5 Do’s and Don'ts For Your Training This Year

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. There are approximately 1.8 million medical articles published worldwide each year. That is a lot of formally peer reviewed journals and this is one of the coolest but sometimes frustrating parts about sports science is how quickly it's evolving. The more we are learning about the human body, the more efficient our training can be. But sometimes this means we have to throw out old beliefs and adopt new ways of training. Here at Trivello, we're constantly challenging our own methods to see if they still hold up or if we need to adjust. So if you're training this year, here are five key do's and don'ts we think are super important to get right. Before we get into that, a reminder of our unwritten rule for athletes. If you enjoy our podcasts and find them helpful, this the best thing you can do for us is share the podcast on your social media or to an endurance friend who you might think likes it. As always, this episode is brought to you by our proud sponsor, Giant Australia, for all your bike training and racing needs. Ride life. Ride Giant Dad. Welcome back to another episode, our normal opening segment. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jordan. I'm looking forward to this episode and my gratitude is getting perspective and guidance, especially from you. And don't put you on the spot or embarrass you at all, but you are really good at identifying my mental state. And for those of you who are new to the podcast, we've been sort of covering my journey from a back operation seven months ago and you know, I think I need to be transparent and say that there are a lot of periods where I'm struggling and I think having some guidance and I'm really good at giving, giving advice to others as a coach and sometimes I need that guidance from an outside perspective. And you've been really fantastic at doing that and giving me reality checks and really almost asking me to pull my head in about being frustrated about not getting the improvement as quickly as I want and I need to take my own medicine, which I'm giving out quite freely about. Things take time and you know, you can't expect to be where you were in such a short period of time, but I do expect that and that's probably where I get the good guidance from you as to say, well that's Unrealistic. And you wouldn't agree with that sentence if you were giving that advice to someone else. You need to take that on board yourself. And I think it's really great. I'm really grateful for you continually pulling me up and saying, stop being so hard on yourself. Give yourself more time. You will get there. It's just a matter of keep working away. And, you know, but, you know, the frustration is there from, from my point of view and my expectation is that I could do this quicker, but the reality is I have to go through the process and trust in the process. Like we tell so many athletes that we coach and I just really need to. Yeah, I want to say out loud that, yeah, I'm really grateful for your guidance and it's really helped.

That's a great one. Yeah. It's so important for people to have an objective view. And we're actually going to talk about this as one of the topics in the episode, but to get an objective view of where they're at because we're just so bad at objectively analyzing ourselves. And one element I would want to add to that is that for you, we've spoken about personally that it's been nine months or so from the surgery and you're expecting mentally to be 100% back and it's just not going to be the case. You're probably 85, 90% there, but that 10% is really frustrating. But it's combined with your. Your own worst enemy as a coach. And this is pretty funny because the, one of the things, one of the areas you're comparing yourself is our time trials. And this time trial we've been doing for six plus years and you're a little bit off the mark of where you want to be. But there's this crazy element of a lot of the tribal athletes are performing better than we've ever seen before. You know, previously we would have one athlete right under 23 minutes for this specific course and the other top eight to 12 are riding around that range. And so it's. This funny comparison is a thief of joy. It's like if you're slightly off, plus the top end of athletes is way ahead. You just feel like you're so far off. But when you look at the data, it's like, well, far out. We should actually be proud that the program's working so well, that the athletes are performing at the highest level. And these are a lot of athletes that have been with us for four, five, six years that are performing these best ever times and they're four, five, six years older. So it's really exciting on one hand, but it's almost like you're making your own bed by coaching these athletes so well and putting them ahead of yourself.

Yeah. And look, it's just human nature that you want to. You want to compare how you're going with others and how you compare with yourself. And I think that's my frustration is that, you know, I can see what I did before the operation and, and, you know, I'm getting closer, but I'm, you know, that 10, 15% seems to be so difficult to get to get nearer to. And I've just. Yeah, as you keep telling me, just keep doing the work and gradually you'll get there.

Yep. Yeah, for sure. My gratitude is. I'm actually grateful that gratitude itself is becoming, and I'm going to say, quote, unquote, cool. Um, we. We definitely didn't invent gratitude, and we're not the first ones to do it on a podcast. But I was listening to another podcast recently and they introduced a gratitude segment on their podcast, and I just loved that. And I just love hearing that. I thought, oh, that's what we do. And it is. Honestly, when we started it, we're kind of like, oh, this is kind of a funny, A bit of a funny thing to include on a podcast. It's a bit of out there. It's a little bit vulnerable for us to say things that we're truly grateful for. We really, you know, push ourselves to just say what's really happening in life and not try and shirk around it or say something surface level. But it really does make a big difference, and that's why we do it. And we really believe in the message of, you know, something to help your own mental health, especially in endurance sports, where there can be a lot of challenges. And so I just have. I'm seeing it more and more, and it's a. It's a widely spread message and I just love seeing that. So that's really quite nice.

