Best Tech And Training Equipment For Cyclists with Shane Miller

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. If you've ever had any technological problems trying to set up your bike on a trainer, on a smart trainer. Ever Googled how to connect a smart. If you've ever googled how to set up my Wahoo Kicker, or even my Wahoo Kicker won't connect, then you may have, or I could almost guarantee you will have come across Shane Miller, GP Llama on YouTube. He is a tech guru. And if you're like us, you're one of the millions of people that have watched YouTube channels giving the latest help on all things technology related to cycling. And not only is he a tech guru, he's an elite cyclist in his own right. He's won almost every possible master's title under the sun here in Victoria and Australia over the last decade, including the 2012 Cycling Victoria Master Cyclist of the Year in the male category. And so in this week's episode, we asked Shane what are the must haves for tech at the moment? We asked him for the best tips, technology, something most of us struggle with, and how to get the most out of your equipment and set up. And we ask him some of the golden questions, like, what is the best power meter to buy? What's the best smart trainer to buy? So this is a great episode talking all things technology, and we really dive into a bit of backstory behind Zwift and behind Shane himself. It's really interesting to hear the tech side of things from an expert, and it really does clear things up. So we hope you enjoyed this episode. Without further ado, here is Shane Miller. Shane Miller, welcome to the Travelo podcast. Now, I want to start by saying everywhere you are. Shane Miller, GP Llama. What is GP Llama?

That's a question I get quite a lot.

I can imagine.

It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a misheard song lyric from. From about 20 or maybe 25 years ago. Back in high school, there was a heavy. There's always a heavy metal kid in school. So this heavy metal kid was rocking out with a set of headphones. He started yelling out, God's pet lama. Godspet Llama. And I'm like, what does he mean? God's pet lama is in Dalai Lama. Is there a deeper meaning to this song that he's singing along to? And I said, hey, Tyson, what does God's pet lama mean? And he said, what are you talking about? It was something else. I'd misheard what he was singing along with. And I'm like, okay, that was kind of weird. And it stuck in my mind that day. And it was around about that time we had to come up with a unique username for the Internet or for whatever it was called at that time, Internet, bbs, or whatever we're logging into. And nobody had GP Llama with one L, like, okay, GP Llama. And it stuck. It's a unique name. And it kind of stuck as a branding thing, too, because llamas, Even though it's 1L, is in the Dell Llama, but the alpacas and llamas, the animal and things like that. And now people are sending me holiday photos from Machu Picchu saying, hey, you're here as well. With a lot. I'm like, enjoy your holiday. Don't worry about my username. But it's stuck. So, yeah, it's kind of worked. So that's the history behind G.P. lama. I misheard song lyrics.

That's a great story. Cause I was wondering if I was missing something, if it was a cycling reference that I wasn't aware of, but I'm glad to clear that up. So we'll launch into the episode and one of the questions we always ask someone in the industry is, what does cycling mean to you?

That's deep. That's deep. Straight off the bat.

Big one. To start with.

What does cycling mean to me? A connection with your environment. I think that's going to have to be it, because you can drive a car and you can see everything out the window and you pass everything, but on a bike, you actually get to live and breathe your environment and you get to see so much more. I mean, here I'm in Ballarat, riding around the nationals course, up the extinct volcanoes. They are old volcanoes. Through the forest. Now, on the gravel bike, places I'd never go in the car. Or I just ignore, because in a car, it's all about the destination. On a bike, it's about the journey, too. So, yeah, just connection with outdoors.

That's fantastic. And the irony of that is you are such an indoor swifter. I love the fact that you still think about it as. As an outdoor activity, and that's what is your passion. And that. That's. That's fantastic.

The wind in my hair when I had.

Speaking of which, when you did have hair, look for the. For the listener who. Who might not know who you are. Pretty much, you've done, in my opinion, as a master's rider, you've done pretty much everything on a bike that was possible. And you've won every race that I've. I've been racing against you for good on, I don't know, 15 years. And since the early 200s, 2000s, 200s, the early 2000s, you were kind of the innovator, not just as a tech head, but on a bike, you were, you were absolutely ahead of the game with, with the latest gadget, the fastest go fast wheels, pedals, aero position helmet, handlebars. And, you know, so much so that I came to you for help over that journey to say, how can I get as fast as you are? Because I want to know what you're doing. And, you know, you won every Masters, national title, state title, you're Victorian Cyclist of the Year a couple of times, you've won the Tour of Bright. There isn't a race I don't think you've been in that you actually haven't won. And, and to be able to do that so successfully for literally 10 years, I just think is a real credit to you. And you were a real innovator and ahead of your game. Why did you stop all of a sudden?

Well, first of all, I appreciate the kind words. That's a great little summary. I put a lot of work, I live and breathe this stuff a lot of the time with cycling, people say the more work you put in, the harder you work, the more successful you are. That's not the case with cycling. There's just so many things that have to fall into place. I guess my success would be attributed.

To.

Being a little bit crazy, like seeking that little, you know, every little. Just trying to squeeze everything out of it. But it comes a time where you've ticked all the boxes. And there was one time when I. It was back in. So Tour of Bright. I target. I mean, we all love Tour of Bright. What that is our. I always call it, it's our little Tour de France, the amateur cyclist. It has hills, it has a time trial, it has an epic climb up Mount Hotham at the end with CRB Hill. And you know them. Tour means a lot to me. I won that back in 2012 when we were masters. Masters. 1, 2, 3. Correct. And then the next year I went back. I wasn't quite on form, so I worked for a teammate, Stephen Lane. And then the year after, it was Masters abc, which caused a few little issues here and there. And I get that And I won Masters A in that. And I'm thinking box ticked. I've won both types of two at a Bright. I've targeted the time trial, and then I targeted criteriums. Did a bit of track as well. Had some fun with that because that's just a small time trial. But just I fell in love with the process of just getting absolutely everything out of my body. And the equipment, too. There's always something new with the equipment. But there was a time when we went to Bright for the 2015 or 2016 tour of Bright, and I was up there with Stephen Lane, Brett Style, and a few others. And we're riding up the backside of Tawanga Gap, and I'm sitting on 380 watts, and I'm 15 minutes into my effort, and I'm like, okay, this is what I need. I know the number, I know what it takes to win, and I know what it takes to win the Tour of Right. In the age group categories, I'm sitting on 380 watts, 15 minutes into the effort, almost at the top, and I'm like, this is really uncomfortable. And all I'm doing here is training to tick a box I've already ticked. I'm like, you know what, guys? I'm just gonna go back to the cafe. My wife's back down here, and it's nice and cozy coffee down there. I'm just gonna turn around. And I think that was about it. I really think that was the turning point where I'm like, you know what? I've ticked all those boxes, and I've had a lot of fun ticking those boxes. And it was about that time where the YouTube channel came along, and I'm sort of now passing on that knowledge during that whole growth period of, like, discovering cycling, watching lance in the 2003 tour and getting a bike and getting some oversized nicks and having a bad bike fit and progressing through and getting faster and winning a few titles. I was helped out by a lot of people. A lot of people. Jason Denhollander, Stuart Vaughan from Hawthorne Cycling, all those people gave me this knowledge, and I started thinking, well, it's time for me to give back. And social media came along and video delivery, it was much easier to just upload video. So I thought, you know, I'll just pivot around and just give back all my knowledge and just start tinkering with this technology and passing on all my tips. That was about it. I sort of ticked all the boxes. And one thing that's rarely discussed in cycling, everyone talks about how great cycling is, how fun it is and, oh, you push yourself and all that. It hurts. It hurts a lot. I've broken four collarbones in races that we've done too. I've broken hips. Nothing hurts as much as what it takes to win a time trial or what it took for me. So it might be different to others. I suffered so hard in some of those trials. You just have to push yourself and there's that mental space that you can be in and you can be comfortable with being very, very uncomfortable. I was done. It just hurt so much. So that's about it. Ticked all the boxes and I was just ready just to rest a little bit. I still enjoy cycling. I still push myself. I was still pushing myself testing a power meter up a hill yesterday. I got to the top. I was a mess. But again, it was under my control, though. When you're in a race, especially a time trial, you know, you put yourself under so much different pressure. So that's pretty much why I stepped away from it. Um, it was also. I don't think we'll ever see cycling reach the Cadel excitement levels that we saw. Remember Tour of Bright? I think it was 2000, might have been 2011, or 12 or 13. Tour of Bright sold out in about 15 minutes. Insane. Insane. The popularity was huge. There was growth, there was a lot of change. The VRs came along, there was other races. Things that are sort of diving off a little bit later on as people started branching out and chasing their own goals for cycling. Strava came along, gravel cycling came along. Cyclocross took off. People sort of chasing their own goals rather than the road. Road is a. What would you call it? It's a bit of a pressure cooker, too.

