141. Joe Friel: Train slow to race fast, and why Pogačar's such a beast

0:00I've been riding with the Hammerhead Karoo for a fair bit now and beyond the slick screen and the 35 hour battery life I'm really getting into the Karoo's climber function. Now what climber does is show you any upcoming climb on a ride whether it's a pre-planned route or not and then when that climb comes up this data page pops up on screen and you get this little climb profile with gradients and colour coded sections for steepness and the distance to the top in length and elevation. so it's amazing for places I've never ridden like on a sportive where you've never ridden the course before but the crew guide you up a climb in this predictive way so you can pace out your effort it's like having a little team ds on your handlebars you can also look ahead at a route and see all the climbs on it so a bit like having a profile sticker on your stem like you see the pros have in races only this way it's way more detailed as you can pick out a climb and look at its specific details as you go.

0:59So check out our full review of the Hammerhead crew at cyclist.co.uk and see why we gave it our cyclist recommended award. Then head to hammerhead.io and use the code cyclist to get a free heart rate strap with every purchase. Just be sure to add the strap to your cart then apply the code at checkout.

1:23Welcome back to the Cyclist Magazine podcast. I am your host, James Spender, and it is just me today. I'm afraid Will and Robin are off over at cyclist.co.uk penning all kinds of wonderful stories about all things in cycling. So head over to the website when you get the chance, but not, of course, before you sit down and settle into this podcast. So I'd like to introduce today's guest. His name is Joe Friel. I think a lot of people will know that name already. But if you don't, if you haven't come across Joe before, I can almost guarantee that you will have come across something that Joe's been involved in.

2:01Now, Joe earned a master's degree in exercise science and emerged into the coaching scene in the 1980s. Then over the years, he's worked with everyone from amateurs to elite professionals in cycling, of course, also in triathlon, mountain biking and duathlon. He's written, I think, over 15 books, including the seminal text. And I don't say that lightly, it genuinely was. It came out in 1996 in an era where you had to get your information from books, really, the internet still in its infancy. So that book was the Cyclists Training Bible. Now the clue's in the name. It was this kind of all-encompassing, highly detailed almanac of how to train to be a better cyclist.

2:44And it's still in print today. It's now in its fifth edition, which I think speaks volumes for that book. Joe also, and this is somewhere else you might know him from, co-founded Training Peaks, which is kind of like, and I don't want to kind of dumb it down, but it's like a highly powerful detailed Strava in that you can log, track and analyze your training and you can do that and share it with other coaches remotely so that you don't have to be in the same place to get coached, but someone can see your highly detailed training file from wherever they are in the world. And also all crunch numbers for you as well and help you guide you in your training.

3:23So TrainingPeaks is still right up there, I'd say, with it's kind of the name in that type of high-end training software. He founded that with his son, Dirk Vriel, who was also a professional cyclist, and Gear Fisher, not to be confused with Gary Fisher of Mountain Bikes. And over the years, Joe obviously kept up the coaching as well as TrainingPeaks. And I think, you know, that's culminated in roles at the US national cycling team. And, you know, most recently still doing lots of coaching, but he's come kind of back onto my radar, at least because he's written a new book. I've got it here. I'm going to hold it up.

4:01I'll describe holding up. It's got a cyclist on the cover for anyone that isn't watching this. Obviously, it's got cyclists on the cover. It's called the High Performance Cyclist, and it is the complete training manual. So again, it's a bit like the cyclist training Bible, but it kind of takes things to a more detailed performance-orientated conclusion. So it's really looking at fine-tuning stuff around cycling, as well as introducing the kind of foundational techniques of it all. So it's an incredible book. I've been flicking through it and picking out some really interesting bits and bobs. Obviously, it's not the sort of book you sit down and read.

4:40I don't know, maybe some people do, but it's a lot of information in there to get your head around. So that's why I wanted to have Joe onto the podcast today to talk about. And some of those topics which we end up talking about, one of them is what does high performance for amateurs mean? Because hey, I'm like, I'm not a high performance cyclist. But Joe says, no, no, look, mate, we all are high performance cyclists, or we can be. It's not about being an elite. It's just about kind of being dedicated and taking it seriously. We also talk about how the only competition is yourself, which is a mantra that I quite like, how you've got to ride easier to get faster.

5:17And we do a deep dive into that. So a lot of that revolves around zone two training, which is something again, I think a lot of people have heard about something Tadej Pogacar, lots of pros are kind of doing these days, we delve into why that's important, how that makes you faster, despite the fact that zone two training is often kind of feel slow. It's not you pushing yourself every single ride. It's in fact, it's doing the opposite, but it does have an effect on your top end. We also look at sleep. We look a bit at nutrition and right at the end, Joe divulges something that I didn't know, which kind of blows my mind and then gives me some personal training tips.

5:55So sorry about that. I've leveraged Joe for myself ultimately, but hey, I'm the host. I can kind of do what I want. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome to the show Mr. Joe Friel.

6:13Yesterday, strangely, it's been quite a big podcast week for me. I was talking to Hunter Allen, who I think you know pretty well, but I'm still not entirely sure of the connection because or even as much as I know your name, I'm beginning to realize how many things you've been involved in. So can you sort of talk me through those projects that in the early, in the mid, late 90s manifested in things that platforms that probably every cyclist has heard of? And where did Hunter fit into that? Yeah, well, late 90s, actually 1999, my son was one of my assistant coaches in my coaching business. And he was appalled at how antiquated our communication system was with all of our clients.

7:02And so he proposed we put together something on the internet, which is a brand new idea back in 1999. So I just gave him his voice and said, go ahead and do whatever you think is good. It's got to be better than what we're doing right now. We were using fax machines and attachments to email, all kinds of stuff that was horrible. So he sat down with a friend of his to come up with something to improve our communication. And that something turned out to be churning peaks eventually, but not initially. It was initially just for my coaches, for my business. But a few years later, after we finally went live with the app for anyone who wants to use it, there was another app we really liked that was owned by Hunter.

