Mega live today where we talk about about Winter training tips & 5 reasons you're not climbing fast.
If you want to check out our brand new Free Roadman Community you can join to check out nutrtion masterclass at www.skool.com/roadman
Listen on
Mega live today where we talk about about Winter training tips & 5 reasons you're not climbing fast.
If you want to check out our brand new Free Roadman Community you can join to check out nutrtion masterclass at www.skool.com/roadman
Live on YouTube. Can I say it? Okay. So, for anyone on Facebook, you're just with me for the moment. The plan is we are going to do quite a long live a mega live where I'm going to talk about training, winter training, winter training secrets. We're actually going to try something kind of different today where why this is going to be a long live. I'm going to batch record all my podcast content for next week live in one go today. So, you'll kind of get to see behind the scenes of what this production process looks like. It's not glossy. It's not slick. There's going to be loads of stupid outtakes where I'm going to say the wrong thing. Wes is going to mess up cameras and he's going to have to come in front of screen and we're going to have to move stuff. I'm going to do ads. I'm going to do intros for podcasts. I'm going to do a long podcast h at the starting not long. It's going to be 10 15 minutes long where I'm going to talk about the secrets to winter training. and that's around dose, frequency, and duration. Then I'm gonna Sarah's going to join me in the studio and we're going to record a writer support episode. And the topic for that is going to be five fixable reasons you're not going uphill very fast. Then I've got a ad to do or a not an ad, but more of a public service announcement to do for our new community. We just launched a new free school community. Uh I'll tell you about that in a little bit. I'll briefly tell you about what it is now. You can check it out if you're interested. Just go to schools skol.com/roadman. Totally free. I just got really frustrated about like how I interacted with cycling. It just didn't seem like there was a home or a hub for talking about cycling. Twitter just has become increasingly politicized and just weird Grock videos taking people's clothes off. So, I wanted somewhere where we can talk about pro cycling and also somewhere that aggregates cool resources that we all need as a community. So, I wanted to build a free tool to give back to the community and that's what that is. So, I'll talk to you a little bit more about that in a while. I think the link for it in the description below somewhere and you can join it totally free in there at the moment. There's like a tire pressure calculator. There's a nutrition master class, a 14-day kickstart because who doesn't need that this time of year and a few other bits and pieces. In between the videos, I am going to answer some questions. So, if you have questions in either YouTube or Facebook, let me know. Are we live on YouTube, guys? Yes, we're live on YouTube. So, if you have questions, I'm going to check in at the end of the first video for questions. So, I'll get through all them then. But this is going to be our first ever Mega Live. You sure we're live on Facebook? Yeah. Or on Instagram? On YouTube? YouTube. Yes, I'm watching. Okay, Wes is watching. Oh yeah, we are. Yeah, perfect. So there's eight people watching along. Wes, so yeah, pop your I'm going to pull it up actually before I start into the first podcast. I'm going to pull it up on this stream. So if you pop questions you have into the live chat. Yeah, there's a live chat feature. I will get to the questions at the end of the first episode. So I'm going to slide this out of shot. Hopefully that's out of shot now. Where's that out of shot for? It's okay. Okay, so I'm going to do the first podcast episode is going to be the secret to winter training. And this will get edited and chopped up for Wes. And I'll do my best to try and get through this in one clean take, but I may make a mess of this and have to do it again. So this is like the little bit of a secret sauce look behind the scenes at how we make an episode like this. So this episode is called the secret to winter training. The secret to winter training, it's dose, frequency, and duration. It's not motivation because trust me, motivation will fade. And it's certainly not an AI plan or a training app that just delivers some new version of cookie cutter. Just please don't do that stuff. It's not even a winter of riding around in zone 2 all winter. Here's what actually trips most cyclists up. Because winter doesn't fail because people do too little. It fails because they stack too much unstructured work that feels easy, but it's never truly easy. They add hours when they can. They let endurance drift into moderate intensity, and they remove recovery weeks because nothing feels particularly hard. Fatigue slowly and quietly accumulates in the background. So, when the season actually arrives, the aerobic fitness looks fine, but the system is already carrying too much load. The scaffolding isn't really built. The body can ride, but it can't absorb the training that actually moves performance forward to the next level. So, if you give me like 10, 15 minutes, I'm going to give you an operating system for winter training that explains exactly how to apply the right stress often enough for long enough without breaking the system. You'll leave with knowing how to set your week up, how to adjust it when life hits as it invariably does, and why consistency beats those hero volume weeks every single time. I'm going to break this into a couple of acts. And the first act is why winter training fails most cyclists. Let me start with a rider you probably recognize because you might be him or I might have been him in the past. He's disciplined. He trains year round. I'm not talking about a beginner here. He knows what zone two is. He knows the physiological adaptations in each zone. He knows what polarized means. He even maybe has listened to some of my podcasts with Steven Sil or he watches Dylan Johnson or GCN videos. Maybe even has Trainer Road or some sort of training plan. And every winter he decides he's going to build this massive base. This is going to be the year. It's a big big winter where it's won. Those sort of phrases. And November looks great for him. If you click into his Straa, November's flawless. December, it it's actually probably looks even better because he stacked an Alfesta 500 in there. He stacks long rides on the weekend. He adds an extra spin midweek because it feels easy. And he tells himself, "It's only endurance riding. It's only endurance. I'm building a base." He thinks he's being sensible. Then January arrives. Sleep starts to fracture a little bit. He's not shattered, but he never really feels fresh anymore. Heart rate is a little higher on easy days. Heart rate variability is just dropping a little bit on the trends. Legs feel heavier on the climbs than they should. Then the first cracks appear. He skips a session, then another. Now he catches a cold. Or he keeps training through the fatigue and the cold because he's too scared to lose that fitness. And by February, he's fit still, but he's flat. He can ride, but he can't sharpen the knife anymore. And now we're getting into the part of the season where you need to sharpen the knife. Intensity feels like a threat that could bring this whole house of cards rattling down.
