The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Episode 189: Is Your Training Plan Crap? Defining High-Quality Training with Alex Hutchinson, PhD

March 27, 2024 • CTS • Season 4 • Episode 189

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In Episode 189 of The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast, Outside Magazine's Sweatscience columnist Alex Hutchinson joins Host Adam Pulford to discuss the details that separate crappy training from high-quality training. Whether you're balancing your passion for cycling with a demanding schedule or aiming to refine your training routine, this conversation offers invaluable insights into achieving peak performance.

Key topics in this episode:

  • What is "training quality"?
  • The role of device data in defining training quality
  • How to adjust training on the fly, during workouts?
  •  Indicators of training quality
  • The role of iteration and reflection on personalizing training for you
  • How do you know if your training plan is crap?
  • Four indicators your training plan isn't working

Resources:

Guest: Alex Hutchinson, PhD
Alex Hutchinson is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist and Outside’s Sweat Science columnist, covering the latest research on endurance and outdoor sports. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. Before becoming a journalist, he completed a PhD in physics at the University of Cambridge and worked as a researcher in the National Security Agency’s Quantum Computing group. He also competed for the Canadian national team in track, cross-country, road, and mountain running. He lives (and runs) in Toronto.

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Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 14 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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Speaker 1:

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 on to our show. Now onto our show. Welcome back, or welcome to the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford.

Speaker 1:

In response to a listener that wrote in with some constructive criticism about my use of the term quality training in a past episode, I wanted to address what I meant by quality. As I started to draft up and outline, some pretty basic questions started to arise, such as what's the difference between high quality training and other training, what makes training have quality and how do we even know if training quality is high? So to help answer some of these questions, I brought in national award-winning journalist and writer for Outside Magazine's Sweat Science column, alex Hutchinson. Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks, adam. It's great to be here Now, alex. You've actually been on the show before several years ago. Since then, we've rebranded the podcast, the world has had a pandemic, new marathon, world records were set and I think you've been writing a new book, am I right?

Speaker 2:

I've been working very hard on the book. It seems like pretty much forever, but I'm now. I got a first draft in a couple of weeks ago and I'm now working on revisions.

Speaker 1:

Awesome man. Well, we'll talk more about that at some point, but I'm, you know, I'm really I'm thankful. You know you took some time to talk with our audience. Um, as I was saying before, time is of the essence, so, uh, really thank you for taking time out of your out of your life and your busy, busy time to come and chat with us. But when you're not writing books, you are writing for the sweat science column and outside, as I alluded to, you wrote an article on training quality late last year. I think it was right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it was last fall. Yeah, okay, and I think it's best to just really pick up right where you left off. And toward the end of the article you provided a quote from Thomas Hagen, the Norwegian sports scientist, and I'll read it right now Training quantity means nothing without training quality, and for now, the best way to improve quality might be to just keep talking about what it means. So I figure we just keep the conversation going. What do you think?

Speaker 2:

That sounds good, because there's a lot to talk about and more questions than answers. Let's say at this point yeah.

Speaker 1:

I think so, I think so, and so, to bring some context, we, um audience members can write in and ask whatever questions they want, and I was talking about a heat training protocol and in there I was like okay, um, do your heat I don't even remember what exactly I said but do your heat training and then make sure that your training quality remains high and move on from there. Um, if training quality goes low, then you need to adjust, blah, blah, blah. And so, as I look back on that, I think I was referring to quality, meaning like intensity. But the first question I have for you is is it too simple to call quality intensity?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, look words, words mean what we want them to mean. So I think in that sentence you just said, I would have understood that what you were saying is like if you can't maintain the pace, that. So I would have understood quality as intensity. But I think there is a separate concept which we would also think of as training quality that is definitely not just the same as going harder or as how hard you're going, definitely not just the same as as going harder or as how hard you're going.

