The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Joe Friel on Fundamental Truths and Practical Training Takeaways for Cyclists (#235)

• CTS • Season 5 • Episode 235

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Overview:
Joe Friel, legendary coach and author of "The Cyclists Training Bible", "Fast After 50", and "Ride Inside" (among other titles), is back on the podcast to discuss some fundamental truths and takeaways on coaching and training. Whether you're new to training or you've been working out for decades, this is an opportunity to confirm what you've experienced and learned over the years and to discover more nuanced observations and techniques from one of the best coaches in the profession.

IN THIS EPISODE

  • Importance of a high performance mindset
  • Balancing the Big 3: Career, Family, Training
  • How to individualize training for Time-Crunched and Time-Rich Athletes
  • Overreaching vs Overtraining: Importance of scheduling rest
  • Race readiness: The difference between resting and tapering
  • Strength training: Why to do it, how, and when for Time-Crunched Athletes and Aging Athletes

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GUEST
For endurance athletes and coaches, Joe Friel needs no introduction. A legend in the endurance coaching profession, Joe is the author of some of the most successful books on endurance training, including "The Cyclist's Training Bible", "The Triathlete's Training Bible", and "Fast After 50". He was a founder of Peaksware, creator of TrainingPeaks software. As a coach, his clients have included elite amateur and professional road cyclists, mountain bikers, and triathletes and duathletes.

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 on to our show. Now onto our show. Welcome back, time Crunch fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford.

Speaker 1:

Joe Friel is a coaching legend in endurance sport. You've already heard from him in our mini-series on the Aging Athlete, where we talked about how being consistent in your training is really one of the most important elements for any athlete at any level of the sport, including the ones that are aging up in their race category. But his lessons don't just apply to masters and grandmasters. In fact, his book, the Cyclist's Training Bible, has been a go-to resource for many cyclists and coaches over the past 20 years. His latest and fifth edition keeps training principles that stand the test of time and have been updated for the latest tech and individualized training approaches. So today I'm back with Coach Friel to discuss key themes from his book that any time crunched or time rich athlete can apply to their training program for better success in health, fitness and performance. Joe Friel, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much, Adam. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me again.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, this is fun. Picking the brain of the coach of coaches is always super fun to do. So first question is why did you decide to write the fifth edition after so many years had passed from the advent of the first one?

Speaker 2:

Well, I wrote the first one in about 1996, the first edition of the book and I got around to the late 2018, 2019, 2020 era and I began to realize that, man, lots of things have changed. I just can't go back and hit it. I really need to rewrite this book. So I just threw out the manuscript I don't think I kept the same was the table of contents and I just started writing a whole new book, because there's just been so many changes that had occurred in over gosh, a 20 year period of time that I couldn't I couldn't really live with myself. I'm going to go back and make those, those, uh, those changes yeah, no, I totally agree.

Speaker 1:

I mean the, the, the sport has evolved at a great level and um. But, like I said, I think the, the, the things that you write about right, the, the evergreen kind of coaching things that will be here with us forever. I mean, we'll talk about some of those today. In a lot of this it can go back to the basics, but the advent of the individualized training process too, we'll press into that today. But where I'd like to start is with mindset. So if we can first talk about really, I think how you open up in the book is adopting a high performance mindset. Why do you start the book like that and what is a high performance mindset for an athlete?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, good question. I always thought that the mental side of the sport was just as important as physical side, and so when I've coached athletes over the years, I've spent a great deal of time trying to understand who they think they are as athletes and people and if there's anything that's holding them back from performing at a high level. And you always find these things. I've coached athletes from novices to olympian and, uh, it's always the same thing. They've got, they've got little things going on within their minds that are potential potholes, things are going to cause us to stop, and so I've always tried to figure out what these things are and then try to put a not really quell them, but try to understand them as much as I can help, so I can better understand the athlete and how to work with this particular athlete.

Speaker 2:

And so I started chapter the book with that chapter, because that, for me, is, uh, among the look forward. I'm talking to an athlete about coaching them. So you know I started down the list of things that I look for, and these things are always evolving in my head. You know, these things are not like carved in stone and never change. I'm always thinking about um, what sort of things am I learning that could apply to the athletes I've coached, and so I've come up with a list that is still used to this day when I talk with athletes about, about. So it's just a very important topic, one that cannot be ignored. If you ignore this, you're in huge difficulty with that athlete come down the road someplace.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and and I encourage everyone to pick up the book and learn a little bit more we're not going to go over the one, two, threes here in this podcast, but we're going to plant the seeds of kind of what to pull out from the book. But I think in the way of this, this mindset like starting there. One thing that you wrote was attitude first, results then come next. Like you know, couldn't agree more. So if, if some listeners are here and they're like what would be like the number, I can't get that like killer attitude. What's one thing, one thing that they can do kind of in their, in their life or in their habits to start cultivating that performance mindset?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there are lots of subset points here, I think. First, the one I always look for in athletes is his motivation. That's key. You you know, if the athlete is not motivated to train, there's nothing I can do to make that change. I've I had, I'm writing another book right now and inside the book I write about one of my, one of the athletes I coached, who had poor motivation.

