Structuring A Training Program On Just 6-7hrs A Week

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, Gerard Donnelly. One of the most common questions we get asked is how should I train if I only have limited time available each week? We know the perfect training program would probably mean you train 15 to 20 hours a week, but for most age groupers, this just isn't realistic. And for many of you out there, you only have as little as six or seven hours of training time available. So what should you do? Should you just give up on your goals because you can't compete with how much everyone else trains? Absolutely not. There's always ways to make it work and we're going to identify today the key things you can do. As always, please remember our unwritten rule. If you enjoy our podcasts and find them helpful, the best thing you can do for us is share the podcast on your social media or to an endurance friend who you think might like it. And of course, this episode is brought to you by our proud sponsor, Giant Australia, for all your bike training and racing needs. Ride life. Ride Giant Dad. Welcome back to another episode. Let's start with our normal first segment. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jordan. This is going to be a good one time efficient training, isn't it? And I think one of the things that I'm most grateful for, and I probably have mentioned it a few times in the 200 or so episodes that we've done, but I'm actually grateful to find your brother Matt's first boy, Archie. He's just started to walk after a year on this earth. But it's always amazing to me that how do, how do infants with no muscle development or coordination have the ability to crawl first and then stand up and they've got absolutely no muscle development at all and how do they get their everything to function in sync? That's the thing that really blows my mind when I watch the development of kids in 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, and as a 2 or 3 year old they can run with really good form and yet they don't have any developed quads, calves, hamstrings, glutes. They're just super coordinated and they get everything to work well. And as you know, Dr. Jordan Moncrief is a real advocate of doing a lot of functional training based on what kids development is over their first three or four years. And it just Reminds me all the time of when I see your other brother, Liam's son, Banks. He's about two or three months away from walking, but he's standing up now. And they've both got different body shapes. Archie's quite lean and Banks is quite well built. And so it's interesting to see how they go about learning to use what they've got as quickly as they can. So I love the fact that this is where a lot of the functional training sessions. It's quite timely that, you know a lot of the questions we get asked about doing stuff away from your chosen sport. How's it going to help me? And if you just look at the way kids develop and how they get to use, how they make or allow their muscles to work together to enable them to crawl and to stand and to run, then these are the things we should be going back to the basics for. To get ourselves strong again with our joints and muscles and tendons and ligaments. And that would be the most simplest thing you could do. And I'm grateful for watching this because it keeps reminding me how important this side of. Because, you know, you look at swimmers who I've seen so many times, where a really lean 12 or 13 year old girl can just motor past some gym junkie guy who's built like a tank but just can't swim, whereas the lean girl's got the, you know, the technique and her coordination down pat and she looks graceful in the water when this guy's just monstering the water and not getting anywhere. And they're examples of, you know, it's not all about big muscles, it's all about how you, how they work together.

Yeah. When you do, when we do some of the strength and conditioning work from Dr. Jordan Moncrief, as you said, a lot of the positions are really basic and you, when you look at infants and kids, a lot of the positions he's trying to get you to sit in and work from are just really basic seated positions on the ground and it's just impossible as an adult. You just. The amount of sitting that we do and the amount of backwards work we do against our bodies works against us and make those exercises really difficult. But when you look at these kids and they just, they do them with ease and they move with pure functionality, it's great to watch and that's why we do love that DNS movement. My gratitude is on the family theme as well. I think I could make Mum my gratitude every single week. I don't know if I have actually but grateful for Mum. She does so much work, you know, for our family, so much spend so much selfless time doing everything for us and our family. And she's done it our whole life and so very grateful for it and really keeps things, keeps his travelo train running behind the scenes, I would say. So shout out to Mum for my gratitude this week.

Awesome.

Before we get into the main topic of the podcast, what's caught our attention at the moment is just some really big power meter mistakes that we just wanted to mention that we're seeing pop up in a range of athletes, beginners, people first getting used to their power meters, right through to people that have been using for a while and still making these critical errors. So we just wanted to point out some things that if you're using a power meter, make sure you're doing these things right. And the first one is, are you using the right bike and the right power meter that you're going to use on race day or are you using the wrong bike in training?

Yeah, the luxury. And it is a luxury because a lot of people now have more than one bike. And so if you're not in that category, you won't be making this mistake because you only have one bike. So you're not going to go down this rabbit hole. But for most people, they might have a time trial bike and they might have a road bike. And for other people now it could also be a shed full of gravel bike and moun mountain bikes. And you could potentially, as long as well as your smart trainer, have up to five different power meters in, in your possession when you're, when you decide to go for a training session on a bike. And, and I think the thing that we need to really establish from the outset is what event are you training for? And that will dictate what bike you're going to predominantly use. You can use all the bikes, the gravel, the mountain bike, the town trail bike and the road bike. I'm happy for that to happen. I'm happy for you to be indoors and use your smart trainer power meter. But we need to understand at the end of the day, the race that we've entered, that's the bike that we need to spend most of the time on. If that happens to be a criterium or a time trial or a triathlon or a road race or a mountain climbing stage, as a mountain biker or a gravel endurance ride, you need to spend the most time on the bike that you're going to ride on that day. And that's not to say you can't use those other bikes, but we want to make sure that's the first thing you're thinking about. So the key sessions, they're the times to be using that particular bike and the other sessions, such as recovery or just coffee rides or even rides with your mates where they're all on a particular bike that's not the sport you're doing, then join in with that. If you're doing a base phase at the start of the season and you're a triathlete doing, you know, half Ironman, which has got a 90k time trial in it, but you know, we've asked you to do some strength work, it's okay to ride your road bike in the hills for those, for those sessions it's okay, you know, I'd prefer you still got used to riding your time trial bike in the hills, but, but it is okay to do that. And, and they're things that are, they're not mistakes, they're. They're just identifying what is important and what's not important. And I think that would be the first thing that people should start to think about and start to form, what bike am I going to ride? And why and when is it most useful?

