Every coach and experienced athlete has their own style, and that style can really show up in how they execute their training routines. In particular, what workouts they do and how they choose to do them. One athlete may have a special interval routine that works miracles for them, but that same routine may leave you feeling flat because it doesn’t fit with how you train. So, in this Favorite Cycling Workouts episode, we’re going to compare the preferred workouts of several past guests and give our thoughts on what you should consider if you want to include one of these sessions in your routine.
We start by comparing the favorite base routines of Dr. Stephen Seiler—a proponent of the polarized training model—with a routine from the owner of FasCat coaching, Frank Overton—known for his support of sweet spot training. Rounding out that discussion, professional mountain biker Sonya Looney shares one of her favorite sweet spot workouts.
RELATED: A Comparison of Polarized, Sweet Spot, and Pyramidal Training
After an in-depth conversation of the different base training approaches, we’ll shift gears and compare three separate high-intensity routines. First, Dr. Paul Laursen, author of the book on high intensity interval training, shares favorite time-crunched Tabata workout. Physiologist Brady Holmer shares a couple hard run sessions, and we round out this conversation with triathlon coach Lauren Vallee’s Hour of Power routine.
Throughout, our hosts discuss the ins and outs of each workout and how well they’d fit into their own styles of coaching and training.
So, start thinking about your own training style, and let’s make you fast!
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:04
Well, welcome everybody. We’ve got the whole crew here so you know that means…
Rob Pickels 00:09
It’s a pot- Nope.
Grant Holicky 00:10
Nope.
Trevor Connor 00:11
Favorites episode.
Rob Pickels 00:12
Oh.
Trevor Connor 00:14
Almost got you, almost got you. We are going to share some of the favorite workouts from guests we’ve had on the show. I don’t know what to say next. So I’m just going to look at you guys and hope you say something.
Rob Pickels 00:28
Wow, you couldn’t think of something to say after that?
Trevor Connor 00:31
No, I couldn’t. I don’t know why.
Rob Pickels 00:33
Yeah, we got some all-stars in here. We got some Stephen Seiler, we get some Frank Overton, Sonya Looney, Paul Laursen – hey, I know what he’s gonna want to do. He’s going to do some intervals, short intervals, I bet.
Grant Holicky 00:44
Basically, it’s that time of year that a lot of us are out there talking about developing the base, developing the engine.
Rob Pickels 00:52
I mean, when I’m thinking of how do I optimize bass, I think “do I upgrade my amplifiers or my subwoofers?”
Trevor Connor 01:00
Yeah, we don’t need-
Grant Holicky 01:01
I don’t know why Trevor just looked at me like “that man is an idiot”.
Trevor Connor 01:07
Good, you read my face.
Grant Holicky 01:10
The whole reason I’m here is that he has somebody to look at when Rob makes a dad joke.
Trevor Connor 01:15
Griffin, you want to rescue this train wreck?
Griffin McMath 01:17
You know, I was just gonna say I look forward to going through these workouts and understanding when and who and how to apply them. So let’s get into it.
Chris Case 01:28
Alter Exploration is a new custom cycling tour company created by me, Fast Talk Labs co-founder Chris Case. Alter Exploration crafts life altering trips that create opportunities for both physical and mental evolution. Alters trips aren’t so much a vacation, as an exploration of you and the destination. At the end of every day, be preoccupied as much by the transformative experience as by the satisfaction of exhaustion, and reach a greater understanding of your physical and mental capabilities while simultaneously experiencing a stunning landscape. Life. Altered. Learn more about my favorite adventure destinations and start dreaming at alterexploration.com.
Trevor Connor 02:14
So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re originally going to do a favorites episode on bass work but everybody that we asked about bass work tended to give us the “I just like to go out and ride with my friends” and we figured 15 minutes of that was probably not the best use of an episode. But we did get some really interesting workouts, we got some good, lower intensity, building-that-volume type workouts, and then we got some good high intensity workouts. So what we’re going to do is break it in two: we’re first going to play the workouts that are the more “let’s build some volume, let’s build up some training stress” type workouts, we’ll talk about those and then we’ll shift, we got three high intensity workouts – play them all, let’s kind of compare and contrast and have a discussion about those. I’m kinda looking forward to these base ones because you know, there’s that constant debate that we bring up of the polarized versus sweetspot. So here we’ve got one from Dr. Stephen Seiler, which is very much the zone two on the five zone model, sustained in that polarized area. And then we got a good Frank Overton “Let’s hit every zone, let’s do a bunch of sweetspot, let’s see how much training stress we can accumulate”. And we are throwing in there, also, Sonya Looney talking about her favorite sweetspot intervals. So what do you guys think? Should we play these and then have a conversation?
Grant Holicky 03:33
Yeah, let’s do it.
Stephen Seiler’s Zone 2 Workouts
Trevor Connor 03:34
Okay, so we will start with Dr. Stephen Seiler talking about one of his favorite zone two workouts.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 03:42
“What’s Zone Two” – you know, that is become the catch phrase, kind of like it’s under your first lactate turnpoint, but it’s kind of close and everybody’s trying to understand what it is. So that’s where I’ve been doing this 180, 220, 180, 220, just going back and forth and then looking at my, you know, am I keeping heart rate flat? And so I’m actually doing quite a few of those and I’m doing – for the first time, I’m using Ergo mode, and just turning off my brain and just working. In three, four years of cycling, I’ve just never done that because I’ve always felt like “no, I want to be engaged, I want to be using my brain to keep the power net”. But no! Now I’m just plugging in and it just goes up and down and does this little – whatever you call it – base interval. And now I’m playing with the idea, “okay, how am I going to program this or progress it? So let’s say I’m doing 180, 220, 225 as the – two, you know, five minutes of each and I’m just going, going, going. Sometimes I go longer, so that’s a programming issue, but you can also think, “well, Steven, you could also bumped the 225 to 230. Or you could bump the 180 to 185? Right, so you could play with either the easy or the higher level, you could link them, how to program this? I think the last thing I’m going to do is bumped the 180 up, that’s probably the least likely thing I’ll do. But I might – I have gone from 220 to 225 and that was just to make sure that I actually averaged 220, because it wasn’t quite achieving what I wanted it to on the power. So anyway, that’s my favorite workout in the sense that I’m interested in it and I’m looking at it, using it and looking at cardiac drift, I’m looking at ventilation, I’m just seeing how my body responds. And very typically my body stays very flat for two hours, and then starts ramping up, you know, so two hours just seems to be kind of my – what should i say – my glycogen limit? I don’t know what’s going on but I do start seeing a clear decoupling consistently at two hours, pretty much no matter what I do, so maybe it’s just my fiber type. don’t know.
