5 Ways To Bike Faster Without More Training

This podcast is brought to you by Trivalo 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. Big show today because we want to help you get free speed on the bike. And we say free because we're going to talk about ways to get faster. We without training more and without spending huge money because as always on this podcast, we want to be as practical as possible. Dad. Welcome back to another episode. Before we get into the main topics, can we start with our normal segment? What are you grateful for this week?

Thanks, Jord. Yeah. December. What a month. I love it. It's the best month of the year. I can't wait for this part of the year. I'll wait a whole 11 months to get the sun on my back. And, and our tradition, as you know, is to always go and get our Christmas tree on the first day in December. And so that's a reminder to me that this is the holiday period coming up for most people in the world. And I'm just grateful that we're in such a privileged position that we can enjoy so much of the lifestyle that we are lucky to have. And when I look around the world, there's so many people suffering so much at the moment and, and so December is a really good time for me, I think family Christmas, getting together and if you're in a position and fit enough to do some exercise in the sun, there's nothing better. And I've had a couple of good rides by myself in my. I've lived in this area for nearly 39 years now and we haven't moved from this house. So that's a bit of a weird situation for anybody to be in the one house for that long. But my local area is, I moved here to be to train full time. This is the area I selected. It is the Mecca for riding your bike and for running and, and it's been so good to me over the journey and I've ridden these roads thousands of times and this time of the year it is the most spectacular time. When you've got views across, you know, it's 50k from the ocean I can see our bay. From my of the hills, I can see the tankers coming into Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. It's a, it's a super place when the sun, sun's shining and mind you, the sun doesn't shine every day in Melbourne. It's very temperamental. But I'm really grateful for, for being healthy, for being fit enough to train for Christmas, for December, for the sun. Yeah, it's a lot, I know, but it just, it is makes me smile and I think, I think we all appreciate nice weather. It makes us feel better about ourselves than the doom and gloom of winter that we, that everybody goes through in the the world and unfortunately the northern hemisphere are heading in that direction. But yeah, I'm super grateful for this.

Time of the year, at least for the northern hemisphere. They get to enjoy the festive spirit of Christmas in the traditional sense of what you see. We have in Australia in the southern hemisphere, a real summer Christmas and they get the winter experience for Christmas. And this isn't my gratitude, but Mum actually just sent a photo into the group chat with the Christmas tree put up in the house and all decorated. And normally as kids we would try and help her, but no one's home to help her. So she did do it all by herself. So that's a big gratitude to mum. But my actual gratitude for the week is a bit of a lesson, but it's also a gratitude and that is for not having a stress fracture, which sounds a bit funny, but recently on inside my running training, I pushed the limits of my running volume and intensity and actually did a lot of the red flags that we really don't want to do in a training program and running. I was trying a few new daily trainers all at once in the shoe rotation and I just did a few things that you probably shouldn't do when in your training program that's trying too many new shoes at once and trying a whole bunch of runs and doing too much of a big session in a new shoe. You really just want to kind of ease yourself into it because it's probably a new stimulus for your body and your gait and your feet. I increase my elevation too much over the week and too much in individual runs. And I also just because of the nature of how my week panned out, I ended up changing the week around and I ended up doing too many run days in a row and the back half my week was completely overloaded with all my running rather than. So I was doing not too much of an increase in volume, but I just did the whole volume over four day period instead of spreading it out over the seven days. And so those things all combined, those factors, just if I was doing one of them or if an athlete of ours was doing one of them, you'd see a red flag and I Did them all at once. And I woke up the next week with a really sore foot and I was going, oh, what have I done here? I think I could see this coming. I don't know what I was thinking. And the foot, I just kind of had a few days off running, which is hard for your ego because you want to keep the training consistency and try to do the right things to manage the foot and rest it. And I think I've just gotten away with it where it's been a couple weeks now and it's been okay and it's settled. So fingers crossed, touch wood that I have gotten away with it. But yeah, big learning out there for some key factors to avoid that.

Grateful that you know, you didn't end up with an injury. And that's just a timely reminder that we all make some mistakes and you know, straying away from the structure of your program because of certain things that happen in your day, in your week and it can happen easily. So don't think that the stuff that we, we tell on our podcast, we haven't made those mistakes, we make them all. And, and you just slightly going off the program and you know you take huge risks with your, with your health and fitness and, and yeah, thank goodness and we are grateful that you got away with it.

So before we get into the main topics of the episode, we just want to do a quick shout out and welcome the newest members of the Trivela coaching family. These athletes have all just jumped on board with the hopes of improving their results. So the new athletes are Brian from Texas, Luke from Traralgan, Rowan from New South Wales, no one from Canada, he's been in the program before is now back on the program. Rory from Ireland but also living in Australia. Now Glenn who actually lives in Bali, Indonesia, Quinton and Ozzie from New York, Matthias from Florida, Lachlan from Melbourne, Courtney from New South Wales and Sam Dunstan from Melbourne. We can't wait to help you all improve on your journey and if you'd like to join these athletes and guarantee your improvement because we offer an eight week guarantee that if you don't improve it's a money back. You can go to our website. And as a reminder, you just heard that we do coach athletes from anywhere in the world. So that's tribalocoaching.com to apply now. Dad, let's get into it. We're moving on to our mailbag segment. Two quick mailbag questions and they're both running based before we get into the cycling stuff. So firstly I apologize I forgot to write down the names of who asked these. So hopefully you know who you are if you can hear this question. But they said Been listening to the podcast on how to execute the perfect marathon. I've completed a number of marathons, but I always struggle to understand what a realistic goal is and how to pace it. The podcast was very useful, but is there any tips on how to estimate a feasible time? I have a Garmin, a Garmin watch that provides a racetime indication. Is that any good? This is a really good topic and we spoke about this a bit with ambition, versability, what you think you can do, what you can actually do. So how do you answer this question?