That's a great answer. And it's really helped me understand where you're at now. And I often wondered whether you were disillusioned with cycling in itself or whether it was just you and your competitiveness you'd had enough of. And so it's a great answer. And just going on to that. Next question would be. You've seen the growth of cycling, as you mentioned, it's just boomed worldwide, Australia wide. It's the new Golf from 2005 onwards. Unfortunately, grown men like myself don't look that good in Lycra, but we don't care. And we just go to cafes and. And sweat all over people. And it's kind of a really weird sort of world. But more and more people have joined. And where do you see the growth of cycling and the people who are in control of our cycling community. Do you see that that's been successful or is there things that you think that.

That's an interesting one. I fought the administration throughout my entire competitive cycling career. A lot. I fought them on because I would rock up to a time trial and one of the officials would tell me off because my drink bottle wasn't three to one and I'm like, no, it is three to one because I've got the rulebook right here. Or we couldn't wear time trial booties up at Wangaratta when it was negative three, because time trial booties had been banned on the track, not for outdoors. Now, I knew the rules. I kept a copy of the rulebook in the car. Like I was that kind of insane about ticking all the boxes. And by the rule, always played by the rules. That's why I'm so proud of my results too, because even when it comes to the anti doping stuff, always by the rules. And you can never take. If you've actually done something, like if you've broken a rule or taken some drugs or something, you're always going to be questioning yourself. Whereas my stuff, all mine, I love it. So anyway, always fought the administration on the nitpicky nit, things like that. And one of the poor experiences that I had was in a team time trial out the road here, not too far, and the course wasn't properly defined and we went sailing straight through without taking it and we missed the turn and obviously missed any chance. And I'm like, ah, really? You're going to run events like this? And then when we come into the finish, the juniors were leaving and their parents were pulling out on course in their cars. It was dangerous. So it was funny. Paul Lumsden, who was at CV at the time, comes walking over. I know Paul, he's behind a lot of the innovation too, so hats off to him for a lot of the progress they made through the VRs. Paul comes walking over and in front of everyone, I said to him, I said, paul, if you're coming over here as a friend, keep walking. You're coming over here representing Cycling Victoria. And I've like, Everyone's like, whoa. He's like, I'm here as Paul. I'm like, okay, right, let's have a chat about. I was. I guess it comes again that. That pressure pot of trying to get everything out of yourself. You can't be friendly all the time and you expect. You ask so much of yourself as, you know, as an Athlete, you ask so much of yourself that when something doesn't work, you know, you feel let down and then if others aren't, don't hold themselves to such high regard as well, you let down by the administration. We saw Cycling Australia fall apart a few years ago now. I haven't had a CA license for a year or two now. I kept renewing that as part of the look, I'll support what they're doing, but I'm not going to go out and race. So I don't know. But we do see, as I was saying before about people chasing their own adventures, we see the cyclocross just booming. We see the local Creswick mountain bike club, VOGA cycling, putting on the pig, dirty pig and whistle gravel ride. Brilliant. Back to the grassroots stuff. So I'm glad to see that booming at the top level, though I think it stagnated a little bit, I guess. It's really hard these days though. There's more and more issues around regulation and traffic management and the risks out on the road are so big. So I think it's a bit of a struggle there. I was seeing a lack of, when I stepped away from cycling in about 2016, 2017, the competitive side, I was seeing a bit of a lack of direction and innovation. And then that war came along with the old cycle versus Cycling Australia and that imploded and then came back. And then I think they're back on their feet now, but I think a lot of people are like, you know what, there's alternatives, so we'll go race those. So I think they need to embrace those. And we see that with cycling. What do they call it? Old cycling have now embraced the esports side of things and they've had to during the COVID period.

There's a definite distinction, isn't there, between the competitive beast who wants to do what like you did, you know, go to all the events and, and, and, and one of the things, just on a sideline, I, I want it to be more inclusive. I don't want to have someone stand there telling me that they can't fit their credit card between my frame and the tire. You know, look, just let's make it easier for people to compete rather than harder and so the people can actually enjoy the day and not be so afraid of being pulled up on the start line when you've trained so hard to to the focus on your next 20 minutes and some guide puts you off mentally by saying, oh, your handlebars are 1 millimeter and look, you've not put a Marshall on a road and I've gone straight through and gone the wrong way. That's a little bit more important than the technological things of my bike. So there's that side and then there's the person who just wants to get healthy and fit and do a PB and not particularly go to a serious race, but wants to do a gran fondo or just be recreational with their mates. And there's kind of two different parallels of riding, I feel, and it's. The gap's getting wider. The racing side doesn't seem to have depth or support and the recreational side seems to be where I think we're heading in. People and wanting to be healthy and fit and seeing it as I don't want to be a racer, I just want to have fun. What do you think?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of pressure on. Because that's the pinnacle of the sport, isn't it? When somebody knows that you're taking up cycling. Oh, you're going to be racing the Tour de France. That's what everybody at work will say. Or somebody. Yeah, somebody who doesn't know about, like, are you going to the Tour de France? It's like, no, that's kind of like the very top of the. So whenever you go and buy a performance race bike, it's kind of like they sell it with the, you know, well, you're going to go race it or you're going to go join a club or people just don't want to. I think this also comes down to the commercial side of things. Is there a commercial benefit to sponsor a team? It's going to be a struggle unless you're invested in it yourself with a coaching business, that makes sense. You support riders, they're out there. That's the end result. For a company to come along and put money into cycling to build the racing side of things. Going to be a bit of a tough ask on return. I think a lot of these organizations who are enabling cycling for the masses, the big gran fondos and the big gravel rides, they just do that because there's just going to be volume of people and the volume you will never get at a competitive race. I think the pig and whistle out here In Creswick saw 600 or 700 riders. They were factoring about, I think, 200. They said, oh, yeah, we're set up for about 200 riders. And they had around six to 700 people turn up. So, yeah, it's sort of like this road has an element of snobbiness to it. But that comes down to. I think it's also misinterpreted a lot about people who are just so super focused on pure performance. The warm up for a time trial, they were a weird beast. I mean, I've done hundreds and hundreds of time trials and there were so many tricks that are just not inclusive for time trials, including you fully kid up, your bike totally decked out, and you just warm up past everyone. You just warm up in your. Like, in your air. Because that used to get to me. That used to get in my head as a tactic I used as well every now and then. But then it was also put your headphones on and ignore people. There was, where is it? A gravel race or a Gran Fondo? You're there with your friends. So I think there is a gap between the two, but there's also room for both. Is there a middle ground? Anytime you get two people on a bike, it's always a race.

Which is.

Why we love it. So it's always difficult. But look, I think we've seen. I think I've seen, especially myself, a decrease in competitive road cycling and the time trialing and things like that, but I've seen more people on bikes and more people discussing bikes, which is for my business now too. So that's a good thing.

Let's dive into the equipment side a little bit and we'll stay on you personally just a little bit longer. And that is that. You know, dad spoke about a lot of your success and how much would you attribute that to your innovation and like you said, that craziness to get the best wheels, get the best equipment, get the best bike, fit the best power meters, bike computers especially, you know, 15 to 10, 15 to five years ago, when in the last five years a lot of this technology has exploded and everyone's on board but you're before it. So. Yeah, how much do you.

That's it. Dr. Steven Lanen said it perfectly. He said it's like real estate. We got in early, before everybody else came along and got really, really quick. So I was happy with that because there was a lot of quick guys there at the end and I was getting my ass handed to me quite a few times. Tire and wheel technology has made leaps and bounds. Like we would go to a race and we would pump up to 120 to 130psi on our 21mil tyres or 22mil tyres. That's unheard of. Now people are racing on 28 at what, 70 to 80psi? Blows my mind I'm rolling around a gravel bike with 22 psi in the wheels. I'm like what is this? Are they going to fall off? So but to answer your question on the technology side of things, I would say most of my success is based on exactly the technology that I chose. We used to write before any time trial helmets were certified to use in Australia. So you had. They needed an AUS NZ certification at Helmet Tour of Bright 2007 or 8 we were racing in skateboard helmets, protech helmets that had no vents on them. So you'll see us in bowling ball helmets because they were more aero. We tested those and they were faster.

It's interesting now Shane, that the cask helmet looks almost exactly like that.

