Ultimate Workouts - 3 Must Do Training Sessions

This episode of the Get Fast podcast is brought to you by Tribalo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. You are joined, as always, by your host, former Australian Ironman champion Jared Donnelly. And I am Jordan Donnelly. Before we get into today's topic and today's episode, big news. We are finally back in the studio. How does it feel?

It's been a while, hasn't it?

Yeah. Yeah.

When was the last time we were in here?

It was months ago, actually. We've been recording a lot of podcasts virtually on Zoom. The audio hasn't been quite up to scratch, but hopefully we can get it right today. And we're happy to be back. We're on the brink of escaping the lockdowns and everything that was happening, and we are getting back to normal, so it feels good to be back in here. So on today's episode, we are talking about three must do training sessions. The must do training session you should be doing and making sure that you're including in your week, and three sessions that you really shouldn't be missing, the key sessions that you want to be doing to get the most out of yourself. But before we get into that, as always, what's caught your attention this week?

I think the biggest thing that's had an impact across the world has been the US Elections. And it might not sound like a topic for triathletes and cyclists, but the message is still the same. Joe Biden is the ultimate persistent, consistent guy. He's just had so many cracks at this, and at age 79, he finally gets his opportunity to become president of probably the biggest Western country in the world. And he's had three or four goes since he was in his 30s. He's always had the ambition to be president, and various things have happened to him along the journey, but he's stuck with it. And it's an example of. In athletics or your own work, if you keep that goal of staying persistent, never giving up, it's not over till it's over, and you will eventually reach your dream. The irony for me was watching Trump on his. On his show that he used to do, Celebrity Apprentice. Celebrity Apprentice. The irony of that is you're fired. And, you know, the American people have fired him, and that's the opposite, isn't it? Just someone who's probably got to a place where most people thought he never could get to, and. And now he's. He's out of it. So, yeah, I'm really pleased to see someone who sticks Out a task succeeding. And that's. That's sort of the one thing that stuck out in my mind. And so you know, the same topic is the welter Roglich, you know, the last stage, penultimate stage. Again he was, he was tested and, and he had the choice of losing the welter on that last stage with 3k to go when Carapaz and Hugh Carthy attacked and he had 45 second lead. And this had happened to him already in the Tour de France. Cracking when it counted the most. And I was just so impressed with the way he fought and held. He lost 25 seconds of the 45 at one stage. It was looking like it was all over and various things happened that he never gave up. Hugh Carthy decided he was going to help him because he didn't want to lose time against Carapaz. And then a movie star guy came back and helped one of his teammates and then a Jumbo Visma guy who was in the break came back and helped. And all these things in the last 10 minutes enabled Roglich to save his Tour. So it was another example of persistence and sticking to the task and never giving up. That was incredible. I was so impressed.

It was slipping away again, wasn't it? And it was very similar to that last stage of the Tour de France where it just slipped away from him. And that had to have been on his mind. And I guess he has a choice there whether he just lets the same thing happen and crumbles again and lets the pressure get to him or he fights like he did tooth and nail to hold that trip 24 second lead.

Yeah, he had to decide, you know, is it too hard or am I. Am I going to not go down with the ship? And I love it when I see someone. You know, it would have been great for Carapraz to attack and win and win the, win the Tour on the last day. But, but you know, we saw it in the Giro with, with the Australian Henley. Henley, Jai Hindley and, and, and the Ineos guy, which I can't remember.

It's always a confusing name. Ty Gegen Gegenheart.