Speaker 2:

And uh, I think all you know, all cyclists, all athletes, all coaches have an intuition of like that was a good workout, that was a bad workout. And it's sort of like the there's that famous, I think, of the supreme court, justice potter stewart, in a case on pornography like how do you define pornography? I know it when I see it, and we all have intuitions about what a good workout or a bad workout is. That go beyond like did I go fast? It's like you know, I mean.

Speaker 2:

And the classic example would be like you assign someone supposed to go out for an easy ride and they end up racing with someone and just absolutely take it to the wall. No one's gonna like we all going to say that wasn't smart. Like if you have, if you have a race two days from now or a hard workout tomorrow, and you just took what was supposed to be a recovery ride and and, and you know, smash yourself, that wasn't high quality, that that's an easy one. But then when you start going beyond that and say, okay, well, let's pin down what does it? What does it mean to have a high quality workout or to do high quality training? It gets surprisingly difficult to to to pin down what we mean by that.

Speaker 1:

It is. I mean, and as as a coach sitting here doing this for over 18 years now, being an athlete before that, I mean we do throw around that term quality training quite a bit and, as I said, like man, I started to really shape this up. I'm like, oh, I'll bang this uh, you know podcast out. Here's going to be my main talking points. I'm like, shoot, I need to do, I need to do a little bit more research here.

Speaker 1:

Started poking around, I found a Hagen's paper, but it also led me to your article and I'm like I need to reach back out to Alex Cause this is going to be a very good topic. So I would say to take those two bits of writing your own article as well as Hagen's paper. The basic premise that I pulled out of that was Hagen was talking about having a process and having a result, and that process is kind of the how and why you're doing something to reach a result, and then the result is the what you did and how well you did it, as it relates to the process, and so I mean that gets a little confusing in itself because it's in my head. I just visualize it's like process at the top, result at the bottom, with a arrow pointing here and an arrow pointing here, in a circular fashion.

Speaker 2:

Visually do I kind of have that correct, as far as you know. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good way of thinking of it.

Speaker 2:

I guess I would actually zoom out a little bit more and say, if we want to start with the sort of the broadest definition of training quality. What it means is did this workout contribute in the most effective way possible to the ultimate outcome that you care about? And that's a race that may be. I mean, there may be a race that's two weeks from now, there may be a race that's three months from now, there may be a race that's five years from now, that you're you're hoping to qualify for or you know whatever. So you have goals on, you know a hierarchical array of goals and and you're hoping that the workout you did is going to be the right workout that will do the most possible to get you towards that goal. And there's no and this is a philosophical thing, because there's no way of knowing whether the run that I did this morning was the right run for me to run, well, at a cross-country race six months from now. But even though we can't know, we can't test that empirically that's what we're aspiring to to have the right workout.

Speaker 2:

And then once you say, okay, well, what's the right workout? Well, there is no single right workout. And then once you you say, okay, well, what's the right workout? Well, there is no single right workout. The right workout can only be defined in the context of your overall training plan. So you know it's not just about following the plan, because your plan has to be good and then there are different ways of getting to that. There are different, different plans. So all of a sudden you have like seven different variables. It's like how, what is my training plan and within that training plan, is this the right workout and is that leading towards the right? So I I'm totally confusing matters here. So I apologize, but yeah, when we're talking about process and outcome, it's like it has to be framed within like what are you trying to achieve? Like and and and and what means are you trying to? What is the approach you're using to try to achieve that competitive or fitness goal?

Speaker 1:

yeah, yeah, I don't think it's confusing in in this way, because I think, like, as I, as I look on, like, uh, physiology and coaching and athleticism, it's like really that process.

Speaker 1:

We can loosely define it as the annual plan, the monthly plan or even the daily plan, the mesocycle, the microcycle and the workout of the day. That's all part of the process. Then you go do the workout and then there's this result of did I hit the pace? Did I hit the power? Did I achieve the goal? Did the perceived effort, or what I recently have been calling the real feel of the workout, did that match the prescribed rate of perceived effort on a scale of one to 10 intensity, right? And then that feeds back into did it, you know, check the box of the process. So I would say the system of what you and Hagen and some of these others are talking about, it's all stuff that we're practicing on a regular basis as coaches and athletes, but putting framework behind it and putting some mutual words around it, it really helps to make high quality training contextualize so that we can all speak the same language.

