Does Stretching Make You Faster, Heat Training, Bodyweight Training and More – Ask a Cycling Coach 352
Coach Chad, Amber, Nate, and Jonathan take a deep dive into stretching, if it makes you faster, how you should do it, and more in Episode 352 of the Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast. Tune in for this and discussions on heat training, bodyweight vs. weighted strength training and much more!
TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE
- Deep Dive on Stretching
- Rapid Fire / Live Questions
- How to heat train at various budgets
- How to drink and eat during interval workouts and not miss a beat
- Is bodyweight training a substitute for barbell training?
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Effects of Tissue Flossing and Dynamic Stretching on Hamstring Muscles Function
Influence of chronic stretching on muscle performance: Systematic review
The Case for Retiring Flexibility as a Major Component of Physical Fitness
Foam Rolling as a Recovery Tool after an Intense Bout of Physical Activity
Chronic Stretching and Voluntary Muscle Force
Effects of Static Stretching on Energy Cost and Running Endurance Performance
The effects of dynamic stretching on the passive properties of the muscle-tendon unit
No Effect of Muscle Stretching within a Full, Dynamic Warm-up on Athletic Performance
Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast
Successful Athletes Podcast
Science of Getting Faster Podcast
For more cycling training knowledge, listen to the Ask a Cycling Coach — the only podcast dedicated to making you a faster cyclist. New episodes are released weekly.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Jonathan Lee: Welcome to the podcast is dedicated to making you a faster cyclist to ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road. I’m coach Jonathan Lee. We’re joined by trainer road and Cannondale’s Amber Pierce. Good morning, everyone by our head coach, Chad Timmerman or everyone, our CEO, Nate Pearson, everyone.
[00:00:29] Jonathan Lee: And that makes us the OG crew. Here we are. You’re back again. It’s good to have everybody, Nate, how are you doing? I’m doing good. How are you doing John? Doing great. It was your birthday last week. Happy birthday. I turned 40. Yeah, big four,
[00:00:43] Nate Pearson: zero. I went on a little trip and I forgot my shaver. And now I’m like, maybe you can’t even see it.
[00:00:48] Nate Pearson: It’s so like, we maybe have a little bit of Scruff now. We all to go a little bit of a beard mountain man. Midlife crisis. Let’s say you do chat. Did you do something when you turn 40? Did you like change something about your
[00:00:59] Chad Timmerman: parents to stop caring, stop shaving?
[00:01:04] Nate Pearson: I, it, I couldn’t.
[00:01:08] Jonathan Lee: Chad, do you have any 40, uh, like a 40 year old or midlife crisis?
[00:01:14] Chad Timmerman: Yeah, no, I’ve yet to experience my midlife crisis because I’m not quite there. I think I’m planning to live to be about 140. So seventies midlife, that’s a
good
[00:01:23] Jonathan Lee: plan.
[00:01:27] Jonathan Lee: That’s impressive. We’re going to answer your questions. We’re going to have a deep dive on stretching today. We’re going to discuss stretching how to do it, why you should do it, what it actually does for you. Also the concept of does it actually make you faster or not because there’s so many different things that we can do as endurance athletes yet we all have limited time.
[00:01:44] Jonathan Lee: So we kind of have to make these decisions about like where we allocate our efforts and resources, because it’s just limited. Right? So we’ll talk about that. If it makes us faster, we’re going to talk about heat training a little bit and how to do it at like accessible or different budgets or different accessibility levels and w how you can actually accomplish quite a lot with it outside of the traditional context of, you know, a sauna protocol and everything else.
[00:02:10] Jonathan Lee: Then we’ll also talk about body weight versus strength training. That’s going to be an interesting point and tons of other stuff, but before we do that, Amber, I want to you’ve. So constant improvement is something we talk about here at train road and you or your team has been working on some constant improvement with AI FTP detection.
[00:02:26] Jonathan Lee: Can you quickly just describe what AI FTP detection is then tell us what’s new with it or.
[00:02:31] Amber Pierce: You got it. Um, yeah, we’re walking the walk on that company value here. So FTP detection is, are, is a new feature that we’ve released to early access, which means it’s just a really early version of this. And we wanted to get it out to our athletes as quickly as possible, but we use, um, an AI model to predict what your FTP is.
[00:02:50] Amber Pierce: So you no longer need to do a ramp test. If you don’t want to. On a day that you have a ramp is scheduled instead of loading the ramp test, you can hit the use F use FTP detection button and see what your new FTP is. And then you have an option at that point of whether or not you want to accept that, or go ahead and load the ramp test anyway.
[00:03:05] Amber Pierce: So ramp test, isn’t going away. You can still do it if you want to, but if, if you’re one of those people who really struggles with that, like I am, um, you can just hit that button up at your FTP and then we’ll give you a workout to do instead of the ramp test. And that is actually one of our, our latest updates.
[00:03:21] Amber Pierce: Uh, this is new. Now we previously, when we shipped this in order to ship it fast, we hard-coded the workout replacement. So if you accepted your AI FTP detection and didn’t want to do the ramp tests, we would replace your ramp test with Goddard minus four as a hard-coded workout. But now you’re going to get an adapted workout that is specific to your plan instead of just having a hard coded, um, single workout.
[00:03:43] Amber Pierce: So that is a new update that everybody was, should be able to see now. And then the other one is if you had more than one workout scheduled on the day of a ramp test, um, now we will be prioritizing the ramp test on your career page so that you can see that AI FTP detection feature, because it is only available in the apps on your career.
[00:04:01] Jonathan Lee: At this point, one thing we have lots more to come
[00:04:06] Nate Pearson: once. Like wordage that’s, it’s more marketing than like inside trainer road, but, uh, Amber said that we predict your FTP there’s. So there’s a model that we built that does predict MTP and that’s in the future. And then what we decided is, Hey, this thing could just be used for today.
[00:04:21] Nate Pearson: And then we just, if it’s that day, we call it detect because it really is that day. Uh, rather than we’re not predicting what it is that day, we’re kind of like detecting what your FTP is, which is cool. And the other thing is Amber and I had some live marketing, like, wait, this poop, uh, thing last time. And, uh, the, uh, the, the model does use heart rate.
[00:04:40] Nate Pearson: If you don’t have a power meter outside. So if you are riding a bike outside and you don’t have a power meter where your heart rate model, model, or monitor, and that’s going to, it does some cool stuff so that we can try to count it for your increase in, um, or decrease or whatever it is, your FTP, uh, detection.
[00:04:59] Nate Pearson: But, and I would start re using it for knowing that what we’re gonna do in the future, just wear a heart rate monitor for all rides. Chad set this like for about, I don’t know, nine years. And I was like, oh no, no need. And he’s like, but you might want the data. And I was like, what, why would you get the data?
[00:05:14] Nate Pearson: So, uh, w why not? What the data now. So just do a little behind Chad sometimes. So just do that. And, uh,
[00:05:21] Jonathan Lee: This is my, by the way, this is my new favorite testing protocol. I really like it. I click a button it’s done. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Far preferred to doing those sorts of efforts. Uh, sweet Chad. You’ve also made some constant improvements to our try plans.
[00:05:36] Jonathan Lee: Uh, do you want to, uh, once again, we’re always looking at data and diff different things feedback as well. This was a source of some feedback that we got from athletes. What changes did we make? Just kind of from a basic level check,
[00:05:46] Chad Timmerman: the tripe plans are kind of around really BS or at least they were to initially build them.
[00:05:51] Chad Timmerman: So, uh, been reluctant to touch them, but they did recognize that the recovery weeks were not really recovery weeks. And in some cases that made sense in a lot of cases, it did not. And it got more complex when adaptive training entered the mix. So those recovery weeks in the tri plans are basically three weeks loading one week recovery, pretty consistently.
[00:06:10] Chad Timmerman: In fact, maybe entirely consistently and the tree recovery weeks, it’s all endurance riding. Um, if there’s a brick, I don’t even think there’s a brick. Uh, I don’t think I left a single brick in there. You can always add one if you want to, but I removed all the bricks. Um, they were only 10 minute runs anyway, but on recovery week, it doesn’t really make sense to just further your fatigue for no good cause.
[00:06:29] Chad Timmerman: Yep.
[00:06:30] Jonathan Lee: So bricks have been restructured recovery weeks have also been restructured to work better with adaptive training, so exciting stuff there we all, Nate, we also made some improvements, some gender inclusivity improvements when you’re signing up for training road and then managing your account.
[00:06:44] Nate Pearson: Yeah.
[00:06:44] Nate Pearson: So back in the day I wrote this, I did like file new project of train road. Probably I looked at the clock like that’s going to help. And like 2009, when we created it and create an initial database structure, what I did is in the, uh, like the gender I put what’s called a binary field. So it’s called is male true or false?
[00:07:04] Nate Pearson: So if it’s not male, it’s false. Since then, I become aware that there’s more genders than just male and female. So now in the app, uh, what we’ve done is in on the website, it’s everywhere. You can, you can, uh, have different choices for, uh, your gender, which is good. Cause it’s, I know it would be, I could just imagine if it was me or my kids feel excluded all over the place.
[00:07:27] Nate Pearson: It’s like, Hey, I’m not here. Um, that’s just not cool. So also, if anyone who, who does this, those kinds of fields get linked everywhere. And it was a big engineering lift. And I’m sorry, we didn’t do it sooner, but it wasn’t just like a wave your hand. It was like lots and lots
[00:07:42] Chad Timmerman: of work. Yeah. Quite a lot of I’m proud that we’re out.
[00:07:45] Chad Timmerman: We’re doing it now though.
[00:07:47] Jonathan Lee: Yeah, exactly. There’s, I’m always forward progress, right? Uh, that that’s the that’s the goal can go to constant improvement and they still hold team here. I know I said like Amber and Chad and me, but like Nate indicated there. That was a big lift, the gender inclusive, the improvements, but all of these are big lifts.
[00:08:03] Jonathan Lee: So thanks to everybody for all the work here at Trane road. You’re all awesome. There’s more than a hundred employees here. It’s not just us four. Believe it or not. So there’s a lot of people doing a lot of amazing things here, and we appreciate all your, and if anyone,
[00:08:17] Nate Pearson: uh, you know, things, Hey, you shouldn’t have done that work like message me and just be patient while they ignore your message.
[00:08:24] Nate Pearson: Cause it could take me a while to get back. It’s not, I mean, it, doesn’t going to take away from you for triathletes. Like let’s get Nat. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help. I saw, I heard some brand through that and it was like, it was like weddings or something. It was very, very funny, but there’s all sorts of things that we do that only help certain groups.
[00:08:46] Nate Pearson: And I know this will trigger. There’s like 10 people listening right now. I can’t believe you spent my subscription dollar. Yeah. Jill you’re you’re cool. You’re you’re still going to get faster. We’re all going to get faster.
[00:08:56] Jonathan Lee: Yep. Yeah. There’s always like a balance between things that we, um, we have teams building features even have like a team that’s just focused on like optimizing small things.
[00:09:05] Jonathan Lee: And like, so that’s like the Strava images that came out recently where they’re really cool if you’re using trainer road and you do a workout on train road and it uploads to Strava looks super cool. It gives you like, it shows your workout and what you did, but then it also shows how it affected your progression levels.
[00:09:20] Jonathan Lee: Super, super cool. Um, those features come from a specific team. We call them the, well, I kind of like our skunkworks team, if you will, but we call them our growth, our growth team, and they do a lot of awesome stuff. So, uh, we’re we’re we have lots of teams on lots of different things all the time. So, um, uh, 24 hours in the old Pueblo, Nate, you didn’t go.
[00:09:39] Jonathan Lee: Yeah,
[00:09:39] Nate Pearson: I didn’t go. I mean, I could’ve gone. I forgot there was a little, like a weekend thing. It was, I was supposed to have my kids, but then my ex was taking them on a trip and then I got my birthday off. And anyways, you did it. And that race, man, I I’m confused. Cause I watched the part of it live and I saw some of your stories and I know, wait, let’s just, let’s talk about the awesome thing.
[00:10:00] Nate Pearson: Keegan, Swenson athlete. W
[00:10:02] Chad Timmerman: what did
[00:10:02] Jonathan Lee: he do? 21 laps, which is 366 miles. And I think 90,000 feet of climbing, he never really stopped. He like, when I say stop it a couple of times on one single track loop, that’s 16 miles or 17 miles just under 17. And it’s all single track. It’s all lined with cactus as Chad is.
[00:10:25] Jonathan Lee: I’m sure Chad’s having like PTSD from, from even walking around that venue with all the cactus all over the place. It’s just crazy. So much got drunk
[00:10:35] Nate Pearson: with a backpack full of, we bought like a $300 cooler backpack. That’s
[00:10:39] Chad Timmerman: where the red beers, that’s where the PTSD comes in login that whole time, because I wanted to understand that we show just about everybody in there was racing.
[00:10:47] Chad Timmerman: So they couldn’t have beers until afterward, which made perfect sense to me. But I still insisted on carrying around like a hundred pound backpack
[00:10:53] Jonathan Lee: full of, oh no. Chad, your legend continues. People were speaking about, they were asking where’s Chad with the beer backpack. People still
[00:11:01] Chad Timmerman: so glad I missed, but where were you the first year?
[00:11:03] Chad Timmerman: Lighten my load, literally
[00:11:05] Amber Pierce: beers with Chad when it’s only
[00:11:07] Chad Timmerman: Chad.
[00:11:10] Nate Pearson: That’s what it is. What John does is it’s so much fun. We’re all here. We’re all trying to talk at once. Cause we all are like similar to say something, but it’s good. And then a second, if you want to complain about something, complain about us spending that $300. So Chad can like carry beers. You know what I mean?
[00:11:27] Nate Pearson: That’s probably not the best corporate use of funds, but it’s
[00:11:30] Chad Timmerman: branding
[00:11:31] Jonathan Lee: for check. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Yeah. So he, he, like, when I say he’s stopped, he usually just stopped and unclipped, but still stood over his bike while his team took food out of his, or took rappers out of his right pocket and then filled in fresh food on his left pocket.
[00:11:46] Jonathan Lee: That was his system. And that was basically just like, and I think a couple of times he sat down in a chair while he switched shoes or switched or put on legwarmers or something that was it. And that sit down in a chair. It was probably less than 30 seconds. So just crazy, like in his lap times for points of relevance, once again, this is like a 17 mile lap.
[00:12:07] Jonathan Lee: Uh, somebody do the kilometer conversion for me here, 17 miles to kilometers, but he carried, uh, he was doing laps at around. I think he averaged somewhere around like a one hour and 10 minute pace. It’s pretty fast. Like, that’s, that’s a quick pace on that course. Um, for him to be able to carry his first lap was under an hour, which is really, really fast.
[00:12:28] Jonathan Lee: That was my all outpace was under an hour. So, um, but super cool. I got to meet so many podcasts, listeners, trainer, road, athletes, everything else, whether it was out on course. Um, it was cool. I w we kind of, with our team, we were talking about like how many people we would pass each lap. Uh, cause we had a totally non-competitive team of seven people that were there and just having a blast, uh, and.
[00:12:52] Jonathan Lee: I lost count at a hundred people halfway through my first lap. It was just tons of people. A very large portion of those people are probably listening to this podcast right now and everything else. Cause you were giving me cheers, saying, go train a road or where’s Chad or where’s Nate. And like, uh where’s Amber, like the whole thing.
[00:13:10] Jonathan Lee: It was cool. It was just amazing to meet all of you, chat with you and just like hang out. And the whole village, the pop-up city that is 24 hour town. It was just a cool time. Um, yeah, it was a blast. I did destroy my wheel though. I only got in one lap, so
[00:13:25] Chad Timmerman: only one lap
[00:13:28] Jonathan Lee: two. No, she did two apps. That was her plan.
[00:13:32] Jonathan Lee: Sophia was a part of our team. She was like, I’m going to do two laps on the first day. I’m going to go home and sleep in my own bed and then I’ll come back the next day if I want to do a lap. And that’s what, that’s my contribution to the team. We were like, you know what? Pro athlete, that’s awesome. You stick to your training plan.
[00:13:45] Jonathan Lee: You do what you need to do. We’re just stoked to have you jump in whenever you want. So Ryan did first lap in jorts, of course, Ryan Standish, trainer road, employee, and pro mountain biker Jordan sky. And then Sophia did two laps and then I did two lap or did one lap. And at that point, even though I blew up my wheel and I had to run it in at the end, uh, we were, we were in first place, which is pretty awesome.
