Today I want to talk about the problem with Strava and Zwift culture. 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 long changes? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Rodman, welcome back to another Rodman Cycling Podcast. Last week, out of podcasting and it's a very unusual week that I'm not podcasting at all, bar maybe in between seasons. Really simple. The reason I was in podcasting, I took a little break and I went down to Kerry and rode my a bike around Kerry for a few days and went exploring. And Kerry is such a beautiful part of Ireland, if you haven't had a chance to check it out. But I went down and I packed my microphone and in transit, similar to Hapme a few months ago, if you remember, these microphones are pretty delicate in transit and in transit, the microphone connection where it connects into the laptop broke. Bit of a disaster because Kerry is pretty rural. Tried four or five different places around there to get a replacement microphone but alas, it wasn't happening. So it was stranded without a microphone. So I'm back up in Dublin and it took me all of a day to track down a microphone. You know, it's like nice thing living in the capital. So today I'm back, I'm back. That's the golden hills. I'm back and I'll be back every day this week. So today I wanna talk to you about the problem with Zwift and Strava culture because this is actually the second friend who has had a similar experience and both of them love training on Zwift, and they love this comparison that Strava gives you. And Strava is great, and I love anything that grows or are cycling community, I really do, and it's when I'm being critical at platforms like Strava or Zwift, it's I'm being critical of them, but still with one hand, but still celebrating them on the other hand that they're enriching the community and they're growing, you know, the user base for what we love to do most is ride bikes. So I don't wanna be someone that's sub-devoid, something cool like riding bikes and say, this part of its code and this part of its bad. It's all good, it's all positive. But if you're looking to maximize your gains, if you're looking to go as fast as you possibly can, maybe tools like Zwift and Strava aren't the very best tools you could be using. You could be using them in conjunction with other stuff in quite a healthy way, but I find that when you get stuck into using Zwift training plans and you're going about Strava segments and you're comparing yourself on Strava segments, Neither of these companies really care about you. What these companies care about, and I know this because back, before I started the podcast, I actually built an app and it was called Pucka Coach, and it was really cool. So what we tried to do is teach a machine, we used artificial intelligence to teach an app, everything I knew about cycling coaching. So if you didn't have a session, if you went in to do a session this evening, but you underperformed on that session, the rest of your sessions that week change in response to that. If you're feeling down sick, if you're feeling injured, if you hadn't slept well, if you missed the session, the training plan was completely dynamic and everything would change in response to that. It was super and we were raising VC capital, but I got a peek behind the court and I asked exactly what it takes to be successful in one of these companies and what it takes to be successful in a company like that, like we got to the final in the MIT Sports Analytics awards and Zwift was one of the companies that was there. What it takes to be successful there, it's metrics that aren't cycling metrics, it's user acquisition, it's lifetime value of a customer, it's how do we keep that customer engaged so he doesn't cancel his subscription. Much the same way Netflix does this. Netflix does it with two very powerful words coming soon. So we never cancel our subscription because something is coming soon. Season two of our favorite show is coming soon. Season three is coming soon. The new Key for Suddle and Movie is exclusive to Netflix coming soon. But the way Zwift and Stravadu it, it's gamification. It's, you know, you're building points and you don't want to cancel because you're going to lose your points and you're going to start back at square one. But the underlying way to build points is not how we condition athletes. It's a flawed system. this idea of building points is not the same as building fitness.
And I had a buddy like probably a year ago and I challenged him to stop using Zwift training plans and let me build them a plan for eight weeks. And this was actually the very start of our first ever eight week challenge. So that was the idea of the eight week challenge. I said to him give me eight weeks. I'm going to assess your fitness at the start on a look at your lifestyle and I'm going to build you a training plan around your lifestyle. Each week, feed back at the end of the week how it's gone and I'm going to adjust the following week based on that. We're going to do this for eight weeks and we'll see where you'll get it. Now, I literally just had and I finished eight weeks with another buddy and a similar experience and this is probably two years on nearly from launching the eight week challenge. So it's hard, it's funny because the roadman blueprint is in the works at the moment and the eight week challenge is the last big product we've brought out. So I don't know, I thought it was fitting. It was almost like a full circle moment for me to see another buddy, another close buddy doing this eight week challenge thing. But anyway, he's been addicted to Zwift. He's been known as Zwift training plans and he's really been measuring his progress if it's gone well or not by comparing his times on a local climb here. It's about an eight, well, it's a bit more than an eight minute climb for him. It's about an eight minute climb for me. It's more like a 10 minute climb for him. And he really hasn't gotten faster for a long, long time doing these with training plans. Although he feels like he's getting fitter, he hasn't gotten faster on his segment. So he stepped away and I built this training plan for him. So, firstly, I got him to threshold test at the very beginning. We set his zones, then we figured out what his schedule was, how much time can he spend each day? What's his goal? We put his goal as doing well on this segment, this eight minute segment, because this mattered so much to him. This climb, 10 minutes climb for me, or 10 minutes climb for him, eight minutes for me. And built on the plan, week after week, tweaked it, depending on how he was getting on, you know, doing all the sports anxiety shit we do in the background, balancing fatigue, fitness and forms or building them for eight weeks, giving them a nice little taper into it. And we're bringing them through a range of zones over the course of the eight week plan that you never get exposure to in these with training plans. So there's nothing inherently wrong with the training sessions they build for you in Zwift. You're spending a lot of time in zone trees on fours on five zone six. What the problem is you never log on. It's like what's today's session? Oh, it's 90 minutes zone two with no changes of intensity, no changes of cadence. It's just 90 minutes zone two, or you never log on. It's like four errors of zone 2, or 90 minutes of zone 1. Zone 1 and zone 2 are almost completely neglected because we need to spend long periods of time in them to elicit a training response. These are building blocks of our fitness, they are endurance zones, they help us utilize fat as a fuel source, they help us build mitochondria, they are really aerobic building blocks that help us layer all the other stuff on top of them. So without spending time on the foundation of it, It's the analogy I've always used. It's like a house. If you want to build a high house, you need to build a wide foundation, a wide structure. And they don't do this effectively. And that's why it limits the upside potential. So by taking my body and stepping back and working on the foundation before we started adding on intensity, he was baffled. He was like, I've never trained so easy. What's going on? I'm only doing zone one, zone two rides, and very specific pieces of intensity at the right times. And he was just baffled. and he said, I'm going to lose fitness, I'm going to lose fitness. And I was like, trust the process. And at the end of it anyway, his time was staggering. So he ended up taking over a minute and a half over eight weeks of this time, which he's held for years. And this is off the back of probably three seasons of between Zwift and trainer road plans where he taught, oh, I can't get any better because I'm getting older. It's not you can't get any better because you're getting older. You're You're training wrong. You're not putting a amount of time you need to put in the correct zones.