10 Ways To Improve Your Athletic Potential

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Do you think you're getting the most out of yourself as an athlete? Do you think you're performing as well as you could? Or do you think you could be getting more out of yourself? In this episode, we're going to go through the top 10 ways to improve yourself as an athlete and show you how you can get closer to reaching your athletic potential. When discussing this podcast topic, we had about 70 answers, but we came up with the top 10. Actually, we came up with the top 11. So you get a bonus one in there this episode. So we're going to get into that later. But firstly, a normal starting segment of the podcast. Dad, welcome to the episode. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jordan. I love this topic. What's holding you back? And it can be so basic. Anyway, what am I grateful for? One of the things over the, over the years as an athlete I have really struggled with is sleeping. If I train late at night, sleeping after a hard training session, and I'm really grateful for the assistance. It's a bit of a tricky one, but I really, I know that a lot of people do struggle. You can't, you can't actually go to sleep. My issue isn't going to sleep. I'm absolutely going to go to sleep. But I generally have trained hard late at night and I end up with cramp. And I've tried. This has been an issue for a long time and I've tried to prevent this issue. And I've tried everything from magnesium powder to creams to stretching to walking to staying up later just so that I can actually get to sleep. And anyway, yeah, just, just grateful that I consulted some expert, a doctor, and absolutely was, you know, enabled me to actually sleep properly for the first time. And I reckon that's in, I don't know, four or five years on a Thursday night where we have races, whether it's our local crit race that finishes it, you know, by the time I get home, it's 8:30 or the indoors with Trivalo racing series we have on Thursday nights. And the same thing happens every Thursday. So I'm very grateful for, for finally getting to sleep without screaming out in bed with cramp.

Sure that every tribal athlete that does our Thursday night races will be contacting you after this episode. Saying, what did you do? Because we're all lying there awake at 1 2am after those races. My gratitude is on a similar line of medicine and we've done a few kind of gratitudes for medical things, workers in the health industry over the last few weeks. Uh, and mine is on a similar theme. I actually got stung by a bee on my ride on Tuesday. Um, quite aggressively actually. It hit my glasses and then bounced off and stung me in the arm. And you forget how much bee stings hurt. Anyway, uh, I just left it. I've finished the ride and it hadn't swelled up too much and that night it was a bit irritated, but I didn't think much of it. I thought on my body might just deal with any issues from the bee sting. And then I woke up on Wednesday and it was completely swollen and full of fluid and really irritating and sore. And so just went down to the local chemist and asked them for some help and some advice. And they just gave me a couple of things and they gave me a cream to help. And immediately the stuff they gave me helped instantly. Within the next four to six hours, the swelling had reduced. And I'm just grateful for medicine, how quickly it can help and just how we can access something like that so quickly and relieve that, that little stress. So that's my gratitude.

Awesome.

What has caught your attention this week?

Well, Ironman California is coming up and I'm pretty excited about this event. We've got the world greatest of all time, Jan Frodeno competing and we've got lots of good professionals competing and we've also got the world 70.3 champion competing. So it's going to be good to see how that pans out and, and how they go about it. And yeah, I'm pretty excited to see what's going to, what's going to happen more. So what's, what's not got my attention? What's going to catch my attention coming up. You know, the cycling season's kind of coming to a close and, and the changes of riders to different teams. And now it's really, you know, looking at the, the end of the summer triathlon season in the northern hemisphere and it's sort of the start of the summer season in the southern hemisphere, which hopefully, you know, the Australian races start to open up and become available. So, yeah, what's caught my attention is what's coming up, I think, and I'm looking forward to that Ironman race. It should be a, should be a cracker.

Jan Frodeno has basically been untouchable for however many years now. And Gustav eden dominated the 70.3 world champs two weeks ago. And for me, he's one of the few athletes that could probably take it to Jan. So I'm really excited for this as well, because he could be the one to finally knock him off. So it should be a really good race. What's caught my attention is recently I've been getting a lot of help from Brenton, who's been on this podcast a couple of times. Brenton Ford from Effortless Swimming with my catch, the catch part of the swim stroke, and previously I had found that especially with a lot of time off swimming, when coming back to swimming, I was really getting impinged on my shoulder and by improving my form and with some great tips from Brendan in the catch part of the phase, improving the technique of the catch completely took away the shoulder injury. So it wasn't a factor of improving my shoulder strength or, you know, I was starting to get pinched and I thought, is this just going to be a recurring thing? I've actually had it for a few years and just changing my technique completely took away the pain and that from one swim to another, you know, it happened in one swim. Once I. Once I fixed the technique, the shoulder pain completely went away. And so that was really encouraging. And it just reminded me of how important the technique part of the swim is and how you really want to pay attention to your technique because it's actually what's going to, one, help you go faster, but two, keep good form.

Great point, Jordan. The fact that you are swimming faster without swimming harder is incredible. Purely on technique change.

Exactly right. That's what swimming is, isn't it?

It's a skill acquisition which has a fitness component, but, you know, you can be as fit as you like, but you probably won't improve your speed unless you actually change your technique.

On that note, let's get into the topic for today. And that is the top 10. As we said at the start, we've actually got a top 11 for you, ways to reach or improve your athletic potential. And we'll start off number one with a bang. One of the biggest things you can do is to improve your engine. What does that mean?

Yeah, it's. It's such a massive topic, and I'm not sure whether we can do it justice in this short. This short period of this podcast. But, but like everything, if. If your engine's tiny to begin with, it doesn't have much room to grow. So what we want to do is make our engine as big as possible. So create more potential, create more opportunity, create a bigger ceiling that you can, you know, you can improve and be, be a better athlete. And if you're limited, it's like the example, I suppose. I think I keep thinking of the size of everybody's heart. If you've got a really small underdeveloped heart, it has to beat a lot of times to get the same amount of blood around the body. When you're resting, it's not so significant, but when you start exercising, you know, we think of a canary or a budgie that's got tiny little heart and it's just beating flat out. If you ever held a tiny bird, you can hear the heartbeat just going bang, bang, bang, bang. And then, you know, compare that to a person who's got such an incredibly developed heart that it can pump out massive amounts of blood with each stroke. So therefore it only has to beat half the amount of times that someone who's got a smaller heart. And that's the same analogy with, with the engine. You know, we want to, we want to have a capacity to, to be, have no limits to how far we can actually potentially improve our physiology.

