Indoor vs Outdoor Training (Test Results)

This episode of the Get Fast Podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. Your hosts for today are former Australian Ironman champion Gerard Donnelly, and I am Jordan Donnelly. In this episode, we are talking about a relatively controversial topic, and it's team indoor training versus team outdoor training and most traditional cyclists, team outdoor training. Because if you're not riding your bike outdoors, then what's the point of riding your bike? But there's a lot of evidence mounting for the fact that indoor training could be more beneficial than riding your bike outdoors. Which is a funny thing to say, I know. But before we get into the episode, just remember that if you want to download our Expert Secrets cheat sheet, that's a cheat sheet of the very best tips and advice that all the expert guests on our podcast have said to help you train smarter and race faster. Go to Get Fast Podcast. And if you want help from us in terms of our own programming to train smarter and race faster, you can go to getfastpodcast.com download that free bonus cheat sheet and you'll get onto our email list, which is the best way to get access to our programs. So before we get into the episode, I want to ask you, dad, what's caught your attention this week? What have you been paying attention to?

There's a couple of things, Jord, that have definitely caught my attention. One of them is the GCN app, and the other one is just on a personal side, the Trivalo athletes and their remarkable continuous improvement in their FTP. And I shouldn't say remarkable, because in my eyes, it's almost expected. But the amount of people producing PBS is just astounding. And there's a few things that have changed in the world, and one of them is, funnily enough, what we're talking about tonight in the podcast is, you know, indoor versus outdoor. So the majority of the guys have been training indoor and they are just doing PBS. Three weeks ago, we had 37 PBS and we pretty much replicated it. Three weeks later, the same people, including myself, have gone from, you know, wattage A now improved to wattage B. So I'm just amazed.

So what do you think that's come down to? You said it was multiple factors, one of them being consistent indoor training. But what else has happened that has resulted in such a consistent increase in wattage output across the board of a range of athletes of different levels?

Yeah, it's never one factor, I reckon, and it's always a combination of things and that you'd like to pin it on one thing. And if we all did that, then we'll all improve and that would be the solution to the question. But it's never as simple as that. I always think it's a combination of things. And that's true in everything in life. If you do a lot of little things well, you'll end up with a really good result. Rather than concentrating on just all your eggs in one basket and forgetting about all the other small 1 percenters, then you're probably not going to get the same outcome. It's like training really too hard one day and then training four days later instead of just chipping away, continually hitting sessions day after day with the consistency thing that we always bang on about. So I think it's a combination of things and that's really the thing that's caught my attention is when I try and analyze what exactly is happening in our program that's enabling all these PBS and I go, oh, well, the guys have done a lot more endurance where there's pressure on the pedals, indoor rather than outdoor. It must be that. And then I'll say, but hang on a minute. They've all raced for nearly 18 weeks out of the last 22 weeks. You know, we've had probably a week off racing every fourth week or every third week or every fifth week, depending on what part of the series we're in in our current indoor racing series. So that's another thing.

Just a private travelo race that we've been running.

Yeah, yeah, so. So there's another reason why I think they've continued with the normal high intensity training session on the other day. So, you know, they're actually mastering how to ride in races better. So they're pushing themselves, they're getting more competition from the races and they're actually learning how to ride with pressure on the pedals and the endurance. They're still able to ride to their numbers in the specific training session we give them. They're definitely recovering better because they're not working as much, they're not moving to work and driving and on the go. A lot of the stuff is in and around home because they're in lockdown. They're definitely more rested, the easy rides are understanding better how to do that. So I just think it's all of that and getting that result is just so pleasurable.

There has to be something said about that factor you spoke about in terms of life balance. And when life is normal, it's pretty hectic. And so training can take a back seat or you are turning up to training tired or under time pressure, whereas in the current circumstances, you've got more time on your hands and you're not running around. Especially for Victorian people, it's not true for everyone around Australia or around the world, but people have experienced different lockdowns for certain time frames. But for Victorian people still at the moment it's, you know, you're probably not traveling to work unless you're an essential worker. So you are, you know, really focusing on your training. And I was talking to a friend of mine who was saying training is pretty much their number one priority at the moment because it's the only thing they get to look forward to each day because they can't leave the house.