Speaker 2:

Tremendous athlete, tremendous talent, but he had poor motivation and um that I could put up with that for only one year. You know if, for example, if there's anything that came up whatsoever during the day that might interfere with his uh training that day, he would simply bow to whatever the thing was and not not work out. But when it came to race day, he's a tremendous athlete. He was really one of the best race day athletes I've ever coach day. He's a tremendous athlete. He was really one of the best race day athletes ever coached. He's just tremendous talent. He was a former um um national champion, junior national champion in road cycling. He had way, way too much talent but always came back to haunting uh. Where it really hurting the most was in uh was in the base period. We were trying to build a big aerobic base. That was very low motivation for him and so, um, those were days. He would miss a lot of those days and always just for me it was really a challenge trying to get him to just to train and um. So that always showed up when we got to the long races later in the season. You know, we got to three, four five-hour races and he had a hard time struggling to just get to the finish line. His talent didn't mean anything at that point, he just didn't have the base he needed because he hadn't been motivated enough during the base period to establish that. So I coached him for one season. I said man, I can't do this again. So I set him on his way by himself.

Speaker 2:

Usually when I, if I let an athlete go, usually I'll refer them to another coach. Here's somebody I think could really help you. But this time I didn't do that because I just saw me passing my problem on to another coach who doesn't need more problems. So I didn't make any suggestions whatsoever for him and he raced for a while after that on his own, as near as I could tell I don't think he had a coach and didn't really last very long and eventually dropped out and was no longer racing, which was a shame because he just he was.

Speaker 2:

This is a tremendously talented athlete that could have gone a very long way if he really put his mind to it. So that's the key thing for me is I want to look for motivation in the athlete. There's lots of things that go into that. You know, for the average athlete, I think one thing that really helps us to is to have a training partner. If your motivation is low, having a training partner really kind of gets you out the door. Another thing that might help you didn't help me with this one athlete, but one thing that might help you with a low motivation is having a coach. Um, if you feel responsible to somebody, something somebody you're going to report to, but how the workout went, that's your coach, and you know the coach is going to be looking good, and sometimes it's a really good way to get motivated is to hire a coach to to work with you. And there are lots of other ways.

Speaker 2:

I I think, for example, everybody should have a second passion besides sport. I don't know what it would be. Whatever you're interested in besides sport could be woodworking or playing the flute I don't know what it could be, but whatever it turns you on, that's a good thing to have. Having something besides training on in your sport uh, can give you something to kind of lean back on when those days when you're not really feeling really good about yourself because your motivation is low and you don't really feel like going for a workout, just knowing you've got something there you can lean against that makes you happy, kind of relieves some of the tension and allows you to make some decisions. That might be a little bit better down the road in the future. And there are lots of stuff we could talk about motivation for an hour all by itself, but I'll leave it at that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, those are really good things, and I think the thing that pops out to me is just limiting distractions as well. I think, when you talk about training coming to the forefront and one of the things that we talked about in the previous podcast was focused on family career training I think the little side hobbies are super important to remain balanced, but we're not talking about huge undertakings and we're also not talking about diluting the focus. It's really keeping it tight and, rather than adding something in to stoke motivation, I would encourage people to look at distractions, look at things that take away from their focus and their energy, because it could just you could have enough motivation. You could just have it depleted by all these other things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, good points. It's extremely important to be motivated, but it's the sort of thing that you just can't turn on or turn off. It's something that needs to be there to be able to take advantage of it, to be the best athlete you possibly can be.

Speaker 1:

Yeah for sure. So as we turn to another key concept in your book, it's the individualization of training and recovery. When you wrote the first edition back in 96, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that the concept of individualized training approach was a thing. Is that true? Is that true?

Speaker 2:

That's pretty much the case. We've all turned the same way back in those days and we've learned an awful lot over the years. But the principle of individualization has been around for a long time but not taken very seriously until maybe the last 10 years or so to become a much more serious topic among athletes and coaches about knowing what's unique about you. Everything is unique in some ways. They can't all train exactly the same way. We need to train in ways that are appropriate for us and whatever that means and this really is a difficult topic to deal with and where I see most athletes making the big mistake in this area is they tend to look to others to see how they should train. So if they're, if they've got some people they ride with, for example, on in a group ride and somebody impresses them, they tend to gravitate toward whatever that person does in their training. They do it also. But you really can't count on that. Um, what works for one person is not likely to work for somebody else.

Speaker 2:

I know lots of people who just had lots of talent, like the person I mentioned just a little while ago, and it was natural talent. He just had everything going for him, he inherited the right genes. He was in the right place at the right time when they were handing out genetics or sports right time when they were handing out genetics or sports and he came across because that. He came across as being extremely talented, not so much in motivation but in terms of his physical ability. He really had everything it took. If you use that guy as a model, there's lots of problems there with how he trains. That may not work for you. He just was able to do things that I've not seen other athletes be able to do. Um, he's. For example, his bike handling skills were amazing. He reminded me some of the pros. You see, uh, from time to time, we've got tremendous talent, tremendous skills. Uh, he had those skills. He could do things with his bike that most people can't do.

