4 Training Sessions You Shouldn't Be Doing (And 4 You Should) - Pt 2

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. Last week we went through four key sessions you absolutely must be including in your training program. In part two of this episode, we're going through four training sessions you really should avoid so as they could be a disaster for your training program. Plus, as promised, we're going to reveal what we think is the absolute best training session you can do. As always, if you like these episodes, the best thing you can do for us is subscribe to us and or leave us a five star review on whatever channel you listen to. Apple, Spotify, YouTube, whatever it is, it really makes a difference for us. Dad, let's get straight into it. The first session that you shouldn't be doing as part of your week is actually a big misconception that we get asked a lot and it's training as a group and specifically certain sessions as a group. Because people always ask us, where is your training group sessions held? And we are totally online, we don't do any group training and there's a certain reason why. And here we want to explain when and where group training should not be applied to your own training program. So start us off with this first one.

Yeah, so you'd almost go the other way and say when should you be doing the group ride? Because we do encourage that as well. But we are not encouraging that you do group training sessions because the main reason is you're going to be in no man's land. If you are the strongest rider in your group, then you're going to be at the front doing most of the work and you might not be getting pushed enough. If you're the worst rider, you're going to be at the back and you could get dropped. So we want to try and avoid these sessions. And the key session is when you're trying to do a specific training session. It doesn't have to be one session. Whatever the goal of that day is. If you end up riding with someone else or running with someone else, or swimming with someone else that's not doing similar thing to what you're doing and you end up following their plan, then you're not on your own program, you're not doing your own individual session. So you shouldn't be doing, for example, a zone one or two session, a recovery ride, or up to zone two ride. Or run or an easy swim if, if you're going to do it outside those ranges. So, so, you know, we always, we always talk about it's good to, it's good sometimes to have others to train with, but, but only when it's suitable for your program, and there's a big distinction there. We do use, and we advise a lot of our athletes to go on a bunch ride or, or a group run if, if it coincides with the goal and purpose of what the session you're trying to do is and, and have an example of, you know, guys will say, it's a Friday recovery ride come along, and I, I'll tell this story. Just, just happened to me basically in January. And this is not a criticism, this is just an observation. And they told me the Friday ride was the Friday friendly ride, just a really easy recovery ride. And, and so I went along and was, you know, only a small group of eight. I was excited to ride with a local group. I knew one person who invited me, and we headed out on the great country roads out there. No traffic lights, fantastic ride. I was thinking, beautiful morning, January sunny. And we got to the first rise, and it wasn't that big a hill, but I looked down and I was fourth or fifth in line sitting in, so getting a draft. And my, my power went from, you know, nice, chatty 150 watts to 300 watts up this hill for 35 seconds. And, and I thought, oh, I'll just give him. I'll give him a few more chances here before I decide to drop off, just to see if it does settle down. And they might have got a bit excited on the first hill, but no, every time we got to a hill, the same thing happened. The group would ride 3 or 400 watts for 30 or up to 90 seconds, and then they'd all coast over the top of the hill and basically stop pedaling. And, and after, you know, after a period of that, it was like, oh, no, this is how this ride's going to go. The good thing was I was on a week where I was allowed to do anything I wanted. So I kept joining in with the ride. And at the end of the, at the end of the ride, I sort of said to the guys, you, you told me it was a recovery ride. What happened to the easy recovery ride? And they all were adamant that was an easy recovery ride. And maybe they got a little bit carried away. A couple of guys got carried away, but. But that's just not what was appropriate if I was trying to do a Recovery ride. And all the guys in there, there was guys who are really strong and powerful riders who are like A grade and there were guys who were D grade. And so the A grade guys were spoiling it for the D grade riders. And the D grade riders were getting a high intensity ride instead of a, instead of a recovery ride. So there's a whole lot group of people in here doing, doing a different ride than they, than they said they were going to do from the start. And this is what happens every Friday. And I said, is this what happens every Friday? They said, yeah, this is what happens. These guys ride hard and we get dropped and try to, try to hang on. And I'm saying, well, don't call it a recovery ride, you know, call it your high intensity ride. So it's okay to do these things if, if it's what you're trying to do on that day, but if you're trying to do something else, then you shouldn't be in that group ride.

Yeah, look, it's, it's these, this, this appears so often in the ride you least expect it, which is the recovery ride or the recovery ride. Refer to as zone one and, or anything easy, that's zone two and nothing above zone two. That's in a five zone model. But they're the ones you have to be the most careful of. Whenever a friend says you want to go for a run or a ride and it's a, it's a scheduled zone, one or two sessions, that's the one that we're saying be really critical of who you're doing with. It applies to every session. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. But sometimes, you know, we love a group ride on a Saturday morning, which is generally the biggest ride of the week for any group around the world. Where it's, that's the kind of rides where you. Most local groups have a sprint somewhere in there. Most local groups go up a couple of climbs and attack them as hard as they can. And that's the kind of ride we actually do love certain times of the year in your program where go out there, have some random spontaneous fun, have some major efforts, have some really hard hitouts in combined with the whole endurance ride. That's a session we do really love. But it's a bit of contrasting advice because we do really encourage people when they say when can I ride with friends? When can I do something social? And we actually say the best time to do that is in your easy stuff is in your really easy stuff Zone One and two. But it's contrasting because that's the time when you have to be the most disciplined. You have to really understand the stress of the session and the purpose of the session and only do those easy ones if the person that you're going with understands your goal of the session and understands where you're at in the program and is willing to stick to that.

