It's just that little bit of a lag built into heart rate. So before you get out and do that test, what we try and get clients to do, you get to do about a 15 minute warm up and then I try and get them to do a three minute TT style effort. So three minutes, you know, as if you're doing a tree kilometer pursuit as hard as you can and that's just to open you out and then you're going to do five minutes easy and then you do your actual test. So a 15 minute normal warm up then you're going to do three minutes like a three minute pursuit and then you're going to do five minutes easy and then into your test and that way if you standardize that protocol and you do it every single time, the results are going to be that bit more accurate. So once you have that figure, if it's your 20 minutes, power figure or your 25 minutes discounting your force five, what you're going to do is you're going to take 5% off that. And this deduction estimates exactly what we would have been able to do if we went for the full hour. So for example, if you've got 270 watts, that's all right, let me see, that's 270 watts, multiply about 0.95 to 0.256. They're about 0.256. It's giving you a threshold as, or if you hit like 170 beats, you're gonna multiply that by 95%. So you have 161 odd beats is gonna be your threshold. Okay, so you're gonna get that number and that's your new threshold number. Okay, that's important. So that's the new threshold number we talk about. And when we talk about what's per kilogram for a threshold, we talk about your 270 threshold number that we've given you, divided by your watts and kilograms, and that's your watts per kilograms, watts per kilo's ratio. So in future episodes, you're gonna hear me talking about Bernal-Donex, watts per kilogram, upper climb, and you're gonna be able to reference that, multiply by your weight and go, holy shit, I would have needed to hold 790 watts for an hour to hold Bernal up that last climb. It gets depressing. So once you have that threshold number, what you need to do is, in the show now, down below, I have a link, click on that link, that's going to ask you to put in your email and your name, pop that in and I'm going to email you automatically over a little auto response or thing set up, it's going to automatically email you a threshold calculator. This is my gift to you. Well I'm down here in Kinsale, everyone thinks I'm why I'm not training, it's because I'm building you a threshold calculator all day, that's why I wasn't training. So I've built a little trash haul calculator in Excel spreadsheet, so get your number, ping it in there and that's going to spit you out a bunch of zones and now we're starting to try and mindfully. So now we know why we're trying and each one of these zones has an associative physiological benefit. So for example, if we're trying at less than 55% of our trash haul figure, we're in recovery pace. So recovery pace, it should feel very easy. It should feel like difficulty is very low. It should almost feel like you're wasting time in that zone. But the benefits in that zone then are, we're recovering from previous heart exertions, we're priming our body for sessions to come, we're getting blood flowing, we're clearing waste products, there's a host of benefits. And only in that zone will we get those benefits. So if we go to 55 to 74%, This is all in spreadsheets, you don't need to take it down. If we got a 55 to 74% of that threshold figure, we're moving into aerobic endurance zone. So that's a steady pace that you'd be able to ride off between two and four hours without putting yourself under pressure. So in that zone, we're starting to build Moira Conjia. That's the powerhouse for endurance and so on and so forth, like all the way up to our zone six, which is our VO2 max. It's extremely short, maximum efforts that you can only hold for a few seconds. And that's about 120% of your functional trash haul power. So once you start understanding how the body works, and you'll start to understand how we get fitter, how we can target events. If we're targeting a criterium, we start figuring out going, okay, well now we're not just gonna go out the door and randomly train and hope to do well in our criterium, we're gonna break down the demands of our criterium, we're gonna say, okay, well we've got 110 seconds sprints to do. Okay, so if I want to improve my sprint, what zone do I need to be in? And you can look across your calculator and you can say, okay, I need to spend time in this zone. So this is the force build and block of build and success while trying to plan. When we have clients coming in the door, this is our start and point. I like to use that analogy of a GPS with clients. When you jump into the car with your GPS, it wants to know two things. Where are you right now and where are you going? Where are you right now is your threshold test and where you're going is your goals. So we'll cover goals in a later podcast. We actually, you know what, we'll do it in the next podcast. We'll cover goals in and these, this podcast and the next podcast then will form two real foundational podcasts that we're going to reference back to.