7:45And so we talked to him about coming in and joining us and bringing his app on board with us, which is called WKO, which is one of the other apps you can just, it's highly technical. it really digs deeply into the details of a workout much more so than turning peaks does kind of takes it to the nth degree great product and so we brought him on board with that product to round out if you will turning peaks so that's how we got together that's how we met was through turning peaks and so what was the the kind of scene if you can call it that around training not just the science the way it was practiced amongst riders in in the 90s what were you i guess kind of up against in a way i'm i'm assuming there's probably quite a lot of old sort of wives tales and ancient training techniques that riders were still pretty stuck to and you maybe had to shake that up a little bit let me just tell you one story that'll kind of summarize this whole idea about uh 2001 it may have been 2000 i've forgotten exactly one of our we were only three employees at the time my son myself and a third person got named gear fisher uh gear called a uh a power company a power meter company i won't tell you which one but he called a power meter company and he said he would like to be able to uh upload the data from their power meter to training peaks.

9:16And the guy on the other end was flabbergasted. He said, why in the world would anybody want to see the data after the workout? That was the world we were dealing with. Even the manufacturer of the product doesn't think it has any value once the workout is over. It's only used during the workout, and then you forget about it. Now we've got all kinds of analysis that goes on with all the data, as you're fully aware, that comes out of a power meter, for example. And so that's how much the world has changed. And gosh, it didn't really take, it's been 25 years, but it didn't take 25 years for that change to come about.

9:53It came about rather rapidly, but we were kind of at the leading edge of trying to get data to athletes. But we had to convince the manufacturers that this was valuable information. So this leads nicely into, I'm going to hold up here for those watching on YouTube, High Performance Cyclist, which is your latest, and I say latest because the cycling, Cyclist Training Bible, now in its fourth edition, that kind of seminal work, you've got a body of training manuals and articles and stuff behind you. But High Performance Cyclist is trying to do something along those same lines, that same project that you started back then, I would suggest, which is there is a bewildering amount of information out there now because of the propagation of the internet because of, you know, you can buy power meters almost come with high-end bikes now.

10:44You don't have to buy one separately. And so now we're suddenly like, what do we do with it? So high performance is, my takeaway from it is it's trying to help us learn how to use those things and employ those techniques. But initially when I picked it up, I have to say, I thought, this isn't for me. I mean, the clue's in the name. I'm not a high performance cyclist so who who is this book for but as i as i well i'll let you explain why that's not quite the case yeah basically in the introduction to the book i explained the whole concept you're talking about right there which is what is high performance we typically think and and the media promotes this that high performance means olympics tour de france uh such things as that and i'm trying to expand the use of this word high performance really means becoming the best cyclist I can become.

11:37What are the things I can do to become a much better rider? That could involve lots of things. It could mean faster. It could mean climb better. It could mean time trial better. Just a whole wealth of things it could possibly mean. But that was the intent of the book, was to help the athlete determine which things need to be done to improve their performance. And that's kind of the direction I was going with that book when I wrote it. The first book you mentioned, Cyclist Training Bible, is actually now its fifth edition. Fifth, sorry. That's the book that's been around. That was the first book I ever wrote.

12:12The first edition came out about 1997, I think it was. Could have been 96. And that book is different from this one in that that book was largely about planning and periodization. the idea of periodization had not been fully developed yet in the u.s when i wrote that book it was a it was a fairly new concept it only dated back to the early 1980s and there hadn't been many people using the 80s or the 90s so in 96 whatever it was when i wrote the book i decided to dig into that topic a lot more because it was important for athletes to understand and that became the primary focus of the book so how to plan to perform now what i'm doing with this book is how to perform.

12:54What do you do within the workouts? Not just the planning of the training, but what do you do within the workout to perform at a higher level? Yeah. Now, given that there is a huge amount of information in the book, well, it would take many, many podcasts to discuss it all. So I thought what might be useful would be to pick out a few kind of themes. And these are paraphrased, and I hope not bastardized, but paraphrased parts of the book, which stuck out to me. And I wondered if you could kind of talk us through them. So the first one, the only competition is yourself, or rather, the only competition should be yourself.

13:33Can you kind of explain that? Yeah, I'm afraid we get too caught up in trying to win or beat somebody else. You know, we've kind of lost the idea of what does competition mean? if we go back to the roots of the word competition, compete. Compete comes from a Latin word, competere, which means to strive together. We're trying to achieve a higher level of performance is what that word implies. And what we've bastardized that into is beat everybody else or beat somebody else. And that's kind of become the way we see this term anymore. and so what i've always believed in is that when we're competing with somebody else we're actually striving together the other person or people are making you a better rider making you a better athlete because they're pushing your limits if it wasn't for them you wouldn't become as good as you are so we're back to the original meaning we're striving together we're all trying to become the best cyclist we can become and that's really what i consider to be the heart of being a an athlete is striving together with other athletes, not blaming them, not trying to whip them.

14:47It's okay to want to win the race or to finish high in your category, whatever your category may be. That's not a problem at all. There's nothing wrong with that. The challenge becomes when after the race, for example, I often see athletes who disregard the competition, set them aside won't talk with them watch the really good athletes like uh pogaccia watch pogaccia after a race what's the first thing he does he goes over and congratulates the people who came in right after him shakes hands with him smiles at him pats him on the back that is competition that's the way competition is supposed to be we're striving together we're all trying to become better because of this this event we're in and he he is just a perfect example of that that you see and really the best athletes.

15:34And not all athletes are that way. You can watch right now the Vuelta is on. If you're watching the Vuelta, you may see after a stage is over that the winner or somebody who did very well in that particular stage disregards or disrespects those he was racing against. And actually what's not racing against is racing with is what it really should be. So that's my philosophy of how to compete, how to be a true athlete comes back to that word. And you give case studies across the book of riders that you've coached, one of them being Dirk, your son. But in this instance, I think linked to what you've just been describing there, was a chap who he had his mindset on hitting three big races in a season, podiuming, podium, that's easy for me to say, podiuming, and he does it, but he's not happy at the end of the season.