Just to clarify the heart analogy as well, because I agree it's such a good analogy to use, but we're not saying that people with bigger hearts are better, you know, because it's just an analogy. It's a metaphor because obviously your heart does develop and grow with exercise and, you know, getting fitter, but it's not the aim. Isn't the biggest heart possible? That's not what we mean. We're talking about. Yeah, like you said, the car analogy is, you know, if you've got a four cylinder car with a four cylinder engine, it can only hit a certain top speed and just can't get above that, no matter how good it is at hitting that top speed. Whereas a car with an eight cylinder engine just has more room to get better. And basically what we're talking about is when we say engine is improving your VO2 max and what you're actually capable of.

Yeah. And, you know, what are the things that you can do to improve that? Well, you need to train in that area. That's the key thing. And understanding what that area is, and it's a really uncomfortable area to train in, it hurts. And when you look at a session on paper and you see that it's a VO2, if you see those words immediately, it brings Fear factor to my mind because I know that it's a very short time period. At a high intensity power output, whether it's running, swimming or riding, I know that it's going to be a short period where I'm going to feel like, you know, I've got concrete in my arms. So the training in that area is uncomfortable and it's one that, you know, most people will avoid if possible. But that is the go to area that's going to enable you to improve your functional threshold power. And without improving your engine size, as you use the analogy as a car, without improving your heart, as the other analogy, you're limiting how far you can go to improve yourself as an athlete.

Talking numbers. If you're an athlete with a VO2 max of 50, then you know, if you can increase your VO2 max to 55, you're basically increasing your fitness capability and your ability to perform better as an athlete. But increasing your VO2 max isn't just enough, is it? And that leads us to point number two is you have to improve your threshold relative to your VO2 max.

That's right. And look, we've got many examples of the elite historic sports people such as Lance Armstrong, you know, 90 plus, a VO2 of 90 plus, and that's great. But if he could only ride to 50% of his VO2, then he might, as you know, it's still quite insignificant. You, you, you want to be an athlete who's got a VO2 of 70 and it can, can train to, to 95% of that is actually going to be a better athlete than a person who's got a 90 and can only train at 60% of their, of their VO2. So, so you want to be able to ride threshold as close to your VO2 as possible. That's the goal. You want to have a big engine ceiling that could be up to 90. So therefore riding 85% of your VO2 at 90 means you're pretty much unbeatable. No one could come near you. But you know, if you've still got a reasonably average VO2, that's still okay because the key point is to be able to train, ride, swim or run as close to that VO2 limit as possible. And that's going to make you more competitive.

It's basically your ability to use all of your engine. If we go back to the car example, you know, an eight cylinder car is no good if it can only hit the capacity of its first four cylinders, you know, it'll be equal to a four cylinder car that can use max capacity. The exact same example as you just provided with those numbers and that's why improving your threshold and what you can hold in all disciplines, your swim threshold, bike, threshold, run threshold, is paramount in your ability to get the most out of yourself as an athlete.

And I think a lot of people think that because I'm particularly a track runner, I don't need to be able to run threshold or endurance swimmer, I don't need to be able to hold, you know, I just have to be able to swim for a long time or if I'm a criterium rider, I don't need to ride at threshold, I just need to have lots of ability to ride high power. But the cornerstone of being able to sustain your effort is to be able to maximize your ability to sustain power or pace over a long period of time and recover quickly. And as you know, as a well trained runner, you find that you can recover on the bike so much quicker because you have a really good threshold as a runner and putting that as a rider, the minute the pace goes up, you can cope. And then when they get that little lull or rest period as, as a criterion racer would, you're ready to go again at the same maximum power that you've recovered from. Because that's because your threshold is enabling you to back up time and time again. Of course You've trained your VO2 system to really sustain the impact of the high max out efforts and that's why you train in those zones. But you also need to train in the threshold zone to be able to sustain that. So you can actually, when you, when you, for example, in a triathlon, if you aren't able to do the second half of the ride or the second half of the run at the same pace as the first half, then you've got to question, you know, what, what is your fitness level? Is it that that's letting you down? Is it your threshold ability to hold? You know, whether it's, you're trying to ride at 75% of your threshold for an ironman, is it, are you fighting because, because you don't have that threshold train drilled into you or is it because your engine's too small to start with, which means you're not fit enough? So there's a lot in there. And that's what I said at the start. You know, it depends on what aspect you're looking at. And people will be saying, well that's all very good, but how do I improve that? How do I, what are those things that, what can I do to stop that being my limiter and getting to know where, when to do that in your program, what phase to do it is really important because you need to have that in the right order so that by the time you get to your race, you are actually at your peak. Peak power and Peak VO2.

Well, for most people they just need to include it at some point because as you said, most people avoid training at that threshold zone or just above it in the uncomfortable or way above it in the uncomfortable VO2 max zone, which is the kind of cornerstone training sessions to improve both your engine and the ability to use all of your engine. And you make such a good argument for threshold training and why it's so important, no matter what kind of style you're racing in. Because as you said, coming from a running background, I told you we've had this conversation before where I felt like I was getting a bit of a cheat code. Moving, switching onto the bike. Because in the bike you do get these micro breaks every so often. And when you're running, the moment you back off the pace, you slow down. So it is just so much of threshold where you just, it's holding as high pace as possible you can for the entire race, whereas cycling, it's over under little breaks here and there. And I just said it's just such a, it feels like such an easy win because you get 10, you can barely hold the power, but then suddenly you get a little 10 second break because it's a slight downhill or you get to sit in the pack. Yeah, free ride and sit in the pack for 30 seconds and then you can just go again. So if we take the definition of your threshold, it's basically the point at where your body starts to produce more lactic acid than it can get rid of. Uh, in really simple layman's terms, you know, and so if you can make that point higher, that's going to help every part of your racing. If you're a crit racer, if it's going to make just sitting in the bunch more comfortable if the pace is on. It's just in so many aspects. If you can improve your threshold, then it'll improve your racing as a whole.