And if we let them task creep, they will occupy like what's the whole saying, a task will expand to the time allocated to this sort of stuff will creep, creep and creep. And eventually we'll just start kind of thinking, you know, there's too much time going into this cycling. It's it's too time consuming. But if we were just a little bit smarter and a little bit more forward planning. So this is something we try and talk to our clients at the outset and we try and get them to look at their weekly schedule and make adjustments about it. Think about it this way. So if you had a bunch of dirty laundry, every time you had a dirty pair of socks, a dirty t-shirt, you wouldn't put a wash on. You have an efficiency cost there. It's an allocation of time. You know, it's the time it takes you to bring the clothes down, put them into the washing machine, get the detergent, throw it in. Instead you wait until you have a bunch of clothes ready to wash. That's more efficient to wash a full bunch of clothes and one go. The exact same way if you had to go to the post office because you'd have letters post. You wouldn't go one letter because you have to drive to the post office, you have to take time out to get there. You would wait until you had a bunch of letters to post and then you'll drive to the post office. It's efficient and effective allocation of you know where our most precious resource time. So So it's that cost of task switching. If you're at home and you're working on your novel, you're working on your music, your send and emails, whatever you do for work, it's the cost of you stopping that task, getting into your car, driving to the post office, getting the stamps, posting them, getting back in your car, getting back home and getting back onto your task and getting refocused on that task. That task switching costs us energy. So what we want to do is we want to batch activities. So we wait until we have that bunch of letters and then we go to the post office and that's a much more efficient way to do it. So just two things we try to add to clients, two ways this can be effective for them. Just the two, like you've got, right Tom, just trying to think of the best way because is a number of ways it applies because it applies to the practicality day today. If you train, like we're going to take for this example, we're going to take a normal dude who works Monday to Friday weekends of family kids because I think that's our typical client that represents a lot of our listeners here and you can substitute working for college if you're not a work guy or family for a girlfriend. But typically we're seeing clients trying and we're prescribing China. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday with Monday, Friday, rest days. Now Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It could be short sessions. Some days it could be active recovery sessions. We're not going to get into that right now. But it's important is you're in your kid and you're doing something Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday. So on a Monday, you're on the day off. So we need to batch some of our cycling activities. We've got a lot of mental energy going into trying to enjoy the week. We've monday off, let's batch a shit to one of our cycling activities on a monday. Let's get all our kit for the week washed on a monday. Likewise, if we bike maintenance to do, bike washing to do, fixing all tubulars to do, bike to be dropped off, the bike shop, get it done on a Friday. And batch all those tasks so you don't find yourself every night of the week washing, cycling kit. If you don't find yourself every night of the pulling out the bike and working on the bike, that's one way you can batch it. Another way you can batch things which I like to recommend to clients who are commuting to work. You drive to work or you get the bus to work or you take your electric scooter to work or whatever you do on a Monday and you bring in as much as possible your lunch at your healthy lunches for the week you know if you're bringing in tin foods and the like you bring in your clean clothes for the week you bring in your towels for for the week, you bring in your share or gels, whatever you need to all that stuff for the week needs to be transported, goes on a Monday, then you can roll it into work, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, on the Friday, you bring home all the dirty shit and it's just, it's a beautiful way of segmenting the week. Also if we're looking at productivity, when we're off on the weekend or for self-employed, you know, for me on this A1 gig, you know, you can very easily find yourself all day, refreshing emails, all day, checking social media stuff, all day on the phone, talking to clients. So what I try and do is I batch things. So I know that my most productive errors are open till lunchtime. So from the moment I wake up until lunchtime, I like to think of this as my creation period. So if I have blogs to write, if I have podcasts to record, this is the time when my brain is most active. This is the time when the neural pathways are really foreign and my creative pathways are really foreign so I try and get my creative stuff done until lunch becomes a very natural breakdown for me then my you know my enthusiasm my motivation it's dwindled a little bit I can still perform menial tasks which don't require as much brain power after lunch that's like phone calls that's emails that social media stuff but I don't need to be on social media every 15 or 20 minutes.
