This Stops 99% of Triathletes From Improving

This podcast is brought to you by Trivalo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Gerard Donnelly. Today, we're tackling something that hits almost every triathlete at some point. Plateaus. You're training hard, you're staying consistent, and yet no pbs, no breakthroughs, just stuck in. In this episode, we break down why most triathletes stop improving. And it's not because they're not trying hard enough. If you've been feeling like your results have stalled, then this episode is for you. We'll show you what the top athletes do differently, what most athletes get wrong, and how to turn your training around fast. But first, let's start with our normal segment of the show. Dad, we've had a lot of guests on lately, so we haven't done this segment in a while. What are you grateful for this week?

Yeah, it feels like ages, George, where we haven't done our gratitude. So, look, it's just a really simple one for those who've been listening for a while. Your brother lives in the other side of Australia, in the northern part of Australia. We don't get to get up there very often to see the two grandchildren up there. We've got two grandchildren who live locally here, so they were actually moving house. They've been in an apartment for seven years and it's too small for the four of them, so they've moved into a bigger space, which is going to be fantastic. So it was great to have four days away helping them move. And I just. Being with the grandkids is just hilarious experience. They just come out with some classic stuff. And Banks is two now and Eden's four. And, yeah, they're just. They're just little humans with a lot of information to get out. And it just makes Andy and I laugh the whole time when we spend time with them. They're just fantastic. And they are so excited when we get off the plane and they run towards you. I just love it. They just run, you know, with their arms out and they want to give you a big hug. It's fantastic. So, yeah, it makes you feel pretty special, actually, that they actually care and want to spend time with these two old people who keep turning up to their place. So, yeah, it was a great weekend. So I'm very grateful for that experience.

For anyone that saw on Instagram, we put a video up because I was actually just on FaceTime to you and Banks walked in and walked straight up to the desk and jumps on your lap and doesn't worry about what work we're doing, but says Old MacDonald. He just says he's two and he says old Mad. He wants to watch Old MacDonald on YouTube, which is just hilarious. So it interrupted our work call. My gratitude is kind of a funny one with just feeling really grateful lately for accessible, good quality healthy food. I actually why this came up was I found an old meal plan on my computer, I was cleaning out some files and I found an old meal plan from 10 years ago when I was trying to learn how to eat healthy and improve my nutrition. And the education back then was quite minimal and confusing. And I was looking back at what I was trying to buy and plan and eat and I was just thinking that, wow, how much things have changed now. That to have a really clean, healthy diet is super simple and super easy. And I was finding it really hard back then. So it just made me really grateful to go, wow, that's a really good part of the lifestyle we get to live now where things are actually quite accessible. That's our simple gratitude. If you'd like to show your own gratitude for the show, you can help our ranking by subscribing and leaving a five star rating. We do see your ratings all the time, we see your comments and we appreciate you. It really, really does help us. Before we get into the rest of the episode, just a quick shout out and welcome to the newest members of the Trivolo coaching family. All these athletes have jumped on board and trusted us with the hopes of improving their results, which we absolutely guarantee. So a quick shout out to Drayden from New Zealand, Blair G. From Toronto, Canada, Angus from New South Wales, Australia, Nancy from Colorado, Benjamin also from New South Wales, Australia, Noah from South Melbourne, Victoria, Tom Vose from New South Wales, Australia, Peter Mendez from California, Donald Rowe from New South Wales as well. New South Wales athletes in this last batch, Kristen Miller from Connecticut, usa, Bill from South Carolina, usa, Rick from la, California, Ricardo, who's resilient but actually lives in Victoria with us and Kim from Texas. We can't wait to help you all improve on your journey. If you'd like to join these athletes and guarantee your own improvement, you can go to our website trivelocoaching.com and as a reminder, as you just heard, we do coach athletes internationally from anywhere in the world. Now to a quick mailbag question. And this is from Niall on Instagram who said, hey, I love the podcast. It's probably an obvious question, but should you do all of your FTP tests and VO2 max interval sessions in the Aero position that is on the Aero bars? I see some mixed reviews online, dad. This is a very easy one to answer.

