The truth about base training for time-crunched cyclists—what to cut, what to keep, and what actually moves the needle.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Trevor Connor: Hello and welcome to Fast Talk your source for the signs of endurance performance. I’m your host, Trevor Connor here with Coach Julie Young and Chris Case. It’s an age old question that is still searching for an answer. If base training is about getting lots of long, slow distance, how do you effectively do base training when you only have six or seven hours each week?
We’ve addressed it before in this show in articles on our websites, and with the athletes we help, but we’re still not done answering. That’s for one simple reason. There is no simple answer. It gets complicated. So in today’s episode, we’re gonna have a round table discussion with two very successful coaches to understand how they handle base training with their time crunched athletes.
I’ve always said if I was asked to make a list of the top 10 coaches in North America, I would not put myself on that list, but both of our guests would be in my top five. We’re certain they’ll have a lot of insights on how to address this age old question. Tim Cusick is the head coach and founder of Basecamp, highly successful coaching business.
He’s also the co-creator of the WKO five plus training software. Neil Henderson is the founder of Apex Coaching and the creator of the popular Sufferfest training series. Both coaches have taken multiple athletes of the world championships and Olympics. We will talk with them about what the ideal base plan looks like, and a base training has fundamentally changed in the last 30 years.
It is possible that the traditional view of base training being about lots slow volume is just an outdated concept, and we’ll address that question. Then we’ll shift to the time crunch athlete and discuss how the ideal base plan is modified for them, including how the stresses of life factor into their training and what sacrifices, if any, they need to make.
Finally, we’ll talk about whether zone two training is valuable for time crunch athletes. If there’s any tricks they can use, like facet training or heat training to amplify their six to seven hours each week. Joining Henderson and Cusick will also hear from USA Cycling’s High Performance Director Jim Miller, with his thoughts on long rides and how base training has changed.
So get ready to make the most of every hour, and let’s make you fast. Well, we’re starting out the new year here and we’ve got two guests of the show who have been with us a few times. Neil, Tim. Welcome to the show again. Thanks, Trevor. It’s good to be here.
[00:02:16] Tim Cusick: Thanks for having us.
[00:02:17] Trevor Connor: And we got Neil and Chris in sunny Boulder.
It’s 60 degrees, even though it’s December. We got Tim in a Arctic for, well, it was an Arctic for us in Pennsylvania. Thought anymore. And Julie, what’s it like where you are?
[00:02:30] Julie Young: It’s been miserable, freezing fog for the last like two weeks, so I’m looking for some sunshine.
[00:02:37] Chris Case: That’s in Truckee. Yeah.
[00:02:38] Julie Young: Actually, I’ve been in the valley working, so I think Truckee is about 15 degrees warmer than Sacramento.
[00:02:45] Chris Case: Wow. Wild. All in all, everybody has wild weather going on. Yeah, I’m in Toronto, so we just don’t need to say more. It’s gray, the great way north. So.
[00:02:55] Trevor Connor: We’re gonna address an age old question that I think we’ll have a lot to discuss, but I’m not sure there’s ever fully an answer to this, is how do you do base training when you don’t have much time because you read any of the least the classic descriptions of base training.
It’s just a lot of long, slow volume, which is great if you’re a pro and you can go out and train 25 hours a week. Not so great. If you have a family and a full-time job and six hours a week is a good week for you. So we’re gonna dive into this, but I actually wanna take a step back. We have two fantastic coaches here who have worked with athletes of all levels.
So I wanna start by asking a broader question, which is, has the nature of base training changed not just for the time crunched? But in general, you know, 20, 30 years ago, it was just long, slow, long, slow, long, slow. Is that still the way it is now, particularly with pros who seem to be having a shorter and shorter base period and have to be able to race longer and longer?
I would say clearly there’s been a lot of differences in how early season training preparation is approached by a lot of athletes. Again, not just a time crunch. So even going back, you know, nearly 20 years ago here in Colorado, I had lots of athletes that. Again, worked full time. They were masters athletes had jobs, and at the time we had comp trainers and rollers were our kind of two primary indoor training tools that folks were using.
And here in Colorado, again, we have variable weather. We do get snow, we get sun and wind, we get all the different things, but a lot of times we have for sure less daylight time to work with. And so most folks were doing some bit of indoor training. And you know, in working with them back then, it was just one of those things of, yeah, we’re gonna do things differently than probably every book they had read at that point.
Or article about base training, which was kind of that neoclassical periodization schema of a 20-year-old pro who’s currently in Spain training in lovely warm weather and doing 20, 25, 30 hour weeks. And that really didn’t apply to my 45-year-old fellows working full-time jobs and trying to get ready for their March stasio race series.
Neil, I gotta give you full credit off mic. Before we started, Neil said, I’m gonna bring in the term neoclassical base training
and time count, five minutes, 15 seconds into the episode.
[00:05:22] Neal Henderson: Yeah, I didn’t wanna hold onto that too long because I might have, you know, might have flubbed it, so he nailed
[00:05:26] Trevor Connor: it.
[00:05:29] Chris Case: Do it while it’s fresh.
Tim, what’s your thoughts?
[00:05:32] Tim Cusick: You know, I think in general the goal of base training, if you think big picture really hasn’t changed, what to me really has changed is the process. So technology came along, something Neil was just referring to, technology came along 20, 30 years ago. We started in with devices.
We started with CompTrain and equipment to be indoors. It moved into power meters and a better heart rate monitor. It’s now moved into wearables and more information. These systems gave us a better way of quantifying things we were doing in base training, and that quantification gave us. Greater precision, and by precision means, I think it, in my opinion, it evolved the concepts we were trying to accomplish.
And it allowed us to greater individualize them, make them more specified in what we were doing, what phases we were in, what we were trying to accomplish, and were we accomplishing what we thought. I also think it gave us really good tools to allow for a broader approach towards base training because in that precision, we understood maybe fatigue or the relationship between fitness and fatigue better, and the measurability of that so we could push the envelope a little bit better, a little harder in places where we can get away with it and understand the impact of that, and the impact being creating additional positive results versus maybe too much of a good thing and going too far.
[00:07:01] Neal Henderson: One other area I would say that we’ve seen some evolution in the training for athletes is that the acceptance and utilization of strength training as part of this foundation, part of this base has become, I’d say more accepted years ago. I mean, I definitely had, you know, internet arguments on, uh, rec sport triathlon and rec bicycles racing.
I believe about the role of strength training. My master’s project that I started at CU Boulder here in 1997 was the effects of resistance training on endurance performance in triathletes. And so strength training for me has always been one of these foundational elements for fitness in endurance sports.
And it allows endurance athletes to be able to handle higher training loads by having that tissue integrity. One of the bigger things in early strength training research was the reduction in injury potential. And so for me, I was always seeing that value in that timeframe. Early season for us, you know, in Northern hemisphere in, in these winter months of adding much more strength training to the routine, which also does have a different kind of fatigue and impact on performance in the endurance.
And so that coupled lower volume generally with then more strength training was just for me, naturally one of those things That just made sense.
[00:08:22] Tim Cusick: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Just to add 10, Neil, what a great point to be making. I would say when we think about some of the evolutions. It really is the integration of different systems too.
We now understand the role of training, let’s say on the bike training, to name it, the integration of strength training, the integration of nutrition. I think now to me, the technology has really empowered a whole athlete approach exactly what Neil’s talking there. We fuel that athlete well, we strengthen that athlete.