Yeah, there's so many aspects to this question that we could give as the answer. There are, in your training program there should be some runs where you've done. If you're training for a marathon, you should have done some 5k, some 10k, some half marathon, some 30k. And for those who are going to be out there for four or five hours, you wouldn't expect them to run more than 30 or 40k. It's more about time on your feet. But to try to work out what your pace is, we've got some really good data from how many years, 14 years of collecting data on our athletes.

Data. Yeah.

To work out that if you have the general fitness for a marathon, and this is the key proviso is we can estimate what based on what your 5k, your 10k and a half marathon is, what your marathon pace is going to be. And the only way that that works is if you've done the actual endurance long training and if you, if you're a great 5k runner and you know, I'll give an example. If you, if you can run 5k in 17 or 18 minutes, that's a pretty handy time. The majority of athletes are going to run around 25 minutes for a 5K. But if you only do 5K training where your longest run might be 60 minutes or 70 minutes, you know you're, you're possibly not got enough endurance to do a marathon where you should be, you should be able to Predict A sub 20 minute 5k could run around a 248 to 250 marathon under our prediction. But if you haven't done the training, that doesn't work. So, so we can give these predictions as long as you've done the training. So, so that's, that's one answer. The second answer would be you should have done some progressive fast runs in your training program. And if you haven't, you want to ask your coach, can you have them? Because they are going to allow you to understand what pace you can actually do when it comes to the real deal. So you should do that over 30k, 25k half marathon. You should be practicing those even on 10ks, where you, you're trying to learn how to, how to pace a run where you're progressively running faster. So that gives you the feeling of the fatigue you're going to have at these 36, 7, 8, 40K mark of A, of a marathon. You're not trying to run 40k in this progressive fast run. You're trying to run to get the fatigue up. And you're running faster than you do on marathon day. You get that feeling that you're going to have at 36K. And that would be a great predictor of can you cope with the pace that you're trying to achieve. So that's another way of trying to work out what you can actually do on race day. And if you're new to marathon, you've never done it before. That makes it even more difficult. But it's the unknown a little bit. So, yeah, it's not an easy thing to predict. But, but you know, we have tried and true methods and you know, if, you know, we've got formulas that it's really easy to spit out the results. If anybody wants to reach out for us privately, we can do that for you.

Perfect answer. I hope that's enough detail there. And the second running question we had again, I forgot to write down who actually asked this and I'll endeavor to do that from now on is should I do my long runs? Whenever I do your long run in the week, should I do my long runs to pace or to heart rate?

Yeah, good question again, and I would say neither. We don't want you to be looking at your watch in those long runs. We don't want you to be looking at your heart rate that much. It's good to glance down because if you're doing your long runs the way we want you to do your long runs, the majority of them should be in undulating terrain where you're running up and down hills. And the idea in the long run is to get strength and endurance time on your feet. That's what the goal of our long running trivalo is. And you know, other coaches might disagree with this, but this is the way we talk about it. This is, this is how we get our athletes to get their long run into their into their program and it's not based on pace or heart rate. The example I would give you, if someone's new to running and they haven't done a lot of base training and they start to progress their long runs from say their longest run was 40 minutes, they're progressing their long run to 50 minutes. If we prevented them from running hard by heart rate, they would end up walking for four or five weeks in their long run to keep their heart rate down because they're not fit enough to enable them to stay under 75% of their heart rate in these long runs. So we would definitely say just go for your run and you should be able to comfortably talk to your partner or talk to yourself if you're on your own without being out of breath. And that's the better indicator of the pace you should be running at. It should be nice and relaxed so that you can do this as long as you possibly can without actually getting out of breath and running too hard. So the idea to use pace and heart rate is to stop you running too hard. But in this circumstance, when we're talking about someone who hasn't got a really good base around them, they just need to run. And for those athletes who are at the other end of the scale, so talk about the beginner and talk about the advanced person, that would be where you would try to make sure the athlete who's super motivated can run fast, needs to really keep a tab on his pace. And I would say you should use your heart rate in that circumstance. But if you're running in the hills, the pace is irrelevant. You're running, if you're running 3 or 4 or 500 meters of elevation, you know, the pace running up and down hills compared to the flat would probably be 30 or 40 seconds per K slower, but the effort is the same. If you ran that run on the flat, your heart rate might be, you know, one 160 or 155. I'm just giving you a number one. Say it's 160. And if you, if you ran the same effort up and down the hills on the, on the, you know, undulating terrain that we're suggesting, then your heart rate for 6 minute k pace compared to 4 minute k pace on the flat would be the same heart rate. That's the variation in, in what the terrain does to your heart rate. So, so it's super important that you, that you use heart rate only for your, for those advanced runners who are, we're trying to stop them from running too fast on their easy long runs. And the majority of people shouldn't be looking at pace or heart rate. They should be just running to feel until they actually get to a point where they are damn good runners. And the main thing on this run is to stop them from running fast.

And again, a really great detailed answer. And yeah, totally agree. So moving on to the crux of the episode and the bright tricks to help you go faster without actually training more. And look, these tricks include both equipment changes, training changes, or execution changes. But basically they're all easy ways to get free speed. And we say easy, but what we really mean is that they're going to be a little bit left field than what you might think come up in this list. Because I think some athletes might expect us to say something like, you know, tune your handlebars to a certain degree or make this minute change on your bike here, or make these little equipment upgrades or aero upgrades, and that's not the way we're going to go. These changes, changes that you can make right now in your training program and start changing immediately without having to train more or necessarily be a better athlete, or any athlete, beginner to advanced, should be able to make these changes and find themselves riding faster on the bike without even getting fitter. So we're going to go through them and give them all an explanation. So, number one, we still think this is underrated, and that is efficiency in your pedaling technique and your ability to keep pressure on the pedals. So how does this make you go faster?

