Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore, and today we are joined by our Empirical Cycling coach, Fabiano. Once again, we love having him back, and thank you all for coming back yourselves. And if you like this podcast and you're new here, please consider subscribing if you like what you're hearing. And if you are a returning listener and you want to support the show, you can always let people know that you are liking the podcast by sharing it with a friend or on a forum or anything like that. Thank you so much for all of those that I've seen lately. You can also donate because we are totally ad-free content. You can do so at empiricalcycling.com. dot com slash donate or if you would actually like to hire us for coaching or if you are happy doing the coaching yourself and you just want to Just get a consultation and have somebody help guide your program and keep running it yourself. Please reach out to empiricalcycling at gmail.com to contact for any of that. And specifically, if you want to ask for Fabiano by name, he's taking on clients himself too. And if you would like to ask a question for the podcast, you can always do so over on my Instagram at empiricalcycling and I do a weekend AMAs up there as well. And we had a pretty good one this weekend. So yeah, looking forward to a lot more of those. So today... I wanted to look at a couple things that are somewhat complementary. So I wanted to look at, first of all, when do you take a rest week? I think this is a question that I've got probably the most on the weekend Q&A. And I also wanted to look at subjective metrics because we've had some coaching experiences with this recently on subjective metrics versus how your legs feel and the decision-making process. But these kind of go hand in hand because we are also going to lean on some subjective metrics in order to discuss when to take a rest week. And so I wanted to start with let's do the rest week thing. So Fabiano, why don't you take me through what is a rest week? What is its purpose and kind of how do we structure it broadly? Well, you know, first, thanks for being back. It's always a pleasure to... Be here and share some knowledge. Traditionally, the rest week, we have been using, if you look at all the training books for a while, you have three weeks on, lots of structured training, trying to progress the training load, more volume, more intensity, more frequency. Then at some point, traditionally, there is so much accumulated. Stress, Training Stress, and all those workouts that we say, well, it's time for a break. We need to give your body extra time to recover. So usually that means a week or maybe a few days, all the weekdays of a week of riding easier and shorter. And at the end of that week, We expect that with all that extra time, your body was able to fix everything, to heal from all the stressors that you apply to your body during, let's say, a three-week period. And at the end of that week, recovery week, it will be stronger. Although it seems contradictory because we tend to believe that whenever we are working hard, that we are getting better. And that's just the stimulus. You actually get better when you are recovering. So we have the recovery rights in between those stressors. And at some point, that may get so much accumulation of stressors that we need more time. That varies from, again, from four days to seven days. Depends on the amount of stress that you accumulated. The more you accumulate, the more rest you need. Yeah, or longer than seven days. I was actually about to say, like, how do we define a week and also how do we tell how long it should be? So one of the things that I usually see in consultations, I usually see people shorting their rest weeks a lot. They'll take, like, here's the most common mistake I've seen in terms of rest weeks is somebody will be doing block training, so it'll be like they'll do a block of FTP. take a rest week, and the rest week ends up looking like you finish your last training ride on like Sunday, and you take Monday off, and then you do Tuesday as an endurance ride, and you do Wednesday as a group ride, then you do Thursday as an easy ride, then Friday you're back to intervals. And so, and then after a VO2 block, I've seen people take as little as two or three days of like recovery or endurance riding, and then they test already. And usually by that time, You are not even close to recovered. And actually, there's an analogy I've used in the podcast before that I was just thinking of that I wanted to bring up before I forgot, which is that my analogy is if you do a set of heavy squats and you do like, let's say, three to five sets of five, and that's probably all you had in the tank. Can you do that again in an hour? In a day? A day? Probably not. Two days? Yeah, maybe. In an hour? Absolutely not. And that's the role of recovery. We can actually see it better and have a more intuitive sense of it if we think about it in a very acute sense of like, if you go out and you do 3x20 FTP, at like, you know, one o'clock in the afternoon. Can you do that again at five o'clock in the afternoon? Almost definitely not, unless you're some sort of freak. In which case, you are probably going to go win unbound or something like that, which would be cool. You should go do that. So, yeah, so that's my analogy. But back to a rest week. So what are some of the things that you use to determine the length of how long a rest week should be? So we've got, you know, the kind of default, Rest Week. Like, what do you start people on if they don't really have a training history? And then how do you adjust when somebody's got a deeper training history and you've been working with them longer? Probably one of the best ways to access that is to first try to measure what we call the chronic training load, which is also known as the fitness in the training peaks terms. And if you have a regular communication with your client, then ask him how you're feeling, how you are recovering, so that you can do that on a daily basis or on a weekly basis. We tend to use the week just for convenience, of course, but as you said very well, it could be going from a few days for those riders that have a lower training load for much longer, considering it's... For example, as you mentioned well, the VO2 block. The VO2 block, we can kind of consider this block, if it doubles on several days a week, you can consider like an overreaching block where the training stimulus goes much higher and deeper into your physiology than maybe a threshold or a sweet spot block. For that kind of block, it's, I expect... Again, as you said, well, a much longer time to recover and to get back to another round of intervals or harder workouts. Can we be very accurate with that? These days, we are trying to use HRV also, HRV analysis or resting heart rate to judge. At least my experience with... HRV data, again, for a VO2 block, it's very clear that we are causing a negative trend on the HRV numbers. The person that higher, let's say they have a higher HRV, it starts to deep and go more closer and lower, lower. And if you know that if you extend that for much longer, they will either get injured or get sick. And you don't want to... have that situation. So by experience and also based on the level of the cyclist or the athlete, you can determine, oh, maybe this client needs for the third week of the block, let's do just two sessions or two double sessions or no, it's time to finish this block and rest. And then maybe in the next block, in the near future, once he has more experience with consistent training and overload progression, Then you may be able to add a third week or three sessions, double sessions per week, for example, apply even more overloading or overreaching. And then, but you know, because of that, he will also need more rest. And communication tends to really help there besides looking at HRV data, resting heart rate, or even just their overall feeling every day on Training Biggs, asking how you're feeling. using that master gland, as we said in the last episode. The brain, yeah. Yeah, to decide or help you decide. Yeah, actually, you're kind of getting at this relationship between your training load and how long the rest week should be. And I also think that one of the other things that... I usually use, besides somebody's training history, that's the first thing I look at. I don't really use HRV data as much as you do. I'll look at it if it's there, and if it's trending in a direction that is interesting, okay, cool, maybe we can use that. But oftentimes, it'll do the opposite of what I expect it would do. And I've seen some people's HRV improve through a training block despite fatigue mounting, which is the opposite of what you would expect it to do. Are you fine to keep training? Somebody's going, no, no, I need a rest week. So it's time for a rest week. And so that's like a piece of objective data that, you know, kind of, because we're going to talk about subjective metrics in a little bit, but that's an objective metric that still takes some subjective interpretation in order to interpret, I don't even want to say correctly. for the best purposes at the time, I guess we could say. One of the other things I wanted to consider as well is, especially while we're thinking about the structure of a rest week before we kind of dig into the nitty-gritty of when to take them, is when do you kind of come out of a rest week? If you've got previous training history, then it's pretty easy to predict how much rest somebody actually needs. But if you are not entirely sure, I really like to use performance as an indicator. So there's two things that I really like to use and the first one is just sprints. Like what is your peak power? Just like, just get up to speed, smash out for like three, five seconds. If that feels horrible and the numbers are horrible, you probably need more rest. because most people actually have really, really good sprint power when they are fresh and recovered. And it also uses the master gland, the brain, in order to provide neural drive to the muscles for sprint power. And so you can kind of get a sense that most things, if not almost everything, is basically back to 100% if sprint power is looking really good. The other one I like to use is how do people feel at FTP and just above FTP? Because just above FTP, at least my experience, is very, very sensitive to fatigue. And one of the things I tell people in consultations all the time is at certain points of the year, sometimes like if you're training and you are trying to overload, like you're not feeling amazing, but you can still do the workout, you should go do the workout kind of regardless of how your legs feel. a lot of times a year, some to a lot, where I don't want anybody pedaling harder than feels really good. And so if easy spinning is all that you can do and riding tempo feels awful, don't ride tempo. You need to keep recovering. And if you keep pushing that, it's not going to help. So that's my kind of quick and dirty guidelines on how to determine how long the rest week should be. Any thoughts on that before I ask another pointed question? Well, you made good points there. And one other aspect that I wanted to emphasize here is, again, regarding the HRV. It's interesting what you mentioned, because one of the goals when you increase the fitness level is actually to increase HRV numbers at rest. Because as you get better and better fitness level, it is expected that you get higher HRV. numbers over on a daily basis, especially when rested, not after a hard workout or a hard day. And there's also another analysis that we can discuss here related to HRV is, let's say you did a hard workout today. Tomorrow, if there are two possibilities, either HRV might be suppressed, which means the sympathetic is dominating, so there was too much stress. and your body is telling you that you are stressed, so you may need another day of recovery, or the parasympathetic might be high, and that can, some scientists also interpret that as a sign of recovery, because it means the parasympathetic is working extra hard to tell you that you are still recovering. Again, it's a science that I would say it's a work in progress. We still don't know. It's still up to interpretation, yeah. Yeah. We may come up with better answers in the near future for what to do, depending on how the numbers change on a daily or even probably better on a weekly basis. But I think it can be very interesting, especially if you use good systems to measure HRV. Another aspect related to The Recovery Week, which I think is very important, is what I call the mental exhaustion. If you think about a block where you train with hard intervals for, let's say, again, three weeks, and after that, it's really hard to find the motivation to jump on the bike and go hard