Rob Pickels 05:52
Trevor, as you pointed out the other day, you did some bass riding on the trainer, I believe. And you came in and said, “My God, there was so much strain after doing it on the trainer monotonously, for hours on end. It’s a different signaling, I think, than when you’re running outside, and you’re coasting and you’re at stoplights, and you’re at 100 watts and…
Trevor Connor 06:15
It was the ERG mode. Yeah, because I’ve done a six hour ride on Zwift and, believe it or not, actually enjoyed it. But this is the first time I did what you two are doing.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 06:24
In ERG mode, you get no favors.
Rob Pickels 06:26
Yeah, zero.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 06:27
If you pause for just five seconds also – and you can barely get moving again because suddenly the torque is so damn high – so yeah, I figured out, “Oh, yeah, I got a really – I can’t do anything wrong on ERG mode, you know?”
Trevor Connor 06:40
Yeah. What do you feel are the benefits of this?
Dr. Stephen Seiler 06:43
I’m just trying to build good basic aerobic capacity. I’m of the general impression that the higher my LT1 is, the better as just a fundamental – that, maybe, is the marker of my basic fitness is the higher I can go without accumulating any kind of lactate, the better. And I’m investing some energy and trying to see whether I can bump, keep that up, as you know, reasonably high. That LT1 power.
Trevor Connor 07:11
That’s really interesting, because I have noticed over the last 10 years, my LT2 hasn’t changed very much, but my LT1 has changed a lot. And I have noticed that my performance racing each year really correlates more with were that LT1 is. The years where my LT1 is much lower, I don’t race as well.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 07:34
Yeah. And I think there’s actually – we could find data, that there’s been some others that have argued this in some research publications that the first lactate turn-point adverse ventilatory threshold is a very good predictor of time trialing and so forth. You might think, “Well, why isn’t the LT2 in that?” but it just seems like your diesel, you know, how much of your basic aerobic metabolism can you draw on without really turning on any kind of glycolysis or a big stress response, that is just a bigger savings, because every time you go above it, you’re taxing the system. So if I can set that point just a little higher and think of that over hours and hours and hours, then that’s good for me. And that’s also, I would say the basic idea of this training intensity distribution is that’s the marker that demarcates essentially two training zones: low stress, high stress. And that’s really my 20 year – I won’t call it an epiphany because it’s taken me 20 years to get there so it’s kind of the opposite of an epiphany – but it’s just the slow realization that what’s really been polarized is not intensity, it’s stress. How do I manage the stress, get the signal, manage the stress? And that’s, for me it’s basically what people have been doing for years hard, easy, you know, it’s not new.
Frank Overton’s Stress Training
Trevor Connor 09:06
All right, so let’s completely shift gears here and let’s go to one of Frank Overton’s favorite workouts. So Frank Overton, as you know, is a big fan of sweetspot training and he has what he – I like the name of this, the AMEX OTS – which I’ll let him explain, but this is all about accumulating training stress.
Frank Overton 09:26
One of our most favorite sweetspot workouts is the OTS ride and it’s a challenge to the athlete if they can achieve, let’s just say a 200 OTS in three and a half hours, and it’s fun, it’s flexible, it lets them do it on a group ride where they can actually probably do more work by following wheels than they could on their own, or if they want to go out and ride hills and, you know, push the higher end of sweet spot, you know, to use the terrain to help them achieve more work. That’s all fair game too. And then, in addition to the favorite sweet spot workout, one of the other workouts that I love a lot – we call it the AMEX ride. AMEX, don’t leave home without it and AMEX OTS is don’t come home without it and so you give the athlete a workload, and you say, “Don’t come home without it”. And this is an all-zones ride. So it works with the spirit of group rides, races, they can ride zones, four, five and six up hills, and just generally ride hard, which is – a lot of athletes like doing this and again, we give these rides maybe once a week, it’s not like they’re doing this four or five times a week. But those are two of my favorite – well, one was sweetspot, but the AMEX ride, you can achieve a lot within if you do a lot of sweetspot within the AMEX ride. But it’s like sweetspot plus all the hard stuff.
Trevor Connor 10:52
Can you give us the quick 30 second summary of what OTS means?
Frank Overton 10:55
Yeah, OTS is optimized training stress, it’s a power-based and heart-A base metric, it’s duration times intensity, and it takes into account the rider fatigue for long rides, so you get credit for the third and the fourth and the fifth hour where you incur more stress than you do in the first and the second, and then also doesn’t take into account coasting, and we use an exponentially weighted moving average.
Trevor Connor 11:18
And then would you do these workouts all year round? Or is it something at a particular time of year?
Frank Overton 11:23
Definitely not all year round, depends on the time of the year, definitely during the build phases where you’re looking to generate large workloads to increase training load. It can be during the season, a lot of times these workouts occur on Saturdays where the athlete has the long ride day.
Trevor Connor 11:42
And then what would you say is the the biggest benefit you gain from these two workouts?
Frank Overton 11:47
A lot of times athletes just need to ride more in order to get faster and so these bouts of training are their chance to ride more, and it expands their range. It also is specific oftentimes for the types of events they’re doing for these gravel and fondo events that are 4, 5, 6, 7 hours plus and we can match these workloads that we know come from the races and have them do that in their training. And it also helps them put the two and two together. So they’re like “dang, this race that I did sign up for is going to be really difficult”.
Sonya Looney’s Sweetspot Intervals
Trevor Connor 12:22
Finally, even though this isn’t so much of a base miles ride, we’re doing that contrasting of polarized versus sweetspot. So let’s bring Sonya Looney in here, she has what she loves to do – she’s a mountain biker, very high level mountain biker – she loves weekly to do 3 by 15 minute sweetspot intervals. So let’s hear her describe this.
Sonya Looney 12:42
I’m a big fan of sweetspot workouts so the 3 by 15 minute sweetspot training is always really helpful for me. It’s hard, and it’s a grind, but it’s not so hard that it actually blows you up.
Trevor Connor 12:56
So describe this – so 3 by 15 minutes, so what sort of intensity are you doing?
Sonya Looney 13:00
So, sub-threshold, like just under threshold but not popping over.
Trevor Connor 13:03
Okay, and then what’s the recovery length between each of the 15 minutes?
Sonya Looney 13:07
Sometimes it’s based on the terrain that I’m riding because I’m on the mountain bike, but 10 to 15 minutes in between, or sometimes 5 minutes in between if I’m getting closer to an event.
Trevor Connor 13:15
Is this stuff that you’ll do throughout the base season – will you do it every week, or is it infrequent?
Sonya Looney 13:20
It’s pretty much every week.
Trevor Connor 13:21
Wow. So once a week or…?
Sonya Looney 13:23
Once a week. I usually do, for my interval training, I do one sweetspot type workout and then one threshold type workout unless I’m doing a recovery week or I’m tired from life (laughs).