I've almost changed my mind, Jordan, over the years that I used to always say, hey, catch up with your mates socially. Because they always say it's going to be recovery and he's going to have a coffee ride. Well, I call bullshit on that. That just doesn't happen. Guys with egos just don't allow that to happen. Some guys have got a different agenda than if there's 15 guys in the bunch. One guy wants it to be hard and the other 14 don't. And if that one guy takes off, the other 14 will chase him down. That's just the mentality of a lot of bike riding. And so I'm almost thinking you should actually not do your recovery or your Zone 2 rides with social groups so that you don't have to be that disciplined. Go out and smash yourself on the hard weekend endurance ride where we want a bit of intensity. Like you just explained, I would flip it almost and think differently because I used to think that, you know, go socially and talk and chat because our description and our goal and purpose of the recovery ride is. I say this to our athletes all the time. If you and I are out riding socially, we would be able to just ride along and we could be writing emails and they. That's how stressful it should be. We could be just chatting side by side, rubbing shoulders with each other and just chatting about life. And we shouldn't be out of breath and we should be just rolling our legs around. And if you can do that, you've achieved the session. But if you're on the rivet, holding the wheel in front of you on that session, it's just lost its purpose. And that's what we're trying to. This topic is, what shouldn't you be doing? And this is what we're trying to get across. If you can eliminate all these. It's almost like a risk doing these sessions. You. You don't know what you're going to get. You know, it's. Life is like a box of chocolates. You don't know what you get. You know, you're going to have that. That feeling of Forrest Gump, of, I know that they said this, but I don't believe them. I don't believe that it's going to be an easy ride. So screw that, let's just go with the high intensity ride, the endurance ride and then, then you can join in the fun actually. So, so I have changed my mind over the years about what rides you shouldn't be doing. And, and I almost say now you shouldn't be doing social rides and group rides when you're trying to recover or where you're trying to do zone two, because from my experience it is a 1% chance of that happening.

Yeah. And I actually went on a zone two run with some friends a couple of weeks ago and, and admittedly my zone two is, is a fair bit higher than theirs. So I, I knew that the risk was low with this. Um, but I said to them, what pace would you like to do? And they want to do between five and five was, that was their goal and that's very comfortable for me and I was very happy with that. And I knew if it was at the top end, it's still, you know, even below my zone too. And, and I was very happy to have an easy day running. And we started off and they took off at 4:45 pace and I was literally just laughing going, this is fine for me, but we've got 10k of easy running here. I guarantee you're not going to hold this for the end. I'm sure not. The last 3 or 4K, they were hurting at 5:15 pace and I was going, this is supposed to be an easy run for everyone. Look, they're just friends, I wasn't coaching them. So I'm just, I'm happy to just go along with the pace, but you can see how easily it happens. And so, yeah, generally the risk is if you're going with people potentially above your level or similar to you, but they're not on a program, so it doesn't matter if they go kind of hard, kind of a big hit out every single session because they're not a strict program. Whereas you've got a really hard session tomorrow and the consequence is you're going to be really frustrated because you're going to be tired for that session and you're not going to get the value of your VO2 session, which is the best session of the week, where you're getting the most training benefit and fitness benefit. And when you can't do it as well, you'd be frustrated that you went too hard the day before.

The irony of it is that the majority of people who aren't on a program, they're actually doing that every day. And look, that's, that's a generalization, but the majority of people who do group rides, four out of sessions out of the week, where they meet on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and once on the weekend, they would all ride similarly on that Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday, that the session would end up being somewhere in that gray zone between 75% to 95% of their FTP. And there'll be bits over that, there'll be bits under it. So that would be the only variation would be they might ride for 50 minutes on Monday and an hour and a half on Wednesday and three hours on Sunday. The duration would be the only variation. But if you, if you flip that and, and said, okay, I'm only going to do one of those sessions, that will enable you to get the value of that session. And that session might be that you want it to be zoned to a recovery or you might want it to be a high intensity endurance. So it doesn't matter which one it is. But the reason why these other guys stay the same, and that's the principle of our whole program, is because they're doing the same sessions day in, day out. And they're very good at that 75 to 95% riding. The minute they're asked to ride at threshold or above, they are really found out. So they're great at riding this range. And that's why we don't want to do that. We want to have variety where you're being pushed to ride at zone two with discipline and then, and then the next day, as you just said, you've got a VO2 set, you are going to nail those numbers. But if you've ridden in that gray zone for three sessions already and you're wanting to do a harder ride, you actually can't ride hard enough to get the value out of the session because your fatigue levels are the same the whole time. Whereas if you ride easy Monday, some effort on Tuesday, then zone two or easy Wednesday, by the time you get to Thursday, you're still fresh enough to push the power wherever you want to at the top of the range, if you want to. But if I look the other scenario, Monday's 75 to 95%, Tuesday's the same, Wednesday's the same. When I get to Thursday, I'm pretty tired and I'm really going to be right above threshold for that Thursday session by the time I get to Saturday. You know, I'm really on my knees because now I'm doing the same session, but I'm doing it for three hours. And so you can cope with that. And people say, well, what's wrong with that? Well, you can cope with that for a period, maybe four to six weeks. And you may get fitter and probably you will if that's, if that's what you start to do. It's like, it's like just repeating the same sessions. And you will get a fitness gain from it. We're not disputing that. But at week six to 16, there will be no more improvement. And in fact, you'll get so tired that you'll start to. Fitness will start to go down because A, you'll lose the consistency because you're so tired and you'll start missing sessions. And this is a snowball scenario.