And you know, it was all down. Again, a decision. You have to make a decision. Am I going to just bury myself to see what happens? And they are. They're at their limit. It's a mental game and you know, it just keeps happening all the time. There's you're in situations or we're watching situations and we're in situations ourselves where we have to make a decision. How mentally tough are we, and you know, I was looking at my performance as an example on Thursday night's handicap race and I had three goes at trying to stay with the bunch and the fourth go I just cracked. And I actually looked at my data later on and my heart rate was 184. You know, no wonder I couldn't do another effort. But I've already gone through three efforts of trying to stay with a bunch and there are reasons for that. The room was 30 degrees, there was no airflow. You know, they're excuses probably, but they're actual facts. Heat does affect, affect me like that. So these are examples of when you have decisions that you have to make at crucial times and you know, can you make the good decision? And even though you're hurting, but everybody else is hurting as well, you've gotta step up. And at the end it's so satisfying that you actually didn't wimp it and you actually put yourself on the line. And you could see when Roglic finished the relief in his face crossing the line, because he obviously would have had his director sportive in his ear telling him that you're safe by 20 seconds or 25 seconds, you know, you've just won the Tour. And the joy, even though he wasn't the best rider on that stage, but he limited his losses to win the stage. It was outstanding.

So what goes through your head then when you get dropped last week after your fourth crack and you would be saying to yourself all the time, I never want to get dropped. I want to be one of those people. And you are one of those athletes that toughs it out the most. But sometimes it happens for various factors. Like you said, there were some factors, factors there that would say limited you. So how do you coach yourself through that and talk yourself through that when you did end up getting dropped and you were on your absolute limit, what do you say to yourself?

There's a few things, disappointments, the first thing in yourself. But post race, it's really good to work out. You know, was it that I mentally gave up or was it that I was physically gone beyond where I could sustain another effort? And looking at the data and I knew going into it that I didn't have the room cold enough because I'd already experienced it two months earlier in a room where it was 36 degrees with no airflow. And basically my performance was 10 or 15 watts lower across the 36 minute effort than it was when I was in a room that had air conditioning and airflow. And I knew that going into it. But I still want to. You still want to push yourself and perform well. But it's a great example of how conditions can, can affect a performance. It's a completely different topic. But, but you know, you think, oh, I was really average today, you know, what's wrong with my form? These are the things you could think about. But no, you don't. You just go, it's just a one night where the temperature was, was affecting me so dramatically that you know, even when I got dropped and I had to try to stay with the next bunch who'd caugh that was a tough effort to try and stay with them. And I knew that I was like 50 watts lower than I should have been riding. But that tells me in my mind, well, I can hardly push the pedals here. So you know, you can reconcile that easily. It's a one off night and you know, you live to fight another day.

Definitely. And on that note of, you know, it being such a mental game, I want to bring up a point that's caught my attention which we spoke about a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. But it's this concept of these little micro breaks that you get in cycling. They can really help you push again. And I spoke about the fact that in running, and you brought this up to me as well. In running, your legs are what's moving you. So when your legs stop moving, you stop moving fast. Whereas you made a really good point to me that on the bike you're attached to a machine. So if you don't pedal, it does actually keep rolling, albeit not as fast, but it keeps rolling. And so I'm finding that these little micro brakes are incredible to allow you to put, you get a 10 second or 15 second break from the pressure on the pedals. It gives you another one to two minutes of effort at your threshold or slightly above threshold, which is so helpful mentally to know that if I can just back off for five or 10 seconds here and just tuck in and hide or recover, I've got another two minutes in me or four minutes in me. And I'm finding that that's really helpful in race scenarios and efforts where you're trying to hold mentally you can really win, win the game there by knowing that these micro brakes are so helpful. And you found that riding, you know, outside again as well because you've been indoors for so long.