again. And that probably also answers when you are on the recovery week. To define with your client when to get back into harder work. I think sprints is really good. We know for sure that the shorter intervals or the shorter efforts, they are the first ones to react positively when you are fresh. So that's a really good way to measure. But also just asking your client, are you willing to go hard again? And then, and then... The answer is no. Well, but that's the tricky part with maybe cyclists and three athletes. They have, most of them, they have Type A personalities. They are able to overcome their real answer. And then we get into another problem. For example, I had clients in the past where they would only go into recovery mode when they get sick. They were never honest to themselves to answer this question. Am I recovered mentally and physically? Tag yourselves. You know who you are. Yes, they are. They know. So how do you handle that? Because maybe HRV, but not everybody. I would say 1% use HRV as it should these days. So most don't use. Then we either have performance tests, like you said, for sprints, for example, or the master gland. But if you are not honest to yourself as a Cyclist or an athlete. And even if your coach asks you, you say, no, I'm ready to go. Okay, you're ready to go. Let's go. But a week later, you are sick again. And that's actually one very strong sign from, let's say, a medical standpoint that you are not doing the recovery weeks correctly. You get sick very often. So that's... So this kind of observations from a coach or even yourself as a self-coached athlete should build over time, especially if you are a new bike cyclist or you're starting with structured training, observe, you got to observe and maybe take notes, try to build a pattern on how your body adapts to consistent training, not just sporadic training, but consistent training, increasing stress, increasing the training load. And then when you are recovering, maybe some trial and error, maybe five weeks, five days, ten days, depending on the level of stress that you applied. Yeah, and make sure that you keep riding during that time. You know, like, there's, I think, there's, this is one of the things where, I think we've talked about this on the podcast previously, where We discussed the debate between should you take a recovery ride or any kind of recovery activity like a walk or like an easy hike, maybe a light yoga class versus taking the day off fully. And I kind of let people decide which. I usually put in training peaks like recovery day or off. And I think a lot of people opt for the bike ride because first of all, being on a bike is fun. and get to get outside and a lot of people that's their kind of downtime get away from everything and that's fine too so but it's like your rest week should not just be like on the couch the entire time a little bit of riding goes a long way especially when it comes to avoiding any kind of like you just did all this hard work now you don't want to have too much detraining happening especially if you're thinking about oh I need like 10 days to recover you know 10 days is enough to start to lose a measurable amount of fitness. And it won't take too long to get back, but of course, if you're also taking 10 days off the bike, it's very, very good chance that you actually got sick. So in which case, take that time off. Don't keep riding when you're sick like that. Use that. The first podcast you and I did, Fabiano, was on above the neck, below the neck symptoms. So use those guidelines. I've used them previously with people and they work really, really well. Yeah, I think it's a very valid analogy. At the end of the day, it's a matter of energy. So you spend a lot of energy to destroy yourself as a cyclist in the good sense. And then you need time to rebuild and be stronger. But when you are rebuilding, it's true. You can't be completely off. for, let's say, 7 to 10 days. And, of course, that will work. But if you, since it's wise to continue to ride during that period, that's the reason we go short and easy, very easy, because then you are trying to balance the pathways, let's say, the cellular pathways that are rebuilding yourselves or making them stronger, but not If you were on the couch for all day, and then your body say, oh, I don't need this anymore, let's disassemble everything and go back to being a, how they say, a couch potato, and that's not the goal. So yeah, you got to find that balance. And on top of that, the mental exhaustion, you got to also recover the willingness. Again, it's hard to have that with our clients, but it may happen. And if it's happening, And sometimes it's happening not because the workouts or the training itself. It might be higher work stress. It might be bad nutrition, poor nutrition choices, and all poor sleep. Maybe you have a kid that's sick. So all these external stressors are gonna extend the time that... It's going to take to recover or rebuild yourself. And again, if you are aware of that, if your self-awareness is working as it should, you should relate that to the time that you need to recover. For example, it's very common when my clients have international travel and they will be maybe out for five days, four days is traveling overnight, bad sleep. I always tell them, let's go easy. When you get there, maybe go for a 30-minute walk. It's not cycling, but at least you are doing some activity. And if you are feeling well, no sickness after that, or not feeling bad, maybe next day, easy ride. Maybe then we progress to endurance ride. And then it's time to go back. And then again, overnight flight and more sleep. As soon as you settle in. Yes. So all variables to really make you sick. You got to take that into account if we plan that to be your recovery week, not try to go, we know this is very common, they travel abroad or very hard, long travels and when they get there, oh no, I don't have my bike, I'm going to be a runner. You know, running is really stressful to your body, you are not used to that and then, oh, I got injured or I got sick, you know why, because that was too much stress when you were supposed to be. with lower levels of stress coming from the physical training. So that's one point to remember. Yeah, the energy it takes to repair tissue is substantial. And it's enough that... Especially if you are behind on sleep and behind on hydration and nutrition, which is very easy to do with airplane travel, then you've already set yourself up for failure, basically, for recovery. And so you've kind of preemptively... Stack the deck against yourself. And so you've really got to be nice to yourself when you do that kind of stuff. And I mean, this is one of the reasons that you are so great with all of the kind of C-suite people that we work with because you understand all these aspects of travel and the stress and what's a practical way to handle working with people. What's available at the gym? Do you have a bike? Is there a bike rental place? Can you ride there? Because there's a lot of places people travel for business where like, I don't want to ride there. I don't want to ride in downtown Miami. It doesn't sound fun. Because I've only got half an hour. I can't get out to the fun, you know, flat swamplands or wherever. So anyway, so now we kind of come to... What our initial impetus was, which is when should you take a rest week? So we've kind of talked about how we will use things like training history to plan how long a training block should be based on its intensity and duration and what's coming up and things like that. But I wanted to even take a step back from that because I think there's really, Two ways that we could classify a rest week. And one is planned or preemptive rest weeks, and the other is a reactive rest week. So a planned rest week would be like what we would do with people we've been working with for a long time, or if we are kind of taking a very standardized approach of like three weeks training, one week of rest. That week of rest, we've got... We know it's coming up. We're going to call that a planned or preemptive rest week. The other one is the tougher one. And so reactive rest weeks would be something like you wait for a dip in performance or a dip in motivation. The people who only rest when they get sick, that is absolutely a reactive rest week. It's not a strategy I would ever actually recommend because once you actually get sick and you need that rest week because you are sick, you have already needed the rest week for probably a week at that point already, if not more. And that's assuming that it's happening with enough frequency that you know it's not like if you've got young kids and they're bringing young kids are just buckets of germs right so if they're just bringing home all sorts of diseases constantly okay not your fault just don't worry about that so otherwise let's dig into planned rest weeks so we already talked about like VO2 blocks and and rest after that so VO2 blocks for most people who need them because not everybody needs them by the way it's a Just a suggestion. You don't have to do these things. But that's like one of the hardest things that most people will do in training. And I think that a lot of the time, because, well, here's another angle, is when to take a rest week also depends on what you're doing in the training, I guess is what I'm trying to get at. So if you've got like, if this is the first time you're doing a VO2 block, Honestly, like a week and a half to two weeks is more than most people need to really get to the end of their rope and go, okay, I'm definitely ready for a rest now. That was hard enough. But if you are racing, like if it's like cyclocross season or like spring crits or something like that, and you have like four or five weeks in a row of racing, now a lot of the time... Okay, you might have one or two of those that you train through and you kind of train during the week a little bit, but otherwise, like, what is your purpose? Are those rest weeks? Are you really resting? Are you kind of riding? Is it just some endurance ride? What are you doing? Like, that's, and actually, that's one of the things that people consult with us the most about is how do I handle, like, the mid-season type thing, like that. So, that's kind of a podcast in and of itself. But, you know, that's kind of a tweener situation. Like, is it a rest week? Is it not? Is it, eh, whatever. So we're going to ignore that for now. But like, you know, during a build block, if you're doing like mostly threshold work, you can do three weeks of threshold work, no problem. And as long as you are sleeping and eating enough and staying hydrated and all that good stuff, you know, maybe like you do four or five easy days and by that next weekend, I'd say 60% of people are ready to get back to it. Don't be afraid if you're in the 40% though, that's totally okay. So Fabiano, what are your thoughts on all of that? Well, I agree with you. In my experience, it might be different for others, but I tend to, in considering like planned recovery weeks, I would say for anything that's threshold. in terms of intensity and above, it's usually very straightforward, as you said. It's between two and three weeks of training, and then the athlete, if they're honest to themselves, as I said before, they will ask you for a recovery week and say, okay, I am done. So then you start to recover. There are signs that may also tell you that that athlete needs a recovery week. But that's a reactive, and so we are discussing that later. And if it's, let's say, sweet spot and below tempo, endurance, like if it's a base training, base block for the beginning of the season, I have successfully worked with some clients where we extend that for four, five weeks. Six is very rare. but mostly between three and five weeks before planned rest week and it worked fine because usually at the end of these extended blocks it's something like they have a family trip or they have a business trip so they told me and on top of that when I know if we plan that before that's going to be an extended block we also progress the training load slower more conservatively because we're going to be Increasing the, let's say, CTL for four or five weeks. Then it's got to be less aggressive compared to what you can do with a threshold or a VO2 block of more experienced riders. And talking about experienced riders, I also noticed that it's either more experienced riders or athletes that have a better genetic... They respond better to training. Somehow they manage to recover from the hard workouts faster than others. And with those, it's also, again, the case where you may extend the block or have the planned recovery later, four or five weeks, because they can handle that better. So it's always going to be, once I always tell my new clients, in the