Well, we train that athlete well, and it allows us to make an investment of similar timeframes for improved, more optimized training, more optimized results.
[00:09:03] Trevor Connor: Let’s quickly hear from Jim Miller and his thoughts on whether the nature of base training has changed.
[00:09:09] Jim Miller: I think it has. They’re racing later in this season.
They’re not taking as much time off. If they take any time off, when they return to the bike, they return really fast. They jump into the builds really quick. I think it’s entirely different than it was.
[00:09:23] Trevor Connor: Well, I’m glad to hear you say that ’cause I will say getting ready for this episode. I read this study, a Spanish study that just came out two months ago in October, and the title of it was Training Strategies, A World Tour Cyclist, periodization and Load Distribution across a Competitive Season.
And they had 28 world tour cyclists, including a winner of the Tour de France World Championships. So this was top level cyclists and the first half of this study they’re going through explaining how they calculated TSS and critical power and ERE and all these scientific terms. And I’m getting all excited going, oh, they got all the data here, I can’t wait to see what they have.
And then you finally get to the results and they’re like, yeah, all these top athletes nowadays, they’re doing a lot of zone one in the winter with not a lot of high intensity. And as they get closer to the season, they add more high intensity. And then in the race season they drop the volume a bit and do more high intensity.
And I went. Well, that’s a really cool use of the data to explain what we were taught in the seventies.
It is interesting how that gets summarized sometimes,
but what are your thoughts? Has it really just not changed that much, or is it more what you two are saying as we brought in a lot of more peripheral elements, strength, training, nutrition, all these other things, but the core hasn’t changed too much
in
[00:10:40] Neal Henderson: my kind of experience in working with some of the world tour athletes as well, is that, you know, many of them are having early season races, you know, high priority events, even in January, February, and so you couldn’t just roll up into it just having been doing, you know, zone two endurance and be anywhere near the podium.
You had to be properly preparing and that preparation was typically starting, you know, in November and December and being ready to race there. It definitely. Changes how a season is approached with those athletes who then often have goals in May, June, July with the Tour World Championships in, you know, August, September, October.
And it’s just really long term having variations and again, that kind of classical, just low intensity and then build. And then race season is not something that is done over a longer six, nine month term. This is happening in like truly micro cycles of, you know, you might have four weeks of predominantly low intensity work with the strength work in, and then we’re straight into specificity and quality intervals and efforts to be prepared for those.
Earliest races,
[00:11:56] Tim Cusick: and I couldn’t agree more. Again, well said. I think you look at the concept of periodization as training and periodization is not training. It’s a process. It’s a process of putting concepts or ideas or things you’re doing in some logical order that optimizes the result. Periodization still is a reasonably decent strategy, I mean, as a process, but it is not training.
What we, what I see now is exactly what Neil’s saying. You see it, it’s being condensed on one end. Pros are racing longer seasons, everything is more value. There aren’t lesser races on the schedule anymore. You need to perform, and it’s the new pressure of the world tour. That’s a reality. So that periodization, the concepts are similar, the process that we’re putting together, but we’re condensing.
I would also say the reverse, you’re seeing at the everyday athlete that’s actually being stretched out for longer and longer. We’re seeing more just general events, gravel racing, and to me really kind of began to change this paradigm a little bit. People are just looking to compete and maybe just complete events from.
Late February till November, and that’s just stretching out for them. You know, they’re, I guess we’d still call it performance season, but it is then taking that same paradigm that we like to call periodization and saying, wow, I need to really stretch that out or repeat it multiple times in a season to get that athlete to perform.
So the concept’s the same. The applications are changing a lot due to change in the athlete scheduling.
[00:13:28] Neal Henderson: Also, an area that kind of overlaps there is the road cyclist of the, you know, whatever. Early two thousands, late nineties was a super specialized breed in a lot of cases. You know, you had some athletes who did different things.
But now if you look at, you know, even just some of the top riders out there, you know, Maria Vos doing this years ago, but not true VanderPol and well Bernard. Racing cyclocross, or if you go back more in the, you know, early 2000 tens, so many track cyclists that were also world tour road cyclists, just that Wiggins guy and you know, Garrin Thomas and you know, the Aussies McGee before them, the winter seasons.
Actually, the Cycl lacrosse and track seasons have been more winter, and that’s a lot of high intensity load. I mean, even some of the cycl lacrosse racers, like three days a week, crazy, four days a week, five days a week on some of those like big race focus periods. But that preparation is absolutely nowhere near what that old school idea of a base training was.
And they’ve had great success on the road, early season, mid-season, late season. And so I think it’s just that variations that you can accomplish work and create a stimulus, and then change the kind of work you do. As you get closer to specific events where it’s then more related to the event that you’re doing.
[00:14:50] Trevor Connor: So even this study from two months ago brought up that maybe part of the reason they went easy in the base phase and saved the high intensity for in the season is because the concerns of over training and burnout, and I know top pros are kind of a unique breed, but even in amateur cyclists now with all these online platforms where you can be racing every single day, all year round, that amount of high intensity becomes a concern for everybody.
So how are we able. To have athletes do this now, even hitting that high intensity in the base and not push into over training, not push into burnout.
[00:15:28] Neal Henderson: I’ve got a couple ways of looking at that. Number one is actually being very specific with your intensity of knowing truly what the athlete’s capability is and targeting specific to that ability In the past.
Sometimes, you know, the higher intensity targets above, say threshold, FTP, whatever you like that term to mean, whether you’re working on the VO O2 intensity or anaerobic capacity, or true sprint and neuromuscular type of work that. If you don’t have appropriate targets, it’s, it is actually easy to overcook somebody or ask them to be doing too much or to not control how much of that higher intensity work is being incorporated.
So when folks just do, you know, a bunch of online races or same thing, do a bunch of cross races and don’t necessarily have sometime a little bit of a governor or a thought towards the highest point for them might be their state championships or a national championship and take some of those early races and not absolutely bury themselves, that you can definitely get into trouble if the, if you don’t have some management of that intensity.
And that’s one thing that I think is. Easier to do now that we have the kind of tools, but it does require the athlete and or the coach to be looking at that information and then making adjustments based on what has been done. And if you see mistakes being repeatedly made by an athlete of encouraging them to do the right thing going forward in terms of how hard they work on the what are supposed to be.
Specific intensity days.
[00:17:01] Tim Cusick: You know, to add to that, this happens a lot more in the everyday cyclists. You are seeing that just total extension go back to your concept of base training and periodization. Things that we kind of have brought forward with us over the years. I think one of the big training changes in periodization is we need to think more in the micro macro cycle and less in the big picture for a lot of these athletes.
To me, where you deal with that is you are looking at multiple short macro cycles. You know, eight weeks, 10 week cycles, like, oh, you’re focused on this now. Okay. We’re gonna have that cycle, and that might be in a year where you have, you know, during your performance, your race kind of frame, you’re in three or four of those macro cycles.
That does make and dramatically changes what you would do in a traditional base cycle to set that up. Because if you understand the demand of each of those, you know, macro cycles, what are you racing, the stuff that Neil was just laying out, then you can look back at your base training and say, what is the best thing I should be doing here?
