By this time in January almost 90% of those who made a New Year Resolution have already broken it. Are you one of those? In this episode I talk to you about a powerful technique which can ensure you don't fall off the wagon - it can create powerful momentum in all areas of your life.
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Hello, roadman, and welcome back. It's been a minute since I've done a podcast, so let me start by letting you know what's been going on and what I've been up to in a busy Christmas period for me. And I had hoped on keeping our regular cadence of sort of one podcast a week going over the Christmas period and straight into the New Year. But honestly, I knew by sort of mid December that wasn't going to happen. camp over in Portugal on the track which I'm going to get into and tell you a little bit about in a second. Then I was straight into sort of a condensed Christmas period back home with the family. We only got back on the 20th of December and then straight back out to New York for our Notre-Shining Camp. So I knew it was a period where potentially the podcast was going to have to go and hold. I hoped it wouldn't. But it did. Good news is I'm back. I'm back and the podcast is back and we're going to settle back into our weekly cadence with the podcast. Also, if you're one of our YouTube viewers, we're also going to start uploading the podcast on YouTube. So you can watch on YouTube or you can take a widget in your pocket as always. So for anyone that's new, the podcast is kind of teamed on my ramblings. It goes a lot deeper to where you know typical old-school A1 show that we used to do which was sort of a newer show. This is, we try and give sort of tippets that'll help you improve your health, happiness and longevity, true cycling. That's kind of our tagline, we want you to improve your health, happiness and longevity, true cycling. And weekly I will give you little bits and pieces that I'm doing on my journey to sort of biohack myself and you're short, find these tips pretty helpful. Some of the stuff we've gone through already made a massive impact on people over the Christmas. So I was delighted to hear the feedback even though I wasn't. Some of you guys were finding the podcast for the first time over the Christmas so I still get plenty of feedback from you guys so that was brilliant. So what have I been up to? Yeah it's been a crazy period. I'm gonna start off with my new year resolution, my new year resolution of always wanted to learn photography and videography. And for a long time I outsourced that with A1, and outsourced that with A1. It wasn't that much fun to do it from completely honest, because when it was outsourced I just really show up and no input into the script and stuff, I just show up a new year and actor in my own videos and it was pretty shit to be honest. So my new year resolution I wanted to learn videography I wanted to learn photography I've really struggled to learn stuff in the abstract so I said look I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to apply this or it's never gonna happen for me but to apply it I had to be willing to look foolish I had to be willing to you spoke of why that's a podcast a few it's a few episodes back now to beginners mindset where you're just willing to show up and make those early mistakes and that's what I had to willing to do show up and make those early mistakes. And I'm started to block the daily vlog on YouTube to get beat us to be rather be the practical application of what I'm learning. But you can see already it's six seven episodes in to the daily vlog. And I'm definitely learning learning audio and video and editing. So it's brilliant. So that was my new year resolution. What was your new year resolution? Did you make a new year resolution. But the vlog as well, it's teaching me something I'm going to talk about at the end of this podcast. Something I call this Humbay Rule and it's Matt Divella here I'm talking about recently. He's a big huge year over. I enjoy his stuff, he's a little bit of an arrogant welcome gift but I do enjoy his stuff. The two-day rule is just it's a way to ensure consistency and I'm going to get into that at the end of the podcast. It's a sweet little concept that I think you can take away from today's podcast. I sort of, you're tangible thing that you can implement to make a positive change in your life. So stick around to the end of the podcast and I'm going to talk to you about that two-day reel and how you can use that because it's pretty fascinating. So at the moment, I got, at the moment, I'm just back from New Yorker and It was busy, it was real busy.
