Welcome to this week's Rider Sport. We've got a rider who has doubled his training volume and he's getting worse. It's a sticky situation.
Anthony, this question. I doubled my weekly training hours, but I'm actually getting slower. What am I doing wrong?
Up to a point, riding more does make you better. Like if you're riding like six hours a week and you double it to 12 hours a week, almost don't need to have any sports science knowledge periodization, you're probably going to get better. Is it the most efficient use of your time?
That's a different question. But this guy here, without having specifics on exactly what he's doing, we're Yeah, he didn't give you much to play with there. No, it didn't.
We're going to have to talk broad principles and hopefully this resonates with him or other listeners. If you're training too much without adequate recovery, we got this one from Dan Lurang during the week talking about stress and different types of stress. Family stress, work stress, relationship stress, which can be big at times.
All those go into the stress bucket along with training stress. So, if your total stress load is too high, you're not getting enough recovery. That means your body's not absorbing the training.
Training gives you the potential to get stronger. When you pair that with recovery, that potential is realized into a training gain or a training adaptation. So fitness improves when you recover, not when you train.
That's the most likely culprit. Secondarily, I'd look at intensity control. A lot of riders add errors but don't scale intensity properly.
They end up riding too much in that gray zone that we talk about, zone three. too hard to recover, not hard enough to get an adaptation to like not targeting key systems like threshold, V2 max, neuromuscular sprint power. They just end up riding around kind of hard all over the place.
Thirdly, I'd look at you've shifted your training balance too much. If it's not the riding around in the gray zone all the time, it's have you just heaped on a load of endurance training and your training total distribution time. So I would look at your distribution graph and your training peaks.
Where are you spending most of your hours? If you're spending 99% of your hours in zone one, zone two, but then you're judging your progress by your threshold power or your V2 max power, yet obviously you're measuring the wrong thing. You're studying English and you're taking a biology test.
That was something that I struggled with when I did a lot of zone 2 riding over the winter. Then did some testing with regards to threshold and V2 max and I was like, "God, my FTP has hardly even moved." And you're like, "You weren't training to improve your FTP.
" It will go up a little bit, but it's not like Yeah, like you can just bang, if you want to get good at 20-minute tests, just do a lot of 10 mile TTs. You're going to get good at 20-minute tests. That's rarely someone's goal to get good at a 20-minute test.
this lad maybe sounds like he's plateauing a little bit as well and I had a podcast during the week specifically around plateau and that's worth going back to listen to in detail but some of the things is like if you're seeing no improvement or very flatline improvement we would call that a plateau or if you feel stale consistently in key sessions again that would be a plateau or motivation's just on the floor for prolonged periods so if you agree then that you have hit a plateau your secondary job becomes to diagnose what has caused that plateau. And I'd be revisiting the stuff we talked about. Is it too much volume without targeted intensity?
Is it no progressive overload week on week, month on month? It's like the analogy we always use of someone goes to the gym for twice a week for 10 years and they look the exact same. They took a stress on, but then their body adapted to that stress and they didn't adapt or change the stimulus.
So, they didn't get the new adaptation. they only got adaptation one. Poor periodization could be another one to look at like not block building, peaking, tapering properly or chronic low levels of fatigue in your life just preventing that adaptation.
This is something and I know it seems every episode I kind of say look get a coach because this is not going to happen to you if you have a coach who is guiding you through this. And if you're putting if you were putting six hours in, now you're putting 12 hours in. like why waste your time just throwing, you know, these sessions or whatever you're doing into the dark?
Look, again, this this listener didn't give us much information. So, maybe get a coach. Happens with bad coaches, don't we?
Yeah. Like, I see this a lot and I talk to guys uh you know, some of the group, right? So, I'm just general walking around cycling friends and it happens a lot.
You see people plateauing an awful lot and they don't realize they've plateaued. A coach's job is so easy to throw up sessions. Anyone can download template training plans.
The coach only starts to earn his money when there's a problem. When there's a plateau, when there's a diagnostic issue, that's when your coach matters. And that's when you start to see who's a good coach and who actually knows what they're doing, who's been in the game for years and experienced this stuff versus somebody who said, "Oh, yeah.
