In this episode I sit down with ex-elite bike racer turned professional cycling coach Andy Turner to take a deep dive into the dos and don’ts, the why’s and how’s of improving bike performance. We discuss how many hours you need to dedicate to maintaining and improving your fitness, the merits of FTP, power meters, training zones and how to adjust your training as you get older.
Check out Andy’s coaching website for more details https://atpperformance.uk
Contents
00:00 intro
00:58 How to improve fitness in less time
3:36 Fitting training into day to day life
4:49 4 hours is enough for improvement?
7:12 what riding should we be doing?
12:17 Cafe ides ae bad!
13:09 Finding right motivation for you?
13:12 Interval training
15:17 Goals and being fit for summer?
16:00 Reverse periodization
18:46 Commuting for training?
20:41 What intervals to do?
23:13 Adhoc intervals or specific intervals?
27:30 How do you track performance improvement?
30:00 Using average speed?
32:00 Training with heart rate?
35.41 Recovery times?
41:00 Training routes?
43:00 Fitness plateau?
46:00 4 hours a week?
49:00 Join the gym / strength training?
53:00 FTP!
53:00 Critical Power assessment
1:00:00 Do you need a coach?
1:05:00 Training plans pros and cons?
1:09:00 Short rides vs Long rides?
1:12:19 Does age impact training?
Join this channel to get access to perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCybgi4WCjGaoEEVjB7tBfCg/join
JOIN MY WEEKLY NEWSLETTER http://eepurl.com/inIvGk
Supported by Saddleback
Castelli clothing https://bit.ly/justridebikes
Sidi shoes https://bit.ly/3tjQ8UP
HJC helmet https://bit.ly/3sRiB2Z
Buy Bikestow Stance stand here https://bit.ly/3LSZQXZ
Follow me:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidjarthur/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/davearthur
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/justridebikesvideo
Today on just ride bikes I’m joined by ex Elite bike racer turned professional cycling coach Andy Turner to talk all things related to performance on the bike and reveal how everybody can improve their Fitness with as little as 4 hours a week sound too good to be true
Right now you like myself are probably limited on how much time we can actually spend riding a bike we’re not Pros we have D jobs but regardless of your goals aspirations and experience and he shows how everybody can level up their Fitness he puts a spotlight on many of the myths
In training from FTP to copying the pros we discuss how age impact training and how you can get more from your riding time without becoming obsessed with power numbers and training zones and cover many of the topics that relate to your performance on the bike I personally found this discussion really
Useful Illuminating and insightful and have made changes to my training as I prepare for the Fred wton this summer so I hope you find it useful as well right let’s dive into it so Andy let’s start with a big question that quite a few viewers uh sent into to me how can you
Improve your performance on the bike with less time I guess how many hours do you have to commit to get any sort of reasonable Improvement in performance we’re talking 4 hours 30 hours what’s the minimum you have to do I’d say the main thing is you want to get you’ve got
A train smart you can’t just ride junk miles or go out chasing high speeds on straa or doing Tempo rides on zift all the time or zift races it’s uh about mixing up what you do quite a bit a lot of people think you’ve got to train like
A professional or you’ve got to be doing 30 hours a week and I mean the level of training they’re doing is purely because they’ve got the time to rest along with it so if you’re looking at how you can best train to improve for yourself you
Want to look at it as a sum of all stresses so you take you’ve got for example young children you’ve got work you’ve got commuting everything that adds up stress or takes out time of your day and if you throw in training stress onto that as well you’ve got to look at
The total sum so we might have a training stress a week of I don’t know 400 and a professional might have 1,200 but then when you look at the sum of all stresses they’re not having to worry about anything else in their life so you might have an equivalent stress of
Yourself of 1200 as well so you still need to rest as much and if you tried to push the training stress more you then have an cumulative stress greater than a professional but no extra time to rest so you’re not going to improve you’re going to have overtraining you’re going
To have Plateau or even decrease in performance so it’s you need to work out what your available rest is and what your total manageable stress is and sort of work backwards from that so you kind of reverse engineering yourself a little bit taking your goal and then where you are
And then you sort of funnel that down into what the training plan that will work for you is and I find for most people the junior Riders I work with generally sort of 14 hours a week is what they can fit comfortably with school but they’re also younger they can
Deal with higher training loads and recover quicker whereas someone who is say between 35 45 they’re going to have more probably family responsibilities they’ve got the work to be honest between 7 and 10 hours is what I’d say would be the maximum for most people but you can see improvements
In Fitness in as little as between four and seven so it’s looking at not just how many hours you doing a bike but how those hours fit into your into your life in your you know daily routine your weekly routine or you have commitments which often people don’t look at they
Look at how many out I need to do and don’t think about the rest you need which should be important something that probably we don’t give enough importance to do we no it’s something so whenever I’m doing my coaching questionnaire for people it’s like what is your time
Availability during the week what are your other constraints it’s like a breakdown of what they’re doing so when do they wake up when have they got to do their commu to work how long are they in work for when are they back how do they feel when they’re back have they got to
Go and pick kids up take them to activities or just you need to spend time with people as well you’ve got to take into account social elements too um so it’s looking at all of that and then what realistic time there is to train not just how many hours do you
Have free it’s what can you realistically manage and then is your work tiring mentally or physically taking into account all of that and that’s what you need to do for yourself is sort of take stock analyze where your stresses are how much time you have both
To train and to rest cuz equally as a professional Rider they can just nap for most of the day we don’t have that luxury that would be nice wouldn’t it yeah so so you say between like 7 to 10 hours of Street sport but you reckon from 4 hours onwards you’re you’re going
To see a Improvement in performance if you allocate that amount of time yeah I’d say there’s an element of how experienced you are as well so someone who’s coming into it quite new really any riding they do is going to see an improvement in Fitness because it’s a
Novel training stimulus for them yeah but someone who’s been riding for longer quite often you’ve got to see a change in the training stimulus or an increase in the stress to see an improvement but I’ve sort of experimented on myself a little because I’ve been cycling for
Over 10 years now and the last couple of years it’s been a lot more onof from illness and work so or as I used to be doing 20,000 km a year it’s been four at most um so I’ve been training roughly between 4 and 7 hours a week
And I’m sure there’s an element of having had the residual Fitness that’s going to be easier for me to get Fitness back but even with riding four to S hours a week I’ve seen quite a drastic improvement so previously my sort of critical power threshold sustainable
Power was about 280 um beginning of last year and then before breaking my arm I’d got up to about 340 which is slightly higher than the year I got my second cat license so it is manageable but it is about training smart and balancing up what you’re doing and doing the right
Thing I even when I’m just going out riding myself I’m a bit of a sucker for just those Tempo miles where you ride between an hour and two at a sort of high Pace they feel like you’ve worked hard but the reality is you’re not getting much more of a physiological
Gain than doing it’s been quite a lot zone 2 in endurance training but you get quite a lot more fatigue which means maybe the next day you have your VO2 max session but you’re a bit fatigue going into it so you don’t get as much out of
That as you’d like so since I’ve been really committing to my own coaching practices essentially of doing the slower endurance work and then doing the high intensity efforts I’ve seen quite an improvement from that okay so you mentioned earlier about junk Mars which is something I’ve heard about what the
Junk Mars mean and and what sort of riding if you got seven hours to ride a week what sort of riding should you do in seven hours varies from person to person because for some people what could be junk miles for another is probably not I mean you want to look at
What your overall goal from training is and work backwards from that and for most cycling events that’s going to be aerobic fitness improving that because most events are over the duration that it becomes mostly aerobic unless you’re doing track sprinting so you kind of got to break down the components of what
Make that and the two biggest ones you want more muscle capillaries so more blood is able to be delivered to the muscles because the blood is what carries the oxygen and then more mitochondria which probably everyone has heard as Powerhouse of the cell what it does is break down fats fuel lactate and
Turns that into energy which is ATP which the thing we cycle through a lot to basically create every motion so that uses ATP everything we do does so we want more blood with oxygen going to the muscles then that’s used to break down fuels in the muscle by those cells and
The way we get those is from the sort of long slow endurance training that helps with something called vegf and that helps with creating more muscle capillaries okay and there’s some papers which show that higher intensities actually limit that potential it’s more to do with the amount of muscle
Contractions you make so to reduce fatigue you could either do 2 hours at 90 RPM zone two or the same at Tempo they’re both doing the same amount of muscle contractions it will both have the same this is sort of a simplified version it’s not going to be exact but
