1.Roman, in today's podcast, I'm going to talk to Spastin Weber

Roman, in today's podcast, I'm going to talk to Spastin Weber. 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 changes? That is the question on this podcast, and we'll give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch, and welcome to the Roman Podcast. Rode Man, welcome back Rode Man. It's another Rode Man cycling podcast. Yes it is. You know what it is because you hit that download button and you hit that play button and you had the big goofy picture of me smiling. So you're well aware that you haven't clicked on Joe Rogan's Baldi head. Rode Man, I've got an exciting episode for you today. It's Sebastian Weber. Sebastian Weber is a name that works behind the scenes, but he's the reason behind some of the biggest victories in pro cycling. At the tender, fresh-faced age of 28, Sebastian was head of Sports Science at T-Mobile. Look, he went on and he had a career where he worked with most of the best teams in cycling, high road, Columbia, HTC, Catusha, Lotto, Cannondair. The lad knows everything there is to know from a cycling and performance point of view. He's one of the greatest minds in coaching. He's also the founder of Inside Software which is poised to become the new de facto threshold testing in our industry. It's an emerging software and it's super exciting. But above all, that Sebastian is a super nice guy and I was lucky enough that he joined me on our upcoming roadman virtual summit. If you haven't heard about the roadman virtual summit really what have you been doing with your life and where have you been? It's tick tick ticking down. It's the 8th of December. It's coming up. So I hope you've registered. Please share the internet. I was grouped, shared. Spam everyone. It's free. Spam everyone. My goal is to just get this out with many people as we can because it's going to be awesome. Tacklan performance from 30 different angles and this guest is at the caliber of Sebastian and wherever on it. So today for the interview, I wanna play an extract from that summit with Sebastian. So if you wanna hear all the rest of the interviews from the summit, it's roadmansummit.com and that's gonna get you access to 30 interviews over two days, the eight and the ninth of the same birth. Just in time for a run up to Christmas. So we'll give you all that info and you're gonna be like, oh shit, I'm missing all this stuff. Now I need to put it on my Santalist. Guys, you know, I say it every day, the podcast is funded by user generosity and it's, we work heavily off that concept of reciprocity. I'm doing something good for you guys. Pop that out to the world. Hoping something good will come back and this will become financially sustainable. So if you want to support the podcast, buy me the price of a beer once a month. How you do that's over on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walsh. I'll let you buoy me a beer once a month to say thanks. And in return, I'm gonna knock you out a secret podcast once a month with all my inside tips and you're gonna get access to this every single day as you have been doing. Folks, I'm not gonna push this one off any longer. Let me introduce you to Sebastian Weber. Thank you, thank you for having me. I'm really excited about this interview. You're somebody who I've definitely followed your work And I think it's fair to say you've shaped a lot of what we, the way we coaches, modern coaches these days, especially with some of your new software that's getting so popular, which we're going to touch on a little bit as we go. But as everyone can see, Sebastian is quite fresh-faced looking. And if somebody didn't know, if they just been following your academic work or your papers through the years, they might have assumed you were like a 65-year-old man. but you got into the sport quite young. Yeah, so, but I studied sports science and molecule human biology. And obviously you're relatively young when you start studying. But then I started coaching why are the entries, so to speak, through performance testing. So I started performance testing with amateurs and also professional cyclists in, what was that, 2000, 2001. And then in 2005, I worked with, at this time, the team Visionhoaf. So it was, I think, today would be called Procontinental. This time it was GS2 team and some individual athletes. And then as a coach in the highest ranks at what is now the World Tour and what had been the Pro Tour, I started at the end of 2006. when I was about 28 years old. Was that difficult to go into? Because a lot of your stuff is quite challenging, the status quo, was it difficult to go into a sport that's dominated by tradition rather than science at such a young age?