Well, you know, the experiences everybody would have in their local bunch. Let's just take bike riding. You know, you've got guys of different abilities in your bunch. Some guys have got a really well trained threshold and it's, it's quite high. And got a really well trained VO2. It's quite high. You can hear the breathing from the people who are, you know, the pace is set by someone in the bunch. And depending on what level you are, you will be either coping, just hanging on, or getting dropped. You're going to be in one of those three categories. And you know straight away that's a sign that I would say you need to work more on your threshold so that you can keep with the people you're riding with for longer. So, you know, not just keep doing the same bunch, ride and getting dropped. You need to work on that, go away and work on that so that you can come back to that same bunch, ride and be able to cope better. But if you don't practice that in your training and when you said before, you know, it's assumed that people get the right order, but it's not assumed that they actually do the session. And if you keep avoiding doing those sessions, that that's limiting your potential. And I can't emphasize how much people do do that. They refuse to accept what's their limiter. Firstly, that's the main problem. And then secondly, they refuse to actually change their program to improve their limiters. And that is the key way to improve your potential. And it's also the key way to hold you back.

That brings us to our third point and third way to improve yourself, and that is that you need to be consistently overloading yourself and stretching yourself in training.

Yeah, it's a big general statement and can lead to the wrong interpretation sometimes. But what do we mean by that? We mean that there are periods in your year plan program where you need to be putting yourself under stress. Your body needs to be adapting to different stress levels and without that you'll stay the same or go backwards. So we can't do that every session. That's not what we're saying. That's what I said that at the start. It's not about doing that every session. It's about doing it at the right time in the block, in the program, in, in the, the phases of your. Of your race preparation. And if you don't have that overload stimulus, then you're going to stay the same. And I can't make that any simpler than that. So what do you do about that? You obviously try to put yourself against people at certain parts of the program that are going to push you. And whether you're using people as your competition or you're using your power meter or your running pace, you're trying to all the time improve on the previous block numbers that you've been able to cope with. And gradually, progressively from week one to week 26 or whatever your program goes for Move yourself along the journey and along the scale of stressing yourself, recovering, starting with a better pace or swim pace or run pace or power number and then stressing that at the same level, recovering and then continually stepping the staircase pyramid. Almost approach to expecting to train hard, get an improvement recovery. So your body absorbs the hard training and then go again with, with new numbers. And if they're the same numbers, great. But you've still got time to improve over the journey. It's not like losing weight. You want to lose weight in the first week. A progress that takes time and over, over a block or, or a training phase and then into years of, of events. It will gradually, you know, get better and better and you'll be able to absorb and adapt to the, to the training as, as you progress through your program and get to race day.

And especially for endurance athletes, it's not just about pushing the numbers in the hard sessions. You know, there is a big adaptation that needs to incur to allow your body to adapt to endurance volume. You know, a lot of athletes when they get into the endurance world, it takes them a long time to adapt to rides longer than two hours. You know, getting up to that three, four hour mark and in an Iron man case, a six hour mark, that's a really, a stretch. And same thing with long endurance runs. You know, building up past an hour, up to 90 minutes, up to two hours plus. And the first time you do that is a big adaptation curve that you need to get through to adjust and it's really uncomfortable. But once you adapt, you get comfortable. But that's where a lot of people, we would say make the mistake of just staying there. Whereas you need to keep pushing yourself and keep going through that adaptation so that your body begins to get really comfortable with these potentially four to five hour sessions. And you're not just getting through them and crawling to the end, but you start to get through them more and more comfortably. You start to get through them with a lower heart rate, et cetera.

And stretch yourself doesn't mean you know your longest ride or your longest, your longest ride is, let's just take riding, your longest ride's two and a half hours. And we don't mean stretch yourself by going out next week and riding four and a half hours. That's not, we want to get to that point at some stage, but in a gradual progressive overload, that's the way we want to do it. Add volume in a controlled way each week. Sure. You could go from two and a half hours to five Hours, you could easily, but it would definitely have a detrimental effect on the sessions. Post that big day, you will be quite fatigued. It's too much for the body to absorb and therefore it'll affect the next part of your program. Therefore, you're going to stop your progress by doing, you know, haphazard changes in stretching yourself too much. So there's, you know, there's a fine line between, you know, being too motivated to push yourself. Yeah, look, you know, let's go for. Let's go for an extra double what we've done before, and that's okay now and then. I'm not saying never do that, but the point is, we're trying to improve your potential in an orderly, organized fashion that's going to enable you to boringly progress the way you should. And I say boringly because you won't have any illness, you won't have any injury, you won't have any fatigue, you'll have all the normal feelings of a program that's absolutely working and suited to you. And the minute you start to go outside those parameters and try to chase it too quickly and lose patience with it, there's so many examples when I. People who have coming back from injury or illness or just taking a break, they know what they've done before and they just want to resume where they were. But I'm saying no, just go as a runner, just go and run every second day for 30 minutes with no structure. Just get that into your body straight away. Do that for two weeks and then we can extend the duration to make it 30, 40 minutes. And then we could do, obviously, improve the consistency by doing it more frequently rather than doing it every second day. You could do a couple in a row and then once you've got that, that base set up, then you can start the intensity. And. And that is really what we're talking about here, is to try and progressively overload yourself in a controlled manner that will stretch you, but not to the extent that's going to break you.

Three big points to start with. Let's go into some easy wins that we can get to improve yourself. And the next one is quite simply if to lose some weight, because losing weight will now allow you on the bike to have better watts per kilo. And being lighter will only help you on the run.

