The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Junk Miles: They Aren't What You Think They Are (#223)

• CTS • Season 4 • Episode 223

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OVERVIEW
Unravel the mystery of "junk miles" with as we redefine the controversial concept and dismantle myths surrounding Zone 2, Zone 3, Tempo and Sweet Spot. This episode will help you transform aimless fatigue-inducing rides into purposeful, performance-enhancing sessions. Understanding the art of periodization and the value of each training zone, you’ll learn to strategically align your rides with your fitness goals and maximize your cycling potential.

TOPICS COVERED

  • What "Junk Miles" really means
  • Weekly training pattern to avoid junk miles
  • Tips for planning effective workouts
  • Making good use of group rides

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HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades 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 onto our show. Now onto our show. Welcome back, time Crunch fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford.

Speaker 1:

Today's topic the ever dreaded junk miles. Everyone is afraid of them, yet I don't think everyone knows what they are, or do they even exist. I'll cover all that and more on today's episode, but first I want to thank John, one of our listeners, for writing in on this topic, as his question to the pod has created the content for today's episode. To help frame this all up, I want to read the original question and then I'll start chipping away at the answer. So here we go. Question and then I'll start chipping away at the answer. So here we go, and this again is coming from John in Bloomsburg, pennsylvania.

Speaker 1:

I may be my own worst enemy. My favorite ride to do is a two to four hour hammer ride, by my standards anyway, and it's fun and a great way to relieve stress from work. On a typical one of these rides, my average heart rate for the whole time is 145 to 160 beats per minute Lots of time spent in zone three to four in a five zone model. So question is are these the dreaded junk mile rides that are hindering long-term performance in my fitness, especially if I'm doing one or more of these per week? Or perhaps, from a more glasses half full perspective, is there a more sensible way and productive way to fit these rides in, say, once or twice per week, into a training plan that will also lead to actual gains? I suppose one way to look at this would be what kind of training could lead to achieving a goal of being able to smash rides like this with some frequency. Lots of questions, so let's get into it.

Speaker 1:

Junk miles Do they exist? Yes, they do, but be careful how you think of them. And that goes for you, john, as well as our listeners, because having fun and going fast with your friends is a fantastic way to ride your bike. It's not junk miles. What is the rationale behind that?

Speaker 1:

Let's first define a key term junk miles. What are they generally? I mean, you talk to a lot of coaches out there. You'll probably find a lot of different definitions, but I would say, based on conversations I've had with coaches, physiologists, scanning the internet of things ridden or time spent in training at whatever intensity, duration or frequency, that doesn't align with your specific training objectives. That also doesn't contribute to your fitness goals. So the junkiness is linked to some sort of goal or objective. Note in that definition junk miles are not a specific percentage of FTP or some gray zone or anything like that. As I've said on this podcast before, all zones matter. So tempo and sweet spot have gotten a bad rap recently because of this fake news. If you will, more on that later.

Speaker 1:

For me personally, I like to think of the junk in these junk miles more in patterns or habits that I see in athletes. For example, always doing the same thing in training Going hard every single day in training, going longer all the time, just for the sake of more miles in the legs Riding when you are super tired, the sake of more miles in the legs, riding when you are super tired. As you can see, these patterns will lead you down the road of fatigue without some sort of intent or purpose, and without intent you can dig yourself a huge hole of fatigue that's just really hard to climb out of if you pattern your training like this. So, even these characteristics and these habits that I just shared with you, they do lack some context, because there is a time and place for monotony more miles going hard on back to back to even back days and putting in some work on tired legs. So it all depends on the intent of the plan and how it fits into the master plan. So let's talk about defining the intent of training.

Speaker 1:

The best way to make sure that you're not doing junk miles is to set up a longer term plan for yourself that progressively overloads your body in training cycles such as macro, meso and micro cycles. These are just fancy words in periodization theory to mean the annual plan or macro phase of training meso and the week of training micro cycle. Now, I'm not going to get into super detailed of what that means today, but if you want to hear more about this, uh, check out my episode number one or sorry, number 46 that I did with Tim Cusick and that the the title of that one is called periodization in training modalities. Additionally, I've linked to a free ebook called periodization, theory and methodology of training by Tudor Bampa. It's a classic work on all things planning for athletes, and it's a really awesome resource that I cite often and come back to myself my in my own coaching practice to stay grounded in this. Now that's for, like the super nerds out there that want to do more of a planning aspect of it. Um so, to John and other listeners out there, I'm gradually telling you that there's a time and place to hammer the group rides in your training, but not every day, and maybe not year round. If you cycle your training properly, there'll be times to stay out of the group to work on other aspects of your riding, so that you can come back to the group and smash, go faster, ride it better have a lot more fun, cause that's really the goal here in training. It better have a lot more fun, because that's really the goal here in training.