2.Was difficult, especially about, you know, communicating, getting…

Yeah, so it was difficult, especially about, you know, communicating, getting people's commitment and buy-in. It was helpful that actually, This was a very reason how I got into the sport. So what happened was in, you know, some people remember in 2006, there was this Fuentes scandal and basically at the German team mobile teams, they fired Jan Ulrich and the whole management and you know, basically everything was kind of renewed. And the new general manager, Bob Staperton, was looking for somebody who had, you know, at this time it might sound weird, but we had a good idea on using power meters for coaching. And at this time it was, it was kind of, yeah, you use it for training sometimes, but you don't like it, but of course, you don't put it on the race bike, right? Never, just too heavy and you don't need it in the race, right? So this was the time exam. So they looked for somebody who was at a very good understanding on how to utilize power meter and power meter data in training and racing, and would not have, you know, a background, let's say as a medical doctor, coming from Italy or something similar, you know what I mean, right? So somebody with a clean background and some new fresh ideas. So yeah, it was difficult and it sometimes still is in terms of challenging, but there was also a very strong support from the team management and the team directors of the general management and the team director or if either supported the stuff really, really well. That's to give us an idea on timeline then was that before like the publication of Andrew Kogan's training and racing with a parameter? Yes. Yes. So it was real. It has several several years before. I don't know. I don't know exactly when it was published because I did never read it actually. Have you not read that? That's interesting. But I know that at this time, you know, I was talking to Uli from SRM, right? So, you know, to give you an idea, so I lived in Cologne, and SRM is about half an hour drive from Cologne, West. So I was at Uli's private house. Uli Schobazia is, you know, the inventor and founder of the SRM systems. It was a real first power meter. So I always talk to Uli about that he should write a book, how to train with that thing, because a lot of people are interested in it, but didn't really know how to utilize it. Everybody said, I don't have time to do this, blah, blah, blah. And I remember, this is why I know that the book from Cogan and, you know, Freer, I think it was, came out. How did, sorry, Hunter was it? Several years later, after I was pitching and pitching the idea to early to write a book about how to train this power. So therefore, I know it, I don't know the year, but I think it has been a couple of years later. And for listeners, SRM was super expensive back in the day. We're in this era now of very affordable parameters with lots of competition in the market. But 2004, I remember I was an undergraduate student and that year I was just getting into cycling and I was starting to look around and I was looking for mentors and I was starting to observe as much knowledge as I could and I came across the parameter and I was quite academic, but I didn't have a lot of money. So I said, look, I need this. I need to get a way to get this. So I had to forge like a bank application alone. I said I needed a car to go to university and spend it all on an SRM. I think it was three tells in Euro at the time for the SRM. Right, right. Yeah. So talking about the old times as a good old day, so to speak. So I purchased a used look max one, if you've ever seen that. That is a hub based power meter. I purchased it, but never really worked that well. And then in my summer holidays from school, I worked six weeks on a construction area carrying around radiators and stuff to own the money to buy a used S.A.M. of money. That's how I started. So I suppose we have these defining areas and everything. If anyone's religious, it's obviously like before Christ, after Christ. Like it seems like in coaching, it's before the parameter, after the parameter. Do you see it as Dassa, pivotal a point the coaching evolution? Kind of, maybe, yes. Yeah, it definitely changed the whole environment and the whole landscape of coaching. And are we still moving the needle since then? Like, how are you seeing coaching from Dan until now? Is the needle moving every single year? Or are we getting a little bit stagnant? Very honest. I think it's frustrating about the stagnation there. Because look, it's true that the power meter changed the landscape of coaching, right?

