Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore. Thank you, everybody, for listening, as always. And if you are new here, please consider subscribing if you like what you're hearing. And if you are a returning listener, thank you so much for coming back. We love having you back. And if you want to support the podcast because we are ad-free, you can always let people know about the podcast. Word of mouth is fantastic. A five-star rating wherever you listen to podcasts is fantastic. And also, a really glowing review helps a lot. You know, loophole reviews are nice, but a glowing review? Really appreciate all of those. And of course, if you'd like to donate to the show to keep the lights on, empiricalcycling.com slash donate. And if you would like to hire us for coaching or consultations, empiricalcycling at gmail.com or head over to the website. I've got a contact form up there with asks you some questions for some relevant background information as well. And of course, if you're a student or a professional athlete, we know how much money you folks don't have, generally speaking. And so please reach out and, you know. Let us know if that's your circumstance. We're happy to help out. And if you'd like to ask questions for me for my weekend AMAs, that's up in the Instagrams at Empirical Cycling, up in the stories. And if you want to ask questions for the podcast, I've got one up right now for this podcast. Questions are trickling in as we record. You can also follow me along for there. And sometimes they'll go up on the same weekend, like at the same time, depending on what the recording schedule is like. So apologies for all of those. Save your good questions. And so today, I thought it would be really fun to have Rory in and talk about intermediate training mistakes because this is somewhere that, in fact, maybe my definition isn't even the definition I want because I've got this down as if you're training for two to five years. However, as after we hit record, I thought, some people probably never get past intermediate. And when we do the advanced one, we'll have to kind of decide, delineate. difference between the two. But, so, Rory, how would you define somebody who's an intermediate with cycling training? And also, I'm going to preface this, prepare to hear Rory the clearest he's ever been. If I knew you were going to say that, I would have changed my microphone input right before we started recording. It was interesting, when you were... doing your intro there and I was thinking about what is the difference between intermediate and advanced and there's a part of me that was thinking I think I maybe crossed that bridge last year and for me the difference was that I started riding my bike a lot more and the things I need to do to get fitter are in some ways a little more obvious and in some ways a little more difficult to achieve so I think the transition from I think for a beginning cyclist it's like that first one to two years as you say and I think it's that period where just about anything will do it. You're having fun, you're getting fitter without having to worry too much about what exactly you do. I think in an intermediate cyclist it's when the work that you're having to do on the bike is still producing results But it's not necessarily at the point where you think, oh, I've really plateaued here. You're still maybe getting that 10 watts a year on your FTP. 10 to 20 or even 30, yeah. Depending on the person. Slow progress, yeah. Because we can think about this as you're approaching an asymptote, but it's not like, you know, the progress is not linear or it's not even predictable a lot of the time because As you go and as you train, your progress sometimes stalls out. You're like, okay, well, I'm going to try this. And then you see a lot of progress. Then it stops again. You're like, I'm going to try that again. And then you stop again. It's not like a smooth curve of fitness improvements, nor ever will it be for just about anybody except the freakiest of the freaks. I think for... Definition of Intermediate. Yeah, I'd like to think about people who've been training for pretty much two to five years still seeing some pretty regular improvements. Or if you're not seeing improvements, this is where the mistakes part comes in. What are you doing that is stopping you from seeing your improvements? So, because, you know, like Rory said, you know, we would expect to see somewhere between like maybe 10 watts a year, 10 to... 30 watts a year of FTP improvement. And I think especially when you really, really hit your peak and you start kind of getting back up to the same number year after year after year, and you've tried literally everything in the book, like, okay, maybe we'll classify you as advanced then. Okay, well, we definitely would. But for intermediate, still seeing regular progress and would benefit a lot from dialing in your training. and your off-bike stuff and all the stuff we're going to talk about today. So Rory and I have prepared a list each. We've done this before and it's been a lot of fun. So Rory, since I'm the home team here and you're the away team, I'm going to let you take the first crack at your list. So what's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about intermediate training mistakes? Well, the away team's about to get an early goal here because I thought of a new one to add to my list right as you were talking there. We've mentioned here at the start that someone who's in that intermediate phase is still able to make that 10, 15, 20 watts a year with some good writing, good training. Mine is don't be hard on yourself when that doesn't happen. Don't be hard on yourself when... The things you expect to benefit from in your training go off the rails. I've got a few clients right now who have been sporadically ill over the last year and for some of them their FTP improvement has not gone to the same rate that we'd maybe have hoped for. Like we've touched on better numbers, gotten sick, FTP's fallen off a little bit as a result. and my advice to them and to anyone listening if you're ever in that position is like to recognize that it will come back you got there the first time and don't be hard on yourself for the subsequent weeks and months feeling like you have screwed up in some way because more often than not this is going to be something that is just not your fault at all. What I'd like to add is that you shouldn't Don't expect to hang on to your peak fitness all the time. Yeah, that's another good thing to point out is don't expect February fitness to be the same as October fitness. Yes, well, depending on when your season is. Depending on your hemisphere. Yeah, so for October, when you're just getting back on the bike, getting back into training after your season break for most people, yeah, I wouldn't even advise people going out and doing an FTP test at that point. You can. It's not going to feel very good. I'd say, you know, even do two or three weeks of just kind of noodling or just fun riding before you do that. Kind of get your legs back under you again. But yeah, I think that's actually great because I think that aspect of performance and training is a little under-considered by a lot of people. And a lot of, I think, what drives some of these training mistakes. is people having unreasonable goals and expectations. That's one of the reasons that a lot of people hire a coach because every year we go through 15 to 20-ish seasons that we coach. We've got a ton more experience under our belts than somebody just coaching themselves. and I think that that's an advantage of that but at the same time if you're coaching yourself and you are beating your head against the wall going how come I'm not improving and you're missing like I didn't take a mid-season break that you know Rory or I would spot immediately you go oh you haven't rested okay yeah you're trying to hammer the hardest rides all year round of course you're not gonna be able to be super super fit 12 months a year 