So I want to talk you through what day was like over there on the training camp for me. So let's rewind back to mid-December. It's around when my period of opiate started and I was at a training camp in Portugal and Nadia on the track in Portugal. And the reason about all these training camps in the moment, I'm trying to qualify on the tandem with my good buddy Peter Ryan for Tokyo 2020. were full gas at the moment, trying to qualify, collect Olympic qualifying points, the window for collecting Olympic qualifying points is open until the world will roll race championships for tandem, which is in June. So we're full gas until then and then we'll see if we've achieved the required standard and I've re-picked for the National Federation to go and represent Ireland in the Olympics. That would be a phenomenal honor and I'm absolutely full gas into that at the moment. So it meant a little bit of sacrifice and it leads board. It's part of a leads board I've kind of forgotten about and it's that sacrifice. It's not the training, it's not the doe-us, it's not the mindset stuff that goes with it that we speak about so often. It's actually missing birdies. It's sort of the broken promises that you'll be places. It's simple things like not being here to take down the Christmas decorations from our girlfriend. It's missing the whole run up to Christmas. You know, I didn't get back from trying to come up with 20 December. Now we just got news, my uncle was sick, had to fly home from New York early but I would have loved to be there three or four days earlier for my family and it's missed weddings, it's broken promises, it's missed birthdays, it's sometimes missed funerals, it's the sacrifice that nobody really hears about in the leads board and it was the big reason in 2013 where I didn't renew my contract with Estella since day for another year as a pro so I and decided to pack my bags and hang a pro so I can live as so difficult being isolated and away from home and constantly feeling lonely and constantly feeling like I was missing out and stuff. I have that feeling again a little bit of training camp but you know what it's a narrow window between here and Tokyo so the sacrifice is really worth it. over in New York and Portugal that I'll take you through a day what they look like in New York because it was a little different than Portugal. So the day started off with peeing in a pot. So every morning you get up and you give your ensemble straight away and your ensemble goes into the sports scientists who analyses it for hydration levels. What I really noticed is the fact that we're just giving a urine sample, it made you way more conscious all day about your hydration needs. So what I was typically trying to do hydration was drink 500ml per hour when I was on the bike minimum, but then also try and get through 3 to 4 litres spread throughout the day, constantly sipping. Hydration scores were constantly better when you were sipping as opposed to neck and large chunks of water at a time and hydration scores were also improved and you put a couple a pinch of salt into your water to help that absorption so it's not just running through you all the time. At the start it's difficult to be in the middle of the night and to affect your sleep but as you get more accustomed to drinking this amount your body becomes more accustomed to what it does with this amount of water and it starts to use it open quite an effective way. Performance on the track is measured in hundreds of a second. The difference between a 16.0 second lap and a 15.7 second lap. It's huge. It's the difference between on target achieving your goals and being off target and missing selection. What I constantly know this was a correlation between my hydration and the ability to hit these splits. While it's not always tangible on the road, because it's just a road doesn't give us that constant feedback that the track does. Hydration isn't always as obvious, but I can absolutely assure you're up in well hydrated is key to performance because we've been able to micromanelise it on the track and it really really pays toll across the whole squad. You could see performances from a day you were hydrated to a day you weren't hydrated. They were just so different. Once I got up and the hydration was ticked off as in I gave the sample for the day, next step was up bit of breakfast. I I typically, depending on the efforts I had for the day, breakfast would either be tree breakfasts for me.
