Welcome back. Today I have a chance to sit down with one of the greatest cycling coaches of all time, Mr. Joe Fel. Joe was seinal in my cycling journey. He was the author way back when of the cyclist training bible. Since then, he's gone on to define an entire genre. We sit down today for a fastmoving, hard-hitting interview where we will show you how to build your own training plan. We will show you timeless principles, what worked back then, periodization, how to use intensity, duration, and frequency across a training week, and show you what has changed over Joe's coaching career. It's my absolute honor to chat with Mr. Joe Fel. Pleasure to have legendary cycling coach Joe Fel back on the podcast. Joe, hi Anthony. How you doing? Is this our second time, third time, fourth time? I can't even remember at this point. Something like that. Something third third or fourth. I think you're right. Every time you're on, Joe, it's a wealth of knowledge. For anyone that hasn't heard the backstory, basically Joe's original book or original to me. I'm not sure it was your first publication, Cyclist Training Bible, was really what kicked off Cycling for me and my friends. And some of us went on to be pros and others just went on to be hobby cyclists and have a great relationship with the bike. But that book was so heavily formative in those years. We one copied a book. Sorry about that joke cuz we were so poor. We had it photocopied. We had it passed around. Every page had coffee stains and rabbit ears on it. It was It was a worn copy of Cyclist Training Bible. I'm actually probably due a new one at this point. I was very kind of you. I won't I won't tell my lawyer. It's uh it's all these years later, Joe, and I know you've the new book coming out, which congratulations about again, but you were you're widely credited in the industry as the coach who brought periodization concepts into mainstream cycling. Traditional periodization, as you taught it, then involved a base, a build, and a peak phase. Is that still valid all these years later? It is. Yeah, there have been some some small changes, but along the way. Um, but essentially that that is basically the way it's been for for decades now and continues to be that way. So, yeah, you're you're right. That's that's still still the way that athletes at all levels train and has been shown to be very effective. So, we keep on doing it. So, if an athlete has a goal or or maybe I'm starting in the wrong place, an athlete who's listening to this podcast now and they're thinking about setting up an annual training plan, what's their first step? First step is decide if there's a what the goal is. Where are we trying to achieve? That's always the starting point for planning is where are we going? if you don't have a a solid uh goal in mind, it's really difficult to do any kind of planning or preparation because you're just doing things at random and they have no purpose. So that that's always a starting place is what am I what am I trying to achieve here? If somebody only has I get that a lot of us listen to the podcast, we'll have a real specific goal. I want to finish unbound in a certain time. I want to win my age category in criterium. If I only have a goal that I can't really put my finger on what it is, I want to be faster. I want to be fitter. I want to be healthier. How do I approach building an annual training plan around something a little bit more less concrete? Right. Yeah. That that's more difficult. Uh the less concrete, the less detailed that the goal is, the more difficult it is to come up with a plan to prepare for it. So, when I'm coaching athletes, what I always want to know is exactly what are we trying to accomplish? And I'm I want to ask questions to to dig down to that point because if if it's vague, um training becomes vague and training doesn't have much purpose in that case. And so we don't really know where we're going and we're not sure what's important and it it just is it's kind of like a waste of time in many ways. It also tends to u cause the athlete to have low motivation if they don't really know exactly what there is what they're aiming for. you know, when I when I say what they're aiming for, I'm talking about an event that occurs on a given day and what your outcome of that event is is hope to be what are you trying to to achieve on that particular outcome. If you do all that, then we can really get very detailed. But if you don't do that, we're we're really kind of like just u uh shooting at clouds. There's not much we can do to really say what we're trying to accomplish. There's a scene in the children's uh book Alice in Wonderland where Alice asks the Mad Hatter, "Which way should I go?" And the rabbit says, "Well, it depends where you want to what where you want to go." He says, "Well, I don't know where I want to go." And the Mad Hatter replies, "Well, it doesn't matter which way you go then." I kind of think about training like that. If you don't know what you're training for, there's almost no correct training session to do this week or correct training load to do this month. That's true. Yeah, that's true. Um and but and this is always a challenge. I understand that it's sometimes difficult when you're maybe a year out, some cases more than a year out. I've got an athlete that I'm working with right now. We're talking about the end of the summer next year.