Absolutely. Yep. So the little short tail cask looks exactly like that. So we were racing so that gave us an advantage and that was one of my realizations of architecture. Time trial. I won, I think it was open B time trial with one of those helmets. I'm like okay, that's all good. As for positioning. So my, my, the biggest, the highest I ever got my FTP was probably around 360 at about 68 to 69 kilos. I'm not sure what that is in watts per kilo. I didn't do a lot of FTP tests but I knew I was around 360. My best 20 minute power is around 385. So they're not big numbers for someone who was around 70 kilos. Big Tom Leaper was time trialing it. I think he was doing around 420 watts. The time trials I was doing around 370 to 380 in but I was still putting about 45 seconds into Tom because I can get my shoulders right in. A lot of people will look at the time trial position from the side and going oh, how's my time trial position from the side? You're like are you racing sideways? Looks pretty aero to me. Show us from front on. That's the key.

Slippery and skinny. Front on, isn't it?

Absolutely. Like if you see a number of the skinnier guys doing our records you're like really? You only did 340 or 380 watts? That's low. It's like yeah, try and do it like with yeah. The surface area of a pin. They are so acknowledging that I've been to the wind tunnel which was the quickest way to spend $800 to be told to keep your head down. That was it. That was, that was really just keep your head down. I purchased every Single TT helmet that was certified. And I always went back to my Lima Speed Demon because that tested best with my back. I've got sort of a lance hump on my back when I'm sort of crouching down TT and pulling my shoulders in. My old helmet tested always the best. As for the equipment wise, though, no bike frames. I mean, companies will always sell you. It's 40% faster, but 40% faster than the 10% that it was attributing to you. They're just percentages of percentages. That's what you're looking at there. Your body is everything. I think it's 90%, I think, is the average thing they throw around in the wind tunnel. We're also into the fabrics before everybody's sort of tweaked onto that. We're using, I think it's Eschler or Elsha material from Chances, which is sort of windbreaking material or with a few trip lines and things like that. That was years and years ago. That's just common now. So I guess that helped a little bit. But also pacing strategy with power meters, that is just second to none. Because you go out in a time trial, you go out super hard, you're pushing along. If you look down at your power, it's like that's way of a threshold. What the hell. And just knowing that, that there's always going to be a monkey on your back, like stabbing you with pain at some point in the time trial. Just know that monkey's there. Don't invite him too soon. Just looking down, looking down at the numbers and just having your averages and just knowing, you know, knowing yourself and doing a time trial. Yeah, and preparation, I think, comes into it as well. The Tour of Right time trial for the new TIP course, which goes up a hill. I rode that about 40 times. I think in a simulation, we broke that into 100 meter sections. I rode that on the old Le Monde Revolution trainer, which I absolutely love, and still to this day think it's the best trainer out there. Read that course 40 times the day. There's a photo of me. I think it was taken by Paul Lumsen from Cycling Victoria. I've taken off the start ramp. A Tour of Bright, the biggest race of the year. I've got this biggest smile on my face because I'm like, I've got this. I've so got this. Not to win, but I've got the effort. I know exactly what I've got to do for every single section of this course. And I came in I think two seconds under my simulated time. I want it. That helps to make it a good memory, but it's sort of the whole package. The whole package. And that's why I do love time trialing too. Just to take it down to time trial, because you never miss a breakaway in a time trial. You are responsible 100% for a time trial and if you pace it well and are the strongest, you'll win in a road race. You can be the strongest rider out there. You can do the most work for the day. You can come dead last, go home with nothing.

That's all music for your ears, isn't it, dad? Speaking your language.

Absolutely. And we want to just delve into the power meters a little bit, don't we, Jordan? Let's just follow up from. I suppose the one thing that you might disagree with this, but the one innovation that you think was a game changer for you was probably the power meter. And it's not going to make you go faster, but it's going to stop you from going slower. That's probably the way I look at it. It's a guide. And we shouldn't be just fixated on the power data. The data is so important. Everybody who knows our podcast knows that we are so data driven with power meters, but we also want to include our sensations and feelings along that journey to match them together to get the right outcome. So execution is relying on feelings and it's relying on you on your power data. So let's just look at what's available out there for the person who's listening, who's just going, what? What? That's a mine field of power meters. You've tested every single one of them. Where do you sit and what would you direct a person who's coming into cycling who wants to understand what the hell power is and what should I buy?

Well, first of all, to address why a power meter is so important. And there was nothing. Again, I'm all about hands on experience. Having experienced something myself, I can tell people about it and give them a good example of exactly why people have an aha moment with something like power or any of the technology that I cover. And this was when my wife I bought her a power tap. She likes cycling too, so she gets all the extra, extra.

Tell everybody, Shane, what a power tap is. Obviously the wheel, but it's a power.

Tap is a hub. Back in the day they also had pedals and chainrings as well, but this was a powertap hub that goes in the rear wheel and Measures power all the way back there gives you a power number. It also did cadence. I think they also did speed too back in the day from those anyhow. It was a really old school. You won't see them around much these days at all. But you had to replace your rear wheel with one of those. And my. I upgraded my wife's bike to a power meter. She was starting to take up racing at the time. It was just natural progressions following us around to all the races around Victoria and around Australia. And she came out for a ride with this, with the power meter on the bike and she came home. She's like, I had the worst ride. I was chasing you guys going so hard up the hills and I got dropped and I did, you know, I chased you up this hill and I know the exact route that we did out in Donvale in Melbourne. Quite hilly around the back roads there. And she was really disappointed. She's like, had a bad day on the bike. Let's upload the data and have a look. Bing, bing, bing. Pb, pb, pb, pb. She's like, hang on, what?

Why?

I've done a five minute power pb.

Wow.

And it changed her ride because again it measured what she did against herself and what she'd previously done. And I'm like, that is the power of a power meter right there. You can get dropped from a ride, a race and have it. You could lose a time trial, but if you PB in power. John Kane beat me at to dive off into a story. I came back from my broken hip nine weeks after breaking my hip. I went down to Phillip island, race the time trial at about 380 watts. John Kane beat me. I was second. Doesn't happen often, but I put out a power pb. I'm like, that's a win for me.

That's as good as I can do.

Exactly right. I couldn't do any better beaten by a faster rider. Better rider on the day. Hats off, but I had my data and I'm like 380 watts. I was super proud of that. Philip island was a great time trial. So that's to me that that story. Seeing Von came home from a ride and change her mood based on the data too was just amazing. Same with a headwind or a tailwind. Like, oh, that was a horrible ride. It's like, yeah, look how much you were pushing out of the headwind. You really measure yourself so good. So onto what power me to go for there is. What do they call it? There's Just you spoiled the choice. But there's also so many to choose from that you'll never decide what to choose. Like smart trainers these days too. There's just so to go with. The best thing you can do is talk to a friend who has a power meter and who likes the power meter they have. That's my first protocol. Have a chat to a mate. They'll give you a real world experience. People call us influencers. I get that. And we'll, we'll give you the brand new shiny look. I've got some Garmin Rally power meter pedals here. I've used those a few times, but I haven't like really smashed things like someone who owns them would. I haven't gone out and ridden them for three or four or five months and had these issues. I'll give the introductory experience with them and I'll dive right into the data. But for long term, it's really hard to get that from any review, any review at all. Even from my stuff. Some of the stuff I do use on a daily basis. So that's the value there. And the trick is to look what I keep using. That's the trick to look at what I use day to day and what I use when the cameras aren't on and what I use when I'm not posting to Instagram. That's the equipment that you want to get. That's what power me to go for.

That's a really good example. And anybody in life, whether you know someone who's promoting cars, well, what car are you driving? And you know, there's, you know, dishwasher, it doesn't matter if someone's promoting something, well, what actually do you use? And that will probably give you a better answer.

Yeah, for sure. People ask me about head units too, and I'm like, well, I use them all. I use three garments indoors, I use a wahoo head unit outdoors, I use different things everywhere. So sometimes it's not a good use case like that. Yeah, it all comes down to your own personal choice. But if you can get a friend to recommend something or you can see behind the curtain of what people are reviewing and what's going on, Social media allows for that. But social media also promotes people having issues because social media becomes a support site for everything. You gotta watch for that. Anyhow, to answer your question, you first need to choose what kind of power meter you're after. Well, first of all, your budget. That's the first thing. Typically I throw budgets away. I want to know just what works, does it do what it says on the box, be it an srm, be it a power estimate, does it actually do what they say? First of all, most of them do these days. First thing to know though is SRM are no longer the gold standard. People claim that SRM are the pinnacle. They are the gold standard. Sorry, SRM, you've been caught sleeping for the last 10 years. There's a lot of other players out there that will give good, high quality data good enough for people to train with and get the best out of themselves. So budget and then where do you want to place that power meter on your bike? You're going to have somebody install it? Do you need to swap it between bikes? And the last few years we've seen the rise of the power meter pedal because you can go and buy a box or order them online in a very small box and then install them yourself with an 8 mil hex wrench and go and ride. You might need to change your cleats. That's about as technical as it gets. No longer do you need to swap out a crankset or a spider or change crank arms or lace a hub into a wheel. That's all getting very, very hard. Nowadays you can just click on Amazon, click buy, install them yourself and go and ride.

