A Power meter is a valuable tool when you know how to use it.
In this episode we talk about what all those confusing terms means (TSS, CTL, TSB ETC) and show you how you can use that data on your screen to increase the likelihood of you winning bike races.
You can find all the link I reference in the show at
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Hello roadman and welcome back to another episode of the A1 show. So this is the second of a two part episode. The first episode I talk about parameters, what parameters to get should you bother your ass actually getting a parameter. In this episode I'm going to roll on from that. If you haven't had a chance to go back to listen to the last episode, I would advise that you go back and check that out now because this one may not make much sense to you. If you're kind of, I suppose we'll call it a power user, advanced user, a power meter, and you've had one before and you know what's what, then you don't need to jump back unless you just want to be serenaded by my sweet voice one more time for 30 minutes. But you will be able to follow along here without any hassle in today's episode. I wanted to talk about how we can actually get get the best out of our power meter. What's the performance management chart? When you hear these confusing terms like training, stress score, chronic training, load, water day, because they still confuse the hell out of some of the best rotors and coaches. I want to talk to you a little bit how you can reverse engineer your target race so you can increase your chances of success on it. And I've got a couple of interesting little antidotes as well. So with all that said, let's jump on in. So I had an email during the week and it was an interesting email. It was from a girl who I started my email as I started my podcast with Hello Roadman and the girl came back saying basically, oh, I'm not sure this email is intended for me. It seems like it's only targeted at man. And I just wanted to knock this one on the head and address it early. It's like the way I'd address a group of my friends who are both male and female. I'd say, hey, guys, in a gender neutral that's the way roadman is used. So I've even whipped together a dictionary term for I put it around today's email. I said roadman, noun, a term commonly used to identify one who accumulated utmost respect on a bike. A roadman is the highest honor it can be awarded to a bike rider. To be a cyclist is all very well but are you a roadman? Two, a term used to describe a man or woman who's endured a great deal of suffering on the bike but will seldom complain. They know they are a roadman usage just a roadman isn't it? Touch it like that. A little bit of a dictionary definition gone out in the email today or a little five magic bullets email. So you can get that in screen capture. I might even put together a little manifesto what it means to be a roadman. But yeah gender neutral gender neutral guys and girls. Okay, let's jump in and talk about some of the nerdy stuff. If training stress score is the basis of 400 underlines all of this performance management chart, performance management charts, if you don't know what it is or you're not using the jump in today's plan or trying to peak since the chart we use for keeping track of all our data that we're generating from our parameter otherwise it's just useless numbers. So the training stress score is the basis of it all. If you can wrap your head around training stress score, the rest of it's really easy. So training stress score, it's kind of like if I asked you to self estimate how difficult a session was. So I'd say the old time, how hard was that? Give me number one to ten. That's what training stress score is. People make it more complicated, but that's what it is. The number just spans differently and it's objectively calculated. Like if I ask you that's a subjective measurement, training stress score is objectively calculated. So for anyone who wants a deep dive, this is a tough one to say, dive deep. Try and say it out 10 times fast. It's like, here's one to try and say it out. Try and say, go blood, bad blood, 10 times really fast. Go blood, blood, blood, blood, blood, blood. Just those more. I digress. Training stress score. So if I was to ride at one hour, absolutely full gas, as hard as I can go for an hour, the most power I can generate for an hour, we give that a score of 100 training stress points. that becomes an anchor against which we gauge everything else. So if I'm to ride for two hours at 50% intensity, that also gives me 100 stress points. If I'm to ride for one hour at 50% of what I can achieve, that's 50 stress points. So yeah, so obviously it's gonna get more difficult for me to calculate here on the fly whatever calculator was, you know, one hour and 28 minutes, 62% of my max is, but you get the idea. So we use 100 stress points as one hour full gas, and that's an anchor.
