Welcome back. Today I have a chance to sit down with one of the greatest cycling coaches of all time, Mr. Joe Fel.
Joe was seinal in my cycling journey. He was the author way back when of the cyclist training bible. Since then, he's gone on to define an entire genre.
We sit down today for a fastmoving, hard-hitting interview where we will show you how to build your own training plan. We will show you timeless principles, what worked back then, periodization, how to use intensity, duration, and frequency across a training week, and show you what has changed over Joe's coaching career. It's my absolute honor to chat with Mr.
Joe Fel. Pleasure to have legendary cycling coach Joe Fel back on the podcast. Joe, >> hi Anthony.
How you doing? >> Is this our second time, third time, fourth time? I can't even remember at this point.
>> Something like that. Something third third or fourth. I think you're right.
>> Every time you're on, Joe, it's a wealth of knowledge. For anyone that hasn't heard the backstory, basically Joe's original book or original to me. I'm not sure it was your first publication, Cyclist Training Bible, was really what kicked off Cycling for me and my friends.
And some of us went on to be pros and others just went on to be hobby cyclists and have a great relationship with the bike. But that book was so heavily formative in those years. We one copied a book.
Sorry about that joke cuz we were so poor. We had it photocopied. We had it passed around.
Every page had coffee stains and rabbit ears on it. It was It was a worn copy of Cyclist Training Bible. I'm actually probably due a new one at this point.
>> I was very kind of you. I won't I won't tell my lawyer. It's uh it's >> all these years later, Joe, and I know you've the new book coming out, which congratulations about again, but you were you're widely credited in the industry as the coach who brought periodization concepts into mainstream cycling.
Traditional periodization, as you taught it, then involved a base, a build, and a peak phase. Is that still valid all these years later? >> It is.
Yeah, there have been some some small changes, but along the way. Um, but essentially that that is basically the way it's been for for decades now and continues to be that way. So, yeah, you're you're right.
That's that's still still the way that athletes at all levels train and has been shown to be very effective. So, we keep on doing it. So, if an athlete has a goal or or maybe I'm starting in the wrong place, an athlete who's listening to this podcast now and they're thinking about setting up an annual training plan, what's their first step?
>> First step is decide if there's a what the goal is. Where are we trying to achieve? That's always the starting point for planning is where are we going?
if you don't have a a solid uh goal in mind, it's really difficult to do any kind of planning or preparation because you're just doing things at random and they have no purpose. So that that's always a starting place is what am I what am I trying to achieve here? >> If somebody only has I get that a lot of us listen to the podcast, we'll have a real specific goal.
I want to finish unbound in a certain time. I want to win my age category in criterium. If I only have a goal that I can't really put my finger on what it is, I want to be faster.
I want to be fitter. I want to be healthier. How do I approach building an annual training plan around something a little bit more less concrete?
>> Right. >> Yeah. That that's more difficult.
Uh the less concrete, the less detailed that the goal is, the more difficult it is to come up with a plan to prepare for it. So, when I'm coaching athletes, what I always want to know is exactly what are we trying to accomplish? And I'm I want to ask questions to to dig down to that point because if if it's vague, um training becomes vague and training doesn't have much purpose in that case.
And so we don't really know where we're going and we're not sure what's important and it it just is it's kind of like a waste of time in many ways. It also tends to u cause the athlete to have low motivation if they don't really know exactly what there is what they're aiming for. you know, when I when I say what they're aiming for, I'm talking about an event that occurs on a given day and what your outcome of that event is is hope to be what are you trying to to achieve on that particular outcome.
If you do all that, then we can really get very detailed. But if you don't do that, we're we're really kind of like just u uh shooting at clouds. There's not much we can do to really say what we're trying to accomplish.
There's a scene in the children's uh book Alice in Wonderland where Alice asks the Mad Hatter, "Which way should I go?" And the rabbit says, "Well, it depends where you want to what where you want to go." He says, "Well, I don't know where I want to go.
" And the Mad Hatter replies, "Well, it doesn't matter which way you go then." I kind of think about training like that. If you don't know what you're training for, there's almost no correct training session to do this week or correct training load to do this month.
That's true. Yeah, that's true. Um and but and this is always a challenge.
I understand that it's sometimes difficult when you're maybe a year out, some cases more than a year out. I've got an athlete that I'm working with right now. We're talking about the end of the summer next year.
Uh you just finished off this season and we're already talking about next, but we're talking about late summer next year. So, we've got more than a year to do this to prepare for it. And uh but that that's the way that that that's where you wind up doing the best training is when you have a long-term plan to to aim for and it's clear in your mind exactly what it is you're you're trying to achieve.
>> Yeah. I chatted to Ed Clansancy, the Olympic gold medal team pursuit rider for GB and he was talking about the pressure of the home games in London 2012, the pressure on GB athletes, but that was an event, one event four years in the making for that one particular event. I agree.