Trevor Connor 13:34
Fantastic. And what do you feel are the benefits of doing that workout?
Sonya Looney 13:37
Sweetspot workout because whenever I’m racing, I’m often, as an ultra endurance racer, I’m not often racing at super high intensities, but having a lot of tolerance for that sub-threshold and having a really wide zone there helps me go harder for longer without blowing up. And I also think that in stage racing, you’re spending most of your time racing at around your sweet spot.
Commentary on Guest Workouts
Trevor Connor 13:58
All right, folks, you heard the three. What are your thoughts? What are your reactions? And Grant, I’m looking at you because you look like you’re ready to get on a soapbox.
Grant Holicky 14:06
No, no no, I have no reaction.
Rob Pickels 14:08
I have a reaction.
Trevor Connor 14:09
Rob, what’s your reaction?
Rob Pickels 14:10
Stephen stole my heart when we got wings together. But he really pushed it over the top when he does –
Trevor Connor 14:18
ERG mode base work.
Rob Pickels 14:19
…ERG mode base work. Boy, my boy over here, you know, stealing out of my playbook, rocking the ERG mode for base on the trainer, man, that’s about as good as training gets, in my opinion.
Grant Holicky 14:34
You’re a nut job, but I do love the concept of prescribing ERG mode based miles because then people can’t
Rob Pickels 14:42
They can’t mess it up.
Grant Holicky 14:43
They can’t mess it up.
Rob Pickels 14:44
You really can’t mess it up. It’s the most amazing thing in the world.
Trevor Connor 14:47
Dr. Seiler, if you’re listening, I just apologize that Rob has convinced you to do this.
Rob Pickels 14:52
No, I don’t think that I convinced him to do it, but you know, you know we’re on the same page, you know?
Grant Holicky 14:56
I’m with you. I’m with you. I don’t have to use ERG mode but – what I like about this is the exploration and base. I like that he’s keeping 180 at 180, so with a low end of base stays at low end of base and then to kind of exploring what the higher end of base is.
Rob Pickels 15:12
And I think it’s important that there is the ebb and the flow in the workloads, to tell you the truth, and other people will be like, “Well, why why can’t I just set it, you know, for him? Why can’t I just set it to 200 Watts and go from there?”, right? Because that’s not riding, that’s “you got to push forward a little bit, you got to pull back a little bit, you know, you’re mimicking what’s on the road, you got to change the tension that’s occurring in your legs”, I think all of that is important andI do think that the trainer can be monotonous for people and something like this helps break that monotony.
Trevor Connor 15:39
So I want hear what you guys have to say about where we kind of finish this conversation because you heard my opinion, I do think raising that LT1 is one of the most important things you can do – and for anybody listening, if you haven’t heard our past episodes talking with Dr. Seiler, he has a three zone model that’s differentiated by two thresholds. You have LT2 – which is what most people refer to as your anaerobic threshold is what you time-trial out – but there’s this lower threshold, which is LT1 and that’s what you can kind of hold for five, six hours, you can hold for a long time. And I’m a big believer that getting that LT1 up is really critical, particularly if you’re a road racer, and doing multiple hours, because then you can do most of the race without really fatiguing because you’re at what’s your body feels is a low intensity, but particularly – Grant, if somebody’s focused on cyclocross, how do you feel about this?
Grant Holicky 16:29
I think there’s a lot of value and the idea of LT1 and raising that up, I think covering the distance or covering the time is super important, you know, especially as we go into this stuff, that’s – a lot of people on the show that are starting to look at gravel, and the gravel races that they’re going to do,6, 7, 8 hour races and having that ability to kind of slow burn through that long period of time is really important. And that’s what I like about what he’s playing with on that top end of base, right, like pushing that envelope a little bit higher and a little bit higher. And plus bass is all in vogue again but bass has always been.
Trevor Connor 17:07
Should have always been.
Grant Holicky 17:07
It’s always been king. And everybody knows I like to do intensity, but there’s always a ton of bass written into the schedule because that’s where we get efficient at clearing, we got to be able to clear what we’re producing and if you don’t get efficient at clearing, doesn’t matter how well you can produce it.
Rob Pickels 17:08
For a cycling in general, I think that LT1 is a pretty universal sign of what’s to come.
Grant Holicky 17:31
Yeah.
Rob Pickels 17:32
And what we often see – and I have done more lactate tests than I can count on people and also on myself, actually – what you tend to see in people is this: somebody comes in relatively unfit, and they’ll have what I’ll call an upward sloping baseline, maybe they’re 1.5, maybe they’re even a two millimole to start. On the next stage, they creep up a little bit, they’re 1.5, then they go 1.8, and then they go 2.1, and then they go 2.5, and they go 3.5. And then they go 10. And they never have a nice flat baseline. So you go out and you prescribe based training to them and what happens? Now they’re, okay, they’re 1.3, they’re 1.3, they’re 1.3, they’re 1.4, they’re 1.5 and then they go up from there, right?
Grant Holicky 18:15
Yeah, no, no, I was just gonna joke that often you see 1.3, 1.3, 1.8, 1.3.
Rob Pickels 18:22
But that’s a bit of a whoopsie on that.
Grant Holicky 18:25
But I do think what you’re saying is dead-on, right? The base isn’t fatiguing you anymore. And I think that’s what people run into a lot is – like just going and doing a long base ride. I remember this when I first started training, I would go out and do a three hour ride and I was exhausted, I’d lay on the couch. And I wasn’t even going that hard, really. And so this, this just breeds that ability to go. And the other thing that I like about what Seiler’s doing is when you push the wattage up that little bit, you are still producing more and now you drop back down, you clear it all out – like, no science behind this necessarily, but anecdotally it should feel like this should up the efficiency of what we’re trying to do in that zone. I really liked that.
Trevor Connor 19:05
So let’s completely shift gears here. AMEX OTS. Let’s hit every zone, let’s accumulate a ton of training stress. So this was Frank Overton’s, leading into the season.
Grant Holicky 19:15
I love this workout when you’re getting closer to racing, because then when you’re racing, you’re hitting every zone. For me, it’s dangerous because I feel like you are giving the athlete free license to absolutely wallop themselves with no structure and I would go out and that workout, if I wanted to get to 200 TSS or OTS or however he describes it, I just do one minute efforts, or 20 second huge efforts but that’s helpful – but I can’t believe I’m saying this – It’s a little too unstructured for my taste.
Rob Pickels 19:45
Wow, look at that. Yeah.
Grant Holicky 19:47
I know.
Rob Pickels 19:48
Trevor just whipped his head around fast enough to give him some whiplash.
Grant Holicky 19:51
Think he might have hurt himself.
