Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore. We are joined once again by our Empirical Cycling Coach, Rory Porteus. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And if you're new here, please subscribe to the podcast if you like what you're hearing especially. 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That's where they are. So today what we're going to do is Rory and I, I decided it would be fun to each come up with a plan that would work for, we think. We hope would work for most people most of the time. And that's a tall ask. And so we obviously had to make it as general as possible, as generalizable and individualizable as possible. And also it has to hit a lot of the stuff that you would need in order to compete in almost any discipline in cycling. That's not like a pure sprint event like sprint cycling or BMX. I see Rory has his hand up. Rory, would you like to contribute today? Yes, I'd like to note that none of these parameters were conveyed to me beforehand. And so what I did was just come up with a training plan. Yeah, so the brief that I gave Rory was come up with the most basic training plan you can. And that was it. And I think I've done that, and I set my own parameters that we'll probably get to. But I wanted to do something where if you're brand new to training, do this. Whereas Kolie, I think, has wanted to build an entire framework for how training works. Yes and no. One could say that. Rory and I have not discussed our plans with each other, and so we are going to critique. That means roast them to each other live here on the podcast. And we are also going to argue about whose is better and why was it mine. So the thing that should happen in one of these very basic plans, it should ensure progressive overload. It should ensure that it should work with the largest number of people. So most people in my estimation are beginners and intermediate cyclists. And so kind of regardless of the volume, that would put most people – actually, I think there's a lot of people who are perpetually in the intermediate stage at some points. But that's a discussion for another podcast that I have lined up for sometime early next year. But it should also target the most aspects of fitness. because this is something that we actually discussed on one of our coach meetings recently was how do you measure fitness? How do you define fitness? There's a lot of aspects to fitness and so this should hit the largest number of them. So does that make sense? But Rory, you were also saying before we got started that you had some difficulties conceptualizing a plan like this because tell me why. Yeah, so Like, regular listeners will know that Kolie doesn't do stock plans in large part because the idea that you can just give someone a stock set of workouts that is going to work for everyone and account for all the different little variabilities in who people are is kind of 80% of the way there. But the problem is that the last 20% is kind of important. and our role as coaches is very much to make sure that that last 20% gets covered. So the problem I've incurred is that I've made a plan that will work for 80% of people. I've somewhat demonstrated why Kolie doesn't do it like this and the problem I've incurred while doing this is one, I typically don't plan, I'll give people their workouts on a week-by-week basis and I'll have an idea in my head of what's coming in the next two to three weeks with a longer view out for, you know, races, et cetera, what are we trying to get to at the other end of training? But in writing this, I've come up with a hypothetical race someone's going to do after 12 weeks and we're going to prepare for it. and the problem is when you get to so I've done it like I've planned out like a three block training plan so something like 12 weeks exactly and the problem is as I was writing it I realized I'd do this for clients but I can't guarantee I'd want someone who isn't my client to just jump into this and think it's doable and I've stuck to my guns in some of that at points in the plan but there's also parts of it where I just I didn't have the confidence to write it out so that Kolie could roast it or for listeners to try and copy it. I do think that it's a good plan that conveys a lot of what Kolie was getting at that he didn't tell me about. That is Making sure that there's an element of progressive overload, making sure that you're accounting for life, rest, the ability to make sure that you get from the start of the week to the end of the week, every single week, and trying to make sure that when someone comes through 12 weeks later, they've hopefully progressed in a meaningful way. And on top of that, it's a plan that could, in theory, be used over and over and over again, because ultimately, if the plan only works once, then it's another reason it's not a good plan. It's why I don't like canned plans either. Often it's a one-directional street. But that is, again, a weakness to this plan is that you could probably do this plan two or three times, but it's going to stop working eventually. So yeah, that's kind of my list of caveats about the design. I'm probably charging £60 for it. at the publication of this podcast. So if you Venmo Rory 60 pounds of haggis or something, I assume, then you can have this plan. He will email it to you. The sad truth is that if you message me asking for a plan, I'd give you it for free. But if you want to send me 60 pounds, that'd be great. Don't tell anybody. Jeez. So, okay. I'm actually really curious to hear what your plan is. Is it describable as in, like, block one, do this, block one, do this, block three, do this? Sort of. So, again, Kolie didn't tell me anything about what I was meant to be doing here at all. Well, that's one of the things I like about a vague brief is everybody interprets it a little bit differently, and I enjoy that. I enjoy seeing where you went with it. As Kolie went to the toilet before he hit record, I was aggressively typing down notes to try and summarize everything. But yes, I could tell you what you're doing in each three weeks, sorry, in each three blocks, and I could tell you what you were doing as the purpose of each week in that block. But again... Part of the problem here is that kind of what I've done would work very well in a video podcast where I could just show people and they'd be like, oh, that makes sense. Whereas now I'm going to describe you the Excel table that I wrote that has about 200 fields filled in. Okay, before we get started with that, I actually wanted to ask you, the assumption I made, so this is one of the trade-offs in any kind of canned plan that you make. My assumption, was that people are not off the couch. People are ready for a fitness build. Did you make that assumption as well? Yeah, I assumed someone who's like a low to mid-volume athlete and this is maybe the first time they've started doing training. Okay, because I figured somebody had like gotten off the couch, kind of gotten up to their regular volume, doing easy, kind of medium fun rides and okay, now it's like December, January, you've maybe been riding since like a... you know, October, something like that. And it's time to start building for race season. So that's, that's where mine starts, but let's, let's, okay, let's get into yours. I'm really curious about what it is. Uh, so I'm, I'm, I'm going to cheat at the start. Uh, I'm, I'm assuming if, uh, I didn't put it in this cause I didn't actually think it was relevant for the actual plan portion, but, uh, I'm making an assumption at the start that someone has. listened to our great advice and has done some good FTP testing. So I'm making the assumption off the bat that they've got a workable, usable number and not something from a ramp test, essentially, which incidentally, I did a ramp test recently and it went poorly. Describe poorly. Well, it turns out that when Zwift thinks you're doing 250 watts, the power meter on my bike thought I was doing 450 watts, and after about five steps, I collapse. So my Zwift FTP is about 240 watts or something, but my real-life FTP might be about 325. That's a pretty big discrepancy. Yeah, and neither are my FTPs. But yeah, I've made the assumption that someone has done