3.In terms of everybody uses power instead of heart rate and stuff like…

In terms of everybody uses power instead of heart rate and stuff like that, right? But think about how you use a power meter. Well, you're still looking at some kind of proxy for an anaerobic threshold or maximum lactate steady state. These days we call it FTP, which just indicates that's a functional version of the scientific term, right? And then we still work with percentages of that. And this goes back to the mid-70s. So to be honest, no, there's no improvement really there. We have the technology, but how we use it, it's frustrating stagnating because it's still the very, very old concept. Hey, there's some kind of domain and intensity which you can call as threshold. And then we just take, you know, we use this to drive our decisions in training. And that's, sorry, that's super old school. And it's funny because I think Amatur is tuning into this, kind of have this lore of magic around pro cycling and what the pros are doing. And across this summit, it's definitely been a lifting of that veil of secrecy. And you see that behind the curtain, it's actually not that crazy, you know, what was the dude Rocky for, Ivan Drago in the lab. There's not this crazy stuff going on behind the court, that it's not that more advanced. I can't think of the pics, you know? Yeah. Why is that? Yeah. Well, I think it depends, right? It depends. I think it depends. I think some things are really advanced in training and in nutrition and in racing and in pacing. But that does not mean that should not kind of paint you as a picture, that just because some stuff is really advanced, that the main 90% is still about getting the fundamentals right. So that, of course, doesn't change and maybe didn't change and maybe it would never change. So how hands-on are you these days or what's your current role? So I'm mostly working for a project called Insight, which is a human, which is maybe the only software to analyze metabolic human physiological performance in all kinds of sports. I still coach one writer. I still coach one professional writer. That's what I've left over, so to speak, from my know who it is. It's some scones from Tracksegg Afraid of. Okay, cool. He's made them well. And so yeah, I'm mainly working for Insight in all different areas, mostly developing of features and consulting and developing testing concepts for different teams, federations. So I work a lot with swimming recently, with canoeing, skiing, formula one. So it's all different, so performance, analytics, and training, and how to use physiological metrics, and how to define needed physiological metrics, like benchmarks for certain competition performances, and how to use utilizes and coaching and testing in all different sports. It's my main. I suppose that's a good segue for us chat a little bit about inside because I think a lot of our listeners won't have heard of it. It's getting a little bit of popularity but it's still more towards the very elite end of the sport that are used. I know you're a big entrepreneur as well and I'm sure you're looking to get that trickle down to all levels of the sport because I think the bits I've played around with it has an applicability to everyone and arguably more so to guys at the lower level of the sport. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it? What do you want to know? You can imagine it as like this one giant algorithm or one giant calculation or simulation engine, which basically creates something like you might want to call a physiological avatar of an athlete. So it's looking at all different aspects of performance, you know, aerobic power, anaerobic or more precise glycolic power, recovery possibilities, few utilization in terms of fat and carbohydrates. Ability of an athlete, which is really important, especially in cycling, as we're talking about cycling here, ability of an athlete to recover. So how fast can an athlete recover at a certain intensity? How quickly he or she accumulates fatigue And then if you would take it to other sports, it's also looking at like economy. So, you know, energy costs for movement and body composition. And you can, you know, and maybe the most important piece of it, because it kind of builds this avatar for you. Now what it enables you to do, it allows you to find out which not, so to speak, you need to turn. Like, you know, what should I change in order to create a certain outcome? So how much do I invest? How much do I get out of it? Let's say I want to change my FDP, I want to change my carbohydrate code, I'm combustion, my fat max, my three minute power. You can basically virtually turn those knobs in the software and find out, should I decrease my body weight? Should I increase my muscle mass? Should I increase my VO to max? Like, you know, you can get these questions answered.