Trevor Connor 19:51
(Laughs)
Rob Pickels 19:53
Yeah, Grant, I think that you know, I’m a little bit more of a “time in zone” type of person, right? And hearing Frank talk about this, it always reminds me – because, you know, Frank is a brilliant coach, he’s had such great success, he’s such a cool dude, you know, I love Frank – but we tend to look at things in a very different way. And you know, prior to developing OTS, Frank was really big on on Kjs, on prescribing by kilojoules, and go out and accumulate X number of kilojoules. And here’s the thing. I don’t think that that works in my training structure but it definitely works in Frank’s training structure.
Grant Holicky 20:28
Absolutely. That’s a very fair point. Right. And I think the other thing is, as we talk about the – you know, everybody’s new favorite metric durability – you can start to get into you know “I’ll play around with prescribing Kjs before, I want you to get this many kilojoules in before you go do the intervals, because I want that durability to come up”. But it still scares me, I still go back and look at what they did to get the kilojoules up. Right, like you did that in an hour? Wait a second, let’s go look at this again, that’s probably wasn’t gonna work.
Trevor Connor 21:01
You know, my initial reaction is “oh, boy, that’s not what I would get”. But I gotta admit, you know, some of my best years – I wouldn’t do it all winter – but as you’re getting towards the end of the winters, getting close to the season, I always love to go out and do what’s called the Oval ride in Fort Collins, which was six hours on the bike. And first hour and a half, you’re hitting all the sprint lines doing these super hard 30 second, one minute efforts, then you hit the hills and you’re doing 5, 6, 7, 8 8 minute efforts and then I – just because I was stupid – when we’re getting close to the finish line, they turn right, I turn right, go climb this HC climb, and then limp home.
Grant Holicky 21:37
Right? What I was gonna say is this OTS, AMEX OTS ride looks like a group ride.
Rob Pickels 21:43
Yeah.
Grant Holicky 21:44
And I think that’s a really nice way for coaches to incorporate the group ride, because that can be a challenge sometimes of how to incorporate the group ride into the training.
Rob Pickels 21:52
And it’s important to be able to give athletes the opportunity to go out and enjoy riding a bike.
Grant Holicky 21:56
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Pickels 21:57
Yeah, perfect training is solo-training so that you’re doing everything to a tee, right? But is that really perfect training?
Grant Holicky 22:04
Well, and furthermore, this is kind of a fun workout too, you get to go hammer yourself in a bunch of different ways. That’s not fun to you, Griffin? That’s not what you had on the list of fun?
Griffin McMath 22:13
No, I just – I’m loving this. I really appreciate as you’re going through each of these workouts, you know, is this suitable for a solo ride or for a group ride? And then also, the notes that we have on the comparison of what’s actually happening with stress and the workload during the workout. So whereas we’re polarizing stress with Seiler’s workout, this one, you’re just trying to accumulate stress and so I think being able to pick apart this so that as coaches or athletes are listening to this, they’re understanding when to plug and play each of these workouts is a good idea. So I think I have questions right now that I can answer – I’d be asking you about what we’re talking about and we’re saying we’re accumulating stress throughout this particular ride.
Rob Pickels 22:13
Yeah, two things I want to point out; one, I love that you’re pointing out the stress aspect of it, because that’s really what we’re talking about, right, it is stress on the body and then hopefully the adaptation that comes from that, but I will say the more you do the Seiler, than the better you can do the Frank Overton.
Grant Holicky 23:08
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
Trevor Connor 23:12
So what about Sonya Looney’s? What’s your thoughts on this?
Grant Holicky 23:15
3 by 15, one of the ones I do is 15, then a 10, then a 5. This is pretty typical early season stuff, getting into the tempo zones. The only thing out of this that I would question is, what mountain bike races is she doing that she’s like…this…., which I know the –
Rob Pickels 23:31
She is (?) an Olympic or a short track mountain biker.
Grant Holicky 23:35
But that also is definitely true of most of the mountain bike races in Colorado, and a lot of the ones in the States. Long climb, then recover on the downhill, then long climb, recover on the downhill. And this is a really good example of kind of starting to get yourself used to what you’re going to go see in your races.
Rob Pickels 23:52
Yeah, I mean, I will say, though, I wouldn’t go 3 by 15 for more novice athletes, I wouldn’t go 3 by 15 for some people who might not have a good base of fitness. I think that 45 minutes of stress -it’s a decent amount, especially depending on how close to threshold you’re getting.
Grant Holicky 24:10
Well, that’s the question, right? If this is true tempo, then we’re getting a very similar physiological response to what we get in base – it’s just a little harder. But as we creep toward sub-threshold work, this is a completely different workout.
Trevor Connor 24:24
And that’s where I was going to split hairs, because that’s what she said- she said, just below threshold. And I always think of, you know, we got Dean Gulledge to describe his training plan to us. And he loves, as you’re getting into February and March, doing 3 by 20s, which is fairly close and he has his athletes to do it sub-thresholds, like 95. Yeah, yeah, right around there. And his point was, what he has seen is it’s – doing it at 95% of threshold, doing 100% of threshold, doing 103% of threshold, all the exact same, so I would split the hairs slightly, you know, she didn’t give an exact number. But I would actually personally call this a little more of a threshold workout.
Grant Holicky 25:07
But still in that case, right, if we look at this as a threshold workout just a couple of weeks ago, Trevor, you and I were talking about pushing more threshold work during this time of year, starting to get used to that, starting to have that in the body and then we can get more specific as we go down the line. And even myself, who loves lots of different zones, that is definitely something that I’m doing a lot more in the winter time, true threshold work or even high tempo work or even regular tempo work, just start to get the work out a base start to get you to understand what it feels like to be under load without crippling.
Trevor Connor 25:42
And now the truth comes out,
Grant Holicky 25:44
I’ve always known that.
Trevor Connor 25:45
That you like me Grant, you really like me (laughs). You like my threshold work.
Grant Holicky 25:52
That is its own episode, that is its own episode.
High Intensity Workouts
Trevor Connor 25:56
Brrr. Winter. The air is cold. But getting back to conditioning and looking to rev up your training. If you haven’t already, now is a great time of year to reflect on the past season, specifically when it comes to data and recovery: two very important metrics in endurance sports. Visit Fast Talk Labs and take a look at our pathways on recovery and data analysis. These two in-depth guides can help you get the most from your offseason. See more at fasttalklabs.com/pathways. Shall we shift to our three high intensity workouts?
Grant Holicky 26:36
Yeah, let’s do it.
Trevor Connor 26:37
Okay, so the first one, friend of the show, Dr. Paul Laursen wrote a entire book on HIT work. So guess what were getting from?
Rob Pickels 26:48
Not hit-man, HIT work.
Grant Holicky 26:50
High Intensity Training. Yes.