an FTP test, and I'm also making the assumption that because this is someone who is not new to writing but is new to training, they're going to end up with a short TTE. And so my plan is starting from the basis of whatever your FTP is, but a TTE around 35, 40, 45 minutes at most. So it's typical for somebody kind of just getting started into intervals build kind of stuff. All right, what you got? So, starting out with some sweet spot. So, I'm starting out by giving someone 60 minutes of work. I should roll that back. I'm making an assumption that someone doing this plan has got about 13 hours to play with, is where I should actually start here. I'm also making the assumption that Mondays and Fridays are either recovery day of like 30 minutes easy, or day off entirely, depending on like Schedule, how they feel, etc. I'm also making an assumption that they have two hours on other weekdays, so Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and they've got about six hours at the weekend, which is split however would work for them. You mean between Saturday and Sunday? Yeah, so I've got two hours on Saturday and four on Sunday, because that feels like a nice balance for most people. Although I would, as always, emphasis, if you have a bit more time, feel free to do it. It'll help. Just, you know, make sure it's something you'll be able to recover from. In general, aiming for two workouts a week, and the rest is either the endurance or the Monday and Friday as easy days. I've put workouts almost entirely into Wednesdays and Sundays, Sundays being the long day. So for the first block, it would be a bunch of sweet spot starting from around 60 minutes of total work and I've put it in as three 20 minute intervals just to try and help someone ease in and then just from there we're aiming at adding about five minutes per interval to each workout so the sweet spot progression through the block goes something like 60 minutes, 75, 90, 100, 110, however In week three of the first block, I changed things a little. They have a day off on the Monday, no matter what. So even if they were doing recovery rides before, I try and enforce a day off. And on the Wednesday, because we're starting to reach the limits of time available to them for both the intervals and the total amount of time that the ride has, that's going to be their first VO2 max workout. Partly to give them a taste of what's going to come when we move on to VL2Max further into the plan, but also to just start to give them that slightly harder kick to see how they feel. Come at me. You planning out an entire block of sweet spot is like whether, it was like, is the sun going to rise tomorrow? Yeah. I'm making an assumption that people will come about it in a fairly, how do I phrase it, in a cautious way, that they're getting everything else right. And again, this is one of those assumptions that I don't make when I'm actually coaching, is I'm not planning out what someone's going to be doing in three weeks from now. And so... I'm responding to the feedback someone would normally give me and I wouldn't necessarily give the plan that I've built here. I'm building out here what I think would be optimal if it all went to plan because I thought it would be much easier to write a plan where I assume everything goes well. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I will compliment you first by saying I think that this is Probably a fair intensity and a fair amount of work and a fair amount of progression for most people to easily handle. I think that threshold, some people, if they get a little greedy with a threshold number, they could really screw themselves up at any of the block. So giving yourself a little bit of headroom on the intensity is smart. and some people some folks don't respond that well to tempos with this stuff and so then you know you're because so you're like right in the middle like that's right in the pocket of like this is gonna work for most people I think yeah um I think uh I think personally I would get really bored um yep and so but we're not we're not thinking about We're not, hold on, but we're not thinking about individualizing so much. We're thinking about what's a plan that's going to get you fitness. And so this is, so you're approaching this more in terms of like how you would design a study. Like we want somebody to get the best fitness they can in like 12 weeks. So here's how I think this might happen. And let's put them through the ringer and see what comes out the other side. Yes, but I also think, and this is something I've definitely found in coaching is When people are in that first 12 weeks, basically, that is when their motivation is absolutely going to be at peak for, you know, doing a new thing. Really excited to see how it goes. I think you can overcome a lot of the initial boredom. Like, that's maybe another one of the weaknesses of this plan is if you did this over and over and over again, you're going to hate the bike because it is boring. And I wouldn't... Again, I wouldn't be this repetitive if I could help it with my clients. Indeed, I've had that conversation with some people recently of, oh yeah, the intervals that I'm giving you are quite a bit different from each other, but they're going to accomplish the similar thing. And you told me that you've found these ones really fun, so we're going to use them a wee bit more than we would. And that's not something I can necessarily guarantee. in this plan, but also I made the rules when I wrote this plan and my hypothetical athlete loves it. Okay, your hypothetical N equals one is giving you great feedback so far. Okay. All right, what's block two after, hold on, how do you structure a rest week? A lot of people ask me this and we've been over this on the podcast before, but as I recall now, it was like probably three years ago that we really went into the structure of a rest week. So how's your rest week structured? So it starts with a day off and then I'd say I'll just run through what I put in but I would stress that this is going to largely change depending on how someone feels as it should. Day off to start, a recovery ride on the Tuesday, bit of endurance on the Wednesday, bit of endurance on the Thursday, recovery ride again on the Friday and then some openers on the Saturday to start to help build them back up and get them back to feeling like they can do a bit of work. And then if they're feeling good on the long day, the Sunday, they can go do a long endurance ride. Otherwise, they'd keep it short and chill again. Okay. Reasonable. All right. What's block two? Give it to me. Let me guess. A light introduction to VO2s. So this again is another one of those places where writing a pre-made plan gets difficult for a couple of reasons. One of them, so everyone knows that we'd say when you do VL to max intervals, you want to try and do them as each one as hard as you're capable to do without killing yourself and killing yourself for the rest of the workout. Yeah, finish the workout and make sure you don't tank the week or anything like that. Yeah. Loss of 20 watts per interval, acceptable. Loss of 60 watts after interval, one, not acceptable in most cases. The problem with writing a pre-made plan is if I say do four maximal intervals of whatever duration there is, I didn't actually specify a duration. what someone interprets as maximal can be very different and that's something I've seen quite a bit whenever I've talked to people online about VL2Max stuff is I say max and some people think I'm saying do it at the intensity of a sprint which I'm obviously not but that's how some people interpret max and much like how we have to think about how we communicate The intensity of something like FTP, I think is very difficult to consistently explain what you mean by intensity for VL2 max. So I'm going to, I'm basically, I'm saying all that to say that my hypothetical athlete understands exactly what I mean. But yeah, I'm limiting it to four intervals per day. Reasonable. I would start with shorter intervals and I would tell someone as they go through probably workout two or three, find the interval duration that you enjoy doing the most. I personally really like a four minute interval because it's just a bit longer