Yeah, I coached uh I've coached a couple of people who were Olympic bound or uh had that dream to to make the Olympic team. And again again the same thing we were talking about three or four years advance. Um and and that really that's really even better than knowing next year if I know three or four years advance where we're going, I can do a fantastic job of getting this athlete ready for it.
The less time we have, the more challenging it becomes to prepare for the for the event. So, you used to use this idea of A priority, B priority, and C priority goals. Do you still use that?
>> I sure do. Yeah. And I run into that with athletes all the time.
That's that that that's become pretty much the standard of from what I gather with talking to both coaches and athletes that they think in terms of AB, A, B, and C. The challenge becomes how do you decide define what is an A, what is a B, and what is a C? Too many athletes want to have everything as an A, and that won't work.
you just can't have every every event as an A. There's going to be you're not really going to achieve anything. It's going to be pretty much a waste of time.
So, yeah, that that's pretty much the standard today. >> So, what differentiates an A, a B, and a C? Is it the specificity of the training is more specific for more tailored towards an A event and a more prolonged taper so they're hitting it in their freshest state.
>> It's true. We're we're going to build the season around Let's back up one step. Yeah.
I mentioned a second just a second ago how many um a priority races you can have. You shouldn't have a whole lot. I would suggest the very best situation is to have one a priority race this season.
That would be by far the best situation because that means and not only is it the best it perhaps the only way to think if you're unsure. Let's let's just set up one a race. But if you're if you've got several races that are important to you, then I would say the next step is you can have two that that's okay.
But those two have to be separated probably four or five months apart or or they have to be back to back one week and then the next way. >> Yeah. >> Back to back like that.
Either that way or spread out over several months. Three a priority races becomes extremely difficult to do. It's possible.
I've seen athletes do it, but it becomes very very difficult to have three a priority races and beyond three is impossible. It just becomes a a waste of time for everybody. Well, conceptually the best way to think about this is historically it's proved very very difficult for a rider to win the jural and the tour to France.
It's been done, but it's been historically done very very infrequently to win the tour to France, the Jiro, the Tour to France and the Valta in one season. It's never been done. >> It's a good reason for that.
And we're seeing that reason right now with Taliba, you know, he's said he's not going to do the welt whereas earlier in the season he says, "Yeah, he's going to do both the tour and the welt." >> Yeah. >> Now it's just a tour because what it what it does when you train for something like that, it takes a lot out of you.
You are fried after, in this case, three weeks preparing for a race. But it doesn't have to be a three-week race to fry you. You can have an athlete who's training for an A race at the someplace during the season and the more time they put into preparing for that race uh the more of a burden it becomes and eventually they begin to realize that that the next if there's a second a race it's going to be extremely difficult to do maybe even an impossible which is what Todd is finding out.
So to to continue this idea of building out this training plan for someone, so we've set our a priority. We're going to have one goal for the season. Now it's our a priority race.
Now, how do you think about if we back that up? How do you think about building the blocks leading up to that? >> Yeah.
The Well, first I'm going to work backwards. So we're going to have a taper or a peaking period which is going to maybe last two to at the most three weeks before the race until race day. Uh I would for cyclists more than likely two weeks is going to be adequate.
For some sports running you may need a little bit more than that because running really pounds the body a lot and that therefore the athlete has to make sure they're recovered from all that pounding. So we may we may go three weeks in that case but two weeks is going to be enough for most athletes in cycling and for for many other sports too. Swimming, Nordic skiing, so forth.
So um that's the starting place that we're going to have this twoe period roughly uh before the race. Then we're going to have a what I call a build period uh a specific uh training period of time where we're doing workouts that are very much like the race and that's probably going to last somewhere in the neighborhood of about eight weeks uh could be 10 weeks depends on the athlete a little bit but that's going to be typically what we do. So there what we've defined is we've we've looked at roughly 10 to 12 weeks up until the race is this latter portion of the season.
>> Everything before that I call mostly called the base period and that should be very long. I want the longer we can make the base period the better off the athlete will be on race day. Um you you really cannot have too much base.
You can have too much build. You certainly can do that and you can certainly have too much peak or taper but you can't have too much base. So the more the base period we have the better fit more the more fitness the athlete is going to carry into the general as a specific preparation period the build period and that means their training is going to be much more focused they're going to get a lot more accomplished and so forth but the challenge with this is always the same thing with this issue when I talk with athletes about this is they don't want to wait that long until they start doing hard workouts they want to start doing them today and and that's a problem which we can come back to later on but that that's a challenge I run into with athletes is they really want they want too much in the way of intensity too early in the season.
>> And I think the science has really come back around to validate the approach that you advocated all those years ago. Like it's just seems unequivocable unequivocal now how much easy riding we need. Some coaches are 8020.
Steven Sylers kind of popularized that. But I talked to world throw coaches on the podcast and Vasilus Anastas brings to minds who's the head of performance at Aana. He's saying up to 90% of his rides in that base period are really easy.
