Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore, joined as always by Rory Porteous. Well, not always. We had Kyle in for the last episode. We got Rory in for this one. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And if you are enjoying the podcast, please consider subscribing, especially if you're new here. And if you are returning, which I assume most of you are, thanks so much for coming back. We love having you back. And if you want to support the podcast, you can always share the podcast. That goes a long way. Thank you so much for all of that. And if you want to give it a nice rating and a review, wherever you listen to podcasts, those go a long way. Appreciate all of those. And if you want to donate to the show, because we are completely ad-free and we are totally free content, we have no advertisers whatsoever, nor ever will we. I've turned everybody down. You can make a donation at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. Thank you so much for all the donations. This has been a big month for that. I super, super appreciate it. And if you would like to kind of do our ultimate Patreon, in a manner of speaking. You can always become a coaching or consultation client, and we've got nice rates for students and professional athletes, and shoot me an email at empiricalcyclingatgmail.com if you would like to start a conversation about getting a coach with us. And also up on the Instagram, it's where I do weekend AMAs, up on the Instagram stories, at empiricalcycling, and give me a follow over there. And if you want to ask questions for the podcast, that's the place to do it. We'll have a purple background for the podcast questions, and we're going to get to a whole bunch. By the end of this podcast, because I put it up right before the podcast, and oh boy, do we have some questions. So today, this episode has kind of been prompted by a lot of feedback I've heard from VO2 Max Blocks. And I thought we would not only just talk about that, but I wanted to discuss good ways to incorporate new types of training because One of the big things that I see people doing is, first of all, and this is way out of my lane, by the way, so this may be Patrick's come back on and tell me I'm wrong about all this, but it seems like whenever you see somebody really successful in sport and you hear about what training they're doing, you think, if I do that, I'm going to get really fast too. And usually that's not the case at all, unless you are also similarly gifted, in which case that's... Absolutely awesome. But I think the first thing is that the shiny new thing is alluring, and I've certainly been victim to it myself. It's one of the reasons whenever a new training method comes along, I want to try it. I usually try it on myself before I make anybody else do it. But the other thing here is that I don't think people necessarily need to do the shiny new thing if what you're doing is working. And I think that I want to get that out of the way first, because this is not necessarily going to be us talking about how you should do other training methods. It's if you want to, and we'll discuss why you might want to try new stuff. So Rory, why don't we start with... Why you shouldn't do Zone 2 training. That's basically what you're trying to say here, isn't it? I have said no such thing. Play the tape back. No, let's discuss first, when should somebody consider trying something new? So over the last while, I've turned my default question whenever people ask for training advice is, why are you doing this and what did you expect to happen? And I don't mean it in a mean way of... You're going to find out what are somebody's goals, and are they going to work towards those goals? What was your thinking? What did you think was going to be the outcome here? Usually you find out people didn't really think too far past the intervals themselves. But I think a lot of people, this is kind of reflecting back on that first podcast you and I did on training plateaus, is understanding what it is you want to accomplish and how... a type of interval or a block of intervals or, you know, just your whole training outlook in general is going to facilitate the sort of improvement that you want to achieve. And I think an awful lot of the problem with the sort of, it's going to sound harsh and I'm going to call it trend chasing. I don't mean it to sound so mean, but the problem with that sort of trend chasing look is that you're chasing the the input and not necessarily focusing on whether or not it's the right thing for your output. Yeah, well, because I think that this is something that I've got on my little notepad here is going to be talking about how to make sure that what you're doing is actually doing what you want it to and ways to potentially adjust to get closer towards those outcomes. But I think, yeah, I think the shiny new thing, Is, well, is, I mean, maybe this is assumptive? Is that a word? Maybe I'm making an assumption here, but, you know, is it just that people want something easy? It's like, if you want to lose weight, okay, go keto, or you just need to increase your step count, or you just need to, you know, follow this simple diet rule, like, okay, today, like, well, for the next three weeks, you're going to eat nothing but Greek yogurt, and you're going to lose, like, eight kilos, or some stupid thing like that. So, like, a simple rule towards a certain outcome, like, is alluring. Like, okay, just ride zone two, and it's going to clear all your lactate, and you're going to be really fucking fast. People want numerical interval. Like, that's ultimately where this is You and Kyle. America levels. But that is something I think is less of an issue now. I think the cycling community that thinks about training is a lot smarter about this than they maybe were a decade ago. But that is ultimately what we're talking about is people heard that X, Y, and Z will do Will give you more FTP, and so you're going to focus on doing X, Y, Z. And that's ultimately why 2x20 just became the FTP workout that everyone did for years and years and years. It was because they heard that's an FTP workout, and logically that means your FTP will go up. And that's kind of getting at maybe what we're hinting at towards here of how do you decide whether that's the right thing for you to actually do and whether or not it's going to actually give you the outcome. that you want. Yeah, I think that starting with just a regular old gap analysis is the best way to start, where you look at what are your strengths and weaknesses, and what characteristics of fitness do you need in order to do well at your target event or events. So for instance, me right now, I have massive sprint watts, and I have not so much aerobic watts, and I would need to you know put down the sprint stuff for a while and increase the aerobic stuff if I wanted to like go race a crit or something like that um fortunately for me I don't really want to at the moment but in the future if ever I want to hop in another crit they still look like a lot of fun I miss them um that's what I'm going to do so it's like where are you at now and what do you need in the future and if your training is not getting you towards what you want to accomplish then that's when you would Try something new. So for instance, if you are looking at, okay, in the next couple of years, I want to like do well at this hill climb, I need good 20 minute power, so I need to raise my VO2 max, and probably a little bit of anaerobic capacity, and really adjust my power to weight. Okay, you now have three things that you need to work on. You need to work on your aerobic ceiling, you need to work on your... Bodyweight, and potentially that's a minor factor, depending on how slim you are starting at, and maybe anaerobic capacity. And so you would want to think about muscle mass and top end and that kind of stuff. And now you've got three aspects of training, and now you can fold this into a periodization plan around your goal events. And so it seems pretty simple at first, but if your training is, for instance, If you're doing a lot of FTP training, you're doing a lot of threshold intervals, and your 20-minute power is not going up, that should tell you something that this style of training is not going where you want it to go based on your gap analysis. I hope that makes sense. Yeah. Like, to give the criterium example, you did a podcast and a Training Peaks article on you're training too hard for criteriums, and that entire article is an example of a gap analysis and how to spot where the deficiency actually lies. Like, is your deficiency aerobic conditioning that's going to make sure that you get to the end of the crit fresh enough to do the peak watts you know you can do, or are you already getting to the end of the crit pretty fresh and you just actually need the peak watts? And, you know, when it comes to that race outcome view, like, that's how you'd make that sort of analysis. And, you know, a crit's probably about as complex as it's ever going to get in terms of trying to spot where those deficiencies lie. The rest of it is just going to end up being, what do you do in training normally? Yeah, crits, track races, cross-country mountain bike, short track, that kind of stuff definitely- Very intermittent things. Yeah, intermittent stuff. And you can do intermittent training as a specific type of training. And the question is really just like, and this is going to be kind of going to interval structure, but like, what is your dose? So if you are going to try to increase your repeated sprint power, is what you're doing- going to improve that. Because there's really no fingerprint, I guess we could call it, in your power profile, you can't look at somebody's 20-minute power and go, wow, they've got really good repeated sprintability. I mean, that's not related. You also cannot look at somebody having a good 20-minute and good one-minute, for instance, and go, wow, they've got really good repeated sprintability. I've got clients who have got a relatively similar power profile, and one of them is amazing and can... repeatedly