first... maybe two, three months, maybe a first year, there's a steep learning curve for both sides where we are trying to fine-tune the parameters that we use, me as a coach and him or her as a client or as an athlete to decide what might be the ideal balance between stress, training load, progression, and recovery weeks. Again, it depends on the intensity of the block. the racing calendar, as you said very well, when you get into those, there are some athletes that you race every weekend, so that becomes really complex to manage, but it's their reality, so you've got to play with that and make it the best for him or her. And so in those cases, if we had to separate, I would go sweet spot and below, we can think about more just considering the training itself. blocks that can be longer before a planned recovery week. If it's threshold and above, it's usually two to three weeks before another aspect that's very important. People tend to forget if you are a master athlete, 35, 40s, 50s. Hey. Yeah, 60s. We recover slower. I mean, it also depends. I coached some master athletes. I actually think that part of that is job stress in kids. More, because one of the things that Herman Ponser has published on is the slowdown of regular metabolic rate doesn't actually happen in your 30s and 40s. It actually happens when you're like 60 on average. Like that's when your RMR starts to drop. And before then, you know, when people are like, oh, my metabolism slowed down, I'm, you know, I'm gaining weight. And it's like, no, you have a stressful job and you've got children. and you're not exercising as much. That's probably the majority of it. And that's what I was about to say, that I had clients that were in their 40s and 50s. I mean, it's not going to be the same as 20s and 30s, but it's not, I mean, it's much better than many of my other clients I have worked at and they are 20, 30 years older. So yeah, it's a mix of genetics, what you just said, extra work, stress, kids, and maybe Bad Sleep, Bad Nutrition, all together that may slow your recovery. But you've got to be aware of that as a coach, as an athlete, that now you have that extra stressors and that may affect how often you need a recovery week. Yeah, for sure. So, let's talk about strategies to be reactive. So, let's start with you had a planned recovery week at like week three. Sorry. So, three weeks of training and then week four is going to be your planned recovery week. And actually, one of the things that I've also gotten asked about somewhat very frequently is do you actually need to take a planned recovery week if you feel good? and I usually tell people that it's better to do that like unless you have a lot of experience with this stuff and you know that you can pull the pin on your training at the right moment most of the time it's better to do it preemptively to plan it and take it before you really need it because I've done this on the bike I've done this in the gym where you get to a point where you can do the stuff because you're getting more fit through your training, but the fatigue has mounted to the point where something snaps and either in motivation or your muscles, it's suddenly just not there anymore. And this is where I think a lot of people can get themselves in trouble. with either training too hard or you're being under-recovered. And things that can be fully out of your control, no doubt. So if you are at week two and a half of a three-week training block and then you've got a recovery week planned, now it's like Wednesday. You just had a bad workout. You've got an endurance ride Thursday, recovery Friday, and then you've got some big workouts. plan, maybe like got a big workout plan like Saturday, then long group ride Sunday. What do you do? Do I push my rest week up? Do I start today? Does it count starting from, let's say I start my rest week Thursday. Can I start training again next Thursday? What do I do? Well, I have two approaches for that. Not approach, but first thing I would say is probably because of my medical background, I am always concerned about injuries and sickness. and I wanna, I always think about health first and of course in my case with the clients, it's health and performance. So if something goes... Yeah, it's totally me too, yeah, health totally, yeah. If something goes off the rails, yeah, that's an alert. But just like with, again, with HRV and resting heart rate, I like to look at the trends. So usually what I do, let's say it's again, as you said, it's Wednesday, bad workout, bad legs, something. First, we try to understand, I always ask, did you have a bad night of sleep? How is your nutrition? How is work, family, anyone sick? Things like that. Did you drink enough today? Did you have enough salt? Yeah. So, ingestion. If they say, oh, it's good, then that's a second alert. And then my next action is, Wednesday was bad, let's recover. Let's go easy Thursday, Friday. Saturday, we have another high-intensity workout. Let's see how that goes. If he recovers in that moment for Saturday, and I always give him an option, if Saturday you start, you warm up 30 minutes at least, feel good, try the intervals. If you are feeling good and you are good to go, let's consider that you recovered from that bad day and now you are ready to continue the block and let's move on. If you are still tired, not recovering or not feeling strong enough to that workout, abort intervals, go into endurance mode or maybe ease mode, just an hour, two hours if it was a long ride and go home. And let's discuss. Let's say Monday, what to do next. Probably is going to be a recovery week, a reactive recovery week. So I always like to look at the trends. I think the trends are very important in human physiology. You know, there's always a bad day, something else is happening, and you may not even notice that something else was happening until you figure out for the next day, oh, that was affecting me. That's why I wasn't sleeping well. That's why I didn't eat well. And then you figure out, you found the solution. You fixed. It's not too much training in this case. It was something else. If it's related to the training itself, maybe it's like you got infected with some virus, but it's like in the pro-dom period where the virus is still acting to make you sick, and then you get sick Saturday. You know, oh, I was getting sick, and then you need to recover. That's reactive forces. by nature, but still. So I think the trends are really good to help us. Also changes in mood or in how the athlete is behaving. You see based on the words that he choose to write a comment, you know, if he's stressed, if he's happy, if he's not. If they leave a comment at all. I've got some people where like, if it's radio silence, I'm like, oh shit. Yes. Text him, hey, okay. And it's that kind of workout where you expect either like, oh, I felt great or I felt horrible and there's no comment. And so something's wrong. Is he alive? What's going on here? So yeah, I agree. So trends, trends, probably the best things to look at and then figure out with your client what's going on to decide if it's time for a recovery week or not reactive. Yeah, and I've got almost exactly the same decision tree that you do. And it's funny because we've never discussed this before, but I bet actually most coaches and most self-coached people have a very, very similar pattern to like a midweek workout going wrong. Like if it's like a weekend workout, like you're at... You know, week 2.75 and it's Saturday and Saturday's workout sucks and you're like, eh, I'm just going to take the weekend off. How often do I get weekends off the bike anyway? So I'm just going to go chill and do life stuff and, you know, rest week next week and then see how the legs feel next weekend. I think that's probably like a very common kind of very practical approach. So, and that's... bringing up performance as a big one. Your intervals sucked, right? I've worked with a lot of people and I know a lot of people who will still go out and do the intervals anyway. And this is one of the reasons that like I, for coaching, we don't want to limit communication, which I know, I think it was more common like 10 years ago. and I think in some sports like less communication is totally fine like if you know if it's like a strength training program or whatever like you could probably do you know probably two to six weeks of strength training before you really need to talk to a coach because everything should be going fine up until then like it's kind of set and forget it but I think especially with like endurance sports high energy input sports where in high training load sports like you know definitely cycling I would guess that you know like marathon running and you know trail running ultra running that kind of stuff is almost definitely up there all that kind of stuff um I think requires more communication with your coach because when days like this happen not everybody has a decision tree and for a lot of people this is why you have a coach in the first place is when this happens you need a level head and somebody with more experience than you to figure out here's what to do and even though What we just described sounds obvious to probably most people. There are definitely people out there, at no judgment, because I'm certainly one of you, where it's not obvious. Like if I'm, because when I'm training myself, man, I make some bad choices. Yeah, I could use an experienced hand, but it's like, what am I even training for? I don't know right now. So whatever, what kind of coach am I going to get? So the performance is a big one. And so a lot of the time, this is the reason that I say, I've said this on the podcast before, like if you're like trying to extend your TTE, like you're like, all right, I can do 35, 40 minutes of threshold intervals and I've got a big race coming up and I need some endurance, so I want to work on this. and I want to get to like an hour. If you do, let's say, 3x15 one week and then the next week you're like, all right, I'm going to extend these out, 2x20, 2.5, okay, cool. And you do the first interval and that's great and the second interval you get to 10 minutes and your legs are gone. Now you've got a regression in performance. And the same with like VO2s. If you're doing VO2s and the power is progressing every workout, that means that's great because it means that they're effective and you're recovering. So we've got two big green check marks. But if power starts to stagnate or it starts to regress or something's off where you're like, man, I just can't push. I can't. My legs don't want to push. I'm not breathing hard. And you're motivated. Now, that's still a reduction of performance. And so, you know. We can use those two things, or even sprint power. Your sprint power is normally 1,000 watts. Suddenly you're like, man, it's 800 watts and I'm not feeling that snappy and threshold doesn't feel that good. Yeah, like, go home. And this is probably the number one way that I use to reactively plan rest weeks. Yeah, and I think we, it's a big word, but I think we can also call that, Repeatability. That's how you say, right? To repeat over the same interval for a few times or timing zone might be easier to decide. And I have also been using a different approach where I try progression, intervals progression. So for threshold, for example, let's say start with 12 minutes. And for the next intervals, we always try to add more time, so let's say 12, 14, 16, 20 minutes, and it's, I think it's also, it adds a little bit of granularity to the perception of the athlete over that workout where he starts with a shorter workout after a good warm-up, a short interval, and then I think it's easier to judge when he goes to the next if he's feeling good enough to do that kind of Workout or Intervals. And if it's not working, then it's time to abort and tell your coach or yourself, something's not good. Let's rest more, make sure. For example, I had clients that they, before I had any comments, they would add, my nutrition is not good. That's why I did not eat the intervals. I love it when people do that. It's like, you know exactly what I'm going to ask, and you saved me the question, so great, let's move on, let's figure this out. Well, the problem in this case is, can you eat better next time, and make sure that we don't repeat that, because we are missing an important window, let's say like this. to complete the key workouts or the key work that we need to progress over this training block. Fabiano was gesticulating even off camera. He's like, like this, right? Sorry. It's all right. You'll get used to podcasting eventually. I still whack the microphone when I'm wildly gesticulating sometimes too, so don't worry about it. But, so that's, I think, you have to look over is how... The ability of your athletes to repeat the