If you treat each of those macro cycles as the same, they’re doing some indoor racing or they’re doing some outdoor, you know, if they’re the same, the base becomes universal. If you understand the demands of each one of those macro cycles, those short eight to 10 week cycles throughout the year, you tend to change your concept of what I’m going to do with this athlete and base, because you’re pre-thinking.
Like, man, I can’t get them too fatigued in base. Or I need more strength and time in the gym than I’m gonna need cardiovascular fitness or basic capacities in place. So you need to be thoughtful of the bigger picture, but you tend to compartmentalize it more. Now,
[00:18:43] Neal Henderson: I tend to, as a coach, not plan. Extremely far into the distance.
You know, I’m not doing eight weeks of detailed training out for sure. 10 days. You know, on the longer side, two weeks, I may have some key workouts that they might see a little bit longer into the future. 2, 3, 4 weeks in some cases. And as we get to those major events eight weeks out, we’ll have really mapped out those major.
Trends, specific workouts to make sure that we have that balance of what workouts help them gain confidence and which ones are also ensuring that they’re gaining the capacity that they need for the event, and that they have that understanding so that they’re not having those questions of, did I do enough or, this person is doing more, should I do more too?
All of those things that you try to catch it ahead of time and have that not just capability being developed, but also the confidence in the process that you’re using.
[00:19:38] Julie Young: Neil, you know, you just said you don’t plan far out in advance, and I find working with master athletes, it’s impossible to be a perfectionist and it’s impossible to be neat and tidy in terms of the training program, and it’s mostly like triage.
So I was kind of curious like how do you create a progression for the master athlete? And I know Tim, I’ve heard you say ramp rates and that sort of thing, especially if we’re talking about base training and feel like these athletes have such a hard cap on their time. So how do you manage that?
[00:20:11] Neal Henderson: Yeah, for me, I do an overview for the year.
I lay things out and it’s usually, you know, it’s been happening over the past few weeks of where those key events that they have for the upcoming season are, as well as some of the other events, and then where those kind of macro cycles are gonna be, where we’re building, where we have recovery. For me, the big part is we’re actually in incorporating and planning those rest and breaks, which.
Again, if we talk about the basis of this episode about base training is if you don’t have a good starting foundation where somebody is coming in relatively rested and healthy, it’s hard to build any good foundation on a wobbly starting place. And so for me, that off season, that end of season kind of mental, physical break, whether it’s, you know, two to four weeks generally, as well as then multiple, you know, three to seven day periods with sometimes no training or extraordinarily reduced training that are happening throughout the season, two or three times a year in most cases, that we have those built into that long-term plan.
And that’s actually where the biggest accountability for me, often as a coach is, is then having that building to those events and after those bigger events have occurred, having that plan downtime and enforcing it. ’cause when an event doesn’t go well. Everyone just wants to go right back and they need to train harder to do better, and that’s usually the worst thing they can do.
And if they’re successful, same thing. I am on top of the world, I need to get even higher. And both of those roads lead to the same place of future failure. And so having those periods where we get off the gas and slow things down and really hold them accountable to that rest and recovery, just like at the end of the season, having a true, proper or off season to be able to start training on healthy good grounds is some of this aspect of that big season long plan that I look at.
[00:22:10] Tim Cusick: I do the same thing. So I lay out a plan, nice little spreadsheet, X’s and O’s, ramp rates, step ups, you know, it’s got all the progression and great periods of specificity in there and everything’s right. And I do a nice presentation to my athletes and we agree on it. And then as soon as we agree on it, I always have the same discussion.
Okay, this is not what’s gonna happen. And this is where literally you cannot think of a better phrase. The map is not the territory. And I have that discussion with all my athletes. We just mapped it out. This would be ideal. Ideal never happens. Great training is about understanding that things are gonna go wrong, things are gonna change, and we’re gonna adapt to that.
And then my athlete will ask me, well, why do we do a plan? And it still is so important to have that overview, like Neil said, because that’s your true north. You’re gonna work back to that concept. And there’s some point where it totally collapses, don’t get me wrong. But as things get a little wrong, an athlete has an illness, a family thing comes up, you know, change.
Having that plan in place, you’re working back to that. You’re able to sit with that athlete and said, here’s what we wrote. Here’s the challenge we have. How do we work back to this plan? Because the map is not the territory. Their life is gonna unfold in a way it does, and it’s gonna change your plan. And you just accept that.
And I find by having that discussion upfront with the athletes, they actually feel slightly less pressured. Meaning it’s not like, wow, my coach is gonna think I’m failing if I don’t get 638 TSS this week this way. So I think it gives the best of both worlds to present things that way. You still need a plan, but you also have to understand that it’s gonna not come true and there’s flexibility and change.
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[00:24:19] Trevor Connor: You’re just starting to touch on what I really wanna ask ’cause we do wanna get to how to time crunch, athletes modify the plan to deal with base training when they have limited time. But before we can get there, exactly what you’re talking about, what is the ideal.
So I’ll throw this to both of you. We’re not talking top pros and we’re not talking brand new cyclists as your typical cyclist, if you didn’t have to factor in life and everything else and being really time crunched, what would that ideal plan look like? What would the ideal base like you are trying to get them as strong as possible?
What would the ideal base look like?
[00:24:54] Tim Cusick: I think if you just think bell curve athlete, I couldn’t give a simple enough answer because it lets me off the hook for the specific demands of what that individual needs. I do like to think of things in the classic periodization format ’cause it’s just simpler to kind of organize the thoughts in our mind.
I think you have a base period. I think athletes should have a good transition in rest. Something Neil mentioned earlier, super important and an appropriate rest for their training history and their age. I think. Strength training leads us into our base training. That’s a little different than most. I think strength training is important for movement, quality, tissue prep, and even as a metabolic re corps to some of your aerobic adaptations.
Then I think as you go through base training, to me, my approach has always been a dependency style approach that then gets edited by the specificity and the demands that you need for that athlete and the demands for them to succeed at their event. But by dependencies, I do take a more classical starting point.
I wanna build aerobic capacity first. In the athlete, it’s most of their other functions are gonna build, most of their performance demands are gonna build off of that. So I do like to start with a phase, uh, and there’s different ways to do this. Here’s where the nuance gets in. It can be more of an extensive phase.
It can be more of an intensive phase, but the output goal. Strength movement, quality as first step, tissue prep, first step, aerobic capacity, first step. I wanna establish those two things on top of each other. Dependency approach. I think once after that, it does get hard to answer because specificity really starts to matter to me.
On top of that next phase, I want, once I have aerobic capacity at the best level I can generate, I really start looking at metabolic capacity. And I’m over compartmentalizing. It’s not this neat and clean back to the map. It’s not the territory, but I’m looking at metabolic capacity and we are beginning to look at things more like FTP and certain performance elements that are happening around there.
And again, you really at this phase, beginning to push in specific demands and what they’re looking for. So to me, I think it’s important that those dependencies are the core of all forward moving process. The thing is, when I say it that way, I don’t want people to interpret that, oh, he does some weightlifting than a bunch of zone two.
And then because of the words I chose, then a bunch of FTP. It’s more complex than that, but you are trying to build a physiological response on top of a physiological response, on top of a physiological response. But in closing, again, not to get pigeonholed on this, that’s more messy than it sounds like.