do like, you know, I can't even tell you the number of watts. Very, very large watts repeatedly for 15 seconds on, 15 seconds off for like, you know, 40, 60 minutes. And the other one is probably 200 watts lower than that, let's say. So, yeah, everybody's a little bit different. And so when you are thinking about dose and response, you want to make sure that you've got a way to properly measure your Training Outcome. And this is all groundwork you need to have in place in order to figure out if your training's working and if you need to try something else. Yeah. Nothing to add to that. Oh, okay. Great. So there's our baseline. And if what you are doing is working and you have data to show that it's working, Keep doing that. Don't mess with success. One of the things that I've noticed in consultations a lot of the time is if somebody – well, one of the first things I really think about is does this person need some tweaks and modifications to what they're already doing, which seems to be working pretty well? Or does somebody really need to overhaul everything they're doing? And usually – A lot of time is kind of in between. Some things need overhauling. A lot of other things are done really well. But it's a consideration. So when somebody starts to try a new training method, and this is I've learned from consultations and discussions and forums and discords and all that stuff, it seems like everybody goes all or nothing. Zone 2 training is the new thing, right? Okay, I'm going to do nothing but Zone 2 training. for the next six months, and hopefully I'm going to come out the other side of that just an aerobic beast. Is this where I get to hate on polarized? If you'd like to. Because that's effectively what this is, is people heard, oh, there's this one method that some Norwegians do or something. They tried on cross-country skiers. And we should do all our training in that style all year, despite the fact that that's not what that mode is actually about. But it's, you know, people heard about a thing and they decided to turn it into their entire plan in much the same way as, you know, people hear about VO2Max work and they decide, I'm going to do two to three months of this, I'm going to do it at least once a week, every week of the year. It's that all or nothing view of training where people really need to be much better at, like, stepping back from Again, like the intervals themselves and take that much higher level view of, you know, what does a week look like? What does your three week block look like? How do these blocks all interconnect? Doing that thing that I've made up on the spot in a previous podcast of when I plan weeks out for people, I'm thinking about where the rest is first and foremost, because that is just naturally. What days here, based on the information have you given me, is going to actually be a good chance to relax a bit and feel good. And I think especially with people that try to do this all-or-nothing approach to making the thing work for them, they don't take into account all the other parts of training, building a plan to actually make it a success. It could be that they execute it on it right. But they just don't give themselves the opportunity to actually benefit from it. I think one of the takeaways from what you just said is be ready to adjust. Because if you start down the path of, let's say you're like, man, my VO2 Max isn't going up and I'm doing a VO2 Max workout once a week or maybe twice a week. So I'll be like Wednesday and Saturday, I'll do my VO2 Max workouts and it's not going up, nothing's happening. All right, maybe I need something more drastic. Maybe I need a focus block. If you undertake something like that, based on the fact that you think you need a larger stimulus, first, like you said, plan out your rest. But also second, if you realize that you're not getting enough rest between your hard workouts, adjust, get more. We have had clients where, specifically speaking of VAT2Max blocks, somebody looks like they're in a good spot to do a focused block, and we start doing it, and we don't see the response that we're expecting. And, you know, with a handful of adjustments, tweaks in terms of rest and, you know, maybe volume or, you know, nutrition or something like that, a lot of times people don't eat enough on these things. And, you know, even interval execution, once we kind of make all those tweaks and we pull all those levers in such a way that we think, okay, this should work now. If it still isn't working, we're going to pull the plug and we're going to try something else because clearly, you know, we've got our inputs and outputs. Ready to Go. And if we're not seeing the output that we want, we don't want to waste any more time. And this is something that I think a lot of people will wonder themselves is how long should I go before I pull the plug on this? And on the short end, I would say depending on how fast you know that you will see a response, a week. Like for instance, if you decide that you've got a gravel race coming up and you're like, I'm going to do a TTE block and I'm going to do twice a week, I'm going to add time to my sweet spot and threshold intervals, then maybe I'll do a long gravel ride, five, six hours if my gravel ride is going to be eight. I'm going to do five or six hours, I'm going to get my nutrition in order, I'm going to work on my logistics, get all that stuff ready to go, get my pacing under my belt. And you are not adding interval time. Between your two threshold workouts. What do you do now? Do you bail out? Usually, the first variable, like you said, rest. What I would do is I would nix one of those workouts. Or if you've got like a group ride or something else that's kind of hard, or you've got any level of stress off the bike, maybe you're not eating enough, we can tackle all of those questions. What is affecting your recovery? And maybe it's sleep. So go down the list, nutrition, sleep, stress, and then workout proximity and intensity. Go down the list, and then once you've crossed everything out and you get down to adjusting your workouts, now you know what you need to do. Maybe you need more rest instead of more training. I've got a couple of examples of this right now. So I've got someone who's struggling with some intervals at the moment. He is managing the interval at the start, albeit in a great deal of discomfort, for reasons that we're still trying to work out, and I think we're slowly honing in on. But I've not added any time to his workouts. I've been saying, right, we're going to adjust the workout such that we're going to get the same training dose if he were to complete it. But our goal is just to complete it. We need to try and work out where the discomfort is coming in and remove as many variables as we can to try and isolate. We've gone through things like, has it been temperature? Has it been fueling stress off the bike? Bike fit is now the main suspect. And I don't want him to necessarily progress each time we try and get this work out. I just want him to feel good. Because the goal here is not actually the progression, it's the diagnosis of why someone feels the way they do riding a bike. The other example I'd give is I just had someone come through a VO2 max block, and much like Cole said, one of the things we're doing is we're monitoring some data that we can't talk about here to see are we seeing the sort of benefit that we expect to see as we go through the block. For anyone that's been coached by us, you'll know there's some secret numbers that if the number goes up, good things are happening. And this guy got to his third week workout number one, number was way down, block over, done, told him, can it, we're recovering at this point because we've reached that limit of what's actually going to end up being possible because You know, I could have given him the two workouts that were already programmed in. But chances are, that number wasn't going to get any bigger at the end of it. The thing he needed most is rest. Yeah, and I think this is, I think it's less common than it used to be. But I still to this day know people who, when things are not going well, will want to double down. And sometimes it's their own clients. You know, the call is coming from inside the house, you know. And we've got to sit down and go, okay, well, clearly, I think you're tired. And if you don't think you're tired, well, then we're going to figure out a way to objectively measure whether you are tired or not. We're going to give you a workout that I think you should be able to accomplish right now. And if you do it, and it's not pulling teeth and everything's great, okay, maybe you're right. But if you don't successfully get through this workout, I'm right. And maybe it's a little bit in between. And a little bit in between means you should still get some extra rest. Because why keep beating the dead horse or the mostly dead horse until it's dead? Your goal is to do the best, most effective training you can with the time and energy you have available. It's not to see how much hard training you can get away with. We are training for Better Fitness. We are not training to win an exercise contest. Like nobody gets medals for training the most and the hardest. Yeah, I think that's the thing you often see whenever people are thinking something's not working is unfortunately they double down and it's just like, oh, if I work harder, if I do the intervals harder, if I do more of them. Depending on what you're doing, one or both of those could be extremely bad for you. Like we've talked in the past about how if you're trying to do TTE work, a good sign of fatigue is that you are either unable to do your current TTE or you can only do up to your current TTE. You can't do that progressive part where you do just that little bit more to make the benefit. And the answer there isn't. Do more to force the issue. It's recognising during the workout that, oh, this is just not the day. I needed to come into this a lot fresher than I did. I think the danger a lot of people fall into is they set out and they're like, I've got to do my 60 