. And it's one thing if you're giving your friend a hard time because You put your socks over or under your leg warmers and they do the other thing, whatever. But when it's like telling new people these absolute rules that are, you know, inconvertibly true or whatever, it's just dumb. And I feel like a lot of those things, because they can be condensed down into short snippets, they're much more consumable. And so if you're new, you're probably more likely to remember a short, simple rule like that than you are an answer that start with, well, it depends. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I don't have anything on my list that's anywhere kind of close to that, but probably the closest is jumping 100% on every training trend. Because I think this is something that... You know, you're talking about free advice. And I know this podcast is free advice, but you can take it or leave it. And I encourage people to try things. And, you know, if it doesn't work, then forget it. Who cares? But, you know, when it seems like the entire world is saying you should only do zone two when, you know, four by eights, and that's all the training you need, and that's all the training anybody, it's the most whatever. Proven Something or Other and Critical Power and FTP and all this other shit. It's like, if you see that in your kind of like training media and all your friends and teammates are on those kinds of bandwagons, it seems like if you're not doing it, what am I missing? If you're doing something that's working for you, and it's not necessarily what everybody else is doing, it's not like, oh, shit, I need to go do what they're doing. Figure out what works best for you, because training and, well, being a person is the ultimate N equals one, because we can talk about all sorts of distributions and statistical blah, blah, blah to prove significance between two groups for a training protocol or whatever, but When it comes down to it, if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. And so when you go feet first into every single trend, it's like, okay, I'm going to do nothing but sweet spot training for a year, because everybody says sweet spot training works. Okay. But then three weeks later, somebody's like, oh, you've got to go jump on the polarized bandwagon, and you've got to do this other thing, and you go jump in that, and then you do that for a couple months. Or it's like, oh, Zone 2 is the only thing you need. Okay, I'm going to go ride Zone 2. Okay. But like, none of these things on their own are 100% of a complete training program. And they are definitely not also completely tailored to what you specifically need. So it's tough to kind of get your bearings, I think, when you are new. And also... and also not feel like you've got training FOMO, if we can call that a thing, you know what I mean? Oh, totally. That training FOMO, that's good. I don't know what would be a good phrase for that. It kind of works. But yeah, the idea that you're, that there, it's like that there's always, you know, the grass is always greener on the other side or whatever. Like, oh, I'm doing this, but I could be doing this other thing. And maybe that's the thing that's truly the secret. which kind of falls into the, you know, there are no silver bullets. There's no magic training style philosophy, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, this new thing is what's going to give me 200 watts on my FTP. Yeah. This is the secret that, you know, Wout isn't telling people and why he's so fast at all of the things. Yeah, the secret is he's Wout and you're not. Damn it. I mean, we just, like today, we just watched the Men's Olympic TT, and like, if everybody could just be wowed by like working hard or doing the training wowed does, you know, it, what kind of world would that be? Like, if you could just like work as hard as you want and become as good as wowed, like it doesn't happen like that. Yeah. So, all right, what's the next one for your list? Next one I got is, and this is something that maybe falls in line with this idea of falling for hot trends in training, but when you're new and you're just getting into the sport, sometimes you can get trapped into the idea because your progress can be so linear and so fast that five hours is good and 10 is better and therefore 20 is even better. just the idea that you'll be able to keep riding this forever and then getting too much of a good thing, right? Like you don't want to, you're new and yeah, you want to use that excitement to motivate yourself, but you don't want to do so much that like in two years you're like, I'm so burned out because I just tried to ride 30 hours a week, like a year into cycling because it was, it seemed like, yeah, I was getting such good results, just Riding a lot and not thinking about it a ton, and then just doubling down on that approach a few too many times, which, you know, I hate to be that person, like people, you know, you get new people in cycling and they ask you your advice, and I always feel bad tempering people's excitement because, you know, when you're new and you're really getting into it, you can be really excited, and that's such a... Fun Feeling. And I think we all remember that time we were really, really excited about something like that. And you want to be like, yeah, use it, but also pace yourself just a little bit or realize that this is a longer process and don't just dive headfirst into 30-hour weeks or whatever. Yeah, this is really not a sport where you get out an equal amount to what you put in. There's no relationship. I think should probably think about more is focusing on the process rather than the results. Because if you decide that you want your noob gains to last forever, and as soon as they start to taper off or peter out, then you're done with the sport, that's not fun. It's not enjoyable. Because if you're only in it for those fast gains, and if they don't keep coming, you're going to quit? Then, I mean, maybe nothing's for you. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people probably can relate to that, where maybe not themselves, but you know that person who is always on to this new thing, and after they've done this thing for a few years or whatever, and kind of exhausted, like you said, those noob gains, that really rapid early progress, they're like, eh, I'm gonna move on to something else. I think especially endurance sports are not good for that. Yeah, I've seen that with juniors a lot too, where, well not a lot, but often enough, where they are really fast to begin with, and then once they kind of hit that level of competition where everybody's kind of as good as they've been for a while, and they're not just like getting easy wins, then they start getting discouraged. And if you are focused on on like having a good process and not the results necessarily and just kind of enjoying the riding and enjoying the training and striking the right balance for yourself. I think that's where, you know, where you are making riding bikes and racing bikes work for you rather than you being a slave to, I need these results. I think that was, I think it was Teo Boss who posted a some post like that, like just after he retired, where he said, you know, it was a picture of him from racing from juniors when that first time he got back after the winter and realized that other people had been training too and it wasn't going to be as easy. Obviously, it worked out okay for him. He had a pretty spectacular professional bike racing career, but yeah, even someone like that, we can be like, you know, you kind of have two choices, like you said, at that point, you can either get discouraged or you can also use it to motivate yourself. I think if you ended up a professional cyclist for over a decade, you can probably say he figured it out. Yeah, I would say so. And actually, that dovetails nicely with one of my next ones, which is forgetting to have fun. I think there's... Fun? What's that? I don't know. Is fun in my Training Peaks calendar today? Yeah. I mean, here's the thing that I tell people in consultations all the time. is, well, one of the things I always want to assess before we talk is what their, or kind of while we talk, is what their personal priorities are for fun versus progress and improvement and that process. Because And I, even with my own clients, where if somebody says, you know, I want to have, I want half of this to be fun, I want half to be improvements, like, okay, well, we can temper our expectations for the rapidity of improvements for you. Because if, yeah, if you're hitting a group ride, you know, once or twice a week, and you refuse to take a rest week, and you're going to go hit that group ride because you still want to go have that fun, okay, like, maybe you're never going to be recovered enough that we can really... Press Hard on the Training Sometimes, and that's going to be something that, you know, you are going to have to decide when your training kind of stalls out, and I'm like, hey, you really got to take like a week or two off this group ride and rest up, and you're like, you know, I don't think I want to. It's like, okay, well then. Then we're just going to have to wait until this group ride stops for the winter for you to get some proper rest. And right now, your level of fitness is just going to be what it is. And we'll get what we can, but that's somebody's personal balance point. And I'm not saying that's the wrong thing. I'm saying that's what somebody wants for themselves. And I'm totally fine with that. I just want to make sure that somebody's got the information that they need to decide, okay, if I miss the group ride, Every, you know, every second or third week, is that going to be the end of the world for me? Or is that going to further my goals here? Or am I okay with my goals not being met quite as strongly? And I always get to my group ride and I have fun. And that's somebody's personal priority. And so I think when people jump into a training plan and