Speaker 2:

So anyway, there, that's the sort of thing you want to look for in yourself is what? What makes me unique? Who am I? Um, don't copy others methods. Find out what works for you. That's a very difficult thing to do, but one of the ways to do that is to look back when you've had your most success. When you had success, what were you doing that was unique at that time? What were you doing in training that really worked out for you, um, and then use that as a model for how maybe you should look at your training going forward, not just doing things because you see others doing it that's perhaps one of the worst things you can possibly do. So and finally, I think you need to know your strengths and weaknesses what am I good at and what am I not so good at and knowing those things is going to go a long ways in terms of making decisions about your training.

Speaker 2:

For example, I always have suggested that athletes should really focus on their weaknesses, which I call limiters. They're a race. Specific weakness is a limiter. For example, if a race is a race an athlete's going to do is involves a lot of climbing and the athlete's not a good climber, that's that's a limiter. But if there's no climbing at all in the race it's flat then it's not a limiter anymore. It's a weakness, but not a limiter. So the idea is know what you're good at, know what your limiters are, focus on improving your limiters while you maintain your strengths, so that that's really the starting place. Place is who am I as an athlete, what am I good at and what am I not good at making that decision will help you make decisions down the in the future for all your training going forward yeah, I, and I think I mean the individualization of training is something that I preach and harp about on this podcast quite often and in my brain right now.

Speaker 1:

What I'm envisioning is this slide from Dr Andy Coggin and Tim Cusick uses it in a lot of his presentations where we show how people can make their power or make their pace and effectively it's, the more aerobic we get, the more similar and predictable we are, the more anaerobic we are, or that we do, or the harder effort we are, either much more anaerobic or not anaerobic at all, and so finding, like your fingerprint of the or the phenotype of an athlete is also really important, and you talk about some field testings and some other things that in tools that people can use in your book to help identify some of these, uh, individuality, um aspects to help them train and recover more and not. On the recovery side, I mean we could talk about the you know podcasts about this too, but not everybody recovers the same, like some people. Some people need the couch and TV, some people need a, you know a book and quiet time, but you know, decreasing stress is always the key. You just need to find what works for you in that way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no doubt about it. Somebody mentioned on on Twitter I read a note about that that one guy was talking about some people recharge their batteries by being around other people for extroverts, and some people challenge you to recharge their batteries by being alone. Both are okay. There's nothing wrong with one or the other. It's just the way we are. We're human beings and everybody's got their own way of of responding, so do what works best for you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and, as you can tell from my two examples, you can probably guess what, what, uh, what vert I am on that, um. But you know, to this point, you know, one of the questions I was going to ask you is you know, for the, the self-coached athlete, um, what should they do about their individualized training? But the answer that I almost want to throw out there and you correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like, like, don't be afraid to fail, like go, try, fail and you'll figure it out, and you talk about that in your book. But I mean this there's a lot of trial and error, but you can point people in the right direction, right, coach?

Speaker 2:

That's how we became adults from children is we learned by failure. When a toddler is learning to walk, they fall down an awful lot, but they always get back up and keep on trying. Eventually they learn to walk. It's the same thing with adults. We make mistakes, we're not perfect and when we fall down we need to get back up again and keep going ahead, because if we keep doing it it's going to work out eventually. So it's really a mindset thing.

Speaker 2:

Again, it's this idea that if I just stay focused on what my goal I'm trying to accomplish and stay at it, I can probably come an awful long ways towards accomplishing it. I might even pull it off in a matter in a short period of time. Or, on the other side of the coin, it may take me a long time. It may take me a couple of years to pull this off as opposed to a couple of months. But that's okay. It's because that's who you are as an individual. Don't don't take that to mean anything in the negative. It's just who you are and you need to learn to live with who you are when you're in your training. Your training needs to reflect you as the individual. All this stuff ties together into one big bow, and we need to kind of keep all that in mind as we're making decisions about how we should be doing our workouts.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and speaking of workouts, I want to change now to some adaptation and and finding some, some peak fitness, because I think, in the way of that individualized training, trial and error, there's these heavy time periods where we go through when we're just, we're building fitness, we're getting a super fit, but along with that comes fatigue we get, we get tired, and I get questions on the podcast of um. You know how much is too much, or you know when? When should I punch through? And really it's the question of overreaching versus overtraining. Overtraining is a whole kettle of fish that we don't need to get into right now, Cause, again, that's probably five podcasts alone there, but overreaching is is a very critical piece of the athlete's journey. So, for to you, uh, coach, real, can you talk about? Uh, what? What is overreaching? And when are athletes going to experience that overreaching effect of like, where they're just tired and they, they need to kind of keep on going for a bit before we get the fruits of the training?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the whole, this whole issue of fatigue and recovery from fatigue that's an extremely important concept in training. In fact, I would say it's one of the key concepts in laying out a program is how often should the athlete recover Because they're going to wind up overreaching? That's normal. Overreaching is considered to be something we really should find to be happening rather regularly in our training. We kind of push ourselves a little bit to the limit. When I say that, I say that with a little bit of hesitation, because when I say push yourself a little bit to your limit, most athletes think that means they got to push themselves so they can't hardly get off the bike anymore. They're just worn out and that's not the way it is. Pushing yourself to your limit, I mean just be. It's barely beyond where you are right now as far as your fitness. If you're able to ride two hours pretty easily um, in zone two, for example, let's see if we can bump that up to two hours and 15 minutes, as opposed to going to three hours or four hours to see if we can do it. We kind of like learn to hold back on this whole idea so that we have overreaching in very small quantities. We're not trying to whip ourselves into shape. We're trying to help ourselves come into condition, into fitness, in a very gentle way. If we can, I'll give you an example of that.