Especially if you've got three bikes and you don't want to buy three power meters. The pedals that they go, you just change pedals from bike to bike to bike and you've got the same power meter every time you ride. Whereas with three individual power meters for three bikes, there's a whole minefield of data inequalities happening there.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, they all should line up. People say there's no standards with power meters. And that is a problem with the power meter industry is that the company's all self certify. There's no standards body, although they're measuring the same thing of watches of what and the torque and the cadence that all should measure the same. And that's what I hold them accountable to when I do my multiple comparisons. But because they are self certified, I wouldn't say it's like the Wild west. It's different for different companies. And some companies will accept that their power meter reach 10 watts low because drive train loss. But then other companies then factor in drivetrain loss as well at a certain percentage. It's not always the same. It's a tricky one, but it's a minefield. But there are a lot of sub thousand dollar options out there now that are really good but the power meter pedal has really, really risen up.

Is that one you would recommend more commonly?

Mainly for ease of use? Yes, but the Varoassioma, I'll always talk about those. They're on the bike quite a bit. They're not perfect. I mean, I've got 4, 5, 600 comparative data sets and there's a few things I'm still working with Vero. One, I'm like, oh, I'm seeing this. And like, oh, yeah, our engineers are on it. I'm like, okay, cool, cool, let us know. But they just seem to work. And Vero are a company that no one probably had ever heard of before too. They used to make billboards, or they still do make billboard signs. I think of baseball with the big electronic signs. That was their business and still is their business. They came along and made the B Pro power meter pedal. Not a lot of people heard about the B Pros. I think they had a weird installation, angley thing you had to do. And so the Asioma wasn't their first rodeo. And they come along with the Asiomas and they've just proven that all you need to do. I don't think they even marketed those very well. They never had a social media following for a while. They just made a product that was relatively cheap, well, relatively cheap compared to an srm. But simply, it just worked. You installed it on your bike and it just worked, done, rechargeable, and it did what they said. All the other power meters, they're like, oh, you've got to, you know, have this spider or have this crank arm or replace this battery. Oh yeah, we're having issues with signal loss. They just worked. So DC Rainmaker, myself, few other reviewers have gotten these pedals to review and we're like, these are actually pretty good. These are pretty good. And then three or four years later, everyone else is doing the same. In the reviews, they were, these are actually pretty good.

That's fantastic. Look, I'm really pleased you've sort of given the listeners a direction to go. And, you know, the pedals, in my opinion, seem to be the most easy, user friendly. The actual calibration issue that, you know, as a coaching business, we, we can have often riders coming out on a velodrome and they know roughly what the average speed is that they normally ride at. And they might be trying to ride at 250 watts and their average speed for that might be 35ks an hour. And all of a sudden they look down in their Garmin. They're still doing 35ks an hour. But it's the power meter's telling them, riding at 220 watts. And it could simply be calibration issues. Is that something that you would be alerting the listener to make sure that you understand what we're talking about here with making sure that the power meter is reading the same every single time? And what are the. What are the nuances that occur with temperature and things like that that affect it?

Oh, you've opened a can of worms. Well, first of all, we haven't seen a lot of innovation in power meters for a few years now. Again, everyone, we're getting pretty much they report one data point per second. Most of them are relatively accurate. A lot of them are now doing auto calibration. They call it calibration, but technically it's zeroing. So it's like a weight scale on a kitchen bench. You pull out the scale and you put it down, it says three grams. You're like, there's nothing on that. So let me just hit zero. That's what we're doing. When we zero a power meter or calibrate it before a ride, which is zeroing off any residual torque in the system so it reads correct reads at a zero point. True calibration requires you to put, I've got a 20 kilo weight just under me here. That does actually checks the true calibration of a power meter. That's a whole other process to do. A lot of them have active temperature compensation, so if you're going from cold to warm, they will still be accurate through that transition. Most of them with auto zero. Some will backpedal or some will auto zero while you're coasting. You can never do an auto zero with a pair of pedals because you're always clipped into them and there's always going to be torque on the pedals. Some of them do it really, really interesting. I think Garmin do a an auto zero once you unclip from the bike and if the pedal hasn't moved for five minutes and the bike is relatively upright, it will do a zero. It'll automatically zero for you. Vero do it a different way. They haven't released exactly how Favero do their auto zero, but it's not while you're riding, it's while you're off the bike. But they just do say, yeah, the bike has to be upright. What else? But it's really hard to know. You don't know unless you've got a second power meter to compare to. Most athletes Wouldn't know the difference between 10 or plus or minus 10 watts at threshold. If you're really in tune with your FTP. You know, I recall the time trial out here in Ballarat actually, which, which is funny. We used to time trial around the, the Lucas estate, which used to be paddocks. Now there's McDonald's, now there's a 24 hour servo. You should see the development happening here. We'll never tt around there again. But I had a new SRM on the bike and I looked down, I'm like, that's 10 watts low. That's 10 watts low. So I had to adjust as I was time trialing. I'm like, I can't push that number because it's too high. I'm going to pull this down. It's so it's a minefield. The best practice though is if you're swapping pedals between bikes. Do a couple of what I call hard jam sprints first. So you talk them onto your bike, spin them around, clip in and just go for a ride up and down the block, do a few sprints, stop and then zero them from there. If you were to put them on your bike and not zero them, you're going to have trouble.

What difference does that make? Doing the kind of sprints first, it.

Kind of what they call beds them in. Even though if you torque down a pedal enough, it shouldn't move at all all. But there's always going to be a bit of flex. Maybe the pedal washer just hasn't quite. Maybe it needs to bend a little bit more into place. There's a ton of variables. Installing your own power meters can be troublesome. For example, if you're installing a spider based power meter with a modular crank arm, you've got to have the crank correctly, crank bolts correctly talked onto the, onto the spider and then the chainring bolts correctly talked. And even these need a few sprints just to make sure it's bedded in. There's no flex or give at any angle, so it's hard to get correct power. It really is. They're getting better though.

Can you teach us about the differences that you know with power meters and how much they can read differently? Because we know it, especially as a coaching group. Athletes will have two different power meters and two different bikes and they're constantly having to just learn themselves and test themselves as okay, I can push this what's in this bike. And I can only push this what's in this bike. When they should be reading the Same, you know, just like a scale, it should technically be the same, not.

Oh yeah, this is a deep subject. How many hours do you have here? The first one I'll say is, okay, there's two things to discuss there. I think just to touch on is that if you've got a single sided power meter, that's different to a total power meter because single sided takes your left or your right, typically your left, and doubles it so it guesses what you're doing with the right. And if you have any imbalance whatsoever, it will either inflate or deflate the numbers. People say I'm always 48, 52. Okay, so I know I'm a little less. Yeah, you might be, but as soon as you go up a hill it might change. As soon as you're fatigued it might change. As soon as you change your position on the bike, that's going to change, your balance will change. So comparing a total power meter, which is the spider, a wheel or a dual sided meter to a single sided can be troublesome. Secondly, your bike that you're on, a lot of people will jump on a TT bike and say, oh my power meter's wrong. I'm not putting out the same power in my TT position. Yeah, that's right. Because your position, your hips, your angles all change if you're not rotating around the bottom bracket exactly the same. I found that hard putting out tons of power, climbing and then jumping on a TT bike and being different. So what I did is I set my road bike up. I wanted to put out most, most of my power on my TT bike. So I set my road bike position the same as my TT bike but just sort of elevated it. Like use that. I'm sort of pointing in my legs down and my torso this way. So my road and TT bike were almost the same for the L shaped leg and torso and hip position. So your bike position and the bike that you ride can influence your output. But that's not actually the power meter. As for power meters themselves and where they measure, a lot of people will say, oh, there's drivetrain loss. So if you're measuring at the rear hub or you're measuring the spider, it's going to be different to the pedals. Or the biggest question that comes along now is always or the most common one is my smart trainer reads low or my smart trainer reads high. That's another can of worms. Because you've got to have a clean drive train, same cassette. Your testing as well needs to be done under testing conditions. People will look at their average data for a ride. Average data from two power meters on two, two different head units can be quite a bit off because the start and stops and the averaging and things like that. So you need to do some steady state tests. That's what all my testing is done using. The power meters are getting better, but the only really good way to know is to put them against head to head under testing conditions and just hope for the best. But rarely do they match.