You don’t get to pack in all of your aerobic capacity, like, great. Um, it’s aerobically fit as I’m ever gonna be and now I’m gonna work on something else. It overlaps, it’s gray, but if you think about the core of the concept, the dependency based approach usually is my style.
[00:27:55] Trevor Connor: So let’s start putting some constraints on that.
And as we said, the purpose of this episode is to talk about base training for Time Crunch. And I get, I was giving you a very broad unspecific question, but the idea was just getting at, you know, what’s the ideal for base. But now let’s talk about how you modify that for different types of athletes. But first of all, Neil, now you do have an athlete who has a job.
Has a spouse, they don’t wanna get divorced, they have six to eight hours a week. How do you modify it for them? What changes do you make so they can still get the most outta their base training?
[00:28:33] Neal Henderson: Yeah, there’s foundational elements of making sure they are well positioned on their bike. Have a plan for developing that strength, stability, and improve whatever areas, maybe deficits there to kind of get a solid, again, starting place in those areas.
From that training perspective, then I use kind of this progression and my thought process is initiate, recruit, sustain, repeat. And so with that initiation, it’s that proper positioning on the bike and that starting place. And so that strength, stability, those kind of things, even skills I have a professional that I work with have just started working with in the past couple weeks and on Tuesday we went out.
And road parking lot drills, just doing real basic stuff. Cones pulling back the curtain to see what is and isn’t there and did some low speed stuff on the grass. It’s like, okay, engine capacity, capability, sure, we’ll work on that, but we got some foundational stuff. We need to initiate better skillsets of actually how we’re on the bike and how we move on the bike and how we move the bike underneath us.
As that initiating things to start from the kind of training perspective. Then that recruitment is, you know, you can do the classical like with the muscle, either force speed or power, which is the product of those two things. And I do work with cadence, specifically high cadence work for that recruitment side.
I do high torque work starts for that maximal force and then power doing short sprints. 4, 6, 8 seconds. True sprinting, not 22nd slogs or one minute all out to the town sign. Starting way too far out kind of thing, but true sprinting and getting that recruitment accomplished initially, and this is over the first.
Several months of training that there might be one or two sessions a week. I used to do in-person group workouts and you know, it was NMF neuromuscular Friday, every Friday we were doing some sort of a neuromuscular work cadence, torque power, or some of all of it as part of that recruitment side. And then we get into the sustaining a given effort, whether it’s a VO O2, it’s a threshold, an FTP, an anaerobic capacity.
It depends on what the targets are and where we are, that we’re gonna choose one of those things and work progressively to, to sustain longer. And then finally, to be able to repeat whatever types of efforts are required that we’ve built up through those sustained periods, which are, again, often those macro cycles are gonna have some focus in one of those domains.
And then being able to repeat whatever that task is multiple times.
[00:31:11] Tim Cusick: That’s a great answer. Maybe Neil should coach me. I couldn’t agree more is what makes this hard. I like to, you know, say, oh, here’s a different view, but I really don’t have one. I think it’s well stated. For me, the only element I see a little different, let’s understand the constraints of a time crunched athlete.
They face the law of diminishing returns probably more than any other endurance athlete. Like you’ll start doing some work and you’ll respond nicely and things will get fit, but you quickly become plateaued and the response to the work you have, because the time limiter itself is just gonna cap you pretty quick.
That’s. Tough to deal with in a lot of ways. So your coaching approach needs to maximize every single moment you have in the understanding that, to me, that means you are gonna take the same model that you coach with, whether, you know, I expressed it as a periodization process of dependencies. Neil has a great way of looking at it in his order of things.
But I would say the problem with the six to eight athlete, they’re gonna stagnate in phases quicker. And what stagnate means is they’re in that where the response curve flattens, right? It gets pretty flat. You have to be more attentive and more flexible to that because you tend to condense, you have to condense phases with an athlete with more time.
And you have to realize as a coach, when that stagnation settles in, you need to change the stimuli. Something Neil was talking about earlier, hopefully in the same progressive order of the way you like to do things, so. You are condensing some segments significantly. You might even be stretching some others out more.
And here’s where the role to me, if I was a time crunched athlete, there is absolutely no consideration if you that you should be training with data. It’s more important to you as a maximization strategy than, uh, somebody using or has more flexible time. I also think we use a lot in our system, and Neil just said it, we use a lot of neuro muscular manipulation.
You need the six and other elements. The athlete doing 68 hours, they need more what we call amplifiers. If there are maxed in fitness, a builder, we have builders and amplifiers in our discussions, they’re maxed in fitness. Can we amplify that? Can we improve this skill? Can we improve how they express that fitness that they have?
Can we manipulate the cadence relationship that they’re used to to make them more versatile to a better performer? You have to dig into all those things for that six to eight hour athlete. Their training just needs to be more optimized to the process.
[00:33:51] Trevor Connor: So I’m very interested, you said with that six to eight hour athlete, there are some things you have to condense and some things you need to extend.
Is that pretty consistent with those athletes? And what is it that you would need to condense and what would you need to extend?
[00:34:05] Tim Cusick: I find it’s more consistent with their training history. So let’s say they, they’ve spent a lot of time riding a lot of zone two, that early dependency of aero aerobic capacity or where you might just be getting them into the, that might condense really quickly.
They’re bringing that fitness with them into the, you know, each progressive season or macro cycle. So you need to look at that and say, am I still gaining, is the work I’m doing? A coach of a time crunched athlete looking to perform has to be super intuitive and on top of the data in that sense. So I would say if that’s what they’ve been doing, you need to condense that because they already probably have a good aerobic capacity.
We can talk classic, you know, are they burning fats as fuel and all that stuff. They already have that built into the system to some degree. So you then might s. Condense that phase and do more higher intensity work chasing some other structure to build on what they brought. If you had an athlete do and hi training and they came in and they were very glycolytic efficient and they were great at burning carbs, you know, just keeping it simple for the scientists and the audience, you might want to expand that phase a little more.
Even though they’re at that stagnation point, you might be looking to get a deeper metabolic response and just try to put a little more patience on top of that to shut down some of that anaerobic and make them a little more aerobic. It’s more responsive, Trevor, so it’s hard to me to specifically say, ’cause you can still follow what I call dependencies, but you gotta be more intuitive.
You don’t have time to waste. Like once they’re not getting gains or once they’re kind of, you need to change that stimuli. The trick is, can you measure that? Like when are they hitting that point? That’s not as easy as me saying it in a podcast.
[00:35:49] Trevor Connor: So if I’m hearing both of you correctly there, there isn’t one formula for the time crunched athlete.
It’s more if you have a pro who you have somewhat unlimited time with, you’re gonna try to squeeze every bit of juice that you can get when you’re dealing with the time crunch athlete, you’re looking for, I can’t squeeze everything, so where can I get the most juice? Is that what I’m hearing?
[00:36:12] Tim Cusick: Yeah. I mean, to me, I’ll answer that one.
If you said, what’s the difference between a untimed crunched athlete, somebody with 20 hours a week to train 18 to 20 versus six to eight? Specificity is the key. Neil mentioned it earlier. You absolutely have to be laser focused on what you need, not what you want. Athletes want, the things they want are things they’re comfortable with.
And that isn’t always the best training and every athlete listening to that, if you’re my athlete, sorry. Um, the reality is you have to use that specificity. You’ve gotta be really good at analyzing the athlete, really good at analyzing the demands of events and laser focus that into the training. Or you’re wasting time, you’re not as optimized, 18 to 20 hours a week, you have more time, you know, you can set the table with more skills and more responses and more levers that you can pull six to eight hours.