minutes of FTP for this workout because this is the one that I'm going to finish off the block on. And they just kill themselves trying to do it in reality. You know, you can just get halfway through that workout, recognize it's not going to happen and just, you know, 50 minute TTE, 60 minute TTE, you know, it's not a massive difference in terms of like, you know, the end goal of what your block was. Your block goal is to increase TTE, it's not to get to 60 minutes. And, well, and at the same time, as you go through a block and you are seeing your fitness improve, I mean, in week three, if you've been training kind of at the limit of your capacity, you may see some really, really good fitness, but at the same time, you have accumulated fatigue. And there's a temptation to be greedy. And I, even in coaching, I fall victim to this once in a while, where I'm like, okay, maybe we can get another week. But I'll usually tell somebody, or I'll try to always tell somebody, this is a little more than I think you need. If we're being greedy about it, let's try this. And if it doesn't go well, well, then you've got plenty of time to recover. We are not in, this is not an emergency situation. And that's not a time when I would do that is when somebody's got like, you know, two weeks to be in shape for a race. So like, you know, so not only that, but like, yeah, having those short and long term goals in your periphery always makes a lot of sense. And, you know, this kind of comes back to setting your Baseline, what do I need to do? How do I periodize it? And then as you get closer to your event, there's less and less training that you can effectively cram into your body and still get there in good shape. Because when you really, really overdo it, you're going to get to your event and just be like, get me through this. I'm so cooked. Yeah, Lee, you mentioned at the start of the podcast about if you're trying to work out what you need to work on, you do a gap analysis. of what you've done so far, the evidence you've got in front of you. The other thing you should probably do when you're planning out a block of training is understand, like, where are the ways that training can go wrong? So with, you know, something like the TT extension work, especially if you're doing, like, sweet spot where you can really rack up the hours on it, your limitation is probably going to be feeding. It's relatively unlikely if you're doing it well and you're getting, you know, All the endurance riding intensity outside of that right, that you're going to end up being hyper fatigued unless there's, you know, a million other things going wrong in your life alongside things like sleep. But your main limiter is going to be things like food. If you're doing something like the VO2 max work or if you're doing a lot of anaerobic capacity stuff, you're starting to introduce new causes of disruption to what would normally be a good training block because those are workouts for you. could actually over fatigue yourself from the intervals. The feeding problem still exists, particularly if you're a high volume athlete, but you have to think, you know, we organize everything usually in a three on one off weekly structure, but that doesn't mean that, you know, you're guaranteed to have three perfect weeks in which everything fits in. Sometimes you only get two weeks, depending on what it is you're doing or depending on like, you know, how old are you? If you're 60 years old. I think if you can manage three weeks on, one week off, you're probably doing pretty damn well in terms of the rest of your life and managing the rest of your stress. So think about what it is you're trying to do in your training and what could go wrong and know in advance, here's how I'm going to adjust if that thing happens. Do I need to take a day off and just get my sleep back and do it? Do you need to recognise that you're not progressing at the rate you should? Lower the number of workouts that you were planning to do throughout that block. Were you planning to do two a week, as I usually say? How about we do one a week for the rest of it and just see how that gets on? You know, think about how you're going to mitigate the problems that you can actually encounter and that, like, more than any particular miracle interval or Training Plan or whatever the fuck is going to actually make the difference because that's often what a coach is actually doing is working out how can I make sure you get to the end of the block? How can I make sure you get to the end of the week? And what am I going to do to make sure that if something went wrong here, I know what I'm going to adjust later on? And if you can get good at that, then you don't need to pay us to do it. So let's talk about How would one dip a toe into the water of a new training thing? Like, I think when it comes to intervals, like you said, once a week, well, not just doing one interval set a week, but like, if you, okay, here's a good example. If you haven't done a VO2 max workout in several months, if you Go right to doing two months straight of VO2max work, which I do not recommend, by the way. A block, one to three weeks. Two, two and a half is typical with fatigue. Sony makes it all the way to the end of three weeks. That's awesome. Et cetera, et cetera. Not better. Important to note. Not automatically better that you managed to make three weeks. Yeah, it's just, it's just, it says a lot of other things. Let's not get into it. So what I would do is I would, if you're like, man, I need to raise my VO2 max. Like my FTP is kind of back where it was last year when I was kind of, you know, you get the noob gains out of the way, increasing your FTP by doing FTP workouts. When that stops working and now your FTP workouts only increase your TTE, okay, I should do some VO2 max work. Like unless you are super, super well trained and you have done a lot of hard interval training in your past, what I would do is I would start incorporating VO2 max work once per week. and see what kind of response you get from that, in which case you go through two workouts. You go through a workout like, let's say, Tuesday or Wednesday, week one, Tuesday or Wednesday, week two. If you see progression, fantastic. Stick with it. If you decide, okay, I've got a little time crutch going on, maybe I'll try it twice a week. Okay, twice a week, maybe you've got like another temple workout or a group ride or something like that on top of that. That's probably fine. For 80% of people, 75, 80%, I think that'd probably be fine. And see if you are seeing some improvements there. And if you are, at that point, I would, like, cast your chips and get out. Like, don't eke up on what your body's possibly capable of recovering from. If you have a good routine and you are seeing the improvements that you want, stick to it. Don't tempt fate. Yeah, like, so before we started recording, I was telling Cole about what I've been doing in training. And I'm doing VL2Max work, and I've done one workout. Well, technically, one day of workout. And it worked. Oh boy, did it work. And I'm thinking I might not do another one for the rest of the year. But like, that was partly... My exploring something new that I knew was going to suck, and oh boy did it suck for two days. But my exploration there was not, I set out a weekly plan and I was going to get my two days in a week for the next three weeks. My plan was, I'm going to do this once and see how it goes. And it went great. And I might do it again next week. To be clear, you did one double. I did one day of doubles, and oh boy, do I not recommend them, but also they were fantastic. Well, in terms of training effect, yeah, they are great, but that's one of the things that I've dealt with in my clients as well, because most people have a pretty good muscular response, and so TTE work, endurance work is fairly straightforward, but when it comes to VO2max work, because of the fatigue that it incurs, You've got to pay that debt. And some people rack up a little less debt than others. Some people rack up a very large amount of debt. And you have to be very, very careful of that. So I've got a couple of clients who are a little older. They're in their 50s. All of them in their 50s? Yeah, I think they're all in their 50s. And for some of them, we will do VO2Max work, like we'll try it once a week. and we'll see if we get a response. If we do, I am, I'm hyped about that. I'm very happy. And if we, for instance, don't see a response, okay, maybe we'll try twice a week, maybe three times a week. Maybe we'll try a back-to-back. Maybe we'll try like a Tuesday, Wednesday, something like that. And if I'm seeing a response, I'm going to be happy. And if we're not seeing a response, I'm going to start adjusting. One client specifically I'm thinking of where we started with the once-off, then we moved up to trying a block with one day of back-to-backs. And I didn't see a response at all. And he also was like, I don't feel like this is doing anything. And so what we did was we moved to doing a double every once in a while. And that worked really well. As opposed to being like, all right, well, if three VO2max workouts in a week don't work, we're going to go to four. No, like, because what I saw was that the fatigue burden when we were doing it every once in a while was fine. But when we started to do a couple in a week, all of a sudden, very not fine. So what I wanted to do was, all right, let's try this VO2max stimulus. We need a little more, but we can't do... You know, three hard workouts in a week like that. So I'm going to stick it to one, see if we can get two workouts in a day, and then we've got like three or four days to recover after that. And maybe we'll do it again the next week or the week after that, but I'm going to be very careful about where I put that. So that's a strategy that I've successfully employed with one person in particular. Is it right for you? I don't know, but it's worth a shot. And that's kind of where you're at at the moment, Rory. is if you tried to do another double tomorrow, you'd probably be like, fuck that. Yeah, for additional