Speaker 2:

And I think it's an important point to make that it's not like coaches have never worried about training quality, of course. I mean, that's the fun, that's, that's their fundamental like, that's their goal is to have high quality training. So, but but it's, there's this sense, especially in this, this, you know, in this modern age of of data and and analytics and things like that, there's the. The cliche is that what gets measured, gets managed, and I think that's a um. I mean that you can extend that and say actually that that can be a problem, because then you end up only worrying about the things that you're measuring. But in this context, if we want training quality to be taken seriously, if you want to be focusing on doing high quality workouts maybe you can't measure quality, but you at least need to be thinking about what it is so you can understand whether you're getting close to it or not. Because the risk is, if you're not thinking about training quality, you're only thinking about training quantity or intensity. Then you're analyzing all your metrics about how much mileage did I do last week, how fast did I do it, what was my average power, and you're letting all those considerations crowd out the question of like was this the right workout, and did I execute it correctly? When I read Haugen's paper it's a slippery concept, as I've already sort of you've seen me talking around in circles here, and so it's I found it maybe not confusing, but just hard to get a handle on, and so I was trying to think well, how do we operationalize this? And so I was trying to think well, what, how do we operationalize this? And and my sense was like the the the clearest thing that I could come up with was the intention execution gap, which is what you were just referring to.

Speaker 2:

Like you go into a workout, you you have you have some sense of what you're trying to do in that workout and you have some way of evaluating how close you came to what your intentions were. So if you went into a workout and it was supposed to be a threshold workout and you wanted it to be to feel sort of like a seven out of 10 workout, then if you went out and just jogged and I come from the running background, so pardon if I use running rather than cycling If you went and jogged and it felt like a five out of 10, that's a failure in some senses. You didn't do what you were supposed to. Same time, if you went out and raced because, let's say, you had a training partner who was in great shape and you did nine out of 10 effort for that workout, that's also a failure. And so in either case, you can say I was two units off what I intended to do, and so I think that's one way of operationalizing it.

Speaker 2:

But when I asked Hagen about this, he was like, yeah, that's one element of it. Did you stick to the plan? But if your plan sucks, that's that that's not necessarily a victory, and you know so. So so that's why you have to incorporate the larger concept of having a good plan. And then he also said it's like sticking to the plan isn't always like the best thing to do. You know, let's say you're just, you're fit, you're feeling great, it was the right time. Did you take advantage of this moment to get into more reps? Or, conversely, if you were tired and starting to, you know you were struggling a little bit. Did you? Did you back off at the right time? So the right workout isn't just a question of doing what you plan to do, because that depends on whether you have a good plan. It also depends on understanding when things are changing and when it might be better to adapt the plan.

Speaker 1:

So two things stand out to me there. One, what if your plan sucks? Let's put that aside for a quick second, because that's a big question itself. And then the second thing is like how to adjust, say like on the fly, right In the moment, and that's awareness. I think that's a highly aware athlete.

Speaker 1:

But once you're aware of I feel good, I don't feel good, now what, right? What do you do, I think, with my athletes anyway, I refer to it as like self-determined training. Give them some scenarios of like. If you feel this way, here's the workout. If you're feeling this way at this point, divert here. If you feel this way at this point, divert here. And so go back to your threshold run, for example, if you're not feeling great, if you warm up, you do a couple of strides and you're like getting into it and you're like, ooh, my legs are heavy and then just not like turning over, which I do well, jog right, run at that five out of 10, let's save the threshold work for another day, for example. Right, that's.