You’ve got a very limited amount of levers. Make sure they’re the right ones.
[00:37:13] Chris Case: It sounds like both of you previously were acknowledging the benefits of strength training. Is that one of the levers that you would absolutely pull for the time crunched athlete? And if so, what are the expectations for them in terms of gains that they should expect to see?
Because I think people are turning a corner, like you said, probably a lot of them already have Neil, but some people that just ride bikes just wanna ride bikes and you know, and gym work is just something that they’re very resistant to it, no pun intended. What should they expect to get out of it? So that’s a two part question.
[00:37:45] Neal Henderson: Yeah. I would say, you know, for me it’s almost a non-negotiable. Mm-hmm. With especially a master’s age athlete, if they’re 22. I don’t know, like I’m not gonna fight ’em on it necessarily. You’re 27 and they just want to get faster on the bike and they have super limited amount of time. Okay, I’ll let that one slide.
But by and large, you know, especially in the later thirties for sure, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, all of those folks, eighties, a hundred percent strength is gonna be a component in there. And it may take the place of mm-hmm what had been a ride previously. But I would always look at, within their schedule, what one of those rides that they’ve been doing has had really little purpose.
Nothing that’s gonna really change them. Give them something. And so sometimes that group ride is a huge social connection. And to say, you’re, we’re gonna throw that away because my buy-in with them gone. Like, that’s their friends, those are their buddies. Right, right. And I’m taking them away from their friends.
That’s not good. You know, and I’m isolating them to, I’m taking away something they love and substituting ’em with something they hate. It’s like, I don’t know if I was a kid at my. Mom took my piece of pizza and put like a bunch of peas on the plate, I’d not be super psyched and I’d fire my mom at that point.
She wouldn’t be my food coach anymore.
Is that
possible? I say, I don’t think so.
I wish somebody had told me years ago thinking of it in that way. Your mom doesn, listen to the show. We have to have that
little bit of balance of those things. But okay, where are we gonna then insert strength, right? What can we give up that especially has less return mm-hmm.
On the time and energy invested for a given kind of ride. Yeah. And so incorporating it in that way would be, again, pretty much a non-negotiable of making sure that we’re there to help them be better and also for their long-term health too. So again, I have access, I’ve got a DEXA scanner in in my lab now, and I can actually look at bone health, bone density.
Well if you, somebody is. Purely a cyclist, their risk for lone bobas is way higher. If it’s a triathlete or if they do a lot of strength training already, we may still look at that and make sure that’s a factor. But for most, if it is just a cyclist exclusively, man, the future mm-hmm. For their health and longevity, again, they may have goals of performance, but I also do as a coach, have that perspective that I’m not, you know, if they win the crit this summer, really important, but also in 10 years and 20 years, are they healthy?
Are they able to lift up their grandkids and Right. And do things, or if they do have a crash that they don’t shatter into, you know, a million pieces and mm-hmm. You know, are catastrophically like injured or unable to continue on in the sport. So those kind of things are part of the selling aspect on making sure that strength.
Is gonna be part of that training again for their performance, but also for their health and longevity too.
[00:40:36] Tim Cusick: Whenever I get asked that question, I always have the first answer. If you’re over 35 to 40 years old, you should be lifting weights, period. It should be more of a priority no matter what you’re doing because your quality of life, your health span will be significantly improved.
For me, I would answer similarly. I will time strength training in when we’ll put a little more investment and when we’ll pull back a little bit of investment. My end goal with the time crunched athlete. ’cause you’re gonna take what you can get and they. The time crunch Athlete specifically does not want to spend time in the gym in general.
They just don’t wanna, they wanna be on the bike getting their results. I want movement quality, so I’m not really looking for strength. Not that I wouldn’t take it, and if they’ll gimme the time I would take it, but at the minimum, I want them to function in a movement patterns. So we are looking at multi hinged exercises, things like that, that are whole balance, you know, whole body kind of focused.
Maybe things that will repair some imbalances while we’re sneaking that in there to get the best movement. So as they get into more intensive on the bike training, they’re prepared for it, they’re moving well, they’re functional, the tissues are prepared, and we avoid injury. That’s really my look at strength training.
If I can get them to keep it up and still gimme six to eight hours, I’m a negotiator. Every good coach is a negotiator, right? Neil, you’re saying, oh, you have six hours this week. Can you gimme one more hour in the gym? Right? So I will always try to negotiate a maintenance of strength work. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but I always try for it.
[00:42:12] Trevor Connor: Yeah, I can give a lot of different reasons for this, but I’m just gonna give one. There is a phenomenon where as we age, you start seeing what are called orphan muscle fibers, where muscle fibers disconnect from their neuromuscular connection and, and you basically can’t use ’em. They’ll eventually reconnect, but they’ll reconnect as a slow twitch muscle fiber.
And they have shown if all you’re ever doing is riding the bike, you don’t prevent that from happening, and that causes a lot of disability later in life. The weight room is how you prevent that from happening. So anybody who’s listening is going, well, I only have six hours. I really feel I need to spend it all on the bike.
You need to understand at some point, because of these physiological effects, you’re gonna see a big drop in your performance, and that time in the weight room will actually keep your fitness, keep your form.
[00:42:59] Neal Henderson: Yep. That selective loss of the fast twitch fiber is, you know, one of the biggest problems with aging.
And so even some of that recruitment work that we do with high cadence, high torque force, you know, start efforts and sprint work again, the athlete may be doing Unbound 200 mile or 360 XL or something crazy long, and you know when I’m asking them to do. Start work or sprint work, it’s not because they’re gonna be sprinting against anyone in any of the races that they ever do.
It’s actually for that recruitment and maintenance of what they have in terms of the muscle fiber and that quality of the contraction. And actually potentially with that becomes an improvement in efficiency and economy of basically that coordination pattern In cycling. You can see improvements in efficiency or economy.
So a lowered oxygen cost for a given power output if you’re connected, firing the right muscles at the right time, not working against yourself.
[00:43:57] Tim Cusick: I couldn’t agree more with what Neil just said. That’s so important. One of the things we preach all the time for maturing athletes train like in your forties, like you wanna live in your fifties train like in your fifties, then you wanna live in your sixties.
I think we get to a certain point, we need to shift our focus from racing tomorrow. To the athlete. I wanna be 10 years from now. And we should start just like we’re doing with an IRA or an investment account. You start investing for your older age and you need to think about that from a fitness approach that changes the way we should see things like strength.
’cause it doesn’t all become about a performance. Now you’re starting to invest in your long game
[00:44:37] Trevor Connor: and in your eighties, hang up the bike, go down to Key West and drink a margarita. I’ll ride down and drink that margarita.
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[00:45:18] Trevor Connor: So I’d like to flip the question around, ’cause I know we’re starting to run out of time. We did a while ago have Chris Carmichael on the show and we’ll put this in the show notes talking about the time crunched athlete.
And one thing I do remember from that conversation is he said there’s a lot you can do as a time crunched athlete, but you have to pick your battles and you’re gonna probably be more of a Crip rider or a psycho across rider doing short, high intensive events give up basically on the three, four hour race.