Look, I think everyone else has to understand as well that when you ride constant zone two and you stay in zone two with pressure on the pedals for majority of the ride, let's say it's a 60 to 90 minute zone two ride, which I'm just using right, as an example, whether it's a run or an easy swim, when you keep the pressure on the pedals, that's a fatiguing session. But it's so good for you because it's not so fatiguing that you're going to be exhausted the end of the week. But it's so good for your efficiency, it's so good for your aerobic fitness. And you're actually getting more out of the session by maintaining that pressure on the pedals. What ends up happening in, in these rides is there's a little bit of zone one, little bit of zone two, a little bit of zone three, little bit zone four, and it's just kind of up and down and actually it becomes kind of peeking up the hills like you said, and then freewheeling and not pedaling down the hills. And you know, if you were to ride side by side with someone, you kept the pressure on the pedals, they'd gas away from you up the hill and then they'd freewheel over the top and down and you'd actually catch them on the downhill with your zone too. So you're actually kind of riding similar speed for, you know, if someone was side by side for this kind of ride. But the person who's riding up and down all the time, one, they're gassing themselves and two, not getting the benefit of the session. So it's a double whammy where it's really not achieving as much as people think. But people think because they're doing these little efforts, they're probably gaining fitness. But that leads into the last point I want to make on this before we move on. It's that the question always is, well, I want to have fun. I'm doing this sport to have fun and I want to train with friends and family. And I love your answer on this. That's great. And there are certainly times when you can make it work if you analyze, you know, the risks of the session and who you're riding with or running with or training with. But you always say you will stop having fun when, after week six, like you just said, you're not improving and you're plateauing and you're stagnating because you're just doing the same thing week in, week out and you'll start to get frustrated. And we say, well, the program's there if you, if you want to do it and improve.

You can't have it both ways, can you? To a point. We want to do that. We want to have our cake and eat it, as they say. So yes, we want to encourage you to pick sessions where you want to be social and, and whether that's the recovery or zone two or the endurance with intensity or just your straight VO2 set, you can do that shared with a, with a group of people. Everybody should be riding their max efforts. But if you, if you do that consistently and you know you're just doing those sessions all the time, then at the end of the day you can't turn around and say, why aren't I improving? You know that you've got to select I want to be social and improve sort of, or I want to be social once a week and then do the proper program the other times and improve massively. And that's a decision you have to make. But you can't complain that you're not improving when you're doing the same sessions. When that's been explained to you that that's not the best way to get your self improvement. If you're not interested in being a better runner or a better swimmer or a better rider, then you don't have to worry about that because your goal isn't to improve. Your goal is just to go training. Your goal is just to be healthy and fit. So we're not talking about that type of athlete. We're talking about the athlete who comes on board because they want to run a good marathon, they want a good half marathon, they want to do an open water swim, or they want to do a Gran Fondo ride, or they want to do a massive triathlon. That's it really needs guidance and they want to be the best version of themselves on that day. So we're talking about those athletes who are really looking for improvement at a constant rate. And of course, as we know, we've talked about this in the podcast so much that that doesn't happen linearly. You know, you've got periods during a year where you've got highs and lows where you're coming off off a base or off a race or off an injury, off an illness. So you've got variations in your form. So, yeah, to get back to what shouldn't we be doing, we shouldn't be doing the same thing over and over again. And each session, like we've explained here, should have, you know, a real purpose about it.

There's a couple of times when it might work. And, you know, if there's a few athletes, which we've had, who are training for the same Gran Fondo and they need to be doing, you know, some hill efforts, then it might work out that they end up meeting up and they go ride together, you know, and they ride for half an hour out to a hill and they go do a climb four by 10 minutes at their own power. But once the main set starts, it's just completely, you're completely on your own. You're doing your own session, you're getting up the climb at your own power, your own wattage and recovering down, not waiting for anyone. You do the entire main set and then you can ride home together. And same thing with running. I definitely meet up with friends every so often. They'll say, what's your run this week? And I say, look, I'm doing these tempo intervals on Tuesday. Jump in if you want, but we'll warm up together, you know, have a, have a nice chat, warm up, do our drills. But then once the main starts, it's, you're on your own for the next half hour while you just focus on yourself. And I definitely don't want to be chatting in between that and then you cool down together and that's, that's a great way to catch up.

If you and I went training Jord, and you know, we started one of those two minute hill reps, you know, if I, if you felt bad and you want to ride beside me, you're not getting the value out of the session. You stay with me and I'm feeling bad because I'm slowing, you Down. So I'm actually not going to be able to finish the session because I'm riding the first couple of reps too hard. So, you know, you can't, unless you've got a twin who's got the same genes as you, you aren't going to be able to ride at your level on any of those sessions. It just can't work. You know, you are different physiology from the person next to you. They could be better or they're worse than you. So for you to try and do that session together is going to be. That's a no, no for us.

He used to kill us at athletics when we were in high school where, you know, we would be doing a set of 12, 2/ hundreds off 30 seconds rest. And, and the disparity of the group was, you know, five seconds across 200 meters sometimes and we were always going off the leaders recovery. And so when you were struggling at the back, you were getting 23, 24 seconds rest, they were getting the full 30 and towards the end you're just sl more and more and you're really just ruining the whole set because you're getting less and less rest. Going backwards even more and so then getting less rest. It's just an absolute disaster.