The follow on from that is practicing your position as well. And this is more applicable to the time trial position on the time trial bike, but doesn't include everything because if you're going to be doing a hill sort of challenge, then you need to get practice what position you've got to be riding up the hill, even on your road bike, and practice riding in the hills because a lot of people tend to get to the hills and, and then realize that their back's really sore from a certain position or they need to practice standing up for periods, that kind of thing. But specifically the time trial position. I was on a ride last week and happened to just be behind a guy who was on the time trial bike practicing his time trial position. And we're on a very undulating circuit and on the uphills I noticed he was getting into the TT position and then over the crest down the hill, he was sitting up and pulling up. And it's. You can never judge what someone's doing because you have no idea what their session is or what the goal is, you know, for that session. But I would assume that if you're on the TT bike and you're trying to practice that you want to spend as much time in that as possible and you want to spend at least time outside of the TT position and with the hands on the sides and especially over that crest and down where you're going to get more speed. And that's where you really want to practice it. And it's good to be in the uphill. But he was really, we were hitting some steep segments and he was staying in that TT position, which is fine. But yeah, unless you're going around a sharp corner and you're not so confident or it's a really steep downhill for a safety measure, then you can pull up. But yeah, really practicing as much time as possible in that position. Cause that's what you want to achieve on race day. And that's the most aero position to be in.

Yeah. So just following on that, top that point, you know, I'm sort of surprised sometimes when I'm saying to people, how did it feel in that session that you just completed? Were you comfortable in TT position? And sometimes the answer comes back as I didn't do that in the TT position, I just sat up because I can push more power in that position. And that to me is a mistake. You need to be doing the right power in the position. You're going to try and do it on race day because you'll get to race day and say you've been trying to aim at 200 watts in those training sessions and come race day and you've been doing it sitting up. And come race day when you're in the TT position because you're trying to be as aerodynamic and fast as possible, you can't get anywhere near 200 watts and you're then questioning what's wrong with me and, and you'll start to change your race strategy and it's purely because you've actually been training in the wrong position. And that is such an important point. If you are a time trialist in a triathlon, you need to be training in the time trial position in those specific training sessions. And the minute you're doing any of those efforts out of that position, that's actually giving you an inflated power number that is not possible to do in the TT position. So you need to test yourself in the TT position, then you need to train in that same position. And so that is one of the things that I think people are really getting wrong and not only in the position, but they're actually training, doing an FTP test, sometimes on the wrong bike and then going to do some other sessions based on outdoor training based on the same power number, but because it's on a different bike, they can't match those numbers. Because guess what, the position's different because of the geometry of the frame between a road bike and a time trial bike. And the power meter is most definitely probably not going to read the same. So you're going to have different values for two different power meters. You know, I've got four power meters in this, in this room where I'm sitting, and not one of them reads the same. And that includes a smart trainer. Like I know on my time trial bike, my time trial bike power meter reads 10 watts higher than my smart trainer does. And so if, if I trained using the smart trainer's power meter, then went to a race with those numbers, then I would be riding power too low in that race because it's 10 watts lower. And therefore I would actually not. I would be losing. I'd ride poorly. And if you know in your example your smart trainer reads higher, so you'll do the opposite thing, that's going to happen. You're going to ride the wrong power in the other direction, which is going to make your race so much harder.

Yeah, our general rule is we just don't use the smart trainer's power just ever every training session where you connect to the smart trainer. That's if you're doing an indoor session, but you select your actual power meter. You don't select the smart trainer's power because it's just not really useful because you're never going to use it outdoors or race day. So it's just a kind of blanket rule for us. And yeah, so we want to keep pointing out these mistakes just to make sure that if you are using a power meter, which we hope you are, you're just not making any of these because you might be doing six out of seven of these. Right. But there's one thing you're doing wrong and that's actually affecting potentially performance on race day. And yeah, we just highlighted if, if you're going to use a smart trainer indoors, not using the power meter on the smart trainer, but using your own power meter instead. And the other one is understanding that on the same bike and the same power meter, you could still have different numbers depending on if you've done a hill climb, FTP or a flat course, FTP or an undulating, and you, they're not all not equal. So you can't really use your hill number versus your flat number. And that is a really hard concept to grasp. And you would think that doesn't make sense. The power is me and what I'm pushing. It's the same bike. Why Is that incorrect?