4.Think what makes it so powerful. And I think it's an interesting tool…

And that I think what makes it so powerful. And I think it's an interesting tool because I work a lot with amateur athletes and a lot of the athletes coming in. guys who are balancing their life is very multi-factorial. They're balancing work, family, relationships, with cycling. Cycling isn't the main part of their day, but they still have a piece of their identity where they like to be an athlete. What a big job is an initial consultation when you're sitting down and you're looking at assessing their current ability, they're available training time and matching that with their goals. And you're saying, look, this goal that you have, like, you know, if you have a goal to do a sub-noiner or iron man, like with the available training time you have, this is not going to be a possible goal. But I think your software does a great job of Sean, like what are those possible times with their current testing at the moment where if you take somebody with an FTP test, you know, it's not given us much insight into potentially what speed they could travel. And they're, you know, breakdown of how much fat still needs and how much carbs still needs to fuel that endeavor. But when you look at inside, you can kind of say, unless we shift your fat-borne capacity, you're not going to be able to take in enough carbohydrates to fuel this performance on that day. Right, right. So you could definitely, a lot of people, especially like an Ironman or in Granfondo races or Maristen running, you're using it especially for this fueling and pacing thing to find out, how much more do you need to, How much more do you basically, for example, you need to be able to take in in terms of carbide intake, to achieve, to not run out of fuel before the finish line, or how much you would need to change your metabolism to be able to reach a finish line with a certain intensity, right? This is questions that it answers for you. So I had one of the Mitchell's gosh performance guys on. He was playing around with pairing different sugars and they're getting carbohydrate absorption up to about 120 grams per hour at the moment, which is pretty cool. Now, some routers will have gas-stroke issues at that, however, number. But if there's an amateur athlete watching that and their target is unachievable, but based on the inside software at the moment where it's saying to them, look, you need to be processed 180, 190 grams of carbs per hour. How can they shift that fuck off and sort of burning a higher fuel, a higher fat demand in their fueling? Right, so that's you know excellent question and the question behind that is basically how is your fat and carbohydrate combustion regulated, right? And of course we could go down into the biochemistry and look at the enzymes that regulated and you know talk about PTH and these kind of stuff. But maybe do you have to have a more practical understanding? like basically you have, let's say, your aerobic metabolism, let's say you call your, you know, very simplified speaking, you have your aerobic engine, which you need to fuel this either carbohydrate or fatty acids, right? So you have your engine and you need to fuel it with either the one or the other. It's like a hybrid system, so to speak, right? And so basically, how you can envision it for yourself, especially as an amateur, also as professional, but for a practical application, how you can look at it is that there's almost like a competition between those two fuses, the fat and the carbohydrates. And what it basically is and what it always is in biochemistry, or often it's like, you know, again, simplified saying it depends on who is the bigger dog in the fight. So if you're, no, it's true. Like, if you're carbohydrate metabolism is very well developed, right? If you are, let's say, a sprinter type. So you are the guy who can produce a lot of energy in the anaerobic way, right? Utilize a lot of carbohydrates to get a lot of energy from the anaerobic, glycolytic metabolic pathway. Then just because you decide to do a four-hour easy going, right? This doesn't go away, right? So this ability of your muscle will still be there. And so your muscles will still process a lot of carbohydrates. Even if you go out on empty.day, the bigger dog still says, we're going to burn whatever leftover carbs we have in the muscle. Well, not whatever leftover, but let's say it's more dominant, right? It is more dominant. And the easiest and the best sentence to remember is when you burn carbohydrates and you produce lactate, this pushes out the fat out of the metabolism. And let me give one practical example why intuitively everybody knows that. Let's say you do a hard interval training, let's say six by four minutes, right? And this is a little bit above threshold and you accumulate lactate and let's say you do six minutes recovery in between.