they decide, okay, I want to race, I want to go smash my first race or whatever, Forgetting to have fun is, it could be a mistake. And not only that, just for the enjoyment aspect and the longevity and cycling aspect, but I also think it's detrimental because if you're not having fun, it means that you are, it could be that you are too focused on the training, and that means that you are going to potentially be skipping rest and Training, when you do need rest. If you're that focused on training to the point where you're like eschewing, you know, friends and family and stuff like that, don't do that. Fuck those people. Yeah. Well, you want me to hang out with my family? Get out of here. It's wrong with you. I got a Cat 3 race to win next week. Right. Well, and I think it's... I totally understand the temptation and the desire to want to be able to do everything. I want to be able to have awesome races every weekend from May through August. And I also want to have all this fun with my friends at Wednesday Night Worlds. And I also want to do all these other things. And it's unfortunately just not really possible. To me, at least, that is the thing I think that is the most appealing about, say, something like CrossFit, where you can do all these things, but you kind of get to do all of them at sort of a middling level relative to people who just do one or two of those things, right? And so you can kind of view it like that, where I don't want to bag on triathlon, you know, the old joke of, like, I want to be mediocre at three things. I don't know. Taylor Nipps seems to have got a pretty good time trial. Right. Right, exactly, yeah, it's definitely not saying that's the case for all triathletes, but, you know, or with the old, ooh, I don't know where the saying is, but like if you, where it comes from, but the, you know, if you chase two rabbits, like they both will escape type thing, where if you- Oh, that definitely comes from rabbit hunting, I think, yeah, the sport of rabbit hunting. Foxes, foxes get really excited and then they get confused and yeah, so yeah, if your goal is to do well at- Nationals, or a big regional race, or something like that, then yeah, you're fun at Wednesday Night Worlds. You may have to take a backseat for a little bit, but that doesn't mean that you can never do Wednesday Night Worlds, like you said. You just gotta figure out the right balance for you. Yeah, for sure. It's not like you've got one or the other. You can do both. It's like one of the dogs I used to have, he would always, whenever I would throw two tennis balls at him, he would try to get both in his mouth at the same time. What he would do is he would kind of get them next to each other and he would put one in his teeth and he would like get his lip flap over the other one to cover it and then he would like pick his head up as if they were both going to come off the ground. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless he's a pelican, he's not going to be able to do this. And he was not that large a dog where he could get two balls in his mouth. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, it's not like that. You can kind of take a little of column A and a little of column B. It's more like a smorgasbord than a dog trying to get two balls in his mouth. Or Smorgasbord, Buffet, there we go, Buffet. Buffet. Okay, so what's next on your list? So, I would say, and it kind of goes a little bit in hand with what you said, but especially when it comes to racing, people can be, early on, can be really, really way too focused on, did I get a good placing in the race, instead of, did I learn something that will help me improve? from this race. Like, you don't have to have necessarily a good finish to be able to be reflective and be like, oh, I made a tactical mistake here and I learned something and that means that next time I race, I will hopefully not make that mistake and have a better chance at getting to that good finish position that I want. But if you're just trying to slam upgrade points and upgrade as fast as possible without thinking, oh, what? Could I have done better in that race? Because early on, yeah, everyone's excited, you want to upgrade, and I'm totally, I'm not saying you have to sandbag and be that person who's just winning a bunch of cat four races and who should have upgraded way before, but being way too purely results sheet focused early on, I think, can be something that's very alluring, because everyone likes to do well, right? Like, you go to work the next, you know, Monday after a race, and people ask you how you did. You don't want to tell them you got dropped. It's not fun at the water cooler. Oh, yeah, how was your race? Oh, I got dropped, you know. So. Yeah, I paid 40 bucks and I drove three hours to race for 20 minutes out of 45. Yeah. No, I totally agree with that. And I think that kind of goes towards You know, thinking about the process, um, rather than the result, because, um, because if you, if you, like, can ride off the front of a race, uh, as a Cat 5, Cat 4, Cat 3, uh, you can do that and get your points and yada yada, but you're gonna get to the twos, and you're gonna be in the elite races, and you're gonna be, like, realizing that you don't, don't understand the mechanics of how a peloton works. and you don't understand positioning and you don't understand where to be when the bell rings or where you should have been like three laps before the bell rang either. And so you can totally miss the boat and you're going to have to learn those lessons at some point anyway. Like I remember our local upgrade coordinator, JD, in New England, whenever somebody was riding off the front of races, he would actually refuse to upgrade them until they could like top 10. in some kind of field sprint type situation, where he wants to know that you are not just somebody who can only ride off the front, because if he upgrades you, and everybody else is now as strong as you, and you cannot get off the front anymore, are you going to be a danger to them? Do you understand the mechanics of Pelotons? So, yeah, I think that that's a really, really good one. Okay, so... My next one is similar to that. I actually have focusing on a goal over process, but that really applies to any level. So my next one is not trying new things or new events. Oh, I like that. I like that. Because I think a lot of people that I've spoken to, not a majority, let's say, but enough where It's definitely a thing, and if this is you out there, then I'm talking to you, where you think, should I skip racing for the next year just to train? And my answer is absolutely not. If you only do like one or two races per year, and you're like, man, this is going to be my big event, I'm going to do really well, I'm going to train for six months to this, then I'm going to taper into it. There's a couple things that are happening. First, if you don't understand the mechanics of the peloton, you know, you might get there and be like, oh, I don't know how to, it's tight, I don't know how to move up from 50th wheel, because I can't go over the yellow line, so how do I get up there? Like, oh, the winning move is gone? Okay, crap, I missed it. Like, you don't want that to happen to you. You still want to go practice the skills of bike racing, and So that way when you get to your bigger events, you are more familiar with them. So I think anybody who's got the like, remember StarCraft where one of the strategies was to like hunker down and build this massive army and then kind of like come blow everybody out of the water later? Turtle and tech, turtle and tech. Okay, there you go. That's it, that's it. And that's not a great strategy in bike racing. It's genuinely not, because first of all, progress with fitness, unless you're very, very fortunate, can take quite a long time. And learning to use your particular strengths and weaknesses also means that you need to go get out and race and figure out where you are relative to the rest of the peloton. And if you don't do that, you don't know what you need to work on either. Like, you might get out there and have this massive FTP, but you don't know how to, you can't surge because you've never practiced it, and you haven't gotten to group rides because you've just been doing like steady state efforts this entire time, like FTP and VO2s, and you're like, man, all these repeated surges are killing me. It's like, you... might've benefited from going to a couple of training crits or some group rides or doing some intervals to that effect. And you don't know it until you go race. So there's a lot of stuff that you miss if you aren't going out and trying new things. And, you know, kind of like you said, like thinking about the process of like, okay, I'm going to go do this race. My result doesn't matter, but I want to learn from it. I want to figure out what I need to work on. That is a good process. I think, to some extent, bike racing can be really, really prone to overcooking people because some people will think, oh, I can and thus must race every weekend between April and September or something insane like that. That's not a good recipe. But also doing the other thing, like you said, only focusing on one or two races and not doing anything else is also not great because just the The process of warming up for a race, getting ready for a race, like packing your car or your bag or whatever for a race, all of those things, if it's a really, really important event for you, will go much smoother if you've done it before when it's been lower stakes. Yeah, I mean, right, yeah, exactly. So, sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, so just taking advantage of the fact that cycling... lends you many opportunities to compete where some sports are not like that, right? Like some sports you don't have competition opportunities all the time like you do in cycling. And it's a blessing and a curse in some ways, but you can definitely take advantage of it and have it work for you as opposed to like have