The Top MUST KNOW Cycling Skills To Go Faster

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. Huge episode for you today. We're announcing the Giant giveaway winner. Someone is walking away with over a $7,000 prize pack. We've got holiday training to discuss and. And then today's main topic is something fundamental that we see a lot of cyclists getting wrong. Because riding a bike is so much more than just pushing the pedals as hard as you can. There are a bunch of fundamental skills that if you're not doing, you're losing power and more importantly, losing speed on the bike. Plus there's accelerating, braking, cornering, descending, riding with people around you. But mostly, the more inefficient you're riding, the more effort you're putting in for less reward, which is the total opposite of what we want to be doing. So today we're talking you through the top must know skills for cycling. And these apply from beginners all the way to advanced cyclists who are still making some fundamental mistakes. We get really experienced athletes coming to us who are really good, but who are still making some fundamental errors. And we obviously get beginner athletes who need to learn and practice good habits as early as possible. So, as always, this episode is brought to you by our proud sponsor and the sponsor of the giveaway, Giant Australia, for all your bike training and racing needs. Ride life. Ride Giant. Dad. Welcome to another episode, the final episode of the year. Merry Christmas to everyone. We're gonna start with our normal opening segment. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jord. This is a really good one. And I've certainly been honing in a lot in the coaching in the last couple of weeks about trying to get people to ride their bikes more efficiently and therefore getting faster. And that's the goal, isn't it? Getting from A to B as fast as you can or faster than anybody else. So my gratitude, as always, I'm relating it to family. And currently we're in a little family holiday, which everybody will probably be doing in the next two or three weeks. We're down at beautiful seaside resort of Lawn, down in the Bellarine Peninsula, or Surf Coast. It's the Surf coast of Victoria here in Australia. And amazingly, we have all of us, the whole family, and that's 11. So there's four children that we have, Andy and my wife, for those who don't know I'm going to tell you. And we have four children of two of which are married and have partners and one has two children and the other has one child and the other two are yet to be married, Jordan and Georgia. So there's 11 of us in the house, which is pretty weird and wild. Three grandkids under three and it's been an interesting first couple of nights. Jordy lasted one night in the house in the bedroom with the kids and now he's outside in his tent so he can actually get some sleep. And you know, Eden, the three year old, she just talks away in her sleep and I think it was a bit too much for Jordi. And yeah, so she's very cute but.

She, she woke me up every hour.

From 2am and she just chatters away. And for those who don't know, she wears hearing aids and at night she doesn't have them on so she has no idea the volume of her speaking because she can't hear any. So it's, it's quite cute.

But it is cute. She just hums to herself really. It's like she's singing herself a song.

So I'm really grateful. This is fantastic to have your family around you. I couldn't take the smile off my face. My Andy and I, and I don't know the last time we ever were away together and, and since the, the children were teenagers. I think the last time was a New Zealand trip when we went skiing in New Zealand when you guys were 16 or 18 and now you're or in your 30s. So it's been a long time and having added partners and three, three grandchildren. So I just love this and I'm really grateful for that. To be in this privileged position to have such a great family around me who I just, I just love amazingly. And yeah, it's my gratitude.

Yeah. Siping your theme of the year. I think a lot of gratitude's for family, which is unreal. My gratitude is. Yeah. Similar theme. I think it's so easy to be. It's a lot easier to be grateful around this period. Grateful for the family that you have and grateful for the friends and family that you get to catch up with. And it's just such a nice period because everyone makes the effort. It's just a, it's just a thing that you go make the effort to see your family and friendship groups and. Yeah, it's just a great period to be around and we look forward to it every year. So yeah, very simple gratitude.

A quick.

Caught our attention before we Move into today's topic. And we just want to do a really quick point on the holiday period. We kind of, we've done an episode almost every year on how to train properly through the holiday period. But we want to refresh potentially some of our new audience members on the key rules for training over the holidays. Because more time available does not mean more training. And we really want to get that point through. Clearly, just because you have more time available to train doesn't mean you should train. And a lot of people think, what? How can that be correct? Because I just want to go ride, I just want to go run. I've got so much time now. I spent all year squeezing my training in. I want to use this period and get the most gains possible. But can you explain to us why that's the wrong kind of thinking?

Yeah, I suppose the best example is if you know that you've got no work and you've got a week off or two weeks off and you're so determined to make this that training camp that the pros do, and that would be an example. So I want to squeeze in as much training as I possibly can. And to some extent that's actually okay if that fits in with your overall goal for 2024. But it's not okay if you've got a race two or three weeks later where you're expecting to perform really well, or a race that's six weeks later or a race that's 12 weeks later. What you do now has a flow on effect. And you've just got to consider that every time you think about what you're going to do in the next phase of your training. And if you're under a structured program like we have with Trivalo coaching, we really want to make sure that we don't change things too much. Sure, you've got more time available, but that more time to train should be based around adding extra time at lower intensity. And if you have that fundamental theory in your mind, you'll come out of this period really well. And the example I use, I did, I did a long Wednesday ride this week and I haven't done that in, I don't know, six months. And so I just basically added an extra 60k to what I normally do. Instead of doing 50 or 60k, I did 120. And that example is, is almost going against what I just said. But the way I rode that ride was I tried my best just to stay in zone two and, and just made sure that I was basically tapping away and and the next day I was able to do my proper training session with intervals with you, Jordan, actually. And I felt great. And that's, that's actually how you should manipulate your program so that anything you do extra is in zone one or two. And, and you know you're going to risk everything if you start riding with a group five days in a row on a training holiday camp where everybody just wants to smash themselves every day. That's fun. And it, and it really is fun. And you'll probably feel really good and, and you will get, you will get a good fitness improvement out of it. But the potential risk is that in the next week or two or three that you will be that tired that you won't actually be able to train properly. And then you'll lose the, the fundamental goal we have, which is consistency of training, which is turning up each day to gradually improve your program and your fitness. Not improve your program, improve your fitness ahead of the quick, easy fix. The quick, easy fix is I want to get fitter quicker. And that's what everybody aspires to. I want to just, I want to get to where I want to be quicker than anybody else. I want to, I want to be a better runner, swimmer and rider. And if I do more, I will be getting there quicker, I'll get to my level quicker. And it just doesn't work like that. And anything that's extreme is unsustainable. That's my number one principle. And at the end of the day, if you keep doing that extreme work, eventually you will start to deteriorate rather than improve and you'll be in a worse position than you were if you just followed the structured theory of overloading yourself gradually and you'll get more benefit, more aerobic in fitness improvement doing it that way and just almost like doing your time properly in the right order. And already I've had a couple of conversations with people saying, I've got more time. Can I run? You know, instead of running the long run, I'm up to 55 minutes and I've progressed from 40 minutes to 45 to 50 to 55. Can I just go and do for an hour and a half? I can do it. And I say, yeah, sure, go and do an hour and a half. But if you can't run two days time because you're so tired and sore and sore, what was the value in that? So, so I know it's a long winded answer to that one question, but I'm trying to summarize all the examples that you're going to face all the scenarios, you're going to face mates just egging you on to come training with them and go training with them on the days that you want to train hard, don't go training with them on the days that you're supposed to be actually recovering. And if they want to go hard in that day and you're supposed to go hard, brilliant, smash it. But on the days where they want to go hard and you're not, let them go.