[00:14:06] Jonathan Lee: Uh, so we were the fastest team, which is great for the corporate division. Yes. Yep. Yeah. For the corporate division, I think overall we were saying. Which is still pretty darn good. Um, pretty awesome. So after that time, granted, after that, we let go of all that. And we had, my brother was doing his first mountain bike event, which was really cool and fun to support him in that his boss came cause he also rides.
[00:14:26] Jonathan Lee: And he’s also a lot of fun. I’m a friend, Neil and Sean. It was awesome. Did you do more
[00:14:31] Nate Pearson: labs? Did you
[00:14:31] Jonathan Lee: get another wheel or did you just know? I could have gotten another wheel, but I was at a race without the weight of expectations and I’ve never had that ever in my life. Like I’ve never been able to just be there and just enjoy.
[00:14:42] Jonathan Lee: Um, I blew up the wheel. My goal was to do a sub hour lap and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do that on the first time because of traffic, uh, lap traffic, but even with running the last 0.2 miles or so, I still was sub hour. So I got that done. And after that, I just had a good time enjoying time with everybody else.
[00:15:01] Jonathan Lee: I’ll tell you a secret, John.
[00:15:02] Nate Pearson: Yeah. You can go to any race and just enjoy it. This isn’t the first one that you had to not do that. This is
[00:15:13] Jonathan Lee: It says what growth looks like. That’s
[00:15:15] Nate Pearson: the key. Amber, you ever have any races that you’re competitive in, but you actually just enjoyed the whole time a hundred percent. Yeah. That happened later in your career.
[00:15:23] Jonathan Lee: Definitely
[00:15:23] Amber Pierce: more often later in my career because I felt that not less pressure, I just, well, I mean pressure, anybody can put pressure on you, but the only pressure you’re really gonna feel is the pressure that you allow yourself to feel.
[00:15:34] Amber Pierce: And so I got a lot better at managing that.
[00:15:38] Jonathan Lee: I think I, uh, it would be inaccurate to say that I race without like fun as well. Like even though I put a huge amount of pressure on myself and then we also have all the other podcast listeners and everything else that are an event that also that is an added weight of pressure, everything else.
[00:15:52] Jonathan Lee: But I still have a blast at the races. I do. Um, even national championships, like the, the, the highest stakes ones. It was just at this time I was like, you know, I accomplished my goal and right now I’m fine. Like I have checked the box. I’m okay with not going out and doing more the
[00:16:06] Nate Pearson: continuum though. Right.
[00:16:07] Nate Pearson: So it sounds like this one, although you voice had fun, this was a dramatic shift. And my question is, but dramatic is different than other ones.
[00:16:15] Jonathan Lee: I’m not sure I had more fun at this one than others. It was just different. It was like a, the, the vibe at 24 hours in the old Pueblo is whatever you want it to be.
[00:16:24] Jonathan Lee: For some people it’s super competitive for some people, it’s just a lot of fun. And it was at that point, I was like, I’m just going to kick back and enjoy the experience of the event and in general, rather than just the racing part. Yeah. So, I mean, I could have begged, borrowed and scrounged a wheel for sure.
[00:16:40] Jonathan Lee: And I could’ve done more laps, but I just chose not to. And it wasn’t like I was letting the team down, uh, our goal wasn’t to get in a ton of laps. Our goal was to just, you know, have a good time everybody get out what they needed out of it. So,
[00:16:54] Nate Pearson: sorry I interrupted
[00:16:55] Jonathan Lee: you. No worries. I, I think that there’s, there is a balance and I think that I wrestled with that years ago in terms of.
[00:17:03] Jonathan Lee: Racing not being fun at all, because if you think about it growing up, I raced dirt bikes. I race skis. Like I was always racing and it was very much not fun at different points in my life. And I had to get to the point where, you know, I wouldn’t have, I would have never raced bikes again, if I hadn’t figured out or I would’ve never raced bicycles years after I quit racing anything, I would have never raced bicycles if I didn’t figure out how to have fun while you know, accomplishing whatever personal goals I had with it.
[00:17:28] Jonathan Lee: So, but it’s a balance it’s hard to, it’s easy to, even though you’ve learned it, it’s easy to let it get out of whack for sure. You
[00:17:34] Nate Pearson: know, do things about that. Sometimes the universe goes, John, like you shouldn’t really race anymore because your wheel is like tacos and too, it is. I think there’s a whole bunch of people who use train road and listen to it who they’re not really, uh, focused on the, the exact outcome, but they want to be fit for this event and just have fun.
[00:17:54] Nate Pearson: They want to achieve it like this is, this is traffic. They might be going against themselves in some kind of like, oh, I want to have this kind of time or something, but they’re not overly competitive, like at a national level or training to actually win the race. Uh, it’s really the it’s the, the fast gets them to enjoy the race more.
[00:18:13] Nate Pearson: And we should, I think we’re going to talk about that even more over coming months and stuff, but that’s a really cool, especially with gravel and, uh, iron mountain bike in general, like all these kinds of things, you don’t have to always win. Yes. Probably know that by listening this, but it’s good to say.
[00:18:29] Jonathan Lee: Yeah, for sure. There’s a, I think Pete said it in his video that we have on our YouTube channel train road.com/or sorry, youtube.com/trainer road. Go check that out. Uh, where he says there’s different measures of success. Pete raced a lot and he’s had to figure that out. Just like Amber is raised a lot, just like Chad.
[00:18:44] Jonathan Lee: Uh, geez, Nate, you’ve raised a lot. Um, I have, we’ve all done that and you do learn different measures of success for sure. So not everybody can win. There’s only one Keegan Swenson that could win that one Lael Wilcox, by the way, just congrats to her. She did 17 laps solo female. Um, incredible. And she’s also, I don’t know if she’s ever done a 24 hour mountain bike event, so it was cool to see somebody that’s well-known for everything from like, you know, the, the she’s done Ram solo.
[00:19:12] Jonathan Lee: She’s done so many incredible, crazy routes and to see her to mountain bike, I think yeah. Silk road. It’s pretty cool. She’s an amazing athlete. So it was cool. Uh, with that said, we also have to say congrats to Kent Maine, one of our train road employees, one stage of the tour, Rwanda. Pretty amazing. Uh, we also have employees getting ready, I think for Cape epic.
[00:19:35] Jonathan Lee: I’m not sure if our south African, any of our south African racers are doing, uh, uh, uh, Cape epic this year, but super exciting. Sophia is going back to do Cape epic and she is specialized number one bet. She is on the factory team, uh, which is really exciting. So she’s going to get a full credit. Really cool stuff.
[00:19:50] Jonathan Lee: So, um, with all of that, thanks everybody for saying hi at 24 hours in the old Pueblo. So cool to see you all and to, to spend some time with you, let’s get into the deep dive. Uh, Jack says, um, so actually the deep dive in general, Chad, should we just approach the topic? And do you have something you want to say before we get into some questions that guide us down the rabbit hole of stretching here?
Deep Dive on Stretching
[00:20:11] Chad Timmerman: Well, actually I have a question for you because the question that I, I moved around, I wasn’t sure how this folded into the stretching question. So I feel like this is almost outside of the deep dive. If we want to talk about this one for
[00:20:22] Jonathan Lee: let’s cover him after that’ll be easier. Let’s cover Jack’s question after this.
[00:20:26] Jonathan Lee: Okay. Okay. But Zach’s question then let’s get into that. Um, uh, do you want me to read Zach’s question and then go in chat? Is that the, is that how you want to
[00:20:34] Chad Timmerman: go with this? Uh, it sets it up nicely and then we can just, uh, pluck off each of those individual. I think there’s nine of them individual questions that are related.
[00:20:43] Chad Timmerman: Some, some overlap.
[00:20:45] Jonathan Lee: Love it. Okay. Zach says, love the podcast. Five stars for those wondering five stars. That means rating. You can now rate the podcast and Spotify. So everybody listening to this, if you have Spotify, please go over there. Rate the podcast five stars. You can give us reviews as well on the app store or on the podcast, whatever podcast app you use.
[00:21:02] Jonathan Lee: Please do that. And let us know if we can’t, if we don’t earn a five-star review, just send us a message. Go to train road.com/podcast, and you can leave a message right there where you submit your questions and let us know what we can do to earn a five star review. So that, and then sharing this podcast and train road is the best thing you can do to help us.
[00:21:20] Jonathan Lee: It’s fantastic. There we go. Nate, just rated five stars. Boom. If you’re joining on YouTube, then you could, you could see that. Um, but, but we got the audible version too. It literally took 10 seconds. There we go.
[00:21:32] Nate Pearson: I mean our marketing budget. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but like, this is kind of it, uh, it was a little bit more, but it’s not that big.
[00:21:40] Nate Pearson: So the way that we’ve always grown are from athletes telling other athletes about us. And part of that, our reviews, you tell friends, you post in groups, all that stuff helps. So if you’re loving AI, FTP detection post about that, it’s very unique. The way that we do it too, we don’t have to have all our efforts.
[00:21:56] Nate Pearson: And sharing like this and reviews. Amazing, amazing, amazing that then we put back into the company, we grow more, uh, we create more stuff and it just, it’s a snowball effect. So you, you do get something out of
[00:22:08] Jonathan Lee: it. Yes. Share with your friends. Thank you. Um, okay. Zach says I’m an older writer. He mentioned 50 ish years old, and I find keeping on top of my mobility is a constant struggle while training pre-exercise post-exercise dynamic static.
[00:22:23] Jonathan Lee: Underload what combination works best. I enjoyed the podcast with Kelly’s Tourette and would be reached by the way you can go back. I believe that that was 1 54. I could be wrong though. Maxine. Maybe you can check on that or somebody in the live tech and check on it, but it was a fantastic podcast with Kelly stret and he is from mobility.
[00:22:42] Jonathan Lee: Um, we’re actually the ready state forgive. It used to be a mobility while, but the ready state. And he’s just a fantastic resource on this. Um, he says, but I would love coach Chad to do a deep dive on mobility. And he says, I love those. Keep the deep dives coming as well as recommend maybe some mobility exercises.
[00:22:57] Jonathan Lee: Heck even if coach Chad come home could come up with some benchmarks for mobility. That would be awesome. Again, love the platform and love the podcast. I have to say before
[00:23:06] Nate Pearson: we start, Amber, you were, you grew up in the eighties and eighties. This was beaten into us. If you don’t stretch, you’re going to die before you work out.
[00:23:13] Nate Pearson: Right. It was static stretching and it’s like it. I even had it where some people like at swim team, older people, they saw me getting without stretching. They would physically stop me. They’re like, what are you doing? Like you got to get out and stretch. Why aren’t you, why are you getting you’re gonna die?
[00:23:28] Nate Pearson: Like you’re gonna drown. I don’t know. So I’d love to hear
[00:23:32] Jonathan Lee: a myth. Number one, that we’re getting a bus right here, chatting.
[00:23:35] Chad Timmerman: I mean, especially back then, there was just no scientific evidence to support it. Just none. It was all conjecture. We didn’t have blogs back then, but I don’t know if you’ve got a warm bottle came from coaches, high school coaches.
[00:23:49] Jonathan Lee: What’d you
[00:23:49] Chad Timmerman: say Amber? That’s why my
[00:23:50] Amber Pierce: poor shoulder capsules. I stress, I stress them. Like just stretch the snot out of them. Like eventually had to get shoulder to shoulder surgery on web because I, I stretched it so much that it, the capsule actually became unstable. So good.
[00:24:07] Jonathan Lee: It is kind of crazy. Sorry, Chad, I’m running on a tangent before you can get a deep dive.
[00:24:11] Jonathan Lee: It’s cool.
[00:24:15] Jonathan Lee: Because when you look at like pro swimmers, their shoulder mobility is weird. Like I’m sure y’all have seen like pro swimmers in the Olympics or anything else when they’re warming up. Swinging their arms all over the place. They, they go in directions that normal arms do not go. It’s pretty crazy. Um, but that kind of makes sense though, right?
[00:24:33] Jonathan Lee: Chad, because those athletes need to explore pretty wide ranges of motion, particularly with their shoulders. Whereas, you know, a cyclist, perhaps it’s not quite as key to have that sort of level of ability for sure. For
[00:24:43] Chad Timmerman: swimmers. I think that’s a pretty relevant range of motion for most of us. It’s not,
[00:24:48] Jonathan Lee: it’s probably a good point to get, uh, to start off on flexibility versus mobility and discuss that, right?
[00:24:53] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. Let’s just put that to bed cause I’m pretty sure we butchered this many podcasts back when we just made it way too complex. So, so let’s just kick this off before we get into the individual questions with just two basic definitions, flexibility and mobility. So flexibility is the static maximum range of motion of a joint.
[00:25:12] Chad Timmerman: So it was basically, this is what’s limited by the joint structure itself and really that’s as simple as bones and ligaments. So if you were to look at a skeletal system free of the muscles, the tendons, the fascia, everything else, you would just see just looking at bones and ligaments that connect them.
[00:25:27] Chad Timmerman: That gives you a sense of the joints flexing. It’s an unencumbered by anything. This is where mobility unders picture, because this is now the ability to move freely and easily through that range of motion. So now we have the muscles and the tendons and the fascia back in all the things that could potentially restrict that range of motion.
[00:25:44] Chad Timmerman: And now we see how much of that range can be expressed. And this is super important without pain, without restriction. Because if you have either, it’s not really a true range of motion, it’s forced, it’s painful. It’s not, it’s not usable. And it is limiting restricting and it does not enhance performance.
[00:26:02] Chad Timmerman: So we hear often people say, I just don’t have the flexibility to whatever. Well, they probably do. I mean, there are some genetic genetic limitations that do enter the picture, but by and large, it’s their mobility that’s lacking. So really simply mobility is how much of the range of motion can you access?
[00:26:18] Chad Timmerman: You know, just how mobile is that joint.
[00:26:20] Amber Pierce: So when you say access, you mean like actually functionally put to use.
[00:26:24] Jonathan Lee: Yep.
[00:26:25] Chad Timmerman: Yep, exactly. Move through. Pain-free comfortably powerfully when necessary, if it’s again, a relevant range of motion to your discipline
[00:26:33] Jonathan Lee: for cycling in particular, when we’re talking about, you’re going to explore a very specific range of motion, you will do so repeatedly many, many, many times.
[00:26:43] Jonathan Lee: So if you do have any sort of impingements or, uh, inability to be able to actually. Productively worked within that range of motion, it’s going to cause issues. Right?
[00:26:53] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. And cycling’s an interesting, uh, scenario in that some of our, basically our lower body has to be not hyper mobile, but definitely mobile, although it’s restricted to a particular plane of motion and our upper bodies are really very fixed depending on your discipline, even more fixed than others.
[00:27:09] Chad Timmerman: I mean, think of a full distance triathlete that that position is so fixed. But if you think of a downhill mountain biker, there’s a very mobile position. So it’s hard to compare the two and the mobility even across riders is drastically varied.
[00:27:24] Jonathan Lee: I remembered that. Yeah. I remember when we were working with, uh, Lee McCormick from Lee Mike’s bikes, Nate, uh, and like when we were starting to explore the range of motion that we needed to, to be able to descend like our hips hurt.
[00:27:39] Jonathan Lee: Remember that? Yeah. It was
[00:27:40] Nate Pearson: my glute medius that actually got super tired, uh, because in that range of motion, I did not have the muscles to do it like three times. And I was like, Ooh, a B. And that’s because it’s, there’s some stability side to aside, which I never worked, uh, at the triathlete I did. But as a, even as a triathlete, I really didn’t do it that much.
[00:27:56] Nate Pearson: But as a cyclist, we don’t do much side to side work. So when I tried to go over to mountain biking and had to use that, definitely definitely was a limiting factor in my.
[00:28:05] Jonathan Lee: Yeah, no doubt, no doubt, by the way, the episode. Thanks to Jesse. One of our awesome copywriters here at train road. Uh, 2 22 is the episode with Kelly stret.
[00:28:14] Jonathan Lee: Um, that’s the episode there. So if you’re joining us in the live chat, you would have already seen that if you’re listening, hopefully that helps you. Um, you know, maybe that’s why Chad, um, and this is a generalization. I’m not even gonna say it. Generalizations aren’t needed here. Okay. Moving on from there.
[00:28:28] Jonathan Lee: Um, so Chad, when it comes to stretching, Nate was talking about this static stretching thing that he had to do in grade school growing up. Uh, and there’s a lot of different ways to stretch static or dynamic or those kinds of the two basic categories.
[00:28:43] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. So the question was posed is should cyclists do dynamic or static stretching?
[00:28:47] Chad Timmerman: And I took this as an opportunity to reframe the question and make it more general and ask should cyclists stretch at all, which is a fair question considering what we just described. And a couple of other reasons I’d like to, to mention. So really this is what, what’s the rationale for improving mobility or even adding mobility training to our regimen.