And I must preface this answer because I think training outdoors, this is really one of the toughest skills to master. If you do this indoors, you can really learn it quite quickly, but you must have a smart trainer to do it properly, because if you just have a set of rollers or a trainer that's just got wind resistance like the old wind trainers, if, if you're not getting changes in, in pressure against you, and that would be headwind, tailwind, uphill, downhill, then you're going to, you're going to find that the pressure on the pedals is just going to be easy to maintain. You need to practice this against changes in, in gradients. And you can do this on a smart trainer, no problem. You can select a course on a free ride where you don't load a particular session. And, and as the gradient changes on your smart trainer, just like outside, you have to use your gears and you have to try and pedal properly to allow the pressure to be the same. And that just sounds like an Easy, straightforward thing to do. But, and we say this a lot on the program about pressure on the pedals. And I guarantee you, if I looked at most of the races that I'm checking out the data, people are unable to ride with pressure on the pedals. They ride way too hard on uphills. They can't keep the pressure on the pedals over the crest and they soft pedal on the downhills. And so the trivelo way is the opposite to that. It's, it's keeping the pressure even for a time trialist. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get, you know, trying to get the same fit athlete to be faster by actually executing the power in the right times of the right sections of the course. And the example I would use is last weekend we just had the Busselton Iron man in Perth in. Not in Perth in Western Australia, in Busselton in Western Australia. And it was one of the windiest days they've ever had. And the wind got up to 30 kilometers an hour, gusting up to 40. And that had 13 changes in 90k, 13 directional changes in 90k. So that's 26 directional changes over 180k. You know, for 5 or 6k you're heading into a nice tailwind, then you do a U turn and you're coming straight into a headwind for 3K. Then you turn left. Now you've got a cross tailwind for 4K. Then you turn left again, you've got another tailwind and this kept going back and forward. So you could try to aim for 200 watts on this whole day and just ride the same power with the tailwind and the headwind. And most people would say, well ridden, that's good pressure on the pedals, but there's a better way to do that. And that's what the Trivalo athletes were instructed to do, was when the bike's going slower, push more power. When the bike's going faster, it's okay to be in the middle to lower ranges of your ranges for your power plan your strategy that you've created for this race, and that's an example of understanding how to put the pressure on the pedals. And if you haven't done that in training, on gradients and wind, in training sessions, outdoor and indoor, then you're not going to be able to execute that on race day. So that is a trick that would make you faster by not doing any different training, doing the same training session. If you're out there supposed to be doing a three hour endurance ride. If you ride the way we're talking about, with pressure on the pedals when you, when you, you know, when, when you're trying to keep the range of cadence the same. So if you're trying to ride between 85 and 95 RPM, you're trying to hold your range of power between 200 and 220 watts, no matter what hill you come to. Unless it's, you know, your bike's doing 50 or 60Ks an hour. That's a different scenario. But, but these are the key things that you want to be practicing that are going to make you so much faster. And it's not any change in the program. It's, it's not any secret trick that we're doing to allow you to be a better rider. It's just you practicing outside in the conditions that you're going to expect to experience on race day. And that's the thing that people aren't doing. They're hearing it, they're listening to it, they agree, but they're actually not going out there and practicing it. So come race day, they're just going to ride. They've got some of the pressure on the pedals concept, right? But as the example I use with Busso, it's a little bit more in depth than that. And that's the difference between probably riding 2Ks an hour faster for the same power output.

And I'll give another quite smaller but specific example. There's this local here near me, which I like to do hill repeats on, but the hill's a little bit different. It goes up in a section for the first 45 seconds and then it flattens out for 30 seconds and then kicks back up again. And if you ride that without efficiency and without pressure on the pedals, you end up with a slower time. And so it's very easy on an incline. You've got the resistance against you. It's very easy to keep the power up. You know, it's, it's really, mentally and concentration wise, it's a lot easier. You still have to do the effort, the physical effort, but it is a lot easier. And so for that first, you know, 40 or 45 seconds, I'm in the range that I want. You know, I might sit at 350 watts or whatever it is for that session, but then when I hit the flat for that 30 seconds, it is so hard immediately, as soon as the gradient flattens out, the power drops to 320, 300, 290, and you have to concentrate so hard to be on top of the pedals to when that first starts flattening out and not let the power drop. Because if you're not concentrating, it drops straight away and you spend 10 or 15 seconds getting it back up to the average and you lose time there. And so if you did that rep as pressure up, but then it flattens out, you lose concentration, you're not riding as quick. Once you get to the second incline and it kicks back up again, naturally the power goes up, you're gonna, you're going to ride that generally the same. And so that gap in between is where you're losing speed, losing the total average speed. And so if you don't ride that properly, you get to the top 5 seconds slower or 7 seconds slower or 10 seconds slower. And that's just one rep, you know. So we're talking about here at half Ironman or Ironman over 90k. And so in a two minute rep when this is happening, that's a really specific example of how it's happening on a small scale and how it applies to the larger scale of a race.

And you've lost the integrity also of the session job where you've got an easier bit in the middle, hard bit at the start, hard bit at the end. We're trying to keep pressure on the pedals evenly. Practicing that is what our goal is. Whether you're on a hill incline or not. And the gradients outside, they are not ever constant, they are changing harder or easier. So you've got to adapt your pressure. That's what I'm talking about. It is such a hard skill to do and if you don't start practicing that, you're not going to make any changes in, in for the same power, you'll ride the same speed. But I'm talking about if I, if I ride that hill like you were suggesting, I would every single time I would know that when it gets to that easy bit, I've got to keep the pressure on. I've got to actually try harder there, maybe change gears and try to keep the power exactly where it was. And, and I've done this many times when we've gone on switchbacks with a group ride, you come up a rise and then obviously every switchback is a lot, sometimes a lot less inclined. There are switchbacks that do the opposite, that are steeper, but if I keep the pressure on the pedals, I can actually put 5 or 6 meters into the group and they're all going, why did you increase your power there? And I'm saying, well, no, I didn't increase my power. I kept my power the same. It's just that you let the power off on your pedals and that's a really hard concept to grasp and takes a lot of practice.