This is what winter failure looks like. It's not dramatic. It's a slow leak for motivated riders. And the first reason happens is that smart cyclists, well, they often do something that isn't very smart. They copy what they think works without seeing the full system behind it. They see pros that are riding big errors so they ride more. They see influencers in Instagram doing long steady rides in Jirona. So they go and do the same. They hear just build the aerobic base and they interpret that to add more hours wherever you can. But winter is not where you win by doing the most hours. This isn't a Straa contest. This is why they've they've gified the wrong things in Straa. Winter is where you win by staying absorbable. And I love that word. It's a word I first heard when I signed for a French team, observable. Because the purpose of winter training, it's not to create your peak. The purpose of the winter is to build a platform, a scaffolding, a framework that lets you tolerate high quality work later in the summer. Because if you're a busy athlete like me, riding longer happens more in the warmer months. You're meeting the friends for those harder group rides. You're doing like the roadman group. We do a Thursday chop. The races are in the summer months. It's where all the fun is. And if you load winter wrong, you raise fitness a little, but you lower that resilience an awful lot. And resilience is what decides your season. And by resilience, I mean your base, which allows you to absorb the training. Your body, which remains injuryfree, resistant to sickness, resistant to just those naggling nicks and knocks that you get when you're the opposite of it, when you're a brittle type rider. The second reason that winter fails is that endurance rides are treated like they're free. There's no cost. There's no consequences. They absolutely are not. Endurance training. Yes, it's lower intensity, but it is still a stress. It's a mechanical stress. It's a metabolic stress. It's an atonic atomic stress. It's a hormonal stress. It carries a cost that shows up when you stack it in with life. And that's the invisible part that most people miss. When you stack it in with life, you need to start looking at your total stress capacity. That's the ability to train and handle life stress cumulatively. Most amateur cyclists, they're not limited by how hard they can train, they're limited by how well they can recover. Pros don't just have more time to train, they have more capacity to recover because it is their job. You know, I can't remember who on the podcast was telling me a story about their wife came home and was giving them some stick for sitting down playing Xbox. She's like, "What are you doing?" And his response was, "I'm working." And it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but that's what they have. They have that bandwidth to be able to recover. Their life is set up to absorb that training. They structure their day to absorb that training. They fewer competing stressors than me or you do. Many of them are in warm climates. They're climates. They're not commuting in the dark. They're not juggling meetings and trying to be a decent partner or parent on four to six hours per night of sleep. So when you copy pro riders volume without pro rider recovery, you're not doing base. You're doing chronic fatigue management. The third reason winter fails is misapplied progression. Cyclists often progress winter by adding just duration. Longer rides, more hours, more days. That can work, but only if dose and frequency are controlled. If you simply add duration on top of week that's already full, well, you create a training low that feels fine for two weeks and then it totally collapses in the third and fourth week. This is the classic winter pattern that I see. You get these few hero weeks. Think that fest of 500 again followed by a recovery week that turns into two recovery weeks if we're honest at the start of January. followed by a restart, maybe a change of coach, and it just never gets that momentum going again. So the question is not how do I train harder this winter. The question is how do I apply stress in a way that I can repeat week after week, month after month without losing the ability to respond to training? And this is where dose, frequency, and duration come into play. Let's call this part act two, the real variables that matter. Because most conversations about winter training, they get stuck in intensity distribution. Should you go polarized? Should you go with some sweet spot work? How much strength and conditioning should you do? Should you do tempo in your base period? The problem is these debates that you see online raging all the time. They often ignore the bigger lever. And the bigger lever is not what you can do. It's how much, how often, and for how long you apply that stress. So, let me define these three variables for a second. Dose is the size of the stress you apply in a given session or a given day. Think of this as the punch. Frequency is how often you apply meaningful stress across the week. Think of this as how many punches I'm actually throwing. Now, duration is how long you can hold a given level of training stress across weeks and months before you change the load. Think of this as how long you can keep punching before you pause, shift, or reset. Winter success is getting those three things right for your life, your physiology, and your goals. Dose is not just intensity. Dose is total stress. And this is the part that a lot of amateurs miss because a three-hour endurance ride, it can be a bigger dose than a 1 hour, one and a half hour really difficult threshold session depending on a few things like your fitness, your fueling, and your recovery status. This is where cyclists misinterpret winter and they equate easy with low dose. But easy intensity, it doesn't automatically mean low dose. A low inensity ride can still be a high dose if it's long, if you're underfueled or if it includes a lot of surges like your weekend group ride or even, you know what, if it's in the cold, riding in the cold takes way more out of me during the winter. If you're sleepd deprived as well, or if you're just mentally fried from work. So dose is very context specific. A two-hour endurance ride might be perfect on a Saturday when you've slept well and life is chill and calm. You just finished your cold plunge and your meditation the night before. But that exact same ride on a Wednesday evening after a stressful day in work and battling rush hour traffic. That dose can tip you into a hole. Think of this as a practical example. Imagine you're training eight hours a week. I think that's a duration that a lot of us watching can kind of manage. If you do four sessions each, each session is roughly two hours on average. That's a high dose per session. It can work, but it requires strong recovery and careful execution. If you do six sessions, the average dose drops much more manageable, much more repeatable, less likely to require an optimized recovery setup. While winter training for most nonp pro cyclists is often about making dose small enough that you can recover quickly while still being meaningful enough to drive adaptations. Now, there's some trade-offs to this because higher dose sessions can be efficient. They can create a big stimulus.
They can build durability, drive fatigue, but they come with a longer recovery tail. If you cannot pay that recovery cost, and that's looking at your lifestyle, the dose just becomes a debt. Lower dose sessions are easier to absorb. They allow you to train more often, but if they're too small, they don't create that progression. they don't drive that adaptation. So, the art here is choosing a dose you can repeat. And that brings us into frequency. Frequency is the most underrated lever in my view in winter training because frequency is what builds consistency. And consistency is what builds aerobic development. Sailors work in a broader endurance literature. It keeps pointing back to the same idea. The aerobic system responds to repeated manageable stimulus over time, not occasional big hits followed by long recovery periods. Cyclists misinterpret frequency in two ways. First, they think more days always means better. It just doesn't. If the extra days reduce quality, reduce sleep, or increase stress, that can totally backfire. The second problem I see with this is a lot of riders think that frequency is about just riding days, but frequency is really about stress exposure. You can have frequency without overload if every day becomes medium hard. And that's the winter trap, that medium hard, the moderately hard sessions. And I I see this time and time again over the winter where you never go deep enough, but you also never recover. The type of sessions that would fall into this kind of bucket for me is the tempo rides, group rides that are just a little bit too hard or with stronger riders where you have a lot of surges, just stuff that's slightly too hard, endurance sessions where it's always pushing you into that fat max. You end up stacking that medium stress every day. No single session kills you, but the week in totality when you zoom out is what kills you. Think about this hypothetical rider. He's training six hours a week, but he often does best with four to five rides. Why? Sorry. Live, isn't it? Something popped up on my screen. But he often does best with four to five rides. Why? But because you cram six hours into three rides, the dose is high. The recovery cost that we talked about is high. You might miss one ride and lose onethird of your entire week. 33% of your week disappears if you miss one ride with this setup. And you often end up riding too hard, especially if you've missed a session because you feel a pressure to make every single ride count. But if you spread the week across four or five rides, now each session dose drops. You can keep intensity controlled. You can recover between the sessions. You can keep momentum. Higher frequency. It it has so many benefits. I'm a huge fan of it because we get more swings at bat. We're out the door more, which means we're honing our skills better. We're just we're building that consistency. James Clear talks about this. Vote for the type of person you want to become. And that's what happens when you get out the door more. when you put your kid on more, when you press start on your bike computer more, you build that consistency. You vote for the type of person you are. But there's amazing aerobic signaling benefits as well. But higher frequency, it does increase logistical stress. I had a US tier one operator on the podcast and he talked to me about admin. And I've become a huge fan of this idea of admin because there is a toll to having to get out the door more. And the toll is real and you don't hear people talking about it. It's a toll in terms of the extra laundry you have to do. The extra time you have to spend because it takes time to get into your kit and out of your