Episode 180: Time-Crunched Cyclist Q&A - Running for cyclists? Anaerobic intervals year round?

Questions in this episode:

• How should I incorporate running with primary cycling training plan (without getting injured)?
• Should high-intensity anaerobic intervals be done year round, even occasionally, or only during event-specific buildup?
• Addressing the numbering of podcast episodes for easier searching

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Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 13 years and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now onto our show. Welcome back, time Crunch fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford.

Speaker 1: 0:52

Today we're going to get into a handful of audience questions, but first please excuse my crackly voice I'm just getting over a little bit of a cold and sore throat because of the season. I suppose. In talking with many of my athletes and fellow coaches, it does seem to be going around. If you have a little something going on, please know you're not alone. Well, I'm not here today to talk to you about the common cold. I'm here to talk about training. If you're new to the show, welcome On this podcast. We cover all things endurance, training as well as answer questions submitted by you, our audience. If you have a burning question about training intervals, hydration, nutrition, strength training, anything in your pursuit of becoming a better cyclist, feel free to head over to trainrightcom backslash podcast. Click on the button that says ask a training question and those questions get sent directly to me. I'll do my best to answer it on the show. Now let's get started. All right, question number one here it is.

Speaker 1: 1:59

As a 50 plus master's athlete, I like to supplement my cycling and strength training for endurance events mostly mountain biking, gravel races with running during lunch breaks at work. I enjoy getting outside midday and appreciate the benefits I get from doing some higher impact work. Typically I run four times a week at a low heart rate for about 6k and try to focus on good form and varied terrain. My question is how should I be running to achieve the most benefits from it and not hurt my cycling objectives? That's coming from Bruce. Good question, bruce. My short answer is honestly, I wouldn't change much about it From the sounds of it from your question. If anything, I would encourage you to keep that run frequency up during your base in general of aerobic phase of training, but keep the running aerobic in intensity a rate of perceived effort of 4 or 5 out of 10, if 10 is a max effort, as it sounds like you're doing Now, you want to decrease the frequency of running down to 2 to 3 times per week. In my opinion, during heavy bike training periods like FTP or VO2 work, you also want to decrease the frequency or don't even run at all on weeks where you have a mountain bike or gravel race on the weekend. This will ensure more freshness for race day. Keeping running in the mix of your training can be a good thing if your legs and body are already used to it, as this contributes to building aerobic capacity in general periods of training and has a whole host of benefits by breaking up the work day, incorporating different muscle groups, adding variety into your training program, stimulating bone density, and it's just a good thing for buck when it comes to training on a short amount of time.

Speaker 1: 3:52

For cyclists who don't run and are curious about running, start with walking. Walk at a work break, just 10 to 15 minutes every day or every other day, build up in duration and then you can start with run walks, which I mean by run walks is running for 4 minutes, say, and then walking for 1 and repeating back and forth In general. I'm not going to get into super specifics on that. I'm just going to say gradually and progressively build up into a running habit, if you're curious about that. I wouldn't advise this to everyone out there, but it certainly is not a bad thing for health and it's a good use of time. The main issue with cyclists who want to run is that they start running far too much too soon, without letting their biomechanics and their legs adapt to all the pounding. Their cardiovascular system can handle it, for sure, but not their structural tissues. They oftentimes will get injured by doing too much too soon. If cyclists run, start low with walking and build up slow. Bruce, for you your main thing is adjusting with less running when your bike training gets more intense or more specific, and I think you'll find success with fresher legs on race day or hard training days.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Okay, question number two, coming from Lachlan Of the podcast. I think I was one of the top listeners last year. That's cool. Thanks, lachlan. That's awesome. You must be from Australia, perhaps because Australia was the country of our top listeners. Please write back and let me know where you're from. So here's more of his question. Essentially have come from a background of no real cycling or running to trying an Iron man in an Ultra last year. In short, loved the cycling and running and trying to balance. Now moving forward with these two.