All right, my turn. I think for me, the first thing that came to mind when I thought about this was not dialing in the basics. You'd be surprised also how far you can go in training and fitness without having something really, really well thought out and having a good routine for it. So like things like pacing. I coach people. who, especially when we start sometimes, have been riding for years and they cannot pace an effort very well. Not even a 20-minute test. We're talking like five minutes, one minute, 30 minutes, two hours. Take your pick. So doing stuff like that, dialing in your RPE. What is your personal RPE scale? We've talked about this on recent podcasts before where it's like, for me, endurance pace for me is like a 4, sometimes a 5, but for most people it's like a 2 or a 3. Some people, they're going to call it a 0.5. I know you know some people like that, and I know you coach people like that too, Rory. So there's that. Progressive overload oftentimes doesn't get considered, I think, and this is one of the basics of, you know, Okay, maybe doing two intervals, maybe two 15-minute intervals is what I've been doing for a while and I've been seeing good progress and now my progress is done. Add a third, see what happens. You know, instead of doing two by 20, do three by 20 and that kind of stuff. And also, the big ones off the bike, sleep and nutrition. Because when you're getting your noob gains and the world is your oyster and you can look at a bike, and get faster. Anything you do is just going to be, it's all gravy. Yeah, it's all frosting. But when you start getting into your intermediate phase, the recovery becomes a massive factor. And it gets a bigger factor as you get better and better and better trained, and it needs to have a higher and higher priority. because you can do all the fancy training you want, but if your sleep sucks and your nutrition sucks, you are going to get nowhere. Yeah, it's interesting. So this isn't the direction I thought you were going to go down when you talked about making sure you get the basics right because my immediate thought was people who are in that trying to take the next steps in their training phase. are probably the ones most at danger from effectively hunting down miracle intervals of some sorts or skipping steps thinking that it's going to get them to their goal much faster than they probably should be aiming to achieve something. So my thought is people who just decide, having listened to us talk about VO2 max intervals, for example, to go and start doing three VO2 max intervals a week for three months. That is definitely what we wouldn't recommend for just about anyone. For anyone. Not just about anyone. For anyone. Yeah, effectively, like, trying to shortcut trading, I guess, is what I originally thought you were going to get towards there. Yeah, definitely don't do that. But I think that people at every level, are prone to that. So I don't necessarily think it's beginners or intermediates or even somebody who's hitting that same target every year for the last 10 years, like, oh, is this as far as I can go? Why wouldn't you look for miracle intervals at that point? So, all right, what's your next one? Well, perhaps a little bit along the same line is, trying the same thing again and again and again and expecting to get the same results. So you mentioned progressive overload already, you stole it from me. But effectively... Sorry, I owe you five euros now, don't I? I don't use euros, sadly. I guess what I'm thinking about here is not necessarily people doing 2x20 every single week. that's not necessarily going to be a productive way to train but I'm thinking more following the same plan every single year almost to the letter in some cases and I already know someone who thinks I'm subtweeting them or whatever the blue sky equivalent of that is but I'm not but as you go into each new year I think it's important to try and try something a little bit different. that doesn't mean a wholesale revamp of how it is you're going to approach training but is there something that you de-emphasized last year that could maybe be something to try a little bit more of this year like say you are really good at getting out and doing a lot of the aerobic stuff like anything that is like VO2s or Sweet Spot or Threshold and maybe you neglected some of the higher-end anaerobic capacity work or just anaerobic all-out power sort of stuff. Maybe try and do a little bit more of that, particularly in the early season when you've got a bit more room to breathe before it gets to summer and you're starting to think about where all your priorities are. Not because you're necessarily going to get... some sort of revolutionary change to what your fitness is, but you'll be able to see, oh, I've not done this for a while, how do I respond to it? Is it something that I'm getting a little bit more benefit from? And potentially, is it something that helps me do training later in the season, not even the racing, but if you do something very early on that might not seem like it's going to have an immediate benefit to you? Does it actually benefit you just because it makes training a wee bit more productive? Strength training. Strength training is a big one there. Yeah, I've started doing that. Still not quite seen the benefits yet. What did you call it? Hateful? Hateful, yeah. I got a PT to help me. He's really good. Anyone in Glasgow that listens to this podcast wants a PT, I'll recommend him if you send me an email or a message. I actually had on my list and I crossed it out because I was like, yeah, I don't know how often this happens, but I actually had written down expecting your earliest training plans to work again. I think that that's the, is there like a noob gains fallacy, logical fallacy that we can lean on here? Because there's got to be something like that. Because I certainly have done this myself. And this is really one of the big reasons that I thought about this. It's because way back when I started training, I started seeing really rapid fitness improvements. Well, actually, this was back in the day when power meters were somewhat cost prohibitive. And I had been training a little bit by the time I got my first power meter, but then I was seeing some improvements and I was like, okay, cool, this is great. And then when I stopped seeing improvements, instead of thinking about, you know, progressive overload, like how do my physiologic systems work? What's my limiter? I was more thinking of, I got to go back and do that other thing that I did that worked really well that other time. and early on in my coaching career, I did the exact same thing where if somebody stopped seeing progress, I was like, okay, well, let's just run back again, kind of similar to what we did before that worked and it didn't work and that's when you go, oh, there's a lot more here. Okay, so that's a really good way to kind of turn your entire philosophy of training upside down is to run into one of those situations. So yeah, I would say you're totally spot on with that. Isn't that one of those definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting the same thing to happen every single time? Or is it something new to happen every single time? It's expecting something new to happen when you're doing the same thing over and over. It's like... Okay, so that does not apply at all for what we're talking about then. Oh yes, doing something over and over and expecting a different result. Yeah. And I think if you're playing a slot machine, Okay, sure, you're going to get a different result. But, you know, if you're playing with Newtonian physics, you should get roughly the same result every single time. Okay, so my actual next one is going to be not working on your race skills. Because I think I have consulted with a lot of people who who approach training and racing the way I approached playing StarCraft in 1998, where I wouldn't do anything until I had a massive army. Oh, I played the guys with the spaceships. Oh, right. Fine. Anyway, most people are probably like, what the hell is he talking about? It's a strategy game. I'm horrible at them. And that was the only way I could do anything is by coming out with overwhelming force against a computer because against an actual person with skills, I would get trounced every single time in like three minutes. So I think that this is something that I see somewhat frequently, which is, all right, I'm going to basically work myself up to this massive level of fitness. When I go race, I'm going to be absolutely dominant and unassailable. And then you get in a race. and somebody bumps an elbow and you're like, oh shit, what do I do? And at that kind of skill, I think, and that kind of experience takes, you know, sometimes you just got to put your hat in your hand and go humble yourself in a Cat5 field and be like, how good am I or how bad am I? And honestly, my first race, I was really bad. There's a picture of me from my first Cat5 race at a... Training crit, leading out an actual child. He was like 12 or 13. He's tiny. And because I didn't realize I'm on the front coming around the last corner, I'm hammering and there's still like, it was like 400 meters out of that corner to the finish line. And I was like, I'm going to win a premium my first race. I'm a badass. And this tiny little kid just rockets by me and I stand up to try to keep up. I have nothing left in my legs. And by the time I got to the last lap, I think I was like, I think it was 10th. I was so, my legs were so cramped up, I could barely unclip. That's, and I was like, how are all these guys standing up? I don't understand this. And it took me a while for, to like both improve my fitness and improve my race skill set to the point where I could actually feel like I was properly racing. And I think that there are a handful of people out there. who are truly gifted that we could look at and go, well, they clearly won everything from Cat 5 and they got up to Cat 1 in like two years and that's awesome. Great for them, but that's not the typical experience. Typically, people need to go learn what, not only what are you kind of naturally good at, but also what do you like? Because if you're a natural sprinter and you're good at sprinting and you hate bunch sprints, you need to go learn that. And instead of having a, you know, if you've got a, 1600-watt sprint, and then you go to your first Cat5 race, and you're like, man, I don't want to be elbow to elbow with all these people. I want to ride away from them. And you've been working