than three minutes and it's just a bit shorter than five minutes. Wait, hold on, four minutes is between three and five? It's unbelievable. Why is this the first I'm hearing of this? I've got a paper coming in. But a lot of people do seem to want to do their intervals for three minutes. A lot of people want to do them for five. I slap them in the middle because I think it's a nice... You get a lot of time at PL2max without having to extend it further. I think there's a psychological difference that's quite significant of going to five minutes. But anyway... Start off short intervals. You're probably not, if you did start at like four or three minute intervals, you're not going to reach that. When we've talked about VL2Max in the past, it's you want 15 minutes at VL2Max as in physiological state rather than interval time. 12 to 15 minutes, yeah. This will not get you there. There's not enough interval time for you to do it. But the important part is the onboarding. Get you used to doing the sort of interval and finding your intensity. Okay, so we're like, so we're three-ish workouts into, to block two. And so we've got first Wednesday, Saturday, and the next Wednesday. Wednesday and Sunday. Wednesday and Sunday. So now we've got... Week two is different. All right, what's week two? So, just to summarize, week one is two workouts, both of them VO2max. I figured that pattern would hold for the whole plan. It doesn't. I mean, stupidly. Week two of the VO2max block, midweek, you're going to do some FTP intervals. Partly as a little bit of maintenance. at all because I want people to start feeling it out a bit more because they've done a lot of sweet spot. They've probably not gone near FTP as a target duration since their test. But I'm asking people to aim for FTP, feel it out, get used to it again, and aiming to do whatever TTE feels like, which my hypothetical athlete says they can do well. At the weekend, more VO2s, one session on the long day again, and the third week starts with a day off on the Monday, and we'll have two back-to-back VO2 max days midweek. I've put them in Wednesday and Thursday, recovery on the Friday, one final VO2 max session at the weekend, if they feel like they can do it. The thing I usually tell people when we get to the third week of a VO2 max block is You will probably hit that point where you decide you've just had enough. And that's the point where you should absolutely not force it anymore because you're not going to get anything out of it. And I'd instill that same bit of advice in my plan. Fortunately, my hypothetical athlete doesn't listen to me. It feels great. And so he does an additional day and feels good before coming into their second recovery week. Okay. Reason. All right. And I also find the same thing too, just in terms of VO2 max blocks is like after two weeks, usually you start to see a little bit of the motivation unraveling, a little bit of the fatigue starting to creep up. But at that point, I usually tell people, if you want to cut it early, we're good here. So anything else we get is bonus. And sometimes that they go for the whole third week. Oftentimes it'll be like a two and a half week block and that's it. And that's fine. Okay, rest week again, similar to the first? Identical. Identical. All right. Yeah. All right. Block three. You've got... Block three. So, I'm assuming... Is it four weeks to your race? Yeah. I'm assuming that the race is on the Sunday of week 12. Sure. So, what are the great benefits of VO2Max work? is in addition to hopefully getting a nice little bump and feel to max that will hopefully come about eventually, you're also going to get some anaerobic capacity gains out of it. And depending on the type of athlete you are, that can be significant or it could be insignificant. Question. So these were all the high cadence VO2s previously or no? Yes. Okay, because in my experience, Hyken's VO2s typically do not increase anaerobic capacity. So it's interesting that you see that it does sometimes. I can say from my own experience of doing them, because my VO2max never seems to go up as part of it, but my watts during a VO2max interval do. But then I did only do one set of VO2s recently, but anyway. I'm giving you a very skeptical look right now. He is giving me a very skeptical look. Well, part of it is also we're getting used to the intensity of, like, suffering that is a VL2 max interval and the anaerobic capacity is going to come around to make things even worse. But I would note that when it comes to the high cadence stuff, I tend to find people have a 50-50 rate of actually executing on it. And whilst it's something that I tell them to do and I encourage them to do, a lot of the time when people do VO2 max stuff, and that's what I'd expect for someone to do a plan like this, they're going to pick that local hill that is just the right length for them to go up at the right rate, and that's going to be the thing that actually defines whether or not they get the cadence target. or not. Because if someone's wanting to do this up an 8% gradient for 5 minutes, there's every opportunity that they're either not strong enough or don't have the gearing to allow them to do the high cadence stuff. And whilst that has its negative implications in terms of total fatigue, especially through that block, I do find that When I give people VO2 max work, keeping them motivated is sometimes a bit more important than trying to keep the fatigue down as a whole. So I find that, yeah, I do encourage the high gain stuff, but getting people to actually execute on it is very much going to be a Who they are, where they train, etc. If you do this in the turbo, there's kind of no excuse. But yeah. So coming to the third block, starting to think a wee bit about race readiness. First workout will be some FTP work. Again, trying to feel it out a wee bit more than we have previously. Not necessarily anticipating that... FTP itself will have moved all that much in the two weeks since the previous workout. However, trying to encourage people to just see where it lies. That would be midweek workout, weekend, first anaerobic capacity workout of three, some 30-30s, just three sets. and then a long ride in the Sunday. How long is a set of 30-30s? That's critical information. Some people might go for 20 minutes on these. Five minutes. So as it's sometimes confusingly written in my workout notes, 3x5x30 slash 30. That'll make sense. This is one of the reasons I try to, especially if I'm programming sets and reps for people. I instead of like X by X because some some lifting traditions have it as like weights then reps then sets instead of weights sets reps and especially if you have numbers like four and five that just gets confusing yeah it's not it's not always like three by three or five by five or something easy like that so yeah anyway so that's why I try to always Write it out verbally. Three sets of, three X, yeah, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So, second week, basically repeating the same workout on the Wednesday, and nothing at the weekend. Nothing as in no hard workout, just more endurance, including the long ride. Final week of the block, Day Off to start with, as usual, another FTP workout, and either the Saturday or the Sunday, a longer single, yeah, this is one of those places where the way I've written it out has made it really hard to describe with it, which works. Well, go ahead, I'm taking notes. Anaerobic capacity, five to six efforts. of a race-specific duration. So ideally sub 60 seconds, but trying to get people to really push out big watts. If you're anticipating that you're doing like a crit and it's going to have like a 30 second hill in it every single lap, I want you to go and push that. 30 seconds as hard as you can, maybe 35, because in reality, if you can push over the top of the hill, that's better than just pushing to the top. And then, yeah, final recovery week, which ends on the race with some openers the day or two days before. Okay. I think for a 12-week build into a race, I mean, I think that... Generally speaking, that would probably get a lot of people pretty fit. I think the only thing I would be watching for your hypothetical N equals one would be the fatigue off of the VO2s. I would be careful with that, especially doing three in the last week because I would personally rather, if I'm going to have somebody do three, I'm going to have them do them up front in the first week and then I will kind of sag it a bit in weeks two and three. So it'll be like, do three week one, then we'll do like a couple rest days, then like Thursday, Sunday, week two, and then week three, be like, maybe we'll do like Wednesday and that'll be it. Something like that. So I completely agree, but I think the limitation in doing that here is the fact that this person's very new to structured training. And throwing three up front in week one is going to be... too much. The answer may actually be don't do three in the final week, no matter what. But that's, again, another one of these limitations of just having to trust that someone would follow this plan and accept the advice of once you start to feel like the fatigue has caught up with you, stop. So in plan structuring, Where I would land on this is I would be thinking about that 80%. 