Speaker 1:

That's one way that I kind of guide them through a self-determined training when I can't be there as a remote based coach. Second thing is, if we're doing like some steady, like steady state running. So longer threshold, maybe like um, somewhere between 10 K half marathon pace, and I'm just looking for time and zone for cycling. It may be like extensive threshold development work, something that we're working on extending their FTP, for example, um, and say I've got three by 12 on there and they're feeling really good.

Speaker 1:

It's like man, I feel like I could just crush, like I'm going to crush this workout, but I could do more. What should I do? I say extend the intervals, go up to like 15, you know 15 minutes each. Try to accumulate time in zone, right, and maybe you'd like sandwich one of those intervals together, right? So you do like one long one and then you know like a 10 or 12 afterwards. So that's some of that self-determined training that I like to implement in my coaching practice. I don't know, is that something that you found with with Hogan when you talked to him, or or is that anything else that you've thought about, wrote about?

Speaker 2:

I think that's high, high quality training. If you can execute that correctly, now the the. The tricky thing, then is you know, how do you know if you're feeling good? Um, and I think there's different personalities right there. I I've certainly trained with people who are always itching to do more, even when it's not beneficial, and I've also trained with people, uh, who not for long, because they don't last long in the sport, but who are always trying to do less. Um, you know who are. I'm a little tired, I better, you know, I better. Back off, it's like, and so you.

Speaker 2:

There's layers of like, and this is where having both subjective and objective data can be useful. If you're just relying on is the pace right? Is the power right, then you're not going to pick up if you're just feeling better or feeling worse. On the other hand, if you're only relying on your feelings, you might be like well, I'm just feeling, it just feels so easy. Well, maybe that's because you're going too slow, right, like, you have to have some reality check and you have to sort of understand that.

Speaker 2:

And this is, I think, where coach athlete relationships can be. Valuable is to have an external voice and, in a perfect world, an external voice who understands how you're wired and whether you're the type of person who needs to be held back or pushed forward or, you know, encouraged to make adjustments or encouraged to stick with the plan initially. So you know it's tricky, but I think this is one element of what gets at the heart of quality training is recognizing how to adjust when you need to adjust, that there's more to coaching or to training than to writing something down on a piece of paper and then executing it highly actualized athletic individual.

Speaker 1:

I don't want a robot, which means if I write the training, don't just blindly jump off the cliff right Following the program, Like if you see something divert, and that's I mean sorry to jump in, but that's that's a hallmark of high quality training, but it's also, ultimately, what you're.

Speaker 2:

The skill you're trying to learn for racing is because in the race you're going to have to make those decisions yourself and and the better you, the more you've learned to um to tap into the, that ability to, to, to decide when you can actually sort of the plan out and push harder or when you need to dial it back. Um, you learn to do that in training. So I mean, I think that having that sort of high quality and adaptive training and responsive training is important for the long-term physiological adaptations, but it's also important for understanding where your limits are and learning how to push them.

Speaker 1:

And I think too, like for all of our listeners like tuning in here, like for all of our listeners like tuning in here, keep in mind this this is a lifelong pursuit for athletes, like some of the best researchers and coaches are, uh, only now, I would say, producing some high quality papers. I mean, someone could probably reference, no, this paper from 1978, explore this, probably. But I think we're having better conversations about what high quality training is and the systems and methods that we use to do this. And with my athletes too, like I, for example, the last week, uh, working with one of my world tour, uh female athletes there she was at altitude camp. We're doing some aggressive training.

Speaker 1:

I'm always like super cautious with altitude camps, especially with elites. Have all the time in the world, all the ambition in the world. How do we go coach? Let's do more all the time, right. So we induce training, we get into it. We're like, is this too much? I'm working with our team director, like, yeah, I think it is. We look at metrics, right. We look at HRV, resting heart rate. We look at the recovery whoop score, which, in my opinion, throw that one out the door. The other two, okay, maybe. But then I'm like what do you, what do you really feel like? And it was like wow, I feel my heart rate just sitting here.