They’ll have a fairly similar gain on that front but the tempo ride is going to lead to more fatigue so then you need more rest and again if you’re in that time limited State and you can’t afford extra rest you want to get the most out of your
Training and then the next day you might have a high intensity session which is going to help the sort of more mitochondrial biogenesis um which is the PowerHouse of the cell as such for breaking down those fuel sources and that comes from more the high intensity efforts and that one
Is amk regulated which is when there’s a high ratio of adenosine monophosphate to adenosine triphosphate so the ATP triphosphate when that’s broken down it splits off molecules so you get adenosine diphosphate and then monophosphate and when that’s that high gradient between the two we’ve used more
Energy so it’s when you’ve done the high intensity work that’s when that pathway is activated and helps uh stimulate more mitochondrial growth so different training elements different Pathways it’s not saying that you should ignore Tempo work because especially if you’re doing say you’re doing a sports even you just
Want to do 100 miles as quickly as possible you’re going to be working in the tempo region there you can improve your actual power that you could maintain with those high intensity and low intensity workouts but then you also need to be able to actually deal with the rate of
Perceived exertion of riding at that Tempo element so there’s still benefit doing that and as well when you go slightly higher to Sweet Spot workouts you’ve got got more sort of lactate clearance and buffering and you the more exposure you have to it the lactate it helps your body adapt by generating more
Transporter systems MCT one and four for transporting lactate into the working muscle or out of the bloodstream because that’s where you hear about with lactic acid lactic burn in reality it’s hydrogen ions but you can still reduce the ass iated level of hydrogen ions by removing the lactate or preventing it
From going into the bloodstream junk miles I’d say long story short it’s anything that’s not working towards your goal or at the right time of working towards your goal so there’s a time and a place for everything really but smashing Tempo arrives all the time probably not going to get the biggest
Gain in Fitness or improvements okay that’s what I’m really bad at just going out and doing a stady Tempo ride all time it feels fun just riding quickly so that’s another element of it is I’ve got people that coach where they really enjoy just a good Tempo smash yeah and
Because they really enjoy it it makes them feel good and it makes them feel confident when they see that their speed has improved from last time they did one I’ll still incorporate that into a plan because it helps keep the motivation that’s the thing it’s if something keeps you happy and
Motivated that’s another reason for including it even if it’s not physiologically the most beneficial like in reality a cafe stop during a long ride having that in the middle it’s not the best thing to do um it will sort of you know reset your body but it reduces
The rate of fat oxidation you’ve got you sort of Peak at that when you’ve been riding for a period of time and when you stop your body goes into recovery States and when you start again it’s sort of as if you just done two separate rides
Really they’re no Cafe rides but at the same time they’re really fun yeah um um so it’s balancing everything up as well you’ve got to keep yourself motivated you’ve got to keep cycling fun you can’t just I’ve done it before I’ve done a month of just turbo rides
And it I couldn’t touch the turbo again for six months after that just me personally for me yeah so I guess it’s finding something that motivates you gives you a reason to get on the bike which is important and but also it sound like mixing it up is important kind it
Makes a steady stuff and doing intervals um we’re filming in January now so should we be doing more intervals should we incorporate that into our schedule this time of year as well it depends on when your key events are starting so I’ve got quite a few people I’m coaching
Where the cycle classic is coming up quite early on or the track Champs are end of February so they’re wanting to get in some quite high capacity race efforts quite soon and given that most of us are not we don’t have the time to train of a professional a lot of talk is
Spoken about with polarized training Zone 2 and people like the 8020 rule World Tour Pros might be doing maybe a 9010 rule at certain times in the year where it’s mostly low intensity admittedly their Zone 2 is sort of up to 300 watts for some of them probably more
But they’re riding at relatively low intensity but when you have less time available you can’t waste it if you have 7even hours a week to train you probably don’t want to be doing just seven hours of zone two work you want to mix up the
Variet a bit so it might be a 7030 split it might be a 6040 again it depends on how much stress you have overall cuz if you’re doing intervals every day it’s very stressful if you’ve not got the time to rest you’re not going to recover well you’re going to get that
Overtraining and see a plateau and fitness so you want to mix things up but it’s mixing up relevant to where you are in the training plan and what you’re doing so if you’ve got a key event coming later in the season you’re not going to be doing your Peak race capacity efforts
Now but you are still going to want to be improving your Fitness and aerobic fitness components by doing some of those high intensity efforts it unfortunately depends and varies on what you’re doing but I’m for people not racing professionally I’m not a fan of excluding efforts at any point in the
Season except for an offseason break K my goal during the winter or the reason I ride during winter is to be fit for summer which is a sort of know two or three month period when hopefully it could be nice and warm and get do some events sporties which is not a very
Defined period in terms of goals but can that vagueness be something I can work towards in terms of incorporating more intervals into my schedule or do I need to be more detail and say WR this go event on this date and work back from that date to three
Months or whatever it might be I’d say it’s useful to work backwards so Summer’s quite a good time to look at it cuz in the UK at least we tend to get nicer weather March and April sometimes um and especially during the winter it’ser it’s easier to get low mood and
You’ve got to spend more time cleaning your bike you can kind of do some people call it reverse periodization but say your event is in July so more than halfway through the year I think a good way of balancing it is to be honest doing more shorter duration intervals
Pedaling efficiency Works Cadence drills on the turbo in the winter when sometimes that’s the safest way to do it as well and then you can add more volume in come the spring when it work nicer yeah because you’ll probably be happier you’ll enjoy it more it’s more time
Efficient because you could go out earlier or a bit later and not worry about it being darker cuz at the end of the day good quality winter kit and lights good lights they’re not cheap so if you want to make the most of your training and also do it cost effectively
I think honestly training indoors over the Winter works nicely and then increasing the volume come into the spring cuz it’s not that you have to build this huge big aerobic base that’s sort of something that’s built year on year on year so you’ll see improvements if you’re doing the intervals in the
Winter and then move on to longer duration work come the spring so it’s not traditional by any means but if that’s what works best for you with your time availability with time being able to be spent cleaning the bike or going out when the light allows you that’s going
To work better and it’s not that doing the base miles will slow you down you keep a level of intensity in there if anything what you can do is incorporate intensity into the end of some of those endurance rides because a lot of the time if you’re racing it’s efforts in
The latter stages of the race that’s going to be where it counts and even if you’re doing a sporty flight the struggle you don’t want to just be fresh for all the first climbs and then find that the final few you’re going to really struggle with Pon the pun um so
You want to be good at the end of the rides as well with relatively high intensity so you can kind of incorporate the two there you’re still going to get like I said with um the high-intensity efforts do give you aerobic fitness gains but you also get different ones
From the insurance work I think for a practical one for most people people even if you can just fit one longer ride in a week just one day at the weekend that’s a good way of managing it throughout the winter because for anyone who works one ride at the weekend if
You’ve got kids or social commitments you’ve then got Sunday to do that or Saturday and you can ride maybe three to four hours on the other day Okay and then you’ve got time to clean the bike as well I think if you keep that on track then through the rest
Of the week just incorporate efforts and you’ve got got a nice balance there well efforts rest and active recovery what about people who might do lot commuting can you build commuting into that sort of training plan or they just jump miles don’t count you have to do your training
Separately to community miles you can definitely incorporate those into there as well at the end of the day for most people hours on the bike are going to result in improvements so even an hour steady to work and an hour back it’s not useless by any means it’s also very time
Effective if you’re using your Comm to actually get some more hours in but you can also do specific drills depends where you are cuz if you’re in a city and you’ve got constant traffic lights Junctions you can’t be doing long efforts there and slamming the brakes on
At the last minute or riding with your brakes on to try and get from light A to B in a long enough time but you can be smart with the sort of efforts you do um maybe there is a climb up to your office or your house on the way back you can
Use that as a bit of a benchmark effort or can do Cadence specific drills between their standing starts from the lights if that’s safe to do so you can be clever in the way you fit things in or if you’ve got a commute that allows a bit more flexibility and freedom in the
Efforts you do just sort of break down what is in the rout and then think about what sort of efforts you could fit in there but equally if you’re feeling a bit tired just use it as a steady ride in use it as active recovery okay because for some people this is another