intervals. And over time, if that's not succeeding, if the performance is not there, again, alert one. Why you didn't complete that last interval? Oh, I ran out of time or I had to cut the workout short. So that's probably not a problem. It's not a matter of performance. But if that's... No, I was tired. Let's see again in two days or three days. Oh, now I feel better and I got the work done. Okay, so looks like we don't need a recover week. I've had instances where people have, like for VO2s or like, you know, hill reps, like anaerobic stuff, where they will blow out that first effort so hard, like lifetime PR for like one minute by like, I don't know, 50, 80 watts or something like that. And that second interval, they're like, Man, I just didn't have it. It's like, well, getting through the workout should be part of it. So if you need to do that first one at like 95% instead of an actual 100, okay, cool. And also like, I think that a lot of people, especially the sprintier among us, you can really, really wreck yourself if you go to a true 100% and so forth. workout like eight by one minute hill reps with like, I don't know, five minute rest or something like that. That's a fucking hard day. And one of the things that a lot of experienced sprinters know intuitively is that you cannot go out there and PR your one minute power on the first rep because you are not making it to the end of the workout, much less the second rep. Definitely not in that five minute recovery window because it'll take me five minutes just to see straight again after doing, I don't know, like 900,000 watts for a minute or whatever. And there is another aspect that people, I don't see people talking about that a lot, but for example, FTP work or threshold work. You know, as coaches, by experience, we learn over time what you expect from people to complete, for example, in terms of timing zone. So let's say FTP goes from 35 minutes to 75 minutes, depending on your TT. And so you prescribe a session, threshold work, let's say he's... 35 TTE, and he gets 20 minutes, he's done. So that's a good alert if he was supposed to be fresh and ready to go, because I would say if I prescribed 30 minutes of work, that at least 30 minutes he would be capable of doing. And if he was done by 20 minutes, then if it's the second or third week of the block, it can be accumulated fatigue, he's too tired and not recovering enough. Or it can also be, I think it is going to be related to the second part of this podcast, which is maybe an FTP that's overestimated. And then he was supposed to be doing threshold work and he's doing VU2 work. And that's not going to last for so long. If five-minute FTP intervals intimidate you, your FTP is overestimated. So we've got to be looking at those variables to avoid Yeah, I think most people listening to the podcast probably do not have an overestimated FTP Oh, here's another good one Here's another So like, with which clients do we prefer to be reactive with rest weeks than proactive? And I honestly had never really considered this as a thing before this year but this year I've been realizing that there is a stratification, well not stratification, there is a categorization in my head that I've been using for a while with some people need rest weeks planned, like their life is regular, there's very few external interruptions but I have several clients where there is a regularity of interruptions from life stress. Either it's work or it's just getting just sickness that's kind of unavoidable or it's like children and family stuff. When that happens regularly enough, I'm usually thinking, okay, I don't know how long I have for this next training block before one of these things pops up and the training is no longer going to be happening. And so I will usually push. The, the, a lot of time also with these people, the training is not that hard. Uh, so pushing out to like four or five, sometimes even six weeks, that is actually, I feel like if I get to six weeks with somebody, uh, in one of these regular interruption folks, um, I feel like that was actually great and then we'll take a rest week and then the next week when we start training again, probably going to see an interruption at that point. So, um, so like, yeah, it's. It's funny because I actually mentioned that to one of my clients. It's like, hey, how come we've been pushing for like four weeks and I see you just planned a fifth for training again? I'm like, well, you're getting more fit. Performance is really good. You're motivated. You're having a blast. And also, by the way, you get your training interrupted by stuff out of your control with enough frequency that if I Planned like this week as a rest week, like we may actually be shorting ourselves training that you could get and the rest week will make itself known sooner than later. And he was not totally enthused about that, but then he was like, yeah, yeah, you're right. That makes sense. Just make sure it's not getting sick or injured, right? Yeah. That kind of interruption. Yeah, well, I mean, some people, like, you go into the office, and, you know, people are in there coughing and sniffling, they don't want to take PTO for sick day, like, I'm not a fan of that, but I understand the motivation, certainly, so it's going to happen, especially people with kids, stressful jobs, like, yeah, it'll be a thing. Well, if it's out of your control, no doubt, I meant more on the side of, oh, you're training too much, not having enough recovery, and then... Yeah. Get sick because of that. Yeah, well, when, when you're, when you're, oh man, I was around some kids over the holidays and, boy, they're gross. Sorry. That's why on the last podcast on parenting, I said that we have, always have a bar of saline solution because we have a kid and gotta be, not just the hands, but the nasal. Yeah, so that's like the Neti Pot thing, right? The parenting. Yeah, the sinus wash. Yeah, you can buy the small packets on Walgreens and CVS and dilute yourself. I'm just thinking of every time I got water up my sinuses, it didn't feel great. Oh, actually, that's enough. Don't try that at home, but I never found an explanation why you can dump a few ml of saline solution on your nose and don't feel uncomfortable, but if you drop pure water, you feel like you're drowning. Yeah, I don't know. There must be like an osmotic receptor, but I don't know everyone ever published that, as far as I know. Well, I know where your next grant is going to be applied to. All right, so this is kind of a dumb way to kind of end this segment, but I have to ask the question, because if I don't, somebody else will. Is a planned rest week better than a reactive rest week? Or is a reactive rest week better than a planned rest week? Again, going back to the discussion of the intensity of the block, if it's a high intensity block, I think a planned rest week makes more sense. If it's a lower intensity block, a reactive week, it works totally fine, as good as a planned week. And then as you added the third element, if it's someone that has regular interruptions to his or her normal schedule, I think it would be like a mix of plan and react rest week if you know the pattern well because that's how it works for that particular person. But that's considering life. That's a very fair answer. And that's, yeah, you nipped the it depends in the bud right there. You got right to what it depends on. And you'll notice that at this point we have actually not We've not really discussed kind of subjective metrics about when you should and shouldn't take a rest week. This has all been objective. One of the things that you've already touched on is that a lot of cyclists tend to be very type A, and I always keep having to Google that. I always forget what it means. It means like people who are extremely organized and fastidious, maybe is a good way to put it. And I wouldn't say necessarily OCD about training, but how would you describe a very type A, like a stereotypical type A attitude with training? I would say they are very goal-oriented. They really define what they want, and they are very, how can I say, not just dedicated, but very Diligent with how they train and what they achieve. Diligent and driven, very driven. Yeah, driven. And very internally motivated. Exactly. And that's how I define them. So then they usually get their goals achieved and move to the next one. Yeah. So way back when I was just getting into science in like 2000... 7, 8, something like that. One of the first people that I really kind of fell in love with their work was a guy named Robert Trivers. And he's at Rutgers, I think. And he's actually done a ton of work. He did a lot of work in biology for a while. And then he kind of moved on to deception. And one of the things that he's published a lot on is strategies for self-deception even. And I think about him all the time when I think about this kind of stuff. Like, when can you not trust your subjective metrics? And, you know, I would say, I would actually genuinely, I would say most cyclists I've run into can most certainly trust their subjective metrics. But there's definitely a segment of cyclists where, thankfully in the minority, but in my experience anyway, where I generally don't trust them saying that they feel great. And it's because the motivation is much greater than, the motivation to do the thing is greater than the willingness to back down from doing either what was planned or what even is part of your identity. I just got out and I ride hard on the bike. That's just who I am. That's what I do. And I'm not casting shade on that, certainly. I mean, I've, hey, if that's your vibe, go to it. Don't hurt yourself or, you know, overtrain yourself or anything like that. But like, so I think that the self-deception here when saying that you feel good when you actually don't. I don't think that this is honest. I think this is genuine. And I don't think it's anybody's fault, and it's definitely not our role or expertise to help people sort this stuff out, should it need sorting. But I think that... and there's more reason to not trust your subjective metrics too but I think this is probably the biggest one a lot of people will think of and I think in my coaching experience this is probably the most common one so yeah that was a lot what are your thoughts here? Yeah there is also the aspect that a lot of not a lot some cyclists do I think it I don't know if it's a misunderstanding or a misbelief but they for example they not talking about recovery weeks itself but just like easy rides for example they believe if they go easy they will detrain so they never go easy even if it's just a day or maybe a recovery week and then it comes to the point where us for example as coaches it's really hard to prove to them until they get to the point where they get sick for example that they need more recovery or if the performance plateaus, it's not improving anymore. And then for some reason, it's probably less the lack of recovery and they are not getting to their goals. And so that kind of personality has, we got to be careful because it's very driven, as we said, they set a goal, they work for it, but... It's important to find the balance, especially for the easy days or the recovery days. And usually that's the weak spot for those kind of personalities is when to relax, when to recover and think, now I am getting stronger, even if they are just going easy on the ride. And sometimes we find clients that have a really hard time to understand that. that when they are recovering, that they are actually helping their body to get stronger and get ready for the next key session or the next high-intensity workout, be it a group ride or intervals ride, whatever it's planned. So in my experience with those, sometimes it's like a small kid. You gotta let them make a mistake and from that mistake, maybe hopefully that will work as a lesson too. from listening from someone outside that, okay, that's not how we should do it. That if we do it this way, there is a better chance that your body will adapt, get stronger, and get ready either for the next block or for your A race, I would say. Yeah, well, you know what I've caught myself saying in multiple consultations over the last couple weeks and months is don't Try to hold onto your fitness so hard that it slips out of your hands. And I think that this is very, very, very common. Well, maybe not that common, but at least very common. Maybe not multiple varies. I think that this is something that I pretty much only say in consultations because when it's people that we're coaching, you know, we... We don't need to tell that to ourselves because we are watching our clients carefully and planning carefully and integrating all of the feedback carefully. It's very strongly considered. A lot of the time in coaching, at least for me, the