That's a great example, Jordan. The person who's getting the most benefit is the fastest runner because they're getting the full 30 second rest. Every other runner in that group is, is getting less rest. So it's a different session straight away, you know, which ironically it should be the other way around. It should be the faster runner should get less rest and the slower runners should get the appropriate rest to be fair.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of time on that point, but we really think it's important just to consider for your training program and how to get the most out of the enjoyment factor. But the improvement, they're the two things we really try and focus on and we really are trying to do both. But there's ways to get it right. So the next one is a really common question we get and it's very fair question. There's nothing wrong with this question, but you need to understand how to answer it and when it's appropriate. And it's should I be adding some run intensity into my program? Should I be running faster? I feel like I need to get faster on race day, so I should be. I feel like I should be running faster. We've spoken about this a lot in the podcast, but we really want to stress our principles here and when we do and don't do this.

Yeah, and it should be. We don't want to complicate these things. The premises that we work on for triathletes as compared to runners is a little bit different. Okay? We have to. We have to make that point because as a triathlete, we've got this opportunity to get our cardiovascular system at a really high level by swimming and riding really hard at high levels, high intensity, and therefore the pressure's off our running, because the cardiovascular system has no clue whether you're riding, running or swimming. It just knows that it's working hard, it's huffing and puffing at a higher level because you're pushing it. So as a triathlete, we would really divert our athletes away from the intensity as a runner, because the risk is so high from getting injured and not getting to the start line and not having the consistency that we strive for so much at Trivalo. And so it is different for a running program compared to a triathlon program. So we know that the cardiovascular system is getting stimulated so much from the swim and from the riding session. So therefore, we can be very casual about making the running sessions with any intensity. We can just concentrate on getting their musculoskeletal system have an ability to cope with the load, and that's just time on your feet. And so people think, I have to run fast, I have to ride fast enough to swim fast to get the value from that individual sport. Well, to a certain degree, that's true, but there's two different systems we're talking about. We're talking about, can your musculoskeletal system cope with the running load? And if you're really good at that and you never get injured, then fine, you're probably a candidate for being able to do some intensity. And, you know, I give the example of many of our athletes where they've been on the program for two or three years and they're all the time asking me, I don't seem to be doing any hard, hard, fast intervals. Am I ever going to get that? I really love doing intervals. That's what I used to do. And, you know, the first thing I'll say is, yeah, but you came to me because you were so injured all the time, you never actually got to train properly. And then, are you not improving as a runner? And they'd say, oh, yeah, I've knocked 2 or 3 minutes off my best 10k since I've been on the program. And I'd say, but you haven't done any intensity in the run, in the run program, have you? And it's just they have to stop and think about that for a minute and go, oh, you did right. I actually have improved without actually doing any fast, hard running and I'm not injured and I've been consistent. So they're the reasons why we would really stress that too much running intensity is, got so much risk about it. And if you can do some other intensity to make sure you're stimulating your cardiovascular system, then that's as good as, you know you need to do as a triathlete. But as a runner we, we have to actually implement some sort of running intensity. And, and you know, the, the duration of the sport also dictates how much intensity you need. Just, just like you said in your introduction to this second point, it's, it's, you know, a sprint triathlon definitely needs a little bit more intensity compared to an ironman. And so as an ironman, we're just trying to train our body for endurance to cope with a three or four or five hour run. And as a sprinter in triathlon, I'm talking about not as a 100 meter sprinter. You, you need your body to cope with a 5k which is anywhere between 15 minutes and 35 minutes for the best runner to the slowest runner. So that's where you should be focusing your, your intensity levels around those durations. And as a runner, you and is not in a triathlon situation where you're riding a bike for intensity or swimming for intensity. You do need to implement some sort of running intensity. And for us the biggest contributor to allowing that is to not get you to run fast on the track too much, but to get you to run up hills. And the injury is so less predictable on hill running compared to on a track where you're generating your own power and really pushing, pushing off the run phase. Whereas as a hill run you can't actually stride out that much, but your legs are really getting the feeling of strength and aerobic development. And I think that is a far less risky run to do than doing 8 by 400 on the track. And I would, over the years of coaching many runners who are not triathletes, their improvement rate has been so much higher that if they've done run hills, he'll hill run sessions rather than flat track 400. And even for my own, my own running career and you know, being able to run a low 30 minute 10k and a low 230 marathon, you know, I, I used to do a lot of track stuff and I would have this unfortunate calf injury that would keep rearing its ugly head. And the minute I stopped doing those intervals, I actually got my consistency back into my program and I was able to really step up my running times without doing track sessions. And that was kind of the aha moment for me as a coach was like, actually, I don't need these really fast track sessions. I'm actually going to get injured and I'm still running better with the hill reps than I were with the track session. So not only I've tested that on myself, but, you know, we've got multiple world champions in our group now who've done exactly that program and you know, without talking all the time about Tom Page. But Stevie Mack's done the same thing where, you know, he's just got really good as a runner. He can, he can run a, you know, low 30, 10k as well. And off the bike he's super strong because he's done lots of hill reps and he'll repeats and you know, he was susceptible to injuries as well, but we've got around that. So. So they're the sessions you should be avoiding because of the risk factor. That's, that's probably what the biggest point we're trying to make here with. What shouldn't you be doing for intensity and running?