it bury you into an overtraining hole the first three months into bike racing. Yeah, that's true. I mean, you're right about that because I was just thinking, you know, if I were going to go run a marathon, right? I couldn't do it tomorrow. I would probably destroy my hip and I would be miserable. And like, if I think my joints were healthy enough to do this, it would take me like a couple months to build up to even being able to do a marathon distance, let alone, you know, going to do multiple in a year. After I finish that first, I'm going to be like, all right, I'm done with that. I just did two marathons, my first one and my last one. Like that would be my attitude. And so, because I know a lot of people who, up in Boston, who run the Boston Marathon once a year, and they start training, you know, like November, December, and they build up to it, and then they're done, you know? It's like, it's not like, oh, I'm going to go run three marathons and prep for Boston. I mean, like some really experienced people might be able to do that, but the average person cannot. So you're right about bike racing in that it really affords you a great amount of opportunity, but it also doesn't mean you've got to swing at every pitch. All right. So I've got a couple more. Let's see what's going to be a good one. All right. Here's a good one. This is probably not going to be controversial, but I feel like some people might feel like I'm calling them out. And if you think this is you, well, then I am. So I think a big beginner mistake a lot of people make is focusing too much on metrics and not enough on performance. Oh, interesting. So, I think a lot of people will be like, okay, if I don't have four watts per kilo FTP, I shouldn't start racing. Something like that. Or, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I've got four watts per kilo FTP. I've been working to this goal. I got it. Now I'm going to go race. Uh-oh. Racing's really hard. I better work on my top end. So you go work on your top end, then you retest your FTP a couple weeks, a couple months later, and you're like, Oh shit, I think I lost 10 watts in my FTP. But you're racing better. And what happens now? Do you go back to pumping up the FTP? And that might cost you race fitness or vice versa? Because especially when people are kind of tapped out on their noob gains, there's always a teeter-totter effect where whatever you are focusing on can often be The thing that is, what am I trying to say, Kyle? Your recent focus is the aspect of fitness that is the best for you at the moment. Yeah, there's always some trade-off, but it's not like the other things go away, right? Oh, I did some sprint, you know, been working on my finishing sprint because I found I'm getting dropped in the last 400 meters of these races. That doesn't mean, like, your VO2 max just goes to the floor or something because you spent a few weeks, you know, doing some sprint workouts or something, and vice versa, right? Like, if you're getting close to a race day and, you know, you've been focusing on VO2 max because it has a hard... Four Minute Climb or something. If you get there in a reduced group, it doesn't mean like you're back to, you know, square one in your sprint or something like that. You got to know that your experience is going to be the sum of a lot of these things that you've worked on. And just because the thing isn't super, super fresh and you may not be always hitting those amazing numbers. And God knows, you know, I'm a pretty quantitative person. I love the fact that cycling is so numbers. or can be so numbers-driven, but it's really easy to get sucked into it because everyone wants that immediate feedback, immediate satisfaction of, I did this workout and I saw this number. I like that. I'm going to do this workout some more and I see this number. When that number is not, like we said, doing well in races or learning, it's just one aspect and not your bike racing career cannot be summed up in one number. like you might want it to be able to be. I don't know. It could be come up with like a bicycle racing index score or something where it takes in all these numbers from different power tests, but then also somehow folds in like results or something. And pack skills. Yeah. Whether you can take an elbow in a bun sprint or if you... It'd be like Madden. Yeah. Successfully make a breakaway. Yeah. Yeah. Rate bicycle racers on like a Madden-type score where each individual attribute, then they can sum them up and give you a total score. Anyway, yeah. So actually, here's a good example is squat, your squat strength. So this is a metric that I see a lot of cyclists really over-focusing on. Not a ton, but enough where it... It's one of these things that stands out in my mind as something that's more common than I would think it would be. So it's like you spend some time in the gym in the fall, and through the winter you start training, but you keep lifting really heavy in the gym. And if somebody's like, oh man, my lifts are just killing me and I'm having a hard time on the bike, it's like, why are you still lifting heavy when you've got races coming up in like a month and a half? The usual answer I hear is, I don't want to lose my strength gains. I mean, okay. If we are measuring strength gains by just what you can squat, then sure. But most of what- You're not a competitive squatter. Yeah, but like most of what you lose is not necessarily your strength. It's just the practice of the motion of a squat. It's like the polish on it, right? Yeah, it's like the motor pattern. It's sort of like it's the first thing you get back when you go get under the bar again in the fall is you get those noob gains back because that's the first thing you lost. And so it's similar to that. It's like if you are focused on I need my FTP to be this high and I need my squat to be this high and I need my sprint power to be this high. many different aspects of fitness, and you cannot have all of them be at the peak all at the same time. Because if you are, if you want to be a really, really strong squatter, you are going to necessarily have to spend more time squatting and less time riding your bike, and vice versa. And there's trade-offs there, and there's trade-offs in other stuff too. It's like, so I think I've told this story on the podcast before, but, you know, Well, I've been working with him for a little while now, but I had a client where when we started working together, he had been doing a lot of polarized training, lots of it. And his threshold was probably 3, what, 30-ish, 320, 330. And when we started working together, he lost like 10-ish watts on his threshold. But he was racing better because I wasn't like, okay, we're going to make sure that your FTP is... these extra 10 watts come hell or high water. It's like, no, we need to work on other aspects of your fitness to race better. And he raced a lot better, much, much better. But he was always like, man, I just, I want those 10 watts back. And so, and I, and you know, we got those 10 watts back plus some this year, but it was not necessarily because of It was not necessarily because we eschewed all of his race-focused training for focus on his FTP. We did some training that I thought might improve his FTP, but I knew would improve his racing. And so it happened to also work on raising his FTP as well, but it wasn't the primary focus. And if it hadn't raised his FTP those many wants, would it have made a big difference in his racing? Probably not. Small difference? Sure. But like, the bigger focus for us, like for this year, was getting his repeated efforts a lot better. And that was the biggest focus. And not necessarily that because we did that, his FTP went up. It was certainly not. That was from something else. So, but we also had him rest more. He actually rode a little bit less this year. And that actually, you know, By the time that we had pretty well established a good base of fitness for the year, all those little tweaks paid off in the long run. But it wasn't necessarily because I wanted his FTP to go up. Because whether FTP is up or down 10 watts, that's not really the question. So have I beat this one to death? I think I have. Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's something, though, that... Yeah, it's really common and really tempting. Like, you can get obsessed with the numbers and you're just, man, you know, I like numbers too. It's totally understandable. I think putting, you can kind of put your ego aside a little bit and it makes it a little bit easier because otherwise you're like, man, that number is directly proportional to my self-worth as a bike racer. But it really shouldn't be. Functional threshold of pride. Yeah. How many do you got left on your list? I have two left. How many do you have left? I got two. Okay. So, all right. So, you're next. Mine would be a similar vein, but maybe not. And this definitely does not apply to all people, because I think there are kind of two separate camps in this uncycling, but focusing too heavily on equipment. You know, there's definitely a minimum level. It is an equipment-driven sport. There's a minimum level that you have to care about your equipment. Like, if you show up to race day and your bike is clapped out and, you know, the brakes don't work and things like that, like, that's a problem. But also, obsessing over it to the point that you're convinced that I spend, oh, the next $200 I spend on my bike will be the part that finally, you know. makes me feel complete as a person. What upgrade can you make for $200? Probably like a new carbon fiber seat post or something. I don't know. But you know what I mean? Like striving for that most perfectest machine can be fun. And that's where I think a lot of people, and myself included, like cycling because it is an equipment-driven sport. But it's also a major downside that people can get really, really focused on equipment. And, you know, as much as I hate the cliche of like, oh, you know, Wout could win on your bike, but you couldn't win on Wout's bike, to a certain extent for new riders, it's 100% true, right? But Wout's not going to win, you know, he's not going to win a TT on your mountain bike. True, true. Which is why there is some minimum level, right? Don't be afraid to show up to, you know, a road race with a cyclocross bike with slick tires and things like that. Like, just because you're going to try things doesn't mean you need 17 bikes. Oh, dude, the number of Goggins I've seen win P12 races in New England on a cross bike with slicks is non-zero. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because, like, yeah, if you, you know, you're not, especially cat. Four, at the novice level, whatever, like, equipment is cool, and if you've got the disposable income, like, flex away, go ahead, you can get your custom geo carbon bike with, you know, the latest wheels, all the stuff. Oh, Kristen wheels, oh yes, please. Yeah, oh man, I'm not gonna stop you, but just, especially as a new, more beginning rider, have a realistic expectation on how far better equipment is going to get you. Yes, if you're riding a, 10-speed, and by 10-speed, I mean not 10 cogs in the back. I mean five cogs in the back. Times two chainrings. Times two chainrings, then yeah. With the downtube shifters? Equipment, with downtube shifters, like friction shifters, yes. Then you can safely say that equipment may be holding you back in race performance. Yeah, your mother or father's like 40-pound bike from... Yeah. You know, 1975 is, yeah, probably not the best thing for you at the moment, but I'm sure there are people screaming into their speakers right now, the phrase is, ride upgrades, don't buy upgrades. Yes. I kind of hate that cliche too, just because it's just like, ugh, like, you're in the sport a long time and you hear things over and over and over again and you're like, ugh, just, anyway, but it's definitely true to some extent. For new riders, especially. Yeah, but the older I get, the truer it gets. Okay, so, all right, my next one is, a big mistake beginners make is deciding what kind of rider you are before you develop fully in the sport. Ah, yeah, this is a, I feel like this is a famous, like, internet thing. It comes up a lot, like, oh, I've been riding for a couple months, and I've got a power meter, and this is what my very first power curve looks like. Clearly, I'm destined to be the next Ghana or, I don't know, like, like, Demi-Volring or something, because I've got it all figured out, and it looks just like that. And you're like, yeah. Yeah, it's like, yeah, deciding that you're like a time trialer because your sprint watts aren't that high. Like, my peak sprint watts ever, so far. Hopefully I'll break them again one day, but it was 2186 peak. So close. So close. The very first sprint I ever measured on the bike was like, I didn't even crack a thousand watts. Oh, really? Yeah. I was not a good sprinter to start with. I was like, just shit. And my sprint got better year by year by year. It went up about a hundred watts per year for the first like... Four or Five Years that I was riding and kind of training and racing. And then I was like, okay, I wonder what happens if I really focus on my sprint and I gain another 700 watts. It is not linear, like 100 watts a year for 12 years. Now you can do, you know, 2,900 watts. So like if I had decided early on that I didn't have a good sprint and I wasn't ever going to be good at sprinting, that would have... greatly affected the training and racing that I did over the next couple of years, because my sprint is, my sprint developed the way that I wish my threshold had developed. And it did it as easily as I wish my threshold had to. Genetically, I got the wrong hand. I feel like I would have been a much better road racer, but I don't have the genes for it. And I trained really hard. I trained pretty well. I started halfway to first base, and I think I made it to second base. And then there are people like Wout who probably started on third and went past home plate and was already hitting the next home run by the time he blinked. Any riding would see massive improvements for him. Yeah, I mean, I've got data for people where... They started at 5.5 watts per kilo. Like, that's their off-the-couch baseline. Fuck. Yeah, like, there are people I've never seen a threshold, like, a modeled WKL-5 threshold lower than, like, 380 watts. God. In all of their data, including when they started riding. Just, so, I wish. Anyway, so. Freaks walk among us. Freaks walk among us. So spend some time in the sport. This kind of goes along with try new things. You don't know if you're going to be good at gravel racing until you go try it, should you want to do that even. You don't know if you're going to be good at a hill climb until you try it. I mean, at that point, it's still kind of a physics equation. You can kind of estimate where you're going to be, but you also don't know who's going to show up. Maybe you are going to win that day, even if you're at 4.8 watts per kilo for 20 minutes or whatever. It doesn't matter. Go race it. Go have fun. Go try it. And even if you're not good at it, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't keep going. I was terrible at road racing. I kept going because I had fun. That's that. I think, too, in American culture, there is this demand that every one of your hobbies and pursuits, you have to be like, Excellent at, or Striving for Excellence. And again, like you said, at the expense of fun and enjoying it, where it's okay if you're a career Cat 3 roadie, that's fine, you know? Like, don't feel like, oh man, I never made it to those big Cat 1 races, blah, blah, blah. If you had fun and you could, you know, look back on it and say like, I had fun and I got out of it what I wanted, it was, you know what? It was what I was looking for in a hobby, in a sport that you're not going to be a professional in, then that's awesome, right? That's all we can ever ask for out of our hobbies, which largely for all of us, it is hobbies. It's not a professional career. Yeah, that's fine. Like, yeah, I feel like too many people feel like they have to be amazing, you know, or just not bother. Yeah, and if that's your personal standard, like if you don't want to do anything that you're not going to be amazing at right off the bat, I mean, and then you kind of, you dip into bike racing and then you dip out real quick. I'm not going to judge you for that. I don't know if that's right or wrong, morally speaking. That's a personal choice and I try not to judge people for their personal choices. But, you know, if you have fun with it, it doesn't mean that you should like sell all your bikes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Okay. What's your last one? My last one is Partially because cycling is such an individual sport, but I would say it's holding off too long before you talk to people in your area about joining a club or a team, finding other friends in a sport that is, yes, largely individual, but also there can be a lot of fun and camaraderie. Good Shared Memories by being a part of a team or a club or something, even if it's not necessarily a team that always races together, because you may be different, interested in different events, interested in different, you know, you might be in different categories, things like that, but just having that community to, like, share cycling with can be so beneficial, and I feel like cycling is so often billed as this individual sport built around rugged individualism. Picture the old racers from the 1900s carrying tubulars on their backs. There is so much more fun to be had if you can do it with people sometimes. Yeah, I totally agree. Having a team is one of the best aspects of cycling because it really emphasizes the social aspect. of the sport, and just, you know, hobbies in general. It's like, you know, it's like my, some of my family members, they have like book clubs that they go to. And like, you know, it's a good, it'll get you reading, which is great, but it's also going to make you talk about what you read, and you also get some friends out of it. And that's fantastic. You know, cycling is kind of like a book club with a lot more suffering, I guess. I feel like... Too often, though, people especially can view road cycling as a bunch of people show up on their own, they warm up on their own, they race, and then 20 minutes after the race is done, they go home, you know? And it doesn't have to be like that. That doesn't have to be your experience of going to a local crit, right? Especially if you have teammates or at least being social and talking to other people because, yeah, if you're showing up for the novice race and it's the first race for a lot of people, for you, Sorry, if it's your first race and you're showing up, there's a good chance that it's going to be the first race for a lot of people who are also there. And so, yeah, you should feel free to talk to people. And yeah, okay, if people don't want to be talked to, that's fine. No judgment, nothing wrong, but don't be afraid to be social at races. Yeah, and I'm not a very social person. Well, you know this about me pretty well, but a lot of people listening may not, but I'm very introverted. And when I went to my first bike race, like the first person I saw was kind of like, I was like, hey, what's up? I just started talking to her just because like she had tattoos and she looked cool and she was in the same race I was. And I was like, you know, I kind of like started to get to know her a little bit. And she introduced me to all of the friends that I had in bike racing around Boston for a very long time. And she also currently manages domestic protein. here in the U.S. And, you know, I've known her for as long, and literally, to the day, as long as I've been racing bikes. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you, like, never know, especially cycling, relatively small community, you know, you start racing in one city, you end up moving and going somewhere else. If you've talked to people, maybe you can find other people to ride with in that new city because your friend knows someone who knows someone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I think, There might be another mistake people make. Maybe this is a little off topic, but that doesn't stop us before. So it might just be that people spend too much time and energy thinking about what team should they join because of the support that the team gives them. Like I think if you are, if you have like no money, it can make a big difference. Because if one team's going to give you a kit and the other team's not, okay, like, you know, that might be the difference between Being able to race with this team and not. Okay, I get that. But if you have your choice, it's better to pick a team where you like the people. And especially I think it's good to pick a team where the people will get you out doing new things. Like if you would never go riding mountain bikes before until your teammates get you to get on a mountain bike, here, we're going to give you this one. Come with us. We're going to go to Kingdom Trails. It's going to be awesome. and then you go have fun and you're like, man, I think I wanna go start riding mountain bikes. If you hadn't known them, you never would have started. So- Definitely. It can be a great gateway to other stuff and it can get you to like a cyclocross race, which is a really fun environment for social things. But it might actually bring you to one of my very favorite race types of all bike races. Some of the most fun, dual slalom. Yeah. Go race dual slalom. For sure. And don't, you know, clean up your beer cans when you're done. Yes. ECCC dual slalom is some of the most fun I've ever had at a bike race, like bar none. Might be the most fun. Yeah. So, and I was doing the timing. I wasn't even on the hill watching people have fun. So, anyway, so that's, yeah, a good one. All right. My last one is getting too sciency when almost anything works. So overanalyzing your noob gains and being like, I need the best training plan right now that's going to get me every single watt at every duration that I could possibly get. And if I'm short five watts at the end of this year, then it was a failure. Like the difference between that and getting 90% of the way there and having a lot of fun on the way. I would rather somebody have the fun and not have those 10 extra watts. Yeah, I think some of this too is also where a couple of the other things we've talked about, it kind of goes hand in hand. One is if you know yourself and you know that because cycling can be so quantitative, definitely have a little bit of introspection and take a step back occasionally from just staring at numbers, even though Things like Golden Cheetah, excuse me, are free and, you know, can give you, and it can be so tempting because it can give you such easy access to looking at metrics and digging in. And if that's something that you enjoy, then that's great, but it can definitely be too much of a good or easy thing to focus on. Well, it can also give you, it can also like create artifacts in the data that you don't realize that. You're seeing, too. It's like, there's a lot of stuff in data where it looks like a trend, but it's really maybe because of the way that you planned your training, or maybe it's something with the heat. Like, you're like, oh man, my heart rate always decouples around June, July. Man, I guess I'm just not that fit right now. It's like, no, it's 90 degrees out and 85% humidity. Like, your wet bulb temperature is... It's like beyond water boiling on the sun. It's like you should probably be like, man, maybe I'm dehydrated, instead of going, oh, I've read this other thing into this data. So, yeah, and like, and so that kind of, what does that go towards, where's my list? Focusing too much on metrics. Because if you're racing well at that point, who cares what your high rate decoupling looks like? Yeah. I feel like also this is where if you do have friends and maybe some people who are a little bit more experienced than you and you can talk to them about these things, sometimes it can be helpful because just like everyone else, if you've been doing a thing for a while, you too have made mistakes and you can probably share some of the lessons that you've learned with some folks who are just starting out. And yeah, sure, some people, especially in sports, can be very, very hush-hush and not want to share any secrets and don't want to give away the game or something like that. But I feel like a lot of people in cycling too, because you said, like we said, it's a social sport. There is a very big social component. And so talking to people about these things can also be really helpful and help you maybe get a... a better, you know, 100-foot view than if you've just been staring at the same plots over and over and over again, trying to find trends and correlations where there may not be. Yeah. Yeah, and, you know, having, knowing good people in cycling who are focused on the right things and are... You know, positive and supportive, I think is fantastic. And we'll also kind of call you on your bullshit when they need to, I think is also very necessary. So speaking of people sharing their experiences, so I asked on Instagram for people to ask their questions about, you know, noob mistakes, but also to share their experiences. And so we've got a couple things here. I didn't leave this up too long. And it's also... Saturday, right after the Olympics TT. So I assume most people are out riding right now. But I think we still have a couple very good questions here. So, well, here's a lesson learned. Volume is relative, aka low volume still needs rest. Yes, completely. Yeah, like, so I think my thought on this, to extrapolate a little bit, is that I know a lot of folks who think that volume is the main driver of fatigue. Where if you're riding six hours a week, but every one of those six hours is spent doing hard intervals or like racing or Zwift racing or group rides, that you can just do that perpetually. And in reality, after a couple weeks, you're most likely gonna see your performance dip. And if you took a week of easy riding, you know, your next group ride the next week after that. You're probably going to be like, man, my legs feel like I could just, I'm going to smash this hill into dust is what's going to happen today. I feel like a funny one that I know is related to this is thinking like, if you look at a workout from doing standing starts on the track, that's like by far the lowest volume on the bike workout you could possibly imagine, right? It's like a bunch of- Yeah, you might go hard for two minutes total. Maybe. That's a long one. and then thinking like, oh, I don't need, I don't need to recover from that, even though you've been like, death gripping a set of handlebars. Yeah, it's like Amron deadlifts that day. Yeah. But, but it's, oh, but it was, yeah, the total, if you pull up, you, you know, put your, turn your garment on and then look at the total moving time or whatever on Strava afterwards, you're like, oh, my total moving time was like 13 minutes, you know, or something. Yeah, actually, I mean, this also gets towards a thing that maybe we should include on the list, which is learning when you need rest. What are your signs of fatigue? Do you get irritable? Do you get grumpy? Do you just start complaining? Is it a situation where your fitness is getting better, even though you are accumulating fatigue? That's definitely a thing. I think we talked about that on the last podcast. Learning that about yourself, and also watching it change year to year might be different, because as your training depth improves, the amount of hard training you can do and recover from can improve. Well, the amount of hard training you can do can improve a little bit, but on the other side of that coin, you can also end up burying yourself even harder as you get better trained, so it's kind of a double-edged sword on that one. Actually, Kyle, do you ever realize that a single-edged sword is also a double-edged sword? Because one side's sharp, but the other side's not. It's kind of a double-edged sword. Sorry. I'm going to cut that joke. That's so fucking dumb. Yeah, but yeah, like learning to dial in your RPE is a big one. Like Coach Katie actually popped into this. She says a lesson. that she's learned or that she's coaching people on is going too hard up climbs on your endurance rides. Like, so dialing in your RPE on your endurance rides and realizing what days are you okay to go a little harder, what days should you not? Like, here's something where, okay, here's another old, old, old phrase. Ride with people faster than you. and they will make you faster. Is that the right phrase? It's pretty close, right? Yeah, it's something like that. And I think if you did that five days a week, you would actually get slower from the fatigue of getting your teeth kicked in every single ride. Right, you don't want to be hanging out of your dear life at the end of the pace line. Every group ride, just absolutely suffering in the wheels, being like counting down the miles till you're done. Yeah, that's not a good recipe. You know, if you don't get dropped first, I mean, how many people have had this experience where you go on a group ride and you're like, man, I keep getting dropped on this one hill and you keep going back thinking that you're going to improve the next time because, well, clearly I've got to be getting a little faster, right? And it never happens until you like step back from it, rest up, train a little bit. And then you go back and you're like, okay, this week I can hang. It doesn't mean I can the next week. Because group rides are good for certain aspects of fitness, but they are not a catch-all. It's not like it's gonna improve everything, even though, look, it's all heart rate zones. You know, it's like whoops all crunch berries. Like, it doesn't work like that. Yeah. So, yeah. If