And we calculate everything else against that. Then once we understand that, stress points, the rest of it's really easy. People try and make it complicated to make themselves sound smart, but the rest of it's really easy. And you can actually just ditch the names they use. They use really complicated sounding names, like chronic training load. Like that's a mail full of the best of the time's chronic training load. That's the blue line. Forget that word, just call it fitness. So fitness score, what they do is they take your last 42 training stress scores. So that's the score for how difficult each session was for the last 42 sessions. They add them together and they divide it by 42 and that gives you a fitness score. So with that you have the realization of the session that happened 43 days ago. doesn't contribute to your fitness, but the last 42 sessions do. Then they have something they call acute training load. Again, you can ditch that term. We can call that fatigue. And that's just a running total of the last seven training stress scores. Then we have something called training stress balance. And this is just freshness. So it's the difference between the two. The formula for it's a little bit more complicated, but it's just how fresh we are. And that's all you need to know. So that using that data, it's this is how we ensure that Chris from him comes to the Tour de France and he doesn't peak a week too early, he doesn't peak a week too late that he's absolutely perfectly on form for the week in the Tour de France. It's a science. So we know how much stress we call the ramp rate, how much we can bring up their fitness or their chronic training load. We know the parameters which we can bring that up each week without them risking sickness, injury, lack of motivation. We also know how much we can ramp our stress level and we also know what the optimum freshness level is coming into these events. So by using this combination of fitness, fatigue and freshness, we can take all the guesswork out of it. So that means if you're targeting like the New Yorka tree one too, like your time is just as important as Chris Froden's time. Your time is important to you. His time is important to him. It's time away from work. It's time away from family. So you want to make sure you get to that event with the absolute optimum chance of performing well. And we do that by using these metrics on the performance management chart and that's how we've over 90% of athletes hitting the goals that they've selected in conjunction with our coach each season because we can guarantee it through this. Now we can't guarantee crashes, punctures, sick the night before because you ate a bad vindaloo but you get what I'm talking about here. This is why I download a template trying to plan. It doesn't quite code it anymore because we're moving to a new data-driven age. I'm actually doing a lot of research you're going to hear about in the next couple of weeks on stress and how we can balance this stress because what I'm seeing is a lot of athletes born in out. I'm seeing a lot of athletes slightly overweight. I'm seeing a lot of people that aren't that happy out there. I aren't a productive out there. I've got to the bottom of this reason that it's really interesting stuff and I'm going to bring it to you in probably the biggest project we've ever brought from A1 in the last few weeks. It's been 12, 14 months of research. It's been a lot of hard work and it's been a lot of, I'm not going to lie, it's been a lot of tears and frustration from me because I was a human guinea pig on this Unbeknownst to myself where you're going to hear a lot about this in the coming weeks But the way you can actually, do you know what before I talk about that I had a phone call during the week And the phone call was I normally box my coaching calls off on a Monday And I do all my coaching calls on a Monday and I called two guys back-to-back potential clients that were looking to sign up and And the one on one coaching package we have, you know, relative to the guy who's doing a bit of plumbing on the side and he's also a coach, maybe we're quite expensive. But relative to our international peers, you know, people who are competitors, we're relatively affordable or 125 year old month, caramelical coaches, a little bit more. As I said, the people, the Cowboys out there are a little bit cheaper. But I was talking to this guy and I gave him the price, 125 months for a plan and he's like, I can't afford that. And this is a guy, he has disposable income, you can tell from the boy because he's buying from the whole ladies he's taking, chatting to him. He has a lot of disposable income, he says, I can't afford that.
And I was like, yep, grand, you know, no hassle, they didn't try and twist his arm, he knows his finances better, nine hours finances. Some people just can't afford it, but based on the boy because he had this, I was like, maybe quite unlikely but I'll leave it big. Then I talked to a junior and talked to him, told him the price tag 125, he's like yeah that's doable. And I'm like oh is your man that paying for it? He's like no, it's like do you have a job? No. I was like well okay. And he's like you know what I'll make it happen. It's important I'll make it happen. I was like well how are you gonna make it happen? He's like oh Christmas is coming up, birthday is coming up. I can bundle them two together. I can do quite a few lawns at the weekend. I have an old winter boy come that use and I can put that together and I can sell it. He's like it's only going to cost me what I need to do this for about 10 months. He's like 1200. He's like I can easily make that. And I was reading that evening, Rich Dad Poor Dad. It's you know an iconic book from Robert Kiyosaki. The tale of his two dads, one who's a PAYE, one who's an entrepreneur. But it goes into the mindset of how you achieve or isn't the mindset of people who don't achieve as much. and those two phone calls summed that up perfectly for me. The person with the sort of, he calls it the paw-per-mindset, he says, I can't afford that. But the person with the expansive entrepreneurial mindset, his question is how can I afford that? And right there in those two phone calls, you see the difference from somebody who's going to go very far that junior because his question was how can I make that happen? This is important, how can I make it happen versus no I can't make it happen and you know parking the coaching you know obviously one of them is getting coached now and one isn't sort of a higher chance of success much higher chance against success because he's someone who's calling our guy in them but I also think even if neither of these guys were coached the junior's gonna excel more in this bike season but he's also going to just excel more as an all-rounder because he has that expansive mindset he has he's a guy who's going to find the solutions to problems rather than finding problems in roadblocks. Probably if you think about your group of friends, you probably have someone out there who's the exact