80% of the time, is this going to work for everybody? And so I would say I would probably nix the third for the VO2 block just as a rule and be like even one to two. in that last week and just endurance riding. And if you are sick of VO2s at that point, go on a group ride at the end of the week and go have fun and then start your rest week or even start your rest week early, same difference. Because I think that that's where you, like me, like a lot of people, a lot of coaches and especially a lot of athletes will try to get away with as much work as they can possibly do, which When we actually think about what are we really doing in the world in terms of incurring fatigue and recovering and all that stuff, it may not always work that way to try to maximize what you can do because the recovery time may be too much. And so that's the only tweak I would probably make. I think for race readiness, I would actually, because my plan is so much more general than this. I knew it. Told you, I'm trying to make money here. All right, so yeah, well, yeah, Venmo, 60 pounds of haggis to Porteous International. Or what do you guys have? Porteous Limited, right. That's what you guys have in the UK. Yeah, Limiteds. I don't, but I probably should. Okay, so I also think that this, 80% of the time, recovery going into openers before a rest is going to work most of the time, yeah. I think, because I was going to discuss this after I described my basic training plan. Like, this is actually one of the... Oh, you're really rowing back on... How good do you think yours will be compared to mine? Oh, you just wait. You just wait. I'm going to win every game that I make the rules up for. One of the differences between beginner and intermediate cyclist to advanced cyclist is intermediate cyclists, this is where you really start to individualize what your training looks like. because a lot of folks may actually feel worse after a rest week going into a race, even with a solid set of openers. And so that's one of the things where I would be thinking if I were actually an intermediate to getting advanced cyclists at this point, I would want to make sure that I could individualize the taper because the taper is like one of the hardest things to nail. and there was a James sent this to me recently or was it Marinus sent me a paper looking at a bunch of the top five I think in the Giro one of the last couple years and looking at the training they did and not only the training the tapering strategy wildly different for several of them a couple of them were very similar some of them were very different a lot of them actually departed quite a bit from what's in the published literature Because of course, how many actual studies, how many times do you actually have a study of trained people going into like a three-week grand tour? Never. It's always got to be observational. So I think that that's one of the things that is genuinely very difficult about writing canned plans. And I remember way back when I got started coaching. I was told this is a really good supplementary source of income where it's just kind of passive. You write a plan, you stick it up on TrainingPeaks. TrainingPeaks takes two-thirds of your action and you make two-thirds of whatever's left and then like, okay, cool. Like people will buy this and they'll occasionally email you, hey, question about it. Okay, cool. That should be pretty simple. And then I immediately thought of all the people who wouldn't Get any faster. Or it would potentially burn them out. Or like they're adding too much extra volume or they're riding too hard in their endurance pace or something like that. Stuff that you as a coach can provide feedback on. But when you're not involved, I mean, I want to help, but I can't. So it's one of those things where I would rather make less money and be more proud of the work we do. and this is one of the genuine difficulties of writing a plan like this and so I if I had written something like this you would be able to like it would be it would probably be even more roastable than yours and yours doesn't even get that many that much of a roast it's only out of like the one to five couches on fire yours is a one couch on fire roast so I yeah it's it's fine But this is the problem is ultimately when it comes to trying to show someone a picture of what a structured training plan is it doesn't have to look complicated. And I think the problem with a lot of these canned plans is they can get too complicated because they're trying to sell themselves a bit more. Not in the same way as... I mean, complicated, looks fancy, looks like you know what you're doing kind of stuff. Yeah. And not in the same way as, like, when you spoke to the guy that designed those Zwift workouts. Like, the purpose of those Zwift workouts is to hopefully make you faster, but... Yes, to keep you engaged, like Instagram. Yeah, keep you swiping. which in itself is probably the most valuable thing a trading plan can do because we talked a moment ago about how, oh, that very first block I put in, people could get bored of it. And I think for the first time they do it, probably not, but the second or the third time they do it, almost certainly. And nothing- You did caution that right up front. Yeah, because if you don't want to do it, there's a risk that you don't do it. Oh, Kolie's currently trying to swat a wasp. I was turning the light on because it's, I forgot to turn the light on because it was bright when we started and now it's very dark. But yeah, the, the, I think ultimately when it comes to any one of these plans, as coaches, if you're trying to sell a plan like this, you should want it to get everyone that does it as fit as possible. But I think we, Should also value the ability to get someone to keep doing it. And I think that's the absolute weakness of this plan, is that you'll do it once or twice at most, and then you'll never want to do it again. It will teach you what to do if you want to try and replicate it yourself and mix things up. Probably not as well as I think you are going to describe to us in a minute of trying to build a bit more of a framework for how someone can design their own plan. Yeah. And I also don't want people to misunderstand where we're at with canned plans because they are a perfectly reasonable investment for a lot of people who don't have a ton of money, can't hire us as coaches, potentially can't hire us for even a consultation. And that's okay. Like, and especially if you're new, a canned plan like that will introduce you to structured training. It'll get you used to performing intervals and doing endurance rides and managing fatigue and all that kind of stuff. So I think, you know, I think potentially like, you know, canned plans are actually, they certainly have their uses and I've guided people to canned plans before. They said, here's where I'm at in training and cycling. Like, should I hire a coach? And I'll say, like, no. Like, you maybe need to get your feet wet first. Like, you don't sound like you need somebody like me. You sound like you need to try it out and see if you like it. And if that works for you, great. And if you find somebody who writes plans that makes