I'm a coach." Yeah. And who can spot it, but he's actually looking at your data and can actually spot maybe perhaps that you're doing too much.
your motivation is low. The other thing that I would say, two things that kind of stood out to me here, you've increased your uh training hours, but you're not seeing any movement in, you know, your speed or your fitness. How is your diet?
Have you are you fueling yourself properly? Are you fueling yourself properly on and off the bike? Are you getting micronutrients and all your macronutrients?
So, that's definitely like a kind of pretty obvious one to look at. And then uh number two, what I would say as well is if you're if you've got all of that in line, your coach is kind of pretty happy that he is doing periodization properly and that everything he says is golden, you've your diet is fine, I would go to the doctor because this, you know, like Dr. Ferrari, not Dr.
Ferrari. No, no, your actual GP, your MD. and get him to uh do a full round of blood testing on you and look under the hood and see are you healthy?
Is everything okay? Because if you're, as Anthony said, doing that much time on the bike, you really should be improving in some way, shape, or form. So, that would be my two pieces of advice for you.
Next question. Hey, rider support. Is all the aero obsession in road cycling actually hurting amateur riders more than helping?
I'm seeing guys in slammed, super aggressive positions suffering with back pain, numb hands, sketchy handling, and blowing up late in races. Would most of us actually go faster if we focused more on comfort and control instead of chasing arrow gains we can't even hold for a whole race? It's just an observation I have from racing masters this year.
I think it's a poor observation. Like there's always been people like so he said guys with slammed super aggressive position suffering back pain, numb hands, and sketchy handling. They're not related to arrow.
People have always had slam positions, sketchy handling, and blew up late in races. That's just like observations on people that are at racing. Unfortunately, has Arrow poured a little bit of gasoline on the fire?
Potentially. I think most of the arrow gains though we see amateurs implementing aren't positional arrow gains. They're more buying speed, which only is really a net positive.
It's a net positive for except for everything except fashion. It's been a net positive. Like a socks are just an easy way to go faster.
arrow bike shapes, just an easy way to go faster. Arrow helmets, all the arrow clothing, like it just makes people go faster for no extra effort. So, none of that has been uh, you know, contributed to the slam stems, aggressive positions, back pain, numb hands.
So maybe the marginal people that are trying to go and like implement arrow positions, but I don't even know if like a lot of the slammed positions and the super aggressive positions aren't the most arrow ones anymore either. So it's very individual, isn't it? I'm kind of like imagining this listener at his local crit and he's got a position kind of like he's on a high nelly and he's kind of hating on everyone who is trying to get down a bit lower, be a bit more arrow, look a bit cooler on the bike and just being like I don't like these young people, you know, looking kind of cool on the bike.
I think slammed uh slam stem all that kind of stuff just looks kind of cool. It's really whatever your comfort in is probably going to be one of the fastest. But like someone the like the good Dr.
Andrew Puit, sorry I had to search into the locker to pull that name out. Dr. Andrew Puit invented the retool bike fit.
I interviewed him on the podcast probably 12 months ago. It's a really interesting chat around position and positions that take pressure off your hands to alleviate numb hands. And some of the more stretched out arrow positions actually put a lot less load on your hand than the ones where you're like supporting your entire upper body weight with elbows locked out.
So, it's been the evolution of positions into a little bit more stretched arrow. It It does have some surprising benefits in terms of comfort. You were you were just saying this to me the other day.
We were riding beside each other and I'm trying to practice more being on the drops. And I was on the hoods, but I had my elbows bent and I was kind of saying, "Oh, this is actually really comfortable for me." And you were like, "Well, then why change it?
Why get down lower? Why, you know, extend your arm? Why do anything like that?
If it's really comfortable and something that you can maintain for a long period of time, why change it?" Okay, next question. Hi, Anthony and Sarah.
I know you're both riding 165 cm cranks now. I've been thinking about switching to shorter cranks, but I'm getting conflicting advice. Some people say it'll help with endurance and joint fatigue.
Others say you'll you'll lose top end power and torque. Is downsizing crank arms smart for endurance riding, or is it just bro science and fear-mongering? I don't want to mess up my setup and end up slower.
It's Yeah, it's a concern for people. I don't know if the mess with your setup and end up slower is the primary concern. I would say mess with my setup and end up injured is the primary concern.
A big consideration for me is just like knowing your body. I've been very resilient through the years historically to changes in setup. I can jump from a training bike to a race bike to a track bike to a mountain bike to a gravel bike to a CX bike.