Trevor Connor 26:52
So he brought up a workout that he loves to do when he’s short on time and it’s 30-15. So 30 seconds really hard, 15 seconds recovery, you repeat that a bunch of times. It’s basically a Tabata workout, but we’ll let him talk about how to do it and why he likes it.
Dr. Paul Laursen’s HIT Workout
Dr. Paul Laursen 27:11
My favorite workout is a 30-15 session where I might do – you know, maybe I’ve got 30, 45 minutes and I’ve got a really busy day but I’ve got this little block on the bike. And I know I can just go to my trainer and I can get this done in between 30 and 45 minutes and it just gives me that awakening. It’s a vO2 session where I might warm up for like 10 minutes on the trainer and then I will break into sets of 30-15 – or you usually do about eight of them and then it’s usually about five minutes per set of 30 seconds heart zone, you know, zone 6, 15 seconds, easy zone one and you know, repeat those for – do eight of those, that’s, that’s a five minute block, two to three minutes recovery in between, almost kind of go by feel, do another block, do the third block, do third – three is kind of my minimum. But that’s, you know, I can even do five minutes or a 10 minute cooldown there, after. But, you know, in terms of making me feel good and feeling like I’ve done something in the day, even when I’m super busy, I love that 30-15 session, you know, I’ve got thousa others that I love too, but if I had to pick one, I’ll go with that one. I guess the value of it is that cognitively I will feel a lot better in my day, because I’ve done something, so it is the time efficiency of that workout. It is of course vO2 max stimulating, right, so you’re gonna get both large fast twitch muscle fiber recruitment for the work outputs and also gonna get ventricular contraction, so all the things that you get with vO2 max – my heart is going to build and be stronger and I’m going to feel great thereafter. For me, in my context – busy CEO a little bit – you know, between meetings or various different things, I might have 90 minutes or an hour to get sort of something done. I would use it there but you can equally use this in any sort of given microcycle in the week to hit that vO2 max nail right? If you can only do L2 sessions around that, then this is a great one to just get in there, time efficient and you hit the vO2 nail.
4 by 4 Mile Repeats with Brady Holmer
Trevor Connor 29:42
Alright, let’s shift gears a little bit here. We have Brady Holmer who is a writer at Examine.com and an exercise physiologist. He actually gave us two workouts. He’s a runner, so he’s given us a couple run workouts. One is the classic – what’s called the cruise interval, doing mile repeats, talking about “you start with three, you might build up to doing seven of them” – we’ll let him describe that. And then he talks about the 4 by 4 minute intervals at 85 to 90% of max heart rate, so let’s hear him describe both these workouts.
Brady Holmer 30:19
So, I’ll talk about maybe one that I like personally, and then maybe one that I think has some very good research to back it up. I’ll preface this by saying that my background is primarily in endurance running so I’m primarily a runner, but a favorite workout of mine, a classic workout is the good old mile repeats. So I think these are great for kind of big – sort of bridge the gap between doing maybe a slower tempo run and faster maybe “lactic threshold or anaerobic intervals”, but for me, these have always just been, throughout the season something that I’ve performed, whether it’s during the summer when I’m training for like a base training or kind of whether I’m trying to hone race pace, doing mile repeats is something that I’ve never really not done as a runner. I’ll do anywhere from three of those, if it’s kind of early on to – up to kind of six or seven is probably the maximum that I would do, but essentially what that is, I’ll just run one mile, I’ll recover for – depending again, on the time in the season – about maybe three to five minutes, and then we’ll just run one again, those should be at a somewhat comfortable pace. But by the end of them, you’re pretty tired so they’re kind of like threshold intervals. In college, my coach called them “cruise intervals”, they go by many names but I think these are good to do kind of earlier on in the season, this depends on what the length of your event is, but you know, they’re great for for base building, and what you know, you can kind of gear them towards – they’re not necessarily at a prescribed intensity so they’re going to be relative to kind of whatever your current fitness is, at that point, like relative to your race pace so as you get fitter, those might get faster. So I kind of do mile repeats closer towards the beginning but mile repeats are one of my favorite workouts to do personally. I think a session that has some good evidence behind it would be 4 by 4 minute protocol, so this is a high intensity interval session. Essentially, what it involves is just doing a total of 4, four minute intervals and those are going to be between 85% and 95% of your heart rate or your vO2 max interspersed with three minute recoveries. Those have very good evidence behind them to support, in particular increasing, one’s vO2 max. So the 4 by 4, I think that’s kind of a good – yeah, it can be a good base building workout – but it could be a good workout for sort of sharpening your racing skills like later on in the season.
Power Hour with Lauren Vallee
Lauren Vallee 32:35
I think one of my favorite workouts is an hour bike ride that’s called Power Hour, and it’s 20 minutes, smooth warm up and then basically it’s 20 by one minute on, one minute off, and you are trying to hit the max sustainable output that you can at a certain cadence. So, that cadence changes for me, depending on the part of the season that I’m in – so if it’s postseason, typically it’s going to be 55 to 60 RPM, so it’s gonna be grinding a really big gear and that is a special form of torture – but I really like that set.
Trevor Connor 32:35
Finally, our third high intensity workout – this comes from Lauren Vallee, she calls it her power hour, it is one minute on, one minute off for an excruciating length of time, let’s just let her describe it. So I’ve never actually heard that variation on it. So what is the reason you do this workout? What are the gains?
Lauren Vallee 33:31
So, the gains are, at that low cadence – I coach a lot of low cadence training for my triathletes and to be specific, it’s non draft legal racing, which is very different than draft legal triathlon – so the 55 to 60 RPM, you’re really holding the muscle contraction longer as you’re driving the pedal down and it just builds tremendous strength at quite a low heart rate for the amount of work and power you’re putting out. So it’s just a ton of strength that you’re building in the offseason which, for me, I think is really smart because you’re not just sitting on the trainer for four hours at a zone two intensity, you’re gonna get a lot of bang for your buck with that session.
Trevor Connor 34:10
And you said, this is just something that you do in the offseason?
Lauren Vallee 34:12
No, that session can be used all year, but you may – what I start to do if I use it in season is I start incorporating more race specific cadence, so anywhere from 70 to 80 RPM depending on the athlete.Some of my athletes ride closer to 80, some of them ride closer to 70, I typically ride between 68 and 75 RPM is when I raced so that’s kind of a sweet spot for – if I’m doing that workout in season.
Rob Pickels 34:38
Lauren, can I ask, are you aiming for a specific power output during this workout?
