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THE UNTOLD STORY OF CYCLING’S REBIRTH AFTER ARMSTRONG | DR LIM

Name: The Untold Story of Cycling’s Rebirth After Armstrong | Dr Lim
Uploaded: 2024-06-18
Duration: 47 min 43 s
Description: Dr Alan Lim walks us through cycling's transformation from the doping-soaked Armstrong era to a cleaner, more innovative sport.

with Dr Lim

47:43·18 June 2024

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Dr Alan Lim walks us through cycling's transformation from the doping-soaked Armstrong era to a cleaner, more innovative sport. As a physiologist who refused to entertain performance-enhancing drugs, he pioneered a radically different approach—solving performance problems through hydration, fueling, aerodynamics, and honest training data instead of shortcuts. This conversation reveals how one person's refusal to compromise sparked an entire culture shift in professional cycling.

Key Takeaways

Stop lying about training. The breakthrough at Garmin came when Dr Lim got riders to admit they weren't actually doing the huge training volumes they claimed—honesty about real capacity allowed them to build sustainable, effective programs.
Broaden how you measure success. Athletes who graded themselves on multiple outcomes (camaraderie, experience, process, integrity) rather than just wins had longer careers and handled losses better.
Find your real bottlenecks, not expensive marginal gains. Most performance improvements come from sleep, relationships, mental health, and honest conversation—not new bike frames or gear costing thousands.
Understand the 'why' behind your training. When riders understood glycogen repletion, sodium losses, and training load consequences, they followed plans with intentionality and adapted them intelligently on race day.
Salt sweat is highly individual. Test your sodium loss by weighing yourself before and after rides, then incrementally add sodium (starting 400-600mg/L) until you're losing less than 2% body weight.
Innovation should prioritize safety and accessibility, not just speed. The most important innovations solve real problems for regular athletes—knowledge sharing, training principles, nutrition science—not expensive equipment.

Expert Quotes

"Do you feel cheated? Any athlete who answers yes to that question is an athlete who is probably willing to dope. You have all these people on a pulpit saying this is wrong, this is immoral, I'm being cheated—ah, I'm a victim—and it's all of those victims who then become perpetrators."

"The complexity of that situation in hindsight is that it wasn't simply about one person but about an apparatus. There was no way that individual could burn the whole thing down by telling the truth."

"It's not only that athletes are better informed but their whole teams and their organizations are better informed. And solving the bottlenecks are not that expensive—they just require conversation, humility, a level of vulnerability and some smarts."

KEY QUOTES

“I always started with athletes with kind of a simple question on this issue do you feel cheated do you feel cheated any athlete who answers yes to that question is an athlete who is probably willing to dope how ironic is that right you have all these people on a Pulpit saying this is wrong this is immoral I'm being cheated ah I'm a victim and it's all of those victims who then become perpetrators”
Dr Alan Lim — Team physiologist, Garmin cycling team

“we learned that for the most part we couldn't go hard for more than two days maybe three days before we needed a day off and that's not just Riders that's also staff right so we're like all right we're g to do two days on one day off and I'm like how long can we keep this up and it comes out well we could probably keep this up for two weeks okay two days on one day off for two weeks before we all take a week where we're just chilling”
Dr Alan Lim — Team physiologist, Garmin cycling team

“what I saw when I first came into the sport which was the scariest thing for me was I saw a lot of illness I saw sick kids either mentally unwell or physically unwell because of all the side effects associated with these drugs if you believe that drugs make us better and healthier then everyone in society would be bought into the promise of pharmaceuticals and we would all be shooting up right now in OIC”
Dr Alan Lim — Team physiologist, Garmin cycling team

