Let's talk about how to structure your winter training
Let's talk about how to structure your winter training. KIRA.ntro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness, and our long-term? That is the question. This podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch, and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. roadman welcome back to another roadman cycling podcast I want to talk to you today about winter training off season how to structure the training principles and sort of just a bit of an overview on how and where to get started this winter so the off season it's the time of year when we can make serious performance gains and by off season I mean there's no racing available at the moment. This is what we typically refer to as off-season or winter training. So if you weren't happy with your performances last year, whether that's the time of Tokyo to ride 100 miles, your performance in a sporty, a race, a time-traw, this is the time of year where you can really make a difference. So we say winter's winter's miles equals summer smiles. You can totally correct course and come out the far side of the winter as a new rider. So whatever level you were at last season, it's pretty much fixed across the entire of the season because although you're doing events, it's difficult to cram into much meaningful training in between these events because you're in this cycle of get ready for an event, do event, recover from events, prepare for the next event. But when it comes to the winter, we've no events. So we've this long period now of focused training. Before I dive in and give you it is strategies to level up for next season. I'd encourage you to head on over to patreon.com link is in the boil it's patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore waltz I've been beating the drum all week and harp and back to the old a one shoulder they used to have and the reason that I harp back to that is because it disappeared it's low no longer with us because I never put strategies in place to make it financially sustainable. So that's what I'm hoping to do with this podcast and patreon is the vehicle I'm using to make it sustainable the moment. So the price of a beer once a month from you guys, what that does for me on this end is it just one, well it's validation that I've gone the right direction for it and you guys like the content but two it's making it sustainable so every single patreon that I get just feels like one step closer to this podcast being around forever and I think we're on the brink guys and girls, we're on the brink of something really meaningful with this podcast where it's getting the leverage your moment where I can almost reach out to anybody in the world of cycling and I can talk to them. And especially for the Patreons, it's your direct link into these. You can ask me anything in oil ask it to them. So I don't know, it's just those people that we watch on TV, they've felt so inaccessible for so long. And I can touch any of them now, authors, sports people, even actors, we can reach out and we can chat to them on the podcast because of the scale we're getting on on this podcast and that's a brilliant thing and I want to preserve it and patreon's the way to do it. Okay guys, so winter training. If you've trained all summer, the first thing you need to do is take a little bit of rest for yourself and after you've taken that bit of rest of a previous podcast and that's I'll go back and search for off-season rest or some variation of those words. The winter's all about leveling up the next level. So I obviously can't in a podcast now, it's a short form podcast, there are roadman boyz I can't build a training plan for every single one of you guys listening to the podcast You're at vastly different levels, you know from males to females young to old beginner to advanced different levels But what I can do is I can talk about principles So the main thing to understand is we have two sides to this equation We have on the one side we have building training stress and we have on the other side of the equation mitigation of training stress So mitigation it's a fancy legal word for reduction or bringing down training stress and the more we can bring down stressors The more we can add so I suppose understanding this concept underpins the entire podcast that we have a hormone called cortisol Which is the stress hormone? This is produced in response to training poor nutrition poor night sleep, you know the general wear and tear that goes in to maintain any relationship work stuff all of this causes cortisol and And when you add in, when we take our training, but we keep in all the other stressors, if that brings us up to 90% or 95% of our total stress capacity, and then we put training in from 95% to 100%, we've only 5% capacity.
Our job, and I've only realized this in the last few years since I…
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?
Is it climbing? Is it how you torque
Is it climbing? Is it how you torque? Is it whatever it is? Now we can start to determine exactly what important and we can start taking elements into our training plan. So the first one was goals. The second was the breakdown analysis of the demands for event versus your strengths and weakness. The next thing to think about your commitment level because this is the easiest way to get this illusion is to have a goal that doesn't line up your commitment level. If your goal is to ride an eight-day professional stage race like here in Ireland we have the it's called the Ross and it's been a breeding ground for so many of our pros I remember the first time I'd done the Ross, I deferred my college exams in law skill in my final year because I taught this is my only chance to ride the Ross, I'm never going to get a chance again. And so I deferred my exams, sat them all at the end of the summer, which was super risky because if I failed one I would have had to wait a whole year to retake them. But I nonetheless, against everyone's advice, decided to do it and I rode the Ross and I think seven, I think I've ridden seven of them now since, but I wasn't to know at the time. But if you want to ride a race like that, it takes a certain commitment level and I once coached a guy and his wife was not supportive and he spoke to me, he's like, look, I've sat down with the missus and I've reached a compromise around my training. I can try and as much as I need to seven days a week. I was like, oh, this is amazing. He's like, yeah, as long as I'm back by seven a.m. Like, oh my God. So you need to figure out what your commitment level is. If you can only ride 60 minutes a day, four days a week, you're not going to do a professional eight-day race. If you can ride 10 to 12, 15 hours a week, you can start thinking about professional races. Think about what your commitment level is and marry that up with the target. Next we got to think about periodization. This is the simple idea of have you ever seen somebody that goes to the gym and everyone has a friend. You know, tag one of your friends in this who does this screen capture it on screen capture wherever you listen to and put it up on Instagram and tag me on it. Do you have a friend who's gone to the gym for like the last 10 years, 3 times a week, but looks identical and has not got any fitter? Well, that's because our body is very smart and I first realized this when I was doing a summer job and a building site and I was absolutely dead to the world on week one and I was pretty fit, I was playing football and I looked after myself and I trained hard and I was dead to the world after work. Like could not move, I'm talking on the bed at 7pm dead. And after a few weeks my body just started adapting and I was no longer tired. I took the same amount of work but my body was recovered. And then it just stayed at that level of recovery. Well that's what happens with these guys going to the gym. For a few weeks they go in and they are ruined with doms. They're dead. They're dead. and they make a little bit of progress, but then they get to a point and it's a plateau and they don't change the stimulus up So they stay stuck there. So that's the idea of periodization we call it in training So each week has to be harder. So each week and the way we can do this is a combination of intensity or duration We can make things longer or we can make things more intense So we need to change the stimulus week by week to get an athlete fitter and of course building rest periods because we only actually get fitter when we take the rest period. So that's why we have micro rest periods, you know, it might be for me, I take a Monday off and then a Friday slightly easier, that's in a week, and then we have macro rest periods with easy weeks built into blocks. But that periodization is super important and if you're not doing that, you're missing a trick and you're just not going to progress. The next one, I just call it life dates and true experience, this is super important. So when you plan out, you open up your training peaks, your today's plan, you need to plan out all your family commitments, all your work commitments, birthdays, social days, Christmas parties, solid in the calendar. They're unmovable. Because what you'll often see happen is I will come and I'll be planning out training for a client and it maybe this is old me before I learned about this life dates concept. and I will plan a big block and then an easy week. And then sort of client will do the easy week, which is typically like a 10 to 15% reduction in training intensity or volume.
After the easy week, then they'll communicate to me and go, oh, by…
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.