So, yeah, and you know, what's stood out in my mind is that it's majority of the training's been indoor. And we're going to talk about this in the podcast. Obviously it's a great segue, but it is outstanding how the improvement has been due to a lot of controlled training. Indoor, definitely.

So before we go into that, we did start talking about last week, the return of pro cycling and how exciting it has been and to continue on that. The Dauphine, I think, had one or two stages left when we recorded last week's podcast. And the last two stages were pretty epic. And the last stage was one of the best funnest stages to watch I've seen in years of anything. And I think it is a preview of what's to come of all the races over the next two months. And we did think they were going to be exciting, but if they're this exciting, it's going to be awesome. You know, how good was it to see such a battle on the hills for the top spot? You know, everyone was racing for a matter of seconds. There was different guys up the road fighting. It was just so good to watch.

It was better than any of the Grand Tours I've seen over the years. And it reminded me a lot of the Tour. You know, the Giro is a very attacking style Tour and it's exciting day after day, whereas the Tour de France is, you know, it's one of the all time great events on the calendar every year, but it has a lot of predictability, a lot of flat stages. But the Dauphine was just every day was what's going to happen today? And it looked like it was, you know, given that Jumbo Visma had dominated the race from start to finish. They had literally five riders in there who could have won the race. And you just never know what's gonna happen next. You know, two days out, Roglic crashes, still finishes in yellow and then can't start the last day. So all those guys who thought the race was over, now they have to actually refocus and try and work out how they're going to win this race. And you know, they had still had four or five people on the last day who could win.

Yeah, because Rogbridge was out. And so second, third, fourth, fifth was suddenly first, second, third, fourth. And they were all within 30 seconds of each other. And it just became such an awesome last stage.

It was fantastic. And yeah, it just goes to, you know, goes to show never give up, no matter what happens. You never know what's going to happen to anybody. Your competitors, you know, they could crash, they could get sick. You know, what's his name from Mitchelton. Scott pulled out as well two days earlier, one of the Yates brothers with sickness. You know, you just don't know what's going to happen. And look, the season is so jam packed, the races are on top of each other. So this is the best opportunity for anybody who has an opportunity to win a pro Tour race. This is the year to do it. Because you can't spread yourself across all these races over months and over a year. They're literally all between August and November, every single race. The spring classics, the three Grand Tours, you know, the Dauphine's that, you know, the middle range races, they're all on top. The world champs might be cancelled, but you know, the European titles, there's just that many races you can, you can, you know, enter that you've got an opportunity where the field might be thin out because people can't race every race now.

Yeah, yeah. And that's exactly what's happened for the three Grand Tours. You know, INEOS released last week their, their team plan for the next, for the Grand Tours, for the Giro, the Tour de France and the Vuelta. And it's fascinating to see exactly that, that they've, they've gone with a complete split. And ineos, who have dominated, ineos slash sky who have dominated the last eight years of the Tour de France. It's been, like you said, very predictable. It's not going to be as predictable as this year because they're not as strong. And so they've put Bernal as the leader for the Tour de France, they've put Geraint Thomas, Tour de France winner, as the leader for the Giro and he's not riding the Tour de France. And then they've put five time winner Chris Froome. I can't remember if it's four going for five. Chris Froome of the Tour de France has been cut from both and he's leading the Vuelta. So that is just crazy news to me. And that just shows what kind of races are going to be shaping up for. They're going to be totally unpredictable.

Yeah. And the depth is going to be tested for every team and the teams like Jumbo Visma have amazing depth with, you know, they've got literally seven riders who could really win any Grand Tour. So they're going to be in the best position and they've got such, such good backup riders to help. And it's okay having, you know, Bernal or Thomas or Froome as your main rider if you don't have four riders who can back you up in those Tours, no matter how good you are, if you ride solo. And Cadell Evans, you know, was a classic example of that. For years he was riding in a team that couldn't help him. And finally he got the BMC team together with George Hinkapy at the helm, you know, and that enabled him to have a really good support team to enable him to win the Tour. And he's the same rider, but without a backup support team, you is really limited. Yeah, yeah.

Well, no, I'm excited. The Tour de France starts in a few days and I'm really excited for that setup start back up again. And I can't wait for all the Grand Tours and all the classics still to come over the next couple of months. It's going to be great. But let's segue into today's topic, which is indoor versus outdoor training. And I guess the first question for you, and I know you're going to give me a classic coaches diplomatic answer, but are you team indoor or team outdoor? And you have to pick one.