And he's calling easy zone one and zone two, not just zone not just zone two rides. >> I I do exactly the same thing. I I believe in zones one and two are easy.
Everything above that 3, four, five, for example, are all hard. And there are times to do these hard workouts and there are times when you shouldn't be doing these hard workouts. The challenge I run into with almost every athlete I talk with is it's not hard enough.
They they believe the only way to become better is is to suffer. That leads to better performances. Now, at some point the season that may be true, but in the base period that is not the case.
In fact, it has it has the opposite effect. the athlete actually winds up accomplishing less of what we really want to accomplish if they try to make the workouts too hard. So I I've this is always a challenge when I work with any athlete.
They always are going to say to me, can I do a list a little bit harder than what this workout says? Can you you've got me down doing zone two? Can can I do zone three instead?
And they don't they don't get the message. The message is we're trying to make it easy because there there are benefits that come from that that do not come from higher intensities. Zone one, zone two accomplish things that three, four, and five don't accomplish.
And but the athlete doesn't feel they have they're accomplishing what they want, which is more suffering. So consequently, I've got a really it almost always comes down to it almost like an argument that you must do these workouts otherwise you need to find a different coach because I really coach if all you want to do is hard workouts all the time. Yeah, I think what I see is what the attraction for hard workouts.
It seems to maximize fitness very fast, but then you also plateau very fast on it. So someone that's like if you took two athletes and they both want to train for an event that both of them have very little to no training done and the event is like six weeks away, a stupidly close time away. the athlete who just smacks the hard work all the time.
He seems to have better short-term performance that I've seen, but then they hit a ceiling that they're never able to break past. And the only way to break past that is to totally reboot and come back to like you talk about starting to build long, boring, slow base miles. >> Yeah, exactly right.
And you're you hit the nail on the head there that the athlete needs to uh if you don't if you if you just I've known many athletes who skip the base period and they decide you know that whatever for whatever reason they're not going to train during those months which is usually the winter months. They're not going to really train. They're just going to like mess around a little bit here and there on the bike.
when it comes time for the for the for their high intensity training to begin something like 10 12 weeks before the race now they're going to go out and train frequently and they're going to train hard but what they've done is they've given up all the fitness you can gather by doing easy lowintensity workouts there there's and there's a lot that goes on there physiologically changes that take place there do not take place when you're doing high intensity workouts you're giving up some of your fitness by doing this so it's point. It doesn't make sense to athletes because they they see hard workouts as being the the the the way you get to be be to become race ready. But they don't understand that that to become really truly race ready.
You've got to have a big base of of of aerobic endurance. You've got to have that. If you don't have that, everything else is just icing on the is is no cake.
It's just icing. All you got icing. You don't have a cake at all.
So you can you can perform on icing but this is very very thin. You know if we look at for example if we take just V2 max and we look at V2 max what happens with V2 max over the course of the season V2 max is going to be a little bit lower not a lot lower a little bit lower early in the season and you as you start the base rate it starts to increase even though all you're doing is easy workouts. Most athletes don't think that's happening.
They think it doesn't really change until they start doing hard workouts. That is not the case. The easy workouts are also building aerobic endurance, DO2 max, and that's going to increase.
That's going to continue throughout the season. But when you get to the the build period where you're finally starting to do some high intensity stuff, now we're going to get this little bump in your in your V2 max. Right at the very end, it's going to bump up.
It's going to be just a few percentage points, couple percentage points higher than what you accomplished with the with the base training, with the easy uh volume type of training. So, you're gonna have this little bitty fitness uh change taking place up here with V2 max intervals, for example, and all the all the stuff you did before that is going to make this little step a little bit higher. You're going to be a little bit stronger because of that.
Without that long, that base period built in, all we've got is just this little bitty piece of fitness V2 max you developed up here. And and what happens eventually is when the when the season comes to an end and you back off the training, which you should do, what's going to happen is that's going to just disappear really quickly. That's going to go bam.
But this is going to continue to stay there. So this is really the heart of your training is all of this base training you do. >> So I remember I again I think it was your original book.
Some of this has just burnt into my brain. You had an expression that the wider your base, the more volume in your base, the higher your potential peak. I think that's a great way of thinking about it because that for me differentiates long-term and short-term thinking.
Now it makes sense why I'm being patient in the buildup because it's allowing me to create a higher peak to my, you know, metaphorical building later in the season. >> Yeah. Yeah.
That was not my idea. That that's repeating something which has been around for a long long time before I even became an athlete. It's it's the it's the pyramid idea.
And we've got this pyramid of fitness we're building. This is the peak up here. This is where the race is going to be.
It's at this end. And early in the season, the base of this pyramid is all your aerobic training zones one and two, especially a lot of that. And up here, this little bitty peak at the end is going to be the high intensity, the interval stuff, the the threshold stuff.