Yep, yep, spot on. And look, on that point, athletes think that it's quite straightforward and we can safely say we have all the data. It's not because we look at exactly how people are executing and where the power is being put down or not compared to the gradient and most of the time, and against wind as well. And you. It's just, it's a really hard thing to execute. So you can start doing this immediately and get yourself a higher average speed. The next point we want to touch on is. Yeah, is one that is still a little bit controversial for the frequency of it, but this is one of the biggest points you wanted to make for this episode. And this is the most important point that, that you really want to dive into here to improve your cycling and get faster immediately.

Yeah, and I almost don't know where to start and if I just use myself as an example, so. So testing is one of the things that, that most people get anxiety over. And I have to say straight up, that's fair enough. I totally agree. The word testing is probably the wrong word that we use for what we're trying to get the outcome of. And so if we wanted to use the word measure, we're trying to measure where our form is, that would be a better way of attacking it. Because the minute you say test, you remind yourself of school and have you prepared well for it and are you going to file or pass? And. And so they're the things that we're not really interested in. It's not, it's not testing in. Our concept of training is a measurement. It's not a pass or fail thing. It's a measurement of so many different reasons about why we're doing it. And the example I'll give you straight out of the bat is when I did have. And for those of you who have been listening to the podcast, over the years, we've had some ups and downs in health situations and there was one period there almost a year and a half ago, nearly two years ago, where I have a back operator on and I went from a FTP of 280 and then I was allowed to start training after 10 weeks of no training. So I wanted to start training really accurately. And so the first thing I could not wait to do was see where my best 20 minute power was and for some people that was like the worst thing that they could possibly think of when your very first training session back is going to be a 20 minute power power test. And I didn't do it first up. I did, you know, some easy rides to build into it before, before I got confident to and the, the, you know, Dr. Wang allowed me to ride hard and so I didn't want to train for the next four weeks not knowing where my numbers were. I wanted to train accurately. So I tested myself and you know, it was no surprise that I was 100 watts lower. I was 180 watts for my first test. And so I just did the next seven days of training based on my new number at 180 watts. Ah, I was totally disgusted with that number and disappointed and didn't even want to tell anybody what the number was. But that didn't matter to me. It was the purpose of doing it was so that I could train accurately for the next seven days. And guess what? For those next four weeks, instead of testing once at the start of that four week block and then at the end of the block, I tested myself every Thursday for those four weeks. Guess what? The next Thursday I did the same 20 minute test. I did 195 watts. So the next week of training I trained to the new number and by the time I got to the third week I was at 200, I think it was 207. By the time I got to the end of the fourth week I was back to 220 after four weeks of training. That's a really good example. If I just stayed at 185, my progression would have been so much slower. I would have wasted. That's not true, not wasted. I would have prevented myself from improving at a rate that I was capable of doing. I had a good FTP previously and I was not keen on riding 180 watts for four weeks. What did I do about that? I decided that I would test myself every week so that I could train to new numbers. And that's a classic example of I don't care what the number is, I just want to know what I can do so I can train properly to that number. Whether the number said 220 or 300 or 500 didn't really matter to me. I just needed to know what the number was so I could train properly. And that was my mindset. Bring on testing and guess what else. It forced me to execute according to the current form I was in. Imagine if I'd started the first three or four minutes at my old FTP, which was 280, and I ended up with 180. I probably would have ended up with 110 by the end if I'd started at 280. So I started somewhere around 150. And by the end of that session, those 20 minutes, I got to 200. So my average was 100 and something. So the next week I knew that I could start at 185, where I was the previous week. I could start there and I would get to 295 or 198 or whatever the number was. So that's an example of having the right mental approach around why you should be testing so often so that you can train as accurately as you can. That's probably the biggest thing. But there's about eight other reasons as well. Jordan.

Yeah, look, if it wasn't clear that this is one of the biggest ways you can get free speed is testing frequently. And there's still a lot of resistance to that. And there's a lot of resistance to testing frequency. And we will die on this hill because it is one of the ways you can guarantee you're getting the most out of your body, meaning you're going to be able to get the best from your body on the bike leg on race day. So take us through your top reasons. That was a great explanation. Take us through your top reasons for why testing frequently is so valuable.

Well, I think it's a training session. That's one thing. And I think people forget that testing is a training session. And guess what? It is the most closest to what's going to happen on your race day. So we're in our sports, whether we're marathon runners, whether we're cyclists, whether we're triathletes. We're in our sport, our chosen sport, most of us, because we want to race and test ourselves in a race situation. There's plenty of people we coach who don't want to race. So I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about those people who want to test themselves in a race situation. They need to replicate that in training. So this training session happens to do that. It allows you to replicate exactly what's going to happen on race day and all the things that go with it. The day before, the night before, the morning of your preparation, what your plan is, what are you thinking about during the actual effort and that that leads to? Well, I actually have to think about my execution, what's my strategy? So once again, we're thinking about planning so this is what's going to happen on race day. So in a simple little 20 minute test, you actually have to go through that in your mind about how am I going to execute this? And then you might wake up thinking, I don't feel so good today. So the plan that I had yesterday where I wanted to nail 200 watts, I might have to start a little bit more conservative and, and that's you making good decisions. So there's so many positive things coming here because of, because we're putting a test in front of you and so you're having to think more like an athlete rather than just a robot who's turning up looking at training session, then just doing it. So it's teaching you about riding to your current form. And that's what execution practice is. And that's probably one of the most important things. It is a training session.

Yeah, as you said, it's one of the most valuable training sessions, but it's also the hardest, which is why we just don't do it as a training session every single time. If the body could cope with it, you would just do almost a 20 minute effort, max effort every single time. Because you're going to get such a big game. But it's just so hard that you can't do that every time.