I don't know what what that rule is about. It's a crazy rule. Like why can I rock up in any other country to a group ride and I get in the ride with them weekend and weekend or start? Why can't two clubs marriage together for a ride? It seems a completely artificial barrier. I don't know why I always accepted that was the way. I know Clontarrif's my local club and I don't ride with them because yeah, that's the reason I think I went up once or twice and they're like, oh yeah, tree spins and you need to join the club. And which is weird. Like, I know myself, Sean McKenna and Colin Cassidy, like we did China Group, which was going out of Clontaar for every day for years. We wrote it out of there. And, you know, we're trading more prominent sites in the country at the time. And Clontaar Cycling Club was meeting around the corner and we never voted them and they never asked us to write them. It's a weird kind of us and them mentality that's on blouse as foster. So I'm not sure what that's about. I would assume it's an insurance tank. But again, I don't know, I'm just kind of guessing. It seems like a barrier that's gone up there with no good reason if I was to guess. Yeah, good question. Yeah, some other comments or some other comments that are coming in. So Shay Daven just said, good podcast. Kurt Rogers, great content, really enjoyed that. Keet Lawler said, I joined swords in March this year it's been excellent and I've learned something new on every club spin and never once been left behind a great group of four different spins at all levels on a Saturday. That's great stuff, because I know that was the club I was talking about when I said I got started and I had an amazing experience. Swords was brilliant to me when I was getting started. So they were all comments on Facebook, there's a bunch more there and there's also a load on YouTube as well so I'm gonna just go through a few of them, Froome Dog is the man, the couture of the France. It was never the same without him. That's Chris. JD said, what makes victory in Sansa Vastian for Evan Paul even more remarkable. He's just started bike racing in April 2017, up with the men who's playing football, PSV ontove, and that's pretty sensational. Chris, Chris, he dolens his Armstrong podcast. It's very good. Even better was Yohambru Nils. I didn't listen to Yohambru Nils. I must check it out. slave to the system said the group road is dying and every second lad has a coach and is on a program. That is true. That is true my friend and I think that's just where smart coaching comes in. It's where there's a lot of cowboys out there as well, West and coaching country. Yeah, the group ride as I said, it's maybe I'm a romantic and I love the history at a sport and I really appreciate that role group, role it plays in sport. So I think it's so important that you can't work on the physiology of an athlete through a training plan and completely discount the technique, tactics, everything you learn from a group, right? I think there are two sides to the same kind, boat need to be nurtured. So you know coaches need to be understanding of this and a coach is failing to appreciate that. I think is a coach who needs the question is philosophy. I think you need to set aside and protect time for a group ride. It doesn't have to be every week but from time to time it's important to dip in and when you're at the group ride you should be at the group ride. Yeah people just need, sometimes they just find it hard to put down the numbers and the strava and the segments and you know I don't know, coach he said, if you're sprinting for an imaginary finish line, for a non-existent prize in the middle of nowhere, against yourself, you need your fucking head examined. I think that kind of sums travel up well. I mentioned on the last podcast and the one before that I was gonna start racking my brains about a way to try and galvanize us as a community and try and finish the season strong, because we don't like that, oh, winter is common brigade and it's a fucking game of My trauma meme is knocking around winter here for you know it's still like it's August Bank holiday weekend is just gone. We've still amazing weather like here in CanSail the sun is beating down at the moment. So I'm gonna put together I'm gonna pull my finger out and I'm trying to get it done this week for a launch early next week and eight week challenge. So an eight week challenge is gonna challenge us to stay on point for eight weeks. goal at the end of the eight weeks could be an event that you pick for yourself at the end of the eight weeks it could be a performance target like you test threshold now you retest in and you're hoping for ex-improvement but I'm going to build in something as well because the daily ritual section that we talked about last day it's very powerful for creating momentum so I'm going to build in some daily rituals around movements around noise and a bunch of this stuff, I'm gonna build in a little bit of weight because over eight weeks, you know, you'll feel so much better if you're a kilo or two kilos down, you know, just how we metabolize energy is very different as well.