All different positions, all different reaches, all different saddle heights. You try to be as close as you can, but they're all off fractionally and it never seemed to cause me an issue at all. So, when I seen the research and specifically when I chatted to Phil Bert from Inos to Physio around the benefits of a shorter crank, there didn't really seem much downside for me.
I was riding 170 cranks on the track on the gravel bike already. So, going to 165 wasn't a huge change. It's the same change between my road to gravel bike as it is my gravel bike to my new road bike position.
So, it wasn't a huge one for me. I think he's overstating maybe some of the downsides and probably not giving enough consideration to injury. I think that would be the main one I would look at.
Like if you're comfortable on your bike already, you know, maybe why change? It's back to the old one that unless you're looking for a marginal gain, like why change? But the considerations that he's mentioned like the change relating to torque leverage like there's a shorter crank arm but in the real world it's actually pretty irrelevant because you can change your gears.
So that kind of offsets that torque requirement when you can shift up and down the block. Your muscles simply just they adapt extremely fast and you can shift into a slightly easier gear or a slightly harder gear as need be. And then every study I've looked at on crank length, it means it seems there's a minimum difference in max power on a shorter crank versus a longer crank.
The big wins seem to be better comfort at higher power outputs because you're opening the hip flexor angle, opening up your diaphragm in a more closed off aggressive arrow type position to make breathing a little bit easier. And then some people are reporting less fatigue on longer rides because it's it's loading the joints less. They're the kind of big wins to summarize the conversation with Phil Bort.
But my main concern as I said is that injury injury. So I think it's kind of a caveat to get back into the bike fitter once you change your if you do change to shorter cranks. Yeah.
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Okay, next question. Hey Anthony, we are putting a team into a national stage race in a month. It's a six-day stage race.
There are two guys out of the five that I feel could do really well. I know that you were managing a team at a stage race a few weeks ago and I wanted to know if you have any advice on how to approach a team with different personalities and different physical strengths and also change the game plan as things unfold over the few days. Well, actually wasn't managing it.
One of the lads, Connor Griffin, was uh he's the budding DS and he was brilliant. Really amazing watching someone step into that role who's quite a bit younger than even, you know, some of the staff and some of the writers and he really took to that super well. So, I can see him having a little bit of a future in that director role.
I was helping out. It's my first time on the other side of the barrier. So, it was a little bit strange.
Connor doesn't really come from a racing background. So, he was able to bring almost like a totally fresh perspective, something that I had never heard before. The conversations bike riders have are largely been the same conversations bike riders have had for the last hundred years probably.
And Connor's brought a totally different perspective. So, I learned so much uh hanging out at the weekend. some of the takeaways for our team that you could kind of give across to this guy where he's two riders who could do quite well.
It's you can't put pressure on the other guys on the team that aren't going to they're not going to be able to do anything to help. If it's a high level stage race that's six day, you have two riders that can do well. Like it's not Eurosport, you know?
Somebody needs to be almost good enough to win the race. Certainly good enough to get a top 20 in the race if they're going to help out. Like the idea of you're going to be riding on the front of the bunch and you're a domestic like these guys riding on the front of the bunch at leazes two weeks ago.
They can all ride 6.5 watts per kilo. So the reality is you can't do that and your three supporting riders can't do that.
If you can set smaller goals for them, you know, to get through the stage, to finish in a bunch, or even something a little bit more advanced, like maybe one of them can collect rain jackets someday and bring them back to the car, or they can do bottles one of the days for someone or position them into a key climb, something like that, so you can frame it so the riders who aren't the GC guys still get to feel like they're a little bit part of the team. I think the thing is you see a lot of teams and I've seen it in Ross Moon it's a big shift and maybe it's just you know spending so many years with great teammates and great riders have been kind of blessed coming through like Aqua Blue in Ireland but you see a lot of teams go into the race and if they five or six riders they just kind of the whole five or six just try to get through the race they're all like oh we'll suck it up and we'll do our best and we'll all hang in as long as we can and that's a huge shift lifts from when you're in a better team and riders will look at the totality of the stage race and they say, "Okay, stage two. Okay, there's a cat 2 climb 50k from the finish and then there's a cat one climb at the finish.
