1.Did you like languages in school? Because today in this brief Roadman…

Did you like languages in school? Because today in this brief Roadman episode, I'm gonna teach you a little bit about the language of cycling. But first, let's cue the 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, a disc podcast, will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh, and welcome to the Rowman Podcast. Welcome back to the Rowman Podcast, Rowman. Thanks for joining me again for another short-form Rowman Vites Podcast. It is an honor that you devote your time to listening to my ramblings about cycling and I never take that for granted. So each and every episode I'm going to make sure you go away. Just having a little bit more knowledge on the subject we all love so much. Bike riding. Before I jump into today's episode, as always, I would encourage you to jump on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walsh. That's your chance to say, thanks very much for these daily episodes. I know you're bleeding through your eyeballs, lay that noise, editing this stuff from all your benefit. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do you a solid and I'll buy you a coffee. Well, that's where you do it. On and over to Patreon. I'll drop the link to that into the description below. Today I want to talk to you a little bit about the unique language that we use as coaches to talk with athletes. And it's a language that if you're not working with a coach, you're probably not too familiar with. Let me sit the stage here. Eight weeks ago, I had a conversation with someone. He was cycling, but he was caught in between two steals. He was too fast for the fast group in his local club, but he was too slow for the fast group. So he was really caught in between. To the point that he was nearly thinking of quitting the sport because he's like, I'm not getting a challenge. And I'm done, I'm not able to compete. And I said to him, look, take a punt on the eight-week challenge. A lot of stuff, you're not gonna know why I'm telling you to do it, but just go ahead and do it. So today, what I wanna do for you guys is lift the veil a little bit and show you some of the things that I've done with him. So it was real, wax on, wax off, paint defence, up, down, paint defence. The process at the time as why Karate here was learning all this stuff wasn't entirely clear until it was revealed later on. Often that's how we do the coaching practice. Yesterday's podcast, if you haven't checked it out, we talked about the importance of testing and I went through and shared my test results. So the next logical step, I love to think it is like baking a cake. the next thing we need to do. So if the very first thing was put in an ingredient one, the testing, what's the next thing we need to do? The next thing we need to do and why we bother or haul testing in the first place, it's to determine our training zones. So when you finish that test, you'll put it into a zone calculator and it will give you a list of zones. Zone 1234.5 and it'll give you a range of heart rates or power if you're using a power meter. So what these ranges mean, And it's not just an arbitrary list of numbers. These are new zones. So zone one will have its associated benefits. What we can expect to happen when we spend time training in zone one. I'm not going to get into what they are right now. I might do it in the next step in the next podcast. Zone two will have its own associated benefits on tree, so forth, so forth, all the way down to zone six, zone seven. The reason we do this, it's so now we have a new type of communication method with the client.

2.We have a new grammar for communication

We have a new grammar for communication. So it's very difficult for me to have a conversation with you guys, the listeners and say, oh, I rode up a hill today at 22 K an hour because you can't interpret that. You don't know the gradient of the hill. Was I riding with a tailwind? Was I riding with a headwind? It's very, very difficult for you to interpret and go, how hard was he riding? How difficult was that climb? He rode 22 K an hour for 10 minutes. What What does that mean? It's almost impossible to make peer comparisons this way, and it's almost impossible for me to give you a prescription to follow that way. So this is why we use zones, and this is why we use power. So if I say now I wrote in zone four at 400 watts for 10 minutes, everybody has a gauge. They know from the zone four, demarcation, that zone four is around my capacity. It's the most I can write for one hour, and now they know the power I wrote, 400 watts. So now they know the sort of power that I could hold for that's all for a period. This is super important for a coach. This is super important for me as your podcast host and you as the listener. So when I talk about training principles, I have a clear way of communicating them to you. I can say a sample threshold session is go right in zone two endurance for 60 minutes and in that 60 minutes add in two 15 minute periods where you're going to work in zone four. Now you have a clear prescription. And that's the power of breaking it down in zones. For us, the coach at the next step, what it allows us to do is manipulate intensities, rather than you going out and riding at the same speed all the time, we're able to, as in that example there, interspersed periods of intensity, say, two 15 minute periods in zone four. Why this is super important is everybody has a friend. Think about this one now for a second. everybody has a friend who's gone to the gym for, I'm gonna say two, three days a week for the last three, four years, they still have a belly, they still have love handles, and they have got not one little bit fitter. There's a reason this happens, they've hit a plateau. So how our body works is we initially get a stress, we get fitter in response to that stress, then our body is smart, we adapt to that stress. So once we've adapted that stress, we've stopped getting stronger. So what we need to do, our job as a coach, we need to change up the type of stress. So it's restressing, you're restimulating it again until you hit the next plateau and then it's rinse and repeat, like going up steps on the stairs. Up the step, plateau, up the next step, plateau. One of the ways this became super evident to me was very early in life, and very early in life. talking like an owl lad here. I was probably 16 and I was working on a building site and I remember when I started in the building site, I used to think I was super fit, you know. I had no idea what training was back then. I taught training three, four times a week for an hour, football training after school and run the couple of days a week in the mornings before school was super fit. But I was calling myself folks, but that's a story for another day, building sites and I come in from work and I would be like to say I was right off with fatigue was like doing it no justice. I was glued to the couch, couldn't even move. Never mind going to do anything. I limp in at 6 o'clock, fall on the couch, barely have energy to eat my dinner, fall asleep by about half-eight and this went till the next day and work. I've chatted the lads in work and to be this fairly heavy set placer and work them with, don't all the same work as me for the day.