same as person A and exact same as person B and I'm sure they've gone very, very different places with their life. So yeah, I thought that was a really interesting conversation. I used this a bit of a segue before I jump into this, talking about how you can reverse engineer success in races. So I've always a big fan of that, you know, learn from mistakes, but they don't have to be your mistakes or success leaves clues and these sort of things because they're just so powerful and we just don't have that much time for trial and error. And that's why the coaching thing works so well because you let someone else, your group outsource and your mistakes, you're letting someone else make the mistakes and guide you around them. But we can do this so well with the parameter and boy graces. So we talked about the power profile last week. So we just a refresher on that. So we plot our 10 second one minute, five minute, 20 minute power. And then we know what that is, our power to waste. And we plot that against our peers. So we know, okay, relative to my peers, I've got five minute power of a week, a one minute power of a good 20 minute power. And then we break it down and we start looking at bike races. So we look at the calendar and we say, okay, So, in Ireland here, you know, the Stomolen GP is a five minute climb. I have a relatively stronger five minute power. I am going to target that. So when you have targeted that, you have elevated yourself away from your peers and you have given yourself a comparatively better chance of winning that race because you are playing to your strengths rather than turning up at a race that is going to finish in a bunch sprint and you have a comparatively weak 10 second sprint. So that's one side of the coin, but the second side of the coin is we also use this performance manager chart, this data, to make sure that the race that we're targeting falls at a time when we are fresh. So we've trained ourselves using our fitness, freshness and fatigue scores. We've trained ourselves, pushing ourselves as far as we can go with our constraints around obviously family work commitments as far as we can go and then we give ourselves a little bit of a rest we call it a taper going into our main event and we bring our training stress balance that's our that's our freshness score we bring that back towards zero so we're fresh for the event so the importance of freshness let me just talk about that for a second so if the Tour de France finishes we're gonna look at our floater every now and then we don't the odds during the year on people winning stages and stuff so let's keep it in the the gambling realm here.
Me and you are gonna have a bet and it's the end of the Tour de France and I'm which I'll let you choose who do you want to bet on? The guy who's just written three weeks at Tour de France to one day race so it's a two horse race. One guy who hasn't done anything for three weeks and he's gonna race the Tour de France, he hasn't been on the boy once, he's gonna race the day after the Tour de France in a one day race or the guy who has written the Tour de France every day hard and he's gonna race the one they race so it's the fresh guy against the fat guy who is gonna be the answer is probably neater so we have one guy who's very low fatigue one guy who has very high fitness the person that we want it's nearly a combination to the two we want somebody who's done two weeks at a tour and has built a lot of fitness but then it's taking a break and they've got a lot of freshness so when that fitness and freshness intersect we call that form. So that's what we try and do on the build up to our race. So we've identified the Stomol and GP as a race we're going to target. Then we try and herd up to the race pushing ourselves using these sort of, we call them ramp rates which is probably beyond the scope of the podcast getting into that if you want to talk more about that, pop us an email, I'll have one the coaches talk to you about that. So we're pushing as hard as we can within the constraints of your family and your work to get you as fit as you can, as fatigued as we can, up until about a week before the race and then we start what's called a taper, a period of, I'll do a separate podcast on a taper and how to structure them, but a period of lower duration training, but also high intensity. So we have specific numbers we're looking for in the taper in terms of your training stress score for the week, but it's lower than previous weeks. So that gives us that form. brings the fitness down a little but it brings the fatigue down a lot and then we're on form so we're giving ourselves a double-sided chance for a common-tuity event on form and it's also an event that suits us and that is how we reverse engineer success in a bike race that's pretty cool I remember the first time I found this out I was like whoa so I'm hoping you're having that same aha moment I'm guessing you're right now and you're like oh now I can see why it just looks like when I turn up by the race and people are on a completely different level to me. They've stacked the deck in their favor and that's what you need to be doing and that's what we do for you guys. So it's a little bit of a darker art. There's a lot of science behind it but at the end of the day it just makes sure you get returned on your training investment if if you're putting in five hours a week, 10 hours a week into training. This sort of double-sided attack on your events means you're just optimizing your chances of success in that event. And that event could be a tap the tour. It could be a week or two hundred. It could be a professional bike race. The same logic stands true because it doesn't matter what level you're at. What matters is how valuable your time is to you. And for all of us, it's time away from loved ones. It's time away from work projects. it's time away from other purposeful endeavors. So it's imperative that we get the most out of this. I had a story about a guy we just finished our eight week challenge, which was pretty cool. And I chatted to a guy just before the eight week challenge, he was a strapper guy. Don't really like to strapper culture because it just encourages us to go full gas all the time and we don't dip into all these different training zones that we need to spend time in. but he was skeptical of a structure trying to plant. So he's been riding the bike for years. He's 10 years deep riding the bike. And he has a local climb that he goes up and his time has drive a segment full gas up this in different wind conditions. He's been around 10 minutes on this climb for years, for absolutely years. Like I said, look, park it for eight weeks. Don't go back and do the segments. Come true and do a structure trying to plant for eight weeks. and then go back and do it a second. And he went through an eight week structure trying to plan. So we trained them as if this segment, this 10 minute climb was his race eight weeks later. And he took two minutes off that same segment. Now he's been doing this segment twice, three times a week.