It does. I mean, I've spoken to dad about this, but I say I'm an intelligent guy. And it starts just to get so confusing with trying to think about testing two bikes, having two different power meters running. Got your wahoo kicker running. You just start to get so confused. And I just said that. It just starts to go over your head. So when you talk about a steady state test or something like that, how could you, if you've got a robot and a tight TT bike, what's the best practice to set up kind of test for yourself to see, okay, how different are the power meters reading compared to the fact that you're on two different positions?

Find a steady state zone that you can ride for 10 minutes or 20 minutes in. Let's say for me, my Lana lab test is a protocol that I developed over a few years and then I used to test meters and it has identified some really interesting issues that you would never see doing other testing. So find a zone that you can ride it for about 20 minutes, probably 80% of FTP or something. So my Lama lab test is in erg mode because that is fully controlled by the trainer. Even though erg is a little artificial in the way it makes you pedal, it's still good enough. These things should still read correctly. Like a kitchen scale. It should weigh butter, it should weigh meat, it should weigh everything the same. It's just simply pressure on the scale. So these parameters should read correctly regarding erg mode, sim mode, et cetera. So if you were to set your bike up and do a 20 minute steady state at say 80% FTP, which is a good training session, even if you don't click the data or if the data doesn't record on both, like ah, it wasn't a fail, I got a good session out of that. And just pedal at say 90 rpm or a cadence you're comfortable with and just do multiple tests. So jump on with one bike, 20 minutes at 80% FTP, swap bikes again, ride at 20 minutes, 80% FTP, but have a control. So set the, say, the kicker or the tacs or the elite trainer that you have set that to hold erg in that zone and forget about your power meter. Just use the other power meter to observe what the kick is doing or what the trainer is doing. But it's about coming up with a test protocol that you can repeat. Now, I've been doing the Llama lab test for years and years now, and I can go back to. I've got hundreds of comparative data sets, so I can always go back and pinpoint. Okay, that was doing that. That was doing that. And if I find an issue with a power meter a few months on, I can go back and look at the same data set and do the same. Do it. Almost a direct comparison of how it performed with the same protocol.

The last question I have on power meters is, you said before, do what you do and not what you say. So what power meters do you use?

Good question. All of them. Look, to be honest though, the Favero Aceomas have proven themselves and it's not. I'm not biased towards any particular brand. If something just works, I will use it because I need solid baselines to compare everything else to. The Asiomas have surprised me, and I love the story of Asiome. Like the Favero being this. They weren't a cycling company. They're not your Garmins, they weren't your Power Taps, they weren't your SRAMs or shimanos. Now it's a little company from Italy who just made a really damn good product. So the Asiomers are on the bike quite a bit. I think they were a bit off the mark with the Asioma duo. She's. They came out with the Shimano compatible pedal body option, which pushed the Q factor out way too far for me to be comfortable on a bike. And my video was, nah, look, it's. The Asioma is if Shimano power meter pedals, which everybody has been asking for, I think they're going to fall flat because you're changing your bike position just to measure power. That should never, ever be the case. A lot of people like, ah, it doesn't matter your mountain bikes like this or your indoor spin bike is like this. That's great. But as we've covered with my history, I was into the detail about my bikes and my bike fit. And if you put a set of mountain bike pedals or a mountain bike wide crank on a road bike, you're like, what? This doesn't feel right. Anyhow, to answer the question. Faveros do very, very well and they've proven themselves. But please do not take my word for it. Jump on any forum, jump on even the Favero Marketing. They've now got a marketing person promoting this stuff. Have a look at the comments. They're amazing. People are just. People just love them. There's always going to be, oh, my battery died or I needed to return this or that, or my bearing popped out, or there's always going to be those in the technical forums, but they're just a love product, they just work. So, yep, I'm on those until something else comes along and I'll. I'll switch.

I mean, we should have told Pharaoh that that was going to be your answer today. Because we guarantee that people are just, just wanting. They don't want to hear almost all the information, they just want to be told, this one, okay, I'll go buy it. So we can guarantee that they'll see a spike after this in sales. But let's move on to training platforms because you've test under the sun. Zwift is the most common, but there's Trainer Road, Spinnables, Sufferfest, Be cool, a whole lot more. And we know that you're a fan of Zwift, but we were just saying off air that, you know, you would like to see a lot more from Zwift. They can do a lot more. So talk to us about what do you think is the best value and what gives the rider the best experience? The best. Yeah, User interaction.

Good question. Again, we need a few more hours to really dig into this one. I'll try and summarize. I've used all the platforms, all the platforms ever since blowing up a number of fluid. Two trainers indoors watching Chris. Chris Carmichael's DVDs, and then to Coach Troy with the Spinnables, the Spinnable series, they were pretty good. And then onto the Suffer Fest. What else did we use? And that was then onto Tinker with BE Core. That was kind of weird. Really hard to set up and get everything connected there. Wasn't the standards back in the day, such as Ant or Bluetooth or anything like that coming on for smart trainers. And then, look, Zwift came along and I call it. It's almost like when the ipod came along for Apple Audio compression. This is diving off of the nerd side of things. Audio compression sort of had, I think, the licensing for the MP4 compression or the MP3 or MP2 layer 3 compression was sort of released to the open so people could compress Audio a great deal into very small spaces. Solid State Storage came along and was awesome. So Apple just sort of hit the nail on the head with the ipod and everyone got an ipod. It was a game changer, but it was all to do with timing. Zwift came along at exactly the same time as the Wahoo Kickr. So I had a Kickr early on. Bought that back in 2013, I think it was. Loved it. I saw the potential, but I was about to sell it. I was like, you know what? The kick is great, but I love the Mylemond and it's interactive, but I can't do anything with it. Zwift came along and made that experience real. I could race. And Steven Lane, again, one of my teammates, I raced with for years and years and years. I said, but load up. He had a kicker at the time, Load up this little beta game and let's race around this little horse. And I had Slain on the flats, so we're racing against each other. This was back in 2015, I think, early 15 or late 2014. And I was just like, hang on. Slain's got me on the climbs. That was. That was the case at the time. And then I had him on the flats and in sprints. Like, this is real. They've virtualized what we can actually do in real world. I said, this is a game changer. And from then we went out to a barbecue. That night, after my first test ride with this thing, all I could think about is just coming home and like, hang on, can I do this? And can I do. And I was testing it all out and getting the power numbers and uploading to Strava. I'm like, this is going to be huge. This is going to be. This is what everyone's been waiting for. And that changed the game at the time. It made. I mean, look, spinning indoors, looking at a wall, it's pretty boring. You're going nowhere. You've got to have your environment set up. Usually we play movies and things like that, but the interaction became social and that was huge. So rather than playing a video over and over and over again. And look, there's some successful companies out there who still just play over and over and over again or dish out a training plan to you. It was the same as last week, or, you know, can progress forward through your training plan over 12 weeks. That's great. But this. This experience, at any time, the experience on something like Zwift will change based on who's online. And if your friends are online or say the ballarat Cycling Club are holding a crit or you know you're racing your mates or that's a game changer, absolute game changer. So it's not more about, it's not really about the technology, it's about the experience and that's what people remember. And Zwift have just nailed it. They've absolutely nailed it. They continued to innovate the first few years because they could. A lot of low hanging fruit. Let's put workout mode in. Let's sync this with training Pete so coaches can assign a training piece workout that can go straight to Zwift. Let's hold races, let's hold the virtual tour to front. Let's do all that. Let's make it an esport, which is another topic. Again, I don't think it's going to be an esport because people really want to watch people suffering on the Ergos. I'm not sure it just took over. The competitors are, they're taking it along. The pie is big enough competitors to be successful, but we need to know what else can be done to make it successful. What's their age, what's their angle? I mean everybody's got an iPhone because it just works. Android doesn't really have that much of a market share, especially in Australia.

It's interesting, isn't it, how you have to time things right and honestly, like, I think I've got a account with Swift since 2014 or 15. I might have used it once in five years and then Covid came and, you know, understanding how to use the platform properly was the game changer for us. Knowing that you can do a free ride with your mates and have an experience kind of socially because you're meeting them like you would on the corner on a Saturday morning and you know, you've set up a time and all of a sudden you can ride any course you like on the available courses they give you and, and you could actually talk to each other on your phone if you wanted to interact and, and really just get a similar experience. And of course you're not getting the sun on your back and the wind in your hair, but you are still getting the next best thing when the weather might be crap or you're in lockdown, for example. So, so it had a real place and, and that to me is, is where it's really come of age. And you would love to have shares in Swift in the last two years and in, in, you know, the smart trainers, you just could not buy a smart trainer.

