1.Hello you beautiful cycling fans. Did you miss me

Hello you beautiful cycling fans. Did you miss me? I'm back. Whoo! The Vuelta was a one. Hell of a ordeal. It felt like months since I've done a podcast when in fact it's only a week. So I'm gonna get back to my regular schedule and now that the Vuelta is finished so we're going back to one a week for the moment and then we'll review. I mean we might pinch it up to two a week. We'll see how it's gone but the days of the daily podcast are thankfully over. Revisit it for next year's year's year and who knows you never know. Today I've got a great show lined up. We're going to, as promised, we're going to dive back into some of the deeper topics. We're going to look today at sleep and how we can manipulate our sleep cycle using a little known sleep hack using CBD oil. Nothing illegal, don't worry. I'm going to talk to you also about a system that has allowed a lot of our athletes to make just exponential progress over the last few years. But before you can adopt any sort of system like that, we got to talk about failure and just owning your failures and looking back at last season and with a frank and somewhat unique perspective, which I'm going to teach you how to do. And then we are, yeah, gonna finish up with a couple of takeaways from those two main talking points and we might wrap up and draw in some general cycling talk, but we're gonna try and keep it pretty deep dive and pretty informative after, you know, the somewhat trivialities of the Vuelta. So before I get started, we no longer have missing pieces as a show sponsor, but we still do have ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is an amazing piece of software. ClickFunnels are a software company that has scaled with out venture capital and any of us out there, entrepreneurs and have tried to do the whole company growth. You know how difficult it can be to a core customer to scale with out venture capital and they teach you how to use the exact model they use to scale without venture capital. It's a brilliant little model and it's made possible through their software, ClickFunnels. It manages workflows, it manages email auto responder, it manages sales point blinds. It's a one-stop shop for any entrepreneur. Definitely check it out and thank you for the good people at ClickFunnels for continuing to show fate in the podcast. I know a bunch of the employees over there are listeners of the show so a big shout out to everyone over in Boise, a US bay so thanks to them and I'll pop a link down in the show notes to ClickFunnels and you can guess your 14-day free trial. Okay let's talk about CBD oil. Okay so what is CBD oil? Most of you when you hear CBD oil probably think oh well is this legal? So before we start yes it is legal it's legal in a you know on recording this in Ireland, jurisdictionally, as far as I know it's legal in every US state or maybe 50 states, I could be still too old now. So check out locally if it's legal, but guess what most places it's legal by now. So CBD oil is legal here in Ireland. It is not to be confused with I suppose where everyone hears CBD they think marijuana and they aren't the same thing. So marijuana is made up of the THC component and that's what we'd all typically refer to as marijuana because it has that psychedelic component whereas CBD doesn't have the psychedelic component even though it's derived from the same plant. So you won't be baked off off your face if you use any of my recommendations today for using CBD oil. So I've been experimenting with CBD oil. I've been using myself as my own one-man personal laboratory and I have been experimenting with quite a bit. I've been using the woop. I did find a practical use for the woop even though the strap is pretty much unusable. It's so dirty now. It is good for tracking sleep and sleep cycles. There's a bunch of gadgets out there, I'm not a mad lover of woop, I might move on to something else, there's a bunch of gadgets out there or a ring is next when I want to check out. If anyone's using that at the moment, let me know. Both CBD oil. I'm playing around with it for enhancing my sleep and I'm going to let you know how I get on with that in a minute. Put some other benefits of it, it's amazing for anxiety. So, if you're suffering from anxiety also stay tuned because it has a powerful effect on that. I've also been using it a topically.

