The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

How Respecting Your Body, Emotions, and Competition Improves Performance

• CTS • Season 5 • Episode 258

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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Starting Saturday, July 26, CTS will publish daily Tour de France Femmes podcasts with Coaches Adam Pulford and Renee Eastman. They'll recap the stage, but the unique aspect of these podcasts will be coaching insights about how athletes prepare for the demands showcased in that day's stage. 

EPISODE OVERVIEW
Respect is a touchy subject, but this is not a touchy-feely, woo-woo episode of the podcast. In true "Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast" fashion, Coach Adam Pulford gives actionable, pragmatic advice on how athletes can change their physical, emotional, and competitive habits to act with greater respect and, in turn, unlock greater performance. When you respect your body, you give it what it needs and pay attention to good and bad days. When you respect your emotions, you gain insights that help you adjust training to align important workouts and performance tests with productive emotional states. And when you respect the competition, you can always feel good about the outcome, win or lose.

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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:

Hey everyone, coach AP here. Before we get into today's episode, I wanted to give you a heads up on a little project that CTS coach Renee Eastman and I will be doing in the coming week. It'll be a daily podcast covering all things Tour de France Femmes, avec, zwift where we'll go over stage, highlights, tactics from the teams and insights as to how and why these women train for a huge race like this. We'll also have a section each day discussing women's specific training, recovery and physiology when it comes to performance at endurance sport and give recommendations to how non-professional women and men could apply this to their own training. Finally, if we're lucky, we'll check in with CTS athlete Allison Jackson and her team, oatley Education First Cannondale, to see what's what as the race goes on. So be sure to check your feeds daily, starting Saturday July 26th, for the pod to drop post race for your daily fix of TDFF, and we'll do it in the classic time crunched way short, sweet and to the point. Now on to our show. Today's episode will focus on how to adjust your training after a bad day, how to manage negative self-talk when it happens and how to show your body, as well as your competition, the respect it deserves. And don't worry, this won't be a woo-woo podcast about abstract stuff, just some solid advice after seeing common mistakes and patterns from athletes year after year. So let's dive in. First topic I want to start with is respect your body.

Speaker 1:

Most time-crunched athletes I coach and know demand a lot from their body. Their brains are stressed from work, their bodies are stressed on the bike and other things, and they could have slower recovery as they age, as they tend to their families, the to-do lists and other duties in life. And yes, by the way, brains get fatigued too. They are part of the body and there's real fatigue that can occur with day-to-day life and demanding tasks. About brains you can learn more about this from a recent episode from coach Jason Koop. I'll put it in the show notes. But there's some interesting stuff when it comes to neural fatigue or brain fatigue and performance in athletics. Now, most amateur athletes who are crunched on time they are short on time and they lack recovery. Therefore they have more variability when it comes to their freshness for training. So all-time crunched athletes listening here should scan their body and read their body daily before, during and after a workout. This continual scanning with awareness is not to hold you back but to bring you forward Now.

Speaker 1:

One quick way to do this is, if you have a hard ride scheduled for the day and you're feeling like bad or like how am I actually feeling today, I don't really know Use the warmup rule first and then learn how to adjust. So that warmup rule and I've talked about this on several podcasts before but if you're not feeling good, I would still get on your bike. Take action before you let any sort of emotion override your decision not to train. Okay. So get on the bike, simply give yourself time to warm up and maybe go a little bit longer. On that warmup, incorporate a few sprints, or what I call openers, which are ramp up to hard efforts. They're not maximum, but they're hard. And then, once you spin easy after that, then you can decide whether you go hard today or your do your your main intervals, uh set or anything like that. If you feel good and normal, proceed. Proceed with hard intensity. If not good or still not sure, just ride endurance and move that hard workout to the next day or another day later on in the week. I'll give you some more pro tips and hacks on how to adjust here later on the podcast.

