Here's a crazy idea. What if losing weight is actually making you slower on the bike? Sounds wild, but I want you to meet Dr.
David Dunn. He's behind the fueling strategies of Inos, EF Education, Uno X, and more World Tour teams. And he says, "We've been doing it all wrong.
In the next hour, he's going to flip your understanding of cycling, nutrition, and race weight absolutely upside down and shatter your preconceived notions." Welcome to the podcast, Dr. David Dunn.
How you doing? Welcome to the Roadman podcast. Thanks a million for having me.
Delighted to be here. H you're the founder of Hexus. You've advised elite teams from rugby to football to world tour.
But for those who don't know who you are, give us a little brief background. Yeah. So my background is obviously I'm I'm like yourself.
So Wikllo born and bred and then had a real passion for high performance sport and started to do some my undergrad, postgrad and PhD really looking at sports nutrition. And then over the last probably decade and a bit, I've managed to work across a range of professional cycling teams with individual athletes and organizations. A lot of time in Premier League, Premiership Rugby and then a handful of Olympic cycles and uh rider cups as well.
So very fortunate to have good experiences with lots of very interesting athletes. Most of the people tuning into the podcasts, I'm sure there's a there's a couple of uh world tour lads in the wings there, but most of the people tuning into the podcast aren't pro cyclists. They're not pro riders.
They've never had the access to that infrastructure that you were part of. And that maybe feels like, and I know it does because we've had conversations, you know, and nights out in the beer where I've been talking. It's like the world you think you take for granted because you're surrounded by high performers.
It's not the world the rest of us occupy. So, I want to try and bridge that gap between the world you occupy and the world I occupy. I've eaten Chinese late at night and not fueling as I should.
Like, I went for a four-hour ride and brought a Twinkie with me the other day. So, we'll we'll unpack that in a minute. But what do you think amateur athletes might be very surprised about that world tour athletes just take for granted and do all the time?
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think when we look at amateur athletes and we let's say look at world tour athletes and I suppose like you said about bridging the gap. I think if we start at what everyone has in common, it's a nice place to start.
You know, fundamentally the best athletes in the world and people riding their bikes at the weekend. Everyone's human. We just have slightly different physiologies and capabilities.
And actually, our ability to expend those really high energy outputs for sustained periods of time is something that we typically see in the elites that we just don't see as much in the recreational enthusiast who's still going out and giving it a really good effort. But I do think people would be surprised, you know, especially now we're seeing this big breakthrough in technology with, you know, more technology in Garmin Whoops, a people start to understand a little bit more about what their bodies are doing, how much they're actually needing to fuel their sessions and what does over and under fueling look like. Yeah, that's interesting because I think as amateurs we like if I think about my club and I don't want to generalize every cycling club but even showing up at bike races a commonality for even everyone up to cat one I would say is athletes are carrying 3 to seven kilograms extra than they should.
Cat ones are pretty trained, but you're looking at Cat 2, Cat 3, Cat 4, Sportif guys. They're carrying in a few extra kilograms and they're training still 8 to 10 to 12 hours a week. It just doesn't seem like we should be carrying that many extra kilograms with that level of exercise.
Like, if you think about your average Joe Public who isn't an athlete, if you say to them, you exercise 10 to 12 hours a week, that's a massive amount of exercise. How are you not in incredible shape? So what mistakes are we making that is leading to this little bit of excess weight?
I think you know ultimately we when we start to look at what someone's fueling needs are it really depends on the type the intensity and the duration of the activity. And if somebody is going out and let's say going for a two or three or four hour ride there may be an overestimation sometimes of how much they should be taking on board during the ride. So I think that's something that we are starting to see now where people are sort of pushing towards these high ends of 100 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour.
But you got to remember you know let's look at the Jirro. Some people are doing 5 hours at an average power of over 300 watts. Yeah.
That amount of power, if we look at that from a kilogjle perspective and then we start to convert that into what the energy cost from a a calorie perspective is for individual riders is just so different to what a rider at home can sustain where that absolute energy expenditure is just going to be less. We're all getting a bit more familiar with kilogjles. It's, you know, I'm rocking Hammerhead which I love.
Couldn't recommend it more. I've been using Garmin and Wahoo for 15 years and I just moved over to Hammerhead this is and I love it. But no matter what bike computer you're using there, we're getting more used to seeing kilogjles as you know, previously you'd have heart rate, power, maybe duration and distance.
Now a lot of people are starting to put kilogjles on their screen. Help me make sense of that cuz a lot of we spoke with the Vector founder last week and they're starting to build training plans their progression around kilogjles. Unpack in its simplest form what kilogjles is for me and then we can go on to bridging that gap between figuring out kilogjles to kiloal.
Absolutely. So fundamentally kilogjles are are really a measure of power. So when you go out on your bike and you put your uh bike computer on and it's going to say after the ride I did an average watts of whatever it might be 200 and that is equated to this many kilogjles during the ride.
So you now have a measure of work done. Um and that measure of work can then be converted into a calorie cost. Most of us in the general population when it comes to cycling will have an efficiency of between or a gross metabolic efficiency between 20 and 25%.
Okay. The elite athletes will be more towards the right hand side of that. Their ability to it'll it'll cost them less energy to produce that same amount of power.
Most people in that's because they're shifting less in the bike. They're more efficient. Okay?
You know, they are more their bodies are more efficient. Now, if we look at the general population and you're looking at somebody who might be using training peaks or a Garmin, you know, you're probably between somewhere between around the 21% efficient mark would be an accurate prediction. So, you're taking that power measure, it's giving you kilogjles, which is your work done.
Yeah. And then you're looking at how efficient that is your body is, and then that's going to give you your calorie cost. So is it simplistic to say I look at my kilogjles for a session subtract the amount I ate during the session and then look at what the deficit is like should I be trying to cover should I be trying to come back from the session with zero deficit is that the goal no absolutely not and I also think with the the amount of energy you'll expend during during a ride I I would say that's a bad idea you're ultimately trying to give yourself a training stress you know your body is trying to adapt to something you're going out you're trying to do work you're trying to provide some fuel during exercise to be able to sustain and maintain the quality and the you know throughout the duration of that session and that's when your intra workout fueling is really important.
It it is there to maintain session quality and enhance performance. Now the amount you take on board on the bike the deficit for not consuming enough to fuel before is not going to be made up by just what you consume on the bike. So I think we need to look at the bigger picture and one bit of advice I'd have to everyone would be if you are looking at a general training ride or a performance ride.
The first thing I'd ask them to distinguish is are you training to train? So are you trying to facilitate an adaptation or are you really training to perform where it is about going to your performing to the best of your ability going as fast as you can for as long as you can. It could be race day or it could be your biggest training day of the week, okay?
Where you want to simulate a race like performance or practice some of those race strategies. So once we have that identified then we kind of know the overall let's say aim of the session. So if we're training to train, we know that we're here to do work.
It's about facilitating a stress and our body is going to respond to that stress. Now I would then say now that we know we're training to train, what is the type? What is the intensity and then what is the duration of the session?
So, we're obviously going to go out on on the bike. Then, we're going to look at the intensity. Are we really trying to go for a longer steadystate endurance ride and try build up more of that aerobic capacity or are we trying to focus more on efforts and our ability to uh maintain a high power output that will really determine the fueling that we should take on board.
Then we look at the overall duration. You know, is it a really long session? If it is a really long session and it is at that higher intensity, we know it's just going to be more carbohydrate dependent.
So that's when if you imagine a scale, we'll start to say before the session, we're going to need to deliberately increase our carbohydrate. Yeah, we're going to need to go for a higher gram per hour fueling on the bike. And then we can always look at the numbers after to iterate on what that recovery period should be.
So when athletes that use case we're talking about the athletes that are carrying you know 3 to seven kilograms extra they're getting that equation wrong somewhere along that pipeline. If somebody is carrying let's say excess mass or they're they're deliberately wanting to reduce weight and they're not reducing weight typically it's going to be because they're not in an energy deficit. Yeah.
So they're over consuming calories somewhere. So I would say yeah you would say they're on the wrong side of that equation where for the work that they're doing they're consuming more than what their bodies are expending but the equation itself is not just your exercise energy expenditure. Your body is going to burn a certain amount of energy at rest and people can go to a lab and they can often get tests done like a resting metabolic rate test you know and that would let's say form a base.
Is that worth getting done? There are very estimations close enough. The estimations are close enough for sure, I think.
And there's a range of prediction equations that are better suited to specific populations. So, if you're more in a general population than a high performance athlete population, you know that there's different ones that can be used and you know, we're also seeing different equations being better suited to certain sports. So, the equations are very good.
You can go to a lab. So, that let's say let's call that your base. Yeah.
Then if we look at that, obviously you're not resting all day. Some of the day you're going to be asleep. So there needs to be an adjustment done based on when you're I guess you're factoring in the type of job you're working at.
Desk job versus construction. 100%. So you'll have what's called a non-ex exercise activity component which is like just like you've said, how active are you when you're not taking part in purposeful exercise.
Somebody could be working on a building site and burning a huge amount of energy just to get their work done or they could be sat here like us and you know sat behind a desk you know moving a microphone around every now and again. Um but you know that could be that you know that can vary dramatically from individual to individual. Then you'd look at what exercise am I doing and some exercise is also associated with something called epoch which is excess post exercise oxygen consumption or an energy cost for that recovery period.
So if you go into the gym for example and you're doing a lot of strength training, the amount of energy you burn in that gym session might not necessarily be crazy high but because of the mechanical stress of that session. The long tail of that effects exactly there's a bit more of a a recovery cost to it. Interesting.
And then there's you know and again some people just completely forget it because they look at their garments and they go this is how much energy I burnt today. Does that come across does that epoch change based on the type of session as well? Like if I have uh you know 60-minute criterium versus a three-hour road race they might have a similar TSS but does the epoch change on the long tail based on the different distribution of power within that session.
So would definitely depend on the type and the intensity of exercise you'd see a higher epoch with higher intensity exercise or whether it's going to be more mechanical stress and damage. um you'd still see you know exercise modalities like strength training would have much higher components than cycling because it's it's non-impact etc. um I suppose I say non-impact but there's less real breakdown um of that muscle tissue in comparison with the deliberate focus in a gym of like I am going to try to lift this break down this tissue and then rebuild it and remodel it with that adaptation and strength training for a long time I've not understood how to classify that inside my training peaks you know where I understand I can look at my kilogjles for a bike session I can understand the cost of that effort when I get into the gym I've no idea what the cost of that effort is.
So, I've really struggled with fueling around that. Yeah, it's a it is an interesting one. And I think for the vast majority of people, and like we said, for for those people who are regular club riders, most people when they go to the gym, it's at a pretty moderate intensity.
The energy cost is not not incredibly high, you know, and at the same time, if you're going in and doing sort of prehab and rehabilitation stuff, when the intensity is lower, it is going to be lower. when you're coming at actually looking at the energy cost of that, there are means and methods to do it. But I would say there are also tools and technology that can start to remove some of the guesswork for you now and start to build in build the cost of that into your plan and look at it in conjunction with you know what's happening before and then what's happening after.
So you know what are you recovering from and what are you also preparing to do? The tech is getting wild even my Apple notes. So, I'm full old school on my uh tech for the gym, but when I walk near the chin-up bar, I get a push notification from my Apple notes to tell me the amount of reps that I done last time.
It's like, so it seems to be working off like the GPS even within the gym to go, you're close to the chin-up machine. Better send them a prompt. Yeah.
I mean, I love the research side of things. You know, my background has very much been a practitioner who's gone to research and has gone to tech. But you know what you're describing there is something I think nature published a paper on this maybe a couple of years ago.
They called it digital phenotyping where you can start to harvest digital trace data to understand when is the best time to nudge somebody to say exactly like you said we recognize that Anthony is in this situation. He's best primed to be able to take this action nudge and he needs to do chin-ups. Well this listen I I I you know I can't speak on behalf of that or your lats.