So that was the the adaptation each week. So it went from 14 hours to 16 hours to 18 hours and then a decompression week and then the next block might have went from 16 to 18 to 20 and a decompression block. It built like that. Do you still think about building these blocks in terms of step up in duration measured in errors or have you now moved to kilogjles because that seems to be getting more popular. It could be done either way. Kilogjles works very nicely, especially if you're a scientist or have a scientific leaning. Most athletes don't want to gather information about kilogjles because it's kind of vague. They like to gather information about hours. How many hours did I train? And since it's an obvious number that really means just as much as probably anything else you can do because it has more more we have more experience with the word hour than we do with the word kilogjle. Uh, but kilogjles is fine. If you want to train with by based on kilogjles, that's great. No problem at all. And I I've heard you talking about the idea of a 9-day training cycle for busy athletes. How does that work? Yeah, that that's one that um I I've I did develop several years ago about athletes, especially athletes who uh who are uh who need frequent rest. uh older athletes especially, you know, 50, 60, 70, 80 year olds uh probably need more rest than 20, 30, 40 year olds and they need to have rest more frequently. By training a nine-day pattern, what the athlete can do is they can do two days which are which are hard or long after weather, whatever time of the season we're in, and then a third day, which is very easy, or even a day off on the third day, and then go back to that pattern again. So we do three three-day periods like that. That becomes this nine-day pattern. And I typically have the athlete do most athletes will do that twice. So they wind up with 36 days or heck uh n 18 days and then we're going to take a rest break and maybe four or five days after that and then start all over again. It works really well physiologically. The problem is when it comes to lifestyle. Um the first time you have to do a 5 hour ride and it's a Monday morning, you're supposed to be at work at 8:00, it's not going to work out. So that that's the challenge with doing this. It works nicely for retired people because they they bas basically have employed people. Yeah. Try they can they can use their time in much more lenient ways. They can do what they want. But if you have to be someplace at a given time on a given day, it's not going to work out. So it really depends on the athletes lifestyle. I was chatting to Dr. Sam Impy. You might know him, but Sam uh advises through a app that he's built called Hexus, a lot of the World Tour teams now prescribed to both him and David Dunn's nutrition philosophy. And we've seen off the back of his 2016 study, I think it was, called fuel for the work required, we've seen a massive change in carbohydrate consumption for both proathletes and amateur athletes. I'm thinking about that first book that we keep referencing, Cyclist Training Bible, to your most recent book. Nutrition has obviously changed an awful lot in that period. But with regard to the kind of training plan we're building out here, what are the other big changes you've noticed over that span of I guess it's 20 years nearly. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's changed quite a bit. And and you're right, there's a lot going on right now with um for example, number of calories an athlete can take in. But I need to warn people that, you know, we're talking about what the pros are doing is gigantic calories. Um but they they didn't start off doing that. they kind of like built into that there's a an adaptation period the athlete has to go through before they can really do that without becoming sick at their stomach. Um and for most athletes we don't really need all that. Uh if you're if you're doing four and five hour um stage races, you know, daily stage races um that that's going that's that's something you really need to think about because it's going to be you need a lot of energy to come in during a race like that. If you're doing a one-hour criterium or two two and a half hour road race, don't worry about that. You're going to be fine just taking in what you've been doing in the past, more than likely using the old standards for for calories. So, also and what Sam was really keen to note for me is this is measured in absolute, but we use values like 120 grams of carbohydrates per hour, but it needs to be relative to your output. So like some of these guys, if you look at the front of the race at Unbound now, like a chatting with Alex Wild, I think he averaged close to 300 watts for 8 hours. If you're going out for an 8 hour ride, it's most likely that you're not, unless you're world tour rider, it's most likely you're not averaging 300 watts for your 8 hour ride, your fueling requirements aren't the same as his fueling requirements on an 8 hour ride because he's producing so much more power. There's a higher fueling requirement for that ride. No, no question about it. Exactly right. Yeah. The more the more powerful the athlete is, the more calories they need. The longer the event, the more calories the athlete needs. You combine both of those things, long and highly intense, the athletees going to need a lot of calories. And if you're not in that category, then this is something you don't need to be worried about.