Is it possible to time your strength training in such a way that it doesn’t affect your cycling training? Coach Chad dives deep into interference-effect and if it is worthy of concern, as well as a guide to training plans for KOMs of different durations, how training fatigue and freshness can mask adaptations and much more in Episode 341 of the Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast!

More show notes and discussion in the TrainerRoad Forum.

Topics covered in this episode

Resources mentioned in this episode

Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast

Successful Athletes Podcast

Science of Getting Faster Podcast

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Jonathan Lee: Welcome to the podcast is dedicated to making you a faster cyclist. The ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road and coach Johnson lean with our head coach, Chad Zimmerman, everybody. And we also have a handout plus plus the black is racing’s IVR drain. Dang it. I even wrote, I get stage fright.

[00:00:19] Jonathan Lee: I, every time I have to say it, but I’m going to screw it up. I wrote it down. I knew it and I screwed up. I’m sorry, Ivy. How are you? Great. How many more cyclocross races are you doing this year? You’re kind of getting toward the latter, like, I guess latter month, really? For us here in the.

[00:00:41] Ivy Audrain: Yeah. Um, well, first I have a tracking across race this weekend.

[00:00:46] Jonathan Lee: Nice. Jack just looks confused. Can you, can you explain tracking across track local? Well,

[00:00:56] Ivy Audrain: Chad, take an unsafe bike and put it in unsafe conditions, race it as fast. So I’m good mix of like comma so easy. It’s a track steel track frame with some more entire clients. So you put across tires or gravel tires on it and it’s fixed gear.

[00:01:16] Ivy Audrain: So to control your speed, you skid and then you go do cyclocross. It’s totally silly. Ridiculous,

[00:01:26] Jonathan Lee: but also fun. Yes, I’ll do that. There’s good memes about this, about track lacrosse on, on the internet as well. So a kind of a cultural phenomenon, like the

[00:01:40] Ivy Audrain: stepchild that everybody

[00:01:41] Jonathan Lee: has

[00:01:44] Chad Timmerman: twist your daughter up to these days,

[00:01:48] Ivy Audrain: she went to boarding school.

[00:01:56] Jonathan Lee: That’s awesome. That’s good to have you, um, are you going to do, uh, are you going to go to, I know we talked about this before, but are your plans to go to cyclocross world champs, even though you’re not likely to be selected for the world champs team, but are you planning to go or to experience it?

[00:02:14] Ivy Audrain: And to, uh, there are a couple of sponsors that maybe we’re going to have me along to go give high fives and, and be there.

[00:02:22] Ivy Audrain: So if I can do that, I certainly will. That’d be really cool. But other than that, it’s just

[00:02:27] Jonathan Lee: nationals for me. And then. I feel like if you’re listening to this and you would be into this, let us know. I feel like we should, uh, maybe even consider having like pit reporter Ivy, uh, on, on, in place to give us behind the scenes content.

[00:02:40] Jonathan Lee: It would be hilarious. I would love it. So yeah, at world champs, like maybe you can go ask Vanderpoel, but he thinks about track lacrosse. I’m sure he’d have a great answer for that. So, yeah, definitely.

How to stop failing workouts

[00:02:55] Jonathan Lee: All right. Let’s um, I’m going to jump right into a question by Phil. Uh, it has to do with adaptive training. He says I’m 57 and an avid cyclist. I do epic events, but don’t race. I recently, which is awesome by the way. Good on you, Phil. I recently did an FTP test after my first block and it went from two 90 to 3 22 way to go.

[00:03:12] Jonathan Lee: That’s super impressive. Uh, that’s a lot of, that’s a lot of improvement in any time, no matter your weight, anytime you’ve crossed that, uh, 300 watt threshold, so to speak, you know, your. Yeah. Yeah, big day. That’s exciting. So way to go. And my problem is that I can’t seem to finish my workouts anymore with the new FTP.

[00:03:29] Jonathan Lee: Should I lower my FTP so I can complete the workouts or keep trying, I work lots of hours, but attempt to stay on track with every workout. So we’ve gotten a handful of, or we’ve gotten questions like this for as long as we train a road has, and cycling has existed probably right. In the sense that athletes get a new threshold.

[00:03:46] Jonathan Lee: Then after that things are hard to do. And that’s what adaptive training is designed for. So in my mind, I’m like, hold on here, is he using adaptive training? And why isn’t it working if that’s the case? Uh, which it just works. Like you can’t really make it not work. It just, it works. That’s how it works. So anyways, I looked into his account and for so many of you that have sent in messages to me on Instagram or anything else that may have feel like you have a similar situation, let Phil’s story be an example here.

[00:04:13] Jonathan Lee: So, great job. Now I dug into your. I looked into everything and here’s what I found. So Phil, I apologize. Uh, but Phil, you say when your FTP went up, adaptive training, adjusted your progression levels to give you achievable and productive workouts. So what happens is, let’s say I’m at 290 Watts like Phil, and then I retest and I’m at 322.

[00:04:36] Jonathan Lee: That’s a big jump depending on the sort of jump that you get, or even the reduction in FTP. You will get adjusted progression levels after that with adaptive training. So if you’re, let’s say your sweet-spot capabilities were you were at a level seven or in this case, I believe it was a 6.8 or 6.9 was what Phil had.

[00:04:57] Jonathan Lee: And if he’s at that level, after he gets that huge bump in FTP, he is not going to be a 6.9 still cause he wouldn’t be able to complete 6.9 level workouts at that new high FTP. Right? So in this case, he actually got bumped down to a 1.9 for that. So with that in mind, that’s what happens. You take that, you get a new FTP and if it goes up your levels go down and they go down a specific amount for you.

[00:05:19] Jonathan Lee: It’s calculated. So in this case, it drops down to give you those a productive and achievable workouts, instead of just running you into the ground with aerobic work, that’s actually very much anaerobic until it’s aerobic. So without understood adaptive training then suggested, and I looked through your workout history, adapted training then suggested adaptations to your training plan, but you ignored.

[00:05:40] Jonathan Lee: So when you get adaptive training yeah. Sad face. Um, when you get it basically says adaptations. And download the calendar or on your career page or in the app, it’ll say that. Right. And it said adaptations pending, even though like a pop-up will come up for you. And in this case, in this case, you either hit, ignore, or you clicked on them, then you hit ignore whatever you did, you ignored them.

[00:06:02] Jonathan Lee: And then you failed a level 6.2 sweet spot workout because you were a level 1.9, which totally makes sense. Right? You shouldn’t be able to complete a level six, if you are a level 1.9,

[00:06:11] Chad Timmerman: it’s like, it’s like just ignoring your coach’s advice. It’s like, yeah, coach, I’m not gonna do that. And then wondering why your coaches advice didn’t get you.

[00:06:21] Jonathan Lee: Yep. Then you ignored more adult patients after that sad day again, and you failed more workouts after that, then finally you accepted the adaptations and you got the workout that adaptive training was trying to suggest to you on day one, and guess what? You nailed it. And you rated it as moderate, which is awesome.

[00:06:39] Jonathan Lee: So it seems like in that was, uh, you submitted this question before you accepted those adaptations and move forward. So, uh, in this case, The lesson is adaptive training doesn’t work unless you accept the suggested adaptations. I know that sounds really silly, like super obvious, but it’s a really important thing to remember when you look, get it know that adaptive training is built on millions and millions and millions of workout records.

[00:07:04] Jonathan Lee: We have over 120 million workout records in our database, and it’s constantly increasing in size. So it’s based on millions of data points here. And it’s looking at that and looking at your recent performance, analyzing how you’re doing to then make those adjustments. Uh, so when you get adaptations, go for it.

[00:07:22] Jonathan Lee: I promise you. It’s not going to be something that’s like, eh, I think I know better. And I shouldn’t trust this. This is where you should go. Um, it’s going to lead you in the right path and look now you’re on the right path field. You’re nailing workouts again, uh, checking them off and getting faster. So congratulations.

[00:07:38] Jonathan Lee: Um, mark has a question that kind of relates to adaptive training as well. That has some interesting. He says I’m a recent new user. And so far, very happy lots to keep me interested during warm weather here in Ontario, Canada, I’ve been doing two workouts a week on the trainer and my weekend workout on the low end.

[00:07:54] Jonathan Lee: You mentioned that he’s on the low volume plan outside. Well, I have a smart trainer. I don’t use a power meter outside. So at the moment I’m using RPE, which is awesome, by the way, you can just use RPE based workouts. So that means that instead of doing your sweet spot work, which is going to be like a level seven or 6.5, something like that out of.

[00:08:13] Jonathan Lee: Uh, instead of doing it with power, you can just say, okay, this interval is going to be 6.5 out of 10 for 15 minutes, and then I cruise and then I’d repeat that. And it gives you all those power targets. Super cool makes it accessible because not all of us can have power meters on every bike. That’s a big expense.

[00:08:28] Jonathan Lee: So mark says, have you considered using on trainer history to correlate to RPE by now you have lots of history of heart rate as compared to power output or, and he says we’re lack thereof. Uh, he says it wouldn’t be applicable directly on the bike because of day-to-day variation in heart rate as compared to RPE, but it might be useful post-talk to give an idea of where the workout actually sat in terms of productivity.

[00:08:50] Jonathan Lee: And he says, I think the gain might be this some days. I think I was working hard. However, historical data was comparing my heart rate to smart trainer power might be useful to say I was or wasn’t. Thanks again. So mark, we are actually doing this, um, we’re collecting this data and we’re building up, uh, different ways to be able to get a better fit.

[00:09:09] Jonathan Lee: For strengths that you have going on. Um, our system can also estimate TSS based off of that right now, which is pretty cool. So it can estimate based on the heart rate that you had, it can estimate what the TSS is and moving forward, we do plan on using that and even more metrics to get even more cool insights.

[00:09:28] Jonathan Lee: So once again, adaptive training is not done. It never will be done. It’s just, this is how we are going to build up this incredible way to train people and make people faster in a more productive way than before. So sending stuff, Ivy. Yeah. Oh, in your

[00:09:46] Ivy Audrain: new year, 20, 30, 20, wherever, we’ll be able to measure your serotonin before you start your workout and make

[00:09:52] Jonathan Lee: adjustments accordingly.

XTERRA World Championships

[00:09:55] Jonathan Lee: That’d be pretty sweet. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. I’m sure that some sort of device measurement will come out for that. And if it’s good then. Yeah. I mean, we’re interested in it. So serotonin device creators, let me know. Uh, I want to, I want to talk really quick about Xterra world championships. It’s coming up this weekend.

[00:10:13] Jonathan Lee: I’m taking vacation for a week, uh, with the family and we’re going there. Uh, we’re going there to support our friends, the peaches. So good luck, Shelley. Uh, she’s going to be racing this. I think I made some sort of a bet a long time ago with her that I’ve joked that she went for a run and I was like, be careful, you keep doing that.

[00:10:28] Jonathan Lee: You might turn it into a triathlete. And, uh, sure enough, she has turned into one heck of a triathlete and she’s a really good mountain biker too, and she’s qualified for world. So we’re going to support her as good friends. Do they make the, you know, the sacrifice to go to Hawaii to support their friends.

[00:10:43] Jonathan Lee: Um, but we’re going to support her and also our COO Brandon and my Cape epic partner. He’s gonna race too. So, uh, it’s kind of exciting, Chad. You’ve never done triathlon. You’ve done duathlon. You’ve never done travel.

[00:10:58] Chad Timmerman: No, no, I trained for it and then got injured and it just kind of worked in my favor because I probably would have drowned my swimming.

[00:11:05] Chad Timmerman: I think you’ve already recognized this. You, you were kicking around the idea of going and just giving it a shot since entry is allowing access to people who didn’t didn’t necessarily qualify. But I think he recognized that not only is it an ocean swim, but it’s going to be pretty hairy weather on the, on the day.

[00:11:23] Chad Timmerman: And there is, there’s a legitimate chance of drowning and in situations like that, if you’re not a solid swimmer, not trying to put anybody off and make them worry about the fact that they’re, they’re doing an ocean swim. If you’re a good swimmer, you’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. But I hadn’t ascended to the Heights that, that I think I needed in order to, I mean, it was just a Jesus, just an Olympic distance.

[00:11:44] Chad Timmerman: And I still think I would have drown. So I wasn’t exactly on track to handle the swim very well. And that doesn’t really set you up for the, for the bike. Yeah,

[00:11:52] Jonathan Lee: I have, yeah, I thought about it because like you said, anybody can actually race it this year because they didn’t have enough qualifying races to fill up the event, uh, due to COVID.

[00:12:02] Jonathan Lee: And now there’s even more slots, probably open because of recent developments with that. And a lot of countries being banned to travel to the U S and Hawaii, so really complex. So I thought about it and then I was like, oh, so that’s how you’d meet your death. And I decided I didn’t want to do that yet. So, um, but Ivy, have you done track road racing, mountain bike, track racing, track, low cross racing.