16:33And it turns out, not only was he racing against somebody else in his mind, that was what he really wanted to do was beat somebody. And he hadn't beaten this particular rider, despite the fact that he had achieved the goals that you and he set together. But also, he hadn't actually really disclosed what he was working towards, which sort of feeds into that next point of how do you set realistic goals that are both I guess healthy in a way so you know they're not disrespecting other riders they're in the spirit of sport they're also challenging but they're not so unrealistic that there's just no point in setting out to try and do them yeah that particular athlete you're talking about um he he had a secret which he hadn't told me which was to win to beat some other uh another athlete one of the competitors he wanted to beat that athlete and even though he had tremendous season was on the podium and all three of his major races he never beat the other guy and i found out about that after the last race because he was expressing some disappointment with his season which really blew me away because he had had by my standards a tremendous season if you get if you have three main races and you're on the podium three times you've had a really good a good season but i had to finally just kind of like pull the information out why why are you somewhat down in the dumps about this race about your season especially and that's when he told me it was because he'd never beaten it did not beat this one guy he really had his plans for the season set around and he hadn't told me that so that so i learned a lot and i hope i taught him a lot in the process of going talking about this this concept of competing so we we both learned a lot one thing i learned was you got to really dig when you coach an athlete to find out exactly what it is they want to want to achieve and exactly why they want to achieve that and you would have to go down to a really deep level of digging to get into the real nuances of why is it this particular race, this particular person, whatever it may be, why is this it?

18:44And so I learned to spend a lot, because of that one client, I learned to spend a lot of time digging into goals. But the issue is here that in setting goals, what an athlete has to do is be, number one, realistic. There's lots of things that go into this whole idea of setting a goal. One of those things is being realistic, realizing that this is within my within my ability this is something i think i can achieve but it's going to push me right to my limit i often hear athletes say they're going to shoot for the stars and if they wind up on the moon they're very happy well that's not a really very good way of seeing this because you know down deep you're never going to hit the stars it becomes kind of like a waste of time to aim for the stars why not just aim for the moon let's get there first before we go anyplace else.

19:33So there's a lot of things to be learned about this whole idea of setting goals, but the goal comes back down to eventually, why is it I'm doing this? Why am I competing? Why am I racing a bike? Why do I do this? That's the sort of thing I want to know from the athlete. And so there's lots of questions I ask early on when I'm trying to decide whether or not this client is right for me or not. And that's one of those very important issues is why do they do this? Why do they compete? I mean, that's almost one of the biggest questions for any cyclist or any person at all. So we'll park that big philosophical one there.

20:12But I definitely hear what you're saying. And I understand that. And then so by having identified, you know, you can work with this person, you've got some realistic, challenging targets, goals. I think like one of the pithiest lines in the book, which I think I'm lifting verbatim, which then is kind of like the level down is how do you get to where you want to be and in its broadest sense you train and you describe training as quality workouts and deep sleep and I'm all about the second one and I definitely am pretty poor at the first one so could you unpack what is a quality workout and maybe you know within that perhaps what isn't a quality workout that riders tend to do and how is sleep or why is sleep so important?

20:59Training is a lifestyle, actually. It's more than just a workout. It's how you live your life. In fact, it includes what's going on between your ears all the time. Also, all this stuff, for a good athlete, that's what is necessary. You've got to see the big picture. You've got to be thinking all the time about who am I as an athlete? What should I be doing to perform at a higher level? And those things include lots of things. The three most important things are, number one, consistency in training. You've got to be consistent in training. If you're not consistent, everything else is a waste of time.

21:37If you haphazardly do workouts and you go out a few times a week and you do really hard workouts, I think that's going to get you there. It's not going to get you there. What gets you there is consistent training, going out day after day after day, week after week after week, and so forth. For years, that's what gets you there. Not doing a hard workout or two this week and next week, that doesn't get you anyplace. In fact, it's often just the opposite of what you need. That is number one. You've got to be consistent. Number two is you've got to sleep. Sleep is when fitness happens. When you're asleep, your body releases all these hormones, growth hormones.

22:14There's a whole bunch of them. that go into making you the athlete you are. And what these hormones do is they make you stronger. They make your bones more dense. They improve the size, the amount of blood you have in your body, the number of red blood cells you have in your body. All this stuff that goes into making up fitness all happens while you're sleeping. So I learned that very early on in coaching athletes, I had to find out how they were doing with their sleep because I'd coached too many athletes who thought they could cram lots of things into their life and still be able to compete at a high level.

22:53And I soon discovered that was not the case. You cannot have a lot of stuff in your life, give up sleep because of this, and therefore be a great athlete. It just doesn't happen that way. The best athletes are always sleeping. They're always looking for a time to take a nap to get more sleep in the night and that's important for them and they understand i just i was in um france this last week talking with a woman who is the sleep specialist for tour teams and she's telling me all the things they do to help their athletes get better sleep the details are are amazing most athletes would never understand all the stuff that she's doing to make sure those riders are getting enough sleep to be competitive the next day and in the long term also.

23:41But that's the second thing that's got to be done right. You've got to get sleep. The third thing is nutrition. You've got to be eating foods that are nutritious. If you're eating junk food all the time, that's really not going to get it done. You're not going to become a high-performance athlete eating junk food. Diet works almost the same way as sleep. If you have the right foods coming into your body, your body produces the hormones such that you need to become more fit. If all you're eating is junk most of the day, that doesn't get you anything that you need. You've got to be really focused on getting high quality food to do this.

24:19Those are the big three. Those are the three things I always look for when I'm talking to an athlete. How are they doing in terms of these three? Consistency, adequate sleep, and a healthy diet. If they're doing those three, they have got it nailed down. I can't really do anything to improve them beyond maybe teaching them how to do a workout. But beyond that, we've already got 90 % of it's already figured out. The athlete's going to do very, very well. If they're missing one of those, that's where I come in as a coach. I want to make sure we get this thing right because it's what's holding you back right now.

24:53You're getting inadequate sleep. You need more sleep. We've got to figure out a way to do that. How can we do that? Well, there are ways to do that that have to do with lifestyle and have to do with how your sleep environment is and lots of things like that so anyway that that's the that's the big three i always look for in athletes so what were the things that you were discussing with the sur de france sleep doctor around things that people wouldn't think about to encourage or you know help i guess riders sleep better uh there were a lot of things but one thing that really stood out for me was she is really concerned about athletes who who go to bed at night and feel warm, which is not unusual.

25:30If you've had a five, four hour, five hour race that day, and the whole day has been packed into all this into the afternoon, and you've got to get a massage and a supper and go to bed yet. When you get to the bed, your body, your mind is still going like this. And part of that is making you feel warm. And warm is not a good condition to be trying to sleep in. You need to cool off. So she introduced me to an idea, which I'd never heard of before. It's a, you can buy this mattress cover now, which is what these pro teams are using, a mattress cover, which you can change the temperature of the bed.