Yeah, I have to agree with you there, Jordan. Look, being vulnerable is really hard for humans, and I think it's a really helpful tool because there's people who, when they see vulnerability, what do they want to do? They want to help you. And if you don't show any vulnerability and keep it boxed up into your own mind and not express your feelings, then you're not going to get the help that you probably could get if you just opened up a bit. And. And you know what? I. My gratitude there was showing vulnerability that I'm, you know, I've got anxiety about not improving. And this, you know, this gratitude segment has been brilliant. And yeah, sure, I know that there's a lot of people listening. You know, we've got people listening over a period. So you're actually. I'm conscious of who I'm talking to out there. And, you know, that's not easy for a person who's grown up their whole life of keeping things to themselves and only in the last sort of five or six years of really identify with, you know, it's better to let your feelings out. And I think this gratitude section has absolutely made me a better person because I've exposed my vulnerability, whereas before, I would always protect that.

Yeah. Yep. It's the new age. Moving on to the next segment of the podcast, which is what has caught our attention. And just some cycling news. We're super excited about the cycling season coming up for three Grand Tours are going to be epic. The Giro is stacked with great riders. The Tour de France, you know, with Yambo Visma splitting up Rock, which going to Bora, there's some really exciting things happening. But what's been happening right now is the cyclocross season has been going on and Matthew Vanderpoel has just been on an absolute tear, and he's won 14 races in a row. And we're out. Van Aert just cannot beat him. And it's, it's been hard to watch how he's just not good enough. Vanderpoel just keeps riding away from him. And these cyclo races are just pure raw power. It's, it's, they're so fun and cool to watch. And over the weekend, we're at. Finally, he paid his dues and he got his win and he broke Vanderpoel's win streak over at a wide range of circumstances. They both crashed, they both had mechanicals. Wow. Lost his seat and still managed to win at the end. And I just love that persistence. It would be so frustrating for Vayner to turn up and get beaten by Vanderpoel over and over and over again. And this is big joke about him that he, he's, he's second place, man. You know, he's come. He's starting to come second more and more. And, yeah, just to have the mental fortitude to stick at it and come through and get the win would be so, so satisfying.

Yeah. And mind games play a big role in it. And, you know, this is one hour of the hardest riding you can possibly do. It's just one hour threshold writing and there's very, very few times do you have a down period. You might get three or four seconds into a, into a downhill corner and then it's full gas out of the corner in and trying to hold balance. If you haven't watched any cyclocross of the World cup stuff, you know, get on YouTube and, and have a look at it because I just can't stop watching it. And I actually watched the whole race from start to finish because I wanted to see how things evolved in the race. Because if you get the highlights, you don't actually see, you know, at one, at one point Peacock was 25 seconds behind Van Aert and van der Poel and you know, within the next lap he was on the front. He caught up and went round them all and was on the front. And then, you know, two laps later he's got, he's gotten separated again and just by, you know, some little minor mistakes here and there, you can lose 5, 10 meters and you've lost the wheel. And, and so no different to road racing. If you lose the wheel, you're in the wind on your own and, and you're getting the competition of being in the group that, that can ride away. And there were sections there where there was a long straigh hill section and the camera work was magnificent. And it watched Vanderpoel who was, you know, he dropped his chain so he was way back. He was, you know, 18th, 20th position and he passed in that section of eight or 10 seconds. He passed eight people at a rate that looked like they were amateurs. And these are really good bike riders. And he went from 18th to 8th. It was phenomenal to watch and, and then to see Wout Van Aert with literally two minutes to go, be conservative. And he'd been going over these two little jumps, just bunny hopping them the whole race. Out of the 10 laps he did it nine times and then on the last lap I'm sure he thought, well I'm not going to risk it, I could crash on this, I'll just jump over, jump off my bike and jump over. And they do this so fast that they barely lose a second. He had, I think he had 10 second lead on second place. And as he put his bike back down, he stumbled and fell and trying to get back on his bike, he knocked his seat off and then tried to ride the last minute and a bit with the guy now only literally 2, 3 seconds behind him with no seat. So he sat down on the seat post I don't know how you can ride sitting on the seat post.

I was cringing.

It was, it was unbelievable. And, and you know, of course van der Poel had trouble as well and he lost places. So it looked like the first, second and third places were all done and dusted with two laps to go. And this is what cyclocross is so exciting because that's not what happened. So many things happened in those two laps that, you know without boring you, but it was just so, so mesmerising to see different scenarios happen and how people responded. It was a great, great race.

Yeah, yeah, it really was. I don't know how Wyatt puts that power to finish that last minute. He's probably pushing450,500 watts to maintain the lead. I don't know how you do that seated with no seat. It's just truly ridiculous. One last thing I wanted to touch on before we get into the main topic is I just read a stat this week which really highlighted to me how much the definition of beginner athlete and average athlete is really skewed because we're constantly looking at pro level performance. You know, the top athletes in the world sharing their training, sharing their journeys, sharing their numbers. We see the top end age groupers and really skew our mindset of our own abilities. And did you know that the top 10% of 5 kilometer times is the top 10%? So the best 10% of runners they're 5k times. For females it's 28 minutes average and for males it's 23 minutes. So a lot of people would be comparing to people that can run, you know, 4 minute K pace or 4:30 and run 20 to 22 and a half minutes for a 5K. But that's the top 10% of athletes, you know. And so if you're below that, you know, your mentality might be a bit skewed and say I'm way off the mark, but you're still in that 90% that's not in that can't run that fast. So you're very much in the majority. And I can't remember exactly off the top of my head what the actual average was. I think it was around 32 and 36 minutes is an average 5k. So once again, if you're just below that, you're still right up there. Yeah, I just think that's really important to think about. Just making sure. We talked about comparison early, but making sure that you're not comparing to the wrong things or comparing yourself to very.