on your sprint. You didn't know that before. You should probably have figured that out earlier before you spent so much time investment in that one aspect of training that you are probably not going to use that much. So does that make any sense whatsoever? I think it does, right? Yeah, except for the part where Andre Greipel was essentially a very risk-averse sprinter, and he did all right. Granted, he had some other assets going for him. Yeah, like having a massive aerobic fitness and also having a good team around him and not being that conservative a sprinter. He would always, I think you're right, he would give up the wheel frequently, but like there were days when he was really, really good. If I can propose a variant on your suggestion here. is where you're talking about don't forget the things you need to do to be a good racer. I'd say one thing, I was guilty of this when I first started thinking about training properly and started racing properly, is assuming that the final 500 metres of the race are the only thing you have to train for, expecting that you're going to be there in prime position to win. And it doesn't matter if you've got the one-minute power to get up that hill first, because in reality, you need to make sure that you get there with your one-minute power intact. So it's making sure that your training reflects the actual demands of what you're going to do and not just the final 30 seconds. Yes, yeah, I like that. Yeah, having a more holistic view of your fitness. And also, not only that, I mean, I tell a lot of my clients this. I don't want you to go to your A race as your first race of the season. I want you to have a couple races under your belt that are going to be similar to your A race so we can actually tell how the training is going and what needs to be tweaked between now and then. That's a very common approach I have. There's a lot of value in those early season races of working out, oh, final five minutes, I just felt like I didn't have it, or the kickers midway through this, like, six-kilometer circuit we do. I was dropping the wheel every single time. Anything like that is handy for knowing when it comes to the training. And also the context before that race itself, like, did you rest enough? Did you do the openers that you probably needed? Were you over-rested? Did you eat enough? Did you sleep like shit? Did you eat enough? Yeah, like, where are all the little things that would help? I had a client, I don't know if I've mentioned this story in the podcast, but I had a client who wanted to cycle as much off-road as possible from the top of Vermont to the bottom of Vermont. That's a good one. Yeah, it sounded awful. He had a great time, though. I've done 200 on 100, and that's paved, and that's a ton of fun, but it takes all day. Yeah, this took him more than just all day. He had to do it twice. The first time, I think from memory, we were ready from the fitness perspective, but the issue we had was twofold. One, there was a little bit of problem with his route, meaning that there was just too much hike-a-bike in the middle of the night, and that was something that when it came to doing round two, just made sure that he rectified so that... you know he wasn't having a horrible time walking instead of riding and the second thing was he got really cold and so between his first and his second attempt we made the conscious effort to try and do a ride that started sort of late evening I can't remember how long he rode for I think it was like six, eight hours basically riding like into the dark the worst part overnight just to try and work out what kit do I need to make this as comfy an experience possible. And he wasn't racing what he did. He just wanted to be able to do this really cool ride that he'd planned out. And part of the way that we managed to make sure that he was able to then go and do it was one failed attempt, which is basically your equivalent of a practice crit, even though we were like, ideally it would have just been one and done. And the second was taking the things we learned from that practice ride. doing a purposefully practiced ride before he went and did the real thing. And yeah, he ended up having a really good ride. It's one of those rides in WKO that just won't load because it's too long. I think that's your computer having a problem. Yeah. I've got plenty of ultra files that are like 24 hours or longer that... They take a second, but they'll load. But yeah, no, your point is well taken, and I think that that's a non-competitive example of exactly the point that I'm trying to make, yeah. So, all right, what do you got next? Not monitoring for if the work you're doing to try and get faster is making the changes you expect. Obviously this podcast talks a lot about things like VO2max. What I'm talking about here is also going to apply to things like anaerobic capacity work or the work you're doing in the gym to maybe try and augment your sprint work. And that is have... at least one way of being able to determine whether the hard work you are putting in is resulting in the improvements that you want to get out of that work. Otherwise, you're at risk of falling a little bit into like junk miles syndrome of yes, the work you're doing is quote-unquote structured and well thought through. If it's not actually contributing to making you improve in the way you want that work to improve, you might as well have been doing something else, which is why it's important to know when you're doing any sort of training, what passive ways do you have either in terms of monitoring how you feel in rides or looking at the data afterwards. to be able to determine that the training you're doing is productive and not like, what would the word be? Flatlining you, I guess. Plateauing. There we go. Yeah, there's a way I like to frame this, which is usually something that I only talk about with our coaches in our coach meetings. I like to frame it as in, is the intervention you have, is it going to be neutral to positive, or is it going to be neutral to negative? Like, if there's a chance that what you're doing is going to make somebody go backwards, probably don't do it. Unless it's like your last option, and you clear it with the person, this may not work, and in fact, it may actually backfire. Most of the time, what you want is, I think this is going to lead me to an improvement, and at worst, I'm going to be right where I was before. And to that point, we actually did a podcast on this almost a year ago, something like that, 10 Minute Tips number 41, called How to Try New Training Methods. And I believe Rory, I think you were the co-host on that one. I don't remember at this point. Yeah, me neither. But I remember doing that podcast, and that's probably a good one to listen to if you'd like to dig more into that. But I have more to add to that now at this point, which is that also knowing where you are in a certain – not only in your season, but also in your training and what expected response you're going to have will also let you know what is a reasonable timeline over which I think I can see an improvement. So if you are extremely well-trained or if you've just been a slow aerobic responder, so somebody like me, and I start doing a new training intervention, I will give myself probably a month, if not two, to try to see if I'm actually improving because I am that slow a responder, especially once I've kind of gotten past my first two or three months of kind of regaining fitness. Yeah. the experiment I guess experimenting is maybe the best way to describe it but clearing it with your athlete or if you are coaching yourself clearing it with your future self I was talking to one of my clients yesterday who's had, and they know exactly who they are, they've had a pretty derailed start to their season due to a whole load of things happening off the bike. And so they have a race coming up in a little under a month, I think. It's one of those Levi Lightpiner ones where they have clearly sold their soul to the devil to get that much prize money. And they just want to be able to turn up and like have a good ride but also support their team as much as possible and it's like okay we've been pretty derailed up to now what can we do to try and get the most out of this that we can whilst also being able to benefit in some of the crits that they want to do because they're having fun with the crits and the my thought was one the first thing we need is just some consistency riding because nothing's going to do more for you than just being able to ride your bike consistently right now. And the second thing is I think we should gamble and do a particular type of training hoping that it becomes in the best form an all tides lift all bolts situation and at worst gets them very good in one particular respect. trying in the short time that we've got to lift fitness in what I guess you would potentially describe as being a very short-term manner to give them whatever fitness we can get that they can hold on to for four weeks from now. And the benefit if we do this is obviously good, they'll get fit, they'll have a good race. The long-term benefit I see from this is that it gives them something to build off of when we can get back to more sustainable training, because