Lowro men today is episode of the podcast I know a lot of people have…
Lowro men today is episode of the podcast I know a lot of people have been spending a lot of time on Zwift in recent months and I've observed this and I've seen one mistake that's getting made over and over again I want to talk about that today, but before I do you know the routine. Let's give the intro The big questions this how do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health or happiness and our long-term That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Welcome back Roadman, it's another Roadman Bites short form podcast. I hope everybody enjoyed the Roadman full feature episode last Wednesday. That was the one where we talked about the group ride and how the group ride in my opinion is falling apart at the moment. I propose a couple of solutions which I think are corrective action, but when I listen back to portions of the podcast, which I don't often do, but I just feared that I came across a little bit preachy in the podcast. Yeah, it wasn't really my intention to come across preachy, but it's a subject matter that I'm super passionate about. So the reason I put that podcast out, it wasn't to propose a definitive solution to how we fix the group ride. It was more to throw in my top-and-swirt and say here are a couple here are some of the problems that I think we'll all agree on or most of us will agree on. Here are some solutions that I think could work but also let's use that podcast as the start of as a catalyst for a meaningful debate on how we fix the group ride and that's really what I want to do is just start the conversation and that's my entry, my piece of the conversation. So that's on you now to go around, share that podcast around, say to your colleagues in your group spins or your clubs, hey look, here's the pieces I agree with, here's the pieces I don't agree with, but I think we all agree it's a problem with the group right and we need to fix it. And you know remember, it should be fun. Today I wanted to talk about Zwift because it's something that I see is undermining a lot of people's chances of being fit and that breaks my heart. I'm such a caring, considerate, compassionate podcast host and it breaks my heart. Before I jump into rippings with the part, I would encourage you all to jump on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore waltz. I'm going to put the link in the show notes down below. That's the place to go across. Boim your coffee, boim your beer. Say, shop house on, you've done well kid. I'm enjoying these podcast tips. Thank you very much. That's the place to go on deal with it and I really do appreciate your support. It means a lot and every single podcast donation I get is something that makes me smile every time the notification rings on the phone. Let's talk Swift. I know a lot of listeners out there have been using Swift especially during lockdown periods and they've become almost reliant on Swift and I know I was a heavy user of Swift and this isn't a Zwift's a terrible platform. This is more understand than the limitations of Zwift. And it's a nice follow on to what we've been talking about in our last few short form roadman podcasts. We were talking about zones and the idea that we get out the door and we have a plan and we go out the door to ride at a specific intensity or the one was known as a specific zone. And the reason we do that is there's a specific adaptation we're looking for. So to recap, if we're riding in zone one and zone two, we're training our body to become better at endurance. We're training our body to utilize fat as a fuel source. We're training our body to build mitochondria, which are like the powerhouse for endurance. These are some of the benefits we're looking to achieve at riding in zone one and zone two.
Now to achieve this, we need to spend quite a chunk of time in zone…
Now to achieve this, we need to spend quite a chunk of time in zone one and zone two. Zone one, zone two should occupy the majority of your training week riding. Now, you do get different adaptations in zone trees, on fours, on fives, on six, et cetera. But here's where Zwift runs into a problem. So let's talk about the uncertainties from indoor training that the company is working with, because make no mistakes with their company, their for-profit company, they're just like Netflix. I heard Netflix CEO talk a couple of months ago and they asked about Netflix, this biggest interview host asked him about who's Netflix's biggest competitor. And he paused for a second, and he said our biggest competitor is sleep. Now think about that for a second. Their biggest competitor is sleep. They're not even worried about Amazon Prime. They're worried about keeping you awake. They're worried about you watching the next episode, the next episode. It running straight into the next episode. God, ah, she will just watch 10 minutes of the next episode. Look, I do it myself. They have some of the smartest minds in the world trying to figure out how to hook you and get you to watch the next episode. Swift is the exact same thing. So a couple of certainties in my 10 plus year cycling, I know about indoor training, with absolute certainty indoor training is boring as hell. There's 100 people finding indoor training interested in annexing. None of us got riding the bike because indoor training, because we want to cycle inside, not move and look at a wall or a TV. It's boring, that's one of the certainties they're working around. The second is we don't normally ride very long indoors. 