[00:12:29] Jonathan Lee: I think I mentioned cyclocross. Have you done triathlon? Uh, it

[00:12:35] Ivy Audrain: wasn’t a triathlon, I guess it was a duathlon ANSYS bike and

[00:12:39] Jonathan Lee: run right.

[00:12:42] Ivy Audrain: One of my first competitive cycling events. Um, Stopped playing volleyball and was getting into writing and do was in Montana, outside of Missoula, it was an off-road event.

[00:12:54] Ivy Audrain: So, um, a little bit of a single track and then a pretty short run, a couple miles. It was like a, it was a fun event. It was yeah, nothing serious. And so somebody has convinced me to try it and embargoed mountain bike. And not only was I not an experienced writer or endurance athlete in any way, I had no business being there other than for fun.

[00:13:18] Ivy Audrain: But I had like, no idea how to recognize like trail markings or, you know, things that you just pick up on when you start writing trail a lot, like, oh, we’re gonna hop on this like double trap permanent. And then the trail very obviously veers off to the right. Um, I didn’t pick up on cues such as that. And miss

[00:13:38] Jonathan Lee: attorn,

[00:13:41] Ivy Audrain: riding on double track fire roads for like three hours, there is a loss for

[00:13:48] Chad Timmerman: sure.

[00:13:58] Ivy Audrain: uh, there was, you know, the, the ride, the whole portion was five or 10 miles or something. Maybe.

[00:14:07] Jonathan Lee: I

[00:14:08] Ivy Audrain: didn’t know. That was like, would it take me four hours? So they’d take me one. I don’t know. And kept

[00:14:14] Jonathan Lee: writing me in a

loop.

[00:14:18] Ivy Audrain: And finally, someone who is looking for me found me like half a mile before the finish.

[00:14:24] Ivy Audrain: And they’re like, you are IB, aren’t you? I was like, am I awake? They’re like, yeah, we revive you’re here and alive. And

[00:14:35] Jonathan Lee: I

[00:14:37] Ivy Audrain: got back and everyone was barbecuing and, you know,

[00:14:40] Jonathan Lee: super done and finished line was gone. Oh yeah, for sure.

[00:14:45] Ivy Audrain: But my buddy took me on the run, knows it was really short and I’m wanting to finish.

[00:14:50] Ivy Audrain: So we just, we did it and it was great. I can’t believe I continued in any interim sports after that. It should have been home and I should

[00:14:58] Jonathan Lee: have. And so was born the endurance athletes. That’s amazing. No bear encounters either because that would be kind of scary, like a. Plenty of bears up there. So, yeah, so I am not going to meet my fate there at the, at this race, but I am going to be supporting, I will not be it’s on vacation, but just the same if you’re there and you see me, I’d love to see you and cheer for you.

[00:15:26] Jonathan Lee: Um, there’ll be exciting. Uh, cool to cheer y’all on. We’ll be soaked cause it looks like some sort of a mini typhoons sort of a thing is coming in for a few days and it’s just going to dump rain on everyone. So it should be real slick. Bring your mud tires. Brandon’s bringing forecasters on his bike and then I’m bringing my wheels with aspens despairs just in case it isn’t that muddy.

Deep dive on timing strength training and cycling

[00:15:47] Jonathan Lee: I have a whole thing figured out, so it’s going to be cool. Uh, Chad, let’s get into the deep dive. It’s from James. Do you want me to read this one this week? Although you did a fantastic job of reading the last

[00:16:00] Chad Timmerman: punctuated. Yeah. Punctuations I wanted to make. So there’s this one? No, it’s all human.

[00:16:05] Jonathan Lee: All me.

[00:16:06] Jonathan Lee: Cool. James says so many of your episodes talk about the importance of strength training. And I fully agree is a 55 year old guy. I know that I need to up the time I spend doing moderate resistance training. So I’m pretty sure that strength training will add more to my overall quality of life when I’m 80, then riding well, that’s a great assumption for him to make

[00:16:25] Chad Timmerman: he points out.

[00:16:25] Chad Timmerman: He makes a lot of good points. Actually. I want to spoil it

[00:16:27] Jonathan Lee: though. Cool, cool. So I realized that for the elite level writers whose lives revolve around writing this, isn’t an issue, but my life doesn’t revolve around writing. This is resonating with a lot of us here, right? I just really want to beat my mates to the top of the climb and go fast.

[00:16:42] Jonathan Lee: I think that my cycling lifestyle may be similar to many of your listeners. According to previous podcasts. If I do train a road workouts too close to strength training, then my mitochondria cells reverse. Uh, their bio neutron genome insert Chad speak here. I think he’s just

[00:17:01] Chad Timmerman: going to talk about the Bionutrient genome today.

[00:17:03] Jonathan Lee: Exactly. So yeah, science, he says I don’t have the time or desire to work out twice a day after training road workout. I’m too exhausted to do any type of strength training. If I do the strength training first, I can’t complete the workout I need my two rest days.

[00:17:17] Jonathan Lee: I think so now I’m down to two days on the trainer and three days of strength training, which seems like my ride training will suffer. I’ve also thought about lowering my FTP quite a bit so that I can do both workouts back to back. There has got to be an answer to doing these close together and making moderate gains in both.

[00:17:35] Jonathan Lee: You may have covered this exact question in a previous podcast, but I’ve listened to most of them several times. And I still haven’t come up with the, with the black and white answer to this question. This is a great point because he’s talking about. Well, actually, I’m not even going to say it cause I know you’re going to say, and I would butcher it and I would sound like a, the, the science words, buzzwords things that he just inserted.

[00:17:55] Jonathan Lee: So Chad, take it away. Where do you want to start with,

[00:17:58] Chad Timmerman: so James, this is a, this is a really big topic. It kind of revolves around concurrent training, which we’re going to talk about. And, and your question specifically is something I want to address in more detail than I could with the other things I want to cover that are going to set up a better answer to your primary question, which is how to, how to kind of make strength, training and endurance training play.

[00:18:18] Chad Timmerman: Nice. So next podcast and I won’t be here next week, but I’ll be here. The following week is going to be w w w we’ll cover how you add strength training to an endurance training regimen and basically fatigue management when you do it, because that’s really what we’re talking about here. So the objective today going to kind of lay the groundwork for that.

[00:18:36] Chad Timmerman: And I’m going to explain why I believe that we’re not at the mercy of what’s what’s called the interference effect. Okay. So interference effects basically states that opposing stimuli. And then in our case, that’s combining endurance training with strength, training, something termed concurrent training.

[00:18:53] Chad Timmerman: These stimuli negatively impact many of the sought after adaptations that endurance training and strength training can bring us. So if you think of exercise on a spectrum, we have endurance at one end and we have strength and hypertrophy at the other approach V being bigger muscle fibers. So put in another way, we kind of have substrate metabolism or how we metabolize fat and carbohydrate on one end and on the other central nervous system adaptation and muscle synthesis.

[00:19:18] Chad Timmerman: Okay. So endurance training improves our ability to metabolize or break down fuel to create energy where strength training actually improves our ability to generate force via the buildup of muscle tissue. So endurance training is a catabolic process, strength training, especially on the hypertrophy side is an anabolic process.

[00:19:38] Chad Timmerman: And then when you think of strength training on the neuro side, I still view it as anabolic because he looked no further than the physiologic phenomenon of neuroplasticity, where, where we actually form and reorganize neural connections. I mean, that’s a form of building, right? It’s definitely not breaking down.

[00:19:54] Chad Timmerman: So

[00:19:55] Jonathan Lee: when we train for

[00:19:57] Chad Timmerman: opposite physiological goals, so we’re simultaneously trying to improve catabolic and anabolic processes. We’re trying to simultaneously improve endurance and strength. This leads to adaptive interference, AKA the interference effect. So to put it really simply endurance adaptations are harmed by strength, training and vice versa, but nevermind the vice-versa, we’re going to focus on the fact that we’re worried about strength, training, influencing, negatively influencing our endurance adaptations.

[00:20:25] Chad Timmerman: So the, the gist of this is that we, we can balance the conflicting training stimuli and not dilute the adaptive response we’re specifically looking for. And concurrent training proponents believe that both forms of training are beneficial and the balance can be struck that we can increase our fatigue, resistance, and we can increase our muscle size and force producing capabilities, push the pedals harder, right?

[00:20:49] Chad Timmerman: The assumption is that neither the endurance adaptation nor the strength training will ever be optimal. But the more I read, the more I learn, I believe that’s an arguable assumption because the research around both concurrent training and the interference effect often falls short and it does so in a number of ways.

[00:21:06] Chad Timmerman: And that’s the gist of what I want to cover here. I have about five different subtopics, some, some super succinct, some are going to might feel a little bit bloated. All of them are what I feel are fair criticisms of why we can’t lean in too heavily into this whole interference effect idea, not to the point where it tells us what we can and cannot do in terms of combining strength, training, and endurance training.

[00:21:30] Jonathan Lee: So first put this in really simple terms, really quick, that strength training. Because of the processes that go on in your body when you strength, train, that makes it so that you can not get as affective of adaptations from your bike training and vice versa. That’s the, that’s the concept that doing one will hurt the other, right?

[00:21:49] Jonathan Lee: Yeah.

[00:21:50] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. These are they’re, they’re effectively conflicting messages. So we send one message. We want one specific set of adaptations, but then we send an almost opposite message and one adaptations associated with that opposite message and there’s interference between the two sets of messages and their interpretations, and hence the adaptations that we want to come with them.

[00:22:10] Chad Timmerman: Awesome. Cool. Okay. So criticism number one has to do with mechanism and talked about this a number of times, and that it’s a long road from what we see at the cellular and the molecular level to what’s our end game performance improvement. So we can get him, we can see improved performance, even in the face of this interference effect.

[00:22:28] Chad Timmerman: I mean, that’s the gist of my whole argument. So an example is a study that looked at recreationally active women. Another study looked at professional soccer players. Another study looked at male and female military recruits. And in all cases, they use a combination of sprint intensity training. So high intensity interval training, and they combined it with strength training, which is a, in this case, heavy strength training.

[00:22:51] Chad Timmerman: So low volume, high intensity. And in all examples, they enhance their overall performance in the relative fields. So in, in, in all three of these cases, pretty, pretty wide diversity in types of players, what they need to, to perform better. They all, they saw also improvements. So the takeaway is that an understanding underlying.

[00:23:13] Chad Timmerman: And understanding underlying mechanism doesn’t promise results. So, so, so it doesn’t matter how well we can see into the details, how well we can look at the cells and the molecules and say, okay, there’s amp K and M Tor and torso one, do this to PGC one alpha, this is metabolic or catabolic. This is anabolic.

[00:23:30] Chad Timmerman: It doesn’t matter how well we understand that, how that translates to performance still. Isn’t super clear cut. So I’m not saying we can ride off and forget mechanism, but I am saying just because we understand mechanism doesn’t necessarily mean we understand the performance outcome.

[00:23:44] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. Well said, Chad, cause that’s like a, that’s a common pitfall that we fall into with everything, the scientific research so many times.

[00:23:52] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. Because the mechanisms seem real. Right. Uh, but like you said, there’s so much filtering that gets in between you and then pushing your pedals faster.

[00:24:01] Chad Timmerman: Well, and I think that, I mean, this is the impetus behind why I wanted to revisit the interference effect because the first time we explained this, I was completely deep into the mechanism.

[00:24:11] Chad Timmerman: I was looking at the alphabet soup of all these things and all their interactions and what they mean for mitochondrial biogenesis and what they mean for strength adaptation that I lost sight of the fact that yep. This, this makes sense way down at the mechanistic level, but again, does it translate to performance?

[00:24:26] Chad Timmerman: Yep. Okay. So another criticism of a lot of the research surrounding, uh, concurrent training and the interference effect is training status. A lot of studies fail to consider the differences in the subjects training. And there’s a lot of evidence of this, uh, the evidence that the introduction of endurance training into a strength training program.

[00:24:47] Chad Timmerman: And I realize that’s backwards from what we’re talking about, but this is an example of how compromise lower body strength happens in trained, but not moderately trained or untrained individuals. So in the case of the trained individuals, it was actually less pronounced when they separated the sessions.

[00:25:02] Chad Timmerman: And we always talk about how much we have to separate the sessions and we talk doing it the next day, do it at the end of the day. But in this case, they only separated by a couple of hours and they saw a decrease in the interference effect for highly trained or at least trained strength athletes. So that already tipped us off to the fact that, oh, maybe there’s not too much to worry about.

[00:25:20] Chad Timmerman: Pardon me? All right. Another study looked at high intensity interval training on the bike, right after heavy strength training. And this was, this was looking at the effects of muscle strength and hypertrophy. Sorry. Okay. So in this study in particular, they, over the course of eight weeks took untrained college males, how to work out a couple of times a week.

[00:25:43] Chad Timmerman: And they both saw similar increases in strength and hypertrophy, so they can move more weight and they had bigger muscle fibers. Yes. Their rate of force development and their other snap did decrease in the combination group. But on the other side of things, the capillary density and the aerobic capacity increased in the combination group.