Top level Athletes, the majority of the population is the thing that we're comparing against here. And look, there has been a huge running boom and we were specifically talking about 5k times here. And you know, 15 years ago there wouldn't be a lot of people doing 5ks or 10k runs. They would, you know, there would be more spectators than what's happening now. I think there's been a resurgence in people getting active and you know, there's still a long way to go in the western society of the population being so unfit. But you know, the 5K park run I think has been such an ingenious thing to have created. And it's a real credit to those volunteers who turn up each week to make sure the park runs that are running around a lot of the countries around the world. And for those who don't know that a ParkRun is a 5K organized event by only volunteers and they have this great website. You should get on and have a look at the website if you haven't had a look at it. And they are providing an environment for people to run. And the majority of the people are probably running between 30 to 45 minutes for 5K in these park runs. Sure. There's guys who are and girls who are running 15, 16, 17, 18 minutes. And as you've just mentioned, they're in the 1% of the people who are in these events. And it's really that, you know, we used to have an advertising campaign back in the 80s of Norm getting off the chair. There's this big guy drinking beer and he get off the chair and just the ad was saying life, be in it, just go out and do something. And this is an example of that. And I think the percentage, George, is skewed because the population has decided to go and do 5k runs. So I think if you looked 5 or 10 years ago, that percentage would.

Be.

A lot faster times.

Yeah, it's just a reminder, don't compare yourself to the top 1%. Same as we said at the start, really the person you should be comparing yourself is to yourself. So whatever time you do, and we try to say this beginners all the time is whatever time you do, that's your time and that's your goal to improve that. So on that note, let's get into some of the do's and don'ts of training that we really think you should be focusing on this year. And these are based around trends we're seeing in athletes right now from pro athletes, from age group athletes, mistakes. We're seeing These are things that are really important to just stay focused on this year and, and really get right. So we'll go one for one. So the first do this is we really want you to understand where to weight your effort properly. So really making sure that there's a lot of noise out there and you can get lost in a lot of the noise. You know, there's so many things you could be doing. But we want to bring it back to the basics. We want to go that frequency of training, getting your body used to training repetitively, getting used to the consistency is more important than getting the exact intensity right or getting all the exact 1 percenters right or every little marginal gain that you can find in terms of your equipment or bike or what exact piece of nutrition should you have 25 minutes before the race, or your exact caffeine intake before a training session, that kind of thing. They're all great things to use, improve on for performance, but just bring it back a little bit and just go if you really want to spend it, you want to spend your time and effort weighted to the things that have the biggest impact. And that's for example, the frequency and consistency of training.

Yeah, and you know, we have often talked about frequency, duration and intensity as the three components of, of fitness and how you can grow and improve. And really if you just concentrated on making your training a habit and, and, and really got rid of intensity and got rid of duration as the priority and just made the habit of training your goal, then regardless of how long or how hard you train, you will start to improve. And then once you get that habit formed, and we've heard many times from many experts that 30 days make, make a habit. And I'm, I'm actually doing this myself. I'm trying to get, you know, consecutive days of, of of doing some exercise that's, that's different to, to riding a bike. Um, and I think that that's one of the things you could just be doing simply is just to think about, make this training a habit and aim to do something. And look, the duration of the effort and the intensity of the effort, they're quite irrelevant if you're trying to get that habit formed. And it could be as long as it's something to do with 15 or 20 minutes, that's actually going to enable you to keep turning up the next day. And then you can add some duration and intensity down the track. But just start with the simple stuff and as you said, trying not to reinvent the wheel and something like the example we talked about many times is Steve Montaguetti was just doing similar sessions throughout his whole career for 20, 25 years with variations in intensity and duration. But he just based his whole program around the same Monday, same Tuesday, all the way through Sunday. And of course there were slight variations in that. But you know, regularly he would do monafart lek on a Tuesday and, and have variations in that depending on where, where he was in the year. But, but they're the things that you, you just don't try to, to over complicate things and, and therefore you can, and you can get your mindset on. Just the one thing that we're trying to do is stay frequently training consistently.

Yeah, I think this, it's really important to note this isn't just for beginners. This is not. We're really aiming this at more advanced triathletes where we see this mistake a lot, where they think that they know enough about training now or they've had enough experience that, you know, it's like, give me the best stuff, give me the more complicated stuff. And it's like, well, no, we see a lot of athletes that are really good at training consistently for short bursts and then get really inconsistent. So you've got to look at it over an entire training block. You know, they'll get really motivated and they'll train really well for two or three weeks or six weeks. But then they have interruptions for one, two or three weeks and they're the times it's really important to do what you're saying and go when it's, you know, when the inconsistent, you're at risk of being inconsistent. That's where it's so important to keep that habit up. That's where it's so important just to get something done and just go back to the goal of frequency and consistency. Because a lot of more experienced athletes go, well, if I'm not going to do a proper session, it's not worth it. They fall into that mindset trap. A little bit of going, I know how to train well. I know how to do really good VO two almost complicated sessions and you're at risk of falling trapped to the mindset of, well, if it's not going to be a super effective session, then I might not do it. It's not worth it. So, yeah, this really applies to experienced athletes as much as beginner athletes. So let's take to the first don't of the episode and don't for the year. And this is quite specific to swim training and swim sessions. But we're Just really pushing more and more for swim training to be weighted more towards technique training rather than just getting to the pool and repeating the same sessions. Because that's going to be the difference between actually becoming a faster swimmer.