Speaker 1:

But the next point I want to bring up is be hard on yourself, but only when needed. So I'm not saying don't have a high bar, but what I am saying is don't be hard on yourself when you don't need to be. Not every day will be your best day and that's okay. We're humans. You don't have to crush every single workout and when you don't crush it, don't crush yourself with negative self-talk. So let's talk about self-talk. I tell my athletes this very often is you can talk yourself into and out of most anything. The placebo effect is real and it's strong, and what that means is if you believe in a pill or a potion or a protocol that it's the right thing and will help you move forward, you have about a 50% chance of that being right, and sometimes higher depending on kind of what the situation is. So pumping yourself up for something gives you a higher likelihood to succeed at it and can also go the opposite way. You can pump yourself down and have a bad day. We can be our own worst enemy or advocate on any given day or any given workout, and I've cited more good reading about this If you wish to learn more about it or if this is shocking to you and you want to learn more. Go into our show notes and link to some of the self-talk articles that I have posted there.

Speaker 1:

Negative self-talk versus positive. Now, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a sports psychologist, and if anyone here listening is one of those professions, please excuse my diluted scientific approach. However, I'm. What I'm saying here is straight and to the point and definitely in my lane when it comes to coaching. Negative self-talk is anything that puts you down, pulls you down or takes energy away from you. Examples of this include you're such an effing idiot. You mess this up every time, or what were you thinking? You're such a loser, right? Does that sound common? Anybody else say that to themselves? So this isn't positive, okay. This only reinforces the errors that you're potentially making and it's not going to help you next time.

Speaker 1:

Positive self-talk builds you up, it motivates you and it gives you energy. So and this isn't even overly positive, but just like stuff like you got this or now focus after you bought something up, just like now focus, or I mean something silly, okay, you can just suck it up, buttercup. You know when the going gets tough. Sometimes that gives my athletes uh, you know a smile, because it's kind of a funny saying. Right, I wouldn't even say it's negative, maybe it's positive, but I think the smile sometimes cause it's just, you know, that kind of classic saying suck it up right, get after it. That can be more positive and give you that energy and help you to focus for the task at hand. We want to use positive self-talk to get you focused so that you can achieve that task at hand and perform better in your workouts and upcoming races.

Speaker 1:

Now one quick little tip here is, if you observe negative self-talk creeping in, I'll encourage you to have a mantra or emotion, something that you do that you can deploy to make it go away. Something like taking a deep breath or just doing a slight smile when you feel that negative self-talk creeping in. I've had athletes say like not today, or use a quick mantra like that, something like stay focused. I actually talk about a lot about mantras with Kate Courtney in a past episode. I don't have the episode number off the top of my hand, but I'll link to it in show notes If you want kind of a bigger deep dive and maybe an elite athlete's take on how to use mantras. It's a good one. If you missed it, definitely check it out Now, when you have a bad day and all the self-talk in the world didn't work, show yourself some respect and give your mind and body a bit of time to bounce back and try it again.

Speaker 1:

Here's an example that I had from last week. One of my own athletes, terry we'll just call him Terry he had a field testing week Okay, so basically three hard days kind of spread throughout the five-day work week where we were doing maximum efforts. Okay, 20-minute test was one of them and that didn't go well. I saw some not so positive comments in training peaks, so I gave him a call and we talked. We identified the few mistakes that he that he made, identified how to fix them, and then I said you know what, we'll try this again next week. He had a five minute effort coming up in a few days and then we went into the weekend and I wanted normal training for the weekend because we need some volume in there. So we decided that next week would be good for the round number two for his 20 minute test. And guess what? Terry not only had a better day, but he had a great day. He absolutely nailed that 20 minute test, hitting a peak 20 minute power, all time as a master's 55 plus athlete and, by the way, he's at his lowest body weight in years Now. He also crushed his five minute test, by the way, and his sprints.