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT2 SECTIONS

Introducing Dr Alan Lim

I'm really honored to be sitting down with Dr Alan Lim today Alan to my mind at least is one of the characters who helped cycling emerge from the dark Armstrong days as a team physiologist for Garmin he didn't even entertain doping as a solution his refusal to allow it enter his mind it sparked Innovation it meant he had to make up that performance deficit by innovating by innovating around hydration fueling aerodynamics and training practices this is a unique insight into how we emerg from the dark days of cycling with one of the good guys Dr Alan limb Dr Alan Lim welcome to the RO man podcast hey thank you very much for having me I was wondering before the call a mutual friend set up this call and I went for roid this morning and I was kind of thinking about different angles to take the conversation you've had such a huge influence behind the scenes on Modern cycle and I think a lot more than some people realize did you ever Ponder the question what would cycling be like if you were never involved um no I've never pondered that question I do Ponder the question though about that with respect to the people I love and care for in my life and maybe that's a form of uh gratitude um you know I I think we all have egos though and I certainly do I love to win I think that I have a Persona that is about Hospitality generosity about taking care of others that's certainly true but the Persona that's maybe more private is that I love wing and I love solving problems and I love Innovation and I love doing things in a way that um breaks the conventional rules of how they were done I've always been interested in cycling because it's a creative outlet for exploration and things um so yeah I don't know I think that everything I might have done in the sport would have done and would have been here if I wasn't here because ideas coales and a lot of what I was able to contribute and have been able to contribute to the sport I think is about luck in the same way that you know at the same time the first patent for the light bulb was submitted you know within weeks a dozen more applications came in right we see things in our world in terms of a Confluence of technology and possibility and many of us see the same things at the same time we get lucky when we have the opportunity to then act on those ideas um I mean how many times have you seen something new come out and say say to yourself ah that was something I was just thinking that would be really cool it came out so I think that if I wasn't around cycling would be in the same spot there would still be the same level of innovation and technology and coolness I count myself as very very lucky as to having been in the right time and right place to be able to you know introduce new ideas and things was it a perfect time in cycling it was just to to calibrate it for audience members listening we're out with a Lance Armstrong area we're into the new really an era I think defined by the team you're involved with Garmin Sharp and voters it was an ERA where we were starting to experiment we were starting to figure out aerodynamics we were starting to figure out the par meter training principles hydration altitude exposure but we hadn't yet gone so far down the rabbit hole that we are now where we're pondering the sustainability of reuter's careers because they've taken it to the nth degree yeah yeah yeah you know um here here the thing uh I was I was a lashy kid you know what lashy kid is no lashy kid is when you're a kid that wears your key around like a little necklace because doesn't sound like the killid no your your your parents are so busy that a very young age you're effectively unattended to and that was my brother and I we were left to our own devices for the most part we had a key to the house we we could come and go as we pleased and while some might see it as neglect I think my brother and I and our experience was one of Independence and one of freedom and one of exploration and I was very very lucky that um I had extraordinarily loving caring parents but I didn't have protective parents so my brother and I were riding our bikes around the streets of LA from a very young age and making a lot of mistakes getting ourselves in very dangerous situations but learning and growing and evolving and then using you know whatever platform we had to level up right I sometimes Vex as I coach about the knowledge that I have because if I share knowledge to a young athlete that's a mistake that they won't make on their own and while that's valuable and that's the whole goal there is no better learning then the mistakes that you make now I reconcile this idea of being protective as a coach or being a knowledge Giver as a coach by considering the fact that all I'm doing is raising the floor of where they're starting but that if an athlete is a real athlete they have an intrinsic desire for more to be challenged and they will continue to push their own unique envelope that puts them in places where they will always make mistakes and they will learn from it and what ends up happening is evolution what ends up happening is higher speeds you know um better performances more consistency and the whole entire field ends up getting better which is to say that whether or not this is sustainable or there is longevity that is the same issue in every generation athletes I've ever worked with and so whether or not today's generation is sustainable um it's sustainable in the same way that the previous generation asked the same question which is no it's not sustainable but there will be younger athletes with a higher floor that will continue to push the envelope and that's why it's not sustainable because there's someone coming for you they're going to do it it's such a Perfect Analogy though because that's what it is it's pushing the floor higher a look at kids now and they're asking totally different questions to the questions I was asking we were chatting with a mutual friend who coached me for a long time and a friend of yours Michael bar I remember Michael sending me across we were using XL for coaching back then so he'd sent me across the EXL sheet of sessions and I remember getting the Exel my first Excel sheet and literally the excitement of opening this email from Michael bar with the sessions I needed to do for the but I was looking at this like someone had given me a like a map to a City I was like these are the sessions that the are doing like nobody knew what sessions people were doing and I had the sessions that the best guys were doing and now everybody has you know trainer roads whiffs you know everyone's a cycling coach your local plumber will do a bit of cycling coaching for you and he be telling you oh you know 2040s you know he's given you Ferrari sessions back from 20 years 30 years ago they're not the questions the kids are asking anymore the questions they're asking now are much more advanced about you know a local kid ask me about how to affect his CDA what tests can he do from home I didn't know what CDA was when I was riding the bike full time that's right that's right that's right and the technology available to these kids as they ask these questions allows them to explore at a greater level and this is where we go from you know crossing the river to Crossing an entire country to Crossing an ocean to launching into space to going into a new Galaxy it's Evolution what was the EOS system like when you stepped into procycling for the first time uh horrible it was it was it was horrible it was uh what I would call an arms race I was this young naive kid just out of graduate school and I walked into one of the most kind of Nefarious coercive uh abusive environments I had ever experienced in my entire life right um what was your first te phon phon not a clean team not a clean team uh you know like