The first basic rule you've summarized there is you can increase the volume but not the intensity. And, yeah, sure, increase the volume at low intensity. It's a great chance to do that because you've got more time. But just because you've got more time doesn't mean your body can magically handle more intensity. You know, most of us are maxing out the max of intensity we can handle per week. We're doing a hard session on Tuesday, a hard session on Thursday, maybe a hard session on a Saturday. Your body can't just magically handle five in a row, you know, just because you're on holiday. It doesn't actually work like that. It can still only handle that amount of intensity. So the intensity unfortunately needs to stay the same. Maybe a slight increase and slight overload, because you've got more chance to recover, but only slightly. But it's the volume that really matters. And so the second kind of rule we talk about is really, you can't go more than one hard day and then one easy day in a row. You know, you can't try and string together two or three hard days in a row. Or like you're saying the example of riding with your mates every day and going five hard days in a row. And I found out this kind of the hard way, even that can be too much in this last couple of weeks, because you just mentioned that we trained together yesterday, and I would say hardly trained because I pulled out halfway through the session. I cracked it and went home because I was too tired. And in the couple of weeks leading up to this, I ended up. I was doing some. A lot of time trial practice. I ended up doing five races basically every second day for two weeks. Just a range of things popped up that were available to do and it was really good testing kind of period. And I absolutely exhorted myself doing that. And this week I could train once and barely got through it. And then yesterday in the hard session, I just couldn't even get through it, I was so tired. So that's an example of even hard, easy. Hard, easy can sometimes be too much for people. And you've really got to watch that.

And, you know, we want to tell everybody that we're not perfect and we're making mistakes. And our job is to get the information out to you from the experiences that we've had. And we're trying to prevent. We're trying to prevent everybody from making the same mistakes we've made. And we've made them all. We've made every single mistake that's in the book. So don't think that we're sitting on our high horse going, we do it all perfectly because we don't. The body is an amazing, I don't know, machine because its ability to absorb load at a progressive level is what our body's made for. It just doesn't like something that's drastically changing. So if you can progress yourself with overloading yourself in a nice measured manner, the 5% added time or 10%, and that's about maximum each week that you should be adding to your load. And the body will cope with that, it'll cope with that small change. But if you double it to 50%, then you're gonna have consequences. And those consequences are, you'll lose, consist, you'll get sick or injured. And so fatigue is massive. And don't underestimate. The intensity determines the fatigue. So does duration, and so does frequency. All those three components of training that really adds to your fatigue. So if you add more volume to your training at low, low intensity, you're still going to have fatigue. If you go for 120k ride instead of a 60k ride, even though it's really easy, your fatigue is absolutely going higher because of the time you spend out there and the nutrition you're burning, the fuel you're burning in your body, that is all causing your body to be under stress and load. And it doesn't mean you're only going to get fatigue when you do hard sessions. That's actually not true. Increasing the duration will cause fatigue as well. And, and you've got to allow your body to absorb that load and it gets good at that. But if you throw too much load at it, the fatigue will be massive. And like you've just said in that example, you can't train properly. And it's infuriating because you want to do the session, yet you can't do it properly. And you know, you said you cracked it and went home. You know, you're disappointed in yourself because you caused that problem yourself. You know, you put yourself in that position, and that's why you cracked it. You're angry at yourself and you know you want to avoid that scenario. And that's why really ramming this home on this podcast is something you want to come out of this. Two or three weeks or one week, whatever time you've got off could be a month. You want to come out of it in better shape, less fatigue, but fit.

A person not completely burnt out. Which, yeah, every year, it happens every year. Everyone gets really excited for the holiday period. And that's why we do this for free. That's why we wanted to mention it, because no doubt you've got a couple of weeks here at least to train well. And so we want to make sure that you do it properly. Moving on to the main topic of the podcast, and we really want to focus on some fundamentals of cycling here because a lot of people make the mistake of with the bike because it's a machine that, you know, once you stop pedaling, you're still moving. So sometimes you can cheat a little bit and think the machine will do the work for you, but it really won't. And you, you need to be making sure that you're maximizing every part of your performance physically and mentally. Bike riding is just such a funny thing. It feels easier than. We actually put a poll up on our Instagram page about what, what do people find the hardest? Running, swimming, or cycling. And we had some very funny responses, but overwhelmingly, it was almost a 50, 50 split between run, running and swimming. And I reckon there was less than 5% said bike. You know, whereas bikes the longest time you're out there, so it's, it feels relatively easier because you're on this machine that's, that's pushing for you. Whereas we want to make the point that just because you're riding a bike and it's going forward doesn't mean you're riding it well or efficiently. And we're not saying that to shame anyone about their bike riding skills or anything. We're just saying that you could be getting so much more out of the bike if you've learned some of these fundamental skills. And we see it so often when an athlete comes in, they haven't got their pedaling efficiency, they haven't got their cadence right, their position. There's so gear changing, there's so many things you want to go through right now to make sure that whether you're a beginner or whether you're advanced, can you tick these things off and say, I'm doing all These things. Well, you know, it's almost like a checklist. And there's probably. There's 30 plus things we can go through, but we're going to go through some of the core ones here. But we want you to ask yourself, am I doing these things right or could I improve these things? And even if you're a really advanced cyclist, you might have gotten super fit with some poor habits. You know, imagine if you improve those habits. So we want to go through those now. And one of the starting ones is, is just understanding what the goal of pedaling technique is.