[00:26:01] Chad Timmerman: So the takeaway is that strength plus immediate high-intensity interval training after led to significant increases in some of the areas that are relevant to endurance athletes, and it didn’t inhibit the strength gains in the untrained young men. So again, training status is something that actually has to be looked at.

[00:26:18] Chad Timmerman: And I think a lot of us maybe don’t qualify as untrained, but probably most of us fall into the moderately

[00:26:22] Jonathan Lee: trained group.

[00:26:26] Chad Timmerman: Now, when it comes to, uh, concurrent training and untrained females, specifically a study looked at concurrent training with different aerobic exercises and different intensities. And this was a decent, decent sample size.

[00:26:37] Chad Timmerman: They had 44 young women physically active, but they hadn’t done any structured training. At least three months. Prior to this study, they separated them into four groups where they did strength, training, all the same strength training, but then some of them did run workout. Some of them did bike workouts.

[00:26:53] Chad Timmerman: Some of them were intervals. Some of them are continuous, so they really varied it quite a lot. Adam do it a couple of times a week for 11 weeks and the concurrent training yielded similar neuromuscular adaptations. So that, that neural adaptation that these to strength benefits over the strength alone.

[00:27:08] Chad Timmerman: And on top of it, they got increased endurance capacity. Now more support that the higher training status can actually lead to greater interference effect. Was it very recent systematic review and meta analysis that looked at strength development during concurrent training. And once again, untrained, moderately trained, trained individuals in this, I think 20.

[00:27:28] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. In fact, 27 studies actually met inclusion criteria, 750 participants, and they confirmed that as athletes become more trained, uh, concurrent training actually leads to smaller strength gains than just strictly. So strength green strength gains are likely to be harder earned as earned Durance if this is sense, and this is kind of a known thing, but what’s not so known is that even inexperienced strength athletes, there was no significant impact on strength gains.

[00:27:56] Chad Timmerman: If the sessions were separated by in this case, just three hours. So no interference effect with just a little three hour gap in between workouts. And this actually carried the same session, chronic, uh, concurrent training too. So, so athletes who did their endurance training and went directly to strength training 10, 15 minutes later, or vice versa.

[00:28:16] Chad Timmerman: No, uh, no evidence of the interference effect. So takeaway one is if you’re untrained, forget the term interference effect, it doesn’t apply to you. It’s not something you need to concern yourself with. Probably the same with moderately trained athletes again, which is where a lot of us fall. Second takeaway is that when targeting strength gains consider prioritizing your strength work, and that we’ve talked about that a number of times, what’s more important to you.

[00:28:38] Chad Timmerman: We’ll place emphasis on

[00:28:39] Jonathan Lee: that. So this is interesting because if you’re a strength athlete and let’s say you’re really going for lifting heavy things, and that’s your goal, and you just want to supplement it on the bike, it seems like there’s a greater chance at having possible interruption there, like with having your strength training, be effected by adding more endurance training possibly.

[00:28:58] Jonathan Lee: But when you go the other way, when you’re talking about athletes that are prioritizing endurance training, the strength training doesn’t seem to come at the cost of.

[00:29:05] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. And I honestly wish it were that simple. It’s not quite that simple, but that, that, that does hold up for the most part. And most people don’t need to dig any more deeply than

[00:29:13] Jonathan Lee: that.

[00:29:14] Jonathan Lee: Leave it to me to over-simplify

[00:29:16] Chad Timmerman: no, no, no. That’s appreciated. Okay. So another criticism. With the research surrounding these two things is, is training variables. And basically we’re talking about the interplay of training volume, the lower, the intensity, depending if it’s on the bike in the gym exercise selection, and that’s something we’re going to dive in more deeply on the next podcast, et cetera.

[00:29:37] Chad Timmerman: So a study that I was found really enlightening was by five Bishop in Steptoe back in 2014. And I liked it, especially because along with the, the words, all the hard words, they diagrammed, the interference interference effect that concept. And if you link to it, if you wanna look at it, it speaker two. And they showed that endurance training has effects on the strength training response.

[00:29:59] Chad Timmerman: So if the intensity and or the volume of your endurance training is too high, the results in what you’d expect is residual fatigue, but that can lead to a decrease in force production, which is tied hand in hand with a decrease in type two fibers. That can lead to a compromised strength training stimulus, and a reduced anabolic response to strength training.

[00:30:19] Chad Timmerman: Okay. Same thing goes with substrate depletion. So you do an endurance workout prior to your strength training and you go in with depleted glycogen stores that can lead to increased amino acid oxidation. So now you’re burning muscle neighboring a protein. This is, this is the fear we all, we’ve talked about a number of times that many people worry about probably too much so, but it’s still still a topic.

[00:30:39] Chad Timmerman: And that leads to that same reduction in the anabolic response to strength training. So this, this same diagram by five and colleagues also address the proximity of exercise sessions and noted that if endurance training, proceeds, strength, training, both that, uh, residual fatigue and that substrate depletion are in play during your strength training.

[00:30:59] Chad Timmerman: Uh, and then if one session is in too close proximity, meaning you didn’t gap it enough in order to, in, in, uh, relative to that other session, the endurance training session, same thing happens. They, along these lines, another very recent study looked at the impact of low volume concurrent training on muscle adaptation.

[00:31:16] Chad Timmerman: And this is actually interesting. They looked at 290 military conscripts conscripts, totally randomized assignment. I mean, there was, there’s just no rhyme or reason to it. You got plunked into one of these two groups and you worked out for nine weeks. You either did four by 15 minute strength sessions or plus four by 15 minute endurance sessions.

[00:31:36] Chad Timmerman: Or you simply did a one by 60 of each and they were separated by at least two hours. And in no cases, did you work out more than three sessions per day? So at the most like 60 minutes per day, Uh, they looked at a whole lot of measures of strength and endurance and physiologic adaptation. And what they found was it didn’t really matter which protocol was followed.

[00:31:58] Chad Timmerman: So I think this poses, the collection that have shorter and longer workouts yields similar results in so many ways. Why do we care at all? And my answer is because fatigue it’s affects on consistency, its effects on subsequent workout, quality, its affects on the quality of the workout you’re in, especially when it comes to strength, training, the idea of if you have four sets and you train to failure on that first set, how does that impact sets two, three, and four.

[00:32:20] Chad Timmerman: And that’s something we’re going to ongoing. Elaborate on the next time we talk about. So the point is, is that, uh, one of the points I’m trying to make is that these variables are all aspects of the interference effect that are well within our control. So recognize it or not all this stuff that happens at the mechanistic levels.

[00:32:36] Chad Timmerman: We still have ways to influence how much this interference effect actually impacts our eventual outcome, our performance. Okay. Next criticism of some, not all of the literature on these topics is the order of exercise sessions. And this is, this is a tough one. This is the one where I think we get a heck of a lot of questions.

[00:32:57] Chad Timmerman: If I do my strength training first, if I follow it after VO two max work, if, oh man, so many permutations. So I’m going to lean on one of my favorite researchers, Keith Barr, and his paper using molecular biology to maximize concurrent training and a few specific recommendations because these, these seem to bear out across the literature, uh, high intensity interval.

[00:33:21] Chad Timmerman: Perform at first, give it a three hour gap. The idea being for the endurance signaling to return to baseline before you do your strength training, the signaling for which can last at least 18 hours post in that gap fully refueled during, and during that interim stretch. And this is backed up by a couple of studies, probably cited in his paper where metabolic signaling responses to endurance training inhibit protein synthesis.

[00:33:46] Chad Timmerman: So this is an anti anabolic, so it doesn’t have to be catabolic. It’s just not promoting the anabolic side of things that could be taking place, but these are relatively transient. Don’t last as long compared with the anabolic signaling to follow strength training. So to put that simply endurance training, signaling fades quickly, strength, training, failing, uh, signaling fades slowly.

[00:34:06] Jonathan Lee: So, um, imply that it may be better to do your endurance training first and strength training. If you were to fit it into a day, is that what that’s getting at there?

[00:34:16] Chad Timmerman: That, yeah. Yep. Basically. I mean, there’s no real optimal because there are other factors. If we could have things exactly the way we want it, if our days were wide open and we could structure our workouts based on no other commitments or obligations.

[00:34:30] Chad Timmerman: Yep. Probably interesting. But even then probably not. Definitely. Yeah. Okay. Another, another of his recommendations is strength training later in the day, followed by protein ingestion. And this just makes sense. He got specific and said, leucine. Protein ingestion. And then he said again, prior to bed. So this does assume that we’re trying to build muscle mass, but I mean, if you’re engaging in strength training, whether you want to, or not, a little bit of muscle mass is going to creep into the picture, it doesn’t mean you’re going to bulk up.

[00:34:58] Chad Timmerman: Doesn’t mean you’re going to kill your strength to weight ratio, but bigger muscles can do more work. Can, can create more force. Another recommendation of his was that performing strength training after low intensity training actually accentuates the endurance adaptation. So when I say low intensity training, basically talking about endurance work, so riding around 60, 65% threshold, and it actually accentuates this endurance endurance adaptation more than just doing that low intensity training alone and the low intensity training won’t actually impact the strength training signaling.

[00:35:31] Chad Timmerman: So an aerobic endurance ride followed by strength training actually yields can yield has shown evidence of better endurance adaptations.

[00:35:40] Jonathan Lee: This is like, I know there’s no room for anecdote here, but I’m going to throw money into, because they’re dealing with studies with like much larger scale. But I don’t know if you’ve noticed this Ivy, but when I am keeping up on my strength training and I’m being very diligent with it, in addition to that, I am absolute.

[00:35:59] Jonathan Lee: I feel like I am faster on the bike. That doesn’t mean that I can press harder on the pedals. That doesn’t mean. And my assumption is always, this is that it’s that the strength training in some way is actually helping magnify or helping increase those adaptations that I’m getting from the endurance training.

[00:36:16] Jonathan Lee: But have you noticed that too though? Like where they go hand in hand and you have like a compound effect?

[00:36:21] Ivy Audrain: Yeah. And I feel like every, I’m not sure how to describe it. I guess it’s hard to quantify. Right. But feeling like you have a strong trunk and a strong core and find your more comprehensively solid makes the effort on the bike for you.

[00:36:39] Ivy Audrain: Less leg heavy. It’s hard to describe, but I agree with you and especially with the offer of disciplines to, um, yeah, definitely want to refute this. Uh, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know if James was implying that, you know, people that are just roaming around writing, they, they don’t do as much weight training or that it’s not a problem for them, but like even.

[00:37:02] Ivy Audrain: All the elite cyclocross athletes that I’ve traveled with this year, everyone’s doing stuff off the bike between races every week, day. It’s

[00:37:11] Jonathan Lee: totally part of our routine. Um,

[00:37:12] Chad Timmerman: no, I, the, I took issue with that, that sentiment as well. I think James just doesn’t understand that even at the elite level strength training, and then I don’t really like the term resistance training simply because even pedaling the bike is a form of resistance training.

[00:37:26] Chad Timmerman: So I’d like to lean more towards strength training, but strength training comes in a lot of different forms and it can be inter entirely bodyweight. It can be entirely isometric and they carry benefits and pro-level high-level world level athletes still do some form of it. And then some of them do quite a lot of it.

[00:37:44] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. Yeah. Well said, all right, Chad, sorry for my anecdotal interruption here. Nope.

[00:37:50] Chad Timmerman: Jump in, jump in. It’s quite a lot of info. Yeah. Okay. So the, the least interference consensus seems to be that separating your endurance training from your strength training by at least a day. So 24 hours between training stimulations is, is optimal, but researchers commonly recognized time constraints.

[00:38:08] Chad Timmerman: It’s just the way it is. So what I want to tell you, not to worry. And, and one of the reasons why I say that is because of a, well, just more evidence at 2017 systematic review and meta analysis on concurrent strength and endurance training sequence. So this was a review of literature up through 2016, noted the endurance training before strength training versus the other way around.

[00:38:29] Chad Timmerman: So, and then use lower body one RM strength and VO two max. So they were measuring strength with, you know, how much you, I think squat one time max and your, your actual VO two max and the inclusion criteria for this review was greater than eight weeks of training. They use males and females, teens, and seniors trained and untrained, and they separate.

[00:38:51] Chad Timmerman: The training modes by five to 10 minutes. So we’re basically talking same session workouts and they found that one RM or so your max strength was higher when strength training came first, but there was no change in VO two max, regardless of the session order. So the takeaway being is that training order for endurance athletes who are concerned with VO two max may not really matter.

[00:39:11] Jonathan Lee: Hmm. Interesting. Cause that’s that hits it. One of the main questions, right? Is that where do I stack them in my day? Yup. Huh.

[00:39:21] Chad Timmerman: Honestly, I think most of this is just, we, we think too much about it because. Fortunately, unfortunately we understand mechanism and it, and it messes with us. Yeah.

[00:39:31] Jonathan Lee: Okay. So another sort of thinking things exactly.