you fit and makes you happy, then hell yeah, keep going. One thing I'll say along a similar line of what you've just said there is that if I was being cheeky but also much smarter than I actually am, I would have quickly signed up for Tim Cusick's Basecamp and then just copied whatever he gives people in there because generally that's kind of what that program is doing as I understand it is it's trying to keep the engagement up with people by turning it into a group activity but also trying to apply similar methods over as broad a distribution of types of people as possible, including people who are fairly experienced and including people who are brand new to it, which is why I think His base camp plans are the ones you tend to point people towards if they want a pre-can. Tim's like stock plans are, I've seen a bunch and, you know, because people will come to, you know, hire us for coaching or they'll come to consult and they'll say, I've been on one of Tim's plans and I'll look at it and I'll be like, you know what, this is probably one of the better canned plans I've ever seen. And so that's the one I usually do steer people towards to give Tim a free plug is, yeah, his Tim Cusick's canned plans. And he's got a billion of them. So you're probably going to find something you like. And no, I do not get a cut. All right. Shall we move on to the superior, but probably too generalized? All right. because I already know what you're going to roast me with and let's see if it's the same thing that I have also roasted myself with because I've already listed a bunch of downsides to my plan too. Okay. Remember folks, my plan has 100% review from the one hypothetical person that did it. Mine has zero reviews from zero hypothetical people and were those hypothetical people too? undertake my plan. They would actually recuse themselves from a review for conflict of interest. So, all right, here we go. I've structured this plan into training weeks and a rest week. And the rest week will be similar to yours. Slightly different. My default rest week is a little different, but we get to the same place. All right, training week. 

Almost doesn't matter how you structure this in a week. Awful, terrible. I'll shut up. Thank you. Other than you are not allowed to fuck with your recovery days, ever. One day off, one recovery ride. And by recovery ride, if I see single-digit TSS... Good job. Game on. Excellent. If your threshold is 300 watts and I see 160 watts in a recovery ride, you did not do a recovery ride, take a day off. Every time we talk about recovery ride TSS on the podcast, I will eventually, in the next few days, start to get my athletes sending me pictures of their two TSS recovery ride. I'm like, good job. We've done a good thing here. One of my clients did an eight TSS recovery ride this morning and I was so proud. I mean, it's not like he doesn't do them regularly, he does, but just in the context of the large scheme of things, I was just like, you know what, it's really good to see a single-digit TSS recovery ride. Next, you've got two workout days. One is a threshold day, and we're going to define that real quick. Threshold, meaning tempo, sweet spot, or FTP. And the idea here is that you can pick one that you like. Like if you like over-unders, you like tempo or sweet spot over-unders, there you go. That's your workout. Or it also allows you flexibility like, all right, I'm bored at the sweet spot. I'm going to do some threshold this week. Easy enough. The idea here is that anytime you go do this workout, show me more time and zone. That's our mechanism of progress. So if you start with like four by 10 minutes of FTP, next time show me four by 12. And there's a little bit of fudge. We always talk about this with like continuous versus, you know, discrete. So it's like, you know, is it four by 10 equal to two by 20? Like not really, but also kind of. So don't even worry about that kind of stuff. Yeah. So I usually prefer to just like an easy way to do is take three intervals, like three, like 10 minute intervals and just add time each time. Add two, two and a half minutes each time, you're golden. You'll eventually get up to three by 20 and you're there. So you've got a threshold day and there's good flexibility in the threshold day. Next, you have a VO2 max day. And with VO2 max, my guidelines are I want you to do a minimum of 12 minutes of interval time. So like a three by four minutes or a four by three. But optimally, I would say 15 to 20 minutes of interval time. So you would do either 3 by 5 minutes or 4 by 5 minutes, something like that. I always want to see you improving power on these. That's your mechanism of progression. And with these, you can either do them with kind of steady state watts and try to increase it every week, or you can do them that kind of send it high cadence. So I'm going to do these as max gasping efforts. And that works too. I would usually prefer somebody does the high cadence stuff, especially if at any point on your VO2 max day, you have graduated to doing double VO2 max workouts. High cadence is kind of a necessity. But otherwise, you could easily get away with just like... Either steady state, progress, progress the watts, or just kind of like go up a hill really hard a couple times and rest as much as you need. And that's that. There's your VATO Max day. Optional third day. This is your fun ride day. This would be a group ride or, you know, take your mountain bike off-road if you are an off-road person. Do a skills day, do kind of like a medium lapse kind of fun day, good time to do any kind of like any kind of coaching work. So if you've got like a skills coach, really good day to do with them and then get in some skills writing afterwards. So you've got two and potentially three hard days per week. And that requires auto regulation. So that we're going to have to get into that in a second. But other than those days. Other than your workout days and your recovery days, easy endurance riding. And for total volume, you can do whatever volume you can reasonably do. For most people, this will be somewhere between 8 and 15 hours. And that's my expectation, is that most people doing this plan are only going to be doing 8 to 15 hours, and that's totally fine. If you've got 20, that's where we start to think about maybe we need to like keep that third hard day in there sometimes out of there other times but most of the time if you auto-regulate this yourself you'll be fine now you've got swaps you can drop any workout day for fatigue you can take a recovery day or do an endurance ride you can also substitute Any workout for another workout if you feel like you need to specialize. Like if your endurance is a little lacking, you feel like you're doing really good with threshold work, you can take your second VO2 max day and turn it into a threshold day. No problem. You can also substitute your harder day, your VO2 max day. Assuming this is your regular week, it's like one threshold, one VO2 max. Substitute your VO2 Max Day for something race-specific if there's something race-specific that you would like to or need to work on. And other than that, you will do a rest week every fourth or fifth week, so you will train for three to four weeks in a row, which is pretty typical for most people. Most people do three. I think four is usually okay, too, if you're not overdoing it too much. And your rest week, stock rest week. Monday, Tuesday off, Wednesday, Thursday recovery rides, Friday endurance ride, maybe start doing a couple openers, Saturday, Sunday, all yours. Ride how you feel. If you feel like you are ready to go, good day to do a hard group ride, do a couple of KOM, KOM attempts. If you want to do any power testing, you feel like pretty good, you want to try to PR your favorite hill, go for it. Just have fun and don't bury yourself before you start training again the next block. What do you think? Well, I wish I wrote notes down while we were talking. I like the ideas behind it and I can see... So... I can see what I would do under that structure. I think someone who's maybe less versed in I should do this now and that then would struggle to know when to switch from what to what. and this is the thing that I think you were maybe