Yeah. The technique is, no doubt about it. If you can really identify areas that you're not being efficient in your stroke and work on those in your training. That's the thing we're trying to say here. Be conscious that I'm going to the pool or I'm going to swim in the ocean and I'm going to be thinking about my stroke rather than thinking about the intensity of the session. Sure, the session's important, but if you don't set aside time in your session to do drills or stroke technique, then I think you're going to fall short.

Yeah. And if you don't actually go and get some help with your technique and then to get that practice again, you go into fall short. So this is a really big one that we're really pushing more and more as the years go on, and every year we seem to wait more of the training around the technique and. And we're still doing the intervals and doing the volume, but the technique becomes more and more of a priority. The next do for the year is have a good understanding of where your fitness is and. Yeah. Do you want to explain this concept of why this is so important?

Yeah. Especially at the start of the year. I think it's. It's almost a reset, isn't it? For some people. For the majority of people, I know exactly where they're at. But the do. If you're not showing where. If you're not knowing. Sorry. Not showing. If you're not knowing where your current form of fitness is, don't hide away from finding it. Finding out that. So that you're going to be guessing. If you're a person who's just started with the New Year's resolution that I'm going to now start my bike training or my run training or swim training or triathlon or whatever you're going to do. If you start the year without having an idea of where your fitness and form is, you're going to be guessing about how to train. And that could waste weeks of getting to understand, you know, oh, gee, that was a bit hard today. I need to pull back a bit next week. Just go out and test yourself and find out where your fitness is and start your program from there and you eliminate the guesswork. You actually don't waste any sessions and you get a good training session. Out of the, out of the testing session anyway.

Yeah, I think the word you use is you just can't be guessing, you know, and we can't even consider the possibility of trying to program someone without testing because we would just sit there and go, we have no idea what to give you because we just have no idea where you're at. And I refuse to try and give you sessions. We could give you a session that's just totally off the mark for where you're at right now and where you want to get to. So yeah, that is just so crucial to bite the bullet a little bit even if you're reluctant to do a test. Yeah, it's just not a matter of how good you are. That's not what the testing is. It's just a matter of finding out where you are now. And that's going to be the fastest way for you to improve. And it's ironic that if you avoid the test, you're actually just slowing yourself down in your improvement.

I do get that your mindset would be this is what my expectation is. That's why I don't want to do the test because I know it's below. Well, that's actually the reason why you should actually test because how far below is it from where you were before? So let's find out. And if you have to be super conservative and drop 20%, then that's what you have to do because you yourself know how much training you've done prior to this period and, and therefore you can make a little bit of an estimate of where you start. And by just not acknowledging that you haven't trained well and expecting to start where you left off previously, that's just going to cause all sorts of problems with mindset and depression almost about your fitness. And it's not a good way to go. It's detrimental. And so you do need to take control and understand where your fitness is currently at.

And a little cheat way to do it, if you have some experience, you've really got good data under your belt is you could just do a certain go to training session to test where you're at. So you might know exactly what your Data is for 6 by 1k intervals or you might know exactly what your power should be for six times three minute intervals. And when you're really fit, you know where you're sitting, when you're, you know, halfway through a training block or when you're starting a program, you know where you are. So that's, that's another just little cheat way to kind of see where you're at and go, okay, what numbers can I push for this specific session? And dad, you have 15 years of this power data where you always know where you're sitting. There's also certain climbs you can do, you know, out back home around the D nongs, you know, where you can compare your fitness to certain clients. And that's been part of your frustration these last few months is going far out. I'm minutes off where, you know, I know I could be on some of these climbs. So there's other ways to test yourself that it doesn't have to be an exact FTP test or full on time trial.

The good one for running, I find is the hill repeats. If you've got a local two minute hill climb that you've been running on for three months or three years or 30 years, and you know that at certain level you can do that at 1 minute 52 and that same start and finish line that you've used for all those years. And if you get there in 2:05, you know exactly where you are. And that's a beauty because it's something you've been doing time and time again.

Yeah. The next don't is don't neglect your body outside of training. So we just, we spend so much time stressing our body in training, giving it that stimulus response. But there's often we're just neglecting our posture, we're neglecting, you know, consistent muscle soreness, joint soreness, we're neglecting our technique, we're neglecting our potential efficiency, we're neglecting niggles. I just went on a ride with a friend and it was his first ever ride outdoors now. So we just ran some easy loops around Elliott park, just a very flat and cruisey course. We just went for 45 minutes. He's been riding on the trainer to get used to the bike, but after 45 minutes his back was absolutely killing him. And it was just a reminder for me, you know, just at its core, the bike just isn't good for posture. It's just really not. And we do get used to it. There is an element of your body does adapt and get used to it, but it just reminded me that you really are sitting in a really poor posture for a long time. Just because you get a bit used to it doesn't mean it's okay. And you really want to be doing as much as you can to counteract that outside of training and off the bike.