26:09So you can go to bed, you can set it for a cooler condition. So you can bring the temperature of your bed down, which cools your body off and helps you to go to sleep. So that was the latest thing she's working on right now and she told me how to go about buying one for myself to try it out and all that kind of stuff and i've yet to do that because i just found out about this last week but it's um it's it looks like a very interesting project for me to get involved in which is how to encourage better sleep for athletes when they've done everything they can but they still can't fall asleep yeah well i'm all for more sleep and through this job i've talked to various people about the efficacy of sleep.

26:50And I did a study a while ago, which I did with a sleep doctor. And it was amazing the change in my reaction speeds when I was rested versus being tired. And it translated to me going from 70 miles an hour on a motorway and stopping within something like 20 meters to me being tired and trying to stop in a car on a motorway and stopping within 30 meters. So, you know, 50%. What can happen in that moment? And if you're bike racing, you know, things are big, you know, everything's going on around you. And that's just a small part of it, right? Because you're also talking about the physiological adaptions that come with sleep.

27:27But there is something to be said for, well, not something to be said, much, much stronger than that. Recovery is absolutely paramount, but also not pushing ourselves insanely hard every single ride. Because I think that comes up, I mean, I know from the way that I ride, I went for a ride today. I don't get to ride very often because of my lifestyle, because of work, family, everything else. So when I do, I can't help but try and go fast. I just end up competing myself into it. Now, that's not actually very productive, is it? Not very productive on a long-term basis. No, short-term, perhaps. Long-term, I wouldn't recommend it.

28:06You know, we're, and this is normal. What you're talking about there, the example you're giving of yourself, is really what I run across with all athletes. at every level the feeling is that the way to become a better athlete faster if you will is to go out and ride fast as much as you can ride as many workouts as you can fast push the limits and therefore you improve your your performance and actually that's not the case research doesn't suggest doesn't support that the research supports the idea that we need we need to develop this huge base of aerobic fitness for endurance sports and until we develop that huge base doing high intensity training is really of minimal value you get a lot more out of it once you finally have this gigantic base of fitness put together aerobic fitness that means easy workouts it means zones one and two for example we're talking specifics but once we get that put together, now we can start doing the high intensity stuff and the benefits are much faster.

29:09They could become much greater because of a hard workout that you do. But when you don't have a good base, those workouts are pretty much a waste of your time. They may feel like you're accomplishing something, but they really aren't. It's very limited what you get out of that type of workout if you don't have aerobic base. So that's really the starting point for this whole discussion you've got to have you've got to have fitness that goes down to the cellular level which can only be established by doing long slow you know very long slow workouts that's the key to building this base so that you can eventually build this this high pyramid which means high performance at the other end but you've got to start someplace which is down here on this base which is the primary your primary concern this is most of the season should be down here I've been riding with the Hammerhead Karoo for a fair bit now and beyond the slick screen and the 35 hour battery life I'm really getting into the Karoo's climber function.

30:10Now what climber does is show you any upcoming climb on a ride whether it's a pre-planned route or not and then when that climb comes up this data page pops up on screen and you get this little climb profile with gradients and color-coded sections for steepness and the distance to the top in length and elevation. So it's amazing for places I've never ridden, like on a sportive where you've never ridden the course before, but the Karoo guides you up a climb in this predictive way so you can pace out your effort. It's like having a little team DS on your handlebars. You can also look ahead at a route and see all the climbs on it.

30:47So a bit like having a profile sticker on your stem like you see the pros have in races only this way it's way more detailed as you can pick out a climb and look at its specific details as you go. So check out our full review of the Hammerhead crew at cyclist.co.uk and see why we gave it our cyclist recommended award. Then head to hammerhead.io and use the code cyclist to get a free heart rate strap with every purchase. Just be sure to add the strap to your cart then apply the code at checkout.

31:21Hello, lovely listeners. I just wanted to tell you that Cyclist isn't just a podcast. No, Cyclist is also a beautiful print magazine. It's packed full of all the best rides from around the world, the newest bikes and kit, and loads of in-depth articles featuring guests just like on today's show. So head on over to cyclist.co.uk slash subscriptions and check out our latest cyclist magazine subscription offers.

31:56Just unpack that because that's something that lots of people will have heard bandied around, particularly recently when people kind of pick over Pogaccia's training techniques. And lo and behold, it comes to light that he just does lots and lots, you know, amongst other things too, but that big base, high volume zone one, two riding. And we hear lots of like stay in zone two stay in zone two what does what are those zones how do you find out about them as an amateur athlete amateur rider and what is it about being in those lower intensity zones that creates the kind of base you need what's going on in your body well what's going on your let's start what's going on in your body that's where the key to this whole thing is why why do we suggest that you do this there's lots of things that are going on for example um there are some things that take days to accomplish, but can only be accomplished with lots of volume.

32:50And that's, for example, your blood volume, how much blood you have in your body. That takes a matter of days of doing long, slow distance training. You can build up this volume of blood in your body. If you want to find a fast way to improve your VO2 max, that's it. Have lots of blood. Have lots of blood and keep it that way. And what I mean by keep it that way is stay hydrated during a workout or a race. That keeps your blood volume high also. But it's the long, slow distance that really kind of builds this volume, all this blood that you have in your body. High-intensity turning doesn't do that.

33:27The volume does. Long, slow ride builds a lot of blood. Second thing is red blood cells. It only takes days for red blood cells to multiply. Red blood cells is what carries the oxygen to the muscle. So you inhale. cell, the blood is pumped from your heart into your lungs where it picks up the oxygen in the red blood cells, carries it back to the heart, which then beats and pumps it out to the rest of the body. Those red blood cells can be improved in a matter of days also by doing lots of high volume training. So there's things like that that can be changed rather quickly because of high volume.

34:06So that's the starting place for all this. It only takes a few days to accomplish those two things, but you got to keep it going. If you don't keep it going, then you lose blood volume and you lose red blood cells. So it's got to keep on going. It takes weeks to do a few things also that are based on long, slow distance. Mitochondria, for example. Mitochondria are the little organisms that are at the muscle itself. And this is what processes the oxygen. So your body has inhaled this oxygen. It's been pumped in your blood to your muscles. The mitochondria is what reaches out and grabs that blood, that oxygen, and pulls it back into the muscle to be used to produce energy.

