Welcome and podcast support
Today I want to talk about tips for maximizing recovery after a session. That's cute out of the intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long changes? That is the question on this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roleman, welcome back to a Roleman Cycling Podcast. How was everybody getting on? Has everybody starting to New Year with a bang? We're coming up, but on my podcast last week on New Year resolutions, and I think it was statistically today that 95% of people have already broken their New Year resolution. And that's if you have this sort of vague, wishy, washy resolution, like, oh, I'm gonna lose 10 pounds this year. here. I'm going to quit smoking. There's a process for going through for making sure it's a compelling vision. There's reasons to emotionally charge your viewing constantly. Go back and listen to that podcast. I think it's the first one that I've put out this year, but it's been great feedback on it. It's cool to get the DMS code because I wasn't podcasting for the little bit when I was Gerona and then COVID and over Christmas. And it's the biggest break I've probably had from the podcast in well over 18 months, considering we're at episode 360, nearly it's been pretty continuous, pretty full gas. And it still warms my heart that this is like a small independent production we haven't taken on any outside cash. And no one is voicing our opinions. When we talk about something, you can be sure it's actually my opinion and it's not because there's a American and company in my ear. This is not to say I'll never take on a sponsoring like that, but I get to be a little bit choosy now. And that's because of you folks over on Patreon. So if you have two minutes and you can spare the price for Point De Beaure, please head on over there and support the podcast over on Patreon. It makes such a difference and it gives us that runway so we can keep putting out this sort of independent, bias-free content. Today, what I wanna talk about is recovery post-workout. So what I wanna put a little twist on it because most of us over the finest as time-crunched. And by that I mean we're trying to kind of, You know, I would say in that window of six to 12 hours a week, some weeks it's a busy week, some weeks we can scrape in a little bit more training. But realistically, 90, 95% of our total weekly time is not training, it's either sleeping, working, family functions. So that means that our time off the bike is super important. And I've been talking a lot about this, especially with my blueprint clients, because stress matters. So if you think about you do a session that's 60 minutes in the morning and then you have the whole day. So you do a 60 minute session at 7 a.m. and now you have the whole day where you're not riding the bike. So recovery matters but the type of recovery matters. Recovery time and activities that you're doing during the day. They must adequately balance the stress from all sources. So like you can't have a shit on a walk or a relationship stress or daily living stress. You need to have kind of a balance of it. So if you look at your week and you go, you know what, I've two really stressful things this week. Try and distribute them so they're not all on the same day because rest isn't restful or restorative when your anxiety levels are off the chart or you're struggling with born out from work. So one strategy to do is like step them back and kind of this is why I love diary. Step them back and looking at the totality that we can spread out these stressful events so they don't build up. But we can also do stuff to reduce our stress and anxiety levels and there's loads of biohacks around this.
Breathwork and the glycogen window
But really simple ones you can implement right now, they're breeding practices. And there's apps that are brilliant for this, whether it's the Wim Hof app, or if you want to get a little bit more mindful and get into a meditative stage, which I was the most skeptical man in the world of meditative. Like I'm from North Dublin. You know, anyone who knows the area of Dublin that I'm from, it's not the generation. Like my dad was a proper man's man. You didn't talk about feelings. You didn't talk about emotions. You definitely didn't talk about your trying meditation. If I had suggested a meditation after my dad that would have been an uppercut. So a lot of you all know what I'm talking about and we're have this inbuilt skepticism around things like this but it works super well and one I'd highly recommend and have no affiliation to it is Sam Harris waking up and what that does just helps to balance us out and it brings the anxiety and stress levels down to you know baseline or below levels which means that when we rest it is actually restful and it is actually restorative. Second thing I want to talk about in this is the glycogen repair window because we've all heard about this glycogen repair window. The idea of a glycogen repair window is when we're out training we have back to our leaving search or our high school biology here when you're taking sugar it's broken down as glucose and then stored in the muscles and the liver as glycogen. is glycogen powers exercise. So we have different fuel tanks. One of them is our sugar fuel tank and glycogen powers that. Then we have our fat fuel tank. But for a lot of sessions we're doing, especially if we're doing shorter, more intense ones, we're going to be dipping into this glycogen fuel tank. Now we do have an opportunity post session to top up this glycogen refuel tank. And we're very effective at