I have a lot of Smart trainers here, a lot of them are out on loan or out on hire to friends because they just could not get a hold of anything. So yeah, the COVID boost. If you jump on Google and type in trends.google.com you can type in any word and check the popularity of it. You type in Zwift for the last five years. You'll see on March 18th. And I know this because my YouTube channel went crazy from March 18th at about 2pm in the afternoon. I don't know who locked down at that time, but it just went through the roof because I've got a whole lot years and years of how tos and setups and tips and this and that. Everything went crazy, but you just couldn't buy the trainers. My question though is to flip this to the negative side. Will we see a decrease in indoor cycling now people can go out and ride again. And if people are associating indoors with being locked down and being sort of, you know, damn, Dan's keeping us indoors. I don't like indoors anymore. Will we see sort of a. Interested to see how that falls out.

It's a great point and it's one that we really want to embrace ourselves as a. As a coaching business because we feel that it should be used to your advantage at all times and not be dictating to you. And if you want to do a race that happens to be canceled due to weather, or you want to do a bunch ride that you know it's sleeting rain outside, you can still do those activities but just use the indoor alternative and that's how it should be used. And if you wanted to do a training peak session, you know, on a Tuesday that you know at the end of the day, you can either do it outside or. Or you can choose to do it indoor and you can grab a few mates and do it together. You can be riding at different watts and still stay together if you wanted to. There's so many ways you can do it, which I think is a real advantage if you use it correctly.

To give you guys a bit of a preview of what's coming very soon. I'm not sure how public this information is. You've probably heard of clubs on Zwift. We have to use meetups at the moment, which are pretty clunky. We've got to use something on the public calendar. Clubs isn't too far away. And for someone like the Trivalo group, I think it's going to be a bit of a game changer, let's just say I might be just theorizing here, but let's just say you were able to create your own club on Zwift and then hold your own event anywhere, anytime, and then send out a link for people to click on to join, that could be pretty handy. This might be the next turning point for Zwift, coming soon with that. But just theorizing, we would be so.

Excited if that happened. And I've been actually corresponding with Zwift with unsuccessful responses. Responses. We've been. We've been running races for two years now where we've been running a handicap. And, you know, the system we use is. Is unbelievably fun and it's fantastic. And because I know everybody's ability, I put them in handicap groups just like you would in a normal outdoor handicap. And we have A grade and B grade.

But.

But to have your own club and to have, you know, your own race where you're not using a meetup, where at the start line, you're not in a pen, you're potentially. When I've got 80 riders on the start line, 100 meters from the start line, that is the worst thing that the meetup has.

Yep.

Why. Why can't they do the meetup like they do their races, where everybody's in a pen?

Yeah, just wait out just a little bit. Just hold out just a little bit.

You're not answering the question there, Shane.

I can tell you why. It's the legacy of the engine. We can dive into that. The engines built on John Mayfield's own home code. I mean, the guy's a genius, how he builds things. He's. John was from actually cycling, a really good podcast of the evolution of Swift just a couple of days ago. Really good. Listen, if people are right into the technology and where it's come from, but it also gives us some insight of why it is, how it is. It was never designed to do what they're doing. It was never designed to scale so much. What they've done with it is quite amazing. The issues that we face are very minor compared to the hoops they're making it jump through. I mean, Zwift is. People say the interface is horrible. Yeah, it is. But there's so many options. There are so many options. You can do a meet up, you can do an erg ride. How you can do a workout with a mixture of sim mode, erg mode and level mode. I don't know if any other platform that actually gives you that kind of a ability, or you can ride with friends or you can do. There's just so much to do. It's just so the engine is not designed to do what they're doing. So for the meetups, that's the meetups. It's a bit of a workaround. Clubs, if that comes soon as not, I won't say as promised as discussed because we're always waiting. That could be a game changer and that could be the next leap forward. If a club was able to. And then Zwift. Don't even need to promote Zwift. The clubs will do it. You guys will do it. Hey, if I had a GP Llama club, I will say, look, here's my link. Come and join my race. That will encourage people to, hey, I'm going to get on a ride with GP Lama. You might be streaming that tonight. We'll talk tech, as we are doing here. Yeah, I'll do that. And then the fallout of that is people have got Drift subscriptions or they're buying a new kicker or an elite trainer or a direto or something like that. That's how to grow the pie. Eric Min was talking about on that podcast about making more hardware to grow the pie. I think they need to innovate to grow the pie.

You say it's a minor. Just talking about the made up thing. You say it's just a minor issue compared to the overall function of Zwift. But I can tell you on Thursday nights when we do these handicap races, it's not a minor issue. When you win the race and because you started 20 meters ahead of the guy second, he actually beats you in the results. When the results.

Sheep stations. Sheep. It's all about sheep.

To make it worse, we video the race and we can see who actually gets to the finish line first. And then the Zwift results come up with the person who won in eighth place and someone else who's 100 meters back on the start line finishing in first place.

And it's.

It is bizarre.

I was going to a video on this because people love. I try and keep my videos on YouTube mostly positive, you know, rather than calling it because people make a living out of calling out junk or just being noisy. And I try and keep a little bit more positive. And one of the videos I was going to do is exactly that. Like have 50 people line up in the start line, do some results. Okay, here's what's happening here is this. But there was no resolution to it. There was no workaround. So it's just pointing out what was bad and it's like, well, that's bad. Okay, what next? Today's video is going to be an interesting one about some Strava integration, which I won't dig into too much, and I discuss why it's a bad thing. But I also, at the end, I'm like, here's what I'd love to see. Here's an idea, just so we can finish a video on a spark of positiveness. Is that the word, positiveness? Yes. Positivity. Positivity. That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah. So, yeah, there are a number of issues. But the thing is, it's not just a swift thing either. Any platform is going to have these kind of issues, be it technology, be it. And a lot of the issues now are social. They're like, oh, you're putting out too many watts, or you've cheated on this and it becomes people against people, rather than is the technology right?

When you take a step back, it is unbelievable technology. To be able to push the power on your pedals in real time and race someone else in real time. That is quite incredible.

The little tip, I wonder, do you understand why your avatar. Because we are standing on the start line and some people might wait 2 minutes, 4 minutes, up to 6 minutes, and then they go to pedal and their avatar has gone to sleep. Is there, is there something that we're doing wrong that's causing that depends what.

They'Re paired to as the power. So to move forward on Zwift, all you need is a power meter. That's it. So it's all about your. Your, your forward momentum is based all on power. Cadence doesn't matter. Your controllable trainer doesn't matter. Your heart rate doesn't matter. Steering doesn't matter. Whatever you've paired, it's all the power meter. So you need your power meter to start reading correctly or start reading something. If there's no power being reported from your power meter, you're not going to move at all. So in that case could possibly be the power meter going to sleep and the pairing disappearing. If it's blue, it depends on Bluetooth or Ant. Ant is usually better in a way because Ant just broadcasts and anybody can pick up ant. Bluetooth is traditionally one to one connection. So if you're connected via Bluetooth and it goes to sleep and then you start pedaling again, the system might say, well, I'm not going to be looking for another Bluetooth device. Or it might just gone to sleep, so just watch for that. Or if something else comes along and grabs that connection. In the meantime, it's going to be invisible to your main machine. All of this, and this is, I mean, the technology we're using is still 5, 6, 7, 8 years old. This stuff is not new. There's been no innovation here to resolve this. Wahoo. Did bring out the Direct connect for the kicker 5, which is brilliant. It switches from. It turns everything into TCP ip, it puts it on your home network. That is a solution, a really, really good solution. And not because it's wired, you can convert it to wireless pretty easily, but because it is a guaranteed connection. It does a handshake, it links, locks into the link and as soon as you start peddling, the data, starts sending. That's. Yeah.

Those who haven't seen your YouTube channel, we recommend going to watch it because there's just thousands of tips about all this stuff. And I recently watched your video on five companion app Tricks and there was a lot of comments which I completely agreed with. Which was, number one, blew my mind. And that was in the. In the companion app, you can. When doing a workout, there's a button where you can skip the interval because if you get to a point where you need, for some reason you want recovery to be shorter or you're running short on time, you can just skip the interview. Whereas it's always frustrating to be locked into a session and then you have to do everything to the T. So that was a major mind blow for me as well. What other tips do you have that you could think of off the top of your head that would really help people straight off the bat? For anyone using Zwift at the moment, is there any tips that come to mind right now that you say this is going to be a quick win for you?