kit. You're going to end up training in the dark, in the cold, maybe you have indoor training fatigue. It increases the cost of being a cyclist. So the best frequency, it's not just the maximum frequency. It's the frequency that your life can support without adding more stress than training removes. So just use that kind of framework to think about it. Now duration is the third lever and this is the variable that almost nobody plans properly. Most cyclists change their winter training based on emotion. They feel good, they add some extra volume. They feel tired, they start to panic that the wheels are coming off. they feel bored, maybe they switch plans or switch to a new coach. Winter training needs longer time horizons. You need to zoom out. This general's tent approach where we need to zoom above it. Your aerobic adaptations, they don't care about your mood this week. It happens over longer time frames. They care about what you repeat for 12 weeks, 16 weeks. Duration is also where base gets misunderstood totally. Base is not the phase where nothing changes. Base is a phase where you build capacity in a controlled way. You keep the stress within a range you can absorb. You you stay in that range stable enough and long enough for adaptation to accumulate. Longer duration gives you these compounding benefits. You get better at the work. You accumulate time at the right zone at the right intensity. You build that durability. But longer duration also increases the risk of monotony of underreovery of stagnation. If you don't adjust the dose and recovery along the way in winter, most riders benefit from longer duration with small intelligent changes rather than consistent reinvention. I'm calling this part act three. And this is how these variables interact. And this bits really interesting. But before I jump into act three, I just want to talk about something that we've been quietly building in the background for the roadman cycling community. I got frustrated about 12 months ago because when I was chatting with world tour coaches, what I seen was world tour coaches were coaching their riders according to a framework. They built five steps, five pillars of performance. And they didn't look at any of these as negotiable. It's was training, strength and conditioning, nutrition, proper recovery protocols, and having a community or tribe. Now, that was built inside every coach, every conversation I had. If you go back on the podcast, that's a reoccurring theme. It's a golden thread that runs through whether you're talking with Olaf Buu from Uno X, Dan Lurang from Bora Hansrove, or Christian Shroud from Jake Olua. I got this golden thread team running through them all, but I got increasingly frustrated when I see an amateur riders and they just didn't have this. They had maybe one or two of these pillars. So, I didn't want to build this, but I also want to serve the community. So, in the last 12 months, I've been quietly building this in the background. A system that includes coaching, strength and conditioning, recovery protocols, worldclass nutrition, and community. And it's finally here. We opened it up a few days ago and it's actually almost sold out. We've had an application process, but this is kind of my call to you if you want to skip the application process if you're ready to get going. It's not a free community. It's $195, sorry, $195 per month to jump into this. But if you are ready to skip the application process, if you put me an email on Anthony Nyromancycling.com, you're going to skip the queue and I can get you started in there today. We're going to cap it out once the community hits 100 people. So, I think there's about 20 25 slots left.
Let me get back to the video because here's the most important point in this entire video. Dose, frequency, and duration. These aren't separate knobs. They are linked. And if you increase dose, you usually need to decrease frequency or shorten duration. If you increase frequency, you usually need to decrease dose or increase recovery. If you extend the duration, you must make sure dose and frequency are sustainable. And this is where winter training becomes simple in a really good way. You stop asking what's the perfect workout? What's the perfect session? Maybe the most common DM I get. You stop asking that question and you start asking what's the combination of stress that I can repeat for the next 16 weeks and let me make a con let me make this really concrete for you because if you love long weekend rides that's fine but the weekend ride is a big dose the recovery tale is long so you can't also stack high frequency medium hard sessions midweek and expect to stay fresh all winter if you're time crunched and you can only ride four days your frequency is lower. That means that means that each session has to carry more of your weekly load dose goes up. That increases the recovery cost. So you must control intensity and protect recovery or you'll drift into this medium hard trap that's just so common. This is also why more is not always the way and that sometimes less can actually be the move because winter it's not just about what you can survive, what you can tolerate for the winter. It's about what you can absorb. And it's back to that word again, absorb. Because a winter with slightly less training stress, consistently applied, often produces a much better spring than a winter with really impressive weeks that look great on Strava, but you can't sustain. Consistency beats these hero weeks every time because adaptation isn't linear. Fitness gains come from repeated exposures, not these isolated achievements. And if you want a simple test, ask yourself this. Could I repeat the week that I'm doing right now with minor progression and overload for the next six weeks without needing this mammoth rescue recovery week? And if the answer is no, the week is not a good winter week. It's this sort of ego-built week built for straa comparisons. Now, let's take a second to talk about how to actually build this winter training framework. Act four, we're calling this, and this is like the practical part of it because I'm going to give you two frameworks based on weekly errors that I think are quite common. We'll say a six-hour framework and then an 8 to 10 hour framework. And these aren't rigid plans and this, you know, this is not going to plan out your whole winter for you, but it's just it's a fun way to illustrate what we're talking about. These are maybe think of them like templates that you can adjust using those three variables if you go back and watch this video and examine those closely again. And When I mention intensities like the real focus is I will mention intensities but the real focus here is on controlling stress. So let's talk about that sixhour per week. The biggest mistake I see at sixhour per week is this idea of making every ride count because when you try to make every ride count you make every ride too hard. At six hours, you win by protecting low intensity work, keeping doses manageable, and sprinkling in just enough intensity to keep the system awake. Frequency, I would honestly target four to five rides per week. Why? Because it lowers the dose per session, and it improves consistency. So, a sample week might look like two endurance rides, that's 60 to 75 minutes. Truly easy endurance rides, nothing above zone two. Don't let them drift into tempo. These are aerobic maintenance and they're going to support recovery as well. One quality session 60 to 75 minutes where you touch something above endurance. And this could be short threshold intervals, control sweet spot, or even V2 micro bursts depending on your history. In early winter, it's often better to keep this controlled, not maximum efforts. One longer endurance ride, two to two and a half hours plus, needs to be steady. It needs to be fueled. It needs to be managing that intensity. and that optional fifth ride of 45 to 60 minutes really easy where your recovery ride. Maybe you're focusing on skills depending on fatigue. The long ride is your big dose. You got to make that clean. You're not going out on a group ride for this. You also got to fuel this properly. You got to keep it steady. At six hours, you cannot build huge durability. I'm going to be totally honest with you. You're not going to build huge durability through the duration of these rides. So, you're going to have to try and build durability through frequency and consistency. The old magic of compounding. You're training the habit and that aerobic signaling, not chasing those one-off rides because you don't have time for them. And in terms of progression, I would progress this by adding small amounts of time to the long ride every two or three weeks or by adding a little work to the quality session, not by turning easy rides into tempo rides. And if you're watching this and you're over the age of 40 years, you probably do need to tweak this, especially if you have a stressful job or poor sleep. The winter move, the winter move for masters riders is often reduction. It's often subtraction and not addition. You want to try and create space to increase recovery a little bit to maintain that frequency. And that might mean two truly easy endurance rides, one moderate quality session and one long ride. That's not as long as you wish it was. Masters riders, they often don't lose by doing less. They lose by doing way too much and they just don't get to the start line fresh enough. Let me jump in and look at that second framework, that 8 to 10 hours a week. And this is the sweet spot for many of the serious amateurs watching. Enough volume to build real aerobic capacity, not so much that you're living like a professional athlete. I would target for frequency, five to six rides per week. Now you can spread stress across the week. Dose per session can be moderate. So you can include two quality touch points per week if you recover well. So a sample week might be two endurance rides of 60 to 90 minutes, easy and controlled. One tempo or sweet spot session, but structured, not a allout freefor-all, something like two by 20 minutes at a control temp or a low sweet spot like 88 to 91% of threshold depending on your phase and your goals. and then one higher intensity session, but not a death march. Early winter might be like short V2 work or some high cadence aerobic work or even some hill sprints with full recovery. The goal is that neuromuscular and aerobic stimulation, not to dig a huge hole. The endurance ride with this sort of time availability, you can stretch it a little bit longer. It can go to three, four hours, but again focusing on the same things, fueled and steady. You can add in an optional sixth recovery ride if you have time for it. But dose control is where you need to be thinking is what you need to be thinking about here. And this is where many riders drift into medium hard because they feel capable. The long ride becomes that group ride with the group that's just a bit too strong for you.