Well, I've got to say I did have this discussion with one of the athletes on coaching this afternoon. And I am an outdoor rider. There is no doubt in my mind that I ride my bike because I love riding outdoor. I love going fast around corners and in the mountains and having the sun on my back and the wind and feeling it on my arms and my face and. And the unpredictable nature of the terrain, the view, the scenery. There's just so many things about riding outdoor that makes me happy. I go to a happy place and I don't care if I'm riding with a bunch of Guys or whether I'm on my own, I'm still enjoying myself. And I've been so fortunate to be able to travel all over Australia and ride in some fantastic venues and across other parts of the world where I'm just astounded at some of the great roads you can ride on. Um, and so, yep, I am definitely an outdoor rider. No serious there.

Good. I'm really happy with that answer. Um, and I didn't expect anything less. And I mean, the question is, can sound a little bit ridiculous in itself because you go, what's the point of riding your bike indoors? You know what your bike's meant to be to be ridden outdoors. But there is such a strong argument for the evidence showing the controlled nature of training indoors and how much better writer you can be and the ridiculousness of it. Actually, one. One article caught my attention online a few months ago. I was doing some, just looking into Zwift and I found this article and it was comparing Zwift Alpe duhs to real real life outdoor aptawares and how hard it is and how much it simulates real life. And this guy did this big comparison of just the corners and what you experience and whether the gradient feels the same if you've got the smart trainer, kick a climb, that kind of thing. And then at the end of the article, he had a comparison between the two and he had indoor scenery. It's great because on Zwift they get the pictures right. And outdoor, obviously the scenery is great. And then he put, but because of the scenery, I prefer indoor. And I thought he must be joking. This is just taking it too far. You can't be serious. But he was dead serious. And a lot of the comments below the article were going, is this guy joking? What does he think the indoor Zwift better than riding Alpe d' Huez itself. You're in the. In the mountains of France. I just thought that is taking it.

Too far, you know, surely it was a typo and he meant to say the scenery.

Sure, yeah, that's what I thought. But it clearly said it and I just thought this is getting out of hand if we're thinking it's this good. But take me through what are the. What's some of the pros of indoor training that you're loving so much and that getting people to start having this conversation about, you know, the fact that really we should be considering the amount of volume we should be doing indoor as compared to outdoor.

Well, that's a really good question. But before we get to that I want to finish on that topic you just talked about. Zwift have just opened up Month on two. And we actually did a time trial last Thursday night for the first 7 1/2 k up it and it was pretty epic time trial. And I've. I've ridden the Vontu in real life and on Zwift. And I've also written Alpe d' Huez plenty of times in real life and on Zwift plenty of times. And yeah, sure, the scenery and the buildings are all replicated perfectly, but there is just no comparison between the two. You can't even have them in the same sentence. You get the feel of the elevation definitely on Zwift if you've got the kicker climber and you can feel the bike really going up to 12 and 13% on month vent two. And it's a really difficult climb. But I've never been so exhausted as I was on month on two in real life at 36 degrees, having ridden the first half of it way too hard and exploded halfway and nearly didn't get to the top. And I've almost joined Simpson in the grave at the 3k to go mark, which is one of the places, you know, a monument that's been put there since 19. I think it was 60 something when he actually died on Mont Ventou riding in the Tour de France. And it turned out that he was full of amphetamines. But, you know, that's another story. But certainly. And my time was literally 10 minutes quicker on Zwift than it was in real life. And that to me, just, you know, how could I possibly turn myself inside out to break an hour on Alpe d'? Huez? And yet. And I really rode hard on Zwift to try and bake 50 minutes. And I did. But there's no way it was a similar experience in terms of, you know, just the whole round experience was just, you know, not like it.

Yeah. I guess that, like, leads to another part of my question to follow up from. What I just asked was how can you possibly say that indoor training can be so good if it's way off? You know, if you're riding 10 minutes faster on the hill, it can't really replicate outdoor riding that well.

Yeah. So, you know, the main part about that we try to focus on in the indoor training is the control. And so ask me the question again, Joel, before we, before we go into that question.

Well, the starting question was, what is the biggest pro of controlled indoor training and why is it making so much noise?

