The Best Bike Sessions For 2022

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. With such a wide range of training sessions that you could be doing what are the best sessions that you should be doing, what bike sessions are going to help you improve the most? Every year we get more and more data on our own athletes as well as professional athletes from around the world as to what the most effective training sessions to improve your fitness, power and FTP are. So in today's episode, we're going to be discussing what we think are the best bike sessions for 2022. Dad, welcome to the episode. Let's start with what are you grateful for?

Thanks Jord. I am looking forward to discussing this topic and we get a lot of questions on this. So looking forward to it. Look, January in, in Melbourne in particular or summer in Melbourne. I'm so grateful there's a long winded version here, but I'm so grateful that we Melbourne has a lot of good things going for us, had a lot of bad things in the last two years like the most Covid country in the world, locked down country in the world. So that's not a, that's not something to boast about, be grateful for. But look, apart from that summer in Melbourne I think is one of the better times of the year and if I had my way I would live in Melbourne, December, January, February, March, April and then move somewhere warmer for the rest. So I really love and great and I'm grateful for Melbourne summer. But more importantly, I'm grateful to be able to witness and watch elite sports people and doing the best in their craft and they seem to be, even though they're against other elite sports people, they seem to be there's a level to go to and I'm grateful to be able to witness that. And the example I would use is Ash Barty. I'm not a great tennis fan, but I love to see elite people strutting their stuff and making it look like they're a cut above everybody else. And, and my gratitude is to be able to witness that and, and you know, to know the work that goes into all the professionals put in the same amount of work. I imagine some probably more than others but, but I was watching some, some matches of the, of the women who are going to be up against Ash Barty and they were playing some unbelievable tennis. They were hitting the COVID off the ball and the rallies were incred and. And then I switched over to Aspar Ash Bardi's match and it seemed almost like a different. A different level, lower, Lower level because it wasn't the same hitting things going on. And then though the winner of that, that, that match that seemed like they were invincible came up against Ash Barty yet that, that those women could not play the same way against Ash Barty. She seems to do dismantle their game and plays it on her level and in. On her terms and I admire that. I'm grateful to be able to witness that. And the other example I use is in soccer. Australia playing a series of matches in the World cup and in the Asian cup qualifiers, and one of the standout players and who just happens to play for Celtic, the team I've supported my whole life, Tom Rogic. And the things this guy can do on a soccer field is above the rest of the players on the field. And. And he is the difference when he plays for Celtic. He's the difference there when he plays for Australia is the difference there. And I'm just grateful to be able to witness people who are at the top of their game but seem to be at another level and you could rattle off player after player, sport after sport. So, yeah, my gratitude is about just being able to watch. Watch people, even the Australian cricket team just dismantle the Poms. And, you know, had they. Had they declared earlier, they would have won 5 nil and not won 4 nil. But yeah, just seeing people dominate other professionals to make them look mediocre. Yeah, my gratitude's for that.

I could say my gratitude was definitely us dismantling the poms. Any UK listeners out there or English listeners, hope you enjoy that gratitude. I was actually at the game last night, Australia versus Vietnam, where Tom Roger was playing. And the guy next to me said, he's. He's that tall and that big. He should not be able to do the things he can do. He should not be. He should not be that coordinated. And I was just laughing because it's, it's totally true. My gratitude is very similar theme. It's for Melbourne sport. Melbourne is heralded as the sporting capital of at least Australia, but we like to say the world, but we just have some amazing, unbelievable sporting events here. And last night, you know, the Australian Open was on. Most of the country was watching Ash Barty while we were across the road from Melbourne park, where the tennis is, watching the Australian national team playing a World cup qualifier. All in the same precinct. And that's just what Melbourne is so good for. And so my gratitude is definitely the opportunity to be able to attend such elite sporting events that we can here. You know, three weeks ago I was at the MCG watching the Ashes, so that is definitely my gratitude on a similar theme.

And don't forget your two nights earlier you were at Olympic park watching the Zatopec, which is a famous 10,000 meter event that's been run for, you know, almost a century since Emil Zatopec retired, I think.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely true, yeah. Seeing Australia's best runners battle it out in the national 10k shout out to Jack Rayner who won with a time of 28:16, which is just blistering. You know, I think they went through 5k in 1412 and then they've done the second 5k in 1404, so. And Dave McNeil who we had on the podcast came second. He lost to Jack by four or so seconds. It was a really good battle between those two and Jack was just able to kick away in the last 600 and it was a great crowd there, one of the better crowds I've seen for a while. So yes, Melbourne sport a lot of gratitude for that. But that further ado, let's get into today's topic and we want to talk about the best training sessions you can be doing to improve yourself. So dad, what have you noticed around training sessions and any little shifts over the last year? Like we said at the start, the more data we get, the more experience we get seeing athletes develop and respond to different training sessions, the more knowledge we get from what the best athletes around the world are doing. What small changes have you been noticing and making?