One, fasted. Two, I sort of like what you call it, a protein fat based breakfast like eggs, avocados, or tree would have a porridge breakfast if I was having a longer day with more efforts in it. So the days were a combination of other road and track days. days only or road days only. So higher intensity meant more carbohydrates, lower intensity, longer duration meant either fasted or fat and protein and then I would start eating on the road. So a typical sort of split day would have been a commute down to the track in Palma which is about a 60 minute cycle then you're getting to the track and you're warming up on rollers or Lamonde at the track. And the goal here is to just get the blood flowing because you've come to the track on the road bike, then there's a bit of getting ready at the track. There's a bit of, you know, going down to the lock up downstairs, pulling out your track boy, getting pressure in the torus. There's a mechanic there, but there's one mechanic for the whole squad. So there's a little bit of self-sufficiency. You got to look at the efforts you're doing for the day. So you might need to change your gear. The track bikes are fixed gears. So you might need to change your gear, put on one gear for a warm up, another gear for your efforts. you're getting into your speedsuit, skin suit, then you're getting here warmed up and you're getting into the track. So you're looking at your schedule, it's a busy, it's a busy squad, what there's probably annoying people on the squad. So everybody has specific efforts to get true for the day. So a day for us typically consists of three to four efforts. So you might have something like a standing 500 metre effort, which doesn't sound a lot, but track efforts are all full gas and standing efforts are a lot more difficult than rolling efforts because standing efforts you're obviously coming from stopped into the effort. So it's a full gas sprint and then into your effort. So a standing 500 means stopped into 500 meters. So your force 250 meters are typically out of saddle full gas and you're trying to get the bike up to maximum speed within that 250 meters and then you're pushing on and trying to hit or you're cruising speed. So it could have been like a standing 500 meter, then maybe a flowing 12 lap or 10 lap or where you're coming in from high on the track. The The track is really banked, so you're using the speed of rolling down from the top of the track and you're carrying that speed for 10 or 12 laps and it's full gas again. Then you could be finishing off with a standing 8-lapper or a standing 10-lapper, which you're warming up and you're warming down in between each effort. The reason you're warming down is you're accumulating the lactate waste product when you're doing these efforts. So when you warm down, if you're warming down for me at around zone two, around 220 watts, so that's zone one's recovery and zone two is your endurance zone. Warming down at around that effort means 50% less conversion into lactate acid. So lactate, well, if I hit 20 millimoles on the efforts of lactate, that's the amount of lactate I've generated during the effort, like 20 minutes after I've completed the effort if I still do a warm down I'll have 50% the amount of lactate than if I was to just sit around so it's well worth doing the warm down and well worth doing the warm up before efforts it's a excuse me I'll explain that cough in a second it's a real track eating to constantly have warm ups and warm downs so the cough that you hear me with at the moment the cough is called Velodrome cough and a lot of athletes who pursue especially get this cough and what happens is the humidity of the air in the track is different to the humidity of the air outside it's a much drier air that we're breeding when we're in the track so the much drier air in the track when we're breeding these joint panic breaths on full gas efforts from our polity and it irritates the lungs and you get a little bronchial tract infections. So I have a case it out at the moment so I'm using a little bit of a cough bottle to stop irritation on it. I had it as quite an extreme case but it's eased off a little bit in the last day. So I wanted to talk a little bit about consistency. My new year resolution, it's the video blogs. It's keeping you guys up today and letting you know what's going on on my journey to Tokyo.
But that's just I have an interesting story to tell and I thought you know it'd be cool to tell about my new year resolution, it's the videography and it's the photography. I want to learn that for myself, not for A1, not for anyone else, no commercial benefit for learning it's sorry there may be a commercial benefit but that's not the pure motivation for it. It's obviously going to say I'm a money on videographers and stuff long term, but that's not the motivation. The motivation is I just enjoy learning new stuff and this is one of the things I'm loving learning about aperture, shorter speed, ISO and how these sort of tree intersect. Never even knew they existed up to the couple of weeks ago. If you don't know what they are, you know, maybe tough. If you do know what they are and you want to have a conversation on that, definitely let me know in the comments below. I'm going to hook up because I definitely want to pick your brain if you're someone that's big into their videography and photography and you want to give tips, tricks and advice I would more than welcome them. We could even go back to some sort of old-scale barter and system where I'll mentor you on some cycling stuff and you mentor me on some videography stuff. But the video blog and the daily vlog I've sort of committed for my new year resolution I do in a daily vlog and the reason that I said I was going to do a daily vlog When I think back to my life, nearly at every junction in my life, whenever I had a goal, whenever I had a dream, the thing that's taken me to that, it's consistent hard work. And the consistent hard work sometimes happens years before you've ever heard about me. Like years before anyone ever knew me as a cyclist, I was starting to put in consistent hard work. Not for a week, not for a month, for year after year after year. A1 coaching didn't exist until I was 10 years into cycling, until I'd made so many rookie mistakes, until I'd made every single mistake under the sun and then it started coming around, then I started talking about it because that was the way to bring my knowledge and my understanding to the next level at that point. But consistency took me from where I was to where I wanted to be, consistency and hard work and that's the goal with the video blog, to