thing that takes the most time in coaching is it's not like... writing the workouts or anything like that. It's what comes next based on where we've been and where we're going. It's that decision-making process that takes so much time and that integrates all this information. Most of the time, coaches are in a good place to not be greedy. We certainly can be sometimes. I'm not saying we're immune from that. overall, you know, we can weigh somebody's subjective feedback, like off the bike I feel great, on the bike I feel great, numbers are in the tank, okay, I think you should rest. Why? I feel good. I think you should rest, because I see the performance is not where it should be. But why? I feel good. Yeah, but, yeah, and that's probably one of the, and I think that's, mostly related to cycling and sports where we have so much data available where people like to say not training by the data but with data really helps us. Oh, that's a good way to put it. Change the preposition and the whole meaning changes. Exactly. So training with data really helps you as a self-coached athlete or as a coach to show the athlete that, okay, This is not working. And that's probably why you're not recovering enough. So, yeah, I think it's a great communication tool to show the history or maybe even the current physiology, how it's behaving number-wise, even if it's not perfect. We know it's not, it's far from perfect, but it's very object. I like to say that, that I think that... For example, training with power is a very objective way to calibrate the subjective perception and then be more honest to yourself. Because if I prescribe you, let's say, an easy workout, IF should be, let's say, below 0.50. And then I see a workout that was an IF at 0.70, I know it was not easy. It was at least endurance. Why? But I felt good. Yeah, but then the next key session, the next key session with interval, oh, I don't know what's happening, my legs were tired, and then you can show him, I know why you're tired, because three days ago, you didn't go easy. So you add that accountability to the athlete when you have the data, even if it's not perfect again, to be more honest on the communication and also... I think it's another scenario when if you are new to cycling or as to consistent training, when you are exposed to all these variables like RP, training with power, power targets, whatever, and then you don't know how to navigate that well, the data really helps you to speed up that process and be more objective as a coach and as a client or as a cyclist to communicate as it should be. and be faster doing the workouts that they should be done, hopefully progressing your performance over time. Yeah. And, you know, I think that a lot of this is kind of, you know, we're kind of straddling the line between like off-bike feeling and on-bike feeling because I've certainly seen frequently enough where, especially somebody who's getting really, really, really fit. They'll feel kind of bad off the bike, and they get on the bike, and it's like, oh, I've got diamonds in my legs today, and I've got a race coming up next week, and it's going to be good. I cannot wait. And then there's the other times where you feel bad off the bike, and then you get on the bike, and you're like, yeah, I still feel bad on the bike. Everything's not here. Okay, reactive rest week immediately, please. You made a good point, if you don't mind. I like to... Please don't compliment me. Tell me I made a good point. No, I mean, looking at, going back to the CTL story, the chronic train load, I always discuss, I have several clients which are, let's say, between 50 and 70, and then we have those that are like between 70 and 90, and the ones that have a lot of time to train, they go hundreds and above, but it's very clear when they get past, usually past 80. maybe 70s, that what I call like the residual fatigue, they will always have with them. And when they start to complain that they are always feeling tired, another thing that I look is the CTL, because if it's above 70, even more 80 or 90s, I always tell them, write for at least 30 minutes before judging. Complete a good warm-up because that's when you may have a real perception of if you are really, everything's tired, you got to abort or no, it's just that residual. It's probably too much training, too much stress that for some reason your body perceives that as too much and it gives you that perception that you are always tired of the bike. But when you get on the bike and you, especially after 30 minutes that you start to really mobilizing fatty acids and using them, that your body's, okay, now I'm all working as it should, I'm feeling good, go for intervals and you go fine. But as soon as you are done with that workout, you're tired again because it's a lot of training and that's when you really need good nutrition, good hydration, good sleep, good recovery, everything must be nailed as you said in the beginning, really fit people have that characteristic that they need to really be careful about. Yeah, and, you know, it's funny you say that about CTL, because I definitely work with a couple pros, and their CTLs would make your eyes water, where it's like, you know, even after the off-season, it doesn't even dip below 100. Yeah. Yeah, which is, which is, yeah, wild, but like, but I think, I think on, for the average athlete, like, you're probably right on that that's a characteristic of a lot of them. As the training load ramps up and you get more fit, that kind of off-bike feeling of like you're always a little sore, kind of a little creaky. In my experience, my personal training experience, a lot of that actually came from under-fueling. Like, and I've also found in my clients, especially when they start getting into the gym, you know, the gym, objectively, is not that many calories that you burn. Like, you can do the physics equation of, like, how far did I move this weight, and I can get work out of this, and I can figure out how many kilojoules did I spend, and, like, it's not a lot. But the repair is substantial. and replenishing your glycogen stores is substantial. And so you actually need a little more energy than you might think after lifting. And I've had clients who are sore for days after lifting and I'm like, why don't you eat more? And so there's no hard data behind any of this, by the way. This is just my experience where that kind of soreness can be mitigated with better fueling. It's not going to go away entirely, I think. Also, you know, it's been a while since I've ridden that much, so my memory may be a little fuzzy on it. Yeah, I don't know if you ever noticed that, but at least my experience when I do strength training, the fatigue is different. I don't know, it's probably more maybe neural, again, going to that exhaustion of the... Yeah, a little brain fog, can't focus, yeah. And you sleep like a stone compared to when I ride my... that it's very interesting to see the difference between both. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of strength training recently and I'm very groggy on my off days now because it's been a little bit and training load is ramping up. So yeah, it's got a different quality to it for sure. But I feel like we could also be talking about wine as well. Oh, I think this one's a little dry. This one's a little tannic. So one of the other things I wanted to actually discuss about subjective metrics is on the bike and especially in races. So on training, training is a luxury for a bad day because you have a choice. Do I sit it out? Do I go home? Do I just drop the intervals and do I continue the volume? Do I go to a coffee shop? Do I go pet some farm animals nearby? All the good stuff you do on an easy ride. In a race, you're kind of locked in. I don't know of a ton of people who will sign up for a race and then have bad likes at the start and be like, oh, fuck that. I'm just going back to the car and going home. I only got a hotel last night and I drove four hours and whatever. Most people are going to be like, I'm here, I'm just, I'm going to race, I'm going to try to get my money to work and see what happens. And actually, our coach Katie had that happen recently. She went to a crit. And thankfully, it was televised, so I got to watch. And you know what's funny is, watching her race, she's like attacking off the front. She's sold off the front for like two or three laps or something like that, gets caught, goes with the counter to her own move, and then just kind of sits in the field for the rest of the day. Like, okay, well, you know, that was my chance. Break gets away. She's not in it. All right, cool. Whatever. I look at the file when it uploads, and then later, she goes, my legs felt horrible. I was like, what? You're kidding. Because looking at the file, I genuinely could not tell that she had, didn't feel like she had good legs. Could not tell a bit. And this is actually somewhat common where I see somebody say, my legs didn't feel great. And I'm like, it looks like you had a good day out here. And so in a race... I always feel like you've got to go back to caveman bike racing. Just follow the wheel in front of you and there's nothing else to do about it. If your legs feel bad, great. Push them anyway. You're there, right? But I think there's a downside to that because it can affect your decision-making. My legs are bad, so what do you do? Katie's literal words were, my legs felt bad, so I figured I had to attack. which I've never heard before in my life. It's one of the reasons I'm so tickled by it. But, you know, most people would be like, ah, I got bad legs, I'm just going to sit in the bunch for an hour and come in like 40th in the bunch sprint. Yeah, I think it depends on how competitive you are in the race. For example. Okay. Well, for instance, Katie is extremely competitive. Exactly. So, and that's where I think, like how they say in poker, bluffing can work. So if she, I think she did a great move. She attacked to see how the Peloton would respond. I had a client that a few years ago, he won a grand fund of doing exactly like that. He was, the difference is he was not well known. He was on a grand final, he attacked, everybody thought, ah, he's gonna die, and he won the race, because no one went after him after that, thinking that he would drop his power and the peloton would catch up. So, but he knew how strong he was, he probably analyzed the peloton the first few minutes and decided, okay, I'm gonna attack and see what happens. And what happens is, what happened is, he won the race. After that, I told him, well, you know, that's not, never gonna happen again, because now everybody knows how strong you are. And, you know, then... Boy, they're not gonna let him do that again. No, they are not. So, that's the approach I think it works for when you know you are competitive against your opponents. You can bluff and try to make a move that may let them believe that... You don't have bad legs. I think that's very wise, actually. But if you know you are not very competitive, that you don't have the power to be fighting in the front group, then I always like to say it's a matter, again, of energetics. You have a limited amount of glycogen. The more time you stay near or at threshold, the faster you're going to be using your glycogen, your glucose, no matter how much you eat, especially the longer the race it takes. And if on top of that we add bad legs, then it becomes even more important to find that balance. And then it depends on what kind of race you are racing, but you got to go back to the basics is, you know, if you draft, you save energy. If you are not competitive, if you try to pull all the time, you'll be using all your glycogen again or your reserves. and you'll be dropped at some point. So what are your goals for that race? And if your legs are not great, if you are not very competitive, I would say maybe turn that into a C-race, a great training session. Make, for example, in my experience when racing, I always love that adrenaline that you get when you align to race and you start. It's impossible to get that from a training session. Take advantage of that. It may actually overcome the bad feelings of your legs. And then going back to what we discussed recently, it might be the outcome of so much training. And at the beginning of the race, especially the first 30 minutes, it's just your legs that need warm-up. And then maybe after 30 minutes, as you said, it's not that you are in a bad shape. It's just the perception that was not true. And then you move on. Okay, I'm feeling great. I can attack. I can stay with this group. But again, it's a combination of variables on how competitive you are, a good warm-up. Very often, most races ask you to line up 30 minutes before, and then if you do a warm-up 30 minutes before the start of the race, do you lose