[00:39:34] Jonathan Lee: It’s a cerebral sport. Yeah, it is a,

[00:39:38] Chad Timmerman: okay. So another criticism is, uh, how fatigue is treated. So endurance training sadly is often just overlaid with the addition of strength training, but that’s how it is. It’s not, I’m going to add strength training to it. So I’m going to cut back on my endurance training in such and such ways rather.

[00:39:52] Chad Timmerman: It’s just, oh, I’m going to pile this on top. See how things go. So we kind of covered residual fatigue up top, but what about fatigue due to this increase in training load? So a paper by coffee and then John Holly, it was a review 2016 asking do these opposites attract and I want to quote. It’s possible that acute residual fatigue from a previous exercise session and or chronic fatigue due to undertaking a greater total workload to match adaptive responses of single mode training are generating the interference effect.

[00:40:24] Chad Timmerman: So simply we’re outpacing our adaptive resources. It’s too much stress it’s too much fatigue. We can’t.

[00:40:30] Jonathan Lee: Yep. It’s common. You, we hear athletes all the time. Say I added strength training, and now that I’ve added strength training, it’s hard to come. You know, I don’t feel like I’m improving quite as much at the same rate.

[00:40:40] Jonathan Lee: That’s typical what we hear for the first week, two weeks, three weeks, something like that. Um, because like you said, had. They’re keeping everything the same and they may even operating it. Uh, even if they had more time, they could have added more and more stress to what they were doing before. The fact is they have now added on more stress and, but we’d like to compartmentalize it and keep everything in such a vacuum where we’re like, no, this is my bike stress.

[00:41:04] Jonathan Lee: So it should be fine. And I should not feel any different than all of the other forms of stress that I’m bringing into my life, which this one in terms of strength, training is quite literal and very direct and comparable to what we’re doing. Right.

[00:41:15] Chad Timmerman: Well, as endurance athletes, I mean, we’re juggling a lot of balls, so we’re trying to do quite a lot of training.

[00:41:19] Chad Timmerman: And if you’re a multi-sport athlete, quite a lot of different forms of training, and then we just layer the strength training on top, and it’s understandable, you know, you want to include this too, but you, in some cases, maybe you can accommodate that additional stress. But I think in too many cases, it’s just, it’s just that little bit, that straw that breaks the camel’s back, that it’s just.

[00:41:38] Chad Timmerman: You have to figure it out somewhere else that you’re going to tone things down, such that you can accommodate this. And that, that would be my advice on this matter for any athlete over coaching is to tone it back, you know, cut out one workout, attitudes, 30 minutes, strength training sessions, and then you can bring that workout back later.

[00:41:55] Chad Timmerman: If you understand, if you see evidence of. The fact that you’re accommodating this new increase in a different type of stress too. So not only is it more stress, but it’s the type of stress. Your body’s probably not at all accustomed to

[00:42:08] Jonathan Lee: I’m

[00:42:08] Ivy Audrain: laughing because even, uh, even just core, it was like the easiest thing to want to cut out whenever I’m blamed for flopping around it’s

[00:42:26] Ivy Audrain: things to kind of between training and work and. Preparing food for myself and sleeping. It’s the easiest thing to want,

[00:42:35] Chad Timmerman: but that’s a super good point. Even core training. You think I’m just going to do a little bit of core training at the end of the day, because core training is easy. Well, it’s not, it’s really not, not if you want it to be effective, especially.

[00:42:45] Chad Timmerman: So it is yet another form of stress or you’re piling on top of it. And if you’re dead tired, even just rolling over on the floor to do a plank for a minute at a time, that’s this more work, that’s a body that could be convalescing that is now asked to do a total body muscle.

[00:43:03] Jonathan Lee: There’ve been multiple times where I’ve like laid down with the intent of doing core work or something else where they have the foam roller or something else.

[00:43:10] Jonathan Lee: I just find myself flipping the foam roller in my hands. I was just like, I’m not doing this right now, you know? Yeah. I’m sure we’ve all done that hopefully that’s relatable for more than just me right now. So yeah. Okay. And then

[00:43:24] Chad Timmerman: probably my favorite topic of late is, is nutrition and how it impacts all these things that shame shamefully I have to admit.

[00:43:31] Chad Timmerman: I didn’t look as hard as I should have in years past. So nutrition is typically poorly addressed and often overlooked entirely in so many of these studies. So my question is, could the interference effect be less about competing signals and more about insufficient nutrition? I do think it’s a question worth asking, even if there’s nothing there.

[00:43:51] Chad Timmerman: So if really this is a matter of endurance versus strength, which is really a matter of catabolic versus anabolic, which is really a matter of substrate metabolism versus protein synthesis. Then it’s kind of a matter of carbohydrate and fat versus protein intake. If we want to look at it from a nutritional perspective.

[00:44:08] Chad Timmerman: So if we go back to that five paper, No one with the diagram, they talk about substrate, substrate, depletion. So carbohydrate and fat depletion leads to a decrease in the anabolic response. And this translates to both an increase in protein breakdown and a decrease in protein synthesis. But what if you nourish properly?

[00:44:27] Chad Timmerman: This may be the question. It’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough to many of the concurrent training interference effects, studies neglect to address nutrition. And one example is a study that looked at concurrent exercise and muscle protein synthesis, and yes, for space crews. I get it, but I’ll allow, here’s why strength training following in this case, 90 minutes of strenuous aerobic cycling led to suppress protein synthesis.

[00:44:56] Chad Timmerman: There was no mention of additional nutrition in this post 90 minute. Pre-write post this 90 minute pre-write, which was also followed with 30 minutes of rest. So basically by all indications, these athletes went to hours about. Only mentions of nutrition in this entire study, where first, the ensure plus dinner that they had the night before, which is 50% of their daily caloric intake in the form of those godawful little meal replacement shakes.

[00:45:24] Chad Timmerman: Secondly, they

[00:45:27] Jonathan Lee: can see that this is a male Jackson.

[00:45:32] Chad Timmerman: So, so th they did concede that the poor nutritional status of astronauts in orbit may contribute to the ineffectiveness of the exercise countermeasures.

[00:45:44] Chad Timmerman: Okay. So how about fast at training? It’s a pretty buzzy topic, but fast, the training would have to recognize has very specific targeted outcomes, but even still, whenever you read about facet training, it’s usually accompanied with warnings talking about don’t overdo it, ideally employed in moderation, only inappropriate scenarios with respect to duration and intensity.

[00:46:03] Chad Timmerman: So the point is even when insufficient nutrition is the intention, nutritional intake is still of keen importance. Also nutrition is yet another variable within our control. So I ask why wouldn’t all studies around concurrent training interference, effect, closely track nutrition, but there’s a lot to be gained there, but do it for no other reason than to rule this out as an influence on their findings.

[00:46:27] Chad Timmerman: I

[00:46:27] Jonathan Lee: think I know why Chad, it’s hard. Like when in, in, if you’re dealing with so many. Study subjects like some of these, you know, with like 290 with those military conscripts and things like that, you know, that’s understandable everybody to eat. I mean, even when you’re dealing with a few people to get them to eat the same thing.

[00:46:46] Jonathan Lee: And then also who’s to say that those people will react similarly to this same exact dietary restriction. Right. It’s I couldn’t agree

[00:46:54] Chad Timmerman: more. I think that’s a very solid point, but it doesn’t remove the fact or it doesn’t a Bolivia. The fact that this is still something hugely important to consider. And just about any study surrounding exercise, we have to know how the, the, the participants we’re

[00:47:08] Jonathan Lee: nourished a great it’s.

[00:47:10] Jonathan Lee: It’s kind of like a drawback of the clinical study model right. In this. Complicated to do that. And the answer to usually weeding out and getting rid of a lot of those variables is to have more study subjects. So then you can average things out, but then it just gets even more complex to control that.

[00:47:26] Jonathan Lee: So, but, but like you said, even though it’s very difficult, that still doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done because what we put into our bodies is absolutely what we get out in terms of performance. So to ignore that is, yeah, it should

[00:47:41] Chad Timmerman: at least be included in the study design, you know, whether or not they’re super happy with how well they did it and how honest their participants were and how well they follow the dietary recommendations.

[00:47:50] Chad Timmerman: It should at least be part of it. And maybe it probably is if I paid attention to old studies versus newer studies, I’m sure it’s better represented these days than then. Okay. So on a related note, um, and these are two interesting points to kind of, uh, conflict with one another, but caloric restriction, induces anabolic resistance, strength training.

[00:48:11] Chad Timmerman: So basically if you’re starving yourself, don’t expect big strength or hypertrophy gains. Okay. That, that ended up itself. That’s obvious if we’re not furnishing enough protein, we’re doing a bunch of strength training and our muscles don’t get bigger. That’s, that’s, shouldn’t be surprising to anybody, but then camera and colleagues in 2012, demonstrated that low glycogen doesn’t necessarily suppress anabolic response to drink strength training.

[00:48:31] Chad Timmerman: So kind of the other side, the other side of things, and there’s a reason I brought this up and I’ll get to it. They looked at 16 physically fit males. They had, uh, so their histories where they trained at least three times a week, concurrent training for more than a year, they all had VO two max is roughly in the 50 ballparks.

[00:48:47] Chad Timmerman: So they weren’t deconditioned. They weren’t highly conditioned somewhere between moderately trained as I refer to it. Um, they did one. Or they depleted of glycogen. The, uh, they did a 10 minutes, a couple of minute breaks at 75% of their two leg VO, two max. So that’s tough. I mean, the calculator VO two max with two legs, and then they had one leg do that work for 75% of that work until basically they cooked it.

[00:49:09] Chad Timmerman: They depleted it of glycogen and then had both legs do eight times. Unilateral leg press. So one leg leg presses at about 80% of one RM. So this is pretty hard work and it’s quite a lot of work. So the takeaway is that in the event that you perform muscle endurance work, so say you do threshold repeats over, under sweet spot work, and you can eat before your strength training.

[00:49:31] Chad Timmerman: The anabolic signaling may not suffer as much as you think, as a result of let’s say occasional glycogen storage. I’m not saying this is something you should do on a routine basis, but if it happens, don’t sweat it. You may still actually get something out of your strength training. And this is, this provides us with an example of high metabolic endurance training followed by high volume strength training and how the two can still play.

[00:49:52] Chad Timmerman: Nice, at least in the short term

[00:49:54] Jonathan Lee: and key to differentiate. Chad’s talking about the fact that if you don’t have all that glycogen nonsense, Full 10 bottles filled. So to speak in that regard with strength training, it will not be as harmed as much, however, under

[00:50:08] Chad Timmerman: exactly. So, so if at the end of the day you’ve done your earn string earlier, you ran yourself down, you realize, man, I haven’t replaced all that glycogen.

[00:50:15] Chad Timmerman: This is going to be a terrible strength training workout. I’m probably not even going to, is anyone worthwhile? I’m not going to get the anabolic signaling that I’m after. Well, this study says maybe not. Yeah. Cool. Okay. And then a, a study a few years back by Wong and, uh, colleagues demonstrated that the addition of strength training can actually enhance mitochondrial biogenesis, which is something we chase with endurance training, but this is being yielded by the strength training side of things.

[00:50:40] Chad Timmerman: So they, they had athletes or participants do an hour. It’s about 65% of the OTM. So we’re talking about in the ballpark of 80% of your FTP, they rested for 15 minutes and then they did six sets of leg press at about 70 to 80% of their one rep max. So, so reasonably high intensity, as many as. Or 15, whichever came first, but either way fair amount of work and contrary to their expectations, the strength training, following the endurance training, amplified this mitochondrial biogenesis biogenic signaling compared to the endurance training alone.

[00:51:13] Chad Timmerman: So they actually got better endurance adaptation, or at least, you know, more mitochondrial proliferation or signaling to it than if they just did their endurance training. So the takeaway beings at one hour of moderate intensity cycling closely followed by pretty strenuous lower body strength training actually increased endurance adaptation, providing us with an example of moderate intensity cycling on the bike.

[00:51:36] Chad Timmerman: And then ho w with the addition of high volume, lower body strength work, and it didn’t negatively impact endurance.

[00:51:44] Jonathan Lee: I mean Ivy and I could have saved them a whole lot of time and just told them that. But, you know,

[00:51:51] Jonathan Lee: we’re just, we’re just

[00:51:52] Ivy Audrain: psyched to hear it backed

[00:51:52] Jonathan Lee: by science.

[00:52:00] Jonathan Lee: That’s it? That’s awesome. Okay.

[00:52:04] Chad Timmerman: So finally, I want to look at the landmark study that actually inspired this entire avenue of research. So we’ve got to go back to 1980, where Hickson, uh, Robert Robert Hickson, uh, basically looked at the interference of strength development by simultaneously training for strength and endurance it’s title of the study.

[00:52:21] Chad Timmerman: It’s linked. And some subsequent criticisms and these aren’t even mine, but I agree with all of them. And I punctuated it with little, uh, bits of my own editorialization. So first Hickson’s moderately trained athletes would not meet today’s standards for moderately trained, uh, and a quote, several of the subjects were active in recreational sports, but none had been training on a regular basis for at least three months prior to the start of the exercise program.