Speaker 2:

I coached an athlete a few years ago Actually, actually, he started doing something before I coached him. He came to me with a problem. The problem was he was very tired. Um, in fact he was so tired he could hardly get out of bed in the morning. And he brought his training log with him so I could look and see what he'd been doing. And what he told me he had tried to do was to create a training plan that was eight weeks of nonstop high intensity. He figured if he could get through that he would start the season being in the best shape he'd ever been in. He could whip anybody at that point. He did just the opposite. He really just didn't have any enthusiasm at all for the sport, although he still wanted to continue training. He did it in the seventh week of that eight-week plan. When he came to me, he wanted to know what he should do and basically I said well, you've got to take time off. There's nothing, no other alternative there. You've got to stop training. You've got to get you back to normal again. And it all happened just because he simply did not take rest days. He just poo-pooed that whole idea of taking a break. He wanted to push himself to the limit as much as he could every day, and by doing that he thought he could make himself into the superhuman, and had just the opposite effect.

Speaker 2:

We all have kind of that notion in the back of our minds that if I just push myself a little bit harder, I can be a better performer. I can race faster, I can do whatever it is I can do better. I push myself beyond my limits frequently, almost daily, as this guy thought. And that's not the way it works. The way it works is you work out in very small quantities. You take small bites moving forward for improving fitness, extremely small bites. They're not big bites at all.

Speaker 2:

You don't go seven weeks and never taking a rest week. What you do, in fact, is what the athlete should be doing is ask themselves when should I take a break? Am I ready to take a break now? That's the key question. Am I so tired right now that I need to take a rest break, take off for four or five days, just really cut back on training, cut out intensity, cut back on duration and just rest. Take an extra day off and just rest. Should I do that or not? That's a good thing to be asking yourself, but athletes never ask themselves that question. They assume if they do that they're a wimp and they just aren't. Aren't doing what they should be doing. The best athletes don't do that. The best athletes always push themselves to their limits every day is how they see the world. But that's not the way it happens. You won't see toddy pogacar on his bike, pushed himself to his limit every day for seven weeks. It's just not going to happen. Um, but yet somehow we've come to the conclusion. That's why these people are as good as they are, because they can handle this massive amount of training without ever taking a break.

Speaker 2:

Not the case, they take lots of breaks. In fact, as the research has been showing from Dr Seiler, stephen Seiler, the last 20 years, these athletes do about 80% of their training very easy. In fact, tati Pagaccia's coach is a friend of mine and he goes says that that Tati spends an awful lot of time, a gigantic amount of time, just riding easy. In fact, this is kind of like Inigo's therapy, for everything is to ride in zone two. You get a lot of zone two riding and everybody hears about that anymore. That's who it came from, xenia Gosan-Milan, who coaches Tati Pagaccia and Iwana Yuso and a few of the other UAE guys, and they're doing pretty well and they're not pushing themselves to the limits every day. They're taking it very easy, most days, in fact, very, very easy. They're training a lot in zone two, which is not hard, but I can try training zone two.

Speaker 2:

But it's amazing what it does when you take that attitude that I'm going to train easy and by training easier I'm going to become faster, and that really does happen. Why it happens? Because, number one, you go into hard workouts feeling fresh, rested, ready to go, so now you can really push yourself to your limit. Um, it's hard to do that more than twice a week. An athlete who tries to get in three hard workouts in a week means you're only getting about one day of recovery between two of the hard workouts and that's generally going to be not enough for the athlete to be recovered to really have a good workout 48 hours later. So what I emphasize to athletes is they work in what I call a 5-2 pattern. They do five days a week easy and two days hard. If they do that, I can guarantee them they'll come into the hard workout days and they'll become really hard workouts. The quality will be very good. So it's it's a big.

Speaker 2:

The problem is not so much physical, it's mental. When you work with athletes on this question, we're kind of going back to the mindset thing again. If the athlete has to get out of their mind that the only way to improve is to push yourself as hard as you possibly can every chance you get, that is 100% wrong. It's just backwards from what you should be doing. It should be the other way around, where you push yourself very seldom during the week, like I suggested, two times a week, and if you do that, then performance is going to be is going to grow over time and you're going to have much better performance than you've had in the past because of your ability to uh, to do things that most of the other athletes don't do. So I'll stop talking now because that's one of my favorite topics and so I'll just back off on it.

Speaker 1:

No, the passion is real. Uh, when I when I asked that question, but I think you know to this point, joe is you hit the nail on the head with all of that. But for the, the non-Tatapagatchas of the world, you know the time crunched athletes, even time rich athletes on the weekend, uh, amateur athletes, masters athletes we get tired from other stuff too. It's not the training, you know, if we've got 10 hours of training, that's actually fairly easy to organize and and um, tell what to do. It's all the other stuff. So the question to you is how do you, how do you determine when you're tired from life, when you're tired from a life stressor versus a training stressor, and and and how would you adjust on the fly with an athlete like that?

