What if I told you that riding slow is actually the secret sauce to riding fast? I know that sounds crazy, and in a world obsessed with speed and suffering, the idea that your coffee shop spin could make you a better rider sounds completely counterintuitive. But stick with me, and I promise you're going to see why the idea of going slow to go fast isn't just a catchy motto.
It's backed by science and it's trusted by the world's top coaches. Here's a jaw-dropping statistic. Most professional cyclists spend 80 to 90% of their training time at low intensity.
The world's best riders, the best guys on the planet, devote the bulk of their time in the saddle to what many amateurs would dismiss as junk miles. Estana head coach Vasilus Anastopoulos. He was on the podcast with me recently and he talked about zone one, like the easiest of the easy riding and he told me how that's become a cornerstone of pro training at the moment.
So, in today's episode, we're unpacking how slow rides actually make you faster. We'll dive into the surprising physiology of low inensity training, how it supercharges your aerobic engine, boosts your fat burning capabilities, and builds your endurance. We'll share lessons that I've learned from legends in endurance physiology.
Professor Steven Sailor, Dan Lurang, Olaf Buu, Vasilla Sanostopolis, Dr. Christian Shrout. We'll bust the myth that more intensity equals more progress and show you how doing less can actually give you more.
And of course, I'll give you practical tips on how you can apply these methods into your own training. Whether you're just getting started or you're a seasoned, maybe even full-time bike rider. By the end of this video, you'll understand why sometimes the best way to get faster in the bike is to take your foot off the gas.
This video is going to be an eye openener. So, make sure you hit that like button right now before you forget. and let's jump in.
All right, let's start with the big question. How on earth can slow miles make you faster? To answer that, we need to look under the hood at what happens in your body during those long easy rides.
We're talking about zone one, zone 2 training, the low intensity conversational paced efforts. You might have heard this called base training. And it's called base training for good reason.
It forms the base of your fitness pyramid. And without a solid base, the peak of your fitness, that's your speed, your power, those race effort performances, they can't stand tall. When you ride at a slow, steady pace, something fascinating actually happens in your muscles.
Instead of relying on those explosive, short-term fibers, the ones you use in sprints or highintensity efforts, your body taps into type one muscle fibers, also known as slow twitch muscle fibers. These fibers are like your body's built-in endurance engines. They're incredibly efficient and they can fire for hours without fatiguing easily.
Why exactly does working these slow twitch muscle fibers at low intensity make you faster in the long run? That's where it gets interesting. So, let's dive in.
The first thing low inensity training does is to give your mitochondria, the famous powerhouses of your cells, a huge upgrade. Think of your mitochondria as mini power plants inside your muscles, producing energy from the oxygen you breathe and the fuel you eat. When you spend more time riding slowly, your body not only creates more mitochondria, it also makes them far more efficient.
This is like upgrading your engine from a small four cylinder engine to a powerful V8 engine. With more mitochondria in action, your muscles generate more energy far more efficiently, allowing you to ride longer and faster before fatigue sets in. But there's even more happening beneath the surface on those easy rides.
Your body also starts building an extensive network of tiny blood vessels known as capillaries. Imagine these capillaries as highways that deliver oxygenrich blood straight to your muscles. The more highways you have, the better the oxygen and nutrients reach your muscles, fueling your endurance and speeding your recovery.
Recent research published in the sports medicine. It highlighted this very point showing that steady lowintensity endurance rides significantly increased the number of capillaries far more effectively than highintensity training alone. In essence, those relaxed rides, the easy rides, they're quietly laying a vital infrastructure to help you ride stronger for longer.
Now, another powerful adaptation that occurs in easy rides, the zone one, zone two, is the transformation of your metabolism. Changing the rate at which you use fat as a fuel source. During slow rides, you train your body to maximize the use of fat as a primary fuel source, a concept known as fat oxidation.
As you regularly spend time riding in this zone, your body learns to burn fat more efficiently. The benefit that means you can conserve your precious carbohydrate stores that glycogen for those crucial highintensity moments like a sprint finish or a race deciding effort. Another fascinating process that happens when you slow down.