re-simulating glycogen post session. And in cycling, if you're new to it, if you're not new to what you've heard this term many times, we call it the glycogen repair window. And this is a genuine opportunity to optimize recovery, but it's not always essential. So think about if you have more than one training session on a competition day, like say you're doing a split session, you're trying this morning, you're trying again this evening, or you're trying to just tonight, and then you're trying again tomorrow morning, then you definitely want to be taking advantage of this glycogen replenishment window. So that's getting a recovery drink, which is carbohydrates to protein, balancing 4 to 1, 4 times as many carbohydrates as protein, within, you know, there's no set in the hard rule, but I try and get it in within 30 minutes of completing the session. But option B here is if you aren't training again in the next, say, you know, 26 to 48 hours, yet the glycogen window is still there, but I would advocate that you don't actually touch that glycogen window, that you let your body naturally restore its glycogen levels and achieve full recovery through just your normal eating practices. And this is able to kick in a bunch of order because when glycogen, we're going to go down a science rabbit hole here, but when glycogen is present, it inhibits something called mTOR. So we're turning off a lot of pathways by adding the glycogen in. So it's not always net positive to just keep adding glycogen in. So if we don't need to have the glycogen in the example, like session isn't for 36 or 48 hours, let's opt not to have the the glycogen and recover just naturally. So Rob, man, it's Tuesday morning and there are two things I just wanted to get off my chest today because the glycogen repair window is something I'm seeing newer Reuters talking about as if it's gospel that the only after every session you need to grab your shower and you need to have your recovery drink.
Stress reduction and takeaways
But it's not always true and so few people are talking about stress reduction practices. This is at the heart of everything we're doing with the Rob Man blueprint because I figured out a long time ago and I'll tell the story. Another day, if you're a regular listener or podcast, you might have even heard it. But when I was writing full time, everything was great. I'd know stress it all. But when I came into the real world and I was trying to set up businesses and I bought one or two other businesses and I fancied myself as a bit of an entrepreneur, and I was still trying the same amount. I couldn't figure out why I was carrying weight and why I was, it wasn't getting any better on the bike. And it was because I was really poorly balanced and stressed. And I had to go on this huge journey to shut down the couch and company spend so much money you wouldn't believe to find this answer, that stress reduction is central to it. So now stress reduction is central to everything that I do at Roadman. The clients are working with, we talk about stress reduction all the time because without stress reduction, it's not possible to balance training, family, work. If you're interested in learning more about that, you should definitely pop on one of our webinars. We have them going quite frequently at the moment because it's the new year and it's the sort of festive season so pop us an email over on admin at roadmansoyclim.com and we'll stick it on to the webinar where I explain webinars about 60 to 90 minutes long where I go through a lot of this stuff and you know I'm typically doing a webinar at least once a week for some club here or there but I can hook you up with a link if you want to join one of those webinars so hit me with a DM on Instagram or email that admin at roadmansoyclim.com Roman, that's really it for me from today. Enjoy your day, enjoy your session and I hope you implement that stuff around stress and glycogen repair window because just listening to podcast isn't going to make you any faster. You have to listen and then take action. Roman, thank you for listening. Now go take action. Jai Tia tomorrow. Okay, stop what you're doing. It's Anthony again. I want to talk to you for one second about the next step in the roadman journey. I'm laying down a challenge for you. It's called the 8 week challenge. So for 8 weeks I'm challenging you to be the very best version of yourself, whatever that is. For 8 weeks I want to take you under my wing and I want to personally build for you the customized training plan on our analytics platform. This plan is going to be laser focused on your goal and I'm going to navigate around your life, your work, your social commitments so don't worry about what your circumstances are right now. I remember after I took some time out of cycling and went off and taught I was a Billy Big Businessman. I came back and I realized I wanted to get into cycling, but I knew after a bit to train it alone it actually wasn't making me any fitter. I needed an entire system. It needed a 360 overhaul. So for the first time ever, I want to share with you this exact system I used to get back in shape. I'm talking stuff like I'm going to give you my morning routines, the cold therapy I used, the cookbooks and recipes I used, and even the motivational audio's by listening to get back on track. So right now what I want you to do is pause this audio, go to www.roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week or check out the link in the bio, click that. So one more time it's roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week. Chatty all soon.