That's going to be this little peak at the end. But you're trying to you're trying to accomplish this. But it starts by building a platform on which this this pyramid operates.
>> So let's dive into the base period and talking about how do we make up this base period. We'll take an athlete who has you know quite a common working athlete has 8 to 10 hours a week training. How do you think about the distribution of intensity, duration, and training session frequency?
How should I slot those three different pieces into this puzzle? >> Yeah. start it starts out with a um with a a slight change taking place over time.
Let's go way back. So now we're talking about let's let's say we're talking about November and December and and the A race isn't until next August. Um that's the A priority race.
So what we're going to do in this this period is just get and what what has happened before these these winter months is the athlete has taken some time off which is very good. That's exactly what the athlete should do. you get not only physical break but a mental break from training.
And as we start back into it, there are going to be a few weeks where the athlete is going to be doing general training um cross training. That that would be a great way to start out and we don't need a whole lot of it at this time. So the athletes may be doing 60% of what they're going to be doing at the peak of their season, but that's going to be that's going to be very easy and it's going to be things that are out out of the ordinary for the athlete.
cyclist. Maybe the athlete goes out for some skiing, some ski mountaineering, some some um some doing some long slow um ski sessions during the winter months or it could be running. It could be there could be lots of things the athlete takes up and decides to do.
It depends on what you enjoy. That that's really what it comes down to. When athletes ask me what should they do during the cross training season, I ask them what what do you enjoy doing the most?
Whatever that thing is, that's what we'll do. Because if I tell you to do something you don't enjoy, what's more than likely going to happen is you're going to miss a lot of workouts. You're going to bypass them because you don't like it.
But if you say, "Man, I I I really enjoy running. Let's go for let's start doing some running, then." So, we're going to start off doing that, but it's not going to be a lot of volume.
It's not going to be every day. And we'll begin to mix in some cycling with that as we go along. And so by the time we get to through this early preparation period and we start into base period now the athlete is going to start doing things which are a little bit more which are quite a bit more specific to the event cycling.
Uh and so now we're going to start getting on more more time on the bike and that's going to gradually increase over the course of the of the base period which could last like 12 weeks more would be better. >> Just just sorry to interrupt you just to jump in on that one. when you say uh we talk about the base period.
So we have that preparation phase, the training to train phase where we're mixing in cross trainining. We get out of that and we're into the base or general preparation phase. If I have 10 hours a week, what's the allocation of that?
Am I better off doing like two five hour rides and having five rest days? Am I better off doing two hours for five days and having two days off? Or what's the the perfect assuming I have no commitments?
What's the perfect distribution of 10 hours? >> Yeah, there is. I don't think there really is a perfect if it's everybody, but there there are ways of thinking about this.
Um, let's say you do have 10 hours. Uh, and I'd like to see the athlete riding frequently. Now, what does frequently mean?
I don't know. I got to talk to the athlete. What's your lifestyle like?
What what all you got going on in your life? Let's say the athlete has five days a week they can ride. I like to see them out there five days a week and we're going to average two hours a day and some of the rides will be shorter than two hours and some will be longer than two hours, but we're going to build up to those longer rides.
We're not going to start off doing threehour rides. We're going to start with an hour and a half and maybe the athlete is only doing something like like uh eight hours a week. And we're slowly going to bring that up to 10 hours by making some of the rides longer, but we're going to keep this consistency going to five five rides per week.
I think that's the starting place. we want to always achieve is we want to always be heavy in this idea that I need to be training both I need to be trained frequently and regularly. If we do those and the athlete is consistent and consistency is what produces results.
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Like we've heard this and we've referenced it already. The idea of 8020 80% of your rides been easy. And I think easy is defined as left of LT1, which in Training Peaks terms is zone one and zone two.
So if we're saying 80% easy, a question I often get is, okay, if I'm time crunched, do I still do 80% of my stuff easy? If I can only do six hours a week, if I can only do seven hours a week in that base period, am I still aiming to do 80% of that stuff easy? >> Yes, you are.
Uh, and at some point becomes very difficult. At some point we're getting to the challenge where the athlete only has an hour and a half and and for for example let's say we've moved to the to the build period now the the specific uh preparation period and so the athlete needs to be doing some hard workouts and some long easy maintenance workouts then we going to start getting real creative. So, let's say the athlete now is going to be riding four days a week easy and and two days a week hard.
If they've only got like an hour and a half each time, that's not going to be too difficult. It's going to be four easy workouts, two hard workouts. But what if they've only got four workouts they can do a week?
How do we do it then? Well, in that case, what I would have the athlete do is would probably do every one of those workouts would have a at least an hour of low intensity zone one and two, but two of the workouts would finish the last half hour with high intensity, zones three, four, five. That would be So, we're going to do two workouts a week where the we we start the workout in zones one and two, but we finish the workouts in zones three, four, and five.
