Roadman, in today's podcast, I want to talk to you about what our…
Roadman, in today's podcast, I want to talk to you about what our base training is dead. 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 long habit? That is the question on this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Welcome back, roadman to another roadman cycling podcast. Today we're going to get into it. We're going to talk about is base training dead. We're going to talk about winter training intensity. We're going to bust some of those old myths. We're going to try and dispel fact from fiction myth from folklore. And before we do all that, I'm going to ask you great kind roadman folk of the internet to head on over to pretty much what is the home of the roadman cycling podcast. It's our Patreon page over on patreon.com. It's at forward slash Anthony underscore Welsh This is the hope for the roadman community. This is where the discussion is happening in our forum there This is where I'm putting in early access to stuff. This is where I'm sharing the secret podcast Last month's secret podcast I'm talking about DNA testing where you can get that done quite affordably and how I'm using it to get a performance edge figure out food allergies, help my sleep patterns and a whole lot more. I'm talking about that in the secret podcast. To get access to that, all you have to do is buy me a point of beer once a month as a thank you for the podcast. It always amazes me and I suppose it's a mentality shift that I had for a long time. I didn't understand why I should pay for something if it was free but with maturity comes that realization that if you don't pay for things maybe they won't be around forever. And I'm now a massive advocate and supporter of Patreon. I subscribe to a bunch of patreons myself of podcasts I listen to regardless of the size of them because it's just me putting it out to the world saying I want that to be around. So that's what I'm asking you guys to do over on patreon.com. So if you buy me the price of a beer once a month, I'll be much appreciated and you get all the benefits and trimmings to go with that. But today I want to talk about the number one question I get asked all winter and I had one of my coaches earlier on in the week and he was on to me and he was talking about a client of his who we have structured in some intensity into his winter training and he's getting a bit of blow back from his club and old guys in the club going oh you're going to be the winter champion you're going to be the Christmas world champion and we've all heard those myths whether it's winter world champion, Christmas world champion or you can't use the big ring until January. That was a big one when I was getting started, where you can't go into the hills until January. Like this stuff is, now that we know about parameters, torque, training, stress score, this stuff is based on just nothing, there's no footing to it. Like going to the hills where I could do a zone two endurance ride in the hills all day, or I could go out in the little ring on a flat road and ride zone 5 intervals, Tabata's on off. So the terrain and the ring, they've no bearing on intensity. So let's just debunk those mitts out the gate straight away. But maybe we can cut through those mitts and to an underlying assumption that they're talking about maybe you shouldn't have high intensity training during the winter. Well again, that's wrong because I think when you look at study after study and cross country skiing running triathlon and especially cycling. We see the time and again the studies that are shown the greatest degree of efficacy and are most important to us, they're the studies that come back and say basically combine and large volumes of low intensity training, we're carefully interspersed high intensity intervals all throughout the year is the correct way to structure your training. So this conversation then hangs on the interpretation of carefully interspersed intensity. And that's where, you know, when we move past and debunk the myths of small ring or winter, how do we use intensity and what way do we use intensity and how do we structure it? And there are the questions you should be asking yourself, not should I use intensity because yes, you should use intensity. It's how much when and what sort. So probably the best way to think about this is to understand training stress score and if some of you will know what this is already and it's going to sound so basic and some of you will not have a clue what I'm talking about and this is going to sound like a NASA moon mission.