Yeah, and the training indoors during the COVID period, which, you know, most of the world's experience that, you know, I can't imagine there's anybody who hasn't had to train indoors during this last 2020. You're fortunate if you, if you've been able to ride outside. You know, most of the time we weren't allowed outside at all. So is one thing that the COVID the positive thing that it's taught us is that training indoor, it's relentless. It's like running because if you stop pedaling indoor, the bike doesn't really go. You know, your power drops instantly. It drops instantly outdoors as well, but the bike still moves in a bunch and you know you're getting a draft or whatever, but, but on zwift or on an indoor trainer, you're just not getting that. So the pressure on the pedals that we talk about a lot in cycling and triathlon, it is so evident when you've been training indoor and you go outdoor, the recovery is there because you've spent literally six months with pressure on the pedals, with no rest, no micro fractures of. It's like being a runner. So the indoor trainer, bike rider feels like what a runner feels like where there's no period of recovery. And you know, that's been a real positive for almost everybody to a T who has been on this program with us, this journey with us. And you know, this morning we happened to be doing a team's time trial and I was astounded how much recovery, how good I felt that I could come back and do another effort time and time again over a 40 minute ride where you know, you're doing efforts that are in the 120 to 130% FTP and and you get a small break and then you can come back and do it again, you know, 10 times. And you know, that would have been a harder session the last couple of years without having that indoor stuff for six months. Yeah. So it is it. You know, Covid's created many negatives, but that's one positive. It's made us able to have a better engine, a better threshold engine like a runner. And that goes so well on the bike.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I found. Anyway, so getting into today's topic, as a coach, I know that you would think that all training sessions are equal and you want all athletes to treat training sessions equal so they don't. They miss as little sessions as possible. That's a big point that you make that you don't expect people to be perfect, but you want to miss as little sessions as possible. But with the wide range of sessions that you can do. I want to know from you what you see as the most valuable sessions for an athlete, what are the ones that will give you the most bang for your buck?

I can be controversial here because I've had a bit of time to think about this question. I reckon, and this is a disclaimer at the start, I reckon your recovery period is near on as important as the hardest session you'll do. And people probably go, well, that's crap because you're not going to improve without training hard. And I agree with that. You actually have to have some sort of overload before you'll get, you know, improvement. But if you keep having overload with no recovery, eventually you'll stop improving. So the person who really works hard at his recovery will actually end up a better rider than the person who continually pushes themselves. So that's the first thing. And that's sort of something that I, you know, I really don't think people give much credit to or kudos to the recovery. Oh, yeah, look, it's just a recovery session, whatever. Well, it is just a recovery session and whatever because you're writing pretty low watts, low, low heart rate. You know, you probably, you know, if you're a runner, you're probably really relaxed running. You can talk, you know, talk away the whole run. As a rider, you know, you definitely could have a, you know, do some emails or, you know, that's, that's how ridiculously easy it should be. But it's important that you don't miss it and it's important that you do the session properly. And, you know, for some people who think it's just a short recovery ride, you know, as you, as you really focus on improving your endurance, the recovery ride should be progressively getting longer. But, you know, in winter, we don't have a lot of opportunity outdoor to do that. It's freezing cold and you're riding so slow. It's actually, you know, it's not an enjoyable thing to do. So indoor, that's where the opportunity is. You know, it is a very boring session. There isn't a lot to focus on. But we're trying to get blood flow so you can add an extra bit of time to help you with your endurance. Which is probably what brings me to the thing that you thought I was going to say in the first place, the endurance. So as much as recovery is a key thing, it's got a disclaimer. It's not going to get you. If you just did recovery rides, you're just not going to be a better rider. You're going to be a better Rider with recovery rides in the things that we're going to talk about now. And the endurance ride is the number one thing. If you don't have endurance, then all the other sessions come race time as well. They're going to be compromised for sure because you can't sustain the effort for long enough. I just had a chat this morning with a rider who said, oh, I just really want to work on being able to sustain my efforts longer and longer. I've got really good short power, but I can't keep it up. And there's all these other guys, they drop me halfway around the ride. I'm great for half the ride, but these guys, they can keep doing it for the whole ride. That's where I want to be. And that's because he doesn't have the endurance yet. He's strong, he's powerful, he probably leave me for dead in one or two minute efforts. But if we went over an hour, I'll be carrying him, holding him, pushing him. And that's where the endurance training is such a vital aspect of any program. And without that aerobic fitness component, you can't train anaerobically because you can't sustain it. That's the reason. So, you know, there's countless examples of elite world champions, Olympic champions who do lots of Zone two endurance. Not zone three, not zone four, not zone five, not zone one, Zone two, where you're not doing recovery but you're not putting too much pressure on yourselves. That's one type of endurance. If you just did that alone, that's actually not going to make you a better rider. Still, it's going to give you the ability to do the other sessions well. But the endurance component needs to be a mixture. It can't be the same thing week in, week out, 52 weeks a year. We need to break that endurance right up into one week where we're doing zone two, a couple of weeks where we're doing some intensity in our endurance, we warm up with zone two, warm down with zone two, and in the middle main part of the body we might actually do some strength, high intensity or some short, hard efforts, unpredictable high intensity efforts that are really going to push you similar to a race for a cyclist. That's what it is. It's road racing. Criterium is unpredictable efforts where people attack. And as a triathlete, we want to do some sub threshold session in that endurance where we're going to replicate our race just like a cyclist does. We're going to replicate the things that are important in A triathlon which is riding around that 80 to 90%. The longer the course goes obviously to an ironman, the more you are to 75, the shorter it is sprint, the more you are to 95% of your threshold. So having that in your endurance ride is something that if you don't do that, where are you doing it? Where are you practicing the thing that's going to happen in your race? So sure the other sessions can do that, the high intensity sessions and threshold sessions can do that, but it's not when you're tired, that's when you want to be testing yourself. And you've often said this as an example. How the hell do you sprint tired as a cyclist? You know, I can push 900 watts. When I'm fresh sprinting, I'm a hero. But after 2 hours 30 of riding or 45 minutes of high intensity riding, I can only push 500 watts. What's happening here, that's when you need to be practicing what's going to happen in a race. So that endurance ride has got so much value to it. And that is in my opinion, the ride that will give you the biggest improvement over a long period of time. And it's like putting money in the bank. You know, if you just keep punching out that endurance ride and you know what I do for the last 10 years, my Saturday ride or Sunday ride, you know, it's been 120k to 200k for nearly 10 years. And, and people want to know what the secret is. There's the secret. Make that endurance ride a non negotiable. And if you can't do it on Saturday, do it on Sunday. And if you can't do it then do it midweek. But you have to have it every seven days. It doesn't have to be hard, but it has to have a variety of really key components, key outcomes that you're trying to achieve. And not repeating it all the same time every week, not repeating 52 weeks of the same endurance ride, mixing it up so that you are really stimulating different aspects of everything that is involved in being a better athlete.