So the second reason would be you get so much confidence if you execute this well, a you've gone right. That was really enjoyable. I came home like a steam train. I'm super proud of that. And whenever you're successful at anything, there is a chemical release in the body from our brain that's giving us a congratulatory drink almost. It's a release of dopamine that says you've done a good job and that's addictive. You're super pumped that you've actually trained that execution testing session really well, especially if your number improves. And you know, the people who execute poorly, when I ring them up, they're thinking about selling their bike and stopping the training program. And the people who execute really well, they're asking me when the next test is because I reckon I can do better. They're two camps from the same session. One person stuffed up the execution and got it wrong, the other person's nailed it. So it's a hugely motivating thing for you to actually do a test well. And it gives you confidence that the training program that you've just been doing is working and you are nailing the execution. So there's a huge, a huge advantage mentally around that it also gives you.

Instant perspective about where your form is. You know, if you're wondering, how's my training going, how's my forming going? Well, the most instant way you can get feedback is do a test and it tells you exactly where you're at and there's no guessing games after that.

Yeah, you couldn't have said that any easier. And I think, you know, that's what we want to find out. That's what, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get perspective of where our current form is and therefore we want to train accurately, like I said at the start. So if we know our number, then the next three weeks of training, if you're going to do it every four weeks or every six weeks, the next five weeks depends on how quickly you're going to do it. But for me, I wouldn't want to let it go too long because I don't want to have weeks where I could be training harder because my form is improving. So it gives you instant information about where your current form is. And as long as you're training well and not missing sessions, that should progressively go in an upward direction. But if you test after five or six weeks and you haven't trained well, then your expectations should be different, it should be lower. So testing is good for positive reinforcement. It's also good for reassessing that I'm struggling with the training sessions. It's because I've missed so many training sessions. I might have been sick or might have been injured. It could be any reasons. It could be work stuff or Christmas stuff. So I'm coming back to this and I've just had so many examples in the last few weeks where I've had to talk to some of our athletes going, they're very disappointed with the outcome. And when we start pointing out what's happening over the journey of the last 10 or 12 weeks, then it becomes really clear that they've made a mistake in their expectation of their starting point. So they've really made a muck up of the execution. So that, that allowing you to train properly in the number that you've got from the test. Oh, that is, that is the key to the safe. If you're not knowing what your training number is, I don't know what you're doing in training. I'm confused.

Talk about free speed. I mean it's. Yeah, I couldn't stand not testing frequently because I want to make sure that I'm getting the most out of my sessions. VO2 sessions are brutal. A lot of athletes dread them. I dread them. You think about it the night before. Sometimes you know how much at the start of a session, how much is going to hurt. So I want to make sure that if I'm going to do this physically and mentally, I want to be getting the most out of the session. And so I want to make sure that I'm trained with the right numbers. If you're not testing frequently, you're not actually sure whether that's your best form or not. And I mean, if you didn't test, one argument might be that, well, if you do the same sessions, then you can just look back. If you're doing three minute intervals where you can just measure your intervals and if you're improving each week, then you're getting that progressive overload. But you're not going to do the same session, or I hope not for six months straight. You're going to do that for a mini block and then you're probably going to change sessions and you're going to do eight minute efforts. So if you don't test, how do you know you're going to do those eight minute efforts to an old number? How do you know if you can actually improve or not? So yeah, it's very easy to not test frequently, but then your numbers will become too easy. And if you do that over months at a time, you're leaving huge gains on the table again, you're leaving huge free speed on the table.

And I've used this example a bit and it's a really simple one. If you're in a gym where you're lifting weight and you're on your back doing a bench press and Jord, you just, you and I decide to do a six week program where we're gonna see what, how we can improve on our bench press. And I decide that my program is gonna be, I'm gonna do 100 pounds every week, eight reps, and you're gonna do 100 this week, 110 next week, 115 the next week 120, you're gonna progressively overload your load. But I'm just gonna stay with the same weight and then we'll test ourselves at the end. You know the answer. Without even going into detail about any scientific research, the person who overloads the training is going to be able to lift a higher weight at the end of the testing session than the person who stays lifting the same weight. I'm going to be really good at £100. You're going to be really Good at some unknown number. That could be 160, 170. That's the same concept as if you train with the same numbers for six to 12 weeks or I've had people six months training to the same numbers. I'm asking where is the overload? They're going to be really good at those numbers. But that's what you were six months ago and that's what you raced at six months ago. So why would you just stay the same? Surely you want to be testing so that you can actually add higher numbers to your training load so that just like the weight trainer, you've got 110 pounds this week, 120. You're allowing your body to adjust to new stimulus and if you don't test, you don't know what your new stimulus is. So I'm confused as people who are so adamant that they don't need testing. And I'm hoping that the discussion you and I are having is so obvious that you shouldn't be doing anything without testing.

Another one is it teaches you how to execute faster and it's such race great race day execution practice and it actually makes racing easier. And I think a lot of athletes underestimate this, that we look at pro cyclists, you know, and the execution of time trials and they've been cycling their whole life and they're still experimenting and they still get execution wrong. You know, we saw many times in the last few years promos, Roglic Chat, Pogata Remco, evenepall stuff up some time trials or execute really well because of their practice. And so it's almost arrogant to think that you can just train and then turn up on race day without having practiced that race environment and practice executing an all out effort. And just think that from your interval training that you can turn up on race day and execute it well, you know, you'll get really good at intervals, you know, if you just do intervals the whole time. But if you're not testing regularly in time trial environments, you're not going to be able to do it on race day. And I think that's a really underestimated point that, yeah, you can't, you can't be too arrogant in that sense and think that, you know, we're all amateur athletes, you need as much race practice as you can get. And testing is just race practice and.