It's a really interesting question and oh, it's a minefield. The answer. I've noticed a whole lot of things and Covid has forced me to notice things. We've had two years of training under our belt now like no other period that I can ever remember in. I mean I really think I started my serious training as a 10 year old and I'm now 63. So it's almost 50 odd years of watching year in, year out people's training performance and the correlation between the two and let's face it, the majority of us are training to improve. There is a group of people who are just out there to keep their fitness and that's fine, that's okay. Goal. And we've never shied away from that. But the majority of people are trying to improve and so I'm forever Looking for little changes from experts around the world. And we interview a lot of them, elite coaches in their fields, whether it be swimming, riding, mountain biking or running. We're trying to give the listeners little insights as to how the elite people go about improving themselves. And therefore we want to then say the average everyday age grouper who we're really targeting to help improve, they can learn lessons from what the trailblazers or the people are ahead of their time. Like the Norwegians. At the moment they are just trailblazers in triathlon. The Kenyans were trailblazers in marathon running and track, track and field, running, tennis. You know, the Americans were dominating for years and you know, the Australians were right up there in the 60s and 70s. So there's, there's periods of countries or people who break barriers and try things different and, and some miserable failures and some are outstanding successes. And just recently the Tokyo Olympics, you know, you've got to, you've got to take your hat off to the Norwegian set up to come away with the gold medal and to be the current 70.3 world champion Ironman, unofficial record holder, unofficial fastest ever Ironman, and can't wait to see them compete in an Ironman at Kona. So they're making new ground. And so the answer to your question is I've just seen so much happen in the last two years as compared to almost 20 years of stagnancy or just little things here and there. But certainly, you know, do we train too hard? Don't we train hard enough? Those questions are being asked. I'm certainly asking them. I'm asking them of myself. I've just been through a period of high performance racing and really questioned my preparation and what was I lacking?

I would say that over the last two years we have a lot of private conversations about training, about principles, looking at articles, looking at research, looking at what our current athletes are doing and saying, well, this athlete's improved this much. What do they do specifically differently? And one of the most common questions we're saying to each other is where is this line of training too hard and not training hard enough? And it's just a constant kind of maneuvering of, and manipulating of training programs. And I just feel like that we're constantly asking that and we do another block and we say, okay, was that too much training hard or was that not training hard enough? How much improvement happened there? And it is just a golden question. And it's, it's funny, you talk about the stagnation. The Norwegian sports scientist Olive Alexander actually said in an interview, he. He was really into sports science, and he wasn't necessarily into triathlon specifically, but he got approached by the triathlon federation to go help their team. And he really buried himself in the data of triathlon. And he just basically said that apart from technology, technological advances, so bikes, you know, the improvement in bikes, maybe the improvement in shoes. Now, the sports science itself had not advanced at all for a long time. And he basically said, it's time to change that because there is absolutely massive gains to be made. And this was back in 2014, 15, when he started working with them. And then you see the results of his labor six or seven years later, even though they've been dominating the last three to five years. But it is an interesting point to make that since you started training when you were 10, there are a lot of fundamental principles that are exactly the same. And that surprises me because you think that with more information it would radically change, but I'm shocked at how many fundamental principles are still the same. Yet we're also at such a good point in history where we're getting some of the best new information coming out and it's really exciting. So we want to touch on, probably, if we look back at the last two years, one of the major things to say that this needs to be a more keystone part of anyone's training program. What is that factor?