the next four weeks definitely wouldn't be sustainable. The downside is that... It doesn't lift, the tide does not lift all boats, the boats sink, and they maybe only get fit in one respect, but they don't get fit in the way that is necessarily going to make sure that they get to the end of this, I think it's 135 mile race. There's a gamble there, and they're fine with it. They were like, okay, trust me that what we're going to do is going to help. And the only thing I need from them is that they ride their bike, which is often going to be the case from your coaches. Your coach is going to be happy as long as you're riding. But, yeah, it's fine to do experiments like this, I guess, is another one of these tips we can maybe give. And that's kind of what my first one was, I think. But know when it's a gamble. But know when it's a gamble and know what you're going to get out of it and know when to bail out if it's not working. Yeah, and I think that that's actually one of the things that an experienced coach can benefit, can be a benefit for is when you do take a gamble, you know, usually you need a separate set of eyes to say, all right, now is when we pull the ripcord. That can take something that's not really improving your fitness and you go, okay, well, we're going to change tack here or you clearly need some rest and maybe we'll see some benefits after the rest. But we can tell when the hole's starting to really get dug that you may not get out of. So when the overreaching is potentially non-functional, we can spot, I'd say, like 95 times out of 100. I think that's underselling it. Probably 99 times out of 100. Not just us. I mean, pretty much any experienced coach is going to be able to do this. So, yeah, I think the question about your point about reframing the goal actually helps a lot. And I think that's something that I didn't have written down but I really like is knowing that when derailments do come and they're inevitable, they will always happen. How do you approach that? You get ill. That's a derailment. Yeah, you get ill. Some of your family falls ill. You get injured. You know, you get crashed out. Like, take your pick. Like, your bike stops working. Your bike gets destroyed in travel. And you can't ride for, like, a week. What do you do? Like, okay, we got options. And you've got to make sure that you are flexible enough to Roll with the Punches, as it were. That's a terrible analogy. Nobody should be getting punched in cycling, but you know what I mean. Okay, similar to, actually, you know what? No, not similar to that, but similar to my previous one talking about, you know, over-focusing on watts and not working on your skill set in racing. It's not working. Actually, yeah, similar to this, not working on your skill set and training. Because I think a training skill set is something that we don't usually talk about. And it's something that I haven't even really tried to put words to previously. But what I mean is learning signs when you're overreaching. Learning signs when you know you need to rest. Learning signs when, or learning yourself in terms of your off-bike stress. Maybe you're bad at shutting down. Maybe you're somebody whose brain is going 100 miles an hour when you're trying to go to sleep. Roy's raising his hand right now because I get it. And you know that you need to shut down. And learning that actually has a massive impact, a positive impact. on your training, especially once you can relax, once you can, and this goes for anything that, and I guess I'm talking about recovery here, because when you don't know how to relax, when you don't know how to shut down, when you don't know how to balance life stress, or even just in terms of like nutrition, how much do I eat? When do I eat? Maybe I'm going way too long between meals. Maybe I'm not eating enough for dinner. Maybe I'm not eating enough for breakfast. Maybe I'm not eating Maybe I'm trying to eat closer to bed and like I'm eating the wrong things. Like any of these things can be potentially very impactful on your recovery, on your sleep, on your training. And knowing or learning and getting to know yourself in these respects is I think one of the best parts about being intermediate. So, and I'll even give an example of myself. It's like, I've been, you know, working on my sprinting for, I don't know, like 10 years or something like that at this point, or almost. And so I've been training legs multiple times a week for a very long time, a very advanced person 10 years down the road in terms of like leg day. I never really thought about this until the last like two or three years. and now I'm learning all the stupid shit that I did back in the day back in the day I mean like five to eight years ago where I'm learning what are the signs that I need to I need to to deload in the gym what are the signs I didn't eat enough before the gym what are the signs that I didn't eat enough afterwards what are the signs that I'm doing too many sets and all that kind of stuff so it's like You can do this with your training too. How many interval days is too many? How many is non-functional? How many can I recover from? And is this also like, do I need this much or do I need more stress in order to get better? And then how much rest do I need on the other side of it? These are all questions that you need to ask about yourself and figure out what is your... ROI, what's your return on your investment in terms of your training focus? And what's it going to cost you in terms of fatigue and recovery? So what do you think? I think it's also important to note that recognizing these signs and responding to them doesn't have to be a purely negative experience in terms of, oh, it means I can't go do my intervals or it means I can't go right at all or whatever it ends up being. It can just be Do I need to make a small adjustment here that allows me to go and do what I did plan on doing? But maybe I'm going to be feeling a bit better about it or a little less stressed about it. And I had this twice over the weekend. On Friday night, I was lying in bed. My plan on Saturday was to go out and do some intervals in the morning, but I would hook onto the back of a group ride. ride with them for an hour or two where I was going to do the intervals and then ride home and then as we do I was lying in bed thinking just how good lying in bed and sleeping is and I turned my alarm off and decided if I'm going to do this then I shall wake up on time and I shall go and who'd have known it I did not wake up on time and I did not go did the intervals, didn't do the group ride but I did the same thing again on Saturday night I was Blitzed on Saturday, like really tired, and turned my alarm off. Usually we would say bliss means drunk, but you just mean tired, okay. In Scotland, words can mean whatever you want, but yeah, we say dishwashered. But on Saturday night, really tired, there was a group ride again on Sunday morning that I thought, oh, that would be nice to go do, but there's not a chance in hell I'm ever going to wake up for it. So I turned my alarm off knowing the priority needs to be that I sleep. But I woke up an hour and a half earlier than I planned, had a really good restful night of sleep somehow and went and did that group ride. So in both cases this weekend, despite the fact that I made changes that would mean that my plans could change, I was still able to achieve the plan I had set for myself just by being essentially kind. to myself in terms of what I expect. So sometimes, yeah, turn the alarm off. That doesn't mean you're not going to be able to get up and go ride, but it's that little bit less stress. And the thing I was prioritising in both instances was, God, bed's just so fucking good. I'm not, I don't want to get out of bed. On the Friday night one, I remember changing my alarm. so that I would be able to wake up on time. And then five minutes later was when I turned it off. That five minutes was enough for me to realize, oh, I'm not doing this. There's not a chance. I like that. I've actually had quite a few clients who will sleep in and be like, oh, man, I missed the group ride or whatever. I just went and did this other thing instead. And in fact, a lot of the time, I will rarely give anybody shit for that kind of thing. Like, if it's like a really key race or something like that, like, you better wake up for that, you know? But if it's like a training ride, if it's a group ride, it's something you can miss, don't worry about it. We'll take care of it tomorrow. If it's a really key session, we'll move it down. Like, learning that kind of thing about being flexible. is, yeah, that's fantastic. It's a great, intermediate training status is an absolutely perfect time to figure that stuff out. Pretty much every time a client has made a mid-workout adjustment and decided to, like, just go do some endurance after, like, trying it, I don't think I've ever said, what the fuck are you doing? It's always just been like, yeah, that was a really good decision. Like, someone tweaked their back on their first interval yesterday, and I was like, Good choice. Definitely don't do it. Yeah, don't do that. I'm just going to ride through my severe back pain. Like, yeah, don't do that. Okay, so I think actually it's your turn right now. So