So yeah. So this equation where we're trying to figure out exactly how to fuel for a session for a long time we've got that wrong. Like I came from an era of doing you know Michael Barry coached me in Sky when when he was in Sky and I was coming up through a French team and I didn't get much nutrition guidance from Mike but I did inherit his habits.
So if it was like a two-hour ride I'd ride one hour to the calf, have something at the calf. If it was a seven-hour ride, I'd ride three and a half hours to the calf and I'd eat at the calf. Probably wouldn't eat for the rest of the session.
What do we know of the dangers of chronically under fueling now that we didn't know then? Yeah, I mean there's, you know, but from both male and female athletes, there are some serious metabolic implications of, I would say, not just underfueling on an absolute level in terms of consuming less energy in the day, but actually when we start to look at the distribution of it throughout the course of the day as well, you can cause this additional stress where let's say you have significant hours, let's call it like six plus hours of being in this chronic deficit where your body is not necessarily getting enough fuel to maintain normal physiological processes. I think that's the first thing we'd look at is your body works off this law of preservation.
So, if we don't have enough energy to sustain what we're doing, we'll start to shut off other processes. Okay? So, when we get into that area where we're chronically under fueling, our body doesn't have a choice but to try to find a way to preserve energy.
You know, female athletes will experience it, you know, very often by losing their menstrual cycle. Body will go, I don't have enough energy. this is one of the processes that I can conserve energy on.
And again, that's a really unfortunate situation that a lot of female athletes find themselves in, often through misinformation online, uh maybe bad advice from a coach or trying to adhere to something that they see on social media as opposed to understanding. I would say one fundamentally that every athlete is unique. So, everyone has their own individual requirements.
Every day can be different. So, how you eat today, and this is another huge problem that we see. A lot of people who are trying to lose weight or manage body weight will go, "Well, I'll just have I'm going to eat two and a half thousand calories today.
I'm going to eat 3,000 calories." That's that's my goal. But today, you could go out for a 4-hour ride.
Your on bike energy expenditure could be 2,000 calories. Tomorrow, you could be at a day of complete rest. So you need to start to understand that your fueling should adjust and your overall nutrition plan and structure should adjust day by day and meal by meal in line with the demands of your activity.
Well, what I noticed using Hexus was and this might be how it's working. I felt it was almost working on a two meal cycle. So if I had a big session on Sunday morning, I was having a bigger breakfast than I was usually.
I was using the shout out to Alan Merchesen has that amazing pancake recipe in the Cycling Chef book. Okay. Three of those pancakes in the morning.
Unreal. But I was having three of those pancakes, which he almost explicitly warns against. He's like, "If it's a big day, you're having three of these pancakes.
" I was routinely having three of these pancakes for a 4-hour endurance ride. But I was also having a bigger dinner than I normally would on Saturday night. It seemed like it was taken.
It was disregarding as important as we think a calendar day is. And we think the day ends here, that's the end of today. Okay, now I start thinking about eating for tomorrow.
Tomorrow Hexus seemed like it was cycling it back to meals for me. So I was over, not overeating, but overeating compared to what I was used to Saturday night, overeating compared to what I was used to Sunday morning. But then the surprising thing for me was Sunday evening, I was eating very little because I had Monday as a total day off activity.
For us at Hexus, the whole thing really cycles around this concept of periodizing your intake in line with the demands of your activity. So what we'll look at is we'll look at your own physical profile, your own lifestyle, and your own unique needs. Then we'll look at, as we said before, the type, the intensity, the duration of the activity.
And if you have more information such as what that predicted average power will be, again, all of that is really useful to get an understanding of what your body is preparing for. And one of our big goals and again coming from my own research background one of my big motivations was how can we use your data to help you understand what to do next as opposed to just being a tracker where you'd say you know I would say okay you know here's what I've done here's how many calories etc were in that. So we wanted to say make that data work harder.
You know you're going to go out on the bike. You know it's about feeling good and when you have that session where you're able to produce what you want to produce and you feel you're capable of how can we replicate that. So for us it was always about taking that training data then turning that into a predictive personalized fueling plan.
And just rightly as you said, some sessions depending on how tough they are, they may require additional fueling. And that additional fueling could start not just a meal before, but multiple meals before to actually sufficiently top up your muscle glycogen content. How far back would that go?
So I suppose if we're looking at let's say preparing for a race is going to be the ultimate. Yeah. So I think that's the extreme scenario where you'll typically see somebody will have to prepare their bodies with a carbohydrate load.
that carbohydrate load would typically start the day before that sort of 24 to 36 hours before that start that I suppose the gun goes and that is enough time to sufficiently top up your muscle glycogen content and your fuel stores to prepare for that race. Now the amount you need to top up by can vary greatly. So, for example, the day before an event, you might be, depending on how long it is, you might top up by 8 to 10 grams per kilo, or you might be as high as, you know, 15 to 20 grams per kilo.
Um, if you've already raced that day. So, for example, people who are going in multiple backto-back stages, you're going to be burning and you're trying to prepare for the next day. I mean, we've seen guys over at the Jiro now consuming 20 22 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram in a single 24-h hour period because they're doing that much work.
Yeah. And they're getting ready for the next day. Um, so that's what that's what I'd say first of all.
It can vary greatly, but from a training perspective, you typically don't see those massive volumes the day before because again, are you you're training to perform, but there's still an adaptation that you're looking to facilitate. It's not about removing all risk from the session. So, you might be looking at the evening before where you're specifically topping up because the morning has a big ride and the breakfast is just not going to be enough to get exactly what you want to get into.
There's actually um I think this came out yesterday or maybe the day before. One of the EF riders actually has pulled together a vlog on the classics and how he was kind of adjusting his intake before and after Harry Sweeney. Harry Sweeney.
That's exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
So, he was he was good. but he was answering questions on the bike and it was you know I I personally have never met Harry but it's also great to see how individual athletes are interacting with the tech but the same tech those athletes have everyone can have access to and again for us it's just about tailoring it to that individual profile not everyone is doing like you said 15 to 20 hours on the bike a week some people are doing less and they're you know ultimately those absolute numbers are lower and things need to be adjusted down accordingly I was listening recently I have Steven Barrett on the coach for as he does the Catalon or whatever they're calling themselves these days and Steven's on I think next month and so he'll be in the hot seat but I know Sam Bennett is struggling with the new high octane fueling the he's getting GI issues trying to take the 12 120 140 grams per hourly is that common are you seeing that among athletes that maybe some of them are struggling to take that much and then as a follow on to that would you adjust pre-event fueling for an athlete who's struggling to take these new high levels carbs. Yeah.
So, I think if we look at, and again, this is the rider at home and and the athlete themselves. I think anyone who's looking at their intraworkout fueling or how much they should take on board during a session, they need to recognize that they can't just go from 30 or 60 grams up up to 100, 120. I was literally puking on the side of the road when I tried Betafel for the first time.
So your gut is trainable, you know, and you need to start to plan and build these things into your training week. So like we said a little bit earlier about identifying that one session in the week that is most, you know, at a racelike intensity or at the highest intensity, they're great sessions to practice your fueling strategies and try to increase things by 10 grams per hour or another 10 grams per hour and eventually work up towards that tolerance level. So I think first of all, I'd say part one is recognize that your gut is trainable.
You might have in your in your week something we'll call it a key performance workout one where you want to deliver you want to replicate competition like intensity and they're great sessions to try practice that. Then if we look at compensating few and to just jump in on that one and clarify so when you say practice that are you looking at to figure out what your current baseline is and slightly just stretch the baseline each week like you would with a training adaptation. So I think there's there's two parts to the answer.
So I would say start with what you're comfortable with and then you should be looking at gradually trying to increase that towards let's say what that overall optimal recommendation could be for that specific work those specific workout demands. Okay. So you're not just trying to push 140 per hour for the sake of it.
It actually has to tie in with the workout. And I think that you know there's some guys there's some brilliant researchers. Look I was fortunate enough to do my PhD up in Liverpool John Moors with a really strong cohort of practitioners, professors and researchers.
one of those guys there, a guy called Dr. Jamie Pew, who who's been on this podcast. Jamie, go man.
Jamie's doing a brilliant job now at like anything in sport, quantifying what that is. So, I know he's already working with some of the pro and the world tour teams, but for those athletes that are genuinely struggling with figuring out what is best for them, you know what? Why not measure?
I'd be picking up the phone to Jamie and trying to say, well, right, let's come out and let's start to measure these things and build that plan backwards towards what is optimal for me as an individual. What's actually interesting is with it because I put out across socials that you were going on the podcast and a bunch of people had the same question of what's the long tail effect or damage to like the use the economics word externality the unattendance uh consequence of the 120 to 140 gram of carbohydrates per hour. But I actually think a more interesting question is we've only started fueling like that.
We've been fueling wrong for decades. What was the damage of under fueling for so long? because I got sick so much and I don't get sick really anymore since I stopped riding 15 20 hours a week.
Yeah, I I think you've hit the nail on the head. So I I think fundamentally when we look at let's say those higher energy intakes on the bike everything stems back from what are the demands of this session? You know how much what is the total energy cost to me across the course of the day?
And we discussed the energy components earlier. One that we skipped over is DIT even consuming that amount of energy. What's DIT?
Uh something called dietary induced thermogenesis. So when we consume food, there's still a cost in our body to digest and assimilate that food. So you know when you're going out and you're taking part in this exercise, you know, in particular the you know elite athletes, it could be six 7,000 calories that they need to take on board just to meet their energy demands.
Now if we look at that and you look at the number of meals in the day and the amount of rice that you can have and there's only so much opportunity in the day to physically feed and on bike becomes one of those really important scenarios where you say well we can start to better match our energy requirements by fueling at these higher levels because the actual cost is so high. Now, if you made a really good point, like what is the risk of underfueling and saying, "Well, I shouldn't do that." And then just not meeting your overall energy requirements.
As soon as you start to fall into those chronic deficits over extended periods of time, you are looking at impaired performance, increased risk of illness, increased risk of injury, um maladdaptation, and all those negative things that fundamentally you're trying to avoid. So, it's athletes can find themselves in this horrible place of I feel like I'm putting in all the effort. I'm doing all the work to the best of my ability, but because I haven't got my nutrition right before, during, and after exercise, instead of enhancing what my body can do, I'm actually impairing and dampening what my body is able to do and how it's able to recover and adapt.
And and you see horror stories, you know, you see athletes, some athletes really fall off the edge of a cliff and disappear, you know, for extended periods of time through illness, through preventable injuries because they've got it wrong. One I've noticed a lot that's started to slightly disappear with the pros is there used to be that old adage when you're at peak performance, you're basically teetering on a tight rope of overtraining, falling off the edge, getting sick, getting injured. And looking back on that, I was wondering is that because that's preceding that peak performance is a period of, you know, higher than normal training intensity, training duration, and the fueling never adapted to that higher intensity.
So now this tightroppe they're talking about that they're treading is actually an under fueling tight rope. I think fueling definitely has a part to play and I think it you know when somebody's getting ready to peak and there may be a few peaks that you're trying to hit and sustain throughout the course of the year you know prior to those peaks you are exposing your body to stress. So if we look at there's something called general adaptation syndrome but let let's imagine a graph and let's say baseline is here when you go and train you're deliberately going into that bit of a hole where that stress is coming in and then your recovery protocols how you fuel after and recover how you sleep how you look after your own mental health etc.
They allow you to start to make the most of those that stress and your body starts to adapt to it and let's say we come out a little bit higher and that's kind of that step effect where you go down, you come up and the idea is over time you build up those adaptations so that you're in a position to perform at your peak and as you've said let's say it's nutrition as one of those big big pillars. If you put that stress on your body and you're not getting the fueling for or the recovery from correct, you find yourself working into that hole and never necessarily finding the the full way out of it to make the most of that training. So that's the, you know, and you look at people, you use the word teetering, who are right on the edge, they've maybe struggled in the past to quantify exactly what the cost was and how they could better match.
They've you know we've seen advancements in all sorts of tools and technology. People are able to better quantify their sleep. People are a able to better quantify the work done on the bike.