fullon operation uh medical vans that had you know blood Spinners and the whole nine yards associated with it and here's the thing is that it wasn't that that I saw as the abuse what I saw as the abuse was all of these doctors directors you know owners who were coercing young kids to do something with their bodies that they innately did not want to do yeah everybody makes the athlete out to be the bad guy everyone makes in that doping culture when an athlete got caught as the person who broke the rules but it took a whole entire office full of people to make that kid break the rule and when the kid got caught that caught that kid was the only person in the media that the media would blame and that's public blame and that was deeply unfair because that kid was in a coerced situation so it's like imagine if you were a victim of child abuse and one day the public found out that you had been beaten but instead of trying to protect you they lamb basted you for getting caught for getting beat right like for showing up to school with bruises and all of a sudden you were a cheater and we forget how young these kids were like I remember chatting to Christian Vander and for his first tour to France Johan brunal had to call his house and ask his dad is it okay if I bring your son to France for three weeks he needed to ask his dad's permission to bring him away to the Tour of France that's how young these kids are yeah they were kids they were kids they were not fully the developed adults who had the means or income to uh fund full medical trailers full of doping apparatus right come on give me a break like you think an 18-year-old just figured that all out you know what I hate from that fun act out like the one thing that you know I can rationalize and I can understand so much of it all I fully bought into Floyd Landis when he said he was he bought that he brought out the book was a positively false and he had a fund called the Floyd fairness fund which has a broke student I remember donating to it and I was fighting people to and nail going there's no way Floyd to do this he comes from a background where you know he's principled he's moral he is this book and I was like that blew up in my face that was I really believed in him I I think all those things can exist at the same time and that's the real difficulty of it and depending upon the context of you know the situation and the context of where Floyd was I do think that as a rebel he was not able to speak the truth but at the same time the truth of his situation was um not that he was a bad person that he was in an extraordinary bad situation right and that there was no way that I don't think individually he believed that he could burn the Whole Thing Down by telling the truth and so the complexity of that situation in hindsight holy moly you know and I don't think that it was simply about Floyd but it was about an apparatus he just happened to be the person in the middle of it just like you know bad luck good luck I was lucky enough to be you know at the you know Confluence of a lot of cool technology that did help the sport to get better how do we you spoke of evolution how do we evolve from that era the Tyler who I've had on the podcast a bunch of times the fak US Postal era how do we get from there to voters Team Clean Garmin obviously you know through the history it's not entirely a clean team because we know hgal and David Miller and stuff had historic dope infractions but it was very very clean compared to what was there and it marked a real in my mind at least departure in cycl history yeah I think first and foremost you have to have a huge amount of belief in not just your own process right but you have to believe that the doping products available on the market what is considered to be cheating are not actually beneficial right so I always started with athletes with with kind of a simple question on this issue do you feel cheated do you feel cheated any athlete who answers yes to that question is an athlete who is probably willing to dope how ironic is that right you have all these people on a Pulpit saying this is wrong this is immoral I'm being cheated ah I'm a victim and it's all of those victims who then become perpetrators so the first thing that I had to reconcile and I had to change in terms of a belief system was convincing these kids that they were not being cheated that they were not being cheated how do you do that I think you do that by trying to open up their world view and when you open up that worldview you understand how small cycling is and how unimportant it is and potentially how absurd it is but there's a difference between an absurdist and a nihilist a nihilist sees an institution like cycling and says this is [ __ ] let's burn it all down right an absurdist sees the whole entire world as absurd and then looks at cycling and says well this is just absurd as anything so I'm going to choose to believe in it I'm going to choose be absurdist by saying cycling is important to me and I had to kind of help these kids understand why they were in the sport was it only to win was it to experience something grander that you have to grade your effort in anything you do on many legs because if there's only one leg that you're grading yourself on the chances of success are really really low and so by broadening perspective and trying to evaluate what success looked like for these young kids in a way that went beyond just winning a bike race was really really important that's process that's effort that's not making mistakes that's showing up with some level of Integrity right that's what you're learning it's the travel it's the camaraderie it's the fun it's the net experience it's the cool dinner we just had the night before there's so many other ways to try to great our existence whether you're a cyclist or doing anything else and so if I could get them to believe that they weren't being cheated then we had a platform for some level of moral obligation to the sport so unpacking whether or not these performance enhancing drugs worked while everyone thought that I was crazy by saying I'm not sure what I saw in that world was more marketing than actual efficacy so the human body is so freaking complex we're Cascade of multiple physiological systems coming together in a way that emerges as something greater than the sum of its parts so when all of a sudden we find a mechanism or a drug to unlock one enzyme to have one effect to increase one aspect such as EPL with red blood cell Mass does that really actually net out in performance when you still have to you know get air through uh bottleneck trachea which then goes into bronchial with a certain diffusion capacity with blood that is going at a certain rate that may or may not you know uh attach to hemoglobin which then has to go through a complex you know arterial and capillary Network to uh fix fixed number of mitochondria which then has a fixed amount of fuel to make a certain amount of ATP which then has to cause a muscle contract over you know some ligament over some femur length right the Cascade of that saying that I'm going to change one part of that improve performance is ludicrous it's especially ludicrous if you think about all these complex physiological systems as a chain on a drive chain and in that drive train what works is harmony what works is homeostasis because if I all of a sudden find a way to make one chain bigger do I get a bigger do I get a better smoother drivetrain no I get a drivetrain that doesn't move anymore and what I saw when I first came into the sport which was the scariest thing for me was I saw a lot of illness I saw sick kids either mentally unwell or physically unwell because of all the side effects associated with these drugs if you believe that drugs make us better and healthier then everyone in society would be bought into the promise of pharmaceuticals and we would