Yeah, you're so right, Jord. You can get, for the same level of fitness, you can get a different result from A to B. We talked about that before. Riding as fast as possible from A to B, with the same level of fitness and a different approach to your riding, you'll be faster. That doesn't even make sense, but it's true. And so the question you're asking is pedaling efficiency, pressure on the pedals. My biggest bugbear is if I'm riding with someone and I hear someone freewheeling, you know, the sound the bike makes when it freewheels just goes. And if I hear that, I instantly turn around and say, start pedaling. And that's probably one of the biggest benefits of indoor training. If you don't pedal, the power drops off. And that should remind you that if you do that outdoor, if you don't pedal, you're actually losing speed even though your bike's still moving. So we've got this false sense of security. Our bike is still moving along the road, and if I don't contribute to it, my bike still moves. But indoor, if you don't pedal for any second, you lose 2 or 3 watts in 15 seconds if you stop pedaling. So that should be enough for people to understand that all I've got to do is keep contributing to the momentum of the bike, and therefore I will actually go faster. And every time you soft pedal. And what do I mean by that? It means when you don't push the pedals the way you should be with intent and in the ranges. And the reasons could be that you've ridden too hard in the previous five minutes, so you have to start soft pedaling to recover. So soft pedaling is something that I abuse myself for when I know that I'm in a time trial situation and I have to soft pedal because I'm trying to recover from the. The hill that I just rode too hard. And then I learn my lesson. So when the next hill comes, I don't ride that hill so hard so that I can keep the pressure evenly over the next hill. So soft pedaling and freewheeling are two things that I'm really so dead against in my own riding. And when I hear others doing it, I'm going to be yelling at them, saying, you know, you need to pedal.

So we talk about pressure on the pedals and we talk about, you know, pressure throughout the entire rotation of the pedal, the full 360 motion. Now, so we're not saying that the most efficient person in the world has even pressure throughout a 360 degree rotation. That's not what we're saying. Because there is no real such thing as the most efficient pedal rate or pedal stroke. Just like there's no one most efficient way to run. Everyone has their own running form and cadence and that kind of thing. But you don't want to be pedaling poorly. We can definitely say that for a fact, that you don't want to be just pushing down the pedals and not pulling up. You want to be training yourself to have that full rotation, have that constant pressure on the pedals, just to give your body that chance to decide what's the most efficient cadence for itself and what's the most efficient pedaling action. Because like you said, if you don't practice that, then you don't know whether you can hard pedal or soft pedal. You'd just be forced to soft pedal because that's all you're capable of. And when we go one level deeper, what does this actually mean? When we go into the analysis of someone's race in a triathlon, in the bike leg, the 40k or the 90k or 180k, we harp on so much about staying within the zone for as majority of the race as you can. And so, you know, you need, you need to sit between 20220 watts. And the more efficient you are pedaling, the more you practice that constant pressure on the pedals, the more that's achievable for you. And the more in training and racing that you're hard pedaling and soft pedaling and harping soft pedaling, and you just repeating that habit over and over again, that's going to happen in the race. You're going to go over for periods and then you're going to be tired and you're going to go way under and you're going to be basically losing average speed in the race. That's what this always comes back to, is going slower from A to B. And so by practicing this properly, you're teaching your body to get into that habit of just staying within the range. And it's a really important skill. And we also put another video up of you were just on the trainer and I quickly took a video of you just doing your recovery session. And if those have been on the trainer and been on Zwift or any one of those apps, if you're watching or just watching your head unit, if you're watching your instant power and you're pedaling, for most People it jumps 20 watts at a time. It goes 130 watts to 150 watts, back down to 125. Every second. It's just jumping up and down based on the pressure that you're putting through. You know, it's 145, then it's 160, when it's 130. And that's totally normal for most people where it's jumping around 20 to 30 watts. And if you didn't know any different, you'd think that that's, that's regular, that's what everyone does. Whereas you were riding this recovery session and you were barely going out of a 5 watt range. You were going 1251-281301-26125, 128. And that just showed that the pressure you were putting through was very constant, even. And again, it seems like a small, trivial thing to practice, but down the line in a race, when you're getting over the crest of a hill or you're getting fatigued, your ability to then hold that pressure consistent and your efficiency at that becomes vital.

Yeah, you've summarised it beautifully. And the 360 degree pedalling action, as you said, you can't imagine that you can apply the same pressure. If you use the clock it at 3 o', clock, 6 o', clock, 9 o', clock, it's not possible because of the angle of your levers of your leg. And so our goal is to try and have as even a pressure as we possibly can. And Training Peaks. Yeah, TrainingPeaks has WKO, which is an advanced metric, and they actually can plot the pressure you're applying in the pedaling action. It's a really. It's very complicated, but it looks unreal. Just to show you that the majority of pressure and power that we're getting out of our pedalling action is on the downward stroke from the quadricep muscles. And, you know, a small percentage of people are riding really well on the up phase, the pull up phase, from 6 o' clock back up to 12 o'. Clock. And that's got major muscles of hamstring and glutes where if you got them to engage and contribute into the pedaling action, your power. If you looked at your screen and started to think about, I'm going to pull up this pedal action, your power might be at 200. The minute you pull up, it'll be 270, 210 or 215. Just with one pedal action, it will increase the power, which straight away means you've got more muscles contributing to the actual pedaling action rather than just fatiguing your quadricep, making that do all the work. So not only are you spreading the load around your body, you're actually going to push more power, which in turn means you're going to ride faster. So you really need to think about this pressure on the pedals being a little bit more having contribution from more muscle groups and the push down and pull up phase rather than just pushing down. And as I've said to people many times when we were little kids, we didn't have shoes that clipped into our pedals, we just had runners on that sat on the top of pedals. So how the hell did we learn to pull up on a pedal action when we weren't clipped in? And if we did pull up, our foot would come off the pedal. So we've learned to ride a bike in a weird way and to change that method of pedaling takes a lot for people to think about that, but it's there for your benefit, not because we want to make cycling harder, we actually want to make cycling easier. And if you get your hamstrings and glutes fitter, they can contribute more. So therefore you'll actually ride faster. And guess what? If you're a triathlete, you'll get off the bike and run better because your quads aren't loaded so badly that you feel like you're carrying lead weights around when you start running.

We had a great conversation with exercise scientist Ryan down from the Fed Union Ballarat, where he was testing one of our athletes and we were looking at his efficiency and just talking about preferred efficiency or preferred cadence. And he made a great point about your go to cadence is generally the most efficient and best cadence for you. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't practice other cadences. Or for our example, we see so many beginner athletes come in and they're just so used to grinding away at 70 RPM, a cadence of 70 RPM, which is just so low. And we really encourage our athletes especially early on to be. We set sessions where the cadence has to be between 85 and 95 or 95 and 110. You really get them revving. And that's not because 110 is better. That's not because any number is better. It's because you try and teach them to pale a different way and give their body different stimulus and give them the option of choosing their go to cadence, not their body, just choosing it for them, because that's all they know or that's all they can do. And for our athlete, you know, going well, he's definitely got some inefficiency. I think it was the pull up was slightly more. There was just certain sections where biomechanically he was kind of saying, well, I guess you could probably try and change this and improve. But he's saying, but it's sort of not worth it because he's so efficient at these now and he's quite an experienced rider. But that's not to say that experienced riders can't change their cadence. But more specifically for more entry level cyclists, you just want to give yourself more tools in the toolbox. I guess that's a summary.