context for people, I did my first non-holiday in just 20 a week in my life, and I feel great, which is why I took today off because I do not feel great. That's why you've been eating cookies during this podcast. Yeah, eating cookies, guzzling down coffee. And I'm on a diet, over-caffeinated and under-fed. just dreaming of cookies, Rory's over here, like, and he's like, oh, they're chocolate covers, like, okay, so did all that kind of make sense in terms of, in terms of my logic of how to, how I incorporated VO2 max work with, with that one person? Yeah, I think the other thing here is, like, in addition to saying not, don't dive head first in, don't be afraid to try something. Yeah. Maybe it is a miracle interval, but maybe you should only do it once and see how it goes. What's the benefit of it? Did you actually feel like you got something out of it? Well, Rory, would you say that after having done hardly any Viotamax intervals in a while, doing two feels like a miracle to you? A little bit. My fourth actual workout of the year. Actually, that's probably one of the other things I want to address before we get to questions, which is complicating variables. You've got inputs, which are your workouts, and you've got outputs, and you're hoping that you are getting your certain aspects of fitness towards where they need to go. So especially with something like VO2max, The complicating factor is anaerobic capacity. Because a lot of the time, doing VO2max work can improve anaerobic capacity. And if you just measure VO2max or anaerobic capacity with like five-minute power, that's three, four, five-minute power, something like that, it has both an aerobic component and an anaerobic component. And if you are improving one, You want to make sure that you're improving the one and not actually getting any – well, it's not like you shouldn't improve your anaerobic capacity too, but it's like if you think you got a whole bunch of aerobic watts, but let's say your training response isn't that great in terms of VO2 max, but your five-minute power goes up 30 watts. But your 20-minute power is the same and your FTP is the same, relatively speaking. Like, that's a sign that it may not have really improved your VO2 max. So that's why I'm saying you've got to tease out these variables in terms of, oh, is that cat going to make a noise on the podcast? She's crying at the bedroom door if she wants to get in. Is that Peanut? This is Peanut. She might say something. All right. Or not, she'll fuck off. She's leaving. Okay. Bye, Peanut. Okay, so... So you've got to be careful with your variables. Because let's say you're going out and you're doing like three by eights. And you're like, all right, I'm going to increase my VO2 max. I think there's a much smaller component of anaerobic capacity for like a 20 minute effort. And so I would rather use more like a 10 to 20 minute effort than I would like, well, 10 is still kind of a little, eh. But Rory, you've actually got a massive 20 minute. 30-minute relative to your FTP. So how would you approach it? I don't understand it. Meaning, how would you approach it for yourself is a question that we might use to address this, in terms of teasing out whether you've actually improved your VO2max or your anaerobic capacity. So I'm fortunate in that The common joke I make to people is that I have left side of the bell curve fitness, right side ability to suffer. I've also got right side ability to just self-pace myself for any duration. So my strategy is I go and do what should be a sweet spot interval and I just feel out the benefit that I've gotten. And I just have an innate sense of where FTP ends up sitting. So on Saturday I did an interval. I did the thing I make fun of in this podcast of I went out and I just tried to see how long I could set up 300 watts for. But I learned that my FTP is not 300 watts yet. Is your endurance pace 200 watts like everybody else's? Whether their FTP is 250 watts or 350 watts? I will say yes, but I'll ask no one to look at my Strava. But I was able to pack out there just based on like understanding my breathing, that my FTP is maybe 290 at the moment, because 300, I wasn't dead by the end of the sort of 15 minute climb that I did, but my breathing was more than it should be. So if you are a similarly anaerobically gifted athlete, I would say the number one thing that you're unfortunately going to have to do is get really good at pacing long intervals and understanding where I'll say inflection point, not in the sense of like a WKO model, but in terms of understanding where your RPE shifts from, you know, I could do this for 30 minutes to I can do this for 15 minutes. You're talking about filling out FTP. Yeah, like the thing we always talk about, but Yeah, if you are at that top end, the danger is if you do do a 10-minute interval, you can properly crush yourself to death. And also, I think for 10-minute intervals, you'll know it's too much. Well, people like you and me, and also Kyle, I don't know, how do we have three podcast hosts with the same similar power profile and ability? I'm telling you, we need to stream that ramp test. Oh, God. Well, when we get a million lessons, I'm game. How's that? That'll be our million lessons. Or empirical cycling is 10 years old next year, so may do it to celebrate that. Have everybody do a real test. How many last 10 minutes each? Oh, God. Okay, so here's one of the other things that I would do, especially for like via to max work and stuff like that. Because I think FTP, threshold, TTE, that's all fairly straightforward. Check your like 30 second to one minute to check anaerobic capacity. And make sure you test it fresh, really fresh. Because one of the things that I think happens with a lot of the people I start coaching is I ask them to test their one minute and they PR it massively. And they're like, wow. I already got a PR. Thanks, coach. Yeah, I didn't do anything. I just put the test in the right spot when I knew that you were going to have the most representative power output of your true one-minute best or 30-second or whatever we're looking at. And comparing that to improvement of like five-minute and 20-minute, things like that. So it's not like you need to have absolutely one metric. or one power output that you decide this is the thing that's going to be the thing. It's a full system. Yeah, triangulate on what your improvements are or what's gotten better. And also knowing how you've been training helps too. Like if you're doing three by eight with like your self-selected cadence, let's say you're like a 90 RPM rider and you've been doing a lot of three by eights, chances are if your Vietto Max has gone up, that's great. But also, That muscular load, your anaerobic capacity may have gone up too. And so you've got to be careful about what's happened. Maybe your VO2max hasn't gone up at all doing that. That's certainly possible. And I've worked with a lot of people who have done a lot of 3x8s before we started working with them or before I consulted with them. And I saw no improvement whatsoever. On the other hand, if you're doing VO2max work and you're doing the high cadence variety, The chances that your anaerobic capacity has gone up are non-zero, but it's much lower than if you're doing it at your preferred cadence, because the muscular load is a lot lower. And so that's something where you can start to think, okay, my anaerobic capacity may not have gone up too much, so my actual VO2 max improvements are likely to have gone up, or most of my improvements are probably from that, which is nice. So does all that make sense so far? Yeah. Ultimately, if you are conscious of what kind of athlete you think you are, and I mean like beyond the, I've just started cycling and I think I'm a sprinter since, where, you know, some people just really understand that they are all about steady state, can't crack a thousand watts to save their life, and then there are people like you, myself and Kyle, who 300 watts sounds great, how long do you want? 40 seconds. But, you know, depending on your profile as a rider, you should be able to predict how much of an anaerobic stimulus are you going to get from something like VO2 max intervals. If you're like me, you will get quite a lot of it. If you are like Chris Froome, or Tom de Mulan is probably an even better example. Probably not as much, because they're just predisposed to, especially Tom, ride at as steady state as they possibly can. And so, for the more steady state minded rider, more aerobically capable rider, you'll be able to tease out whether or not benefits are FTP or run road capacity, just because you'll notice that your FTP watts have gone up quite a bit. More than, um, otherwise, whereas, yeah, people like me are in that danger zone where, uh, sure can do a lot of really hard watts, oh boy, is it nowhere near my FTP? Um, so, let's tackle two more things before we get to questions. Uh, first would be, how long does it take to see a response? And we've said this on the podcast before, where can sometimes, for a really hard way to max block, it can take a couple weeks. to fully recover and really see the improvements that you've made. I think on average, if you don't really completely kill yourself during a via to max block, if you've done a block indeed, you should probably see improvements anywhere from like two to maybe even six weeks. On average, I'd say about three to four is pretty typical, especially if we kind of nip that block before it really gets somebody going super, super, super deep. Yeah, it really is a less is more thing. Yeah, and even with a TTE block, if you're doing a lot of muscular work, and you're really, let's say you've got Unbound coming up, and you're doing the 200, and you're like, man, I don't have a lot of time to train, so I'm going to do a lot of extensive threshold and sweet spot work, and I'll try to get out once a month and do a longer ride. Get All That Stuff Buttoned Down, in terms of logistics and pacing, you know, it may still take you a couple weeks to fully freshen up after that block. Like, VO2Max is not the only thing that can