only. I mean, if you could just ride and just have everything get trained up. It'd be awesome. It would be awesome. Love it. Okay, so here's another one. How to find FTP if you're a rookie and you don't know pacing at all. So this kind of goes into RPE also. So feeling out your two thresholds, your first and second threshold, sometimes known as aerobic and anaerobic, but I hate those terms even though we use them sometimes. LT1, LT2, also problematic terms. We typically will refer to them as LT1 and FTP. They're close enough, let's say. So FTP is... How would you describe it? The hardest pace that still feels sustainable. But here's the thing, I think... For new people, especially if you're new to athletics in general, like if you're an athlete and you've done any kind of extended efforts in your training previously, like if you're an Olympic weightlifter or a powerlifter, you may not be in this camp. You may be, this may be totally foreign to you. But if you have, if you've done like soccer or if you've done, you know, track and field or cross country or something like that, you are probably going to have a very easy time picking out your FTP. by RPE. Yeah, I found having been a swimmer, even though I was like a sprint swimmer, it was still pretty easy to find my FTP by feel, but I also had the benefit of having done a lot of swim training based on heart rate and heart rate zones and stuff like that anyway, so I kind of knew it both by feel and by heart rate and just, you know, yeah, you do that for 10 plus years. Oh, yeah. You take it for granted, right? It becomes so easy, you take it for granted, for sure. Yeah. So here's another thing to realize with FTP pacing and feeling. First of all, your heart rate is probably going to decouple, but that doesn't mean you got it wrong. So in a way, you can and cannot rely on heart rate, especially if it's like hot out, or if you had too much coffee, or you're dehydrated. All these things can affect it. But one of the things to watch for is that It feels like a muscular effort, and it's less of a lungs-burning effort. Like, your breathing will be hard, but it shouldn't be, like, running away from you. Yes, I think that's a good sense. Like, you should just be on that edge of control. Like, it's not, you shouldn't have to death grip the bars. You shouldn't, like, have your head down, like, counting down the minutes. Yeah, yeah. At the very least, you should be able to, if you're, like, basically untrained, You should probably be able to hold your threshold for 30 to 40 minutes. And every time I, because I miss threshold efforts, I really do enjoy them. Every once in a while, I'll go just do a 30 minute threshold effort, because that's about as long as I can hold it. But like off the couch, I can just be like, okay, I'm writing, I'm writing. And within about five minutes or even less, like I've got it nailed. I'm like, okay, here it is. and that's something that I think everybody should strive for in terms of like their RPE because knowing your FTP and feeling it out is way more useful than just setting training numbers because if it looks like it's dropping and you don't have an obvious explanation like you're sick or something like that, usually it means it's a sign of fatigue and so it's a great number to have in the back of your head or just kind of have in your back pocket to just use as a Kind of like a static marker for your fitness. Like if it's going up, that's fantastic. If it's going down, red flag. Yeah. I think the other thing that becomes useful with that is there's another old saying that like it never gets easier, you just go faster. So if you're well in tune with that feeling of like what FTP is, what threshold, things like that, that's going to help you like all the time, even though that power number or that speed or something is going to keep going up as you get fitter. Searching for that feeling is kind of like this reassuring sensation of, yes, I know what's going on, it feels natural, like you get used to it. For various reasons, I've started going on short jogs recently. Traitor! Yeah, and I also noticed that the other day, that like, even though I haven't seriously run in a long, long time, it was relatively easy to figure out where that Threshold was, and oh, I could go do this for 20 or 30 minutes, not blow up and die. Yeah. Even though it's a different sport. Yeah, it's so useful. Like, if you're hiking up a mountain, like, you can kind of ride that edge, even if you've never hiked up a mountain before. Like, if you've done a threshold effort, you know exactly what that feels like. Alright, how many years does it take to finally get to the point where you do easy rides easy enough? Well, if you've got a coach, hopefully a couple weeks and not years. Otherwise, it's you against your ego. Or people, or riding with other people on like a chill ride and then telling you to slow down and stop half-wheeling people on the coffee ride. Like, no, no, no. Well, actually, that's another thing I notice in newer cyclists. a lot is wondering if something that kind of feels like it sucks is normal. I mean, generally in sports training, there's plenty of things that kind of suck. Yeah, I know. How many traditions are we doing right now that we think are great? Are we going to look back on in like five years and be like, what is wrong with us? Yeah. So here's an experience I hear about very frequently, where somebody goes and rides with some of their friends, and the friends, number one, refuse to stop. or refuse to ride out of their preferred pace or power or something like that. When it's like, hey, I thought we were going to ride together. Yeah, come ride my pace, get on my wheel. And that pace is way too hard for you. And you're like, I don't know if I could do four hours like this. If they don't want to slow down, maybe those aren't people that you want to ride with all the time. Because if you're supposed to do an easy endurance ride, and you've got intervals the next day and that ride's a little too hard, it's going to spoil your intervals. And so, you know, like figure out if you want to go on that ride, I mean, avoid it if it's bad for you, but like if you want to go on that ride and you're having fun, yeah, go for it, sure. But it's not necessarily going to be the best to like do that all the time. You know, it's, you know, if you're, well, like we kind of did, we talked about the riding with people faster than you thing before already. Yeah. I get the sense, I feel like the riding with people faster than you, to me that feels like advice that comes from like a lot of team sports where there's skill where, oh, if you practice skills with people who are better than you, you will get better. And that is also true to a certain extent where it's like, but if you're say brand new at ice hockey or whatever and you're playing with people who are way... Better Than You, you're just gonna be a mobile traffic cone out there. You're not gonna learn anything, because it's gonna happen so fast, you're gonna fall over. Yeah, I've actually heard this from soccer players, where if they're playing with other people who are kind of mediocre, they play worse. But if you're playing with people who are really, really good, like as good as you or better, it elevates your game, because they're playing better. And I think that would definitely be the case in cycling on a team. Like if you've got good team tactics versus a team of people with like mediocre team tactics, like it will definitely affect how your race plays out. But yeah, like in group rides, yeah, I don't know about that one. Unless there are people who are like, yeah, we can ride a couple. Yeah, we can ride 20, 30 watts easier if that kind of is the right pace for you. And we'll stop whenever we need to stop for food and drink. And like, those are good people to ride with. Like, the number of people I coach where they've got like one or two people that they can ride with consistently with the right pace who always, you know, who want to take stops and, you know, aren't too worried about the things that are, you know, minutia and details. People who are good to ride with for you are worth their weight in gold. They really are. Yeah. Okay. What? What's up? Oh, I was just gonna say, also, it doesn't, like, you know, everyone likes the social aspect of group rides and stuff, but yeah, you shouldn't feel bad if you skip them, because it's not gonna be good for you. Like, you know, no one gets upset, like, people should not, your friends, Your actual friends should not get upset at you if you don't go to things because you have other priorities. So, yeah. Let's see. Here's somebody sharing their experience. I did two years of nothing but six days per week of VO2 and anaerobic capacity work. Yikes. Yikes. It went terribly. Never resting is not good. Oof, yeah. I mean. Do we even need to comment? Oh, God. I just... What? At that point, you wonder, it's like, were you like a shell of a human even in your day-to-day life? You're like going to the store, buying groceries, and you're just like, I can't think and walk normally. Just walking through brain fog like it's the Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah. I cannot imagine what that's like. And imagine just not ever... Not seeing any improvements, really. Yeah. Or thinking that this is how it's supposed to be? Is everyone else doing this? How does anyone stay in the sport if everything is like this? Well, actually, this reminds me of one of the things I have on the intermediate training mistakes, which is doing the training plan that you did while you were getting your noob gains and thinking that that's the right plan for you. Because when you're doing noob gains, you can like, if you're just off the couch, you can do sets of 10 for squats and have your FTP go up. Like, I'm not kidding. But once you become well-trained, okay, now we need to do some focus. And thinking that one is going to affect the other, or one is going to be the right plan later, so