Yeah, It's a beauty because you could have an indoor power FTP, you could have an outdoor on the flat power FTP and you could have a hill.

Climbing and all on the same power meter on the same bike in the same position.

And you could do that, you know, if you were not listening to our advice, you could have them all on three different power meters and therefore you would be that confused when you come to do your next training session. So why would we have an FTP for hill climbing? Why would we have one for flat outdoor? Why would we have one for indoor? Because we want to train very accurately. And if we're deciding that the next training block, it's in the middle of winter and it's snowing outside and we can't go outside to do any training sessions, we're going to rely on our indoor FTP. And that could be 5 watts lower than your outdoor flat FTP and 15 watts lower than your hill climbing FTP. So we're going to train with the number that we've tested on. And if you come into summer like we are in the Southern hemisphere and you're not going to use the indoor trainer at all, then we want to use our outdoor flat FTP for our outdoor training sessions that we might be doing on the courses around our house or on a velodrome or whatever the outdoor sessions we're going to use. And then if we're going to do some hill training programs like there are, you know, going on in March this year in Victoria, there's a huge race called Three Peaks. And if you, if you are using your flat FTP power number for your hill climbing, you would definitely be riding too low because you can ride probably 5% higher against the gradient of a hill. And that's the key point. Why are the numbers different? Because you're not generating the power on a climb. The hill is pushing against you, so it's easier to push against the resistance. When you're on the flat, you have to generate your power yourself because there is no resistance from the gradient. There might be some wind resistance which will help you to push against to give you some more power. But, you know, generally you want to do out and back. So we're going to have tailwind and headwind, so that'll equal itself out. So the power from a hill climbing test should be the highest because the gradient is allowing you to push against it. The power from the flat outdoors should be next highest. And the power from indoor, that is a really difficult thing because you are not moving around the bike as much as you can. Outdoor, you're stuck in one spot. And so therefore, sometimes it's harder to generate more power. Indoor, there are exceptions to that, but that's the general consensus that we've had from the athletes that we've coached.

Absolutely. Last few. In terms of power meter mistakes, making sure that all your settings are updated correctly. So whether you're reading your power on your watch or your head unit on Zwift or on Training Peaks, just making sure that your FTP settings are updated. Because you might load a session onto Zwift. But when you start the session, if you haven't got the right FTP set, then it's going to spit out different numbers than what you should be training to. And especially if you're changing bikes, potentially changing power meters between sessions, you've really got to make sure that before the session you keep updating that. If you're looking on training peaks, for example, then making sure that you've set that FTP correctly in your settings. So it's giving you the right data to look at the same thing. If you're loading the session onto your Garmin or your head unit and watch, that's just a really important point to keep on top of because you could potentially get to a session, forget to change it, and then you'll just be. He would assume this wouldn't happen because I personally just. I'm really, really well on top of what kind of numbers I'm going to push for this session and really aware of it. And I can't imagine a situation where we personally just would look at numbers and not see that they're incorrect. But we do understand that when you're new to power and you're not used to seeing the numbers and you kind of have no idea what your ability is, you'll just be looking at numbers and have no idea what they mean. So you could easily just get look at the numbers, not even know that they're wrong, and do an entirely wrong session.

Well, generally the format should be you do an FTP test and Training Peaks can have a button where you can automatically let Training Peaks adjust it. We don't recommend you do that. We recommend that you manually adjust your FTP every time because for some reason, if your power meter over reads or under reads, if you've selected the automatic on training peaks, it will put a number that's not real. And some training sessions people are getting 2,000 watts of max power. Well, that's not a real outcome. That's that's something gone wrong with the power meter. So there's an example of, you know, not taking control yourself. So you should manually update your FTP only when you know you've improved. And you know the scenario is if you're indoors and you open up Swift, Swift will automatically change it from a previous best FTP and you have no control over that, so you have to actually manually change it back if it's not a real number. So you could actually have an FTP number on your training peak session. And then you're looking at the Zwift screen and that's set to a different number. So all of a sudden in the one training session, you've got two different power meters at play with power FTP set differently, and that's a disaster waiting to happen. It's so confusing.

Sounds really pedantic, but the consequences are really frustrating because if you don't do it properly, the session is either going to be way too hard and you're going to fail it and feel like crap and, and wonder what's wrong with me, or it's going to be far too easy and you've just kind of wasted an hour on the trainer where you haven't really gotten much out of it. And especially when today's topic is, you know, how to make sure that every hour counts. If you only got six or seven hours, you can't afford to waste an hour training session where you didn't get the most out of your body. If that was a hard session, spot on.

And look, it doesn't take much to just make sure the Swift FTP is set the same. You go into settings and then, you know, if you're Garmin or if that's what you're using, that's also got an FTP. So if you're running your training peak session through your Garmin, you're running it through Zwift, you know, and your training peak session, there's three different settings that you need to be on top of. And you know, that is crucial to getting the most out of every training session you're doing last couple.