predicting that I would pick up on this is what I'm holding the flag up for and I'm fully expecting to be wrong the third optional day of a group ride I think there's you'd need to put guidance in on what kind of group ride and I think I would allow for the hard group ride to be a swap for the FTP day or the VO2 max day depending on what kind of ride it is. Yeah, because you can get that short, like my club does like a short one hour one which is basically a crit for an hour and that would absolutely replace a VO2 max day. Another club that I go to does longer hour and a half to two hour rides that are fast for like the last 30-40 minutes and that would maybe suit to swap out if the threshold a wee bit more because it's not quite as intense. Yeah. So you're very... I pull out of... That's the thing that has the chance to derail it if someone doesn't find the balance but I also think that someone's maybe going to feel I think this is a really good way to show how to structure a normal weekly structure and a recovery week, but I think it also needs a flow chart next to it of roughly, you know, for the first two months, here's what you should be doing, and then two months later, what should you be doing after that? Like, what are you maybe expecting someone to do? Because I think you and I could design plans under that framework and it'd be quite good. If this is the hypothetical never done this before athlete, that's maybe where it becomes a wee bit more challenging to coalesce it into something really good. But what I will say to finish my compliment sandwich is... The shit sandwich, yeah. Yeah, I will note that you only had one side of compliment in my compliment sandwich. Where's an open face? A pizza. The problem with making jokes is I forget what I was going to say. Well, I don't know what you're going to say. I think it would serve more than that hypothetical 80% that I talked about with my plan. in terms of it's going to capture more of what people are able to do. I would just worry that eight weeks in, it'd maybe get a wee bit lost in it. I think that's reasonable, but here's, so here are the definite downsides of that, because you have like a 12-week like set piece, like here it is. Yeah, it's rigid. Yeah, you're gonna hit play on this movie and it's gonna go start to end and that's that. Mine is a lot more open-ended. And that is definitely a downside. And I noted that as a downside. You cannot do this year round. Like this is something that like if you are building and you're like, I want to build that's going to get me there most of the way, this will probably get you there. But yeah, a downside is that it, a downside and an upside is that it relies on auto regulation. and so if you are somebody who and here's the thing is like a lot of more casual cyclists are great at auto regulation they're fantastic at it and because you know if they get a little tired they're like I don't feel like riding my bike today I think I want to go for a run instead like okay cool go for a run like go to something else it'll be probably shorter it might be a little easier great it's gonna be easier than a group ride that's for sure um and so so that's what where The intrinsic motivation of a lot of cyclists to maximize things is going to be a definite downside of this plan. No doubt about it. And also your point with group rides, you're absolutely right about that. So I would say I should amend this with the optimal group ride is one that is hard, but not destructive, and you can finish it. And so maybe even like moderate to hard, like you finish and you feel like it's somewhere between a seven and a nine out of 10 RPE. You should not be getting dropped on this group ride. Can I say I agree that seven to nine, but also a three or under, not between the three to seven. That three to seven is kind of the trap for group rides where you're maybe not getting as much out of it as you'd benefit from and it's just a bit too hard whereas the cafe ride versus the fast group ride are two great options to have and again come back to that point of keeping people engaged and wanting to keep going because again one of the problems even within coaching like one-to-one like we do, is if someone doesn't communicate sufficiently that they want to go and do their group rides, I don't know when they are, so I'm not going to schedule them, but if you tell me when they are, I will, and I make sure that's accounted for when I structure a plan. And tell you how much they want to go. Yeah, yeah, like if I was getting coached again, which I am thinking of, I would make sure to tell my coach that I want to do my Tuesday and Thursday group rides. And sometimes I want to do my Wednesday ones. And that's a major issue with coaching. I was going to say, that's an entire plan. I'm going to do Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday group rides. Yeah, like that's a major issue with what would happen in my training come the summer. But there's what I've learned this year. has been there's nothing that keeps me on the bike more than going to those group rides because I really enjoy cycling with my friends and the impact of COVID and also moving out to Edinburgh temporarily was such that I never got to do that and whilst my cycling got better in recent years a large part of why I'm so much stronger this year is just that I kept going. out to those rides. And that was a bigger benefit than any specific training. What's that? You have better consistency, so you're more fit? It's almost like that was the very first thing that we talked about on the very first podcast you were on. Was it? It was. Consistency and progressive overload underlie everything. Yeah. And so, okay. So, back to me. I think one of the other things that's nice about this is you can adjust it. Adjusting it to any discipline is easy. Like on your group ride day, go on your mountain bike, go on your cyclocross bike, go to the track, go for track races, something like that. And the downside there, again, is you've got to be able to manage the fatigue. And that's one of the things that probably should be in here somewhere. is that if you're not seeing progress and you cannot immediately pin it down to like, I forgot to eat lunch or I didn't sleep last night or I've been, you know, I've been having high stress at work so I'm not recovering. Like at that point, you've got to, you've got to shift gears into just easy spinning or just go right to a recovery week and do not pass go. That's, that's basically one of the elements of the flow chart for a lot of the workout days that you've put in. Like you said, For your FTP day, whatever intensity that ends up being, the goal is a bit more time than last time, and that can be five minutes, sometimes someone's just on a storm of a day, maybe it's 15 to 20. But the addendum to that is, if you are just making it to what you did last time, or worse, doing less, part of that flow chart for trying to help someone work out what they should be doing is saying, you probably needed more rest coming into this, so take the next. a few days a lot easier than was maybe planned. Maybe even start a recovery week earlier depending on when it is. And another downside here is that especially for beginners, and I would say actually for people who are well-trained athletes of just about any discipline, feeling out FTP is actually pretty easy in my experience. Most people can get it very, very quickly, like in a workout maybe two, especially with like a handful of cues. It's pretty easy for most people to get. So if you are a more super beginner cyclist, this is probably not going to work that well. If you're like, is this my threshold? I don't know. Plus or minus 50 watts from here, I guess. It's not going to go well with that because if you like to do FTP workouts and you're like, all right, I did 2x20 last time, I'll do 2x20 this time, but you're doing 10 watts more this time. Holy crap, that's awesome. Now, how long do I go? Okay, I've got to get to like an 8 out of 10 RPE. So you've got to be able to like auto-regulate in these two dimensions of both intensity and duration, and also maybe a third of like absolute RPE. So that's going to be a tough thing. But I think for most of the audience of this podcast, it's probably going to be within your wheelhouse to accomplish all those things, especially if you're honest about... how you're actually doing the riding. And another thing like you mentioned with not being able to properly coach somebody is if somebody's doing all their endurance riding way too hard, this plan is going to fuck you up. No doubt about it. You are also using my hypothetical athlete who's perfect. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Your guy did your plan and then was like, I like that. I want to, I'm good at auto-regulating. I want a more generalizable plan. I can adjust it myself. Like, there you go. You've got it. Maybe that's the actual truth of this podcast is that I've designed something that someone just starting out should do and you've designed the plan they should do afterwards. Yeah. I think mine is probably a little better for intermediates. Now that we're thinking about it, yeah, I think you're right about that. There we go. Hold on. I need to check what the actual brief was, because if it is a first-time training plan, then... Oh, no. You've specified almost any training status, so I don't have that look full to win. Wait, did I also mention that you can substitute like a race-specific workout for the hard ride, the group ride? Yeah. Okay, cool. I was just making sure I got that noted. Okay. So, all right. So what was the brief that I gave you? You said very specifically. Oh, it was specific. Nothing else, which is part of the specificity. Let's each come up with the, all caps, most basic training plan we can possibly think of that would work for the largest number of people of almost any training status. And I think we've both kind of done that. Yeah, we both kind of have. Although, I mean, this is, it really actually shows one of the differences between Coaching, like a beginner and somebody who's been at it for two, three years at this point. You know, like if, you know, like if you did some racing. My plan is not going to cut it for someone whose training age and also structured training age is quite mature. I would want to change this plan quite a bit for someone who's very used to training. Same, yeah. And my plan, I would want somebody to take as a basic framework and, well, no, I wouldn't. My plan should be thrown out for somebody who's advanced enough, for sure. Because one of the differences between being an intermediate and being a really advanced cyclist of highly advanced training age is that the necessity for overload, Gets Bigger. And the hole that you can dig yourself is deeper. And the problem with being really well-trained, being a very large stimulus to get you better, and having all that fatigue to climb out of, that changes how you structure a year. And so for intermediates, you can think about, all right, if I've got a goal race in June, and I'm going to start in January, and I'm going to start kind of Building Properly in like February, March, you'll probably get there no problem. If you are very, very advanced and you're like, all right, my goal race is in June, I need to start thinking about how I'm going to approach it one to two Junes before that, and potentially more. I remember Tim Cusick again, I can't remember if it was on your podcast, it might have been in one of the webinars, talking about trying to go through the structure for an Olympic cycle for an athlete going to the Olympics. And the thing he picked out is obviously it is seven years of preparation, but the notable part is that it's not four years of preparation because the year after the Olympics is a bit of a down year. Very down here. And that's part of the importance for trying to get someone to peak in four years' time is you're not slamming them with four years' worth of hard training. You're trying to be as adaptable but also as rigid as you can to driving that sort of The seesaw of fatigue that they have to sit on for as little time as possible, but also as far out from the event as possible that you can guarantee this is about as good as we're ever going to get you to. And overdoing it is a risk. Yeah, it's a very high risk. And I would say what training age? What would you think of for a lot of people thinking about like a training in a quad like that, like a four-year cycle? Like I would say you probably don't want to be anywhere less than like five or six years in training at that point, maybe even eight to ten. Five or six, but I think one of the things we shouldn't get too struck up on is this is not something that's going to affect that. 80%. Because I, for instance, who am firmly in the middle of the bell curve, I'm not going to think about an event that I'm doing in three years' time as something that I'm ever going to peak for. I'm only ever thinking about next summer. It is the athletes that are truly on that elite performance path that have to start thinking about it because that's when livelihoods start to get into it and one of the advantages those athletes obviously have is an abundance of time hopefully to train and to recover from what they do which leaves you open to a lot more opportunity to plan on that multi-annual basis than just Jimmy has a 95 job and has two hours a night to ride, who obviously is never going to benefit from that, really. Yeah, and this is like the 1% of even the 20%. The 20% being probably, or even 10% being more advanced people who really need to individualize training and really give themselves a strong overload and bits of rest, too. And some of the more advanced people I'm working with right now, they've... Pretty much since their season ended, you know, over, you know, summer, fall, like a lot of them have not been doing that much hard training. A lot of gym work, low volume, have some fun, occasional intense thing. Okay, sure. But everybody's on the same page when it comes to, you know, when we get to in a couple weeks from now, or even a week or two from now. It's go time and you've got to be ready to handle what's going to come at you. And they're aware that that's the real goal. And also having that mental downtime for advanced people is also really, really handy a lot of the time. Especially people who have families, people who have friends, people who have jobs where they've been putting off stuff. All right, cool. Now it's time to take that vacation. Now it's time to go down the list of stuff that you were putting off. File my taxes, who knows? Don't worry, I file on time. I just quickly looked it up and there were, they're phrasing it weirdly, I think it's 267 cyclists were at the Paris Olympics. So if you think about that in terms of like the total number of people that could possibly even make it to the elite level, that's tiny. like how many people race at the Tour de France? Is it like 150? And this is including track cycling. I think it's like 150 or 180 or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, but this is also including track cycling and I think that BMX, I'm assuming, mountain bike as well, like has a tiny fraction of like the number of elite cyclists in the world and they all aim for this event every four years apart from that one time it was in five years. and this time when it was in three years. But yeah, like the number of people that have to really think over that long annual cycle is very different, especially when you compare it to, if we're thinking about the most elite of the elite, we've gone way off pace in terms of what this podcast is about. But I think it's an interesting comparison and like thought experiment because this whole podcast isn't a thought experiment. Do I expect people to actually go out and do one of our plans? No, absolutely not. Maybe you do? Okay, fine. I hope it works. I don't know if it will. Yeah, like, Taddei Pogacar has to prepare for the Tour de France every single year, and he's probably got an element of the long-term annual training that he has to do every year, but the fact that his goal races are annual is going to influence how strong is he able to be in... an Olympic year, for instance. Because there's no chance in hell Taddy Wiccatcher is going to intentionally peak in an Olympic year. He didn't even go to the bloody thing this year. But he wants to peak every June or July, whatever month