[00:29:05] Chad Timmerman: We’re already stretched. Why would we possibly pile more onto this. I see this coming down to two equally important reasons. The first is that adequate mobility. I consider it vital to good health and general wellbeing. And I don’t think many people would argue with me on that. When you have restricted movements, it simply leads to less than satisfactory lifestyle.
[00:29:23] Chad Timmerman: And I mean, in general, across the board, um, I I’ve been dealing with a shoulder issue. That’s, that’s my most recent issue. And I just resolved it maybe a week ago and it’s been liberating. It affected my life in so many ways. I mean, even sitting here on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, just lifting my cup of coffee.
[00:29:39] Chad Timmerman: I had to do it with my elbow in a particular position. And I had to kind of brace for the little Twitch that would come with just lifting a cup of coffee. I mean, even an unweighted arm, it hurt me. And I can steer this at all of you because
[00:29:53] Chad Timmerman: I know Jonathan in particular has already talked about dealt with addressed, seeing, you know, travel great distances to see a physical therapist you have. And I bet all of you have experienced movement, restrictions and pain that goes with it that affects your day to day. That affects your mental state, that the grade, your confidence, and it can downright butcher your motivation.
[00:30:13] Chad Timmerman: I mean, everything I wanted to do out in the gym and I I’ve quite a fancy gym and I keep making it fancier. And I’m so restricted. When you have a shoulder that doesn’t accommodate much movement, you can’t do a heck of a lot. And when you were a cyclist and you already bombing your lower body with all the stuff we do on the bike, you really can’t do a lot.
[00:30:30] Chad Timmerman: So, so it’s, and let me ask you, I mean, Jonathan, we’ve talked about it, but Amber, Nate does anything spring to mind.
[00:30:39] Amber Pierce: Oh man. So many times it’s, it’s every, I feel like every time I have some kind of a restriction like this, it’s this really powerful reminder that our bodies are extremely efficient. You know, in, in biology physiology, we talk about metabolic costs.
[00:30:52] Amber Pierce: Our bodies are, they do not waste energy and they do not waste. Um, th they don’t waste anything that’s going to require metabolic costs. And so everything is very efficient. And then when you have some kind of a restriction restriction, you realize like very concretely, just how much it affects everything else, because we don’t have a lot of buffer.
[00:31:12] Amber Pierce: It’s just not built in that way.
[00:31:15] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. And that, that’s a super good segue into what I consider to be the second, most important point for rationalizing or incorporating mobility training into what we, all, all the things we already have to accommodate. And that’s excellent. Mobility is absolutely necessary when the goal is to optimize movement.
[00:31:31] Chad Timmerman: So if we’re looking for optimization, then nothing short of excellent is going to suffice. It’s hard to do anything really well. If you’re fighting your own body, it’s pretty simple. And what we do, isn’t, hyper-technical in nature, the movements we do. I mean, especially if you’re clipped in, seated on your bike, you can ride very sloppily and still turn those pedals over.
[00:31:49] Chad Timmerman: So, so it’s not highly technical, like say throwing a javelin where every little nuance change in what you do carries big outcomes, but it is hyper repetition. So if we have a single small movement fault and we magnify there are sorry, multiply that times, hundreds, thousands, even millions of times. And that’s, that’s literal millions of times.
[00:32:10] Chad Timmerman: We’ll repeat this. This is the very nature of overuse injuries and it’s, it’s not that we use it too much is that we use it. Improperly, our bodies are capable of being utilized again and again and again for the same joint action, the same muscle action. But if we do it in properly down the line, it’s going to lead to issues.
[00:32:28] Chad Timmerman: And it’s because of this, that I believe that mobility is one foundation among a small handful of them for becoming as fast as you can be. If it’s not there don’t plan on ever achieving that.
[00:32:38] Amber Pierce: Another way of looking at this is your body is always trying to help, right? So your body is going to try to maximize is going to try to optimize based on the training.
[00:32:46] Amber Pierce: You’re fueling everything else that you’re doing, and the fewer constraints that your body has, the better it can optimize. And so when you have less mobility, you have more constraints. When you have better mobility, you have fewer constraints and you give your body the freedom to explore that useful accessible range of motion and determine what the best movement pattern most optimal movement pattern is going to be.
[00:33:09] Amber Pierce: You can’t do that when you have too many
[00:33:11] Jonathan Lee: constraints
[00:33:12] Chad Timmerman: completely, completely. And this, this kind of brings me to a side point that I do want to bring up. An equally important reason. I feel like it’s a combination over a result of these two reasons are an offshoot of it. But mobility training is something that offers us the opportunity to suss out what I’ll refer to as referred limitations.
[00:33:30] Chad Timmerman: So we’ve talked about referred pain or, you know, what referred pain is. It’s, you know, something in one part of the body is actually causing pain in another part of the body. And the same thing happens with our musculoskeletal system and our flexibility and mobility limitations. And there’s just too many examples to mention, but let me, let me do some pertinent ones first tightwads can, can cause me problems.
[00:33:51] Chad Timmerman: And I linked to a study on patellar tendon issue, patellar tendon issues, because I know a lot of us deal with those, if not all of us, at some point in time, I mean, just tightening tight quads can actually lead to knee pain. And it’s so simple to address static stretching and dynamic stretching, actually improved function in the linked study, reduced pain in people with inflexible clots.
[00:34:12] Chad Timmerman: It was as simple as that, all they had to do was just LinkedIn that muscle a little bit, give it a little bit of weekly love, daily love, whatever, whatever it may be, issue resolved, um, tight hip flexors, even tight glutes can lead to low back problems, tight glutes, especially your glute max can manifest as sciatic issues.
[00:34:29] Chad Timmerman: And I bring this one up because it’s especially on my mind recently because I’m seeing a sports therapist. It was, I went in and she asked me the laundry list of issues with my body, previous issues, current, uh, what I do. And I said, I’m having sciatic issues. And I don’t know if there’s much to do about that.
[00:34:46] Chad Timmerman: And she says, oh, well, I don’t know that it’s dyadic issues. Let’s take a look at your glutes. Sure enough. I’m seeing relief from addressing my glutes. Um, wow. Tight, tight hamstrings. No, not news to anybody at least. And lead to low back pain, knee pain, interestingly, even foot pain. And then move on to the upper body.
[00:35:04] Chad Timmerman: If you have tight lats. And this is what explained my shoulder restriction tight lats of all things, a big muscle on your back was causing my shoulder. My, I couldn’t bring my arm above my body, up in front of my body because of something that was going on behind my body, tight, upper back obviously can lead to neck issue and then tight scapular scapulae.
[00:35:24] Chad Timmerman: So, so your shoulder blades, this can actually to shoulder issues galore. And what’s interesting is I found out that all this is is about me right now that my scapulae, my shoulder blades were tacked down. I mean, this is the opposite of mobile, right? What had happened? I basically cultivated my own muscle imbalanced by not recognizing the benefit of, of fuller scapular range of motion back and down, back and down.
[00:35:47] Chad Timmerman: That’s all you hear. That’s all I told as a personal trainer, never recognized that pretty much. Every exercise can be changed in such a way that you actually protract your scapula. It also. Let the shoulder blades move their full range of motion so that you don’t over time restrict that motion. And as cyclists and it’s people sitting in cars, I mean that position, we sit in a protracted position.
[00:36:07] Chad Timmerman: So my consciousness was always on keeping it retracted so that I don’t develop those other compensations when I was just reinforcing the opposite compensation
[00:36:16] Amber Pierce: motion is lotion, but yeah, the scapulae are really important. Um, and those can, and having less mobility in your scapulae can affect rib mobility, which can affect breathing mobility as well.
[00:36:28] Amber Pierce: So all of these things are connected and pretty vital
[00:36:31] Jonathan Lee: at one, one thing, if I could add another reason that cyclists should, uh, this whole question is shouldn’t cyclist stretch at all. There’s an inherent risk that we should all choose to own. If we are going to continue cycling in and crashing and typically in crashing or something like that, what happens is that we are forced to explore ranges of motion that we don’t typically explore.
[00:36:55] Jonathan Lee: And that’s when a lot of injuries happen, right? So that either looks like when you pull a groin or even a lot of collarbone breaks, uh it’s it could very well be exacerbated by a lack of mobility that a person has. Um, this is really common shoulder injuries. It’s like galore knee issues. Same thing. If you are not to the point where the Chad’s talking about this range of motion, where w where within we pedal, and that’s what we explore.
[00:37:22] Jonathan Lee: And we do that repeatedly, and we have to be able to be good at. But then if you are a cyclist, particularly one, if you’re a cyclocross mountain biking, anything off-road or crit racing, because you crashed just as much as an off-road or, um, anything with that, you have to know that occasionally you’re going to be pushed out of that range and you have to be, you have to be able to take that.
[00:37:43] Jonathan Lee: Um, we’ve talked about before, how it’s such a shame when you see grants who are cyclists or sorry, pro two or cyclist, and when they fall over, uh, they’re out for weeks, right? Uh, for one reason or another, and this is the sort of thing that you just have to account for as well. Not only will it make you a more durable cyclist, but it just makes you a more healthy human.
[00:38:01] Jonathan Lee: Um, and that’s really the important thing. If you are not a healthy human and it’s tough to get faster, um, we can’t just become such a narrowly focused tool. So yes, he should stretch and do all that to be able to be effective at riding your bike, but you should also be prepared for the rainy days, so to speak.
[00:38:16] Jonathan Lee: And mobility is a great way to be able to do that. Chad, do you have anything else to add on that before we talk about like, how flexible do I need to be? Because that’s the tricky part is if we talk to somebody in a different sport, or if we look to something like Instagram or something else or Tik TOK, we see people that are insanely flexible and suddenly the, the definition of flexible is redefined.
[00:38:38] Jonathan Lee: When we see that, and we wonder if we’re flexible. So
[00:38:41] Chad Timmerman: our flexibility needs a cyclist is super narrow. So rather I’d like to look at the benefits of stretching. Just, just be a bit more broad about this. And I guess we could really phrase it as, or ask ourselves, why do athletes stretch? What do we floss?
[00:38:54] Chad Timmerman: Why do we roll? And I want to just focus on the big three. I have others and I’ll get to them relative to another question, but let’s look at the top three that are most often cited. The first of which is injury prevention. And I’m here to tell you that no research reliably links stretching with injury reductions, and there’s a lot of reasons behind it.
[00:39:12] Chad Timmerman: Maybe the studies weren’t formulated, well, maybe they didn’t, it didn’t have a big enough subset of folks,
[00:39:17] Jonathan Lee: whatever. And that in being in that study well,
[00:39:22] Chad Timmerman: okay, so that’s one limitation. That’s one issue they’re going to face, but there’s also just the idea that it’s too hard to control. I mean, you can have athletes do a particular thing for a particular length of time and if they get injured, did it come down to the fact that they didn’t stretch or the myriad other things might’ve caused the injury.
[00:39:39] Chad Timmerman: So it’s, it’s just too tough thing to, to measure, um,
[00:39:45] Nate Pearson: uh, over time. I mean, if there was a strong signal, you would see it, this,
[00:39:49] Chad Timmerman: it would have to be a really elaborate observational. It’d have to go back so far. And I think
[00:39:57] Nate Pearson: this is that this is I talk about, I don’t even talk to us. My is like a PhD, Johns Hopkins, public health, top one of the top researchers in the world for on tobacco.
[00:40:08] Nate Pearson: But that’s, that’s an example. That day people who smoke and people who don’t, people who smoke, it, cancer, people who don’t. Right. And if it was impactful, like as much as that, uh, people who stretch people who don’t, you would see it all the time, people don’t stretch, get injured and at a much higher rate.
[00:40:24] Nate Pearson: So if it’s, if it’s really small like that, and you can’t do a, John says design a study where you get some kind of injury inside of him, you look at populations over time. And because they’re so such variability, and the reason why someone gets injured, I’m guessing the reason is there’s not enough, like oomph to it, to that factor to get out of there.
[00:40:44] Nate Pearson: That’s what I think. Or it could be designed. I’m not really into the research. That’s what I’m thinking is the, the, the reason why it is, and that doesn’t mean though, that there’s not impact, which just means it’s not detectable at that level.
[00:40:55] Chad Timmerman: I think that the good part about studies solid
[00:40:56] Jonathan Lee: observation.
[00:40:57] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s hard to observe those sorts of impacts. That could be absolutely real and beneficial for an athlete, but it can be hard to observe those when you’re looking at various different people or even large scales like that. And it’s boy, it’s like, imagine. Putting together some sort of study or review where you have enough size to be able to pick up on that too.
[00:41:17] Jonathan Lee: It’s all just really complicated. It’s not as simple as we think of like, oh, I stretch now. I’m not injured. And, and, you know, mark that down. So anecdote doesn’t equal it. Sorry, Jen.
[00:41:27] Chad Timmerman: Well that’s okay. Well still on the topic of injury prevention as being one of the reasons why we should stretch, uh, my, my favorite blog phrase, and I’m sorry, but blogs, these days, blogs period, they’re just rife with, uh, except for
[00:41:40] Jonathan Lee: canada.com/blog,
[00:41:42] Chad Timmerman: that was a hundred percent and logs are solid, certain blogs and research and certain blogs.
[00:41:46] Chad Timmerman: Don’t do what I’m just about to describe. Basically my phrase of the day is research shows. It’s been my phrase that the last several years research shows, and then it just gives you something and you’re just supposed to buy it, you know, swallow it, hook line, and sinker, scroll down. There’s no links, there’s no citations.
[00:42:03] Chad Timmerman: And often enough there’s products or services to be purchased at the end of all of this. So, and, and it doesn’t mean that stuff isn’t true. It just means, you know, if you’re going to tout this, can you at least site it? Can you give us some evidence of the fact that this is true, that there’s some evidence that supports it, but based on everything I’ve read, injury prevention is simply about the one flip pay that that’s not the best reason for us to get behind adding stretching to our, to our regimen.
[00:42:26] Chad Timmerman: Then amongst the big three, let’s get to the second one, improve performance. I looked at a systematic review that looked at 28 studies, uh, and they looked at improving muscle performance and they, they did jumping sprinting different types of contractions while they find chronic stretching doesn’t affect muscle performance in half the studies, chronic stretching increases muscle performance.
[00:42:47] Chad Timmerman: And the other half of this studies, chronic stretching decreases muscle performance in none of the studies. Okay. So it may help. It may not, but it doesn’t hurt. So in terms of improved performance, you at least know that you’re not going to damage your performance by adding, adding mobility to it. So there’s no, there’s nothing really to lose by trying it except for the time commitment and then perhaps opportunity costs, which we’ll discuss about, uh, discussing a bit.
[00:43:12] Chad Timmerman: And then also, uh, another study looked at, uh, dynamic stretching that the benefits of which actually counteracted its own concurrent effects. So the muscle tendon stretching that we look for when we stretch was countered by the muscle or it countered the muscle warmup effects. So on the positive, we got a warm up on the negative, the muscle stretching had a negative impact.
[00:43:32] Chad Timmerman: So. Within dynamic stretching. It’s there’s no way you can’t just sit close books, say dynamic stretching works. Let’s get after it. Um, and this, this line of research actually led me to a really interesting article where the author suggested that we retire flexibility as a major component of physical fitness.
[00:43:51] Chad Timmerman: This was just done a couple of years ago, and I thought all this ought to be good, but I read it. And there’s a lot of solid support because he recognized that there was little predictive utility with a little bit flexibility, flexibility in general. And it it’s, it’s not a stretching contest, right? I mean, we’re not looking for who has the most flexibility we’re looking for.
[00:44:10] Chad Timmerman: Who’s the best athlete does flexibility predict that, you know, show me evidence. Um, his point was that time is better spent on other things like managing your body composition, uh, cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength, and endurance, and all things that are related to better health than performance benefits.
[00:44:28] Chad Timmerman: You also pointed out the flexibility and mobility can be achieved indirectly through, and he noted strength training, and I’d already come across a link study that strength training versus stretching for improving range of motion. And this was another review just last year, looked at 11 randomized control trials.
[00:44:45] Chad Timmerman: They had 452 participants. And what do they note? But improve range of motion was similar between strength, training and flexibility training. So, and there is a caveat that most of these studies did look at the hamstrings, but still it’s a muscle and strength training. Brought about the same level of flexibility mobility as did dedicated mobility, flexibility training.
[00:45:05] Chad Timmerman: And then when it comes to specifically strength, performance, we don’t even need to get into that. I linked to a single study that is representative of many studies that provide much support for the negative outcomes that are associated with stretching just prior to strength training. And yes, this is just prior.