Yep. And that's what I wanted to get to. It's. It's absolutely the controlled environments. It's like being in a science lab. And as long as you can change your mental focus to understand that the outcomes you're going to achieve, rather than, this is not writing, this is not real writing, this is not outdoor writing. I hate this. If you have that mindset, then you won't be able to get on the bike. So you've got to change your whole mental focus and go right. I can't go outside. So what are the options left? And funnily enough, there are a lot of limitations of how you can improve as a rider if you just ride outside compared to if you use both. And I'm a real advocate now of using the best of both worlds. Indoor has so many good, positive things that are completely different to the good, positive things of outdoor riding. You don't get the feel of the wind, you don't get the sun, you don't get the views. You know, you just don't get any of those things that I love about riding. But you get the value. That's what you do get. You get the controlled value where if you're outdoors and you come to a hill that you've climbed and the only way from this point is downhill, it might be eight minutes of downhill. There's literally no pressure on your pedals for the next eight minutes on Zwift, no matter where you are, if you stop pedaling, you don't move. So that is the biggest standout thing, is the pressure on the pedals that Zwift has that you. You have trouble achieving with the terrain that you pick on an outdoor ride. So you have to be real careful what course you pick outdoor to achieve the same thing. And for example, if you're trying to replicate some pressure on the pedals, and you know, you'd need a climb that goes for 40, 50K to get that two hours of pressure on the pedals. Well, there just isn't one. You know, the longest climb we have in Australia is, you know, an hour and a half worth of climbing. And that's, you know, that's fantastic. But even on that, it's got some downs and some easy bits, so the pressure's off the pedals. And as people know who ride with power, it's hard to push power on a downhill. You know, it is really hard to keep the pressure on the pedals when. When you might run out of gears. You're in the 53, 12 or 11, and you're still spinning your legs, so the pressure's gone. So that is the biggest factor in indoor riding that I think differentiates the positive for indoor against the negative of outdoor. So I find that that is the single most thing that I would put the top of the list as to why we talked about in our. What's caught my attention at the start, why the guys FTPs have improved. It's not just one thing, but I can tell you what is the pressure on the pedals of those endurance rides that we're doing on Saturdays. That has certainly been one of the key factors that guys are able to sustain constant power. And it's a real art. And you know, the example I was talking about recently was one of the guys sat behind me after the endurance ride on Saturday morning. And Ben won't mind me mentioning his name, I'm sure. And it was really, really interesting to see. I'm sure Ben was happy just to roll along with me, but. But I was on. I was on a set of rollers, so I was able to hold steady power. And I was trying to hold around 145 watts to 150. And it's quite easy on the rollers because you can't really move around that much unless you really stomp on the pedals. So it was easy. I was just spinning. It was a warm down, but Ben was forever going ahead of me, then dropping back, then going ahead of me. And it seemed like he was having trouble keeping constant pressure on the pedals. And after we did this for half an hour, and after about 15 minutes, he really got the hang of it. And he didn't move from my side. And it was fantastic to see what he was like in the first 15 minutes to what he was like in the second 15 minutes. He actually learned how to keep the pressure even. It was really good. It was a pity I couldn't talk to him and tell him that he was going well, but up until that point, it was a real standout for me.

Yeah, And I wanted to ask you about the rollers anyway, because when you train indoors, you've got the option of an old school type of trainer. Um, you've got the option of the newer smart trainers, which have a lot of fancy options on them. And then you've got the rollers as well, which is, you know, keeping that balance. And that is a good, good way to keep pressure on the pedals because if you don't, you'll fall off.