Not the Zwift in particular, more so your environment where you've got your bike set up and everything. I think if your bike is set up on the train and ready to go, you're more likely to get up and go. So if you need. A lot of people say, oh, should I use my good trainer on a good bike on a trainer, or should I use my carbon bike? Yes, absolutely. There's no problems at all. Once installed correctly, it will have no problems at all on your bike. I've been trying to break carbon bikes for years because it would make great footage for YouTube. Imagine if I was breaking bottom brackets or snapping chainstays. Or it could be a meme. Doesn't happen. But if you have your environment set up as I have behind me here, I Have the bike set up. I have a towel rack, I have drinks there ready to go. I have the fans read to turn on. Yep. I have a computer there ready to go. So if I want to do a. Yeah, that's there. There's the. The kicker climb the elite riser. Everything is set up, ready to go. The. I've got the environment set up. People who have to build their indoor, you know, so removing zip in the picture entirely, be it full gas, be it trainer, road, be it whatever. People have got to build their set of their training setup every single time. It's like that's the last thing you want to do. It's like, I just want to get on and ride my bike. Because outdoors you can just put. Put a set of kit on in summer. In winter's a little different. You got to fully kit up like pair of nicks, top, shoes, helmet, go. That's it. Pump your tires up. That's. Whereas indoors, if you've got to go, I've got to pull the kicker out, I've got to pull the trainer out. I've got to set a fan up. Where's my laptop? It hasn't got charge. Where's my ant stick? Where's my towel? Where's my drip? It becomes hard and even to pull it down once you're done with the session. So the best tip I can have is, Jared, I can see a TV on your wall right behind you there. Like, everything's set up, ready to go. Your bike's already there. So if you wanted to get on and do, say 20 minutes and you can get a good workout in 20 minutes. If people don't believe me, send me an email or pay me. I can give you a session that will kill you in 20 minutes. You will never want to do it again. It's still worth doing. And you can do it in. You can be up and running in a few minutes. So just have your environment set up or just think about what you might need to go and buy to get that environment set up. Be it a new fan, if you're using a simple pedestal fan that just sprays air everywhere, they're horrible. If you can get a directional fan, like a little Vornado. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Sorry, I'm calling out your pedestal fan as being bad. If you can get a little Vornado fan, directs air in a certain straight at your body, grab one of those. It will be a game changer. Indoors, have a desk nearby with a towel on it. It'll be a game changer It'll just be I've got my mouse and move the keyboard or you've got access to your phone. I mean, today I spent half the time of my ride researching for my latest video and making notes as I'm writing because I had the keyboard in front of me, so I was working at the same time. Might be a little hard to do conference calls and things, you know, while sweating away, but if you can set your environment up and to be welcoming, there's a more chance you'll do more K's indoors.

That's fantastic. That's absolutely spot on. And you know, being prepared is half the battle. So it is user friendly. I can do it straight away. One of the things that I find is really a limiter and I'm wondering if you have a solution to this is for people who've got an old kicker version, 1, 2, 3, 4, or just bought a new one and have a 11 speed bike. And now I've got a 12 speed bike. So we've got this problem of the bike doesn't fit the kicker. The kicker doesn't fit the bike with. Explain what I'm talking about here to the listener in layman's terms.

Okay, well, I know it's a podcast, so I won't hold up the little adapters that I have here which have been redesigned by Wahoo in the last few months to fit different bikes. It's. These are the new throw axle adapters that fit certain bikes. This is a problem. This is a problem because there's no real, there's standards when it comes to bike width. Like you've got 12 by 142, you've got 12 by 148boost, you've got your standard 130, 135 road bikes with quick release. They're all standards, but then around that is different so that the space around. So they had to accommodate bikes with different disc brake. What would you call it? Just the space around it. People are trying to beef up bikes for the new seat stay sizes and wider chainstays and things. It's a bit of a nightmare. Now we have Shimano 12 speed. We have Campagnolo, what, 10, 11, 12 and 13. For the, for the camp, it can be troublesome.

So what, what actually happens is when you use the wrong ratio cassette, your gears won't work. So that's the bottom line. When you jump on, zwift on, try and do a ride, it is a horrible experience because you can't get the gear you want.

You can you can mash through it. And for a few months when I was in Perth, I had a kicker with the wrong. I could use about three or four gears and that's it. But if you use that and ride through, if you've got two bikes like your husband and wife or your partner has a different bike and you're both sharing it, you're going to wear either the cassette out or you're going to wear a chain out and it's just going to be a horrible experience. And if you actually throw a chain off either inside or outside, it could drag on your bike. That will cause problems to your bike. You rip into the carbon with the chain falling off. That's not a good experience. So I always recommend match your trainer to the bike that you have. Preferably even the same size cassette is what you use on your wheels. So your chain length and your B tension don't have to be changed at all. That's getting down the technical side of things. But if you run a, say a 28 cassette outdoors on your wheel, run the same inside. If you run a 30, run the same inside. And definitely for 11 speed, 12 speed, 13 speed, all match those. This is definitely an area that trainer companies need to then adopt. Trainers haven't changed a lot in the last few years, but I think training companies now need to start offering an option. When I buy a trainer, what free hub do you need? Do you need sram? Do you need Campeg? Do you need. What's the other one? Shimano. I forgot Shimano. How about that? Yeah, they need to be offering that as a sort of a modular solution. It needs to be a little sort of like you get your big kicker box. It needs to be a little box on the top where you just open that. Okay, here, I'll put that cassette in or that free hub and there you go, away you go. That's where training companies need to go for their free hubs. Having to buy, if you don't have Shimano or Shimano compatible, you have to buy something else for it can be a pain.

Yeah, the additive is the problem and, and you know you're wrapped, you bought a brand new Kickr version 5 and you've still got an 11 speed bike and you basically can't ride it. And you know there needs to be a solution where you can do more spacing or something to match them, to marry them. It can't be that hard, can it, Shane?

It is. It is hard though. That's the problem. I've Got my bike. I've got behind me here is an Eagle. That's a gravel bike. Riding gravel bikes indoors is so comfortable because the position's upright, the handlebars are a little wider, the saddle's a little softer, it has a bit more squish. I love riding my gravel bike indoors. Not for, yeah, because it's a gravel bike, just because it's just more comfortable.

No one can work on a gravel bike. It's like you're sitting at your office.

Desk and you can, you can, you can. On a road bike, it's all that scrunching down into an optimal position doesn't need to be comfortable, it needs to be optimal to win races. Whereas on the gravel bike, like, whatever, I'm not riding this to win, I'm just being comfortable. But I've got an Eagle rear derailleur, which has a 52 tooth on the back. So the derailleur cage is really long. And that actually hits some trainers, so I can't use a few. So they're not quite there yet. In making a universally compatible direct drive trainer, that's definitely an area where trainers need to go. And they've become in the last few years, a lot quieter, a lot better ride feel, more reliability the most. Now it's about bike compatibility. Can they sort of innovate towards being compatible with, with everything? And that's a struggle given the industry's standards. Standards. There's so many to choose from. That's the problem.

On the trainer note, the Wahoo kicker is the most popular by a country mile over the last two years. Is it the best?

I'm a little biased because I've always had a kicker and I know that ride feels a kicker. So. Well, if you were to do a blind test and put me on, say any of the trainers that I had here, I could probably pick the kicker that I'm on. It's just got that distinct flywheel feel to it. The original one had the wine to it. It's funny, if you ever watch a live stream with somebody that doesn't have audio filtering on, I can actually tell, tell, tell what kicker they're using, be it a first, second or third generation kicker. It's fun. It's a bit of a game I play. Oh, That's a kicker. Gen 2. They're like, how did you know that? We've spent so much time listening to these things. In Australia, in particular, Wahoo have a big, big presence. They've got a great support there. FE Sports are bringing them in Wahoo have staff here in Australia now looking after the market. So their support is really, really good. The distribution network is large. You can walk into any bike store in any town depending on who they stock. And you'll see like here in Victoria, I mean Ballarat Shore Cycling, you walk in there, there's a whole stack of kickers. I can walk in right now and buy Core Headwind Kicker 5 or whatever I need or even a kicker bike to have one of those there. So yeah, when your distribution is so large, you're going to have the popularity. It depends on what market you're into. In the US it's a little different. Saris are a little bigger over there being American made throughout Europe. Tacx is a little bigger coming out of the Netherlands. How they're now Garmin but they've sort of been sleeping a little bit. We haven't seen much at all move from those guys.

