You're looking to have like a cognitive downtime as well. And that's just like not the pressure of getting up. Like I've seen this getting back into training now, getting back into structure training for the past few weeks. It's very different waking up and having to train and choosing to train. They're two different things. I was waking up for a long time looking out the window and going, "Oh, it's kind of cold. I won't train today." That's very mentally freeing when you don't have an expectation that you need to train every day. So, that's what we're looking for during it. We're not looking at metrics. We're not looking at workouts, mileage targets, wattage targets, none of it. We're looking to just like move most days. gentle movement, hiking, walking, swimming, and yeah, that's that's really like my main thing is like take that break. And if you wanted to go really a little bit nerdy on why we're taking the break, like we could debate the training peaks model, but the performance management chart where we have fitness and we have freshness and they kind of intersect to give us form. All season we're trying to build fitness, but with with that we're building a lot of fatigue. This is like a great opportunity to do a total fatigue reset. Fatigue will reset a lot faster than fitness will reset. Now, it necessitates you letting go of a little bit of fitness to shed that fatigue, but you're not letting go of all your fitness. You're not starting from scratch again. But you are letting go of a chunk of fitness that you want, but you'll build back higher. Don't worry. It's funny, isn't it? Because you kind of think, "Oh my god, I'm going to get a winter break. This is going to be amazing. I don't have to get up before work and do a session for a couple of weeks." But people do really actually struggle with taking this and you'll hear people doing, you know, sneaky sessions and not telling their coach that they've been out for a 4-hour ride, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I don't know, maybe that's another psychological problem. Yeah, I I don't know. People just get addicted to the to the endorphins and they get addicted to the calorie burn as well. They kind of feel like, oh, if I ride, I can eat a bit. I was just going to ask you about the food the food element of taking a big kind of winter break for three three weeks. Look, I don't think you can hold race weight all year round. Uh, look, I don't think you should go. It's not as cycle is not as old school, even if you're an amateur as it used to be. Like, you know, big Yan Olick and stuff. Uh, people have let us know in the comments what weight you used to get to, but he'd go on the piss eating pizza and burgers all winter, come back in January and start taking the weight off. And this was very typical for a lot of pro cyclists where they come into January in really bad shape, race their way through the springs, and then they'd be fit by maybe Jeralia in May. M we don't really see that anymore. Cyclists hold closer to race weight all year round. Yeah. I think professional sport I mean the most famous example that I always think of for is not in the cycling uh industry at all. It's Ricky Hatton the boxer who passed away sadly. He was crazy man for the Chippers and Points of Guinness. I mean he would balloon in the offse and then would come back and shed it all within a matter of months. It was insane to see. But I think the professionals do tend to stay closer to that line all year round now, don't they? Yeah, but there's definitely a bit of downtime like the I'm not sure if you watch that Vizma Lisa and Bike with WS off season. H I was watching on the trainer yesterday. It's good. W's over in California and he's just doing rides and catching up with Red Bull and playing basketball and stuff, but he's at a basketball game and like he's eating burgers at the basketball game. Yeah. You know, W's not eating burgers in the middle of the season. You know they're using I know they're using Athletes Kitchen and so everything is weighed, everything is measured all season. You were over for Lumberia with Visma Lisa bike. You know how dialed it is. Every gram, every gram is counted for and W's arguably top not arguably he's one of the top five riders in the world. Uh so you know he's doing that to the nth degree and I think you know it's just an example where he is kind of slightly letting his hair down in the offseason.
Okay. So how do I know? We spoke about my kind of uh longer break, but really quickly, how do I know how much time to take for a winter break? I mean, how do you calculate that? I think that 10 to 21 days is a good little marker. And then how cooked are you? You know, you went with three weeks, you came off bad lance, you were pretty cooked. Yeah. You know, your fingers and your toes weren't working too well. So, some obvious indications you're pretty cooked. Have you had a long season? You know, one of the young lads I'm coaching, Daniel had a long season. I don't know how many races he had, but like he raced basically twice, three times every week, all year. There's a lot of travel. There's a lot of, you know, just mental fatigue with getting ready. Like, you're constantly getting ready, cleaning bike, getting ready for the next race, cleaning bike, getting ready for the next race. So, yeah, that needs time to decompress. So, I think how long you take off as a function of how fatiguing the season was, both physically and mentally. You know, I'm genuinely proud of my little man cave, my [snorts] escape, my safe place. It's not glamorous by any means. It's crammed into the spare room in our apartment with bikes stacked in the corner, boxes everywhere, and the smell of chain lube is just kind of hanging in the air. But in that corner, that's where the work gets done. That's where I switch off from everything else, and I lock in on my training. And the centerpiece of it all, it's the Wahoo Kicker Bike Pro. Honestly, it's the ultimate man cave bike. The thing just feels alive under you. It climbs, it descends, it shifts, all automatically. You can dial into your exact position to the millimeter, just like your outdoor bike. And with the new setup, everything's smoother, quieter, and way more immersive. It's that perfect mix of comfort and performance that makes indoor cycling feel like a privilege, not like a punishment. And look, I'm Irish. I'm sitting in Ireland recording this right now. I know what it's like to wake up, look out the window, see wind, rain, and sideways hail, and think, "Do I really want to be out