Lauren Vallee 34:43
Not necessarily. It’s supposed to be best repeatable output. And so if I were to give somebody a cadence floor, maybe I might say, “you know, don’t really work hard to get higher than 230 if you can” – I might do that, but I coach using perceived exertion and then I use the data afterwards to be the feedback – and we could go into a whole conversation about why – but it really is supposed to be best sustainable output and what happens, the more you do that workout is you really get a feel for “oh, I can sustain 20 reps of this” and that is part of the outcome and part of the goal of doing that workout. And so as you do it, yeah, you should have a sense that “okay, it’s 70 RPM, so I’m trying to hit 230 watts”. And then I’m looking at as, as the reps go on, am I losing power? Am I building power? Am I staying the same? So you kind of use the power within the workout to kind of meter out your intensity. And then me, as the coach, we’ll sit down with the athlete afterwards and talk about “Was this higher or lower than last time? And what was the context that you did that workout in? How much fatigue do you have? You know, how close are we to a race?
Trevor Connor 34:50
All right, guys, what do you think? Which did you like, which sounds horrifying? Would you use all these and would you use them for the same purposes? Or is there some variety here?
Rob Pickels 36:01
No, no, absolutely not use it for the same purpose. You know, Dr. Laurson is doing a 30 by 15, 30 seconds on, 15 seconds off. I tend to be more of a 30-30 type of person – Grant, I know you like to do a lot of 40-20s – there’s a lot of different workouts in very similar vein but I think that they all work a little bit differently to tell you the truth.
Grant Holicky 36:25
I agree with that. 30-15, 20-10s, the true Tabata kind of stuff, I believe – and maybe this is just me personally, and how I do them – I think it pushes you a little bit out of threshold-y style stuff, you can see a little more variability in heart rate because the efforts aren’t as long. When you start with a 40-20, what you tend to see is a pretty steady, average right around threshold.
Rob Pickels 36:51
In terms of heart rate.
Grant Holicky 36:52
Uh, and power.
Rob Pickels 36:53
And power.
Grant Holicky 36:53
And if you look at average power after 10 by 40-20, you’re gonna see an average power that’s kind of dead at your threshold. To me, I’ve always liked that because that’s a different way to get threshold work in that similar reflects racing. I think when you start getting shorter, and you get into that, you know, 30-15, 20-10, that’s more spiky And then you go kind of 40-20, 30-30, 20-40 – by the time you’re 20-40, the heart rate’s, kind of just getting a little bit more steady, but I really liked 30-15 so I do them pretty early in the season. I like it on a Tuesday and you know, then turning around on a Wednesday and doing more threshold stuff. I like touching that VO2 max world and then stepping away from it. And you know – as I’ve said on the show – I think that like vO2 max is such a misleading term because it’s like everything over threshold. There’s a ton of nuance in there. So I really like going to 30-15, I like how that workout feels, I like what it does for an athlete – kind of preps them for what’s to come.
Rob Pickels 37:13
Yeah. Yeah, for me it’s – I don’t term these VO2 max, I term them “max aerobic power”.
Grant Holicky 37:58
Yeah.
Rob Pickels 37:58
Because it’s kind of what you’re doing – you’re doing these at around a max aerobic power but because the work and the rest are both so short, I think that v02 tends to lag behind. And if we’re looking at a time at vO2 max and that’s – when I think of a vO2 max workout, I think more of the better onset time vO2 max, I think that there are better ways to achieve that. But, for me, working through a progression like this, getting the body used to that max aerobic power for short palatable time periods, this is a great in my – I use this during the base season, a great lead in to true vO2 max work – it lets you get used to it without the pain of the full vO2 work.
Grant Holicky 38:40
And it also starts getting you used to the pain.
Rob Pickels 38:43
Yeah.
Grant Holicky 38:43
Like “oh, I can do this again”.
Trevor Connor 38:44
That’s the big thing for me. That’s what I love about Tabatas. I do think physiological adaptations, there’s multiple different ways to get very similar adaptations, but you think about racing, how often are you on a race where somebody attacks, you respond to them, you do this huge 20-30 second effort, you just caught them, you’re trying to catch your breath, somebody else attacks and you got to go again – you got to get used to that “huge effort, you don’t get enough time to recover before you got to do huge effort again”.
Grant Holicky 39:11
Well and there’s multiple ways to do Tabatas. One of the ways to do Tabatas is you kind of cap the high end effort, right? Say you’re gonna do the on at 150% of threshold power. The other way to do it is just go as hard as you possibly can and you’re gonna watch it fall off as you go through the eighth. Another one you watch it be pretty steady through the eighth. And so like, again, I will forever say there’s a lot of nuance up there. And how you use it is really important – but I agree with Trevor, you’re starting to get used to hurting and there’s something to that.
Rob Pickels 39:39
I actually I do the opposite. I cap the recovery, and I make the recovery a base wattage, I make the recovery 65, 70% of FTP. And what that means is, because you’re not dropping to zero, because you’re not dropping to 50 RPM, it limits how hard you’re going on the next one.
Grant Holicky 40:00
And that’s what I do on 40-20s. I did that same idea on 40-20s, when I get a little shorter like 30-15s or 20-10s I don’t really cap it, like, “go hard, go easy, go hard, go easy”, but 40-20s? Yeah, absolutely. I really liked this workout early season, you just have to be careful about A) how often you use it, and where you use it in the week.
Trevor Connor 40:19
You don’t love me as much as I thought you did.
Griffin McMath 40:21
So then why do you get to the end of this workout and feel great then, because I just heard you all talking about capping out so much, why does someone feel great after this?
Rob Pickels 40:30
I think that for a lot of athletes a little bit of suffering is a pleasurable thing.
Grant Holicky 40:30
Exactly what Laurson said – you feel like you did a lot, you feel like you worked out. It’s such a great short time peace. And this is one of those quintessential workouts that again, we were talking about is, you touch every single zone or every zone is involved in what you’re trying to do. There’s no such thing as “I’m only in zone three” – well, I don’t think there’s ever anything that you’re truly only in zone three but this is one of those things that can be inferred as vO2 max could be looked at as threshold, can be looked at as sprint, can be looked at at all these different ways. You walk out of it going, man, I just wax myself. This was awesome. It’s a great way to feel like you got a lot done. Yeah.
Rob Pickels 41:10
Right? And what happens in an on-off situation like this is every rep, you just get into a little bit of suffering without going into “Oh, this is too much suffering”.
Grant Holicky 41:21
You touch it and leave.
Rob Pickels 41:22
You touch it and you touch it and you touch – and you know, he’s doing what, eight repeats, you know, multiple sets of that. You know, so you’re getting twenty-four little instances of just a little bit of suffering and by the end, the sum of that feels good without ever crossed the line where you’re begging for the interval to end.
Grant Holicky 41:41
But the other thing I love about this – and again for early season, awesome on the trainer, that’s an awesome way to pass time on the trainer.
Rob Pickels 41:48
It’s hard to do this stuff outside.
Trevor Connor 41:50
I’m the exact opposite.
Grant Holicky 41:50
It is.