34:48Mitochondria, the more mitochondria you have, the more oxygen you can process. Therefore, the faster you can go at a low intensity. You can ride a low intensity and start going faster because you're able to produce more oxygen to the muscles, to those long, slow-distance muscles, the type 1 muscles. And so that's something that only takes weeks to achieve also by doing low intensity, high volume training. And by high volume, what would you describe, how do you define a high volume ride for the average person? You're going to make this difficult for me, aren't you? And I appreciate, you know, we're all different.

35:23We're all different, but that's the problem with the word high volume. High volume really comes down to who are we talking about? Are we talking about somebody in their seventies or somebody in their twenties? are we talking about a guy who's got a vo2 max of 80 or a guy who's got a vo2 max of 20 uh you know so things are so varied here it is i really can't point it out but the high volume is what is is is an individual item so if the athlete has been training all their life which is great if you have an athlete who's been doing that i would look back to see what is what is the average over the last 10 years or so what have you been doing for the last 10 years that becomes kind of like a baseline this is what we've been doing what's been our performance with that baseline performance has been great super we just keep going that's high performance not been good we need to do something to improve it one way to to to increase the the base more volume uh what's that volume become i i really can't say because it's it's it's you can't nail this down it's one of those things that just refuses to have a number placed on it but it's something that is relatively high for the individual.

36:33Borgalc is in a different world by himself. You know, he's only how many hours he puts in a week. Over 30, I'm sure. Most of us couldn't even come close to doing that. Doesn't mean we have to, but that's what he does. Because it sounds like those grizzled old Belgians that were, right, the likes of Roger de Vlamic that were riding behind mopeds in the sleeting rain in the middle of winter for 300k before breakfast. Turns out those were the guys that were doing it right. It turns out that way. You're back. yeah i've read some of their diaries that go back to the 1960s and 70s and 80s what were these guys doing this is this is before power meters even before little things like stopwatches in some cases and they're putting in lots of volume and that that was all there was to their training lots and lots and lots of volume and and they got very strong doing that but you've got to top that off somehow with workouts that are focused on your event that's where a lot of them fell through they were not doing that they were not doing workouts that focused on the event they were just doing lots of volume so they were getting this great base in lots of cases they weren't taking it to the next higher level taking it all the way up this pyramid to the very top they weren't doing that so that that was the piece that was missing from a lot of these uh a lot of these riders so it's um again can't put a number on it but it needs to be doing something which kind of stresses the athletes you gotta you gotta experience some stress physiological stress to improve stress means you're gonna feel fatigued occasionally fairly regularly you're gonna feel fatigued that's a good sign too much fatigue is a bad sign you're doing too much just a little bit of fatigue i'm tired this is a good day to take it easy i'm not going to do anything much today i'm gonna cut it short in fact i like to find the athlete who will do that who's really down to the point where they know when they're tired so they're going to cut back that that is a good athlete to coach and that's something else that stuck out actually is in this world of everything being quantified by scientific instruments power meters heart rate continuous glucose monitoring it goes on and on and the things you can do in labs is you know even more elaborate than that, you still have a focus on rating of perceived exertion, RPE, which is more of a, dare I say, old school, because it predates lots of other of those tools, old school kind of thing.

38:56Why is rating of perceived exertion still so important to an athlete? Well, it's the most basic thing you can possibly have to indicate how the athletes are doing. You know, we've got all this data you just mentioned a lot of data points right there and and the data points go way beyond if you use training peaks there are you can be overwhelmed with data the question becomes what's the most important thing what we added to the training peaks several years ago was five little faces at the bottom of the screen a frowny face had a bad workout i didn't feel good you know kind of a half i'm kind of a halfway smile not or halfway frown rather it wasn't too bad but it wasn't great then kind of a you know basic smile it was okay fourth one up it was really pretty good workout it went well and the fifth one was it was great you know big smile on the little face and i'm more interested in that than i am in what somebody's power output was you can learn an awful lot by how people feel and i'm afraid we've kind of lost track of that i started as an athlete back in the 1950s when i was a kid and um we didn't have anything i went all the way through junior high, high school, and college without even so much as a stopwatch.

40:10We didn't know any data whatsoever. There wasn't any heart rate monitors. We didn't have stopwatches. The first time I got a stopwatch was 1971. That was the first time I ever found out that I could time something I was doing. If I went for a ride, I could actually time the ride. Up until then, it was just kind of like, you know, I left about one o 'clock, so let's see what time I come back. But having a stopwatch on your wrist was like, this was like mind-boggling back in 1971. But until that time, all we had was, how did you feel? How hard was the workout? And we would share that information.

40:47I would go for a workout with another rider, and we would frequently say, well, how do you feel? How hard is this for you? And we'd share the information back and forth. The other person might say, well, it feels pretty hard to me. And I might say, well, it feels really hard to me. and that says that I'm working harder than he is so maybe we need to slow down so that was kind of like the starting point for everything that has to do with measuring how the athlete is responding to training today we're overwhelmed with data if the data is good I like the data in fact I'm kind of a data freak when I look at somebody's data after a after a race especially after a workout either either one I can find all kinds of things there that interest the hell out of me and I can started asking questions to find out exactly what was going on that produced this data point.

41:33But the most important thing I want to know still is how did they feel? And when you're in a bike race, you know, if you're in a road race, especially, you really can't be spending your time looking at that power meters and heart rate monitors and lactate analyzers and all this stuff. You've got to make decisions right now within a bike race. And those decisions have to be based on how do I feel and what do I think I can do and what have I done? So all this stuff really it all boils down to that after the workout we'll now take a look at all the data and compare that with how you felt which is nice nice reference point how did you feel and how did you perform those two things are really very very important so so i'd rather have if i couldn't have anything else i'd rather have rpe which i think must have been really difficult for um eddie merx's trainers back in the day because he was notorious for showing up on the start line and grumbling about having a stomach upset and then afterwards saying he didn't feel good all race, but yet he just won race after race after race.