And the other workouts that week are all going to be in zones one and two. So that's something that's going to happen a little bit later on in the base period. I'm really not too concerned about all this stuff because all all I'm really interested is the athlete being on the bike frequently and regularly.
If we can do that and we can and we can build slowly gradually build more time on the bike, then the athlete is going to reap the benefits of of the base period. >> What do you think about for somebody that's time crunched the idea of supplementing his training? say he only is he or she only has six to eight hours a week, but they have an ability to commute into work or they have an ability to maybe even walk into work.
Can we count this as zone one? We most certainly can. They most certainly can.
The athlete should be doing anything they can to build fitness. Walking builds fitness. It's been shown to be very effective.
Quite honestly, the research done on walking shows that it improves aerobic capacity. it it makes lots of physiological changes to the body that are beneficial. For example, the left ventricle uh of your of your heart which is the kind of the key to aerobic capacity becomes m becomes larger because of low inensity training and the larger the left ventricle becomes that means and the more powerful it becomes that means the more blood it can can shoot to the muscles when it's time to really uh call on on getting red blood cells to the muscle tissues.
So it really can be a big help. Riding to work would be perfect. If I can get just get the athlete to ride to work every day, ride home from work, that would be gigantic.
That of course it depends on what they've got available, how far they have to go and what the traffic is like. And there's lots of other issues there. But in general, yes, turn riding the bike to work is a fantastic thing to be doing to supplement other training the athlete may be doing.
So, I can ride to work five days a week and I can ride on Saturdays. I can do my workout on Saturdays. Great.
Let's do that. That's going to really do a lot to build your fitness. >> I had a coach in 2012 actually.
He coached me and did the Catalon sprinter Sam Bennett at the same time. I was racing in France that year and he frustr I was frustrated at the time because I didn't understand it. But in the winter period, he had me doing these building up to but walks five, six, seven, eight hour walks at points and I was losing my mind because I didn't really understand the benefit of them and it's only been in years since and more specifically on the podcast where I've got the chance to chat with great coaches like yourself and physiologists and they all nearly unanimously endorse the benefits of walking.
>> I agree. Um my wife and I do this a lot. We eat in the summertime.
We'll get up early and uh do a walk three miles or so and get a cup of coffee. >> Yeah. >> Walk back uh and then go for a ride.
It it really does a great deal for your aerobic fitness. It really is quite beneficial. Most athletes, again, it's not hard enough for most athletes.
They think it's not. Therefore, if it's not hard, it means it's no good. That's not the case.
It's it's accomplishing things that um you can't accomplish with hard workouts. So So it's quite beneficial. Yeah, I'd highly highly recommend that.
>> Yeah, I I've seen data on the the number one thing for determining an athletes long-term outcome of them hitting their goals. It's consistency. And the number one thing which undermines consistency is intensity.
When people do too much intensity, they break down either mentally or physically and then they lose the consistency. So from that you can summize that the number one thing to stop people hitting their goals is intensity. >> It's true.
Uh I I agree with 100%. Um let's look think of it this way. Consistency is critical.
It's it's very important. I I would much rather have the athlete doing the wrong workouts consistently rather the right workouts inconsistently. >> Yeah.
So consistency is the key. I I you know I don't care if you what whatever you do let's make it consistent. Let's let's do it regularly and frequently.
>> I think it's the cheat code for life. >> Yes, it is. It's pretty much pretty much the way life is.
It's because you need to be frequent and consistent with whatever you do in life. Training is no different. So, but that but that's the number one problem I run into with athletes is they you know they say they can't they that they didn't achieve their goal and they trained really hard and we started going back and digging into it.
What I find out is they missed workouts every week, several workouts, and all they think they have to do is do like two or three really hard workouts and therefore they be ought to become Superman. It doesn't work like that. You're better off doing a lot of long slow distance workouts than you are doing two or three very hard workouts if you really want to prepare for an event.
So yeah, so consistency is the key. Back in the first year I was illegally photocopying your bike, your book, I remember building my training plan and I can still remember it now. You know, I was a student, I was ambitious, I had a lot of time and I'd set out week one was 14 hours and it progressed based on a weekly available time.
So that was the the adaptation each week. So it went from 14 hours to 16 hours to 18 hours and then a decompression week and then the next block might have went from 16 to 18 to 20 and a decompression block. It built like that.
Do you still think about building these blocks in terms of step up in duration measured in errors or have you now moved to kilogjles because that seems to be getting more popular. It could be done either way. Kilogjles works very nicely, especially if you're a scientist or have a scientific leaning.
Most athletes don't want to gather information about kilogjles because it's kind of vague. They like to gather information about hours. How many hours did I train?
And since it's an obvious number that really means just as much as probably anything else you can do because it has more more we have more experience with the word hour than we do with the word kilogjle. Uh, but kilogjles is fine. If you want to train with by based on kilogjles, that's great.
No problem at all. >> And I I've heard you talking about the idea of a 9-day training cycle for busy athletes. How does that work?
