Forget Training Zones This Is What Actually Makes You Better

Training advice can sometimes feel a little overwhelming, but often it can pay off to remember the basics. Avoid over-complicating things because that can lead to better performance outcomes. What are those basic pieces of advice, though, that we should always remember? In this video, I'm diving in to hopefully remind us all what we should prioritize and focus on. To help me out in this, I've spoken to a sports scientist and world tour coach at Jacob Alula, Peter Leo, also another former world tour coach at Bahrain Victorious, Tim Kenner, and Ian Boswell, ex-Tour de France pro turned gravel pro and unbound winner who's now passing on the knowledge he's learned as a rider with EF Coaching. A mix of different perspectives, and I wanted to get their different takes on what truly matters when it comes to trying to ride a bike as fast as possible. I have got my own perspectives on this, and I remember at times as a pro feeling stressed out, trying to focus too hard on elements of my own performance and preparation, and losing sight of what really matters in my eyes. Riding a bike as much as you can and being able to keep doing that as consistently as possible. We've all got different ideas on this, and it was interesting to get the perspectives from our coaches on what their overarching philosophy on training is. I would like to quote something that is actually known from engineering, which is called form follows function. I think the same applies to our adaptive system, like our physiology. It's basically the predominant stimulus we get exposed day in, day out, will be the one that we actually adapt to. I think the specificity of your training is quite important in order to be able to see those gains. I would say the biggest contributor to getting fitter is consistency. Consistency doesn't necessarily mean training every day, but I think it means for most people who are time crunch, you might have families and work, and you're trying to balance their performance and improvement with life. It's finding consistency throughout a regular training plan. The key to success is finding a way to incorporate training into your lifestyle. I think people get really caught up on their goal or their outcome, and they forget about putting habits and processes in place that lead to the outcome. I think then, obviously, you can break the event they're targeting down, understand what's needed to perform at that event, and then structure the training accordingly. My key takeaways there are that however hard you're training, whatever time you might have available, keeping things consistent and specific to your goal are key. On that, it's also important to make sure that what you're taking on in terms of training is realistic and you can keep it going. As Peter Leo said, even those of us looking to train on four or five hours a week can also overtrain and burn out too if you get the balance of your riding wrong. I think how hard you ride, your intensity can be one of the biggest challenges to get right, no matter who you are. Too hard and you'll feel burnt out, too easy, and you're not making the most of your time. What are the key rules to live by then when it comes to deciding how often you can train each week and also how hard you can push yourself in each ride? As a coach, I actually get a bit frustrated with people who want to commit to a training plan but don't bring the time budget with them that is actually needed to be able to follow something more structured. Then my recommendation is, well, if you cannot really provide that kind of flexibility or time allowance with you, then it's probably better to just go out, have fun, and ride however you feel and whenever you feel like. The trap people fall into when they can only train for say four times a week or say four to five hours is every week looks the same. Often, the harder rides aren't hard enough and the easier rides aren't easy enough. There's also no progression and no overload. You need to stress the body in some way to drive the adaptation. Is it possible to overtrain if you are doing a four or five-hour week on the bike? Oh, big time. I think that's what we see very often with amateur athletes that they become very, very greedy from the intensity side and every short training session ends up being a high-intensity workout, which obviously should not be the case. I think there is a lot of more variation that you could add to a short training session. I think it's a bit debated but if you're really time-consumed, you want to get some aerobic benefits, you want to get in an early session, why not do a 45-minute faster session? It does not always have to be a really hard session but you will probably end up having one to two high-intensity sessions in a week when you're time-consumed. That is one of the things I put in at least once a week is, hey, go out and ride with friends. It's however many hours. It's two to three-hour ride on the weekend. Don't look at your power meter. Don't look at your heart rate. Just go ride your bike and have fun because I think that's a huge part of the sport of cycling is the social aspect of it. For so many of us, it is an opportunity for us to connect with friends, to ride new places, to go explore. The only way to do that is, and the best way to do that is with other people. I don't think those should be counted as junk miles. I do think that those are, yes, the social miles are just as important as the hard workouts. Lots of people that are in this kind of situation that I work with personally, they're often shocked about how easy the training feels but their progression, they see their progression when we test them and when we look at their numbers because I'm accumulating work with them over time and it's sustainable. Once they zoom out over six to eight weeks, the amount of work they've done is more than they would have done previously but it feels easier and more sustainable. A few points that really hit home personally there, especially now considering that I've got far less time to train as when I was a pro and it can be so easy to get this sudden burst of motivation, jump on the bike and just smash myself for a week. As you've heard there, it's actually more important to remember the big picture. Look at where you want to be in a few months' time rather than focus on those short-term gains. On the other side of the training considerations, I've always been a big believer in the power of recovery and how important it is if you want all that training to actually sink in and allow you to improve. How important is rest for the average rider trying to train around a busy life? The biggest problem you've got with amateur athletes is that they want to do the same training volume than the pros but they forget that the pros actually do it for work and they can schedule recovery time in their world while age groupers or recreational, they need to go to work, they