Speaker 1:

So this is a good example that sometimes we just need a slight nudge or a slight adjustment to get a great result. It's usually not some grandiose plan or move or effort that's needed to correct for that behavior or have a great day. If you have good momentum and good habits and training week after week, month after month. It's just a slight adjustment that you need. Here's another pro tip If your program, your coach or your AI bot coach calls for a field test and you have a bad day or a bad test, it doesn't mean that you failed or that your training has failed you or that you are a failure. It means you had a bad day. Maybe you had a bad route or bad preparations or something that tripped you up for a short time bad preparations or something that tripped you up for a short time All you need to do is gather yourself up, refocus and try it again for a 20 minute test.

Speaker 1:

Okay, think about this Maybe a 90 minute total workout, 20 minute effort If you had a bad one on Wednesday, you could go again the next day. Okay, that's not outside of the realm of things. I've done this myself and I've done this with my own athletes. That fatigue maybe you only got like 10 minutes through or something like that the fatigue that you had shouldn't be enough to compromise you the next day. But mentally there's a block. Okay, and so if you're good at getting over these mental blocks, just get a good sleep, go again the next day. Your physiology should be able to handle it. But for most people I'd recommend a few days to ensure any fatigue that is in the system gets out of the system. Maybe have a few more good sleeps and mentally you can wrap your brain around doing an all out effort again. Okay. So you want to minimize life stress, get good sleep, get rid of the fatigue and then go after round two. So for most people I'd recommend a few days, but just know you can go again the next day too, and you should be able to do that.

Speaker 1:

So we're really talking about adjusting on the fly and, as I just said about five minutes ago, using the warmup rule is probably like my best advice. I can give you right Sometimes you just need to get the body going to fully assess it before you make any big uh you know decisions about to do or not to do the day. Now here's another piece of advice that I give my athletes, too is think about your training as weekly targets, not always as daily targets. What I do is I tell my athletes that here's the plan on training peaks and here's what we want to achieve within the week. However you get it done, that's up to you. Just bring yourself into the hard days fresh, and if you need to move things around or take an extra rest day, do it. Usually, whatever fatigue, stress or mental block was there, it'll usually go away with proper rest in a day or two.

Speaker 1:

Now, cultivating awareness in yourself. I've also peppered this into many podcasts, but I think it is something that I'm working with my athletes daily, because if you can cultivate that awareness, you can read your body, and that applies to so many things, but it really applies to being a good athlete and getting good results and good adaptation and good achievement to our goals. One of the ways I do this is I encourage my athletes to reflect on their workouts To our audience right now, to anybody listening, reflect on your workouts daily. How to do this is step one. Look at your workout after the ride and see how it went In training peaks there's a really cool overlay with prescribed power at intensity or prescribed heart rate and then looking at how you actually did it. Okay, this pertains to the quality of the workout session. Did you do what was prescribed? How well? How much time and zone were you able to achieve what was planned?

Speaker 1:

Additionally, write in training peaks with comments, things like how you felt, what was perceived effort, what were you thinking? How did you fuel throughout? And you'll usually learn more about your process and that process by doing this kind of like reflected step and you'll probably learn more than doing the workout itself, because now you've slowed down heart heart rates, lower hormones are different, right, so you can actually learn and reflect a little bit better. Additionally, communicate with your coach, if you have one, uh, verbally, if you're like a verbal sort of person. Or maybe you talk with your spouse, if they listen to you, or talk with your dog, whatever, whatever it works, but have some sort of reflection process that you that you can do on a regular basis and that will go a long way in cultivating this awareness and that process really only takes like a minute, maybe two minutes max, and it's a great bang for the buck when it comes to kind of learning and in in in, like I said, cultivating that awareness. When you reflect, you create awareness, and having increased awareness will help you determine if and how to adjust for future workouts more quickly and ultimately give yourself that respect on days where you need it most. Respecting your body and respecting yourself means giving a little grace when you need it. High performance equals high demands, yes, but we all make mistakes and we all have bad days, and letting up on the high demands on those days can make a world of difference when it comes to your future self's success. Now, speaking of respect, this next section pertains to respecting your competition.