So for triathletes, do they need to be doing an endurance ride and endurance run and endurance swim or just one of them or change?

Absolutely, yeah. If you're not doing some sort of swim that replicates, you know, is it a 500 meter swim in a sprint, is it a 1500 meter in an Olympic, a 1900 and a 70.3 or near on 4K in an Ironman? If you're not doing Chunks of swims where you're swimming 500 reps or 1000k reps or 2 by 15, depending on if you're an ironman or if you're a sprint athlete. You need to have that in your program because that's what's going to happen on race day. You're not doing intervals on race day. Intervals are the thing that gets us to improve. But without the endurance aspect like I just spoke about on the bike, you can't actually sustain it in the swim section of the triathlon. The same thing happens in the run. You know, it's so crucial because the run's the third leg. You can get away with it a bit in the swim because you're fresh and, you know, on the bike, the bike's propelling you, so you're still moving, but you still have to push the pedals. But as a runner, we talked about this at the start of the podcast, you're propelling everything and you're most tiredest after being in the water and on your bike. Now you're trying to run and, you know, if you, if you don't have that endurance to sustain that effort across the whole, you know, whether it's a half marathon, a marathon or a 10K, you're going to fade. And the endurance session is the thing that will stop you from fading across as a cyclist, as a swimmer, as a. As a runner.

Great. So that's the first major session that has to be included, one of the keystones. So if you're getting your endurance session in, what's the next keystone session that you'd want athletes to be completing? And I know that you're going to answer this with. It applies whether you're just a cyclist or a triathlete. The top of session is the same, isn't it?