[00:52:48] Chad Timmerman: That to me says, untrained, maybe not completely deconditioned, never trained, but that’s untrained. That’s the three month gap. Then let’s look at the protocols themselves. This is fascinating. And for a number of reasons that we’ll talk about first, the endurance protocol, six days a week for 10 weeks, they had to do six by five VO, two maximum.

[00:53:10] Chad Timmerman: On on three of those days on the other three days, 40 minutes of running as fast as they can. So basically high-end VO two max work on the bike or low end VO, two max work on the run, but they were just flogging themselves six days a week for 10 weeks in a row on the strength side, only five days a week for the same 10 weeks.

[00:53:29] Chad Timmerman: And it was all about legs five by five squats, three by five of knee flection and extension three by five of leg, press three by 20 calf raises when these were divvied up on different days, but five days of this, and it was all done with as much weight as possible, which suggests to me training to failure, which again, we’re going to talk about next week.

[00:53:49] Chad Timmerman: So, and then the third protocol, which was endurance plus strength, and it was just these together. Just combine them, just do it all with exactly. So, so that the combination one is just more work plain and simple. They didn’t volume match it. Okay. They didn’t tone anything down to, to make it the same volume across groups support, and Sobey’s just had to do all of it.

[00:54:12] Chad Timmerman: So these, these are all massive

[00:54:15] Jonathan Lee: in this

[00:54:16] Chad Timmerman: case, it is navies. It was so these are all massive doses of training for any athlete, let alone untrained athletes so that another criticism not mine is that the endurance groups are on the order of two and a half times. The amount of endurance training that has been used in subs.

[00:54:33] Chad Timmerman: Similar studies. So no one has taken things to this extreme sense. And it sounds like I’m ripping on Hixon here, but we all have the benefit of hindsight. He was a frontiersman. He was this his first time laying it out there. Here’s my theory. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to beat him up real bad and see how these two things intertwined.

[00:54:51] Chad Timmerman: So can’t fault him at all can fall the athletes who stuck it out for 10 weeks though. I, I hope they were paid well. Okay. So lastly, fatigue, nutrition, sleep, hydration, recovery, none of those things were described, which just leaves us to wonder. So again, my takeaway is not a critique of this landmark first time study, but rather a criticism of anyone who leans into this study without considering or knowing the details.

[00:55:15] Chad Timmerman: Okay. So put another way, if this is your basis for argument is perhaps not the strongest support for the interference effect. Okay. And in closing, I’m just going to read you my three overall takeaways first. The interference effect simply doesn’t have enough unequivocal support to deter any athlete from combining strength, training and endurance training.

[00:55:34] Chad Timmerman: Be clear on that. Secondly, at least in my opinion, secondly, unless you’re at the elite level, there’s almost certainly more to be gained from concurrent training or I’m sorry, strength training, plus endurance training than a Durance training alone, regardless of workout, order intensity duration, proximity to other workouts, combination of workouts, et cetera.

[00:55:52] Chad Timmerman: Don’t get hung up on the details. Doing both they’re both beneficial. And then thirdly, adaptation has to be nourished even in facet training, which may inspire signaling that can lead to adaptations. The downstream adaptations themselves have to be nourished.

[00:56:07] Jonathan Lee: It was a really good, uh, good takeaways for athletes to be able to apply.

[00:56:11] Jonathan Lee: And like, these are things that I should do with strength, training and keep in mind moving forward. Now

[00:56:17] Chad Timmerman: I hope to get a little more specific, so not next week, but the week. After I’m still trying to put it all together. Cause this is, this is literally half of the research I came up with on this topic, which is why I got divided into two, two podcasts.

[00:56:31] Chad Timmerman: So I got to trim that down, such that we can have some very actionable takeaways so that people aren’t still left wondering, well, what does that mean? What do I do next time? I go to the gym. So give me, give me a couple of weeks. We’ll see what I can put together.

[00:56:45] Jonathan Lee: Awesome. Cool. Thank you, Chad. A great insight into that and I’m glad to know that Ivy and I are scientific.

Rapid Fire questions

[00:56:52] Jonathan Lee: So, uh, let’s get some rapid fire. Matt says I’ve been using train road now for the past couple of years across the winter months. And now looking to use it year round, heading into the 2022 and 2023 season. The problem I have is that I am coming into this winter of 21, having not trained for several years.

[00:57:10] Jonathan Lee: Long story short. I’m the unfitest. I have been heading into the winter train road training season. It sounds like just an off season, uh, in this case, Matt, so, okay. Don’t worry about it. He says the question I have is should I select some random workouts to get back up to speed prior to a ramp test? Or should I just crack a crack and live with the, and he says in quotes disappointing, starting our base point.

[00:57:30] Jonathan Lee: Any suggestions are welcome. Uh, love train road. Thanks from Matt Ivy. Uh, what would you say? Okay.

[00:57:36] Ivy Audrain: We’ll all of our athletes train so much more and so much harder than I would ever taking a few weeks off is a detriment and makes you feel like you’re there, but as you’ve ever been, that’s crazy to me, this is totally normal off season.

[00:57:53] Ivy Audrain: It’s totally okay to take a few weeks off and

[00:57:56] Jonathan Lee: also

[00:57:58] Ivy Audrain: it’s totally necessary. And starting from that base point and feeling like you have a lot of ground to make up and something to work towards is exciting for me. Uh, don’t be sad, Matt. Just

[00:58:13] Jonathan Lee: begin to, yeah. And I w I would say, yeah, just do the ramp test, cause you’re going to have a better calibration.

[00:58:20] Jonathan Lee: So basically what you’re asking for here is should I noodle around before I left for a little bit before I get to training or should I just start training? And the fact is training isn’t, um, prior to adaptive training, I think that hopefully we can shift this narrative it’s adaptive training, but prior to that, a lot of athletes would keep their FTP where it knew where it was, or keep whatever benchmark they use for their training, where it was from the previous season or from where they were during the meat of the season, perhaps not the peak of the season.

[00:58:50] Jonathan Lee: So that’s why it felt like it was hard when he came back to training is because you’re training too hard in the video. But now it just take that Ram test and then your levels are going to adjust, and then you’re going to have workouts that are going to be appropriate for you and Matt. You’re going to be so enthused with this.

[00:59:05] Jonathan Lee: First of all, acknowledged like Ivy said that there is an ebb and flow to every season, but you’re going to be so enthused because you’re going to see your levels going up every single workout it’s going to be awesome. So don’t worry about it. Take off seasons.

[00:59:17] Chad Timmerman: This. But back when I taught by classes, I would get a lot of people who expressed interest in taking the bike classes, but didn’t want to join them until they had a base level of fitness so that they could join.

[00:59:28] Chad Timmerman: And it’s the same idea that exactly training for training, they feel like they had to train in order to be ready to train. And that’s, that’s just not, that may be the way it works in some scenarios, but when we’re assessing fitness and giving you a starting basis, we, you don’t need to train for that. You just come in, we see where your fitness is and we, we move from there.

[00:59:47] Chad Timmerman: So I do understand that reassessing and seeing your threshold or your FTP has fallen is a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s temporary. Just, just trust the process, know that your body needs that break. Some fitness may slip away, but you’ll get it all

[01:00:01] Jonathan Lee: back. Absolutely. Uh, Rachel, some more rapid-fire from what she sent to us last week and we didn’t get to, uh, this was round two from last season.

[01:00:09] Jonathan Lee: She says, ready to go celebrity crush as a teenager.

[01:00:17] Chad Timmerman: So we do this in order like everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

[01:00:20] Jonathan Lee: yeah. Go ahead. You go

[01:00:21] Chad Timmerman: first. I’ll go first give out of your time with Heather Locklear, Heather Thomas, which, which probably means nothing to anybody unless they’re pushing 50.

[01:00:31] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. I didn’t need

[01:00:33] Ivy Audrain: time to think. My celebrity crush as a teenager major is the same as an adult

[01:00:38] Jonathan Lee: dryness.

[01:00:41] Jonathan Lee: Awesome. Yeah. Uh, my, uh, yeah, with my timeframe, Brittany Spears was the hottest thing on earth when we were kids, teenagers, I guess you could say. So this dates us very well. Maybe that’s what Rachel is going for here is trying to figure out our exact age to the date because she probably just got it. A cake or pie.

[01:01:00] Chad Timmerman: I honestly can’t choose. I just can’t.

[01:01:06] Jonathan Lee: Good for you.

[01:01:11] Chad Timmerman: Very woke when it comes to cake

[01:01:16] Jonathan Lee: Ivy pie all day. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. We just had pecan. I’m going to say it. Pecan is how I say it. Pecan pie over the weekend. It was chill. She’s amazing. How fast have you driven in a car?

[01:01:37] Chad Timmerman: Upwards of 130 miles an hour? I don’t know because I had to stomp on the brakes so hard. Uh, I’m checking the speedometer, looking at the road, checking the speedometer, looking at the road.

[01:01:46] Chad Timmerman: What do I see? But a police car coming up over the horizon. So for what it’s worth though, ceramic brakes on 20 inch wheels are astounding and I dropped 60 miles per hour. No time. I didn’t get a ticket by the way.

[01:02:02] Jonathan Lee: Oh, wow. Ivy. Um,

[01:02:05] Ivy Audrain: conservative painkiller and driver. I don’t know.

[01:02:12] Jonathan Lee: I don’t

[01:02:13] Ivy Audrain: think so actually. Oh, no, I, for sure I did, because I had a really old Subaru that I was curious, but could and try

[01:02:19] Jonathan Lee: it did

[01:02:26] Jonathan Lee: tailwind day? Uh, yeah, I I’m in a car. I don’t know. Uh, probably over one 30, um, motorcycle, different story. So I think statute of limitations has passed. So 167. Uh that’s when it topped out and it was governed at that point. So, uh, okay. When people stand, uh, stand up for a standing ovation are usually the one earlier or one of the earlier people to stand up or one of the later people, this is, this is a good dating question to ask, you know, that’s a, yeah, yeah.

[01:03:01] Jonathan Lee: Two different types of

[01:03:01] Chad Timmerman: people. I try to avoid crowds and hence standing ovations. So don’t do either.

[01:03:08] Jonathan Lee: Yeah.

[01:03:09] Ivy Audrain: This question assumes that I’m the kind of person that goes to like plays and operas instead of like basement punk shows. So I

[01:03:16] Jonathan Lee: don’t know, I be starting the slow clap and the basement puncture. Uh, it’ll be hilarious.

[01:03:24] Jonathan Lee: Uh, yeah. I’m uh, one of the latter, I don’t like to start it darker milk chocolate off. Dare you. How dare this question exists, right? Chatter chocolate. Why? Yeah. Why does it even exist? Dark chocolate. Oh my goodness. That’s why, you’re why

[01:03:46] Jonathan Lee: I everyone, the first time, or when I went to Switzerland, I was like, oh, Swiss chocolate. I can’t wait to try it. And Swiss people, please tell me that the chocolate is better than all of the various kinds of milk chocolate that you had. That milk chocolate was not very good. So, uh, okay. The most, okay. The song fill in the blank.

[01:04:06] Jonathan Lee: The song Africa by Toto is yeah.

[01:04:09] Chad Timmerman: Indecipherable and yet somehow powerful. I’ve never made sense of that song, but it moves me every time I hear it.

[01:04:16] Jonathan Lee: All right. And absolute masterpiece. Uh, regrettable is what I would say. It’s it’s it’s existence is regrettable to me. I, that one is nails on a chalkboard.

[01:04:27] Jonathan Lee: Jessica. I remember hearing on a previous episode that Chad is a big movie TV show buff. What movies or shows have you been enjoying lately on the trainer lately? Chad.

[01:04:35] Chad Timmerman: Okay. Since I’m not particularly good with brevity, I use my top four networks. I’m going to start with apple TV. I’ll be quick invasion.

[01:04:45] Chad Timmerman: If you haven’t watched that. It’s it’s enthralling. So good. The morning show is always just interesting. I can just put that on any time. Hulu dope, sick about the opioid crisis. Tremendously illuminating and just really well done. And then what we do in the shadows. And if you’re not in the know in terms of Tyco, YTT, you need to be because the man is brilliant.

[01:05:07] Chad Timmerman: He’s behind so many good things. And Jim inclement, of course, Netflix Narcos season three, which is Mexico and hell bound. And these are both readers. So if you’re okay with subtitles, I prefer subtitles on the bike when it comes to long workouts, because it’s the time just seems to pass better when I’m reading something and midnight mass that’s absolutely worthwhile HBO.

[01:05:29] Chad Timmerman: Max, my probably my favorite thing going right now is succession. I live for it on a weekly basis. And of course, curb, your enthusiasm is in like it’s 10 seasons stilled just doesn’t have a week episode. And then my current fascination, which I just stumbled across last night, it was on Hulu. It’s called normal

[01:05:43] Jonathan Lee: people.