Yeah, it's. Yeah. You know, we do have lots of varying Ways to ride in, which is really interesting. And I was just experimenting. I just wanted to see. I was almost going out in sympathy with Joe Spano broke his smart trainer. The fan belt broke and he had to ride the rollers because he had no other bike on Saturday morning. So it was going to be interesting thing to experiment to see whether you could sit on the rollers for three hours plus. And it really highlighted how well you are and how comfortable you need to be to hold that position, because you are balancing on a set of rollers and it's not, you know, normally people use rollers outdoor as a warm up thing where they're just warming their legs up. They're not actually doing any specific efforts or because most rollers don't have resistance. But the set of rollers that I have have three levels of resistance. So you can actually ride, you know, 400 watts for as long as you like if you wanted to on these rollers. So Angie can use it for just a basic spinning your legs for a warm up activity. So riding the rollers really teaches you how to pedal well indoors. And if you don't pedal well, you know, pedaling 360 degrees, pulling up, pushing down evenly, you start bouncing on those rollers and guess what? You'll bounce off. And this is a great way to learn how to get really good pedaling technique action going. And I can assure you I never thought I could ride more than an hour, an hour and a half on the rollers. But, you know, having just done three plus hours on Saturday, I've just proved to myself that, you know, you can do it, you can balance for that long, you can keep the pressure on the pedals evenly. And in that three, that endurance race we did, there was bits where I had to push some higher power through the hills and there was bits where I was sitting on the flat. So I had to keep changing, you know, changing my pressure on the pedals. So, you know, it is something that you can actually use to your advantage. And this is one of the things we're talking about how valuable I couldn't do that outdoor, maintaining that pressure on the pedals for three hours on a course that, you know, the courses I use around here, there's so many times where I'm going downhill and the pressure's off. So. So, yeah, that's one of the key things is that pressure on the pedals.

And just a quick note before we continue, the audio for me was breaking up a little bit. I'm not sure how it's going to come up on the recording. But if it does, just know that because of the current CO restrictions, we can't be recording this in the studio together. So we apologise for any audio breakup. We're recording it with the best stuff we can and we hope that it comes up all right for everyone to listen. But this is why it's probably not as crystal clear as it normally is. So, continuing on that note, with thinking about the pressure on the pedals and whether you're on the rollers or not, if you've got a power meter, you can often see most power meters show you your left and right power balance. So once you finish your session, you can go and find out where you're 50, 50% even we 48%, 52, one way or the other. And like you said, if you are just a pusher, you're not a puller, you're not the full 360 degree action. If you're one leg is stronger than the other, you're going to get found out on the rollers pretty quickly because you're going to be going sideways a lot. And one argument against indoor training is that people can say, well, you aren't learning to ride outside properly, you're in such a controlled environment, you're actually not learning to ride the bike on different terrain.

And.

But the flip side of that is that it really teaches you to ride evenly, or can teach you to ride evenly and controlled so that when you get outside, you're riding properly. Because if you just train outdoors, you might never understand that you're actually riding really uneven, but you're getting away with it because you're outdoors and you've got plenty of road to be on.

Yeah, and look, I use the example of the guys I coach who use just normal courses, everyday, suburban streets, and then they use the velodrome and then they use the indoor training facility. You can control everything indoor. All you have to worry about is your power and probably your cadence. And if you really wanted to, you know, look at the speed you were doing or the altitude you're climbing there, they're just not that relevant to anything but power. And yeah, power and cadence are two key things that you're trying to learn as a bike rider. Am I pedaling correctly and what power am I pedaling at? Heart rate is a result of those two things. And obviously, you know, from all the coaching that we do, if you try to pedal cadence in the hundred revolutions per minute, you're going to stimulate your heart rate. If you try to do strength efforts at 60 RPM. It's not so much a heart rate session, it's more a strength session. And this is really a controllable thing indoors. And when you're outdoor, these are things that are secondary to the traffic, pedestrians, the wind, is it uphill or downhill? And then I'm trying to focus on my power and my cadence. So the distractions are enormous. And it's good to go indoor and practice these things and then go to the velodrome where you're not got the traffic or pedestrians or traffic lights or variation in, in terrain, but you've got wind. So you've added wind to your power cadence and wind. And then once you got confident with that, the next step is to go into the suburban streets where it's reasonably flat. So you've got now having to learn how to ride in the traffic and then once you've got that down pat, then you can go into the hills and try to learn how to ride power uphill and downhill. So, you know, it is a good stepping stone for outdoor. If I was trying to get someone to learn how to ride comfortably outdoor. The second thing is racing indoor is getting almost every facet of racing except for the bike handling skills. So I think it's good for those people who are really unconfident outdoor to practice racing indoor because no matter how many mistakes they make, they, you know, this sounds quite controversial, but no matter how many mistakes they make indoor, they're not going to crash. You know, in swift, you run into the back of another bike, it doesn't matter, but you can get the feel of the surge of the race. You can get, get to understand that when you get tired on a climb that's coming or you're on your limit, you know, you only need to, to push the power a bit more and you can stay with the bunch and then your race is still going rather than, you know, getting dropped. So there's so many good things you can learn without the risk of the crashing so that when you come outdoor again, you can have mastered, you know, how to ride with pressure on the pedals, how to ride uphill, downhill, how to sit in the bunch. Because these things you can practice with the safety of not crashing and then going into a race you'd be so much more used to. And we've got novice riders joining us who've been racing with us now and never raced before and they're just hooked on racing. So they can't wait to see some races in real life and try and hone what they've been practicing on the indoor trainer in a real race situation outdoor. And of course they're going to make mistakes. And outdoor, it's not are you going to crash? It's when are you going to crash? And, you know, that's true for everybody. Everybody who's ridden outdoors has come off at some stage. We do need to practice our skills outdoors, there's no doubt about that. But when the situation is reversed, you know, that's one of the things we're going to lack when we can't go outdoor. I'm not an advocate for doing everything indoor, but I see the value of the things I just spoke about with racing and with learning how to ride with pressure on the pedals are two key things.