Yeah. Whether you're a runner as well or an endurance swimmer. But I have to say that depending on the event you're doing. Are you focusing on an endurance triathlon? Are you focusing on endurance Gran fondo, an endurance swim. So this next point that I'm going to make really depends on what type of athlete you are and what you're trying to become in your chosen sport. Let's just take triathlon to start with. If you're choosing the Ironman, you need to do lots of work at threshold, because you're going to spend a hell of a lot of time between above tempo and just below threshold in your race. And it could be five hours at that. If you haven't got that sustained threshold Riding or sub threshold sweet spot riding, come race day, you're going to find it really difficult to sustain it. So the threshold is really important. But having said that, if you're a criterium rider and you happen to break away, and we've seen so many examples in the Tour de France where riders have broken away with really high powered attacks and what do they have to do for the remainder of that attack to stay away and win the stage right at threshold. So if you haven't experienced riding at threshold, like the example I talked about earlier, that the athlete who said to me, the cyclist who said to me, I'm really good at short, high powered efforts, but I can't sustain it well, that's the all round cyclist, which we've talked about many times on podcasts, is being able to do this in training so that when it comes to a race situation, you can just zone in on what your numbers are. So there's 20 minutes to go and you've broken away, or there's 20k to go, which is possibly 30 minutes, you basically look down and go, what's my best 30 minute threshold? And all of a sudden you're going to ride in that zone. If the guys catch you, you couldn't have done anything else anyway. There's a thing, a little trick you can do is to spend the first five minutes riding a little bit above it so you can establish a break and make them give up. But that's unsustainable, so you have to drop back to a little bit below threshold when you've done that, and many times we've been in a breakaway where I've said that to the guys, come on, let's just give it five minutes of really hard riding to establish the break properly and, and then we can go into a normal threshold riding. And you see the Tour de France all the time, the guys in the break going flat out for the first half hour, hour, two hours to try and get in the break and then everything slows down. Cause they can't sustain that intensity. So the threshold training session, if you avoid that, and most people do, why, because it's incredibly uncomfortable and you almost dread, oh, I've got, I've got to do threshold today, you know, and that's why it's so important to do, because most people avoid it. And if you can bring that as part of your armory, you're going to be such a better runner, such a better cyclist, such a better swimmer, and, and avoiding it is, is just, you know, you might as well Just be one of the, one of the pack riders or pack runners. You're just not going to get the improvement that you need. So. So where do you ride at threshold? Well, sometimes you want, you need to be riding just under. So if 100% is our threshold, you know, we want to sit between 98 and probably 108% at the most. Again, it depends on how long the actual effort is. If the effort's eight minutes, it's, you know, it's a lot harder to sustain 108% of 8 minutes or 108% of 12 minutes or 15 minutes than it is to sustain, to do 108 minutes or 4 minutes. So the shorter the session, the higher you want to be around that threshold, mark around that hundred, but not past 108, the longer the threshold effort. You have to keep it down so that you can repeat the effort various stages through your build program towards your A race. You need to change that so that as you get towards, you know, the taper period, you're doing longer threshold. If it's at the start to build that aerobic base. And then towards the end you're shortening it so you can get higher threshold to the upper range of your threshold without going into VO2. And that's a really important thing to know the difference between it, because once you tip over that red zone, then you've really, as we know in VO2, you've got two or three minutes at that percentage and then you have to stop or, or slow down.

So that can be a little bit misleading because 98 to 108% is quite, is quite high intensity quote, unquote. I know you're saying it's threshold, but for more endurance events, whether it's a gran fondo that's going to be a 3 hour plus ride, or any triathlon that's longer than a sprint, you know, even an Olympic, up to a 70.3 or Ironman. How long are you wanting to do these sustained threshold efforts for, for example, in training sessions?