Yeah, I think the. We really have to define what we mean by intensity because the goal for triathlon is to be able to run at your race pace, you know, at a far. At your race pace. We really. I want to avoid the words fast and speed when talking about running. Cause triathlon is just not a fast or speedy sp. Um, and so in training we want to push ourselves and test just above that race pace and practice that, you know, off the bike. And there's a time and place for, for running at that race pace for extended periods or slightly quicker. Um, but just think about if you're doing a VO2 max session on the bike and you're getting your heart rate right up there and you're doing those sessions where you're. You're tasting blood a little bit and you're gasping for air. Now the risk is quite low in terms of injury. It's just very hard training. If you were to try and do that running, just think about what that would take for you to get to that level. So. And how fast you'd have to be turning over your legs and just the risk is so much higher and we just don't want to even go there. And I think we really Forget how much of an endurance sport triathlon is. And the word sprint is so misleading and Olympic in terms of the distances. The sprint triathlon is generally minimum an hour. It's still an hour and a half. You know, that is an endurance event. That is an endurance sport. Anything more than three minutes, five minutes is really, you're in your aerobic system and a 5K fresh flat out is like you said, 15 to 35 minutes. The actual triathlon event is an endurance event. And so you have to remember that, that just because it's called a sprint doesn't mean you're out there sprinting hard. And we have to remember that we are not Hayden Wild. We're not getting off the bike in the super tri series in the super league and running 240 pace, flat out off the bike. You know, we're not Matt Hauser at the world triathlon events averaging 255pace for 5km off the bike. You know, that is fast. Those guys need to be training speed and pace. They need to be on the track running fast and hard and because that is flying. Right. But we're just not at that level and we're just not going to be running that intensity. So look, if you are a sprinter, Olympic athlete, it is a little bit different because you do have to train yourself for your 5 or 10k paces. And like you said for half Ironman or Ironman, once you're getting really ready for an Ironman or marathon, um, sure. We use 5 and 10k markers to test your overall fitness and where you're at. But we're just not interested in your 10k PB, you know, because you're not going to be near that pace in a marathon. In the Ironman, you know, we're interested in can you sustain a pace that's, that's relative for your, what your ability should be able to do at the end of an Ironman and that's what the training is all geared to.

I, I totally agree, Jordan. And you know, if you're doing those interval sessions on a track, you know, at VO2 level where you're really running hard, two hundreds and four hundreds, just how long is it going to take you to recover from those sessions? You know, you could be sore for two or three days and not be able to do the bike session properly the next day. So, so that recovery thing gets overlooked. You know, great. I did, I went and did those hard intervals but I'm exhausted for the next two days and I can't actually do the rest of the program. Because that type of running is really, really too hard for an overall general triathlon program. And not only is it the things we've talked about where risk and it's not beneficial and it's not appropriate, a lot of the time we talk about anything we do in training has to replicate what's going to happen on race day. And if you were trying to run on race day, two hundreds in 30 seconds, then sure, we would do that in your program. But that's not a requirement. And so you've got that aspect and then you've got the fact that it takes so long to recover from these really hard running sessions. So that is another consideration you have to point out when you're talking about intensity.

The third type of session we want to avoid in your training program is not a specific type but a specific style. And what we mean by that is how quickly do you resume training sessions or resume your training program after a race or after any interruption. And this is just a common mistake we see and we really think athletes need to just get this right and in terms of their programming and stop training like normal after any sort of interruption that comes in the form of a race or sickness or injury. And take us through why this is so important and why, why you think athletes don't get this right.