I suppose there's too much emphasis on weight in our everyday life in general. And here we are banging on about weight, but the topic we're talking about is ways to improve your potential. And if you just too heavy for the event you're trying to do, then it's in your interest to make yourself more competitive. And one of the simplest ways is to actually think about what you're eating and how nutritious is your food and the volume you're giving yourself. Is it enough if you're training hard, is it enough of the right food? You know, it is easy to just ignore it, just like it's easy to ignore VO2 sessions and threshold sessions. You'll still be fine, but you won't reach your potential. And this is what we're talking about. Give yourself every opportunity to reach your potential. I'm always talking about don't do the extreme thing, do the well balanced thing. And that's what I'm talking about. A well balanced, healthy fruit and vegetable based diet with, you know, with good protein, with the right carbohydrate. That will give you the potential to be as lean as you need to be for the event that you've chosen. And as you said at the start, you don't want to be climbing hills. If it's bike riding, you're doing it and it's a, you know, a peaks event that's, you know, 4,000 meters of climbing. You don't want to be carrying an extra 4 kilo around the day for 10 hours when you don't have to. If you just concentrated on being a little bit more serious about what you're consuming and taking an interest, if you can do all this training, take an interest in what, what food you're putting into your mouth.

Don't get it twisted. Losing weight the wrong way will not improve your athletic potential and will not help you improve yourself as an athlete. You know, if you are not getting enough nutrition in, anyone can lose weight by cutting calories, but you're not getting enough nutrition in, then your recovery will suffer and you will suffer as an athlete and it will be detrimental. So like you're saying you want to lose weight, but you want to do it in the right way. Another quick win is also based on recovery and that's just getting better sleep. If you get better sleep, most likely you're going to be able to perform better as an athlete.

And this is a very straightforward one. We have talked about it before. Look, the body recovers during sleep and that's the role of sleep. And everybody in the world does it. Some people do it way better than others, some people need more sleep than others. Some people seem to get away with less sleep than others. So you've got to find out what Your fine tuned potential sleep is. And I definitely know if I've got good deep sleep that I know that the body's recovering while I'm doing that. The stress levels are obviously zero because you're in deep sleep. It's when you're doing light sleep that you're probably not recovering as well as you should be because your mind's buzzing. So you need to be really concentrated on making sleep an important part of your everyday routine. And I'm just as bad and guilty of not getting the right sleep as the next person. So for me to sit here and say, yep, I get my sleep down pat, that's absolute garbage. Because there's periods where I've just said in my gratitude, every Thursday night I get zero sleep. And it's been bugging me for that long that I've done something about it. And it is important that you really prioritize that sleep being one of the key things that can make you perform better the next day and the day after, et cetera, et cetera. So don't underestimate the value of what sleep is doing to your ability to perform and potentially reach your potential as an athlete or hold your back.

A little bit of a bonus tip here. Now, I cannot say for certain how scientifically accurate this is. I just read it in an article and thought about trying it myself because sometimes you're really tired, but then you go to bed and then you're really wired and you're not, you're suddenly not ready to sleep. And this is a universal experience. I know that everyone experiences this kind of concept. And the article was saying that it's to do with our sleep cycles. We all know that we have sleep cycles throughout our sleep. We go through different stages of what type of sleep we are in. And when you're. Once the sun sets and your body starts to release certain hormones to get you ready for sleep, it is going through a cycle. And then you should do everything you can to get yourself ready for bed. So that when that sleep cycle hits where you get really tired and you're ready to sleep, you can just jump into bed and close your eyes and sleep fairly quickly. If you at that stage miss the cycle, miss the chance your body goes through another. I can't remember what the article said, 40 to 45 minute potentially cycle before it's ready to sleep again. And so that happens to me a lot where I feel like I'm ready to bed, but then I'll do all my things, clean my teeth, maybe put out the clothes the next day or something. But then by the time I get into bed, I've missed it and you lie there awake for 45 minutes. So that was just a quick tip the article had and I've been trying it recently and it has really helped. You know, getting ready for bed a little bit earlier. I might not go straight into bed or go to sleep, but once I feel that sleep cycle kind of hitting, now it's time to turn the light off. And that has actually helped me. So I thought I'd throw that in there. The next one. This is a way that you can really make sure you. It's an inverse way to make sure you're getting the most out of yourself as an athlete and that is to do everything in your power to avoid injury and illness. The key word is there everything in your power.

I was just thinking as you were saying that things that, that enable me to stay healthy and fit across a long period. But don't underestimate how everybody's probably carrying some niggle at some sort of period throughout their athletic career. And you have periods where you're completely out of action. You have periods where you, you're trying to get back from injury. You have periods where you're injury free. And everybody goes through these cycles so it's the person who can stay on the track sort of thing. The longest will a be the most consistent. And therefore without training the house down can actually still get the best outcome, uh, when it counts on race day. So don't, don't underestimate this one as how crucial it is to, to stay injury free and illness free. And the minute you start to feel something happening, whether it's your heart rate telling you your resting heart rate or your average heart rate overnight resting heart rate when you wake up in the morning, or your average heart rate for the period of sleep, they are good indicators for me of, of just taking notes that it's not changing substantially. And if it is in the wrong direction, my resting heart rate's going up and my average heart rate during the night is going up, then it's a sign that I am, there's something happening in my body and I need to take note of it. So they're the things that you can do that will help you make better decisions about the session you're going to do the next day. It doesn't necessarily mean I'll change sessions. It just means I have to be conscious of maybe not being at the top of the range for that session, maybe being happy with being at the Bottom of the range. If I feel like a bit of a headache or feel a little bit run down and I've got a hard session, you know, ready, it's okay, you know, you're still consistently training. If you make that an easier session, you know, it is okay. And people think, oh, no, I can't miss any session. And the way it's written, 100%, well, that's not what we're saying. That actually could be detrimental to your and cause you to be ill and then cause you to be injured just as bad. So they're limiters, but they're also potential improvers if you do them well.

The best example I know of this is Stewie McSwain, the Australian track star, who has just exploded the last few years in his results. I think he's ranked second in the world over 1500 meters at the moment. Just has had a stellar, a record of results and run of results over the last two years. And in an interview with his coach, Nick Bideau from the Melbourne Track Club, Nick was asked, you know, how has this happened with Stewie? What's he done differently to kind of start really excelling and get these results? And especially the Melbourne Track Club all trained together. They've all been a squad for 3, 4, 5 plus years. Why is he now standing out amongst the rest of the squad? And Nick Widow's answer was quite simply, he's had the longest run without injury or illness. He just said he's put together two to three years straight without any major injury or illness. And he said, that's what I put it down to. He's not doing anything more special than the rest of the athletes in the squad. And that was so telling for me. And part of that is luck. But, you know, we really want to do everything in our power and everything that we can control, take control of avoiding injury and illness.