what's your fourth one? This is maybe a convenient one to bump off of there, which is don't burn out. and don't lose track of cycling being something that you at least originally started doing for fun. I think there's a very big risk of people when they start to get to that point where they do a training plan and then they get to the next year and they do a training plan and they get to the next year and they do a training plan and even if they're doing things right, they're changing things up, they're... making changes that are going to allow them to get faster. The risk is they start to sacrifice the fun of the sport and that can include not doing things like group rides. Like if you have, like I've mentioned in a previous podcast, there's like four or five group rides I could go to every week and it just so happens that I have my most fun racing with friends. So during the summer, my... productivity in terms of structured training is close to nil but I'm out there having a good time and I wouldn't sacrifice that at this point and I think to a certain extent people listening to this shouldn't either if there is rides that you really enjoy doing go and do them if you are coached by someone be it at this company or elsewhere like tell them the rides that are really important to you and Ask for as much as possible. Can we make sure that I can fit this in? And yeah, there might be sacrifices, but it's good for you to be able to go and have fun. And again, it's another one of those ways, if it's anything like the group rides I do, to be able to identify all those little things that you've done in training and to work out where the improvements you maybe want to make are, if it's like a fast ride. But yeah. Have fun. Make sure that this is something you're going to want to go and do again and again. Make it so that the structured training, be it like the long and easy stuff or the short and hard stuff, is something that you have the mental energy to engage with because you're having fun and it's not just, uh, this again. I remember I was talking to somebody once about coaching. We were having an intro call. And when you have an intro call with us, if the vibe's not right or something's off, it's okay. Don't worry about it if you don't feel like it's right for you. And I actually told this person, I don't think this is right for you because they wanted to go off and do adventures at any point, do a lot of group rides. and they didn't actually want to do any structured training and they're still asking me, can you like coach me to get you faster? And I'm like, I can only give you so much unstructured training in order to make you faster. And sometimes you're gonna have to balance how much of this do you want that's fun versus how much do you want to get faster? Because at a certain point, group rides can make you fit up to a point. But beyond that point, you need to actually stress your body in certain ways that a group ride oftentimes is not going to do. And if you're tipping in the balance of, I want to get faster, sometimes you have to, like you said, you've got to make some sacrifices. It doesn't mean you've got to become a training monk and never go on a group ride. That is absolutely not the case. and having the right balance of fun and satisfaction with getting faster, I think that is a point well taken. I think if anyone has a sort of winters that I do, or God forbid some of the clients I have in Scandinavia do, and you're that kind of person. The bad news at this time of year, you're only just getting back outside and there's been like four or five, maybe God forbid, more months where you haven't been able to ride with friends and the smart, like well-ordered, well-structured, productive training can be enforced on you simply by the conditions outside not being pliable for fun. That carries its own difficulties in terms of trying to... ensure you stay motivated, you don't get burned out, but it is possible to be the kind of person that wants to do a lot of the fun rides if you are essentially periodising your fun, which is the worst phrase I've ever said, between summer and winter, because that's when you're going to be most productive doing this sort of thing. Yeah, true. Yeah. And actually, in a similar vein, I've had a lot of people ask me, like, oh, well, do I have to do this certain type of training this certain time of year, like volume? You know, if you hate riding the trainer longer than 90 minutes, like, I'm not going to tell you to go longer than 90 minutes. I'll maybe ask, like, hey, can you occasionally give me, like, two? That'd be great. I'm not, you know, if, especially if you're not making money doing this, if this is fun and for passion, like, you know, don't torture yourself over it for sure. Um, all right. I guess that leaves me for my, uh, my last one. Actually, uh, I had this one too and I crossed it out, but this actually is similar in a similar vein. So I'll just add it to your point. Um, which was, uh, um, switching your training focus too often. So I've definitely consulted with some folks who have gone from, I'm going to train really, really hard, and they'll train super hard for two weeks, and then the fatigue mounts and they go, the motivation goes away. And they're like, fuck this, I'm going to go ride for fun, they'll ride for fun for two or three weeks. But I know people who do that with training programs too. Oh, I'm going to hop on the, I'm going to do all polarized now, or I'm going to do all torque training, or I'm going to do all... threshold training or sweet spot or whatever. Take your pick. But I think, yeah, periodizing your fun. I hate that phrase, but I like it. Knowing that the fun stuff is going to come when it gets warmer outside. Yeah, that's great. Actually, we currently and previously have coached a bunch of folks in Iceland. And I remember one person in particular, said that every Sunday there's a group ride in Reykjavik. And especially in the middle of the winter, when we get that one hour of sunlight, everybody goes out to this ride and rides together because that's the only time in the winter that you get to see other people on bikes. And I was like, yeah, we're going to keep that in your schedule. There's no way that's going away. And sometimes weather's bad and you can't go out and make it. But oftentimes, just kind of good fun on a Sunday. You know, it's, it's, it's a, and also knowing how much of that you need, speaking of individualizing your training, like knowing that you need to go see people and have a social ride like once a week or every two weeks or something like that. If you know that about yourself, you know, especially when you start working with a coach, be like, I need this in my life. Like this keeps me happy. This keeps me motivated. Stick with it. Um, all right, I guess. Is this, is the same as when one of our clients says, This is our weekly practice crit series and I want to go do it. I basically see it as the same thing. It's like, this is the group ride with all my friends that I want to go do. It's like, okay. Yeah, yeah. I had that with Wells Ave. I had so much fun going there. And I didn't go every week, but I loved going and I went as often as I could. Yeah, a ton of fun. So, all right. My last one is going to be unnecessary or unnecessarily aggressive. Dieting. Yeah. Because I see this... Yeah, go ahead, sorry. I think you're maybe not going to go down the same road as I'd interpret this, but Dan Bigham, now Red Bull, Bora, whatever it's called, had an article that he put up and has since taken offline, but I saved the files because I found it. The Wayback Machine always works. Yep. Basically looking at what's the effect, his argument was that aero's more important than weight in a road race. And I think he's right in that front, but essentially he looked at what's the effect of a rolling road race if you lose a kilo, a single kilo. And he was obviously comparing it against a bunch of aero improvements. And the effect of a kilo change was basically like 13 kilojoules of work. difference throughout the entire race. It's like two or three watts. It's minute. When you think about if you lose a kilo and you're having to go up a hill at six watts per kilo, that is six watts. Like it's very small amount. And so the thing I try to make sure people don't fall for when it comes to dieting is dieting to a degree that is, I guess, non-functional in terms of actual training outcomes. If someone is 62 kilos, and wants to get to 61, I'm going to perhaps suggest that we can use our energy a wee bit better. If someone is 96 kilos and wants to get to 88, that's maybe something that's perhaps more in the discussion, depending on other parameters around their body composition, height in particular. But for many people, do not... Go hunting watts per kilo as a way to overhaul your racing because the amount of weight you have to lose to achieve those benefits is often significant enough to be dangerous. Yeah. And you know what's funny is with a lot of my very well-trained athletes, we have weight goals for their races, but they're not minimums. or it's not like a weight maximum like you can weigh only as much as this on a certain day. It's a minimum. Like you've got to get up to this weight for race day. Like give