Have you had any preference between racing indoor and outdoor?

I actually think racing indoor is harder because, you know, when I look at the examples of the crit races and the road races we do, there's so many periods where there might be easier sections of the race. And whereas on Zwift, when it eases up, you still have to keep the pressure on the pedals to stay in the bunch, whereas in real life, you can really be riding extremely high power and then periods of easy power. But you don't get those extremes in Zwift. You can ride really hard in Zwift, but when it's easy, you're going to get dropped. So you have to keep the pressure on the pedals to stay in the bunch. So in some ways, it's harder to ride out during a race because it's more tactical, because there's higher efforts and easier efforts, and you have to be ready for the unpredictable nature of that. So Zwift is less unpredictable. So it's a more tactician race outdoor, whereas indoor, it's really the strongest guy is going to win, which is kind of good. But that's not what bike racing is about. We know from everything we've ever talked about in all of our podcasts, that's part of the thrill of racing, is not only that the best guy doesn't win. If you've got half a dozen guys who've got the same fitness and one is extremely tactically talented, he will beat those guys hands down every time, even if he's less fitter than those other guys. You know, tactics is such an important role. And I suppose that's the native of the indoor, the peloton. Indoor, the speed is so much faster than the individual. And in real life, that's not what happens if you break away from a bunch. In real life, the peloton normally look at each other and the bunch slows down and the guy gets away because they're all hesitating. But in swift, they might hesitate. But because there's 10 of them, they're still rolling at a speed that's faster than the individual. And the algorithm's wrong. So that's a bit of a negative. But you know, the value of the race is still there with the things we spoke about.

Yeah. So you touched on just before the fact that you've pushed it out to see how far you can ride the indoor trainer. You went three hours on the rollers, which is a pretty crazy effort. You know, balancing on the rollers takes up a lot of energy, so doing one hour's enough. Going up to three hours is pretty crazy. And you probably before this period would, would hesitate to, to schedule into anyone's program or your own programming any extended time on the trainer because you just think it's too long just to sit there. It's too boring for one mentally and physically. It's just not worth it sitting there for the same amount of time as an outdoor ride. But you did test and you pushed up to what, a four or five, even six hour ride indoors. How did that go?