Jord, you know, we've just got to change our mindset on this and stop being afraid of the testing and embrace it. And you know, if we had lots of races available to us we would be using some of those races as C races and just go and do the races. You know, there might be just a local park run on a Saturday. You know, it's, it doesn't matter in the scheme of our ironman training or a half ironman training. It's just a great training run where we could go for a 30, 40 minute warmup and then do 5K park run where we're trying to run and execute our strategy of trying to say we're trying to run 5 minute K pace, start at 5:10 and finish at 4:50 and then go and do a 30 minute cooldown. That could be your long run for the weekend with a little bit of intensity if that's the goal of that weekend. So that's an example of using testing as a, as a trump card rather than a oh my God testing. I'm too scared of what I, I don't actually know what people are scared of. Am I going to fail or something? That, that could be the premises of their mindset and I could not be. My mindset is so the other way. I am at the other end of the scale. I, I just don't want to train without knowing if I'm training properly. I don't want to waste a session, in other words, I don't want to waste a week, I don't want to waste one session. We don't have time to waste in training. And it's not all about the numbers, but it's all about actually knowing that you're training in the right areas. And I think a lot of coaching groups and I don't want to be critical here, but because we are so adamant the other way, it's just my opinion, I think that if we're not open to seeing how our athletes are progressing or not progressing, then that's a bad thing. We should be putting ourselves on the table saying, okay, you need to test, we trust our program and if you aren't progressing, I want to know straight away in that testing period what went wrong. Was it equipment, was it you executed poorly or did we not get the training right? And if we didn't get the training right, if we didn't test, we wouldn't know that. So what are we going to do? We're going to change something in your program and if we don't keep testing and you keep getting poor results, then we've got to keep working out what to change. So if we didn't do any of that, we would just let you do the program and get to race day. And guess what? You had the worst race of your life. And so we're putting ourselves on the line here to make sure that our program's working. And the other spectrum of that is the athletes who do test and improve, they just trust the program, then they are on board because they know it's working. And so it has this tenfold flow on effect of real positivity and confidence in trusting the process and knowing that this is working. And if I just keep going down this line and I'm so happy I'm testing because it's giving me feedback about how I'm going on this journey of 12 months or 2 years or whatever your goal is to go from you know, 3.1 watts per kilo to 3.5 or whatever your goal is 300 watts or you know, 40Ks an hour or 30Ks an hour. All these goals that you have, you want to be finding out along the way how well you're going. It's no good setting a goal. It's almost like you know, going to discover the world and you set out and you, you just, you don't hear from that person for two years, you don't know what they've done in the process where they've been. And at the end they can tell you whatever they like because no one knows what they've done. But this way we know exactly what your journey is all the way along. And I think that that allows the athlete to buy into the process, that this is a really great training session. It gives us execution practice, it tells us what to train to, it actually shows us where our form currently is and it's a super motivating thing to see improvement. So I've gone on a lot about this one but I think if anybody's not convinced about it, well, I can't help you. I'm sorry.

I would finish off by actually thinking about the Diamond League example with the athletics where you watch athletes do the Diamond League season and series and especially in Olympic year it's really prevalent. But even every year they have the world champs that they're building to as their a race. And on the diamond league circuit these athletes are turning up these 800 meter athletes or 1500 or 5K and they have to turn up every second week and do a race. And I just watch some of these athletes run 11, 800 meters over their season and they just go, geez, that is mentally hard. You know the 1500 meter athletes where they just, they're trying to run for the women, it's sub four minutes and for the men it's 3:30, 3:30 for the 1500 and the 5K. And you watch the season progress and they turn up and we saw a big progression this year. Jess Hull was a great example. Her opening run was 359I think coming into this year. And her PB was 356. And she's not trying to run 356 at the start of the season, but she's not going to not race because she's not in 356 form. She's starting a season and she has to run that first race to get a starting marker, see where she's at and build on that. And then over the course of the year she runs eight more 1500 meters and every time she's just shaving off a second. And that is really hard to turn up and keep doing that mentally and physically it's just so tough. And then she got to a month out from the Olympics and she runs a 3:50, 3:1500. This is the third fastest or fifth fastest time of all time. And comes into the Olympics in absolutely flying form. And so I just, you know, and that happens across every event. And you know, these athletes are proving that the racing is some of the best training they can do. It's great experience for them. It gets them prepped for their a race which is the world champs or Olympics. And it's exactly what we're saying. It's all the positive reasons why they're doing it. And they're not just going to say, oh, I'm just going to test at the start just how it doesn't go. I'm going to do 359 now and then I'm not going to race again until a month before the Olympics or the Olympics is going to be my thing. She's done 11 more races in between that.

Yeah. And I think as I said right at the start, testing is the wrong word. It could be racing. It could be just a hard training session that you're trying to really push yourself. And if you do this a lot, it does make race day easier because you're used to it and your mind is used to it. And I think that's, you know, we say in a lot of our race planning to our athletes before the race, just replicate what you've been doing in those race ready sessions on race day and you'll be fine. And I think that really makes them feel at ease because that is actually what we're trying to do. We're trying to replicate. And obviously we want to get another percent on race day, but we're not trying to do something that's outstandingly different to what we've been doing in our, in our testing and rate and training sessions. So I think that's probably enough on that. But I really believe that this is free speed. If you, if you, if you, if you buy into this process and understand the why, and I think if you don't understand the why, that's probably the reason why you've got anxiety over. And look, you still want to perform well and you should have a little bit of nervousness and that's good, that's good to have a little bit of nerves and a little bit of adrenaline. Whenever I'm lining up at A, B or C race, I look down at my resting heart rate. It's always raised, and that shows that I care about what I'm about to do. So I think you need to be putting yourself in these positions a lot so that when it comes to the main day that you don't get over anxious about what's happening on the big day. Apparently the big day is the big thing and it shouldn't be. It should be just a replication of what you've been doing.