If you do update your power meter, if you get a new one, if you upgrade, be really careful not to compare to your old one because it could read similar, it could read totally different, and it really sucks sometimes if you get a new one and it reads 30 watts lower than your old one because it feels like a bit of an ego boost. But I mean, that doesn't happen too often, but it has definitely happened to some athletes. Of ours, you just have to cop that. And you just got to really keep that in mind, especially be careful six months down the track. That is not comparing apples with oranges. And you're not comparing the data now from six months ago off a different power meter. That's where recording your own data really consistently and not just recording your power, but what power to accredit to what speed. And that's where comparing data from six months ago could be really valuable.

You could go one step further, Jordan, in your data spreadsheet. Just make a note at the end of each of those testing periods. This was my Quark. This was my Favero Sa Amo. This was my Garmin Pound. You know, whatever. Whatever the power meter is, just make a note of it. And that would make sense. I actually was looking at Strava today from a session that I did. But, you know, I've lived in the Dandenongs for 37 years, so I've done this particular climb I don't know how many times, but I was looking at it, what I'd done six years ago just to try and see if I'm actually improving or not. And. And this is an example of how the power meter has changed from what I wrote six years ago. And so the time was something like 23 minutes, and my power was 245 watts. And six years ago, I rode. I looked for a time that was similar, 23 minutes. It was almost. I'm trying to find, you know, there's a lot of sessions I've done. So I found one, and it read 265 watts with my old power meter. So. So, sure, my weight could have been different, but I'm actually heavier now than I was then. So the number today should have been higher than the one six years ago when I was lighter. But in fact, for the same time six years ago, power meter was 20 watts higher than today. And that's a great example of what you just said.

Yeah, yeah. And as always, we go, well, you could have ridden the actual hill differently, and that would create different power as well. So there's many factors, but that's why we have to look at it, and that's why we keep track. As much data as possible. Last one on the power is just making sure you're calibrating before every session, and that's hard on race day because there are plenty of examples where on race day, especially in triathlons, you have to rack your bike well before you get to start or before you're actually going to jump on the bike. So that can be a bit frustrating. And it does happen where you calibrate it, but it means nothing because by the time you get back, the Power Ranger is not calibrated again. But that's where you have to be aware of your own numbers, your own speed, your own rpe, which is really tough, and compare it all, not just be blindly looking at power.

Yeah, and, you know, I suppose there are exceptions with races where you don't have any control over it, but in training, you have control over calibrating your power meter. And look, if you're, if you're that lazy and you can't spend 20 seconds calibrating your power meter every single time you ride your bike, you know, I think there's. You need to rethink about your. Your time management, because it is so important. There's so many sessions where I've actually forgotten to do it and, and I felt like, gee, this feels really hard on the trainer here. And then I've stopped and recalibrated and all of a sudden now it's really comfortable. It's because the power meter was 5 or 6% out. So you just need to do that every session. And most power meters will give you a number when you calibrate. Some power meters, don't they just. They just say calibration successful. But whatever the response is, you need to make sure that that happens every time. So, you know, the example I've got, I've got three different power meters in the house, and they've all got different numbers that spit back at me. I've just got to remember what they are for what bike. So, so, you know, there's a little bit of information that you need to be across for that as well.

And if, if you can't remember that number because sometimes it's really random, it's like 487 or something. I'll even just calibrate it two or three times just to be really pedantic and really sure that, okay, it's spitting out the same number every time. I'm happy with that. Let's move into the topic because that's what everyone's here for. They want to know that if you've got limited time, how do you structure a training program around that? So, as always, the first answer is, it depends. But take us through the scenarios of how you would answer this question, depending on the athlete.

If I try to break it down, I suppose, into what are your actual goals for the time you have available, and we're talking anything under 10 hours here. And it could be, look, minimum could be for a marathon runner, three or four hours of training a week, and for triathlete, eight or nine, for a cyclist, six or seven. So anything in those ranges for those particular disciplines. So what are your goals? And that will answer a lot of the questions that we're going to talk about. So I'm going to break it into three. One is your goal is to just not lose fitness over this period of time because you're so time limited. You are just happy to train and not expect to improve because you know you're not training like you used to in terms of time, but you want to maintain fitness. You don't want to go backwards. So that's the first category. The second category would be you're limited in time because of whatever the reason, job changes or family or. And you want to still improve, but you don't have much time. I want to talk about that. And then what about the third category? The person who, regardless of the time available, wants to be super competitive and just be like his competitors and be good enough with half the time that the other competitors are using. So they're the three scenarios. They're the three goals I want to kind of discuss.

Yeah. So go through. So if you know, if it's level one, two or three, maintenance, improvement, or ultra competitive, what's kind of the general rule around them? Yep.