Speaker 2:

yeah, what I've talked. I've talked about this before with lots of people, I think with you. Actually, one time, probably, I want to meet with an athlete who's got problems, like like the guy I talked about earlier. Uh, one of the first questions I ask is how much sleep are you getting and getting, because that that's usually an indicator of what's going on in their life. If the f is not getting at least seven hours preferably eight or more hours a night um of sleep, then there's something wrong with their lifestyle. And usually that thing that's wrong with their lifestyle is you're trying to wedge too many things into their day.

Speaker 2:

And this always brings me back to the next topic, then, which is you know, as you mentioned you referred to it a little while ago three things in your life. You know family, career and training. If you've got a high goal, that's that's the only three things you should have in your life. If your goal is simply to finish a 5K walk, you can probably pile more things into your life. If you're going to be nationals, that's not going to work out. You just can't put more stuff into your life. In fact, you're just taking things out of your life. So we get back to the basics and as soon as you get back.

Speaker 2:

Because the problem is, when people have too much stuff in their life, what they always do is they try to find extra time by cutting back on sleep. They go to bed later and get up earlier so they can wedge more things into their day and that begins to show up in their in their performance. Their training goes down the tubes, they're not racing well, everything's going poorly, just because the bottom line is they just got too much stuff going on. So when you figure out what those things are, get them out of their life, get them back to just three things that they focus on, and now we can start making some progress in their, in their training and their performance. So it's right, it's not really real complicated. It's just a matter of getting life back to normal again, back to what we're, how we normally would would operate in um in the world as human beings.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, uh, completely agree with that. In, the higher the performance goal, the more necessary that is keeping distractions at bay, keeping motivation stoked, focusing on very few things to be good at for sure, and that and that leads into, um, kind of my last talking point on overall um training progression. Uh, from your book is when you do talk about performance and one of your last chapters you talk about race readiness. So can you talk about what race readiness is and how it's even a little different than just, uh, you know, freshening up for a hard workout or or, um, even a little different than a taper Cause? There's a lot more that goes on to race readiness. I'll turn it over to you.

Speaker 2:

We're getting close to, uh, to what I call an A race, a high priority race, which you should only have probably one or two of the entire season, three early, pressing that. So building an aerobic base that took months to accomplish. Then we started building race performance or race fitness, getting ready for the intensity of the race besides the duration. So these things begin to come together and then finally, we come down to the end of the season, the end of this preparation for this race, and we start to do what you mentioned a while ago, which is a taper Again, a cut back on volume. And as we cut back on volume, what happens is the athlete begins to feel rested. And we do this very gradually, in small steps. We kind of step down, taking this volume down. While we're keeping the intensity high, intensity must be kept high. If you don't keep the intensity high, intensity must be kept high. If you don't keep the intensity high, if you, if you lower the intensity also as you're lowering the duration, you're simply going to wind up with very poor race readiness when it comes to race day. Keep it, keep the intensity high and cut back on the, on the volume, the duration of your workouts. How many, how many hours, for example, you train in a week. That goes on for typically about a week and a half, two weeks, and then the athlete starts coming into what we call form. Um, form is an interesting word. Won't go into the details, the history of it, it's a word that goes back to 19th century horse racing. But the bottom line is, when you're coming into form, you begin to feel really rested, really fresh, and you have this eagerness to do something hard. You have this eagerness to push yourself to the limit, and so you have to really watch yourself. When you get to this point, this, and you're down now to maybe a week, week and a half until the race, and you've got this sense that you're feeling so good, you want to go out and test out how good you are against other people. So you go to a group ride and you wind up riding three hours, pushing yourself to the limit, and that's the end of your peak readiness. You just blew it. The race is now over. You're no longer going to be race ready. You're going to be tired when you come to the race again, because the whole idea of peaking is to get rid of fatigue, to get rid of this tiredness and as it goes away away, then form begins to go up, and form is a dangerous sensation. It's dangerous because it feels like you really should be doing something more than what you're doing right now. You feel like you could really rip the legs off another athlete if you wanted to. So you have to do that.

Speaker 2:

And we finally come to the last few days before the race, and now we cut way back. Now we're just going to do just very short workouts and have extremely high intensity for whatever the intensity for your race should be time trials, for example, versus mountain bike, versus road race, viterium versus all these things you know there's all kinds of talk about in cycling. The idea is we're trying to get you, get you to the point that you are rested and fresh and ready with the intensity that you need to be able to use on race day. And then we come to race day itself, and now you should have this um, this bound up, energy and enthusiasm and readiness to go. That's hard to hold back, and yet you still have to hold back. If the race starts and you push yourself to your limits immediately go out really hard. You may have just blown your entire race. That's the sort of thing that novices do.

Speaker 2:

I coached a pro mountain biker one time, um, who was really very good, but the only one of the major problems I noticed she always started toward the back and, uh, she'd work her way up through the race and finally wind up in the very front of the race and could often wind up winning. And that worked really well if the, if the course had enough places where she could pass. But if it's a single track almost all the way she'd be stuck someplace back in the pack and couldn't get. Couldn't get to the front. So I had to try. I tried to change that with her. I told her it's good, she had a race coming, so let's see if we can just go out a little bit faster out of this race, kind of get in the front and see how that feels to you and we'll kind of draw conclusions from that point going forward. So she called me after the race and said it was a disaster.