[00:45:21] Chad Timmerman: We’ll elaborate on different timing later with endurance training. There’s nothing in direct support for improved performance, but indirectly, I mean, anything that facilitates our return to training is going to increase our training consistency and our adherence, and eventually could in fact manifest an improved performance.
[00:45:39] Chad Timmerman: So while it doesn’t directly happen, it could indirectly over time happen. So I don’t want to say it can’t affect endurance performance, but I couldn’t find any science to directly say stretch. And your endurance performance will improve. Should we stretch or now? Uh, yeah, because there are other reasons.
[00:45:57] Chad Timmerman: And the first of which is the third reason in the oft cited reasons for stretching is increased range of motion. Okay. That’s, that’s typically what we’re after when we stretch. Right? So if we know that, uh, improve performance, probably not likely injury prevention, just nothing that really supports it, increased range of motion, tons of support for this.
[00:46:18] Chad Timmerman: So the results of acute stretching or rolling are transient and short-lived right. So anything you do. On on the roller or on the ground, or however you go about it. You’re probably going to see effects that lasts on the high end, about 30 minutes. So the takeaway is that there has to be some level of consistency.
[00:46:36] Chad Timmerman: If you want to sustain these changes, you can’t just do it, call it good and expect to be flexible forever. Um, so in, in line with this, my recommendations, papers recommendations, or to roll this into a warmup or a cool-down or set aside a usual time, such that you do it with a high level of consistency and there’s benefits to be had with just about the timing at just about any time immediately post-workout does carry with it, the benefit of elevated tissue temperature and greater blood flow, because you could just coming off of a workout, your muscles are charged, so to speak post-workout I mean, you can do it right after the workout.
[00:47:10] Chad Timmerman: They’ve linked to a paper that showed benefits of doing it 24 hours all the way up to 96 hours. Post-workout so it doesn’t, you don’t have to stretch immediately post. You don’t have to even do it the next day. As long as you’re getting it in there somewhere, no benefits have, uh, demonstrated themselves.
[00:47:27] Chad Timmerman: Uh, formerly might actually be the best solution when it comes to quad and hamstring flexibility, which is obviously relevant to us as endurance athletes, cyclists, especially. And I link to a study that looked at, uh, 15 male, 15 female college kids. They did dynamic stretching, static stretching, foam, rolling.
[00:47:44] Chad Timmerman: They did all of them in random. Uh, on three separate days, separated by 40 to 72 hours. So, Nope, Nope. Carry over effects. And what do they find is that there was greater, greater flexibility was achieved in the foam rolling intervention. So take away here is that range of motion increases or could be that range of motion increases are probably the number one reason to engage in mobility training.
[00:48:08] Jonathan Lee: Sorry, flexibility. Yeah. If this resonates with me after coming back from my injury, I actually, so I had a, uh, an actually it’s on the forum go to trainer road.com/forum. And if you look up me, Andrey’s what we’ll post the link into the chat right now on YouTube as well. Feel to me injuries. You’ll see it.
[00:48:26] Jonathan Lee: And I had a whole routine that I would go through. It’s a mix of mobility work. And then also just some basic, like simple strength exercises. But when doing those regularly, those are like a great fixed chat or a great, um, assistance check for me to be able to know how I was doing. And if I was ready to actually train, because I was dealing with a severe knee injury, it was keeping me off the bike, excruciating pain.
[00:48:50] Jonathan Lee: And this was years like, and it was really difficult. So if I went out to go do a training ride, which once again, such a huge fan of the trainer in particular for many reasons, but this is a great reason. If you go and do a ride and you get halfway out on the loop, but you’re experiencing pain, you have to ride back.
[00:49:09] Jonathan Lee: And then like possibly push through pain even more. Whereas when I was on the trainer, I could just stop as soon as I, if I felt pain while I was rehabbing this injury and coming through once again, totally different golden getting faster necessarily, even though that was the way to get faster, I was just trying to get my body to work well.
[00:49:26] Jonathan Lee: And when I was able to do this normal routine with consistency, I was able to see like, Hey, I’m not where I need to be in terms of hip internal rotation or whatever. The, the main thing that I was working on, I’m not where I need to be on that right now. So I’m not going to do a big, long workout and do something small.
[00:49:45] Jonathan Lee: Um, I might not do anything at all. So it’s like part of this too. And you have this routine, like you’re talking about Chad, it’s a really good way for you to keep tabs on how your body is doing and whether it comes from injury or whether it comes from lack of maintenance, you know, do something consistently.
[00:50:00] Jonathan Lee: So you don’t have to worry about the lack of maintenance. And then you can find out whether it’s a, you know, you’re ready to go or not. So coming back from injury, once again, this is an education, not just talking about average cyclists, but coming back from injury, that really resonates with me. And it’s a very valuable thing was for me.
[00:50:15] Jonathan Lee: Um, Chad, you mentioned foam rolling. Do foam rolling and stretching. You’ve mentioned the fact that range of motion was better in that study of athletes when they were foam rolling versus, uh, I think it was dynamic versus static. Do they accomplish the same thing? Should you be doing both of those things or can you do either or because once again, it’s like a time thing.
[00:50:34] Jonathan Lee: Like if I’m going to be doing mobility, work, flexibility, work foam, rolling work, and all the other many different things that I could do, I could spend hours doing that and I might be better suited just spending hours training and getting faster. Right. So let’s say
[00:50:47] Chad Timmerman: that was a comparison between all the different types or a few different types of stretching.
[00:50:50] Chad Timmerman: And they’re looking at the hams and the quad strings in youngsters that don’t think they were athletes. They might’ve been untrained, but it does further the point that I’d like to make. And in order to do that, let’s just do a quick 10,000 foot view of what stretching is. I don’t intend to make this a kinesiology lesson.
[00:51:06] Chad Timmerman: I don’t think that information is going to really make anybody faster. So I’m going to keep this super simple and just say that muscles contain a, uh, basically a receptor called the muscle spindle and that can bays the appropriate muscle length to the brain. Okay. So if you, if you stretch, if the muscle becomes too long, if it becomes long, too quickly becomes too long, too quickly, there’s a involuntary contraction term, the stretch reflex, okay.
[00:51:31] Chad Timmerman: And stretching can affect this reflex both positively and negatively. So stretching directly targets the muscle tendon unit. So when we talk about stretching, static, stretching, passive stretching, dynamic stretching, that’s, that’s what we’re targeting, right? So this in turn can increase the range of motion.
[00:51:47] Chad Timmerman: And again, it’s transient 30 and 30 minutes at the high end, but other methods. Especially, if you perform them with regularity can carry lasting effects. Even if they’re achieved, they had different effects, different responses. So the point is that stretching the muscle tendon unit, isn’t the only way to improve your mobility.
[00:52:04] Chad Timmerman: Stretching comes in many forms and these many, many forms, however you do it can positively affect our mobility. It can help us access each joint range of motion. And it doesn’t matter if it’s done via stretching, whether it’s static or dynamic or passive, whether it’s done via tissue manipulation, which is the rolling and, and also the flossing that we’ll touch on.
[00:52:22] Chad Timmerman: So, so my point here is simply don’t get hung up on the stretching modality, just, just do something. Find one of them that works for you. Find whatever combination of them works for you find the things that address your specific limitations.
[00:52:35] Jonathan Lee: So rolling, I guess one way to think of it. Stretching just pulls on the muscle was rolling, actually could work on a muscle all along every inch of it, right.
[00:52:43] Jonathan Lee: Chad and being a, being a pretty big differentiation between the two.
[00:52:48] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. So this, I just saw as kind of an opportunity to talk about the various forms of stretching and we kind of already talked on them, but I did, but let’s, let’s just define them in case anyone isn’t clear. I don’t expect everyone’s up on all these terms.
[00:53:02] Chad Timmerman: So I’ll quickly lay them out. Static stretching is, is, you know, basically the, the bane of everyone’s existence who doesn’t understand the actual benefits of stretching, right? This is the one that’ll negatively impact performance. So we shouldn’t do it this, and we’ll talk about that. But this is holding a position at the end of your range of motion.
[00:53:20] Chad Timmerman: So he goes, as far as you can stretch and you sit there. So good examples of this would be the couch stretch that we’ve promoted in the past, the pigeon stretch, which is where you get those deep hip muscles by putting your foot up in front of you on like a plyo box, knee out to the side and leaning into it.
[00:53:35] Chad Timmerman: Um, and then there’s dynamic stretching, and this is moving in and out of your Enza range of motion. So you don’t hold it at any point. You simply move to one end of it and it come back to the other end of it. And examples of this would be like swings, especially good for cyclists, whether you recognize it or not.
[00:53:50] Chad Timmerman: And then really simply jumping jacks, jumping jacks are a good demonstration of dynamic stretching. And while, while we’re on the topic of dynamic stretching, I did come across a study that looked at the speed of the dynamic stretching, and they compare 50 reps for a minute versus a hundred reps per minute.
[00:54:06] Chad Timmerman: So just, you know, the, the pace of it, it’s not that they get 50 or a hundred times, but that speed. And they looked at strength, range of motion, muscle, and tendon length, again, stretching’s intended outcome. And what they noted that what they noted was that slower worked better in all measures. So my takeaway here is simply that there is no need to get overly aggressive with your dynamic stretching.
[00:54:26] Chad Timmerman: And I feel it necessary to bring this up because when you talk about leg swings and dynamic stretching, and I’ve seen people do some outright dangerous stuff, so slow it down, it doesn’t need to be explosive or. Yeah. And there’s also a PNF and it’s a appropriate, uh, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, which is an assisted form of stretching.
[00:54:46] Chad Timmerman: And it falls in line with all the passive stretching where you’ll use like a towel or a band gravity and other person. It will cover that another time if we cover it at all. Um, and then foam rolling and foam rolling is exactly what it sounds like. You’re, you’re rolling your muscles over foam. Okay. So it’s a, it’s a foam roller.
[00:55:02] Chad Timmerman: You roll hard foam candy. It can be. And if it’s, if, if all of the foams hard to you or that that’s an indication that you should probably do a bit more rolling, because some of that foam is downright soft. Once your muscles are compliant and can actually handle it. Um, so it, the aim here is the release of fascial tissue, which is we’ve talked about before.
[00:55:23] Chad Timmerman: It’s the connective tissue that surrounds and separates our muscles and foam rolling addresses the condition of the tissue. So it’s no longer the muscle tendon unit. Now it’s the condition of the tissue itself. And think along the lines of adhesions, tissue, stiffness, a term, fix a Tropic responses. This is basically the, the viscosity of the muscle itself, which sounds weird.
[00:55:44] Chad Timmerman: But I saw it described as like squeezing a gel packet. At first, it’s kind of solid. The more you squeeze it back and forth, it becomes less viscous, same idea instead of a gel packet, we’re talking about the fascia of the muscle, right? And then finally a tissue flossing only going to touch on this a little bit, because frankly I ran out of time, but it’s a long, it’s kind of along those lines, you use compression via a floss band and movement of the joint too.
[00:56:09] Chad Timmerman: And this is a quote from one of the papers I came across to alter the relationship of the fascia with the neuro neuro musculoskeletal. So think about that. It’s the fascia and how it relates to both your neural system, your muscle system and your skeletal system. So it was trying to change that relationship favorably a bit.
[00:56:26] Jonathan Lee: Okay. Can I visually explain what that looks like? It looks like wrapping a really tight band around a portion of your muscles, and then you move through the range of motion and it’s not very comfortable. It can be really painful. Yep. And basically what it does is if you think of your muscles with the lining, it pinches that.
[00:56:42] Jonathan Lee: So then it allows them to operate into just a slide independently from each other. It forces that myofascial release at a different way, instead of just mashing with the foam roller, it’s squeezing it so much, but then still requiring the muscle to move that it kind of, it tears, those binds and those, those, those adhesions that exist right there.
[00:56:59] Jonathan Lee: Yup.
[00:57:00] Chad Timmerman: Yep. And then the, the single study that I think too on a tissue flossing did point out that it may Trump dynamic stretching and some measures. So I think, and I’m not saying this is better than dynamic stretching it’s again, back to that same take home, pick one, pick all of them, bury them, do a little bit of whatever.
[00:57:16] Chad Timmerman: All of them demonstrate efficacy, at least in some ways, if not a lot of the ways.
[00:57:22] Jonathan Lee: So the answer, instead of doing all of them, the answer is to do what works best for you. Is that that’d be a fair assumption. When we going back to that question of, should I stretch as a cyclist or should I foam roll or should I do any of these things you have to do?
[00:57:35] Jonathan Lee: What works is that, is that appropriate? Yeah,
[00:57:38] Chad Timmerman: that’s actually a good segue into my next question. Um, or the next question, which is what areas of flexibility should I focus on most, which I kind of reframed as to what areas of flexibility actually limit your performance. Um, one of them actually limit your day to day, you know, just, just normal things outside of the performance realm.
[00:57:56] Chad Timmerman: And I think the big question becomes is mobility training necessary for athletes. And in my view, that’s a hard, yes, I think from, from the perspective of young athletes, you can maintain your existing mobility by establishing and then supporting super important proper movement patterns. Okay. So you don’t allow the limitations to creep in.
[00:58:17] Chad Timmerman: Your your scenario and eventually become compensations and then have those compensations down the road translate into greater issues. So to put it in another way, it’s prehabilitation and that’s kind of a buzzy term, so let’s just call it what it is. It’s preemptive self care. And recently, when I was with my sports therapist, she asked me, what do you do in terms of self-care?
[00:58:37] Chad Timmerman: And it was like, I don’t know what that means.
[00:58:43] Jonathan Lee: I mean, it’s only imagine
[00:58:45] Chad Timmerman: it’s better in the, in the term, right? Self-care what do you do to care for yourself? And, and obviously she’s talking in the context of bodywork and I didn’t have any good answers for her, except that I did a lot of things, but I didn’t do any of them consistently.
[00:58:57] Chad Timmerman: You’re like I
[00:58:57] Jonathan Lee: lift heavy. I pedal hard, hard
[00:59:01] Chad Timmerman: clay on a roller and rive and cry and try to pretend I’m watching TV, even though it’s so much pain, I can’t process anything I’m seeing. So this is my point here is this is your opportunity as a youngster to establish the consistency that it’s going to serve you for a lifetime, you know, set those habits up now because they will benefit you take it from an aging athlete.
[00:59:20] Chad Timmerman: It brings us to aging athletes. This is an opportunity to fix issues rather than avoid them or accommodate them or tolerate. It is surprisingly easy to work around movement limitations, to learn, to live with them. And you can do it for long periods of time. What am I describing there, but chronic pain. I mean, something that one out of three Americans and Brits, I think those were the statistics we looked at last time.
[00:59:45] Chad Timmerman: Point is a lot of people suffer from this. So it’s my view that mobility training is a way for us to take ownership and effect control over these things. So it’s our opportunity to decide how we move quite literally through life, through training, through competition, through playtime, with, with your friends and your family.
[01:00:06] Chad Timmerman: And then we’ll address this a little bit later, but it doesn’t have to add significant time to your training. I do recognize that we’re already busy with training. Um, we’re already busy with our life schedules and I also acknowledge that there’s a payoff versus opportunity cost scenario here, you know, the cost of something else.
[01:00:24] Chad Timmerman: It is either going to come at the expense of something else. If your time is super limited, or you’re going to have to figure out how to economize, trim down those other things such that you can force this in here. But my belief is that young or old, some is always better than none. How much is needed, how much is actually beneficial is always contextual.
[01:00:41] Chad Timmerman: So, you know, a young writer with no real limitations versus a batter veteran like me, I’m probably going to dedicate more time to this and I need to, even if it comes at the expense of a little bit of time on the bike,
[01:00:53] Amber Pierce: Oh, go
[01:00:53] Nate Pearson: ahead. Now you are young. I don’t
[01:00:56] Jonathan Lee: sorry. Say that again, mate.
[01:00:57] Nate Pearson: Am I an aging athlete or a young athlete?
[01:00:59] Nate Pearson: Like here,
[01:01:01] Chad Timmerman: you’re on the cusp buddy.
[01:01:04] Jonathan Lee: Welcome to the club because the Chad saying
[01:01:08] Nate Pearson: my coffee mugs soon,
[01:01:10] Chad Timmerman: I was temporary. Look, Chad,
[01:01:13] Jonathan Lee: I’m still gone. Check out, check out that shoulder mobility
[01:01:18] Chad Timmerman: role. My last day, the
[01:01:20] Amber Pierce: point about chronic pain is really important. And I want to also emphasize that that could also be just chronic discomfort.