I'm forever trying to work out whether 85 RPM in a time trial or 89 or 93 is going to give me more bang for my back. I'm still trying to experiment after 45 years of riding a bike as a time trialist. So it's funny, one of the guys I was talking to, he said, oh, I'm just getting used to this cadence changes that you've got me doing. He said, ironically, the cadence that I go to, which is about 80 to 83, none of the sessions in the first three weeks of training, one's at 60 to 75 and the other one's 90 and above. So I'm not even pedaling in my normal cadence range. And I said, it is fairly ironic, but, you know, once he understood the reasons, he's on board with that and, and he knows it's going to make him more efficient cyclists, faster cyclists, and it made it easier to run.

Yeah. So we did an individual time trial a couple of weekends, weekends ago, individual tire trial race. And actually world champion or world silver medalist in the time trial. Grace Brown was in the race. She's home for summer, Christmas, I'm assuming. And she came down and entered the local tt. Always good to see a gun Professional rider, one of the best, second best time trial in the world this year performing. And she came flying past me at one point and we both pointed out her cadence was pretty interesting. It was a lot lower than anticipated and it really looks like if we were to guess it would be about 80 to 85. But you made a really great point that it just really looked like that every single pedal show was efficient. There was absolutely no soft pedaling whatsoever. It just really looked like she was getting the most out of every single revolution. Push down and pull up. It was just this consistent. The cadence just did not change. And you just assume that that leads to really efficient time trialing.

It was a great night because I'd finished my time trial early and I did a warm down lap on this circuit. It's a car racing circuit. It's about 3k around and it' really wide road so, you know, two or three cars can fit across it. And so I was, you know, warming down, out of the way and I had all the gun riders come past me. Every single one of the guys who were riding 44-47ks an hour come past me. So I was getting this perfect view of how to ride fast. And almost without exception, every single thing I noticed was how they were pedaling. Of course their position looked fantastic. They were aero, they had their head down and not in the wind and, and they were absolutely motoring. But the most important thing I could see was how their upper body was so still. And it's like a duck. You sit on the water, you don't see anything happening but the ducks going across the lake quite fast. But above the water it's just looking around, whistling Dixie. And underneath its legs are just going flat out. And everybody was getting the most out of every pedal revolution. That's the thing that I actually acknowledged. As I was saying, how's the pedaling action? This guy so powerful through the whole 360 degree action. And it made me think, oh, far out. I'm still not pedaling very well after all these years. When I see these guys, that's why they're riding faster than me, because they're pedaling. They're getting the most out of every pedal action for that 360, that one revolution. And they might do it 80 times a minute, but they're getting way more bang for their buck every pedal revolution than I am. So it was a really good eye opener to me.

Yeah. And you can't be too harsh because it's a massive fitness thing. You've got to be fit enough to be able to do that, to hold that wattage for that cadence. But that's why they're professional athletes. So that leads us to the next point. And just another thing is understanding your position on the bike. And this is a road bike or a time travel bike. And this is not just about getting a bike fit. This is just about really practicing the skill of getting in good position. And one of the first tips about position that really helped me years ago was world record 12 and 24 hour holder Dr. Mitch Anderson was assessing my back bike position and he just said to me, what are you doing? He said, the glutes, the biggest muscle in your body and you're hardly using them. He's like, you're trying to go all through your quads here. And so he forced me, pulled me back on the seat and said, sit back down in your saddle and get those glutes engaged. And again, he's not saying that that's the only way to ride. Well, he's just saying you're just not using them at all. Go practice for a block. And after I practice it for about 12 weeks, really felt a difference in myself of, oh, now I know how to engage my glutes like that. Now I know how to just feel some really strong, powerful pedaling actions. And it's just about that body awareness. Yeah.

And you can actually do it yourself while you're out riding. And you know, if you put your hand underneath your hamstring or on your backside while you're pedaling, you can actually feel the muscle going hard, you know, locking in and then it sort of should, should release once the quads are taking over and should be on, off, on, off. And not so exaggerated like that. And it's so subtle that if you can't feel that or you can't feel a little bit of a dull ache in your glute, that means you're still not engaging them properly, which therefore leads to getting your bike fit properly.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So you can sit in a position where you can engage that. So certainly saddle height where you sit on the. Because you could have your saddle in that position. You could be sitting on the front of the saddle, right on the nose. And none of your, your glutes are sitting on the seat. It's just your pubic bone that's sitting on the seat. And therefore you could, you know, you could be, have your seat in the right spot, but you're not actually sitting in the right spot. So practice sitting on the full seat. If the seat's set for your proper bike fit spot, then sit on the seat properly.

And it's not even just about the bike fit or the bike fit will help you get in the better position, but it's about once you've got the bike fit or once you got a bike that's a suitable size at least, it's you practicing, experimenting with positions and you training yourself to get in the most aero position possible. And the more you can pedal at an aero position again, the free speed you're going to get. So go to a velodrome and tuck yourself in and get in the most aero position possible. And it's the same thing with the bike fit. It's just this constant balance between how aero can I get versus how hard is it to push the power, because if you're so aero that it's just too hard to push the power, then it's not worth it. But you only get there by training and practicing. You're not just going to magically get more aero without actually putting yourself in that aero position. So, again, it's just a skill you can practice and really get better on. And when you turn up to race day, there's nothing worse than putting in all this training and effort. And you see it at all the local triathlons, people in the TT position, but their heads as high as possible in the wind, you know, and that just comes from practice, from tucking your head down and getting your shoulders tucked in. And I really think that it can't be underestimated how many people you see doing so much work in training and then it's just all going to waste because you've just basically this huge wall that's catching as much wind as possible because you just, you know, you're not practicing. The handlebars are there for you to try and tuck into, but you're not doing it.