I'm not going to win up a cat one climb. I'm not going to be useful to the lads coming into a cat one climb. I'm better off sitting up the cat 2 climb, preserving my energy because I have a chance to lead out someone or to be effective in the bunch sprint two days from now.
" So they look at that energy expenditure and that distribution of energy expenditure over the totality of the stage race not a single day and they're in it for defined goals for the team. It's not about like oh we'll all get to the finish and we'll kind of race each other. You came 48 and I came 56th.
No one cares if you came 48 or 56th. Can you position your GC guy into the front group at a key time? Like weeds on the hilltop finish day with one of our young lads, Leo, who's only 18 and he was top five U23 GC, which was a good ride for us in a competitive stage race.
He had that until the last day when he crashed. But on the third day, the hilltop finish, we had two of the guys who could have went deep into the last climb, but they weren't going to win on the last climb. They weren't going to do a top.
They weren't going to do a front group on the last climb, so they just gave everything in support of him to position him into the tattoo climb earlier in the stage. And then they pulled up, grabbed the can of Coke from the car, and just cruised in easy, as slow as they could to conserve energy, just make the time cut so they can still be there to help the team tomorrow. And I think that's important is to make that shift from you're just a group of lads that happen to be wearing the same jersey to you're a team that has goals and you're all trying to contribute towards that goal.
Yeah. And and also it's so much fun. I mean, the crack we had every evening in the house.
What I will say is a lot of the teams that we were competing against kind of stayed in Airbnbs and hotels. We rented a big house and we did all of the cooking together, ate together every evening, had lo I mean, oh my god, I've never seen or heard my eyes were like I was googly eyes listening to tactics. Team tactics.
You do this, I'll do that. boy is the funniest man in the world. He's hilarious.
And then the characters of so we had two guests from Denmark come and ride for a road man. And honestly by day num by the end of the day number one it was all like very team because everyone still had as far as I could tell a lot of fun and that is also the other thing to try and remember that okay I know that you're talking about it from the other end like the very super high performance end your teams in Aqua Dan Morrisy had fun because you guys were organized you knew what you were doing so it's but I think that's the like key point it's the having fun but when you get into that internal competition where it's like all five guys just like full gas all day. There ends up being this like competitive relationship between all the riders or all trying to like oh I can get ahead of my teammate on GC.
It's like that's not how Cyclone works. Like the atmosphere is so much better when you have somebody that feels like they executed their job in support of their teammate that day. Their teammate, even if he doesn't pull off the win, he's so thankful of that and it just forms a much nicer bond within the team.
Yeah, it's it was an amazing week at Ross Moon for Roadman. So, well done to all those guys and listener. Best of luck in your stage race.
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I'm going to put that in the description down below. Next question. Anthony, do you believe in bad luck as a bike rider?
I've had a series of crashes, broken a few bones over the last few months. They were kind of silly falls in races and one out training. I feel like I'm the butch of all the jokes in the club now and it's almost become a vicious cycle as my confidence is knocked.
Plus, the constant stick from my club mates and focusing on not crashing is actually making me even more jittery. And that's from Hugh. Yeah, there's there's bad luck for sure in cycling.
There's definitely a degree of randomness. I crashed a lot in my first two seasons and most of it honestly was just inexperience. It was getting an engine before I had the skills.
It was like, you know, giving a learner a Formula 1 car or something. I wasn't didn't quite have an engine like that, but my engine was definitely better than my bike handling skills was. You see a lot of riders, especially if they're transfer athletes from other sports or if they're exceptionally light, because in a sport where there's only power and weight, if somebody comes in and they're super light, it often doesn't take much structure training to get them up to quite a strong level, but their bike handling isn't there and you can see them getting a lot of crashes early in their cycling career.
Like there is just a lot of randomness in cycling. Like a dog steps out, a spectator steps out, a bit of oil through a traffic island, whatever. unexpected gust of wind.
All that's real, but bad luck does cluster. Like Dan Martin spoke on the podcast about some riders are just magnetized into crashes. He almost felt like it was an otherworldly magnetism that when you had it like a jinx or a hoodoo that when you had it, you just found crashes.
No matter where the crash was, you ended up in it. And then other riders, they had this polarity from crashes. like Peter Sagan would go through these crashes and you're like he's 100% down and he just emerged the other side.