So now we've seen more of a democratization of previously what maybe the only the elites had everyone is starting to have access to in their daily lives. what you used to have to go into a lab to get, you can get in ecologically valid settings where it's now you on your bike with your friends, but still harvesting that same information that can help inform what to do next. I think a piece amateurs miss that pros definitely have now and I missed it for a long time and it was only chatting to Mate Moharic and he said it took him 10 years to figure out that the purpose of training is to get an adaptation to get better on race day, not just to train.
And it sounds like a very simplistic statement and it is a very simplistic statement. But a lot of us fall into that trap of just trying to turn boxes green on training picss and that becomes a successful week when we should be looking at did we get an adaptation from that week? Not did we complete that week.
Oh 100%. Like like training is is obviously a huge component but it is just not the only component. That training is going to apply that stress or it's going to give yourself the chance, the opportunity to see what your body can do, see what it can tolerate.
You need to then find a way to maximize how it can perform either during that session or recover from the stress of that session. And I often think, you know, nutrition has always been this, you know, I'm losing weight, I'm gaining weight, I'm using it just to manipulate body composition. Nutrition is a training tool.
It is fundamentally there to enhance your performance. And what you eat before, during, and after exercise can amplify how your body responds or completely dampen if you get it wrong, you know, and I put it in the same, you know, bucket like you've got sleep there as well. Imagine you've just completely underslept and you've had three backto-back days of, let's say you regularly sleep seven to eight hours.
You don't have a young child and you know you can and then all of a sudden you go to three backto-back days of four hours. So you've reduced it by 50%. you're now in a sleep deficit or sleep debt.
How do you think you feel? You know, there's a physical manifestation there where, you know, you go out and you're just, you know, you're on fumes. Yeah.
You know, but people sometimes think they can get away with it. They can eat the same thing every day despite days being different. And, you know, that's just fundamentally not true.
You're going to leave a lot behind taking that approach. So interconnected. I've noticed my motivation to avoid and I hate tagging foods bad foods and good foods cuz then you attach a morality to the food.
And I had this conversation with Aaron Dza who's advocating for an enhanced games. Have you heard of this guy? Yeah.
Oh, I've I've heard of the enhanced games. All right. Yeah.
So, he's he's advocating saying look everyone should be breaks off and you can take whatever you want. Well, I've got one before I take the sip of this. You you struck a nerve with me good and bad.
I think there are terms everyone pros, you know, developing athletes. That's where I was going. I'll come back to it.
You finish your point. And you know, pros, developing athletes, recreational athletes, club cyclists, food is neither good nor bad. You know, different types of food can be appropriate or inappropriate depending on the situation.
And that's the best way to think about it. If you want to go out and have a bag of Haribo, you know, but you've been sitting behind a desk all day, you're not doing any activity, you've no planned training, that's an inappropriate choice for the demands that are being placed on your body. you jump off a 4-hour ride, you've given it absolute socks and you've left everything out there, it's actually a really appropriate choice because you've depleted these fuel stores and you're actively looking to kickstart that recovery process and replenishment process.
So I would encourage people don't think as good and bad. Start to move towards is this appropriate is this inappropriate and how am I making that decision as to what is that's brilliant. You articulated that much better than I was going to but that was exactly where I was going.
when he was saying Coca-Cola is an inappropriate sponsor for the Olympics, that it's a bad food. And I was like, you can't say it's a bad food. You can say it's appropriate or not appropriate.
Like Coke in the middle of it. I almost can't think of a more perfect drink in a stage race. It, you know, final error.
You're seeing lads getting bottles of Coke, sugar readily available, mixed with some caffeine, tastes good, chilled, change of pace from your sports drinks. It's appropriate in that setting. But if you use good, bad, and that morality attached to it, it's just the wrong framework to analyze it through.
But I noticed with sleep that my willpower to make appropriate choices at the right times is diminished when I sleep poorly. Like if I have a, you know, a night out, you know, we were at roller and you're on the piss until 4:00 a.m.
or something and you come back the next morning. You're not choosing the healthy breakfast, you're choosing the full Irish the next morning. And it's like what's happening there that it's diminishing my capacity to make the choice that I know is correct.
Yeah. I specifically on rule air. Yeah.
I'm um I'm choosing water typically. I'm kind of finding my way back to baseline. Um restricted sleep will will start to impair cognitive ability and you see it play out in different performance ways and different lifestyle ways.
So, you know, let's say you're playing basketball. You'll see in often you see it in like impaired shooting. Your ability to make those shots starts to drop off.
But typically with restricted sleep, you will start to feel exactly like you said, that little bit fuzzy, that little bit tired. Things become a little bit more effortful. So motivation tends to drop massively.
And you know, if we look at motivation starting to drop, you know, you you refer to it as willpower. I'm tired. You know, you start to default then to what is the easiest choice.
Okay. So for people who are struggling with sleep or know that they're they might be going through a block where there might be restricted sleep, what I would encourage people to do is actually restructure their physical environment. If you can make the the better choice, the easiest choice, you will increase your likelihood of of picking that.
So, for example, let's say you go out and you're a bit hung over and the only food that's available in whatever Airbnb you've rented is a a good appropriate option for breakfast based on the whatever you're doing for the day, you're more likely to take that anyway. So, there I love that idea of removing friction but also adding friction to the negative habits. Like if there's something you don't like to do, if you add two or three friction steps.
For me, reading a book, I know that now in this distracted world, I can't seem to get through a chapter without picking up my phone anymore. So now I know if I put my phone in the other room, I'm unlikely to walk into the other room to get my phone to flick on Instagram res. So I'm more likely to sit and read two, three, four, five chapters of book.
No, 100%. I I mean, behavioral science and behavior change are things that I'm really passionate about. They're a big focus of my PhD.
And there's a research group over in UCL uh University College London over in the UK who produced something I think it was back in 2011. I think the lead author was a woman called Susan Mickey. But there's something called I suppose a combi model.
Um it's really let's say this meta theory of behavior change. And it states that for a behavior to occur you need the capability which could be psychological or physical. Do I do I know what to do?
Do I have the skills to do it? You need the opportunity. Am I around the right people?
Do I have the the things in my environment? And you need the motivation which could be reflective and automatic. So is it something that I'll I wake up I brush my teeth it's an automatic process or do I see something and then all of a sudden think oh you know I want to to do that and I think too often people think that just because I know what to do means I'll do it.
You know, I would say knowledge and behavior are equivocal in many senses that that doesn't fully translate into just cuz I know I'll do the opportunity that you have around you and def you know creating those defaults where the more appropriate choice becomes the one with less friction is definitely a good option for lots of people at home and I'd also consider motivation like motivation comes like that it's peaks and troughs all day every day and we could just see something you know you could be you know have low motivation today you watch a stage of the zero something cool happens and you just go I I'm going to jump on and do a session. You've seen something it's triggered a response and your body you have an action um that you're then moving towards. So I think there are the other things that people need to think about at home.
You know knowledge is not going to lead to behavior. You know how can you restructure your physical environment your digital environment when you have a peak in motivation and you go I really want to know what I should eat to get ready for this. Yeah.
How can you have access to go, okay, now I know what to do and I can ride that wave of motivation. And then you start to build up a little bit of self-efficacy or belief about your own abilities because you're starting to have these graded tasks where you're now working through those boxes and going, I did this. I got ready better.
Then I ended up performing better. Now I feel better. I'm more motivated to go and have something more appropriate for my recovery.
And you start to build those positive cycles. I love this angle we're going down. Uh because we started out with this idea of let's bridge the gap between the knowledge that world horror writers have.
You know how the incredible physiques they have and the less suboptimal physiques that we have as the rest of us normal humans. And I think this is a really interesting lens to explore through because you talked about having knowledge. But for me knowledge is an absolute there.
Having knowledge that's like if you think of it on a continuum of 0% to 100% having knowledge and possession of it seems like it's 100%. There's that Mark Twain uh quote. It's not what you don't know that hurts you.
It's what you know for sure it just isn't. So, and I think that's the problem. A lot of us have knowledge that we think is correct, but we don't have a 100% certainty that it's correct avenue.
So, we one don't fully commit to it because we're not certain, and two, we're kind of operating on flawed logic or, you know, we've pieced it together from noncredible sources. So if we were to start to construct a blueprint now for that athlete who is 5 to 7 kg overweight to fuel properly so they're not doing that damage we've identified where they're not compromising immunity. They're not starting to build inflammation stressors from underfueling on the bike but they were starting to create a deficit off the bike.
What does that blueprint start to look like? Yeah, I'd say the first thing going back to your knowledge and like you said misinformation that's out there. You know, you do have that say Dunning Krueger effect where you know people know some and then they think that they know more than they know and actually the more you know you the less you know the real you realize the less you know.
I've had that on the podcast quite a bit. I I I think look I think it's a that's the way we should all be thinking you know and I think people who do have knowledge or information really what that should empower people to do is ask the right question or ask a better question. So just because you've learned something or let's say um let's say we're talking about an energy deficit.
So I want to improve my body composition. I'm deliberately looking to reduce my calorie intake and I know that being in a deficit is going to help me get there. So that let's say that's knowledge.
Now how you can use that information is to ask a better question to say when is it appropriate for me to reduce my intake without compromising my performance on the bike. Now that knowledge has helped facilitate a better question and you can say okay well I know I'll go back to knowledge. I know I need to fuel this much before this session because this is the cost of it, but actually I have nothing on at the rest of the day and then I'm going into a rest day.
So I'm better off starting to move my deficit towards that period of time and then into the next day as well. So you knowledge should facilitate better questions that allow people to navigate towards building out what we would come back to and say it's just like training. Your nutrition should be periodized.
You should be increasing and decreasing the your carbohydrate and energy intake in line with the demands of your activity. And during those periods of less intense, lower duration or periods of complete rest, they're completely appropriate times to start to reduce that intake, working towards those deficits. But during those periods where you're really trying to perform, you want to practice what it's going to be like at a race.
They're the times it's better to go back to that energy balance and say, "Well, I'm going to focus on delivering a performance here. It's more appropriate there and less appropriate." This is really good.
I love this angle there. So, I spoke to Dan Lurang, head of performance at Bora, and he had this idea of before someone starts thinking about, I'm going to peak for this race. I'm going to peak for this race.
Pull out your Google calendar and now put in the stuff that's a big stress in your life. So, what day you getting married? you know, what day is your son born due to be born on?
Put in these big stressors that are immovable in your life. And now let's start thinking about building your training plan around this because we can't get an adaptation to training in the presence of high stress outside of training. So I'd nearly say based on what you're saying there, we could layer a second layer on this Dan calendar idea and start to lay in periods and identify periods in the week and in the day where we should be high carbohydrate, where we should be medium carbohydrate and periods where we can start to think about a calorie deficit.
So calorie deficit doesn't become a 247 obsession. It's just these periods we can start to think about calorie deficits because it's appropriate to think about them there. 100%.
And exactly like you said, if if you look at that training calendar, you know, and you know, Dan's obviously done a phenomenal job and all the roles and athletes he supported, it is going to be periodized throughout the course of the year. You know, there are going to be periods of higher volume, lower volume, days of higher volume, lower volume, days of complete rest, days like you said that are travel days, family stress, you know, and going back to what we said, nutrition is a training tool. It is there to support that work and amplify what your body can do and how it responds to it.
So I think you have to think of of both in conjunction. You know I'd have a fundamental belief you cannot make an accurate nutritional recommendation until you understand somebody's training. Only then can you start to say well because they have this on this day it's at this like we said before type intensity duration of the activity.
This is how much time they have available to recover. This is when they're preparing to go next. Now we can go based on all of this we can quantify what is the most appropriate thing when we should be ramping up and pulling down the energy the carbohydrate intake while still evenly distributing protein to maintain protect and enhance the lean mass that they have.
Is it only carbohydrate that's getting periodized throughout the week? Is protein staying a consistent recommendation dayto day? So it's not just carbohydrate.
