But something we've emphasized a lot on this podcast, you're gonna hear it with the next generation of coaching that we're bringing to kinda coaching 2.0, it's coming this winter. It's mental relaxation, because we've talked about this 360 view on coaching. Because mental relaxation, in whatever way possible, will go through stuff from deep breathing techniques to make the body more alkaline, to meditation apps, guided meditation like head space, or a Buddhist stuff like, all your roles, things like this. It doesn't matter what sort of mental relaxation you go through, because it's a passive strategy, and it's really going to help recovery because it's going to affect cortisol. So cortisol, it's that phoieter flow hormone that's produced in the body, and that's produced in response to stress. It's not meant to be a constant drip feed of cortisol into your system. But cortisol constantly drip feeds into your system. This is damaging. We've talked before how our brains are unable to distinguish between cortisol release from mental stress and physical stress So our cortisol level it's when it gets elevated It's impairing us to get into those two phases sleep or trying to get into it's why I was checking out that Weep for the last while because it measures you that sleep quality in the Delta phase and the deep sleep phase And we're gonna get a lot of good cognitive regeneration and muscular regeneration stuff going on in those phases of sleep So, conversely, there will be times when work, family and life in general, unavoidably produce high levels of stress and adequate cortisol. At this time, you might have to look at your schedule and you might have to reduce the load. And this is what I mean by a training. Training has to be dynamic. It has to bend around to the demands of your life. It can't be a static object. So this is why I laugh when I see these, you know, with their trying to road sessions that are just static plans because that's just never, never going to work. I'm a big advocate of proper recovery. What I find when I don't recover properly or I find as well when I see athletes who aren't recovering properly, they're just not ready to hit that session the next day. So if you think about it, like if you have a zone 5 session tomorrow, which I haven't recovered properly today, your zone 5 session, it might be 20 watts lower than it should be. And because it's 20 watts lower, the physiological adaptation you get from that session is lower again. Or say you do hit the watts, but it's taken more of an effort to get there. So it's this knock on effect that's impacting the session after that and it becomes a toxic, a toxic succession. A toxic, toxic succession. At the end of it, it can result in, if you keep going through well, especially for hoiling out of any of that, it can result in some really bad shit. We've athletes come into us who've worked with other coaches, just aren't monitoring this stuff and they're suffering from adrenal fatigue. It's a tough place to back someone back out of. It really is. It's not a place you want to go to because it starts impacting all of us over our stuff to do. All of us have jobs, families, girlfriends, hobbies, interests, order pursuits. We're all well-rounded, I'm sure. That doesn't just impact cycling performance. That impacts getting up in the morning and having enough energy to go hanging out with your kids. It's a nasty shit. This is why I'm a big advocate and I will be pushing this new. We're coaching 2.0 and our 360 vision for coaching because I think it has to be connected the rope lads. Like it just does. There's no, we can't coach someone in isolation, you know, the mental piece, as we can see there, the mental piece, it's so important for getting us into a state of reduced cortisol, which is going to help us get into a deeper phase of sleep, which is going to help recovery, which is going to help us hit that session hard the next day. And all that so inextricably linked to mood, to appetite, you know, we've touched on eating patterns before and emotional eating and stuff like that. And that's so closely linked to how you're performing on the bike in sessions, how you're feeling and work relationship quality.
There's a few pieces that this jigsaw that I'm going to help you guys put together over the next months. I suppose this is a journey. We're not a journey. I'm sure the destination, as we said before, it's a mirage, but the journey, you should enjoy us and we'll throw down some no-goods of information as we go. One of my favorite writers in the bunch, Marcel Kittle, he has retired 89 professional victories, 14 Tour de France stage wins, more than any German in history and yeah he announces retirement. He sort of cited a loss of quality of life. I'd like to tell you all today that I'm ending my career as a pro-cyclist. I've taught long and heard about this decision on the side. And this goes to my closest friends and family. The decision process has not been a quick one. It's one that has taken place over a long time during my newly 20-year sports career. There's been not only incredible success but also difficult times. I have always been, I have always been one to openly question and reflect on such things, sort of like learn and get better. together with the people around me has made me a successful athlete that I am now, but this method has also told me to leave my old ways and learn new ones. I know there is much more than just sport, for example my own future family. Recently I taught on this future without cycling has grown. As has the awareness of the sacrifices that such a beautiful but also difficult sport like cycling brings. The big question for me the last few months was, can I do what I do and continue to make sacrifices I need to be a world-class athlete? And my answer was no. I don't want that anymore because I've always found the limitations on a top athlete as an increasing loss of quality of life. That's why I'm very happy and proud at this point in my life that I can make a decision to follow my heart in a new direction. It's interesting. I felt like a retard reading his broken English. I almost felt like I couldn't speak English. But there you go. It's interesting because you know, we see these athletes on the TV and we've almost disassociated them from being real humans. I remember listening to Bradley Wiggins's wife talking and she was talking about the experience with their children watching Bradley in the Tour de France in 2012 and she said the kids to be watching the TV and they'd be disassociated their dad Bradley Wiggins from Wiggle on the TV. And like if the mom was to ask them, you know, who's that? And they'd be like, oh, it's Wiggle. And if she dug deeper, it's like, who, well, who's Wiggle? They'd be like, oh, it's Daddy. But it was a disassociation of that. And I think we often do it ourselves. We see them just as athletes. We see Kittle. I know, definitely I've got a story like Cher, which in Minute, what I've got. We see him as the athletes who, you know, romped to those 89 victories, but we don't really see the man behind that. We don't see the frailties. We don't see the sacrifice. we don't see the, you know, the yearning to grow as a person and not just to be, not just to be a cyclist. I think it's one of the great, the great purposes of education and I suppose I use education in a really broad sense to mean travel and new experiences and it makes you realise that there's more to life than just the very narrow world you're brought up in and whether that's educating somebody who's coming from a super rough neighbourhood to say, you know, there's more to the world than just being the top dog in your local neighbourhood and trying to climb to the top of the criminality ladder or in our case if it's education and you know, shown in athletes, look just more to life, you can go out there, you can build yourself a business, you can start a new career, you can get a job, you don't have to live your life in the limelight, you don't have to take these risks, there's a million different directions you can go and each is textured and colourful and beautiful as the last one, he's woven, who's to say he won't be a high performer in whatever new pursuit he goes and you know if he's not that fine too.