all be shooting up right now in OIC right did your refusal to consider EPO and performance enhancing drugs as the the Panacea the catchall solution for perform performance did your refusal to engage in that mindset Force Innovation where other teams weren't forced into Innovation Ro man I know how serious you take your goal setting whether they're Fitness or life related goals if you're looking for a powerful alloy to support you on this journey look now further than heu heu has become my secret weapon for when I don't have time to prepare a balanced meal ensures I get the nutrition I need without sacrificing time or taste plus it stops me from reaching for that takeaway menu I always throw a bottle into my backpack when I'm heading into the city to work and it stops me eating junk convenience food snacking on crossons and bars of chocolate because I know they don't support my training goals it's a handy nutritious meal on the go and it's got over 22 gram of protein hu is perfect for athletes to don't have time to cook or prepare food before a training session it's convenient nutritious fuel at your fingertips ensuring you hit your daily fueling needs for that session H ready to drink has 26 essential vitamins and minerals in every single bottle you're getting a whopping 175 health benefits plus it's made from natural ingredients like Topeka Sunfire seed coconut and more the best part it's the flavors there's eight crazy beautiful flavors iced coffee is what's in my backpack right at the moment you can get youu directly to your home all you got to do is head on over to the hu website hu.com Roan yeah but first let me be clear I wasn't refusing to do it I was [ __ ] scared of it it's scary I was too chicken to like be like yeah let's Che you up I mean it's just stupid and scary you know it's like I mean it's scary and I was I was so afraid so afraid and so I'm like I don't want to do that man like let's find another way to do it let's think about the system as a whole and let's think about ways that you can create an improvement in a variable such that the rest of the body stays at some level of homeostasis and that would protect our health and so yes I think it did but it wasn't hard it wasn't hard because there was so much good marketing around performance enhancing drugs at the time that the athletes were not paying attention to their real bottlenecks and to the real process of training and Recovery I think that there is this whole issue with marginal gains but marginal gains only works if you don't have any bottlenecks having an improvement Downstream doesn't matter if Upstream you're bottleneck by Relationships by your mental well-being by Sleep by not getting enough good training by a Fubar travel schedule right the the the amount of loow hanging fruit around performance was fast and abundant during that eror so you're not talking about a training change here you're talking about an entire Club wide cultural change with this stuff that's right that's right that's right um I'm talking about honesty I used to hear and when I first came in about what these guys were doing like five day blocks and this much volume blah blah but whenever I took an athlete aside and I was like look dude are you really doing that is that how much load you're really doing everyone fessed up like no man I can't do that just pretending I'm just like telling guys I'm doing that because that's what I'm supposed to be doing that's what the coach says I'm supposed to be doing everybody was lying on their training diaries about what they were doing and in an era where you can't track the like yeah for sure everybody was like you know lying and I remember getting the a bunch of the guys on Garen together before the 2008 season as we were preparing for the Juro and then the Tor of France and I just sat them down in a room and I said look I I know nothing about how to get you guys ready for this like I'm totally ignorant I'm totally at a loss but I'm good at synthesizing information and I would love to hear in this room you know we have you know 20 years of doing the tor France between all of you what is needed to be successful at the tour and when I started listening to everybody and we started being honest with each other about the training schemas for example with training we learned that for the most part we couldn't go hard for more than two days maybe three days before we needed a day off and that's not just Riders that's also staff right so we're like all right we're g to do two days on one day off and I'm like how long can we keep this up and it comes out well we could probably keep this up for two weeks okay two days on one day off for two weeks before we all take a week where we're just chilling and then let's repeat the process let's do what's sustainable and when we started doing that that's when the athletes started getting better and stronger because we were you know in balance and the human body wants to adapt the human body wants to get better just needs to be stressed and incremental and agressive way so applying some logic to the situation and then trying to progress to a point where we could understand what are the actual demands of the tour how many KJS are we doing on average and is our rolling history of average coming into the tour equivalent to that are we within two standard deviations in training load to what we're going to experience at the tour if not then we don't have more than a two% chance of finishing this thing so let's give ourselves some probability here right just look at it in a super simple way um you approached it very different than other physiologist at the time what gave you that unique lens because you're coming in and you're viewing this problem but instead of viewing it through the same lens that physiologists have viewed it since we began cycling where they had these huge training loads they had this idea of going out training six seven hour training routs and coming back in the door like eating is cheating like dead falling in the door they didn't care about the adaptation they cared about the process of logging training miles what gave you that new lens to view all this differently well I think that um from my perspective it wasn't a new lens it was just my lens and it was a lens informed by things like Collegiate cycling and it was a lens informed by being educated and having statistics you know there were only three College grads on the entire phon act Squad right like the who are we you know like you know like education matters and even just having a fundamental understanding of statistics for example or having growing up in a race environment with coaches who understood things like specificity and progression and you know how to quantify trading load is time times intensity equals work and keeping things very simple all of a sudden by just being myself I was different in that environment because of how I was raised in the sport now I was never at a high level in the sport but the way that I thought about solving problems was different and what I suddenly realized was that me having experienced a tour I'd never even ridden a pro race in my life right but me understanding how to solve a problem and me being curious and me being approachable so that a were vulnerable enough to share what they knew with me the approach of synthesizing information to solve a problem I think is a very very basic one but what gets in the way of that is too much tradition and too much ego I believe in culture I believe in Tradition I believe in an ethnocentric way of doing things but you also have to believe in progression and progress and so I think a combination of a very American as well as an educated mindset as well as ignorance allowed me to syn EMP iiz what I was listening to and hearing into new solutions that were based off of what writers were telling me not what I was telling writers what Bridges the