there today?" And that's where the kicker comes in. You can get a worldass session done right there in your safe little space, no matter what's happening outside. If you want to build your own version of that space, a place to train hard, stay consistent, and escape for a little bit. Check out Wahoo at wahooitness.com. They've got everything from the flagship Kicker Bike Pro to the Kicker Core 2, which gives you that same legendary ride feel at a killer price point. Wahoo! Building the better athlete in all of us. The next one we're going to talk about, I think, is something not a lot of people will know or think about the importance of. So the second piece I think that a lot of people skip on and this is like this kind of maybe came around as a result of Mark Cavendish. It's dental checkups, dental hygiene checkups. I would have never thought about going to the dentist in the offseason. I only really go to the dentist if I have a problem with my teeth. But Kavesh had a nightmare in the 2010 season. I think it was 2010. Maybe someone will correct me down below. his whole winter training preparation was like ruined with dental problems. He couldn't train because of the pain in his teeth for like a good chunk of the winter and he was the best rider or the most winningest rider in the world at the time. Cavendish went into like La Prima Vera first race of the spring uh Milan San Ramo almost every year as favorite or one of the favorites because all he has to do is can he get over to Pio. If he gets over to Pio, he's going to win. And I'm not even sure if he raced it that year. If he did, he had a stinker because his preparation was so bad all the way through winter. He missed team training camps and he ended up having to get that surgery in the middle of the winter. So since then, most teams now insist on a full dental checkup for all their riders in the offseason. Yeah, makes sense. I know for I know one person who always goes and get his gets his teeth checked. He's got the shiniest teeth in the whole pallet. You can see them from outer space. Neil's polish, you know, he's at the front [gasps] and he all he can see is like his his teeth sticking out. This is true. [gasps] It's just something I've always noticed very different things.
His teeth are so white and large when he's like working really hard for uh Pogy and he's at the front of that train and he's kind of grimacing. Yeah. His teeth are they're extra because it's super like disruptive to your training. Like it blasts up that you have a podcast on sympathetic nervous system. Like it blasts up your sympathetic inflammation. It wrecks your sleep. It totally crushes your training adaptations. So in this new era of everything is controlled and cycling, it's just one of the things that people can control. So they go and they control it. Yeah. I mean, if you're a regular rider like us, kind of coming back to normal people, you've got training, you've got work, you've got family, you've got a social life to try and, you know, squeeze in when you're training. Your social ro is your group ride. That is we were just saying that this this week that my social life is the group spin. I That's terribly sad. Maybe we can get uh that cut out of the show, but it's true. But when you when you've got so many things going on in your life, you do tend to ignore these routine checkups like going to the GP, get getting your bloods done, getting your prostate examined, all of these kind of fun things that every, you know, men in particular tend to push off like week after week after week. So, this is a good time, isn't it? This winter break to start scheduling these things. A great example of this is h if anyone's listened to the podcast like a couple of years uh you'll remember obviously Sarah I had a small cut on my forehead when I met you I thought it was a small cut on my forehead and I kind of explained it as it sat right on the brow on my helmet line and I was like it's abrasion from the helmet just rubbing and it was like a small scab it wouldn't go away and it started out like really small like quarter the size of my fingernail and it gradually just got bigger and bigger and bigger and I ignored it for like maybe like 18 months and it just got bigger and bigger until I eventually went to the doctor with it. But yeah, but you went to your GP who I always call Dr. Nick from the Simpsons and he was like, "No, shout out to him. Worst GP in the world." He's like, "It's grand. You're fine." And then about another six months later, we were like, "Okay, we got to get you to a specialist." Yeah. like why that hap not justifying my laziness here but it's like you're saying when you're balancing training around family around work the windows for getting this sort of stuff done are very small like I should have been addressing that in the off season and because I let it roll into the season now it's easy when you're super busy to just roll onto it'll be grand it'll be grand it'll be grand and eventually it ended up being like a benign skin cancer that I had to get operated on and I was off the bike for like a long time good good while I couldn't get a helmet on my is swoll short. Oh, your whole your whole face is twice the size of it that it usually is. Where's a picture of a stick? I have to try and find those pictures. I've tried to forget about that. It is funny though, isn't it? Because you're feeling fit, you're so active, and you have this healthy lifestyle, but we ignore those other things, you know, like exactly what you were speaking about. The other thing I wanted to mention as well about teeth is all of the sugar that you eat as a cyclist. I mean, we're eating simple carbs, i.e. sugar daily, even if it's in drink form, gel form, Haribo, wherever you like to get your carbs. So, you are exposing your teeth to a significant amount of sugar. So, I would say dental, definitely go and get that checked out. But also, and just to finish off on this point before we move on to the next one, I don't think I would confine just dental like we're saying with me, that's like a medical screen. But some stuff I would definitely get done. It's dental, it's medical screen, and it's a full blood work because iron deficiency or even if you don't, you're not quite as far as deficiency, but you're just low on iron. That's literally the easiest fix to gaining more power and more watts. Like I've seen riders add 150 watts onto their threshold by just fixing an iron deficiency. Like it's insane because you can't transport oxygen your in your blood if you don't have iron present.