Intro and Girona camp news
Rowman, I want to talk about how your strict of schedule and your limited availability for training could be your number one asset this winter. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question on this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roadman, welcome back to another Roadman cycling podcast. Today I've got an interesting topic. It's almost like what happens when you turn everything you've been doing upside down and on its head. I want to tell you a short story about when I realized that I was structure of my winter training completely wrong and how we've used this to great effect inside Roadman coaching with our clients and it's something you're going to see a lot more of from us again this winter we're rolling out the Roadman blueprints in the middle of October and it'll be based off this style of training because it's just unquestionably a better way to train for anyone who has limited training availability. Before I dive into all this let me just remind about two things. Firstly, our Jirona training camp. There's a couple of spots left on it. I think two spots left last time I checked. It's roadmancytland.com forward slash Jirona. It's the 17th of October we're heading off. You don't even have to know anyone to come on the trip. It's a really friendly group. It's mixed abilities. There's going to be a slow group. There's going to be a fast group. I'm just stoked to show you all my favorite climbs, my favorite cafes, my favorite training routes. It's going to be amazing that I absolutely cannot wait. I'm actually heading off pretty soon because I'm going to head over there a few days before the rest of the gang arrived just to make sure everything is in place. The second thing is the Patreon. The Patreon or what we call the Beer Fund to keep the podcast floating and we have a group of loyal Patreons there who much indebted to for supporting us over the last year, especially true the COVID pandemic. So if you're enjoying the podcast and you're getting some value from it, how can you not get value from this content today to restrict of schedule will be coming here at number one asset. This is going to be fire. So just to say thanks for that, just head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore waltz, buy me the price of a pointed beer once a month just to say thanks. If you see me in a pub, would you buy me a beer? If the answer is yes, go ahead and buy me a beer. So what amazes me about cycling? It's the crazy advancements that we've made in some areas. Like you just need to look at aerodynamics on the track. The times are getting faster and faster. World records are getting broken every single year. But in other areas, the sport just seems to be at a complete standstill, like resistant to change. And aspects of training practices are definitely one of these areas, which is resistant to change. Now, I definitely made the mistake of falling into this all school training dogma when I started out. And it pains me now when I'm watching friends and other Reuters making these same mistakes. We actually, we seem to nearly be governed by some sort of invisible set of rules within Saikl and it's passed down this flawed misinformation from generation to generation. It's nearly like it's okay to put on weight over the winter. We start back and we ride easy kilometers in the little ring till the new year then there's some sort of magic threshold. I don't know, maybe it's around 2000 kilometers. And at that point we start learning some sort of intensity. Where this underlying wisdom came from, I've no idea to be honest, it's maybe it's passed down from Joe Freel and the training boy or maybe it's like a club mate or something that's passed it on. But the idea is with all this stuff that you need to build a strong base, a strong broad base and we've heard this pyramid analogy that the wider you build the base of the pyramid, the more intensity you'll be able to add it on.