Yeah, I'd be struggling to find reasons why you shouldn't. So I'm interested to know if there's reviews saying you shouldn't be testing in the position. Our simple theory in everything we do is try to replicate what's going to happen on race day. And if you're going to be happy to sit up out of the aero position on race day and cop more wind, then by all means, test that way and train that way. But we don't recommend that. We recommend that you get your body used to being in the aero position for pretty much all your training and doesn't have to be specifically for FTP tests, but it's more important for those tests to get an accurate number because we know that you can push more power sitting up in a less aggressive position than you can in the time trial position. And even if you're on a road bike, you should be practicing down the drops getting as aero as possible so that every time you race, you have, you have been tested properly to the position you're going to actually train in. So, yeah, replicate what's going to happen on race day. And if you're going to sit up on race day, fine, test sitting up. But if you're going to be as aero as you can to try and get as fast as you can, that's in fact the goal we're trying to do is get from A to B as fast as possible. Then you need to be practicing in your aero position for the majority of your training.

And tell that to Lionel who I think a couple of months ago posted a video online doing his efforts sitting up and pushing quite high power. And he said, what are you thinking? You just spoke about, you know, at the Ironman that you, you weren't race specific and you do any sessions and you're getting a great number, which is good for the ego, but it's not race specific. But I did see an episode recently where he kind of mentioned that and, and ended up saying, you know, if you want to be specific, get into the aero position. So we agree with his latter video, not, not the former. And we just want to talk about something that's caught our attention as well. And this kind of really relates to the topic of the episode in terms of breaking through a plateau and plateau and expectations on performance and improvement. And we kind of wanted to touch on the spring Classics and some of the, you know, the racing season has really started again for triathlon and cycling. And a particular example I was, I was looking at, and I want to hear your thoughts on this was the expectations on wetvine Art. Because we just had all the major sprint classics and cycling races happening over the last month or so or six weeks. And Wout has had a really tough few years. He peaked a couple of years ago, I think in terms of his performance and results. Performances and results. But he's had some big crashes and had another one over winter and he made it back for the spring classics and he got himself into top three, top five positions, which was unbelievable. But couldn't quite just top it off to win, which you need to be in incredible form to actually win these big races. And I think it raised a really important point for me where I was getting frustrated with a lot of the comments online saying he just doesn't have it anymore or wow, it's just not there. And everyone expects that after these crashes and big interruptions that he's had that he'll just return to normal form. And we make this mistake to ourselves that we just expect that if something happens like a big crash or sickness, that will just return to normal form really quickly. And he's a great example of why that's not true. And to even be top three or five was an incredible effort from him. And it's a good reminder that we can't just expect that those things don't, don't have an impact and that you can just go back to world class form or for ourselves, back to our PB form out of nowhere. You've got to give the injury or the sickness the respect it deserves and know that it'll take some time to get back to where you were.

Yeah, there's no athlete in the world. Remember Pocajard, hurt his wrist two years ago and was not that successful.

Lost the Tour de France.

Yeah, he wasn't winning like he is now. He seems invincible at the moment. And Remco had another, really, he's had two shocking crashes, one where he went over the bridge into the crevasse into the river and he was out for six or eight months. And then he had a car, a van door open on him recently where he was again almost going to give up his career because his injury was so bad. And he's on the comeback trail as well. And Wouts had this knee issue. You know, you Get a close up of what his knee looked like. It looks incredibly, just not natural the way his knee looks. And so, yeah, you know, we expect that, you know, they will just resume the form they had previously. This is going to take time and I have no doubt that WOUT and Remco as two examples, just like POG did when he had his injury. You know, we're quick to judge very, very poor performances. And this is part of why we're doing this. Topic is for, for the age grouper, we're actually worse at it about ourselves having expectations that are really unfair because your expectations are not taking into consideration things that have happened. And that's the mistake. You need to adjust and allow for things that are happening to you in your world. And you could be extremely unlucky and get sick three or four times and it might not be luck. It might be that you're not sleeping well, you're not eating well, you're training too hard, there's a lot of stress in your world. They can be fixed, those things. But if you're getting sick, it's just, you know, you happen to be on a plane flight with a whole lot of other sick people, which seems to be the norm lately. A lot of diseases are getting carried from person to person, mainly at airports, it seems like, or big areas where there's a lot of people. And we knew from COVID that disease travels very easily from human to human. So these are examples of people not allowing for things that happen to them. That creates that inconsistency in training, which means that at the end of the day your level will be so much different. And I think that's important for a guy like WOUT or POG or all these World Tour hero riders that we see. They go through troughs as well as the everyday age grouper does. And we need to be aware of that and allow for it. That's the key thing.

Yeah, and we want to keep talking about this because we're talking about breaking through plateaus and PBS today. And the expectations of when you should break through is really, really important. But before we get right into that, I wouldn't mind having a just continued quick discussion about the spring classics and Poga Charles form. It's a little bit off topic, but he's just dominating to a level we haven't seen in a long time and he's quite frankly unbeatable. So I wanted to ask you, as if you're a sports director of a team, what would your tactic be here? How do you beat the pog. What's your theory?