It's going to be carbohydrate and and energy will will be big ones that we'll see. They'll be the the two most dramatic that we'll adjust. Okay.
When you know and that really comes back to the fact that when we're exercising, carbohydrate is going to be our primary fuel source. But as you said, when we look at protein, protein is something that we want to maintain on a consistent basis. For most people listening, around 1.
6 to say 2.4 gram per kilogram of their body weight, let's call it an average of two grams per kilo is enough to maintain a lot of protein. When you start thinking like chicken breast 30 g of protein and like I'm 80 kg so I'm looking at 160 gram of protein a day and a chicken breast is 30 grams of protein roughly.
You're like that's you need to be thinking about your meals in advance. They can't be just I'll bang on a bit of pasta here. No, 100%.
I would say there's there's really lowhanging fruit for everyone for this. So most people will consume a decent amount of protein in lunch and dinner. They're like typical behaviors that we see in society.
I think more people are becoming more aware at breakfast where they're consuming, let's say, some eggs. They're adding in some Greek yogurt on top of Since using Nexus, I started banging two scoops of protein powder into my porridge in the morning because I was like, I can't I've eaten oats forever in the morning. I was like, I can't have a zero protein meal because it just puts too much pressure on the rest of the day.
Yeah. And I think that's it. really what you're trying to do is evenly distribute it as best as possible throughout the course of the day.
And I think like you've said there, I think most people listening to this, I would say look at your breakfast and look at your snacks. They're the opportunities for most people to increase or elevate their protein intake. And all of a sudden, what you'll start to see is recovery can start to improve.
Things like muscle soreness starts to dampen and those adaptations that we're trying to facilitate start to improve. And you know, a simple snack could be maybe you're, you know, getting ready for training and you wanted some uh granola or Bertcher's musli before, but add in two, three tablespoons of Greek yogurt. Or are you actually having a recovery snack or drink when you get off the bike before you go and eat your meal?
Maybe it's as simple as bolting in something there and saying, "Well, let's have an additional meal and let's call it a smoothie, whatever it might be, where you might use some whey or, you know, whatever protein powder you prefer or some Greek yogurt and dairy and start to pull together a good recovery drink that's not just high in protein that will help remodel that muscle, but also provide other nutrients to aid that recovery process." So, while we're on that recovery drinks, for a long time, the dominant narrative I heard is recovery drinks should be 4:1 carbohydrates to protein ratio. And then we had this glycogen re-uptake window where people literally set stopwatches and they're trying to be drink their chocolate milk in the shower.
Is that still solid science about glycogen re-uptake? And what's the ideal recovery drink look like? So, again, I the ideal recovery drink really depends on the session demands.
So, you know, you're going and doing a strength training session for 45 minutes at a moderate intensity. You're doing an hour spin. You're, you know, versus, you know, a stage of the tour to France this year.
Those recovery solutions look very different and they're going to be very different for the individual basis. But I think there's there's typically, let's say, some there there is ways you can quantify it. Now, we're quantifying it in Hexus and starting to understand what was the actual cost, how can we distribute it, what does this recovery period look like, but also some good rules for everyone as well.
You know, I think if you're looking and struggling to hit that protein intake throughout the course of the day, I think it's always good to consume a serving of protein in that post training window. That won't slow down your absorption of carbohydrates. No, you're like, if anything, it's going to help the uptake of carbohydrate and sort of accelerate that recovery process.
In terms of the 4:1 ratio, it really depends on how much you've depleted and also not just what's happened, but what are you also trying to prepare for? So, I might not have done that much work today, but actually maybe I'm starting a race tomorrow. Yeah.
And actually, I should be looking at topping up my glycogen stores to prepare for that. So, I would look at it in those contexts. And in many ways, I'd always look at, you know, what you should intake over a 72-hour window.
There's what am I doing today? What am I recovering from yesterday? And what am I preparing for tomorrow?
And if we look at the let's say the recovery drink, that's just one of I don't know it could be 12 to 15 meals, you know, 12 to 20 meals across that process and you and you'd start to factor it in around those. But I think general rules of thumb, if somebody's going out for long intense rides, they're going to need some carbohydrate and some protein after. If it's lower intensity and it's shorter duration, some protein might be good to help just make sure you're hitting your daily protein targets.
I know you're working with half the world tour at the moment. or we got UNOX Inos EF. Yeah, Q36.
5. Um, yeah. No, it's great.
We're look, we're really fortunate. I think for me personally, my background is as a practitioner. So, I've I've spent the last decade working with sports, working with athletes, and we're really fortunate now more than anything, to be working with great people.
You know, I can't obviously go through and name everyone, but I I look at the work. Let's let's say Q36.5.
They're having a, you know, a great year. Um, obviously Tom's come into stepped up. I I was a huge critic of Pickock last season.
I thought even with the transfer, I thought the most overpaid rider in the world. If you look at pro cycling stats last year, the run-of-the-mill domestics had more points, UCI points than him for the last couple of seasons and he had this top five, you know, one of the X-Men wages at the top of it and you're like, he clearly doesn't merit that based off his palm. If you take off-road out of the equation and you look at purely as road pomeirez, but he stepped up this year big time.
I mean, I for me personally, I I never have the credentials to comment on on any individual rider, but I I I do look at someone like I definitely don't either. The um you know, I I have hu huge admiration for for Tom and what he's doing. But but you know I was fortunate enough actually during my PhD studies before Tom had had really burst onto the scene back when he was back in Trinity.
We were running focus groups to start to understand what do athletes really want and I Tom was one of those athletes in one of those focus groups at that time. I think he was writing for Trinity. I think the tour Britain was on and it was stage five.
It was some hotel at near St. Albins's in London and he just had such a great mentality towards this is what I need to maximize my performance and he had some unbelievably pointed quotes that we we ended up publishing in the research. I think he said if it is not completely tailored to exactly what I'm doing then what is the point?
Yeah. When he was referring to his nutrition and it's there's a lot of EQ for a young lad to make a statement like that. I you I mean you you have like huge admiration for anyone and you know there's what he's done is fantastic and what the team have done around him is fantastic and it's it's been a really nice full circle moment for us because we've gone from being practitioners and making observations to say well there's probably better ways to do it athletes are looking towards technology the information seeking behavior has shifted in society practitioners are struggling to deliver at scale Tom comes in with brilliant insights like this.
We use that to then go and develop what could an intervention look like. The I want to say the intervention gets out of control and grows into what is now Hexus which is now being used by the team and used by the nutritionist to help fuel those performances. And I think you know a ma massive credit to Adam the nutritionist there as well.
I mean he really drives a great program you know he can do everything. I think there was uh I was catching up with someone from the team and he was even he ended up driving the team bus you know as well like someone was stuck and they were like can you drive the bus and he goes I I'll drive the bus you know and in professional sport people like that who are what I just call energy givers they're there to help you know our role as practitioners our role building technology is to help support people maximizing their own physical potential you know we're there to to ultimately do that because they're the people that deliver the performances. Whatever small part we can play, it's still those people who are pushing the power through the pedals and and taking all of the hardship off the bike on the bike and dealing with all of those stresses.
So, I really hope and you know, Touchwood will continue to do that with those people, those organizations and grow that. But we're always, you know, ultimately we deal with people and is about helping people achieve what they can. So, I'll loop back to the recovery drink.
is like if I'm finishing a stage and I'm a Tom Pickock, I just finished a Azure stage. Am I uploading my file, it's pushing it to Hexa straight away and it's giving me my recovery drink recommendation in real time or is the nutritionist analyzing and giving them that recommendation. So typically what will happen is the writers will have access to an app, the nutritionist will have access to a web app, so a web platform.
Um, on the mobile app, the athletes will have built all of their individual profiles. Just like anyone could do, we'll start to understand everything that we discussed earlier about their own physical profiles, preferences, training demands. We'll pull in the planned training data from training peaks or planned workout data.
So, ahead of time, we'll sync in here is what my body is about to do. Okay? So, that will then determine and how are we modeling that for say a year of stage today.
People will understand the duration. people will understand what the average powers will be, you know, and they they give really good indications of what the energy cost will be, how much we need to prepare our bodies for that. So, they're benchmarking it maybe off a previous stage that had 2,000 meters of climbing.
Yeah. And I think a lot of people are also sort of, you know, they've gone and they've done wreckies and they've started to see these things at different times. So, there is there's good data to inform that.
So, that's going to inform what's going to happen at breakfast then and what's going to happen the day before. You know, you know, I don't think we're seeing many, you know, you're not seeing anyone going out low before those. People are looking two, three grams per kilo of carbohydrate to prepare their bodies and get ready.
Then they're going to, you know, depending on how big the stage is, some people might then be told actually let's have an additional snack on the bike. They're going to get a recommendation for how many grams per hour they want. And to your point on the recovery drink.
So all of that information will sync training peaks or it could be intervals for other teams or other platforms. We'll pull in the plan data. We'll turn that into predictive personalized nutrition for each rider tailored to their own demands.
When they then go and do the work, that onbbyike computer will upload that file to those training planners. Hexus will automatically sync that in and then we'll update the recovery period based on what's actually happened. Very interesting.
Um, what's the trend we've seen with I'm assuming it's cherry drinks on the finish line. Everyone seems to be necking these cherry drinks. Vizma is especially it's especially visible on the finish line.
W the other day winning. So what morreny tartar cherry or those sort of really high antioxidant whole food solutions, they've actually been around for a while and a lot of the research originally was done on them when you're looking at sleep and actually starting to improve somebody's sleep quality. The research when you dive into the methods on them in the past have often been that there are benefits.
There are benefits to recovery. There are benefits to sleep. But when you actually look at how those studies were put together, they were often put together in diets that were stripped of fruit and vegetables or really low polyphenol intakes.
When you look at the demands of stage racing, you're not always in a position to take on board huge amounts of fruits and vegetables. One, because you're on the bike for so long, you're looking at things like fiber and maybe you might have a lower residue day to try reduce some gut weight that you're trying to manage weight. Let's say it's a if it's a big climb.
So those options become really useful solutions for athletes who are exposed to those extreme scenarios and trying to accelerate the recovery. Also providing a little bit of carbohydrate as well. But it's not a replacement for your recovery drink.
It's a supplement too. No, absolutely. I mean it's you got to look at what's doing what job.
You know, protein is going to be there to help repair and remodel the muscle. Carbohydrate is going to be there to help to uh replenish those depleted glycogen stores. Tarte Cherry is going to be there to provide a whole food antioxidant-rich um source of food to try to help clean up and some of those metabolic waste products and also support some good quality sleep.
A lot of listeners to the podcast are the wrong side authority. A lot of the athletes you're working with are the right side of 30. Not all of them.
There's still hope for anyone that does listen is, you know, especially in endurance. Like I think people can rediscover themselves in their 30s, which is great. Not so much in your 40s though.
I haven't got there yet. So maybe I'm speaking to myself here. Maybe this is my own psychology talking into myself.
But does the fueling requirements change as we age 30 to 40 to 50 to 60? I think energy requirements do change as you get older. So you know rates of energy expenditure often drop off in older populations.
Uh your rate of muscle protein synthesis can often drop off in older populations. So I think as you start to age there are additional considerations um more than anything else. So maybe your base energy requirements may be slightly lower.
Um but also your as a result of your protein synthesis dropping off, you might need to increase your protein intake to still try to maintain the muscle that you have, which is especially important when you look at age related degenerative diseases like sarcopenia or muscle wastage. You know, ultimately we want people to be aging really well. We want them to be healthy.
We want them to have function, be able to get up and down the stairs and go and socialize and meet their friends. And if we start to see too much muscle wastage, it can start to negatively impact function. You know, I might not be able to get up and down of a chair.
As you know, as basic as it sounds, and there's really good regression analysis on this where if you can benchmark your current activities at your age and do a regression as to what you won't be able to do when you're older. So, I can't remember the exact stats, but if you can't uh deadlift your body weight at age 40, you're not going to be able to stand up out of a chair without help age 80. Stuff like that.