Well, without doubt, racing has been the biggest thing that's changed in the last two years, our particular program at Trivello. And sometimes things happen accidentally, sometimes things happen with a purpose and they're very well planned out. And the reason for why it happened is not necessarily the important point. The actual, the thing that happened is the important point. And that's, you know, I don't mind saying that I'm experimenting all the time. I don't know everything about, about physio physiology of each individual athlete. You know, I'm forever learning and understanding and improving my knowledge. And if I don't, I don't say that out loud. I'm acting like I know everything and I don't. And it's got. People got to be clear that, you know, as much as athletes are experimenting with their efforts in an individual session, I'm experimenting on myself continually with what works and what doesn't work for myself before I put it on to the athletes that we coach. And so one of the things that you and I at Trivelo decided when Covid came in was that we would use one of the technological advances in the last five, six years to Our advantage, and that was to use Zwift the way we wanted to use Swift and not just be part of the game like the rest of the 2 or 3 million people around the world are using it. And our idea was to create an intensity session that would fit into our weekly program. And you know, call this fortunate or, you know, Covid has a lot of negative things, but far out, this is one of the more positive things to come out of COVID We in fact created a race like situation in our training program on a weekly basis for, you know, the first time we did it was for probably eight weeks. We had a break, then we did it again for another eight weeks. And then the second year, which was the year just gone, we did it straight through for I think 14 to 16 weeks breaks in there. That's right. And we had some testing periods in the middle of that as well. And, and for me that was a game changer. And when I do the post year analysis, like we talk about the post race analysis, the post week analysis, the post session analysis, you and I are talking about how did our year go with our athletes. And looking back, when I look at the data I'm searching for when was, for example, myself or you, when were you riding your best power? What Was your highest 20 minutes? What was your highest 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes? And it was during this period of winter lockdown where we were doing this kind of experiment of using Zwift as a race. And I'm not talking about, you know, just picking, picking a C grade race or, or race that's below yourself so you could win. I'm talking about putting yourself. And we manipulated it to be a handicap. And we weren't entering into any of Zwift's races. We were doing our own races where, you know, we would put our group into handicap times and, and therefore it, you know, in real life, in bike riding, in handicap riding, it is the best training session to do in a, in a scratch race. For those who are unsure or unaware of how cycling races are run, you could have a handicap where people are put into groups of five to 10 riders or sometimes 20 riders. And you are supposed to ride together as a, as a time trial team. And your goal is to get to the front of the race and then shoot out for the win. And you know, there could be six groups spread apart, you know, from 30 minutes to scratch and in every group in between. And I'm just explaining how handicap works. So the idea is that you ride together in your group and why Is that such a good way to train is because you're on your threshold. Pretty much you're slightly over when you're doing a turn and then when you pull off and let someone else do a turn, you're slightly under threshold and, but at no stage are you getting a freewheel or, or a relaxation. So you're forever basically riding threshold. And if you can do that for 30 to 35 minutes, which is what we did for our races each week, that will bring you up to higher and higher levels of threshold. Why? Because you are doing that type of training. So if you wanted to be a better criterium rider, you would do lots of big over under training. And that's what criterion racing is. Big effort, recover, big effort, recover repeated. If you wanted to be a time trialist you would do lots of threshold. But, but to improve your cycling across the board and improve your FTP, you really need to do more threshold riding. And we don't do that. And why don't we do that? Because it's too bloody hard. It is to do that as an individual training session on your own threshold once a week. You know, I'm, I get people revolting when I tell them they're doing it every four weeks. You know, imagine saying you're going to do it every week for 16 weeks with you know, some, some breaks in between. Obviously for periodization you want to have some easier, easier weeks in there, but generally you're going to be improving your threshold if you ride threshold training.

But that is the key point, isn't it? Is that you just, you know, for whatever reason mentally it, you just can't do that stop type of session on your own. You know, it's just, it is so hard to go out and do 40 minutes at or above your threshold. You know, we had so many people getting new FTP set in the races because they're pushing their body beyond what they normally could for 40 minutes in a race like situation. And that's, I guess that's the really the kind of, the magic little secret here is that when you put somebody in a race situation, especially like you've explained with the handicap, there's so many elements to it that make it just such a valuable training session. And the handicap itself, you know, there's no resting in the group because you are fighting tooth and nail the entire race to catch the groups in front. So no one can afford to sit up and ease up. There's no tactics like in a typical road race or crit race where it's One big bunch, and no one's willing to go on the front, do the work. Your whole group is really trying to work together, and sometimes someone might, you know, not work as hard, and that's their loss because they're not getting as much out of the training session. But for the most part, every single rider wanted to win because it became quite a coveted thing. You know, these Tribalo races where we really. We had a yellow jersey out of it, we kept point, a points tally for each race, and that really motivated people to get the most out of each race. And you wanted your group to win, and so you were, one, really trying to help your teammates. You'd say in your group and get the most out of the session. And two, you didn't want to ease up or get dropped. And so people were on their absolute limits, just trying to stay with the group. So there's just so much value in it, and there's probably more that I haven't even spoken about yet.