gap between those two worlds is trust voters and the upper management must have had a lot of trust in you as an individual and the processes you were espousing to the squad yeah I I think trust takes time there is the relationship attachment model which says that in order to become friends with somebody you first have to really get to know them and getting to know somebody takes time after you get to know somebody for a period of time you begin to trust them and then that trust leads to some level of Reliance and that creates a feedback loop if you're then showing up in a reliable way more trust is imbued and then from that Reliance ultimately at some point comes a commitment and I think that because I had grown up in the sport and because I had known a guy like Jonathan since we were both 16 years old racing at Junior Nationals together you know I've known Dee Barry for example since we were both 16 there was a lot of knowing that led to trust that led to Reliance that led to Commitment was there a moment that you felt this new system was validated was it a stage win was it a performance from a reuer you know I I think that for me there were many little micro points of validation I think that that validation for me began even before the Garmin Squad was fully into effect this is with the Tia C team you know the young development teen and it was I think a lot of my relationship with Danny Pate that validated that I was on the right track I don't know if you remember Danny he wrode for he wrote for Sky he was a really great riter and so talented and he was someone who was always seen as not willing to listen on his own kind of schedule not coachable all these sort of things and when I remember walking into uh to you know they were were at maybe the milk Ross or something like this and I walked into his room to catch up and say hello and he was like Al it's time to do some education tell us about glycogen you know and he just spouted out some question and at that moment I knew that he really trusted me that he was the one wanting to know and wanting to be educated about something like muscle glycogen and how it worked and how it was you know uh stored and you know synthesized and branching enzyme and glucose molecules coming in structure and why you know the relationship to that and insulin sensitivity and exercise blah blah the whole rapit hole of what is gly which leads to this is why you have to eat after you finish a bike ride do you think Riders respond better when they they understand why they're doing something as opposed to just being told drink chocolate milk after training do you think if you sit them down and you talk about glycogen reuptake and fuel absorption Windows there's more Buy in into the act of ab having a recover 100% And that goes from everything from their nutrition all the way to the training load if I can show them how one day in their training statistically affects something three weeks later right whether it's a recovery day or a hard day of load and they can see it in context they know why that Training Day matters and why the time in a particular Zone matters they're committed to it they believe in it and they do it but they do it with a certain amount of intentionality around a bigger goal such that if we go out there they say Noe you're wrong I can't actually manifest that today we have to rethink this but I know that I have X number of days to tweak the training because they see the big picture then there is this higher level of not only trust but there's a higher level of improvisation for informed improvisation on a given day who was the best guy everything who was the best guys that taking a plan and just executing I don't think it's about the guys who were the best at taking a plan and executing I think it was the guys who were the best at taking a plan understanding the intention and then being able to change the plan in real time on a given day to make it better and the best guy I think uh in the world at doing that the most confident was probably Michael Barry interesting because we're fascinated in sport winners like you know pogacha you know spoke to Dan Martin on the podcast a couple of weeks ago you know another one of your writers and these guys are immortalized for their wins like you take Dan like his Le lomber gr sour stes you're immortalized but the gap between winning and second place it's so absolutely tiny but none of us ever remember the second place in these stages like right what is that X Factor like when you've been around so many reiders you've seen so many of these great Champions but you've also seen so many of the Riders who didn't quite materialize that potential can we like the French call it the or something like what is it yeah I call it fun I call it play I call it uh those things because those athletes who were wholly enjoying the process despite the Stress and Anxiety gets that gets to all of us but that fundamentally more times than not really had enjoyment those were the guys who when talented had long-term success because they weren't grading themselves on one outcome they were grading themselves on many different outcomes and so they could leave a race having lost while frustrated at the loss equally proud and happy about all the other things that went right but isn't that a great analysis for all of us to take into our lives about balance because if yeah i' use that analogy of a ship if you have a ship and you have one compartment and it starts to take on water the ship quickly loses buoyancy and it'll sink if you're a ship with multiple self-contained buoyant compartments your work life can be going quite bad and it's not like you're you have a bad life because your relationship is still going well your sport is still going well your spirituality is still going well your link with your community is still going well yeah and these different um I guess buoys can hold us up at different times when something else isn't working that same you know analogy works with the people in our lives and how we hold one another up because none of us are going to be good on any given day but as a whole hopefully that we can all make progress together and this is where teams and you know that balance of having self-reliance and ownership ironically is also knowing when you need to ask for help let's take a little bit of a right turn because you've built you know one of the defining companies in Sports Nutrition in scratch Labs what do you make of the modern state of cycl and nutrition because it's changed a lot in the last 10 years we're seeing amateurs now trying to push 120 140 grams of carbs per hour what do you make of that Evolution and is it all positive yeah I think it's positive in so much that the more that athletes consume the better they're brains work and maybe that a lot of this nutrition is not about fueling muscles but it's um unlocking the governor that is our central nervous system and whenever our brain feels like it's in danger and hypoglycemia is certainly one of those uh cases so is heat stress um so is this excessive buildup of you know say lactic acid it may not be that fatigue is all peripherally mediated there may be a lot of central mechanisms to fatigue and if we're more aware in a given time and point it's not that that you know it's anything more than we've got better brains in sport right and that's what allows us to push harder uh I love it I I I love that you know we're getting away from this idea of having to maximize power to weight especially in the midst of racing now that still may happen in a training block or a training phase as a are trying to hit the razor's edge of performance but I think that I'm even seeing this trend right now where athletes understand that when they're going through a training block that they adapt better when they are a little heavier to that training block and then the only time that they can