that might be where this came from. I started by doing a lot of anaerobic capacity and VO2s, and I was doing three days a week, and that went really well. I got all my noob gains there, so I decided to double down on this and do six days a week, and I did that for two years, just trust the process, bro. Oh, God. Few phrases irritate me more sometimes than that one. Trust but verify, I think. You know, it's like, what is that? Is that Reagan? Is that Reagan? I know it's got something to do with, like, nuclear inspections, I think. I don't know. I don't know anything about politics. Is that politics? Anyway. What's the worst, funniest, or most bizarre rookie training mistake you've seen someone make? Well, I think two years of six days a week of VO2s and energy capacity might take the cake. I knew a guy who, when he started, he was doing FTP tests every week. Oh, God. Like 20-minute, like a 20-minute FTP test every week and then adjusting. I know somebody who got an altitude tent in their first year of training. Wow, I want that kind of disposable income. I know, right? Well, other ways you can save income is don't get lab tests. I mean, we did a Wattstock episode on this years ago now, but the premise was that your power meter is more than enough information because like lab tests, they have to be done iteratively. They don't necessarily show you your training zones depending on how the test is done, especially depending on how the test is done, how it's interpreted. Like you could show, you could do a three-minute step test with lactate for the same person. and show it to four different people and you're going to get eight different interpretations. Yeah. I think to go along with that though, I think some people also will be interested in things like DEXA scans and stuff like that. And those also, it can be interesting if your goal is like body recomp or something like that, but you know, the question always has to be, yeah, what is actionable out of this data? If you're going to pay your hard-earned money for this thing, It better provide you that many dollars of utility, at least. Aside from just being cool, like, oh, I got this cool, like, you know, lab test done, look at this cool paper with these numbers. You know, if that's what you want, then fine. Yeah, actually, more often than not, when I've done a consult with somebody who's got lab data, like recent lab data, I will compare it to their power data. And oftentimes, the lab data... It does not, is not corroborated by the performance data. Like somebody's, you know, somebody's threshold is like, the largest delta I've ever seen between lactate tests and somebody's actual threshold is about 80 watts for FTP. Holy shit. That's going to be a bad day. You're going to have a bad time. I mean, as well. No, 60. It was 60 watts. But still, like 60 watts? Are you kidding me? You know what is crazier? It underestimated. Oh, no. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's better than the other way? Maybe? I mean, if you're doing threshold efforts at like 320 watts and your threshold's 380, you're going to be like, An hour, I could do this for like five. Yeah, exactly, yeah. I mean, I guess, I don't know. Given the choice between under and over, I guess you take under, but... Or is like five watts over is better? And that's the thing about those tests, is that sometimes somebody's just set up for a poor test. Some of my clients have gone out and gotten tests and the lactate data... Carb writes exactly what we see in the performance data, and exactly what their RPE data says. So, you know, trust but verify, I guess. Okay. We got two left. So, oh, here's one. So, not asking your coach to explain how workouts or gains translate to race scenarios or needs. Trust the process, bro. Yeah, I think that's pretty reasonable. Well, it always... Doesn't always necessarily translate to a race scenario. It's like, what, if you've got a five-hour endurance ride, what race scenario is five hours at a fairly easy pace? That's fair. Unless you're doing RAM. Right. In which case, it's like, okay, five hours at fairly easy pace times like, what, 30? Yeah. Anyway, so, yeah, I'd say... If you've got a coach and you're relatively new, yeah, ask your coach. Because one of the things about working with us, for instance, is that if you are not sure of something, it's always better to ask. And if you want to do something that's not necessarily in the plan or that you like, or if you feel like something is good for your fitness that's not necessarily in the plan that you did previously, ask. I've had plenty of clients be like, I feel like I race better when I do these types of intervals. And I'd be like, yeah, let's try it. And we toss them in and either it'll be great or it won't. Or it'll be kind of like- 50-50 chance. It'll work or it won't. Or it'll be kind of like, I can't tell that anything's changed. And then it's like, okay, well, then we have another aspect of the process to get into. But it's not necessarily like that you've just got to like shut up and do what's on the page. Well, at least not with us, anyway. So, okay, last one is, how crucial is it to do FTP tests and train to zones? Like, when should you stop guesstimating? Well, you should not FTP test once a week, I guess. Yeah. I think the important thing is getting, you know, their zones, and we talk about this a lot, but You want to be close. Like we said, 5 watts here and there in your zones doesn't matter. But like we said also just now, you don't want to be 80 watts off or something, like 30% off or 25% off. That's not going to be good for anyone. You're going to hate it either way, high or low. That's not going to be a good time. Yeah, I think dialing in your RPE to start with is, it's really crucial. So like, I mean, I guess not only that, maybe even to step further back, it's working on your pacing. Because this is something that I work on with a lot of my clients who are relatively new to structured training and who maybe don't have a huge history of endurance training. Like some people, if they used to run cross-country, and they're getting into training. It's like, I know I can say, I can describe an interval in a certain way and they're gonna go out and most likely they're gonna nail it the first time, which is great. And if they don't, it's like, okay, maybe my cueing was wrong. Maybe they've got an expectation in there that's a little off. Maybe they've got an assumption that we need to tackle that made them execute it not quite perfectly. But we're never usually more than like one or two workouts away from somebody absolutely nailing something. And so I think, I mean, God, Rory and I did a podcast a couple months ago about how basically how like training to your zones could steer you wrong. It most likely will if you decide, okay, I need to establish my FTP and then I'm going to do via to max intervals at 110 to 120% of FTP. I mean, if you're like me and Kyle, you should be doing them at like 140 to 150% of FTP because that's where the gains are. How long can you ride at 110% of FTP, Kyle, and not feel it? Oh, trained? Oh, like many minutes? I don't know. Like, if FTP is 30-ish at 110%, I don't know. probably at least 10. And the first five, you're not really going to be working that hard. You're like, oh, this is basically FTP, it feels like. Yeah, it could feel like FTP for the first five, eight minutes, for sure. I mean, I think what my... Way back when my FTP was 270, 280, I think I did an eight-minute climb. It was Mount Philo for those in New England. It was closed that day, so I got to go up the regular road, and then I went up the heading back road also, so I did kind of two similar-ish climbs. And they were about eight minutes each, and I did them at around 360 watts each for eight minutes. Nice. Yeah. So that means your FTP must be like 320 watts. Oh, God, I wish. I mean, at the time, my 20 minute was probably 290 to 300. Yeah. Yeah, I remember being around there, yeah, like FTP 280, 290 could easily do over 300 watts for 20 minutes. You know, I wish it was, I wish those rules were, you know. Okay, so maybe to more address this question directly, it should be more like thinking about how you as a rider, how your personal power profile looks, and thinking more about what effective training looks like rather than thinking about, you know, what Training to Zones. Because if you just think about zones, okay, I'm going to ride at 120% of FTP, and that's going to raise my VO2 max. For some people, it absolutely will. For people like you and me, it absolutely will not. And so maybe we need to do one of these days a kind of like a dummy's guide of training zones or focus or something like that. 

It's a good idea. We'll think about it. We'll put that on the very, very, very, very ever-expanding list of podcast topics. I'm scrolling down. We're going to start becoming like an every-other-day podcast to get to all these topics. Oh, my God. Just single lines for ideas. I think we've got 10 pages of them. Yeah. Anyway. All right, so any concluding thoughts we have on this topic before we let everybody go for today? Yeah, I mean, I think everyone, you know, no one should feel bad about their new mistakes. You know, we've all made them. You know, hopefully you've made it to the point in cycling. If you're experienced now, you can have a good laugh, a good chuckle. I hope that person who is doing nothing but anaerobic capacity and VO2 max can always laugh at it now, and not just like cringe and like... No, I cringe at mine still. Wait, Kyle, we didn't... You and I haven't talked about what were our biggest noob mistakes that we made, so I can immediately tell you what mine was, but what was yours? That's a good question. Do you need a second? Yeah, I think... I'll tell you mine. Yeah, maybe you need a second. Okay. All right, so mine was... So that person who said that they were doing six days a week of VO2s and anaerobic capacity, it wasn't me, but I had that double-down mentality of I'm going to work harder, and that's going to make me faster. And so instead of doing two, three hard days per week, I was trying to do like four or five. Gosh. And not only that, but I was doing really hard efforts. Like I basically picked the hardest shit I could out of training and racing with a power meter out of the workouts in the back. And I remember one very distinctly, the very last one I did where I went, fuck this, this is stupid. I will go find it because it started with eight by one minute max efforts. Oh God. I think it was a kitchen sink workout. Yeah. I don't know. 