Speaker 2:

She went out so hard that in the first two minutes she had to stop alongside the road and catch her breath. She was breathing so hard and so I realized that she doesn't. She didn't understand the difference between going extremely hard and controlled, controlled hard, and she didn't. She couldn't do that. She could go out extremely hard, but she had to learn how to control that, that enthusiasm she had and that fitness and that form that she brought all together. So we had to go through this whole process then of trying to teach her how to start a race, and once she learned how to do well, she was always good. But once she learned how to do that, she became extremely good. She went on to win a cup, two national championships back to back. A really, really good athlete was one of the things that was holding her back was this, this thing about, uh, how to, how to start a race? Um, but she was good at holding back. She just wasn't so good at managing what that, what that intensity needed to be to excel. She eventually learned, though.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that's where you know I I tease out race readiness is because it is more specific than oh you're tapered or oh you're fresh. You know there's a lot that goes into race readiness. It's almost like freshness, flow, preparation and patience all coming together at the right time. And again a lot of that just comes with trial and error, as you just described with the mountain bike athlete, is you got to fail a little bit to move forward on that. But I think that in that preparation, in that process, what we're talking about here are those those high points of what athletes are looking for, the performance aspects and then how to get there. Well, all the tools in the world right, those two books behind Joe, those are, those are tools, right. This podcast is a tool and I think to all that point.

Speaker 1:

You know, one of the final things that I get a ton of questions on for endurance athletes is strength training, and I don't want to get into I think the case is closed in how beneficial it can be to athletes, so we're not going to convince anybody to do it. Some of the questions that I get and I'll just flip them to you, joe is when an athlete gets crunched on time. So we were at 10 hours and maybe this week I only have six to eight. Should I do my strength training or should I do my endurance training? Which one should I cut?

Speaker 2:

I would not cut either one. I might wind up figuring, figuring how to do both. I may wind up tapering those things a little bit, cutting back on the amount of duration involved in them. But um, first of all this this sport cycling is an endurance sport. We're doing um, strength training to um, as a supplement, if you will, to help to help out in improving our performance, but it's not the main thing we're doing. The main thing we're doing is riding our bikes and building endurance. So we're not going to cut back on that at all. We need to keep that going.

Speaker 2:

Figure out things that can help to keep the strength turning going also, especially for older athletes. This is a real thing. For older athletes. They need to be very aware of building strength, lifting weights, putting stress on their bones and their muscles. If you're 20, 25 years old, it's not that big a deal, but if you're 55, 65 years old, it's a big deal. You need to be focused on this. So what do you do when you don't have time and you need you know you need to get it in somehow.

Speaker 2:

I would say let's look at what's most important in the strength turning realm. I would say number one is for cyclists is hip, knee, ankle extension strength. Being able to drive the pedal down is key to to the athlete's performance on a bike. So you haven't got time to go to the gym, so what can you do? How about doing one-legged squats in your living room? It's only going to take five minutes or so and you can get in a. You can get in three sets in five minutes of one-legged squats. It's not going to take a lot of time at all. In fact, it's going to be really quite good for you or for the older athletes, even older than 65 and, say, 75 or even older. Just sitting down in a chair and standing up, sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up. That's the same activity again, helping to build that hip, knee, ankle extension strength that is so important. So that's critical. That's the most important thing the athlete should be doing.

Speaker 2:

The second most important thing I find with athletes is core strength doing. The second most important thing I find with athletes is core strength. Um, core strength shows up in athletes in the way they pedal their bikes. When they're working at their highest level, they wind up scooting forward to the saddle. They they're losing uh power because their core is not strong enough to transport the power from their. You know what you're trying to do is you're trying to transport parts that you're holding holding the handlebars, down through your torso to your legs. That's the process you're going through. If you let go of the handlebars, you can no longer drive the pedals nearly as hard as you could when you were holding on the handlebars. So that that's that's.

Speaker 2:

This whole thing is linked from hands to feet. There's a there's a link going on here and it goes through your core. If core is weak, you cannot drive the pedals as nearly as powerfully as you could if they were, as if you had good core strength. Again, it doesn't take much. Just do some planks, get on the floor. You don't have to go to a gym to do that. Just get on the floor and do some planks. So we can narrow this whole thing down. If you're crunched on time, we can narrow it down to two exercises being as the most basic exercises the athlete should be doing. The cyclist, especially, should be doing. That's not complicated at all. It's not going to take hardly any time at all. You can fit into your day. I would also suggest fitting in other things, but now we're starting to talk about taking more time, but these take a lot of time. I would suggest you need some flexibility training. That should be part of your gym workout. Gym workout is not just lifting weights, it's also flexibility and it's also mobility.

Speaker 2:

Cyclists tend to have really poor mobility in the hips. Hips and lower back uh, just don't have the mobility they should have when they've been right. You know, riding a bike is a singular, plain activity. You're going straight ahead all the time. It's not like basketball or football where you've got a lot of movement going on laterally. This is a straight ahead movement, one single plane. Because of that, our hips especially become rigid. We lose the ability to move our hips as they're meant to be moved, and that sets us up for problems on the bike. The transfer of power again to the pedals if the hips are not stable, that presents problems for the athlete in terms of their ability to drive the pedals down.

