So our job, and I've only realized this in the last few years since I got back to unbalanced training with all the other things, a huge job that we have, which I'm gonna talk about in another podcast, is mitigation of stress. How do we, that 95% that currently is our diet, our sleep, our relationships, our work, our social, all those things that make up to 95%, how we bring that 95% cortisol level down to 50% cortisol level. So when we add training back in, instead of getting a 5% bump, we can get a 50% bump. So that mitigation of stress is actually half of the equation that I never realized for a long time was so important. Today's podcast I want to focus a lot on the other side of that equation, not the mitigation of stress but the actual training principles themselves. As I said, I can't build a training plan for everyone today but what I'm going to talk to you about is principles that are evergreen regardless of what ability you're or what's the age of your cycling life cycle you're at. Is that a little pun on cycle, life cycle? Like that. Those things don't happen accidentally, folks that's a lot of advanced planning on my part. Number one numeral uno, goals. And I know if you're anything like me as soon as you hear the word goals you're always gloss over to white and you think this is some corporate nonsense bullshit but we really they're so so important for cycling I've been around so long and I've seen people trying to do without having a goal in place and it makes no sense if we don't know what we're shooting for what we're aiming for we don't know where to aim our energy. So I remember I had an old coach and he said to me at the start of the winter if we move if we had a beer again next winter at the same time what has to happen in the season for you to feel like this was the best season ever. This you know be realistic in it as well I'm not going to go into this stupid like corporate smart goals but be realistic with the goal you know your goal isn't gonna isn't win the Tour de France unless you're currently at that level so what is the the goal, write it down, put it somewhere visible, tell somebody, review it. There's some crazy Mr. Miyagi paint the fence shit going on there, write it down, make it visible, tell somebody, review it. Pause that, rewind it, listen to that sequence. I'm not going to dive into them, but they're important. Now, depending on what your goal is, if your goal is say you're currently asked 200 functional threshold power, so you've gone, you've done a 20 minute test with your power meter, and you've got 200 watts. And your goal is to get at 280 watts, we'll say, next May. What you can now do is you can break it down and we call them KPOs, key performance indicators. So where would you like your FTP to be in December, February, April before leading into May. We have that procrastination podcast. If you haven't listened to that one, that was earlier in the week, go back and have a listen to that. And I spoke about this continuum from on one end of the continuum, we have something that's boring on the other end of the continuum, we have something that's overwhelming. Goals of the exact time. If we have a gold boring non-inspiring it's not going to get us out of bed. If we have a gold overwhelming likewise it's not going to get us out of bed. We need one that's in the sweet spot. The challenge is enough to not be boring but it's conservative enough to not be overwhelming and that's the challenge and that often the best way I find to do this is sit down with a training partner, someone a teammate or a coach if you have one and talk to them about okay these are the golds I'm thinking about what do you think it is? Are these achievable? Are these slightly stretched without being overwhelmed? That's the perfect one. Next we want to move on to an analysis of the goals. So if your goal is right the whole route next year, now we need to break down that goal and say, okay, it's five days. What's the demands of these five days? It's endurance, it's climbing, yada yada, snap them down, break it into smaller pieces and then cross match this with our current strengths. So our current strengths and weaknesses, we can do things like power profiles to determine strengths and weaknesses. But we need to know if what's our endurance like? Have we ever ridden two three days back to back? Can we climb? Because now we need we know what the demands of the event are the whole route. We need to figure out how does that match up? Where's our weaknesses? Where is the chink in our armor? What's going to stop us completing our challenge? What's going to stop us winning the whole route? Or what's going to stop us completing the whole route? Is it endurance?
After the easy week, then they'll communicate to me and go, oh, by the way, I actually have a lot of stuff on next week and I'm not gonna be able to ride the bike that much. And then what's happened? They've had two easy weeks back to back. But if I hadn't known this in advance, they could have pushed on for another week in the build. And then the week, when they have a lot of social family commitments where they can't train, it becomes a natural break, a guilt-free natural break. So, planning this stuff in where you can also figure out where is the places we can get super compensation blocks, where we can train harder than an unsustainable hard for a week. You have time off work as your wife or husband gone away so you have a lot of extra time on your hands. We've got to plan all this in. The last thing to consider is intervals. And should you do intervals? Yes, you should be doing intervals. If you're not doing intervals, you're completely missing the game. You're missing a trick. Old wisdom with cycling was no intervals before Christmas. And that's completely wrong. But I think we've gone too far the other way now where people feel like they need to do every bit of training needs to be an interval, every bit of training needs to be on their own maximise it with the gains for parameters and hitting their zones, I would highly encourage you to have at least one training partner who you meet regularly and to have one group ride per week. I think the social for longevity in the sport on a micro and macro basis like getting through with training block and getting through season after season, it's really, really important. Guys, we are starting to roll out this newer quality eight week challenge and the eight-week challenge. What really for the first time choice to do is we've two sides to this equation where we have the training side where I'm actually going to build out eight weeks of training for you around your commitments, around your life, your family, your work. We're going to use all these principles we're talking about here. But on the far side of it again, what we're going to do for the first time I've never seen a coaching company do is we're going to focus big time on the mitigation of training stress because cross our clients, this is where we've got the biggest gain where we started using strategies like meditation, like cold therapy, like grounding and a lot of this other stuff we'll talk about over the course of the eight weeks in the video series and modules I've put together. It's two sides the equation. If you're only doing one of them, like you can imagine if you're talking to a cyclist and all they were doing for their training was meditating and journaling and focusing on their sleep. You'd be like, you're not getting any training done, you're not going to to get any better. I look at guys who are just training and aren't doing this other stuff the same way going, oh my god, you're just leaving so much free gains on the table. So that's what this is, all the information for it's in the outro for the podcast. I would highly encourage you to jump on and start this 8 week challenge because it's going to be a catalyst to set you up for the season to come. Robeman, thanks for listening to another Robeman Cycling Podcast. Okay, stop what you're doing, it's Anthony again. I want to talk to you for one second about the next step in the roadman journey. I'm laying down a challenge for you. It's called the eight week challenge. So for eight weeks, I'm challenging you to be the very best version of yourself, whatever that is. For eight weeks, I want to take you under my wing and I want to personally build for you the customized training plan on our analytics platform. This plan is going to be laser focused on your goal and I'm going to navigate around your life, your work, your social commitments. So don't worry about what your circumstances are right now. I remember after I took some time out of cycling, I went off and thought I was a Billy Big Businessman. I came back and I realized I wanted to get into cycling, but I knew after a bit, to trying it alone, it actually wasn't making me any fitter. I needed an entire system. It needed a 360 overhaul. So for the first time ever, I wanna share with you this exact system I used to get back in shape. I'm talking stuff like, I'm gonna give you my morning routines, the cold therapy I use, the cookbooks and recipes I use, and even the motivational audios by listening to get back on track. So right now what I want you to do is pause this audio, go to www.roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week or check out the link in the bio, click that. So one more time, it's roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week. Chatty also.