So the maintenance one's really simple. You don't have to, you don't have to flog yourself. You can maintain a good level of aerobic fitness if you just stayed around, around zone two till the cows come home, as I say. So we're just happy with pressure on the pedals, getting some aerobic stimulation, cardiacs, heart rate, cardiovascular systems, not being stressed too much, but it's actually working. So you couldn't spend all the time just in zone one. You would need to spend some time with pressure on the pedals going right up to the top of 75% of your FTP. And you know that will allow you to go the whole time. So if you're a bike rider and you've got six or seven hours available and you are not worried about improvement, but you could, you could do all those as, you know, zone two rides and, you know, really enjoy it and be able to ride with a whole lot of social rides in there, and that would be a really good outcome because normally you would probably ride just above zone two in those bunch rides, depending on the standard of your bunch ride. But, but you then have the freedom to, you know, just to know that, you know, I'm still maintaining my fitness because I am actually riding at that zone two level, which is, you know, technically, you know, if you use the zone system, a lot of the best scientific research tells us if you spend 80% of your time zone two or lower, and 20% of your time, you know, at zone three or four or higher, you are going to improve incredibly. So we're just taking away that high intensity just so that you can actually get through this period of maintenance training.

And the key point there is that you can train harder if you want, but you just don't need to. And a lot of people feel like they, they will lose fitness unless they train hard. And you're saying that no, if you just did zone two, you'll be pretty good. Obviously you won't improve and you won't be at that ultra competitive side, but you'd be pretty good at maintaining. Yeah.

And there'll be a point if you did that for a long, long period of time where you know, your fitness would start to lose. And that's why the intensity is important at some point in time. And I suppose that's what point two is the goal of. I want to stay healthy and fit, but I still want to see some improvement. And that's us just adding one more session. That's us that's just adding an intensity session once a week or once every fortnight, whatever your schedule is, once every 10 days. And that that high intensity session needs to be at threshold or higher. You don't want to spend that time in that gray zone which is between zone two and zone four. That gray zone is for people who can spend 15 to 20 hours a week training.

To clarify there, when we say zone 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, we're using a five zone model in this example. And we know that every podcast or every video might use a three zone model or a five or six zone model. But zone two is anything below that first lactate threshold, above threshold. Is that above zone four is above that lactate two threshold. So the gray zone you're talking about is between the lactate thresholds LT1 and LT2. That's, that's zone three and four.

So yeah, so we want to spend some time up to zone 2, LT1, lactate threshold 1, anything in that area. And then we want to spend that other session at threshold or VO2 or anaerobic. So that could look like 60, 30s, you know, anything under a minute with short recovery, 40 20s, 30, 15, 30 on, 15 off. It could three by, you know, three minutes times two sets with three minutes recovery. That's an example of that high intensity session. And if you're doing things that are less intense than that at threshold, that's where you're doing your five by fives at, you know, 100 to 108% of your FTP with, you know, two and a half minutes rest period in between. So they're, they're two examples of different sessions that are high intensity, but they're, they're challenging different aerobic systems. So, so it's really important that as long as you're doing one or two of those sessions, alternating is fine. Concentrating on one of those for a structured period and then swapping over is fine. But doing one of those is important to give you the stimulus that, that, that you're looking forward to improve.

And so if we break that down to actual sessions, let's say we're talking about a cyclist, they've got six to seven hours a week to train. You know, that might look like two zone two sessions that could be between 60 and 90 minutes each, one high intensity session which is generally around the hour mark or just above, then that leaves room for an endurance ride of, of potentially three to four hours to fit in there. And it all depends on who you are and when you, when you've got 67 hours. Is that based over three days only? You know you've only got three days to train. In that case, you, like you're saying you're probably doing one zone two, one endurance ride which might still be zone two, or with some intensity and one intensity ride, or you might be able to split it over four sessions like the example I just gave. So it is dependent, but we're just giving a breakdown of what those sessions might look like.

That's a good summary. And, you know, it depends on how many days you can train. And if you've got five days and you've only got five hours, then you know that takes away your endurance ride straight away. So that's a scenario that's really going to make it difficult. And therefore, you know, you've got to try and make sure that most of those five hours, four of those five hours are all at zone two.

That's a good example. Let's say if you've got five days of training, but you can only train for an hour max, a day or an hour and a half, just, you know, you might have a full day of sport with kids or something over the Weekend, Saturday, Sunday, and you just can never fit in a three or four hour ride during your week. That's just not possible. Ultimately, if you could, that would be preferable, getting an endurance session in, whether it's cycling, running as part of triathlon as well. But yeah, it's a good specific example that just no matter what your week is, you're never going to be able to get away from the family for three to four hours at once. It's just too unfair. So talk to us a little bit more about that and how would you break down the week then?

Yeah, and that's where the intensity is going to give you the best bang for your buck. So we're trying to do some Zone 2 stuff. We're not going to spend time recovering because the rest of the 23 hours out of the 24 that you've, you're not training, you know, you are, you know, doing some sort of recovery in that, in that period. So we want to make sure that we really push ourselves in, you know, possibly two or three of those hours out of the five that you've got, if that's what your limit is, or six hours. So if it's three one hour efforts where, you know, you're spreading that apart Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, you would want to be doing threshold or above in all of the three of those sessions. And an example would be to do two structured sessions and try to get, if you're, if you're training indoor, try to get a race on Zwift, something like that, where it's unpredictable training where you know, you're in the middle of a race and someone attacks and there was a hill comes up and you've got to, you know, you've got to get with the bunch and stay with them. So you've got to ride the high power. So they're really great ways of fitting in some high intensity with some fun. But you know, you really want to make sure the other two days you are actually getting the correct stimulus, which is VO2 up to anaerobic or the threshold. And they're the things you can't really avoid if you've only got that small amount of time.