Speaker 2:

Flexibility is part of that. You need to have some flexibility, especially lower back. Athletes who have poor flexibility typically have really tight backs and down the back of their legs also hamstrings, calf muscles, very, very tight. You need to work on that also that that has a lot to do with how you sit on the bike when times are tough, when you're being pushed to your limit. It's not just strength, it's not just your aerobic, anaerobic endurance, it's also your your the core strength that you have or you don't have, and the ability to move your body as it's designed to be moved, to move it in ways that allow you to perform at a higher level.

Speaker 2:

So that's critical. It doesn't take much time at all. The most important thing is to get on the bike and besides that, the second most important thing is work on hip, knee, ankle strength. And third, on the bike and besides that second most important thing is work on hip knee ankle strength. And third, work on core. And fourth, work on flexibility and those things. Those last three things take very little time. You can knock it out in 15 minutes, no problem at all.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and to that point I think too, like everybody has their threshold of time. But when you're saying I don't have time, look at your schedule, get a little creative. But also don't think that you, as Joe said, need to go to the gym. Like, get creative. I say and I probably said it on this podcast before is the bar is so low for endurance athletes on muscular fatigue, like we can, we can overcook our muscles so we can train our muscles properly in 10 to 15 minutes with some of the exercises that Joe just mentioned, and then you're tired and then you rest and then you move on. Like muscles are ones and zeros in the way of are they fatigued, are they not? Whereas the aerobic system, it's more complicated. You go forever.

Speaker 1:

And that's where I would say if you don't have time, great strength training is good for you. Don't sacrifice endurance time, but look at the time. If you have time in the evenings 10, 15 minutes, maybe while you're watching TV, maybe you're traveling you get to the hotel, take 10 minutes and do some planks. You're going to feel a heck of a lot better if you just do a little bit of that in your whatever else time that you're kind of burning. So just get creative about that. Last question to you, Joe, on um, on strength training, is one that I get often. Um, but it's when to do the strength training. So say we have enough time, we don't have all the time in the world, but should we be doing strength training sessions on hard interval days or should we be doing it on easy endurance days? Should we be doing it on our off days? When should we, when should ideally we be doing it on easy endurance days? Should we be doing it on our off days? When should we?

Speaker 2:

when should ideally we be doing our strength training?

Speaker 1:

yeah, it kind of depends um. This is a loaded question too, by the way.

Speaker 2:

There's just a lot that goes on. There's a lot of stuff going in my head about this whole thing, but the bottom line is that, um, um, first of all, strength training. If you talk about the big picture of strength training not just doing a few setups or a few crunches, rather, or, or planks or that sort of thing there's some things that really do need some more attention, and that's so early in the season I like to have an athlete. But going back to the way I do it now but this may not work for everybody this is how I would have an athlete do it Early in the season. I'm talking about like back in November, december one of the focuses of our training is strength. That's one of the things I'm really focused on with the athlete, and so now it's a high priority, and actually the bike at that time is a little bit lesser priority. So I'm going to have the athlete working out twice a week in the gym, but they're going to be solid workouts in the gym, they're going to be hard workouts and the bike workouts are not going to be all that demanding, because we're talking about it's october or november or december. We have a long time till the first race. Let's just kind of build some aerobic fitness, a lot of zone one, zone two, and that's about it. Even do some cross training, go for a run, go for a walk, go for a hike um row on a gym, a machine in the gym, whatever it may be. But the focus then during this time is on strength we're going to build, we're going to build strength. Then we're going to start now. We're going to start switching the the priorities around.

Speaker 2:

So as we move extremely early base period, like november, december, as we move out of that into january, february, now we start doing more time gym. So now, instead of lifting heavy weights and trying to build, uh, muscle mass, in effect, we're going to start doing much lighter weights with higher repetitions. So that becomes the way we transition. So there's a periodization process going on here. So we've periodized from doing high strength training emphasis with low cycling emphasis to the other way around. By the time we're like in january and february, now we're starting to put more time on the bike. So now let's go back to when those workouts should be done. If it's, if it's october, november, I'm going to pick out the best days of the week to lift weight because at this point, from my point of view, cycling has actually a second, secondary position relative to strength, turning and all the other stuff we've talked about in the gym mobility and flexibility, all that kind of stuff. So this now becomes our focus.

Speaker 2:

So now, what's the best days to lift weights? As the season progresses, we're in this period of time where we're talking about now we're going to switch to putting more emphasis on the bike and less on the gym. I'm going to change that. I made you wind up changing those days. When is the best time now? What's the best time to ride your bike? When can we fit in strength training? And I would suggest, like in january, february, march. That should come after long rides, should not be done the day before rides like that. And when you get into the time of the season when you're working on high intensity. Same idea Strength training now becomes something we do after the high intensity workouts.