2.I've been rubbing it in as a cream to alleviate stiffness and…

So, I've been rubbing it in as a cream to alleviate stiffness and soreness after a session. So, yeah, this is a bit of a deep dive on the whole area. So, yeah, you can kind of park your psychedelic connotations because it doesn't really have them. it's not that it doesn't really CBD oil, it doesn't have any psychedelic properties to it. You may wake up a little bit groggy the next day. So it's a common in an oil form. So I've been typically shooting for between 50 and 100 milligrams of CBD oil before bed. Most of them you apply it under your tongue and you leave it sit there for like 30 seconds before you sort of swallow it down. So you will notice that if you're shooting for the higher end of that range, the 100 milligrams, you're going to wake up a little bit grubby the next morning. Like that's nothing to worry about. You'll shake that off. That's kind of, I guess just like an overstimulation of that endocarbonized system. So don't worry too much about that. But what I have noticed is the CBD, it is enhancing my deep sleep cycle. I'm getting more deep sleep than I'm using. And this is tested on the woop, like my deep sleep. again upwards of two hours of deep sleep now or previously of maybe getting sort of thirty-five to forty minutes. So it's made a big difference on that and deep sleep, you know, if you don't know and your machi walker, why you sleep is an amazing book. If you read that book, you will never renege on your sleep duties again because it's just so powerful. Like when we're awake, Matt Walker explains that we're having mini stroke like damages to our brain every minute we're awake and this mini stroke damage is only repaired each noise when we're sleeping and if we don't get adequate sleep we get more damage happening during the day than we have repair happening during the noise and that's when we have degenerative diseases and we increase the likelihood of things like Alzheimer's and all forms of dementia not just Alzheimer's. So we want to get into that deep sleep phase as much as we can because it's a lot of cognitive regeneration goes on there and for us as athletes this is where all the repairs get on. So if we can hack sleep you know we're miles ahead. I don't know a lot of you guys and girls and myself included. We're trying to balance a lot of things with our trying in these days. We're trying to sneak in sessions before work. We're trying to sneak in sessions after a worker maybe hit a gym on the lunch break. And what that means is like if we're racing and we're looking to step up or you know we're even competing sportifes against guys who a more flexible schedule than us, they're going to cream us. So we need to find out how we can hack our situation, hack our environment, to get just a little bit more out of our own personal situation and sleep is one of those areas where we can really get an edge if we know we're up to. So that's what I want for you guys out of this episode. Today I want you to just get a little bit a little bit of an edge, a little bit of an edge on that competition. So how does CBD is working the property that's going on behind it? For any of our physiologists out there, we have a receptor, it's called 5HT1A. And that receptor triggers the release of serotonin, serotonin, rheuptake. So serotonin you might know, you know, you might have heard me, if you listen to a lot of the podcast, you might have heard me before, or a variant to it, it was like the happy hormone or the feel, good hormone. hormone, well it's actually an inhibitory transponder. So that means it actually blocks out stuff, it blocks out signals. So when I say happiness, happiness in this case is the absence of negative. So it blocks out signals that make us feel anxious and it only lets those positive thoughts through and that's what gives us that happiness feeling. But serotonin, it's a precursor to melatonin and melatonin regulates the sleep cycle. So that's the process that's going on in the background. So that CBD oil, it really, when you boil it down to it, that's what it's doing. It's helping the serotonin to release the melatonin to regulate the sleep cycle. And it's powerful. It worked super, super well for me. Like I'm waking up like a dead man. Like I'm having dreamless sleeps where I'm waking up just like so refreshed. It's insane. You know, anecdotally it's working super well for me. the evidence it's like to somebody's studies are spending six, seven years that I'm saying.