Yeah, I think our general fitness as compared to our specific fitness so the example I would give, and that's a good one you just gave on the bike there. I spend all my time on the bike. If I tried to do some sort of endurance walk, I would have huge trouble. If I tried to do a park soccer game, I could be injured within three minutes of going left or right or sideways movement patterns. So, so the expectation is that, you know, you can just be, be okay in any, any activity that you're going to embark upon, but if you don't think about how your body functions and looking after it, you're, you're going to end up as injured as ever. So, you know, we, in our sporting career or choices we make, it's, we're very fit for that, for that specific sport. And if you don't actually do something away from that particular sport, and I'm talking, if I select to be a bike rider, which is what I'm doing, if I don't do some other stuff off the bike where I'm, I'm trying to give that all round fitness, where I'm building my core and making sure I'm getting the flexibility and sideways movement patterns, then I'm one dimensional and the risk is so much higher for me to break down. And I think that's what we're trying to get across here is don't just train the one thing, be good at that sport, but don't neglect adding things that are going to help you stay fit.

Yeah, that's that. If you surveyed runners, 90% of runners carrying some sort of niggle or injury and that is just crazy. Like it's, it's not normal and we just kind of carry on like it's normal because everyone's doing it, but it's not, you know, you're ideally, you don't have niggles, you don't have injuries just lingering or festering or potentially building up which can delete the more longer term injuries. Like we did an episode on stress fractures with two experts on stress fractures and just the way they spoke about how it kind of just builds up, builds up, you don't notice then bam. That stress fracture happens. Yeah, it's just not normal. We need to make sure that we don't just accept that as fact that I'm always sore, I'm always, always injured, I've always got a sore back. You know, there are other ways to do it.

If you've got, you know, serious medical injuries. That's not what we're talking about. You know, so some, if you got a sore back and it's not just muscle soreness, it's actually some spinal damage. Well, we're not talking about that. We're talking about you can do lots of things that, you know, don't just keep riding your bike and hopefully it will go away. Your back soreness, you know, do something off the bike that's going to get your back to be stronger and functioning better so that when you do ride, you're going to be able to hold your posture and your core is engaged the way it should be.

The next do is putting more weight behind and prioritizing training that you actually enjoy and find motivating. And this is the flip side of the first point you made, which is doing the frequency and consistency of training that works versus making sure that you are including in your weeks and your training blocks stuff that you enjoy and you're going to stay consistent with. Because if you're not enjoying it, that's a fast way to lose motivation quickly and just end up not doing it. So if the goal is consistency, well, how can you help yourself get more consistent? And so it's kind of the flip side of this coin is we're saying, well, there's an ideal way to train, but also if you want to throw in some variety in there, if you want to do a few different things that make the training not so robotic and a bit more fun, then you can do that. And that's actually okay.

There's only a small percentage of people who are that focused and that mentally strong who can, regardless of what the session is, just focus on getting the outcome. And I take my hat off to those people. An example of the opposite to that is making sure that you know, first and foremost you're enjoying what you're doing because you're more than likely going to do better at it. If you like your job where you work, you will actually be more productive. If you like what the training sessions you're doing are, you'll probably get better at it. So the example I gave a lot of guys is last week we had the tour down under here in Australia, in Adelaide, and a lot of the guys really want to get together with their mates and ride a lot of kilometres and spend the whole day in Lycra on their bike, get out the door at 7 o' clock and meet for coffee at 8 and then trundle along to where the race starts is, and then do some hard muck around, really hard hit outs here and there and attack each other and just have a ball the whole week and then get home at 3 or 4 o' clock that afternoon, having spent the whole day riding the bike. That's what they want to do. That's what, that's. That's a fun aspect of their year. And I don't want to prevent that. I want them to go out and have fun that week and understand that, sure, there's consequences if you overdo it. You'll be very tired for the next two or three weeks. Is that going to ruin your whole year? Probably not. But if you go to the extreme, it probably will. But really what we're trying to do is making sure that you have periods where you actually having a ball and you're enjoying the whole week. And you'll probably more likely enjoy the week if you come into that period with your mates and you haven't seen for a year. And maybe like most of the groups who meet there, they only see each other once a year at that tour. If you're really well drilled and fit because you've done all the other stuff during the year, well, use this week to have some fun and not be so regimented in your training.

Yeah. If you were to look at it scientifically, there is probably an optimal way to train and it's super robotic and you would not stray from that. And pro triathletes are probably training that way a little bit. And that's a really hard way to train. It's really hard to stay that motivated in a really super controlled environment. You would not stray outside your lactate zones, you would not stray outside your heart rate zones, your power zones, your pacing zones. But if you want to go away from that a little bit, that's what we're saying is that's okay. Just know that you're probably not doing it the fastest way. It's not the most optimal way to improve. But having an element of that is so important and we really encourage people to do more of that this year. The next don't is. This is going to sound a little bit controversial. Don't take breaks in training blocks. So can you explain what we mean by that? Because it sounds like we're just saying, well, you should be training all the time and don't take any breaks.