When we start shedding a little bit of weight and where acceleration improves, everything improves when we start shedding a little bit of weight. So I'm gonna put together some sort of eight week challenge and I'm really looking forward to it because I'm looking forward to it, as I said, because a lot of this stuff I'm creating for me as much as I'm creating it for you. So an eight week challenge, I'm gonna pull together. I'm gonna get the head down and I'm gonna try and work on it this week. I've no internet down here. I've no internet in the house and can say, I don't come down that often, so we don't have internet down here. Yeah, so I normally have it on my phone and I'm with Virgin unlimited, excuse me, unlimited data with Virgin and I got a text off them saying, my unlimited data has exceeded my fair usage amount on my data. So the unlimited isn't unlimited, it's unlimited with an asterisk from Verge and I've exceeded my fair usage. So I chat with two good people at Verge and good people, he was very loosely there. And I'm like, yeah, I need my data back. So I'm willing to pay, just let me know what I need to do to get extra data here. And they're like, you can't get extra data until the 19th of the month when it resets. I'm like, no, like I'm happy to pay here, just let me know what I need to pay because name my data back because I can't even send a WhatsApp or whatever and they're like, no, nothing you can do. So I was saying, okay, the summer is I'm a customer who wants to give you money and you're a business who's refusing to take my money. So it absolutely bizarre. So yeah, I'm dataless at the moment. I'm not sure how I went on that rant, but it's just something that's annoying me at the moment. So this will be my little soapbox for things to annoy me at the moment. I think it was a family yard. I had to walk grinds my gear section. Yeah, That could be my walk around my gear section. Drop me podcast recommendations that you guys are listening to as well. It doesn't even have to be cycling podcasts. Some good podcasts I'm listening to at the moment. I like some hearts to waking up podcast. Obviously, Joe Rogan experiences a classic blind boys one isn't bad. What else? Cyclomones is the cycling podcast. The cyclone niche is poor on podcasts. have to say that's why I'm I'm pretty sure we're gonna absolutely dominate with your help. We're gonna blast into that category because there's just not a lot there at the moment. When you contrast it to YouTube and how many YouTube bloggers are just killing it. Like it's hard to make a mark in the YouTube vlogging section if you're in that cycle and the useful podcasts. Pretty poor selection out there at the moment. So yeah whatever podcast you listen to the moment definitely ping me somewhere Instagram we're in all the We're in all the cool places, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Facebook groups, all that type of good stuff. Guys, I hope you enjoyed the show today. We had a fairly action-packed show. Sorry if the first bit was a little bit confusing. It's something that doesn't naturally flow that well and it doesn't naturally flow that well off my tongue. I know if it's the first time you're hearing a lot of these concepts, it probably wasn't that will receive to your ear ear either. So if that's the case and it sounded a little bit waffly, trust me if you go back and you listen to it a second time, the concepts that sound foreign will start to make sense. And this sort of new vocabulary, like once you listen to it a few times, it will become normalized. And next time you hear me talking about what's per kilogram threshold, you'll understand what's going on and you'll be able to communicate in this language with your friends. So guys, that has been the A1 Show podcast from Kinsel County Cork. It's Tuesday and I will be back to you on Friday for the next one. So as I said, at the moment, we don't have a show sponsor, but what I would do, and I would appreciate in lieu of me shilling, someone is, if you can tell friends, subscribe to the show, rate the show, leave reviews on iTunes, and just generally start to lay the floor up under this bitch. Okay guys, catch you later, it's been a pleasure.