Flipping the training pyramid
So we're told that you have to build this broad base before you start ever putting any intensity on and then at the end top of the base is you're sprinting. You know the last thing we're going to do is sprinting and that's months away from all of us. But the first time I ever heard this traditional periodization question was from Michael Barry and he was riding for Team Sky at the time and anyone who doesn't know who Michael Barry is, he's a legend in the sport. He's had a career span and I think almost two decades. He wrote it, some of the biggest teams in the world, Team Mobile, HTC, we have Team Sky, US Post, that he was a legend. And did you ever have one of those aha moments in your life for you to, oh shit, I'm known that it's completely wrong. I remember sitting in Michael's kitchen and I was a full time bike rider getting money at the time to ride my bike. And I remember sitting in Michael's kitchen in Toronto talking about training and how Team Sky were building training plans and I had this massive light bulb moment. I talked to myself I'm doing this all backwards. My pyramid is upside down and what am I doing makes absolutely no sense. So to think about this, detraining doesn't occur evenly across all fitness levels in an equal manner. By that I mean if you stop training the first thing you lose is your top end speed and power and that's the hardest thing to get back. Then the next hardest thing to pick back up is your threshold. Then the next hardest thing to pick back up is your tempo and so on. Look, if you're a professional boy grider and you're listening to this or you're a full-time boy grider, you can definitely still go long. But for those of us, myself included these days who are trying to balance work commitments with family and having a social life and you can't ride five hours a day, you're better off opening the intensity. We need to work in reverse, turn the pyramid on its head. So we need to train the elements of our fitness, which D train first. So we're focusing on sprint power, then VO2 max, then threshold, then finally endurance. This is called reverse periodization. This is the systems we're using across all our clients. So how I would build out a winter training block, it's frequent testing and working in reverse. So I would go test sprint power, do a four week sprint block, test VO2 max power four week VO2 max. Test threshold power, four week threshold block, test endurance, endurance block and then we're into the season. Very, very different. In fact, completely opposite to what everybody is doing at the moment. But the results we've seen with this have been insane across all our clients. We rolled it out to just a small bait and number of clients last year to see what would happen because there's scientific articles on it. know, it's science is never binary and articles on PubMed, especially aren't binary, just never like everybody says you should do this. But at worst, the results of reverse periodization are it's the same as standard periodization. And at best, it's shown to be multiples better. But at worst, it's the same as normal periodization, it's still worth doing, because what it means is if you think about it, we're working on higher intensity stuff at a period of time, and a period of the year when light is dwindling and we don't have to do long rides on dark cold wet windy snowy days we wait to do them until the spring so worst case scenario it's a massive benefit to us scheduling was best case scenario it's a massive benefit to us scheduling was and we get crazy adaptations from it and that's what we see in across the beta group of clients we use the way. And that's why we're rolling it out this season as part of our roadman blueprint, which is coming mid October. Now, there's a group of people out there that do intensity all winter. And these are the guys I feel most sorry for because this is anyone that's following us with our trainer road plans, because they're so fundamentally flawed, in my opinion.
Why subscription plans fail you
Now, I actually don't want to spend much time in the podcast covering these at all, but it's just so many people have messaged about them. That I don't even want to put these in the same bracket as people who are studying coaching or top orders, like we've mentioned, like Joe Freel. But the goal of these plans, it's not training, it's entertainment. The goal is to keep the entertains on your training plan so you renew your subscription the following month. That's the goal, that's it. They're not worried about your chronic training loads, your fitness, your fatigue, your freshness scores. The metrics they care about, it's called client-shorn. How many clients renew month to month? And look, hands up, these platforms are doing an absolutely great job, but they're not doing a great job at serving you and your fitness goals. They're doing a great job for what they intend to do a great job at, and that's serving your board of directors, their shareholders, not athletes. So folks, as we head into the winter, step away from reliance on those platforms and look at their motivations for what they're doing. You can use them as an ancillary tool, but please, please, please don't rely on them. And I would advocate and strongly encourage you to order. Get in touch with us, you know, pop us an email at admianatroadmancycling.com, and we're gonna stick together like a free consultation call for you and figure out how you structure your winter plan with no obligation, or just sign up for one of the plans and we can do this for you because, you know, success leaves clues. You don't need to forage this part on your own and figure all this out on your own. Learn from other people's mistakes. I tell you, I made mistakes for a long time when I was struck from my winter china. But reverse periodization this winter is going to be a complete game changer for you. So I'm going to leave the email to get in touch with us in the description down below and contact us on the waste in other fucking winter. Well man, thank you for listening today and hopefully I'm going to see a bunch of you guys in your own. The link for that as well is in the description down below. Thanks for listening and I'm gonna chat to you tomorrow. Okay, stop what you're doing. It's Anthony again. I wanna 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 wanna take you under my wing and I wanna personally build for you customize training plan on our analytics platform. This plan, it's gonna be laser focused on your goal and I'm gonna 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 taught a really big businessman. I came back and I realized I wanted to get into cycling, but I knew after a bit, to train 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 used, the cookbooks and recipes I used, and even the motivational audios I listen to get back on track. So right now what I want you to do is pause this audio, go to www.rogemansawycling.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 weeks. Chatty all soon.