It's wild. If you can't do 10 long arm chin-ups age 40, you're not going to be able to put a overhead suitcase in a carry-on age 80. Oh, you sound more familiar with that than me.
The only thing I will say is I mean our our our bodies are incredibly adaptable bits of kit and you know you can always start to like we said it before you can start to expose it to these stresses and it will adapt. So you know even if you're in your 40s I don't think it's too late if you're in your 50s you've but you have to put in the work. It's, you know, real health and performance.
You build it. And it, you know, sometimes it is a brick by brick appro approach and saying, well, what can I do today? It's not going to, you know, I'm not going to all of a sudden go from no pull-ups to 10 pull-ups, but can I do an assisted band pull-up and start to progressively overload that and progress that over time.
And I think that's one thing I would say to absolutely everyone, like it's it is never too late. There's always opportunities. Don't be afraid of coming in on the, you know, the very beginning right at the start line because you can start to build up pretty fast and those little wins really do compound.
You mentioned protein being a extra consideration as you age. Is there ballparks of you said around 2 grams per kilogram of body weight for your you know your non-masters athlete but as we progress as we go from 40 to 50 to 60 to 70 to we've 80 year olds listening to the podcast how would they start to benchmark how much they should increase that two grams per kilogram I I still think that 2 grams per kilo is a good target I typically you know when we see the older population I think you know we see activity drop off you know lifestyle whatever demands it might be I think it's more about creating opportunities to maintain pain that um because I think we're seeing a drop off in people act people's actual intake more than anything else. Okay.
So there's good progression you know lots of new and novel foods coming out. I think it you'd want to be living under a rock to not to see you know you go into the local you know corner shop or news agent and all of a sudden there's protein bars you get protein milks you get protein you get protein and everything. But I think there's bit there's more availability now.
So, I think for those aging populations, I would just be more conscious as opposed to saying eat more. Like, what can I do to still hit two grams per kilo now? And I think they'll be in a really, really good place.
Does the source of protein matter as long as it's full chain aminos? So I suppose you're getting into the kind of like let's say vegetarian, vegan, let's say animal protein almost if I'm taking in like back to kind of my porridge in the mornings. I'm taking in two sc scoops of whey protein with that like does that differ from me having salmon fillets before.
Obviously salmon fillets might be a great example because high fat component to it. The quality of protein does matter and typically what we see is in animal-based proteins, it's not just, let's say, about having that complete amino acid profile, but they're particularly high in one amino acid called leucine. And lucine is typically that trigger for muscle protein synthesis.
What we see in plant-based sources is we often see incomplete amino acid profiles, which means you often need to pair them and we see lower leucine content. So there is when you're looking at maintaining muscle there, you know, you will often, and I wouldn't say that it can't be done. I just think people who follow a strictly vegan approach, they just need to think about it more because there's there's plenty of top worldass athletes who are vegan.
Is there any world tour lawyers? Uh not that I've worked with personally. I'm sure there is but you know instead of just saying having let's say a dairy source if you're a vegetarian or let's say eggs, meat, fish, which are great high lucine, full amino acid profiles that will deliver the job high quality sources we need.
If you are following a vegan diet, I would consider how you start to pair a grain, like a nut, a bean, a soy, and a legume. And th those sort of combination of different vegetarian sources often bring together more complete amino profiles. Um, you know, so it's it's always a balance in terms of what your preferences are.
And that, you know, people take different choices for ethical reasons as well. You have to respect that. you know the I think your your animal-based products will be are often they require less effort to hit those targets and again the responses that we see from a muscle protein synthesis perspective are you know they're tried and tested we know we can deliver the results a little bit more thought over here and you probably need to consume more but you know I would encourage people to try consume well I'm saying two grams per kilo of high quality protein you know are you consuming chicken fish eggs dairy Um, yes.
Is varying the source important? I think varying the source is important, but for different reasons. You know, if we're looking at our our gut and our microbiome, and you you far more intelligent to people than me, like Jamie, who we spoke about earlier speaking about this, you know, including a a variety of foods in our diet and that biodiversity, it really helps our overall gut health.
And so, I think it's we we can't look at these things in isolation and we've got to look at, let's say, that whole system and, you know, where the different roles are playing. A quick word from today's sponsor. A few years ago, I came out of my local coffee shop after a long winter spin to find my cafe lock on the ground, sliced clean in half.
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Is there supplements that are common? the the vegan vegetarian sort of just got that triggered in my head because every vegan I know is taking quite a few supplements and it got me wondering I know we're into an era of personalization now where especially world heroiders are getting blood panels they're looking for deficits and they're plugging holes with specific supplements for those deficits but nutritionists I've spoke to in the past almost universally would endorse creatine as a supplement but they wouldn't necessarily be world horizon specific nutritionists like you is creatine something that riders should take and if so, what else should it be taken with that in the stack? Yeah, I mean I mean we we can go a million and one different directions here.
Um if we look at creatine, creatine is an incredibly wellressearched supplement. You know, we know that it can have impacts on both strength and power, but I would say also for the general listener more recently cognitive ability. I've seen the Alzheimer's research around.
Yeah. So, you know, I would encourage, you know, you know, and I I spent a lot of time working in rugby and we didn't look at it just from a strength and power perspective, but we also looked at it, you know, because those guys were getting concussed. Yeah.
And what could we do to help prevent or help somebody with some of those symptoms who may have had a concussion and start to improve the let's let's call it the I suppose the the brain energetics or how that we can help somebody who's recovering from that. And there is some nice research about the role that creatine can play during that period. So let's go let's split performance and let's split health first of all and deal deal with health.
You know, creatine from a health perspective, I think there are large benefits in low daily doses. From a cognitive, what's a low daily dose? Five grams.
I would say, you know, it could be three grams a day for a lot of people. Um, three to five grams a day. You, you know, particularly in the elderly population who you might be concerned about things like Alzheimer's or cognitive function.
Basically, my parents like which is I've never had that thought until the penny just dropped right now going why am I not telling my parents to take this? Absolutely. I mean, it's it's something I've had that discussion with my parents.
I think it's incredibly valuable and it's uh you know it's not that expensive. It is quite easy to consume in the world like Yeah. And and that's where people need to not get confused.
You know, just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's it's ineffective. You know, look at what else is really cheap that can have huge benefits. Vitamin D, you know, we know that as we go through the different seasons, the majority of the vitamin D we get comes through sunlight and it comes through skin exposure.
You know, our arms and legs are out in summer. We'll start to top up our own vitamin D pools. But during those winter months, you know, obviously we're dialing in from Ireland here.
And I mean, there's an argument how long the winter is here, but you know, it's I mean, it's gray a lot. It's gray a lot. It's got a lot better recently.
Um, but let's let's say October through to to April. You know, during those typical winter months, we know that we're not going to get a lot of exposure to vitamin D. It's a very cheap supplement.
You know, you anything between 1 to 4,000 IU daily is a really good winter supplement to take to help protect your immune system and maintain that. And you know the way you get so I started using a Jew of red light unit this year found it re anecdotally but found it really helpful. I I don't know if I I've never been diagnosed with seasonal effective disorder but definitely just when you wake up in the morning look outside it's gray skies all the time.
It's very different to waking up in Jirona where it's blue skies all the time but jumping up in the morning on front of the Jew of really seem to help that whereas going out walking the dog with a bit more optimism in my day. But I don't know, does vitamin D alone give you those same benefits that you would normally get if you're in a country that has less cloud cover of sun exposure? So, I mean, if you're in a country that has less less cloud cover and it's going to be sunny all year round and you're going to be out in shorts and t-shirts, you know, you're you're going to need less vitamin D from a supplement because you're probably going to get enough naturally, like you said, through those through the fact that it is sunny and you're outside.
So, I think it is really looking at those times where you're either going to be in extended periods of long sleeve clothes uh for, you know, for months um or there's just the sun is just not necessarily out. But I, you know, again, what are we trying to do with the supplement? We're not just supplementing for the sake of supplementing.
We're specifically trying to reduce your risk of picking up things like an upper respiratory tract infection and reducing your risk of illness during the winter period by maintaining that. Same thing with creatine. We're trying to support that cognitive function in that, you know, for an aging population.
There's other supplements that can have a really beneficial effect as well. You know, a daily fish oil tablet. Again, if we look at something that is has a good dose of, you know, our omega-3s be made up of EPA and DHA to start to dampen some inflammation.
Interesting. I don't take that. So, what's would be a good dosage for or what am I looking for firstly in a fish oil and what's my dosage look like?
So there's some really good research around I suppose if we we look at omega-3 and we look at DHA around cognitive function and then EPA again around really I suppose from an inflammation perspective one or two grams of high quality fish oil a day would be a great daily dose not crazy expensive it doesn't need to be but also you know if you're not consuming fish regularly in your diet it may be something that you look to supplement if you are you know you know living in the Mediterranean having a lot of oily fish all the time poor gas on the niswas it might not be something for you. So, it's also one of those things you need to consider what what's beneficial. You know, a probiotic would also be one where I think when people are starting to look at how they're positively influencing their own gut health, that could be really beneficial, you know.
So, Jamie talked to me about probiotics uh and this kind of new fueling strategy as well. And I I I don't want to misquote him because I haven't it's quite a while since we chatted, but that was one of the supplements where he was quite bullish on probiotics in this new era of carbs. I mean, he he's an expert.
He's he's the expert in the space. He did his PhD in the area and he's an absolute wealth of knowledge. So, I think it's definitely something that people should be considering.
You know, I do look at people with, you know, multivitamins and other bits. If you're consuming enough fruit and veg daily, and like for me, I'm going to say seven to 10 servings, which a lot of people go, geez, it sounds like a lot, but all of a sudden, you have a couple of servings in your breakfast, you know, some sliced banana and a handful of berries. You have, you know, some salad in your lunch.
you have a few vegetables with your dinner and then maybe you add something to a smoothie for a recovery drink. Like you you've hid it like that. So I think if you're consuming enough from your daily diet, you might not need to spend money on the multivitamin, but maybe you don't consume enough oily fish.
Maybe fish oil is a is useful to include. So I think, you know, they're kind of the broad bucket. If we're looking at the health side of things, like I said, we've got creatine, we've got fish oil, we've got vitamin D, and then we've also got our our probiotic.
From a performance side of things, there are definitely other supplements that can start to creep in. And again, it really depends on what you're trying to achieve. You know, we look at creatine in a performance sport setting.
You can load creatine. There's, you know, you can do a fast load or a slow load. You could take five grams five times a day for five days.
You will often see some increase in body weight. It's driven. What's a what's a big load of creatine in those in this loading phase?
Well, well, that would be it. You know, it could be often like around 25 grams a day distributed into five doses for five days. Not necessarily the best move for endurance athletes because you often see this jump in in body weight that's often associated with this.
How much would you be talking? It depends on the individual, but you could be up a couple of kilos of water. Okay.
Um, you could do something like a slow load, three to five grams a day for 30 days and then just maintain that. And then you could still see that to support those bigger blocks where you're actually looking to try more power or, you know, maybe you have a specific focus on the track where that becomes really important. And again, these are all the different considerations we need to think of because maybe a fast load for a track cyclist is exactly what they want.
They want more mass. They're trying to produce more force. Whereas a road cyclist, there are different implications.
But and that's that's where we've got in the last few years, isn't it? It's not this one-sizefits-all approach to diet anymore. Like back in the day, they were trying to make like, you know, Christian Vandervel on the podcast and he's just talking about going out on rides where he just coming in the door, literally fall in the door.
He was so glycogen deployed, couldn't lift the bike up the stairs in Jerona, dying. Everyone, they tried to turn him into a 52 kg Colombian climber. If you have a 6'2 frame, you're never going to be a 52 kg Colombian climber.
We've seen a move away from this. On the one end, we have, you know, Yonas and as Greg Lemon called him. He said he looks like a prisoner of war and on the far end we have guys like you're working with like uh in Uno X, like Abrahamson.
Big dude. It almost doesn't look like a cyclist anymore. What's the thinking with the direction they've gone with his nutrition?