3.It's this is a super powerful concept

And it's this is a super powerful concept. So it's I would encourage you to play around with it yourself. I've no affiliation. I'd love to check out some different brands of it because I know there's different pollancies and stuff. So I'm early enough with experimenting with different brands myself. But yeah, I'd love to play around a little bit more and and just see what what the effect is on the different potency of it on my sleep cycle. I see and I was actually listening to Joel Rogan last week and he was talking about THC is obviously your typical marijuana psychedelic one but you can take that on tablet form now but if you take like a one to one THC which is banned by the way the CBD isn't banned on the wireless so if you're a race and are competing Stairclaire THC, you stay fine, you're on the good side of the line with CBD. I actually do my masters in this exact topic, the World Anti-Dopon Code. So yeah, if I did get pinged for something like that, it will be doubly poignant. So THC makes you paranoid, it's the normal marijuana, but CBD, then it's very powerful for anxiety, and treating anxiety. It's where actually the whole thing came from. It was a US, about years ago, and I think the FDA, it's FDA approved in the US now CBD for treatments for schizophrenia. And in the US it actually started because a motor was treating her child with home remedies of it. And she was starting to get amazing results, even though the kid had pretty resistant to a range of different treatments. when she brought the kid in, you know, presenting improvements and their symptoms after it just being exposed to CBD oil and giving CBD oil daily that physicians taught like we should look a bit closer to this. And that's how it actually, you know, came to mainstream prominence. But Joe Roggan was joking around saying, you know, he takes his THC, kind of makes him paranoid, but then he takes his CBD, which helps with anxiety. So the net effect that that is, he's just kind of a bit more of accepting of his impending doom. So yeah. I've been using it a topic so I've been using the cream version and it's amazing. It's like a really good best form ever of DP's or do you remember if anyone were going full-order share if anyone used to play you tell your age or if you refer to DP's as winter green, your bollocks, you're an old lad. So I'm on the right side of the referring to winter grain as deep peat. So deep peat is like a muscle rope, which just seems to burn and definitely don't rub your balls or your oils when you put deep heat on because that's not gonna end well. I've been not sold or both deep peat is an amazing muscle rope that you know it's been used for, it's been used for decades for athletes but the CPD cream is super powerful and it's the same effect it's that kind of deep heat effect but it seems to also give a real relaxation of the muscles and I've seen studies where it's lining up in terms of treating inflammation lining it up against like ibuprofen and it's killing ibuprofen in those studies side by I saw it and absolutely no adverse effects, still really, well, other than people thinking you're kind of nuts for using CBD and having the boiling kind of weird shops. But no other, apart from that, no other adverse effects. So yeah, I don't know, I'd lie around with that a bit more. I think it's another real useful benefit. What I'm excited about in CBD oil is, there's not a lot of education in, I don't like to generalize, but I haven't got time to talk about two thousand specific cases. Procyclists typically don't come through toward level education, it's fair to say. And maybe the worldview is learned at a later stage in their life, and they learn a lot by osmosis, bugging around people, surrounding the environment. As a result, we have a regrettable culture and pro cycling of sleeping type of abuse. sleep and tablets forget to sleep but also sleep and tablets recreationally like people taking still knocks and staying awake and having a couple of glass of wine and it minimizes calorie intake but also gives you a crazy buzz. And this has been gone on for a long time but that sort of recreational culture stemmed from the use of still knocks as an age for getting to sleep. But you gotta be a complete moron to be using like still knocks for getting to sleep right now because stuff like still knocks, it doesn't let you get into the deep phase of sleep which is exactly what you want.