5.Start every 10 minutes at very typical, very simple training program

So you start every 10 minutes at very typical, very simple training program. You're doing the six minutes of recovery in between, but obviously to recover. So what you're doing is you are combusting the lactate in the six minutes, which you are accumulated in the four minutes before, right, in the on phase. Yeah. And because if you ask somebody, hey, do you think you burn fat during these six minutes recovery, then a lot of people will answer you intuitively. No, I, you know, I, even though that is maybe my fat burnings or maybe I write at 100 or 200 words or 150, 200 words, even though that normally would be my fat burnings, I'm not burning a lot of fat because I'm a recover to burn the lactate, which I just accumulated, right? So whenever there's lactate, this is like a takeaway message. Whenever there's a high lactate concentration, your muscle will use a lactate because it's a much, much more efficient fuel. It will use a lactate over the fatty acids. Okay. It'll fuel off the lactate. Yes, of course. Like why we are sitting here and chatting, our heart, for example, of my most powerful muscle is primarily running on lactate as a fuel source. That's really interesting. And let me complete this maybe with an interesting important piece for your daily training. Let's say you go out, let's say on a four hour ride, I say, yeah, today I'm doing a good set burning ride. This is my aim for the training. And even though if you have the intensity ride, so even if you know precisely if you need to ride it, 160 or 180 or 200 watts or whatever, let's imagine you go out in a little group ride. And every 10 to 50 minutes you do a sprint, like in Germany here we do sprints to the next sign of the next city center sign, something like city limit sign, something like that. And imagine every 10 to two minutes you do that and you accumulate in the sprint, let's say you do a long sprint or a harder effort, right? And your accumulary is six or eight millimals of lactate. It pushes out the fat for the next five to 15 minutes. So if you do this four times per hour, what was intended to be a fat burning right is actually not really a fat burning right anymore. You do it's the Roblian Intermission. Roblian this is the moment when you just press pause and you think to yourself, oh shit I'm getting a lot of value out of this podcast every day and especially today's episode I'm getting a lot of value and I'd like to pay a little bit back. Roblian I'd encourage you to head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walsh and that's the way you can pay a little bit back and make sure this podcast sticks around so other people can get value in the future. Okay, let's get back to Sebastian. So it really needs to be a disciplined fat-burning rod, even the surges up a little hill, you know, that potentially push you out of fat-burning zone for five, ten minutes hours. Potentially, potentially. And here I'm sorry to say this there is so to speak, there's a general recommendation ends because when you are an Ironman type of guy and you're your glycolic capacity of what is called VL-MX, like the counterpart for the VO2-MAX, when this is relatively low, so you're not really good, so to speak, at accumulating lactate, then you can do a 30 second effort, not a lot is happening to your lactate levels, right? So the amount you push out the fat is rather low. If you are more like a sprinter type of guy, and you do this, well, then sorry, then you potentially accumulate a lot of lactate, and it will take you a long time to get rid of it. So therefore you block your fat or you inhibit your fat combustion for a pretty long time. And what's happened to your glycogen stores in this period? Well, depends on how much glucose you take, but in general you will use glycogen for that, of course. Right? So if we take a typical protocol that a lot of amateurs will do, we're on a super easy fat-burning or recovery ride that go with no breakfast, or maybe an endurance ride that go with a lower carb breakfast an interval data go with a higher current breakfast. Is that something you would advocate? It's that is very difficult. I mean, basically the sign says, yeah, in general, if you go with lower carbohydrate supplementation or carbohydrate content, for example, leaf out the breakfasts, or just have proteins for breakfasts, then you can elevate your fat combustion rate, you go to a higher fed combustion rate earlier and there's even some signs that indicate that there is a potential to have a better aerobic adaptation to your training. So the training benefit can be higher. However, most of the studies, 90% of the study is quantitatively speaking, only look at the transcription level.

6.That's something that's often overlooked

So that's something that's often overlooked. All the studies showing, or most of the studies showing that the effect only happens on the the transcription level. So basically, genes are activated that should potentially increase your performance. But when you look at the studies really looking at the performance outcome from doing this low-carb training, then the effect gets really small to not existing. And what is important here is that the studies that you're looking at are looking for statistics. looking for a change and let's say, you know, the average adaptation was better with always outbreak first, with high, high carp or low carp or whatever. But what many cyclists are looking to as a professional, right? You see, Ineos is doing it, doing it not, Jumbo is doing it, doing it not whatsoever, right? So you look at what are the big guns doing in terms, right? And what is important to note is that when you look at those studies, for example, they are very great examples of, for example, one very popular one where they do a 100k time trial and they do spikes in performance in the 100k and do it with a low carb and a high carb diet. And you can see that in average, it doesn't work. In average, the high fat low carb diet is is is hampering performance tremendously for the full distance for the harder effort, but there are a few outliers. So long story short for some athletes at works. And what I would like listeners to understand is that in the professional world, in professional cycling or in other professional sports, we don't care about the average. We don't care if a low carb diet works in average, right? When I was coaching a professional world to a team with 28 or 26, I don't care if this works for every writer. But only thing I'm interested in, if it works for my one guy who can win the race, if he gains 2% with it, then I'm going to do it. And then you are going to read it in the news about it one day. And you go, I have to do it. But that's not mean that it doesn't mean that it works for you. It could be that this is again, in this study with 100 kilometers of time trial, I don't know, there's maybe 20 subjects and for 18, it doesn't work. So the general recommendation, not knowing you as an athlete, not knowing your physiological profile. The general recommendation will be, ah, better be careful. But there are one or two guys that really helps. So in a fictitious world where you decide to expand your coaching stable by 100% and you take on a fictitious second athlete, and it's one of our viewers and he's a time crunched guy, sort of trying eight to 12 hours a week. What's your key sort of process for getting to understand the physiology of this writer when he comes into you? Well, for me, you know, it should all start with a proper assessment. And don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to advertise, you know, on my own project or the own tools here. or whatever it is, it should just start with a very, very precise assessment of, you know, at HECO it says, what are the limiters? What are the limiting factors? I would always sit down with an athlete, for example, when there was a new rider coming in and that's the same, that's exactly the same for a professional rider as it is for a time-crunched, amateur age group or whatever, right? It starts with an assessment understanding what are your limiting factors? is keeping you aware to performing better for whatever your goal is. And sometimes that's training. Sometimes what you say, it's training that got this nutrition. Sometimes it just being able to stay in a better era position, right? It is just being more efficient in writing in the pack whatsoever. When it comes to physiology, it comes down to understand the physiology, how your body, so to speak, ticks, right? Are you, you know, do you have a high view to max? Yes or no? If not, well, there's tremendous room for improvement, right? Do you have a high VLA max? Yes or no? Is there room for improvement? Based on your goal? Yes or no? Are you a little bit overweight? Is there a potential room for improvement and lose body weight? Yes or no? Right? All these questions, which you need to tackle and answer in order to have the best strategy. I maybe think about not as a training program, but think about as a strategy because training program for most people feels like and cycling it feels like yeah, training program means you need to be out on the bike riding. But strategy could involve doing whatever flexibility training for your aeroposition or other things. I think it's a great point as well where you talk about cycling being more than just the physiology, the bike. This is something that permeates, a message that permeates the entire summers from all of the world tour guys.