really make weight is when they're recovering and resting yeah the point you have on the brain is super interesting and even anecdotally I wrote the mountain bike last weekend on a quite a technical trial I hadn't ridden before so I feel so bad on it because I just couldn't get my hands off the bars I hadn't got the skills and I noticed on like the fourth or fifth lap on this my decision making was gone like muscularly fatigued I didn't feel that bad but my decision making like a gap that I could get through no problems on lap one I'm like clipping shoulders going through these trees and everything it was bad yeah yeah it's bad yeah so you know I think that it it's not only that athletes are better informed but their whole teams and their organizations are better informed in a way that helps logistically execute this stuff because it's not easy to do the logistics of feeding in the middle of a bike race especially when you get to more technical Ravel mountain bike related uh things so like you know marathon is going to be very different than say the Olympic bike races what's the interaction between fueling with carbohydrates and hydration levels I'm thinking even on the bike and off the bike is there effect on our hunger levels on grenland when we're less than optimally hydrated hey Ro man excuse the short Interruption I love riding the bike but on account of being so busy with the podcast at the moment I'm now what's called a time crunch Rider I never thought i' see today but I have a tool I'm using what bike to keep myself sharp and on point with specific sessions to maximize that available training time I have a what bike Adam right here in the recording studio beside me and when I have an hour in between interviews I jump on it's removing all the friction points from me there's no more 10 minute setup unfolding legs banging my knees off stuff getting my hands dirty usual connection issues it just works every single time the atom's perfect for virtual racing as well because it has crisp gear changes it has 1% accuracy and it has Max gradient capability of up to 25% if you're looking for an indoor trainer I honestly couldn't recommend this any higher I've been using a w bike since 2013 hly it's the last indoor trainer that you're ever going to need if you head on over to W bike.com now and you use code roadman 10 that's r o a d m n t n and that's going to get you 10% off your W bike I don't know maybe I'm not well informed there but I do know that there is there are three fundamental things that we're always trying to get right we're trying to get the water right we're trying to get the amount of sodium right we trying to get the amount of carbohydrate right carbohydrate is dependent upon the energy expenditure and whether it's cold or hot energy expenditures are probably similar and so let's just say that carbohydrate amount stays the same but it's carbohydrate amount stays the same the water and the sodium need goes up or down depending upon the temperature and so now the concentration of carbohydrate changes because we might need more more water and more sodium when it's hot out we might need less water and sodium when it's cooler out and so what I've kind of taken to doing is this is no matter what type of liquid an athlete is consuming we hold the concentration of sodium the same and that needs to be equivalent to the amount of sodium that they lose in their sweat easy and that helps to regulate then thirst mechanism if you get the sodium if you know the sodium sweat and you get the sodium concentration right and whatever they drink then thirst becomes a really really good mechanism for maintaining both electrolyte balance as well as water balance when you don't get it right say you're just drinking plain water your thirst mechanism will first and formost maintain electrolyte balance over water balance because there's not as much salt in the system your thirst mechanism will by de facto get you to stop drinking once there is sodium balance in your blood you place enough water to your bra the sodium concentration back but it will stop you from drinking up to the amount of water you've lost because there's not as much salt in the pool so if you add more salt back then your thirst will continue to drive up and now you're in water balance and an electrolyte balance so this old school notion that thirst doesn't work for maintaining hydration is correct on one hand because it doesn't prioritize water balance but it's correct incorrect in another way in that your thirst mechanism is keeping you alive by not allowing you to become hyponic so as a amateur athlete how do do I or do listeners test that salt expenditure very simply you weigh yourself before and after exercise and if you're more than say 3% body weight loss instead of trying to force yourself to drink more the next day incrementally add more sodium to what you're drinking then go out and ride and drink thirst weigh yourself again and if you have lost less water weight you're on track and keep on increasing that increment into a point where you're not losing say more than 2% of your body weight so so what would your starting point be for sodium content and then what increments would you go up in my starting point would probably be you know you see a range in across the population as low as 400 milligrams of sodium per liter to as high as 2,000 so maybe start at 400 and go up by 200 milligram increments and most people will fall somewhere between 800 and a th000 but some people might not actually get to the right level until they hit 1,600 or 1,800 milligrams of sodium per liter of fluid consumed so very very simple experiment and because there is so much variability there's not not a one- siiz fits-all in fact if you were to look at the you know the the the the genotypic traits and the phenotypic traits that are most variable across the human species sodium sweat both at the genotypic level with the cf1 gene set which is what controls sodium sweat as well as the amount of salt that we end up seeing lost by different human beings is amongst the top three most variable things more variable than you know eye color height body size shape Etc and just finishing up be awesome to get your thoughts on the current state of cycling what are you what are you thinking at the moment of the I suppose the the incessant Innovation almost is it at a point where you think there's got to be a cap on it soon or we're going to have to slow down on Innovation around I'm thinking like Tire Tech has changed so much in the last few years drive train efficiency Gams aerodynamic Gams yeah is there more big gains to come or have we had most of the big exploration of these gains I think they're going to be more big gains I mean even when I think about myself and I think about all the things I want to learn the list is so long that I don't have enough time to explore all the Innovation I want I think the Innovation is really good but I think that innovation has to have certain aims and the the the the the singular priority that I put together is safety um I want the athletes not just to go faster or to get more out of their bodies I want them to be safer yeah and any Innovation that is geared around rer safety and health I think is a positive one and so Innovation doesn't just have to be about going faster Innovation can also be about the safety and care of the athletes just like the biological passport was an important innovation in that light um I worry however when Innovation becomes economically unfeasible for those people who were interested do the sport as a form of health and wellness and as a way to maybe test the waters around competition well that's what I hate at the moment I hate that a kid thinks that he needs to spend 10 15,000 dollar to get into the sport like Dan Martin said he he rode his first world championships on a bike that cost 900 Euro like you can't do.