Speaker 1:

The real culprit, though, when it comes to junk miles, is hard intensity every day. If you're a rider who is doing some kind of structured training or training at zone three and higher. Every single day you are doing junk miles. Why? The answer lies in the patterning, and it's deeper than just zone training itself. My conversation with Dr Steven Seiler entitled how to build durable athletic performance, and that is episode number 48. We talked about the negative impacts of flipping the anaerobic switch every day. So this means harder than ventilatory threshold or LT1. That's what is meant by going hard every day. This triggers the fight or flight response in the autonomic nervous system. Often your body gets overly stressed to the point where it has a hard time recovering properly from all the training intensity. And all the training intensity that you're doing won't do any good because you're eventually not going to be able to go hard enough to elicit a response and you can't recover enough to make an adaptation.

Speaker 1:

Another really good summary on this is actually coming from Dylan Johnson, and he's got a YouTube channel out there. The title of this particular topic is called Unproductive Training. This topic and it's a it's a quick listen, but he goes into different modalities of training, much like I do in that episode with Tim Cusick, and he actually had a really good conversation with Steven Seiler. So I think what I found to be most beneficial on that one is you take a, an elite athlete and ambassador, and himself an exercise physiologist, and Dr Steven Seiler and a coach, and you give them a topic and we're all saying the same thing or giving the same advice on this topic. So for a different angle on it and a good summary with great research to back it up, check that one out. I'll put it in my landing page and show notes for this episode too.

Speaker 1:

Now my main point here and, as you can see, junk miles is not just one intensity zone or percentage of FTP. It's a series of bad habits in training that leads to a condition where you're just fatigued without much benefit. So how do we avoid junk miles? You want to have high quality training. That is how you avoid the junk miles. What is quality training? Quality training simply means has the athlete completed what was intended with high success?

Speaker 1:

I did a whole podcast about this to check out, episode number 189, entitled is your training plan crap? In that episode, my guest Alex Hutchinson makes the case that following a mediocre plan is better than not following a great plan If you have goals where you want to improve your physiology. The main reason is most athletes just overdo intensity these days. I'll also remind you that variety is a principle of training and if you follow a plan with variety, that will keep on stimulating you in fresh ways so that you can keep on making gains, and that's a really good thing. So a good plan will cycle the training with progressive overload, variety and a bunch of other good stuff. That's in Tudor Bampa's book, okay. And every good plan will have some course of correction along the way. As I preached here on this podcast and other episodes, that good plan will always allow for adjustments. Laying it out will give you the roadmap. But we're humans, we're not robots and our messy, chaotic lives needs some flexibility to them, especially in the way of a good training program.

Speaker 1:

But I would say my go-to recipe for a solid patterning of intensity to avoid chunk miles and burnout is to have two to three days per week of harder intensity that means harder than zone two. Then the rest of the week is either a rest day or zone two training. So how that looks Monday, rest day, tuesday hard could be intervals, or it could be your group ride, John. Wednesday zone two, endurance. Thursday, hard day, friday, recovery and that could be a easy spin in zone one for one hour or less, or it just could be another rest day. By the way, saturday, that's another hard day. Or long endurance day. Sunday, zone two endurance, real simple, no percentages of FTP, no zone talk there, but it's the pattern that I really want you to latch onto, uh to to find the answer to how to avoid these junk miles.

Speaker 1:

Okay, also, don't forget to have fun with this. Having fun should be a huge intent of your macro cycle or your annual plan for masters, juniors, even elites. Keeping the fun factor high will ensure that you do your training because you actually want to do it, and those who do more training will increase fitness and increase their performance. So to John's question their performance. So to John's question what training will help me smash these group rides with friends? First part of that bring contrast to your training. That goes into the, the planning, all the cycles of training that I'm talking about, but as a high level, general concept, keep the hard days hard, easy days easy. And zone two, zone two, okay. Uh, as I said, a lot of people just go hard every single day and that creates problems. Okay For you, john, in particular, lengthen your long ride.

Speaker 1:

That's another good piece of advice. So, once you've mapped out your training plan for the year, you'll have phases in there where it'll be a high volume focus in a good program, whether you're time crunched, time rich or anything like that. And since you, john, you said you're already doing two to four hour group rides on a fairly regular basis. I'm assuming that you're not super time crunched, you're probably not out there doing eight hour rides, but having a month or two or several months kind of peppered throughout the year where you're working on long ride adaptation, you want to lengthen that long ride. So whatever kind of distance or duration that you have right now, lengthen it out each week or every other week by 10 to 15%. And I'd say probably, since you said you're 58 masters rider, build up to a five-hour ride. That'll really deepen your aerobic depth and that will really help you improve hammering for two to four hours.