There's so many things that I want to list. One is mentally, if you've done a big campaign up to your Ironman or even an Olympic or your a race could have been a sprint triathlon or it could have been a 5k that you've been training for or a marathon, you actually need to take a little mental break from the rigors of the day in, day out program. And that gives you that refreshed feeling when you've had this little rest from the structure of Tuesday I have to do the hill reps, Thursday I have to do tempo intervals, you know, steady state on Saturday and then my long endurance run. So a couple of weeks or days or depending on what event you've done, the duration of the event and the intensity event determines how much recovery you need. So, so you've got that fact that mentally you just need to give your brain a little bit of a rest. Of course, physically, you know, you, you need to allow your body to absorb that race and that load from that, from that campaign that you've had. Whether it's been a 16 or 26 or year long campaign, you really need. Just like we have a deload week in the middle of our blocks, we need to Have a little freshening up period to allow the body to absorb the training load. And without recovery, you're not going to improve. So if you just keep hammering the body the whole time, you are not going to reap the benefits of it if it comes from injury. And we're talking now away from the events and from the training load, we're talking about injury or sickness. You know, they are both very similar, but they are both very different as well. If you've been sick for eight days or six days or two weeks, and some people been sick for two months over the last three or four years, we've experienced all of you, we've all experienced that since COVID where, you know, sicknesses aren't just a couple of days anymore. Sometimes it's been weeks where people are quite unwell and so you just can't resume your program as if nothing has happened. For example, if you've been sick for two or three weeks and you've hardly trained, let's say your FTP was 200 watts and you resuming your next training session, where you should actually start with a recovery ride and an easy run. And you should be doing that for four, five, six days. And your heart rate will be really elevated because your body's still coping with the stress of being unwell. But remember, if you haven't trained, do you think that your FTP will still be at 200? It's more than likely have dropped 10% over that period. So the minute you start to do your recovery ride, you should be actually allowing and adjusting your power to the fact that you're not the athlete you were three weeks ago. And I can give you 100 scenarios. If you've had four days off, that's going to have less impact than four weeks. Obviously, if you've had four days off, our advice is always saying start easy for the first two or three days and try to give yourself four days of easy training. If you've had four days off before you start to do something like, you know, 90% effort or 100% or above that, how can you be above 100%? I'm talking about FTP. So we would really think about trying to make sure each athlete has an understanding of how sick they were and how long it's going to take them to get back to normal 100% type training where they're feeling 10 out of 10. And so we use that measuring stick of how do you feel each day? If you feel 6 or 7 or 8 out of 10, you should only be training at that percentage 60 or 70 or 80% of your threshold or your to feel it should be something around that number. And if you feel back to normal but your heart rate's still elevated, you still shouldn't be doing intensity. You should wait till your body and your heart rate tells you that you're ready for that. So it's super important that you are listening to how you feel and that's for sickness. So there's going to be a variety of answers depending on how long you were sick for. But the key thing we're trying to say is you don't resume your normal program until you feel your heart rate's coping. That could be your resting heart rate that's not elevated anymore and that you feel more like 10 out of 10, just health wise. And if you're feeling a little bit foggy still and you're still six or seven out of ten, you should not be anywhere near intensity. And you can't resume that program if you're injured. That is quite different. You know, injuries generally aren't two or three days of injuries. It's pretty unlikely that if you got an injury you would only be out for two or three days. It is possible that you might get a really minor strain. And again, you can't just resume. If it's a running injury, you can't resume running. You may need to take a big step backwards and concentrate on rehabilitating the injury rather than resuming running. And that could take two weeks for a three or four day injury. If you've strained your Achilles, you know, we don't want you to stop training, but we want you to reduce your training load on the Achilles. So, you know, it could be a return to running over two or three weeks. But if you've had a major injury like a knee operation or a torn hamstring, where it's four to six weeks or a torn calf, these are all examples of you just can't resume running until you've actually rehabilitated the injury. Whether it's the calf or the hamstring or the knee where you're strong enough so that you won't re injure it. And so going back to resuming your running program when you've got an injury like that is, is just a disaster waiting to happen. You will repeat the injury. And believe me, I've done it many times. I think I've had 30 comebacks from a calf injury over my journey. And it's just the same stupid repeated story of, you know, thinking it feels okay. And not doing any rehab, not getting that. That weakness, because the injury is caused from a weakness in the muscle somewhere. And so you need to fix that weakness before you can actually expect that it won't happen again. And so therefore, you should not resume your normal running program until you've fixed the issue that caused the calf injury or the hamstring, whether it's a running form issue or whether it's the shoes you're wearing, or whether the muscle just isn't strong enough to cope with the load that you're doing, or it's a technical thing. So there's so many answers to that one thing. Don't resume training sessions or the program. It's based on what the scenario situation is.

One of the crucial points you made there, though, I think, is that it's almost more of a mental thing than physical. Sure. There's the physical limitations of coming back too early that you need to be aware of. And on. On the bigger scale, when it's a big injury or something, I think it's a lot more obvious to people. They're very aware that they should take their time, but it's. It's more the acute stuff than the stuff that's, you know, they're out for a couple of days or maybe a week or. Again, we. We really speak about the race here and how quickly you should return to training, but you do need to give yourself a mental break in these positions. An example I want to use is I spoke last episode about the fact that I was actually so sore from a bike race, which you wouldn't believe, that I couldn't train all week, and I just happened to be talking to a friend about running on the weekend, and it just took me all week to just feel motivated to train again after just a really tough mental race. And they actually just said to me, they said that when they're. When they're running consistently, they feel good, but when they stop for a bit, they just find it so hard to get back. And they said, do you ever struggle with motivation to run? And I was like, absolutely. I'm someone that absolutely loves running, and I've done it my whole life. But sometimes when you just take a bit of a break and you just think about the training load you were doing or how hard it was, it just feels like a big mountain to climb, to get started again. And even for me, I find that the first run back, if it feels like it's going to be too hard, it's actually really struggle to get going. And what Helps me is just going for 30 minutes to start, just super easy recovery run. And I always find, and I found this on the weekend, just that first 30 minute run, you're 15 minutes in and suddenly you feel back and you feel good again. And it's just taking that pressure off. But you have to help yourself win that mental game and not expect to just jump straight back into peak efforts. And so to make it easier, you know, if you return to training, having those two or three days of easy training just makes it easier for you to win mentally like you were talking about, because they're just achievable sessions and you can get them done and you start feeling really good and you get that consistency back and you start remembering why you like training and you're over that hurdle of actually getting training again. If you rock up, do a fear two sessions straight back those 30 30s or whatever look like at the biggest mountain and it just feels sickening to even think about and you just don't even want to do it. And so you have to just really be conscious of helping yourself win that mental game as well as getting it physically right in terms of what your body's ready for.

Yeah, tiny steps, isn't it? Give yourself a chance to get that dopamine release of satisfied, completed session. And don't underestimate how valuable that is as compared to, I've got this hard VO2 set and you fail it, you actually feel worse. Not only mentally, but physically you are as well. So take small steps when you're coming back from returning or resuming to a program, just think about that. Small little wins will give you this great motivation mentally. And obviously it's giving your body the physical start and slow build, gradual build that we're professing you, you think about.

Yeah, the last point we want to make is don't do any training session without a purpose. Really, every single session, no matter what zone it's supposed to be in, has a goal. Even if it's a coffee ride, it should have a goal. And that doesn't mean that every session has to have some robotic structure and there's no room for flexibility or freedom or for just free riding or running or swimming. But it just means you do have to understand what is the purpose, goal of the session and what am I trying to get out of this?