Yep. So that's why we, we don't, we gotta be careful not to go too deep in these threshold sessions, because they do, they're very taxing and you need to have recovery. And if you do them too often, and I'm saying some people, I want to improve my threshold, they end up doing three sessions a week of threshold. And that's actually going to make you sick or injured because it's unsustainable, as we've said many times, things that you can't Keep doing. You're going to break down because of it or you're gonna be so unmotivated because it's just too hard. So we want to make sure that, you know, we have a lower range that we can drop down to that's not dropping down further into the next zone. And you know, some people say 94%, 96, but I'm, I want you to be as close to that, under that limit as possible. And you know, 98 to 102 is probably, if you're an Ironman trainer, that's where you want to be focusing on. If you're a half Ironman, you want to bump it up to probably 104%. If you're an Olympic, you definitely want to be riding at 108, depending on the length of the event and of course, what stage you're in of your program. Like I said earlier, at the start of the program or towards the end of your program. So the length of the threshold session is directly related to your event. So if you're doing a gran fondo that has an hour's climb in it, you need to be spending, you know, two by 45 minutes at, you know, at 90% somewhere around that, that area. So you can't do that at 98%. So, so therefore you have to break it down to 4 by 20s or 6 by 15s where you can ride at 98%. It is near impossible to ride race pace in training. So that's obvious. So we need to break it down. That's why we do it in intervals.

And I know you like scheduling some of those longer ones where it's 3 by 30 or 3 by 45 or even yourself, you've done 2 by 45k, you know, time trials at threshold or just under that, around that 90% range or even 1 times 90 kilometers, which is just a grueling session.

And in a race, you know, at 90k, you're not going to ride at Threshold, you're going to be riding it at 90% at the most. You know, if you've got an engine that a VO2 of 90 or 88, you know, maybe you can ride at 95%. But you know, for 90k time trial, you know, I'm so excited if I can ride 90%. But, but that is the sweet spot. You know, 86 to 94 is a sweet spot under sub threshold and, and sorry, above sub threshold and under threshold. Yeah, but that's a different, a different session we're talking about there. We're talking about trying to get ride right writing at threshold. And obviously we can't go past 15 minutes otherwise we're doing an FTP test. So the number that we really look towards is that five to 12 minutes, that's our zone for the threshold session. And you wouldn't want to be doing too many more efforts because you would be so exhausted if you tried to do 30 or 45 minutes at threshold straight. Because it's, that's, that's your race pace and you're not going to be doing race pace in every training session.

That's a really important distinction to make and it can get a little bit confusing when you're talking about thresholds and some thresholds and they're, they are only slightly different. But like you're saying, you, you just won't be able to achieve, you know, really long duration sessions of threshold.

No, you're just going to exhaust yourself and you won't finish the session. So, you know, as you know, we have ranges in our sessions where this is the top of the range, this is the bottom of the range, and you sit where you think you can finish the session. It's no good doing, you know, four by eight minute efforts and your first one's at 108% and your last one's at 90. That's actually not achieving what we're trying to do. We want 32 minutes. Four by eight is 32 minutes at threshold. Well, actually you've got 24 minutes at threshold and one at sub threshold. So you've actually not achieved the outcome of the session. So you're better off doing all four at 98% and getting 32 minutes at threshold than doing three.

Yep. Makes perfect sense. All right, what is the third must do workout in?