And this is different to recovery. Taking a break is something that we do encourage, but it's got to be structured. So that doesn't even make sense, that sentence, having a structured break. Well, it's intentional. That's what I'm trying to say. Taking a break intentionally is different to. I just want to have a break and just, you know, do my own thing for a period. And in inadvertently, the reason we're saying don't do this is because most people have worked so hard to get a level of fitness and then they feel like, I just need to get away from structure, I just need to give myself a little bit of a rest. There's a lot of things that are causing you to think like that. So you need to think probably about the things that are causing that first rather than just jumping into, I just need to have a break. And what happens when people do this, I guarantee, I say to them, okay, if that's what you really feel like doing. But if you come back 20 or 30% worse off than when you left, then you're doing yourself a disservice. You're going to have to already start again. And for any people who've been injured or sick and who aren't intentionally taking a break, and that's the unintentional break because you can't actually train because of your medically being prevented from it. It's super frustrating having to have to claw back the fitness that you have worked so damn hard to get. And now you have to actually go backwards to get forwards again. And that's the reason why we're saying don't take this break where you don't do anything. Because you know you are going to find it so frustrating to have to work so hard to get back. You know, for every week that you take off, generally it takes two weeks to get that back. So if you take four week break, you're going to take eight weeks to get back to where you were before the break. And so if you're okay with that, fine. And that's what you're intending to do. But that's what we want to point out. I don't think it's a good thing to actually continually do this roller coaster of almost bipolar training where you train really well for a period, then you take this break and you go back to. So if we used a number out of one to 10, you got your training to seven and then you went back to five and then you had to start again. You went back to seven after some good training and instead of continuing on getting to 8 or 9, you took a break and you went back to 5 and all you're doing is going 7, 5, 7 5, 7, 5 for the whole year. You're not ever going to improve that way. That's why I'm asking you, think carefully about doing these. I'll just Take a break, period.

The word disservice is just the key word there. You're putting so much time in these hard training blocks. You might train really well for 12 weeks and then if you decide to take this break and yeah, you're really just doing a disservice to that hard work you did and then you just redo it, it's just a waste of your own time and potential, basically. And so what we're really talking about with a break is the definition is a structured break from a structured training program. So you don't have to stick to a full training structure. But you do want to make sure you're not detraining yourself. And so that means keeping up the volume, even if it's all super easy, keeping in some short, sharp, high intensity efforts in there, but not at the same volume as you would do in a full on structured program. But yeah, you're really just trying to avoid that detraining that will happen if you just take a full break and don't do it smartly. The next do or go on.

I was just going to say we're not advocating that you should never not take a break. So I just want to make that clear. We think that there should be periods where you should actually take a break and. But don't make that break. Four, six, eight weeks, you know, have a break that's, that's organized and going to fit into your yearly structured plan. But we're saying don't take the ad hoc break where you're just randomly doing nothing for a long period of time. That's kind of the different differentiation we're trying to make here.

The next do is really finding and making an effort to find what makes you accountable and what keeps you accountable because that's going to be the fastest way to get yourself improve and get yourself to a goal. And it's a little bit different for everyone. But yeah, how do you find what keeps you accountable specifically?

Yeah, and for me, I've always been someone who needs an event. And look, this is a large percentage of the people we coach, they also need an event. I was actually talking to one of our guys who's actually on a break, ironically, and who's going to get back into it.

A structured break.

Yes, a structured break is going to get back into it. And he's just questioning what he wants to do for his training and what his goals are. And we kept talking backwards and forwards and we just came to the conclusion is, look, we don't want to commit or put pressure on to a race. But that's actually what's going to get him motivated to train the way he wants. And that was quite a good conversation to get to that point. And if that's the sort of mentality you have, then be okay with putting an event in. You don't, you don't have to set the event is I'm going to qualify for the Olympics. You can set the event is I'd really like to do okay and enjoy that event. And it could be a gran fondo, it could be a fun run, a marathon, a half marathon, a 10k or even a 5k park run or an ocean swim. It could be just something that's going to get you out of bed each day to know that when you stand on the start line that you're actually fit enough to complete the challenge that you've put yourself. And so that's what keeping yourself accountable, that's a really good idea to do. Set goals. And of course at the start of the year we are now doing this podcast right at the start of 2024. And you know, if that's going to keep you accountable for getting you up in the morning and getting you motivated, then do that. And you know, sometimes it's better to actually go out of your comfort zone and do something that's really challenging that you know, you, you, you've been doing something year in, year out and you know, you, you're quite good at that and you're getting your fitness growing over the years, but do something that's really going to challenge you and, and that's kind of gonna, gonna get your motivation, your mindset to actually probably do the added things that are, that we talk about, you know, we train specifically for the sport, but doing those other added things like sleeping better and eating, eating better and, and some rehab and some, some structured strength and conditioning and, and you know, maybe getting massages included and you know, thinking about, you know, doing a sauna once a week. All these other things for this big challenge that you're going to do. You know, could be a heat, a heat acclimatization thing that's at a really hot temperature where you're going to do the event. So sauna could be really handy for that. So lots of things that are going to, that are going to make you have no question when you wake up each day that you're fired up for what the goal is for that day, for your long term challenge that you've given yourself.

Yeah, I really like that last point that find a Challenge for yourself and pick something that's out of your comfort zone. It's really. Yeah, it's just. It's a really rewarding thing to do and to pick something that's just going to push you to break that monotony or monotonous routine, which training can definitely be. And we spoke a little bit about you yourself. I think the same the very first episode of the year where you kind of put it out publicly that you're going to challenge yourself to do more strength training. That's just an area you've been neglected. And we said we keep it accountable on the podcast and you've started it. And I guarantee that journey is going to be one of the most rewarding parts of the year if you stick to it, because it's something that's been out of your comfort zone a little bit, especially post back surgery. So that's just a great point. The reverse of the next stone is kind of a reverse of what we just said before in. Don't take breaks from training. But it's. Don't be hard on yourself if you're missing sessions or if things aren't going to plan.