The tempo ride becomes a threshold session. The endurance ride becomes a fat max session. Suddenly every day has a little bit of bite in it. You must protect the easy days. If your easy days are not easy, you have no space for the quality hard rides and you have no space for adaptation. At 8 to 10 hours a week, you can build real fitness. You can build real durability. But durability comes from repeated work, not those occasional massive weeks that we talked about. A consistent threehour ride every weekend for 10 weeks beats doing fivehour rides for a couple of weeks followed by a couple of weeks off. How would I progress this? I'd progress it the same similar to the last way. I'd progress this gradually by increasing the long ride or slightly increasing the total weekly endurance time while keeping the same number of quality sessions or progress by improving execution. And that just means better fueling, better pacing, better recovery, better admin around the offike stuff rather than adding just load. And I I keep hammering home this point about the off the bike stuff because life stress really matters. Winter is where life stress is most underestimated in my opinion and life stress is the part of the equation that if you take nothing else from this video take this that training stress is not separate from life stress they add up if work is intense sleep is poor if your nervous system is already loaded the same training do becomes very costly so your winter operating system it needs a decision rule and here's one simple rule I would I would say you should try and incorporate into your winter. When life stress rises and be honest with this, reduce dose first, not frequency. Keep the habit, keep moving, but make the session shorter and easier. A practical example of this is you planned the 90-minute endurance ride, which you had a brutal day, boss is shouting at you, you slept badly. Do 45 minutes easy instead. Same frequency, lower dose, lower cost. Or maybe you've planned the structured tempo workout, but your rest and heart rate is up and your heart rate variability has dropped. You just feel flat. Well, just turn it into an endurance ride. Keep the duration if it's not too costly or shorten it. Save the quality for when you can actually absorb the quality. This isn't like you being weak or wussing out of this. This is experience. Winter training isn't a test of toughness, of manlyhood. It's a test of judgment. Like, why does any of this matter that I'm talking about today? because we care. We want to get return on our training investment. There's a huge opportunity cost to us riding the bike to leaving family and loved ones and missing promotions in work or deadlines. So, let's make the most out of our training. Like winter training, it sets your ceiling for the year. It doesn't set your base. That's why it's kind of a counterintuitive term. If winter training is mismanaged, you're still going to get fit, but you'll not have that scaffolding to push your ceiling into the spring. You'll always be protecting yourself from collapse. But if winter training is managed properly, you can arrive into the spring hungry. Your body's going to be responsive. You can handle blocks of intensity. You can stack quality. You can actually build form because you're already not carrying this hidden fatigue. This is why spring success is often locked in by January. Not because January has these magic workouts. Trust me, it doesn't. But because January is where the cost of your winter decisions start to show up. And if you're feeling that cost right now, it's not too late to do a U-turn out of this. If you overdosed in November and December, January does tend to expose it. If you get dose, frequency, and duration right, January feels stable. Definitely not effortless, just stable. And stability is what lets you build. So, what's the secret to winter training, I hear you ask? Well, it's not the perfect zone 2 ride. It's not copying the pro plan. It's not trusting our AI overlords. It's understanding that training stress and life stress must be dosed, repeated, and sustained intelligently. Choose a dose you can recover from quickly. Choose a frequency your life can support. Choose a duration long enough for adaptations to compound with recovery built in before the system breaks down. If you do that, winter stops being a grind. It becomes an investment that pays you back all season long. And here's the thought I want you to take into your next ride. When you're deciding whether to add more, do not ask, can I do this today? Can I actually get through this session? Ask, can I still do this six weeks from now and be better because of it? And that question is the difference between winter training that looks impressive and winter training that actually makes you fast come the spring. If you enjoyed this video and you got a lot of value for it, please do me a quick favor and press that subscribe button and the bell notification because we have some massive interviews coming up in the next couple of months, including an exclusive with Chris Fum, which you're going to love. And let me know in the comments what you're struggling with around your training. And if you are, as I said, really struggling with it and you want to put those five pillars together, pop me an email on anthony cycling.com and you can skip the queue to join our not done yet community. That's for people who are like the title sounds, not done yet, and you're ready to write that next chapter in your cycling story. Thanks for watching. Okay, folks, that was one of the podcast episodes. I'm going to get a quick drink and I'm going to dive into the laptop and I'm going to have a look and I'll go through some of the comments. H where's that iPod is about to die. You might plug in the battery pack into it or do I have the battery pack? Oh, you battery pack. Uh so I've got a couple of Let me double check what I have next to do. that uh next up I got some uh what have we got to do next? Sarah's going to come in and we're going to do five fixable reasons your climbing is slow. Uh, and before that, yes. So, I've got a really cool podcast episode coming up. Uh, be on YouTube, podcast, all the usual cool places that's coming up on I think it's tomorrow with Daryl Fitzgerald. Uh, Daryl Fitzgerald is in Science to Sport in Jerona. Really cool spot. We recorded the podcast live there with him. Science the sport coaches some of the best riders in the world. John Wakefield who's the senior coach in science to sport. He's also the head of performance at Bora Red Bull. So you can imagine a good chunk of the world's best riders are stepping through the door as a science to sport whether it's for bike fit or whether it's for coaching advice. So next up what I have to do is an intro for that episode which I actually forgot to do. So I'm going to do that now. And then I've got one, I think, short ad read to do. And then Sarah is going to join me for the five fixable reasons your cycling is slow. I'm just going to click into Facebook uh first and see if I have any comments coming in on Facebook that we should know how to check the comments coming in on Facebook.