7.Physiology is one part of it

The physiology is one part of it. We've seen all these outliers for the years. You've worked with high roads and Mark Avinsch is there on high road at Inkwind. You were there. His early performance tests indicated he almost shouldn't be a professional cyclist. They were so bad. Yes, we're looking back and potentially the end of his career now as maybe one of the most decorated cyclists of all time. And I think a lot of amateurs watching this, and especially in the news with culture, where they think you can sit inside on a virtual e-game, and then all of a sudden, plug yourself into a race environment, come merge, and you're somehow magically gonna inherit all the skills that you need to ride in the bunch to shelter, to feed, to change clothes, to all the other dynamics that happen within a peloton. Well, yeah, so there's a mark, Kevin, the story about his test as Hyrule was a little bit different, that indicated that this is time of the year he wasn't fit, and not the general note said. But especially what I learned also from experience with the teams, and I think this is a very similar point is, when we were recruiting, for example, when we were looking at youngsters to become professionals, we were looking at not so much about the physiology, but from a team perspective, you would try to find somebody who is highly successful, but not yet reached his limits in terms of his physiology. So it doesn't really help if you say, this guy is doing quite okay in the under 23, or quite good in the under 23, but he's already at 85 VO2 max, and already at 6% body fat, and has been in the wind tunnel five times, then you have to ask, well, then where the heck do you wanna improve him? So what you're looking for is somebody where you say, yeah, he's doing very good based on what he has. And now if you throw all the tools at him in terms of better training, better nutrition, better aerodynamics, better everything, you know, then it's going to take off. Yeah, I talk over the term I call that coaching age. When I get a client that comes into a roadman's eitalin and you chat to them and they're like, yeah, so I've been racing for 10 years. I've had 10 different coaches and, you know, I've been to the wind tunnel. I've been to like 15 different nutritionists. You're kind of like, oh, I'm not sure what I can do for this guy. Yeah. But if a guy is coming from a nother sport, it's blank slate, it's year one, even if they're 30, 32 years of age, you're like, oh, there's still quite a lot of room for improvement here. Right. Right. Key towns are something that's coming up quite often across a lot of people at the moment. And I think some people are just unsure how to use it. And again, it's back to your point of it almost doesn't matter what works for the masses is that one specific rider, in this case, ruglage getting a super benefit from it. And that's why everyone else now thinks it's fashionable. I know it's up to two of the guys on Michelin Scott yesterday and they said they were looking to test it again this winter but they still hadn't pulled the trigger and confirmed they were going to use it. Have you played around with them or what's your thoughts on them? Yeah, so we have used ketones, And the version of it before it was commercially available, so when one package was still $800. We played around it and obviously because of the price tag in a smaller scale and only during exercise. And the latest research indicates that it might not be as beneficial or it can actually in a bit performance in some cases when you use it during exercise. So during exercise there's a little bit specific, it's not that straightforward. And you know how, where it's getting more popular is using it as a recovery supplement, right? And there as a recovery supplement, it seems to work quite well and also for, for you know, a broader audience, so to speak. So what's gone on with that? What is this, like what's the mechanism behind why it's useful as a recovery strategy? I will not talk about this, I guess. Okay, but it's something you're still actively kind of playing around with and looking at. Right, right. So moving on to more broadly, stepping away from keytones, moving on to broadly the fueling requirements for an athlete. I think your typical Joe going out at the weekend, the jail companies want him hammering in, you know, a jail every 20 minutes, whether he's on his group, right on a Saturday or he's on his, his whiff section on a Tuesday. Do you have any take on fueling strategies? Well, it highly depends on your goals and on, I think it depends on three things.