4.Want to get into the deep phase of sleep to get a sleep fast but…

So you want to get into the deep phase of sleep to get a sleep fast but Stilox just gets you to sleep fast like THC will get you to sleep super fast but it's going to reduce the amount of time you have in deep sleep and reduce those cognitive benefits you get from deep sleep. Stilox or any other sleep and have a duty exact same thing you'll be out straight away but you'll wake up the next morning and you haven't got those cognitive benefits, the cognitive restoration benefits you should have from a good night's sleep. So if you know someone on them that's a pro cyclist and they're trying to make their way in the game or they think it's helping, they're trying, it's not, it's completely under mind. And it starts habitual use of still knocks. It promotes such an acidic environment, an inflammatory environment that you start picking up other issues. So get off them, they're toxic shit and try CBD instead. So takeaways on this, yeah, it is safety use, so forehead use it. There's a range of products out there. There's a range of products, there's a range of potency. You can buy creams, you can buy shampoos, you can buy multibitamins, you can buy dog treats, you can buy everything you can imagine is in CBD. Now, you got to do your research, you got to check which is actually derived from the plant and which is cooked up in the lab in some sort of CBD derivative. that out. I think at the moment, while I'm going to experiment with you using it for muscle stiffness and soreness and especially injury, I get kind of a tight erector spin-in. It's like the stabilizer muscles around your back. I get that from being on the bike and sitting at the desk because they're both going to go in unnatural position. I've experimented with that and it's given me great relief. But I think the main pure-reviewed benefits for CBD oil at the moment are for treating sleep and treating anxiety. So that's definitely something if you're suffering from either of those conditions it is well worth checking out. So here we are. I hope you're enjoying this all deeper dive. It's different to the podcast. Sorry, it's different to the podcast when we're talking all day about cycling because you know it's sometimes it can be, I don't want to say, tough to keep to mix out. But on someone and flatter sprint stages and things. It's just not that enjoyable. Yeah, commentating on the more, would you call it? I'm no commentating. Who knows? Maybe. I'm up most respect for the commentators in Europe's board when they have like a TV outage and they have to carry on a conversation. It's just goes on and on and on about nothing like the literally had a conversation about a portal one day in Andorra. So, I'll preplated to the boys. Before we go any further, I did say said that missing piece was no longer a show sponsor, but their legacy to us. They've cheekily, cunningly got one more show sponsorship out of us because we are announcing the winner of the competition. So we ran a competition during the Vuelta and the winner of the competition is Andrew Hastings. So Andrew, you've won any one product, your choice shipped anywhere in the world. So get in touch with missing piece and they are going to hook you up if they have an email as you already. So continuing our deeper dive, I hope you're not operating heavy machine region on this podcast. It's one of those ones where you need just extreme focus. I find myself writing along sometimes and I was listening to David Epstein on Rich Roll this morning talking about how generalists excel in a specialized world. It's super interest in on the debate of whether we should specialize, you know, at all 10,000, they are a real and Malcolm Gladwell of purposeful practice or whether generalization and trying to range a stuff is going good. Anyway, that's a segue as I often do. So if you're looking for an interesting podcast and you're finished listening to this and you're finished listening all my back episodes and you're finished giving me feedback, interacting with me on all the social stuff, maybe pop on over and check out someone else's podcasts because that is interesting and enjoyable. I get some cool podcast recommendations for you guys, so keep them flying in. I'm enjoying pat dively someone told me to check out. I'm enjoying that one. So do keep those recommendations coming in. And I do like hearing from you guys. Right, let's dive into this one because this is a super, super important topic at this time of year. I want to talk to you about this is prompted by a conversation I had with a client last week won't be named.