Do you two agree? Are there things you just have to give up if you can only do six to eight hours a week, or is it possible to still do those types of events?
[00:45:57] Neal Henderson: I definitely have a couple examples that I would say Time crunch athletes can be successfully competing in long events. It is absolutely not a requirement to be training 20 hours a week to have success at something like Leadville 100 as a good example.
Or even, you know, I’ve had Ironman triathlon athletes that train eight to 10 hours, eight to 12 hours a week on average. The key thing with some of those is, again, that specificity, the progression, and we may have a very short window. Of a month or so, two to six weeks in many cases, where we will have an increased block beyond what their normal is, and it may just be a single session each week.
And with some of those athletes, again that work full-time jobs, I’m asking them, can you take a day off of work so that you can do one of those big long rides? And for that kind of athlete, a four hour ride is a big long ride. And because it allows them to do it where they have more recovery from that, it’s not just the time of that day off of work, but it’s actually that they’re able to do that ride and then have adequate recovery after it, rather than trying to jam it into an already busy day.
You know, there might be enough daylight hours for them to wake up at four 30 in the morning and ride from five to 9:00 AM and then go to work from nine to five and come home an absolute. Wreck and for the next five days or longer, they’re just completely wasted from the effort because they weren’t able to recover from that.
And so I would say there’s a lot of ways that athletes who are generally a very low volume athlete can be successfully preparing for longer events. But you have to be a little bit creative and you don’t do what others do and what the classic training guidebook says you need to do to be successful.
’cause you only have to do that lead bill 101 day a year. I’ve had a guy 10 years in a row, sub nine hours every time. And generally he was a six to 10 hour a week training. And you know, having that specificity, strength training, quality specific intensity work, all parts of his training schedule that allowed him to achieve that goal year over year for a decade straight.
[00:48:14] Tim Cusick: I would agree. I mean, you improve the odds maybe by selecting a shorter event, but it certainly doesn’t rule out everything. And it really depends on your goals too. I mean, this stuff is supposed to be fun. If that’s what you find fun, just get comfortable with that and find a way.
[00:48:29] Julie Young: Tim and Neil, I’m sure you’re familiar with this paper that recently came out, much ado about zone two.
[00:48:35] Neal Henderson: Yeah.
[00:48:36] Julie Young: So Trevor, Chris and Griffin did a deep dive on that and dissected and discussed that in episode 3 89. Basically it just disputed what we think we know about zone two, like do we need it in a training program? And basically it argued that you can achieve the same things that we have attributed to zone two through HIIT training in terms of cardiovascular health and mitochondrial function and mitochondrial density.
So I guess I would be curious from you, and this is kind of along the lines of what Trevor had just asked, but for that time, crunched athlete. Who is doing, and I think all of this is dependent on the goal of the athlete, whether it is a gravel race or it is crits and cyclocross, but like for that time crunched athlete, is there some truth to this that, you know, maybe we can achieve more for that athlete with the high intensity if they’re just doing like the crits and the cyclocross races?
[00:49:34] Tim Cusick: Yes and no. Wait a minute. I’ll give a classic cycling coach answer. It depends. I think when you look at an athlete, we tend to have a certain reductionist approach, and I think a lot of science studies look at and actually can reinforce this. For me, I look at an athlete, you have fitness, which is a capacity.
How fit are you, how metabolically fit, how cardiovascular fit, what can you form? So fitness, the underlying condition. Then you have conditioning. And conditioning is the concept of how long, well you can express that capacity. Can I take that fitness and race it? Can I sit in a pace line? Can I do a tough gravel climb?
You know, whatever the specific demands are. And then finally you have performance. Like at some given point, you’re gonna put that in the race and say, am I gonna win or lose? I think when you look at concepts and say, well, is zone two effective? Is it not effective? Can I get the same out of HIT? You have to look at how that.
Concept how what you’re looking at affects each one of those. So from a pure lab. Well, and you looked at that study and said, this works. Oh wow, there’s an interesting result at a much less time, higher intensity. I can create the same physiological responses as zone two, but does that translate into conditioning as well and does it translate into performance as well when the athlete really executes?
That’s kind of, to me, the rub. You have to kind of compare that to and make sure it makes sense. Everything’s a tool. Everything can work. HIIT can work, zone two can work, everything can work. It depends on those three scenarios to me, the athlete, what they respond to, both physiologically and psychologically in the end of the day.
Fitness to conditioning, to performance, what gets them all tools in the toolbox, and it’s just how the coach use it.
[00:51:26] Chris Case: It’s a very, it
[00:51:27] Neal Henderson: depends answer, but I like it. I’ve got a couple ways that I look at that. Number one, like just a general thing is if you’re looking for a stimulus for change, for an athlete who has a very long history of training, endurance sports, you know somebody who’s been doing this literally for decades, multiple decades, third, 30, 40 years, doing a bunch of zone two work is probably not gonna create much stimulus.
They probably have adequate tissue integrity to handle whatever intensity you might put to them outside of a base phase, and they’re just spending time and actually they’re gonna be de training nine times out of 10. Somebody who is a pretty fit athlete, if you just gave ’em eight weeks even of low zone two work, they’re absolute markers of fitness in a lot of cases would actually be less because you’ve detrained them, you’ve reduced the load, the work that they’re able to handle, unless you.
Crank up the volume, which again, is not always the answer that everyone has the ability to crank that up to 11 and beyond. So one, the history of the athlete has a part of it. Number two is that individual variability of the kind of training stimulus you can apply. You know, I could get 10 different athletes that are doing the same event, right?
Whether it’s a cyclo cross race, a grand tour, a you know. 4K pursuit on the track, whatever gravel race, give them the same training and I’m gonna get 10 different responses. I can put them all on the same exact workforce ratios volume, progress them over eight weeks, 12 weeks, and we’re gonna see variations in their response to that.
The heritage study is a huge seminal body of work that just shows how applying an equal training stress to a huge multi-thousand participant basis saw changes in certain fitness parameters of basically zero to upwards of 50% in a period of time. And so with trained athletes, we absolutely see the same thing, that the same amount of work you might prescribe will not yield equal results to all.
So there’s some individual variation in whether this is muscle fiber type, other genetic markers, tendencies that folks have for sure is a part of that. The third part here is, funny enough, like I’ve been doing this for a while and years ago I was told by folks that I’m the low intensity guy. I told everyone that I was doing a lot of testing in a lab here in Boulder, and I would say Boulder is one of the over-training capitals of the world.
And I would see these signature responses of individuals who are always doing a lot of intensity and not doing actually proper zone two, elevated baseline lactates, low fat oxidation when we do the metabolic measurements. All of these things that were just. Very commonly associated with always doing, you know, zone three and above and not having true rest days.
And when they do endurance rides, they’re doing a group ride and their normalized power is like 0.95, you know, intensity factor. And it’s like, oh, when do you rest? Like never. That’s when I’m dead. I’ll do that. And it’s like, okay, well you might wanna, you know, change this up to actually improve your performance.
So I told everyone to go slower zone. Two years go by and I start doing some high intensity workouts with specific higher intensity targets with what we did with the Suffer Fest. And now I become the high intensity guy that all I do is high intensity and that’s all I believe in. It’s like, well, no, I’m the same person that I’ve been over time.
