Hello, roadman! In today's podcast, I want to talk to you about Zwift
Hello, roadman! In today's podcast, I want to talk to you about Zwift. I want to talk to you about how their training plans, their flaut, their hoarding your fitness and they may even be undermining your health goals. 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 and if you're a regular listener to the podcast you know I love business and I love innovation and I love companies that try and just make our eco system better and for a long time it's been a problem because You had two distinct groups, you had one group of super smart people, and you had another group of cyclantusias and rarely in that weird Venn diagram did they intersect. So we didn't see much innovation in cyclant and in the last few years we have. And I'm super thankful of that. So this podcast, I need to temper it by saying I'm pointing out problems with the current technology, they can't erase, they will improvise and it will get better. But right now it's not serving the need as advertised. And specifically what I'm talking about is with training plans because I know I've had a bunch of DMs on Instagram from people who are following with training plans. So I took some time to dig into these with training plans and see what they're made of. What are you actually going to get better if you're following is with training plan. And I actually horrified because I think not only could you be hurting your fitness in the long term but I think you could be undermining some of your long term health goals which is when we started out the podcast that's health happiness and longevity so I felt a bit of a civic duty to point out some of the pitfalls and how you can step around that. Before I jump into unpacking all of that I'm going to ask you to press pause on the podcast and head on over to patreon.com buy me the price for coffee the price for point once a month, that's how we keep the podcast moving forward, that's how we keep the show on the road. And because I love this concept of reciprocity, if you do buy me that point to bear once a month as a tip to cap to say thanks, what I will do in exchange for you, in addition to bringing the podcast five days a week, I'm going to record a secret members only podcast, which will come to you at the end of each month. And this is where I go deep on all your questions. And I try and give my best stuff to my patreons. If you can't afford COVID, pinch is hitting a lot of people right now. And if you can't afford the price of a point of beer once a month to support the podcast, that's totally understandable. And you can go ahead and keep listening to the podcast free of charge. Okay, folks, when I dug into this Zwift plan, I was a bit horrified if I'm honest. And really, because I think if you're following a Zwift plan, this is going to be quite hard to hear. I don't think you're training for cycling. I think you're actually just doing cardio. It's very similar to going to a spin class. You're going to a spin class and it's all there, shouting 10 more seconds and then you get to the end of 10 seconds and it's like 10 seconds to go. And it's like, imagine you don't a 1200 watts print for 10 seconds and then they say, you've got 10 seconds to go. Like how does that work? And what is the story with push-ups on the bike? Yeah, five push-ups. That's a bit of a side note. We have to make it here. But that's to illustrate that it is similar to this. It looks glossier and it's wrapped in a nicer wrapping, but that's what it is. It's a spin class. So the first problem with it is these plants, they lack individuality. So maybe the best way to illustrate this is when I have a client coming in the door. So I was starting with a new client today. So what did I do with this client? Well, I interviewed the clients and I chat to the client and I get to know them and I understand their experience. I understand their current activity level, are they cross training, I find out their age, then I do something called a power profile, where I look at their numbers, I see their 10 second, their one minute, their five minute, their 20 minute power, so I can make a profile that are strengths and weaknesses.
From this, I'll start compiling on my end a list of potential target…
From this, I'll start compiling on my end a list of potential target events for them based on those strengths and weaknesses and unique idiosyncrasies of what I find out from their conversation. Then we'll agree on an event, then we'll figure out the demands of that event and we'll reverse engineer the demands of that event. Maybe it's a one-hour criterion, so we know we're gonna have 60 corners in this criterion, and there's gonna be a 10-second acceleration out of each corner, and the last minute's gonna be a zone-5 effort. That's what we know the demands of the event are. Now we can start pulling that apart, reverse engineering, and making sure we're working on all these things in training. This is back to our early podcast where we talked about we have all these different training zones. one, two, three, four, five, six, and each of the zones, they're a narrow band in water to our heart rate, and we get an associated adaptation for spending time in each of these zones. So if we're spending time in endurance zones, we get building mitochondria where utilizing fat as a fuel source, you know, this so this is what we need to figure out, what are the demands of the event, then we start reverse engineering that. What you can't do is what's with those and it's a template, it's everyone's doing the same thing. It's a spin class. Okay, and then my second problem with it is, it's I call it the 80-20 reel. So think about, we have three fuel tanks in our body. So we have the oxidative energy system, that's mainly our aerobic energy system, that's powered off a combination of fats and carbs. With our second system, these are all sound confusing, but it's not really, and it's called a glyco-tic energy system. These are anaerobic system. Think about this as a born sugar, a borns glycogen that's stored in the muscles or the liver, and then we can actually disregard the last system. It's our phosphinogen system and it's like between three and 42nd efforts, but it's not that relevant for this. So we'll just assume we've two energy systems. We've our oxidative system aerobic, we've our glycoleic system anaerobic, so we've been