Yeah, it's one of those things that even I'm guilty of this. You just gotta be a bit kinder to yourself and not be too, I don't know, almost bullying yourself into. And you pulled me up on this. Actually, this morning I said a sentence like, I'm just so sick of being lazy about getting my strength and conditioning going. And you're saying, well, you're not being lazy. There's just other priorities that you're putting in front of yourself. And I think that was a really good perspective for me. And, you know, I have the intentions of doing this other work well, but it's just not high on my priority list. So therefore, it gets put back in the back burner a lot. So, you know, I think the point we're trying to make here is it's okay to, to not be perfect and it's okay to. To be normal and not. Not be able to achieve everything that you want to. You know, we see so many things on social media where it looks like everybody's achieving every day of every minute, and this is not true. You know, so, so have, have your plans, have your goals, but, but don't, don't be a bully to yourself if you, if you can't achieve it every day. You know, you're getting your planning, your preparation there, and if you can get out there and actually do the session that's a, that's a really good tick. But if you can't, then, you know, don't be the miserable person who's, who's, you know, a pain in the ass to be around because you're so disappointed with yourself, which is probably what I do a little bit. So.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's a really good don't to try and change. Yeah.

It's this fine line between you want to set goals for yourself and you want to have high expectations for yourself and that's great and go for them, but if you don't achieve them. We spoke about this self worth thing a little bit last year, but you're not a worse person because of it. You don't need to bully yourself because of it. You want to do both. You want to be able to set goals and go for them. And it brings us back to, we circle right back to point number one, which is understanding where to put your weight of what's important. You know, we can have these goals of doing the best sessions and doing all the 1 percenters, but if we're not doing them at the end of the day, as long as you're trying to be as consistent as possible and you're sticking to good frequency, that's 80% of the work done. You know the rest of it, you know that last 20%. You don't have to be right yourself if you're missing that because you're doing most of the work. And the more we do is obviously better. But we're just trying to point out for this year, don't be so hard on yourself if things aren't going exactly to plan. So the last couple of points, we really want to encourage people to prioritize this year. Structured deloading and really emphasizing recovery.

Yeah. And I think one of the things I'm concentrating on is trying to get more sleep and I'm using the OURA ring a lot and it's super frustrating because I just don't go to bed early enough and, and the OURA ring keeps reminding me. And so now I've decided to do something about it. It's, there's a lot of firsts coming out in 2024 for me and, and I am really crapped off with going to bed too late and waking up at the same time. I just, my body clock just wakes up when it's daylight. I can't help it. And obviously in daylight savings in, in Victoria, in Australia, you know, the longest day was the 21st of December. So, you know, it was basically daylight at 5:30 in the morning. So as soon as it's daylight, I wake up. And if I've gone to bed at 10 o', clock, 11 o' clock or 12 o' clock at night, I'm still going to wake up at the same time when the light shines. So if I can get more than five hours sleep and start to push that out to five and a half to six hours, that's going to be something that's going to really contribute to my health. And I've seen this because I can see with my OURA ring that my resting heart rate has been so consistent over many years, 10, 15 years. And as I'm getting less sleep, my heart rate variability is absolutely going rock bottom and my resting heart rate rising. And the minute I start to get some good sleep, all of a sudden my resting heart rate goes back to where it was, you know, previously. So that's evidence, as anecdotal evidence from me that I can see that if I actually think more about recovery and, and that the healthy aspects of fueling much better and sleeping better and just relaxing more and not being on the whole time, not thinking about how my athletes are going, as an example, just switching off, turn the phone off, stop checking, seeing how people are going, that's the things I need to do. And you can think about that in your own life, about your own work and, and having periods where, and this is something you're really helping me with is blocking periods of actual concentrated work, blocking periods of concentrated training and, and having periods of some relaxing and, and then if you do all these things really well, you'll actually start to perform better, which is the reason why it's a do.

I heard this, this just personal development podcast person speaking about, just very general, just speaking about keys to a good day. And I just like this framework of the keys to a good day are some sort of challenge, some sort of, you know, mental challenge, which we often get from something like work, something we're working on and working towards and problem solving, some sort of physical exertion and also challenge. So, you know, moving your body, getting out and training and then actual proper relaxation and reflection. And that is just something I feel like is missing so much from most people's days is a dedicated period, whether it's 15 minutes at the end of the day or half an hour to hour where you just switch off and reflect on the day and actually wind your body down and wind your nervous system and everything down. And I feel like a lot of us Just don't do that part. We do the other parts well all the time, the training and the stress part, which is good for us, the growth part, but we don't do the reflecting part. And we're just learning more and more about the importance of sleep health, the importance of deloading, a lot of that stress, the importance of recovering after training, the importance of fueling after training, all these things that we really need to prioritize. And a lot of people listening to this episode might have thought we were going to talk about do more of this specific session or do more of this type of training. That's actually what the science is saying is more beneficial this year. But instead we're saying, well, no, we actually know a lot of the effective training sessions. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. Like we said before, it's actually prioritizing a lot of the other stuff that's, that's really being shown to be an absolute must for our performance. And that is exactly what you just spoke about. You know, more sleep health, more, more nutrition health, that kind of thing.