And I suppose this is the one that everybody's good at, which is the over under. And what do I mean by over under? I mean way over 120 and up. So it's a high intensity, high intensity session and the recovery is really short and it's generally half of what the effort is. So 2 to 1. So if the effort's 60 seconds, the recovery is 30. If the effort's 40 seconds, the recovery is 20 even down to 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. These are trying to make you ride repeated efforts over threshold, which is going to stimulate the anaerobic zone six, Zone seven, the area that most of us are good at because we've been doing and we're talking specifically bike riding here. If you've ridden a lot of bunch rides, you're really Good at doing an effort, then recovering, then doing another effort and recovering. So it's not something that's foreign to most bike riders, but having to Repeat it, say 29 times or 35 times in a training session, can you do the first block, the second block and the third block evenly? And so if you start it, let's give an example. If we're trying to ride 30 seconds at probably 300 watts is the range we're trying to ride at. And by the third set, if you're doing 270, 260 and 300 watts is 140% for you, you're not, you're not going to get, you're not going to get the same outcome if you start to fade in this, because sure, it's about riding high intensity, but it has to be across no different to the threshold. You have to do all three sets at a range that you can sustain. And this is the one where we want you to go hard, but you've still got to manage your effort. And just like in a bike race, if you attacked four times at your all out sprint to the finish line, you would get tighter and tighter and your first effort might be 1200 watts. Your second effort will be 800, third effort will be 600. And your last effort you'll be. There's not much change between what you're doing pushing the pedals now and so called attack. So you've actually still got to measure your effort. But doing these efforts will actually make it so much more comfortable come race day when if there are 20 attacks, you know that you can sustain 60 seconds, 30 seconds, 40 seconds, and then have such a short recovery if someone counters again, great. That's part of my game. I'm doing that in training. And if you do that 20 times in training, they're gonna have to do a lot of attacks to get rid of you. And that is one of the reasons why we do so many of these above threshold high intensity sessions where you're really in zone 6 and 7 for the majority of the time and they're agony, but because they're so short, you can seem to get through them as compared to threshold. Comparing the two, threshold's way harder in my opinion. But it's such a key element to the three most important things. And that's the topic for today. And look, I've talked about four of them being the recovery, but definitely the over under high intensity session, the threshold session and the endurance session. The variety in the endurance session, they're the three things that you can build your whole program around. And you know, I'm very confident that if you did those things and didn't train at all around those sessions, just did easy recovery, you would improve at a rapid rate.

No matter what distance the event is, you still want to be doing the high intensity sessions because that's what provides the overload, isn't it?

That's what provides the fitness improvement. And that's the difference here. Sometimes we're trying to get or in every training session we're trying to improve our fitness, except for recovery. So make that distinction. Every training session we are trying to achieve something that contributes to us being fitter. So this is something that's definitely going to make us more fitter than doing a tempo ride. You're going to improve your fitness at a greater rate by doing this. You can't do it forever, week in, week out, 52 weeks a year. And that's why we throw in some recovery in. Periodization is so important. But having this in blocks is going to keep that staircase that we talk about so often. Work hard, recover. Work hard, recover. And your fitness line is now there, now it's there. And with, with these sessions, you're going to get that, you know, improvement at a rapid rate. If you're just doing continuous, easy sessions, your, your line is a nice straight line. It's fractionally going up. It could take years to get to where you want to. Slow progress, slow progress. And sometimes that's good, depending on what phase you're in of your career or your goals. You can't be doing this the whole time again, it's unsustainable for long periods of time. You need to have recovery. You don't see the pros training like this 12 months of the year. You know, I've seen so many pros take eight weeks off in their season and that's when they do their easy base training. You know, and there's so much data telling us that if you just did a little bit of intensity in your base training, you'll be at a higher level when you start to resume your normal training again, which is really ideal. And so, you know, you sneak a little bit of intensity here and there. It doesn't hurt you that much, doesn't create too much fatigue because you're only doing it not on top of the other main sessions that you do in your season. There's a huge difference there. But you know, so much evidence, so much anecdotal evidence that tells us that high intensity session is something that you should keep doing throughout, you know, the whole year, but not, you know, every single week.

So the last caveat I want to get really real clarity on is even if you're an endurance athlete and you're a triathlete doing a 70.3 or Ironman, you still want to be doing these sessions, don't you? But not in every discipline.

That's right. You know, you can't be doing this as a runner. It is so fatiguing and the risk of injury is too high. As an Ironman triathlete, you're training for a marathon, so there's no need to do 120, 140% pace. As a runner, you're getting it on the bike and you can do some short, hard 50s in the water that will give you a cardiac response that gives you the fitness improvement you're looking for. 25s, 50s, hundreds on the bike, in the pool, you're getting so much of that high intensity that you don't need to do it in the run. We've got example after example of runners who haven't done any intensity and their 10k PBS just keep tumbling down. They're running faster and faster week in, month in, year in by hardly doing any intensity. But if you're just a runner on its own, you do need to have that. And the reason you can do the intensity as a runner is because you're probably got a really good base but as a triathlete, which is spending a lot of time swimming and riding, so you don't have the same base as a pure runner. So you know, we use the other legs, the other disciplines, swimming and riding, to get our high intensity and it translates across to a runner. And that's an important distinction to make.