Innovation, bottlenecks, and closing thoughts

Yeah yeah there's a lot of innovation that can be taught in terms of training process in terms of I mean even your podcast is an important innovation in that you were talking about the about health and happiness which is fundamental to Performance if you don't get that right you're never going to be your best so your format of discussion is an innovation one that is you know available to to those interested in becoming better so we don't have to just see Innovation as a more expensive bike frame or Tire um you know we can see it as many many other things and this is a you know pluralistic environment where you have to have many many different things right we somehow focus on the most expensive marginal gains while not paying attention as I said earlier to the real bottlenecks in one's life and what I can clearly tell you is that for most of the athletes I work with solving the bottlenecks are not that expensive they just require conversation humility a level of vulnerability and some smarts I love that I think that's a great place to to leave this conversation because it's a nice summary of everything we've talked about that there's no quick fixes and the big thing to prioritize is that health and happiness and it ends up being the big Domino that triggers some great and productive Downstream effects that's right that's right yeah it's just a bike go ride it have some fun you know feel yourself and to quote Rainer Maria Ry you know let everything happen you beauty and Terror no feeling is final Al it's been an honor thank you if you enjoyed this conversation please click up here there's another video I know that you're absolutely going to love And subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any of our amazing upcoming guests

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What did Team Garmin do differently to compete clean after the Armstrong era?+

Team Garmin, with Dr Allen Lim as team physiologist, refused doping as a performance tool and instead invested heavily in sports science, hydration strategies, fuelling protocols, and aerodynamic gains. Lim argues that removing pharmacology as an option forced the team to innovate in areas that had been largely ignored during the doping era. That approach directly contributed to the founding of Skratch Labs and a broader shift in how professional cycling approached athlete nutrition.

How did the Armstrong doping scandal change professional cycling?+

The scandal exposed a deeply coercive environment in which doping was treated as a baseline requirement rather than a choice, as Dr Allen Lim describes it, an internal arms race that defined team culture. In the years that followed, anti-doping enforcement tightened, team structures changed, and physiologists like Lim gained more influence over performance decisions. The shift created space for legitimate scientific progress in training, nutrition, and equipment to become the primary drivers of competitive performance.