Yeah, great question. And look, to be fair, this season van der Poel is the only guy who's conquered him twice. And you know, van der Poel's a pretty impressive athlete in his own right. And to win Milan San Remo when POG threw everything at him and the, the pressure and the, in that race and, and van der Poel was able to stay with him unluckily at Paris Roubaix when POG crashed. We don't really know what could have happened at the end. But you know, they're the two races that the POGS lost. And he's pretty much won every other race that he's been in except he lost Flesh Wallone, which is the other one. And you know, he looks unbeatable. But if in the World Tour, remember the World Tour cycling, we're talking, we're not talking triathlon, we're talking World Tour cycling where it is a team based sport where these number one riders in each of these 20 teams have got between eight and 10 riders helping them get the best positions, protect them from the wind, and setting them up for an unbelievable possibility that they will actually go on and finish and win the race. So my theory is that I was talking to my wife about this and I'm saying, look, the only way that POG can be beaten is if the teams actually get to get together and, and, and really work together to let Poga char attack them and ride solo for 40 or 50k. And then all the teams get together and you know, one person can't beat 10 teams rolling turns, it's just not possible. And they are going to get thrashed by Poga every single time they race him if they don't do some different tactics. The sports directors need to get on the phone to each other in the middle of the race and say, okay, you know, just, just take Liege, Baston Liege as an example. He attacked on Laradout and if I was the sports director, I would have let him go and let him hang out there solo because it's, there was still, you know, 40 odd K to go for the end of the race. All the teams should have told their, their team members, just ride up this hill easy and Let him have 50 seconds a minute. And then we all protect our key riders like Remco and Healy. And you know, there were four or five teams that had their main riders right there, but they also had two or three other team riders with them. So having four or five teams well represented with two or Three riders each, which is what happened. They should have been on the phone saying to each other, right, all of the number one riders sit on the back. All the teams work together. Four or five teams work together. Let Pog hang out there. Let's just keep the distance at 40, 30, 30 seconds. And then he will be riding solo against a group of 12 riders. And you can't tell me that that's going to have a different outcome when, when they catch him at the end. And there's still plenty of climbs where these fresh riders like Remco and Ben Healy, they could throw everything at him because they've been sitting on. And that's the way to do it. And that's just my theory, but. But I would love to see that happen. I don't think it will, because I think there's too many egos in, in World Tour cycling, and some of the team members don't want to collude. I don't even know if that's a rule you can't collude. But I'm sure that you have to find a way, otherwise he's going to win the next 20 races he enters. Unless people actually start with some different tactics, which is the same as breaking through a plateau. You have to start with doing something different. You can't repeat the same thing and expect a different result.

It's different in the Tour de France, where you've got to be a contending hill climber, and the only people that can contend are Remco or Auvergaard against Poga. But in a race like this, you know, when he breaks away, he often breaks away on a climb and everyone gases themselves trying to go with him. And you just can't. It's proven that you just can't. He's too good on the climbs. But when he gets over the top, often, luckily age, there's 30 or 40k of rolling course left. And in those rolling courses, you're exactly right, 12 should beat one, but they don't. Because when he's out there, he is just time trialling, mono power, mono pace, just the exact same, as hard as he can. Whereas behind it's attack, slow down, attack, slow down. It's cat and mouse tactics. It's people going and they're not wanting to do the work. And so, as we know from time trialing, if you just keep consistent power and pressure on the pedals, you go faster than if you did burst and then easy, burst and then easy. And so if they managed to get organized behind, which is a Classic case of racing, but for him, they're not going to beat him otherwise. And then, and then if it's just a hill climb finish in a, in a Classic or in a Grand Tour, then he's probably unbeatable.

I think, I think I made a mistake. I think I said he lost Flescher alone. He actually didn't. He attacked at Mudahoy and he was in the pack there and he just rode away. He won Flech Relone. He actually lost Amstel gold.

Yeah, I knew what you meant and I, and I didn't correct you. Sorry. But let's move from that into the actual topic and breaking through a plateau and getting PBS again. And we can't have this conversation with, without just making sure everyone understands the basic principle of diminishing returns, which is the longer you've been in the sport, the fitter you are, the harder you have to work for smaller improvements. It's as simple as that. When you're a beginner, improvements come easier and the more experienced you are, it's harder to find those small improvements. And it just makes logical sense. You know, if you're, if you're 150 watt FTP rider, you know, we can see athletes, you know, improve 10 to 50 watts in their first testing period or over the course of the first three, six months, you know, but logically you can't do that forever. If you kept doing that, you would get to 600, 700 watts. It just doesn't work. And so getting from for example, 150 to 250 for someone might take them only six months, but getting from 250 to 350 then might take them two or three years. And then getting from 350 above might not happen, you know, or they might go, they might just start gaining 350 to 355, 355 to 357. And that is the principle of diminishing returns. So just understanding that improvements come easier at the start and you have to work harder for them later. And so when you do understand that, again it's an expectation thing. You don't expect to be improving by major amounts every single time you retest yourself.