all of that warm-up work? Probably some of it you lose, but still it's very important if it's a mass stat, you need to start intense, be at the front, avoid the bad riders that may cause you an accident, for example. So those things need to all be well... Plan before the race. And it's always, I think it's always going to be wise to at least be positive and say, okay, if this doesn't go as planned, let's make it a C race, make it a good use of all of that adrenaline and go strong. You always get incredible numbers with race data that it's hard to mimic on the training sessions. Yeah, I'd say that last bit is actually true some of the time. A lot of the time, like I remember when we had Adam Palford on and we were talking about Allison Jackson's Roubaix win, one of the things that stood out about that file was that nothing stood out. It was just like long and kind of hard. It's not like any, wow, look at these big five-minute, 20-minute numbers or anything like that. I think that having a good warm-up and having a good routine before a race is absolutely critical for, I'd say, most people. Just knowing that you got the regular beats in, like, all right, go get my number, pin up, get on the trainer, spin for... 20 minutes to an hour or whatever. Go line up at the appropriate time. I know I'm close enough to the start. Everything's going to be great. There's a lot of calming in that routine. And also, it's something to think about that's not nerves. So if you are somebody who gets really nervy before a race, that can blunt how you feel. and it can also affect your legs in other ways. I've been so nervous before my first couple races ever especially, I was so nervous that I could basically blow myself up on the start line without even having turned a pedal in a race, which is why I think my... One of my first couple races ever, I got dropped like 10 miles in or something like that because my heart rate hit like 170-something on the start line. I was so nervous, which was my threshold heart rate, by the way. Anyway, so that kind of feeling can blunt your perception or it can also heighten your perception. Like if your legs are kind of off and you're nervous, suddenly they're really off and it's really bad. and you know it's well beyond our area of expertise to really offer strategies for that kind of thing beyond our kind of normal coachy stuff but it's definitely a thing that you can and should consider and especially once the race settles down and you settle down and everything starts to have a normal flow then you can really kind of get a sense of okay here's how my legs are so to bring it back One more topic here before we get to listener questions is going to be, when we can rely on them, what subjective metrics, well, we kind of talked about a couple, but let's review them again. What subjective metrics do we like to reactively put in a rest week? I think motivation is a big one. Like, I think that was the first one you said, like, are you motivated to get on the bike? If the answer is no, please don't, you know, go do something else, go take a hike, go walk the dog, sit on the couch, eat apples and cheese, watch a Kurosawa movie. That sounds awesome. Yeah, we should see also a better sleep quality. If you are monitoring sleep, it should improve because at least my case, I've been training. later in the, late in the day and it really disturbs my sleep. So, but if I go easier, it's usually doesn't disturb as much as doing like a hard session. And another area that we, we use that on the cardiopulmonary exercise testing, the RPE scale. And it's interesting because it's not very common to do as a coach, but in the cardiopulmonary, testing I've seen people doing is to segregate or dissociate. They may ask you the RPE for your lungs and your heart and your RPE for your legs. Oh, fascinating. So they try to differentiate between like central fatigue and peripheral. Yeah, peripheral. So that also could be an interesting metric to track during the recovery week. How is your perception of the central fatigue? Maybe that includes the brain, the overall motivation, and how you perceive the fatigue of the legs. Because sometimes they may be dissociated and you may have to extend the recovery. I think you gave a really good example with strength training where you may, the cardiovascular and the mental might be good, but the legs might need maybe a couple more days, one more day of recovery. some light massage, which is probably one of the few ones that really improves the perception of the leg soreness and maybe fatigue. And that's on the subjective because we already discussed the objective metrics. Yeah. I would also suggest, besides sleep-watching mood, and if you are not sure what your mood is, Ask your partner what your mood is, and you will get a very rapid and honest answer. And when it starts to improve, you know you're in a good spot. Like my lady will always tell me when I'm in a good mood because a lot of the time I'm a little grumpy about something or other. And that's when I'm like, oh, I must be really recovered. This is kind of great. Time to push hard again. Sorry. Here comes grumpy me. Well, another metric that related to that is, and I think sometimes external validation might be interesting, is work and family stress. Monitor that. Because again, if the work stress or traveling or family stress is high, you may need more time to recover. before going back into harder training again. Yeah. All right. So before we get to listener questions, any other thoughts before we dive into those? Because we got a bunch. No, I think I'm good with all my observations at this point. Okay, cool. Me too. First one is many thoughts, hard to formulate a question. Perhaps I am too tired. Very likely, yeah. Actually, that level of neural fatigue, that kind of brain fog, it doesn't always just happen when you're lifting hard. It can easily just be because you are dehydrated. That's a big one. Or it could just be that your brain is just starved of glucose. For me, how... How well I can focus on a task is like my number one indicator that I am either tired or behind on calories. And otherwise, whatever, for me personally anyway. So a lot of the time, you know, if you've got something personal, like if you get headaches or like, you know, one of my old clients, was a motivation person, like would hardly ever leave a comment other than just like, oh, felt good, intervals went great, or can we move this around, stuff like that. And then as soon as I saw comments about like, I wasn't really motivated to like do intervals today, like it was always about motivation. As soon as I saw that, I was like, oh, rest week right now. I don't know what else is going on, but rest week right now. All that kind of stuff is actually really, really useful when you can actually rely on it, which, again, I think most people really can. Yeah, as a coach, in my experience, especially with new clients, as you start to understand how he works or how she works, many times it's easy to figure out when, for example, nutrition or hydration, especially nutrition, is bad. As a coach, I feel an obligation to always recommend like a consultation with a nutritionist or a dietician. And again, the goal is to tell them to learn how to, going back to the data, work with data. In this case, will be like diaries and understanding what makes up their diet. And based on that, optimize. And when you have someone who's... Hopefully an sports dietitian who's an expert who has a lot of experience, you can really speed up that process and deliver what you need to make those recovery weeks work better. Yeah. Second question, feeling good but power down. I couldn't have set this up. That is not a plant. Should I do more wrist or reintroduce intensity? It's a curious way to phrase the question, right? Like, my power is down, but should I reintroduce intensity? So, I'm guessing... I don't know. How are you interpreting this? I would need more context to maybe see what happened in the past few Days, or at least, or maybe weeks, and then I think we may answer that with more precision. Yeah. Because initially I would say more rest, for sure. Yeah. I'm going to go with, because I always want more data, and so I'm going to go with, do like five minutes at threshold. After you've kind of spun for a while and warmed up a little bit, do five minutes at threshold, and how that feels will tell you a lot. as long as your threshold's set right, obviously. So if that feels bad, probably, you know, you need more rest. But if it feels good, all right, maybe it's time to start reintroducing some of that kind of work. But it's like, yeah, I usually want people to go test their legs, and then if they're good, okay, we'll push. If not, we'll pull back. Yeah, testing the legs is a really good approach, for sure. Let's see. Resting heart rate seems to track decently. Sometimes confounded by nutrition before bed, is it better than HRV? I guess monitoring fatigue and when you need to take a rest. The food before bed one is interesting because depending on... Because I would assume that especially if you've got like a giant belly full of food, like you're not going to sleep well. I know I certainly don't. Like if I eat 30 minutes before I go to bed and I've had like a massive shake and I'm just like, oh God, there's a brick in my stomach, I'm going to sleep horribly. And I'm sure that would affect, that's probably going to affect my HRV the most. Yeah, so if resting heart rate works, then do that because this is the thing is like you want to track all the data and make it work for you and see what patterns hold up the best. Exactly. And if you know you did something that will affect the resting heart rate or HRV, I mean, I think it becomes a little bit, I would say almost useless to use that data on that day because you know you did something that affected. You know you were naughty. Yeah. So, measure again next day without doing something like alcohol ingestion, sleeping late, hour of your sleeping normal time, and then see if it recovers. If not, then, okay, now we need a trend, and that trend probably serves you better than just looking at a day when you had bad behavior the night before, and it screw up everything. Yeah. Yeah, and bad behavior in this case would probably mostly relate to alcohol. But especially with food, because I think that a lot of people may still be afraid to eat before bed. And I mostly don't eat right before bed, mostly because I'm uncomfortable with that much food in my stomach. And so my strategy is to eat like two or three hours before bed, but as close as I can get. And actually, for a while, one of my strategies was to have my last... Feeding, as it were, with as much calorie density as possible. And so I would have a small protein shake and some dark chocolate or something like that, and that worked really well for me. But one of my issues that I was having with those large shakes was that I was getting my carbohydrates from frozen berries and stuff like that. So it would be a really, really fibrous, water-intensive thing that was like... It was like a liter of food in my stomach, which is, for me, is too much. So, yeah. So, maybe, you know, maybe talk to a nutritionist and try to dial in some different food choices and kind of figure out where close to bed you need to eat. Because I think this is probably a problem that a lot of people have if they ride late at night, too. And like, oh, what am I going to do? Not eat after my two-hour hard training ride? Then I've got to go to bed in an hour and a half? Like, ugh. Talk to a nutritionist about that one. Exactly. Yeah, find what might alleviate the problem in this case. Might not have a perfect solution, but at least make it less of a problem because you need to eat for sure. Next question, can you skip a rest week if you know a natural rest week is coming up in a couple of weeks? So, you know, like maybe a vacation or holidays or something like that. I would say this is where you would probably, if you wanted to stay ahead of the curve on the rest, if you are, like if you've got, let's put it this way, I would not want to see somebody go like seven really, really hard weeks of training. I would say you probably want to do like a, you know, like a three rest week, then another three, something like that. But if it's like, all right, I've got a pre-planned time off the bike coming up in like five weeks. Do I think I can do four weeks? What I would actually do is I would reduce the intensity of your training or at least the frequency of the really hard sessions. I would like drop one of them. If you're training like three interval days per week, I would go down to two, if not for the first week, but like for at least weeks two, three, and four, I would drop to two and maybe even one and mostly. QS to rest with volume. Yeah, I've