So I I think just to just to bring it back to basics, I think there's a there's two sides to the equation. And I think historically everyone's looked at one sides to the equation, which is if I want to improve my power to weight ratio, I need to be lighter because I can produce this much power. So if I drop this much weight, then, you know, I'll skew that equation in the direction I want it to go.
And Zift has been quite bad for that for amateur riders because a lot of amateur riders, Zift, Ruby, whatever it is, it overemphasizes what's per kilogram as a metric. Like I've jumped in on group rides on Ruby and Swift and I'm getting dropped and it's like I've never got dropped on a group ride in me life and it's like I'm getting dropped with a load of random C fours on a group ride because they're clearly optimized for power to weight. Well, or maybe they're cheating as well.
Me personally, I know less about that. I mean, I look at those platforms and I do I love what they've done in terms of activity and getting more people active and getting more people social. There's also the element when you're outside on a bike with a group of people, there's a hunger as well that you're like, I I'm you're not dropping me.
Like I'm like this is, you know, they're they're the intangibles. It's like I can see you and that's not happening. Um and like you said, like you you don't know what people are doing behind closed doors.
But I think going back to that equation, the other side of the equation is somebody might be a little bit heavier, but actually they might be able to produce more power relative to that weight that still Yeah. So it starts to skew that equation up in the right direction as well. And the the the absolute biggest mistake I see and this isn't even just in cycling.
This is actually across a lot of elite sports where weight is important. People often bring with them their adolescent or early career weight and say this is my best weight. I was best when I was at this.
And you go you're you were 20 at that moment in time. You are now 28. You've had eight years.
peeking into my brain here. But you've had eight years of being a professional or training at this volume. You've developed new mass.
Your frame has evolved. You know, that concept that that happened at that young age is where you are right now. That needs correlation and causation.
Well, it just needs to be completely recalibrated because, you know, very often when you start to fuel people properly and you start to see, well, what can they do? Maybe when they're a little bit heavier or maybe when we just fuel this more appropriately to not try to drag them back into this, you know, hole where they're maintaining this unsustainable idea of what this ideal weight is and and allow them to evolve forward and go, "This is the rider I am today. These are the physical qualities I have.
How can I amplify those physical qualities and really bring that to life?" And I think, you know, you know, we work with Uno from a, you know, we'll provide technology. we're not involved in in the the day-to-day.
They have a fantastic team of practitioners uh across nutrition and across performance science. You know, their previous nutritionist, James Moran, is he's now their head of performance. So, you know, they they have an an unbelievable appreciation for that role.
And I think they're a testament to showing that when you when you work with an an individual and when you work with an athlete to figure out what works for them, the results speak for themselves. Can we bro science this and figure out how what what weight an athlete's going to perform best at? Like so I I raced in France.
I was 68 kg. I'm walking around now at 80 kg. If I was theoretically to get back into cycling now, how would I go about figuring out?
Cuz in my mind, I'd go, okay, all my best performances were at 68 kg, but I was also in my early 20s at 68 kg. So it it's exactly like you said there. I'm correlating those performances just to that weight and ignoring all the other surrounding circumstances to those performances.
So now with that new realization, if I was coming back into cycling and it's like I want to nail ideal weight here in that continuum of where I am now to where I was, how would I begin to identify where peak performance is? This is a great question and I think it's applicable to so many people. the the the very first thing I'd say is this the concept of ideal and what you're working towards you've got to go into it with an open mind.
So what people have as historical data in ter like like I said 10 years ago they need to drop that as an anchoring to say well I I think it's this you just need to fundamentally go in and go okay I'm going on this journey and I'm trying to figure out what works best for me as an individual athlete. The most important step is setting up the process and going okay for me to identify this what structures and systems do I need to have in place is what's my training like what is the goal of that training am I fueling appropriately and recovering appropriately to maximize what I'm doing in that session I I think I could be a bit lighter so go with the instinct and say well let's put ourselves in a deficit and let's start work towards that while still not going gung-ho and making these mass massive drops. What you'll find is as you start to transition down and as you start to work into that more moderate deficit while still supporting the training demands and just focus on process, you're going to start to produce these sessions where you you get to a point you go, I I felt great there.
My numbers were actually the best that they've been in the last 10 years. I I was a couple of kilos heavier than I was in my 20s. But actually if I look at my output during the session and then let's say let's just focus on the last hour.
What was the quality of training like in the last hour of that session you know for the first time in a long time I've been able to maintain and sustain that high intensity and like you said finish a session where I'm not just falling off the bike because I'm absolutely cooked but I'm falling off the bike because I was able to go to another level and produce another level of performance. Now you're starting to see the hints that you're getting towards that direction. You know, su success does leave clues.
And as you set up the process, the system, and the structures, just acknowledge that you are you're transitioning on that journey and that throughout that journey, you're going to start to get those hints. You're setting up little experiments at each of these weights and looking for clues of success and then pulling at that thread to go further in that direction. I think yeah for me I think so because otherwise you're just saying well I this is it and I'm going to get to this and then you could get to that and go I've gone too far okay and if you go too far it's a hard place you know sometimes when you go too far it can not just be weeks it can be months it can be a season seasons to pull yourself back out of there and then you lose like you lose time yeah like I've seen riders with that where they've even pulled into adrenal fatigue where they've gone so far in one direction.
So if we are to set this up and we take for granted in this thought experiment that we're trying to we we want to adapt to the training we're putting in but we want to also create a deficit and experiment with benchmarks that are further towards our lighter end. How do we create safe guard rails to know how much of a deficit we can create while still having an adaptation to the training? Because if we create a deficit but we all of a sudden lose the adaptation, you know, it becomes pointless.
Yeah. So, so there are safe ranges and evidence-based ranges for deficits to start to work towards in where you can still be looking at session quality and quantity. So, I think the first thing to recognize, like we said, let's go back to it.
Every day is going to be different. But if you're putting yourself in a let's say 10 to 15% or 3 to 500 calorie is what it'll work out for most people, energy deficit each day, you know, you'll still be able to produce the work that you need to do. So, if I was to go out now, I could have a 2,000 calorie session on the bike and then I've got all the other components that we discussed about it might, you know, my total energy cost for the day with all of the factors included.
Let's say it's 3,900. And if I say, okay, I need to, I might just drop it, let's say relative 10%, so around 3,000 or 390 calories, pull that down a little bit. That's that mo modest deficit that allows you to still do the work without having to completely chop everything and going I'm just having 2,000 calories and I'm just going to suffer.
So this is really interesting because for me you mentioned something there as well is like trying to figure out success leaves clues trying to figure out what is working. Cyclists we've lived by the scales and the power meter for a long time. Is there other technology or otherwise even feelings that we should be tuning into as signs that this is working like tuning into sleep?
Can we be monitoring hormone levels or am I missing a piece there? I think you can actually most of this you can go out and measure. You can measure everything.
I suppose ultimately you've got to decide what you want to do with it. And it's like we said at Hexus ultimately we only ask for data or want to collect data if it helps inform what to do next. what can we do to help improve your likelihood of success?
You you mentioned one word there. I'm more on the subjective side of things. I think one of the biggest things is actually starting to, you know, for me as a nutritionist, like fundamentally like I'm a coach.
I like to talk to people. I like to understand how they feel, why they feel the way they feel, what caused it, how can we replicate, not replicate. So with all of this data, I think it is really important to start to take into consider those subjective measures as well.
Yeah, you know, there's something called the perceived recovery score. It's a scale of 1 to nine. You know, there's there's a brilliant researcher in New Zealand, a guy called Dr.
Jeff Jeff Rothschild, who we're really fortunate to have support some of our work in Hexus. And, you know, we were catching up a little bit about other ways of understanding people's recovery, you know, and Jeff shared the research on on this PRS score and and actually it can start to become a really good indicator of how well somebody can perform that day just by asking them how well recovered do you feel? So Joe Freel has this in his first book which was written I would say 30 years ago.
Joe's back on the podcast next week, but the cyclist training bible I would say is almost 30 years old and he has this idea in the morning of a morning check-in. And the more we've gone into this era of high-tech wearables, Whoop, eight sleep mattresses, you know, Hexus, Training Peaks, Veecta, all this, the the more I'm starting to feel like it's a trifecta of the technology like your wearables, your glucose monitors, your training peaks data. And the part that so many people are missing is that how do you feel like how motivated you to train today?
And actually an interesting one that a few coaches have started experimenting with is this idea of and this might totally throw off the hexus fueling idea. They're putting so much emphasis on how you feel in the morning that they're letting you self- select your session based off. So you get a you get a menu of sessions that you need to get completed in a 7-day period.
And now you wake up this morning, you go, actually I didn't sleep great. I don't feel like I want to go long cuz maybe it's pouring rain outside and you've 6 hours and your training partners have canceled and you're not feeling great. I have an hour and a half with some threshold intervals so they can do them inside.
I'm self- selecting to do that session today. That obviously throws a spanner in the works around fueling. So I'm not sure the sustainability of that model.
Yeah, I from our side of things, we're completely adaptable in real time. So, and I think it it's important that any technology you use that should be trying to help and support your performance should be adaptable in real time because real life means plans change. You know, especially for amateurs.
Well, especially for amateurs, all of a sudden the meeting with someone else has moved and the training session you wanted to do. From our side of things, it's relatively simple. If you know that session has moved to a different date or a different time, you just move it.
You know, a different session has come in for the day, you can reync or you can add it. And then all of a sudden your new fueling plan is completely created. So you know exactly what to do next.
So it doesn't mess up your day before. Well, obviously you can't go back in time. Your day before is what it is.
Yeah. You can't go back in time, but everything's taken into consideration. And again, given the constraints that are on your life, like I said, it's a when plans change, we're there to help and we're there to remove the guesswork and go, well, because this has happened, what's the best thing I can do now?
So we'll update whatever the session demands are, how they move, everything can update in real time from our side of things. But I think going back to your point on the subjective athlete monitoring, I think it is important for practitioners to listen and athletes to listen as well. And going back to what we said said about leaving clues, just start to unpick it.
The different data sources that you have, your sleep data, your training data, your planned and completed nutrition data, they'll all start to allow you to better understand why you felt a certain way. So, if your muscle soreness is higher tomorrow and you reflect back and you go, actually, do you know what? I was only consuming a gram per kilogram of my body weight of protein.
I just I I wasn't consuming enough to fully help that recovery process. There's an area that I can start to target and improve. And they're the small wins, not even small wins, like they're major wins that can transform how somebody starts to perform when they start to unpick those and I suppose build a better version of themsel or a higher performing version of themselves.
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I chatted with Olaf Buddlin coach a while ago and he's mad scientist. I really like chatting about Olaf. We our first podcast I think we scheduled an hour and we were like 10 minutes into it.
He's like yeah an hour is not going to be enough. He's like we need to do a part two. But one of the things I found really interesting was he differentiates between downstream and upstream effects.
And I wonder in this new data age like is there some upstream decision we could make that really screws us downstream? One example he gave me was a lot of athletes taking their lead and they're doing a lot of smoking mirrors on Instagram because they know people are watching is the lactate readings. So they're doing lactate readings on Instagram.
He's like a lot of people are copying those lactate readings. And in his words, lactate reading is the easiest reading to contaminate. Very very simple to get a bad lactate reading.
If you get a bad lactate reading, you set your threshold wrong. Your training stress score is wrong. Recovery protocols are wrong.
potentially fueling now is wrong. Do you worry that we're so reliant on upstream that it could cause some cascading effects downstream? I think you know it's a you've just basically posed a data reliability question you know are you confident in the test and the results that you're going to get.
I think if you're concerned, let's say it's a lactate reading and let's say you're going out and you're doing it yourself and you're not that confident in it or maybe you've learned a bit on YouTube, but you're, you know, you're you're not 100% sure you're learning on the job, there are physiologists that are trained to do that, that might be one that might be worth investing to make sure that you're getting valid data to inform that. So I think it really depends on you you have to look at data quality and go the information I'm getting you know is it reliable and like you said what are the what are the upstream and downstream effects of that because you know you get it wrong yeah there are downstream effects from there I think you know when we look at training there's going to be a you know the demands of your session they're going to be a physical output you know you're going to go for this long it is going to be this hard or at this power or average power um and this is the modality of exercise. So, from a fueling perspective, it's, you know, we have that information, your physical profile, your preferences.