8.What is your goal? What is your actually need of carbohydrates

So what is your goal? What is your actually need of carbohydrates? How much carbide you really burn? And then think about the broader picture in terms of the recovery. So what I mean here is that we should think about not the actual training. We should think about the next trainings to come. So for example, when you go out on a Sunday and you have two more days recovery before the next session, then you know, there's plenty of time and there's not really a need to go fueling during the ride, you can just empty you so you speak your glycogen stores because you have 48 hours to the next ride, no problem at all, right? But when it's Saturday and you have a long ride on the next day, then you should think about fueling during the ride because you think about the next session. And is there an argument for if you fueled on that day, you could your performance would have been as X% higher, and then the adaptation to that training would have been that little bit higher as well? It's not that straightforward. In general, we talked about the low carbohydrate, higher fat diet, and how it potentially could improve adaptations, right? The idea is basically, so now I have to talk a little bit technically here. Go for it. So technically, and that might be for some people, might be a little bit surprising, but technically your beta oxidation, so the process of beta oxidation is anaerobic. It might sound strange, but you look it up in biochemistry, it's anaerobic. basically there's basically only one single metabolic step in the whole body in every cell where oxygen is processed. This is in the mitochondria. So why I bring this up is because because the adaptation of the mitochondria. So what ultimately is your last bottleneck in processing oxygen and producing energy or power output, erobically, the ultimate bottleneck is how much mitochondria you have, how active it is, how much ATP it can process. And for the mitochondria, it doesn't really matter, so to speak, if you have a higher oxygen requirement because you burn additional fat, which needs additional oxygen, or because you go 20 watts harder, because you push a little bit harder. It just triggers a higher oxygen demand. This is by the way, also you can find a lot of literature telling you that high intense training increase the fat combustion because the only thing you're doing, you're increasing your tromax and therefore you're increasing your ability to use fat as a fuel because it needs additional energy and therefore additional oxygen. So the answer here is that yeah potentially potentially going a little bit lower in your carbohydrates, burning more fat, so to speak artificially, so to speak, increases your oxygen demand and therefore potentially increases your adaptation, right? That's a little bit simpler way you might think of it as a car, think about the fuel combustion or your mileage in a car. When you drive it really economic or when you put the air conditioning on and the DVD player and whatever, it uses additional fuel without the engine needs need to work harder so to speak, right? Or without you going faster? And that's a little bit the same here. So higher fed combustion needs more oxygen and therefore potentially triggers a better aerobic adaptation. That's really interesting. There's a really interesting book. It's called The Wanting by Gary Kelleher. And he has this idea almost like Archimedes leaver that if you have a big enough leaver, you can move the world. And he has this idea with his daily routine where he looks at what's the wanting that if I solve this problem, every other problem ceases to become relevant in my entire life. So to take that metaphor from Gary Keller and bringing across to us in this conversation and cycling, if you were speaking to the audience directly as you are now and you were looking to identify that wanting that our comedian is lever to take them from where they are to their goals, what would that wanting be? That's a question for you. Yeah, obviously the answer is it depends, right? So I just always give that answer. Yeah, no. So obviously the answer is it depends. For a road cyclist, you mean? Yeah, a road cyclist. Yeah. It depends. We'll make it more specific with say a road cyclist who's carrion maybe, tree kilograms and wants to. He doesn't know for a time trial at the moment and he wants to go a little bit faster. So, look, let's come up with some use cases here, right? So let's take your cyclist who is already in this board for three, four, five years and whatever has the ability to train, let's say, 10 hours per week, just to make up one example. So you have a limit on your time and you're using this limit already for the last one, two, three, four years. The sad truth is that your adaptation for your view to max, so to change your, like, from a physiological point of view, right?