Well, if you looked at that example, Joy, with the same group of people doing the same training, their management outside of the training has to be the difference. You know, potentially in the training session, they could be pushing themselves too, too much if they're running against people are too much better than them. But the management away from the training is kind of, you know, the training sessions are important to make sure that you do them in the right intensity. But managing afterwards, you know, as we've talked about already, you know, recovery, massage, stretching, strength and conditioning, sleep, nutrition, relaxing, removing stress, you know, from. From your mind, meditating, whatever it could be, that is managing yourself to, to keep yourself on track and, and you know, others do it well, others do it poorly, but that is also something that, you know, could actually unlock your potential if you're doing all the things, all the 1% as well.

On your point of, you know, knowing when to push to the top of the session and not to. I was actually speaking to Stewie's training partner, Jordy Williams, about this last year, and Jordy said that he actually got really sick from a period of over training where Stewie was starting to really excel and Jordy was trying to go with him in all the sessions, and Jordy was just running himself into the ground and he ended up getting totally sick. And that was a situation where he was. He was doing what we said in point three and stretching himself in training and overloading himself, trying to improve, but it was just too much for his body and it ended up being detrimental.

Now, look, I can't agree with you more. It's a great point. I was thinking that the points were going to come up later, but I didn't want to preempt it. So we'll leave it at that, I think.

Well, point number seven then, I think, because a lot of these points do tie in together and you'll see why once we get through them. But point number seven, this is one we have said plenty of times, but it has to be reiterated. Do the sessions that you suck at. Yep.

And I'm pretty good at avoiding the sessions that I suck at as well as any other person. And look, we're not sitting here saying we're bringing it this. We're just trying to get across that these are things that will make you reach your potential. So don't avoid the stuff that's hard. Just have your mindset different. Um, guys don't want to do this. And if I do it, look how much ahead I'm going to be of them if they keep doing the same sessions day in, day out, and I do the ones that I suck at. What a difference. It's going to be next Saturday when I join my bunch and go for my bunch run or my bunch ride. And all of a sudden, after, you know, 12 weeks of me concentrating on my weakness, the sessions that I know are going to improve me, whether it's the VO2 session or the threshold session. And all of a sudden, each week, I start to get closer to the middle of the pack in the bunch. And then all of a sudden I'm starting to get the front 15, and all of a sudden now in the front five. That might take three or four months. To get to that point or six months. But you are working on your weakness so that you are going to, you know, in your little area of group of training partners, they will notice what you're doing. And all of a sudden, instead of, you know, taking no notice of what you do, they'll be asking you what the hell are you doing? To see where you've come from to where you are now. And that's you unlocking your athletic potential. It's a mouthful. You're trying to unlock your athletic potential and by doing the stuff that you know, that you really know is your weakness, that's going to be your strength and that's why you're going to be a better athlete.

On that note, this ties in perfectly with our next point. And that is something that most people avoid. And maybe it's because they suck at it, maybe just it's because it's really hard. And that is that to be a better athlete you need to test yourself more. And we would say as a coaching group, we test our athletes begrudgingly to them more than any other coaching group we know in the world. And we would love to find a coaching group that does as much, you know, infield testing as us consistently. And there's clear reasons why we, we do this and this should not be this low down on the list, you know, for us as a coaching group and our philosophy, testing is so important. And why is that and how does it help you improve as an athlete?

Well, we basically do all this preparation for a race. So the key to going well on race day is to practice the same scenario that's going to happen on race day. So that would be one reason why you would test. So what, what does testing involve? It involves you running, swimming or riding at your ability for a sustained period of time. And that's what a race is. So the more times you practice racing in training, the better equipped and understand your body will be to cope with the, the intensity of the day. So that's one good reason it's a good training session on its own, regardless of the main reason that we do it, is to actually find out what our next training numbers should be. Because without testing, we could spend six months training to the same power number. If we didn't test to find that it had gone up, stayed the same or gone down. So if we test and find that it's gone down and we still try to train at the number we did three weeks ago, we'll possibly fail every session. And that mentally is quite damaging. You feel crap enough that you can't ride the same power, but if you can't even finish the session, it is really soul destroying. So we want to make sure that we're training to our current ability and we presume that as we progress through a program that our number will rise as we're using power as an example. So you wouldn't want to be training to the same power that you were six weeks ago, because where's the overload there?

So ties in perfectly with our earlier point. Right. You need to keep progressing yourself and stretching yourself, and you can't do that if you don't test regularly.

Yeah, so. So if you're staying at the same number, you could do the whole six week program trained at, say you tested yourself at the start at 250 watts and you use that number for the whole program, regardless if you're getting better. And if you did use that number for the whole program, I would say that you would improve anyway. But you're not going to stretch yourself by training to new numbers and therefore you're not getting the value out of every session. So you end up coming to the next race the same similar athlete that you were. You're still just as fit as you were when you started the program, but you haven't improved. So to me that kind of defeats the purpose of going from race to race is I want to do better than I did in the previous race. And if the previous race you won that race, well, that's fine. What are your goals there? You want to try and beat what you did last time in terms of your own personal numbers. So you actually do have to test yourself to find out A, how your body copes in a race condition, which is what we said at the start, and B, to train to the appropriate numbers so that you do actually become a better athlete come race day. The third reason is execution, practicing how you actually are going to do it on race day. So. So not only is it those two key points, but it's another opportunity for you to practice. You know, what are your numbers and how, how do you cope under pressure, executing those numbers in your race plan?