We use a concept called training stress score to build out our…
But we use a concept called training stress score to build out our training plans. And the idea of training stress score is, say if I'm right and beside you on a session and we do a narrow session and at the end of the hour session I ask you on a scale of one to ten, how difficult was that session? Well, you'll say to me, it was a seven out of ten, it was fairly hard, record and manage to be harder. So that's what we call a subjective measurement. You are self-classifying how hard that session was, seven out of ten, one being the easiest, ten being the hardest. That's what we call a subjective measure. Training stress score moves back to an objective measure. So objective means it's comparable across a bunch of different people and it's no longer you that's self-assessing it, it moves to the toward person assessing it. So in this case the toward person assessing it is data. So I can look at your power, I can look at your heart rate and for the exact time right that was 7 out of 10, I can attribute a training stress score of 30, 35, 40, 50, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But this now is our numerical value that's objective for classifying in how hard training is. So how we calculate this training stress score is one error as hard as you can go elicits 100 training stress score. Stay with me, I know it sounds like a leaving serum maths problem, but it's actually not that complicated. So one error full gas equals 100. And that's it. So now we have a new vocabulary for talking about stuff. So one error full gas 100. So if we do two hours at 50%, that's also 100. If we do one hour at 50%, that's 50. You know, the calculations obviously get harder and I am really shit at maths. So I'm not gonna be able to pull any more advanced calculations than that out of my head right now. But we use this training stress score as a way to figure out how much intensity we should interspers into your training week. So every single session we have a training stress score, we have weekly training stress scores And then we have parameters from how much we can increase your training stress score from week one to week two to week three. Do you remember I used to go bowling back in the day, a friend's birthday party or something? Maybe there's a bowling fish in Atto here who actually properly bowled, but I remember going to kids' birthday parties and, you know, I was such a rock and roll star. I didn't use them coasters down the side, but some people did. I'd say them on the other lines, the coasters. So what we have here, I've got a bunch of parameters we use as coasters to make sure somebody doesn't hit a gutter ball. The gutter ball in this case on the left, you're trying in too hard on the right, you're trying in too easy. The coasters down the side, they're set of rules we have for how much we can increase your training stress score week on week to make sure it's not too hard to make sure it's not too easy. We call those coasters or buffers ramp So how much can we bring up training stress from one week to the next? That's really the crux of training intensity and should you use training intensity or should you use intervals in the winter. The answer is yes and how much and how difficult the intervals will be is the answer to that when we went back to the definition of combining large volumes volumes of low intensity training would carefully interspersed intervals of high intensity. We're looking to define what carefully interspersed intervals is. The carefully interspersed intervals, the way we judge that, the way we gauge it is true this training stress score. So if we see it's pushing to the high end of our ramp rate, we bring it back to we see if it's not pushing enough, we bring it forward. Because I use the example of did you ever have a friend who goes to the gym him like every three times a week say for a year and he doesn't get any fitter. That's because he initially got fitter and then he plateaued and he didn't change up the stress. He just kept the same stuff in the gym. So our body adapts. So our ramp rate and training stress score makes sure we give enough stress week on week to make sure we don't adapt and plateau. So the way we typically structure is in a four week system where it's week one we build week two, we build, we trade, we build, week four, we rest. So an example could be week one, if you've got eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, then seven hours the following week.
We'll build training stress building
We'll build training stress building. Your training stress could be 300, could be next week, trade 10, next week, trade 15, and the next week we bring it back. So we build that in the same structure. Now that's a very basic 20,000 foot overview of how you build that micro structure on the three weeks on one week off. That could be four and one. It could be five and one. It could be six and one. Depending on the writer's work schedule, his family life, how much he can recover. But this podcast, the main thing here is the bunk, the myth that you shouldn't train hard with intensity during the winter. The last thing I want to touch on is training specificity. This just means that the closer you get, and I'm like to a full podcast on this, the closer you get to your target event, the more specific your training should be. So as you come, if you're trying to for a crit, as you approach the crit, the demands of training should begin to the mirror to demands the event closer and closer. So we break down what are the demands of a crit? Well, you're going to have to sprint out of a corner a hundred times, seven second sprints. Have you done that in training? Because if you haven't, it's not going to magically happen for you on the day. So you're going to have a big five minute effort to get into the break. You're going to have four straightaways, which are going to be three minutes each. We need to build this into our training plan as we get closer and closer. But months out from the event, right now, we don't need to do that because training needs to mirror the demands of the event as you get closer and closer. So we're building that backwards. Right now, the demands of our training don't need to mirror the demands of the event. So we're working on things like endurance, building mitochondria. We're working, you know, kind of all the markers for aerobic fitness are typically yet worked at this time of year. And I always find that this time of year, it's our best opportunity for building fitness, for piling on extra training stress, for building that really strong base of volume, we're carefully interspersed intensity. And I would love to deep dive into case studies. And maybe I'll get one of our athletes and I'll go through his characteristics and say, you know, this is Joe Bloggs and he is age, here's his training background and here's how we're building out his plan. And that's something I'll probably look at and do in upcoming podcasts, because I can't, everyone's so different that it's not possible for me to build out a sample week from the Iron Man to the Crit Racer to the Cyclocross Racer to the Ultra and Joransky, because everyone's plan is going to look so different. This podcast, the sole intention is to debunk that myth that you shouldn't do any intensity during the winter so I hope I've effectively done that. Roadman, thank you for listening and I'll chat you again tomorrow. 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 8-week challenge. So for 8 weeks, I'm challenging you to be the very best version of yourself, whatever that is. For 8 weeks, I want to take you under my wing and I want personally build for you, the customized China 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 and went off and thought I was a really big businessman. I came back and I realized I wanted to get into cycling but I knew after a bit the training 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 by listening to get back on track. So right now what I want you to do is pause this audio, go to www.rogemancycling.com forward or check out the link in the bio, click that. So one more time, it's roadmancycling.com forward slash eight week. Chatty also.