Speaker 2:

Okay, rest day rest day opposed to a four hour or whatever, and that's you know you. You're looking at all these different sources of data, including subjective ones, and I think you know, every time I write about stuff like hrv, heart rate variability and stuff, there's a desire people want it to be the ultimate arbiter. We all want to know, like can I just get a green light or a red light or an orange light every day that tells me whether to go?

Speaker 2:

and it's like no single indicator is really able to, in my opinion, to, to, to, to substitute for looking at a whole bunch of different indicators I I think for a, for an in-tune athlete like their, their intuition, their, their feelings is is the absolute best thing, but it we're so full of the desire to dilute ourselves or to to trick ourselves into or to give ourselves permission to train harder or whatever, that it can be useful to have these objective data, sources of data, even if they don't, they're, they're not infallible and they're not, uh, you know, they have their sources of variability, but they can give you another, another uh sort of decision point to help reinforce the decision that you know today's the rest day. Yeah, these, these are hard decisions, obviously.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, super hard decisions and I and I get excited with if data can help us solve those problems because, again, remote-based coaching from afar you know she's up at 2,000 plus meters in some island for office, spain and I refer to those elements of like HRV, resting heart rate, as small directional arrows to guide you toward an end decision, right, but all the all of the other context of what's the, what's the fatigue leading in, how does the athlete feel? You know these are other arrows that are more important. So, yes, data, but also process, result in a framework and a structure to help guide your decision-making, I think is really what. What we're finding in this, in this endurance athlete coach community of sorts.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I think you know maybe another element to mention on this note that that that Thomas hagen brought up is the importance of kind of learning from each step and debriefing and assessing so and so it. You know you want to know which data is useful for you. One way to figure that out is to, over time, be watching, to start with a just kind of descriptive approach to data, where you're trying to understand and you and you you make, you're going to make some mistakes. You're going to have some times where you push it too hard or maybe don't get, don't push it hard enough, or whatever. You learn from that and you look back and you say you know what there were, there were some warning signs here.

Speaker 2:

I I felt like crap and it turned out I was. I was right, or maybe the heart rate variability or maybe something else is is was pointing that out and so taking the you know, on a on a regular basis after workouts, you know, after a given week of training, to assess how did this week go, what went well, what went poorly, what you know, what do I think is going and after a given race cycle or fitness cycle, um, that that's an you know something that I hadn't really thought about is training quality. What is what is sitting down in front of a spreadsheet? That's not training quality. But to Thomas Huggins, that's part of training quality If you, if you're not learning from your experiences, you're not gradually increasing your ability to, to dial it in for for future training cycles.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and I think that I mean honestly, like I, I know I can do that better and more. I think the debrief after workouts there's some tools, say on, like training peaks and and, um, some other analytical tools that I use. But even that, like the green, yellow, orange, red on training peaks meaning if I prescribe a workout for, uh, you know, one hour and the athlete does an hour and a half, it turns orange. So it's like one visual indicator that it's like something was not completely appropriate, but it's just pure volume, right. So there's like limitations there. Then the training peaks comment about how it felt. Then, looking at the you know the, the prescribed workouts relative to their pace or power within that, so you can get in there and go granular and I think that's good. I think, as an athlete, you need to do that, in my opinion, like if you're a self-coached athlete, getting in there looking at your data relative to what you planned and thinking about kind of like journaling.

Speaker 2:

That's a really good way to do it and you should do that after every workout, even like a zone two endurance workout yeah, I agree, and it's like I think where I came away from, uh, you know, after you know, reading these articles and thinking about it, there's, there's no, it's a complicated thing. There's a billion facets to training quality. If there was a one concrete thing that I would suggest to athletes, it's like, before each workout, have an idea of and not everyone has to do the same, but what?

Speaker 1:

I would say is like effort out of 10?