[01:05:45] Jonathan Lee: Nice. I don’t have anything to add here. I am. So not a TV person. Uh, I

[01:05:51] Ivy Audrain: have a hard time watching TV or movies on the trainer too, because I might just exalt and peddling. And I just want them to watch

[01:05:58] Jonathan Lee: TV

[01:06:01] Ivy Audrain: flip through like a few minutes of take talks, waiting to hear for the normal sound, a buzzing, like

[01:06:07] Jonathan Lee: it’s a, it’s

[01:06:08] Chad Timmerman: a weird thing because I used to have to have very specific music and in order to work out hard and now all, all my workouts, a hundred percent are done watching.

[01:06:18] Jonathan Lee: Hmm. I’m impressed. Wow. Yeah. I actually took a picture the other day. I got this Instagram ad for this thing that goes over a bathtub. I don’t know. It was weird. It was like a thing that you’d like put over it and then it can hold like your phone or your iPad, a drink, like all these things. And they had this scene laid out with this bathtub and it was like impressive.

[01:06:37] Jonathan Lee: There was a book over here. There was a screen over here. There were candles, there was drinks, everything. And I was like, Hey, it’s coach chat. That’s how you train be on the

[01:06:47] Chad Timmerman: bug. It’s

[01:06:49] Ivy Audrain: not allowed to be own with our own thoughts ever,

[01:06:53] Jonathan Lee: you know, bring your entire life with you to the bat. Okay. Bennett says recently started training road and I’m loving it.

[01:07:01] Jonathan Lee: We’ll be staying in Florida for the winter where there is ample opportunity for outdoor riding. How do I continue my structured trainer road training? I probably could bring my kicker, but still, how would I then use train road to guide my train or. Yeah, so outside workouts. And if you don’t have a power meter, you can use the there’s a little switch and instead of power base, you can go to RPE based, makes it super easy.

[01:07:21] Jonathan Lee: Like, yeah, you’re going to love them. And Florida, I have a, my good friend, Dylan lives in Florida. It’s awesome for structured workouts because it’s consistent. And that’s what you really want, depending on where you’re at. If you’re up in the Northern part of Florida tends to be a bit more Rowley and stuff, but yeah, it’s consistent.

[01:07:36] Jonathan Lee: So it’s fantastic spot for outdoor training. And then if you are going to be training inside, get yourself a fan and a, some sort of an air conditioner. Um, it’s not very, not very cool there. Okay. Dylan recently switched to our carb and he says hyper loading. He mentioned that he’s been using Martin three times.

[01:07:56] Jonathan Lee: And in fact, great results using only high carb drink mix for up to three hour rides. I haven’t tried the strategy on longer rides. How far should one go on just one or on just drink mix or to certain point, should you change strategy to a lower carb, higher calorie food and just eat more and try to maintain 80 to a hundred grams of carbs per hour.

[01:08:15] Jonathan Lee: So, first of all, lower carb, higher calorie food implies that you would be having higher fat content or protein content likely fat content, um, which if your body is trying to metabolize things and operate, and you’ve got like everything running fats, just going to slow things down. Um, so like, if you look at things very objectively, it’s not going to speed up digestion or help it in any way.

[01:08:35] Jonathan Lee: So, uh, to answer Dylan to this one is there is no limit technically. I mean, it’s really, if you can continue to be able to take it. And you’d get over things like pallet fatigue and everything else like that, then you can keep doing it. I know it doesn’t sound very appealing, but what’s way less appealing is slowing down and feeling like you’re going to bonk, uh, after those three hours, whereas having energy to the end of the ride and then continuing on and not being just fully dead thereafter after that ride, that’s what you really want to go for.

[01:09:06] Jonathan Lee: So I was still efficiently,

[01:09:09] Chad Timmerman: so concerned myself with Intech in the same 80 to a hundred grams per hour. If that’s what seems to work for you, Dylan. But my concern would be around hydration. If you’re, if you’re drinking Elly calories and you’re doing it in such a carbohydrate dense manner, especially if you’re sweating, I think at some point you might come up against dehydration issues.

[01:09:27] Chad Timmerman: And even if it’s, even if you’re not sweating, there’s still insensible water loss, things that you don’t notice. It ways that your body is losing some of its body water that will creep into the mix, especially three, four or five hours into it.

[01:09:40] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. That’s why I think that pairing this like gels and mix.

[01:09:43] Jonathan Lee: So then you can always make sure that you’re drinking enough of your mix, allow yourself mix your, uh, dilute your mix to a degree that you can drink more than a bottle an hour, if you need to, depending on your size and your sweat rate and everything else, like I being smaller and then also not sweating as much as somebody like Nate, who we’ve mentioned on the podcast sweats a lot.

[01:10:04] Jonathan Lee: And he’s a very tall person. So as a result, he’s got a whole lot of surface area that he’s bought. Body’s trying to shed that water on. He needs to drink more than 500 milliliters an hour. Right. Uh that’s. That’s just how it goes. So you have to keep that in mind. Like what Chad said is absolutely real. So, and it’s a shame too, because if you’re to the point where you’re like, okay, well I’m already at 120 grams an hour, but I’m getting dehydrated.

[01:10:26] Jonathan Lee: So I guess I just need to drink more of that mix. And then you make your gut get upset because you’re not used to taking in that all because you’re trying to avoid. That’s why it’s a little complex, you have to think about it. So I’m once again, a bell curve Weller. So it’s super easy for me to just kind of do the status quo and be okay with it.

[01:10:44] Jonathan Lee: But yeah. Good point. Just to clarify

[01:10:47] Ivy Audrain: those super high carb drink mixes people, maybe don’t hydrate in the same way because otherwise you’re just intaking more carbs and.

[01:11:00] Jonathan Lee: Yeah,

[01:11:00] Chad Timmerman: I think unless, unless you have a hydration pack or only one of your bottles is drink mix in the other bottle is water. I think it’s going to be hard for you to get enough water in addition to, because I mean, the hydration typically aims for what it’s like four to six, maybe 8% carbohydrate per, per volume.

[01:11:18] Chad Timmerman: And those drink mixes are way, way, way above that. So that’s a whole lot of nutrients into the gut. That’s going to pull water into the gut. That’s going to pull water away from the skin. That’s I mean, just all the, all the dehydration complications come right along with

[01:11:30] Jonathan Lee: that. Yeah. And there’s like a, the isotonic, uh, level of, uh, of a gel or a drink mixer or anything else that you’re taking in that should minimize the amount of water you have to take in to process that effectively and that your body would shunt and pull away and pull into the gut to be able to process it.

[01:11:46] Jonathan Lee: So the things like Martin with things like SIS and their beta fuel stuff, you’re dealing with isotonics, so you don’t have to lose quite as much. The real problem. I think with dehydration in this comes from the. Um, some people may sweat more than a standard bottle, an hour sort of rate, depending on the ambient conditions and them as an athlete and person.

[01:12:08] Jonathan Lee: So in that case, if you’re just relying on bottles alone to get in your calories, then you don’t, you can’t take in extra, right. You might be already bumping up against the stops in terms of what your gut can tolerate. So then you necessarily dehydrate yourself. But one thing to keep in mind is if you Martin and, uh, SIS, not as much their beta fuel, but I believe that Martin has sodium in there a decent amount.

[01:12:32] Jonathan Lee: Um, and then I like for Cape epic, what I did is I had precision hydration, little capsules, and those I think are 250 milligrams. I popped one of those every single hour on the bike. Sometimes I popped extra. If it was like really hot, I would take two. Um, and then I was already getting sodium through my Martin.

[01:12:52] Jonathan Lee: And then some days I would mix my Martin a bit more diluted and then I would know that I would need to take in more. Um, but in most cases I just have my bottle and my gel, and that got me to around 120 grams an hour. And I just checked those boxes off. I was never taking in less than a bottle an hour.

[01:13:08] Jonathan Lee: So that’s kind of how, but it gets tricky when you do both at the same time. And if you’re a really heavy sweater, so you have to think about how you want to balance that out. Um, maybe you mix it more diluted. So yeah, for back to Dylan’s question though, if it’s over three hour rides, if there’s no magic drop-off point, um, where people say, oh, at this point you can’t do that.

[01:13:29] Jonathan Lee: You need real food. People say that because of pallet fatigue. That’s why they really say it. Um, also because of like feeling satiated. Uh, but I would argue that that also if you’re feeling properly and you’re just working and on the bike and everything else, you don’t feel tired or you don’t feel hungry when you’re feeling at 80 to 120 grams an hour.

TrainerRoad’s Polarized Training Plans

[01:13:51] Jonathan Lee: Um, depending on, on who you are. So. Yeah, anyhow, uh, some listener questions that we have here, uh, Sam says, Hey guys, loving the podcast and the adaptive training. Good to hear that you can give it a shot, go to train road.com and sign up, give it a try. We have a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you don’t like adaptive training after that point, we’re happy to give you your money back.

[01:14:12] Jonathan Lee: Oh, we think you’ll like it. Sam says, I’m curious to know which training plan is best suited to targeting steep two to 20 minute. KLMs that’s a huge range. 10 to 20 minutes. Uh, it says so basically almost every Caleb he says. Yeah. Also keeping in mind two to three hours of endurance for getting out and back to the climb and three quarters of the way through an eight week mid volume peer, uh, polarized training plan, which has been good.

[01:14:36] Jonathan Lee: However there’s been no anaerobic or sprint work, Inc. I’m thinking I need a training plan that will focus on maximizing the CO2. Um, so let’s talk about the polarized plans first, and then we’re going to talk about the KLM stuff. Um, so you mentioned that you had your in the eight week mid volume polarized plan, which that is that replaces build plans that we have in, in our training plan system.

[01:15:00] Jonathan Lee: So, and he says that there’s been no anaerobic work or sprint work and that’s intentional because that’s typically race specific stuff that you find in specialty plans, not in the build phase. Right. So, uh, that’s why it hasn’t been included in there. Um, but that said. You can always substitute workouts if you’d like that you have for whatever unique needs that you have.

[01:15:23] Jonathan Lee: Just keep in mind. If you just start to throw in anaerobic work in lieu of putting in work, that’s more focused on VO two max Cirque, which if you’ve been following that build plan, you absolutely have been doing VO two max work. That’s it just, um, VO two max sometimes looks like five minutes long. It looks like four minutes long.

[01:15:39] Jonathan Lee: It looks like three minutes long and it looks like 105%. And, uh, from there, uh, not too high. So VO two isn’t crazy high. It’s just painful. So, uh, that’s kind of the rule of thumb there. Uh, okay. But I want to mention something that’s a polarized specialty plans. First of all it is of interest to us, but we want to get more data and feedback before diving into the specialty plans.

[01:16:05] Jonathan Lee: Because what we’re looking for right now with the polarized plans is how people are using them. What workouts they’re skipping, what workouts they’re substituting, what sort of improvements they’re getting in their different levels. Uh, if it’s showing that it’s a great handoff to their events, and if they’re showing greater increases or less increases than other modes.

[01:16:24] Jonathan Lee: So then that way we can tweak those plans and adjust, because right now we’ve done some new that’s super, by the way. Where we’re trying to stick to an 80, 20 as close as possible adaptive training. We’ll throw you out of that. 80 20 to a certain, uh, uh, to a certain degree, but not wildly. Um, but 80 20 is the intention is designed as that.

[01:16:42] Jonathan Lee: And that’s talking time and zone. We know that there’s other opinions that it’s, instead of time zone it’s intent and 80 20 on your days when you’re dealing with three days a week, or you’re dealing with four days a week, five days a week, six days a week, that gets a little tricky. So we want, you know, we’ll see how everything works on this, very by the book approach with.

[01:17:01] Jonathan Lee: We may try things where it’s looking at days, then the intent of the days on what you do. And we may end up changing this up and just finding what works best and having some sort of a hybrid as well. So that’s the point of getting these plans out and using them. So if you’ve wanted to use them, please use them because we would really like to get more data on these.

[01:17:20] Jonathan Lee: And I even say we kind of need more data, more people using the polarized plans than those that currently are to get reliable data points. Cause we have so many data points on, uh, on how athletes train in general with various different plans. So we’d like to have a lot of data points on the polarized ones.

[01:17:37] Jonathan Lee: So if you’re interested in trying them, please give them a shot. You can just swap the block out on your calendar right now. If you have a base block or a bill block, find that on your calendar, click on the little anticipation and then you can swap it out with one of the polarized ones or you can just drop one of those polarized blocks on your calendar.

Guide to KOMs of different durations

[01:17:53] Jonathan Lee: So we give it a shot. So then we can figure it out, uh, and get some really cool data on. So that’s the polarized stuff. Uh, now training plan guide for KOMS Chad, if you’re to do under two minutes and that’s like your KLM goals that you’re going for, that I would say maybe the gravity plan that we have

[01:18:13] Chad Timmerman: would be assuming it really emphasizes

[01:18:15] Jonathan Lee: that short.

[01:18:17] Jonathan Lee: Yeah. So that would be, and that’s, you could drop the block on there or you could do a whole base build specialty into the thing, however you’d like, right? Yeah. Uh, two to five minutes, what you say there? I feel like the crit plan would be pretty good for something like that. You could also do short track.