It relates to improved lactate clearance. This is connected to a key metric called lactate threshold one. You might hear people saying hear people saying LT1 or your aerobic threshold.
Essentially, LT1 is the intensity at which lactate, often misunderstood as merely waste, begins to rise slightly above resting levels. Spending plenty of time riding just below or around this threshold, gradually shifts it upwards. In practical terms, this means you'll be able to ride at higher speeds or power outputs without accumulating fatigue.
This adaptation occurs because those highly efficient slow twitch fibers and newly created mitochondria become extremely efficient at consuming lactate as fuel. In other words, your muscles actually recycle lactate, preventing that familiar burning sensation from kicking in prematurely. As your LT1 shifts and it moves closer to your lactate threshold too, your LT2, you're effectively raising the baseline of your fitness, enabling faster riding, staying more comfortable aerobically for longer.
Perhaps one of the greatest yet underrated benefits of slow, steady rides is their gentle impact on your body. Unlike going out and smashing yourself, long and easy rides, they produce significantly less neuromuscular stress and hormonal fatigue. like a two-hour easy spin.
It doesn't leave you on the couch scrolling Instagram shattered for the rest of the day in the same way that a two two-hour interval training or a group ride might. While that might seem obvious, the implications for your training consistency are profound. The Estonic coach Vacillus Anastopoulos told me the aim of endurance rides should be to finish tired but not completely exhausted.
Why? Because it allows you to repeat it again tomorrow and the day after that. That consistent sustainable workload is precisely what leads to long-term fitness gains.
Professor Steven Syler, who pioneered the 8020 training principle, he explained it perfectly when he said, "Your floor matters more than your ceiling." In other words, real progress doesn't come from a single epic training session. It comes from being consistent, stringing together sessions over weeks, months, and even years.
Slow, steady rides keep you in the game. They prevent burnout. They prevent overtraining and you don't get injured or sick as much.
So to put this simply, slow, easy rides trigger a powerful chain reaction of positive physiological adaptations. You're building more efficient mitochondria and extensive networks of capillaries. You're teaching your body to burn fat more effectively and you're raising your lactate threshold.
You're also enhancing your body's capacity to handle consistent training. Think of these slow rides as constructing the foundation of a skyscraper. Sure, this isn't flashy work doing the foundation, and it might not feel as exciting as highintensity intervals, but without this strong foundation, you simply won't reach those heights that you're capable of as an athlete.
That was heavy. So, let me share a quick personal story with you here because I haven't always been a disciple in this church of easy zone one, zone two rides. In my early cycling days, I did what a lot of amateurs do.
Every ride was a hammerfest, group ride on Tuesday, out the door, full gas. Maybe I was meant to do an easy ride on Wednesday, but it somehow turns into a mini race because a buddy showed up and we half wheel each other. Weekend meant to be a chill ride, but it ends up being a town science sprint to see who pays for the scones going into every single town.
I was constantly riding what the coaches call that gray zone, that moderately hard intensity that isn't easy enough to recover, but isn't hard enough to really push the envelope on getting adaptations. And guess what? Sure, I got better initially because I was riding a lot, but I hit a plateau.
I was exhausted and my numbers plateaued. They weren't improving at all. Does this sound familiar?
Be honest. Looking back now, I can see why this was all wrong. Why I took a bad wrong turn on this podcast.
I now have the privilege of chatting with some worldclass coaches. I interviewed Dr. Christian Shrout recently.
He's the performance coach for Jacua and he explained that many amateurs fall into this trap of wanting every single session to feel intense, thinking that intensity equals progress. In reality, it's stalling your progress. For guys I'm coaching, and put me a message.
I'm going to leave a link down below if you are interested in working with me as a coach. For guys I'm coaching, I've dramatically dialed back intensity. I've even slowed down how I'm training myself.
Less upper zone 2 rides and more zone one rides. And let me tell you, riding super slow, it is hard on the ego at first. It's hard going out the door and people riding past you.