be consistent, to have hard work all the way because I want to learn videography and I know that when I put in the work it's going to take me to somewhere special at the end of it. And there's really it like in our culture now of instant gratification I have to get instant like service videos getting taken down I have to get instant feedback Amazon Prime stuff's coming the next day you know people are I remember we used to walk to the video shop to get a video line up get your video and then And then you have to rewind it when you were giving it back. Remember that, remember you have to rewind your videos when you're giving them back, or you gotta find out an extra vision. Like now if people's internet stream is a little buggy and Netflix is pausing, they're so impatient. That's the difference in patience levels have just changed completely. I actually think we're in an era now, where everybody talks, it's so, so difficult to succeed because YouTube's so crowded, you can't have a podcast because everybody has a podcast and it's too difficult to succeed. Excuse me, Velodrome Cough. I think we're in an unprecedented area of a bit, so much easier to succeed in sport, in on YouTube, on podcast, in media, in writing, in anything you want that's never been easier to succeed. People are so distracted. They can't keep their focus on anything. Look on any bus. Everyone has their phone in their hand. Look at any family dinner table, people are checking notifications every few seconds. The phone is killing people. It's killing attention, absolutely easing it away. So if you can put focused, consistent attention onto whatever your passion project is, whether it's work, whether it's relationship, whether it's family, whether it's a new pursuit like photography or videography, if you put consistent passion on that, you're going to separate yourself from the mediocre, very, very, very fast. And I have something that I've done for a long time and I recently watched a video, a Mati Vela video where he was talking about it. And he calls it the two-day rule and sometimes I've been doing it for years. And I never had to label the two-day rule on it, but it's been the foundation of my cycle for absolutely years.
And it's so simple. You just never take two days off in a row. So I have my rest days on Monday, depending on the week I might also have have a rest day on Friday. But you never have two days in a row, I'll never take a Saturday and a Sunday off. And the reason is I'm an absolutely massive momentum driven person. Once I can keep that momentum going, amazing things happen for me. When the momentum stalls, the self destructive momentum is equally as difficult. I nearly compared to the track and the fixed gear. Once you have it up to speed, the fixed gear is a beautiful thing. It gets faster and faster and faster nearly on its own. But once that gear bites and once that gear gets on top of you it slows down all on its own. And I'm the exact time. I'm a completely momentum-driven character. When I'm off the wagon I'll fall completely off the wagon. So I need to build in, I've talked a lot about morning routine and habits. I need to build in these morning routine and habits. The kickstart this momentum for me every single day. And I know by not taking two days offer pursuit that I will build this momentum and whatever my goal is, I can just absolutely crush it, especially as I talked about, because we're in this just attention deficit disorder of people just not being able to focus on anything. So I'd advise you if you have a new year resolution, you may have been abandoned already, with some crazy starting, it's like 90% of new year resolutions are already abandoned by January 20th. So if you do have a new year resolution, don't abandon it. Pull it out with a fire and say to yourself, look, it's okay to miss a day. It's okay that I didn't absolutely nail today's workout. It's okay that I've fallen off the wagon a little bit because undoubtedly I'll have something during the year where I'll get sick or have a family crisis, something will happen where I'll have to take two days off in a row. But it doesn't mean I'm going to just completely give up on it, dust myself down and get back on it. I don't let that negative momentum build. So if you're finding yourself in a situation right now where that negative momentum is starting to build just ditch it and start that positive momentum again. Make a token step like right now to start that positive momentum again and I'm building that tomorrow and then start implementing that two-day row. Habits are so so important and for me when you can build this two-day real into your life. You can start to build powerful lasting habits. If you look at the habits of an athlete versus the habits of a smoker, they're just so, so different. Stuff will come up in your life, no doubt. You're going to wake up and you're going to have a headache. You're going to wake up and it's going to be pouring rain. You're going to wake up and you're not feeling too wet. You're going to wake up and you've aching joints. But the athlete's habit is they've their runners beside the bed and they head out in the morning for a walk. They head out in the morning for a run. They get up in the they do coral work. That's the athletes habit. You contrast that with the smokers habit, who's the pack of the cigarettes beside the bed. They get up in the morning and they smoke. And that's what they do. And it becomes automatic when they're having a good day or a bad day, they smoke. So it's building these lasting habits because the habits form how we see ourselves. And the most powerful desire in the world is the desire for us to act in conformity with how we see ourselves. If we see ourselves as an athlete, we won't binge eat food five days a week. If we see ourselves as an athlete, we won't loy in every Saturday and Sunday and get up and have a froy up because it's not how we see ourselves. It's not part of our makeup where athletes, that's not how athletes behave. That's not how athletes conduct themselves. So start to build these habits in until they become automatic. So when you use this two day rule long enough, it just becomes automatic. And the example I always like to use, it's the wearing, it's the brushing your teeth in the morning because you brush your teeth more automatically now. You never get up in the morning, oh my god, I'm not brushing my teeth this morning. It's boom, it's automatic. Every time you get up you brush your teeth and that's what can happen when we implement the two-day rule long enough and when we instill those powerful, powerful habits into our system.