Yeah, and I want to explore that a little bit more. And you touched on in there, you said you will improve, no doubt if you stay to the same numbers. But the topic of this podcast is not how to improve, it's how to get the most out of yourself if you're looking to get more out of yourself. That's why this is so important. And then, yeah, this third point, you've raised which is practicing execution. I mean, we have examples of athletes where we're very specific in race plan execution. You know, athletes have very specific race plans of what power they should hold at the start of the race, what they should be going for in the middle, what they should be aiming for at the end. Same with running. You know, what pace to go out in the first K. Let's say it's a 10K event or a half marathon. What to do for the next half an hour, what to do for the half hour after that. It's all broken down very specifically. That takes practice to be able to execute it properly. You're rarely or almost never do we get an athlete nail it on the first go. And so, dad, I don't know how many times it takes athletes to get, but you would say you still have athletes who are on their 50th FTP test and they stuff the executioner. So if you're still getting it wrong after so many times, how could you possibly expect to get it right just in the first time, Let alone if you're turning up to race day having not practiced race execution and done these sessions, you're just setting yourself up for potential failure.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it seems so obvious, but it's remarkable how many people have, have not considered this as part of their program. And, and that is definitely limiting your potential to, to become a better athlete. And that's what we're here for is to. Is to improve. And this is one of the key areas avoiding this is is going to leave you the same athlete and not reach any potential that you possibly might have without you even knowing it.

Yeah, we can't hammer home the point of testing more regularly anymore. And in fact, we could do a whole podcast on the benefits because there is more than we've even mentioned right now, which is why we do it so much as a coaching group. Moving on to 0.9. And we touched on this before, but we'll just reiterate kind of what we're talking about here. And that is again, as a coaching group. Anyone listening to the podcast would know that we love data and we train to data, but you need to, in order to get the most out of yourself, be able to learn how your body works, pay attention to your body and be able to train to feel as well.

Yeah, and I think it's often the unheralded silent partner of your program training to data and training to feel, they do go together. And you can't just train to Data, if we were robots, that would be a hundred percent accurate. There's the numbers, just go and, just go and execute that. But you know, if your hard day is a Tuesday and you turn up on Tuesday and you feel fantastic, you should be training to the top of your range because you feel good. If you turn up on Tuesday and you're absolutely struggling, you've still got fatigue from the weekend. You ask yourself, what are the sensations I'm feeling today in the warmup? I'm not going that well today. So you change your strategy, your plan, your execution according to your feelings. The feelings and sensations you have should determine how you train. The numbers are the guide, the feelings are what you implement. And I can't, I can't even imagine, if you don't think like that, how you could possibly think that you can train to the top of the range every single session if you think that's what it's about. It is based on your feelings and that feeling can be determined by your mental attitude. You could have a bad mental attitude even though your feelings are great, but you're mentally not in it. So that is important as well. So feelings and the attitude and approach that you have to the session is crucial to actually executing and the outcome. So to unlock your potential, you actually have to listen to your feelings and it's not okay to not. It's not okay to ignore them and just to train your ass off every single session, because that's what the goal is. Sure. The goal is to have overload and to progress and to push yourself and to stretch yourself and to execute with a good plan. But if those plans and executions don't relate to your feelings, good, bad and mediocre, then you're not actually getting the full potential that you could possibly reach. So you could actually do two or three weeks of still doing the consistency of the program, but at the bottom of the range because you're listening to your feelings and sensations and then come out of that a much better athlete than the one like you explained with Jordy Williams. You know, pushing himself, doing, thinking he's doing the right thing, but just so motivated that I want to improve so badly that I'm going to do everything to stay with this guy who is really running the house down. And if that's what it takes to do it, I'll do what he's doing. But. But that can be detrimental. It can put you into a big hole. So. So it's a difficult one and it's a hard one, but it's got to be mentioned.

It's really taking everything into account. That's in the context of what's happening in your life, isn't it? So you could turn up to a session, like you said, and be feeling flat. But you would ask yourself, okay, what's been happening? Has work been really stressful this whole week? Am I not getting enough sleep? Have I not fueled properly for this session? And that's why I've got low energy? There could be a whole range of things happening, and then you might decide that, okay, I'm not feeling good, just going to stick to the lower end of the range. But then you do that and you start to really warm up in the session, and by the time you get to the second or third set, you're feeling on again. And then you can. Then you can adjust and go to the higher end or the opposite if you feel okay. There are no specific signs that you're super fatigued. You start at the top end of the range, but you just find that you can't hit it. You need to be able to quickly adapt and say, okay, this isn't happening today. The last few sets, I'm going to lower it, hit the lower end of the range and be okay with that. Yeah.

Limiting your losses, it could unlock your athletic potential and understanding that pigheaded or stubborn and listen to the feelings and adapt and change. And that takes a lot of discipline to do that because we are so motivated to strive to reach our potential in training. And I know that I coach a lot of people who think that I want them to be at the top all the time. And I'm at pains to remind them that we give you a range for that very reason, for you to take control of your own session according to how you feel. These are your ranges from the data. The data is so crucial to set you up, but you take control of where you sit in that range. On any given training session, you're in charge, not me. I don't know how you feel. I can only give you the ranges to train at and you decide, you know, and if you're. If you're lazy and not. Not doing it, when you feel well and good, then that's. That's on you. You know, you've got to understand and come race day, that's so important that you understand your feelings and sensations because you don't want to, you know, obviously you're tapered come race day and you feel really fresh and recovered and you feel invincible at the start of, you know, whatever event you're in whether it's a marathon, whether it's a triathlon, or whether it's a. A hill climb on the bike. At the start, you're going to feel fresh. So you've got to not only listen to the feelings, but understand that the zones that we're holding you back on are there for a reason. But not to go with the feelings of, I can smash this now and then fade at the end. Because you listen to the feelings too much and not enough to the ranges of the training zones that you're put into, the race zones you're put into. So it works both ways as well, that you don't just dismiss that I'm feeling perfect today, let's go for it and abandon all the control that you've. You've trained so well and executed so well over the journey.

We won't go down this rabbit hole. But you do need to be super flexible and adaptable on race day, don't you? Based on all these things, you need to be willing to change your plan really quickly if something's happening where you're just not hitting the range you want or something stopping you from executing exactly how you want.