5.Could cryptically identify him, but that's not cool

I could cryptically identify him, but that's not cool. So I'm going to keep anonymity. So you need to take absolutely 100% responsibility for everything that happened you last season. So this is successes and this is failures. So I know there's a good George Washington quote that kind of springs to mind where it was something like 99% of failures come from those who have a habit of making excuses. And it's so true because when we think about, we treat stink party cities. We've the events that happens, we've how we respond to that event and that equals the outcome. We don't just have event and outcome. So you know, those who are who are prone to make an excuse as we'll say, I punctured therefore I DNF'd. They're missing the piece in the middle, which is response. you punctured, you chose to not get a wheel and chase back in, therefore you DNF'd. Or you crashed, you chose to lick your wheels and feel sorry for yourself, therefore you ended the race early. So we get to choose how we respond to events that happen. We can't control events that are going to happen to us, but we get to choose that response. So if you don't like the outcome that that you're experiencing, and so I don't know any area of your life, you get to choose your response to that outcome. So an example, like I see all the time, like, you know, have a harsh look at yourself when you're listening to this, because now is the time we're coming into the offices and the last race that it sees in those on us. You know, have a hard look at yourself and think, you know, am I at my idea body weight? You know, if you're trying in at the moment and your carrying extra pounds. Let's have a frank look at yourself right now and go, yeah, okay, I'm training three times a week. I'm following this sort of loose dietary plan that's laid down by, I think I know what I'm talking about. I think I know I need to curb load. I need to refuel. I've picked up a few tippets here and there. So you're still four kilos overweight. So you need to own this. You need to go, okay, I need to change my response. I've been given this information about this is the way to train, this is the way to eat. I've complied with that information. I've trained this way. I've gone out with the lads riding around at the weekend. I've bought all the kits, the fast wheels, the bike, but I'm still overweight and I'm still getting smoked. I'm still not a cat one rider. I'm not winning races. What's my response? Go and follow a proven system. go and work with a coach. And then you're going to have a completely different response. So it changes the dynamic. So if you don't like the outcome you're having at the moment, change your response. So because if you don't change your response, absolutely nothing is going to change. And the moment you change your response, everything changes. We've all seen races where, you know, Iliokhoye is a quick step, tour, a tour, Google that are YouTube. it. If you haven't seen it, it's one of the best finishes to a race. He crashes in the last couple of kilometers as he solo and he has a choice. That's the event. He's crashed. He slid out and he has a choice how to respond to it. And he responds by saying, you know what? I'm still ahead of the guys in the race. I had a bigger lead now with a small lead, but I'm still in a favorable position. So he puts his head down and he gets the line and he wins it. And it's a brilliant piece of commentary. It's a brilliant last couple of kilometers. It's absolutely much more much much to watch, but you can take that as a metaphor for how your training is going at the moment, because if what you're doing is yielding a set of results, unless you're cleaning up and winning every race in Ireland, unless you're at ideal weight, it cracks me to see you guys riding around. I've been there, and this is why it cracks me, because it was only the beginning of the last year when I got back, I was carrying so much weight, and it felt horrible. It felt horrible wearing a soycon kit. I didn't feel like a bike rider. I even felt horrible in my cities because they felt hoity on me. I felt uncomfortable, especially in a hot day or some shit. I felt so uncomfortable and sweaty. And it's not a nice feeling, but you need to change your response to it. You need to change and go, okay, there's objective facts out there at the moment.

6.We have objective facts on how to eat

We have objective facts on how to eat. I'm not gonna get into nutrition now, but there is an eating system which is objectively true. Maybe years ago, we had a lot of debate about global warming, but right now, all the top PhDs, all the top professors and scientists agree on global warming, it's happening. We're the exact same a nutrition at the moment. There's an agreed upon philosophy. People, you know, push agendas, you know, to be a vegan agenda, to be a paleo agenda, but they're agendas, they're not the way to treat philosophies which are just objectively true, and they're out there at the moment. If you seek advice on this, you can't fix your diet. Exact same way with training, We have thousands of athletes coming through our system in the last few years. They're coming out the other side with results. It's not a fluke. We've emerged for some guys, get sick, injured, whatever. But boy and large are big data. We're churning out so many athletes out the far side. When you work one on one with us or any of the top coaching companies, you work with one of the US top coaching companies, this is the outcome you get. If you go and you work with somebody who's a plumber or a painter and does a bit of coaching on the side, they're not professionals. not sitting around working and reading peer reviewed stuff all day. They don't have sports, scientists in-house. You're not going to get that. So you need to look at your response if you want to change your outcome. Like one of the big take away from me from this sort of big aha moment I had was, I remember I tried a bunch of stuff for years. Because you got to remember when I started I was a shitcat tree and then I was an equally bad I got two and then I was in equally bad cat one. I wasn't great when I went to France. And I didn't get to the States until six years into race. And I was pulling myself up from each level. But it was just before I went to France, or was I in France? I was just getting France. I was just getting kind of good that season. And it's because I found out I made a friend who wrote for Team Sky at the moment. And he basically said to me, like, what are you doing? And I've been piecing together stuff on YouTube. be piecing together stuff, you know, articles from Silicon, they were selecting weekly chat to guys in the car, a practicing on top guys, we're doing this, trying to piece together a system and it's like, oh, he's like, what are you doing? You know, there's actually just our way to do this. Like there's an objective way to do it that everybody who's a pro follows the same system and you're not following that system. Why? I was like, there's no real good answer for that. So I felt, I felt pretty shit about that. I felt shit that an angry that nobody had told me that it was this system earlier. And yeah, I was as relieved as I was disappointed when I found out about it. And so that's been kind of a mission in A1 coaching for me is to just get this system out there. And I like to say it's kind of the bloat at a moment, a cold of silence around this system and teach people that there is a system. Like if you come through, you know, the force part of the system is actually, you know, we like to get, I like to to think of it as you know if you have a super powerful engine of a super car you need a strong chassis you know you're building a house if we're going to use that analogy or a pyramid the foundation needs to be strong that foundation is stranded, stranded, like you need to go through it's small, stranded, and protocol. If you're gonna lay training on top of it like if you're just cycling what I've gone through this it's something that's just functional movement like dynamic movement range is like it's like running through a full range of motion without holding stretches and it then's building into like you know traditional inverted air quotes. Air quotes are still the easiest way to know who's not a cool guy. So traditional stuff like the squat. But you got it, this stuff has to be adapted and this is where I mean like it's this is a specific system. The stuff has to be adapted for a cyclist. You can't go down to your local gym and get your local meat head to give you a program. It doesn't work because he's not a a cyclist, like the squad has to be stuffed like, you know, heels, elevators off the floor, because that way you can get a little bit lower, yeah, ground the gym, go out and tell you that, but the toe-down motion is how we pedal.