And I think, Jordan, I think we forget that if you keep being that harsh on yourself, it does affect your mental approach. You do get disillusioned and disappointed with unreal expectations. They're false expectations. That is one of the reasons why people actually change their mindset on things is the expectations are actually wrong. If we simplify this Just imagine we have a rating of 1 to 10 and your top that you could ever achieve is 10. And you might be an athlete who's been doing this for six months or 18 months and compared to an athlete who's been doing it for 18 years. So the athlete who's at 18 years is probably close to 8 out of 10 of where their ceiling is. The athlete who's been doing it for six months might be at three out of 10. So they've got so much more room to improve up to 10, whereas the athlete who's actually been hard at it for majority of his life, they probably will find it harder to get any improvement. And you have to change your mindset around that. You know, you and I laugh and joke, we're happy to get a 10 second improvement over a 5k time trial or a 15 second or 20 second over a 10k or a 3 watt improvement on an FTP test. Whereas some of the athletes we're coaching are improving by 90 seconds in a 5k or 2 minutes, 30 in a 10k or 25 watts in a 20 minute FTP. And you and I understand that that's because they've got so much more room to improve, whereas someone like yourself has been doing this for a long time. Depends on where you are in the year will depend on how much you're going to improve compared to last time you tested.

Yeah, and I think that that's a really important point in terms of understanding where you are in your year. Because I might not run a pb because my pb was when for 5k it was in absolute peak form. But I'll run the best I have for the last three months or six months and that might be still be 30 to 45 seconds off my all time best. But just the nature of where I am in the year or the seasonal, what's been happening, I might have improved 30 seconds over the last block of training or 15 seconds and that's a huge win. And so it's not always about all time PBS or all time best efforts, it's understanding where you are in the season and again your expectations of where you should be.

Yeah, I think if you put that into perspective, you can't for, let's say a year, 52 weeks, you know, depends. Where are you in January? Are you a person who's been training their house down from October through to January or are you a person who's just starting their preparation in January? So there's two examples of someone who could be, you know, at the bottom of their level as compared to someone who hasn't got much more room to move and is ready to do a race somewhere. And then in April those expectations could be flipped completely because the person in January has done their race and they've had a little bit of a rest. And that person should be expecting to drop some fitness because they've peaked for their main race and their numbers will be different in April to what it was in January. Do they get depressed about that? No, they don't because they understand that, that that's the normal progression throughout the year. Whereas the person who gets to January, who's at the lower level by April, they will be expecting to be 10% better than they were in January and their form is improving. So we've got to understand where we are in the year at any given point and where our form is according to where our actual race is. And so you don't want to be holding form for nine months. You want to to have periods of ups and downs where you're getting some good fitness, like that staircase effect that we talk about. Get some good training in, you know, and then get the recovery period so that you can absorb the load and then do some more training again, up your fitness levels slightly by, you know, a percent or two and then get some recovery. And that should, that should work towards your main a race. Then you do a really good down period where you're recovering and letting your body really repair from the, from the build that you've had. And then you would be starting at a lower number again. But we have the numbers come back at our athletes going, oh, there's something wrong, I've dropped 5%. Why is this so, you know, but they're not thinking about the big picture. They're thinking that I should be improving week on, week on, week on for four or five years. That's just not how it works. You know, we want to have improvement over a period of five years. But what I'm trying to say is in that period there'll be highs and lows. And as long as you understand where you are in your build or year or your structured program for that particular eight month period will allow you to be realistic with your expectations. And that's also. People say I'm plateauing, but they're actually not really looking at where they are in the year. They're just thinking, look, I'm not improving, so something wrong? Well, there's actually nothing wrong, it's just where you are in that particular part of the year.

So that's the key question I want to ask next is how do you actually know you're plateauing? If an athlete says I've plateaued, I'm stuck, I can't break through. The key question I want to ask is, is that true and do you know for sure? Because if it is, then we have some follow up questions about how to break through, but a lot of the time it's actually not true. And there's some other factors you need to consider.

Are you asking the question? This is not asking you the question, but is the athlete asking you the.