Rob Pickels 41:52
Really?
Trevor Connor 41:52
Tabatas, I cannot do them on the trainer. I have to do them outside.
Rob Pickels 41:56
Wow, look at you.
Grant Holicky 41:56
Weird dude, you’re weird.
Trevor Connor 41:58
You just don’t love me at all?
Grant Holicky 41:59
No, I love you. I love you for your quirks.
Rob Pickels 42:03
I love you for who you aren’t.
Grant Holicky 42:05
Fair.
Trevor Connor 42:06
So Brady Holmer, this is kind of a shift.
Grant Holicky 42:09
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 42:09
And do we want to talk about both? Do we want to talk about his 4 by 4s? His one mile efforts?
Grant Holicky 42:14
Well, I think his 4 by 4, as he says, these are something he does later in the season, right?
Trevor Connor 42:19
Yes. He basically says the one miles are something he does early –
Grant Holicky 42:23
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 42:24
Kind of build up and then the 4 by 4 are an in-season thing.
Grant Holicky 42:27
What I like about this – and I actually could read this completely wrong – it’s kind of the old run or float mentality. The cruise, you’re gonna go out and you’re gonna do this with some speed but you’re not pushing, you’re allowing speed to come up and I think that’s another really kind of fun thing that’s early in the year, let the stride catch up, let the technique catch up. You’re not worried about the pace, you’re not worried about your watch, just go up the pace for a mile and then calm it down, up the pace for miles and calm it down. Again, another way to introduce workload.
Rob Pickels 43:01
For me though, I look at it a little bit differently. I don’t like threshold-y stuff early in training. Early in training is when I’m really polarizing a lot. I’m either very base, or I’m really focused on that max aerobic power vO2.
Trevor Connor 43:18
Rob really doesn’t like me.
Griffin McMath 43:19
Why is that?
Grant Holicky 43:20
Part of who you are. Oh my god.
Rob Pickels 43:21
It’s probably – it’s in some regard part of who I am. No, I believe that, in some regard, I think that those are the purest focus on the physiology side of things. For me, when it comes to threshold work, I think that there’s obviously some physiological adaptation but there’s a lot of other things that come there’s a little bit more event and performance specific there. And so I tend to kind of – base season – focus on base work, zone two or vO2 work. During the build, that’s when I’m really focused on a big volume of threshold-y type of training and when we get to race season, I’m almost back to more of a sharpening with a vO2 high intensity so I’m kind of like an hourglass-y shaped person with with how I do this. And so – you know what, hey, everybody’s skins cats differently and apparently Trevor skins cats incorrectly.
Trevor Connor 43:53
I’m going to bring up something that you haven’t heard because I want to hear your response to this, Rob. I was talking with Dr. Seiler yesterday and we were talking about the polarization of the low intensity and the high intensity and he said one thing he often sees people think is when they are polarizing, they have two extreme polarized – meaning they’re either zone one, or zone six with their tongues hanging out – and he said his experience is actually that you see a lot of that high intensity done more in zone four, which would be kind of that threshold, a little above threshold type zone. How do you respond to that? Because you just said you’d like to polarize by going higher intensity.
Rob Pickels 44:55
I wouldn’t say that that’s pyramidal training, not polarized training.
Trevor Connor 44:58
Okay (laughs).
Rob Pickels 45:00
Hey, here’s the thing, right? This is training that I do, it’s training that has worked well for me, it’s training that’s worked well for athletes. I think that pushing that upper vO2 max aerobic power ceiling up makes room for the threshold improvements to come. I think that it’s a great way to balance stress on the body – because during base, I do relatively little vO2 max, we’re not doing a lot of work, we’re doing a lot of work down low – and then I think that people can handle, through a build phase, a lot more threshold or just sub-threshold training in terms of training volume. And so that’s why I’m doing it sort of in that emphasis. Now the race season looks different from base, because there is more high intensity than I’m doing in base.
Grant Holicky 45:01
I would agree with that. I think I think you’re hitting an interesting thought. I think that during the base season, are people ready for a ton of threshold? They do a time threshold, and I don’t know if they’re ready for it.
Rob Pickels 45:55
And I don’t believe a little bit of threshold does anything for anybody.
Grant Holicky 45:58
I mean, I disagree. I agree physiologically, disagree psychologically. And I think I’m always paying attention to training people psychologically, too.
Trevor Connor 46:07
Well, I’ve gone from feeling the love to just – I’m being attacked.
Grant Holicky 46:12
It’s not about you, Trevor.
Rob Pickels 46:14
It’s not about you, Trevor.
Trevor Connor 46:15
So the other thing that she brought up that I actually want to ask everybody here about is she says she coaches by perceived exertion, she doesn’t give power or heart rate numbers.
Grant Holicky 46:15
But I do love the early season – and this is a good segue into value stuff – I love the early season intensity, I like going hard. I, again, would put a little bit more structure into it than what she’s doing – she does everything on feel is what she’s talking about. One of the things I love about high end vO2 max work early in the year is that it is teaching people to push a really big gear at a really high cadence. And I think that people do one or the other: they tend to push a really big gear and be at low cadence, or they push a really high cadence at a really low gear. Sprinting, attacking – again comes back to cyclocross and mountain bike – those people are spinning, and they look super supple when they’re spinning the pedals on the bike – they’re pushing massive gears and massive watts. So that comfort that you can start to create at big watts with high cadence – I like it. And early in the year, you’re not so fatigued that you get bogged down that. You can do it – this is something we talked about before with sprinting early in the year – you’re gonna hit these great sprint numbers that now you’re going to try to hold yourself to for the rest of the year. If you don’t sprint early in the year, you’re never going to see that big number, you’re too tired.
Rob Pickels 47:40
She is a total RPE-based person and I find that really interesting. You know, I think that that probably works for some athletes, it might not work for others, but I will say a lot of coaches do not put enough emphasis on RPE so I’m just happy to see that somebody even cares about it.
Grant Holicky 48:05
Yeah, I’d agree with that. I remember years ago, getting into a battle with Neil about how feel doesn’t matter and he was on me about “feel is the only thing that matters” and what we got to eventually is I was talking about racing, and he was talking about training. And I was like, “Oh no, I completely agree with you feel matters more than almost anything in the world when you’re training, I just don’t want people to think about how they feel when they’re racing, because you should feel like crap, so don’t like really focus in on it”. But I do, I agree, I think we get too caught up in – this my whole point with FTP, right, that FTP is beautiful, because it incorporates feel, because you’re gonna have to make some choices. If I’m tired, I’m dehydrated, I’m beat up from my lift, I’m all those things, your functional threshold power might be lower. And that’s okay because you’re still getting the same physiological response.
Rob Pickels 48:56
Something I find interesting about Lauren, right, she’s primarily coaching triathletes and that is something where feel, I think, is able to swap more universally between the three disciplines.