I had to let go of friends going up some climbs. And I had to ignore the temptation to go with the fast group every week on the Roadman Saturday spin and actually just stick to my zones. But the results after a couple of months of doing this, I really noticed a difference.
My heart rate for a given easy pace dropped. That's a sign of improved efficiency. I could ride longer without feeling just broken and smashed.
And when I did do hard intervals, the power numbers were starting to look really, really good. By going slower in training, I was able to go faster in races. And this lines up perfectly with what the coaches are saying with what Steven Siler preaches.
I basically flipped my intensity distribution. I was doing 50/50 hard to easy rides and I flipped that to 8020 or even 9010 some weeks and it worked. This personal turnaround is why I'm so passionate about this topic because I've lived the mistake and the correction.
As a coach now, I see the relief on my athletes faces when I tell them, "No, you don't need to smash every single training ride." In fact, most of your rides should be easy. It's like giving them the permission to back off.
And ironically, that's when their fitness has seen leaps forward. So, if you're watching this thinking, "I tend to ride kind of hard most days." I've been in your shoes.
And I can't emphasize enough that embracing true discipline around those easy rides, it's a total gamecher. Don't just take my word for it. One of the amazing perks of hosting this podcast is I get to pick the brains of these amazing top coaches and exercise scientists.
And when I interviewed Professor Sailor, this is the guy who basically coined the term polarized training. He hammered home that consistency beats intensity over the long run. He famously analyzed decades of training data from Olympians and he found a striking pattern.
The best athletes in the world follow an 80/20 distribution. 80% easy, 20% hard. And during our chat, Syler said, "The danger zone, he calls it.
It's in the middle." And he meant that gray zone of riding too hard on easy days and too easy on hard days. It feels like you're working, but it yields minimum gains.
And he urged that most of your training should actually be easy. And he's right because this is borne out in the research. It's not just his opinion.
There was a 2024 meta analysis and I'll try and link it up down below if I remember and that concluded that a polarized approach mostly low intensity some high intensity was superior for improving V2 max in well-trained athletes compared to a threshold heavy approach. That's huge because it validates the idea that spending a ton of time in low inensity zones can boost your topend power. What do stage slayer Mads Person and half the professional pelaton have in common?
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All from a formula made with just three natural ingredients: broccoli sprouts, lemon, and sugar. Whether you're racing at the front or you're smashing local segments, Nomio helps you get more out of every ride. Take it before key sessions or races for an immediate edge or take your training to the next level and get more out of your hard work.
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Details are in the episode show notes or description down below. Top coach I've spoken with on the podcast from Joe Fel to Dr. Alan Lim to Matt Brell that echoes this.
Dial in plenty of easy volume. It's almost like a secret society agreement among them. The real gains come from the boring miles, not the Instagram worthy suffer fest, but the solo steady zone one zone 2 outings.
And they all caution against the common pitfall of riding in the middle zone too often. So if you've bought into this, now you're wondering how do you actually do it? How do you actually implement it in your training?
So let's break this down. The first step is to determine what easy means for you because easy for you is going to be different to easy for someone else. You first need to know what slow zone one zone 2 means.
Well, the easiest quick and dirty method to do this is to talk test. An easy ride you should be able to hold a conversational pace full sentences without gasping. If you're solo, you could even try sing a few lines from your favorite song.
If you have to take breaths at odd places or you feel your heart rate ting, you're probably going too hard for this easy ride. If you train with a heart rate monitor or a power meter, an old school field test will work to determine your zones. I've got loads of articles over on the Roadman website with correct protocols on how to do this.
Secondly, we're going to apply the 8020 principle or 9010 rule. You're going to structure your week so that roughly 80% of your rides are in that easy aerobic zone and the other 20% can be high intensity threshold intervals, group rides, races, the fun stuff. For beginners or during the off season, it actually could be closer to 9010.
Consistency is key. Instead of hammering three days and then been cooked for the next four days, I'd rather you ride five to six days where four to five of them are chilled out, mellow rides. Step number three, polarize your hard workouts.