aerobic system and anaerobic system. Now there's peer reviewed, study after peer reviewed, study to back up the efficacy of this 80-20 rule. So we're looking to spend about 80% in our aerobic zone and about 20% in our anaerobic zone, but Zwift violates this completely. And you might think this isn't that important, but oxidative, why we spend so much time in the oxidative system in our aerobic system is it creates mitochondria. Now mitochondria are, they're like the powerhouses of endurance, but they also have a solid benefit of mopping up free radicals. Now you've probably heard the word free radicals because They're nasty shit. Free radicals are responsible for inflammation, but they're also necessary to be there for all sorts of hopes to diseases. Free radicals promote a host of horrible Western diseases like Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer. Free radicals are there in some goias during the production and onset of all those diseases. So free radicals around our body are a bad thing. And when we train, we create mitochondria which help to kill these free radicals and help us age better. Now when we train super hard, we actually produce free radicals. But this isn't a problem because we've built the mitochondria that can mop it up. So that's why the 80-20 rule is important because on the one hand 80% of the time we're doing real good building mitochondria and 20% of the time we're creating excess free radicals. But it's not a problem because the mitochondria are mopping up these free radicals. But when you violate that rule, that starts becoming a problem because the relationship of how many mitochondria we're creating versus how many free radicals we're creating is altered. Another problem is I call it the Netflix effect. A number of years ago I had it go up building a cycling coaching app and we tried to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to teach an app, everything I know about coaching. So we tried to teach the app how to understand where someone is in a training phase. We tried to all the background information I talked about like experience, activity, age, strengths, weaknesses, targets. We tried to teach the app all of this. But as we got further and further down the line, you realize you're balancing two sometimes conflicting notions on one as a cycling coach and someone who are passion for a physiology, you are on one end of a spectrum. And then as a business owner, you're on the other end of a spectrum because you need to keep customers.
It's expensive to acquire customers and your customer needs to stay a…
It's expensive to acquire customers and your customer needs to stay a long time. And a lot of time for your customer to stay a long time, they need to be entertained. That's why we dub that the Netflix effect. And often what's right and a coaching and a physiology point of view isn't right for customer retention. Like we have all these training zones, we talked about zones one to six, but we don't actually need to have all these crazy changes in intensity. We don't need 10 seconds in zone one, 20 seconds in zone two, 30 seconds in zone three. Like a typical session for me at the weekend, I wrote for four hours in zone two. That's It's not that glamorous. It's not that glossy. If you are as with owner and or as with programmer and you build a session that's four hours in zone two, you're going to have customer drop off. You're going to have decreased lifetime value is the metric they're looking at. You're going to have decreased lifetime value of your customer because they're like, well, I don't really need to whiff to do four hours in zone two. So this Netflix effect, both heads and it's in stark contrast to what we actually should be doing at time. So for those reasons for the lack of individuality, the violation of that 80-20 principle and then this constant need to have this Netflix effect of entertaining the customer to retain them as a customer. I think it's flawed at the moment and I wouldn't recommend anyone to be following one of these plans and this isn't my Boy's opinion I tried to as much as I can't a code on this one avoid confirmation boys and just dig into the data And I didn't want the podcast to read like a phone book So I don't cite stuff you're on podcasts because honestly who cares about that only like Point zero zero one of people and if you care that much about you can dig into the research yourself or drop me a DM I'd be happy to share it with you So guys help is on hand obviously we build trying to plans and we follow all these principles we build this individually, we don't violate the anti-20 principle and we're not that obsessed with Netflix effect. Our customers stay with us because I've customers now with me since 2012. The same customers with me all the way through. Now you talk about a lifetime value from Zwift and that's why they're not seeing the bigger picture on this. You can keep customers for a lifetime when you're making lasting changes and impact on their lives eight years. like, is with won't have a customer for eight years, none, zero. And if you want me to build your plans, check out the roadman's icon website or pop me an email. My link is in the description to this podcast. But please, whether it's you're coming to us for coaching or you're going somewhere else, please do seek out professionals on this and don't just follow template plans because, you know, the heart muscle, it's not a toy. And why I'm doing this why I make these podcast is I'm passionate about helping people. You're helped, you're happiness, your longevity and at the moment these with plans to me look to be violating a lot of core principles and I don't like to look at them so please don't don't do it. Folks that has been another roadman cycling podcast. Thanks for listening and I'm gonna chat to you all again on Monday. Hey everybody it's Anthony again. Really quick I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14 day kickstart challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you the leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans regardless of what your level is. There's the master's beginner, advanced, there's meal plans, shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you through at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoidglings.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the that's roadmancycling.com slash 14 day