Speaker 2:

And by this point, by the way, when we get to high intensity training on the bike, I always have the athlete cut back on strength training. We go from two workouts a week in the gym to one workout a week. It just becomes maintenance. The challenge is not really high. You can get by with it quite easily and recover from it in a matter of days, no problem whatsoever. So now, if it's only going to be one workout a week and that's going to come on a day for example, it could be on a day when there's a day off I would often have athletes take a monday off from training and that would be the day training being on the bike and that that would become the day they lifted weights. And then tuesday might be a long ride or an easy zone two sort of ride, and then wednesday perhaps is their first hard ride of the week. That's now 48 hours after lifting weights, and the weights exercises weren't all that challenging anyway. So that's the way I progressed the whole thing.

Speaker 2:

So the idea is you have to periodize this. It's not things you just put together and they stay that way for the entire season. You have to blend them together based on priorities and what's the and especially also if the athlete's needs are that's. That's one of the priorities. I didn't go into that, but you have to say what it is this athlete really needs. If the athlete really needs a lot of strength training, we're going to do a lot of strength training, especially october and november into december there's going to be a lot of strength training, especially October and November into December there's going to be a lot of strength training going on. If they don't need so much, then we'll do much less of it. It really is a very individualized matter that has to be resolved based on the individual and also what the schedule calls for as far as training in the big picture.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, that's probably the perfect answer on that one, and very inclusive too. I like the way how you went all the way back into the periodization because, again, it's a loaded question. I actually got this question back in 2023 and I did an episode on it I think it's episode 166 talking about combining strength training and cycling, and so you can check out that for a little bit more, because essentially, it really plays out to what are you trying to achieve? What are your goals with the athlete? And I think it will cycle and it will flow. And this goes back to what Joe was talking about with individualized training approach, where everybody's a little unique and a little different, because some athletes don't need as much strength training and some athletes don't need as much strength training in certain time periods, whereas others do training, and some athletes don't need as much strength training in certain time periods whereas others do. There's no perfect answer other than figuring out what works best for you and your individual needs, but Joe just laid out probably some of the best examples and a path to follow in the way of finding that out.

Speaker 1:

So, to wrap this thing up, I'd say let's summarize by a few of the key points, and the first one is results come when you establish the attitude. First, joe talked about having a high performance attitude and how that will trickle over into every aspect of training and racing. Second part is that cycling has evolved tremendously and coaches as well as athletes. We need to evolve with it. So Joe did just that by writing the fifth edition here of this book, and individualization has come to the forefront in understanding that dose response of training for better performing athletes.

Speaker 1:

Finally, there's a fine line between overreaching and overtraining. A high performing athlete needs to tow that line at times, but error on the side of a little less. There's some tools that I use personally to show uh and teach athletes when they're walking that line and when to stay, when, when to go, uh. But again, that comes down to that individualization of sorts. Everything that Joe talked about agree completely. So, uh, if, if, if. You need to rewind back to where uh Joe talked about. Uh, you know when I asked him that question and he talked about how passionate he was there. But overall, this is an awesome podcast. Joe, I really thank you again for taking even more time on your day to talk about one of the many books that you've written. So thank you so much.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, adam, I enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker 1:

You know, before we go, I just want to kind of share one last quick story. Joe, I mean, you're awesome at telling stories, but I have to share one. This is a little bit of full circle in the way that this interview is shaping up, because back in college I was a chemistry major and a wrestler in a D3 school. I've been an athlete my whole life, had no clue what the heck was I going to do after college, but my wrestling coach told me to go sit on exercise phys class with Carl Foster.

Speaker 1:

My friend got me into mountain biking. That led to Xterra racing, that led to road triathlon, road racing, and I had always been a decent runner. So pretty soon I just changed everything over to exercise physiology. I got obsessed and I convinced my professor that we should have a triathlon class on campus. We started a triathlon club and a cycling club and we had an exercise science class triathlon 101. And we had about 30 students in that class getting college credit for it and we used your triathlon training Bible, the third edition, as our course book. So I was teaching from this book back in college, 22, some years ago, and now we're sitting on a podcast talking about training.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you very much for using my book. I appreciate your, your candor on that. It's it's. It's always fun to hear that people got something out of something I wrote. That's that's. That's, that's the greatest thrill there is writing a book, as people say. Yeah, I get emails all the time. People say that you changed my life because of what you wrote people's lives at all. I'm just trying to help them be embraced. Better is all I'm trying to get to. So thank you very much for doing that. I appreciate it Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

You know, I think most coaches would would love a few hours to pick your brain on all these topics. I'm just glad that we could. We could do it, record it and share it with literally thousands of people. So, um, joe, if people want to read your books or they want more more of you, uh, do they find you on social media? More podcasts where can they get more joe friole?

Speaker 2:

um, I've got a website called joe friole training dot com. All my books are listed there. You can purchase them through the website, um, and the blog is there. Also is stuff that goes back dash to to 2007, I think is when I wrote my very first blog on that, on that website. So there's there's a long, long history there. You can almost trace the changes have taken place in my, in my philosophy of training and my methodology by looking at my, my blog, but there's just a wealth of information there from stuff that goes back a long way. So so, yes, joefreeltrainingcom is the website.

Speaker 1:

Perfect. Well, we'll link to that in our show notes, as well as blogs and writings on motivation, consistency, some stuff that he did with fast talk, fast after 50, you'll, you'll find it all there. So again, joe Friel, thank you so much for taking time and, yeah, I think our audience will get a lot out of this one.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, I enjoyed it.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on the time crunch cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actual 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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Adam Pulford

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