But exactly what you said, the free ride, you know, that is you go and have fun, ride as hard as you like or as easy as you like, that's still got a goal and purpose. That's Ride as hard as you like or as easy as you like. That's the goal and purpose. But it's a free, fun ride. So that is still having structure, but it's giving you. Okay, Saturday is a free ride. Sunday, I need to stay in zone two and not above it. Monday I need to stay in zone one and not above it. And you've got the freedom to ride any. Anywhere in those zones, as long as it's in those zones. And that, that one you mentioned where, you know, go for it, ride as hard as you can. That's still got structure, but it's, but it's got a purpose and it's, it's got a freedom about it. But you've, you know, your goal is to have fun today and, and attack the guys in the bunch and, and hit the hills hard and see if you can drop everybody. That's still a purpose and that's the point we're trying to make. Doesn't matter whether you're doing a coffee ride where you're hardly even pedaling and you spend more time at the coffee shop. The purpose is recovery and you're achieving that even though it's not a structured session where you, you know, it does have structure because it's asking you to stop yourself from riding outside of zone one. So there's the structure, but the purpose and the goal is just to take it easy. And so if you don't think about that enough, you're just going to be doing the same training every day. And I know that most people dread the fact of I actually don't know what to do tomorrow. I think I should do a hard session. But today was supposed to be zone 2, but didn't end up being like that because I rode with my mates and ended up being hard. Then I'm confused about what I should be doing tomorrow. So straight away, they've lost the goal and purpose of the structure of the week and day to day. So it's really confusing to people to understand what am I going to do tomorrow? Then they haven't thought about the day after or the weekend. They're just thinking about today. I'll just, oh, the guys wrote hard, so I'll do that. And then all of a sudden you've done that three times in a row. And because you don't have a thought process about what am I doing when I wake up tomorrow, this is what I'm going to be disciplined to do. And people go, I don't want to do that. But. But the answer to Me is, but you've asked us to improve. And so if you don't want to do that, well, you can't say that, you know, I want to improve, because you're asking to get the improvement without changing anything. And that's why it's so important that you understand there is a goal and purpose for every session. And at the end of the day, that's what's going to get you the improvement, where you're not just repeating the same session day after day. We know that that will improve you generally, but it'll get to a point where that won't happen and you'll actually stay the same and stagnate. And so the goal on purpose is a really good reminder that I'm wanting to be a better version of myself every time I'm racing against my mates or doing a training session that I did two weeks ago. Now I'm a better version of what I did then.

It comes back to the very first question we asked in part one, and it's what you said that athletes are always asking. How do I get the most out of my week? How do I structure my training week to get the most out of myself? And to do that, one of the answers is, think really critically when you're planning your week ahead. Okay, what session have I got coming up each day this week? What do I need to do to get the goal and purpose of that session? Where do I need to do it? How am I going to train? What location am I going to do? What course am I going to use? What power am I going to aim for? This is why knowing your data is so important. What heart rate am I aiming for? What are my zones for this session? And I think I want to bring it back to Stephen Sala's brilliant point that he brought up on our podcast when he said, um, essentially we have all this data and this knowledge and these training zones, but what the body doesn't know, all that the body just knows. At the end of the day, was that a hard stress on the body or was an easy stress on the body? And you can almost break down the sessions into that. And we want to use a lot of data to try and figure that out. But he's going, you just have to be really clear. Is that is today an easy day on the body or is it a hard day? And how are you going to achieve that? And I really like, you know, understanding that when planning your week.

Yeah, couldn't be. Couldn't be made more simpler, you know, and even if It's a medium stress. You know that list. You wake up the next day knowing, and that's part of the planning and preparation is knowing what's going to happen on Thursday, which will affect what you do on Monday, which will affect what you do on Saturday. And if you haven't thought that through, then you're just, you're just living in the moment all the time. And that's, that's not what a good, you know, eight month program does, you know. Yes, we talk about doing the sessions in the moment properly. That's different to I'm just gonna, oh, it says I'm gonna do a high stress on the body today, I'm just gonna max out on it. And then for three days you can't do anything because you're that exhausted. Well, that's actually not contributing to, you know, you being able to back up again. So that's a bad idea to do that session that way. And so they're the things we're trying to prevent here is the sessions you shouldn't be doing. And even though it has a goal and purpose of high stress, you've gone way too far and you've got to be in control of that each day. And some people say, well, that's very limiting. But it isn't because consistency is still the biggest contributor to improved performance than the big hero sessions. And if someone can show me data that that's not true, then I'll change my mind and we'll start coaching differently. But this is what works. And so we're trying to give you this advice so that you can implement it into your daily life and think about these things which are going to make you a better athlete, which is going to make you happy because you are improving. And that's the bottom line.

That's all the notes for the sessions to avoid or the styles of sessions to avoid. And we did promise that we want to talk about the absolute best training session you can do. And because there is a key standout that we do believe that if you do this repeatedly you would be, it is one of the most valuable you can do. And this doesn't mean the best session, you should always do it every single time. But it is the most valuable. And so, dad, the big reveal here is, and the answer here is a testing session. Is a testing session, a time trial or a race that is the absolute best training session. It is the most specific to exactly what your body is required to do on race day to get the best result. And there's a reason we do it regularly, but there's a reason we don't do it all the time. And the reason we do it regularly is because it's one of the best sessions you can do. And it just gives us so much benefit. And the reason we don't do it all the time is it's also the hardest training session to do. It's the most taxing mentally and physically. And so our final point here is that is absolutely something you need to be including in your program. But you can't do it too much because if you overdo it, then you're not going to get the variety. You need to get the fitness, the benefits and improvements that you want. And you're going to be too taxed. But you absolutely need that specificity. Right?