We got too many comments coming in Facebook. If you're watching on Facebook, you can uh feel free to drop your uh comments in and uh I will get back to them. They're the same. If you're watching over on YouTube, uh drop your comments in and uh I will at the end of it I'll get back to them. U so right, we're going to do where I'm going to do the intro for the Daryl episode because I know you need that for tomorrow. So this episode is around how pros actually train. So, I'm going to start it off here. Bear with me. How do pro cyclists actually train? What exactly is the intensity, the frequency, and the duration? Getting your winter training right is the difference between flying in the summer and burning out by February. Ever looked at what the pros do in the winter and thought, I should be doing that, only to end up cooked, sick, or just feeling absolutely glued to the road. In this episode, I'm joined by Daryl Fitzgerald from Science to Sport, and we're going to strip back training to the three levers and the three lenses he looks at training through the ones that matter to you, and show you what the best riders do behind the scenes, how they build base, where the intensity really belongs, and why zone one is the secret weapon, and how hard Sorry, where's going to have to go take two on that? Now you see this what happens. Okay, so this is Daryl intro take two. How do pro cyclists actually train? Like what exactly is the intensity, frequency, and duration? Getting your winter training right is the difference between flying in the summer and burning out in February. Ever looked at pro riders and we're going take three. This can take me 10 times sometimes. How do pro cyclists actually train? What exactly is the intensity, the frequency, and the duration? Getting your winter training right? It's the difference between flying in the summer and burning out in February. If you've ever looked at pro cyclists and thought, I wonder what they do in the winter. Should I be doing that? And you end up copying it and then you're sick. then you're cooked or absolutely glued to the road. Well, in this episode, I'm joined by Daryl Fitzgerald from Science to Sport to strip back the tree levers that matter most and show you how the best riders in the world train behind the scenes, how they build base, where the intensity really belongs, why zone one training is a secret weapon, and how to train hard without breaking. and stay to the end of this podcast because the biggest mistake time crunch writers make will be revealed. Welcome to the Roadman podcast, Daryl Fitzgerald. Okay, and now before Sarah comes in. Uh, I have one we have an we have an episode coming with Chris Film, which is absolutely amazing. And I still can't believe we've an episode recorded and Wes almost has it edited with Chris F which is just insane to me where I sat down for almost two hours. But in that episode, we haven't fully built out this school community yet. This is the new community I was talking about to start. But in that episode, I want to include an ad to make people aware that we have this new community. If you want, you can go and check that new community out now. But this ad is going to be going into the Chris Froom episode. Uh, so here it is. Okay, just to add for the Chris Freom episode, Wes, before we continue with the Chris Freom episode, I wanted to just take a second to give you a quick heads up about something really cool I'm building. It's a free resource for the cycling community and I think you're going to love it. I've been increasingly frustrated with Twitter as the place I go to talk about cycling for the past while. There's just so much noise there and everybody's just pushing their politics on you. So, I wanted to build an alternative, a place where you can talk about all aspects of cycling regardless of your level. And I'm also going to stack this members area with free resources. Stuff that you need that the community needs that you ask for. So, to kick this off, I've added a 14-day kickstart meal plan into the community. I've added a tire pressure calculator and a nutrition master class that I recorded with Dr. David Dunn and Dr. Sam Impi, two of the leading experts in nutrition who work with a lot of the world tour riders. You can join this community absolutely free. It's takes you two seconds to join. I'm going to leave the link down below. All I ask for you to do is to be a good community member to uplift others around you and to give more than you take. If you want to join it, all you got to do is go to www.schoolsk.comroadman. The link for that is down below. Okay. And that's that's that. So, I'm going to take two seconds because I'm going to Sarah's waiting outside. I'm going to tell her we're ready for RER support. So, bear with me and we will get cracking on that. I also need to get my notes for our RER support episode. So, uh we are going to talk about five fixable reasons your climbing is slow. So, I'm looking forward to that one. Okay, so Sarah is joining me. Uh, so we're going to go through five fixable reasons your climbing is slow is the plan. So, how many times did it take you to do those ads? That wasn't too bad. Wasn't too bad. One of the intros took me a while cuz you've done a real bad job of writing it. Oh, no punctuation. I knew I'd somehow get the blame. Uh, before we do this, I need to do the intro for this uh episode into that camera as well. Um, so uh where I'll do the intro for this episode straight into this. If anyone's watching on Facebook, Wes has just died. I clear that Facebook. Okay. So, five fixable reasons you're climbing a slow. Is this aimed at me? Me, I think. Just the added pressure of live. People won't see this at home, but when it's edited, if I say something totally stupid or off, you know, Anony's like, "No, no, you can't say that." And we start again. So, no room for error here. No, no room for error. I wasn't going to do the intro into this camera and then me and Sarah get started with support. This has been like a mega block of podcast and I'm absolutely burnt out. Here are five fixable reasons your climbing is slow. You know the moment when the road tilts up, you look down at your head unit and it starts to show those little red gradients ahead and suddenly it feels like someone's after coming up behind you and they're dragging off the back of your saddle. That moment's absolutely no fun. You're not new to the bike. You train. You've done the hard work. And yet on the climb, you're watching wheels just drift away and thinking, "What am I missing?" Here's the good news. For most riders, it's not talent. It's not genetics. It's a handful of fixable mistakes. Small little leaks that add up to minutes on every meaningful ascent. In the next few minutes, we're going to walk you through five of the biggest culprits and give you strategies to fix them in a way you can actually apply this week.