Question.

Based on what we just said? You know, I am in the build period and I'm looking for improvement here and I expect that I should be with the training that I'm doing, I should be plateauing, I should be improving, not plateauing. And so if the answer to that is yes, then then we're doing something wrong and we need to really dig into why this is occurring. But you know, you, that's the first question you would ask is, well, you would say to the athlete, where are you in your particular phase of your year? And they'll say to you, I've just done a race and I'm just in the recovery period and I've just started again and the last couple of weeks I don't seem to be improving that much. Well, you would answer that question by saying, well, you're not plateauing at all, you've had a high and now you're recovering and about to start your journey again. So it would be, you would have to find the circumstances about where are they getting this plateau information from?

Yeah, and I think more so in that example you're just assuming that they are reading the data accurately. But that's more the question is how do you know are you actually reading the data correctly? Because an athlete might feel like they're plateauing or feel like they're not getting better, but they're not actually testing. And so in that example you're assuming that they're testing regularly, so they're seeing that numbers. But, and we know that that's not the case most of the time. So have you tested recently? Have you got data to show you that you actually are plateauing? Are you comparing races? But if you're comparing races, are you comparing incorrectly? Because an athlete might say I was five minutes slower this year than last year but the conditions were so much worse or last year might have been a short course or all these things. So you've got to make sure that if you're feeling like that the data is actually truthful. And you often talk about comparing training sessions. That's a great way to know where you're at yourself. Especially if you do similar training sessions year round in terms of not just hard sessions but zone two all the way to VO2. That's a great way to compare for how you're tracking.

Yeah. And I've got a few examples I want to talk about. One is the bunch ride and the other one is the zone two ride. So the bunch ride where you're with your mates and you're wanting to have fun on that day and the goal might be endurance with some intensity. And so that's kind of like a free, free ride day. And you might be thinking that normally in the bunch I'm, when we come to these hills, I'm mid pack or I'm towards the front or I'm towards the back or I'm last or I'm first. You're somewhere in that particular compartment of your bunch and you will know that generally if you're worse than you are from previous weeks, that's either the group is improved or you're staying the same or going backwards. So that's a good, that's a good measure of where you sit comparing yourself to others. But it's not that scientifically based, is it? The group that you're riding with could have been training the house down for all you know and you may have missed some sessions. So that could be just a one off or a couple of weeks where you're still coming back from whatever. But you're using that as normally I should be at the front of this pack and I'm not and I've done this myself and so have you. Your expectation is that, gee, I didn't go so well today in that bunch ride. But you haven't actually looked at what you'd just been doing or what they had been doing. So it's a little bit fraught with danger when you're comparing against other people.

Or worse, you're on the bunch ride and you hit a climb or something and this happens to our traveller group a lot and you get shot out the back and you're going, what the hell, I just can't hold the wheel. I'm off this week. And then you get back home and you look at Strava and it was your all time PB up the hill. It's just everyone else did a 30 second PB themselves and everyone was flying.

That day or they all rode too hard. And they all blew up 10 minutes later and you caught them again. You know, there's so many things that can happen that can confuse your mindset. And look, a lot of the things we talk about with plateau is it's in your mind, what you're perceiving. And I think that has a lot to do with expectations and getting that right, getting your mindset right about what should be happening right now. And the other example I want to give that is, look, for years and years I've been doing a Wednesday ride and sometimes I do exactly the same ride just as a little experiment and sometimes I like to mix it up. And look, this period where I'm trying to come back from, you know, a pretty average two years of racing and training with some illness and some injuries. And so I've decided to do. I think I've done 20 weeks where I've done exactly the same Wednesday ride. It's just, it's around a two hour ride and I love it because it's got very little traffic. I know the course really well and I've used that as a zone two ride where I want to be at the top of zone two and sometimes I want to be, you know, easy zone 2. So over the journey my time has ranged from 1 hour 52 to 2 hours 2. That's like a 2 hours 04 actually. It's like a 1412 to 14 minute difference over 2 hours. And you might think that's, that's pretty hard to do when you're only riding zone 2. But it just shows you when I'm feeling good, I can ride literally 10 minutes quicker. And over the period of that 20 weeks, I've had like the last couple of weeks I did a 204 and the week before I did 152. So I was literally in the space of two weeks in a row. I was 14 minutes different. I rode differently. There's no doubt about it. I rode harder for the 152, but I stayed in zone two. And to me it was like I'm really feeling average the second week because I'm. I'm really fatigued from that massive build that I'd had. And now I'm in this recovery period and I couldn't really push the power if I tried. And So I was 10 minutes slower. But that's a great example of if I wasn't in tune with what was going on, my mindset was going far out. 204, that's the worst ride I've done on that course for 16 weeks. Is my form bad? Well, no, it's not because I just did a 152 just recently. So you don't lose form in one week or two weeks or four weeks. It takes six to 10 weeks to change your form. So that's just me understanding that I'm not plateauing. I'm not going backwards there. I'm just responding to the fatigue that I have. And I know in my mind I was okay with that. And it was a great lesson to me to see the differences in just a particular session, how you could get the wrong mindset, wrong outcome, wrong feelings about where your form is.