60 minutes, 90 minutes, two hours if you're a complete sadong masochist. So our two certain desire is time restricted and it's boring. Now if a company wants to make a product that you renew every single month, so a sticky product where customer retention is good, they got to work within that time constraint. So they got to make sessions that are 60 to 90 minutes long. That's their first job. And their second job is to alleviate boredom. Because if you're bored out of your tree on Zwift, you're just, you're not going to, you're not going to record as a membership. So as a result of that, zone three, zone four, zone five, zone six, you can tax these systems with very short duration to time. Like think about gone for an endurance ride, a zone one, zone two ride. We need to do a long ride, two hours plus endurance ride, typically tree plus errors to tax that endurance system effectively. Whereas if we want to work zone four, zone five, this is minutes. You know, we can do four by four minutes zone five, and that's a good session. We can do 10 by 10 seconds zone six, and that's a good session. And you can cram that into 30 minutes. And it's also quite interesting because that keeps us engaged, keeps the mind engaged. Think back to why spin classes are sold. So I call our peloton or these things. Where they so popular and don't get them confused with training. That's not training. That's cardio. That's what your buddy does who goes to the gym. You know, you're a sightless, you're training, you're not trying to get a cardio workout. When someone goes into spin class, they're cardio, they're working their cardio system. They don't have a specific purpose, it's pure headless chicken stuff like we talked about. So, if somebody's doing cardio, it's fine, let's give them all the zone 4, zone 5, zone 6 stuff. And that's what's the width of the soil to do, because it's engaging to give you zone 4, zone 5, zone 6 stuff, and to a lesser extent zone 3 stuff. So, they have a complete omission of zone 1, zone 2, because it's born and it doesn't work within their time-restricted nature. So it doesn't fit either of those things they're trying to navigate around. Now, if you think about zone 1, zone 2, the best analogy I use, imagine you're building a house.
Want to build a house, you want to dig the foundation as deep as…
You want to build a house, you want to dig the foundation as deep as possible. That's what base training is. That's our zone 1, zone 2. the more base training we have, the more zone 1, zone 2, the more zone 3, 5, I can't even count now, zone 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, we can add on top of that and the more effective it's going to be. Sure, you can build the flashiest house in the world but don't dig a foundation and that's what's with this. They just go straight into building, no time worrying about that foundation. Sure, let's do some zone 4, let's do some zone 5, let's do some zone What happens as soon as there's a storm your house gets blown the fuck over and that's that metaphor is exactly what I'm seeing happen people All around the world really because you know, we're not constrained anymore boy local. Yeah, I'm seeing it on local spins But people are reaching out to me in the DMs people who get emails often we've had influx in new clients and it's almost I remember I used to go to this barber in clung however I live and he had a sign up and I had home haircuts repaired without comment. And I don't know why it always just stuck at me because I thought, man, you must see some crazy ass haircuts. I almost feel like that when people are coming in now saying, I've been on Zwift for the last few months, I feel like I need to hold my tongue and repair that home haircut without comment. And I was out riding the other day with a client of mine who's just finished the eight-week challenge. And one of his comments struck me on it because he's been doing a lot of this with stuff prior to that. He's in the shape of his life after the eight weeks. He's absolutely flying. You know, anecdotally, friends can see it. He's lost weight. He's stronger. He's faster. He's PBing on climbs, hitting Strava segments. He hasn't before. But I can see it in the figures as well. He's gone better never. And he said, Oh, I never, I never realized like how much easy riding there should be in a week. And he said he was actually worried to start when he's seen how much easy writing or what's how much on one's on to stuff that it actually made up the bulk of his week. And I was like, well, welcome to actually train and not just the on cardio. So folks, if you are just on Zwift, I'm afraid to tell you, you're your might as well go to the spin class, start to impress us on your handlebars folks 10 out of 10, go go go go go. Yeah, you're not trying to, you're doing cardio. So that's it. Hopefully you're not listening to this on front is with on front of the one of these with the old windows with build plan. It's not going to work. You need to bite the bullet. There's no shortcut to this. Also, you got to get outside. You got to get outside and ride your bike. Being fast and on a stationary bike, it doesn't count. You know, can you go around a corner in the wet. Do you know when to get on the pace out of the corner? Do you know how to descend? Technical descends will gravel. It's a small part of it. And this is why I'm so passionate about the group ride because skills is at least 50% of this beautiful sport otherwise we just look at E-racing on the TV but it's not the reality. That's why we love Strata Bianchi at the weekend. Well, to find out 350 normalised watts for five hours. Big shout out. Okay, well, man, I hope everybody enjoys their bank holiday Monday. Thanks for listening and guess what? Guess what? I'm gonna chat to you again tomorrow because a roadmap podcast is five days a week. Thanks for listening folks.