One that varies from person to person with who I coach some prefer a rest day where they’re not on the bike and they don’t touch it but then others find if they do that the next day they just feel stiff and not really rearing to go so
For them half an hour easy it’s better than doing nothing at all okay so nice long steady ride a weekend intervals during the week what sort of intervals would you suggest are they like go-to favorites you have and are you better dinner on on the trainer or on the bike
I guess it’s WEA dependent well it yeah it’s depending on what’s available to you in terms of because for anything that’s a longer effort it’s difficult with Junctions or changes of gradients but then things like V2 Max efforts are quite good ones for improving overall Fitness they hurt which is why I also
Hate doing them but they are very effective so if you’ve got a power meter you’re looking at sort of between 110 to 120 105 to 120% of your threshold power um if you’ve got heart rate monitor you’re looking at getting sort of your heart rate maximum by the last minute of
An effort maybe if you’re doing four to five minute efforts and for rate of perceived exertion you could maybe spit out a word here or there and come the end of it be struggling to make a noise um those are quite good efforts to do you can they’re quite easy to do on
Climbs if you’ve got one long enough for that on the turbo they admittedly are quite hard um especially with urg mode I suggest don’t use urg mode that so when you set Power and you have to write up power so the trainer will set the resistance to
The power you’re doing but if you start slowing down your pedaling it increases the resistance to match overall gets harder yeah whereas in if you do it on just level mode where you’re using your gears for resistance it’s all right to let the power drop a bit because the
Heart rate will stay yeah and that’s the the V2 p is the heart rate so honestly you’re looking more at heart rate than power for those but that one’s a good one for on the turbo uh or on the road with climbs Sweet Spot efforts find personally for me work quite well for
Some people they don’t and others they do it’s again playing around what works for you so I’d suggest probably two interval days a week where it’s like dedicated interval sessions on the turbo and then if you’re doing the zone two ride maybe an F or to
Come the end of the ride okay cuz you can know have had all the zone two benefits throughout and then you’ve got the fatigue resistance at the end whereas if you do the efforts at the start you switch into sort of more using carbohydrates rather than fats as a fuel
Source and it changes the way the training session Works essentially um you’ll get more of the gain uh the zone two benefits if you keep the intensity lower and then do something at the end of it rather than the other way around so raing makes at the end of ride not at
The beginning when the first climb yeah so intervals on a trainer make a lot of sense but if you are riding outside because you like riding outside you don’t have a trainer can you do more ad hoc intervals like see there’s a lampost and Sprint through it or you better go
For very like 2 minutes on 2 minutes off do you have to be that detailed with your intervals I would say if you’re riding Outdoors when I set sessions for people they are always ones that can be done on the turbo but then if they’re doing them outside my recommendation is
The warm up and the cool down can be more varied in length because more often than not you’ve got to ride somewhere where it’s suitable to do the effort yeah so quite roads and yeah let’s take the V2 Max effort so four minutes on 5 minutes
Off but I’ll say to people like don’t worry about the Gap in between the efforts so much as long as it is five minutes it can be longer so say there is a climb on their route that is between 3 and a half and 4 and A2 minutes long if
It’s 3 and a half minutes long you can start the effort a little bit earlier on and aim for that and if you finish just before the top of the climb and you’ve got to go that very slowly fair enough it’s still going to be you’ve done the effort right it
Doesn’t matter if you do the rest of the climb a bit slower and then it might be 6 minutes 10 minutes to get to the next climb to do that or the next stretch of road that’s suitable I think it’s good to mix up efforts on climbs and flaps
Because you use slightly different muscle patterns depending on what you’re on but just being a bit more flexible you can be a bit more ad hoc with it like there’s a general structure for what you want from that session but if you’re a few seconds here or a few
Seconds there on over side of the effort and there’s a longer gap between them then that’s all right you don’t have to be 100% all the time have to stress if you miss the start of your next one you be more relaxed about it and I think it
Sound like doing an interval in a climb might be a bit easier the gradient working against you so maybe bit easier if you live somewhere hilly of course but if you don’t have the hills you bit bit of a challenge isn’t it really yeah again it’s breaking down what your end
Goal is um for most people a lot of events they do it’s a climb is often part of the feature of their events and where it’s going to be important to produce that power but if you’re a time trialist or a Pursuit while you’re doing 4 minutes
Effort you want to be very good at producing that on the flat and ideally in an aerodynamic position whereas on the climbs you can be out of the saddle you can be sitting no more upright so again it’s s of you’ve always got to look back look back from where your end
Goal of the training is and if it’s just to get fitter and have fun yeah use the climbs if it’s specifically 10 mile time trials and events that are flat where you need to produce power do some efforts on the flat as well okay I guess it depends on your
Actual goal whether you’re racing time tring sport I know lots of viewers said are doing sport EES which seems to be quite a popular one and I’m doing a sport Eve in the summer and for me goal getting around in a reasonable kind of state and not falling apart in the last
Few climbs um so I guess Taylor and your riding now to the goal event and like where it’s going to be lots of climbing or long distance can help will that make a difference to the riding you do now as well and over the next few months I’d
Say especially so that’s the struggle uh Fred Wht Fred Wht for my sins yeah so that one is hilly so you’re going to want to be comfortable on different climbs especially ones with steeper gradients so packing the climbs as much as I can is going to be an
Obvious Focus I guess well cuz even with quite light gearing on some of those climbs you’re going to be you end up quite hunched over so you close your hip angle a bit and you’re also working at quite a low RPM so some low RPM Cadence drills will probably be quite good okay
For you and then getting used to CU When you go into that sort of cramped over climbing position you change the length of your muscles and you change how the firing pattern is so I did my University dissertation on and especially in clients like 14 20% it’s very different how your muscles
Work so you want to be riding on climbs like that getting used to it because then you’re more likely if you don’t do that you’ll be more likely to get things like cramps because you’re doing something that the muscles aren’t used to so if you train that as part of your
Training sessions you come to the Steep climbs at the Fred Wht and hopefully your body will be more adapted and ready for them and then again if you’re doing climb efforts at the end of your endurance ride those climbs at the end of the Fred wit should feel that a
Little bit easier how do you track your training and do you need heart rate do you need power do you need all that I guess if you’re trying to race or train at high Lev you do makes a lot of sense and it’s more accessible but if you’re
Put off by a high cost you need all that can you just go on F yeah definitely you don’t need to have a heart r monster and a power meter I won’t lie in saying it’s you get more data out of it and you can
See more in there I think it’s a bit like with things like these metric monitors that do heart rate variability and stuff my experience of heart rate variability it tells me how I already know I’m feeling okay and a power meter will tell you you’re working hard when
You’re working hard a heart rate monor will read a high heart rate when you can feel physically your heart beating as fast as it can so they’re not necessary but I think what they do is help add into the training log so whether you’re keeping track in straa or training Peaks
Or even just a physically written training diary I think that’s the way to keep a track of things so I use training Peaks for the most part because you can have your heart rate you’ve got your power but you can also fill out a rate of perceived exertion so one to 10 and
Then also a sort of basic mood profile where you just have very frowny face and very smiley face and somewhere in between there you put where you’re feeling because even heart rate or power by itself doesn’t give that much information um you want to look at it as
A broader picture so it’s like the heart rate is the internal work the power is the external so if your heart is putting out this much work to generate as much power it’s useful to know but then it’s how do you gauge the Improvement or what
Does it mean yeah because if your power goes up and your heart rate stays low it can mean different things it might be that you’re getting fitter in which case your rate of SE exerion might have dropped and your feeling on the bike is strong equally it could be that
You’re getting quite fatigued okay so your rpe might be creeping up and your feeling on the bike might not be as good so keeping track of that is very important those sort of internal subjective measures you’ve got to be aware of them as well and so if you’ve
Got a training diary add notes to it on how you feel but it’s quite good just using speed if you go out and have a loop that you regularly do average speed is the trend because I know straa does that with um average speed it does Trends yes and
Let’s say you do your 40K Loop and it will vary day today uh but you might see a trend that’s zigzagging up and as long as you put in s of maybe notes on how you felt on the ride like did this feel particularly hard what were the