me, like show me 72 kilos today. Like don't show me 68 like you usually are. Like you need to gain weight for this. And a lot of the time it's glycogen like and just water weight and plasma volume because that kind of stuff can go up and down so rapidly. But I think where I had initially gone with this because I coach a lot of people who have body composition goals, not only for health but for performance as well. And I've consulted with a ton of people who have dieting as part of the positive outcomes they want. And a lot of the time, For intermediates, this comes because you see a training plateau. And you think the only way now I'm going to get faster is by losing weight. And most of the time, I'd say the dieting I see is, like I said, unnecessary or unnecessarily aggressive. Like there's a lot of stuff in training that you can tweak to Potentially show improvements. And especially, ironically, for people who are really focused on body composition, eating more oftentimes will get you much faster without gaining you weight. I think a lot of people vastly underestimate their energy intake needs, but we're going to go into way detail on that in another episode, possibly in the very far future. But the other things that I usually see... with dieting is like doing it at the wrong time of year also. Like as you head into racing, like the last thing you want to do is try to lose like four or five pounds like the four weeks before your goal race. Like that's going to be the opposite of, and occasionally, you know, I've heard of pro cyclists doing this in the past, like before, you know, certain hill climbs or before certain races, like these are genetic freaks. and they know how to tow that line also and they usually have an entire team of people behind them making sure that things are going right. Yeah, there was that story of, oh, who was the Aussie guy that won the Giro not too many years ago on Bora? Oh, God, I should know this name and I forget. While you look him up, the story I heard about... Hindley, Jai Hindley. Yeah, Jai Hindley. The story I heard was that he had never met nor spoken to Tim Podlagar, and then one of the decisive stages of that Giro he won, he was basically told, aim to eat, it was like 180 grams of carbs an hour, just for this stage, and... Hindley basically just had to take it on pure belief in the fact that his team were listening to this person, that he should do what this person does, and clearly it worked. But the point is, pros have so much advice and so much, in the case of teams like JumboVisma, like... direction about what exactly they put in their body that we as amateurs and even like the people, the company coaches that aren't amateurs don't have that resource in the same way that like these big world tour teams do. Oh, for sure. The other thing I was going to note, you said don't do anything in or on approach to race season much in the same way that We talked earlier about knowing what your intervals are doing and how to assess whether or not they work. Know where the weight comes from because weight cycles up and down. If you weigh yourself every single day and keep your diet steady, it goes up and down basically with how many weeks in this training block have you done and then recovery week, oh, look, it changed again. Knowing what to look for is just as important part of that journey. I had someone who a few weeks ago was really worried about their weight and they're a very high-level athlete. And my insistence to them is you need to eat more, you need to like just really get on top of carving. eventually their weight came back to a level where they felt more comfortable mentally with where it was sitting and I'm just hunting down the comment that they put in their matrix but it was something to the effect of oh funny how just feeling well seems to make weight loss less of an issue the point being that if you are focusing on making sure you get everything you need it's a lot easier to be able to control that aspect of yourself Yeah. And many cases more is easier to lose than the other way around. Well, I remember when Namrita was on the podcast a couple years ago talking about this. Her big point, I think the best takeaway from that is you want to lose weight eating as much food as possible and not as little food as possible because your body has compensatory mechanisms. behavioral, metabolic, et cetera, et cetera, that are going to adjust for the energy intake it has. So, yeah, and not only that, but also knowing what, if you are losing weight at the appropriate time of year, knowing what those low energy availability symptoms, what are the issues you have with that that say, I need to eat something? I know a lot of people who will, well, I've consulted with quite a few also, who will be like, yeah, I calculated, I think we talked about this on one of the last podcasts, I calculated my energy needs by figuring one-to-one kilojoules to Kcal for my ride, and then I use a, like a BMR calculator, you know, or like the Cunningham equation or something like that to figure out how much do I need, and then I put those two numbers together and that's it, and I'm hungry, but like the equation says that's all I need, but I'm also like kind of grumpy. and my libido is in the tank and I can't really focus at work. Like, okay, you've just listed three things that as soon as I get any of those issues, I go right to the cupboard and I start eating. Because I know that like, especially when I'm dieting, I diet, I've been dieting, you know, on and off for the last couple of years trying to improve my body composition. If I hit any of those issues while I'm dieting, I know there's a problem. I know I've spent more energy than I thought I would. And no matter what the plan says, I know I need to eat more. And guess what? I'm still losing weight. But anyway, so we're going into more dieting. But like, yeah, whether or not you should or not, I think most intermediate people, unless you are like obese and you've got a doctor telling you like, hey, you need to lose weight for your health. If you've got apnea or something like that, that's going to help. Okay, yeah, you should prioritize that. And if you're working with a coach, say, hey, I want to lose weight. How do we adjust my season to do that immediately? Especially if it's a pressing concern and you don't want to wait a couple months for the off-season to get that rolling. Yeah, there's no reason, especially if it's for health, there's no reason you should wait on that. But it does mean that some of your priorities should change. But on the other hand, if you have hit a training plateau, Dial in your training. Make sure that everything you're doing is appropriate. Also adjust your timelines and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, there you go. That's my point. I would like to just add on the low energy availability side to note explicitly that this is something that does affect both men and women. It's something where the discussion in public has often been around women and red-ass and it's good that that is something that has become more a part of the conversation around food in relation to exercise but it's not something that men can just man their way out of because they're men so please don't assume that a Y chromosome gives you that ability to just take it. Yeah, you are not excused from these issues because you don't have a period. And oftentimes, and if you have a menstrual cycle and you lose it, you've been having this, especially if it's from low energy availability, it's not like this is an acute issue. This is chronic at that point. And that's something that I... I've been very seriously considering doing a podcast series on energetics of cycling and exercise. For that reason, I think it's something that a lot of people would benefit. It would benefit more cyclists to know more about that. And, I mean, I've invited a couple people on the podcast to talk about that, and hopefully they'll accept my invitation soon. But if they don't ever come on the podcast, I'm going to have to do it myself. And that worries me, because I hope I... Don't screw it up because this is an important issue for a lot of people. Also, if you're a smart person that eats well on your bike and you see your friends not eating well on your bike, try and prompt them to do a little bit better. Even if they're just a casual rider, not interested in racing or even training, point them in the right direction. Tell them, oh, you have one gel for this three-hour cafe ride we've done. And you have a coffee, you maybe have a roll and sausage. Tell them, like, take a couple more gels with you. They don't have to go to the full 80 grams an hour, but if you can just get them doing a little bit more, then they will feel better for it as well. Yeah, that's my nickname on the bike, by the way, is rolling sausage. All right, you want to grab some listener questions? Yep. All right. Oh, the last one that came in was, no question, but I like that you're defining this by years instead of watts. Looking forward to listening. Actually, this, I think, is potentially another issue that not everybody, but I think a couple folks have because I've seen it on forums here and there, which is that, well, and also it's in the scientific literature