Good question. What did I do? I mean, I think early on, I did a lot of just like riding around. You know, I feel like I was relatively lucky in that I had a longer background in swimming before, so I knew that just riding around all the time was not the secret to success and that I would have to do interval training and things like that. I don't know, I spent a long time though just kind of doing whatever and you know I knew enough kind of how a season should be programmed but the first however many years I like didn't have a coach and I was just doing I was just picking doing the kind of classic thing of like okay I know here are some workouts that I like to do and then I know that they're doing something and so I'll just pick them kind of at random to go do and not really putting too much thought into it. and, you know, showing up to races being like, okay, I can, I'm not in no shape, but not having really thought about what it actually took aside from, oh, if I do some hard workouts, do some longer rides, do some easier rides, it'll be okay, you know? And for some people, that's great. I mean, it certainly, it certainly wasn't enough to like burn you out though, right? Right, right, right. I think I knew enough not to burn myself out, but also like- Because swimming did that. Wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't progressing really, just, you know, you kind of, because yeah, you do this workout, you know, you go, okay, I'm going to do a VO2 max workout this week, but wasn't doing like a VO2 max block, and so yeah, it would go okay, but then how do you know that you're actually getting better at that because you're not consistently doing it, you know? Yeah. And you're just kind of picking workouts that are effective, but could be much more effective done. in a at all programmed manner instead of just like looking at a list and being like, what do I feel like doing today? I remember it sounds like initially when I started riding and trying to train and get faster, I didn't know what structured training was. So what I would do is I would go out on the bike path and I would ride as hard as I could after every like road crossing. and then I would kind of taper off because I would get tired, obviously. And then by the time I hit the next one, I was kind of like going slow and I was like, okay, that was a hard ride and that's all it was. I had a hard ride and I had an easy ride and I would kind of like go kind of, it was basically like not even as good as a group ride, basically. I actually remember doing something similar like that when I was really young at like my first First couple, like, organized swim practices, you know, and you're like, I mean, it was also young, so understandable, but you show up and you're like, what am I supposed to do? Do I just go hard all the time? Like, clearly not. Like, there's clearly, like, in swim workouts, again, just like cycling workouts, they can be written out, so you kind of know what you're going to have to do, and it's just like, yeah, not everything is all out. There's a warm-up, there's technique work, things like that. Yeah, learning. It's a rude awakening. Speaking of learning, I found this workout that made me put my bike down. Also, by the time I got to the point of doing this workout, which I was doing indoors on the trainer in February or March or something like that, when I bailed out of this workout, I didn't at the time really realize it, but I had over-trained myself so hard, I would not actually really ride a bike longer than like a 20, 30-minute easy commute for like six or seven months. Might have been longer. Might have been even more. So I was really burned out. I felt horrible for months and months and months. And because that's how stupid I was about training. So the workout was warm-up, one hour of endurance at 56 to 75% of FTP. Main set. 75% of FTP as warm-up? I think I skipped that part, if I recall correctly. It's a four-hour workout. By the way, this is lactate threshold, tempo and sweet spot endurance, followed by eight by one minute, all out with one minute recovery intervals. Yikes. I mean, 15 minutes cruise at tempo, 75 to 85% of FTP, four by 10 minutes. Threshold at 5 RPM higher than normal, with 10 minute recovery intervals, then 45 minutes of sweet spot, and then 15 minutes of easy riding cool down. It does sound like someone just pulled stuff out of a hat, like wrote down things. Yeah. And just... I didn't finish the 8x1 minute set. I think I got to like number four, and I was like, my soul has left my body. God. and I just, I got off the bike. I mean, I remember trying to do, yeah, I'm glad I stopped though. I remember early on trying to do the, the early original edition of like the Sufferfest Revolver, which was 16 by one minute, all out, one minute rest and just being like, and I was doing it like with a group and we were, it was when I was in grad school and so like Brown and RISD cycling teams, the winner, we're all together riding our trainers and some of the really like slow twitchers like doing fine and I'm just. Fucking dying. Absolutely dying. 16 kilos in a row. Like, after the third or fourth one, you're like, you don't pedal at all during the offs, and the ons, you're like, pedaling slightly over threshold, you know? Like, as much as you can muster. But that's it. You're like, I'm breathing hard because I haven't recovered from the first three I did where I buried myself, and now I'm just like... just able to get up to speed in a minute before it's stopping, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the cueing on workouts like that is critical. This is like more of a coaching perspective, but how you describe what you should do matters a lot. Like eight by one minute all out with one minute rests, like, I mean, all out, I am really gonna go for it. I mean, and like at the time, inside on the trainer, all out for me was probably like 700 watts or something like that. And my second effort was probably like 300. Right, yeah. And if it were like, you know, one minute on, one minute off, like times eight, like as hard as you can for the set and finish the set, that's a very different pacing strategy. Maybe I would even negative split it. Extremely differently. Yeah. But at least those first three, you're very apprehensive. Yeah. Apprehensive as in vomiting. It's like the, I mean, that's the kind of thing when you get like 30-30s, right? It's like, there's a different style of 30-30s if it's 15 minutes of them. Yes. Versus four or five. Yeah. Although the first set of 30-30s I got was... All Out. So I went as hard as I could for that first effort, but the instruction was stay seated, so I couldn't necessarily like really blast a sprint. And it kept me from going hard enough that I couldn't finish the set. But after that first one, I realized, oh, there's a repeatable all out where I can finish the set, even though that wasn't necessarily the cue. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna like just... I'm going to have a little agency over myself and decide to not actually go all out, even though I was told to, and I'm going to make sure that I'm not dead for the end. Yeah. In swimming, it was always like, yeah, you had to quickly learn some of that, too. Because, yeah, different, especially, I feel like, because swimming is sort of a team environment. You have lots of people doing the same workout. So yeah, all out can mean different things when you're working with 30 people and you're telling 30 people to do the same workout, right? Yeah. And if you're telling sprinters versus aerobic diesels to go all out, yeah, very, very, very different sets. Okay, cool. So, all right, those are mistakes that noobs make that we all have made. And yeah, like you said, nobody should be really ashamed of having made these mistakes. And if you're making any of these at the moment, you are well within your own power to change that. But if you feel like something's going well, and you want to ride that out as long as you can, by all means, keep doing that. It's not necessarily that like, oh, I'm doing polarized training and the gains just don't stop. Please keep doing that until the gains stop and take a rest and then see if you can do it again. I mean, it's not like you have to be beholden to any particular training style. It's like whatever works. I mean, that's what's empirical about empirical cycling. If it works, regardless of whether or not I know why, we're going to use it. So... So if you've got any questions on this, feel free to reach out to me, shoot me an email at empiricalcycling at gmail.com or reach out to me on Instagram. I hope nobody has my number and can text me, but Instagram is basically the same thing at this point. So yeah, if you want to support the show. because you are enjoying it. Please share the podcast. That goes a long way. I love seeing all of that. Word of mouth goes a long way also. Thank you, everybody, for spreading the word and saying nice things about the podcast. If you would like to hire us for anything, shoot me an email at empiricalcycling at gmail.com for consultations and coaching inquiries. And if you want to donate to the show because we are ad-free, your donations keep the lights on here. They pay for our hosting fees and whatnot, and we really appreciate that. All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Yeah, have a good one. Enjoy the Olympics. Watch all the sports. Yay, especially track cycling.