incur a lot of fatigue. All super hard training-focused blocks can incur a ton of fatigue, and you've got to be very, very conscious about monitoring your fatigue in the block and having enough runway on the other side of it to kind of maintain your fitness and let it really come up to where it truly is. Because I think one of the things that I've seen, not infrequently, is that a nice way to put it? I haven't seen it a lot, but it's happened enough where it sticks out in my mind that somebody will like finish a block and then they'll rest or what they think is rest for like three or four days, then we'll start the next thing. It's like that's... It's probably not enough rest based on what I just saw you do to yourself. And having any kind of flexibility in your periodization built in is going to be very, very handy at these points. Because if you're taking longer to recover, let's say you've just done a bunch of extensive sweet spot work and you're heading towards unbound and you're like three weeks out. and you take a rest week and then the week after that you're like, man, I don't know if my legs are that good. So you should be riding, you shouldn't be like taking bed rest, but you've got to be nice to your legs until they come around and you've got plenty of time for them to be good for Unbound, but you've got to be careful because if you decide, okay, well, I've got, I'm going to do I'm going to go right back into my training block and I'm going to get a couple days of taper into Unbound. That's probably not the best approach. You've got to be careful with watching your training response and having had similar training blocks previously and watching your recovery rate from those is going to be the best predictor of what's going to happen to you in the future. And so every time you iterate on your training plan and you adjust something, I mean, once in a while, sure, like trying something whole hog that's new is going to be fine, but also know that it could go terribly wrong. And as coaches, we know terribly wrong. Well, it's not like a quotidian thing, but it happens often enough that when it does happen, like, first of all, we feel terrible. And second of all, we learn a lot from it. And especially if it's totally new to somebody and we've set them up like, okay, this may not go well. And then it doesn't go well. It can be like, well. We tried. And that's okay. Yeah, the bit you mentioned about sort of like setting expectations around recovery. People are far less forgiving of their legs after doing a VL2 max block than they are if they do. three really hard crits every week for a month, which is essentially going to be more or less the same impact in terms of just wrecking it. It can be, yeah. I think people should wreck it. Well, if you're not good at sitting in, it'll definitely be hard. Yeah. In a crit, like, it's constant and you're moving all the time. You're having to pedal probably out of every corner. In a VLTMAX interval, you are potentially lying on the side of the road after some of the intervals. People really need to shift the mindset away from thinking training can't be so hard that, you know, you can't get over it in a week. Ideally, you do get over it in a week, but with hard stuff like this, that's rare. It can take two or three. Like, I've got a client who went to Toad and Masters Nats, and the training between... There was not nearly as much training as one would think. Because Toad was hard, you got to recover from that. And then, you know, got Masters NADs coming up, and so, which actually just happened this past weekend. And so, it was more about making sure that the recovery was there, and that when we got a chance to train, and train properly, that we did. But it was not necessarily that... You know, that, that we jumped right back into the training, because you cannot at that point. So yeah, again, like watching your fatigue, and thinking less is more is always a better strategy than thinking more is more. And once in a while, more is certainly more. Because, you know, if you haven't done hardly anything for several months, and then you go out and you do a Vita Max double day, that's more is more, and you're going to get a big more is more response. until you try it again, then you do it again, then you do it again, then you do it again, and now you've done 10 VO2 max workouts in five days, and you don't want to look at your bike for the rest of the year. This is also a sideswipe of a message at everyone that was at Intelligentsia for the past week and a bit to rest. You probably need it. One of my writers who just went to Intelli, I'm sure is going to tell me, why do I have so much rest? I'm motivated to keep getting better this week. It's going to be like, no, you are, you've got a date with your couch and Netflix or Pulu or the Olympics probably. Yeah. One of mine was vomiting and shitting. in the week beforehand, and then still ended up deciding that they wanted to race. And to be fair, they did really well. So what the fuck do I know? Well, one of those 24-hour bugs. You can recover from that as long as you hydrate. The last thing we need to think about is what is your minimum effective dose rather than the maximum dose you can get away with? Because that's exactly what it is, is just getting away with it. doubling down on this stuff, like we said before, is not always better. Increasing the dose sometimes can be better. However, if you are not careful about your dose, you can screw up a couple weeks of training, and you can potentially screw up an entire season. So, like we said before, with anything, start with a workout per week. and kind of keep doing your normal thing on top of that. Here's probably not the best example, but it's an example. Let's say you start a diet in the fall, but you also start lifting weights at the same time. What's going to happen is when you are lifting weights, you're going to increase the water content of your muscles rapidly. Like every time I start lifting weights in the fall at the same time, Every time I start lifting weights after some time off, and I sort of diet at the same time, I shouldn't do that. Because I've learned what happens is, when you start lifting weights, I'm going to gain like one and a half kilos or so, maybe two. And if I'm in a deficit at the same time, I'm going to be very hungry, but I'm not going to see the number on the scale going down. And I'm going to be very, very, very frustrated. So instead, so these are two variables, right? Going to start with setting a baseline. Start lifting weights. As in, when you get back to riding in the fall, for instance, as a parallel, start with easy riding. Don't jump right into VO2s. Don't jump right into anaerobic capacity intervals. I mean, even if you're doing reverse periodization and you're going to use the winter for short intervals, then you're going to go longer when it gets nice out. You should still not start with, all right. Whole Hog, I'm going to start right from like, you know, a month before my peak crit type training that I had from the summer. Like, don't start there. Start easy and build into it. So as the parallel, I would start lifting weights for two weeks and establish my baseline with my extra like muscle mass. It's not really muscle mass, just water weight, but it's in the muscle. So it technically accounts for hypertrophy. And then, after I've established that weight, then I start the diet. And the same thing happens with any type of training. If you are doing FTP training and your FTP is going up while you're doing this, that's great. I don't think you necessarily need to do anything harder, but maybe your periodization dictates that you should. Fold it in gently. Start once a week. See what your training response is. Know what your inputs and outputs are. And watch your fatigue. And once you've done all that, You're probably going to be in a good spot to decide, do I need more dose, or is this dose totally sufficient? I don't really have anything to add to that. That was kind of a perfect summation of, if we had an air klaxon to celebrate, I'd play that. All right. Well, that's good, because I normally suck at that. So, over-caffeinated and underfed for the win. I cannot wait to finish the podcast so I can go eat. I've got pasta ready. Oh, it's so good. I'm meant to be recovering, and I'd like you all to know that Cole has me recording a podcast at 11 p.m. You decided what time you wanted to record today. Don't give me that shit. That's very true, yeah. I did defer the podcast from yesterday when I was dying. Hey, I wanted to do this hours earlier. Okay, first question is, how long should you try before giving up? Well, I'm 42 and I haven't given up yet. So I'm still trying. I think if you're thinking about giving up, then the time already passed on when you should give up because you're mentally already gone from whatever it is you're doing. Yeah. So typically for most workouts, if you're recovering enough between your workouts, you should see a training response within a couple workouts. It's usually pretty easy. So if you're doing like VO2 max workouts, you should ideally see the power you can do for your efforts going up, either that first one or like across the effort or something like that. As long as you've got your intervals kind of squared away and you know the right dose for you in terms of that, you definitely should see a response fairly quickly, which is how if, you know, Which, when I mentioned previously, when I've had somebody doing a, tried a VO2 max block, and I had them pull the plug in the first week, so we weren't seeing a response, like that's how quickly, if you know what you're looking for, you can kind of get a sense of if something's working or not. But you should be able to see it work out to work out if you are recovering properly. Yeah, same with things like anaerobic capacity. Oh, totally, yeah. Like, if you're doing like a set of 30-30s all out. then you'll probably see the power goes up a bit. Yeah, and the same with like one-off anaerobic intervals. Like if you're doing 30-second reps or one-minute reps or something like