Conditions like because if it’s windy and rainy you’ll be a bit slower so doing things like that and then you can see an overall picture of oh okay the last time I did this loop I was 4 minutes slower but I actually felt stronger today or that I was putting out less
Effort than back then so clearly my fitness has gone up or just a regular climb that you do it might be one that’s quite close by and you do it absolutely flat out each time and you can see the trend as it goes up and increases in
Speed so I think keeping track of things either with straa or training Peaks I think is probably the best one cuz I think with straa these segments you now have to pay to see how you compare on them a training Peaks the free version is all that people need for the most
Part you can see what you’re doing you can see how many hours you’re fitting in y and you can keep track of just with RP if you’re not using power or heart rate it’s quite easy to do that and I’d say for Riders they’re wanting to get one thing to measure metric heart
Rate is probably the first place to start okay it’s useful for the endurance rides it’s useful for the high intensity stuff but it’s also very good at telling you a bit about yourself if you know your max heart rate and you know you’re not reaching it anymore you might be
Getting fatigued so you know it’s maybe best to take a break or if it’s really really high and you’re not feeling working any harder maybe there’s a bit of illness coming on so I think heart rate tells you the most overall info it’s just important to sort of
Understand what it’s telling you yeah Power is then a useful addition to that and with power there are some good value options available but you do want to make sure that it’s going to be accurate and reliable so you want it to actually it’s you want it to be consistent within
Itself because even if it’s not reading the power that you’re actually doing as long as it’s consistent from one day to the next you can gauge improvements at the end of the day whoever crosses the line first in a race or finishes the event of a PB doesn’t matter what the
Number is that it says that’s completely irrelevant um um it’s about seeing your own personal progression I’ve tested a few power meters and some of them read 30 wats higher than the Benchmark and some are 20 wats lower but as long as they are consistent within themselves you can get
A good idea of progress Improvement on that metric but even then power is not the be all and end all it’s speed is the main thing so you can become more efficient with your pad Lan you can get better at holding and more ARs and up position on the bike those will increase
Speed without affecting power so it’s a useful metric but there’s a lot of detail and information around it that’s I think you can get more out of just monitoring what your relative performance is to yourself that’s nice to know yeah because a lot of time crunch cyclists won’t have know time to
Invest in learning how to use heart rate and and parameter and decoding what actually means and you probably could add too much complexity to your training and think you’re doing one thing but actually doing the other so it could be possibly counterproductive and and just strip away that complexity and just
Focus on I say root performance could be easier certainly if you’re more not a beginner but you’re trying to find improvements without going too extreme in your training approach I’ve also seen people getting obsessed with numbers when there’s so many different mats take into account they they sort of let the
Numbers tell them how they’re feeling okay um cuz again with heart rate variability I’ve seen people with heart rate variability trackers or recovery things and they’ve said oh it says my recovery score is low but I feel great what should I do should I listen to this
Thing on my wrist or should I listen to how I actually am feeling and knowing myself yeah or equally it says they’re really fresh and they feel really tired and they need a rest day they will sometimes listen to the tracker and go out and train anyway it’s
Sort of not really ideal yeah and then you get people chasing Fitness scores and comparing power numbers from Theirs to their friends or anything El and SE it becomes too much with it’s all got to be individualized and focused on you as yourself not anyone else so focus
On that and the big things that come there are those measures like RP how you feel on the bike those are really important metrics I was testing a Garmin Edge for the last few months and it has a recovery time feature sometimes it give me like 40 plus hour recovery time
Like I can’t take 40 hours to recover cuz I had that during a stage race and it gave me 72 hours to recover and I had a stage the next day and that wasn’t really good for the morale I don’t know how accurate that is though is it
Accurate or is it is it a wild figure I can’t say I’m sure about how they measure the recovery metric there I imagine it’s taking the stress that it’s accounted for from the session and then also your previous stresses so if you’re used to dealing with a certain
Amount then it knows you can deal with more so someone who’s not ridden before doing an hour on the bike is going to be quite tough yeah whereas someone who’s used to doing 4our rides an hour on the bike is pretty easy so it will probably take into account relative metrics and what
People are used to so it’s that chronic versus acute training load okay yeah so that’s that’s the risk of a lot of the technology is it giving you false readings almost with recovery time or how you’re doing or improving or and also if you’re not understanding fully
In a training phase you’ll want to be working at a level where you’re not quite fully recovered that’s what they call functional overreaching where you stress the body and the responses that the body then has to adapt and it does that by basically becoming fitter you
Need to stress it and you won’t be recovered probably the next day fully but then you’ve got to incorporate the rest because if you don’t rest then you won’t see that training adaptation so I can see some elements of it being useful but I can’t really dive into or critique
It too much about knowing fully how they do it but I’d say listening to your own body is the best way to go and becoming quite aware and in tune of How It’s feeling that’s something I had to teach myself over quite a few years and try
And teach any athlete that I coach sort to listen and understand themselves so it’s always nice to see them take the initiative sometimes like if they wake up feeling overly tired if it’s an easy session they’ve got to do then I’ll give them a little
Nudge to do that as long as they’re not showing signs of illness if it’s a really hard key session that they’re probably not going to achieve because they’re feeling overly tired it might just be because they had a late night the night before CU they had extra work
So that’s that stress has increased so you’ve got to adapt the training slightly so I’ll say to them okay don’t do that effort session today let’s maybe bring forward the Resto we’ll do that effort session the day after when you’re more rested but then you had this
Session the day after will reduce the intensity of that so you’re not overly fatigued going into the day after that so it’s all you can’t just drag one thing somewhere and hope to change the rest of it you’ve got to look and again take that sum of all stresses so whereas
Before we had efforts rest key session now we switched it so it’s efforts then key session so we want to change stuff around there as well just to see where the stress is how that’s going to build up and how much recovery time they need so I’d say for people want to build
Their own training plan don’t worry about switching days around or even if you’ve just got to miss a day and have two rest days in a row it’s not a big stress everyone has to do it and you’re not going to be losing out to someone
Else and the worst thing you can do is stress it about it cuz then that adds another stress into it what you say it’s easy to set I’m done cuz I I’m really bad at listening to my body I’m getting better I think I feel tired today and
Taking a day off but then I feel guilty for not ride my bike that day and I think well I’m missing out a day or two days and I’m losing Fitness and I’m or losing the opp opportunity to get fitter so you you can feel guilty and that it’s
It’s tough to kind of find a place to be comfortable with yeah I’d say some practical ways to sort of help help with that uh say part of your schedule was you had an hour to train and you’re not feeling great so you’ve not got that
Hour anymore so maybe you can use that hour to there was a job you were going to do at the weekend something to tidy or fix you can then do that through that hour that’s good thinking you’ve given yourself another hour of the weekend where you could do something and it’s
Not added any additional stress anywhere or you can do some basic snc work or some Mobility stuff that’s going to reduce the chance of getting injured or improve strength on the bike there’s other things you can fit in that might just be short and effective and not as
Fatiguing or like I said the idea of fitting in a job that you’d save for the weekend in that hour that you would dedicated to riding a bike because it’s a free hour essentially now so if you switch it to then I don’t know for me it’s probably going through organizing
Emails or putting files and folders in the right ad life admin yeah so if I then do that on that day where I’ve missed the training session I’ve given myself an hour spare at the weekend to fit in either an additional hour or a different sort of session or if I’m just
Feeling completely run down it’s another hour of rest yeah so it’s thinking like that and not it all comes down to stress and stressing about missing training is going to make stress worse and that’s going to impact training as well yeah you mentioned something earlier about
Riding a regular route and using that as a sort of Benchmark that’s quite a good idea having like a route of a I don’t know what distance 15 25k have that as a benchmark and ride that every week every month perhaps mhm and use that as a sort
Of a a way to measure your performance can that work yeah it can be quite a good way of doing it you you don’t want to get into the habit of riding it at that Tempo Pace all the time um what you want to do is compare it basically sub
Maximally so I mean if you’re going at a race speciic ex verion of three or four that’s probably zone two you can talk in full sentences and you’re seeing a trend that when you do that loop at that effort level it’s getting quicker that’s a good sign that your base Fitness is