Yeah, well, look, I have progressed since March, George, is just to see how far I could actually extend this. And I just didn't do this straight away, it took from March. So, you know, I'm a believer of everything in progression. So if I, my goal is to see how far and how long I can ride on the indoor trainer. Well, I certainly started back in March when we started the first lockdown and I'd never been on the trainer for three hours, you know, so that was, that was an achievement in itself, 100k on the indoor trainer. And then I just progressed week by week to, you know, 110 to 120 to 130. And you know, the next milestone was 100 miles, which is 160K. And I'd done, you know, quite a few weeks, four or five weeks of that. And then it was right, oh, how much further can I go? And you know, built to 180 to 250. And two weeks ago managed to do 220k, which is just under six hours. And why would you do that? Well, I'm really adamant that you need to keep the endurance going in your program. And people say that's the limitation of indoor training. You can't go for a five or six hour ride like you can outdoor, you can go for 200k outdoor ride on a Saturday and it's just so much more enjoyable. Well actually is so much more enjoyable. But if you do it and manage it and manipulate it, you can still achieve endurance on the trainer because I just proved it to myself. So it was clear in my mind that if I wanted to actually see if you can do it, I had to do it on myself before I could say to people that I'm coaching that this is possible. Mind you, it did need some manipulating and I did have to put myself into three different events to cover the, the 200 odd K so that it felt like I was in bunches the whole time. So it would have been difficult on my own if I was just staring at a wall listening to music like I used to do, pre match, pre Covid, pre Zwift. So you know, and I would, I would set some two hour indoor ergo programs which I found that was a tough session to get through. And geez, how would you write any more than two hours or two hours, 10 or two hours 20. But, but now I don't have that restriction on me. And you know, I don't like mentioning my own data, but I've never ridden such high power in the last four weeks than I have in the last eight years. And I've got a feeling and we've, you know, we said earlier on the podcast that we've had up to you know, 30 PBS for FTP in the three weeks ago and then three weeks later last Thursday we had another 30 odd again. And the majority of things that are happening is endurance is being the main key thing that we've been concentrating on. Sure. We're racing every week, that has to have some input into the improvement. Sure, we're doing the specific training session, but extending the endurance. And most people, they're all joining that Saturday endurance ride where they've gone from never riding more than an hour and a half on the indoor trainer to all reaching three hours. You know, I'm talking 30 or 40 riders. And so the coincidence is those same 30 or 40 riders are all doing PBS in their FTP. So to me the correlation between that pressure on the pedals endurance riding is massive.

And you have spoken about as well the weight of the indoor training already. You know, the amount of pressure on the pedals over a three hour period is worth a five or six hour outdoor ride because the amount of um, rest you get in an outdoor ride, if you're out there for six hours, you could potentially have three hours of non pedaling and non resistance, even if you are pedaling, because there's a lot of downhills, whereas a three hour pressure on the pedals could be equivalent to that.

Yeah. And you know, you've been in a bunch with me when I can hear the sound of freewheeling and how angry I get and I turn around and say, why are you freewheeling? Keep rolling the pedals over. But you know, when you sit in the middle of the bunch, there are periods where you don't need to pedal because the bunch is dragging you along. And they're the things that you don't get indoor, you don't get any free power. We call it, you know, outdoor, you just forever. Even when the road terrain drops a meter, you can feel it, the pressure in your legs is less and then the terrain kicks up, then you can feel it, the pressure in your legs is greater. So you're getting all these little micro fractures of variation, which is actually a good thing. But for pressure on the pedals constantly, it's actually not being attained. It's a good thing for other types of training. But when we're talking about this endurance pressure on the pedals, it's actually not a good thing because there's so many times when you're getting these little micro fractures of recovery and we actually don't want that when we're trying to achieve this constant pressure on the pedals all the time that we talk about. And if you come to a set of traffic lights, it could be 30 seconds or a minute, you're standing, your heart rate drops, there's no pressure on the pedals, there's no blood being flowed around the legs and you almost start refreshed again. And if you did, you know, some of the rides that we do, I could, I could have 30 traffic lights in the space of a five hour ride. So I'm getting 30 stops. And then normally guys want to stop for coffee in the middle of it, which I'm dead against. I want to have a coffee at the end when the ride's done. Not to fact that I don't drink coffee, it's just that it just breaks up the pressure on the pedals idea that we're trying to achieve. So the indoor riding has all these positive things that you can't achieve outdoor. Unless you were on the Nullarbor plane where it was a flat road and you know, you're into block headwind for 190k. That's about the only time you could replicate the same thing, but that would be as boring as, as you can imagine. So, you know, I've got plenty of examples of everybody in bunches who I'm forever saying, keep pedaling, you know, just keep that pressure on the pedal so we can replicate what we're actually achieving indoor.

Yeah.

So just before you mentioned that pre March when the world changed, you actually had probably resisted going on to Zwift. Not so much that you had anything against Zwift, you just prefer that when you got on the trainer, you wanted to focus on your session and do it properly. And that's probably a factor that you didn't like about, about Zwift and training indoors is, is that people were still doing it wrong. And doing it wrong depends on your goal. But you know, athletes, cyclists are still getting on there and just not, not actually achieving what we're saying and they're not actually having pressure on the pedals and they're not doing the sessions properly and they're not getting the benefit from indoor training.