Yeah, and look, letting our body absorb the training load, you know, we have said that a lot, but, but that's what the, the deload and recovery is for. And adding these other objectives such as fueling and sleeping, you know, that allows you to gain the benefits from the training that you're giving your body. And, and you know, there has to be a period of rest so that the body can recover and absorb that load of hard work and, you know, repair all the damaged muscles and cells that you've trained so hard to do. And you know, that soreness that you get from, you know, doing a whole lot of sit ups, too many sit ups too soon in a, in a training program, you know, unless you give yourself some recovery there, you're actually going to make those cells worse. They're actually not going to recover and regenerate the way they should. And therefore you actually will get tired rather than stronger.

Yeah, the last don't for the episode, the last thing we want to finish off on is don't copy others, especially without knowing the full detail of what they're doing. There's just no way you should try and copy someone's session or grab bits of what they're doing without the full story because we have no idea why they might be doing something. And the whole, the whole scene is rife with this because pro triathletes will put snippets of what they're doing out online. But you Just don't know the full picture. And training programs are so particular to the person. So if you're grabbing bits and bobs of something, they could be doing that for one totally different reason to what you need to be doing for your training block or training week or one specific strategy. So it's just a big no, no to. We're just seeing a lot of this where people are grabbing bits of bobs of what people are doing around the world and it's just a disaster for your own program.

Yeah, I love this one. I really think that at the end of the day, you need to just keep your training structured to you and simple. And if you see people's form and whilst we're away in Adelaide, I had many people coming up to me saying, oh, wow, I can see this particular person that you're coaching has improved incredibly, you know, and they're almost saying to me, what, what are you doing with them? They want to know the magic potion is, is there a key thing? And, you know, I'm not avoiding that question when I'm talking to these people because I want to keep it a secret. I'm trying to say to them it's just an accumulation of time doing things well and, and not. And so these people are trying to grab a session from me that's going to put into their session their program, that that will be the key to the safe and that will make them improve just like that other person. And that's not how it works because the people who they see that are getting better, they're doing a lot of things well. And it's not just one session in their program that's enabling them to improve. It's, you know, just what we talked about.

It's.

They're recovering better, they're having more periods where they're letting their body absorb the load, they're doing maybe more endurance, they've increased the intensity in some sessions they've talked about more. They've actually done more VO2 sessions than they have in their previous period where they were just doing zone two work. So there could be a whole myriad of reasons why that person is showing great form. And for you to just try and grab and copy one aspect of it without knowing the whole full story is a disaster waiting to happen because you'll just be like a rabbit in the headlight. Well, all of a sudden you'll just run away and do this session and then try that. And then all of a sudden you're getting exhausted from that. That didn't work. So you'll go and find another person who's successful, grab what you think worked for them, and before you know it, you're just running around in circles, not having the same simple structure that is going to get you to the position that you want to be. And that is keep it simple, stupid, and without being too detrimental. I just get super frustrated with people just grabbing bits and pieces of other people's programs.

Yeah. The secret sauce isn't in the session itself. It's in the art of the coaching and the programming and where it fits in. And being able to look at athlete as a whole and figure out what they need at this particular moment to bridge the gap from where they are now to where they want to be. That is a secret source, and that is, you know, what the focus is. So when someone's asking, what's that person doing? Well, the answer might be totally irrelevant to them because it's just totally off where they're at right now and what their goals are. And a really good example to finish off with is Christian Blumenfeld just recorded potentially the highest VO2 max ever. I don't know if it's been officially, I think the word is ratified yet, but he supposedly recorded a VO2 Max between 101 and 105, a relative VO2 Max of 100. And I think the old record was 96 or 97, so he's just blown it out of the water, which is just absolutely astounding. And it was all recorded and filmed, so they can definitely verify it if they need to. But the Norwegian method has gained such popularity over the last few years and. And let's do what the Norwegians are doing. But he is just a totally different, completely unique freak of a person and an athlete. You know, his lung capacity, his VO2 max just shows how different he is. So to try and copy what he is doing would just be detrimental for a lot of people. And to even try and grab bits and bobs of what he's doing is just detrimental. With a VO2 max like that, he is literally the top. 000-001-percent of the human population. It's very hard to model a training program off that person.

Yeah. And for majority of people, you know, if we compared VO2s, which is not a good thing to compare, you know, the average female is in the 40s and the average male is in the.

Is in the 40s or mid-40s. Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

So. So it's, you know, it's athlete, you'd.

Say, not the average person. That would be average.

The average athlete. Sorry, yeah, and the average person is way below that. And you know, you can train that but, but it's, you know, it's, it's again, you know, grabbing things from, from what you've seen on, on social media or what's reported.

That's it for this list of do's and don'ts for 2024. As we said, this list was a bit of a different angle, which we always like to do because we don't like to just say the main things. It's, you know, if you really focus on these things mentally, we feel like you'll have a really good year and you're focusing on the right things that are important for your training. So that's it for this episode. As always, if you'd like to get coaching from us, you can go to our website, travelocoaching.com and we offer an absolute guarantee in the coaching. If you don't improve your FTP in the first eight weeks, the coaching is on us. You can head there to apply for a coaching spot. Thanks as always for listening. We'll see you on the next episode.