Increasing you can then use I think it’s better to use shorter segments for doing okay higher capacity efforts so local time trials are great at a 10m time trial at your local Club you can do the same course again and again and again and see your times change and if you’ve
Not changed your equipment or anything like that you can see a rough Trend you’ll get variations because you have different weather conditions air pressure and wind rain things that will affect it but that overall trend is what you’re looking for so you won’t see a nice straight line of
Progress it will very much be a and then there’s your high pressure day and then there’s your super low pressure day but as long as you’ve got that overall trend so yeah I think just using straa segments or TT courses or loops and just timing that and keeping track of how you
Feel during it and that’s why the training diary comes in and just putting how you’re feeling and how the ride itself felt okay what do you do if you feel you plateaued in terms of your Fitness you like you’re riding every week you don’t feel get any faster or
Stronger is there a ceiling to every sort of Fitness potential or is it just so you need to change your training to add in some different intervals to do something different add more variety so I think more often than not it comes down to varying training stimulus we’re
All quite good at getting into habits yes but we stick to those habits possibly a bit too routinely so it’s good to get into a habit of say doing an hour or two of riding every day every other day three days in the week and two
At the weekend but we tend to just repeat the cycle again and again whereas what you’ll need to do is switch the efforts up a bit so that’s often people that have come to me for coaching help it’s been that they’ve plateaued and you look back on the training it tends to be
Very similar stuff they’ve done okay quite often it’s that Tempo riding stuff and they do get fitter but then it plateaus and I won’t have to add in extra hours normally it’s more a case of changing the training stimulus so often it’s reduced the intensity on those
Longer rides and then do more key efforts it might also be that you need to do more pedaling efficiency work um it’s quite easy for a lot of us to not be particularly efficient at pedaling I remember at Uni when we used to get rugby players in to do power stuff on
The bike they’d have numbers that were through the roof and even wats per kilo that were very good but it didn’t translate into much performance on the road because they weren’t efficient with the pedal stroke so when the left leg was pushing down the right leg was
Almost resisting that okay so it gives a higher power number because there’s more torque going through both pedals but it’s talk going the wrong way so pedaling efficiency is another thing to look at and then even how you’re fueling your training so you might be plateauing because your recovery isn’t quite right
Or you’re not fueling your sessions well enough if you’ve got high intensity sessions and you’re not eating the right Foods beforehand you’re not going to get as much out of them um equally if you’re not recovering with the right Foods afterwards you’re not going to see the
Same benefits um because the food comes into afterwards more of like a recovery and rest number four and it’s the fueling the workload you’ll get more out of your session so that’s where the training diary is very useful because you can see what someone’s been doing
And so like when I look through people’s training history I can can see areas where I go okay they’ve been doing the same thing repeatedly they need to change things up or I can see where things have been going wrong and again with that questionnaire I mention I send
To people as always a question about how do you fuel your training before during and after um just because you want to get an idea of that element of it and then even if someone has got a lot of the elements right and they’re still missing from the stimulus you can look
At things like adding strength conditioning in there so that’s something I recently did a bit of a self- experiment on was a 12we strength conditioning program riding on average 4 hours a week so Nots much at all and then two half hour strength sessions a
Week quite basic for the most part cuz I broken my arm and was still recovering so I couldn’t use heavy weights or have things hanging do you mean off the bike weights like dumbbells and stuff okay yeah and that led to a surprising like by my standards quite a surprising
Increase in performance across 5c 1 minute 5 minute and 20 minute power admittedly again it might part of the reason I saw a bigger Improvement was because I used to do quite a bit of strength training and obviously more training on the bike and then some ways
It’s sort of easier to get that back with less training stimulus but the fact was I think that you will still see a noticeable gain incorporating a bit of a strength training routine because it helps improving pedaling efficiency muscle fatigue ability um recruitment of muscle fibers cuz humans are annoyingly
Inefficient so when you push with all of your might with your leg you’ve got let’s just for the sake of argument this is not accurate a thousand fibers in the leg and when you push absolutely to your maximum you might only use 700 because we’re just not very
Efficient at using them we try and save energy we don’t want to use that many because it uses a lot of energy but if you do strength training which stimulates more motor unit recruitment so we have the nerves which go to the motor unit and it recruits a number of
Cells to contract we can increase the number it recruits which is why when people go to the gym they see big strength gains quite quickly in terms of what they can lift so even a brief strength program will’ll see more motor unit Recruitment and then instead of
Recruiting 700 you now recruit in 800 or more so you get more bang for the same nerve impulse and that can then translate to on the bike you can because you have access to recruiting more fers you don’t need to use them all and when they start fatiguing you start recruiting different
Fibers so you get benefits with fatigue resistance time to exhaustion whereas people used to think it was just for Sprint work the reality of strength training helps with a huge variety of aerobic fitness areas and it’s an interesting one it’s not one you’d necessarily think of lifting a heavy weight for just five
Or six reps can have quite an impact in your performan as pedaling at 90 RPM for 3 hours yeah but it’s definitely worth looking into and it’s something that’s becoming a lot more in Trend certainly you see more articles about it you see more teams are incorporating it um more
People are starting to do it and I think there is a genuine reason to look into doing that even if it’s a fairly basic program and even if it’s more from an injury prevention aspect yeah because if you want to be training consistently you don’t want injury to
Get in the way of that so you’re saying all cyclist should join the gym and do some weight training not even necessarily join the gym you can do stuff at home yeah there’s a lot of mobility and strength work you can do at home using body weight okay um I think
If you really want to do Peak Performance and looking at especially for those racing or actually as well for people who are getting older it’s important to do because this is one issue with cycling it’s nonweightbearing so there’s no stimulus to help with bone maintenance and the unfortunate thing is
As we get older we get a reduction in bone mineral density um and cycling does not help that at all it’s good for muscles but not for bones so strength work can help maintain bone mineral density which means as you get in order you’re less likely to get lower back issues or
Anything like that and there are other ways you can manage that such as cross training at times with running cu the impact helps but equally if you’re not used to that you can get injuries exacerbated so I’d say the strength work is very good for helping with bone mineral density so for older
Athletes it’s good to do to help maintain and actually for younger it’s good to increase that bone rental density so at the point when it does start to Plateau or decrease you’re at least starting from a higher threshold so it’s something I’ve looked at for myself cuz my family history on my dad’s
Side has a history of prostate cancer which probably means I’m going to have treatment at some point which means that the bone Ral density is going to reduce more so I know it’s important to make sure it’s at a good level now so that I don’t have issues later in
Life because it’s one of the key issues people have is um fractures as people get older fractures if it’s say a hip or something fall over yeah and that comes from maybe walking ability becomes affected and a big part of that is bone rental density and muscle function so
Strength training is good for long-term Health and Longevity so even if you’re not looking at it as Peak Performance it’s very good to do for just overall health and function I think the reason most cyclist and myself have never done any sort of Weights is is trying to get
The weight down off the body because know the lighter you are usually the faster you climb and I’ve always lacked power so I try to keep weight down to try and keep my sort of power to weight ratio reasonable uh but as I’m getting older now past 40 I’ve joined the gym
Last year um with a eye to the Future like you say and found know I’ve had a bad back the last few years which should give me a bit cuz I don’t do any stretching typical cyc is finish bik rice sit on the sofa eating cake and
Stuff so trying to do more Mobility core work and and just general functional sort of weight training I found a benefit in just the last and like during the winter swapping an hour on the bike for not even an hour in gym going to gym for know 30 minutes I found real
Benefits so I guess that’s something more of us should probably look at even we are adverse about it’s not putting weight on it it’s not bulking up it’s just increasing that sort of B in density and a bit of General kind of Fitness isn’t it really yeah and I’d say
One thing people might worry about is how do they fit it into their routine yeah um you can do at home stuff uh with fairly minimal equipment or you can look at joining a gym and say there’s one near where you work if you’re commuting
Maybe go to it before work or after work just cuz then you’ve not got to make another travel Journey or if you take your children to to a class or a thing that maybe lasts an hour take them to that go to the gym in between pick them