Yeah, I want to continue on that in a second. But the last kind of example we wanted to talk about was the ultra competitive athlete, the one who still has a very limited time to train but still wants to be competitive. Is that a similar kind of answer?

It is, but we would, we would have to say to that person, if you don't have the time for the endurance ride, then you're not going to be competitive. And that would be a thing that they would have to really take on board. So that example we use where a person only had, and that would be very rare by the way, if someone only had one hour every time. But we try to give enough scenarios so it can fit the listener who's listening. Well, that suits me and, or this doesn't suit me. But if you've got, you know, three one hour sessions available, but you've got the weekend, you can ride three or four hours, that ultra competitive person will have a really good program and they can be really quite competitive if they're, they're really using their endurance ride the way that they need to. Compared to someone who's got 20 hours a week, the endurance ride for that person, the ultra competitive person with limited time, that endurance ride or for a marathon runner, that endurance ride run, that has to have some intensity in it. And for a runner you would use the hills and you would just, you would just increase the, the effort on the hills a little bit more than, than if you had, you know, 10, 12 hours of running each week. When you've only got three or four hours of running, you would actually try to run some of the hills a little bit more solid. And for a bike rider, you would absolutely try to, you know, get some bunch rides where it's really hard and it's unpredictable and you're racing against your mates. And then you would add Zone 2 stuff in your cooldown so that you're getting that aerobic fitness when you're tired after two, three, four hours. As I speak into someone before, you know, he's asking, should I, should I do longer midweek rides coming up for this big event that I'm doing? And I'm saying, well, you should be doing that anyway. If you've got the time. If you've got the time, add more time to you, We've said that so many times, add more time to your cooldown and make sure that doesn't go over zone two, which is, you know, anything up to 75%. But you know, 60% of your FTP is where you should be sitting on that cooldown, you know, down to as low as 40%. So anything between that 40 to 75, but try and hone in on 60% to get the best bang for your buck. If you're limited for time. And the listener needs to understand we're only talking about people who have got less hours in the day, in the week, in the months to train to. We're not talking about people who've got all the time in the world to fit the best structured program into them into their week. So it is important that, you know, you use that endurance ride. That is the difference, Jordan. Making sure that we get the value out of that endurance ride. Because in the others in the maintenance person or the improvement plus just trying to maintain there's potentially going to do some intensity. But you know, they're not got the time to do the long endurance stuff. And you know, if you're spending. Another example I just thought of then if you're actually spending time driving to. Let's start again. So if you're actually riding your bike, going through traffic to get to the endurance ride where there's some hills, you're actually commuting rather than actually training. And I would rather you did drive to the hills and then spent the three or four hours that you've got in the hills rather than commuting and spending an hour in the hills and then commuting back and getting a total of three or four hours. That is going to be the best bang for your buck. So you need to need to be up at 4:00 in the morning, be ready to ride on your bike in summer at 6am so that you have to be home by 10. You've got three hours from six till nine, a commute back home, 10 o', clock, you know your day's done and you've had three great hours in the hills and you haven't spent the whole time stopping and starting at traffic lights all the way out there and getting one hill in and then doing the same on the way home.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. There's one particular travel athlete I can think of that is constantly really strapped for time and they somehow manage to just maintain a really good level of fitness. And then when they have periods where they've got a little bit more time, they can really step up and they smash it. And they really do prioritize the endurance ride as much as they can, which is not all the time, but when they can, they do it. And if not, they're basically just getting on the bike and smashing themselves for short, sharp periods. And we've spoken about our winters with series where we hold races within the Trevelo group. And this athlete would literally get home from work so late that they jump on the bike five minutes before the race, whereas everyone else is getting the most out of the session where they're doing the extras, they're doing A great half hour warm up. It's building good aerobic capacity, getting themselves really warmed up for the race. And this athlete will just get on, do the 35 minute race as hard as they can get off, finish the day's work after that. And they are literally using every minute they have just to do the high intensity part. But they're getting a huge benefit out of it. Obviously if they did half hour warm up and a half hour cooldown, it was an hour and a half session. They're going to get great aerobic benefit out of that. But they still are able to maintain really good fitness and be riding really well just from doing something like that and getting the actual hard race in.

And look, I know every athlete's different, but the amount of limited time this person has proved, it has proved to me that, you know, with, with small, well balanced, structured training sessions, you can still be at a level that's super competitive. And no, this guy was part of the nationals winning teams time trial at Bunningyong in the Australian titles here in January. And you know, I reckon his previous, you know, two or three weeks before that he might have ridden his bike twice or three times. Yet he was, you know, he was able to, because when he did ride his bike, he rode, you know, max, max efforts in his sessions. He maintained that that good structure and look, that will fall apart, there's no doubt about that. When that goes on for two or three months, you will lose fitness. You will, you will not be the rider you are. So we're not talking about that, we're just talking about the, you know, the opportunities you have with the limited time for a period of time. But if you try to do this, you know, for two or three years, you would, you would not be an improvement situation. You will just be almost like a bipolar rider. You'll have good periods and bad periods and you just keep doing that up and down. I'm feeling good now and I haven't trained for a while now. I'm struggling again and I'll do a couple of good weeks of training now I'm going good again. And you're never actually getting any better. And so we're not talking about that athlete. We're talking about someone who is actually doing exactly what they should be doing in the limited time they have. And answering that question, can you still be at the top of your game? Well, you can. It is a lot harder pathway to follow, but it is possible. If you're really committed and you are on top of the details and and you don't waste a session. That is actually the key thing.