Yeah, yeah. And look, you mentioned before, you know, why are we afraid of it? And for me, it is the effort. You know, I do, I love the testing for all the reasons you said, but there is fear there and it's just because you know how hard an effort's going to be and you line up on the line going, oh, this is going to hurt a lot, you know, and you really just know that, that that middle to back period is just. You're in the hurt locker, but that's also the fun. And. Yeah, and you can play games with yourself to get yourself really psyched up for it and, and focus on the benefits rather than focusing on the fear or the negatives or how much it's going to hurt. And look, we spoke a lot about this next point and so I'll just fly through this one. But a way to get free speed is what we just spoke about in terms of the benefit of testing and it's execution. And it's quite simple. You fix your execution, you'll end up with a faster time. If you don't go too hard too early, you won't blow up, you'll end up with a faster time. If you stay in the right zones, you'll end up with a faster time. And I think that's the as simple as that point needs to be. Would you agree?

Absolutely. We've done that one to death, I think.

Yep. The next one for free speed is fix your positioning, but more specifically practice the time and the position. So the first point I want to talk about is the balance between getting more aero that's going to give you free speed, but being able to hold power because the higher power you can maintain. Obviously that's going to help you with improving your overall speed as well. But there's a fine balance here and if you can get this right, you're going to go faster for the same fitness level.

Yeah, we, we really push this a lot with our new athletes is, you know, you've got all the equipment, you've got a great bike, you've got a power meter. Has anybody fitted you to this bike? And the answers are varied. You know, the majority of people haven't. And that's not, that's not a negative. It's just I would be really super encouraging. It's not a rule for our program, but I really want to encourage people to go and get an expert to check them out to make sure they're able to push the power and still be reasonably aero. So the two things have to work together. You can't be that arrow that you can't push the power and you can't be pushing big power when you're, you know, the only way to do it is by sitting up. So.

Yeah, so the positioning, I can really block a kind of wind. Yes.

Yeah.

You don't want to be wind flag. Yeah, because it's easier to push high power when you're sitting up. It's just the leverage can.

Yeah, so, so it's really, at the end of the day, it's always about how fast you can ride from A to B. And so the position will allow you to do that with lower power, with a better aero position. But is that sustainable in that position for 180k or 90k or 40k? And you know, they're the things you have to learn in your training. So get the fit right. That's going to allow you to do, if you're doing an ironman to, to, to try to be as aero as possible and still push the power comfortably. And that may take time after you get that proper bike fit, but that is, you know, that is not a very expensive thing to do when it's going to give you probably in an ironman, you could get 15 minutes advantage out of it.

The cool thing we've seen with the Pros and releasing a lot of their own kind of wind tunnel testing and then just seeing what position they end up with in races is that every position is slightly different depending on the pro and what they decide. With wind tunnel testing, you know, the aero gains versus the what they push power wise. And they find their limit of what's worth it for them. So you can really model that and you don't have to pick a pro and copy exactly what they're doing. That's not going to work. But you can model what they're doing to try and improve their aero position. And they're really tucked in their heads close to their arms as possible. They're as lean as possible and slipstream as possible in their position. And one trick you can do is if you ever do a race, there's always photos of the event. And you can go on, you don't have to buy the photos, but you can just go on and check the photos and check your bike position and see what you look like when you think your aerospace versus what a pro might look like and how aggressive they are. Or you can, even if you're training around the velodrome, just get a family member or a friend or your partner to even just film you around the velodrome and practice being quite aggressive in positions and maybe sitting up a little bit more and just seeing what you look like on film and even just do it on the stationary trainer. But it is nice to do it outside in real world environment just to practice those differences. And the last point I'll make on that is once you get a position that you're trying to achieve, you need to train that position and spend time in that position in order to be able to execute it on race day. And in terms of running off the bike, you need to practice time in that position and running off the bike in that position to make sure you can actually run. Because you might be in a super aggressive position, but your legs are so dumb from that that you can't run off the bike.

Yeah. And you know, getting someone to film you is a great idea. I really love that. And getting photos and video is great. But if you go to the velodrome by yourself and you do say four laps where you're trying to make sure that your head is right behind your fingers and see what average speed you're doing in that position and then move your head to a little bit higher and maybe your arms a bit wider. Do four laps in that position and you could see straight away that it's probably 0.3 of a kilometer slower. Doing a different position. They're things you can do yourself without even going to a wind tunnel. Trying to hold similar positions is a really good thing to do to practice on your own. And you know, can I hold this really tight, fast aero position for long enough time? And if I can't, it's not worth it because the next point you just made was you can't actually run because you're so stiff and tight from being in a compromised position that a lets you ride fast and push good power. But guess what? You can't run. And you know, it is a triathlon, not the fastest bike ride. So at the end of the day, you need to be in a position that allows you to run and that could take time spent in that training position, the aero position, so that eventually you'll be able to run well no matter what your position is on the bike. And I think that's the thing people don't give themselves enough is time to practice their new position. I've just got this new bike fit and it doesn't work. And I've only been. They've only had four or five rides. I'll give the example. When I got a bike fit, it literally was six months between me being where I was before I got the bike fit to being better than I was. And that took six months of practice before I could actually ride the time trial bike as fast or faster than I could before the. For before the bike fit. And I reckon most people would have abandoned the bike fit, but it ended up being faster than I was before. So it was worse worth persevering for that result.

We said we wanted to do free speed, but it would be remiss to talk about speed gains without talking about equipment. So we just want to list kind of the main things where you could upgrade your equipment to get more speed. Just knowing that this is. We're probably going to put this in order of cost. What costs the most, cost the least. And then we can just kind of chat about what might be worth it for you. So look, the first one, it doesn't cost the most, but it is an expense. But we've spoken about this whole episode is the power meter. So if you don't have a power meter, getting a power meter is going to be a much easier way to make sure that you're executing properly and doing everything we say and training to the right numbers. That's going to be a game changer for you because if you're not doing that you're probably not training nearly as effectively as possible. So we want to get that one out of the way. Yep.