It's it's a lot easier to make sure that we're still matching that. Yeah. But like you said, if the training is set wrong, you might be fueling for that training demand, but maybe it's too hard and actually you're just find that you're sort of overreaching a little bit because the stress is too high and it needs to be pulled down.
It just emphasizes having some guard rails around and stuff. rely on making sure your power meter is accurate and properly calibrated and not 20% off. Oh, 100%.
And I think it's just people just need to have their eyes open and if something seems a little bit off, like you know, does it pass the smell test? If it seems a little bit off, why not just ask a question? What's the harm?
And then from like like I said, like we said earlier, when you're looking at knowledge, you might have a little bit more information. It just allows you to ask a better question. Yeah.
I like that idea of upstream and downstream because if we think about what we're a lot of what we're talking about is performance and the world you're operating in is performance is up there but I'm not sure that downstream of performance is health. So I'm not sure as amateurs we should be mimicking the performance and all the behaviors and characteristics of world tour riders because they're optimizing for performance and we're optimizing for health. Yeah.
And I think this is is this controversial? Is it not controversial? the, you know, performance and health, they are two different things.
Sometimes what it takes to be at the absolute best to be able to deliver and create an experience that just nobody else in the world can replicate. You know, let's an Olympics, whatever it might be, everything that goes into that might not always be healthy. And, you know, because you're placing all of this stress, you're trying to facilitate all of these adaptations to get to that point.
it it doesn't mean it it's all unhealthy like and it's our job as practitioners to support both the health and the performance of the athlete. So when we are looking at strategies, it's not about how far can I push this person without them breaking. It's how can I maximize their health whilst still maximizing their performance and like you said like guard rails need to be in place and that's why the dialogue between the practitioner and the athlete is so important because there are fluxes that happen dayto day like you said someone wakes up and goes I just I just don't feel that well today you know if you're trying to maximize for performance there you'd say well you still like you have to complete this this was the plan whereas you could come in and go okay we should modify and actually find ways is to make sure that we're still bringing you on that journey without putting you into that box or getting you ill.
Because you know, if you look at one of the best predictors of success at the Olympics, I there's some I think there was some research on this. I think I want to say there was a a researcher called Ray Smith back in 2016, it was one of the best predictors of success was someone's ability to complete their plant training. And actually, I think it was like you're four times more likely to be on the podium if you've completed 80% of your plant training, you know, during that cycle, you know.
So, and there's similar studies about long-term health objectives that I've seen as well. Like, if we think about there's three levers with your training. You have frequency, how often you can train.
You have the duration, the length of your sessions, and then you have your intensity. Frequency was the number one thing they looked at that determined long-term performance outcomes that you completed sessions frequent enough over a long enough period. But, interestingly, the one thing that undermined frequency in amateur athletes was intensity.
When people ramped the intensity lever too much, the frequency dropped off and that killed their long-term performance goals. Yeah. And I think that's why you got to take into consideration how you periodize.
Like you can't train hard all the time. You know, am I like what is the objective of the session? Am I trying to simulate this higher intensity performance right on the edge or am I trying to build up those aerobic adaptations?
But I think you know when we look at both of those components and you actually look go back to the process do the basics well consistently. Yeah. That that gets the majority of the people almost all of the way there all the time.
And it's a it's a dichotomy that marketers in the cycling space are struggling. see like some of the big cycling coaching companies who are aggressively marketing and trying to get new clients in and a lot of their stuff is around time crunch athletes like we can help you with eight hours or 10 hours a week but there's a inconvenient irreconcilable truth about you chat to Steven Syler or any of these guys now about emerging research. We used to think that there was this zone one, zone two, imaginary cliff.
And we've all had these friends you've been out training with. We've ridden the bike long enough where they're like their zone two starts at 200 watts. So they'll ride through the city at 200 watts like trying to ride on bike paths to keep the 200 watts going because they thought there was an imaginary line there and if they went at 190 watts, they weren't getting an adaptation anymore.
But all the the conversations I've had on the podcast are like really the differentiator is maybe more three zones. Now we look at left of the LT1 force inflection point on the lactate curve and zone one and zone 2 blends together and you're getting quite similar adaptations in zone one and zone two. But the inconvenient truth for marketers is the minimum effect of dose in that zone.
It's huge. You need to ride a long long time in that zone. It's worth seeing world riders doing six, seven, eight, even nineh hour rides in that LT1 left of its own.
Yeah. I I think for people that are at home that are listening, I think it's also important just to recognize that, you know, you've got to operate within your constraints and you've got to be flexible. You know, training is something there for the majority of people, it's the time of the day they enjoy the most.
I call it cardio now, not training. Training, right? Okay.
Cardio, h physical activity. Well, um it's it's the time of the day you enjoy the most. you get out, you can be by yourself if you want to be with your own thoughts, you know, a podcast, music with your friends, but it's there to be enjoyed.
And if you're staring at that number and it is you're just trying to hold it, you're also taking away what I would say are some of the other social and psychological benefits of what you're actually trying to do these things for. You know, people want to feel better, not just about the numbers they're producing, but you know, the overall impact of the exercise in their life. And I think it is important that you know the numbers are important and they do do a job but but like everything people need to have that little bit of flexibility.
Like you said if I can't hold 200 it's not the end of the world. You know I'm doing the basics well consistently and I'm I'm I have the right process and the right frameworks in place and in many ways like my floor of what my minimum expected standards of myself are are at the right level so that when I do need to rise I'm in a much better position. And your floor is much more important than your ceiling.
what you do every week. And this is a great takeaway I had from someone on the podcast. Not even talking about cycling, he brought analogy from something totally different like a relationship you have with your peer with your wife.
You have these weekends away which are the Instagram highlight reel where you'll bring the wife over to Paris and you'll spoil her and have this amazing but that's not the reality. That's not your dayto-day. That's your ceiling.
Your floor is the hundreds of small interactions you have each day. It's like how you text each other. Like how you say pass me the salt.
how you greet her when you open the door. That's your floor in a relationship. And I think the same with sport, with cycling, the floor, what you do dayto-day, week to week, matters much more than the altitude block you do over in, you know, Granada at the end of the season.
100%. And I think so many people from when they're looking at sport and they they see the highs and the lows, you know, the athletes that are there, winning is so hard when you actually boil it down and go, well, what does it take to win? how many people actually get to win.
So those those absolute ceilings where somebody has won, they've delivered the best, they were at their best for that that period of time, they're spiky and some things are out of your control, like a crash, a this, a that, but as you said, it is that floor is so important because it lays the foundation for absolutely everything else. And it's also something that you can take confidence in as you're trying to achieve that peak. I mean, let's borrow lessons from other sports.
It it was the first thing Rory Mroy said after he won the Masters and achieved that career grand slam. He was proud of his consistency, you know, and actually what he was able to do and he praised his own process, you know, and I hate to say like it it sounds boring. It doesn't sound as sexy as I did this and it's, you know, the latest innovation of what, but but it's what works.
Yeah. You know, when when you look at you've worked at Olympic champions and when you look at their dietary habits, are they doing stuff different to everyone else? Is there a different level of excellence they're bringing to like, you know, you listen back or you watch the Last Dance with Michael Jordan, you watch the Overlap podcast with Roy Keane and they you talk about these great athletes we've had through the years and it seems like they were just a little bit more intense, a little bit different to everyone else.
But but is it more intense? Is it different or actually everyone has access to the same information, the same tools? The the floor is slightly higher in the elites, you know, and maybe that's because their intrinsic motivation is a little bit higher because there's a reward there.
But the I think the biggest thing with athletes is is ultimately that like they just want it a little bit more. They're what they expect of themselves is a little bit higher. So when they're looking at what's appropriate and what's not appropriate, you know, athletes are less likely to go out on the booze every weekend because it doesn't facilitate what they want of themselves.
Yeah. You know, what they expect of themselves. We've talked a lot about what to change, what your diet should look like.
I know your PhD focused a lot on the how, how to change, how you make this behavioral change. If someone is listening to this podcast now and they're like, "Okay, I'm armed with some new tools, but I also go out on the beer and I order takeaway three times a week. How do I start to turn the ship around?
" Yeah. The very first thing I'd say to people is people like to say, "I'm here and I just I want to be up here." Like, I think I could be up here.
And it goes from 0% intensity to allin. And the problem with that is it sets people up for failure. So they try to do everything in one go.
And when you try to do everything in one go, you sustain it for a period of time, but ultimately there's a relapse. Something goes wrong on some day. Sometimes it's out of your control.
Maybe the train was delayed, something happened, and bang, you know, you're derailed. You're exactly derailed is the word. But when you're derailed, what happens is your self-efficacy or that belief in your capabilities, you then feel like you failed.
Then you go, I've failed. So you have this negative impact on your emotions. you go, "Well, I've done that badly, so I may as well not not go and do it again.
" And you set these unrealistically high expectations of what you wanted to sustain. You don't hit them, which you could have told yourself at the start. You've you then have this negative cycle where you're telling yourself you failed and then you don't believe you can do it because you've done that.
So, let's stop by let's start by removing that. And I would say to everyone, if there's something you're trying to improve on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the hardest thing you could do and one being the easiest thing you could do and one is something you could do absolutely every day on your worst day of the week. Start there.
Pick something you can do on your worst day of the week. So, it's not we're dreaming too big. It's we're almost not breaking it down into a small enough.
It's great at tasks. It is great at tasks. It's like what is that one thing I could do on my worst day of the week?
put that in as a again raise the floor just a little bit. Yeah, that's interesting. And then once you have that in place and you're confident in that, what's the next thing?
And then you start to build momentum. You start to build belief about your own abilities and you can start to up and sort of leverage up that floor. Also, what that does is it changes how you see yourself.
Have you read Atomic Habits? I haven't. It's clear.
I haven't. I I This is a book I should have read a long time ago. It's an interesting one because it's kind of similar to your PhD.
I'm sure if you were back in PhD land, you would have done it. But he has this idea of vote for the type of person you want to be. So if you want to be a cyclist, I started working with a new client recently and he came in with these amaz hadn't trained in years.
Comes in with these amazing goals. I want to do this. I want to have this FTP.
And he's like, "What do I do tomorrow?" And I was like, "Well, find your heart rate drop." And he's like, "What?
" And like he thought it was going to be this real complicated session with changes in cadence and intensity and big chats about kilogjles. Like find your heart rate drop. And he's like, "Seriously?
" He's like, "Yeah, find your heart rate drop." And he found his heart rate drop. The next day it's something else.
And the idea with that James Clear says is every day you do one small activity. It's a vote for the type of person you want to be. So if you see yourself as an athlete, because his idea was identity change is super profound.
And this is my lived experience with it as well. Well, I went through a period where I'd ridden the bike full-time, been in France, Canada, America, made a few quid riding the bike, not very much, but came home and then I kind of went into startup mode and I seen myself as like there's a grandiosity in the idea of retiring, which I was never at a level to retire from. I was just I was quitting because I was [ __ ] and I wasn't making world tour, but in my mind, I was retired.
So, I put cycling to on a shelf to one side and I started this entrepreneurial phase. I started hanging out with different people, started putting on a little bit of weight, and for the first time, if I jumped on the bike, I actually wasn't one of the fast guys in the group ride. And I had this moment where I was like, "Oh, I've actually started to put on a bit of weight.
I'm actually probably sliding towards a place where I'm not that happy anymore with how I look or how I feel. I have to draw a line in the sand. I have to get back.
" And if you looked at a picture of me then, I didn't look like an athlete, but I still seen myself as an athlete. totally delusional and borderline schizophrenic cuz I had none of the characteristics of an athlete. I ate shite.