And stick around to the end because the fifth one is the one most misunderstood and fixing it is often the fastest way to stop getting dropped on a climb without actually having to train more. Sarah, the authority on getting dropped on clims has joined me. I feel seen I'm not the only one who struggles with this. I mean, climbing is it's that moment. You kind of described it in the intro there. the moment when you see the that gap between the wheel in front of you just drifting further and further away that elastic band. There's not a climb in Ireland you haven't been dropped on. So true. I'll put my hands up. But you're going to help me with all that today, aren't you? H Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. There's I think climbing is misunderstood and this is going to help people a lot because there's two parts to climbing. There's the the physics and there's the physiology. side of climbing. So like on meaningful grades, yeah, you're fighting gravity and that's how many watts you can sustain. Like everyone wants to break climbing down to well there's only two variables, you know, weight and power. And that is true, but it's also like how effectively you spend those watts. That's like your budget for the week. Like there's many ways you can spend your budget for the week. You can go out and blow it in the bookies after 10 minutes of getting your wages or you can distribute it evenly across the week and pay your bills. So it kind of breaks down into two parts. It's that sustainable power that we talked about, what you can hold on the on the climb and that's your power to weight that everyone rattles on about. But there's also the climb execution and that's where I think the fixable mistakes can come in. How we approach the climb and you know I don't want to give away everything here, but this is things like pace and cadence, fuel and cooling. Like there's loads of stuff we can get into on this. Yeah. Because you are where you are with your weight at this very moment. So, why not use these tricks or hacks for one of a better word to, you know, help you get up those climbs a little bit quicker and maybe not get dropped or not get dropped as fast. So, okay, let's jump into the very first reason. The first one is there's a technical term for this and it's called WBAL, but there's a that's kind of a confusing term and I'm going to start shallow and then I'll go deep with this. I remember one of the first times we went cycling. We were down in Cork. You might remember it coming from my uncle's house heading back into Conale and there's a big steep hill on the way and you approached this like you didn't know what power meters were but this was maybe I don't know a twominut climb. You approached I'd say at 800 watts for the first six seconds and then 40 watts thereafter. So like we were just started dating so I was probably trying to show off a little bit. And can I also say I was really hung over that day. So you tried to go up like Alip, but it's the it's the distribution of your available resources over the duration of the climb. And that's what WBAL if any wants to really dig into this, I had a very technical podcast with the Catalon as you do their development coach Alex Wellelburn. We talked about what WBAL is. WBAL is effectively your battery for effort. So if you think about that client we talked about, that's a twominut effort. You have a twominut battery as well. So, it's the distribution of your resources over that 2 minutes. So, most people that I see that struggle on clims, yeah, maybe they can improve the power to weight, but we're going to take that as like parking it for this conversation. They're going to go a lot faster by just distributing that effort better over the climb. And this is often worse with people who pace off heart rate as well because heart rate lags behind effort. So you go, "Oh, I can sustain this heart rate for 20 minutes." But you're actually way above your sustainable W ball power, like your critical power, and you're dipping into reserves, and eventually, you know, the mathematical equation. I'll show you exactly where you're going to fall off the line. But this is, isn't this something that we see as well? You might be touching on it. Um, but you kind of get pulled into going at somebody else's pace. We've seen like I think Inos or Sky changed that, didn't they? where they pace, they work their own numbers going up a climb rather than climbing to feel. And I think when you're really struggling with climbs and you're not very good at pacing, that's a good thing to do, right? Do your own pacing. Like there's no point in me following you up, you know, if you're racing up a climb. I had to concentrate on my own effort. And in some cases, if there's not that much of a gap between the amount of power that two people can put out, but you shoot out of the traps really fast, but I pace it better, I could potentially beat you because you might fade halfway up or 3/4 the way up the climb. Yeah. Wiggins is a classic example of that. He used to ride the climb rather than ride against his rivals. And it's not very romantic for him used to do as well. It's not very romantic. It's like, how can I get from A being the bottom of the climb to B being the top of the climb in the fastest way possible? Well, I'm just going to distribute my effort almost linear over the top of it. Now, it doesn't always have to be a linear distribution. A negative split sometimes works for people where you try and ride the second half of the climb faster than the first half of the climb. But I think that really works well because it focuses the mind to not riding the first half of the climb too hard. Yeah. Which maybe gets you closer to a linear distribution. But some riders were actually calling for parameters to be banned for this reason back years ago. Like Vinceno Nebley said it was taking the romance out of climbing that Wiggins had to just ride this steady state all the way up. So I would work on that and I think you can work on that by just going out and practicing this. Like go out and do the same climb. Do it, you know, we'll call it instinctively ride it the first time just the pacing that you would normally do it at and then go out the next day and ride the same climb with this negative split strategy and I guarantee you go faster on the negative split day. Oh, that's really interesting. So, kind of do a little test, a little self. Trust me, bro. Trust me, bro. Okay. I absolutely love that. I think that's really really good advice. Okay. Um the next the next one's around kind of uh your engine which I want to talk about because you can sometimes it's a it's about the type of efforts that you have practiced in the run into this and your engine just can't sit at the right intensity long enough. Um, by that I mean like you could be sure, you could be good on these short little rollers and punchers.
Like you can do a two-minute climb, you can do a 5minute climb, you can do a seven-minute climb, but then there's a limit when you start going over 15 minutes or you know that 15 to 45 minute where we'll call them proper climbs. You the wheels start coming off. So if we look at your power distribution curve, you'll probably have good power and shorter durations. And I really see this as being a typical when I'm I'm looking at athletes files. If an athletees coming in, they've spent a lot of time on these indoor plans like using a trainer road or a Zift for example, which has this almost Netflixification of training where they feel like they need a lot of intensity thrown in to retain customers. People end up having very good power duration course for lower durations, but it's not that glamorous to go and do 45 50 minute intervals on an indoor trainer. So most people neglect this. So long climbs, they really reward something called high fractional utilization. And that's holding a high percentage of your aerobic capacity for a long time. And that's mostly driven by like mitochondrial density and function, capillarization, lactate production versus clearance, and this new term we've kind of heard of durability about durability. That this term has always been there. Just to go back to the lactate production versus clearance, we have a a really uh I hate seeing it on my uh my training plan every week over unders. And that's essentially what we're trying to train the body to do there, isn't it? Just be become a little bit more efficient at clearing lactate and then going again. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Hate that session. But you can build your I think the fix for this it's not quite as fast as the fix for pacing. But it's just to start thinking about your weekly training to match the demands of your weekly training to what you want to get good at. Like if you're going away to ride a Morca 312 or an attack the tour that you know has long climbs. Don't build your week around all these short efforts all the time. Make sure you're anchoring around stuff like sweet spot efforts which is like 88 to 91% the threshold. some maybe threshold efforts like the old school 2 by 20 type threshold efforts. So like a week you you could progress that as well where you're diving in instead of jumping in by two by 20 threshold which is quite hard. You might start it with like two or three 12 minute threshold efforts and then a week later it's two by 20 threshold efforts. A week later it's three by 15 minute threshold efforts and then week four you come into a dload load. Just going back to that durability piece I know it's kind of a new buzzword. It's the the the function has been there forever, but this word your ability seems to be popping up everywhere. Can you just talk a little bit around what it means? It's simplified. Like it's not a new idea concept. Yeah. It's when I had Vasilla Santoopoulos on the podcast from Estana. He talked about this and he's just like it's just a word for what we've always known that you need to be good later in rides. So durability is almost like if you see an athlete who can climb well because the climb's 10 minutes into the ride and then they fall apart four hours into the ride on the same climb. This would have happened and been vividly uh shown to me when I used to go and spend some of the summers in late doal. But we'd stay at the top of the doal because it was super cheap accommodation and we figured oh be amazing. We can ride it in the morning first thing like we can roll down and ride back up and we'll get a bit