Yeah.

And look, Zwift has really improved as well because you can now load your training session onto Zwift so you can actually do the session properly and still get the benefits of feeling like you're riding around outdoors and people, riders around you. So, yeah, it's actually improved incredibly. So every single training session you can choose to load your training peak session onto, it's all, it's there. Every, every day it's there. You can choose whether you used it or not. So you can concentrate on riding. You know, say you're doing six by five minute efforts. You can concentrate on, on the power that you're supposed to be riding by looking at your head unit. And you're still getting the benefit of feeling like you're riding, you know, against riders outdoors. So it's distracting, but you can still use it properly. The thing that I'm against is people just getting on swift and every day, just like I'm against people getting on the local road. In your area, for example, here it's beach road. I'm against riders riding in groups Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, because they're just riding in a group with no specific goal. And the people who get on Zwift without really doing any training programs are doing the same thing as riding on their local area. They're just riding the same ride every day with no variation in their, their intensity, their duration or their, you know, their effort is just the same all the time. So you need to be changing the variation and that's why? Using Zwift to manipulate it. The way you want to do it is. Is making it a whole new ball game. So we're using it. We're using it for our own individual races. We run a trivelo race, which is a handicap. Zwift have their own races, but I very rarely do them as a short, hard, intense race because there's so much that's out of my control. I'm racing against people. I don't know what their weight is, so I'd rather ride with a group. And we've got a group of 60 or 70 riders where it's a handicap, and I know everybody's got the right numbers, and so it's all controllable. And then we've got our own training sessions where they're actually loaded onto Zwift and we can train properly against those programs. So. So we're manipulating the indoor trainer to suit ourselves.

So to finish off, if circumstances were normal and we didn't have to train indoors all the time, what do you think the optimum ratio would be between indoor and outdoor riding? And given this lot of new data that we've got with the benefit of the endurance ride indoor, would you continue riding indoor on this, on the Saturdays at all, or is just riding outside still outweigh it?

I think I would be. If possible, I would pick my terrain outdoor a bit better. And the main set of my endurance section, I would try to make sure I've got more pressure on the pedals. I do that anyway. And people who ride with me know that that's how I ride outdoor anyway. You never see me stop pedaling, whether I'm going downhill or whether I'm going uphill or the flat or I'm in the middle of a pack. You know, I've. I've written in the middle of the pack with my brake levers on to try and feel some resistance so that I keep pedaling. It sounds ridiculous, but. But I'm trying to achieve the goal of pressure on the pedals in my session, so I'd be more particular about the courses that I'd select to train at. But, you know, I just have to look at Matt Hayman as the example. You know, he didn't do any outdoor training when he was injured, and he came out and won Paris Roubaix by just training with pressure on the pedals some really hard sessions in his indoor training sessions. So I think that's. That's a standout. And, you know, that makes. Makes me believe that. I think you need to pick the best things about both indoor and outdoor to your advantage. That would be my summary.

And to answer that final question, what would you guesstimate? Depending on the person, but guesstimate for the average person, the best ratio would be.

I think climate has a lot to do with it, too. Jord, if you're. If you're in an area, say you're in Europe and it's snowing for six months, you don't have a choice. It's almost as bad as being in lockdown. There are places where you just can't get outside because it's minus 8 degrees. And if you live in the mountains, you know it's snowing and it's ice, you can't. You have to ride indoor. If you're in an area like, you know, northern Australia, where you've got pretty much all year round to choose, I would say if you can't find a course outdoor that replicates the terrain you need. If you can't replicate the terrain you need, then you should ride indoor.

Perfect. That's the easy answer. Well, that's a good way to finish. Is there anything else you wanted to mention about the indoor versus outdoor argument?

No, that I've learned a lot about indoor and I'm so happy that for every negative there's a positive. And I really think that I've learned a lot about how you of indoor training and it's something that I will definitely embrace in my coaching.

Perfect. Well, that's it for this episode. Thank you very much for listening. Once again. If you want to get access to any of our travel programs to train smarter and race faster, go to getfastpodcast. Com. And if you go there, you will also get to download a free bonus cheat sheet of the expert tips and advice from all the guests on our podcast to also help you train smarter and race faster. That's it for this episode. We'll see you next time.