Up head back otherwise you’ve got drive there drive back drive there drive back it’s just a bit more time efficient um so that’s probably a good way of fitting that in there yeah so we talked for quite a while now without mentioning FTP which is something I know
A lot of Cycles are obsessed with or concerned with and if you are looking to train to a reasonable level and buying a high rate M and parameter and we talk about zones quite a bit I guess we need to talk about how do you establish your
Zones and is FTP really that important should I not worry about it I think FTP is an interesting one because it’s come under quite a lot of scrutiny recently and in some ways rightly so but in other ways it’s a bit of sort of cycling science snobbery okay and I’m
Slightly guilty of this myself bit bragging rights about an FTP is it watch FTP it’s like trump top trumps isn’t it yeah it’s an interesting one cuz nor depends how people base their FTP have they done a 60-minute test or have they done a 20-minute test or have they done
A 20 minute test with a 5 minute fatiguing effort beforehand because the real way of doing it when it was initially Andy Cogan I think was the guy who came up with it it was a 5 minute allout test before a 20 minute allout test yeah and in reality that’s very
Similar to a critical power test where you use two maximal efforts to determine in a sort of reliable sustainable performance cu the problem is if you just went for 20 minutes flat out it’s very unlikely that 95% of that is going to be what you can sustain for
An hour yeah whereas the original test which was 5 minutes flat out 20 minutes flat out that’s a bit more reliable because you’ve already fatigued yourself beforehand and then I can’t remember with that one if you take the 20 minute and then Times by 0.95 or if you just
Take that fatigue 20 minute but that’s a lot more Sim similar to critical power which is where you take different effort durations and it creates a power curve for you and that’s accurate up to a certain level generally to about 45 minutes but I found it work effectively
For 60 Minutes on some people okay but what they all come down to is a sustainable maximal steady state and whether that’s lactate or FTP or critical power or ventilatory threshold 2 they’re all pretty similar in the sort of zone of area and dayto day it’s not
Going to be the same anyway it’s going to vary ever so slightly so I think for most people using FTP to set your power zones for training it’s going to be fairly effective okay um you said that 5 minute 20 minute test is the best way to do it
They have like a ramp test or anything like that is no short quite often depending on the type of ride or a ramp Tas will I overread or underere okay by quite a margin I’ve seen some studies into people doing ramp tests followed by submaximal tests afterwards and those
Look a bit more accurate but again it’s taking multiple metrics to derive a sort of broader picture of things um but I’d say for most people FTP test is going to be all right for you and then base your efforts off of that the thing is if it reads
Proportionally too high you’ll find your VO2 max efforts are maybe 105 to 115% of that if it reads a bit low you just do a slightly higher intensity okay so again that’s coming down to that rpe V2 Max efforts flat out for 5 minutes uh Sweet Spot
Efforts comfortable but hard for 15 30 minutes so it’s getting down to the RP elements again I personally with the people I coach do the critical power testing because I’ve get that broader picture so I get 5c 1 minute and 5 minute test the 5c and 1 minute are for
Their Sprint power and then glycolytic capacity which is sort of short sharp anerobic very short Hill Climb effort and then the 5 minute I use along with a test another day in that week which is 3 and 12 and then put that into XL work out the slope and the intercept on there
And that gives you basically a power curve which should tell you if you put in a Time duration how long they can maintain that powerful and it’s generally accurate to 35 45 minutes but I found it worked well for 60 minutes for people in terms of how much of a bragging number it
Is it’s an interesting one cuz in the UK we’re obsessed with 10 m and 25 mile time trials which for people on the faster side are 20 minutes and an hour or 20 minutes and 50 minutes if we going the same speed so there is use in that
Regards but equally as I said before pedaling efficiency you can get a high power number and not translate it into great speed okay so I’ve seen people time trial us to go even a fairly similar coefficient of drag go faster for fewer watts and part of that’s probably because they’ve got a more
Efficient pedaling stroke or equally their power meter under reads massively and the putting out way more power in the person other person’s over reads I remember someone he had um I won’t say which brand it was cuz I don’t know whether it was necessarily that brand or
Whether he just calibrated it badly but I remember his 20 minute power was 480 Watts wow but he went significantly slower than me on climbs when I was doing 400 and he weighed 5 kilos less than me wow yeah something odd there so he had a good bragging number but it
Didn’t actually result in much and then there’s also what numbers are actually relevant for what you’re doing yeah cuz if you’ve got a really good 20 minute power okay if you’re doing a 20 minute time trial great what if you’re doing a 5 minute climb at the end of your six-h
Hour event full of climes what’s your power like then yeah so that’s more sort of Maximum aerobic power and then what just coming up more in research at the moment is resilience which is what your power is after you’re fatigued so the big difference with the world tour ride
Does is yes they produce a huge 20 minute power but they’re doing it on a climb at the end of a 200k stage 18 days into a race yeah it’s crazy yeah so I think that’s in like with zift you see there’s a lot of people with high five and 20 minute
Powers and they’re doing numbers that are close to like World Tour Pros even exceeding some of them but how are they then doing it like I said into a five hour stage 18 stages in so that’s where things become important and even then sprinting a big metric that people forget you’ve got two
People one of them rides on the front at 400 watts per an hour impressive numbers someone else rides behind him at 300 watts per hour saving all his energy and then just Sprints around at the end who’s won the race yeah yeah yeah and I guess FTP is useful to find your
Your Zone stuff but like doing a sport Eve knowing your 20-minute power like you say isn’t that that useful it’s useful in training if you are prepared to go to that level in training but it sounds like me you are bias here you are a coach to make that clear um but
Coaching versus uncoached can you do a lot of this on your own it sounds a lot what you’re talking about it sound quite complex and a lot people might be like I don’t it’s all Godly go to me so maybe a coach is the best way I’d say coaching
Makes it easier for you but even if you’re being coached I’d recommend you do read Around the subject put some time into learning and reading so I follow quite I still learn a lot just because it’s always changing and people Test new things find new ideas so following some
Good coaches or Sports scientists on Twitter X whatever it’s called now I find is quite a good one because they do share interesting data and then also learning to be quite critical so even I think I think it’s good when people I coach question why I’m doing
Something because if I can’t answer why I’m doing something then it’s useless yeah so questioning things questioning the research you read and applying it to yourself so I think you can learn to self- coach if you’re very good at looking at things objectively rather than subjectively I’m not good at that
That’s why I’m not the best at coaching myself I one of the other coaches who I work with we sort of Coach each other a bit okay because we both look at things subjetive rather than objectively but I think people can learn a lot for themselves and it is important even if
You go down the coaching route keep learning about yourself keep questioning things but there are some good YouTube channels out there with people sharing advice on training and even like experience of what’s worked for them you can always try it on yourself see how it works experiment learn new things I say the
Thing with coaching is it kind of compresses that process so rather than learning all of this for yourself going through the process of getting the degree and researching all these elements you get someone else to do that for you and apply it to you but equally
Only you know yourself no one else is going to know that so even if you go for coaching that’s where the coach athlete relationship’s got to be really it’s very important because the coach needs to learn from you yeah if the coach just says right this is going to be the best
Thing for you you without having leared anything about you it’s not particularly it’s probably not going to be the right thing you’ve got to learn yourself a bit yeah about you what works for you what you enjoy and with people just starting out riding I’ve had people come to me
Ask about coaching I’ve said honestly you don’t need it at the moment just go and ride your bike more ride with groups learn bike handling skills ride more and read stuff so I haven’t done so much recently but I used to post quite a lot on my website to try and
Just help people understand a bit more about what they’re doing so I think long story short you probably will get a bit more out of a good coach and there are plenty about but it’s important to try and learn about it yourself and about yourself and you can do that whether
You’re coached or not and I think just try and get a broad variety of information and knowledge and um look at people in similar situations to you and training for similar goals to you what do they do and learn for yourself sort of to be able to break down your event
Into the components needed for it so we’ve got the Fred Wht we know there’s going to be steep climbs so it’s good to train up steep climbs that’s going to be something that will improve already it’s a long endurance event so you’re going to want to get used to riding for longer
Periods just to make sure that your Kit’s all right you want to know your saddle and your bib shorts going to be comfortable for that period of time you want to know whether you start getting numb hands do you need to change the position a bit to reduce pressure on
Your wrists or should you wear gloves or double padded bar tape um and then you’ve got the physiological elements of it which are long endurance rid so you need those long slow endurance rides but there’s also those high intensity efforts that you’ve got to do up climbs and there’s