And it’s, these different pieces have different times and dependent on what you’re preparing for, we’re gonna add different elements of that. But there absolutely is time for zone two. I’m not necessarily a believer in doing. Eight weeks of, you know, 20 and 30 hours of it is the right thing for everyone.
’cause just not even possible for a vast majority of the people that I work with, even professionals for that to happen. And then again, what they’re training for and how they respond to training. Tying back to that second point,
[00:55:08] Julie Young: so I had a couple experiences in the lab that I run that puts doubt in my mind about this idea of just hit training.
And one of the individuals was really committed to cross training. He did ride his gravel bike, but just an hour here, an hour there. And then the other, both of these guys were time crunched. The other one was training for sprint triathlons, you know, so doing some level of endurance, but again, just not big doses, like 45 minutes to an hour, but mostly that high intensity work.
And both of them, as you said, their lactate was high. So I guess it makes me believe that that type of work is not producing the, or developing those types of shuttles that are taking that lactate into the slow twitch. And so, I don’t know, I just feel like there’s something missing there if you can’t get that zone two.
[00:55:59] Neal Henderson: For sure. I’d say you have to have aspects of that in training. Now, is it always gonna be the four hour ride, five hour ride that folks can accomplish that in that way? Probably not. A lot of folks. It might be a half hour morning on the trainer rollers or something like that before work, and then after work, adding a little something, whether that’s, you know, going out for a hike or cross country ski.
Adding cross training is in as one of those ways that I do encourage those folks that have those limitations in time to add in some zone two work, whether it’s, you know, on the bike or not. It’s okay to do it in those different ways and be able to work on getting the zone two intensity work in though not at those absolute massive doses all the time.
[00:56:41] Trevor Connor: Jim Miller’s another top coach who has worked with both Elite and Time Crunch athletes. Here’s his thoughts on the importance of a long ride.
[00:56:50] Jim Miller: So
if I
have a time crushed athlete, the one thing I do try to do is find the weekend or the days off they have and give them the long rides. There is no substitute for long rides.
Two, two hour rides are not the same as one four hour ride. So I always look for the long day. But then the rest of the, like especially base period, I would do it long more so two work tempo work and then add in some interrupt efforts or FRCs. Always short early on, but I would include ’em early. You gotta get your bang for the buck.
[00:57:20] Julie Young: I’d be curious what you both think about, you know, kind of layering in some strategies that don’t necessarily require additional time, but that may amplify the training response. So for example, like a short endurance ride maybe. Pulling back on the carbohydrate intake before that ride. Not just for the metabolic response, but also the molecular signaling response, and then some variation of heat training to boost the hemoglobin.
And not to get too wacky and too like in the weeds and get people away from thinking about the fundamentals, but just I was thinking that might be a way, again, without requiring more time to amplify the response.
[00:57:58] Neal Henderson: For sure. I would say there’s a lot of different ways that we play with that. In some cases, we might even do a short, really high intensity block or effort or couple of efforts at the beginning of a, you know what might only be a 90 minute ride, but there’s this preload that we apply at the beginning of it, and then ask them to sustain that more steady state, you know, zone two-ish type effort after that.
And so it is a. Significantly different stress than if they just road zone two for the whole 90 minutes or something like that. That’s one way for me. Intensity preload, do some heavy work and then do whatever that adequate, you know, allowed time that they have for that added zone. Two to get in there some endurance time, other things that can create that stress.
So fueling again. There’s lots of different ways to manipulate what’s going on there. You know, by and large, if we’re trying to do our high intensity work, well, we might often think about it is far better to be properly fueled, have adequate carbohydrate before, during, after. But if we’re doing a predominantly zone two type of session and we’re trying to do a couple sessions in a day or some cross training mix with that.
Being a little bit under fueled for somebody who needs to stimulate, who needs a little bit more change in their ability to utilize fat as a fuel source or increase that capacity is something that you can play with and see how they tolerate it. Some folks just don’t do well and if the quality of the workout really fades out or they do that before they go to work and then their boss is yelling at ’em ’cause they can’t add one and one to get two and you know they’re in finance or accounting, well I mean that’s probably not gonna work out well either.
And they’re gonna stop paying you ’cause they got fired from the job and they’re, you’re no longer their coach and they’re sad and you’re sad and everyone loses. So beware how you manipulate some of those things and the impact that it may have downstream, not even specifically in the workout as you mentioned then heat for sure is a way of creating physiologic stress that will yield some physiologic responses.
Again, the appropriate amount of stress and building that up, sometimes it is necessary. For someone to do some of that kind of work before an event. Somebody lives at sea level and they’re coming up to do an event at a higher elevation. Well, they’re not, they might not have an altitude machine, but actually doing heat training is gonna help them be slightly more physiologically capable of adapting to the stress of high altitude.
It does not give you altitude adaptations, but they’re just more physiologically potentially capable of adapting to that.
[01:00:28] Tim Cusick: Yeah, great points. I mean, the idea of the concept of amplifiers are language. You can do these. To me it’s again, way more difficult to do that in the time crunched athlete, and this is like we tend to look at the time crunch athlete as some defect of the untimed crunched athlete.
Like, wow, untimed, crunched athletes are, they’re the right answer. Time crunch. Well you’re broken and we’re gonna do something different for you. Everything will work. What is challenge for the time crunched athletes is they’re time crunched for a. Their life is busy. They have family, they work a long job, they do other stuff.
So when you begin to apply these potential manipulations, these amplifiers, like heat training, like carb restriction in workouts, that can be extremely problematic because what will often happen is we convince the athlete this works and it may or may not. They do it for a day, and then they’re like, okay.
And the feedback is like, wow, I feel good. I was more fasted, I was lower carb today, and that was good. It felt good and I did it. And then suddenly, three weeks down the road, they’re struggling to maintain training. Suddenly a couple of shady workouts start showing up. You know, they’re not completing interval sets because the short game felt good.
The long game, didn’t they? Heat train? People love this. I hear everybody talking about I’m heat training, and then three, four weeks later, they’re like, I thought I was feeling great, but I’m struggling to train. Heat training is an additional stress load and if the rest of your day, the rest of your week, you can’t unload that to adapt to it.
All you’re doing is adding non-productive stress. Yeah, it could increase your plasma volume and help those things for you, but you don’t even know if you’re an adapter. So I think when you think about the six to eight, the time crunch athlete, these things might work, but you also need to think the long game at all.
Given times I might get one better workout, but if it’s gonna impact me two, three weeks down the road and hurt my training, the six to eight hour person, every training needs to be a good day. Now we know that’s not gonna happen. The map is not the territory, but every day needs to be a good day. The more you can establish consistency in your quality of training, that overloads everything.
Then if you’re doing that and you’re well entrenched in that and you’re managing your training stress as well, and you want to try a little of this or try a little of that, then maybe try it. But if it interrupts that consistency, that nice rhythmic training, don’t do it. It’s a trap. The cost to the benefit you’re thinking becomes too high.
You’re just not paying that cost today. You’re gonna pay it down the road.
[01:03:15] Neal Henderson: Yeah. I mean, that leads into something that the rest factor, rest and recovery are the needs with at the end of time Crunch athlete are not lesser than that high volume athlete because in most cases, their baseline stressor or level of life stressors is elevated.
And so their training stressor, tolerance, or what they can adapt to from a physical sense is actually really limited. And so rest and recovery become actually of more importance than my 24-year-old pro toy guys that like the biggest stressor of their life is. Nothing, um, that’s a totally different thing than the 58-year-old guy with, you know, a set of twins and a job and a boss, and things are challenging.