Yeah, we keep talking about really useful tips such as how to pedal properly, pressure on the pedals, riding in the ranges with power so you're not overstimulating your body, so you have to soft pedal and being in an aero position and trying to get the best power for that, that speed that you're trying to get without losing power and slowing down. All these things require you to practice in training. And so come race day, if you haven't, if you haven't been doing any of those things. And I just laugh when people say to me, oh, you know, going for a long ride, it's just so boring. I am so concentrated on how's My pedalling technique, am I pulling up right at this minute? What effect is it having on my power number? And am I riding in the zone for this session? Am I pulling up and pushing down? Am I sitting on the seat properly? There's so much I'm thinking about in that. Just the example I just gave before that four hour ride that the time went so quickly because I was just all the time thinking about, you know, where's the wind, where's the hills, where's the downhills, how's my pedaling, am I engaging my glutes, am I in the ranges? Have I had a drink? There's just so much to practice. And come race day, if you haven't done that in training, then you won't do it in race day. Don't expect that something miraculous will happen on race day that you haven't been doing in training. Just like we say, don't do anything on race day that you haven't done in training. So do things you've done in training on race day. That's the absolute opposite, which is what we're trying to get you to. Practice, practice, practice. So on race day becomes second nature to you, it's automatic that you will actually be thinking about all the things that are going to make you more efficient to get you to ride from A to B faster.

Couldn't agree more. I had a friend ask me that exact question after another four or five hour endurance ride. They just said, how do you ride for that long? They just couldn't comprehend. They said, exercising for that long must get so boring. And I basically just gave the answer. You said, exactly. We're aiming for a zone 2 ride average and you've got to build up to that point to be able to hold zone two for four to five hours. But you're watching your power to make sure that's in the zone 2 range and you're watching your heart rate. And especially when you're hitting an uphill, you're really trying to pedal efficiently, but not trying to go way over. And then on the downhill, you're trying to really keep that up. And so outdoors, when there's constant gradient changes, basically every 10 seconds, you're reassessing. Yeah. And also, yeah. Changing gears, which is the, the next point that we're going to touch on. But I just really wanted to reiterate what you just said about if you can do that in a four to five hour endurance ride where you can stick to that, those cadence ranges, those power ranges, those heart rate zones with all the changing factors that are happening. Think about how much easier that it becomes in a race. And it's a real subtle kind of strength. It's not hill repeats, it's not strength worth in the gym. It's just constant consistent pressure on the pedals and that zone two strength. And that will just do you wonders come race day.

People talk about the 1 percenter gains and doing this and that this is massive. If you can just think about this in your training and get good at it and implement it into racing. This is game changing stuff. This will make you faster for the same. I keep saying this, the same level of fitness you go into the race. If Jordy, you enter into a Saturday's 40k time trial, you knew nothing about what we've just talked about, but you are able to ride 40Ks an hour. And I got you to implement in your training all the things we talked about. You could ride 42ks an hour with the same fitness level that you go into the same race. The same person can ride 2Ks an hour faster by thinking about the things we're just telling you.

Yep. The next one we want to talk about is, and this is just a simple skill to practice and learn is gear changing and how to know when, how to change gears. And I think I was lucky. I learned because we grew up in the, in the Dandenongs, in the hills. And when I was riding with you out in the hills, it's either constantly uphill or downhill when they're not small hills. And I would just sit behind you and I just watch your gears. And every time you changed, I changed. Every time you went up, I went up. Every time you went down, I went down. And that just taught me. Oh, eventually I got the pattern myself and I would do it myself. And the most damning thing was when I was sitting behind you compared to when I'd go sit behind anyone else riding was over the top. You know how you're not letting a fraction of soft pedaling happen over the crest of the climb. As soon as that crest starts to flatten out a little bit, bang, your gears are going down straight away. And so there's absolutely no soft pedaling. So the momentum of the power, the cadence doesn't change right over that crest all the way to the downhill. And I was always shocked at the difference between when I was. When that was happening, I kept thinking, oh, we're getting to the top, he'll ease up here. And no, it was just flick the gears down. I have to do the same in order to stay on the wheel, go over the crest and then keep that pressure on down the hill.

Yeah, it's a, it's a really another subtle skill that you're trying to, trying to teach all new cyclists is to, to change their gears. And I think someone during the week I said, I think in one of those one hour sessions I changed over it because on your bike computer, if there's an actual setting for how many gear changes did you make? And I looked at it and it said 274 gear changes in that one hour. And I was like, oh, I didn't realize it was that much. But, but if you're out on a four hour ride, you could be changing gears that many times because every time the road gradient changes or the wind changes, you need to keep the cadence in that range, which is somewhere between 80 and 100 RPM. And the only way to do that and to keep the power in the range, the only way to do that is to either change the pressure that you're applying to the pedals to keep in the power range, but then you'll drop the cadence out of the range or to actually change gears. So you've got two choices. Apply different pressure through your legs or change gears. And the easiest way is to keep the pressure the same and just use your gears. You should be changing gears all the time. And I still have people saying to me, I think I changed gears once or twice in that session. And I just say that's not possible. You couldn't have been in the range or the power range or the cadence range without changing gears. And you know, many times people's batteries have gone flat and it's, and you know, people said, I just, I just charged it last week. There could be many reasons, but it certainly for most people wouldn't because they're changing gears too many times because they haven't charged their battery. But, but that, that should happen. If you're, if you're actually using your gears the way you should be, then you should be having to charge your, your electronic gears regularly.

And that's why we talk about all the time why we don't like erg mode. It's just another reason why there's, that just into the power isn't the only thing that's important. You know, it's the way you're doing that and your efficiency and you being able to do it yourself. And so if you're riding in erg mode and it's forcing you to hold the certain power. Yeah, you're going to be getting the, I guess, overall stimulus because it's forcing you to sit at 180 watts or whatever the target is. But if you're really struggling and you're really tiring, your cadence is going to get lower and lower. And it's just a really crap way to train when you have to grind it out at 60 RPM or less. And that happens. We see a lot of people doing this grinding at 50 RPM because they're struggling to hold the power, but the machine's forcing them to do it. It's just, it's just not efficient training at all.

The only positive thing that I can think of, Erg Mode, is that you can actually, the machine's forcing you to hold the power and cadence and, and, and so that's not cadence, just the power. Well, it does it. It forces you to hold the cadence, and if you don't, it'll end up dropping so low that you can't push the gear. So it's the same thing, though. But, but if the point won't. It won't come to that point until you drop 10 or 15 RPM outside of that range. You disagree?

Yeah. Well, it's just when you. This shows how little we ride Erg Mode. But, but just. It's. It'll hold the power no matter what. And so when you can't hold the power, you. Your canes are just getting slower and slower because it's going right. If you're only going to ride at 60 RPM, you're going to have to push this much of a hard gear to hit that power. So, yeah, yeah, kind of forces you to hold, basically.