Speaker 1:

If you've been watching the Tour de France over the past few weeks, you probably saw Tade's crash on stage 11. If you didn't, here's a quick version and recap. There was a group up the road and I believe the yellow jersey was in it. Ben Healy was in the yellow jersey. Tade was in a small chase group just behind. Another rider ahead of Tade moved up and to the right he had like a slight attack. Tade was on the race radio maybe and he had a slight mistake, a touch of wheels. His front wheel hit the back wheel of another rider and Tade went down what looked to be a pretty hard crash. But he got up quick. Neutral sport helped him, put his chain back on and he was back up and riding. Now the yellow jersey and the whole peloton slowed when Tade went down so that Tade could bridge back up and get back in the race. Now it seemed like half the internet and half the world watching were against this and the other half was either for it or neutral or around it. And it was just a very interesting as I was reading comments, I was having conversations with athletes and and and just observing kind of what the commentators were talking about and it and it just observed it and it was. It was fascinating. I think it was a great moment in sport and it was a great moment to talk about some of this stuff.

Speaker 1:

But first let's talk about other sports. I come from a wrestling background where we definitely exploit weaknesses in that sport, meaning if your competition gets hurt, you strike hard, or if you watch tape or if you have competed against an athlete and you learn that they're, say, for example, terrible on their feet. You go takedowns with them all day. You never get on the bottom, you never get on top. You do whatever it takes to win. Now, another approach would be to have a move so good no one can beat you. There's only a few wrestlers in the day that really had that. A few of those were. And there's only a few wrestlers in the day that really had that and a few of those were back in my day anyway was Kale Sanderson, bruce Baumgartner, john Smith, dan Gable Okay.

Speaker 1:

Now, tade is definitely like one of these athletes where he's got a move or moves where no one can just compete against it. Okay, so just an ultra competitor. Now, some of the comments and feedback was like the Peloton shouldn't have slowed. If they have an opportunity to strike, strike, try to beat Tade. Okay. Now, stomping on throats, winning at all costs, kill them all and let God sort them out, is a thing in some other sports and some other worldviews, but not in others.

Speaker 1:

And I'm not going to say whether the yellow Jersey and the Peloton did what they did was either good or bad. I'm simply just going to ask some questions. What can we learn from it Can you observe the layeredness of civility and respect of competition, layeredness of civility and respect of competition? Can you see how the calculations were made with the view of if we win, we want to win in this certain way, and can you also see that this wasn't the first time that this happened with these main competitors in modern times? If you can see that, I think that is good Then you can make your choice of whether this was good, bad or other.

Speaker 1:

Now say what you want about how they do it in other sports or in the women's Peloton or wherever, but in my opinion, from the nuanced layers of tradition, respect and the unwritten rules of the men's Peloton, we can learn a hell of a lot of how to treat one another and ourselves. The tour is huge. It's amazing. It's one of the world's most competitive events of the year. Okay, but it's not war, it's not life or death. The golden rule is a common thread through many religions, cultures and generations Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The men's pro tour peloton simply practice this on stage 11, because it's part of their culture and, as I said, we can learn a lot from that. Whether you agree with it or not, it's a sign of showing respect when someone had a bad day or a little blip in their radar, which happens to all of us from time to time and a little respect can go a long way.

Speaker 1:

So we packed a lot into this episode and it's time to wrap things up. So let's do it with a few summary points. Number one respect your body. We demand so much of a daily, but with proper rest and adjustments along the way, like trying that hard workout in a few days from now you'll usually find better success. Use that warmup rule to gauge how you're feeling on the day and have a reflective process to understand how the workout went, what you did right, what you did wrong, and that will improve your awareness over time to make better adjustments.

Speaker 1:

Secondly and finally, remember the golden rule, and maybe don't kick a person when they're down. That's not how I think most people would want to win or try to succeed. But if you do, let's hope the next time you fuck it up, your competition ain't wearing their steel-toed boots. That's it. That's our show for today. Let all that marinate and I think you'll find ways to apply it to your training, racing and life. Thank you, 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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Adam Pulford

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