7.Is the stuff the pros have been doing for years, but it's only…

And this is the stuff the pros have been doing for years, but it's only getting into, oh, snail, and we're only starting to do it now, which is bizarre to me. But, you know, so the strength training is the fourth section in that, and then you're moving into your nutrition, and then you're moving into your actual training, your one-on-one coaching. So it needs, you need to go through it, and to go through it in a sequence. We've been trying to blow a lid on this for a couple of years, but the podcast is a great platform for me to do this now and it's a deeper dive, there's no trivialities to it, I can talk in long form and nobody's going to cut me off. It's a beautiful forum for communicating with you guys about the power of this stuff. I'll pop a link in the show notes and description for the Strandtrian system, you can watch the video and you can see what I'm talking about, of the Strandtrian system we need. That's the force piece if you don't have a systrand training system in place you know you can get this stuff like the power of the internet like I remember paying like what 50-60 euro per session for personal trainers mental mental teaching you the wrong stuff so you know you can get this stuff now you can get access to it in video form I only have to create this once so I don't need to charge 50 per session you know it's 51 and you can have a forever use 10,000 times it's like 40,000, 90,000 or something we charge for the whole system I think that's like podcast offers normally like 149 or something but still three sessions with a PT. So I'm going to put a link down below and if the price isn't already 49 I'm going to reduce the 49 for the podcast listeners and if you want to get hooked up on that but yeah it's like was it Einstein's quote the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result so my goal with this podcast in the common you know weeks I'm I'm going to blow it on this system. I'm going to teach you exactly what this system is, step by step. Like today, we've talked about the strength as being a foundational piece. If we haven't got the strength and dynamic movement and because I can sell linear, it's up and down all the time. So we need to get that dynamic movement, things like even scapular attractions because we need to open up that. Like it's all a fascia that needs to slow it. You can have a look at that in the video and explain a lot more what's going on with it. and then you'll deep dive when you get into it into what actually the plan is, how to use it. It walks you through it, holds your hand through it, it's easy to follow, but it's easy to follow and you have the information now. But before you have it, it's hard to piece this together and that's what happens to me. So that's what I'm going to use the podcast for. I'm going to just hold your hand and show you this stuff step by step. But I'm also going to do a deep dive on the stuff that people don't really talk to you about. People don't really want you to hear about like the CBD oil. I'm going to go deep on hacks for fat loss, for enhancing sleep, for positive charging ions, structured water, boil hacks like the chili pad for sleep, and I'm using a trampoline at the moment for an emphatic drainage. Bunch of stuff like this, we're going to get deep and it's going to be we're moving away from the kind of race commentary triviality. But I hope you're enjoying it. Do give me feedback on it because the feedback does guide me on it and this seems to be the direction and the majority you guys wanted me to take the podcast. So I do hope you enjoyed our real deep dive into sleep and strength training. And I'm gonna chat to you guys next week.