Speaker 2:

how, how hard is this supposed to be out of 10? And then, after the workout, write down how hard it was out of 10? Um, you should probably write down before the workout how hard you're planning to do it. So you can't, you know, reverse engineer that. Oh, I did exactly what I said I was going to do. And look, you're not always going to nail what you thought you were going to nail, and that's fine. It's not like you have to stick to that, as we said before. But you can start to look for trends and that'll give you the sort of first, broadest, crudest sense of like did I do what I was planning to do? And maybe, as we said before, maybe, maybe your plan is crap, but you know, you can't even make that judgment until you execute your, until you know whether you're executing your plan.

Speaker 1:

Now to that question, alex how do you know if your plan is crap?

Speaker 2:

Uh, you'll you'll, 10 years from now, you'll look back and you'll know I, I, you know what, maybe I should have done more mileage. That's, that's the only way to know for sure. No, I mean, it's interesting like, look in in running, um, the hottest thing these days is is norwegian double threshold training, so it's a ton of like highly controlled, lactate, monitored, uh, threshold workouts and it's more or less in. In some ways it's kind of like the opposite of of what the conventional wisdom was five years ago, where it's like don't do any threshold training, you should be either jogging easy or sprinting, you know, basically. And so it's like so did everyone's highest quality workouts suddenly become their lowest quality workouts retroactively? It's like you were doing the wrong thing. Quality workouts suddenly become their lowest quality workouts retroactively. It's like you were doing the wrong thing.

Speaker 2:

I don't think so. I think there's. There's many roads to Rome and and, um, you know like I, so um, and this goes back to what we were saying. It's like you can't evaluate a workout in isolation. It has to be in the context of its plan, and there are different plans and the plan that's right for one person might be wrong for another person. It's always going to be an inexact science, but you should have some rationale for what you're doing and you should have some reason to believe that your plan is is is not crazy.

Speaker 2:

I mean, in the last couple days I was rereading the training van manifesto of nils vanderpoel, the the speed skater who won the five thousand and ten thousand uh in speed skating at the last olympics, and you know his training program is nuts. It's nuts If Joe Schmoe trains five days a week and then he goes and like parties two days a week or does whatever he wants. His training is insanely repetitive, insanely hard, insanely periodized. Yeah, if Joe Schmoe gave me that training plug I would say, like man, you are an idiot, get this. You know you have not learned the first thing about any basic training, but he set the world record at both of his events and won the Olympics.

Speaker 2:

So you know, by definition his training plan was good. But I wouldn't have known that a priori right Like it turned out to be a good plan and sometimes I think you know so he was going with what he strongly believed in and he was willing. I think I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think he was happy to fail, doing it in the way that he was confident was right, rather than just stick with the sort of tried and true conventional wisdom. So so we all have to be careful about pronouncing. You know what's a smart plan and what's a stupid plan. That said, we, you know we, we can look at the patterns of of successful athletes and we have some pretty good ideas of what's probably a good plan for for most people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, if, if you haven't listeners, if you haven't read that manifesto and I did a, I think I did a podcast, or at least I mentioned that or we talked about it um, definitely go and read through it, because it is, it's bonkers, it's brilliant, it's crazy, but it's and it's very thoughtful, right like.

Speaker 2:

It's not that he just just has some sort of harebrained physiological plan and he did it. He's thought very carefully about for him what makes him tick. And so one of the points he makes is, like, for me, motivation was the hardest thing. He was a world junior champion who then stepped away from the sport when joined the army for a year. Did ranger training, um, like, obviously motivation was hard for him. So finding ways of making him, of making the sport worthwhile or even tolerable for him, was more important than, like, the balance of, you know, aerobic to anaerobic work or whatever.

Speaker 2:

Um, and and he recognized that and, and I think you know he correctly assumed that that, you know, finding a plan that he believed in was more important than the details of the plan. You know, maybe he might argue that the details of the plan were important too, but I, you know, I interpreted that he was it that he was. It's as much as a psychological document as it is a physiological document, I think, and it is just to to triple echo your point. It's fascinating. You google, uh, how to skate a 10k or half a 10k mills vanderpool and you'll find his, his.