Especially if you're an age grouper, which most people listening to this are. They're not professionals. And professionals need to be doing high intensity. Yes, they're the only ones.

Yeah, there's a huge difference. And look, you know, even some of the professionals still perform very well without killing themselves with, you know, some intervals. As a runner, you know, I'd love to see some more statistics on, you know, who are the best runners and what are their, what are their training sessions and everybody's different. People perform better with different stimulus. So what works for one person may not work for another. But yeah, definitely as an age grouper you really should be getting your intensity, not as a runner. Getting your intensity on the bike is really going to enable you to be an all round better triathlete.

Would you Say that's more to do with reducing the risk of injury than.

No, two things, the fatigue. So injuries, a scary part of running fast all the time, it's there, it's always there. Runner's either running or he's injured, there's no in between. How you going? Yeah, I'm running well, how you going? I'm injured. Hardly anybody says I'm not going that well as a runner. And you'll go, oh, why? You go, oh, because I had an injury. So the fatigue thing is just so running, because you're propelling yourself in the water as a swimmer, the water is holding you up. As a bike rider, the bike is holding you up. As a runner, you're holding yourself up. And it's all involves the whole skeletal system, the whole muscular system, gravity. You've got to propel yourself, yourself, as you said earlier in the podcast. Whereas put effort through the bike and the bike moves forward, it doesn't involve using arms and legs together, whereas running, it's just a whole coordination of activity. So the fatigue is massive. And that's why you don't want to add another intensity session to your running. You've already got enough as a cyclist and as a swimmer, adding another one, it's just going to get you more tired and possibly overreach all the time and therefore your rate of improvement because you'll lose the consistency. So as we said with the example on the bike where you do four eight minute efforts, if you could just keep those four runs going, you know, they're not hard, they're long and they might have some strength, heel efforts or something like that, but just do them and you'll still be a better runner because you've done four each week for the last 30 weeks as compared to one hard session and not running much more other than that because you're injured again, you want to get to race day having done, you know, six months of four times a week and that adds up to 4, 400 runs compared to six months of one really flat out session each week. You know, the person who's more consistent, persistent is going to have the better outcome.

It's a really important factor to think about, isn't it? The toll of what a session can do on the body. And you can exhaust yourself on the bike, but it's not damaging your skeletal system, it'll be tiring for you of your muscular system. And then swimming is like you said before, it is actually upper and lower body and you are having to keep yourself afloat. But there's no gravity there because you've got, you're in the water so you can be just as tired, but you're not coming out and risking skeletal injury, I guess.

Yeah. And look, the, you know, the upper body, shoulders and arms, they're the ones that are getting tested the most. And if you're a prolific kicker, which you shouldn't be in an endurance sport, you should be just having your legs for balance and a little bit of propulsion. But that's not the main. It's just, it's your upper arms and shoulders that are, they're going to be very tired. Plus, if you fit in the water, you're not going to stress your cardio that much in the interval session, in the swim session. Of course you are. It's upper body plus cardio. But in a race situation, you should not be breathing that hard in a swim. You know, Ironman 4k or half Ironman, roughly 2k. It should be comfortable. So these high intensity sessions that we're talking about on the bike, that will really stimulate not only your cardio and all the working muscles and cells, but it really sets up every sport that you're doing. That's the key thing. We're using the intensity sessions in some sports to help the other sport and therefore we don't have to replicate that in a run or that as much in the swim.

Well, there you have it. Three must do workouts to include into your training program. If you're not having them as the basis of your training program, then as you would say, you're probably doing something wrong.

Yep. And look, it will just take you longer to get to where your, your first part of your journey's aspiring to. That's the key thing. It's okay to not have those things in your program, but your progression will be so much longer and slower. And again, that's okay.

That's it for this episode. Thanks very much for listening and we'll see you next time.