Yeah, you will never ride as hard as you will when you're in a competition. And that's just the fact that's human behavior. If you want to get the most out of yourself, make it a. Make it a race. And we're also competitive, so, you know, once we got the handicaps right and people were in their right group and it, you know, everybody, bar none, improved. And. And it was. It was great. Every week I'd have to reset FTPs for the whole. Basically the whole group of, you know, and people just progressively improving. And that, to me, when we ask the question, what is the best bike session going forward? Well, don't forget to put yourself in a competitive race situation. And it has to be at the right time of the year. It can't be done every week for 52 weeks. That's not what we're saying. There has to be periods where you are getting to ride at threshold if you. If you want to actually improve your threshold, put yourself into a. Into a group handicap situation or find one in real life that doesn't have to be on swift. And again, we're just talking about zwift here. And I think, you know, the. The heart, the beauty of swift. And there's a lot of negatives about swift, but there's a lot of positives as well. The beauty of it is, can't really relax. You can't really. You know, even when you're going downhill, you. You still gotta actually keep the pressure on the pedals. And, you know, I've never been that tired after A Thursday night. And you know, I don't remember a lot of bike races outdoors where I've been that exhausted from age, trying to keep with my group and try and contribute to my group to get to the front of the race and then have a sprint at the end to see, you know, if I can improve a couple of places. And I never get pushed like that in a training session by myself. I'm very motivated to push myself in training. I will say that right out loud. But, you know, I'm going to go another level. We're talking about that in gratitude. What, what makes these elite sportsmen a little bit better than their competitors? Well, just that next level when you, when you've got a number on your back and you're racing. So. So I think one of the things, you know, it's not new, everybody knows that racing is good for you, but it's the type of racing you're doing. You know, if you're in a crit race where if you analyzed your data post crit event, you would see that you had maybe 15 spikes of 110 to 140% of your FTP and then you might have had, you know, in the zones, you might have had 14 to 20 minutes in zone two and three. Well, well, that's not the racing we were doing. We were doing where the majority of time you're in zone four or zone five for that 30 to 40 minutes. And you know, there are a lot of crit races where you can just sit in the bunch and still be in zone three and a lot of other people doing the work. If there's a headwind and it's a flat section, you can tuck in. So it is really. I'm being very fussy about what, you know, don't. I'm just not saying just go race. You have to go and find races that are relative to what you're trying to achieve. And my advice is, if, you know, all the country clubs that I used to cycle with, we always did handicap racing. And the reason we did it was not to get threshold improvement. We did handicap racing because there wasn't enough club members. And to have a scratch race with seven members was crap. So rather than having a grade with seven, B grade with six, C grade with 10 because the club only had 30 or 40 members, you have a handicap where you're racing against the D grade riders and you give them 25 minutes start and all of a sudden you've got a race of 30. And so the handicap style of racing I believe is the one thing that people could do more of, whether it's on Zwift or whether it's in their clubs. And the reason is because it's riding at your threshold for the majority of the time, whether you're just under 98% or whether you're 105%. But as an inner handicap, as you understand, it's a team, you're riding with a group of riders, and you don't want to be gassing your teammates. You want to ride at the same speed and power that the group's riding at. So therefore, it's almost controlled you to stop you from doing those 110, 120% efforts, because you've got to ride as a team.

And it's good because the stronger riders can do more work, and the riders that are not as strong in the group can hang on and not do as much work. But both type of rider are getting a real big benefit out of it. There's. There's a real element of, you know, when you say that you've never been so exhausted, you know, from a swift phrase, compared to a crit race, there's definitely an element of, you know, you're not riding like you would on the road. I definitely know that my head's going everywhere. I'm not even looking at the screen, and my arms are, you know, really gripping the bike and almost pulling the bike. If I was doing that on the road, I'd definitely crash. So you can get a little bit more out of yourself with that regard. But I think the last point on that is that in this winter block we did last year in 2021, by the end of that, everyone was definitely done with the races. That was. We'd maxed out as much as we could do. I think mentally and physically, they were really tough. So it was. It was a really hard training block. And you started to. I think the last couple of races, a few of us just really, we. We didn't even hit the same power close to it. We just were mentally physically exhausted. I think we really, really found the limit of the amount of races we do. And that's like you're saying, you know, when you want to apply this to your own training program, don't go and do 52 weeks worth of races in a row.

Yep. And I have a lot of athletes that we coach who. Who will race. I've got examples of people who will race four or five times a week if I let them, and they just love racing, and that's fantastic. That's what, that's why they ride their bike, give them a race and they're happy. But at some point you will start to a become very fatigued because it is very tiring racing. And the second point about racing too much is where is your training? You are, if you're trying to prepare and do well in a race, you're doing very little training because if the more you train and race, the less effective you're going to be in the race. So, you know, enjoy the racing less because you're too tired. So we really encourage people to do blocks of races and then make sure you come out of that and refocus on building your base again and get the endurance training into you. We like to add the endurance training into our program whilst we are racing. But yes, definitely there are people who we do coach who if I let them, would race five times a week and that would be good for a period of four to six weeks. And then all of a sudden their fitness is dropping even though they're still quite good at their level of racing. But you know, they'll start to lose fitness and then they'll start to perform really poorly.