>> Yeah, that that's one that um I I've I did develop several years ago about athletes, especially athletes who uh who are uh who need frequent rest. uh older athletes especially, you know, 50, 60, 70, 80 year olds uh probably need more rest than 20, 30, 40 year olds and they need to have rest more frequently. By training a nine-day pattern, what the athlete can do is they can do two days which are which are hard or long after weather, whatever time of the season we're in, and then a third day, which is very easy, or even a day off on the third day, and then go back to that pattern again.
So we do three three-day periods like that. That becomes this nine-day pattern. And I typically have the athlete do most athletes will do that twice.
So they wind up with 36 days or heck uh n 18 days and then we're going to take a rest break and maybe four or five days after that and then start all over again. It works really well physiologically. The problem is when it comes to lifestyle.
Um the first time you have to do a 5 hour ride and it's a Monday morning, you're supposed to be at work at 8:00, it's not going to work out. So that that's the challenge with doing this. It works nicely for retired people because they they bas basically have >> employed people.
>> Yeah. Try they can they can use their time in much more lenient ways. They can do what they want.
But if you have to be someplace at a given time on a given day, it's not going to work out. So it really depends on the athletes lifestyle. >> I was chatting to Dr.
Sam Impy. You might know him, but Sam uh advises through a app that he's built called Hexus, a lot of the World Tour teams now prescribed to both him and David Dunn's nutrition philosophy. And we've seen off the back of his 2016 study, I think it was, called fuel for the work required, we've seen a massive change in carbohydrate consumption for both proathletes and amateur athletes.
I'm thinking about that first book that we keep referencing, Cyclist Training Bible, to your most recent book. Nutrition has obviously changed an awful lot in that period. But with regard to the kind of training plan we're building out here, what are the other big changes you've noticed over that span of I guess it's 20 years nearly.
>> Oh yeah. Yeah, it's changed quite a bit. And and you're right, there's a lot going on right now with um for example, number of calories an athlete can take in.
But I need to warn people that, you know, we're talking about what the pros are doing is gigantic calories. Um but they they didn't start off doing that. they kind of like built into that there's a an adaptation period the athlete has to go through before they can really do that without becoming sick at their stomach.
Um and for most athletes we don't really need all that. Uh if you're if you're doing four and five hour um stage races, you know, daily stage races um that that's going that's that's something you really need to think about because it's going to be you need a lot of energy to come in during a race like that. If you're doing a one-hour criterium or two two and a half hour road race, don't worry about that.
You're going to be fine just taking in what you've been doing in the past, more than likely using the old standards for for calories. >> So, also and what Sam was really keen to note for me is this is measured in absolute, but we use values like 120 grams of carbohydrates per hour, but it needs to be relative to your output. So like some of these guys, if you look at the front of the race at Unbound now, like a chatting with Alex Wild, I think he averaged close to 300 watts for 8 hours.
If you're going out for an 8 hour ride, it's most likely that you're not, unless you're world tour rider, it's most likely you're not averaging 300 watts for your 8 hour ride, your fueling requirements aren't the same as his fueling requirements on an 8 hour ride because he's producing so much more power. There's a higher fueling requirement for that ride. >> No, no question about it.
Exactly right. Yeah. The more the more powerful the athlete is, the more calories they need.
The longer the event, the more calories the athlete needs. You combine both of those things, long and highly intense, the athletees going to need a lot of calories. And if you're not in that category, then this is something you don't need to be worried about.
You can keep on doing probably what you've been doing up until this point, but you got to make sure you're doing it. You just can't you can't get by on water alone. I run into athletes who want to lose weight and then what they do is they want to burn as many calories as they can during the day and replace as few calories as possible.
That's not that's usually not a good idea. Usually the athletes going to wind up crashing and burning because of that. So you need to be careful with this, but you also need to know exactly what your body needs and then go about trying to design a a plan to to get you there on round on race day especially.
>> So outside of nutrition, what else has changed? Yeah, the one of the more recent changes that I'm I'm having a lot of fun with is something this guy has it's still up in the air what the name should be and it seems to be be becoming durability. Uh but has been called stamina and resilience.
Uh these are terms being used by people who especially sports scientists who've been talking about this and I I really like the idea. This is something I came I I I wouldn't say I came up with the idea, but this was something I started thinking about. I think it was 2019.
I was watching the tour to France and I forgot who it was right now. Someplace in my notes I wrote it down. Uh but there was a break of um five athletes in a very very long stage and um they were holding they held 300 watts basically uh for for close to five hours and finally they all dropped away except one guy and one guy was left to to finish and he won the stage.
um he averaged 300 watts. But you have to realize that those guys their their FTP is somewhere around 400 watts. So he was riding at 75% of FTP, which doesn't sound all that hard.