[01:18:36] Jonathan Lee: Short track might be pretty good, but short track really focuses on repeatability. No, um,

[01:18:42] Chad Timmerman: by the same, that’s what’s going on here. It’s not going out to, it’s not gonna ride two to three hours to go out and do one. So I’m assuming these are

[01:18:49] Jonathan Lee: repeats hopefully, but definitely that’s the

[01:18:52] Chad Timmerman: case, but she brought up an interesting or an important point, right?

[01:18:55] Chad Timmerman: From the get-go that’s a broad range. I mean, training to be a specialist in two to 20 minute efforts is a huge range. It may not seem like it, but there’s a lot of, a lot of ground covered in there in terms of anaerobic reliance versus a rubbish reliance versus Rubic reliance in terms of repeatability.

[01:19:12] Chad Timmerman: It’s, uh, that’s a lot to train for, to be good at all those durations. In fact, you’re not going to be the best at all. Those there’s just

[01:19:19] Jonathan Lee: no way. It’s like, how can I be a Peterbilt? And at the same time also be a Porsche. And you haven’t

[01:19:26] Ivy Audrain: known many KLM hunters, like truly been because they absolutely ride three hours to the climb

[01:19:36] Jonathan Lee: three minutes long.

[01:19:37] Chad Timmerman: Yeah. No, that makes sense. Okay. So I get, I understand the context then w which, okay. If you’re going to pursue on the shorter end of things, you’re going to look at the two minutes to the five minute climbs for a little while, and then train differently to attack the six to maybe 10 minutes and then train differently at the 11 versus 20, and then a little differently for the 20 ones versus sixties and sixties, it could all work.

[01:20:03] Chad Timmerman: Sure. But you’d have to compartment carp compartmentalize your training relative to each of those little durations. If you actually want to be as good as you can be. Individual durations

[01:20:13] Jonathan Lee: six to 10 minutes. Uh, the cross-country marathon could be good. Climbing road. Race could even be good at rolling

[01:20:20] Chad Timmerman: road, race or rolling.

[01:20:22] Jonathan Lee: Rolling road. Race would be better. Good call 11 to 20 minutes. That’s where you’re looking at climbing road race. Um, you might even start to look at 40 K TT there a little bit. Um, depending if it’s on the longer side, he might want to go toward that. But climbing road race is the jam for that sort of stuff.

[01:20:39] Jonathan Lee: 21 to 60 minutes, 40. Century or a grand Fondo plan. Sorry. Um, as it’s called, those two would be ideal for that. Um, any particular

[01:20:49] Chad Timmerman: I know you said.

[01:20:50] Jonathan Lee: Yup. And then if you get even longer on this above an hour, then you’re looking at the once again, the Gran Fondo plan is typically going to do it, uh, feel free to sub in longer rides, if you want to do that.

[01:21:02] Jonathan Lee: Um, uh, whether it’s throughout the week, uh, whether it’s when you’re riding outside and you want to do those two, it’s all up to you. So you can pick on plan builder, or you could just pick the training plan. You could throw it on really for those. So hopefully that gives you like a guide. Uh, granted, if you’re looking at.

[01:21:17] Jonathan Lee: That’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different, or I guess within his range, it’s going to be four different specialty blocks that he could add it. And if you just do four different specialty blocks back to back and take these KOMS with that intent, that’s probably not going to be the best way to find good fitness.

[01:21:33] Jonathan Lee: You’ll need to reset and kind of rebuild into that. So you got to pick your battles. He can’t be good at two-minute efforts and be good at 20 minute efforts, relatively speaking, you might be really just to somebody, but about KLM level. Uh, yeah, probably not. I want to talk into some cheeky KLM tips in general.

[01:21:51] Jonathan Lee: Um, if we can, the reverse sag is a really good move. So I mean the best move is just to have your fast friend, uh, try out your bike on the climb really quick and hop onto the bike. Keep the bag in your bottles. Yeah. Yeah. Pass everything off to your friend. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be doing that. I’ll have. Ride my road bike for a really long time.

[01:22:16] Jonathan Lee: We’re done in Tucson this winter and they’ll have him snag me a bunch of KLM. So, um, but there’s the reverse sag. So if you’re in a group and you’re going through something and you really care about KLMs, this will, and all your group, and this will possibly make it so that you will be ostracized and uninvited from your group.

[01:22:30] Jonathan Lee: However, if you care about KOMS more than friends, which most KLM chasing folks seem to, if that’s the case, then drop to the back of the group before the segment starts and then just slowly work your way through that baseline. So then you finished to be the first one in the group. And, uh, once you get to the end of that segment, um, silly little tip, that will go a long way to making sure that you are faster than everybody you’re riding with because everybody you’re riding with is going to be super enthused to find out that you really care about that.

[01:23:00] Jonathan Lee: So, uh, there’s that the other way that you can do this, you can go even more. So there’s an app or like an app online called KLM with the wind. Uh, it combines like. And KLM stuff. And it basically says which KOMS, you would want to go by very goat and attempt to based on current wind conditions,

[01:23:24] Jonathan Lee: this is tearing Ivy’s soul out. So yeah. So you can do that. It’ll give you like a surf report more or less, then you’ll go out and just find the KLMs that work. Uh, and then outside of that, though, if you’re going to do KOMS remember the one tip that I would have is that in most cases KLMs are short. In most cases, I know somebody out there probably is targeting like a six-hour KLM, but, uh, in most cases they’re short.

[01:23:51] Jonathan Lee: So in that scenario, you’re probably not going to be best at chasing KOMS and the base phase, probably not in the build phase, in your specialty phase, depending on the sort of racing you’re doing, that’s likely when you’re going to be better or best at your short things and particularly post goal race.

[01:24:08] Jonathan Lee: And then you give yourself a few days to recover. Go get yourself some crowns, because that’s likely when you are going to be as fit as you can be, unless you’ve really drug out of peak until that last school event. And in that case, you’ll probably be in a fatigue hole and probably shouldn’t have drug about that long, but that’s like open season is once you are done with your goal event and then you’ve recovered just a bit and you’re ready to go.

[01:24:31] Jonathan Lee: So Ivy, uh, do they have a track lacrosse category for KOMS? They have e-bike they have, do they have that?

[01:24:44] Jonathan Lee: Oh, that’d be hilarious. Yeah, they have like e-bikes stuff and then they have, I think there’s that you can take, I dunno, maybe not, but. We’ll do like motorcross where you have

[01:24:55] Ivy Audrain: different, like, you know, the, the,

[01:24:58] Jonathan Lee: uh, CCS. Yeah. I dunno. I dunno. Wild world. Yeah. It’s a wild world over there. I haven’t a clue. So, um, I did get a, I did have my first, uh, pushed off the trail by a knee bike, going for a KLM, uh, experience this past weekend.

Can you treat knee injuries while training?

[01:25:14] Jonathan Lee: So usually they’re very kind and nice folks. Um, this guy said out of the way, K O M. And uh, so I moved out of the. So his motor was worrying. Okay. Steven says my question relates to injury and adjusting my training plan. I’ve been using trainer road for a couple of seasons and, and, and have enjoyed nice gains in my riding performance.

[01:25:35] Jonathan Lee: So I’m happy to report that your product has helped me make me a better cyclist suite. That’s the goal. However, I haven’t experienced any problems and may need to take some time off from cycling. My question is what is the best way to modify or adjust my training plan? Or do I stop my current plan then select train now rides for light recovery.

[01:25:54] Jonathan Lee: I assume adaptive training will be able to modify rides for me. Um, he says I’m having my condition evaluated and seeing a physiotherapist. So still getting exercise, just not as much cycling, heavy as plan builder in the past to develop training. And I assume that I should start another training plan when I’m able to ride again any best, any best practice ideas would be appreciated.

[01:26:13] Jonathan Lee: Uh, IVC, probably a whole lot of, uh, this info on the forum where athletes talk about me injuries and that sort of stuff. What, what input would you. Yeah, we feel a lot of

[01:26:23] Ivy Audrain: questions for athletes, uh, trying to come back from illness or

[01:26:27] Jonathan Lee: injury, whether they use erode or not on the forum. It’s a common point of discussion.

[01:26:33] Ivy Audrain: Yeah, totally. And, uh, the degree of injury is totally varying from just an isolated knee thing or over a back thing, or, um, both knees or something that very clearly seems like a bike fit issue. And, uh, so there are good approaches and bad ones and the athletes that do it right, are doing what, um, what Steven is doing, seeing the specialist.

[01:27:01] Ivy Audrain: And it’s, it’s hard to, was it good advice via, you know, Instagram, DMS people that need help, but because we’re not doctors, but really the best approach is to figure out what’s causing that, get imaging, see a specialist, um, and. Might look like he needs to just take time off a bike, you know, um, depending upon the severity of students injury, doing train now riots, when it feels okay still might not be the best approach.

[01:27:30] Ivy Audrain: And that’s where we see a lot of, uh, athlete inquiries as well. People that aren’t coping well with their injury and right in the, that they’ve been suffering from this injury for months and try to just incorporate endurance, train now rides when they can or something. And they’re wondering why they don’t feel better.

[01:27:47] Ivy Audrain: And they want our advice, which is, I think something that you dealt with with a knee injury for a really long time,

[01:27:55] Jonathan Lee: you would

[01:27:55] Ivy Audrain: never just fully take

[01:27:57] Jonathan Lee: time off. I would never take time off and be like, oh, it hurts again. I’m going to skip today’s workout. And that was like the most that I did. And man, it got so bad because I was neglecting and there’s a whole post on yurts.

[01:28:08] Jonathan Lee: I think it’s called knee injuries for cyclists. It’s in the forum. You can find it. Lots of people chiming in. I put down pictures of everything that I would. The exercises that I do. And I still do those exercises on a weekly basis to try to do that maintenance work that I need in addition to strength training.

[01:28:25] Jonathan Lee: But I kind of have like a process that I would walk a person through if they’re in this case is number one. If you are experiencing like a lot of pain and inflammation, you need to reduce that inflammation and pain to a manageable level and manageable level means that you can live day to day without chronic pain.

[01:28:42] Jonathan Lee: You need to do that. And if you’re just pushing through that and picking more workouts and you’re skipping ones every once in a while, but still going with it and just experiencing pain on a chronic level, you need to not. So take time that you need to be able to get that inflammation down, address that with diet, address that with, um, a lot of different mobility exercises or changing everything up.

[01:29:05] Jonathan Lee: But you need to get that inflammation down once you get that down, focus on mobility. So number one, reduce inflammation. Number two, mobility. The mobility is talking about productive range of motion, right? So that’s talking about joints that can explore a range of motion, but doing so with control and being able to productively leverage that, that range of motion that you have.

[01:29:27] Jonathan Lee: It’s not just flexibility, making sure you can do the splits. It’s making sure that you have full mobility or full range of your joints, but then you can also productively move throughout that range of motion that you have. So the great resource Chad’s mentioned that many times becoming a supple leopard by, uh, Dr.

[01:29:44] Jonathan Lee: Kelly stret. We’ve had him on the podcast. You can look up that episode. He a fantastic resource on finding mobility and being able to maintain mobility as an athlete. It’s wonderful. After that, then you can work on strength. So that’s where you want to start building up from there. Now that is absolutely.

[01:30:04] Jonathan Lee: Like for me, the biggest differentiator that I find, if I slack off on my strength training, I will start to develop instability issues. It’s just, and it’s very logical, but it happens like clockwork. And it’s very important to remember. So, but I couldn’t do strength training. When I had a ton of inflammation, I needed to get rid of the inflammation.

[01:30:23] Jonathan Lee: And I also couldn’t effectively do strength training when I couldn’t even squat. Right. Because I had such limited ankle and hip mobility that my squat stance in my technique was completely off. Right. So I needed to take care of these things in succession. And then once I was able to do strength training, it was a huge help.

[01:30:39] Jonathan Lee: And then that’s when you worry about getting faster. So if you’re experiencing something like this, don’t think I need to do train now rides today when you’re back at step, one of trying to reduce inflammation, worry about that. Um, and, and work those, those rides in later. So, Chad, uh, what, any advice that you you’ve helped?

[01:30:57] Jonathan Lee: Lots of athletes and you’ve been through this yourself even just recently with an injury.

[01:31:02] Chad Timmerman: I think my single bit of advice, it would relate to the nature of the pain, if it’s acute and they keep out some flexibility. But if it’s chronic, if it’s something you’ve been dealing with for a long time, see a professional sooner than later, and this is, this recommendation is based on a heck of a lot of experience on my part.

[01:31:21] Chad Timmerman: And yes, things I’ve observed, but I’m mostly concerned with me. Let’s be honest. And when it hurts all the time, and I think I’ve got it figured out and I’m doing something that brings a little bit of relief. And I think Armando, I got it figured out. I’m never right. And, and the longer I postponed going and seeing a professional and this almost always entails imaging of some sort, at least an x-ray preferably an MRI.