have a family around. The biggest shifts that can be made in recovery is allowing the time for recovery. I think it can be one simple thing is probably scheduling two rest days a week. Why not? If your Monday is a rest day and maybe the Friday prior to the weekend is a rest day, then you can do some quality work between Tuesday and Thursday, which is a three-day block, and then you could do a quality bunch of work over the weekend, which might go a bit more into the volume part, which is Saturday, Sunday, and then you could rotate through and that could be nicely built week over week because it follows the same off load and deload structure. I think that's something that you should, if you're self-coached or if you're just interested in adding structure to your training, you should always have that in mind. It's not about only that week, it's also what the week afterwards looks like. I think having a bit of a more week-by-week concept helps a lot. I still think perception of how you feel is incredibly important. Sometimes it is better to call it a day, rest, and get back to it the next day because the last thing you want to do, and I see so many athletes do this, is they grind through one or two workouts. The next thing you know, they're skipping workouts for the remainder of the week or for the next two weeks. There are a lot of other factors that affect your training and how you feel on the bike that maybe aren't calculated in HRV or in your training stress scores. It's just unquantifiable metrics that we don't yet have the ability to quantify. Last up, let's talk about structure because I've noticed in stopping racing and training full-time that in those moments when I do focus my riding more, try to reintegrate some structure to my otherwise free-spirited, quite haphazard riding, I do start to notice my fitness notching up without actually adding a whole lot more volume. How structured does riding need to be and what are the key ways to build this into your training? Advantage of adding structure comes in the plan being more sustainable, being able to notice if you're progressing and if you are, why, so you can change things, and making the most out of your limited time. The recommendation is never do or copy what the pros do. I think you can get some inspiration of what they do, but you should be able to break that down and say, okay, what does that mean for myself? If a pro is doing four times four minutes at 500 watts, of course you can do four times four minutes, but probably you should start at 250-300 watts and progress from there, or set yourself an RPE, like a perception of effort target, or use your heart rate ceiling as, I do four times four minutes, but I don't want to go above 170 beats per minute, something like that. I think use inspiration, but break it down to your individual needs is my key message. Structured training, it's really about maximizing the time you have available. For a lot of people, that may be eight to 10 hours a week. When you do have those limited slots of availability to ride, to make sure that you're trying to get something out of that workout. There's plenty of different areas to work on within that framework, whether it's you're working on your endurance, you're working on your VO2 max, your sprint, identifying what you want to improve on, and then doing workouts that improve on those potential weaknesses that you have. We all have weaknesses. It's easy for us to want to work on our strengths. For myself, I would love to just go do climbing efforts every day, but I know that doing some sprint efforts or some efforts on the flats are probably more beneficial to me, just given that they're harder efforts for me to execute. Finding a couple of key workouts that you enjoy, but also a couple of key workouts that maybe are a little bit more mentally challenging to find progress in areas that you might not be as skilled in. A lot of really good, simple advice there, but are we all guilty of aiming for the marginal gains rather than the maximal ones? Also, what's the best way of staying motivated no matter what training you're trying to take on? I think even at the elite level, it's still important that the fundamentals are right. In a sport like cycling, where there's lots of different types of marginal gains you can chase, I think people often lose sight of the basics that have the biggest impact, such as consistently riding, progressing your training, recovering properly. I think I just love seeing progress throughout the season. I think we all have a point in the year when we lose fitness, and just finding the joy in seeing where I've been and where I want to get to. Of course, as I get older, I know that my power, my speed, everything's slowly in decline, but that said, I still just love riding my bike. I think even within myself aging, I think there's still joy in just seeing that progress. Maybe if it's not throughout my career, maybe it's throughout the season, or maybe it was throughout a season, saying, hey, I want to get better at this this year, and maybe I'm not going to hit those same numbers that I hit five years ago. However, it's better than I did two months ago. I think just finding those little successes regardless of where we start is key. It's been really interesting hearing from different perspectives on this and seeing how different coaches and athletes approach training. I think what really stood out to me when we talk about getting the basics in our training right is, one, training with the right aim in mind, and two, being as consistent with our riding as we can be. Also, even though these days we have all the tech and data at our disposal to manage our riding, power meters, heart rate straps, and such like, actually, as Ian and Tim mentioned, some of the really important things to consider are the more old-school pieces of advice that definitely still apply, such as listening to your body, evaluating how hard each session felt on a scale of one to 10 or RPE, rate of perceived exertion. Actually, getting these things right should be prioritized over anything more technical and complex. Also, focusing on the skills needed to ride a bike, the things you learn and develop on a group ride that will make you faster and more efficient in those settings, be it a race, a Gran Fondo, or another event. Above all, though, all the coaches I spoke to here stressed how it's key to make sure that the training you're taking on is achievable. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Keep the motivation to ride, and like Ian mentioned, enjoy the process of training and working towards your goal, whatever that may be. Let me know in the comment section below, what is the most important thing to you when it comes to training and what's worked best when it comes to getting those basics right. Thanks, as always, for watching. I do hope you found this useful and helped you prepare for your own goals. As always, we'll see you on the next one.