We can all any one of us here could go out and ride for some period of time at 75% of FTP, but do it for five hours. That's a little bit different situation. Now we're talking about a guy who's built great durability.
he can hang in there for a very very long time which most athletes can't as as evidenced by the fact that four of the five riders did not make it to the finish line. >> He got there all by himself because he had such great durability. This can be trained.
It's highly trainable and there are various ways of training and various ways of checking it. But it's a good thing to do I think in terms of working on especially long events that the athlete has. Long events mean more than an hour long.
I think most of most of us understand the specificity in that, you know, if I want to get good at a 10 mile time trial, I can go away and I can do a bunch of threshold style efforts, but it feels more like opaque, the idea of training durability. What how do you think about training durability? What goes into it?
>> Yeah. Well, the starting place is decide how good the athletes durability is. Um, some athletes just seem to have really good durability and others don't.
I think that's the key to this this this rider I'm talking about is he just he's been around the sport for so many years by that point in 2019 that he had built great durability and that showed up when I came came racing for that for that particular event. But otherwise he was not a contender. He was never a finish somebody who contended for the podium on any given stage because he was a long he was a long race guy is what he was.
>> So how would you test your ability like a a 20minut test a 4hour ride and then see what your 20-minute power is at the end of a 4-hour ride or would you use kilogjles or is there a different test protocol? >> Yeah I that's the basic idea is good I think four hours is a little bit on the long side for most athletes. They don't really need to to do four hours unless they're training for something like a like what the pros are doing.
But um yeah, let's say the we do this. The athlete rides for an hour in zone two as a warm-up and then we go to a certain location, certain piece of the course that mimics what we need to be doing for the athlete. For example, it could be a hilly course, could be a flat course, it could be a climb.
and the athlete does a 20-minute effort at at a given heart rate, let's say at zone four, just below FTP for 20 minutes, then goes out and rides for another half hour, comes back to the very same course again, the 20-minute course, rides another 20 minutes, exactly the same heart rate. Then what we do is we compare the power output for those two for those two episodes, those two those two intervals. And um what we'd like to see is that the that the second one is no more than 3% lower than the first one.
If it's more than 3%, the catches might catch it. The athletes um durability is not very good. But if they if they can keep it within 3%, then we've got pretty good durability already.
Most athletes when I have them do this, they don't have very good durability. They drop off quite a bit in in the uh second effort because now we we've built some fatigue. they've been riding for a couple of hours and now it's showing up on this on this second effort.
So, that becomes one way of doing this. I'm I'll do that at early in the in the build period to see where they are durability wise and then we'll do it periodically like every third or fourth week we'll do it again to see how they're coming along. >> And how do you fix poor durability?
>> How do you fix it? you you do long interval uh long intervals training uh especially zones four just below the threshold uh long efforts by long I mean like 20 minutes so we're going to do 20-minute intervals with five minute recoveries uh and we're going to do an x number of these depending on the athlete and that becomes our durability training it and then again we have a long warm up maybe an hour before we start those intervals then we do the intervals and then a long cool down and we see how the how the intervals went. That's another indicator of what our athletes durability is like is if those 20-minute e efforts remain fairly constant all the way through or if they begin to taper.
So, we're looking for that sort of thing, too. So, it's another way of getting feedback within a workout rather than doing a test. >> Have you looked much into heat training?
It seems to be quite the invogue thing with the Tour of France writers world tour highest level at the moment. Yeah, we're heat turning is really something quite beneficial. I talk about this in the book that in this new book that um it's one of those things you can do to build build higher performance especially V2 max as as an element of performance.
Um in the past we thought um uh heat training was just something to get you ready for a hot day's race which is true. It it will that's one of the things you're doing but you're also building some benefits there that have to do with V2 max. Um, but here's here's the clencher.
What you've got to do in one of these long rides when you're trying to to build the O2 Max is you've got to stay hydrated. If you don't stay hydrated, you accomplish just the opposite. You actually train your body not to be very good at at uh at V2 max because the the less when you're sweating and you sweat out a lot of a lot of fluids in your body, what happens is you're winding up getting rid of a lot of blood at the same time.
That's where that a lot of that fluid is coming from is from your blood. As the blood amount of blood in your body decreases, your V2 max also goes down. So what we need to do is stay hydrated so it's your blood stays fairly constant in terms of how much fluid you have running through the veins.
And that's going to help to to boost your V2 max just by doing that. So hot heat train can be very effective for the athlete, but it's more than just drinking. It's also being the the experience of of challenging the body to deal with a with a stressor.
Um, which is something outside of what most athletes are are trying to do. Most athletes try to avoid the heat. It's actually a very good thing for you.
Not not year round, but at certain times of the year, it's highly beneficial. >> Yeah. And I actually read a paper on this last week that to echo your point on hydration.
But interestingly, it said it's hydrating with room temperature fluid. that if you hydrate with cold fluid, it blunts the heat adaptation response. >> Good.
It's good. Very good point. Yeah, I had thought in terms of that, but you're right.