[01:31:44] Chad Timmerman: I learned things that there’s no way I was going to figure out. The last one I thought was, uh, a back issue, maybe a hip issue. It turns out I have femurs that aren’t shaped like most people’s femurs. They’re not scalped in a point where they are. So when I sit down into a deep range of getting bone on bone impingement, this is pushing my acetabulum back into a different place in the joint compartment.

[01:32:04] Chad Timmerman: It’s caused issues in a number of places, but there’s no way I could assess that out on my own. So now armed with that information. I know what I need to avoid doing what I need to do to rehab, uh, th th the injured muscles or joints and what I need to do to prevent further injury by working on muscles that I hadn’t addressed, at least not effectively up to that point.

[01:32:31] Chad Timmerman: So, and, and this is not the first time this has happened. There’s so many times, and I think a lot of us want a web MD at supersleuth it figure, you know, there’s so much information online. I should be able to piece this together by describing my symptoms, plugging it in finding a YouTube, uh, physiotherapy service, maybe paying for it.

[01:32:50] Chad Timmerman: Probably not in my case is trying to call what I can from the freestyle and make sense of it. I have nobody to blame, but me, but the lesson has always been, go see a professional that they’re professionals for a reason, they dedicate their lives to learning about this specific thing. And they can help you way faster than you can, by trying to piece it together bit by bit over the course of injury after injury, same injury.

[01:33:11] Chad Timmerman: After saying that.

[01:33:13] Jonathan Lee: Yeah, the, uh, you bring up a good point. Chad, everyone, typically there’s like this process that somebody goes through when they go and see a fitter or even like a physio at first and they go, I have a leg or like a leg imbalanced leg length discrepancy. That’s usually what they end up saying.

[01:33:30] Jonathan Lee: And they’re like, I have a unique problem. And that’s why this exists. But every single person, I have not met a single person that has actually gone through this process of imaging and working with somebody who has said, no, I had, I don’t have an imbalance I’m perfectly even left to. Right. Everyone is somehow different left to right.

[01:33:49] Jonathan Lee: Symmetrical nobody. Yep. Yep. That’s how it works. So as a result, that’s not a unique problem instead, what you should go. Okay. So where do we go from here? Where is the imbalance at and how do we adjust from here? And that’s what the professional will actually be able to do with the knowledge that they have.

[01:34:06] Jonathan Lee: Um, Similar to Chad on my left leg, my, my femur ax or sorry, my, my, uh, my tibia twists and twists actually a significant amount. It’s almost 10 degrees. So the bone basically like on one side, my lower leg is just twisted compared to the other side. And that’s just how it is. Right. So, uh, as you’ll want to, if you can, and this is really hard because you might not be able to find the person locally.

[01:34:32] Jonathan Lee: I had to go to bend Oregon, uh, from here in Reno. So, and that was to Dr. J to Shari and he was wonderful because he took a very number one, he’s a cyclist. He understands our context. That’s very important. Um, you know, when you sit down with your physio and he’s like, alright, see, do you have speed zeros? Or do you have Duray pedals?

[01:34:50] Jonathan Lee: You know, like he was in the nose so that he was able to say, okay, with those pedals, you want to adjust like this for this scenario. So we went through that and then we went through all the different things that I could do to be able to get mobility and then work on strength thereafter. And it was.

[01:35:07] Jonathan Lee: After I did all the mobility work, which is still very hard and very uncomfortable. But after all the mobility where it goes, like, what should I do for strength training work? He’s like, oh man, at that point, if you can do all these mobility exercises, it’s all the normal stuff. Make sure that you’re doing proper squats, Bulgarian, split squats, the things that Chad just be published on our Instagram recently, strength training movements for cyclists that are really good to be able to, to, to help that sort of stuff is what you can do once you get to the point where you’re kind of liberated from this deficiency that you have.

[01:35:40] Jonathan Lee: So don’t just stop at an imbalance, dig deeper and find solutions with it. You really have to be proactive because it’s not as sort of thing where they can flip a switch and it’ll be better. You have to really work at it. We’ll link to that forum thread down there too. And

[01:35:56] Ivy Audrain: do you want to reiterate too that it can be hard to want to see a specialist when you don’t maybe have access to, to them and you don’t have to be John and go to a different state in order to find someone to help you, but it can be hard to want to dish out like a couple hundred bucks to go get the help that you need.

[01:36:17] Ivy Audrain: But it’s easy to think about how willing you are to do that for like an upgrade or on our bikes or some equipment. And for me, when I decided that it was a worthwhile investment to figure out what was going on with my body, how much sooner I wish I would’ve done it and how worthwhile it is, it’s hard to decide.

[01:36:36] Ivy Audrain: And to merit it when you’re not exactly sure what’s going on and you think it might just be minor, but it’s

How fatigue and freshness can mask adaptations

[01:36:42] Jonathan Lee: all right. Next question from Alex, he says, dear tr our team, first of all, thank you. You’re doing a great job. I have a question related to FTP and fitness level as in peak form, somewhere in September after my 2021 a event, I decided to back off a bit for the off season while still continuing training on trainer road and riding outdoors.

[01:37:00] Jonathan Lee: So I assumed that he just like backed off on volume because it doesn’t sound like backing off much when you’re still doing structured workouts and you’re outside. But I assume backing off on volume is what he’s talking about. Maybe not following a plan is specifically, I don’t know. He says my fitness level and he mentioned on a bunch of different platforms is consequently decreasing.

[01:37:19] Jonathan Lee: As I am facing far less training load than this summer, I would expect ramp tests would result in lesser FTP. Although the opposite is happening. She says through my last ramp test, my FTP grew by seven Watson, November in comparison to the end of August. He said, which is already his best ever at that point happening at the end of three weeks in the Swiss Alps.

[01:37:38] Jonathan Lee: That’s an important little point there. He says, I thought I would painlessly go through train and road sessions with such high FTP, but it keeps going. He’s like, so now I am puzzled and I do not understand why my FTP keeps growing. Do you have any explanation for what is happening? Surely the most first world of first world problems, uh, the Alex is experiencing the Alex.

[01:37:55] Jonathan Lee: We’re here for it. My MTV just keeps going up. I don’t know what to do. Please explain. Um, Chad, what stands out to you in this one? Uh, here I have some things that stand out, but let’s, let’s just go through with you first.

[01:38:12] Chad Timmerman: Reduced thing as training load and seeing better numbers. And that’s even if it’s a temporary reduction, he’s I think getting a peek into what it feels like to be fresh for probably maybe the first time in his cycling career ever.

[01:38:24] Chad Timmerman: I think, uh, we’ve talked before how common it is for us to get used to a certain level of fatigue and that doesn’t disrupt training. You just train through it, you accommodate it because being tired as part of being an endurance athlete. And every once in a while, we get a little glimpse into how good we can feel if we allow ourselves to recover to a point where we are truly recovered and it’s, it’s different.

[01:38:46] Chad Timmerman: Because you’re always trying to walk that fine line between too much recovery and just the ever so slightest amount of re D training and then staying on top of it and continuing to ride that wave as best as possible. So I do understand it. I absolutely can relate to it, but I can also relate to what Alex is describing here, where he comes back from a training hiatus of sorts, or at least a reduction in training and sees heart rate numbers.

[01:39:09] Chad Timmerman: Power numbers feels just better in this. This typically for me happened November 1st, almost every year that I taught by classes because in October, all I did was go and ride outside and enjoy myself. Still hit it pretty hard, but it wasn’t burying myself in the usual intensity and volume. And I would be fascinated by the fact that my heart rate could go to one 60.

[01:39:33] Chad Timmerman: I’ve never, never, I haven’t seen that in months that I could ride Hills at particular power levels. And all of this was unusual. I was doing what he’s doing, searching for that one thing what’s changed. What’s different, never really recognizing I’m just doing less, which means I’m just more recovered. So I’m not saying this is a matter of simply reducing your training to do, to be less and expect to be faster, but do recognize that when you’re always overdoing it, it’s really hard to recognize what it’s like to actually feel

[01:40:02] Jonathan Lee: good.

[01:40:04] Jonathan Lee: Yeah, I can’t help, but also look at this and see, he took it. He got that best ever FTP test at the end of three weeks in the Swiss Alps, I would assume that that was a lot of volume that you took in over that time. And if he got a PR directly after that, I assume that if you had rested a little bit and then taken it, you would have gotten an even higher number because that shows that you were probably in, uh, at least in the state of, in an S in a state of acute fatigue, right?

[01:40:30] Jonathan Lee: Uh, just from that, that load that you probably took on with some sort of a trip like that. So this is really common. We see so many athletes that have high, they pick high volume, but they actually get faster when they go down to mid volume or some athletes get faster when they go to low volume, um, they’re able to train more consistently and then they’re able to perform better.

[01:40:49] Jonathan Lee: Their body is able to adapt better to the training cause it isn’t overloaded now adaptive training, weld counter for this though. And you’ll notice it. If you’re, you know, regularly, it’s very difficult for you to be able to execute the workouts as prescribed adaptive training is going to make sure that you’re going to be getting the workouts that you need rather than constantly giving you workouts that are too hard.

[01:41:09] Jonathan Lee: Um, so that kind of goes with it, but this is a very interesting fact. And one of the reasons we created adaptive training and progression levels is the fact of. Fatigue and freshness really have a masking effect over your ability to express the fitness you have right there. There’s always some level of interplay there.

[01:41:29] Jonathan Lee: It’s, it’s very rare that you could get a day where fatigue and freshness are not a part of the, in fact, I’d say it’s impossible to get a day where fatigue and freshness are not having an effect on your ability to produce work on the bike. So when you look at that’s, why when you look at just one FTP test or any testing protocol, particularly the complicated ones, and you take those testing protocols that just puts you in a box based on one day, and then you stick with that for a long time.

[01:41:53] Jonathan Lee: It’s difficult. You need something that changes every day because the fatigue and freshness is always going to have an effect on you. So

[01:42:00] Chad Timmerman: well, there, there are two ends to the same Seesaw. So, I mean, one goes up the other has to come down and vice versa. So it’s, it’s again, it’s important to every once in a while, I’ll get in touch with what feeling truly fresh feels like, and it may not happen.

[01:42:15] Chad Timmerman: But if you can sample it just one time, every once in a while enough to remind yourself of what it feels like. And then, and then remind yourself that this is what I can feel like on race day. If I taper properly, you know, maybe the train doesn’t change much at all. You just address your recovery relative to your most important events, a little more seriously, then that’s how you can and should feel prior to your most important events.

[01:42:39] Jonathan Lee: It’s like you right now, Ivy and the race season, right? Like you are not just absolutely hammering yourself in between these race weeks that you’ve been doing.

[01:42:49] Ivy Audrain: No. And then I had a rest week and then I said, I knew all the time I FTP yesterday.

[01:42:57] Ivy Audrain: Yeah. So yes we are saying is right.

[01:43:02] Jonathan Lee: Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Even athletes the pro level, it’s the same thing. So this is why it’s really important to have a base phase. That’s very productive and to have a build phase it’s very productive. And then in that specialty phase, why I recommend to a lot of athletes, even in this specialty phase to drop down your training volume a bit, you can do that really easily and train a road, um, because chances are, you’re going to be, uh, it’s usually warmer weather during peak.

[01:43:27] Jonathan Lee: For most events, you tend to target them in the spring summer or fall, something like that rather than winter. So you’re probably going to be riding outside more and just want to do social riding and doing that sort of thing. Just trying to stick to that same high volume plan, add and add in all of that other stuff is a recipe for failure when you need at least, or I should say fatigue when you need at least.

[01:43:47] Jonathan Lee: So, uh, try, consider stepping down. Once you get closer to your goal event, uh, it’s a very common approach and you’ll notice that within the plans they’re already built to step down in overall volume, especially since we’ve redesigned the plans in their latest iteration, based on the data where we got it’s.

[01:44:05] Jonathan Lee: Uh, yeah. It’s steps down a lot. So freshness is important and if you follow a good structure plan, you’ll get there, particularly with adaptive training. So congrats, Alex. I hope your problems continue of having a FTP. It just keeps going off.

[01:44:22] Jonathan Lee: Shoot. It went off again. Yeah. So thanks everybody for joining us on this podcast, whether it was on YouTube, this is prerecorded, so we can’t get into live questions. Uh, we’re grateful for all of you for joining in on YouTube, listening on whatever podcast that please share the podcast with your friends.

[01:44:40] Jonathan Lee: That’s a great way to help us and go to trainer road.com and sign up. Start training with us. Start using adaptive training. It’s overwhelmingly positive. It’s so great to see how many athletes are seeing new PRS and just getting huge levels of motivation on the day to day of their training, rather than having to wait to see if it all pays off later on.

[01:44:58] Jonathan Lee: Super cool. So give it a shot. And then if you want to submit a question to the podcast, which I’m so grateful for all of you that do that every week. Go ahead and do it at train a road.com/podcast. We’ll talk to you all next week. Thanks everybody. Thanks everybody.