The old non smart trainer you mentioned earlier, the Le Monde, which I have as well and the beauty of having that, you can go to a race and not have to plug it in. I mean you can still plug your kicker in into your cigarette lighter if you cast as a cigarette lighter. Adaptive. But yeah, it's just the ease of. But it just, it doesn't. It feels a bit different though, doesn't it that you've got to wind, you know, and it's a resistance against air rather than. And you can still use it as a smart trainer if you've got a power meter and you can still ride Zwift with a Lamont which people don't actually understand. Like I've got a set of rollers you can see behind me. I ride the rollers on Zwift but it's not a smart pair of rollers. It's just I'm using the power meter. So you know, where do you see those types of trainers? Are they just going to be gone?

They're gone though from a training perspective. The Tour of Bright time trial that I was mentioning before that I simulated the race on that was all in the Le Monde. Reason being is because it's self selected power like, like you've got. If you've got a. Erg mode gets you this. There's not, there's nothing I can relate to Erg mode other than riding up a hill on somebody else's wheel and they set the pace. Like I remember riding up Tour again to Onga Gap. I was on Michael Polhurst wheel one of the masters races and he's sitting on 360370 I'm like, I'm not choosing the pace here. He's choosing the pace we have to ride at. That's the only place I can think of Erg mode. Whereas these other ones, and especially in a time trial, your mind will wander, you'll go to sleep and you'll be like, ah, look down at your power. Holy hell, I've got to get back onto the power. Erg mode doesn't really teach that very well. So the Le Mans was great for that. So that's why I love the LeMond 4. You've got to have that little process in your brain going. Keep putting the power out, keep putting the power out, keep bringing the power out. And it's just so buttery smooth. But those trainers, they're too loud. Yeah, they're just not going to. You can get close, very close, but you'll never get that buttery smooth, self selected feeling as you do on the Le Monde. But they're just too loud. You're not going to have those mass market anymore. I'd love to see a smart LeMond, but as soon as you start adding smarts to it and you digitize it, it's going to change that ride feel. It's going to make it a little bit more like artificial. They just nailed that train. I'm so disappointed there's not a Le Monde 2000 or something like that out there.

Well, Shane, you've got a wealth of knowledge and it does come from your, I'd say, addiction to testing every single thing on the market. So we appreciate you sharing it all with us. One of the final questions we like to ask our guests is back on the deeper end like we did at the start. And that is what is a life lesson you've learned over the last 12 months that you'd like to share or on to others?

Oh, we've gone deep again. Life lesson, I don't know. I like to. I see that comes down to people. I think life lessons is about people and the interaction. It's about like, again, it's all who you know and the experiences that you have. That's been really thrown a curveball with COVID So that, that's really. It's hard for me to come up with anything like that recently. And a lot of what I do, I work with machines because they don't talk back, they don't have an attitude. I've got the attitude. So it's great that I'm not butting heads with anything. I'm butting heads with technology and it usually does what I say most of the time. Life lesson. It's all, I think it's all about balance. I'm now a father of a young little son who runs around and just making sure that. I mean, even though I do live and breathe cycling, it doesn't define who you are. So if you have a bad day, if your FTP is dropping and look, you'll only ever hit your very best FTP once. If you hit it again in the future, that's great. Sometimes you'll never get to where you've been in the past. And I've had to come to terms with that. I'll never be at 360 FTP again. And my recovery is changing. I'm 43 now. I'm not when I was, I mean, I was sort of racing masters at 34 and above. But yeah, cycling isn't everything. It can be a part of your life, but I guess compartmentalize. It's like going get your workout done and go on about everything else that's more important.

Really powerful answer for someone that lives in breeze cycling and it's your job. So it's really nice to hear. And I did lie. I do have one more question and that is still from a broader perspective. But technology is so great, but it can be a big inhibitor. And especially cycling, you know, it's not always intuitive. They can be roadblocks. You can get frustrated and it's just easy to give up because you just can't get over a roadblock of some sort of technology. You're missing a bolt and suddenly your whole zwift setup is, is irrelevant. So what advice do you have for people trying to get through any technological roadblocks?

Most of the times it's not you, it's the computer. It's something else. And there's always somebody who can help you out with it. Be that on YouTube. There we go. There's a promotion for my own YouTube channel. If you're having trouble with something, you can just Google it. Jump on YouTube, go to a find a good bike store. Now bike stores that they're all up to speed with the technology. The old school bike stores used to be like, Dave, you have, if you're not running a box rims with 32 spokes, we don't want to know about you. What's this carbon stuff? Bike stores are now beyond that. If you're having trouble with any of your setup at all, go and find someone to help solve the problem. You can outsource it These days. And that's what the Internet has been fantastic for. People get responses to me within seconds. That will save them hours or days. And it's not just me, it's the same with any other content creator or people who are online responding. So find an online community. But also note that some online communities are trouble support ticket sites. So if you jump on and go, never going to buy a wahoo ticket, they always fail. You're like, yeah, but you don't hear, we're going to have good experience because what they're doing, they're getting their workout done and they go off to work. They're not on the forums complaining, but it's never terminal. And at the end of the day, if you can clip in, go out and ride your bike outdoors, that's awesome. There's no better feeling. Yesterday I was out on the gravel bike. I'm loving gravel at the moment because it's a cross between. I'm not hardcore enough to ride a mountain bike and do all the hardcore stuff. I'm still a roadie so I like to look down and see curled bars. But it's got all the technology there and there's no cars. There's really no cars out there on those gravel roads. From a technology point of view, I've got to put a shout out to the Varia radar. If you're a solo rider who rides on empty roads in towns, it's not really that useful. It's always beeping. But something like the Vario radar definitely look that up if you know what I'm talking about, you know, and if you've got one, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You don't know what the Vario radar is and does. Just have a look and see if one's for you. They are a game changer for situational awareness on a bike. Will I call it a safety device? No, that's a bit of a minefield calling something like that a safety device. But what it will do is if I'm out on a gravel road in my own little world, loving life, wind in my bald hair, headed hair, you know, thinking about something else, beep, beep, beep, beep. I'll be alerted before I can ever hear something coming behind me. Good example the other day, I'm going for a gravel comm, wind is blowing. The wind was on my back. I wasn't going for a tailwind calm and I'd never do that. But you know, all you can hear, just noisy racing. It's going really hard I had about a kilometer to go. Beep, beep, beep, beep. And I'm on a single lane, dirt track. Look down. I could have never heard that. Turn around, there's a car pulling a caravan. No worries. Cool. I'm about sharing the road. I don't own the road. We don't. I pulled off to the side, stop, had a drink, had another go at the con later on, gave him a wave. Seriously, Varia radar again. Drop in your local bike store, jump onto YouTube, have a look at how they work. And if you're like, it's just, it gives you more situational awareness out on the road to make better decisions. People say, look, it's not going to stop the car from hitting you. Get a mirror. If you can be better informed about your environment, you can possibly be safe and have a better experience on a bike. That is one of the game changers that I've seen in the industry.

That's awesome. And we won't ask any more questions, but I want to tell the listeners that a lot of the people we coach, if they're having roadblocks, like Jordan mentioned before, we promote you absolutely. As the guru to go to, to really navigate your way around. And I'm forever saying, just go onto YouTube, find GP Llama and he will have a video answering the question that you have. And it's true, you do have all of the solutions that we've come across in our coaching business where people are stuck and everybody gets stuck on similar.

Similar parts of Erg Mode explained. Everybody has to watch my video on Erg Mode explained because I'll explain the spiral of death. Everyone encounters the spine. They're like, my train is broken, all my legs don't work. What the hell have you prescribed me to do here? What am I doing? Watch my video call called Erg Mode Explained. You will go, ah, it was me all along.

The good, the good thing about that is we don't let anybody ride Erg Mode chain, so they will never have that issue. So if they ride Erg Mode and that happens to them, they deserve it.

Yes. Well, we want to promote your YouTube channel, all your socials, they can find you. Shane Miller, GP Llama, really helpful, but we can't condone the Erg Mode video because our philosophy is don't use Erg Mode.

It's good for power meter testing. It's good for power meter testing.

Nothing else. By the way.

It has its place. But yeah, as I said, self selected cadence, self selected power zones. As. Yeah, that's what I alluded to just before. You've got to have that process in your mind. You've got to train yourself to hold that power. And at race pace. It's uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable.

Thank you so much, Shane, for joining us. Yes, go check him out. Shane Miller, JP Lama Everywhere, especially the YouTube channel. Yeah, thanks again. Really appreciate it.

No worries, guys. Always happy to have a chat. And yeah, enjoy your next ride. Sam.