3.Went to get up the last night and he's like, I played for episode…

I went to get up the last night and he's like, I played for episode with the lads, went to the drive and ranch after that. I was like, where are these lads getting the energy? Look at him, look at me. How is it possible he's fitter than me? What I later learned is he'd adapted to distress, So he'd adapted to that stimulus so his body wasn't making those gains anymore. So he got the initial period of stress like I was experiencing at the time. Dennis body adapted and he hit that plateau and why he still had that weird egg shape, mad love handle shape was because he hit the plateau and he didn't change up the stress. He stayed in the same job and that was the fourth time it was really evident to me and I didn't know at the time that I was learning a coaching principle. And we now call that periodization. And it's something we do on a macro level over someone's training plan and someone we do in a micro level over interspersed in periods of intensity and rest within a given training week. So there you go. If you were baking a cake, that would be the next step. You go and do your threshold test, then you go and set your zones and now we have a vocabulary where we can communicate with each other. That's that got deep. That was a good one. I enjoyed that. Hopefully you took a lot from today's podcast. I mentioned yesterday and it is now up and it's in full flow to answer those questions I get all the time. What hard is it to use and what else are you taking in races? I collated everything I'm using. This is not sponsored stuff. This is not things I'm paid indoors. These are different brands, my ugly sunglasses, the pocket helmets, the bond shoes. These are things that I use, things that I've bought at full retail price and I was chatting to a buddy earlier and we were talking about how there's just such a need for this because you're getting such uninformed opinions when you go into the vast majority of bike shops. I don't have to disparage every bike shop because there's some great service and some bike shops but the vast majority of them, you're going in and you're getting a 45 year old triathlete behind the counter and he's recommending the entire choices to you for a criterium. You know, this lad has never raised a criterium in the rain and slid out on a front wheel because he's got the pressure wrong or he's got the Torah choice wrong. That's what roadman resources is. It gives you the battle test confidence that I have skin my knees many times on collating this list and chatting to the other lads, pseudocultures and A1. It's something that we're constantly going to keep feeding into. Even just before I publish this podcast, I put up my wheel recommendations of a train on wheel I've used, Mavic Serium, around 400 euro price points. I've put up a raceway, fast forwards that I absolutely love that they braked super well in the West, which is a rarity for a rim brake. I've put up a disc brake version that I would also recommend in Envy and then I've put up the money now object, just won the euro millions. Anthony, what's out of wheels would you get? and flush as a calm, it's a set of envy wheels. They are mint. Folks, that's it for the roadman podcast. Do share around the roadman resources. Look, it's not gonna benefit me. It's gonna benefit you. It's gonna make your, you know, it's just gonna make the bunch safer. It's gonna make your training partners better, get quipped, you're gonna have to deal with less punctures, less mechanicals. It's gonna make everyone, people helping people, folks. It's powerful stuff. That's it, and tomorrow, don't forget, We're back for a feature lens, roll my podcast. Until then, it's been emotional.