We actually had the founder of the 8020 rule and where all this dialogue comes from around you should be doing 80% of your training easy and then only a small section hard. That was Dr. Steven Seiler. And we asked him this question and said, well, yeah, what if you've got limited sessions? What if you only train three times a week? And he said, well, it's super simple, you go really hard on those sessions. And he said the caveat is as long as you're giving yourself enough time to recover because you can't just smash yourself all the time. But he said, if you, if I can only train three times a week, then for sure I'm doing three high intensity sessions. That's going to give me the best bang for my buck.

Yeah. And it's kind of almost shocking to hear scientists say, you know, it's okay to go and smash yourself. But you know, the reality is it's three times out of seven days and you've got, you know, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday probably opportunities to do that or Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday. And you know, you've got ample recovery time in there. So you know, you would be doing yourself an injustice if you actually didn't use those sessions. If you're, if your goal, remember, is to, to be competitive once again.

That's not going to work long term though. So when someone says I'll just, I'll just smash it for a period, you'd go, oh, that's even still not a good idea. Even if you only got three sessions. Why is that?

Yeah, because eventually, you know, the endurance component of the training is what is our, our, our base. And, and if we keep, and I'm really strong on this with the people we coach, if people are missing out of the last eight or 10 weeks and I see they've done five out of the 10 endurance sessions, the correlation between their form falling and those sessions is massive. And so that tells me every time that, you know, if you start missing the endurance, then eventually your form and your fitness will start to dissipate very quickly. And all of a sudden you'll be asking yourself, why aren't I riding like I was 12 weeks ago? Well, the key component that's gone is the endurance ride. And that, that just brings that, that strength in the mitochondria to be able to hold form when you're getting tired. And the cell development and the breakdown of the fatigue you get from four or five hour rides or three or three hours and above, if you're doing some strength work and you know, that is incredible for the body to really maintain its peak form. And I think that is going to be a game changer. Even if you do still do the intensity stuff midweek, there'll be a time where, you know, I've seen the example of when summer comes around. No matter where you are in the world, there's a lot more opportunities to race. So the people who, we've got examples of people who like to race two or three times a week, which I'm not a big fan of, but that's what they love doing, so let's let them do what they love doing. But I have to say to them, if you choose this method of summer riding, the consequence is that you'll form eventually by the third month of summer. You know, summer's generally going to go for, you know, with, with a bit of, bit of good weather in spring and a bit of good weather in autumn, you could have a four to five month period of really great racing. But by the time you get to month three and four, if you haven't done any endurance and all you've done is race Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday with no endurance, your form will actually deteriorate and you will be a lot worse rider at the end of summer as compared to the person who races less and actually gets the endurance ride in. They're still getting the intensity from the race, they're still getting their, their dopamine fix from, from having a competition in their blood, but they're still maintaining their fitness and they can do that for six months of the, of the period that we're talking about and, and be, you know, actually better at the end of the season because they've had the right fitness levels all the way through and they haven't dropped off.

Yeah, it's such a great point and it really reiterates what you said earlier about how valuable that endurance session is. And if you can't fit that in, you've just got to expect that you're probably not going to improve the way you want and be competitive in the way you want. And just that example we gave before of that athlete that was doing the absolute minimum but maintaining a good level. That's because that athlete is only ever doing short time trial races where they're doing 15 to 30 minute efforts and they can maintain that or they're doing our crit races, you know, they're not doing anything longer and if they did, they would struggle because they're just not doing any of that endurance. And so they're really good at that specific kind of tempo because they can keep that up in their training. But it just highlights a really big point that if you're an endurance athlete, if you're a triathlete, this isn't going to apply as well because you just won't be good for anything over an hour, an hour and a half because you're not doing any specificity for it.

Yeah. And you know, as a, as a competitive marathon runner, you know, the example would be the same. You know, if you're trying to train for a marathon or an ultra distance run, which is longer than a marathon, you know, 50, 60 kilometers or some people up to 100 kilometers. If, if you can't get that endurance run into your body, you're not, you shouldn't be targeting those events. You know, you will be fine if as a marathon, as a runner and you, and you can't have the time for it, you have to think twice about what events you should be doing. And so if that, you're in that scenario where you can't do that endurance run, then marathon should be stepping down to half marathon. That would be my advice. And you'll have some, some similar fun experiences doing 5Ks and 10Ks and making your main race the half marathon, rather than, you know, blindly saying, I'm an endurance marathon runner and that's what I'm going to do. But I've only got, you know, X amount of time and my longest run I can do is 90 minutes. Well, you're, you're going to have a bad experience on marathon day. If your longest run is going to be 90 minutes, you need to have some capacity and that's what the topic is. You know, if you've got limited time, then you need to think about a, what is my goal? Is it, you know, maintenance? Is it just get a little bit of improvement or ultra competitive? And if you're a marathon runner and you don't have the endurance day available to you, you shouldn't be doing that event.