42:33But it's telling, isn't it? Because that is a line you'll often hear riders say. You don't hear, I felt good today. You'll hear a pro rider in a post-race interview saying, yeah, I felt good today. And obviously for them, that has more import than just to kind of throw a line like, yeah, I'm feeling good. That probably means something to their training. But there was something that intrigued me because as much as how the training is affecting you is so important, I was also drawn to this idea that there's your efficiency factor, which is a way of trying to assess whether or not training is working beyond just saying, hey, I've seemed to be able to produce more power numbers because you know what, that might not be really useful to you.

43:14It's a ratio, am I right, between your heart rate and the power you're putting out. And it helps, it kind of coincides with the low intensity, high volume training, because it's not about pushing high numbers in power. It's about pushing the same number of watts, but for effectively a lower consequence of heart rate. Is that about right? You're exactly right. Yeah. Efficiency factor is something I came up with, it's probably been well over 20 years ago now. And the idea was that the athlete who's the most efficient has the greatest power output for the lowest heart rate that that's always the case you find a pogaccia i think i read someplace that his zone two is like 400 watts or something ridiculous i've forgotten what it was now with something really really high number for wattage which tells you something about him already he's putting out more wattage than most athletes can do when they're working as hard as they can for an hour.

44:19So that's a great sign. He's in excellent condition. And I'm sure Merck's is the same way. We didn't have any data back in those days to measure. The best athletes are always that way. They always have a great power output for a relatively low heart rate. And so that's all I was trying to figure out with this efficiency factor. And so in the book, throughout the book, I make this point. If you want to measure how you're doing on your long, slow distance rides, look at your EF, your efficiency factor. And if you don't have the data available to you like on TrainingPeaks where it does all the math for you, all you got to do is divide your power, average power for the workout by your average heart rate for the workout.

45:01And that will give you a number. And what should happen over time is for the very same types of workouts, that number should rise. And it's really fulfilling for the athlete when they see this happen. A month later, they're doing exactly the same workout they'd done on the same course, same conditions. And now their EF is several points higher. That's a sign that improvement is taking place. And it's all physiological improvement. This doesn't work, by the way, for high intensities. You don't do zones three, four, and five and measure efficiency factors. Only zones one and two. But you've got to compare it with a previous workout, which is very similar to zone one and two.

45:39So what I always tell the athletes is go back eight weeks, find a similar workout eight weeks ago see what your ef was compared to today that number should be higher today if we're making progress if we're not making progress if that number is now we're not making progress something's wrong someplace so we got to figure that out i don't know what it could be we've already talked about consistent training sleep and diet there are other variables to you know lifestyle pressure and all you know all kinds of things but that that's a great number to be looking at to see if you're making improvement aerobically.

46:11That's how you can measure it. So time for me to start combing back over my old Strava data and anything I've got stored on an old polar heart rate monitor somewhere. But another metric, which to my mind anyway has come up time and time again in just general fitness, is obviously massively linked to cardiovascular system. It's almost a kind of metric of the cardiovascular system. It's your VO2. So again, And correct me if I'm wrong, that's your blood stroke volume. It's the amount of blood and oxygen your heart can basically pump around in a heartbeat. Is it right? It's the amount of oxygen you can deliver to a muscle because of your cardiovascular system, in part.

46:49And it's one of the best markers there is physiologically of our performance potential. Lots of athletes have had VO2 max tests done. you can find out a number which becomes an indicator of where you are on a on a lifelong scale of what happens it's you know it's how much blood can you deliver to the muscle divided by your body weight essentially is what we're looking at why your body weight because if we add more body weight you're going to go slower and so what we're looking for here is being able to go fast and so that means low body weight and high volume of oxygen being delivered to the muscles so that's vo2 max volume of oxygen per minute per kilogram is what we're talking about you know that can be improved every athlete has such a number the number is indicative of lots of things about them as a person really for example uh if somebody's got a vo2 max um anybody's got a vo2 max above 70 they're amazing this is a one heck of a person physiologically above 70 that's a gigantic 70 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram per minute is what the pro athletes do pro and nurse athletes that's that's very common number for them that's if you tested everybody in the volta this this week you'd find probably every one of them is 70 or higher in the vo2 max that's normal for those people the very highest like in the 90s i think the highest ever was like 96 or 97 i think it was cross-country skier and norwegian and uh so that's the that's the upper end there's also a lower end.

48:23As you get older, this number comes down. You lose it at the rate, on average, of about 1 % per year it comes down. That starts someplace around your mid-30s. The number starts coming down. And you can turn that around, you know, but when you get to be, so when you get to be, let's say, 45 years old, you have probably lost somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 % of your VO2 max. And when you get to be 55 years old, another 10%, 65, another 10%. So this keeps going down throughout your life, unless you do something about it. You can momentarily, over a short period of time, turn it around and bring it back up again, but that involves training.

49:09If you don't train at all, you're going to lose it at a faster rate. You're going to lose it at 15 % per decade instead of 10%. So if you just stop training, so I'm going to quit doing this, it's silly. I'm just going to drink beer and eat. That's all I'm going to do. VO2 max goes like this. And when VO2 max gets to about 15, which is extremely low, when it gets to about 15, you're in a wheelchair. You can no longer get around. People are now pushing you every place. They're feeding you. They're taking care of all your physical needs. that's all being done for you because you can no longer do anything along that lines you're so physically weak because of the low very low vo2 max that you can't you really can't live as a normal person so but you can turn this all around let's say a 45 year old realizes they've lost 10 percent of their vo2 max can they turn that around yeah they probably can but it comes down to things we already talked about do they already train consistently if they've been training consistently and this has been going on, and something's wrong someplace outside of training, it could be sleep.

50:15Maybe we're not getting to sleep. It could be diet. Maybe diet is messed up. It could be stress in their lives. They've got too much cortisol in their system because they've got a very stressful job. They've got this horrible lifestyle they've put together, and it's deflating their VO2 max. So it's a long, long story, but the bottom line is VO2 max is always going to go down over time, but you can temporarily raise it back up again with training and lifestyle. Are you, because this is an argument I've had with a mate, are you effectively given a VO2 max in a way? So as described, it goes down as you get older, you can reverse that effect.