Who is Dr Allen Lim and what is he known for in cycling?+

Dr Allen Lim is a sports physiologist who worked with Team Garmin-Sharp during professional cycling's post-Armstrong rebuilding period. He is best known for his applied research into athlete nutrition and hydration, which eventually led him to co-found Skratch Labs, a sports nutrition company. He is widely credited with helping shift professional cycling's performance culture away from pharmacology and towards evidence-based sports science.

What is Skratch Labs and why was it founded?+

Skratch Labs is a sports nutrition brand co-founded by Dr Allen Lim after his time working with professional cycling teams. It was created because Lim found that commercially available sports drinks and foods were poorly formulated for the real demands of elite endurance sport. The products are built around whole-food principles and a focus on osmolality and palatability, drawing directly from the fuelling strategies Lim developed inside the peloton.

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Key Takeaways

Stop lying about training. The breakthrough at Garmin came when Dr Lim got riders to admit they weren't actually doing the huge training volumes they claimed—honesty about real capacity allowed them to build sustainable, effective programs.

Broaden how you measure success. Athletes who graded themselves on multiple outcomes (camaraderie, experience, process, integrity) rather than just wins had longer careers and handled losses better.

Find your real bottlenecks, not expensive marginal gains. Most performance improvements come from sleep, relationships, mental health, and honest conversation—not new bike frames or gear costing thousands.

Understand the 'why' behind your training. When riders understood glycogen repletion, sodium losses, and training load consequences, they followed plans with intentionality and adapted them intelligently on race day.

Salt sweat is highly individual. Test your sodium loss by weighing yourself before and after rides, then incrementally add sodium (starting 400-600mg/L) until you're losing less than 2% body weight.

Innovation should prioritize safety and accessibility, not just speed. The most important innovations solve real problems for regular athletes—knowledge sharing, training principles, nutrition science—not expensive equipment.

Expert Quotes

"Do you feel cheated? Any athlete who answers yes to that question is an athlete who is probably willing to dope. You have all these people on a pulpit saying this is wrong, this is immoral, I'm being cheated—ah, I'm a victim—and it's all of those victims who then become perpetrators."

"The complexity of that situation in hindsight is that it wasn't simply about one person but about an apparatus. There was no way that individual could burn the whole thing down by telling the truth."

"It's not only that athletes are better informed but their whole teams and their organizations are better informed. And solving the bottlenecks are not that expensive—they just require conversation, humility, a level of vulnerability and some smarts."

KEY QUOTES

“I always started with athletes with kind of a simple question on this issue do you feel cheated do you feel cheated any athlete who answers yes to that question is an athlete who is probably willing to dope how ironic is that right you have all these people on a Pulpit saying this is wrong this is immoral I'm being cheated ah I'm a victim and it's all of those victims who then become perpetrators”
Dr Alan Lim — Team physiologist, Garmin cycling team

“we learned that for the most part we couldn't go hard for more than two days maybe three days before we needed a day off and that's not just Riders that's also staff right so we're like all right we're g to do two days on one day off and I'm like how long can we keep this up and it comes out well we could probably keep this up for two weeks okay two days on one day off for two weeks before we all take a week where we're just chilling”
Dr Alan Lim — Team physiologist, Garmin cycling team

“what I saw when I first came into the sport which was the scariest thing for me was I saw a lot of illness I saw sick kids either mentally unwell or physically unwell because of all the side effects associated with these drugs if you believe that drugs make us better and healthier then everyone in society would be bought into the promise of pharmaceuticals and we would all be shooting up right now in OIC”
Dr Alan Lim — Team physiologist, Garmin cycling team

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What did Team Garmin do differently to compete clean after the Armstrong era?+

How did the Armstrong doping scandal change professional cycling?+

Who is Dr Allen Lim and what is he known for in cycling?+

What is Skratch Labs and why was it founded?+

THE UNTOLD STORY OF CYCLING’S REBIRTH AFTER ARMSTRONG | DR LIM

Key Takeaways

Expert Quotes

KEY QUOTES

Introducing Dr Alan Lim

Innovation, bottlenecks, and closing thoughts

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

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THE UNTOLD STORY OF CYCLING’S REBIRTH AFTER ARMSTRONG | DR LIM

Key Takeaways

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Innovation, bottlenecks, and closing thoughts

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THE UNTOLD STORY OF CYCLING’S REBIRTH AFTER ARMSTRONG | DR LIM

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2.Innovation, bottlenecks, and closing thoughts

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THE UNTOLD STORY OF CYCLING’S REBIRTH AFTER ARMSTRONG | DR LIM

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Introducing Dr Alan Lim

Innovation, bottlenecks, and closing thoughts

Introducing Dr Alan Lim

Innovation, bottlenecks, and closing thoughts