It would do exactly that because that's that's one of the things the athletes do when they're trying to cool off is drink like a a slushie, something that's really cold to to cool the inside. Good point, road man. Whether you're a weekend warrior or a world tour rider, the right tools can make all the difference.
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I'm going to put that in the description down below. Uh I think to finish up uh Joe, let's do a couple of rapid fire questions because I had someone on LinkedIn I was putting out a while ago. I'm interviewing Joe Freel and a couple of people came back with uh some questions.
So we'll rapid fire through them. What was your FTP at age 60, 70, and 80? >> Uh well at 60 we didn't have FTP.
Uh so I I wasn't able to measure it. That that's that was a fairly new concept. you know, when I was 60, it was the early 2000s and um at that time term FTP had not been invented yet.
Um but at 70, mine was 269. I recall because I was just talking to my son about this the other day. I was telling him what what to expect as he gets older.
We're talking about his FTP, which is pretty good right now, but um it doesn't stay that way as you get older. Becomes embarrassing fact as you get older. >> And what was the drop off from 70 to 80?
Oh man, that that's the embarrassing part. U I'm now 81 and uh I won't give you numbers because again it's too embarrassing to talk about numbers when you're this old. Uh but let's just say it's a big percentage of what I lo at at at age 70.
Uh the numbers have gone down considerably and um that stands out because I have a hard time staying with group rides anymore. So it's a real challenge. >> I love that.
Uh, okay. Next question. You have one day off, nothing on the cards at all.
You can do one cycling training session. What is that session? >> It's going to be a long easy ride.
If I've got a lot of time to ride, I'll I'll just go out and put in a long just I want to see the scenery. I want to see what's going on around the city and uh enjoy myself. >> Exact same for me.
Uh, the biggest training myth that you still see circulating? biggest training myth. Well, the biggest one we've already talked about, which is um that the athlete believes that the the key to fitness is high intensity.
That that's the only thing you have to do is high intensity. Therefore, you become much faster. And that that is so wrong.
It's uh I I it seems like I talk about this all the time when I'm talking with not only uh athletes but with even with podcasters is that it's not that way. It's it's it's you know, hard workouts are not the key. It's you by itself.
You've got to be doing the easy stuff. Also, >> the most underrated training metric. >> Most underrated training metric.
Um, efficiency factor. Uh, this is something I came up with many years ago. Um, and it's a good indicator of how the athletes aerobic fitness is coming along.
Basically, it's um, uh, normalized power divided by heart rate. So, it's how many watts you can create per beat uh, is what you come up with. And uh we're gonna see that number rise.
If you're doing a lot, if your aerobic fitness is improving, this number will rise. So what I tell athletes to do is do a do a long easy ride today like a zone two or whatever you're doing for long easy ride. Look and see what your um what your e EF was, efficiency factor, normalized power divide by heart rate.
That that is shown in training peaks just as a a normal an analysis data point. Click that and go and then count back eight weeks in your trading. find a very similar workout and see what the EF was on that day.
What we should see is your EF is increasing as your training goes on. If it's not increasing, there's something wrong someplace or you're at the end of the season and we've kind of like plateaued, which is not unusual. But that's a really good marker of how your aerobic fitness is coming along.
>> Yeah, I love that. It's one metric that really helps you tap into that kind of aerobic decoupling as well. >> Yeah.
And decoupling tells you what's going on as far it's it's uh normalized power divided by average power. And uh the more the more spiked your training is, the higher this number is going to become. So if you're training for something like um like a time draw for example, uh you don't want to be spiking on that.
You want to be very steady on that. So we'd like to find the decoupling is very very low number, less than 10%. That's what we're aiming for in that case.
Triathletes the same way. a road cyclist riding with a fairly high uh decoupling 1.25 1.
3 is not unusual at all. >> The best cycling performance tip you could give to a racer in a single sentence. >> Pay attention to what's going on around you.
>> I love that one. I love that one. Joe, thank you very much for your time.
What's the best way for me and everyone else to get uh a copy of your new book? Because I promise I'm not going to photocopy it this time. I will actually be buying it.
>> Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Um, best way is probably just to go to uh to um uh any any place where you buy books, you can find it.
Just it's called high perform the jewel high performance cyclist and you can find it um you know if you go to Amazon or any place else you'll you'll be able to find the book. So it's it's quite easily found. It'll be on my website shouldn't be on there todayrading.
com but uh should be able to find it fairly easily. How many books have you ordered now? >> Uh, I just finished number 19.
>> That's unbelievable. Joe, any more in the pipeline or are you calling it quits? >> No, I've I'm I'm I've got things I'm thinking about.
I haven't come up with a with a solid idea yet, but I've got something that really interests me and we'll see if it interests publishers also. That's the key. You got to find something not not only do you like, the publisher has to like also.
>> Yeah, I love it. I love it. Joe, thank you so much for your time.
Absolute legend and a pure privilege to chat with you again. Thank you, Anthony.