of defining a well-trained person as X, like your Vita-to-Max is this much. I really like defining it more by time. Yeah, I don't know, Rory, do you see this oftentimes on forums? Because I think you do too. In terms of what? In terms of people thinking that somebody isn't well trained because they've only got like X watts of FTP. Yes-ish. I think the years one's better because the difficulty when you talk about just pure watts of FTP is someone could have a 400 watt FTP and we have been riding for six months. True. They are truly in that gifted class and fuck them for it. But that doesn't actually express much around their trainedness, I guess. It's certainly going to have an effect in terms of how do you continue to get them faster. People who are naturally fast in terms of higher FTPs need to go through the ranks of like... what I guess we're defining as beginner intermediate expert a lot quicker simply because they cross, they climb the ladder that bit quicker. But they are, someone with like pro-level genetics is still going to start out probably as a kid just riding their bike a lot, maybe get to a low to mid 300s FTP. just off the back of the fact that they're riding their bike a lot because they're a kid and they enjoy it. And then they have to transition to the next step. And that's going to take a little bit more focus eventually for them. So yeah, I think there's also the advantage of when we talk about it in terms of time, there's the implication of having ridden an amount per year that, you know, If an average cyclist who's just like a fun casual rider does 60 to 100 hours a year and they tell you, oh, I've ridden my bike for 10 years, that tells you something about them from the noob gains perspective of, oh, they've definitely run out. Sorry to tell them. Even if they start structure training, it's not going to magically turn them into... a significantly better athlete overnight. So yeah, like being able to put a year number to it gives you a good idea of how far someone is in their journey. Because if someone's one year in and they've got the 400 YFTP, then good things are happening to them. If someone's 10 years in and they're barely cracking 250. I definitely coach a couple people like that where it's like they're kind of new and like you would not believe the power profile. I'll send you one later. yourself. All right. So actual listener questions now. So thank you, listener, for that good prompting because, yeah, we're on the same page. How do you actually ID your own specific strengths and weaknesses as a rider or racer? Because I think that, you know, we mentioned this, but how do you actually approach this? It's a hard one. I win all the 30-sign sprints, so clearly I'm a sprinter. That's how people used to do it, and I think that's the mistake a lot of people fall into, is they only compare themselves to the people around them. I think more effective ways of doing that are, despite the fact that I hate looking at it, I know most people that listen to this probably look at intervals, or if you don't, you look at like... The Training Peaks one's really bad. The WKO power curve is really good. Oh yeah, check your race notes. So going back and looking at your own subjective feedback about how your race went and looking at those files, that'll be the most informative, especially if your races are the kinds of races that you want to do well at. If you are racing crits, you want to do well at crits, look at your crits notes. If you are racing crits when you want to do well at road races, Your crit notes are helpful, but they're not as good as the ones from your road races. So try to compare like for like with those. Yeah, like look at the shape of your power curve as well. Like look at, you know, what part is really impressive and what part do you wish was better? The part you wish was better is the thing that you're unfortunately not going to be well adapted to. Also when you're thinking about your training and like what we talked about earlier in terms of being able to assess whether or not certain training interventions are working, the ones where you see most like you're getting the best response. are typically going to be the things you're predisposed to training towards, and again, that's going to be something that ends up being replicated in your power curve. Kolie's not allowed to talk about this because he's sworn to secrecy, but I had an entire theory around how WKO calculated its training intensity levels, basically based on what we're talking about now in terms of what durations end up getting. in your perk of your best adapt to is how training intensity levels get calculated. And then he corrected me in terms of what it's actually doing. But yeah, think about... Without violating my NDA. Without violating his NDA. Frustratingly. But think about the training you do that you see the most benefit of. If you do a bunch of like really hard 30-30s... and you see your four-minute power go up 50 watts, guess what? You've probably got a really good anaerobic engine. If you can do a bunch of VO2s and you see a significant pickup in FTP, congratulations, you're probably predisposed to some aerobic improvements. Or just your four or five-minute power even. Or that as well. But thinking specifically of like, are you predisposed to being really good at long duration or short duration, you will be able to, Fudge, more or less, out of your data in your trading where you roughly lie in that bell curve. Yeah, or are you kind of pretty decent at both? And not only that, but kind of to reiterate what I mentioned earlier, is what do you like to do? How do you like racing? If you hate... rubbing elbows in a bun sprint, maybe, and you've got a good top end, like, okay, maybe you can lead somebody out, or maybe you can, like, take a last half lap flyer. Like, you are not obligated to race a certain way. And actually, I'd say most commonly, in my experience anyway, most people just sort of want to be the last person standing. Like, in terms of what... their ideal race scenario is, is like something very attritional and you want to be the strongest of the rest. That's how I see a lot of people would like to race. And in that case, you've got a certain amount of training that you need to do in order to make a race that hard. So basically, train like Kristen Faulkner, I guess. All right. Any advice for making your neck stronger for long rides? Yeah, get a bike fit. Yeah. I know the feeling. Yeah. Oh, here we go. All right. How much noob gains can you get as an intermediate? This sounds like an action run, but I love it. Yeah, definitely not many, but I'd say it mostly depends on your training focus. Depends what you're doing. Yeah, so I'd say most commonly I see people avoiding higher intensity when they're newer. Don't see a lot of people going out and doing hill reps or like, you know, five minutes, one minute, whatever. And so like VO2 max, higher intensity type stuff is not typically something that somebody will do regularly. And if you are getting into that intermediate phase, you know, you can go back and listen to my interview. Yeah, you can go back and listen to my interview with Jim, but if you've done a ton of endurance training, you are actually really well set up for a big improvement once you start doing some high-intensity stuff. So I'd say that this is training-focused dependent, but you can actually see some noob-like gains when you become an intermediate by changing your training focus. If you want to improve your sprint and you've never really trained in the gym before, as soon as you start... touching a barbell or even a couple dumbbells or a kettlebell and you're doing the right movements and you see a massive improvement in your sprint power, oh my God, there's nothing better than like having ridden your bike 10 or 20 years and then suddenly starting to do that and going, wow, I'm a massive responder to this type of shit. One of my clients is like that and he's having an absolute blast. So yeah, it's good stuff. So anything to add on that one? No, I mean, it's basically what you've done with your upper body. Kolie's flexing. It's slightly bigger than the last time he did it. Very slightly. Like, I don't even think that I can even tell. If volume is reduced in the long term due to life, how do you continue to see gains? For contacts used to average 17 to 25 hours, now to 9 to 15. Somebody got a job. Sorry, can you say that again? How do you keep improving as an intermediate when your volume goes down? When life catches up. Yeah, when life catches up. A lot of the time, if you're training focus, if the training you're doing is the right training, you will still see improvements, just not as rapidly as before. Rory is nodding. Would you like to elaborate on your nod? I think at worst, if you go through a longer period of lower volume, as long as you're consistent in the training you're doing, you'll be able to at the very least maintain what you had. If you're seeing like an enormous, if you're going from 20 hours to five hours. This is like 20 to like maybe 12 to 15, which I honestly think is not that big a hit. And in terms of maintenance, like you can do way more than maintain by going from like 20 to 15. By any chance is this from my client who just got a