It's more unlikely, George, that that would happen. It's more likely that you have actually not listened to the ranges set and gone with your feelings, and you will start to deteriorate because you've gone too hard. That's actually more the scenario that will happen, and that's people actually just going by feel, which is why we are so anti just going by feel alone. But I'm introducing feel after you have your ranges and your plan set. That's what we're talking about. There is a difference here. So what are you saying, Jared? Let's just go by feel now? No, I'm saying here's your race plan. And then on the day, you will feel fresh. Don't get sucked in love with your plan.

I love that we do this on the podcast and we do it often where we'll spend 10 minutes just hammering a point and then say, but you should do the opposite. You know, it's this. It's always this big paradox, and that's what a paradox is. It's. It's almost two things being true at the same time. You need to stick to the plan and stick to your numbers and not go by feel. But at the same time, you need to be paying serious attention to how you feel and be using that. So, yeah, it's a great paradox, which is what a lot of our philosophies are. And it's like you said, you can't be a robotic athlete where it's just this black and white, nothing else. You mentioned some keywords in there, which is a perfect segue to our second last point and that is limit your losses. And we've spoken all our points so far is how to get the most out of your body and how to increase your athletic potential from a physical point of view. But now we want to talk about a mental point of view. How do you get more out of yourself mentally? And there's a few angles we want to touch on here to finish off with. But the first question we want to ask is how well do you get through tough periods?

Now, let's start right from the outset. Everybody is going to have tough periods. There is no one I've coached and including myself, has had a free run where it's easy peasy. It is, it is a roller coaster. So let's just get that right out there. We are going to have really good periods, we're going to have mediocre periods and we're going to have really low periods. And the challenge to, to improve your athletic performance is to be aligned with your mental state. And on any given minute, any given day, any given week, any given month, any given block, and your ability to understand what is going on in your world, in your mind, can be the difference between holding you back and reaching your full potential. So understanding that there will be rough periods, and I always call them roadblocks. And roadblocks are always temporary and they're not there forever. The road will eventually be opened up and it'll be a massive freeway with nothing to stop you. So our job when there are road blocks put in front of us, is to navigate a way around them. And that takes a lot of mental fortitude. And if you're not ready for that, the roadblock will be insurmountable and you'll be stopped dead in your tracks. And you'll just sit there, not going forwards, not going backwards, not going sideways. You just stay, stay where you are. And this is a real limiter. And the person who can manage or manipulate themselves to get around these roadblocks and put it behind them. It's just a little hiccup on your journey and it could cost you in a five hour drive, could cost you 10 seconds, or it could cost you two hours because you've actually taken a wrong detour because of the roadblock that's put in front of you. You've made a bad decision. I Don't feel so good today, so I just won't train and that could be okay. But if that happens four days in a row, is it actually you don't feel good or is it mentally you're not up for it, so you're ruining your consistency, your fitness is going to drop. And what would be the opposite to do that? Just do something little, Just the run today is an hour. I just can't face that. Go for 15 minutes, the ride is two hours. Oh, no, there's no way I'm doing that. That's just out of, you know, I don't have the time. Do 45 minutes, do 20 minutes, just do something. And you know, doing six or seven of those, ahead of six or seven nothings, you're still ahead of where you were. You're not sitting at the roadblock. You've done something, you've made a decision and changed the course of what would be potentially a limiter. And if you can understand that and put it in perspective, then it doesn't seem insurmountable anymore. It's just a roadblock. You've got to sort out why it's stopping you. And if it is illness or injury, that's fair enough. But if it's just a mental feel that I'm, you know, super tired or, or there's too many other things going on in my world that I can't even concentrate on doing any training. But in actual fact, if you did something, you might find that it frees your mind up and, and, and gives you a rest from the, from the strain that you've been under, from whatever's influencing you in your world at this particular day and the endorphins and the release of the chemical releases you get from doing something that's actually satisfying once you get going, you know, it's, it's a game changer not only for you continue on your improvement in fitness, but in your whole mental approach for the next, you know, three or four hours after you've done it and you feel good about yourself, you know, Jesus, I look like I was never even going to do a session today. I'm so wrapped that I went for a 15 minute run. It is a game changer and it is something that can't be underestimated because it is a limiter or it can enable you to reach your potential.

There's a lot to be said about that hormone release that happens from exercise and how most people, when you're in that low period, when you're going through a tough or stressful time. Exercise feels like a burden. The training program feels like an added stress, whereas it really can be used as the opposite. It can be used as a thing that keeps you on track and that makes everything else easier, even though it does take time. It's like the sharpening the saw analogy where an old man is using a saw to saw through a tree and it would take him all the saw is really average, it's just not working for him and it's just taking him all day to get through this tree when it should take one hour. And if he just took half an hour to sharpen the saw saw, he could get the job done way quicker. But the whole day he avoids sharpening the saw and the task ends up being longer. So in this scenario, if things are going wrong in all other aspects apart from exercise, exercise can actually be the thing that makes everything easier. And I really like that example you used of the hormone release that happens because you can be feeling really flat and then you do a session and suddenly you're looking through the world through rose colored glasses suddenly compared to this, this grim view that you might have had before. And it comes back to what we said earlier about limiting your losses. And the athlete that can limit their losses in these situations and just keep getting the sessions done is going to come out ahead of the athlete that froze in the towel and the athlete that just really lets the wheels fall off. And suddenly missing one session turns into missing a whole week turns into missing a whole month turns into you've just undone all the hard work you've been building up for the last three months, four months, six months, year, whatever.

Yeah, there's so many examples. And you've got to think of ways, and we did talk about this a lot in previous podcasts of just, you know, putting your socks on, putting your runners on, and just, just talking yourself into. And you know, I've done this many times, the session might be a really hard session and I'm, there's no way I can do it. And so what are the choices? I can't reach the, the goal of the session, so I do nothing. What I'm saying here, and what you're, you're agreeing with is just do something at low level. And that's what limit limiting your losses is. It's doing something. Sure, you didn't achieve the goal of the session, which is high intensity, you missed that, but you're still achieving the goal of consistency. And at the end of the day, consistency wins over smashing out sessions every time the person who smashes out six sessions in four months and the person who smashes out 34 sessions of mediocrity will still be ahead of the person who does it. High intensity for six of them. So don't think like that. If I don't hit the target of the session that it's a worthless exercise. It's absolutely not. Consistency is still king.