[01:01:26] Amber Pierce: I think a lot of athletes get really good at pushing through and tolerating pain and discomfort to a point where for those of us who are experienced in training, we kind of have this default mode of just push through and override those sensations. And so we’re at higher risk of putting up with and tolerating a lot of discomfort that you don’t necessarily need to.
[01:01:50] Amber Pierce: So just because you’re not experiencing what you might define as chronic pain, you might be just, you know, experiencing some chronic discomfort. That frankly is just a huge energy drain. I mean, if you think of. Doing a time trial, for example, the minor discomfort, or maybe not. So minor discomfort that you feel from the saddle is such a massive distraction and such a huge energy drain as I guess, very simple, straightforward analogy that a lot of people can identify with.
[01:02:17] Amber Pierce: But you just
[01:02:17] Jonathan Lee: think that that discomfort is real and major discomfort,
[01:02:22] Amber Pierce: right. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s such a drain and it drains everything. And Chad mentioned this earlier in this conversation, but I mean, what that does to your, your motivation and your ability to just to engage with life in general, let alone your draining.
[01:02:35] Amber Pierce: I mean, it’s huge. So, um, I would challenge everybody. Who’s listening to this. You might think up chronic pain, whatever. I’m not there yet, but you might have some minor discomforts that you just, that become white noise to you over time. That might be affecting you more than you think.
[01:02:51] Jonathan Lee: It’s a really good
[01:02:52] Chad Timmerman: point.
[01:02:52] Chad Timmerman: You can suss that out via a single massage. I mean, you can go in to see a massage therapist and maybe it’s a rarity or it’s your first time even, and you come away thinking, oh my God, I feel so much better. And you do small things where you realize, oh, I don’t have that pain or that restriction or, oh, it used to be hard or painful to do that.
[01:03:11] Chad Timmerman: And it isn’t now, so, and it’s kind of a wake-up call to how much pain you’ve actually just kind of stuffed. And then you move past don’t acknowledge.
[01:03:19] Amber Pierce: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said to my massage therapist. I didn’t realize how much tension I was carrying until it was. And then when it’s gone, you’re like, whoa, wow.
[01:03:30] Amber Pierce: I, you know, that was just building up over time. And I was just tolerating, tolerating, tolerating, accommodating, accommodating, accommodating. And that brings up another point. Just, this is not, this is just anecdote, but I was working with, uh, uh, uh, bodywork professional. And, um, I joke, I not jokingly said something like, oh, you know, I had this pain came out of nowhere.
[01:03:51] Amber Pierce: It was all of a sudden and he just laughed and he’s like, that’s what everybody says. You know, this came out of nowhere. All of a sudden he said, but really what’s been happening is your body has been accommodating and compensating for a really long time. But because you were able to compensate and just push through or tolerate, um, you didn’t notice until the whole system broke down.
[01:04:11] Amber Pierce: So it’s very rare that these things come out of nowhere. And to your point, you know, being aware of the discomfort earlier on in that kind of accommodation, uh, pathway, right. Might be very beneficial.
[01:04:27] Nate Pearson: It’s kind of like your body’s codependent. And it’s like compensating, compensating, compensating. And it’s like, I’m tired of this.
[01:04:32] Nate Pearson: The resentment goes up and then they just blows up and you’re like, why didn’t even know, like you should’ve told me, just came. I just came out of nowhere. It has been years they’ve been
[01:04:41] Amber Pierce: putting up.
[01:04:44] Nate Pearson: No, they haven’t been telling you that I’ve been thinking it. They’re just, that’s the codependent part. It’s in their head.
[01:04:48] Nate Pearson: They’re like, why didn’t you know this? And they all gave up at
[01:04:50] Jonathan Lee: once. Chad, the question needs to be. Um, she is, is being too flexible, bad for me as a cyclist. There’s a whole lot of, uh, Don scientific narrative around this, where it’s like, I’ve heard this before, where whether it’s you stretch too much and you become less powerful or you become less fit for one reason or another, I’ve heard this narrative.
[01:05:14] Jonathan Lee: I don’t know if there’s any science. Yeah. And I
[01:05:16] Chad Timmerman: think a lot of this probably stems from static. Stretching’s bad rap. So I kind of want to look at it from that perspective first. And then I have a couple other little points to make. So I think the question then becomes is, is, or does static stretchings batter up applied to endurance athletes?
[01:05:33] Chad Timmerman: I mean, we know clearly affect strength athletes, does it affect us? Um, and, and, and what is that bad rap is that acutely? So when we’re talking this severe sudden response to stuff that happens immediately, static stretching can reduce force capabilities. And this reduces that elastic response, that stretch reflex I talked about earlier, and this is, this is especially relevant in strength, sports, and sprinting, et cetera.
[01:05:58] Chad Timmerman: Uh, my question is how important is this, this downside? This so-called downside to most of us. I mean, I do recognize that someone attracts burner in particular, this is probably pretty relevant, right? The last thing they want to do is hold a long static stretch and then hop on the bike and try to do a standing start and, and bury themselves for a lap.
[01:06:17] Chad Timmerman: So, but you know, them aside, ours is a sport of largely concentric only contractions. Right? So, so we only have the, the muscle, Amber, do you want to take this? I know you’re going to cover the concentric key centric topics.
[01:06:32] Amber Pierce: Yeah. Concentric is where you’re attracting the muscle and the muscle is shortening.
[01:06:36] Amber Pierce: And then there’s also another form of muscle contraction where you can be contracting the muscle as it’s lengthening. So, one way of thinking about this is as you’re walking downstairs, your quadriceps muscle is actually lengthening, even though you’re contracting it. Whereas if you’re trying to do a leg extension on a leg extension machine, for example, you’re contracting that quad at the same time as, uh, as it’s shortening.
[01:06:59] Amber Pierce: Um, so it’s a very different, uh, it’s a very different sensation, um, and a very different effect on the muscle,
[01:07:05] Chad Timmerman: right? And, and, and as you vacillate between that lengthening and shortening, that’s, that’s where the elastic elastic component comes into all of this. And so, so my question is with us only really exhibiting or performing concentric only contractions, does that elastic component play little, any part of that next contraction?
[01:07:23] Chad Timmerman: I mean, we shut off for long enough. It’s hard for me to imagine. And there probably is research on this. Sorry. I didn’t find it. Th that says, you know, it’s turned off long enough that the elastic response is dead in the water and we don’t really benefit from it. And that wouldn’t surprise me at all. So, so where would the decreases in muscle plasticity actually harm our performance as endurance athletes?
[01:07:42] Jonathan Lee: Interesting perspective.
[01:07:44] Chad Timmerman: And we do know with running, I mean, as far back as 2009 and probably farther back than that, uh, in a linked one study that where static stressing does raise energy costs. And in this case of the endurance running itself, but running relies on the stretch reflex, it has an Accenture component.
[01:08:00] Chad Timmerman: Muscle stiffness is a big concern with runners, not so much with riders.
[01:08:05] Jonathan Lee: And if I could pitch kind of like the other side of the coin here, if you get injured, then you can’t train at all. And who cares about the minimal energy costs that you have, right? Like, like we’re kind of talking about those, like, sorry, what?
[01:08:18] Jonathan Lee: Say that again, Nate, it doesn’t prevent
[01:08:20] Nate Pearson: injury. Well, very well.
[01:08:24] Jonathan Lee: It very well could if you’re very not mobile. And then you are exploring ranges of motion that you are not familiar with and you’re doing so repeatedly, that’s likely going to cause some sort of injury, right? So because there’s, there’s this temptation to do extremes, right?
[01:08:38] Jonathan Lee: It’s hard to look at the evidence and say, well, the study hasn’t proven that there’s no injury. So I am going to completely ignore any personal signs and signals that I have. And I’m going to not stretch because it can harm the air. It could make it more energy costly from an energy perspective to move, or he can look at it like, well, it’s probably good to do some maintenance and to make sure that my body can just perform well within this range of motion.
[01:09:00] Jonathan Lee: And if that’s the case, once again, I’m just looking at it in a vacuum here. If you’re worried about losing a small amount of efficiency when you’re operating and then compound that over a month of training or just missing that month of training, because you’re injured, you can’t just like you can’t just completely lose focus here and pick one side or the other.
[01:09:19] Jonathan Lee: That’s why.
[01:09:20] Nate Pearson: Yeah. Uh, specifically I know you’re I hear your point generalized, like, don’t do it. If you don’t do this, you could lose out way more on the other side. So many things in life like that, generally in running how I, and this is more of a study back this up, but I think it’s more like a mix of it though.
[01:09:40] Nate Pearson: It’s first it’s technically. Like for a list of injury, the technique first, then it’s usually like some type of muscle imbalance, like weak glute medius or something inside of that. Uh, I actually, maybe even before that is volume and intensity and like how you space or running. And then probably mobility is probably pretty far down.
[01:09:59] Nate Pearson: And a lot of times with technique for, especially for new runners, it’s going to be actually less mobility. It’s like shorter steps because you’re, you’re doing these huge balance strides and you’re bam, bam, bam, every time. So although that is in the list of things for running and your hope, your point totally stands.
[01:10:15] Nate Pearson: If I was a runner, if I was a runner again, I would probably put more effort into other preventative things just for your point first and then work down the pyramid to that, to see if there’s really an issue with that. And there, and there are definitely people who do have that issue and there’s something that is tight and they fix that and they don’t have the ITB and issue.
[01:10:32] Nate Pearson: Like their ITBM being tight. Being one of them, mine would get really angry when I would do too much volume and I would physically like release it with my fingers and it relax and I can run again. It was crazy.
[01:10:44] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. So I, what I’m trying to avoid as a person listening to this and being like stretching will make me slower.
[01:10:49] Jonathan Lee: I’m never going to stretch. And if anything forces me into any sort of a stretch, I’m going to avoid it because it will make me slower. Don’t do that. Like, uh, don’t, don’t just go from one side of the other, like that
[01:10:59] Nate Pearson: wearing a helmet might slow you down.
[01:11:02] Jonathan Lee: Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. Yep.
[01:11:04] Nate Pearson: Not much. But remember, helmet
[01:11:07] Jonathan Lee: really makes you slow as when you crash and you don’t have a helmet that makes you real slow, so whatever.
[01:11:13] Jonathan Lee: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it’s all about priorities. Like we can’t lose perspective on what really matters here. Um, but she had really interesting point on the eccentric and concentric contractions and how static stretching actually affects that. That was a very measured approach of looking at that. It is, and that is
[01:11:30] Chad Timmerman: specific to static stretching, but there’s even, you know, if we’re going to poke holes, let’s look at dynamic stretching too, because you know, this is an argument that I could see cited.
[01:11:37] Chad Timmerman: And this is a study and there is support for this, that this one in particular, look at the knee flection peak torque and how it decreases with the dynamic stretching warmup. Okay. So, so now people are going to think, oh, I can’t do dynamic either because I actually decreases my peak torque, but we’re endurance athletes.
[01:11:52] Chad Timmerman: I mean, how often does peak torque actually limit us as an endurance athlete? Again, maybe if you’re a track sprinter, then you have to take off and you need that peak torque for the initial boom, boom. Getting the wheel up to speed. Maybe that’s a concern for most of us. I don’t think it is. And then even forward those tracks.
[01:12:09] Chad Timmerman: Th th the science supports that if you static stretch, as long as you keep those stretches short and short in this case was under 20 seconds, which I still consider a reasonably long stretch, low and
[01:12:19] Jonathan Lee: intense long enough when you’re in holding that stretch. That’s for sure, for sure, for sure.
[01:12:23] Chad Timmerman: But, but low in intensity, so not so much because the idea here is to keep it and they used it very commonly the Likert scale, the one to 10 scale.
[01:12:32] Chad Timmerman: So five on a scale of one to 10, 10 being intense pain, one being zero pain, and then you can follow it and basically ameliorate all the harmful effects of static stretching. As long as you do a little bit of dynamic stretching, a little bit of movement specific to what you’re going to do. It’s also a study that I linked to that shows that even if you, you can follow 30 seconds of static stretching.
[01:12:54] Chad Timmerman: So a good long hold with a single three second max isometric contraction. So just think of straightening your leg out, squeezing your quad as hard as you can for three seconds, boom, washes away. All that so-called damage that the static stretching could have brought. Okay. At least that’s that single study says.
[01:13:12] Chad Timmerman: So, but it was backed up quite well. So the point is that if static stretching is, or must remain a part of your warmup routine, do it. And I say this because I’m highly in favor, very strongly in favor of retaining the comfort of a familiar protocol. I recognize the psychological benefits in this, and I’ve linked to a study that does too.
[01:13:33] Chad Timmerman: They looked at five seconds of static stretching versus three by 10 seconds of static stretching versus dynamic stretching versus no stretch warm-up. And what they found was there was no difference in flexibility, no difference in physical function, but the participants felt more likely to perform well.
[01:13:50] Chad Timmerman: So, so it affected their psychological state because they got to do something that was familiar, something that made them think, okay, now I’m ready to get this done. This is what I’ve always done. This puts me in the right frame of mind. This makes me think I’m taking care of my body, prepping myself for the work ahead, avoiding injury, improving performance, all the things that may not be true, but if they believe it’s true, certainly powerful.
[01:14:12] Chad Timmerman: So my recommendation. Yeah. So, so my recommendation and this is based on paper’s recommendations is it w whether it’s foam rolling or static stretching, simply follow it with some workout specific dynamic stretching. So, so for cyclist, this would be like swings or brief quad stretches or heel grabs, you know, don’t hold them, just, just move through them and you can achieve the range of motion improvements and avoid that whole stretch reflex decrease that could come, come with the static.
[01:14:41] Jonathan Lee: So, what I’m gathering so far is that there’s a whole lot of like absolute theories that get put out there, like do not stretch or absolutely stretch or do one thing or the other. And what I’m gathering so far is that any sort of absolute approach like that and hard and fast rule is likely to be, uh, or should be ignored.
[01:15:00] Jonathan Lee: And instead you should look at this pragmatically personally, find what works best for you and utilize the, the range to be able to be sufficiently mobile. The one thing that we haven’t covered is the original point that Nate brought up was timing. When he was being physically stopped in the pool to continue swimming.
[01:15:17] Jonathan Lee: Uh, I’ve heard a lot of people say that you stretch after you do not stretch before, or if you do stretch before you have to do a warm-up and then you have to stretch. So what about timing, Chad? Yeah.
[01:15:26] Chad Timmerman: So this kind of brings us to other, some of the other claimed benefits of, of, uh, mobility, training, stretch, training, whatever you want to call it.
[01:15:35] Chad Timmerman: And one of them is to attenuate her reduce set to set performance. So, so there are that the decline in sets set performance, and it’s often referred to as interset or within workout stretching, you know, should I stop mid workout? And this is especially applicable to strength training, because you’ve got time between sets, right?
[01:15:51] Chad Timmerman: But you’re sitting and resting. Maybe you can do some stretching. It doesn’t apply as well to endurance training, but I can imagine it being worth a shot. I mean, something that anyone could apply if they want. One study looked at agonist, antagonist rolling. And basically they’re, they’re looking at the quadriceps, right?
[01:16:08] Chad Timmerman: So if, if they were rolling the agonist, they’re rolling the quads. If they were rolling the antagonists, they were rolling hamstrings. If they were doing a combination of the two, they were spending half time on one half time on the other. And then I think there was a control as well. And they did this during the two minutes of rest.
[01:16:23] Chad Timmerman: And then, so, so the one group did actually rest for those two minutes. And then there were the three other interventions and with strength training. Yes. But again, these are leg extensions and they were done to exhaustion. So this is strength training, but it’s not closely again to endurance training, but it’s at least along those lines because they, they did, uh, three sets at 10 RM to exhaustion.
[01:16:42] Chad Timmerman: So they push to the point of exhaustion. And what they found was that whether they stretched the agonist, the antagonist or both, or neither, it increased their training volume and in doing so, and this was a criticism, increased their fatigue. But if the volume goes up, you would expect the fatigue to go up.
[01:16:59] Chad Timmerman: So I don’t think that’s a valid criticism, but in all cases, does it reduce the perception of muscle soreness and regarding muscle soreness? This is something that’s perhaps centrally meeting. So put another way. It’s something that’s probably stimulated by central brain modulators. Right? So, so this is like not in the muscle.
[01:17:18] Chad Timmerman: This is actually in the brain. And along these lines, uh, I came across a study where they looked at people who would hold a stretch or accumulate 240 seconds of stretching or more. So we’re talking more than four minutes. And what was interesting about this is they saw a large increase in non-local range of motion, so they could stretch one muscle and then experience greater range of motion in other muscles across the body.