Yeah, I think that's a really key point to make is that, you know, these were training sessions. They weren't, they were called races. But realistically the purpose of them was they were training sessions. So even if you're doing a B race or a C race, you tend to taper a little bit the couple of days before because you want to perform well. Whereas we were not afraid of any athlete going into these weekly races under full fatigue from the training load. There was no tapering for these races. That's a really important point to make. So the follow on question is kind of what you said before about you can't really do a 30 to 40 minute threshold effort on your own. It's just, it's putting yourself through hell. So to counter that when you do a training session, you break it up into intervals. But you've been asking the question, well, now that we know that's a more valuable session, how much do we try and do a 20 minute threshold session, a 30 minute threshold session versus how much do we just break it up into our normal 6 by 5 minute intervals?

Yeah, and this is the intriguing thing for me and I have no scientific evidence except for my own experience as a coach with people I coach and on myself, including you. So I'm giving information based on my observations over years. And you know, there can be people who would totally disagree with what I'm suggesting, but I still believe that the interval training is a superior training session that can be sustained for a longer period of time than doing threshold writing regularly. It has its limitations. So does interval training have its limitations? And it can't be done again, all the sessions we're talking about, please, if you're listening, don't think that this is what you should do for the whole year. There's got to be periods where you're not doing these, where you're having recovery. But when you're trying to get yourself up for your races, you know, what is the difference between a threshold ride and an interval session ride at threshold? Well, there is quite a significant difference because you can't ride threshold at 107% or 110% for very long before you start to fatigue. Whereas an interval session, you can ride up to 107% of your FTP repeatedly because you're having a rest. The examples are people know the sessions whether you're doing four by eight minutes, you know, three by 10, five by five, you know, anything over five minutes where you're having to hold threshold. You know, the, there's, there has been many scientific studies that we've, we've read where they were talking about 2 by 15 minutes comparison to 4 by 8, comparison to 5 by 5. And what's the best bang for your buck and, and we read those articles and, and, and troll them. You can ride between 102 and 107%. The shorter efforts. Obviously if you're riding higher power, you're stressing your body better, whereas if you're just riding a straight 20 to 30 minute threshold effort, you can't ride that at 7% above your threshold for 30 to 40 minutes. It's just not possible. It's like trying to ride VO2 for more than three minutes. It gets to a point where you actually can't sustain the power so you drop off, so the session becomes less valuable. So is interval session better than straight threshold training? Well, I believe the mixture of both is better. And so therefore the people who hate to be tested, and that's what they're thinking the 20 minute FTP test is. It's just a test. Well, it is a test to see how you're going and how you're improving. But the real reason is because it's a threshold session. It's a session where you're practicing riding at your threshold for 20 minutes up to 30 minutes. And even for some people, up to an hour, that's the true threshold training session. Obviously, if you're riding it for an hour, you're not going to be able to ride more than 95% of your 20 minutes. So, so 20 minutes is better than an hour. Probably, you know, 20 minutes is still better than 30 minutes, but, you know, is four by eight better than a one off 30 minute effort? Well, in my opinion, if you mix the both together and have a period of two to three weeks of four by eights, or five by fives, or three by tens, and then have a threshold session, then it can be in a period where you're having some recovery and you can ride the threshold a little bit fresher so you can push the power. And all of a sudden you're getting a session where you're practicing at threshold every fourth week. And so to me, they're the combinations of best sessions looking forward that I think would be game changers for people. And it's a lot of secrets to give away, but I think it's worthwhile giving people this advice. And whether you're capable of doing it or not, it's easy to talk about these sessions because they're very, very difficult to do. But this is the way I see forward. If you want to, you know, build your FTP to A, to a point where you know, you can now ride faster. Cause that's what it's all about, isn't it? Getting, getting a higher power number so you can ride from A to B faster. And, and eventually you're going to have to do some hard sessions. And which ones do those are going to give you the best bang for your buck? Well, well, these are the ones that I think the ones that we hate doing, which is threshold training. They're the ones who are going to give you the best outcome. And the minute you actually acknowledge that and accept it, you're actually on your way. If you keep resisting those sessions, then you're going to miss out on the thing that's going to make you a better cyclist.