Speaker 1:

Here is another tip for those who are doing a bunch of group rides is have a goal for the group ride. What do I mean by that? Don't always do it the same way. I want you to change how you ride the group, especially as it pertains to the cycle or phase of training that you're in. So, for example, if you're in a VO two phase or some sort of like race prep, go really hard. Okay, that means send off hard attacks that maybe it's on a hill climb, that's a you know a minute or two long, just drill it at the very bottom, try to shed everybody and get to the top. Maybe you'll be dropped but that's fine because you're going to do a hard VO2, maybe even harder sort of attack to mimic that same intensity that you do in training.

Speaker 1:

Now, super huge asterisk and alarm bell goes off here because I am not saying do intervals on the group ride. Please hear me on that. I hate it when people do intervals on the group ride. Don't do that. But you can change your tactics so that you're doing long, hard attacks, you're leading out a friend for the sprint, basically like one to three minutes, up to five minutes. You can do that on a hard hill climb. That's your intensity on the day, whether there's one of them, two of them, four of them, whatever. Do long, hard VO2 and above nine out of 10 RPE sort of efforts amongst the group ride, and that's going to help, uh, fit into the whole cycle of your training.

Speaker 1:

Now, if you're in more of a tempo or threshold phase. You want to spend more time at the front doing more work, much like John. It sounds like you're already doing so you kind of you know, make it a nice hard day like that where you just grind it out. Now, on days where you're leading up, maybe you're in a race phase or something like that already you just want to work on your sprint or you want to work on your tactics. Sit in more, do less, get on wheels, be patient, read who you're riding with and if your group ride has a town sign sprints or a sprint at the very end or sprint at the top of the climb get yourself real fresh for that moment. Okay, oftentimes I see a lot of masters rider just jump in the group ride and always go hard and they always kind of do the same thing. Change it up, try to win that sprint every once in a while, even if you're not a sprinter. Work on it, because it's going to improve your anaerobic capacity. It's also going to make you more fresh in the moments that you want to go and it's also going to help you learn more about yourself. Okay, the biggest thing is sitting on the front the whole time. That will lead to all the bad things that we talked about with junk miles and just make you tired all the time and you won't get a ton of gain from it. Now, when you're in your base phase or on a recovery week, stay out of the group ride, just let it go, it's fine, it'll be there for when you come back.

Speaker 1:

Final piece of advice or tip on this is just think ahead a little bit. Have an intent or a purpose or objective to the training, and this doesn't have to be super uber detailed either. If you're lazy like me, with no annual plan, no super specific thing, you can simply pick out two to three days per week where you jump in your group ride or hit some Hills. Then you do a long ride per week, okay, and you just kind of keep on rinsing and repeating. This will keep you fit and well-balanced, because the other days, remember you're just, you're going easier, you're doing zone two, you're taking rest, you're taking recovery rides, things like this. So it'll keep you fit and well-balanced so that when you are ready to get specific or tune up for a race, you're poised for a proper training block and by patterning your training like that, you'll be able to not overdo the number of days at intensity. Even though you don't have any huge grand master plan, sticking to a plan of two to three days hard per week will keep you moving forward and keep you out of the junk miles genre of things. You moving forward and keep you out of the junk miles genre of things. Finally, when in doubt, go easier or rest. There's a great article on this from CTS called the Five Most Important Rules. I'll link to that in my show notes and it's a good companion read to this podcast written by Chris Carmichael and Jim Ruppberg.

Speaker 1:

And one example from me this past Sunday actually had one of these days. I was tired. I was tired from international travel, I was a bit jet-lagged, but I had the whole day to ride and all my numbers and stuff. You should have been fresh and ready to go, but I was just tired. I didn't want to ride. It wasn't overly welcoming to ride outside, so I took a nap instead. I didn't want to ride. It wasn't overly welcoming to ride outside, so I took a nap instead and I chose to hit the group ride the next day. And you know what? I felt great on it and I know because I've done it wrong before. I know. If I would have ridden on that Sunday, I would have just pedaled blah miles, I would have stayed tired and I wouldn't have had as much fun or gone as hard on the group ride. So I kept my hard days hard, easy days easy and I had a lot more fun doing it. So, uh, when in doubt, go easy or rest.

Speaker 1:

So in summary, to wrap this thing up, personally I don't think junk miles should exist in a well-structured training program. I don't think junk miles should exist in a well-structured training program. If you can plan or think ahead, even a little bit, adjust by listening to your body on the day, and check and evaluate after your ride to see if you've met the training objectives, you'll avoid the training patterns that lead to junkiness. Stay grounded in high quality training with a good plan and you'll get faster year to year, month to month, and you'll have a lot more fun in the process. That's it. That's our show for today.

Speaker 1:

Thank you again for listening to our show. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend. It's the best way to grow the show and ensure to keep pumping great content out to you, our listeners, and if you're like John from today's episode with a question, please head over to trainwrightcom backslash podcast and click on ask a training question. You can submit any question on all things endurance and I'll do my best to answer it on a future episode. Be sure to tune in next week and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Thanks again, everyone. 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.

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