done both approaches. The one you just mentioned and another one that if it's like a last-minute decision for this vacation, for example, is to, let's say, complete three weeks of VO2s and then maybe change to tempo or just endurance for a week or two, not really rest week, maybe keep the volume high until you get to the point where I actually did that once after a view two blocks and it really worked well. So I think that's also a possibility if you have to, if it's like a last minute. Otherwise, what you proposed is probably the best to split the two blocks. Yeah. Oh, here's a good one. When is it okay to skip a rest week? Which I think is probably another way to... I would categorize this under reactive rest weeks. So if you've got one planned and you're feeling good, performance is good, and you're not feeling any of those other kind of residual issues like deep fatigue in the legs or brain fog or grumpiness or anything like that, if you're like, man, things are really going well and I want to get a little more out of my training, maybe I can go another week, I would say try it if. You know it's not going to cost you if it goes wrong. So if you have to race in two weeks and you're like, well, I can do this fourth week of training, I'll skip my rest week because then it was just going to be like a week of training-ish and then race or something like that. Maybe if you're not sure, Stay on the conservative side. And this is something that I used to be a lot less conservative in my coaching practice than I am now in terms of making these decisions. But the longer I do this, the more I've seen that even if it's not like rest necessarily, like you said, like just a lower intensity week of like just endurance training and maybe a little bit of tempo work, like if when in doubt, something like that. is perfectly fine. And in a lot of cases, it can actually be more beneficial than you might think. Yeah, and another approach that I like to use when trying to consider that's going to miss a recover week is, okay, now we are heading into overreaching area. which is there is a higher chance of sickness, of injuries. So like non-functional overreaching. Yeah, non-functional overreaching, which they say is the last before overtraining. So if that's the case, as a coach or as a self-coached athlete, be extra careful with how you feel, performance, if you are not dropping intensity, if you plan to continue with intensity. Make sure that you double your observations on recovery, sleep, nutrition, everything else to make sure that that positive trend continues and you make good use of that because non-functional overtraining can be, actually it's functional overtraining that I'm trying to say. Well, there's a very broad, fuzzy border between functional and non-functional. I mean, so we can even define functional as like you will improve your fitness or you are improving your fitness from this or you will improve it after you rest. But like non-functional is like you drive yourself so hard into the fatigue hole that when you're done resting, you are just back at baseline and you have not super compensated. Exactly. So you are trying to move through over that like linear. progression to something that's deeper, but still when you recover the functional, you get super compensation. And that's something that's more probable to happen in the extended blocks or when you do a lot of doubles or back-to-back sessions. So when you are doing that, yeah, it can be more beneficial, more training adaptations, but there is also a higher risk of problems. So be careful to... Observe all the metrics that you are tracking and in case something goes off the rails, recover week or at least extended recover to avoid major problems. Yeah. Next question, do you always trust an athlete's gut even if it seems an illogical time for a rest week? So if somebody's asking for a rest week and I don't think it's the right time based on the logic of like the training block or the structure, Yes, in that case, I absolutely 100% of the time trust the athlete's gut. If somebody's asking for a rest week, they fucking need a rest week. 100% of the time. Yeah, you gotta remember that not might be because of the training itself, but something else that might be happening in his life or her life. Yeah, definitely. And that's something that some people are... are more willing to share. Some people are more reticent to share, and I certainly don't begrudge that. Some people are very private people, and that's fine. I don't need to know what's going on, but tell me I've got some stress happening. It's 8 out of 10 most days, and some days it's an 11 out of 10. Okay, cool. I know exactly what to do with that. I don't need to know where it's coming from. I don't need to know the work drama. I don't need to know that your pet is sick or anything like that. I just need to know what's the level of stress. Exactly. Oh, here's another twist on this one. Should you take a rest week even if you feel like you don't need to? So I would say depending on – this is where I really rely on somebody's training history. Like I have clients where – I will definitely plan a rest week when I know they don't need it because of what's coming up in their season. If I know that we've got a really good six-week plan that we've used every year to this race or something like that, I want to make sure that we've got those six weeks to ourselves and we're coming into it fresh. And so even if somebody trains for like a... You know, if somebody's got like a rest week and it's like, okay, now we're seven weeks out, what do I do with the next week? I'll kind of go namby-pamby on the training. So that way they still get to week, you know, six to go really fresh. So like even when somebody doesn't need a rest week, sometimes if the periodization kind of dictates like that, yeah, I'll give them a rest week when they don't need it. And it's certainly not going to harm anything because really what's the worst case scenario is you Mess up what has been predictably reliable, and now it's no longer reliable, and somebody's got, you know, doesn't have the fitness that they were expecting, and, you know, why? Because you went, okay, well, let's skip this rest week, even though I know that we'll need it soon. Yeah, I'm going to put my foot down on that and be like, yes, you're resting more, or like, we'll just kind of... Do a half-rest, half-endurance week, and then we'll really start up. So, something like that. Yeah, each case is going to be different. It's more seasoned athletes, you may be more confident that you can extend or skip. I would say the better answer here might be extend the block, not necessarily to skip the rest week, because he's going to need one anyway. next week or the following week. But again, always being extra careful that you are going to more dangerous wars, that you need to be more careful about how you navigate those. Yeah. Yeah. And stay on the conservative side of this stuff. Yes. That's my recommendation. If you stay consistent with your training, you're already doing a great favor to yourself over time, over the long run. So better have a few rest days than trying to something that you may not be ready for and then pay a higher price. Oh, for sure. Are rest weeks necessary on lower volume plans, like six to eight hours, where you've got two that are intervals and then one that's like, just endurance, or the remainder of just endurance. If you are new to cycling and consistent training, I would say yes, you still need those recovery weeks more often, or not more often, but as usual. But as you move on into higher intensity or more years of training, yeah, we may extend those blocks. I have done that. a few times, what they call the time crunched cyclists, where you can go, some people go like for 12 weeks without a full recover week, but they train just like four, six hours per week, so there is plenty of recovery in this case. Keep an eye on how long it takes from each of those high intensity sessions to recover, and if you are doing fine, every time you complete one of them, you should be fine to go without a recovery week for longer. or at least a couple of days. Yeah, and on low volume folks, a lot of the time, unless the training itself is pretty intense, pretty consistently, on like six to eight hours, a lot of the time, the reason you are only training six to eight hours is because you've got a lot of very time and energy demanding things in your life already. And so, My default for somebody on lower volume is I'm going to be more reactive with the rest week planning, mostly because I know that, like you said, the training load isn't that high and they should be getting enough recovery. But if they're that busy and stressed that they're not getting enough recovery, I will still treat them as a kind of regular three-on, one-off to start with and kind of play it out from there. So, yeah, a lot of it really does come down to what's the recovery like, for sure, like you said. True. All right, next question is, how accurate is lack of enthusiasm or disinterest for an indicator of rest? Actually, one of the interesting things about the rest and training question, and I think that This also ties into the differential diagnosis of red-ass versus overtraining and things like that, where there's a lot of overlapping symptoms. To me, this sounds like it could easily be you are lacking food, you are highly stressed, it could be that the training is too much. I'd say, generally speaking, the answer to the question is absolutely yes. This is a very good indicator of needing some rest. But my, because this is where I went immediately, is why? What's going on? So, kind of like lacking that zhuzh is... I'd say indicative of potentially many things and you, depending on how long it's been going on and how your training has been and what the stress has been like, you may even want to see a doctor and get some blood work done. It's true because most of the time with cyclists, it's actually the real inverse. You gotta tell them, oh no, go easier, go shorter. Lack of motivation is usually not a problem. So if you are facing it, that's a... Big Allard for us as a coach, like what's going on? Is it sickness? Is it lack of food? Or maybe, again, family work stress that's slowing down your recovery rate? You got to investigate that and based on what might be the answer, find out how to improve that. Most of the, at least in my experience with my clients, is actually trying to hold them back, especially on the easy recover rides. You know what's funny is the person who asked this question, I usually don't really notice or care about the question asker on Instagram. So if anybody's asking in the future, oh, do you recognize me from all the questions I asked? The answer is probably going to be no, but I know this guy. and he's the first person because I coached him for a little bit. He was the first person to tell me like, you know, I feel like a coach's job is more to pull the leash than to crack the whip. That was the first time I had heard that distinction was from him. And so, shout out to this guy. He knows who he is. And it's interesting. He's coming back with this. kind of question. I know he does a little bit of coaching himself too, so it may be more motivated by that, but I do think it's interesting that we've got both perspectives from the same person. And there's also the aspect, if you look over cycle season over season, there might be some boredom that's affecting them. Oh, monotony. Yeah, or monotony. That might be actually the problem, not... The training itself, which is they want to just be doing something different and then, but they didn't, they aren't aware of that yet. This is when you see people going on more runs. I also can tell that monotony has been a problem for somebody if I get them into the gym and they always want to go back to the gym like immediately. Hey, we're doing two days a week, can I do three? Are you sure you're in the right sport? Okay, off-season, yeah, okay, maybe we can do three. in-season. If you want to do three times in the gym, you may want to reconsider your priorities because you could still be a competitive cyclist three times in the gym for sure, but it does take a lot of time away from proper on-bike training. Okay, next question is, is quad or glute soreness a good measure or grip strength and neural drive? So I'm actually tickled by the grip strength thing because I've not looked at the literature, but without even looking at it, I can tell you that yes, grip strength is a good indicator of neural drive, and increasing your grip strength with grip-specific training is not going to increase anything related to this metric that is an indicator of other things. So I'd say grip strength and neural drive, you can measure it like that. I usually