that, you should see the power going up. Or even like if you're working on any kind of intermittent stuff, you should see it going up. And if you're not, either pedal harder, see if that works. I hate to say it, but occasionally that's true. Or give yourself more rest or something like that. Manipulate the variables till you get it right. And so if you don't see a response at first, make little tweaks. to see if you can improve things. And absolutely nothing is too sacred to not touch. Interval time, interval style, rest time, recovery times, how much endurance riding you're doing, how hard you're doing, the endurance riding in between, all this stuff is up for debate. There's nothing that's too sacred to not tweak. Yeah, that guy who I pulled the plug on in his third week at the very start, that was after I decided to give him Much more rest between the last workout of week two and that workout that I eventually pulled the plug after, because I wanted to see where your what's going to go up this time, and when they didn't, that was the kill point. All right, next question is, oh, we got a couple questions on strength training. I tried strength training and I like it too much. How do I now find time for both? Well, that's a you question, buddy. Everybody's got their particular ratio of fun stuff versus training focus. And wherever your priorities lie, that's how you should prioritize where you'd spend your time. If you love strength training and you want to be in the gym three times a week, then that doesn't leave you much time for riding. That's what you want to do? Be honest with yourself about it. There's nothing wrong with that, for sure. I spend a lot more time in the gym these days than I do riding my bike, partly because my hip still hurts like a bastard, but at this point, I like it a lot. Part of the reason I haven't done much, if any, intervals this year has been because I've just done a lot of group riding instead, and that's been great fun. And I haven't had to do intervals. I've gotten, you know, fitness benefits from racing against friends a lot. And yeah, sure, I could have gotten those fitness benefits probably quite a bit faster than I have. But I enjoyed myself more. And that's actually great. Benefit. The one thing I'd recommend for people who do take the prioritizing fun approach is do what Koli said at the start and do that gap analysis to eventually work out, okay, based on everything I've done over the past six months or whatever, what did I miss out on? What could I maybe do over winter, say, to improve things? Next question. Introducing new clients to strength training mid-season. This is a tricky one. because it kind of depends on what you want out of the strength training. It's the same thing as like if you introduce a diet mid-season. Do you have time for this? Do you have the energy for this? Because diet is a stressor. Strength training is a stressor. Do you have the ability to make tweaks? Like if you're going to introduce somebody to like heavy squats or deadlifts or light press or something like that, three weeks out from a race they want to do well at, it's probably a bad idea. Like, start easy. Yeah, think how rough that first week is after someone just gets into strength training. Yeah, my recommendation for this would be to start very, very easy and technique only. And there's a good chance somebody's going to be, if they've never really done strength training before, there's a good chance they're going to be sore just from learning technique and just putting a bar on their back. So, I think It's probably not the best, but that's where periodization comes in. If you think somebody needs strength training, like if their PT says they need strength training and it's desperately needed, yeah, put it in mid-season, like get these people healthy first. But after that, really you've got to pull back and think about the periodization. So yeah, so go light at first and then work up to what might be just a regular maintenance dose for them in season. In the off-season, they've got all their technique down already, and then you can really kind of hit the accelerator on the lifting, potentially. Let's see. Is modifying volume increase as important as an impact sports so much as proper fueling and rest? Is this meant to be? I'm not totally sure. So let's address it like this. How would you incorporate running? How would you start running in season? Well, you haven't heard the last podcast that hasn't gone out yet, which is me and Kyle, and Kyle's talking about starting to run. these days, a little bit. Well, he's never near a bike. Like, you do it light and you do it short and you recognize that they're with you through your skills as a cycling coach. So the limit of what you'll do with running is just assign them things that count as something above recovery in most instances. Yeah, the volume aspect in impact sports is... Significant. Yeah, it's very significant. And that's something where you really need to be cognizant of recovery. And like, I mean, if I were a running coach, and thank fuck I'm not, but not to shit on running coaches, I know that there are a lot of really good ones out there, but I'm just not one. So I would want somebody to keep detailed notes on like, how are your shins feeling? How are your feet? How's your nutrition? Are you getting in enough vitamin D and calcium and all that kind of stuff? And I would be very, very conservative on planning when somebody runs and how hard and how long somebody runs. Very conservative. What's the best way to talk to a coach about trying something different to what they normally do? Just ask. It's very easy. And if you work with us, that's one of the reasons that we don't have any We're not totally married to any particular type of training. We have certain things that we like to do in the absence of all other stuff that we know are going to be effective for most or all people. However, if you feel like there's a thing that you either like to do or you feel like improves your fitness better, then ask. I have a client who this year said, I feel like previously when I've done these certain types of intervals that I wasn't assigning her. I've gotten really, really good fitness off that. And I said, great, let's try it. And so we started doing exactly what she said, like once a week, we're going to hit these intervals and we're going to watch them progress and we're going to see how this impacts your fitness. And it did great. She was absolutely right. And I'm glad she asked because otherwise I may not have ever given them to her until like, you know, a couple months from now. I'm like, man, we got to work on X, Y, and Z. Let's try this style of intervals. She'd be like, oh. This is what we did, I did like two years ago, and I felt great. And I'm glad I'm doing them again. It's like, she asked me, and so we cut out a bunch of faffing around to just get right to the point. And it was great. Yeah, I had someone last week message, he's just gone on vacation, and he just said, hey, there's a 200-kilometer gravel adventure ride I want to do on Sunday, is that okay? And I was like, yeah, sure, of course. I'm not going to stop you having fun. That's something that I think some people really like the sort of rigid structure coaching can provide. I was definitely one of them. But as a result, I think when I put workouts into people's calendar, it gives the impression of like a rigid structure. But I want everyone to understand, and I tell them this in the intro call, that All of this shit can move around. It's not a problem in my end to do it. Don't feel afraid to ask. Don't feel afraid to ask to dump or work out because you'd rather go do the group ride instead. Yeah, and if somebody does that constantly, then we're going to have to have a talk about does this fit your priorities? And if it does, then I'm going to play more group rides for you as opposed to more structured training. And if that makes having a coach not worth it to a person, that's fine with us too. I'm not offended if somebody doesn't want to work with us. Genuinely not. Let's see. I will try to do my first TTE block. How long time should the intervals be in the first week? Okay, setting a baseline. That's actually a really good question. What did you do in the FTP and TTE test? Plus five minutes. Well, I know you work like that. I usually... If I've got somebody where I know what their FTP is, I will oftentimes not test them, and I'll go right to the intervals. And so I'll give people a range. And I'll start with giving three to five by ten minute FTP efforts, five to ten minute rests. And that's where we start. And if somebody does three, then that's where we start and that's where we build from. And if somebody does five, That's great. That's another place to start. And that's where we build from. So set your baseline first. And I would say, if you were doing this as a baseline setter, do them for, it gets to like an eight out of 10 RPE, where you've got to like, do like five minutes, where you've got to really look at your computer and focus and kind of be like, all right, I need to, this is no longer easy. And we'll call that an eight out of 10 RPE. You don't need to go any harder than that. Always leave a little bit in the tank, in my opinion. And next time, go out, and if you did five efforts, let's say, that was 50 minutes, cool, all right, next time I'll say, give me like four by 12, or give me three by 15, and let's see how that goes. Some people I'll be, I'll push the interval time faster, we'll go right to three by 15, otherwise we'll try like four by 12. But that's how I would make that progression. Yeah, don't set a rigid expectation on what you should be able to accomplish. And if you're going to set a rigid expectation in terms of how much time you want to do each interval session, be very conservative. Yeah. Because it's, you know, you want to, what is it, under-promise and over-deliver, you know. Leave yourself feeling satisfied. Yeah. Yeah. For instance, like I had to go out of town for a couple of days for a funeral. And when I got back, um, not only, obviously