Speaker 1: 5:56

I'm a little confused about anaerobic training, though I haven't fully decided my events for the year. I want to try a cycle cross race at some point or gravel, but we'll focus more towards Marathon's Ultras and just having fun on the bike. I'm unsure what this exactly will look like, but probably spend a decent amount of time training on bike. One thing that I am wondering there seems to be a fairly consistent VO2 or threshold plus endurance slash, base aerobic focus year round. Do you keep anaerobic workouts, even if it's just occasional year round, or do you focus into specific blocks prior to events that have a necessity for this? Again, that's coming from Lachlan. So short answer is for my time crunch athletes, I do incorporate some higher intensity efforts, even when we're in base training phases. When I'm trying to build something more specific like FTP, I'll focus mainly on threshold work as well as endurance. I always keep endurance in there and I keep focused on that objective to drive the adaptation that I want, then recover and move on to the next training block.

Speaker 1: 7:11

My longer answer and as I try to understand your question completely is I think that you're asking mostly about anaerobic intensity in base or aerobic phases of training. The main reason I incorporate some higher intensity in this phase is that for a time crunched, athlete volumes are low and we don't have a ton of fatigue per session of endurance like volume athletes will. So incorporating some intensity higher than zone 2, 1 or 2 times per week will help maintain some VO2 and anaerobic capacity which typically fall away if you don't touch them on a regular basis. Additionally, if you say ride four to five times per week, one time per week with intensity will not ruin any of your endurance building. My experience and in my opinion it will only help.

Speaker 1: 8:04

So how to weave all this in is obviously dependent on the individual. So it depends, and some of those dependents are how many years they've been training, what their training goals are, how much time they're actually on the bike, things like that. But if I'm working with an athlete in their base phase, most of the sessions will be in that zone two, endurance, an intern zone, especially in the first several weeks of base. But if we're only training six to eight hours per week, especially for a seasoned rider. I find that having that one to two days of intermittent intensity is really effective for various reasons. This can happen simply by doing one or two group rides per week, maybe a hard Zwift race or group ride there, perhaps some Strava, qom or KOM hunting, or just a hard structured workout with some sprints.

Speaker 1: 8:59

I find that the other endurance days go a lot better when I incorporate one or two days like that, meaning that the athletes adhere to their zone two endurance range, training their aerobic systems, and have contrast between training days, which is very important for adapting to training and building aerobic capacity. Those hard days don't always have to be overreaching either. It could just be maybe one hard effort or maybe that one group ride per week. That's it. The rest is endurance in that base or general training phase. As I said, the other performance aspects, like sprint to Rio two effort, doesn't fall away as much if we were to stay in zone two only for, say, eight to 12 weeks, again for low volume athletes. This is my approach. For high volume athletes I'll still incorporate a group ride once a week or maybe a sprint day, even when we're doing a volume block of just a lot of endurance riding. This is to help keep snapping legs and not lose the upper end of that adaptation. My final word on this goes to all beginners, as well as directly to you, lachlan Endurance miles or zone two riding should always be part of a training program year round and in any, every training phase for a cyclist. This is because it's an aerobic sport and we should be building aerobic capacity on days where we want that training fact. But most athletes only have about three to four good days per week where we can go real hard, like doing threshold work, and benefit from it. The other days should be recovery or endurance training, and this will ensure you keep adapting and improving from your hard workouts. So, lachlan, I hope that answers your question, but feel free to write back if you're still a little confused on that one. All right.

Speaker 1: 11:01

Question number three this is coming from Dave and it's kind of a request. So here it is. During the podcast, you frequently refer to past episodes by number, but I can't find them anywhere on Spotify. This is a bit frustrating. Any help? Yeah, dave, we took care of it. So on Spotify and other platforms we've started numbering episodes and we'll be working on numbering the previous episodes, kind of doing a bunch of work to do that, but I will try to refer to the episode number as well as the title in future episodes so that if anyone does want to go back and listen to a specific episode, you can simply search for it by title or number or whatever works best for you. So thank you for that feedback and personally I don't use Spotify, so getting that feedback from our listeners, such as yourself, I mean that's super helpful. We want to make this podcast better each year for everyone out there, and so doing a little admin stuff like that that was a good heads up on that. So thank you, thanks, dave.

Speaker 1: 12:08

Okay, so to wrap this up great questions today, folks. I really enjoyed answering them. Keep the good questions rolling in. That's it. That's our show for today. Thanks for listening and be sure to come back next week for more. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.