When it is time for intensity, make it count. Since you're not doing moderate hard sessions every day, you'll have a freshness to really smash the hard days. This is where you target those specific adaptations.
For instance, doing four by 8 minute intervals at your maximum sustainable sustainable intensity. This is a classic Tim Carson session from the early Team Sky days. If you're doing this once a week, this can yield huge, huge gains and especially if you're coming into this well rested from your easy rides the day before.
Step four, gradually extending your easy rides to reap the full benefits of slow training. Longer durations at an easy pace are necessary, but don't just jump from if a long ride is relative. If a long ride for you is 90 minutes at the moment, don't just jump from that into a 5hour ride overnight.
Gradually increase your long ride duration. Maybe you're currently zone two is a max two-hour ride. Try adding 15 to 30 minutes each week to one ride, building it up to four, five, even six hours over time.
Whatever fits your goals and your schedule. Step five is monitor and adjust. In the beginning, riding truly easy, it's going to feel weird.
You might feel like, am I doing enough here? Was he right? To reassure yourself, consider tracking some of the metrics.
For example, monitor your heart rate at a given pace over a few weeks, and you should see it getting lower at the same pace, indicating improved efficiency. If you want to get a little bit more nerdy and you have a power meter, you could look to decoupling. On a long ride, does your heart rate drift up over time at the same power?
As your endurance improves, you should see less drift, meaning you can hold the same effort longer without fatigue. These little signs once they're going in the right direction, they're going to keep you motivated and they're going to show you the slow miles are paying off even before you formally go back and test again. Whether it's a field test or a laboratory test.
Step six, trust the process. Perhaps the hardest part of polarized training, it's the mental side of it. We live in this culture of instant results.
Go hard or go home. Shifting to patience-based training approach, it can be challenging. You might see huge gains in the first few weeks because aerobic adaptations take weeks and months to acrewue, but trust me, it's accumulating in the background.
Resist the temptation to spike your easy rides with extra intensity just because you feel good. If you really have an itch for speed, schedule that into one of your hard days. Part of keeping easy rides easy is also known when to take a full rest.
Siler actually joked about the myth of the recovery ride. He's like, you're either riding or you're recovering. Often a day off is better than a 1-hour ride labeled recovery.
So, don't be afraid to take a full day completely off the bike. Also, every three to six weeks, depending on your plan, it's wise to have a D lo week with less volume and intensity to consolidate the gains. The irony of slow makes you fast.
It extends here, too. Sometimes doing nothing for a few days. It can spur an improvement because your body finally catches up and it gets that adaptation.
and has time to make those repairs. Think of your training like baking a cake. High-intensity workouts, they're the icing.
They're the flashy sweet taste. They get all the attention. But the cake, the actual substance of the cake, that's not glamorous.
That's baked with flour, eggs, sugar, the basic ingredients that take time to cook. Your zone one, zone 2 base miles, they're those basic ingredients. Skip that.
And it doesn't matter how fancy that icing is. It doesn't matter what toppings you put on the top of the cake, it's going to taste like Now, I challenge you in the coming weeks to start to implement this. Swap out one of your hard rides or your moderate rides for a true easy ride and maybe extend it a bit a bit longer than you usually would, but keep that intensity chill.
Keep it low and see how you feel. Folks, I really hope this is helpful. These lessons, they're a gold mine.
I would have loved this stuff when I started cycling. So, thank you for watching or listening if you're listening on the podcast. And if you found this deep dive helpful, please give it a thumbs up and share it with a cycling friend.
Put it into the WhatsApp group, especially someone that might be hammering every ride and not seeing results. Because sometimes all it takes is a friend to say, "Hey, maybe we should chill on this ride." Drop a comment below and let me know your experience with slow training or any questions you have.
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I'm going to put that in the description down below. And if you're new here, please don't forget to subscribe to the channel for more of these sciencebacked cycling podcasts. We have interviews with some experts that I mentioned I'm going to link down below and tons of tips to help you become a stronger, healthier rider.
All right, folks. That's it for me today. Up here is one of those other videos I mentioned.
Go slow to go fast. See you next day.