Speaker 2:

It's his 60 page document including his entire training cycle, like diary leading up to the olympics and he only trained five days a week Trained damn hard on those five days, but yeah, the whole time he's like the other two days he would do whatever he wanted, like he would go with his friends, he would have a social life and um but. But he trained exceptionally hard on those five days yeah.

Speaker 1:

So how do you know if you have a? Uh, you know your plan sucks. I would say, based in my experience, some red flags to me is if you're always getting injured, that's a pretty good sign that. Look at your training, okay, because usually there's like too much intensity or, um, maybe too much run volume for a runner, too much ride volume, if you're a cyclist, you know, and you're just like not as durable to handle that high load just yet. And another one is like if you're just always tired, right, that's also a hallmark of too much intensity. If you're just like eyes bleeding all the time and you get back to your work desk, or at night, you're like falling asleep in the couch, like check the training distribution of intensity, right, because it's all contextually woven with what the goal, what the end goals are, how much time you have, and then so many other aspects that we get into. But those are too tired, too sick, too injured. Those are three things that would indicate that you have a plan that sucks, in my opinion.

Speaker 2:

I think that's that's a good one.

Speaker 2:

One one one that I would add, maybe in a sort of longer term retrospective sense, is if you're, if you're training, performances are always, always predict racing performances that are way higher than what you actually deliver in races. I think that's a common um. We've all encountered workout heroes, and look, everyone's different. Not everyone has to have the same workout to race conversion, but there's some people who, uh, work at an extremely high level that they can never sort of match in in, relatively speaking, in in races, and to me that's that's usually a a a pretty good indicator that they're they're leaving their races in training and that they're they're trying to win the workouts um, so I don't know if that's that's I would. I would add that as as as something to um, unless your goal in life is to win the workouts, if your goal is to compete, well, then if you're, if you're constantly training at a high, at a high level, that at a higher level than you can compete, then you need to think about whether you're, you're, you're, uh, you're pushing too hard.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I agree with that for sure. Um, so, to wrap this thing up, Alex, if, if our, our listeners they're they're generally crunched on time around six to eight hours total per week. What, what's like one or two things that you would strongly recommend for them to improve their quality of training?

Speaker 2:

yeah. So I'd go back to this idea of an intention execution gap um, take the time to to um, to articulate to yourself, or perhaps even write down what, what, what you're planning to do in each session and then assess how well you executed that. And I would, I would suggest, if you don't already have a way of doing that, start with just something like a one to 10 effort rating and that that just gives you. It's not going to give you all the answers, but it's at least going to get you thinking about did I do what I intended to do? And if not, why not? Maybe there was good reason, but uh, the you have to you forced. It starts the process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I like that too, and I think starting that process also starts to create more awareness of your training, more awareness as an athlete, and that is never a bad thing. I think the continual learning and growth that you'll get out of that is is really good. Once you get organized and start writing down what you intend to do, see if what you did do match the intention or not, then you'll start to see trends. If those trends lead you toward increasing your 10 K or decreasing your 10 K pace or improving it, increasing your functional threshold power, your VO2, whatever it is, that's great. If it's not, your plan might suck, right. So then you need to change it. You need to learn, you need to. You need to read more articles from Alex Hutchinson on outside magazine, right? You need to probably talk to your, your friends that you ride with, who, um, may have been riding or running longer than you, or find a good coach.

Speaker 1:

You know there's because no one knows everything. But together I do think that we can learn a lot more and provide better context and better information to increase your performance on your athletic journey, and that's really kind of the the, the core of what we talked about today.

Speaker 2:

That makes sense to me.

Speaker 1:

Well, Alex. Thank you so much for joining us today and really enjoyed our conversations, as always. 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 train rightcom 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.

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