It's the benefit of the more experience you have as an athlete is you get to learn how you respond to sessions more and more. And, and you can apply exactly what you just said to any session. And if you're, you know, a staple session would be six by three minutes, whether it's, it's on the bike or running. And I know when I'm in good form, I know what paces I can run for those 3 minute efforts at 1k intervals in my best form, I know if I'm going okay, what range I'd be at. I don't know if I'm a little bit unfit or out of form. I struggle to hold, you know, y pace. So, yeah, it's a really, really easy way to monitor your own progress and where you're at. But given, let's say that that's a given that you've checked the data, you actually are plateauing, you're stuck. What do you do then? And so the first point we want to talk about is if you are actually stuck, one thing to look at is athletes can really get caught out just getting in the trap of continuing to do what they're good at and starting to avoid what they're not good at. And then the more and more they train, the more and more that what they're good at feels comfortable and the more and more what they're not good at feels uncomfortable and they start to avoid those sessions and they just stick to the sessions that they're good at. And that can really some plateau also.

Too Jord, you tend to cling to the things you enjoy most. And as you just said, you enjoy doing things you're good at. And look, that's the challenge, isn't it? You really need to turn that mindset around. And okay, I know I'm a good threshold rider, or I know I'm really good at over, under VO2 or I know I Suck at endurance. I just can't, you know, I can't do that very well. You need to do more of that. You need to actually change things up. Find the areas that you're weak in. It doesn't mean you dismiss the things you're good at, but you put them to the side. The example would be if you're a really good runner and you're swimming and your riding is really letting you down. Just keep your running ticking along. Don't emphasize the running so much. Put more work into your bike. You know, what are the things I need to do better on the bike? My endurance is terrible. Right. Start to do more longer rides or extend your longer ride. So don't stay with the, you know, I've only been doing an hour 30 for my long ride. Well, you need to push that out to an hour 45 over the next four weeks. Push that out to two hours, to two hours 15 to two hours 30. And that'll instantly change things. If you've just been doing the long ride an hour and a half, or if, you know, if you're really struggling with those threshold efforts, don't stop doing them. Don't. You know, I guarantee you, if I look back at the people who are struggling with threshold, guess what sessions they miss the most is those threshold sessions. Over a block of six weeks, I'll look back and they've missed one here, another one there, another one here, and they're nailing the other ones, the VO2 stuff where they're over under because they can do that with their eyes shut, but they can't do the threshold work. That's just one example of people who are avoiding the stuff that they need to do more of their little things. Pay attention to what is actually happening with, with where your weaknesses are and start to concentrate on that. That will actually change things incredibly quickly if you just start to think about that.

Yeah, as we, as humans, we're kind of creatures of habits. We just start to get into the, into our routine and we like our routine and it feels comfortable and you turn up to the same bunch right on Tuesday and everyone rolls around at the same pace and power. And you, you get to your endurance or high intensity sessions and you just do the ones you like and you become good at them. But that doesn't allow for that stimulus and overload that we really need. And so we want to be really clear here that that can be a trap, you know, just repeating the same training over and over week after week. But that doesn't mean that you can't repeat the same training and that doesn't mean that that's the reason you're plateauing. You can do the same training week after week, but you need to provide some sort of different stimulus or overload inside that same training. So can you give us that an example of, of, of what we're talking about here? Because it sounds like we're saying two opposite things, but both those opposite things are true.