of a warm up and then we can ride it last thing in the evening. So sometimes we do that. We just stay at the top, roll down, you'd be freezing after rolling down. So instead of going into the valley cold, you'd ride a bit of climb again to warm up or maybe the whole climb again to warm up and you ride again at the end of the day, four or five hours later. And the power drop off and the time extra it took to climb at the end of the day was shocking because I had really bad durability. So that durability is that ability to produce the same effort after a certain amount of kilogjles. Yeah, I can't imagine riding Alto three times in a day. It it shouldn't have a massive drop off if you have some decent durability, but it's just a new word for something that we've always known, like you're meant to be good at the end of a an event, at the end of a race, because that's mainly what matters. Okay, the next thing that I can work on to improve my climbing speed. Actually, just before we jump into and continue with these, I just want to give a heads up about something really cool that we are building in the community. It's a free resource for the cycling community. And the reason is I've been increasingly frustrated with Twitter as a place where I used to love to go to talk about cycle on Twitter, but I'm just getting increasingly frustrated with how much noise there is there, the politics that's there all the time. So, we wanted to build something like an alternative to this, a place where you can go and talk about all aspects of cycling regardless of your level. And I'm also going to stack in a bunch of free resources in there, stuff that the community has asked for, and I'll continue to add that stuff in there. So, to kick this off, I've actually added in already like a 14-day kickstart meal plan, a tire pressure calculator, and a nutrition course that I recorded with Dr. David Dunn and Dr. Sam Impy, who are two of the leading nutritionists in the world tour. So, if anyone wants to join this new community, it's totally free and all the resources in there are totally free. All I ask you to do is to be a good community member, to uplift others, and to give more than you take inside the community. So, if you want to check that out, you can go to www.school. That's school spelled sk. That's how the cool kids spell it. SK school.com. Oh, I think the the the thing that sets, you know, the whole thing apart in there is the community. It's on it's on fire. Everybody just putting their questions in. We've got coaches in there answering them from technical kind of aspect and then we have people within the community who've also had similar issues come in and chime in with their you know with their problem solving. So before I let you continue to talk for a second I'm going to stop the dog barking background for keep show I think just let her in. Anthony. She's a diva. She's a Jack Russell. Yeah, she's a Jack Russell and she's a diva. Oh, hi. Hi, Trouble. Hi. Want to say hello to everyone? She's gone again. Okay. So, we're almost there. Are we into No, we're on number three. Okay. You ready? We're on number three. Okay. Did I miss one? Number three. Oh, yeah. You know, yeah. Okay. Okay. Let's jump into number three. Okay.
Number three is you're not prepared for the torque requirements of the climb or the gradient changes. And so, what this looks like or how it'll manifest itself to you on steep climbs when cadence starts to drop, as it inevitably does, your legs are start to feel like concrete. Like cardiovascularly you're fine, but your muscles give up on you. like your quads, your glutes, they fail first. And this actually is most visible on gravel climbs. They seem to amplify this because there's like a weird search for traction on rough surfaces and awkward torque demands that kind of amplify this. So, what power actually is, because we're all familiar with the term power, but power is torque multiplied by cadence. And steeper gradients Sorry folks, we have a dog coming in here. Sorry, you're going to pour out. Let's close the door. This is the beauty of live, isn't it? Okay. Where do you want me to start? On that way, start at the beginning. Okay. So, you're going to talk about torque again. Yeah. Okay. So, you introduce and Yeah. Okay. So number three to help me increase my climbing speed it's you misunderstand the demands of the climb and by that I mean you haven't understood that torque is different uh on steeper climbs and this is you see this happening quite a lot on gravel climbs because gravel climbs are so steep and they have this weird interaction of the surface is rough so it forces you into this awkward torque demand and you'll feel this manifesting itself as cardiovascularly you feel fine, your heart rate mightn't even be that bad, but you're like your exoskeleton's almost starting to give up. Your quads and your glutes are starting to fail first. And what's happening here is we're all familiar with the term power, but power is comprised of torque multiplied by cadence. So on steeper gradients, you'll often push towards higher torque demands at lower cadence. And that's unless you absolutely nail your gearing, which just sometimes isn't possible to nail your gearing. And higher torque recruits more muscle fibers that we're not used to. So it increases local muscular fatigue and it absolutely rips through glycogen as well. So, if you only ever train steady state regardless of the zone at your favorite cadence, you're going to lack that cadence range for when the gradients do really like the amount of time I spent in Badlands below like I would say 40 cadence was insane. I was just going to say I'd hate to see I should really check out my average cadence for on my Badlands ride because I'd say it was super super low. But we do know that when people even get fatigued, their cadence generally does drop, doesn't it? Well, for me, and I I know that this that's something that we worked on in my training for Badlands, you know, I did a lot of low cadence drills to kind of make sure that I had that leg strength because we knew it was going to happen. It's going to creep. I think the problem with badlands is you do things. I I you were really undergeeared. I was under gear for sure. I don't think we quite understood how steep the climbs are going to be. So that creates a low cadence demand, but also the load. You know, first time doing an event like that, I didn't fully anticipate how heavy the bike was going to be fully loaded with all the fuel. So when you the miss steep gradients, heavy bike, it's just heavy rider, bad gearing. Yeah. I think as well the way I usually describe for new people coming into the sport and you can see that they have a low cadence. Now, cadence is something that I've worked on, not just on hills, but in my, you know, cycling over the last couple years, and I'm slowly eating those numbers up from like an average of 70 72 when I first began to I think I'm up in the mid 80s now. That's been a really slow process, but the way I always look about look at it is if you have a high cadence, you're kind of using your lungs and your respiratory system to fuel your movement. Yeah, we're talking about almost the inverse of your problem. That's what I'm saying. If you're using your legs, if you're using low cadence, you're using your muscular system and your heart and your lungs can go forever and ever and ever. So, you were doing like years of unknowing strength training for bad. Exactly. Yeah. But your heart and lungs can go forever. I mean, they're constantly working around in the background. Yes. You get fatigued, but your leg strength and your muscles will burn out a lot easier. So, for me, that's just kind of like a way that I think about always trying to be in that nice higher cadence. Yeah. I think that kind of what you're talking about there feeds nicely into the fourth point which is around under fueling under hydration because there's when you do find yourself in those lower cadences now there's a glycemic demand at riding high intensities always but it seems like it's higher I must confirm this with like Sam Imp next time I have him on the podcast it feels like it's higher at lower cadences and on longer climbs this is a problem because when people are under pressure when they're riding at zone four they end up suboptimally fueling on the climb as Well, and if you're doing like there's long climbs like we rode alto the de Letras which is like a six-hour climb or something or longer. It's like 80 kilometers bottom to top and even some of the climbs in um Morca are long climbs as well. You could be climbing an hour on some of them. Uh what's the pig mayor is like a long long climb really really long. So you'll see the pattern for a lot of people when they fuel poorly on the climb is you start okay on the climb, but the climb starts to feel disproportionately harder regardless of grade the further up the climb you go and power's dropping off. Like if you look at the power file afterwards, power is dropping off as rate of perceived exertion is absolutely skyrocketing, heart rate's going up. And why that's happening is because at those sort of intensities, we rely heavily on carbohydrates and low glycogen. It's obviously going to reduce your sustainable power. It's going to reduce and it's going to increase your rate of perceived exertion on the climb. And then if you couple that with dehydration, it's just like it's a recipe for disaster because dehydration is reducing the plasma volume. And that's higher heart rate for the same work is going to be the consequence of that. So it's just none of it's good. But the good news is the fix is easy. Like even if you're not using anything like uh you know carb calculators and you just want to keep it basic, most riders will perform better on a 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour, especially if there's intensity sprinkled into that ride. But fueling like before the climb is what's going to matter for you. And aiming to hydrate well before the climb as well, like in that kind of 400 to 800 mil range in the time leading up to the climb. And cooling also helps like pouring bottles over your head, keeping your jersey unzipped. an absolute game changer. The cooling kind of aspect, just to go back to the fueling, I think if it's a a ride that you're doing every week, you know, in your club spin, I know exactly where to have a gel or um a couple of like a couple handfuls of Haribo on our Saturday spin.