I couldn't agree more. It's been a long wait to find out what that best session is. And look, we are big believers in if you're a competitive beast. And the majority of people who are listening to this podcast, they're wanting to find any 1 percenters to make themselves better. That's why they're listening. And we're trying to give you that advice. And if you do, one thing is find as much competition as you can over a period of a four or five week. So you could argue that, okay, I could do that every day with my bunch, couldn't I just find as much competition as I can? That's not what we're saying. We're saying do the training so you can prepare yourself for a testing situation, whether it's a race or you're doing a solo test where you're trying to measure the improvements you've been making over the previous four or six months or four or six weeks. And so without that testing, you're not really going to know. And the testing could be the hardest bunch ride that you do in a four week period. Okay, today I'm going to, I know the route. Today has got a five minute climb and a, and this and that, and I know the guys in the bunch and I know where I should be in relation to where I sit in that bunch. And so today's my big test. I want to see if I can move up a position in the bunch. And that in itself is a test. That's, that's you measuring yourself against what you know is the common theme around where your form is against other riders. It's not a very data driven test, but it's a really good one for perspective. And then you go to the next level, which is actually doing some sort of run test or swim test or riding test where you. You're measuring your pace as a swimmer and a runner, or your power as a rider or your actual speed as a rider compared to what you did four or six weeks ago. And it's a great measure of how well to execute. If you don't execute well, doesn't matter what form you're in, you can still blow the whole session. So the more times you get to pin a number on whether it's a B or a C or a D race, that's going to give you the best bang for your buck to improve your ability when it comes to your big race that you're used to putting yourself under pressure to perform, using data as your guide. So that's actually what we're trying to get better at. Most people who are on this journey, on this podcast, and we've got lots of people been listening for years, they want to improve. They're trying to find ways to improve their performance. And this is one of the things that people are scared of. They're avoiding. They know that it's good for them, but they still can't get their brain around the fact that it's a test. But I've got this anxiety around it. I think we talked about in one of Tom's podcasts where he was a rower and he raced every single weekend. So the anxiety of testing for him was just not there. He's just used to putting himself under pressure every Saturday. And, and they're the things that we want to get you used to. It's a great training session at high intensity, but it's also getting your body and your brain used to measuring yourself. And we don't want to fail. So that's why we've got this anxiety. But you are in control of that. You can decide whether you start too hard or fade or whether you start right below the tipping point. And you're in charge of dictating how you do that so when it comes to race day, you don't make those mistakes of blowing up. And I think that's. That's a really big motivator. I have told the story many times, and for those who haven't heard it, I did four weeks of FTP testing every Tuesday for four weeks in a row. You know, Pet was saying, are you mad to do an FTP test every but the reason I did it. And if you understand the reason, you can, you can then make, make it sound like it's fair and reasonable thing to do a I knew it was a hard training session. That was the first thing. So I was going to do five by five, that's at threshold, so that's 25 minutes. And I decided to do a 20 minute with no stops. So that's what an FTP test. And so by doing that each week, I was learning how to execute and I was learning where my number was. I was doing it because I wanted to find out, not after four weeks of training. I wanted to find out after seven days of training whether my. Because I started so low, at a low base, I've gone from 270 watts to 180 watts. That was the reason I wanted to do this. So after week one at 180 watts, I wanted to see whether I should be still training the next seven days at 180. And I decided to test myself. Guess what it was 200 watts. So I'd already gone up 15 or 20 watts. So the next seven days I trained at 200. Then I did another test the week after and it was 217. Then the next test, it was 220something. So if I'd have just done the next three weeks at 180, I would have been robbing myself of the improvement. And so that's another reason I wanted to know, am I writing more power? And if I am, I want to train accurately. And so there's a, that's a really good mindset around. Oh, geez, FTP tests are hard. I don't care how hard they are. I want to know what my number to train to is. And I'm not going to lose another day's training at the wrong number. And it's a great high intensity training session. And I can learn how to execute so well week in, week out. So they're unbelievably good reasons why you should be always asking yourself, do I need to test myself? Am I at the right numbers? And you know, am I, am I getting the best. We talk about sessions to do and what not to do. If you aren't testing yourself regularly, you are not going to train accurately. So without anything we've said in these two podcasts with the best sessions and the worst sessions, if you have the incorrect data, it doesn't mean anything. Those sessions, those sessions are all with topics we've talked about, are completely useless because we're training to the wrong data.

Yeah, I guess the summary of the testing is we don't train to train, we train to race. And if there's no races available, then we test and the testing is a replacement, but when there's races available, we do that. And obviously you can over race. And if you're doing too much races and not getting any training in, then that's kind of useless as well. But this is, yeah, the point we really wanted to finish with. So if you'd like help implementing the right training sessions to do or not to do for you and yourself and guarantee your improvement, you can go to our website, trivellocoaching.com and as a reminder, we do coach athletes internationally from anywhere in the world. And we have that guarantee that if you don't improve your FTP in the first block of training with us, then the coaching is on us. Thank you very much for listening, as always, and we'll see you on the next episode. Morning. Keep on, Keep water.