One of my favorite principles for life is that one is better than zero. So if you don't do anything, you can't possibly improve or get the most out of yourself just to, if you just get a one, no matter what that is, then that's going to be an improvement. Another angle I actually wanted to touch on with the mental side of your reaching your potential is you're really training your mind to become stronger, just like you're training your body to become stronger. And so there's this concept of a mental coin jar. So if you think of a swear jar, every time you swear, you chuck a coin in and then the jar builds up and you get this full jar of money. Basically, whenever you challenge yourself mentally to something that is going to be hard, something that's uncomfortable in terms of training, a challenge that you're not sure you can complete, you know you're doing an FTP test and you're going to aim for five more watts, or you're doing a runtime trial or a session even where you're, you're really hurting and you're not sure you can get this last set out at the what's prescribed. And it's a real mental challenge in the last minute of that to hang on and hold those watts. And there's plenty of examples. People have set maybe bigger goals like a certain race or inside a race, they might have been suffering. And in that time they really dug deep and held on and were proud of themselves for how they were able to hold on. And every time you do one of these things where you mentally challenge yourself and then you succeed in that mental challenge is adding another coin into your mental coin jar. And what that does is, and this concept comes from my favorite man, David Goggins. What that does is it means that whenever you're struggling next time you can dip your hand into that mental coin jar and remember all the times you've been in this position before and use that as motivation, but also use it as self belief that you've done this before and you can do it again and start taking note of these, of these mental times when you've really been proud of yourself and pushed through. And it can just be a session. It can be a time when exactly what we're saying. Life was getting really in the way and you were struggling to get your sessions done for the week, but you still did them. When you're as unmotivated as possible, but you still did the session. You got a one instead of a zero. And that's something that you can add to the coin jar and dip your hand into for next time. And sure enough, once this jar starts to fill up, whenever you come to your next mental challenge, you've got a whole jar here of memories to dip your hand into to give you that self belief that, yep, you can do this. And after I heard David Goggins talk about this, I started to keep a mental note of all these little wins. And I can't tell you how valuable it is to train yourself to in these hard situations. Situations. Think back to those times and how much of an energy lift it gives you and how much it changes your physiology, your belief in yourself and you in the moment you stop suffering, you start believing that you can do the task you're really struggling to do right now.

What a great example of how you can use it to your advantage. And come race day, what you were just saying, it just made me think about when I stand on the start line, whether I'm on an athletics track, I'm on a box straddle over a bike, or whether I'm on the beach at a triathlon. I'm looking back at how full my jar is and I've got so many experiences where I was challenged. Today is no different. I am so confident in my ability to meet any challenge that's thrown at me today because of what I've put myself through and the way I've managed mentally to cope with any situation. And it could be in the middle of the a 6 by 3 minute VO2 set when I'm at the last 10 seconds of the second last effort and oh boy, this is getting hard and my legs are feeling like lead and I just lift for 10 seconds. And I remember that, you know, when it gets hard on race day and I feel like, oh, geez, it's getting hard here. But it's Nothing like a VO2 where I'm at 120%. Here I am in a race, in a triathlon where I'm only having to hold 80% and you know, it's perspective. So you've been there when it's tough and you just implement those same feelings when it gets Tough when on the day where you want. Where you want to stand up and you want to be strong, you want to be counted personally. I'm not talking about winning. I'm talking about you being challenged personally to improve or to push yourself to another level than you were previously. Is that, at the end of the day, why we do all this preparation for our big race? It doesn't matter what the race is. We are up for the challenge. We've put a challenge in front of us, which is in itself really admirable. You're training yourself so that you can be as fit as possible, so you can cope with the actual event, and then you're going to be challenged at some stage in the preparation and. And then on the day where it counts, and if you've got this mental strength that no matter what has happened to you along that journey, you absolutely will be confident that you can maneuver yourself around any roadblock that's put in front of you on the day when it counts.

Great way to finish off. And as we said, we've got a bonus point. The very last one we couldn't do a podcast without mentioning. This word is the C word, and it's not covered. But if you want to get the most out of yourself, the best way you can do that is be consistent. And we're going to put a tiny spin on this. And because we've talked about consistency, it's. It's. Yeah, you say it all the time, dad. You've got to be boringly consistent, but you want to get the most out of yourself and. And really improve yourself to get closer to your athletic potential. Challenge yourself to see how long can you be consistent before Stuart McSwain was consistent for two to three years, and look where that got him. So for yourself, can you put three months together of consistent training? Can you put six months together? Can you put a full year of consistency together? Challenge yourself. How consistent can you be?

Yeah, and it's so easy to just talk the talk. Yeah, that's pretty straightforward. I can meet that challenge of just fronting up day after day. Boy, that relentless waking up each day and you're challenged again with whatever it is for the day. You have to be well managed, you have to be well organized, you have to be well planned, you have to be fresh, you have to be well recovered, you have to have your day absolutely organized. There's so much that goes into it. You have to work out when you're eating, and it can be derailed so easily. And it's like the kid building a set of blocks and every time it makes a mistake, he has to start again. And so the minute you lose consistency, it's like all the good work you've done almost falls apart. So the longer you ignore the consistency rule, and we've said a million times, consistency is king execution's queen. But we know that consistency won't enable you to be able to execute, though it is boring. Every top athlete that gets interviewed on a podcast is if they're asked one thing that they think is going to enable them to be the athlete they are, they will without doubt mention, I've done this, I've done that. But at the end of the day, I've been really consistent in the last year or two years or five years. And that will be the main thing that will be the result of or the reason why they're they're now at the top of their game.

It's a great way to finish. Thank you very much for listening to this episode, as always. Now, last point to finish on. We've got some really exciting episodes coming up. We've got some exciting guests coming on and last week we on the ep, on the podcast, we spoke about getting Sam Long on. Well, we did one better, we think, and we got his coach to join us on the podcast. So we're really excited to bring that episode to you where we get to chat to Sam Long's coach. We have some awesome other guests coming on soon as well. So again, thank you very much for listening. We hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you next time. It.