Welcome to this week's writer sport. This week we're going to show you how you can change your fitness in six months. Anthony, okay, amazing question. First up, we have Anthony. I've been getting coached by you for coming on six months now, and I just wanted to say how much the last six months have genuinely changed everything for me. Before we started to work together, I thought I had things figures figured out. I was riding loads, chasing numbers, smashing myself most days and going absolutely nowhere. Since I started working with you, everything shifted. Not just my fitness, but how I ride, recover, and actually enjoy the process. Again, I've been trying to convince a few club mates that proper coaching isn't just for pros and that what we're doing is way more than getting a training plan. Could you maybe talk through what you've changed for me, why it's worked, because I think a lot of writers would benefit from hearing how simple changes done consistently can completely flip their pro. Maybe don't read out the name on that. I won't. Okay. And I don't think you'd appreciate it. Yeah, I've seen that question coming in. So, yeah, I guess the premise is, can we lift the lid a little bit on what we've done differently with Mr. X in the last few months? It's been a total step change in the types of training. It's something I'm encouraging a lot of my athletes to do. And I think this is a good platform for maybe laying it out and showing people how the training they're doing at the moment is a little bit flawed. I think we've been lied to subtly but very consistently. Most recreational athletes are training like professional athletes, just less. They train less volume, less recovery, less support infrastructure, but with the same mindset. Optimize for power. Optimize for critical power, FTP, durability, what insert whatever high performance metric you want there. But here's the problem with that. You're not a pro cyclist. And that's not an insult. You're you're just not, unless you're a pro listening to this and then totally discard that. You don't earn your paycheck riding your bike. Training shouldn't be built around performance. It should be built around health. like long-term resilient robust health because performance is downstream of health, not the other way around. When we start out optimizing for performance, we can miss health. When we start out optimizing for health, we still get performance as the byproduct. So, it was a total paradigm shift. We went from chasing FTP to chasing health span. So, we reframed the question entirely at the very beginning. Instead of how do I get faster in the next 6 months, it was how do I build a body that's still going strong 40 years from now? And that's the difference between health span and lifespan. One is just surviving, the other is driving. Body, brain, bike, everything. Let's say you have, let try and break this down. I'm trying to think of a realistic amount of hours. Say you have 11 hours a week for training. Now, that's generous by most people's standards, but I'm really bad at math, so you can figure it out for your own hours. Now, we plug in the non-negotiables into our 11-hour training plan. The things that science is screaming at us that we can't but prioritize. The peer-reviewed data is so strong that you can't ignore it. So, I'm talking strength training. You need to get three strength training sessions in per week. 45 minutes minimum effective dose, three times a week. We say that's three hours out of that. I think you should also peel away one hour for meal prep so you don't have that excuse for the days to reach for the takeaway menu. You know, we've all heard the clichés, you're never going to out train a bad diet. That's another era gone. The research is so good on sauna use as well. It's a maybe a separate podcast on changing white fat to brown fat, all the heat acclamation benefits, mitochondrial development. So, two sauna sessions of 30 minutes each per week. That's another hour a week. on blue zone research would show us that the connection to your community is really important and I think I have emphasized that over and over again the podcast the group ride community I think it's a good idea to do a group ride three hours per week as well so that means we've three hours left to train that's all we have left we've 11 hours so now the problem we were trying to solve for at the very start wasn't how do I distribute 11 hours of my training the problem is much more concise than that how do use three hours effectively and distribute that time across my training zones to get the associated adaptation in each of those zones.