Going to be benefits doing that too um you’re probably going to want to maintain a pow for the most part at your sort of first threshold which is when you go from burning predominantly fats to carbohydrates and then on the climbs you don’t want to go excessively hard
Because you generate a lot more fatigue metabolize which won’t clear for the rest of it so you can break down your event into those components and work out where you need to train towards but it just takes a bit of time and I’d say that coaching streamlines that whole
Process for people okay iag some people are better coached also some people can coach themselves and depends what sort of person you are and your level of experience sounds like a big factor as well we should talk about training plans as well is it worth following a training
Plan there are lots out there like training Peaks uh stri I’m sure have training plans you download and follow is it worth following one of those or make your own training plan from scratch I think the ones that you can get off the shelf from straa training Peaks zift
Those the thing they do is they offer a consistent plan to sort of keep you accountable I think that can help quite a lot of people if you’ve not got a plan to stick to it can be a bit difficult to find a reason to keep doing the sessions
And for the most part those plans tend to offer a nice variation of stuff they’re not individualized in terms of other than just being set to your threshold power but they do offer something that keeps you accountable and you can do the only issue is that they’re not adjustable
Around so say you have a work trip that pops up out of nowhere or you’ve got to work late one night it doesn’t tell you how to then alter sessions for the rest of the plan so that’s where you need to have either input from a coach or know
What you’re going to do to optimize it and honestly if you’re stressed and worried about what to do best thing to do is just have additional rest because the reason you’ve missed that session is probably because of an additional stressor if you don’t use an off-the-shelf plan then I’d say the best
For most people is go for a plan where you’ve got at least two rest days a week probably at least two interval sessions a week and then one two to three hour ride or two plus hour ride a week um you can do more than that if the weekend allows it
So say if we were just to go for a basic one that will off uh TOS up the hours at the end of it but we’ve got Monday rest day okay off the bike okay or if you prefer active recovery half an hour spin especially in the summer out on the road
Clear your head feels good might be better for you than resting fully that very low level yeah okay and then Tuesday we would have a key interval session so maybe an hour at most okay Wednesday hour or two depending on the time of year and availability if it’s
Lighter nicer weather 2 hours outside if it’s cold dark winter 1 hour inside easy zone two Thursday we look at doing another interval session so you’ve had that Gap in between them so you should be able to perform both those key sessions well Friday rest day and then
Weekend maybe you do two rides of maybe one two hour and one 3 hour or maybe you’ve only got time to ride one day so you do one 3 to four hour ride and then another rest day it doesn’t matter if you’ve got two rest dayss in a row there
It might might just be what works best with your time availability cuz the weekend is often when we’ve got time to do the jobs we haven’t had during the work week but then you’ve got roughly one two three four five sixish hours to use in a week and you’ve only ridden
Four days okay yeah and on the weekend if you have both days ride are you better to do two short rides say say two hours or do one longer 4our ride which is a better kind of use your time and better Fitness Improvement I’d say prioritize one longer ride okay um
Because with no Cafe stop of course ideally time the cafe stop near towards the end okay for that Sprint yeah but equally if you need to refill food and drink then do that and if the group want to stop partway through stop with them and enjoy it because it’ll be
Fun yeah um that balance in there well like training versus being sociable and having a nice time yeah and equally if people like coach sometimes they pop up and say right few friends of mine have said we want to go mountain biking this weekend can I change that up and it’ll
Be different cuz it’ll be vary in intensity there’ll be a lot of downhill work where they’re not pedling at all they’ll be going up the hills where it’s probably higher intensity but they’re going to have a lot of fun it’s going to keep them motivated to follow the rest
Of the plan and also you learn some skill elements from it so it’s off plan but there’s still a big benefit towards it okay um but yeah sorry going back to the L better than two short rides if you can do that yeah I’d say prioritizing one
Longer ride is better cuz for the sort of the aerobic fitness gains with that more muscle capillarization better fat utilization you want to go for longer yeah whereas if you do the two shorter ones it takes a little bit time before you get into that area of achieving
Those benefits yeah and so if you do two 2hour rides you might have an hour or half an hour where you’re getting the real benefits whereas if you do that 4H hour ride you’ve got two and a half hours of achieving those real benefits and if you’re doing
A sport Eve that longer ride going to be a clear clearly a big benefit for you isn’t it really yeah as well of like what I mentioned if you’re doing those longer rides it’s not that you have to do an 8 hour ride to be able to complete
An8 hour ride but it’s good to do a longer ride to know if your position might say lead to acccess pressure on your wrists a lot of people when they’re getting bikes now there’s more racy bikes being bought with head tubes and far out stems and everything everyone wants that Pro look
With the big saddle to Bar drop which I used to do guilty adly for racing but now I’ve changed my position a lot that I’m not racing and it’s where you want to make sure your setup is right so if you’ve got that racy position you might
Be putting quite a lot of force through your hands and getting quite a bit of discomfort in your wrist and your shoulders come the end of it so then you might want to look at moving the bars closer and up a bit and that you’ve got to take into account there’s a little
Bit more weight on the saddle so do you need a better padded bib short or do you need a saddle that maybe fits your shape a bit better work out where there’s hot spots developing so those long rides are useful as well for optimizing your equipment and position and knowing like
Come event day that you’re not going to be 4 hours in and feeling like you’re sitting on a bed of nails yeah yeah definitely a long ride exp any issues your fit and also fueling and fuel yes true yeah you need to get good at eating
Quite a lot for a hour plus event yeah we haven’t talked about nutrition yet but perhaps save that for a future episode yeah how has Age come into this as know as an older cyclist I know lots of people watching this are older does age have an impact on how much you train
How hard you train or do you train a same amount like Junior versus some in the 60s how do you factor that in it’s an interesting one because I say younger Riders are generally able to recover better um and also the type of training they do is generally different especially for
Juniors when they’re in that growth stage they want to improve things like lung capacity muscle mass they want that and you can do that easier when you’re younger um they’re probably not looking so much on the endurance level of things but it’s changing now where Jun is that
Be picked up for World Tour teams like there’s quite a big shift in how training is going cuz Riders Who are 16 need to be able to train at a level a world tour team season I saw cat Ferguson’s signed for moar I think on her 18th birthday she’ll be straight off
To them but used to be like The Grand Tour winners be like in their late 20s kind of when in their Prime but now they’re in early 20s it always used to be 27 was your Peak right now it’s if you’re not winning world tour Races by
19 you pass it yeah but um pressure’s on for them anyway people develop at different rates but yeah when older athletes it’s taking into account all the different things they probably got more commitments in terms of family and everything until the point where you’re retired and you’ve got more time yeah um
You’re at the age where maintaining muscle mass is important because you mentioned earlier with German not wanting to put on muscle yeah but equally there’s been a few things that like cross-sectional area of fire muscle as a good predictor of performance on the bike you look at uh Pacha he’s got
Quite big FS for a grand tour Rider compared to finger guard that’s why I’d say Pacha is better at One Day races and sort of more explosive events but that’s another thing to go into I think when you’re training as an older athlete you got to take into account you probably
Need a bit more time to recover a because your body doesn’t recover as quickly and B you’ve probably got more commitments whether that’s work or family doing stuff in the garden there’s lots to consider there the other thing is that the area that will probably suffer most isn’t your endurance it’s
Going to be your higher capacity efforts so with muscle mass decreasing um V2 Max decreasing you want to really make sure you’re getting those key efforts in still so you’re still wanting to train these really high intensity efforts you just need to incorporate enough rest for them as well
But I think at that point endurance isn’t so much of a worry especially if you’ve been riding for a long time you have that good level of Base Fitness and you see long endurance events at steadi States like um the Transcontinental race it’s not younger Riders doing those and
Being very good at those it’s people who are a bit older so endurance is an element that you will be able to keep and be stronger at for longer what you need to maintain is the muscle mass and the strength so gym work strength conditioning very very important but
Also making sure you do those high capacity efforts on the bike don’t neglect those so sure one minute maximal efforts and 5 minute V2 repeats they’re going to be very useful for maintaining those Fitness components that will suffer as you get older I read a great book about Ultra Runners a few