For probably since Java came into existence and longer before that he was probably timing on his car toy. So he stepped away from it for eight weeks, went through a training plan where he spent time in each zone where he used his parameter purposefully and he came back and he took two minutes off the climb. That is an absolute lifetime. So it just goes to illustrate how powerful this stuff is. So if you do have a parameter it's Wart, Utiloy, and that parameter. Nearly all of us have garments on. You can do a lot of this same cool stuff with just heart rate. We call it HRTSS. It's the exact same principle to apply. It's really Wart diving into this and making the most of this sort of stuff but having the power meter sitting there on your dashboard and just looking at it isn't going to make it any faster you need to get a little bit of an investment and pull time to understand this stuff and once you do I promise you it'll truly yield some amazing amazing benefits. So I hope you've enjoyed this double header on how to use your power meter and if it's worth even having a power meter and I think my consensus and takeaway is definitely yes if you have the disposable cash to get a parameter. It's definitely worth having, but also a lot of this stuff can be achieved through heart rate. So knowledge and learning how to use this stuff for us and investing in the coach is paramount. And then if you still have cash left over, the parameter after that is the next best thing to go for. It'll speed you up a lot more than a new frame or a new set of wheels. And speaking of speeding up, I'm just going to finish off by telling you about the strength and conditioning plan, because the strength and conditioning plan is the basis of everything I build and this season at A1, I'm trying to put together a system for you guys and this system is showing you whether you're someone who rides the bike 20 years a week or four hours a week trying to build a foundation for success, trying to make sure you don't get injured, you don't get sick, you don't have back pain on the bike, you don't have knee pain on the bike because if you're suffering from those things, if the last error of your spin is just miserable because you're shifted to get comfortable in the saddle because of back pain, that shouldn't be the case. So we've put together this strength condition and plan to reduce and alleviate those sort of back pains and knee pains and the spin to make it more robust, build that connection with your legs to make sure you're putting the power into the pedals. So it's the first ever purpose built weight training plan for cyclists. It's 12 weeks. It's step by step instructions. It's a video course and it's everything I wished I had when I was getting started on the bike. And for you podcast listeners, it's at a massive sale price. So please, if you haven't checked that out, go and check that out. Because that's the way, you know, the story I was hearing was the strong foundation. If you can build a strong foundation at the bottom, that means you can build a very high peak at the top. So a lot of this stuff we're talking about, like reverse engineered, how to win bike races, this stuff isn't going to happen. If you're not robust, if you keep getting injured, if you can't transfer explosive power onto the pedals, like we just can't train someone who in zone five and zone six, who hasn't got that ability to to pull it explosive power onto the pedals. The easiest way to build that is through a tailor target and strength condition plan. Going through the GM and like with your PT, going through the GM and just lashing around lifting some stuff, it's a waste of time. You may as well sit on home and flick around Netflix for the afternoon. So I'd encourage you to get this, but not just get it because that's not going to solve your problem. Get it and use it. It's two sessions a week in the GM and I'm going to hope it's easier. We can all squeeze that in. Guys, I've really enjoyed the double header on power meters, thanks for listening and be safe out there on the road. Chat this on Robin.
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