But isn't that okay? So again going back to like what we were just previously talking about that stage race we were at. We were I was talking to some riders at the end of a particular stage race where there was a lot of crashes and they were all saying you could feel that there was a crash coming.
You know what I mean? That takes a bit of experience as well doesn't it? and kind of a little bit.
Most people can feel that though in the bunch, but you can. Most people can. Most people can.
Yeah. It's the staying out of crashes. That's very elusive.
No one really know. Obviously, everyone's like, "Oh, you should be at the front." Yeah, that's obvious.
You reduce your chances of being in the crash if you have very few people in front of you. But whatever it is, it's it's definitely come in kind of waves for me. Like I had a crash in or didn't have a crash in Visit Nina a good few years back.
Damen Shaw was the Irish national champion. Me and him came around the corner. I think we were going for sprinting for second and third.
I was in his wheel. He It was like a 90 degree rightander and then 250 meters to the finish. So you came through the corner.
You basically started your sprint straight away as soon as you came to the corner. I was on his wheel. I was waiting to open up because it was a headwind.
I was like, I'm going to go from like 150. I looked up and there was a motorbike Marshall had stalled in the middle of the road. Damo didn't see the motorbike marshall had stalled and he sprinted straight into the back of the motorbike marshall busted his collar bone.
I hit the back of him went sideways. The group that was chasing us from behind crashed into me hit my front wheel straightened me out and I hung on and got like fourth or fifth or something. Wow.
But that's like one of those freak things that when your luck is in, the world seems to conspire to keep you up. But when your luck is out, you can be cruising along. Like I had a crash one of my first times with an Irish team on the track just on a warm down lap after like a 3 km pursuit and on the the coat desert a little blue bit down the bottom.
I just went down bust myself up stitches everywhere. It's just so embarrassing. I don't Everyone seems to be looking just at that point.
I think it's all okay. Two things for me. One is I think so keep your head on a swivel.
That's what I always say about to newbies. I I don't know how experienced this person is, but they do say that they're racing. So that to me means that they're not like brand new to the sport, but I always say to anybody who comes out on the ride is uh keep your glucose levels high and don't switch off ever because there's a lot of things that can happen, potholes and as you said, oil.
There's other people also doing kind of stuff that's probably not the safest. So don't switch off and go into daydream land about what you're going to eat when you get home. when you're on your bike, stay tuned in.
And the second thing I will say is to people who have a club because we did have a rider a couple of years ago who was quite unlucky as well and came down a lot and had a few broken bones and there was a lot of stick in the club to that person and it really did affect them mentally and emotionally and their confidence took a huge knock. And I'm not saying that that was the reason that they kind of eventually went away from cycling. I'm sure it certainly didn't help.
But I would say to people who are in clubs and you know rather than giving stick to you actually called a hole to a lot of the stick that was happening at the the coffee rides and people calling out and taking the piss. You know you had a quiet word with a lot of people in the club to kind of say okay let's kind of not do that anymore because this is becoming you know almost self-fulfilling every couple of weeks with it. So I mean everyone kind of then was like oh Jesus.
Yeah. You know cuz like slagging a banter is pretty normal in a club but you know just kind of thinking forward this is actually affecting that person how they ride their bike. But also the voices in the club matter but your internal voice matters as well because your self-image if you see yourself as somebody who's a good bike handler versus somebody who's accident prone or crash prone those two are really different.
So changing that voice in your head. Now, there's no point in standing in front of a mirror and saying, "I am rich. I am rich.
I am rich." Like, that's not going to change your reality. Your identity is only going to change by good choices on the bike, by validation that you are a good bike handler.
So, I would say it's getting out in like a graded adaptation sense, and the stuff that you're struggling with, corners, technical descents, practicing them, and just getting better and better. That self-identity will change through repetition and good experience. Yeah.
I think almost as well like yeah, drop the ego. Try and have a growth mindset. If somebody is saying to you as a rider, you know, oh, your cornering could be a little bit better.
Don't take your hand hands off the handlebars as much or I'm sorry, you don't have the skills to take your jacket off in the middle of a group. Take all of that on board and, you know, try and try and grow as as a as a cyclist. Put them back when you're taking your jacket off.
So, at least you don't take everyone out. Okay, Sarah, I think that is it for another week. Roan, thank you for tuning in to another episode of Rider Support.
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