So the point I was trying to make is when you actually go into a race scenario, you don't have Erg Mode as an option. So that's the number one reason why we don't want to practice stuff that's not going to happen on race day. Remember we said that before, that rule? And you do what you get in training, what you're going to do on race day, and don't do anything different. And so we're going to try and ride at all our training sessions in Erg Mode. Then come race day, we have got no ability to understand gradient changes, wind and gear selection and cadence because the machine's done all of that for us. So that is the number one reason why we are so against it is because you are totally lost. And the minute the new people who have been riding Erg Mode for two, three years Indoors, join our program, and I say, you can't use erg mode. And they go, okay, I won't use erg mode. And then they cannot ride in the zones or the cadence, even though they've been really efficient in training indoor. And that, to me is such a shock that they can't actually ride the session properly without the machine holding them. So now they're having to do it themselves. And the comment is far out. How do you possibly hold the right power and the right cadence? I can't do it. And therefore I'm saying, well, this is what's happening to you on race day. When I look at your file from the races that you've got in your history, your power is all over the place. If you're trying to average 200 watts, I can see eight minutes at 400. And if the course is reasonably flat, why are you riding eight minutes at 400? And then you've got 16 minutes at 65 watts? You know, you've got such variations in power is because the erg mode is not assisting you to hold the right ranges and cadence. And you know, that is one of the key things. And obviously the other factor that you and I are so against is because it's going to hold you at the mid range. Say it's 200 to 220 is your range for that session. It's going to hold you at 210 unless you manually change it during the ride. You have to manually get your computer or laptop to adjust up or down to. Well, if you're tired, how the hell are you going to aim at midway? 210 watts. You want to ride 200, it won't let you. And if you're really fresh, you want to ride at 220 watts because you're feeling good. It'll hold you at 210. So it's restricting in so many ways for you to take ownership of how you feel against how you're going to execute that session. That is one of the key things that I'm against.

One of the funnest parts about training is getting fitter. And one of the most enjoyable parts is beating your numbers. And so when you're getting fitter and then you go to a session and you feel really good and you smash your numbers from the week before, you're supposed to ride at 300 to 320. And last week you held five efforts at 3:15. This week you go, I feel really good. And you do the first one 315, but then you go 323 25, 330. And then you last month, 340. And you've never hit those numbers before before. It's an unbelievable feeling. You go, wow, the training's working. I'm feeling really good. I just smashed that. Whereas if you're on erg mode and it held you at 3:15, you'd have no concept of whether you overloaded or not. So, yeah, that's just a personal preference. And that kind of leads us to the next point in thinking about training hard. And it's a weird point to make. We don't talk about it very often on here because triathletes, we love the suffering and we love the pain of training. And triathletes, endurance athletes, cyclists know how to push ourselves hard and we know how to train hard. But training hard doesn't mean going maximal effort all out, trying to your vomit all the time. That's not what we're talking about. We're training hard is on that four to five hour endurance ride, concentrating and holding zone two the whole time. You know, training hard is when it's a VO2 max session, really maxing yourself out and getting the most out of yourself. When it's a sub threshold session, that really uncomfortable sweet spot kind of zone three to four tempo session, those longer efforts, that's really uncomfortable. For me, that's one of the most uncomfortable sessions I could do. I like VO2 max intervals, you know, to the cows come home. But the longer sub threshold efforts, you know, they can be really tough. And so training hard is, is being disciplined to stay in the zones, stay concentrated, training really hard when you need to train in Zone 2 for the whole ride when you need to, you know, that's a really, really important skill to get right.

And look, the only thing he didn't say was training hard in recovery. Training hard takes discipline in recovery to train at the goal number of that recovery session. And I call that training hard. Someone says to me, how did you go today? You were doing recovery. I said, yeah, I really went well on my recovery ride because I stayed disciplined and I didn't go outside the zone that I was supposed to. So really successful hard training day. But it took my 100% concentration to keep in the zones. And that's what we're talking about, training hard, training hard efficiently to get the value and the goal out of what the purpose of the session was.

Yeah, and I think the big point on that whole concept is obviously what we've summarized, but understanding you get more benefit by 1, staying in your zones. But understanding stimulus response. So, yeah, when it's time to train overs, when it's time to train VO2 max intervals, you are making sure you're going over and you're not cheating yourself by backing off that stimulus. And again, the stimulus response doesn't have to be VO2 max intervals. The stimulus response we're aiming for is what's programmed in that session. And by sticking to it, you are getting the benefit from the session. So I think, yeah, that's all you need to say on training hard. But we don't often come across an athlete where you go, are you really pushing yourself hard enough? That's kind of not necessarily the question, but it's more just, are you getting the right responses from the training program?

Yeah, look, I think early days, when we first started doing the podcast, we were really pushing the concept of training easy so you could train harder. And we still agree with that. But now we've moved on to trying to get people, they've already understood that concept. The consequences of training too hard. Consecutive days means when you try to ride really hard, you can't do it because your fatigue levels are so high. So you're not getting the stimulus response that the VO2 session is asking of you on that particular day. And so training easier to train harder is our motto to begin with. And now we want the people to take the next step, which is understanding that you are training hard if you are in the right zones and descriptions that your particular training session day is asking you to do.

I think I used to think that. Oh, come on. Like, that's just taking it all too seriously. We're supposed to ride our bike for fun. You know, who wants to be concentrating that much on a zone 2 ride for four to five hours? I just want to go ride my bike and enjoy it. But I would argue that you go ride with an efficient, experienced rider and they can now ride and do it that way and chat away and enjoy the scenery and enjoy talking with a mate, because they've got that experience. And at the start, it's hard and it takes a lot of concentration. But you will cross a threshold where if you go on a bunch ride with some really good cyclists, they'll be tapping away, really consistent pressure on the pedals, really good, consistent cadence, resting in the power zone, zone two, keeping their heart rate in zone two while enjoying conversation, while enjoying the ride. So it doesn't have to be exclusive.

Yeah, I think there's still, you know, such a wide variety of riders out there and, you know, riding's really taken off in the last, I think last 10 years. It's, it's just had this huge boom and, and especially in the last three years with COVID There's a lot of new cyclists out there and Boy George are they strong and powerful athletes. And they've got very limited cycling skills in terms of understanding technique and tactics and, and when to ride hard and when not to ride hard. They're just brutally strong, which is brilliant. They've trained their backsides off and they are powerful, but they don't have the nuances that the guys who know how to run a program that's got them to a really high level. And I'm not just talking about those people, but even some mid pack age groupers who understand how to get the most out of themselves, they can actually not just ride flat out hard every day because the people who are just new to the sport can do that for a certain period of time. But eventually they will be riding themselves into a hole and that's what we're trying to prevent. That's why we're talking about this training hard concept about the consequences of doing that will eventuate. It's just a matter of time. So just because you're young and strong and powerful doesn't mean you just have to ignore all the nuances of the subtleties of training.