not only did I eat a little extra, um, despite my trying to maintain my diet, um, I, um, I felt really good when I got back to the gym. And so my first exercises, I was like, if I was, I was like, normally my goal is to add a rep. and to get to a certain amount of reps before I increase the weight. This time I was like, if I really blow this one out, I will not actually be able to do this workout again and progress from it the next time I go do this exercise. And so I had to hold myself back because I was thinking several weeks down the line in that moment, which I used to not be able to do. I feel like I've grown as a person, just a little bit. Not only in terms of my waist, I'm just kidding. So, okay, next question is, after a year of okay execution and okay progress, try a different plan or focus on better execution? Maybe this is a little off topic, but I think it's probably relevant in terms of deciding if you need to try new training methods. Biggest limiter for the year was. Because I think for most people who are busy, have families, have jobs, the execution is probably an inconsistency, are probably larger factors than the content themselves, as long as you're not over-focusing on one type of workout. Because everything is relevant. Like VL2Max work is needed, threshold work is needed, endurance work is needed, race-specific stuff is needed, pacing work sometimes is often as needed. like, you know, position specific stuff is needed. Like if you ride a TT bike and you're on your TT bike twice a year and you do five time trials, you know, your ratio, and those are your important events, your ratio of what you're focusing on is not what I would call optimal. So, so a lot of the time it's, yeah, it's, it's execution, but also deciding on Do you need more or do you need less? And I think for most people who are fairly well trained, my honest answer is they need less. For a lot of my clients who are very well trained, as they get better and better trained, some of them absolutely hate this, but I don't give them as much training. I give them more rest because the training gets harder and you need more recovery. Obviously. And typically, that works a lot better. And especially if I think somebody's recovery isn't always as good or as fast as I want it, then yeah, we'll definitely err on the side of more rest. And that would be partly an execution thing, more than changing the plan specifically. Yeah, I've got someone who's a 25 to 30 hours a week raider. and it's quite difficult to make sure that they rest enough because you only do 25 to 30 hours a week if you really fucking love riding a bike and that's kind of that's one of those things you sometimes have to fight back a little bit on with clients is just I really hate putting the boot down, but sometimes you do have to, is just saying, no, you need to take the rest seriously. Yeah, and a lot of the time, in that situation, I mean, you know, people, I'm not very authoritative. People don't, if I tell somebody to do something, there's a 50-50 chance or less that they'll actually do what I ask them to. including Rory and the other coaches. And so if I ask somebody to ride less, I'm like, man, I think you're tired. You need to do less. I will get ignored oftentimes. And then I'm like, okay, I see where this is going. And then once they are like failing intervals, I'm like, hey, how about that rest we talked about last week, huh? And they're like, okay, you were right. And so next time that happens, hopefully they're a little more open to Okay, I'll do the more rest thing. But yeah, it's like, it's a real negotiation. Like, it's almost like hostage negotiations, you know? It's like high stakes sometimes. Like, you've got this race coming up. You need to, like, get on the couch. And sometimes, you know, I'm not there, like, tying somebody to the couch, but occasionally I'm like... It's... One of those things where I think this is especially important for like a self-coach athlete is if you can download sleep apps on your phone that are good enough to get the job done and just throw that data into TrainingPeaks or, you know, they will have their own app-based graph of your sleep over time and you don't need to get in the weeds of things like REM sleep or a number of times you woke up in the middle of the night. It's just How many hours did you get and did it feel good? And if you start to see that things are slipping or if you notice that your sleep for the past week or two has been worse, that's like a real canary in the coal mine to get you to change something sooner rather than later. And another one of those things that's relevant to what we've talked about this episode of when do you decide something's not working for you or something's too much? Sleep is such a good indicator of whether the direction of travel is good. Yeah, I actually am thinking about a client where when we started working together, in the first couple months, her resting heart rate dropped precipitously. Well, that sounds bad, but no, I mean in a good way, because previously it had been quite high. And she was doing a lot of very consistent training, a lot of intervals every week. And as we worked together longer, her resting heart rate started to go down and down and down and down and down. And then she was like, holy shit, look at this. I'm like, yeah, that's awesome. You're really fit. This is great. And it was a good indicator that things were going well. As work stress started to ramp up, travel stress started to ramp up, I saw that resting heart rate start to kind of get into the old pattern of sometimes being high, sometimes being low, and I was like, oh, yeah, okay, so now I see where this is, and that was one of those canaries in the coal mines for her of, okay, we need to err on the side of more rest, and that kind of got things going back in the right direction, but like, it's only a useful piece of information if it's a useful piece of information, and you've got to make sure that It actually is telling you what you want to know. Yeah. And for the avoidance of doubt for anyone, I don't think you should be paying for work to tell you this information. I think you can work this out for yourself and save yourself the tax. I mostly agree. Next question. What is the value of new training things if most people can't even do the basics right? Well, that's easy. There's not. That's fun. I mean, Rory, one of the first things you said on this podcast was like consistency is kind of the most basic requirement for improvement. Yeah. Yeah. I say fun because sometimes the thing you need to do is just that thing that You know, it gets the neurons in your brain fired up to go and do more like me trying to be able to max day last week. Partly that was so I could see what I put people through as well as learning about it myself. I'm not necessarily in the position right now to have really benefited from that. Certainly my training is atrocious if I was looking at it from an outside perspective. Do I have to sign up for Strava and start following you to see what you're doing? There's a lot of group rides. But the basics, the basics, fundamentals. Yeah, if I'm trying to get somebody into position to do a VO2 max block, for instance, the sort of thing that people might be listening to the podcast and then hear about the benefits and be really keen to go do, there's a bunch of work we do before that to try and really maximize the benefits of it because of all the things we talk about in terms of fatigue, etc. Part of being able to manage the fatigue of that is also being able to manage the fatigue of everything that came before. Like, we're big proponents of volume, for instance, and that's something we try to, like, really make sure we can set up to do alongside something like appeal to max block as well. But part of being able to do that is also, can you just handle the volume on its own without all that intensity? I think I remember when Fabiano was coaching me that before I did one of my first VO2max blocks. He just gave me a high volume block, and high volume according to what my availability and tolerance for training was at the time. And that was in part to hopefully set me up for a good VO2max block, but also just to see can I actually cope with the training. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was also the very first training block he gave me when he started coaching me. It was just... Let's see how much riding you can tolerate, because alongside that, he's going to learn everything about how well, like how well am I actually pacing something like an endurance ride? How well am I actually feeding? Am I sleeping well after it? Am I stretching? Apologies, Fabi, I never stretched. I quit putting in training piece for people because they never did it. Stretching, core work, like it's, if somebody's going to do it, they're going to do it. If they're not, they're not. That's a good example. Well, I mean, I think that you're absolutely right about that. And that's one of the reasons I like kind of just building up riding volume in the winter as your baseline. So it's like setting a healthy habit. It's establishing a good level of consistency. And yeah, like you're right. If somebody is not able to handle building up to, let's say, like 12 to 15 hours a week or something like that, then and it's always hit or miss whether they're riding or not, then it's like, we're going to work on the fundamentals of let's get you more consistently riding and we'll occasionally do some intervals and fun stuff, but like the big focus is not on, you know, let's do an FTP block, it's like, let's make sure that you are riding enough and sleeping enough, like hitting all the basics. Okay, next question is, we have a lot of people asking about mixed blocks. So I, one person says, you mentioned, Mixed Blocks in the AMA. We'd love to hear more about those. Another person says, why not make them a default? They usually are more of a default, actually. One of the reasons that, if I remember this correctly, four years ago now, something like that, three, four, from the VO2Max series, is like when I said