Rollman today, I want to give you an idea for a bike workout if…
Rollman today, I want to give you an idea for a bike workout if you're really crunched on time. Let's cure that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long chances? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh, and welcome to the Rollman Podcast. Welcome back to another Roman podcast. How is everybody getting on? Hope your week is going well. Today I want to talk to you about a bike workout that you can cram into as little as 20 minutes. It's called a Tabata workout. So I want to talk to you about when this workout is suitable, what this workout involves and why you should consider adding this workout to your little itinerary of sessions. Guys, before I dive in and address this podcast topic, I just want to remind you about patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch the link is in the bio for that one. Guys, we don't have a title sponsor for the podcast and the patreon your patreon supports how we keep the podcast going. It's how we cover all the associated costs. I really, really appreciate if you're getting some value from this podcast if you go and support us over in Patreon. It's as little as the price would be once a month if you're getting some entertainment value or you're getting some training information value from this. And there's so many small creators that are struggling at the moment and it pains me to see some of the trope that passes for subscription channels and how much they're actually charging. And I look at some of the good creators that are going out business for want of a small amount of cash. So I don't want those to fall by the way. So if you're getting some value there, head on over to patreon.com. Okay guys, a 20 minute bike workout. So what is it? Let's actually start with when this is suitable. I think it's better because I'm just, I'm thinking about questions I get from clients. And that's why that hesitation there. I always get a question from a client saying, I had a narrow and a half session plan today about meetings or after running over and I've no time. I'm working with coaching some of the busiest guys you can imagine. CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world, investment managers on Wall Street, these are some of the busiest people you can imagine. Every single one of these guys and girls has time to squeeze in a 20-minute workout. If you don't have time to squeeze a 20-minute workout in your day, I don't know what the hell you're doing because I've never seen that you can't find a 20-minute slot. So you literally have no excuse for not getting this workout in. 20 minutes. So if your time crunched this workout is for you, if you're trying to execute a taper, this workout is for you. So a taper is an entirely separate podcast topic, but I'll briefly touch on what it is. So a taper is after a long sustained period training where we're building fitness, building fitness, just the week before the event, what we want to do is get some freshness back. So we want to maintain our fitness and get some freshness. So it's a part of taper is where we actually execute a descending block of Tabata sessions for the three days prior to the event. So we have three days out, we have three of these Tabata efforts that I'm going to describe.
Two days out, we have two of them, one day out, we have one of them,…
Two days out, we have two of them, one day out, we have one of them, then we have the day of the event. This is a way to give a serious top end speed, maintainer fitness, but also give us freshness because there's such a short duration of this session. So it doesn't actually stress the body that bad. What is this magical session you're talking about? Well, it's only four minutes of actual work. And I'm going to ask you to do two of these four minute efforts. So in a 20 minute effort, I'm going to ask you to do a little bit of a warm up. Then it's four minutes of work, four minutes of recovery, four minutes work, and then a warm down. So for the four minutes work, what it is, it's about 170% of your threshold for 20 seconds and then a 10 seconds of recovery. And you're going to repeat this eight times for a total of four minutes work. Let me say that again. Just so you got to get your pen. So it's 170% of the threshold for 20 seconds, 10 seconds recovery, repeated 8 times. It's 4 minutes total work. Now I actually don't go by 170% of the threshold recommendation. What I do and what I advise clients to do and you guys as listeners, I'll advise you to go full gas for 20 seconds considering you have 80 days to do. So as hard as you can reasonably maintain for the 20 seconds considering you've ate to do. But I don't mean effort 1 for 20 seconds, your average of 1000 watts, and effort 8 for 20 seconds, your average of 350 watts. You'd be better off averaging 600 watts for every single one of these efforts, and that's what you're trying to do, have that consistency across the eight efforts. So you're going to do two intervals of that in your 20 minutes. And this was a session developed back in 1996. I love now Ram Alder, that I can actually say back in 1996. So it was a professor Tabata and the session is named after him obviously. He developed this protocol and the study that he went through, he looked at two sample groups and I briefly just want to tell you about this. It's not a complicated study but I want to just briefly give you the results because it'll give you some confidence into why you should do this session. So the first group he had them, it was a five-week study and he was doing five sessions per week with both group one and group two. So group one he gave them efforts at 70% of their VO2 max, five sessions a week for the duration of the experiment, group two he gave them the Tabata efforts that I recommended. So at the end of it they measured both their aerobic and their anaerobic fitness for changes. So their aerobic gains were roughly the same from group one to group two. Group one then an anaerobic experienced no anaerobic gains. Group two our Tabata group experienced a 28% increase in gains. Now this study it's been expanded on it with more complicated studies but it still kept the name of the founding professor Tabata and we still call it the Tabata effort. It's a session that oil cram in when I'm stuck for time. It's a session oil cram in when I need sharpness. It's a session that it's a go-to for me if a client says look I'm really struggling for time today you're going to walk away from this 20 minute effort and you're going to know you had to work out.
Don't need two tree errors to get a workout on the bike
You don't need two tree errors to get a workout on the bike. This is the myth that people think I don't have time to train for the bike. It's a very time-consuming sport. It's a very time-consuming sport if you allow it to be a very time-consuming sport. In posing this sort of structure on your train and it gives you a massive bang for the book. If you look on that return for training investment, it's massive on the bike. And to go out and try and do a Tabata session, and this is a real thing, you can go out and you can do a Tabata rowing, you can do a Tabata running, you can do a Tabata with jumping jacks with kettlebells, whatever you want. But a lot of these things are high impact, they're high impact on the joints, they're high impact on muscles, on bones. The bike, as we know, it's very low impact, so you can go and you can execute one of these Tabata sessions. The day after you're going to have that freshness again to execute this Tabata session so you can get bang for the book. Although I do recommend you going back if you haven't already and listen to the podcast on threshold testing, setting your zones and while that's important so you don't fall into the trap of tink and that every single day of the week you can do a Tabata session. We talked earlier in the week about the number one mistake people make and it's not right in what structure it's It's been in too much time in one single zone. Tabata attacks is one zone, but it's an example of how you can tax your zone six, your super threshold stuff. And it's a super enjoyable session. Although I will put the caveat that it's super enjoyable, retrospective. At the time, you're gonna hate me. Let me know, drop me a DM and let me know if you enjoyed the session. Let me know how you found it. Let me know if you got through it. Suck it up. If it's the first time you're doing it, you will get through it. Just commit to doing it. You're gonna go to four minute efforts inside that 20 minute workout. And in between, you're gonna easy warm up, easy and cool down after the force effort, easy warm down after the last effort. Enjoy it, folks. It's a cracker, one of the most enjoyable sessions in bike riding. Roadman, that's it for this week. I'm gonna chat to you again on Monday. Enjoy your weekend, folks. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I wanna invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14 day kickstart challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans regardless of what your level is. There's masters, beginner, advanced, there's meal plans, shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you through at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio that's roadmansoycling.com slash 14 day.