[01:17:41] Chad Timmerman: And this just drives home. The point that that peripherally muscle tendon stiffness is, is what you try to address. But globally, there might be some neurological benefit, honestly. I’m not sure it matters. I mean, it’s super cool, but, but so what if it results in less post-workout discomfort, it’s a win, right?
[01:18:00] Chad Timmerman: Um, and then, and then with this, this, uh, set to set performance rolling in between, uh, it’s not the most consistent findings, this, the study that I just talked about or talked about a little bit earlier was the one on the positive side of thing, things, but against it were four negative ones and one no difference.
[01:18:16] Chad Timmerman: And yes, they were all strength training routines. I’m pretty sure or studies, but it’s, it’s, it’s a bit wishy-washy. And as far as the endurance training application, I’m not sure one exists, but I don’t see the harm in trying it. I mean, if you’re doing say a, a five by three VO, two max workout with three minute recoveries in between, why not hop off the bike, roll your muscles for 30 seconds, PPAR, agonist, antagonist, whatever, get back on the bike and see how it affects your performance.
[01:18:41] Chad Timmerman: I mean, it’s become pretty clear. There’s not a heck of a lot of harm in it. This is foam rolling. We’re not talking about sitting in a 32nd static stress the entire time. So I honestly think it’s probably worth a worth a go
[01:18:53] Jonathan Lee: that’s an interesting concept. So in terms of stretching beforehand stretching during our stretching after, is there a specific recommendation, Chad?
[01:19:00] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. So
[01:19:01] Chad Timmerman: let me, uh, give me a minute to pull my notes here. So, so, so the next question, or I guess that, well, it says, should we stop after our up and stretch? Um, and that’s basically what I just described. What I did skip over is a before or after training. So, and this brings us to yet another shortly. I promise of, uh, some of the touted benefits of stretching and, and one of them in one that actually does hold some scientific evidence is to reduce muscle soreness and increase or reduce pain and support of this, uh, Metta that looked at 14, uh, 14 studies where they, they rolled before seven studies where they rolled after.
[01:19:43] Chad Timmerman: And they got a minor reduction in muscle pain perception when done post. So, and that’s interesting across a number of studies, but the consensus across so many related studies is that there is a potential for minor reductions in pain perception on top of that, no harmful effects in this regard. So it never increased pain perception.
[01:20:04] Chad Timmerman: So again, it doesn’t hurt. It may benefit. Um, the takeaway from this and related studies was that two to four sets, 30 to 60 seconds of rolling per muscle group. And really, if you want to simplify it, it’s just accumulate 120 seconds. Rolling per muscle group per session seemed to be the way to reduce pain perception.
[01:20:27] Chad Timmerman: Um, and then while we’re on the topic of rolling, I don’t know if this is a question that was directly asked, but I think maybe Zach asked is the intensity of the rolling. And the consensus is the kind of have to balance the pain rating with the roll time. So, you know, how long it takes you to roll top of muscle down to the bottom of the muscle.
[01:20:44] Chad Timmerman: You’re going to do it rapidly. If it’s very painful, you’re going to, you can take a little more time if it’s not quite painful. So the two light pain, sorry, two high pain levels are going to limit the duration of each of the directional roles. So the recommendation is if you’re going to go slow, keep it more, the lower end of the spectrum, you know, maybe a four of a 10 on that, on that liker scale.
[01:21:04] Chad Timmerman: And then, then with high pain, which gets the job done quicker, you push it up to the higher end, but I didn’t see anything that recommended anything higher than a seven out of a 10 or a seven on a one to 10 scale. So it was never excruciating pain. Uh, as much as you can stand, get it done, make it brutally painful.
[01:21:20] Chad Timmerman: It was high discomfort for sure. But, but tolerable, none, the less, it was noted that high pain seemed to be best reserved for post-workout when muscle performance and fascial tension is less of a concern. Um, because with, uh, with the lower or interset, there, there is a possibility that you can negatively impact performance.
[01:21:41] Chad Timmerman: So why take that chance? Keep the intensity a little bit lower.
[01:21:45] Amber Pierce: Um, there is admittedly a little bit of irony here that, that you have to do something really painful in order to reduce your pain perception. Just,
[01:21:54] Jonathan Lee: yeah, that’s what my sports therapist
[01:21:57] Chad Timmerman: keeps reminding me. She’s she’s telling me there will come a time where you will maybe actually fall asleep during one of these massages and it’s unimaginable.
[01:22:04] Chad Timmerman: It’s I’m scooting off the table. I don’t know how many times a session it’s painful, but it’s actually changing my
[01:22:11] Jonathan Lee: body. So that’s to recap on this one, Chad, and to keep this one tight it’s beforehand, if you’re going so stretching before hinder stretching after it’s okay. Either way, but stretching beforehand, you want to make sure that you are doing it harder or not too hard.
[01:22:27] Jonathan Lee: Now
[01:22:27] Chad Timmerman: stretching beforehand seems to lean toward the lower end of the pain scale
[01:22:31] Jonathan Lee: and then stretching after is
[01:22:34] Chad Timmerman: a bit more abuse because you’re not worried about hampering performance. Rather. You’re looking for the benefits of the. Awesome. Cool line reduction. Yeah. So
[01:22:43] Jonathan Lee: did you, oh, sorry, go ahead. I thought Nate was going to chime in on something.
[01:22:46] Jonathan Lee: Do you have anything they joined chime in on Nate, it looked like you were going to share a part with you.
[01:22:51] Nate Pearson: Uh, I would just going to say that, uh, for stretching for me, um, when we talk about it, my Adderall has to work overtime, especially if it’s just not that interesting to me. So I was going to say, are we ready to go on?
[01:23:04] Nate Pearson: But I think you just summarized it all. Chad, you did a great job just in general, in the history of Nate. Uh, when all those people said, my PE teacher said to stretch, I like did not stretch. I like, he’s like deeper. I’m like, I don’t care if that’s my us, but it is a huge issue for a lot of people. And I think in the chat too, people are saying they like it a lot too to keep discussing things.
[01:23:26] Nate Pearson: For sure. I would, I did not say anything bad. I feel like I’ve just attacked you on your hard work. This is a new thing, not a new thing.
[01:23:35] Chad Timmerman: I can take it as
[01:23:36] Jonathan Lee: direct criticism. Chad, any, any final notes on it that we want to cover? Um,
[01:23:40] Chad Timmerman: yeah, I guess we can cover the last couple. Um, the benchmarks or the benefits we’ll know a few more reported benefits of.
[01:23:48] Chad Timmerman: Adding mobility training. And one is that it reduces muscle damage and there was, uh, another review, like the 32 studies and they use foam rolling again to significantly attenuate an increase in the markers of muscle damage. So basically they reduce the markers of muscle damage. Um, roll rolling immediately after the workout, as well as up to 48 hours post.
[01:24:08] Chad Timmerman: So a little bit of support for, for getting it done after, in terms of trying to reduce the amount of muscle damage that that takes place, which again, leads to those things. We pursue a quicker return to training, which leads to greater consistency, which leads to greater gains, et cetera. Um, and also in that Skinner review, they noted that that the, with the foam rolling, there was an increase in the range of motion.
[01:24:28] Chad Timmerman: No negative performance impacts no gender differences and again, no direct link to improve athletic performance. And then one little bit of support for pre-training stretching is that it does raise muscle temperature and increased blood flow. And there’s no real argument across this. I did link to a study that supports it, but that’s kind of a no brainer.
[01:24:46] Chad Timmerman: I mean, if you’re working the muscle well, it’s going to get, it’s going to get increased blood flow with that blood flow. You’re going to get increased temperature, pretty straightforward, and then a mid workout men ride this, this isn’t exactly what I was talking about with the interset it’s rather a no research necessary reply.
[01:25:04] Chad Timmerman: And that if at some point you have to counter the effects of long durations in a very fixed position. Sometimes you have this luxury. Sometimes you can do it. You know, I’m thinking training, rides, casual rides, that sort of thing. And sometimes you just have to tolerate it, but there are dynamic on the bikes, examples.
[01:25:19] Chad Timmerman: I mean, you can do, even if it’s just taking your leg out of the pedal and flopping it around a bit, flexing your knee and going through, there are things sitting up tall and letting your legs dangle. So you open up your hips a little bit, take some pressure off your low back, um, all sorts of roadside and Trailside opportunities, where if you have the opportunity, the option of getting off and addressing it then and there, you know, even, jeez, I dare say in like a multi right event where you’re out there for four or five, six hours where you to take a minute, every two or three hours just to deal with some of the growing pain.
[01:25:51] Chad Timmerman: Would that benefit your performance in the next couple, three hours to the tune of a minute? I have to think it would.
[01:25:58] Amber Pierce: It’s also time for snacks. Just snacks out
[01:26:01] Chad Timmerman: there. Exactly. And just, just to break from it right now, you know, if that, if your scenario accommodates it. And then finally, there’s the, what I termed the no kidding claim.
[01:26:11] Chad Timmerman: Uh, if you reduce recovery time and you returned to training is, is improved. That’s this, that, that, this is how it works. So it’s typical result. You know, the soreness goes down, muscle damage goes down, pain goes down, all of these things facilitate a more rapid return to training. So pretty hard to argue that one.
[01:26:27] Jonathan Lee: So stretching recap, that, does it make you, does it make you a faster cyclist? It could, if injury is inhibiting you, or if any sort of range of motion is inhibiting you from riding well, uh, it could also take away from training time. If you spend too much time doing it, there’s no point in spending too much time doing it.
[01:26:43] Jonathan Lee: You can stretch before you can stretch during you can stretch after just do what feels good and don’t be afraid to use a variety of different tools. Does that recap it well? Chad
[01:26:52] Chad Timmerman: sounds pretty good. Yes.
[01:26:54] Jonathan Lee: Awesome.
[01:26:55] Amber Pierce: And just make a couple of quick comments on the psychological side of things here. Um, and I won’t take too much time, but we talked briefly about placebo, um, and having stretching or foam rolling, being a part of your routine and kind of putting you into a good mental state.
[01:27:10] Amber Pierce: I just want to step back for a second and mentioned that, you know, putting yourself in an ideal emotional state for performance is not just about placebo. Like there is definitely a real benefit to being. Uh, primed emotional state, whatever that happens to be for you, and it’s different for different people, um, but having a routine and if stretching your foam rolling as a part of that, that puts you in a confident state of mind or an engaged, excited state of mind versus, um, you know, uh, a reluctant state of mind, that’s a huge, uh, that has huge impact and implications for performing, whether it’s a training ride or race.
[01:27:48] Amber Pierce: Um, and the other thing I want to just mention is, you know, in terms of timeliness and integrating this with training, so you’re not just adding one more thing and one more thing, and one more thing, this is all stuff that you can do at the same time as other things. Um, so I, I really liked, uh, when I was training really consistently having a transition period after a really hard training ride, you know, to transition from sympathetic into parasympathetic and having a stretching routine, um, and doing some foam rolling was actually a really nice way for me to, to build that in.
[01:28:21] Amber Pierce: So it was kind of like, it’s just a calm, you know, block of time that doesn’t have to take a lot of time, but listening to music. Watching a fun, funny TV show, something like that. It’s just the time to kind of check out and kind of bring your body like your, your autonomic nervous system, kind of down a notch and transition into that parasympathetic.
[01:28:42] Amber Pierce: So there is a psychological component to this too, that could be additionally beneficial so that you’re actually kind of hitting a lot of potentially helpful things that will, um, enhance your training. It don’t necessarily have just to do
How to heat train at various budgets
[01:28:55] Jonathan Lee: with stretching great points, Tristan, his question, he says this summer, I’ll be doing races in the cane Creek cup in North Carolina and moving there for an internship.
[01:29:04] Jonathan Lee: So these will be entirely new races to me. I raced in high school and the Colorado Nika series. So I have a decent experience racing, a Delta two, but not much experience in the heat and humidity. I go to school in South Dakota at 3,500 feet. So once again, the temperature and humidity is very much on the moderate end.
[01:29:19] Jonathan Lee: What can I do in South Dakota or Wyoming that would translate to help performance in the heat and humidity over the summer and doing a 13 per hour per week plan indoors when weather is bad and outdoors and weather, when the weather permits and he says, and hopefully whatever changes can fit within my engineering student’s schedule.
[01:29:36] Jonathan Lee: Thanks Nate. We did a science of getting faster episode with Dr. Chris. Minson where we went over all the details of heat training. Tristin. You should listen to that. Absolutely. But Nate, what would you say to Tristen in this case? Probably not. I don’t know if he has a song. I don’t know what they have at their disposal.
[01:29:52] Jonathan Lee: So, yeah,
[01:29:53] Nate Pearson: Kristen and, uh, sounds like, uh, Tristan might be, yeah, I’m guessing young, right internship out of high school, going to be a budget. Trison what I would do. You’re 13 hours per week indoors only. And I’m guessing then you’re going to have some easier rides. I would start by adding on your easy rides, uh, no fans and see what happens.
[01:30:14] Nate Pearson: And you’re going to start to sweat a whole bunch. I would do that until you don’t have a huge, probably heart rate response on those, or you feel more kind of normal on those rides. And then you can do it on a couple more. I’m going to do for all your endurance rides, because it does add recovery. Make sure you hydrate to it.
[01:30:30] Nate Pearson: The next step of that would be closer up to your race. I would say the two weeks leading up, you could increase the heat by like doing those train rides inside of a, a bathroom with like the shower on and stuff. The humidity. Doesn’t very surprised that when we saw it in humidity to not increase it, but that does not make sense to me either, but you at least get the heat up there a lot hotter.
[01:30:50] Nate Pearson: You put a little, if you have a little space heater, you can put in there, but generally, um, you can get these adaptations with like within two weeks, if you’re doing it like four times per week, but it’s also going to help you by increasing plasma volume, even in cold cool conditions. So it’s kind of a good thing for anyone to get into the process of, but on the other side of it is to John’s point earlier.
[01:31:12] Nate Pearson: It adds a stress. It adds RPE. It adds a mental fatigue. And if that then prevents you from doing a hard workout and you’re going to be slower anyways. Um, so that’s how I would do it. You could even, this is more of a mental toughness thing, but at the end you could do try doing, maybe I would say a workout, like a threshold workout, cause that’s really going to heat you up, uh, or a sweet spot workout, but to maybe one point below your current progression level and try doing that in the heat and it’s going to be really, really tough and you might fail it and that’s okay.
[01:31:45] Nate Pearson: Uh, but just the idea of experience being hot because have you guys had this too? Where the first time you get hot, like you forget what it’s like to be hot and it’s a different kind of uncomfortable and you’re like, mm, I’m not sure if I’m cool with it. Cool with this. I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with this.
[01:32:00] Nate Pearson: And then like, Hey, I’m a dad. And then like maybe like 30 or an hour into the race. You’re like, actually I’m okay. Being hot and your mind switches. And you’re like, this is the new normal I’m in hell. Kind of, I dunno, but that’s how I, that’s how I would approach this. Um, the way that if you have more money, you have a sauna, which I, which I did is you do your workouts.
[01:32:21] Nate Pearson: And then afterwards you have your sauna pre warmed up. You jump in there. Uh, I’ll talk about something that Dr. Minson said, then you jump in there and you’re, you’re in there for like 30 minutes, 40 minutes. You start sweating after you do this for a little while, your sweat response happens way faster. It doesn’t feel as hot.
[01:32:38] Nate Pearson: You, you notice the improvement and again, that can happen over two weeks, but then when you stop it tapers off really fast. I think it’s like seven or 10 days. You’re back to normal. Uh, yeah. So in documents instead to in the infrared to be in there, while it heats up in my experience with my own one, when I did that, I had no sweaty, no heat for like 45 minutes until I got up to temperature.
[01:32:59] Nate Pearson: This might be a different kind of sauna, but I have like a, or I had one that was, uh, like a Costco. And for red one that I just bought, I don’t know if it
[01:33:05] Chad Timmerman: was, and there was a recent paper surface that talked about maintenance of that re uh, those adaptations to where you said that they dissipate pretty quickly and they do, but you can maintain them with, I think it was, it might’ve been a single heat exposure over seven days.
[01:33:19] Chad Timmerman: Maybe it was four days, but the frequency was quite a bit less. So tried to try to dig that up.
[01:33:26] Jonathan Lee: One another really accessible way to do this Tristin is if you don’t have us on the, so, so actually let me step back and run through a logic dislike, kind of like a logic tree. If you will, with this, let’s say you do what we talked or what nature just talks about, uh, by making your easier rides hot.