girlfriend? No. Okay. Because one of my clients got a girlfriend and he messaged me to say, oh. I guess his training focus has not been focused on training. Slightly don't. But I'm glad. It's having fun. Having fun and enjoying it and then, you know, when you're ready to get back to being on the bike, being motivated for that, that's fantastic. So, yeah, congratulations to him. Okay, English is not this person's first language, but The gist of the question is, do you need to do harder training, like more focused training as you get more advanced? Sort of. Yeah, I would say generally speaking, yes, but not all the time. Yeah, if the poison is defined by the dose, then... Unfortunately, to get poisoned, you're going to have to up the dose a little bit, but you have to be smart about doing that. So rather than talking about poison, sometimes it takes doing a little bit more in your training to be able to achieve the sort of improvements that you've maybe seen in the past, but, and it's a big but, you cannot Overdo the intensity in such a way that it is going to completely derail your ability to A, call it training sustainably or B, not allow you to repeat the training itself such that you can continue to get better from it. It's why we do not, in fact, recommend that people do a VO2 workout every day for 13 weeks. We much rather people do things much more sustainably than that. Well, this is where periodization comes in. Yeah. And also personal preference and how well are you recovering. So I also read this a little bit as because it starts with is it necessary to touch a bit on like tempo and FTP intervals and stuff like that. And that to me also is like, this is almost a question of maintenance. Like, do you need that stuff to maintain? And I would say, generally speaking, a little bit, yeah, for sure. I mean, there's, it's muscular endurance for a reason. This is an endurance sport. But yeah, without reaching back out and clarifying with this person, I don't know if I could really get many more details on what they truly meant. So my apologies if I totally misinterpreted your question. Shoot me a DM on Instagram if I did. My apologies. Okay, this is not quite an intermediate training question, but I like it anyway. If targeting shorter events like crits, would you ever prescribe long rides like over three hours, including VO2s? Yes. If you have the time to do a long ride, absolutely. Yeah. Here's why I like this question, because it gets to a question of specificity. So if you are looking to improve your physiology in the long term and you want to maximize it, generally speaking, riding more is going to allow you to improve a little bit faster than riding less when you do your focused intervals especially. So somebody who's riding six hours a week is probably only going to get to a certain level no matter how much intensity they do. And then in order to keep improving, you might have to do eight, 12, 15 hours a week or something like that. person-dependent, there's a huge range of individual variation. But on average, I'd say that's probably the case. So when it comes to specificity, I remember in high school when I joined the cross-country team for one season because a friend made me do it, there was a big debate on do you actually need to run longer than your longest event? And I think that this is still a question today. And I think in terms of specificity, the answer is yes. Because if you've got a six-hour race and your longest ride is two or three hours, should you go ride five or six hours once or twice before that race? I think it's an absolute necessity. But on the other hand, if your longest race is 40 minutes and you don't have time to ride three hours, should you upend your life to go longer than three hours? I don't think so. But I think in the very long term, if you're really trying to improve your physiology the best and maximize your aerobic fitness, yeah, you kind of do need the volume. It's unavoidable at some point. Yeah. I think I've mentioned this before. I basically did this as a case study on myself last year because I somewhere between doubled and tripled my normal volume from what it previously was. and the line that we typically look at to try and monitor overall aerobic improvement over time. In previous years, it's kind of been rolling up as we go through spring and summer and then down in winter. And last year, right at the start of spring, as soon as I started picking my volume up, the line went vertical. So it's the rate of improvement you're able to achieve, I think, is a really good way of describing it. is still a higher volume can make up for poor quality training in terms of like the structure and the intent of what you want to get behind it but if you combine the two and are really smart about it you can see quite a bit of improvement and the fact that your primary event might not go longer than an hour shouldn't preclude you from doing any sort of ride that is triple or more that. Yeah. Okay, last question. Plus, you do this to ride your bike. Also, yes. I know people who absolutely hated when I would give them off days. They're like, I love to ride my bike. Can I ride my bike? I'm like, all right, keep it easy. And they do a great recovery ride and everybody's happy. What lever is the most frequent that needs to be pulled? if somebody's stalled, like FRC, VO2, FTP, Z2, if you have to pick one. I'm not going to pick one because that's not how the world works. I'll pick one. You'll pick one. I'll pull the consistency lever just riding, doing something. If you're in, as the example I gave earlier of trying to CRAM slash crash training for something that's a short period of time. There's only so much you're going to be able to do in that sort of time. But remember the thing I said there, we might be doing some specific intervals to try and raise all ships, but the thing I'm most looking forward from people is consistency, just riding, riding, riding. If you fall off, it doesn't matter what you do when you get back on it, go do some intervals, go have fun with group rides, whatever it is, as long as you're riding your bike. that's going to help you more than hyper-specificity towards one thing. I'm going to go the other way where I think it's recovery. I'll reiterate training specificity, training focus, all that kind of stuff. If you've just been noodling and you suddenly start doing VO2s, Okay, yeah, sure. So it's context-dependent because in some ways how well-trained you are is a state function, like your historical path to get there is irrelevant, but in some ways it's a path function where it very much matters how you got to where you are. So I think the thing that most people miss is how much recovery they need and the things that Expedite Recovery. So I'd say a lot of people when they get to the intermediate stage and they start doing focused training or they've been doing focused training for a couple years, they think, I need to increase the stress so I'm going to double down on how much hard training I do. And sometimes you can do that if Everything else in your life is in place to allow you to recover. So you want your life to be facilitative of the adaptations that you're making. And your sleep, your life stress, your nutrition are all permissive for the maximum rate of recovery, but you cannot change, you cannot speed your recovery. You can just let it be as good as it's going to get. and as you change the external variables, it's going to get a little worse. No amount of ice baths or anti-inflammatories or what? Theragons. Theragons, oh yeah. None of that's going to, it'll change your perception of your fatigue, but it's not really going to let you recover that much faster. I'd say it's probably is not measurable, depending on how you want to read the literature. That's how I read the literature. Anyway, so that's, yeah, I think the recovery's got to be the big one. But I would also say go back and listen to that podcast I did with Jem on the meta review that they just did, which basically says what everybody knows is that as you get more and more well-trained, you kind of need to... Train harder to see some improvements, but that comes at a cost. And that cost needs recovery. So there you go. All right. That's it for our questions. Rory, anything else before we get out of here? No. I hope you all thought I sounded better and can stop telling me I need to buy a microphone. Well, you did, but you actually need to get closer to it to use it more. I haven't even seen it in your cam shot this entire time. Thank you everybody for joining us on this tutorial about how to use a microphone and we will, sorry, Rory. Yeah, thanks everybody for listening and if you would like to reach out for coaching, empiricalcycling at gmail.com or head over to the website, empiricalcycling.com and that's also where you can hit us up on the contact page and provide some background information on yourself. and if you want to support the show, empiricalcycling.com slash donate, you can kick us a couple bucks because we are ad-free and always will be and if you want to do word of mouth and share the podcast because you're liking it, thanks so much for all that. If you want to ask a question on my Instagram, empiricalcycling and I guess that's it. See you next time.