So let's finish off with what would the breakdown be for a triathlete? Let's say a triathlete on the age of six or seven, maybe up to eight or nine. But let's go really specific with they've got absolutely limited time per week. How do you break it down between the three disciplines?

Yeah, I suppose the simplest way is to say how much time is spent in the race and that should be reflective of what you do in swim, bike and run. And to be fair, people have got 20 hours. It's still the same scenario. I still apply that philosophy of, you know, if I spend overtime swimming undertime riding and undertime running, I'm going to be improving my swimming incredibly. But that could improve me two or three minutes. Whereas if I spent more time riding and running, I could possibly get up to 5 or 10 minutes improvement. So it's where you're going to get the best bang for your buck. So unfortunately, swimming becomes a maintenance thing if you're limited in time. And I don't mean as in the effort, it just means once a week. If you're struggling to do seven hours of training, you're going to have to spend two or three hours depending on your event, whether it's 70.3 or Ironman. And again, the same philosophy. Probably not a good idea to do an Ironman if you've only got seven hours of training time available. Half Ironman is really pushing an Olympic distance is probably where you should be selecting. So I'm really pushing that idea of think about with the time you've got available, what should I be doing? And if, you know, you've been an endurance athlete and that's what your passion and desire is, look, use this time, you know, where you've got limited time to, to do a different event which is shorter and you know, you might surprise yourself and enjoy that as just as much. But if you can't do that endurance run and ride as a triathlete, then you're going to be limited in how well you're going to perform on race day because you're going to be exposed, you know, after, you know, if you're doing a half Ironman and you've swam, you know, basically 2k and tried to ride 90 and run half, half a marathon, if you haven't done any riding or running that's in that seven hours, that's, that's, you know, been somewhere around the time it's going to take you to ride that, that 90K. And for, for some athletes that's three hours. For other athletes that's two and a half. And for the run it could be an hour and a half and two and a half hours for the half marathon. So, so you've got to have that time in your training program. So where does that leave you? If you've done, say you've done some long runs that are two hours and you've done some rides that are three hours, there's five out of your seven or eight hours that you've got available. So, so you know, those other three or four hours have to be a little bit of a swim and you know, some sort of running and some sort of riding in those other three hours. So, so you know, that's where you shouldn't be doing the two to three hour ride and the hour and a half to two hour run. You should select another, another event in triathlon, another distance as an Olympic distance and you'd be having more fun that way as well.

And the 8020 rule can really again be thrown out here. If you go into, let's say you opt for the Olympic distance at this amount of training, then you could really just get quite specific and just do a lot of your training at race pace zone. And you know, if it's a 40k TT, which might take you an hour to an hour and a half, and if it's a 10k run, which again might take you 40 minutes to an hour 10, you know, you could potentially do an hour ride with a half hour run at race pace and do that consistently and you'll get really specifically good at that race pace.

Yeah. So I think the scenario should be I have to rethink my event and then I can fit my time into it. So, so the caveat would be yes, you can still be competitive, but not in, as an endurance athlete. Anything that's, you know, as a, as a runner, you know, 5k, 10k up to half marathon with, with limited time as a triathlete. Absolutely. You know, sprint, Olympic, no problems pushing the envelope depending on how many hours you've got for half half ironman.

I guess that kind of summarises it. Yeah. Any other final words on fitting a structure training program on limited time?

No, I just think you've got to be really more realistic in your expectations and make sure that you select the goal about how you want to go about your fitness. Are you going to maintain, are you happy to maintain with a little bit of improvement or are you super competitive? And once you've established that, then select the event that is going to allow you to fulfill that goal that you're really setting as your target during this period where you've got limited time. And the whole scenario of this podcast was to set up an expectation that you can still be an athlete, you can still be competitive, you can still compete in events that. But as long as you're realistic about your performance and have that correlation between training time expectation and outcome, that's a.

Great way to finish. Yeah. We hope this helps anyone out there with limited time. Because there's definitely a lot of people in that position. We want to give you hope that it's definitely still possible and you can definitely get a lot out of yourself. You don't have to be doing so many extra hours at Zone 2. And there is actually a little bit of a myth, I think, in the industry about how many hours you should, should be doing. And I even saw one pro cyclist talk about how they can't remember the last time they did a 30 plus hour week, even though it seems to be a well known thing that all elite athletes do 30 plus hours. And we've spoken a lot on the podcast about elite cyclists. You know, they're doing their 2k races and then everything around that is just super easy and not even that long. So, yeah, don't fall to a trap thinking that more is always better. You can get a lot out of your weekly shorter time. So we want to look at both sides of the argument. We hope we've provided that today. So that's it for this episode. As always, we'll see you on the next one.