[01:33:41] Jonathan Lee: So you don’t use a fan, you do it in a warm room. And then let’s say that you start to recognize that I’ll actually now my key workouts the next day, or a couple of days later are too hard to do that. In that case, that should be a clear sign that you should not be doing those easy rides in a hot state.
[01:33:56] Jonathan Lee: Don’t do that. Don’t compromise the high-quality work. Another way that you can do this is that after your workout, if you don’t have a sauna, but you do have a bath, you can get a bath. Um, and I mean really hot, like uncomfortably hot. And then if you go into that bath and make sure you keep your hands and feet and other spots where you’re most likely to vent heat, keep those underneath the water.
[01:34:18] Jonathan Lee: Um, that can do a great job of, because really the main aim is you’re just trying to elevate core temperature and keep it elevated for a substantial period of time, relatively speaking. So if you can do that with a bath that you absolutely will, you’ll be sitting in the bath, but you’ll be dumping, sweat, um, because it’s so warm your that’s because your core temperature is high and your body is trying to cool off.
[01:34:38] Jonathan Lee: So that can be another easy way to do it. Um, it can be as easy as turning off a fan. It can be as easy as turning on a shower of like hot, humid water close to you, if that’s possible, or just taking a bath, those are some really accessible ways. But to like, uh, this kind of ties full circle into what Amber just said, in terms of placebo, if it affects you psychologically in a positive way, then it is absolutely performance enhancing and probably not a PED.
[01:35:04] Jonathan Lee: So you can do it. Uh, now on the other side, if it’s something that mentally inhibits you, then absolutely it is very much a thing that is going to make you slower. So if you find yourself in a situation like Nate said, first time experiencing heat, and you’re not familiar with it, it will absolutely erode your ability to perform like that.
[01:35:25] Jonathan Lee: That happens. So even if like there’s one side where you can look at it and increasing plasma volume and all these markers inside your body and on the other side, Tristin, if you can just get used to being. That will even just, that will help you when you’re talking about comfort and focus during that race, when you’re doing them.
[01:35:43] Jonathan Lee: Because North Carolina, you are going to be hot and humid. Forscher at those races. So there’s just no air movement it’s gets really hot. So, yeah. That’s the cool part about heat training it’s super accessible and everybody listened to this should absolutely go listen to the science of getting faster episode with Dr.
[01:36:00] Jonathan Lee: Chris Minson. It’s so good. It’s fantastic. And go to trainer road.com/blog. We have great resources where we’ve organized all the information.
[01:36:07] Nate Pearson: Nate. I want to say a mental thing too. We just said a different way. Uh, you always hear people are like, I just melt in the heat. I like I do horrible in the heat.
[01:36:15] Nate Pearson: It’s like they pre say that they’re going to be horrible. And if you are like that, I want to say, to have the mindset of, um, I’m gonna be able to go deeper in the heat than anyone else. I’m gonna ha I’m not gonna let that prevent me from going deep. I know this is going to hurt, and I’m just going to experience it more than everyone else.
[01:36:33] Nate Pearson: And that’s how I’m going to compete on this day. Cause everybody gets hot. Everyone’s going to get hot. You don’t actually experience it. Like if you took a core body temperature thing, I bet you don’t get any hotter than anyone else. It’s a mental thing, but you can’t take it in general. There’s this is a generality.
[01:36:48] Nate Pearson: Uh, but if you come in the mindset of it’s going to be hot, I expect it. This is like, how bad do you want it? But I’m just going to be able to handle the heat better than anyone else. You’re going to outperform yourself with, uh, compared to the other.
[01:37:01] Jonathan Lee: And if you’ve been doing these simple steps of heat adaptation in one way or another, then you don’t have to lie to yourself and say, I’m better prepared for anybody else.
[01:37:09] Jonathan Lee: You have this really good concrete track record of things you’ve done to prepare yourself for that. So it makes it a whole lot easier to believe, right? Sorry, Amber.
[01:37:18] Amber Pierce: Oh, not at all. I was just gonna say that mental preparation is key because what you’re doing is you’re differentiating the sensation from your abilities, right?
[01:37:25] Amber Pierce: So oftentimes you get into a situation where you feel worse than you would expect, and you think it’s because, oh, I’m not that fit. I’m not that strong. I’m not up for the challenge, but that’s not the case. If you know that this is going to be uncomfortable in a very specific way. If it’s your first time in the heat, it’s just about heat adaptation.
[01:37:40] Amber Pierce: It’s not about your fitness. It’s not because you’re not a good athlete. It’s not about your ability is just about, you’re going to need to adapt a little bit. And if you can differentiate those two things, it won’t undermine your confidence
[01:37:51] Jonathan Lee: on. Don’t let bad sensations predefine your abilities. I like that.
How to drink and eat during interval workouts and not miss a beat
[01:37:56] Jonathan Lee: Good stuff, Amber, uh, Tom has like one of the most practical questions ever, and I’m surprised it’s never been asked. Uh, it’s a good one. By the way, you can submit your questions@trainroad.com slash podcast. You do that every week and I appreciate it so much. So if you have a question about training, about racing performance, anything like that, about equipment who knows go to train road.com/podcast and submit it now, then hopefully we’ll be able to cover it next week or in coming weeks, Tom says, Hey gang, thanks for the terrific podcast.
[01:38:22] Jonathan Lee: You’re also inviting that. It seems like a safe space for it to ask what might seem like an obvious question. That’s in the roots of the weeds. He says, I’m wondering about drinking while on the bike. And he also says pupils dilate and Chad sits up. Finally
[01:38:38] Chad Timmerman: read the question to that point and checked out and started looking up.
[01:38:43] Chad Timmerman: Metabolism. Oh, no, I got this one and then it was good to share nothing positive. It’s all garbage. But I did want to
[01:38:50] Nate Pearson: get into this mindset of worry about nothing. That’s not good
[01:38:55] Jonathan Lee: that matters
[01:38:57] Chad Timmerman: after that, that none of these words registered. So I can’t, I can’t help you.
[01:39:01] Jonathan Lee: He says, sorry, not that kind of drinking from your podcasts.
[01:39:04] Jonathan Lee: I feel pretty comfortable with what to drink, how much and how often. But my question is whether you have any tips or tricks on how to drink during tougher intervals. I’m always trying to manage my heart rate during these threshold or along via two max intervals by carefully controlling my breathing.
[01:39:18] Jonathan Lee: But the second I take a drink, my heart rate spikes, and I’m back to gasping for a short time. I understand the physiology behind this, but I’m wondering if you could share what you do. Frequent short sips timed with your breathing, which feels like many paper cuts he says, or just taking the hit from a big swig, waiting for rest periods is fine, but you can’t do that during a race.
[01:39:38] Jonathan Lee: So I’d like to train, to have an approach in racist as well. He says, who thought Thursdays would have come. One of become one of my favorite days of the week. Thanks for everything from Tom. That’s a great one. Amber, you’re the pro racer who has probably had to take drinks and super compromising positions to not only like you’re breathing really heavy, but you’re probably got riders going all over the place.
[01:39:59] Jonathan Lee: Uh, how do you time? This seems like a really simple question, but I bet it’s going to be an enlightening one for a lot of people. How do you, how do you, when do you drink when you’re doing an interval workout or during the.
[01:40:09] Amber Pierce: I strongly prefer to wait for rest intervals. So during a, during a workout, I will sit during restaurant volts, but I’ll do that even if it’s a 10, second or a 32nd restaurant level, right.
[01:40:19] Amber Pierce: I won’t have to wait for a five minute restaurant or bowl. Um, and in a race, if it’s not a solo time trial, it’s the mass start race. There are always moments in the race where the race slows down and you have even just a micro recovery. It might just be five seconds, 10 seconds. So one of the things that you can practice, um, surprisingly is your proprioception.
[01:40:40] Amber Pierce: So knowing exactly where to reach, to grab that bottle without looking and being able to put it back without looking and being able to do that quickly, uh, is a really great skill because you can, the second you see, you know, attacks and attacks just been covered. There’s a lull in the field. You can grab that bottle, take a swig, put it back super fast.
[01:40:57] Amber Pierce: Um, and if you watch the pro Peloton, you’ll see these guys, I mean, and, and gals, uh, grab their bottles super fast tickets to put it down. They’re really, really fast and efficient with this. So it’s less about managing heart rate and it’s actually more about your technique of being able to get the bottle out and put it back quickly.
[01:41:14] Amber Pierce: And then that way you can be kind of like a little hydration sniper, right? The second you have that opportunity, you just grab it, you get the fluid down and then you’re back at it. And the more, the better you get at that, the more you can take advantage of those micro recoveries to get a drink in. Um, if you’re on a solo.
[01:41:33] Amber Pierce: T T and that’s your event, then? That’s a different story. You still want to train that proprioception because you want to be really fast and efficient with that. Cause you don’t want to break out of the Aero position any longer than you need to. Um, but there may be no, there, there may be no way around that elevation in heart rate, but if you train that, you know, okay, this is how it’s going to feel.
[01:41:51] Amber Pierce: And I know that I’m going to recover from that. And then you can have that confidence that even that little perturbation in your heart rate isn’t necessarily going to derail your pacing or derail your performance.
[01:42:01] Jonathan Lee: That’s uh, this is one of the reasons why I really like hydration packs for mountain biking and gravel living.
[01:42:07] Jonathan Lee: Because it’s just less to do to drink. You can have that little, uh, that little hose right there. So then you can just drink whenever you need. And there’s less to do with the whole operation, um, because you do get more efficient with it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed too, when you switch bikes and you have different bottle cages or that bottle cages in a slightly different spot or you switch bottles.
[01:42:26] Jonathan Lee: And for some reason it’s different, it throws you off and suddenly it matters more. I kind of want to focus on one thing that Tom said here, where Tom said, um, I’m always trying to manage my heart rate during threshold or long view to max intervals by carefully controlling my breathing. I think that, so if, if this is something you haven’t paid attention to before Tom, and you’re just really new to that concept and doing it, then it’s a great thing to do.
[01:42:52] Jonathan Lee: But if you are, if you feel like your focus, as soon as it shifts from breathing and it shifts from that, that it gets out of control, I would argue that you might be focusing a little too much on this. Um, and like, because first of all, you’re elastic. You’re not, you don’t have to be perfectly static. Your breathing rate can change and it can be briefly interrupted.
[01:43:13] Jonathan Lee: Um, this will happen in races. This will happen for many different run that you swallowed a bug or whether anything happens. Like you’re going to have moments where you can’t maintain perfect breathing. Can’t maintain that focus on maintaining your heart rate. It’s okay. Don’t worry about that changing.
[01:43:28] Jonathan Lee: And if a drink messes that up, but then you return back to normal within a handful of seconds. That’s also, okay. So don’t feel like somebody, everybody else out there is taking drinks and it’s not affecting anything in you’re the only one, if you’re focusing too much on that breathing and making it absolutely perfect.
[01:43:45] Jonathan Lee: That might actually come to become a hindrance. If it’s too much of a focus. Um, but I like Amber in between intervals. In fact, I actually went through like a pretty long phase where I felt like if I didn’t drink, when I first started writing, so I would take a drink when I first started riding and I would almost get addicted to that and get terrified of dry mouth.
[01:44:06] Jonathan Lee: If I had a dry mouth, I’d be like, oh my gosh, I need to take a drink. But I got to a point where it actually kind of just forced myself through that initial reaction of, oh my gosh, I’ve got dry mouth. This is going to be like, I’m thirsty. I need to drink. And when I got through that, cause I was still drinking a bottle an hour.
[01:44:21] Jonathan Lee: So I’m still getting the amount of fluid that I need. But when I was able to push through that initial dry mouth response, it was like my body deconditioned that, and now I got to the point where I was like, you know what, if I’m breathing hard and a drinks does sound drink does sound good right now. But my interval doesn’t end for 10 minutes.
[01:44:36] Jonathan Lee: I’m fine. I’ll make it through the 10 minutes. And then in that rest, I will drink. I’ll be able to do it then. So I chill. I mean, unless you’re doing like two hour intervals or one hour intervals or something like that, I’d challenge the concept that you can’t wait to be able to do it. You can take in a whole lot of drink in between those, uh, those work intervals in that rest.
[01:44:57] Jonathan Lee: How about, how about you, Chad? You’ve done a ton of crit racing to where you like, you know, getting drinks and stuff is also tricky because it removes your focus for awhile.
[01:45:06] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. I think Amber’s basically covered it in situations of high intensity and criteriums. Are it, there was a period of time where I couldn’t imagine getting a drink during a criterium, but as you, as you’ve learned to relax, learn to move through the field better.
[01:45:18] Chad Timmerman: Aren’t always attacking. Like I used to be all the time, but I mean, you find opportunities to eat and you need to grease that groove, right? That movement pattern needs to be so familiar that it’s basically an unconscious action. You just, you recognize the need for thirsty, recognize the opportunity to grab a drink before we know you’ve already done it, the bottles back in the cage and you’re still riding.
[01:45:38] Chad Timmerman: So I think it definitely comes about with practice. And I do think that when the option presents itself and you can ride with the hydration pack, that’s absolutely the way to go. It’s so easy, so much easier to stay on top of your hydration. When you have a backpack and a hose hanging in your face,
[01:45:53] Jonathan Lee: I just noticed the Amber took a drink.
[01:45:54] Jonathan Lee: It was her recipe.
[01:45:57] Amber Pierce: Chad was going to be a restaurant. He was taking the pole back here. Um, yeah, I actually a director of ours years and years ago, early on my career used to get on the radio when we were racing with radios. And whenever there was a lull in the race and say, eat, drink, and be married. And it just became this little mantra of mine.
[01:46:14] Amber Pierce: And so we would joke about it, but then it got to the point where we would say that to each other on the race radio. As soon as we realized that there was a lull where we didn’t have to be really on point at that moment, one of us would get on the radio and remind everybody else, eat, drink, and be married.
[01:46:28] Amber Pierce: And it’s now this little recurring phrase in my mind. And I hear it. I say it to myself during workouts. I say it to myself during races. Like anytime there’s just a little in a moment, it’s like, okay, eat, drink, and be Merry. So that’s the time to get your hydration in. Um, if you need to, you know, usually get your fuel in and just those.
[01:46:48] Amber Pierce: Being mindful of those micro recoveries, even on a group ride or along solar ride, you know, just have a little, it can help to have a visual trigger or something that reminds you like, okay, you’re chilling right now, grab a bottle. And if, if it’s on a group ride or something, if you see someone else, take a bottle, take your bottle, right?
[01:47:07] Amber Pierce: Like allow yourself to use those visual triggers to remind yourself, but, um, training the technique of it is, uh, it’s definitely a very, very helpful way to approach it.
[01:47:16] Nate Pearson: How often in the pro Peloton do people attack when other people are drinking on purpose? I mean, it’s, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve done it where I see the rear camera.
[01:47:26] Nate Pearson: I didn’t know someone was eating, but they were like eating a bar and it’s like hanging in their mouth. It’s, it’s really hard to like to follow someone when you only have one hand available or you have like dangling from your mouth and you can only breathe a certain way.
[01:47:39] Amber Pierce: Yeah. Less effective in the pro Peloton, because if somebody has a bar in their mouth or they’re taking a drink, they’ll just check it to follow the attack and then they’ll go get something else from the team car later.
[01:47:49] Amber Pierce: So it’s, it’s less effective. We don’t, I would say that’s less of a, a selection opportunity than, you know, other aspects of the race.
[01:47:59] Nate Pearson: I know definitely happens in triathlon, sorry, an aid stations. Some people will just blow through eight stations cause. Thinking it makes there, there are other, the person who’s running with them.
[01:48:10] Nate Pearson: This is on the run up, started running. Uh, it makes them have to have a choice is I’m going to hydrate or I’m going to try to stay with this person and not make the, like the emotional rubber band snap. Yeah. And I don’t, I kind of think of it as bad forums will purposely wait for someone to take a drink to attack.
[01:48:27] Nate Pearson: Um, but it’s, there’s no rule against it. Do whatever you want.
[01:48:31] Jonathan Lee: Um, everybody should drink more earlier. Yeah. At world championships this year, uh, we saw plenty of times, uh, actually all throughout the world cups. Whenever anybody went into a feed zone like the other riders, or they would all go through the feed zone whenever somebody would take a bottle, they were attacking.
[01:48:48] Jonathan Lee: Uh, I remember Nina doing this. I remember Vanderpoel doing this. I remember, um, jeez, all of them Mathias, like all of the men. And then you saw everybody trying to do it to a law and all accomplished, but it’s just simply didn’t matter. Cause she’s too fast. Um, but like, uh, this is common and there are no rules against it.