And so that rest becomes so critical. So, you know, I, I always have my phrase, I say, you know, rest, it’s not a four letter word. Yes, I can both spell and count. It’s not a bad word. And it’s something that a lot of times, that time crunch athlete is also not well-versed at embracing and understanding the critical aspect of rest, relative rest and recovery.
So sleep quality, we know in pretty much anything out there adapting to training. If we don’t have enough sleep and quality of sleep, our capacity to adapt to any training stresses is gonna be fairly limited. And so that’s one of those first and foremost things and how we build out that training. Lots of different ways of playing around with things, but even stuff like, you know, 16 and five day schedules.
So you’re using all the weekend times. On a 16 and five and the five days of reduced training occur Monday through Friday. And a lot of times I have folks take like three days completely off Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Tuesday and Thursday easy on that five days. And again, day one starts on a Saturday.
And those course, there’s cycles in those effectively two weeks and two days on of that 16 days that you’re able to still use the weekends, but it doesn’t mean you’re not having other rest as a very important part of what’s happening in their training schedule. And you have to focus on that, help them focus on it.
[01:05:27] Tim Cusick: It’s so important. Everybody who just heard what he said, listen again, like we rewind a little and listen again. That’s what I mean. We tend to look at the six to eight hour training processes, broken versus normal. It’s not, it’s subject to so many of the same standards, but because we look at it as broken, we look for.
Solutions that might not fit certain amplify heat training, all the things that we were just talking about, and then you ignore the quality principles because you have less time that really make training great. I would never try heat training if my training isn’t consistent. I’m not sleeping as well as I can with my stress of life, and I don’t have the appropriate rest built into my training plan.
If I’m doing that and I’m doing that well for three, four cycles, then maybe I’m gonna try heat training because heat training won’t work for you if you don’t have those things underlying, and even then it might not work for you. So it’s so important that this six to eight hour person doesn’t see it as a broken system, that you understand you’re subject to the same principles of physiology, you’re not going to escape that, and you’re actually maybe more subject to it because of your overall life stress.
[01:06:35] Chris Case: Well, I think it’s about that time that we get take homes from everybody, especially our two guests. There’s a lot of knowledge on this episode about training principles and base training and the various methods to get where people want to go. So I’ll start with Neil. He’s in the room with me. Neil, you’ve done this before.
One minute. What’s the most important message people should take from this episode?
[01:07:00] Neal Henderson: For me, with base training, regardless of whether you have a lot of time or a little time, or somewhere in between, you have to make sure you’ve preceded your foundation with a rest and recovery period. Being healthy at the start of the season as you begin to build is important.
That foundation then is gonna be built with the things that you need to help you succeed. So areas where you have had deficits, you need to address that initially from the start and make sure that you are strong, stable, and then working with purpose. Progression, which is gonna be counterbalanced with rest throughout that early phase of training.
Regardless of how much or how little relatively speaking you do, the balance of those things is what’s gonna help you be ready to reach your goals in the upcoming season. Who would like to go
[01:07:52] Chris Case: next? Julie, I’m picking on you.
[01:07:55] Julie Young: Okay. So I am just gonna pick up on all the great things that were shared today.
And I think for me, one of the things among many that stands out is this, you know, working with these great coaches, working with the good coach, and that coach helping to educate that athlete on why they’re doing what they’re doing. You know, I’ve heard Neil say a couple times that you know. Buy-in, which is so important in creating that relationship.
But just all the little, the nuance to training and really helping that athlete connect those dots. And I personally working with Time Crunch athletes, I think it’s fun because it’s like you have to be super creative in, in terms of really leveraging the time and being super nimble and being creative.
And also, Neil, you said this and I appreciated you saying this ’cause it’s something I believe like helping these time crunched athletes adopt that mindset that something is better than nothing and that so many of ’em feel they have to have these big blocks of time when in fact if you can make those small deposits, they really do add up and they matter.
[01:08:57] Chris Case: Trevor.
[01:08:58] Trevor Connor: Yeah, originally I was gonna come in with a take home of whether you train six hours a week or 26 hours a week. The principles of training always apply. And you can’t escape that. But I’m gonna do a slight modification of that because I really liked what Neil and Tim said, which is there’s really important work that you need to do off the bike work, all these other things that you need to do that even if you’re only training six hours a week, you can’t forget about.
Because I think, and I can tell you this from experience, I’m a time crunch athlete now, and you just get in this mindset of, I only have seven hours this week. I gotta spend every single second on the bike. But the last couple months, I have spent more time in the weight room than I have in years. And if you go on WKO, my CTO is abysmal.
It’s the worst you’ve ever seen in December. But I’m riding stronger and better than I have in December in years. And it’s because I’m getting back to doing that foundational work and not getting stressed about I only have seven hours, I have to spend every minute on the bike.
[01:10:00] Chris Case: Yeah. I think to echo several points, I like the idea of the creativity that it takes to have.
A good base training season with limited time, and that has to do with letting go of tradition in some ways replacing, maybe replacing that mentality of, oh gosh, I mean if I only have six hours and I’m trying to be a bike racer here, I gotta ride my bike for six hours. That’s not true. And it’s not just weight training, it’s depending on where you live using other sports, other activities to both build various athletic abilities and capacities, but also just sort of let your mind drift away from cycling a little bit.
That’s something we didn’t really talk about much, but I think that’s extremely important, is to give your mind a break from riding in a group or just riding. So yeah, just making every session count, you know, when you have 20 hours a week. Sometimes I think the purpose of why you’re riding drifts a little bit, but if you only have six, the purpose should be identified very clearly every time and make it count.
Tim, what would you say?
[01:11:11] Tim Cusick: I’d like to just say everybody’s feedback there was wonderful, um, but it is an excellent summary to me. Just to add a little additional spin is like, yeah, I mean the six to eight hour athlete, there’s nothing broken there. You still are subject to the same physiological principles.
What you do need to do is have greater specificity. So focusing on what you need for success, you need to have greater optimization. So that often means a little extra focus, quality, execution. And then three, you need to be more responsive to the changes that are gonna go on during your training plan or your training execution.
Meaning that flexibility needs to be, in my world, data-based, and we see some change occurring or some change that has stopped occurring, and we’re responding to that by implementing new stimuli, new creativity, new. Change depends on the direction we’re heading in the process. I think if we accept that as a whole and we just understand that’s we have a limitation of six to eight hours and we can still do a lot of great stuff in there, we’ll do just fine.
[01:12:21] Trevor Connor: Excellent. Fantastic. Great conversation everyone. Thank you.
[01:12:24] Julie Young: Thank you.
[01:12:25] Tim Cusick: Thanks for
[01:12:26] Julie Young: having.
[01:12:27] Trevor Connor: That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk. Rev would prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a Radian review. Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. Give us a like and subscribe there too and help us reach new audiences.
As always, remember that the thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those of the in. We love your feedback. Join the conversations@forums.fast talk labs.com or join us on social media at at Fast Talk Labs for access to our endurance sports knowledge base. Continuing education for coaches as well as our in-person remote athlete services.
Head to Fast Talk labs.com. For Tim Cusick, Neil Henderson, Jim Miller, Julie Young, and Chris Case, I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening.