50:54But are you kind of more or less in a pretty narrow bandwidth and forever you'll stay there, you know, excluding the aging process? or could you be an athlete who was a really good club rider with a vo2 of 65 and then you put the really hard work in and you get to be you know the upper echelons of an elite rider with a vo2 max of 75 could you make a leap like that it would be very difficult to make that big switch at that point there's a lot of things to go into such as experience uh racing at a certain level you know the pro the pro cyclists the ones who are in you know the world tour they are basically they have basically been training since they were teenagers if not before that my son started when he's 12 years old um eventually turned pro but that was a big piece of this was he was he had a lifestyle built around riding a bike and to this day he's like 55 years old now to this day he still has this lifestyle built around training he now does other things in biking cycling ski mountaineering for example cross-country skiing he does lots of things but basically this is possible for him because he spent his life dedicated to the concept so yes you can turn this around but it takes it takes a lifestyle change typically to make it work exactly the way you would like it to work.

52:17It's hard to go from club rider to pro at the elite level overnight. That's going to take years and years to accomplish. Meanwhile, you're fighting the passage of time, which is trying to deteriorate 1 % a year or whatever. All right, here we go again. Here we go again. So this just popped into my head as we were talking about that. Is that old adage true that it takes a week to lose it and three weeks to get it back. Yeah, something like that. I never found any research that supports a number on this, but just from experience, I would say, yes, it's probably about right. If I take a week off from training for whatever reason, it's going to take me a few weeks to get it back.

52:58How many exactly? Maybe two, maybe three, I'm not sure. And it kind of depends on how high my fitness was prior to that and exactly what I've been doing. For example, there's research showing that really good runners, world-class runners can improve their running just by walking so but not a lot just a little bit but if we can take a an age grouper runner and have them do a lot of walking they improve their running at a much higher level so it depends on who you are what you've been doing all along and what you do in the meantime to stay active if you stay active at all and staying active certainly a big piece of this whole whole idea so if we do that then yes the athlete can continue to can come back, it's probably going to take some time.

53:44Well, we've got a little bit more time left and I'm going to be incredibly selfish. And I'm going to just assume that a lot of listeners are like me. I'm a 40 year old bloke. I've been riding my bike for ever since I could, you know, take the stabilizers off, but never really a serious competitor. And I still do it for my job. I used to commute to work every day. That was some brilliant base miles. COVID means working from home, that doesn't happen anymore. So I'd say I've probably got between work, family and trying to get some sleep, about six hours to ride with a week. And just to throw in there some other things that might be useful to you, my Garmin watch, make of that what you will, reckons I've got a VO2 of 55 at a point in my life, well, probably actually more useful now, I reckon my FTP sitting on a Watt bike is around about 280.

54:37So what should I do with my six hours per week cycling wise to, I'd like to think incrementally improve. It's not the be all and end all to improve, but certainly not allow the slide to happen where age and life just overcomes me and I can't do, I mean, you know, I'm in under no illusions I'm going to be able to ride like I did when I was 25. But I'd still like to ride like I do now when I'm 50. Sure. You bet. And there's no reason why you can't. You should be able to do that, right? Okay, good. I like that as a starting point. That should be all of our goals is to maintain our performance as we get older as best we can.

55:15And it's possible. I've seen this so many times. So what can we do to do to accomplish that? Well, you know, the number one thing is we've got to make sure that training is consistent. So if you have six hours a week, we want to get in six hours of training every week. We can't have six hours, three hours, four hours, six hours, five hours, four hours. It needs to be six hours. We need to be consistent in our training. That's the starting point for all this. That's always what the body responds to best is just consistency. Get out the door and do it. That's the starting place for this whole thing as far as success is concerned.

55:47Secondly, what I would suggest is that you get in two hour and a half workouts a week. If you can make that work into your six-hour schedule. I don't know if you can or not. That may be difficult to do. If you can get into one-and-a-half-hour workouts, that's three hours of the six right there, chewed up in two workouts. Those workouts would be a little bit different than the other three. The other three would be like one-hour workouts. They'd just be zones one and two steady. But those two longer workouts, what you do is the first hour of each of those workouts steady, zones one and two. long warm-up and then the last half hour give it hell okay just do whatever you feel like doing it go as hard as you can do sprints do hill climbs do intervals whatever you feel like doing do something that's high intensity twice a week for the last half hour of the ride long warm-up and then do that if you do that twice a week plus the other three hours of riding a week i feel pretty certain you'd be in really good shape at the end of this some period of time six weeks later whatever may be and this would this would um set you up if for for hopefully hopefully you get more time to train and then you could do more but you don't need a lot of high intensity what you need a lot of volume as much volume as you can get with a little bit of high intensity so what i'm trying to do there is get as much volume as possible you know so what i'm trying to do there is get what five hours of volume a week, low volume, low-intensity volume, and one hour of high-intensity volume a week.

57:20And that ratio should give you pretty good fitness over time. Is that quite a good applicable ratio in general, a five to one? Not perfect, no. You're dealing with a situation which is not a normal situation for an athlete who wants to compete at a high level. They'll probably be doing much more training. in that case we're going to get in a lot more volume than a 5-1 we're getting a lot of volume could be 10-1 sort of ratio but the key is going to be that we've got to get some intensity in for the for the racer who's in your situation for the riders in your situation but if we had more hours we would simply get more volume on top of all that and a couple more questions again selfishly just for me.

58:07I've often thought this, right? I feel like I'm constantly trying to lose weight in that cyclist kind of way, which is part probably body dysmorphia and some hang up on cyclists are supposed to be skinny, but also because naturally as you get older, particularly as a guy that I drink far too much, you tend to just slowly put on weight. I'm trying to offset that, parking the, well, maybe just don't drink so much beer then to one side. If I go for a ride, Am I better off seeing my blood glucose, blood sugar go right down at the end of the ride, go into a sort of almost fat-burning state, come home and just try and put my feet up, maybe even better yet go to sleep?

58:46Or should I be doing what people used to tell the likes of me to do, which is get some food in you, get some protein in you within 15 minutes, which I know is probably very outdated advice now. But am I better just to go to sleep and then recover and not eat to lose weight? Let me tell you a personal story about this whole idea. Okay. I'm 81 years old, and I started gaining weight just after my 70th birthday. I started gaining weight. I'd been the same weight basically since I was in high school, about 70 kilograms, 154, 155 pounds, all the way through high school into college and after that. as I was competing as an athlete.