I drank. I single at the time. So I was out dating all the time.
All none of my friends were athletes. I'd left that all behind. But I still see myself as an athlete.
And because I delusionally seen myself as an athlete, I had a set of habits that were associated with an athlete for when I got back into training. So what's an athlete do? Well, he lays his kit out the night before.
He knows what session he's doing the next day. His bike is working. You know, he arranges to meet training partners for it.
So, I had this set of habits that just snapped me back into cyclist mode so fast. And that's what James Clear talks about. Each of those small acts, finding your heart rate strap, you get to vote for the type of person you are.
And when you cast enough votes, you become that person. Yeah. I mean, I I I love the story.
And actually if we if we re rewind rewind back I don't know is it 60 minutes or an hour at this what however long it is when we spoke about motivation and we spoke about the three components you know do you have the um capability the opportunity and the motivation we broke motivation down into um we broke we broke motivation down into automatic and reflective. Now if you go down a layer deeper underneath that you've got something called the theoretical domains framework and there's more about 14 components. One of those is identity under uh reflective motivation.
So what you described is essentially there was that type of person that you wanted to be. There was an identity that was motivating you that was your driver. It wasn't that you didn't know what to do.
It wasn't that you didn't have the opportunity to do it. It took that identity to then say well actually I want to be that. And it was that thought process that then drove those decisions.
And I think people need to learn how to tap into those in different ways. In many ways, you you did your own behavioral intervention on yourself where you started to persuade and incentivize yourself because that that is, you know, that was the model of you that you wanted to be. And to do that, you then said, okay, well, I'm going to put these things.
I'm going to do this. And it it drove. And I think that's where people need to understand when they are trying to influence choice having the ability to know what like again that's a great example you knew what to do next.
You had a thought that thought triggered an action and that got you off on your journey and that was that was the step and I think that is something that people can replicate and I think tapping into what that internal motivation is is so powerful. I think that internal dialogue to yourself or even how you articulate yourself to other people also feeds into that identity quite powerfully. Like a friend of mine was trying to quit smoking recently and he said I said are you still off the [ __ ] He's like yeah still off the [ __ ] But you know what they say once a smoker always a smoker.
And I just thought this isn't somebody who doesn't smoke. Like if you ask me do you want a cigarette? I said no I don't smoke.
I've never smoked in my life. I'm not a smoker. I don't identify as one.
Even though he didn't smoke, he still had that caveat at the end of the sentence. But once a smoker, always a smoker. And I was thinking he hasn't had an identity shift.
Yeah. And it's still part of the journey. Do you know what I mean?
He's obviously worked really hard to get to that place, but sort of rebuilding that identity. It, you know, it takes time. And, you know, he's back on the [ __ ] Other things influence social environment.
if he's if he's in that setting where every weekend he's surrounded by people who are also smokers, it's starting to have that it's starting to make that easier to get towards that relapse. So, you know, we spoke a lot about building behaviors. I think the other thing to to consider is how do you prevent relapse, you know, because for most people, most people will make some sort of change.
And the reason why it's so important to start off small and you know if we if we go to the research side of things there was a researcher over from Stanford a guy called BJ Fog he had a book called the power of tiny habits and his own theoretical model of change but he was the one who put that out as like the smallest step is the most important step because it it has to be something that you can do on your worst day of the week because you're trying to prevent making that step that you then go I failed and getting into that I failed I've let myself down like whatever. I'll just, you know, I can't do it. You know, you've got to you've got to in many ways treat yourself with a little bit of respect and understand that the best way to support yourself doesn't have to be the hardest way.
It doesn't have to be the most intense way. It couldn't just be this the smallest little move to get things going. I do a little kind of mantra each year and for 2025 my one was instead of all or nothing make it all or something and it's kind of feeding back into that just because I can't get a 5h hour bike ride in a Saturday.
Yeah. Can I get out for 40 minutes and do a few toas? Probably can't.
You know I I go a step further. Just make it something. Yeah.
Do you know what I mean? Like you do something you know you straight away you've you've done something. You feel better that you've achieved something.
You're starting to build up that positive cycle. you're starting to reinforce those positive messages that that you're sort of going in that direction. Momentum is important, isn't it?
Like you see it like I'm not sure if you you know Armstrong is a bad word in the cycling world, but if you listen to the Armstrong podcast, you always hear him saying Mr. Mr. M has moved the dress like the momentum is shifted.
You know, Pogacha hadn't got it a couple of years ago. Yonas had it. And it's like you seen the the viral clips of Pogy, I'm gone.
I'm gone. And I'm saying, "Oh, make sure you stay with Tad. Stay with Tad.
" The momentum was with Yumbo this year. Momentum's moved the dress. Yumbo don't have it anymore.
Welz, you know, he's he's plugged the hole a little bit in the Jurro, but it's his first win of the year. They didn't have that classic season where everything they touch just turned to gold. The momentum's with again.
And it isn't powerful that sort of stone gathering the moss down the hill analogy. 100%. And I think, you know, we've both been really fortunate to experience, you know, the behind closed doors in elite sport.
But what people don't also see is that what they what you see on telly when somebody wins, the stuff that happens behind closed doors, the confidence that people take, the change in mood in a camp that just starts to galvanize itself. Like in professional sport, winning takes care of almost everything. you know, you can start to build and feel, you gain confidence, and all of a sudden, you start to believe.
And belief has to be one of the most powerful things in elite sport and one of the most dangerous things if you're competing against somebody who just believes that they can do it and they have the confidence that they can do it. Like, you know, look at a few years ago, uh, I think it was stage nine of the tour when Bob went off on a 60k or Bob Young went off on a 60k breakaway. Like, incredibly headstrong, but just believed he he could do it.
Yeah. And it's just that's it. I'm like, "No one's going to catch me.
" Well, that belief and identity almost tie in together. We think back to Man United 99, Champions League, like they're one down, what, two minutes to go. That team, that era, that franchise, the class of 96 or whatever they called themselves, they just didn't lose games.
And that was their standard. That was the belief they had. There's two minutes left on the clock.
Doesn't matter. We'll find a way to win. 100%.
And you can see it dotted around all sports. like it's it's unbelievable when you see a team that is gathering that momentum and is building that belief you know I mean like you know I'm a big rugby fan as well and I spent a lot of time at Harlequins you know Harlequins the year they won the Premiership more recently you know they had a game it was it was a semi-final game against uh Bristol I think they were 28 nil down and it was like the game was dead and gone and then all of a sudden it was you know one big moment try momentum shifts another meant to move the dress and then and then all of a sudden they start to believe and then all of a sudden it was probably one of the greatest days in the club's history. I think they've they've renamed it Bristan Bull.
So it's a you know and and for those guys those memories but like that feeling and they wouldn't have gone into that game without that feeling in that training center and in camp that it's you know it's festering it's building you know and I think those intangibles that happen behind closed doors and you you must be looking at some of the teams at the minute who are who are building really good momentum you know again going back to your Q36.5s you know you know something special is happening in some of these teams that people just don't which is fantastic and we'll see the culmination of of this work you know this year next year but it's as you said momentum is an incredibly powerful thing what I've actually really enjoyed uh the past couple of months is Inos because we've seen them from the team that everyone loved to hate because they had such domination fume Wiggins Garant Thomas like what F you win four Brad won Grarant in 2018 so they're dominating the tour to France and then they drop off the franchise looks like kind of done. Huge systemic problems inside.
You can hear from, you know, whispers every now and then. I've had people on the podcast talking about some of them and, you know, Steve Cummings problems there. And now this season, Bernal is back at the front of a bike race.
And it's interesting. You can almost see the body language of the staff, the riders in the bus. They've got a bit of swagger back.
They're they're not full Conor McGregor. Yeah. But the swagger has come back.
And I thought it's a really interesting template for business leaders. They had one of the superstars of the sport. They invested him in a long-term contract.
He had not even just a career threatening, a life-threatening crash. And instead of, you know, my background is law. There's plenty of slippy ways to get out of a contract if they wanted to.
It doesn't look like they tried to get out of that contract. They backed their man on a huge salary. It took him three years of being absolutely brutal.
Now he's back at the front of bike races. Yeah, I mean it's fantastic to see. It's fantastic to see for the Pelaton more than anything else.
People want those big names. They want them competing and and it is brilliant. And again, you know, I don't think it's any, you know, I don't think it's any coincidence.
You know, Scott Drawer is back at Inos this year, which is fantastic to see. So there's there's definitely incredible team behind the team efforts going on there as well. Um new riders in like Bob, you know, bringing different experience like I'm I'm the I'm the nutrition guy in terms of the technology.
So I stay I steer well clear of that and it's broke on X there yesterday. Did you see you following this? No, not not that's a not my bag.
Yeah. So there's a couple of people were saying Remco's a done deal for next year. don't know the truth in it.
I I have no idea. I just know that like I said, they've they've got some of the best minds in sport at that organization, you know, and it's again, if you're looking at what they've achieved in the past and the people that are there, they're going to they're going to go back to doing what they've done best. And, you know, I think it's and I think you could say that about lots of organizations who are looking at what that recipe for success is and the right people and all that side of things.
So, really exciting. weed about a million questions in through email, forums on this topic. And obviously we it would been a 12-h hour podcast if we hadn't went in depth on all of them.
So what I wanted to finish up with was kind of a lightning round of quick less than 30 second answers on each of these 10 questions. Fasted rides, yes or no? No.
One food cyclist should eat more of elite cyclist or amateur cyclists. We'll say amateur. Amateur cyclists.
I'd say well I'm going to say one food. Haribo. Well, I was going to say elite cyclist typically carbs.
You know, amateur cyclists probably typically are still not meeting their protein requirements and maybe not their carbohydrate requirements. But let's say protein for amateur and carbs for pro. One food cyclist should eat less of.
Alcohol still is never going to support the performance side of things. Yeah. I had Hannah Grant on the podcast as well, chef, works with Vizma, exact same thing.
She said like the proper amount of alcohol is zero. Yeah. Now, I'm a huge believer in social recovery.
There's a time and a place like I said appropriate. You know, you've gone and it's it's been a big event. You know, celebrate it.
Winning is hard. But, you know, from a day-to-day perspective or a week- toeek perspective, alcohol evening treat when you're watching Netflix that won't ruin your diet. Dark chocolate.
Nice. Nice. Most underrated nutrition habit for cyclists.
Preparing what they're going to eat on the bike before they go as opposed to just grabbing what's in this what's in the drawer. Okay. I feel seen.
I feel heard. most overrated supplement. Overrated.
This sounds bad, but honestly, like we're so focused on just remaining on what the evidence base is that we just we'd almost just steer clear of everything else. I'm going to say I'm going to say BCAAs. That'll be expensive urine for most people.
I say ketones. One piece of nutrition advice you wish every cyclist would ignore. Eating less means better performance.
Favorite meal to cook the night before if you were doing a ride yourself? I'm gonna be boring and say risotto. Yeah, nice.
Good answer. Good answer. One thing you knew for certain five years ago that now you know to be false.
This is a controversial one. I'll say it in 30 seconds, but I'd say five years ago I would have said some of the best nutritionists in the world were underperforming in their job. And I think the reason for that is because the level of personalization that athletes actually need, we didn't have technology to support the practitioner and deliver a human computer approach to making sure that we're there 24/7 delivering to the individual's athletes needs and maximizing the use of their data.
If you could only eat if a rider could only eat one breakfast on a training day for peak performance before every ride, what would that one breakfast be? I mean, it goes against everything we've just discussed over the last hour or hour and a half where every day is different. Um, I would pick I'm going to cheat.
I'm going to go with protein pancakes and then I would adjust my toppings in line with the demands of activity. I might have some more musli or some more granola on top of it. And if I don't, I might just have some more berries to keep it higher protein and sort of lower energy.
That's so anyone listening, you should definitely disregard that lightning round and just listen to the rest of the podcast for much more nuance advice. David, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
so much for taking the time and I think that's cleared up a lot of questions. Certainly has for me and hopefully has for listeners too. Thanks a million for having me.
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