Like I always even if it's not in my I have an alarm on my hammerhead that you know tells me to eat every half an hour and I usually stick to that rigidly but I this one spot even if I've already eaten 5 minutes before or 10 minutes before I will still eat at this moment because I'm not going to really get an opportunity while I'm trying to stay on the wheels or like push an effort to drink out of my bottle or have eat because that's going to put up you know my heart rate up as well when I'm eating. So the hammerhead again, even when we were doing Badlands, it tells you how far away the next climb is, which is an amazing feature. So you can kind of say, okay, my next climb is a kilometer away. So get the grub in now, and that's going to sustain me for for the climb. And um yeah, I just find that really good. Just like absolutely load yourself up with carbs before that really hard climb. That would be my advice. Caffeine. Caffeine's always your friend. Yeah, caffeine. I'm actually going to put a really cool post uh into the school uh community today about caffeine and why why it's so popular, how it works, and like the best times. Caffeine used to be banned. I know. Yeah. Yeah. People were using caffeine suppositories. There's amazing. Would you ever do that to not get dropped on the group ride? I would do anything to get not dropped on the group ride. But there's these receptors in your brain that make you feel fatigued and make you feel tired. And caffeine basically dulls down those receptors and that's why you feel like you've got this super high energy. So have a little look in school later and you'll see that that post about when, how, and uh why you would take caffeine. So interesting that we're finish up the fifth point of the fixable reasons with the one we almost can't avoid and it's what's per kilogram but with a slight twist on it because it's it's not the part you think. Like there is riders out there who are strong on the flat, you're strong on the on the group ride, but you're constantly just getting hammered on climbs and you're looking for that like like what's the lowest hanging fruit weight to go a little bit faster on the climb. It's obviously those four things we've talked about, but on those steady climbs like performance is there's no way of getting around. It's strongly tied to what's per weight. And that's like when I say weight, it's like rider plus kit plus bike everything. Total system weight. But a small reduction in mass like 1 kilogram. It definitely helps for sure. You're going to go uphill faster. But I think a better way to approach this is think the 1 kilogram lighter is not going to massively help you on the flat. Putting on a little bit of extra power, like a modest increase in your sustainable power is just going to help you all around. like it's going to help you disproportionately as a bike rider. And it's actually not that hard to do if you're at like a train at an unstructured level or your basic level. raising sustainable power is sorry folks I forgot what I thought started from is that hard to do. So raising your sustainable power isn't that hard to do, especially if you reverse engineer the demands of the type of climbs you're going to do. If you're going away to a Morca, if you're going away to a top tour, you kind of know what the climbs are. And then it's starting to I put out a good blog post yesterday on Facebook about how Mate Mor likes to deconstruct this training. And that's effectively it's breaking it down into its constituent parts. So you can start to reverse engineer and put a few of them into your training because sticking on or taking off like three four kilograms is amazing. But the crash diet often leaves you in that negative energy availability. And when you're in a negative energy availability, you can't fuel adaptation to train. And so a much easier way to get faster, it's actually just to create a quite a modest deficit with your diet. so you're not crash dieting and to focus on doubling down on trying to do some of those sessions that we talked about like sweet spot sessions, threshold sessions, stuff like that. Yeah, I think we do just become obsessed as cyclists with the whole weight thing, you know, even if I can't if I'm struggling to to lose weight, what if I spend 600 bucks on that carbon printed saddle that weighs like 40 grams? Oh, do that for sure. or you know, you know, all the kind of I've got titanium bottle cage bolts. Yes, I love them. That's steep. That's steep. But yeah, no, it's good to hear that you can kind of work on something else as as you said, like your power rather than just trying to lose a load of weight. Yeah. The goal isn't to be just as light as you possibly can. The goal is to be powerful for your weight and that needs training along with a slight weight loss. So, just to kind of wrap it up and wrap it all in the bowl before we finish off, like we talked about, I wanted to give you those five fixable reasons. So, there it's pacing is the first one, not going into it and whacking the base of the climb. It's sessions that match the demands of your climb. It's torque, cadence range, so you don't get trapped just grinding up it. It's fueling, hydration, cooling strategies for the climbs. And it's power to weight does matter, but focusing on the higher leveraged, you know, uh, gains you can get there rather than just chasing weight for weight's sake. And my challenge to listeners will kind of be to just pick one of these in the next 14 days. Maybe it's just pacing discipline or maybe it's adding to two interval sessions in a week or having the fueling targets on your rides. Try and take one of those and run with it for the next 14 days and just track that as your own little challenge. Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely going to try and get a little bit better at pacing and not get pulled into what everybody else is doing on the group spin and kind of ride my own right up the climb. Okay, folks. Let me know in the comments what you did choose for that little challenge for the next two weeks. Uh, thanks for watching. If you have a friend who can't climb for donuts, please share this with them and we're going to see you next day. Okay, I think that's a that's a wrap. I think that's everything for the live. That's Yep. That was a blast.
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