it is. Well, there's, in my estimation, there's more money in winning the Tour de France than winning the Olympics. Especially if you can do it four years out of four instead of one year out of four. Anyway, I actually wanted to do one more thing before we wrap this up, which is I want you and I to sit down and think, what are the similarities between our plans? Because there are quite a few, and I'll put down the first one, which is we both have two recovery days a week. Two recovery days a week. With an option for more. Yeah, don't fuck with them. Fuck not with thy recovery days, as the 11th Commandment says. No. But that's also another one of those things that goes back to what we talked about in a previous podcast of when I'm structuring someone's training, I'm looking for the days that suit them best to recover first and foremost. It's about how do we shed the fatigue of everything we've done recently or what we're going to do that week more than it is how can I add more fatigue? Yeah, it's not about maximizing the training. It's also about balancing. The Recovery. So another similarity we have is we both, as a general rule, have two hard days per week and occasionally a third-ish. And that's something that I think both of us are kind of relying on. You're relying more on, I can get away with this once or twice occasionally, and I'm relying on somebody to make that call for themselves. Yeah. I've definitely said this in the podcast before, but especially when it comes to something like a trading plan like this where I don't have any control over how it goes once it's out in the wild. The thing you're trying to guarantee is that someone's able to do it more than it is someone's able to come out with the absolute most optimal. benefit on the other side. And the only way for us to really guarantee that someone is going to be able to do it all is to try and enforce the limitations on them. And my approach to that is I chance it a few times with some three workout weeks. Your approach to that is relying on the athlete to be able to do it. And both of those have their ups and downsides. You're telling me I trust people too much. Yeah. Trusting the guy trying to get your internet fixed too much for the sense of it. Oh my god, dude, this fucking Starlink. Eight o'clock, it just shits the bed most days. Yesterday was so bad. I'm so sorry to the person whose call I had to move to this morning because the internet was so bad. I had one megabyte download speed. But Friday night, apparently, there was a boxing match on that everybody was watching that I didn't hear of until... after it happened, so something like that. Anyway, what else do we have in similarities? Oh, we have as major set pieces, Threshold, VO2 Max, and some kind of harder work, some kind of intermittent efforts. You've got 30-30s, I've got... Group Rides, which can be subbed for 30-30s or like minute-long hill reps or anything race-specific. So like if you are doing crits or something like that, you can do repeated sprint workouts, you know, that kind of stuff, like easy to do. So we've got like the basic ways to train. Like we've got, you know, we've got our peanut butter and jelly of training. We've also got something that I bet most people listening to this beforehand wouldn't have thought to put in, and that's both of us have put in openers on days that are not before a race day. We've scattered some openers throughout the plan, especially post-rest week, to try and make sure that someone is coming into their work weeks capable of doing them, which I think is something most people wouldn't think to do. Well, you know why we do it as coaches? Because that's the first sign we get from our people, how they're feeling after a rest week. Because sometimes if somebody goes out and they start riding and they're like, holy crap, I feel awful, next week is going to be pretty damn easy, isn't it? And that's something that you would have to figure out on your own in one of these plans, like in yours. I think another downside of having like a 12-week structure is that it's difficult to – you've got a timeline. It's difficult to pick up where you left off and then still get to the same spot because the same spot, your race day is – it's static. Yeah. And so – and this is one of the things that we do as coaches with our clients all the time is – is we also help them reprioritize. If you get sick for two weeks before your A-race and you're still not quite feeling good by the time your A-race rolls around, you might be like, oh, well, if you really want to go, maybe you can, but I don't know if it's going to help you. Maybe we need to reprioritize longer term, change your goal for this season, what's down the road. That kind of stuff happens all the time. I had an instance of this recently. One of my athletes is quite strong, but he's been sick as a dog for about three weeks. But he's also been in the middle of, I think it's a club segment hunting competition. I just rolled my eyes so hard. Well, a lot of the discussion has been around Do you need to do this? Can you please go? He's probably prolonging how sick he is by participating in that continuously. Well, he was over the worst of it by the time the day came around to do it, and he said he'll make a judgment on the day as to whether or not he feels up to it. Oh, we know how that goes. Well, the final didn't look amazing, but He said it went poorly, but he had a good time. He took the call, I think. That's what matters. But that was an instance of, like, there was three weeks there where I was just kind of shuffling things about as needed. That day, I ended up just saying, you know, have a chill endurance ride if you can, but please don't feel like you have to go and do this effort. And he went into the effort. but like that's the sort of adjustment you sometimes have to make it's not just negotiation yeah it's not just a workout like goes badly and oh what do we do in the next few days etc or I don't feel good enough to do this workout it's sometimes you need that wholesale adjustment and yeah as you said that that race is static it's not going to move So how do you adapt when you fall out of the intended path that your training is taking you on? How do you get back on track? Maybe not in such a way that you are 100% optimizing things to get you to exactly where you should have been, but how do you get to good enough, like still arriving feeling like you can turn up at your race each time? and feel like I can do the best performance I can do given everything that's happened in the past X numbers of weeks. Yeah, and in my experience, most people are actually really good about keeping what happened recently in their head when they evaluate how they did on that day. some people are not so good at remembering what happened and we do have to remind them occasionally but I think also maybe this entire thing if you are if you've always been on like a more like let's put it this way if you've never been coached and you are curious about what happens with a coach, like this is probably an insight into like the difference between having a regular plan and also having a coach. So hopefully it's been informative. Take notice of how dissatisfied we've been with our own plans throughout this process. That's pretty typical for us in general. It's like, oh God, what could I have done better? I think that's the thing that I thought we have fairly constantly for probably the rest of our lives. It's a terrible job to have imposter syndrome, and I can tell you that. I think everybody's got imposter syndrome at this point. Yeah. So, all right. Thanks, Impostors, for listening. It's been great having you with us. If you would like to reach out for coaching, please give me an email at empiricalcycling at gmail.com. And if you want to share the podcast because you liked it, please do so because we are ad-free and word of mouth is the best way to support the podcast as well as hiring us for coaching or consultations. So empiricalcycling at gmail.com. And if you would like to ask a question on the weekend AMAs or in future podcast episodes, go give me a follow on Instagram at empiricalcycling. and yeah, all right, donate to Hurricane Helene Relief and we'll see you next time. Bye.