Replicating the same thing is like that question we had from our Instagram where we're trying to ask whether we should be sitting in the time trial position or not. So we're trying to actually replicate what happens on race day. So in this situation where we're trying to do the same thing, we're trying to replicate training sessions that are going to replicate our race day. And the example you gave where the bunch ride people are rolling turns and they're going to be fantastic at that. But if they don't do any other stimulus, the only thing they're going to be good for is riding rolling turns. That's all they can do. If, if they get to a bike race where they're asked to do some threshold work where they attack and get breakaway and, and have to have to hold, you know, like POG 20k or 5k at threshold, and they haven't practiced that, they're going to get caught. So they've only got one trick in their, in their tool bag and they can't do anything else except for ride that, that type of session. So replicating what you do in training is going to mean you're going to be good at that and that's it. So we are trying to create more stimulus and you can do similar sessions but have different stimulus. And the things you can do is keep the frequency consistent. That's one thing you can do. Keep the duration varied, don't do the same duration all the time and then change the intensity for various sessions. Even though you're doing similar sessions, you can change those sessions three different ways. How often you do them, how long you do them for, and how hard you do them. So they're the things you need to really think about. Every time you're feeling like you're plateauing, change the stimulus because the body will get used to doing the same thing and it'll get very good at it. And if you keep throwing in changes, then it needs to adapt. And that's what we're trying to do. Get the body to adapt to a different stimulus.

The easy one that comes to mind. Is the Steve Monarchetti example, who's famous for the monafartlek. And he came on the podcast years ago and essentially told us how he's been doing monophartlek the same session for 25 years. And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. But if he just did the same session with the same intensity like you're talking about, that would be a problem. If you maintain the same pace in that session every single time, he would never improve. But as he gets fitter, he pushes the pace higher. And that's as simple as it needs to be. You can also change the way you do the session. You know, it's an over under session. So you can do it really at VO2 in the hard part and really at slow, almost walk recovery in the easy. Or you can do it just over threshold and just under so you're barely changing pace. Or you could do it the exact same way every time, but as you're getting fitter, you push for harder pace. That's the whole goal of training.

Yeah, it's a great example. And you can manipulate every session. And we're not advocating changing sessions for the sake of change. That's going the ridiculous. We know these sessions work, but if you're finding that you're actually not able to do the session properly, there's some other thing that's going on here that you may need to actually retest and you're not actually hitting the target numbers I'm talking about here. So keeping on top of where your form is so you can actually replicate that in training is also important. And that could cause a plateau because you're actually not finishing the sessions. And we get so many examples of this where athletes have got the wrong training pace for their run sessions or swim pace for their swim sessions, or power number for their bike sessions where they're actually failing the session. And guess what? Instead of doing an hour 20, they do the warm ups and then they get to Main Set 1 instead of doing Main Set 1, 2 and 3, they get halfway through Main Set 1. They've tested inaccurately, they're riding in this session way too hard, way too much power that they can't sustain. And therefore they fail that session and don't do main set two or three and end up doing 45 minutes instead of the hour 30. Don't do the three hard efforts that they're meant to do and all of a sudden you do that four or five times. Keep failing four or five sessions in a period of two or Three weeks, you've lost that consistency of training. You've lost the fact that the overload isn't happening because you're not finishing any sessions. Every time you don't finish a session, that's one less tick that you can give in that box of consistency. And consistency doesn't mean you just turn up and do some version of a training session. Consistency means you turn up and do a session that's got the duration and the intensity in it that you want to, to get the overload. And there are exceptions to that where if you're not feeling well or you need to adjust the session down. I'm not talking about those, I'm talking about where the expectation is that you're feeling okay and you should be doing this high intensity session and you can't do those, those efforts because you're got the wrong numbers and that will cause you to fail the session and not finish it. And that was what will cause you to lose the consistency. Even though you look back at your training block of three weeks of training, it's all green. But if you dig into the sessions, eight of those sessions were incomplete. Even though it's got the time right, you've done the duration, but you didn't do the intensity. So you've got to look for reasons why you're plateauing. This could be one of those key reasons where you're actually not, you're incompleting all the sessions.