So a book I'm reading at the moment is, I'm actually reading two books at the moment. I've had this, I don't know why, I've had this weird thing that I always like to have a couple of books on the go. I've needed them finished at the moment but I will report as I get them finished. So one is Jocko Wilick. Jocko Wilick is a former US Marine and one of his things is catchphrase is there he is discipline equals freedom and it's really powerful because I know growing up I was you know probably not a model student in school I used to like playing football too much and bonking off school a little bit too often and I hated the idea of rules I hated idea of someone telling me what to do, where I had to be at a certain time, maybe that's what I've gravitated towards entrepreneurship more than your steady traditional 9 to 5 job, but I hated the idea of rules. But now I'm trying to build rules into my life all over the place, like I was just talking about the two day rule there. So rules are so, so powerful, and they give us this freedom. They give us the freedom to be better versions of ourselves, to give us a freedom to explore, to give us the freedom to have great mental clarity and Jaco Wilkes book it's a call extreme ownership but one of those catchphrase is discipline equals freedom is sort of born itself and it's stuck in my brain and the second book I'm reading at the moment it's called the 5am club and the idea is it's talking about the power to get up at 5am every morning. I haven't quite built this into my routine yet I have been starting to rise earlier since reading that I haven't finished it yet so I will want to get deeper into the book, give you guys a meaningful review and see if it is actually worth getting up at 5am. Because he makes some powerful and compelling arguments for getting up that early. Guys, it's a pleasure to be back down the podcast. It's a pleasure to bring you the podcast for the first time on YouTube. I don't know why it hadn't been bringing the podcast previously on YouTube, but it is a pleasure to do it. I am going to be bringing a lot more YouTube content this year. So if you are watching on YouTube, please make sure you subscribe down below and like it. And also a lot of the best comments on a lot of the best advice, comment the comments in people's videos on YouTube. Great discussions on some of the YouTube channels or in the comments. And oftentimes there's better value in the comments section than there is in the actual content that that the creator is given. So please, if you have questions, if you have opinions, stick them in the comments down below. But I want to ask you a question today. So if you're listening on the podcast, jump over to the YouTube channel and let us know in the comments. I want you to tell me if you've ever tried getting up that early. Have you ever tried the 5am club? it's something I would really, really love to hear from you. The podcast is gonna be back weekly. The YouTube channel is rolling daily or almost daily or as I say daily-ish with vlogs and I'm debating let me know if you think I should bring back the A1 news show. Alright, I'm pro cycling, I give coaching tips. It's a little bit more informal. We don't dive as deep as we do in the podcast. That's why I love the podcast because it goes on for as long as it needs to go on. And I just have your own devoid of the attention because it's normally passive. It's normally in the car. It's normally on the bike. It's normally unswift. So I'm in your ear and I have your own devoid of the attention. Yes. So thank you for listening to the podcast. Thank you for watching on the YouTube channel. with a big year planned with a one absolutely poyles content coming your way. You guys are the reason I do the content. It's the motivation, it's the drive. So please engage, comment, let me know what you're enjoying, what you want to see more of, what you want to see less of. Same on the podcast. I love hearing topic suggestions. Thanks for listening and I'm going to be back to you guys really, really soon.
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