So a question on this is one thing I know that you do do to help athletes get through a threshold style session is you do just slightly over, just slightly under. So you get an athlete to spend a minute at 102% and then two minutes at 98% and it really mentally is a bit more manageable because you're just not holding that 100 FTP for a sustained period and you can, you can get through a bulk of training doing that. Would you recommend incorporating that in a lot or do you think it's still, you kind of want to keep it more sustained and not do that over, under too much. I know, you just put that in to help.

Yeah, another, another good observation. Look, at the end of the day, anything that's going to allow your brain to let you get through the session is worth, worth trying. And look, I'm trying to disguise sessions as, you know, as maybe 30 seconds on, three minutes off, not off, but under 30 seconds, way over 107 or one minute at 102 or. And all we're trying to do is make the six minutes or the five minutes or the eight minutes or the 10 minute effort. We're trying to make it manageable. So you're actually, your brain's distracted by, oh, now I'm only doing this for a minute and now I've got two minutes at this. Whereas if I said to you, you got 10 minutes straight by three, most people will go, oh, far out. This is going to be hard. But if you're tricking your brain into getting to the end of the 10 minutes or the 8 minutes or the 5 minutes in another way, well, fine, you know, that's what we're trying to achieve. As long as you can get the end goal result, then it doesn't matter how you come about doing it. But being a little bit more scientific, I definitely would prefer people try to ride at the top of the range for the full five minutes. So if I gave you a range of 98 to 105, you know, your goal is always to be at 105, but there's going to be some weeks where you can't achieve that. So. So the answer is there's never always, you know, a definitive, this is what you should do. It's always how you're feeling that day, that week. But at the end of the day, if you can really stress yourself and get through the full, if it's a 5 by 5 or a 4 by 8 or a 3 by 10, get through the full 30 minutes. And that's what we're trying to achieve here. Anywhere. Threshold riding between 20 and 35 minutes, as long as you can get to the end of it holding the same power or better, then you've achieved the goal. If you ride too hard for the first 16 minutes and fade in the last, we've actually only done 16 minutes at Threshold and the last 10 minutes is at sub threshold. Well, it's actually not the session we're after. So if it's going to cause you to have a failure, then I'd Rather you drop the session, drop the power. But yeah, there's so many scenarios that we can talk about here, but I just want the listener not to be complicated, not to be puzzled by what we're talking about. You know, whatever way you can work out in your brain to get yourself to ride threshold training sessions, whether it's intervals, whether it's straight threshold, whether it's handicapped zwift races, whether it's meeting your mate at the velodrome and you're on, you know, doing a 20 minute test together, these are the things that can motivate you. Do those things so that, you know, you don't have to think about getting to the session. All you've got to do is think about executing because that's, that's the key to it.

And I can say it definitely helps because, you know, there are some superhumans out there that seem to never run out of willpower. But for most of us, you know, normal quotation marks, humans, there's days where we're low on motivation, days where we're low on willpower, and these little tricks can really help. And I brought that session up because you actually dropped it into my program yesterday. And I did those efforts around the velodrome. And there was quite a big wind yesterday. I can't tell you how you know, riding one minute at, you know, above over the threshold and then two minutes under the threshold, while also manipulating your watts compared to the wind around the velodrome, because every half a lap, which is every 15 seconds, you're into the headwind and then the next 15 seconds you're into the tailwind, managing that on top of the one minute over two minutes under. I was not concentrating on the fatigue at all. And it made the session a lot more enjoyable. And I looked down at one point and my heart rate was quite high, really, to the top end range of my heart rate. But I hadn't noticed that I was pushing that hard because I was focusing so much on the execution. And that was just a really nice trick. So I think it's really overall good advice. Were you going to say something on that?

No, I just think that that is exactly what we're talking about. You are not thinking about the six minute effort you're about to do. You were thinking about the details of each of those breakdown components. You know, what's the power? I'm supposed to be riding it now. How long is this for? It's just a minute. And now I've got to deal with the headwind. Now what should I be pushing what should my cadence be? And before you know it, you've done the six minutes exactly and you're on to set two.

But really good advice, and I think what you're saying is just spot on. The goal of this episode is what kind of training sessions do you want to be doing? And you spoke just then about, well, you have to ask the question, what's the goal of this block? Because we've established already doing some racing sessions, doing threshold sessions, doing a mix of intervals are all good, but you've got to know when to pick your times to do it, because you can't just do the same kind of training all year round. And so really, you've got to ask the bigger question, okay, what block am I in now? What's my next period look like? And what's my goal for this? And so, okay, I'm going to do as many races as I can on Zoo, for example, for the next 12 week block or the next 12 weeks. I really need to focus on my strength and my base again. I need to get that back. And that's my focus. And they're the types of questions you need to be asking to be able to answer. What's the best training sessions for you to be doing?