Only a couple of skills to go. One of the big ones that we don't really touch on much is cornering and bike handling and applies to both forms of cycling, just road cycling, but especially time trialing and in triathlons because the more time out of that time trial position, the less aero you are, the more you slow down and, and look, if you're doing a U turn on a course or something, really it's, it's can be seen as much of a muchness. You might be losing 1 to 5 to 8 seconds every now and again. But if you really are horrible and it's there's 6 or 8 or 12 U turns in a course, you are losing free time there by not being efficient. And you definitely, unless you're a pro, you don't need to be trying to maximize every second, every half second by taking the corner or the U turn as hard as you can, you know, really pushing that line. But it is really valuable to know how to enter a U turn U turn well and come out with some decent momentum and speed so you're not also having to waste energy by getting that bike speed back up.

Yeah, it's interesting if you follow A really good person who's a good cornering cyclist or descender with, with lots of turns in it. And you could constantly be losing 5, 6 meters to that person. Even though you're on the wheel, they're gapping you through the corner and, and that's more matches you're burning. And if, as you say, if there's, say there's 75 turns in a, in a, in a road race or a time trial, which by the way happens, you could actually have to do that. 75 efforts to get back as a cyclist back on the wheel, which is, you're just burning matches and using fuel. Way too much pushing power. You know, the person who's going through the corner beautifully is not actually changing the pressure on the pedals like we talked about before. So the more times you actually have to stomp on the pedals to get back into the wheel, the less efficient cyclist you are. So learning how to corner is a really useful skill in maximizing the efficiency of your bike riding. And at the end of the day, that's what we're talking about today. So there's some key things you should think about on sharp left handers and sharp right handers. The number one fundamental is that if you're going around a left corner, you have your left pedal up at 12 o'. Clock. If you're going around a right corner, and this is obviously basic, but I still see people going around the left hand corner with their left pedal down at 6 o'. Clock. And guess what? If the corner is too sharp, your pedal will hit the bitumen and it will flip you over the bike. And so that's a harsh lesson to learn. And it's happened to pretty much every cyclist that I know, including myself. And so you must lean into the left side of the left corner with your left foot up in the air at 12 o'. Clock. And your right pedal ankle foot should be actually pushing away from the bike. And that's something you can think about. When you're going around the left hand corner, push down on the pedal on the right side. That's at 6 o'. Clock. And that will give you more of a balance on the bike because the left side pedal should have no pressure on it. The right pedal at 6 o' clock should have all of the pressure on it. And your body will determine how well you can corner. And we've got one classic corner just near where we live on the way home from most of our long rides. It's a really sharp left hand turn and it Keeps going, it just keeps turning left on you. Just when you think you're coming out of the corner. No, it's not, you're not out of the corner yet. It's really dangerous because there's cars coming the other way. And if you get this wrong, you'll be on the other side of the road and you potentially could hit a car. And we're forever going around at maximum speed trying to see how fast we can get around that corner safely, obviously. And you know, that is a really good way to learn how to pedal properly. So if you get your body to lean and your head to face to the, the nearest point that you can see around the corner, that will actually start to send your bike in. Whatever your body's doing, the bike will follow. So, so that's a real skill. If you watch the, the pros descending down the tourmalet or altoairs, you know, they're, they're really leaning into the corner.

With all their weight on the outside.

With all their weight. Yeah. And it's, and all their weight is on their, on their, their opposite foot that's going around the corner, but their body is leaning into the corner. So just to take it up and summarize, Jord, the cornering skills should be practiced. And the more times you go around a corner really slowly and safely, the more confident you get. Then you add some speed, Just keep the same technique and making sure that you keep your left foot up for a left hand turn and you keep your right foot up for a right hand turn and everything after that. You'll have to keep practicing. And you know, I've crashed, slid down, gone too far on a left hand turn, ended up on my backside because I've got the angle wrong. And there could have been many other factors. The road was wet, there was some grease on the road. So you just have to be very careful about the road conditions and surface and be as careful as the conditions are. And you know, if you gung ho and flying down the corner and all of a sudden you come off, I guarantee for the next, you know, three months of riding, you won't be the same corner. You'll have lost confidence. So we don't want you to come off. Yeah, we want you to practice it safely, but practice it. And the only way to do it is to go on downhills and practice your cornering.

Yeah, I think that big left hand you're talking about is how I learned to corner properly. And I used to come out of that corner 50 meters behind you because I could never take it at the same speed and then over the years just got closer and closer and now we can take it at the same speed. And I'm pretty confident in that corner. I touch wood every time I'm in front of you on that one. Now you're yelling out saying careful, because you just know how dangerous it is. I'm going, I've done this corner hundreds of times now I'm fine. Now I'm not a 16 year old rider anymore. But touch wood, that's when you get arrogant or too confident. That's when those things seem to happen.

I'm saying careful because I've still crashed on a corner and slid out and I know the consequences on this corner. If there's a car coming, we're underneath the car.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's why I'm saying it's not worth it. Practice, but don't go crazy. And that's why I'm yelling, I know you can do it, but I'm still being a parent going, if you get this wrong and the guy who's been up and down a ladder for 40 years, why does he fall off his ladder? After 40 years he becomes complacent and he's forgotten all the things that have prevented him from coming off his ladder. Same on a bike. You ride a bike for 40 years and you haven't come off on a left hander or a right hander. The minute you do, you lose confidence so badly that you corner like a beginner again until you get your confidence back.

And I'm definitely willing to leave my ego at the door. And I've been the person that's gone to the car park and practice going around a pole, you know, pretending that's the cone or you can just put cones down. But you know, practice u turning without a cone or a pole but just in space. And, and I'm definitely happy to do that. And I have actually pushed. I know you keep doing it over and over and you're fine with the line is. And I've definitely pushed it to where I've skidded it out and it didn't fully come off, but I went, oh, that's the line that was too quick around that u turn. But you really get, you get confidence knowing what speed you can handle. So really, really important. And it's just a way to, you know, get more efficient on the bike. As always, last couple, a really big skill is being able to read your head unit on the bike. So you've got your head unit, your Garmin, your Wahoo, whatever that's you're riding with and what's on there, you know, some people just have time and speed, some people have cadence on there. You really should be looking at power. But then when you're looking at power, are you looking at the instant power, which we spoke about before? Do you actually know the difference between instant power and your average power? So instant power is every pedal stroke, what's happening. The average power is what you've averaged for the ride. And then more specifically, you know, we're saying that everyone should have lap power. You know, what's, what's your power for the current lap that you're on? You know, is it a three minute effort or a one minute effort or, you know, out and back course, the lap going out and then you'd lap it again. For coming back, using lap power in a race, these are all skills that you actually have to get better at again. It's going to help you be a better bike rider.