Years ago and they were all in the 50s and 60s and older and they was just like absolute bossing it because you don’t lose that endurance as you get older but I’ve noticed I definitely lose that top end but I don’t know whether I’m not trading that top end enough or whether
It’s just I’m just losing it perhaps I need to focus more on that top end with intervals to incorporate that into my training and less bash around at Tempo Pace perhaps yeah I’d say two sessions a week where it’s that high intensity work is going to be enough you
Don’t want to fit in more than you can because then you’re just going to be fatiguing yourself and you need to be able to rest from it to have that consistency um and then it’s the gym work as well okay pays massive dividends just in terms of maintaining muscle mass
Because if you maintain that muscle that again is part of the predictor of performance with I think it was a good cross-section I saw and it was um the difference between a 65y old who had trained consistently with running okay and someone who hadn’t and it was like
The inside of the leg was much there was much more muscle mass in there for the person and ran because you’ve got that impact work which helps maintain muscle mass really well so for cyclist you want to be cycling and gym work for maintaining that and then the strength
Sorry the uh high intensity efforts are going to help maintain that element of performance because you said the ultra endurance Runners they’re going at quite a low intensity admittedly for sometimes 100 miles which is ridiculous crazy but if you got them to 100 met Sprint be nowhere yeah and they’d probably be
Nowhere compared to what they’d have been as an 18year old because that element of performance has changed you also get a slight shift in muscle fiber types you’ll probably will all have heard of fast twitch and slow twitch there’s more detail on that but the fast twitch can produce Force very quickly
But they get really tired very quickly whereas the slow twitch produce less Force but can do it again and again and again so Sprinter has that fast twitch to move very quickly with a lot of power but can’t do it for very long whereas the slow twitch can keep going and going
And going um so it’s why gror sprinters recycling sprinters they tend not have a very high age that they can keep being competitive at Cavendish is an oddity yeah and you’ve also got to take into account the lead out helps him a lot but you do see that sprinters in
Cycling often come up in waves and they’re often younger but cavage seems a lot that second kick we always had and they like to kick and then kick again it seem to and another element a bit be to be fair that as he’s older he’s probably got better endurance especially in a
Grand tour yeah yeah you need that endurance to perform at the end of it I mean he’s always the Shan FIS King and he’s still competitive I mean we saw the year won the green jersey only just got pipped by W manard um but yeah I think of I think he’s
Someone who’s Incorporated still that high capacity level of efforts I know when he was doing more track work with the Rio Olympics that sort of resurged his sprinting I know with the track Squad GB there’s a lot of gy workk involved I can’t say whether he was
Doing a lot of that as well but it did bring out a another life in the sprinting performance and so again it’s that high capacity efforts maintaining muscle mass and maintaining those high level efforts it is a case of when you get to an age where it starts reducing it’s use it or
Lose it and if you’re just riding low intensity you lose the V2 Max Capacity you lose the glycolytic element if you’re not doing the gym work or the sprinting you lose the muscle mass to produce those Peak forces so you need to train those elements don’t neglect them
That train your weakness almost in there which something all bad aren’t we yeah and even if you’re not doing races if you’re doing climbs and you’re riding group you’re going to go into that sort of V2 Max element up some of those climbs so you still want to train that
And sprinting itself helps with maintaining some muscle mass elements it’s that high torque work the strength work helps maintain that as we said for the strength and power work in the gym it doesn’t just help sprinting it helps overall fatigue resistance and performance at higher capacities so that’s the big takeway for older
Athletes is to not neglect the high intensity and ideally find and room to incorporate strength training off the bike so good that’s some good solid device there especially as a older cyclist here so thank you Tom Andy fascinating chat uh I’ll put a link to Andy’s website down below in case you
Want to find out more about his Services as a coach and um advice on your website as well and you got any questions for a future episode if you enjoyed this um let us know and we do some more um topics that there loads we talk about
Their nutrition do more on their riding into your 40s 50s and 60s as well can’t we so more into uh but yeah thanks for watching thanks time Andy thanks see you again soon
20 Comments
Thanks for having me on to chat! I hope that people find this helpful and I'm happy to further explain any points if anyone has any additional questions in the comments 🙂
I am finding that having a physical job is having a negative impact on my cycling.
If you had to choose between a 2021 canyon grizl 1by with sram force explr or a 2022 specialized diverge expert with 1by with a sram gx derailleur. What would be your choice
I don't understand the fascination in improving performance, when most people don't race. Just get out and ride your bike……enjoyment is way more important than w/kg, FTP, etc
Excellent stuff, was able to take away some good advice on how to go forward with my own training/riding.
So, Andy is explaining science. But the layman's take is that this man knows how the every man should ride to improve. At the end of the day, Isn't that we all want?
This is such a valuable video and spot on. Great advice. Many thanks!
I really enjoyed listening to you Andy. I trained in sports science and you clearly know your stuff and how to tailor it to individuals. I really liked your emphasis on strength training for on and off the bike benefits, especially for older people (like myself, age 49). I am a strength coach and recreational cyclist and my focus is on healthy ageing rather than athletic performance but one of the joys to be had for recreational 'athletes' like myself is that we can keep performing well as we get older, if we are strong enough.
I was a recreational runner for most of my 20s & 30s before taking up strength training aged 39 and then came into road cycling at age 42. I log everything and 2017 was my first proper year as a cyclist. 2023 was a very similar year in terms of number of rides and distances cycled (the intervening years were lower due to work reasons) but my speed is way down and I have been trying to figure out why.
My weight is about the same and my max and resting heart rate is pretty much exactly the same (so I assume my cardiovascular fitness is much the same) but one factor that I think might be important is that in 2017 I was routinely barbell squatting 100kg and deadlifting in excess of 130kg while in 2023 I was barely managing 70kg and 100kg respectively (thanks to a hamstring injury which fortunately didn't seem to affect me on the bike). I am currently working my strength back up to decent numbers again but I am also – for the first time – actually training to ride better using a turbo (and Wahoo SYSTM) rather than just going out for a ride and getting fitter during the year so hopefully 2024 will be a good year on the bike.
I look forward to any future episodes!
I appreciate the advice that's targeted more toward the average "everyday" cyclist. Without an "A Race", is periodization recommended? Would a consistent sweet spot training rhythm be a better means of improving fitness (w/a long weekend group ride including above threshold effects)?
Wow David this is super informative…..I could listen to these sorts of interviews for hours. Obviously, this professional cycling coach Andy Turner, really knows his stuff. I really like his style, he explains various cycling aspects so well. I'll definately be listening to this interview again as Andy is a wealth of information. Thanks again David and I hope you can possibly get another interview with Andy again.
Great video Dave
What a really excellent video Dave. 😎👍🏻
One of the big points there was ‘fun’. Got to keep it fun if you want to keep at it in the long term. Especially when it’s something we do to enjoy/improve ourselves in our spare time. Nice to hear the realism of balancing training with life stresses and recovery, rather than more is better.
Superb video. I've shared with the club.
I’ve only got 4 hours to train… do I have over an hour to watch a video? Of course I do..
Cycling is fun but when you have to ride for 2+ hours it starts to feel like a choir.
Thank you for the information…
I am 65 and cycling for 8 years
I race in grandfondo s and I ride 50 60. 100 miles . I ride 4 days a week .
I have been on chemo for 3 years . And Cycling during chemo . On the days I get chemo. I ride 80 miles .
Lost some speed but keepe my Endurance…
I ride with south west bikes on Sunday with guys that are fast …
Working on getting my speed back ..
My question is I want to do the race across America…..
And I need to train for this ….
What would be a good way to train for thus event ..???
I do know lots of time on the bike .
Mu average speed 14 to 15 mph . Climbing 8 to 10 mph …
Thanks for your time .
Quality sensible fitness explained 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
I've seen a couple of people ask about running as cross training for cycling. I tried to reply but the replies don't seem to have sent so will add some info here:
So running itself can help with the aerobic fitness element of cycling. So if there is a period when you can't cycle, running is a good way to keep that aerobic fitness. However you need to be careful because a cyclist who can ride 100miles is likely aerobically fit enough to run a marathon, but unlikely to be structurally strong enough to deal with the impact and eccentric muscle loads. If adding running to your cross training, build up very gradually. It is great for bone, tendon, ligament, and muscle health and strength, but needs to be built up gradually, the same as introducing strength training to your fitness routines
I'm 56 and my summer training is
1min interval session
30sec sprint session
1 high rep weight session
1 long MTB ride.
Winter I do two weights sessions and in lieu of the 30sec session.
So four sessions per week in both seasons.
Is that suitable for MTB xco and marathon racing. As that's mentioned in the interview.