Yeah. And look, definitely we talked about free speed and power meter is free speed, but in the sense of it does cost money. Whereas the other things we've talked about is you just changing things in your mind and in your training. Whereas this is actually an equipment thing which does cost money. So we're making this a separate thing. So we don't have anybody in our program without power. And that's because it's on. We know we want to be able to measure everybody and see how they're going to. And you don't have a power meter, you can't measure it. People can, can tell me by email or by texting till they're blue in the face that they can, they can measure whatever they like without a power meter. And I will just disagree to the cows come home. You, you need a measurement that's, that's going to give you data and, and you know, using heart rate has got so many good things about it, but it's also got so many bad things that don't allow you to measure your effort. And you know, perceived exertion is something we include in our program. We want people to know what power equals the feeling. And so the power meter is part of the program. So you need to do that to be a better, faster rider.

And so it's funny because some of the things we're going to talk about here, you could get these or not. And we actually don't mind if you do or not. You can come into our program. But the power meter is one that we say is a non negotiable. So upgrading from a road bike to an aero bike. We don't mind if you ride a road bike in the triathlon or if you have an aero bike, a TT bike, but whatever bike you have, you need to have a power meter. So the equipment upgrades you can make from most expensive to least expensive are probably making that jump to a proper aero bike. Disc wheels on that bike, aero helmet, a fast skin suit, a measured fast skin suit. Changing the front end setup. So getting some of the latest tech in front end bars which are really changing quite rapidly and not just putting some standard flat front end bars on the front, which we'll chuck about it a second. Then there's all the minor upgrades like getting aero bottles, aero socks, aero long sleeve if you're going to rock that in a cycling event, not so much a triathlon, you know, actually getting the Aero helmet with a proper aero visor and not just having cycling glasses on. Out of all of those, you know, where do you rate the, the benefit of spending money versus, versus the cost?

Yeah, I think the first two we mentioned, the power meter and transferring from a road bike to a time trial bike for triathlon, that they're the two things that are going to be the biggest game changers and the time that you'll, you'll get back from, from having that information and that technology and sure, disc wheel, aero helmet, skin suits, aero bars, all the things you mentioned, they're all really good add ons but those two things, the power meter to enable you to execute properly and stay in your ranges and riding a road bike and you know, you and I have been talking about this. I rode the road bike at Kona in my first go with just normal handlebars that we didn't have any clip on bars in those days. It was a steel frame bike. And you know, the, the speed I was able to ride there compared to what I can ride now, 40 years old, I'm literally 40 years older. I can ride faster now than I could ride then. And, and that doesn't make sense. It's purely that the bike I was on was just not up to standard compared to the bikes that there are now. And you know, my bike time was reasonable there but it was still under five hours. But you know, if I had the bike that I own now, I'm sure I could, you know, knock off minutes.

I'd love if we had a. Yeah, exactly. I love if we had a time machine and could put a power meter on steel junkyard bike you had in 1988 and see what power you had to push to ride that fast in that, that back then. And then you equate that to if you could put down the same power on a, on a modern day aero bike. And it's crazy. And honestly you look at road bikes 10 years ago and, and you've seen, I've seen some articles recently comparing that and literally bikes have just exploded in the last five years, seven years. It, it is absolutely crazy to see what Chris Froome, Tour de France winner was riding in 2014 compared to just the absolute machines they are on now, it's pretty wild. So to finish off the episode, we want to mention one last unwritten rule of training to get free speed and we can't leave an episode without mentioning this and that is that consistency trumps everything. If you just train consistently, you don't change anything else. But make sure you're consistent for a year. You are so guaranteed to be a faster rider.

Well, I don't think we have to dig into that too deep. Everybody that has been successful in whatever career, they are at the top of their level, they didn't get it because they missed a lot of training sessions. They got it because they actually were so, you know, I look at, we've got our own Olympian in our, in our Trivalo group who was at the 1996 Atlanta Games as a 5,000 meter representative for Australia, who could run 13 minutes 24, Julian Painter. And I look at the way he goes about his training as a, as a 50 year old and it just resembles him as an Olympian. He, he just does the same stuff. He does, does not miss sessions and you know, he's already turned out to be, you know, he was a, an absolute gun, 5,000 meter runner. And here he is, he's won national titles as a cyclist, time trials, road racer, but he's implemented the same strategies of consistency and turning up to train and you know, there's no, there's no correlation. That is so much, so obvious. Then, then consistency equals success.

Yeah. You were just talking about the brilliant interview with Andy Buchanan, who just ran the Australian marathon record in 206, the fastest marathon time ever by an Australian. Incredible result and, and really quite well executed. And he got asked on the news, you know, what made this jump. He's the first athlete to go around a 207. It's, it's a huge jump in what's been achievable for Australian athletes. What were you doing in your training that was different? And he said, what was different was I trained for six years straight. That was the secret to his success, which is just an absolutely brilliant answer.

But he went on to say, Jord, he did go on to say, I didn't do anything special. I just turned up every day and because I trained consistently, this is where I ended up.

Yeah, it's absolutely brilliant. So that's our unwritten rule is consistency trumps everything. And the other unwritten rule is that on this podcast, if you like the show, if you find it helpful in any way, if you found this episode helpful, the best way that you can give back to us and help us is to share this show with a fellow athlete, make sure that you like the show, wherever you listen to it, subscribe to it, whether you listen to it, whether that's Spotify YouTube and share it with a fellow athlete who would also find it valuable. That's the best thing you can do to thank us if you do find this information in these episodes valuable to your own training and racing. So that's it for this episode. Thank you very much for listening and we'll see you in the next one. You want. Keep watching. Keep.