Yeah, digging into that data, if an athlete was truly plateauing and we wanted to figure out why, we would really be digging into that and finding out, okay, what's happening happened here. Because most of the time it's remarkable how just a few really good blocks of training will turn an athlete around. A few really good consistent blocks of training where they don't miss. And it's very rare that an athlete would come to us and we look at their last 12 weeks and they haven't missed a session and then they still plateau and they don't test and they don't improve. In fact, it's almost a guaranteed way to improve. So that's the, that's the flip side of this coin is that the on off training is a killer for progress. And so if you really ask yourself when is the last time I strung, you know, a solid 12 week block together, where I hit every single endurance ride and run endurance swim session, where I hit the midweek intensity sessions as planned, where all of my other sessions were in great zone two, I maintained zone two, I maintained pressure on the Pedals, good pace, good training. You know, if you can answer yes to all those, then I highly doubt that you will be in a plateau position.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And look, as I said earlier, consistency, which is frequency of training, the duration and the intensity, get those things right over a really good block of training. There would be exceptions, of course, to every rule, but you would, there would be a reason, Jordan. There would be something going on in, in that person's world that's, that's preventing this, this improvement. And I would say that maybe the attention to detail in those sessions is lacking. So you could be doing a great 12 weeks of training and take no notice of what you did. Week one, week four, week six, and you're just turning up and you're just doing the sessions, you're just opening up the session. Today I've got a bike ride, I know I'm doing 40, 20s, I've got three sets and I'll just try my best and I'll just get through this session and that's all I'm going to do today. Whereas the other athlete, the motivated athlete, he's going to say, what did I do the last three weeks? Well, my numbers, I could hold 230 watts for those 40 second efforts. Can I hold 234 watts or 235 up the range or I'm so exhausted this week, I know this will be detrimental to my improvement. So I need to lower the range a bit. What did I do last week? So going in and finding out what are you doing in each particular week? And then when I finish a session, I want to see what my numbers are. I'm going into the session going, what did I do for those 17 efforts? And I go and check, was my cadence right, was my power right? What were my numbers? And then I go to the next week's session this knowing in my mind, what did I do last week? So this is a way that you'll be clearly seeing whether you're plateauing or not. And you need to adjust yourself in an individual day's session about where should I be? So that attention to detail, every day's training is really key to preventing a plateau. I can't emphasize that enough. If you're plateauing, I would guarantee you're not paying enough attention to what you're doing on a day to day basis. And you're just turning up and going through the motions and instead of turning up with a really good plan and you're preparing for that day's actual, you Know performance and you know, that's our motto, plan, prepare, perform, and so do those two things well. And I, I would be doubting that you would plateau.

Yeah, the correlation is just so inevitable between turning up each day and training with purpose and training accurately versus intermittent training or being off, being on. And if you do feel like you're plateauing and the data shows that, then yeah, we would look back at your last four, six 12 weeks and go, out of the seven sessions of the week, how many did you hit? And not only did you do them because you can just do the time like you just said, but not do the session properly. How many of them did you do properly? And if you added that on week after week, you might just find it was one week, it was five out of seven, one week, it was six out of seven, one week it was seven out of seven, you feel good. But the week before that was two out of seven because something happened and then the answer becomes really clear. The last mistake I wanted to touch on was just the mistake of jumping from thing to thing, program to program or session, style or session to style, and not sticking it out. That's a really easy way and easy mistake to make to store your progress and just jumping around so much. And this person said this, or this person said I should try that and doing that is a really inconsistent way of training. And it kind of has the same where you might be training but you're not training with the right purpose and that's going to plateau your progress.

Yeah, look, I'm going to use myself as an example. I have been fluffing around, I'm going to call it that, I'm calling myself out here. I just have, I've just had too many other things on my mind. So I've really not trained with purpose. And in the last six to eight weeks I've decided to do some training with purpose and go back to my old training sessions and doing some strength efforts, doing some threshold efforts and doing structured sessions. And before I was maybe just jumping on Zwift and doing some races here and there or just, you know, just, just basically trying to get a training session in where I know I have to keep fit. So I just try to do something and, and lo and behold, the minute I started to do some structure, all of a sudden I'm starting to improve again at a rapid rate. Whereas before I was just maintaining and the correlation was massive between training with purpose or training for the sake of training and wow, what a difference. And it got me excited and all of a sudden I'm hitting higher numbers. In my five minute strength efforts. I was, you know, the example I used before, I was doing 260 watts and struggling. And then three weeks of doing that, in the third week I was nailing some 275 watts. And they're little gain, little wins like that. You're 15 watts above just by doing it three weeks in a row. And the other sessions as well. But that's every Tuesday, you know, Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, three weeks in a row and you get this feedback and it's motivating that all of a sudden, wow. I look back and I'm. I'm 15 watts ahead of what I was three weeks ago. And that to me shows that, you know, I need to really, if I want to get the improvement I'm looking for and not stagnate, I actually need to do things in the right order, in the right manner that I know works.

Yeah, it comes back to very sound principles that we know work. We don't need to reinvent the wheel and it's what we always talk about that trust the process and trust those basic founding principles and don't over complicate it. And if you've made any one of those mistakes, then they're easy fixes and that's the promising side. So if you want help breaking through your own plateau to join us, you can go to our website. And as a reminder, as we said at the start of the episode, we coach athletes from anywhere in the world and you get the same level of service wherever you are. So if you do want help breaking your own plateaus and you're a bit stuck. We have also just had some more spots open up for US athletes, but internationally, anywhere around the world or Australia, apply@trivalocoaching.com thank you very much for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.

Sam.