think... focus, moodiness, motivation, those kinds of things are equally good indicators if somebody's in tune with them. But grip strength would also probably correlate really well to sprint power. So why use two tools? Well, I guess why use one tool when you can use two, but sometimes why use two tools when you can use one? I can see arguments either side. probably as good an indicator of anything else. If it has a pattern for you, then you can use it. If it doesn't, then don't. If you don't want to do these things also, don't. But quad and glute soreness, soreness does not have a perfect overlap with fatigue, and that's really the issue. So the answer, strictly speaking, is no, but I could see situations where you are sore and you also have Bad legs, and if the soreness goes away, you have great legs. But there's also a lot of people out there who are just perpetually sore, and that's just their life, and they perform great, they train well, and that's that. So, yeah, do you have any extra thoughts on this? Yeah, if you remember when we did the podcast on RPE and CR10 scales, so the RPE was correlated to heart rate, and the RPE and the CR10 was, Related to the lactate, the amount of work, or pain. And if you think about soreness, it's a kind of pain, a painful muscle when you move or activate that. So my assumption here is that for some people, that might be more connected than for others. Some say, okay, I know it's soreness, but I can jump on the bike and ride normally. Or for the others, they may associate that pain. with the pain of, not the pain of riding your bike, but maybe the pain of doing efforts, high-intensity efforts. And they may say, okay, if it's hurting, it may mean that I should not be doing those intervals. And then I think it's the case where we've got to discuss... where if it's maybe it's coming from strength training or maybe again like poor nutrition choices that's slowing down that recovery and trying to understand more where that soreness is why is it happening more often or or not and then but yeah I would see it related to the CR 10 scale and how it could affect a few individuals when considering a recovery week or not. That's a really excellent thought like because You know, if I hurt, I must not be recovered, right? I don't know why I've never put that together before, but it's so obvious. So obvious, of course, I wouldn't put it together, honestly. So, yeah, I, and that's another thing where I think, you know, we can, we can compartmentalize your RPE scale, like you were saying earlier for like, you know, central and peripheral, like legs versus lungs. like how hard is your breathing versus how much do your legs hurt on a, on a, like a, I was about to call it a ramp test, but you, cardiopulmonary exercise test, right? Yeah, it's like a ramp test. It's just, you just add, you just add. You just got a mask on and, you know, all sorts of other, EKG, you're hooked up to wires. So, a lot of wires. It's still a ramp test. Yes, at its core. So, so like, I think we could probably, Start to separate these kinds of RPE and pain of muscular soreness. Okay, great. But does it go away after you spin for a little while on the bike? Yes? Okay, great. Done its job. And are you performing well? I cannot tell you the number of times I've been very, very, very sore, and I have performed really, really well on the bike, in the gym, wherever. In my experience, and also just according to the published research, yeah, not a perfect overlap. So if it works for you, it works, but if it doesn't, it doesn't. And another aspect I've got to just keep an eye on, it might be a poor bike fit where there is like... Yes, check your saddle heights. Yes, that may fix it without any change in your plan, training plan. I cannot tell you the number of people we've had with slipped saddles with... incredibly sore quads and dropping performances. It's like, oh, have you checked your saddle for slippage? Check your bike fit. Oh, my cleats have slid. Oh, my saddle slid backwards. It's down, whatever. Yes, definitely, definitely a good thing to watch for. Okay, two more. Please discuss the RPE of feeling fat, but really you're just well-fueled and hydrated. Can you say it again? Sorry, I missed. Can you explain the RPE off? Yeah. Discuss the RPE of feeling fat, but really you're just well-fueled and hydrated. So a lot of times you get to the end of a rest week and I know exactly what this person's asking. You feel a little puffy. You're like, am I inflamed everywhere? What's going on with me? Did I have... Too Much Salt. Who knows what's going on? I certainly don't. But I am very puffy and I don't feel good in my skin. I'm sure everybody listening has been like, yep, that's me at the end of a rest week. And then you go do a set of openers or you go do that first ride and like after that you're like, oh, now I'm back. Yeah, that kind of inflammation discussion is really interesting because, for example, my experience when I do intervals, the next day I'm... Totally Inflamming and I am all puffy. And then one rest day, the inflammation gets a little bit better. In the morning, I'm fine, of course, better. But it's really dynamic. And when you consider a recovery week, then I think it changes the variables. Inflammation is not the culprit anymore if you are eating well. But then it might be all that exoglycogen that's being stored in your muscles and the water that comes with it. So hopefully it's not. too much fat tissue than you ate. Yeah, well, very likely it's not fat tissue. Yeah. Extraordinarily low odds of that happening, unless in very certain circumstances, I could imagine people putting on some fat pretty quickly, but you've probably been extremely depleted at that point, like you just stepped off the Mr. Olympia stage or something like that. Yeah, I think also in the acute term, different people have different responses for water retention to that level of stress for working out. Because I get a tiny little bit puffy after really extreme stress like that, but not nearly as bad as you, for instance, apparently do. So the individual variation on this is really wide, especially at the end of a rest week. Yeah, it's probably just a lot of water retention. And also, I find that when people start to feel like this, and they kind of start to go, oh, I don't feel good in my own skin right now, a lot of the time, that's because your body's done recovering now. That can be a sign that you are good. I'm not going to say it's 100% reliable. I don't think we have any data on that. But in my personal experience, that's usually a sign that you're probably good to go. Now you may need some openers. But that should not be an excuse to skip the recovery week, right? True. Very true. All right. Last question. Oh, speaking of which, how do I know subjectively when to end a rest week? My body says seven days is arbitrary. Well, your body and all types of logic agree that seven days is arbitrary. I would say going out and tell, because we just sort of started touching on this, but for me, the one that I always use is go out and show me a couple minutes at FTP. Show me a sprint. How do they feel? Do a group ride. Do something fun. Do your legs feel good to push? And also, do you have a history of needing openers? And so your first ride back may be horrible. And if you are like, well, I usually need openers, so I don't think that first ride back can actually quote-unquote count, you know, maybe two or three rides in, you'll figure it out. But also, you will feel better as you go those couple rides in. A lot of the time, I'd say probably the majority of people will just feel good after a rest week, just... from the gun, and that's great too. So you've got to kind of figure out which one of these two you are before you start really making decisions. But I'd say for the most part, you should just feel good. You should not be avoiding stares, let's put it that way. And you've got to also think about how they structure their recovery week. You said in the beginning of the podcast, it doesn't mean you have to sit all day long because that may, it will affect your baseline perception. And then when you jump on a bike, you may feel horrible because you lack that riding. And that's common when, like I also said at some point, when someone travels internationally and they have bad overnight sleep and then they have to come back. So that really messed up with their perception at several levels. and then they jump on the bike. I don't expect them to feel great. But if it was a regular recovery week, riding short and easy every day or maybe with one day off, it should help to feel better when you jump back and also to judge when to go hard again. Yeah. I also have one more anecdote to consider, which is yet another angle to attack this from, which is that I was just remembering when one of my clients went on vacation, I think last year or the year before, where he didn't get on a bike for like, I think it was like five or seven days or something like that, and then he got on a rented bike, but it had been even longer, and he felt great. Really had a power meter on it and everything, so he brought it to his computer and had really, really good numbers and was setting some good times on some climbs and things like that, and was like, wow, I had great legs today, cool. After 10 days strictly couch-ridden or bedridden, I would say that's probably not the norm. However, during his vacation leading up to that, there was a lot of physical activity nonetheless. A lot of walking, a lot of travel, mostly just walking around, fun tourist stuff. is something that should not be discounted when you are also thinking about rest and recovery. Because if you are really, really sedentary on a rest week, I'd say that's probably for most people, certainly not everybody, but for most people it's probably counterproductive. But if you are fairly active, like you have a very active job, like if you're in the trades or something like that or you're a mailman or mail person, yeah, I could certainly see that you're getting plenty of active recovery during your job that may even count a little bit for like training crossover. And so I don't necessarily think that, you know, thinking about, oh no, I've got this rest week coming up for a vacation and I'm going to be walking a ton, my gains are all going to go away. I actually don't think that's really going to happen at all. I agree. Yeah, and I always ask, I remember one of my clients, he bought a treadmill, a work treadmill, like a desk treadmill. Oh yeah, so you can like walk and type and be on meetings, yeah. Yeah, I said, how many steps are you doing per day? He said 10,000 steps on top of his... bike workouts. I said, well, we've got to change that because that's probably affecting your recovery rate. And so we adjusted. So definitely plays a part on the recovery days or even on the active days if you have an active job. Yeah, definitely. So, and I also remember back in my days as a carpenter in Boston, I think that my experience was that The physical activity, I was probably doing anywhere from like 10 to like 20, I don't know, 5,000 steps a day. Maybe 25 is a lot, but yeah, easily 10 to 20,000 on average. So probably on the higher end. I would guess that it had a very strong impact on my recovery from my workouts. And not that I really could tell at the time, I didn't know my ass from my elbow at that point. but I think it also had some general health benefits like for when I wasn't riding so much like it kept me active and a lot of the time just that kind of stuff is all you need to really meet your like health levels of activity because some most of it was pretty mild some of it was fairly vigorous and so it's your off-bike activity should not be set aside as if it's not happening to your body. Indeed. Yeah, I've got to take that into account. And that's hopefully where new wearable sensors may help us track that better because currently it's very limited to what we can account for that. Yeah, very true. I was actually going to get a couple wearables and start testing them soon just in case we need to make any recommendations for our clients. So I guess we'll have more to talk about with that when we're done recording. But anyway, let's finish recording because those were all questions asked on my Instagram, at Empirical Cycling on Instagram. Thank you everybody for asking such great questions and thank you all for listening. If you want to support the podcast, share it, like it, nice review wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to reach out for coaching, empiricalcycling at gmail.com or just head over to the website and I've got a contact form over there. Yeah, if you want to donate to the show because we're ad-free, empiricalcycling.com slash donate. And I think that's it. So we will see everybody next time.