No, I can't agree more and I feel like we do talk about this a lot, but this is the purpose of this particular podcast is to just to completely re emphasize to those who may be new to it that lap power is key. And as a time trialist, if you've got a straight out and back course, you know your average power for the whole ride is running on the screen. So you can see that. But the minute you do the U turn, your average power, if you take 15 seconds to do that U turn, guess what your average power was into the corner? 200 that you've averaged for the whole stretch. And when you come out of that Corner, it'll be 192 and you'll go, what the heck. And that's where the lap power is good. So if you're trying to average 200, you come out of that corner at 192, what are you going to do? You're going to ride at 210 to get your average back to 200. So you're going to actually ride too hard and not in the zone that you want to. So by pushing lap power, you get rid of that U turn and you start afresh and you're back on your 200 watts, if that's what your goal is. And so you're not actually, you know, detrimentally riding too high to catch back up the watts you've lost. You might be listening, saying, well, wouldn't you want to catch those watts up? But no, you don't want to catch those watts up in the first three minutes to get it back to 200. You want to catch those watts up over the next 30 minutes or 15 minutes, whatever the next lap section is, and know that you're losing power. And if you average that out. And that's what brings us to the normalized. Normalized takes into consideration whether you're not pedaling downhill or whether you're going around a U turn or a roundabout. So indication, yeah, it's a much better indication of the effort that you're doing. So on a really tricky, undulating, technical left and right turns, roundabouts, U turns, hills, normalize is way more accurate than your, than your average power. So, so these are the things you should be having on your screen and understanding in training and practicing it. Lap power in training, you can't do those 5 minute interval efforts 5 times 5 minutes looking at instant power. You are not mathematically advanced to be able to average it out for five minutes. And people say, oh, I just looked at my instant power and I thought that I saw lots of 200 watts. So it should have been around 200. In fact it was 188. And when, if you had been looking at lap power, it would have told you exactly what you would average for that five minute lap that you were doing. So having data on your screen is so crucial, it's not, not useful. It's crucial to the outcome that you're trying to. We're not saying for you to stare down at your dart, your data computer screen for the whole and not look up. And not look up. We're actually using that as our guide. So if you want to glance down and see what your lap power is for that section that you're doing, it's sitting at 200. Happy days. Concentrate on your aero position. Concentrate on the gradient on the road, the pressure on the pedals, you know, how's your heart rate, how's your nutrition? Concentrate on those things. How am I going in the race? And just keep glancing down at reading the head unit and just getting that guide as you're writing rather than fixated on what you're looking at.

Again, it's a skill to practice and on our head units we've got eight bits of data. A lot of people would just sit there with three. Time, speed and heart rate maybe, but we're looking at eight and sometimes there's 10 or 12 bits and so you have to flick across two pages. So it takes a skill to be able to know what to look for, to be able to write and read the Data at the same time, to be able to look up at the road and and glance down every so often and to know what you're actually looking for and to be able to do that while concentrating on the race and in your head figuring out what the game plan is and what you should be doing right now and asking yourself those questions around what should my heart rate be, what should my power be, what should my cadence be, what lap is this? Et cetera. So that is a skill in reading your head unit and knowing how to use it for the bike. The last mistake before we finish the episode and last episode for the year is just general racing mistakes that you want to make sure you clean up. And that comes down to the Is your bike charged before the night before a race? Are your gears charged? You mentioned that before. There's nothing worse than getting to race day and you start riding and you're stuck in the one gear. Have you charged your power meter so you can read your power? You don't get to race day and you've done all this work. Nine months of preparation for an Ironman, you didn't charge your power meter. Now you've got no power for the race. Actually charge your head unit, your Garmin, your Wahoo, whatever. So it's not flat on race day. These are skills to actually did you service your bike a couple weeks out, but then make sure you can still have a few test rides on it, not service it and then not ride it until race day and then something mechanical goes wrong because it's been broken in the shop. These are all basic mistakes to make sure you're getting right for race day. Man.

Do you know how to change a tyre? If you're an Ironman and you have a puncture, you have to change the tyre and have you practiced that? And have you got the right tyres on your bike that are not old and looking like they're going to puncture the next ride you go out. So just doing those basic things well will get ensure you get, you know the result you want on race day.

That's it for this episode. We hope you enjoyed this episode on Fundamental bike Skills. As we said at the start, go through that list and ask yourself, can I tick off all those that I'm doing them really efficiently and if you can, then you are. We can guarantee you'll be a pretty good cyclist and if not, what could you improve on what you need to practice? What will help you get a little bit better? So that's it for this episode and finally it's time to announce the winner of the Giant giveaway. We had almost 1,000 entries, which is super exciting. And thanks again to Giant and Cadex for sponsoring the giveaway. One athlete is walking away with a brand new set of a brand new set of Cadex wheels of their choice. And if you've never ridden a disc wheel, far out, I can tell you it makes a difference, especially the Cadex ones. It is so fun. It gives you that free speed. And if you're not going to put them on a triathlon bike, even the carbon race wheels for the road bike, absolutely incredible. Plus we give you a big top up of sis nutrition and some tribalo goodies and kit for you to rock. So we need the winner to DM us on Instagram to claim the prize and if they don't claim it within seven days, we'll announce the next winner on next week's episode. So make sure you tune in to that just in case the winner doesn't claim their prize, which would be devastating for them. So without further ado, the winner of the $7,000 prize pack is. Dad, you want to read their Instagram handle? Their Instagram username is Drumroll Jord and.

Super excited to give this away and so grateful for all the contributions from everybody. And it's Josh hb.

Perfect. So that's Josh hb. Not actually sure who that is. We had a lot of randoms enter there. A lot of randoms. There was over a thousand entries. But congratulations, Josh. Please shoot us a message on Instagram. We can organize getting your prize sent out to you. Merry Christmas to everyone. We hope you had a great day. Enjoy this period and we'll see you in the new year. We're super excited for to bring you a whole bunch of other podcasts in 2024. Merry Christmas, happy New Year. Cheer.