do it in a block, that's assuming that like, you know, folding them in once a week or something like that is not effective. Like see if you can increase the dose. And that's one of the reasons another person says, why do you think focus blocks tend to work better than mixed blocks for many? Well, it's not many. Some people, they work really well. A lot of people, they work really well. But like a lot of people, they don't work that well. Depends on personal training response. Depends on training history. Depends on training habits. And so when somebody's How much of a dose do you actually need? Right. So when somebody gets really well trained, that's exactly where I was going with this, Rory. It's as you get super well trained, you need a more focused dose of a thing a lot of the time. Some people who are very, very well trained and are genetic freaks can do literally anything. And that's awesome. I'm jealous of them. But when you need to really overload a particular thing. Then we're going to do a focus block. But before that, oftentimes I shy away from these focus blocks unless I know somebody can handle it and I've got a good feeling they're going to respond well to it. And we've kind of worked up to it in the past a lot of the time. Occasionally I'll go right for the focus stuff, but oftentimes I do kind of default more to a mixed block because I want to make sure somebody can handle the training load. They're recovering well. And there's no guarantee that if we go right to a focus block that we're going to see a ton of improvements. And if the training history is not that deep, they might be overly fatigued and there's a billion other things to consider. So yeah, I think going more for a mixed block and by mixed, maybe we haven't defined it yet. I mean by doing both threshold and VO2 max work kind of simultaneously in a three-week training block. I think it also depends maybe a little bit on time of year as well. I think you've got more leeway to do a focus block early in the year when you're planning for next season, because you kind of know the route you're going to take. And you still have people where some people will benefit from the mixed structure and some people will benefit from a focused structure. But generally... You've not got things like, you know, group rides aren't getting in the way because it's too snowy. There's no racing for you to worry about except Zwift, which maybe that is your source of the mixed dose of whatever type of training you're doing there. You have more control and a cleaner structure available to you when it's, you know, whatever your equivalent of winter is, unless you're... My guy in California that just sends me pictures of himself skiing. But when you get in the season, things start to get a bit messy. And especially as you get later in season, it's like, okay, the need to recover is only increasing up to the point where you actually convince them to take a break. But also, you've got that one more race they want to do, and they really want to prepare for performance. So it's like, all right, so we've got... Two and a half weeks until then, okay, we can top up your TTE in that time, and maybe we'll get, like, some hard sprint workouts in to just try and really make sure that your form's good, that your legs are feeling primed. Like, that's, as you start to get into the proper season, that's when things get a little iffy. And even if you're trying to do, like, more focused training in season. If you're also racing alongside it, inherently, that's a mixed block by default. Yeah, because the training is racing. Or rather, racing is training, sorry. Training is racing when you're me. That's true. I was thinking of that testing is training and training is testing thing. Yeah. Which is also true. But I think another thing that's inherently appealing to a focus block for trained scientists like you and me is that we've basically controlled all our inputs. We know what we're going to get out on the other side. We are not confused about what stimulus is this going to yield, like what potential improvements in what aspects of fitness is this going to yield. It's pretty cut and dry. If we're focused on one thing or maybe like one and a half things or something like that. We're going to get most of this dose. We're going to get a little bit of this. And that is inherently appealing to trained scientists where I've only got one metric to look at and I'm not confused about what somebody's training response was. And that's one of the other things that's unfortunate in a lot of ways about cycling and cycling being, you know, really Every aspect of fitness that a person can have from like explosivity to, you know, um, to aerobic power, to aerobic endurance and muscular endurance. And like, it's just, you know, the list goes on and we've got to train somebody up for most or all of them for like road racing, for instance. And it's, uh, it's, it's difficult if you, if you have somebody doing like, let's say like one day a week of sprints, one day a week of VO2s, one day a week of threshold. and let's say a group ride occasionally, substituting in for one of those workouts or occasionally on top, who knows, you've got a lot of mixed inputs and you may not know exactly what's improving and at what rate. And so, because the fatigue from all these things kind of compounds also. And so when you freshen somebody up, like, okay, well, we've got to go look at Every aspect of somebody's fitness and see where they're at. Because, you know, when you're doing everything, who knows? Yeah, we mentioned earlier, how do you tease out whether or not a VL2Max block has made your FTP go up or your anaerobic capacity stuff go up? And that's much more difficult when you're doing a whole bunch of different things. If you're getting really silly about what you're mixing into your training block, like if you were trying to do 30-30s at the weekend and a set of VO2s on a Wednesday, hopefully both go up. And occasionally we have to do that in training, for sure. But, you know, is it my favorite? It's not my favorite. Do I hate it? No. We make do. And a lot of the time... I think I'm experienced enough of a coach where I know, relatively speaking, workout to workout if something's working or not, and also that I've made the right decisions for somebody's fitness and that we may not even necessarily have to test. It's just time to go race. And especially for like busy pro athletes who've got, you know, like oftentimes very busy racing schedules. We don't have time to test. Testing is a luxury at that point. You know, if somebody is going to be fresh enough to put out good power, I don't want them to test. I want them to go use those legs in a race. And so at that point, hopefully somebody is also in tune with themselves enough where they can give me race feedback and that's going to kind of substitute for our tests. And so, yeah, so there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes into it. To answer the question, yes, a mixed block is kind of actually the default. I don't know why we've never really talked about that on the podcast before, but I think previously the idea was if what you're doing hasn't been working, try these things. And that's kind of also the point of this podcast. Is doing identical weeks back-to-back a way to improve recovery and still get training gains? Identical weeks of what? is certainly a way to do the same thing twice, if I'm understanding it. Did they mean I did 2x20 and 2x25 last week, so I'm going to do 2x20 and 2x25 again this week? Potentially. So I guess what I'm reading into this question is kind of what you said, which is if you don't progress, and presumably your body's capacity for that workload has improved, if you don't progress, Time or Power, in whatever manner is appropriate for your intervals, are you potentially having a lower amount of training stress? And I would say yes, but we're talking like a margin. We're talking a small amount. Because if you do 2x20 week one, then you do 2x22.5 the next week, or you should, and you only do 2x20 again, You know, we're only talking about two and a half minutes per interval. It's not a massive amount. It's some, but it's not massive. And that's still training stress. And it's not the same as doing two by 20 one week and then doing two by 10 the next, which is a drastic reduction of training stress. Because that's well within your body's capacity. You are not quite into that territory of where it hurts to the point where you're like, okay, this is where I make my money in this interval. which presumably you wouldn't get to until the last like couple minutes of interval two on the second week. So you're kind of getting there, but you're not. So I don't necessarily think that that's the right thing to do. But if you are, you know, like you mentioned with your client earlier, Rory, if you're in doubt and you've got other stuff to work out, not progressing is a good idea for sure because now you've controlled all of your training variables and you're trying to isolate other variables. All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. And if you've got any questions or comments, please direct them to Rory. No, I'm just kidding. Send them to me at empiricalcycling at gmail.com. That's also where to get in touch for consultation and coaching inquiries. It's currently, by the time this comes out, it'll be like mid to late July, potentially even into... It'll be early August, and so that's usually when the big coaching influx is transfer season in the coaching world, basically, and everybody wants to get started for the next year, so we get a big crush, and if you want to get ahead of that, now's a good time to email and inquire and all that good stuff. So if you also want to donate to the show, because we are ad-free, empiricalcycling.com slash donate, and if you would like to share the podcast and support it, because we are free, We really super appreciate all of that. If you want to ask a question for the podcast, so can you follow on Instagram, Adam Pulford Cycling, and now Rory can go feed his cats. Later, everybody.