9.Your possibility to vastly change your view to max without changing…

So your possibility to vastly change your view to max without changing or without increasing your weekly commitment to training are slim. There's only so much you can do, right? There's not so much more you can do in terms of increasing your aerobic power. If it would be different, like this is why I bring this up, it's your biggest lever that you have, right? Your biggest lever that you have is just cranking up this view to max, to skyrocket, and you will ride much, much faster. That's very, very simple. But the problem is, in this example, we just maxed out our training time already. So the possible additional improvements you will see in VO2 max or relative to SLIM. So in this case, the biggest lever that you have as a road cyclist is your VL-MX, is your glycolic system. One of the very early studies that we did, we looked at the differences in VO2 max and VLMX in professionals and amateurs. And the difference in VLMX is only 20%. If you think about it, in a good amateur 60, 65, whatsoever, maybe, and a professional 75 to 85. So that's approximately 20%. The difference in VLMX is like 200%. Whoa. So there you have your biggest lever and the importance of VLMX. So just break down VLMX for someone who's not familiar. Oh, sorry. So, view to max is a proxy for, it's basically maximum oxygen consumption. And why it exists, like normally you can say, okay, we don't care. We don't care how much oxygen you take up. The reason is very simple. There's no technology and it would not be very feasible to stick like a probe sensor into your mitochondria while you're riding your bike and measure aerobic energy turnover. But what we know, what science knows is that your aerobic energy turnover is absolutely proportional to the oxygen uptake rate. you use VO to max because you can measure it. And VLA makes so to speak is a counterpart of your anaerobic metabolism because when it's also not possible to stick a probe center into the cytosol where this is where in the muscle cell where anaerobic metabolism happens and measure glycolytic energy turnover. But the rate of lactate production is again absolutely proportional to the rate of glycolytic energy production. So now I can just go to Amazon eBay or something and buy a handheld lactate analyzer and measure it. That's why we use it. So VLMX is like your glycolic counterpart, so to speak, what view to max is for your maximum aerobic performance or power VLMX is for your glycolic part. And the differences in VLMX between amateurs and professionals is-ish twofold. And so, physiologically speaking, this would be, maybe your biggest lever and the importance of it, the effect it has on your performance increases vis-a-vis your to max. So when you're just starting, don't care about it. But if you are this guy, just we just make up this example, or we're writing for a couple of years and you max out your weekly time commitment, there might be a big of potential. You are the case which you're trying to bring up is the time trial list. Maybe your biggest lever is aerodynamics. Maybe just train how you train but put your trainer in front of the mirror and have your girlfriend use a lipstick and outline your front area or your side area and tuck in and the practice is positioned or use a Leomor device to understand if you're able to keep your head down and show us up. Maybe this is the biggest potential to improve performance in a time trial. Sebastian, wherever I really enjoyed that chat. Thanks very much for taking the time. I thank you for having me. Cheers, mate. Roadman, before you go, I've got an important announcement to make because over two days and the eighth and ninth of December, I'm gonna speak with 30 of the world's leading fitness experts. And I want you to join me free of charge from the comfort of your own home. This is the first ever Roadman virtual performance summit for aiming to bring together the best minds and fitness and they're gonna share with me their secrets bio-hacking your physiology, melt away body fat and smashing your cycling goals. Would you like to learn their secrets? It's easy. All you have to do is register for your free ticket over at www.roadmansummit.com forward slash free. That's www.roadmansummit.com forward slash free. The link is in the bio.