[01:49:05] Jonathan Lee: And in my opinion, it’s fine. Like, go ahead and do it. I I’ve never attacked somebody in a feed zone. I’ve never done that, but I absolutely would do it. Like if it’s coming down to it and I want to race, like Amber said, I think it was last week when you race, you’re entering the arena of competition and there are rules that are written out and you don’t want to trend, you don’t want to transgress those rules, but you know, that, that happens.
[01:49:28] Jonathan Lee: That’s part of it. So you do have to be kind of wary, like if you are taking a drink mid effort or you’re doing. Like, uh, I use, I actually, I have to tax and people are drinking and it’s typically when, after somebody attacks hard and a crit and then somebody is going to sit up, I know people are going to be relaxing, whether they’re drinking or not.
[01:49:47] Jonathan Lee: I know they’re going to be relaxing. And that’s when I hit them. That’s why counter attacks are productive, right. Is because people have done something hard and they want relaxation. They want that thing. So catch them wanting while you are just, you know, uh, giving them exactly the last thing that they don’t want.
[01:50:03] Nate Pearson: You want a drink during like, like Amber said the times where there’s a big, low, and you don’t want to be like, what John said before is I have some dry mouth. If we’re one V one, we’re in a breakaway last lap on a Crip, and you’re stupid enough to like, take a drink because you don’t want dry mouth or it’s not gonna impact your hydration at all.
[01:50:20] Nate Pearson: Like maybe I wouldn’t get, like, don’t be mad at the other person for doing that. Um, you can say, I have a rule against this, but I would. How silly would that be? If anytime someone attacked, when someone else was drinking and I was like, fell play, I would not get that into your head. It’s like, this is the way that it should be, because I’ve heard people say that, like, you know, don’t do that.
[01:50:40] Nate Pearson: Um, but I, that’s a tough way. It’s and most of the times, too, when people attack you, you don’t even see that the other person’s drinking. Like I said, that rear camera, you don’t even notice after the fact you have a camera. You just, the time was right. And a lot of times, like John said, it’s a lull. Um, not many times people attack.
[01:50:58] Nate Pearson: No, one’s like 110%,
[01:51:01] Amber Pierce: by the way, is the best
[01:51:02] Jonathan Lee: time to attack just FYI.
[01:51:04] Nate Pearson: It’s 110%. Yeah. Well, it’s only if you’re at 90. Exactly.
[01:51:09] Jonathan Lee: Um, one of the please ever go ahead. I was
[01:51:12] Amber Pierce: just going to clarify one point. So there is a, an unspoken rule of etiquette, um, which is to not attack in a feed zone and that applies to road racing specifically.
[01:51:22] Amber Pierce: So it’s not considered good form to attack in a feed zone. It’s not against the rules. People absolutely do this. Um, but it’s not, it’s, it’s like kind of frown down upon, but that’s different than attacking when some individual happens to be drinking or eating in the middle of the group at a point that’s between the feed stations.
[01:51:42] Amber Pierce: Um, so I just wanted to make that clarification
[01:51:46] Nate Pearson: it’s different than mountain biking, different and different, uh, Ironman, Ironman, MCAS. Knock and cups out of people’s hands, just taking every copy. So what happens in
[01:51:56] Jonathan Lee: Ironman?
[01:51:58] Nate Pearson: The first, the aid stations are long and huge, but the first person in gets the choice of their drinks and the first sponges.
[01:52:05] Nate Pearson: And the second person gets what the, what the volunteers are still holding. So people will run through their last aid station, blah, blah, blah, boom, take every cup. And they want every water thing of water on them. Right. And there’ll be pouring Coke on them because those are going to get it backward of cooling inside of that.
[01:52:21] Nate Pearson: But also like maca is a famous, like mind game strategist. You’re behind them. You’re like, oh, I was expecting 15 cups to pour on myself and I get three and then it’s hot. And you’re like, how can I do this? This person’s got a lot cooler than me, the mindset. And there’s also probably an actual core temperature difference.
[01:52:39] Nate Pearson: Uh, that is well within the, the, the rules rules. I’ve never heard anyone complain about. Yeah, exactly. You should have ran faster into the, uh, aid station really. And people do that. They race into the aid station to get that first person. Uh, do you have to be the first ones that needed to get that.
[01:52:54] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. I mean, the opposite also happens when writers don’t get a bottle and they tried to get it.
[01:52:59] Jonathan Lee: You’ll see, you’ll see riders then turn the screws on that athlete because they know that they want something right now that they can’t have. They’re probably in a bad mental state, even if it’s not that they’re going to become dehydrated for missing that bottle. They’re distracted. And it’s an opportunity for you.
[01:53:13] Jonathan Lee: Um, I know Tom, we’re kind of drifting,
[01:53:15] Nate Pearson: I guess it is. If you’re an age, grouper is an Ironman aid station. Don’t go through and knock all the things out.
[01:53:24] Jonathan Lee: But I have
[01:53:27] Nate Pearson: definitely done this in a small, so a small race, an aid station might have two people and then it be holding up four cups. And I am racing for a podium position against somebody I’ll grab a four cups coming in and I’ll use all four cups, like all, all that.
[01:53:40] Nate Pearson: I might drink all of them. Uh, but the person behind me either has to slow down or they should have gone in faster or, you know, they get somebody they don’t want. And to me in my mind, I don’t think there’s any, oh, I gotta only take half of these because all of these people behind me need it. No, go faster.
[01:53:56] Nate Pearson: Like be ahead of me. And then you can do that or have space or just stop. Like you can go the aid station table and get some too. There’s all these choices where you can do stuff in there. And I shouldn’t be limited by the amount I get, but I’m not also knocking them out of their hands. I think that’s a little suspect.
[01:54:10] Jonathan Lee: I want to hear everybody’s opinions on this and the trend road forum, whether it’s attacking in feed zones, whether it’s attacking when somebody is feeding. Or we’re talking about the triathlon stuff. I want to hear everybody’s thoughts on this, where they stand personally, where you stand and then just generally where you stand to, perhaps what you’ve done differs from how you believe it should go.
[01:54:30] Jonathan Lee: Um, the
[01:54:31] Nate Pearson: volunteers do in this situation, like you try to take two and they’ll be like, Nope, this is for the person behind you. I’ll let you do it. It’s also knowing, and that situation I could stop. And, you know, if I wanted, if I really needed an extra cup or anything, I was gonna finish the race with that.
[01:54:44] Jonathan Lee: I think Patrick Lang I grabbed the two liter thing of Coke at Kona, like back in 2019. And he was just dumping the whole two liters on himself. And after he like, basically cleared the whole table, you know what I mean? Like, yeah. Yeah, totally. And
[01:54:56] Nate Pearson: don’t know what was behind him. He was just hot two 40 marathon or something.
[01:55:01] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. What he is doing. Um, the last point I want to cover, Tom, you mentioned squeezing in timing, drinks with your breaths. And I mean, you may be in a situation where this race is like longer than an hour and you are truly on the rivet the whole time and there is no time for you to rest. And if that is the case, then yes, squeeze it in between breasts.
[01:55:20] Jonathan Lee: But for me, that’s a trap. If I’m trying to squeeze something in between breaths, it’s because I’m not being as efficient as I should, or I’m not giving myself the chance to just be okay with waiting for the rest interval or waiting for the eventual rest. So it might be a good sign, Tom, if you find yourself squeezing it in between breaths like that, that, Hey, you know what?
[01:55:39] Jonathan Lee: I should calm down. I can relax. I’ll be okay. I can take it a little bit later on. Okay. Stephan. It says his body weight training, a substitute for barbell strength training. You emphasize strength, training a lot so much. In fact that I want to get a consistent strength, a strength routine going way to go.
Is bodyweight training a substitute for barbell training?
[01:55:55] Jonathan Lee: Stephan did to here you’ll get faster and healthier. She says, I’ve read somewhere that a pistol squat should be roughly equal to a body weight, barbell squat. So can I replace that and a deadlift with a resistance band that, that lifts, well, those are, uh, not scientific. I would say they’re very different movements and you’re talking about a pistol squat and a barbell squat.
[01:56:14] Jonathan Lee: Chad, we don’t have to do a deep dive on this one. I just want to get across the principle for most of us. Cyclists is body weight, strength training sufficient, or do they need to use weight?
[01:56:25] Chad Timmerman: It’s sufficient till it isn’t. So, I mean, we have to provide a stimulus that you’re not capable of, or that exceeds what you can currently do to spur out at patients.
[01:56:33] Chad Timmerman: And at some point body, weight’s not going to be enough way to do that anymore. So unless you’re, unless you’re increasing body weight the whole time, which. It may happen to a small degree, but it’s not going to happen is it’s probably gonna, your strength capabilities are going to outpace your increase in body weight if that’s happening at all.
[01:56:51] Chad Timmerman: So my point is that a pistol is only going to be heavy enough for so long, and then you can start doing more reps, but then you’re not really targeting strength, strengthened strength, improvement, so much a strengthened Durance improvements, and it becomes something else. So initially it’ll probably be plenty heavy enough pistols or heart, and then a full range is especially hard.
[01:57:08] Chad Timmerman: And if you’re trying to get the full range that you’re going to find a spot that that’s super weak, and that will be enough of a stimulus to bring about improvement. But once that improvements achieved and your body’s not any heavier, it’s no longer going to be a
[01:57:19] Jonathan Lee: sufficient stimulus. I’d argue that for endurance athletes, you don’t likely need to go beyond far beyond bodyweight though.
[01:57:26] Jonathan Lee: Like if you’re chasing strength gains, it totally makes sense to start adding more strengths. But if you’re just chasing the ability to be functional and to be more well-rounded and everything else, I don’t really know if you ever need to add weight. I probably over speaking here, but it might be weight dependent on the individual.
[01:57:45] Nate Pearson: There are some jacked people who just do body weight and you look online. There are very, like Jed said, there are different things you can do to like progress going to make them harder and harder and harder. And with cycling, I like the idea of doing a lot of things that are more on the 15, 20 rep range.
[01:58:00] Nate Pearson: So it’s another one is you can just add things up. You can do less rest in between work on your muscular endurance, uh, rather than your like raw strength and obsession for mountain biking, that could be a. A huge thing. So I, I think to your point, John is probably okay in general. Uh, but you’re, you’re always going to be limited at some point, did I set
[01:58:19] Chad Timmerman: it on the last podcast that, that some of the body weight, body, weight, strength athletes, I mean, the people who focus specifically on calisthenics are some of the most impressive athletes I’ve ever seen.
[01:58:28] Chad Timmerman: I mean, there are the lines of gymnast where they just have these bodies that can do dang there anything, um, whether that makes them a faster site. I’m sure that translates in some ways. I don’t know.
[01:58:39] Jonathan Lee: One thing I want to add to this though, is that the thing that strength, equipment or weights get you is you can do simply you can just simply do other exercises that you can’t do otherwise like kettlebell swings without a kettlebell.
[01:58:51] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. You know, it’s not really, not really much. Um, so there are certain movements that you can do with equipment that you just simply can’t do. Otherwise. That doesn’t mean that you can’t get functionally strong as a cyclist. I think you can, for a lot of things. Um, it’s again, I always follow, uh, Derek teal, my good friend.
[01:59:08] Jonathan Lee: He also has a strength training for cyclist businesses called dialed health. And he has like no equipment routines on there. And I, and I personally feel that they are, I still get sore, but then when I don’t do them for a long time, and I find that they are adequate for getting me to be a strong cyclist, uh, just in general outside in terms of physically strong, outside of the context of just spinning my pedals around.
[01:59:30] Jonathan Lee: So I think there’s room for. But Stephen, I, I, you just adding equipment if it’s a cost barrier. Yeah. For sure. If it’s like some sort of access barrier where you just don’t have it around you at a gym or anything else like that. Yeah, absolutely. Like you can do a ton. Well, you don’t have that, but also, I don’t think that cyclists should be afraid of touching weights.
[01:59:50] Jonathan Lee: Cause that’s probably on the other end of the spectrum, a lot of cyclists would like don’t get heavy and you’re not going to get heavy if only that was, it was that easy that we just got swollen gigantic. Every time we touched the weight. So Amber, I just
[02:00:03] Amber Pierce: want to jump in and say for somebody who’s just getting started with strength training.
[02:00:06] Amber Pierce: If you’ve never done strength training before bodyweight is a great way to go, it’s a good place to start because what you really want to do is, um, establish good motor patterns and good form. And that’s a lot easier to do with bodyweight stuff and even some modified stuff. So if you’re somebody who struggles to do a pushup, you know, you can start by leaning up against the back of your couch and doing pushups that way.
[02:00:27] Amber Pierce: I mean, that is enough to get you started and start to create a stimulus for some people. And I just want to reiterate that that is totally okay as completely legit, it’s really effective. And then you move into, you know, maybe a half push-up and a full pushup. So that’s an example of using modified versions of different exercises and you can get a lot of benefit out of just the body weight stuff, working on that form, creating a good foundation before you ever do need to introduce equipment and additional weight.
[02:00:55] Amber Pierce: So that’s, that’s for maybe a different audience, but for people listening, I just wanted to jump in and say, you know, if there’s. You can come in and start pretty much anywhere. Cause there are different modified versions of movements that you can do that might be more accessible or approachable for you.
[02:01:10] Jonathan Lee: Well said, Amber well said, Nate, are you, are you getting Jack and swole? Is that your focus now? Just on getting strong? Yup. You’re moving past body weight then I assume. Oh yeah. Heck yeah. I real strong.
[02:01:25] Chad Timmerman: And we should differentiate between being strong and being max strength strong. I mean you can use body weight, exercise and calisthenics to get very, very strong with chasing max strength improvements do require more and more and more and more weight, which, you know, like I said, body weight training, can’t furnish, but that’s not really what we’re after.
[02:01:46] Chad Timmerman: So I do think the body weight can go a long ways. And um, I had another point I wanted to make, give me a minute, come back to that. I want, I’m
[02:01:54] Nate Pearson: not going for strength. I’m going for like looking good. So that’s a slightly different, um, and I’m not going for like sports performance. Right. And the way that I lift is more of the hyper purpose.
[02:02:06] Nate Pearson: I never say that word hypertrophy eight to 15 reps like that, not the like neuromuscular stuff. And that is a lot because of that range gets kind of narrow and the incremental like increased. It is a lot easier with weights than without, but to Chad’s point, like I see it all the time on like. I totally agree with Chad.
[02:02:26] Nate Pearson: Some of the best physiques I’ve seen have been calisthenic people and then also they can do amazingly strong. Well, that
[02:02:33] Chad Timmerman: reminds me of the thing I was trying to think of was, uh, they did compare and this wasn’t a study, but it was a comparison amongst a couple athletes, I think for like Cali moves or one of the calisthenic websites where if you could do a plant pushup, so appliances, you know, basically your hands are on the floor and your body is miraculously suspended behind you at an upward angle that’s upon itself.
[02:02:55] Chad Timmerman: But to actually do a pushup from a punch position. So you get all the way down to the floor and then back up equated to having a two times body weight bench press or something along those lines, it was ridiculous how much strength they had cultivated by only moving their body weight. So that’s something very much in favor of bodyweight strengthened, shrink training.
[02:03:13] Jonathan Lee: It will be amazing to be that strong by the way, to be able to make yourself float. Basically. That’s pretty crazy. Yeah. Amber, did you have anything else that you wanted to jump in on?
[02:03:23] Amber Pierce: No, I’m good now.
[02:03:25] Jonathan Lee: Awesome. Everybody. Thanks so much for joining us for this episode. We had a very deep dive on stretching.
[02:03:30] Jonathan Lee: We talked about heat training. We talked about body weight training, and also we talked about drinking in a very practical application for all the cyclists and, and. Controversial feed zone tactics. Uh, so head over to the forum training road.com/forum. This episode is episode three 50 to jump over there, tell us how you feel about those points and any other questions that you have, whether it’s on stretching, whether it’s on different modalities.
[02:03:52] Jonathan Lee: We’ve got a ton of live questions about everything from massage guns to cold plunges, to all this stuff that kind of tend to be related to what we were talking about. We didn’t have time to go through those. So jump over there to the forum. Let’s chat about it. Go to trainer.com, sign up. And if you are signed up for chain of road, it means so much.
[02:04:09] Jonathan Lee: If you shared this with everybody else. So share trainer rode with them, get them to sign up, get them to get faster. You can do outside workouts so you can continue to train as you wish, and you can lower the volume and get faster around he’s adaptive training. It’ll still work with your outside stuff in the future.
[02:04:24] Jonathan Lee: It’s really exciting. So with all that said, thanks everybody. And we’ll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye everyone.