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it all comes back to what your goals are, which we started to talk about in week one of 2022 on our first podcast, what are your goals for the year? So that will determine where your training is, what block you're up to. And now we're talking about specific sessions, when to do those sessions. So if your race is, let's pick a triathlon example is Ironman Busselton. Well, you know, you would want to have periods of blocks where you are working towards building your FTP so that when you get to December of 2022, your FTP is at its highest point so you can ride the fastest you possibly can. So in that, in that block you, you want to be building from January, you don't want to be hitting a massive amount of 8 to 10 weeks of flat out racing. You would do that in a different time period, closer to maybe August, September, October. But that's not to say you wouldn't race, but you would not have the emphasis on threshold racing. You would have fun with crits, whether it's okay to have periods where you're not riding in zone four or five where you've got 25 minutes in zone two in a crit race where you're just sitting in Protecting yourself. So, so there's, you know, you can still race but have different race outcomes and goals. So even though we're pushing the racing thing and it's only good for a certain period of time, but you could do racing like that and, but have a different goal in the middle of that race. My goal today is to warm up for, you know, two hours, go and do a 35 to 40 minute crit or an hour criteria where I'm going to do massive over under efforts of, you know, 3 or 400 watts and then sit in and then attack again. But I'm not trying to ride threshold. I'm literally not trying to ride threshold at all. I'm trying to be unpredictable in the crit race and protect myself so that I can actually maybe break away then ride threshold if I've broken away, but, and then warm down for an hour and a half and I've got an endurance drive with some intensity in it, you know, and it happens to be a race there. So there's so many different scenarios that you can do to your program at different times of the year. But the one thing that we need to tell everybody is that no matter what you're doing for 2022, if you don't take notice of your aerobic fitness, you will come short come race day. So you need to keep that aerobic fitness going day in, day out. And that is a program that needs to be 52 weeks of the year. And whether you're doing your aerobic training in zone one or two in certain periods of the year, that's still aerobic training endurance. Whether you're doing it in zone two with periods of zone four and five, that's another period of the year. But you're still doing that same endurance session. And you know, from all the years that I've been riding, I've. I've very rarely missed an endurance ride in every seven days of my program. Whether I'm riding an easy endurance day for four or five hours or whether I'm riding the most hardest four hour endurance ride that I can find, there will be variations in that. But that is the bread and butter, the staple diet that has enabled me to ride at a reasonably good level at 63 years of age.

It's funny that you definitely instilled that in me because whenever I miss an endurance ride or run, it's like, it's like nails on a chalkboard inside me. It's like this innate feeling that I can't shake. I know it's the worst session to miss. And it's the one that you really don't want to be missing. That's a really good way to finish off because my last kind of topic I wanted to touch on was last year when we really saw in yourself and in a lot of our athletes, this really exceptional period of improvement compared to a normal block of training. We highlighted the racing as a really key component of that. But I want to get even more specific here for the listener to get some valuable training sessions, because it wasn't just one factor. And you always say that it's never just one factor. What were some of the other key training sessions that were happening around that racing that contributed to the improvement?

Yeah, and it's funny because that's where I've gone to straight away since, since my last race that happened a couple of weeks ago. I've gone straight to those sessions. I need to improve and I know where it is and I've discussed this with you and you know, straight away I'm out there doing my VO2. Um, and that is the session that, you know, combined with the endurance, combined with the threshold, threshold slash racing, that is the session that will build your engine very quickly. It is extremely difficult session to do. It's almost, I almost have nightmares thinking about it. Um, and when I'm doing, when I'm doing the VO2, I'm counting any way that I can get myself through it because what are we trying to do? We're trying to ride at 110% or more of our, of our threshold. And you know, just think about that. It is going to hurt and you're going to have to be mentally tough to get through this stuff and you don't get much recovery and there are very wide variety of ways of doing VO2 and we've got lots of different versions of it to get the same outcome. Whether you're doing 60, 30s or 30, 15 or 1 minute strength efforts or 2 minute, 3 by 2 minutes, you know, they're all extremely uncomfortable.

Yeah. And while you're about to answer this, I will point out that we had a listener mark asked in our Facebook group and you can join our Facebook group the links there. In our show notes, ask this very question that you're about to answer. You know, what sort of VO2 sets should I be doing? He said, do I need to be doing shorter ones or longer ones?