59:32And I never had to worry about it. My body weight always stayed down. But 70, something happened at 70. And all of a sudden, very, very slowly, body weight started climbing up. Not rapidly, but just enough that I would recognize it occasionally. And then over the course of something like 9, 10 years, that number was starting to get to the point that kind of bugged me. I didn't like it. I was getting a belly. Even though nothing had changed about my lifestyle, I'm still doing the same amount of volume I was doing before on the bike, still eating much as I had always eaten, number of calories, types of foods I was eating, sleeping well at night.

1:00:09I mean, all these things were not caused by lifestyle stuff. So I started doing some research. What can I do? What has been shown to work for athletes in trying to maintain or lower body weight? And so I read lots of stuff. The one that really got my attention was an eating style, which is a little bit different than the normal. And from what people normally think is the way you have to lose weight, which is to cut calories. This was not about cutting calories at all. It was about changing when you got the calories into your body. Let me give you an example. In the study, they talked about this, that if we took you, for example, in the morning, we had you eat a certain meal, whatever it may be.

1:00:52We had you eat a certain meal. And then we measured your blood spike, sugar spike in your blood afterwards, say an hour later, we would see what happened to you eating that particular meal in the morning. And then on another day, we'd have you eat the very same meal late in the day before bedtime. And we would measure again to see what's happened to your blood sugar spike. What the research says is if that happens, the blood spike is higher late in the day than it is early in the day. So you're going to produce a lot more blood, a lot more sugar after the same meal, just depending on when you eat it.

1:01:28You eat it late in the day, big spike. Early in the day, small spike. Aha, there's something going on here, kind of interesting. And by the way, when sugar spikes in your blood, that is turned back into fat. You spike your blood sugar late in the evening, and then you go to bed a couple hours later, your body's going to use that that that extra sugar there to help you produce more fat in your body it's going to store it that's your body's way of having avoiding problems in the near future when we run out of food so i started trying that so i eat a big breakfast to satisfaction so i'm not hungry at all but i'm not stuffed either eat a big lunch to satisfaction and at supper time eat a small supper i've lost like what eight pounds so something neighborhood of four four kilos i've lost roughly small a little bit less than that and since i started doing this i started doing it like six weeks ago eight weeks ago i forgot exactly when i started but my life has been riddled with moving to a new location remodeling the house we moved into which has been a total job that's somebody in our house all day long, carpenter, plumber, roofer, painter, etc.

1:02:41Every day, all day long, lots of stress. Despite all that, my body weight just stayed down. So I didn't cut any calories at all. All I did was just move my calories earlier in the day. The other option that came out of the same sort of research was if you don't want to do that, if you want to eat your big meal in the evening, which is very common in the U.S. anyway, if you want to eat a big meal for dinner, go for a workout after dinner. Go ride your bike after dinner. Go for a long walk. Go for an hour, hour and a half walk after dinner. That'll bring your blood sugar back down. Now you can go to bed and you're going to be lots better off.

1:03:14That doesn't work for me. My lifestyle doesn't allow me to go for a workout after dinner. I do my workout early in the day. So this way, I shifted everything to the morning and lunchtime. And the rest of the day, I just kind of like, take it easy. Don't worry about it. But I never get hungry. So it could be done. But you've got to make sure you do it exactly the way I'm describing, which is almost all your calories early. Yeah, which is ironic and ridiculous. I remember adverts growing up on British TV. I don't know if you had the same company in the States called Slim Fast. And it was all about shakes replacing meals.

1:03:51And the strap line was a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch and a proper dinner, which is the absolute inverse of what you're saying. Yeah, most people, I've had people come to me and say, you know, I can cut out breakfast should I do that to help lose weight, because that way I'm cutting calories. And it seems like a normal thing to do. So I just cut out one of my meals, only have two meals a day. Therefore, I'll lose weight because I'll have fewer calories. But what the research shows is that people who skip breakfast tend to gain more weight than people who don't skip breakfast. Everything else remaining the same.

1:04:23And the people who skip breakfast are more likely to become diabetic, type 2 diabetics, when they skip breakfast and eat their meals later in the day. So there's lots of variables here, but so far I've found this works very well for me, but it worked for everybody. I don't know because I'm doing this for the first time myself. I've never had a client do it, but I would suggest giving it a try because it's easy to do. You just eat a big breakfast, big lunch, and a small supper. brilliant well joe it's been absolutely fascinating we haven't even got onto strength training periodization versus polarization all the so many things in the high performance cyclist and just things in your sports science canon that we could chat about but my one takeaway from all of this is i cannot believe you're 81 that is insane it's true i can guarantee it it's proof absolute proof that cycling kind of keeps you as my uncle used to say yeah hopefully it does Good stuff.

1:05:17Well, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure. And yeah, time for you to get back to being foreman and remodeling the house, getting out on the bike, and making sure you don't eat too late. I will. Thank you very much, James.

1:05:31Joe Freel, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much again, Joe, for coming on. As we talked about, as I said at the top of the show, Joe has written a new book. It is The High Performance Cyclist. It is in my very hands here. It is something that I think everyone who takes cycling even wonderfully seriously can benefit from. Even if you just want to read the stuff about sleep, which is really interesting, why sleep is so necessary. I mean, sleep, it's like free training. You don't even have to do it. You just have to sleep. It's great. So that's published by Bloomsbury. That's in shops now. Great Christmas present, I'd say, for the cyclist in your life.

1:06:08and as for me well I think I better go out and do some zone two riding I've got six hours to play with when I said that to Joe I did think six hours is is that's optimistic I think I've probably got more like four in me a week and even then but anyway I've got some time to play with I'm now going to structure that training slightly differently and who knows I'll check back in with this in a few months time and see if those hard long steady miles have paid off I'm sure they will because basically getting out on your bike in any shape or form is good for your body, it's good for your soul. So yeah, I mean, why are we here?

1:06:44Put your headphones down, go and ride yourself, but do come back in two weeks time for another episode of the Cyclist Magazine podcast. Thanks for joining me.

1:06:58Hello, lovely listeners. I just wanted to tell you that Cyclist isn't just a podcast. No, cyclist is also a beautiful print magazine it's packed full of all the best rides from around the world the newest bikes and kit and loads of in-depth articles featuring guests just like on today's show so head on over to cyclist.co.uk slash subscriptions and check out our latest cyclist magazine subscription offers