Grant Holicky 48:57
Yes!
Rob Pickels 48:58
Right, and if you’re only talking about these objective, external metrics, you can’t apply that to swimming, you can’t apply that as well to running and so I think that it’s great that she is focusing because that is something that is universal between swim, bike and run.
Grant Holicky 49:23
Yeah and to piggyback on that, like, run heart rate versus cycling heart rate, right? What’s your cycling heart rate at threshold versus what you run heart rate at threshold? That could be 20 beats different.
Rob Pickels 49:24
What’s your cycling heart rate on your TT bike versus on your road freighter?
Grant Holicky 49:28
Right, it incorporates that variability, it pays attention to that variability – that’s a really good point, though about doing three disciplines, there’s more crossover that way.
Rob Pickels 49:45
The other thing too that I’ll say is sometimes with high intensity, I think that it’s just about working hard, and not necessarily about telling an athlete to hit a certain wattage, if I tell you 360 watts, and you could have done it at 395, well, you probably should have done in 395, you know? So that’s where RPE comes in as well.
Trevor Connor 50:05
That’s something – particularly when you’re talking about these short like 30 second, 20 second efforts.
Rob Pickels 50:10
Or 20 by one…
Grant Holicky 50:13
I love this work out, this is my favorite workout.
Rob Pickels 50:17
Really?
Trevor Connor 50:18
Wow, okay.
Grant Holicky 50:18
Revolver 16 by one minute – one of my favorite workouts.
Trevor Connor 50:21
But the point I’m going to make – I always tell my athletes: if you are watching your power meter while doing a 20 seond effort –
Grant Holicky 50:27
Yeah, you’re doing it wrong.
Trevor Connor 50:28
You’re doing it wrong.
Grant Holicky 50:29
Absolutely. I love this workout as a preparation for cyclocross season. I love minute on, minute off. And I’ll tell you a little story, in the preparation for cyclocross world, Eric called me and said, “I would like to change the training plan”. I said, “why is that?” “Well, you got a minute on, minute offs on Saturday”, and I’m in my head going, “what, he doesn’t want to work?” He goes, “those are too easy.” Like –
Trevor Connor 50:52
He’s not doing them right.
Grant Holicky 50:53
No, he’s doing them, right. He’s just used to these, this is something he’s very used to, because we do them a lot. So he’ll go out and do minute on, minute offset 120 to 140% of threshold and for him, he’s like, that’s just not that hard. But that’s what I like to produce in an athlete, because that’s the kind of athlete I tend to coach. But I do like that she buries the cadence throughout the year, I would be a little bit hesitant to have it all be low cadence early in the year for this many of them, for 20 of them, that he’s going to wreck the legs. But I understand that mindset of there’s a lot of triathlon coaches that like that lower cadence, because they’re feeling like they’re using a different musculature on the bike, and then you can shift to the run and do different musculature on the run.
Griffin McMath 51:39
Grant, you talked about your athlete just now who will do minute on, minute offs out of 100-110% threshold? And you said, “Well, he can do that because there’s just not that hard”. How can something be +100% of threshold, and it not be hard?
Grant Holicky 51:57
I think it’s what athletes are used to, this is why I’m so adamant that the psychology of sport is so important. If you spend time there, you get comfortable being uncomfortable and it’s 140, 150% of threshold power – I mean, I that’s still well below max for a lot of these people. And it’s not that the workout isn’t hard. It’s not that he’s not going to be tired at the end of it. It’s just that it’s not a challenge, mentally or physically. He knows he can complete the session. And it’s pretty – just run of the mill. This is what he’s used to.
Rob Pickels 52:29
Yeah, and I’ll say to illustrate this, I’m going to use a slightly different workout and that is this: the first time you do a block of 30-30s followed by threshold, it’s the most excruciating thing you could possibly do. Yeah, especially that first minute or two is just you are willing yourself to not stop and take a break. You do that workout once, twice, three times, definitely by the third time you’re like, “this isn’t so bad”.
Grant Holicky 52:57
Yeah I know what’s coming – sorry to jump in – this is Neil’s classic Batmans: ins and outs, right? You start with this huge vO2 max effort and then you’re settling in, you’re recovering –
Rob Pickels 53:07
Correct.
Grant Holicky 53:08
At threshold.
Rob Pickels 53:09
Exactly.
Grant Holicky 53:10
And the first time you do it, you’re like, I can’t recover here. And then eventually what you learn, Griffin, is like when you do these over and over and over again, if you learn yourself and you’re paying attention to yourself, you’re like, add a minute, I know I’m gonna feel better. And lo and behold, a minute to a minute and a half and you’re like, oh, okay, I’m okay.
Rob Pickels 53:26
And this is a huge skill. I’m gonna call it a skill. And maybe it’s a mental skill in cycling, is learning how to recover even though things didn’t necessarily get easier.
Grant Holicky 53:37
Yeah, no.
Rob Pickels 53:38
And that’s where these minute on, minute offs, they sort of teach you that because they stink and they’re no fun and you want to stop after three but you learn you can keep going.
Grant Holicky 53:48
Yeah, I love them.
Final Remarks with Griffin McMath
Trevor Connor 53:49
So, Griffin, let’s give you the final word here. You’re starting to get into this, anything that you heard in these workouts made you go, “man, I want to go out and try that”. I
Griffin McMath 53:57
I think knowing where I’m at in my journey with endurance sports in this capacity, to me, I want to choose things that are going to build my confidence up and lay down basic skills. And I’ve had so many conversations now with Grant especially and Dr. Scott Frey about mindset and belief and what that does to an athlete over time that I’m looking at some of these workouts that are more about sweetspot or you know, the looney rest of team like obviously I would love to be able to say that I’m crushing some Seiler workout – I’d be stoked to be able to say that – but I think really doing some of these things where I’m working at the core and then kind of customizing later, that would be ideal. So maybe the three by fifteen sweetspot intervals, I like what Rob said at the end there about this power hour like “you might want to die after three of these” – which I think I would at this point – but knowing that if I just use that as the goal, like if I can get up to 20, I think that would be fun for me right now. Just knowing that I would have something to work towards so that’s the way I look at these.
Trevor Connor 54:59
Fantastic, well, any last thoughts? I think Griffin –
Grant Holicky 55:02
– brought us out in a nice way, I like that.
Trevor Connor 55:05
Then, that was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a rating and review. The thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk those of the individual. As always, we’d love your feedback. Join the conversation at forums.fasttalklabs.com. Tweet us with @fasttalklabs, head to fasttalklabs.com to get access to our endurance sports knowledge base, coach continuing education as well as our in-person/remote athletes services. For Griffin McMath, Grant Holicky, Rob Pickels, I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening!