Yeah. And, and my answer to that question is where is your race and how far out is it? So, so to do the VO2s, I think you need to be doing the strength side of VO2 where you're doing one minute efforts at low cadence at 110 to 120 plus percent, whatever you can manage that would be a fair way out from your race. And as you get closer to the race, you, you should more direct yourself to the 30, 15, 30 seconds at 120 plus FTP with 15 seconds off repeated sets of that. So you're getting to rev your legs, whereas earlier in the program you're building the strength but still doing VO2. You're still doing VO2, but you're doing a different version of it. Just like when I say racing, you can do handicap racing or crit racing. There's different versions of racing. Even though it's still called a race, this is still called VO2, but there's, there's slight variations that are going to give you a little bit different outcome. And I think, I think if you, if you use the program like that, then, then you will definitely see massive improvements in not only your FTP but your ability to sustain. You know, if you're a bike rider, you know, attack after attack from, from other people, you can cope with it because if you've done, you know, nine one minute efforts, you know, at 400 to 500 watts, you know, good luck to someone who wants to attack you nine times because you're, you're totally prepared for it. And, and if you've done six by two minutes or you know, four by three minutes at, at 110, 115% again, you know, they can, they can attack you all you like because you're ready, because you've done those sessions.

And let's be really clear, when you talk about short versus long VO2 sets, the longest you're going to go is, is three minutes. Really.

That's right. So we'd love to go. Let's understand VO2 is riding basically 110 plus percent of your threshold. How long can, can that last? Well, pretty much my limits, about 2 minutes 30, I think, with before my power starts to drop off. So no matter what you want to do, if you want to do VO2 for five minutes, all that's going to happen is you're going to ride lower power and it's going to be closer to 110%. I still think you're better off riding shorter, shorter efforts at 120% to get more value. And if you can only manage 110%, think about dropping the time back so that you can actually sustain it for a longer period. At a higher power. And that's something that I know sounds a little bit complicated to people who are listening, but you really need to understand what you're trying to achieve here. You're trying to achieve high power for short bursts of time, which is going to really kickstart a lot of things in your body. Incredibly incredible buildup of lactate metabolism where you just feel like starving because you've just burnt the fuel so quickly. And it's an anaerobic effort. Oxygen's not converting energy. You're just basically using all of the anything it's in the body and it's pretty much gone by the time you get to 8, 9, 10 reps. So it's an incredibly cruel session, but it is so valuable in improving you as a cyclist, whether you're a cyclist for bike racing or whether you're a cyclist for triathlons. This is a session for triathletes, make no mistake about it. Just because you don't ride at that intensity in a race, that doesn't mean you don't do that in a session. That would be, you know, quite weird. You know, you. You need to replicate stuff that's gonna happen in the race, for sure. But in order to improve your VO2 and your FTP, why do we do that? Because we can ride faster speed with higher power. So, therefore, you need to train your body to cope with this. So that come race day, when you do a 70.3 at 80 to 90% of your FTP, it feels quite comfortable.

Well, that's a great way to finish off. And I guess the last thing I really want to make clear is, is this concept that we spoke about finding going too hard and not going hard enough. And by no means are we saying that the best training you need to be doing is slogging yourself and picking these harder sessions possible. Because we're talking about really hard sessions here. And that's, you know, one of the best things that the Norways have really led the charge, the Norwegians have really led the charge on, is how much they dictate their training by their lactate levels. And so what if. If, you know, Christian Blenfeld could go harder in training, he doesn't. Because they take the lactate and they go, well, that's your limit. And he's, you know, aerobically, he's feeling fine, he's not out of breath, his heart rate isn't too high. But that lactate, saying to him, no, we don't want you to go harder this session, so don't be afraid to stay in the range and not feel like you have to be slogging yourself and maxing yourself out every single session. Because we will often find with athletes, the athlete, even if they stuck to the low end of the range, they probably will complete more consistency sessions consistently rather than the athlete that burns himself out.

That's so true. And you know, you've got to think about what's going to happen in four days time, seven days time. Sure, I felt good today and I went way above where I should have. But you crashed and burned and can't complete the next session or you've gone too hard for half the session and not been able to complete the session. So therefore it becomes ineffectual. So yes, you know we're talking about pushing yourself but, but you still, it's a training session. It's not, not the end of the world race that you're trying to, you know, pin your season on. So, so you're still better being consistently conservative but really pushing yourself in these hard sessions but maintaining the conservativeness and not the gay abandonment of I'm just going to smash it every single week because eventually that will be your undoing. Because consistency, we know, is going to get you to the start line in better shape than having two fantastic smashed out sessions and then missing four.

It wouldn't be a traveller podcast if we didn't finish off by saying please be consistent with it. Thank you very much for listening to another episode. We hope you've enjoyed it and we'll see you next time. It.