Since the early days of Fast Talk, we’ve been asking our guests (be it coaches, athletes, or scientists) to share their favorite workouts with us when they come on the show. In this edition of our Favorite Workouts series, we ask what sort of support work and strength training they do to help keep their bodies functional and strong for the upcoming season.
RELATED: Favorite Workouts—Race Season Edition!
It’s something that’s inescapable; over time you can tell the difference between endurance athletes who only focus on their sport from endurance athletes who spend a lot of time doing strength and functional work. The ones who do that extra work walk differently, they have far fewer injuries, and frankly, they just look healthier.
In the cycling world, we call it off-the-bike work, but whatever you call it, doing strength, mobility, flexibility, and stability work will not only help you perform better in your sport, but it will keep you healthier and more functional through your lifespan.
RELATED: Strength and Conditioning Core Exercises for Cyclists
In this episode, master bike fitters Dr. Andy Pruitt and Ryan Ignatz share some of their favorite strength routines while coach and Exercise Physiologist Dr. Stacey Brickson shares her favorite Bosu ball exercise. Lee Povey tells us why he likes heavy strength training and Adam St. Pierre shares why he loves to go for runs that barely feel like runs. Finally, we hear an old clip from eSports cyclist Jennifer Real about why she likes to do regular yoga sessions.
So pull out your gym mats and let’s make you fast!
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:00
Trevor, hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with Grant hollow key, Griffin McMath and Rob pickles. We got kind of the whole crew here today. Sure do so guys, it’s our Thanksgiving episode. This quite literally, goes up on Thanksgiving Day. It’s end of November. We haven’t done a favorite workout episode in a while. This is where we ask guests some of their favorite workouts. And thought it would be fun to do a theme, which is, there’s a good time of year to be in the gym, to do stuff that’s not on the bike, or, if you’re a runner or triathlete, not running or swimming, get in the gym, do some other stuff. So we got a few favorite workouts. But before we get there, I kind of wanted to throw this question to all of you, what are your favorite workouts? What do you like to do as off the bike type stuff?
Rob Pickels 00:54
Yeah, I’ll say I do think that this is a really interesting time to get into the gym for a couple different reasons. I think for a lot of the country, the weather just isn’t that great. People might not be motivated. It’s dark out after work hard to get a ride in. And I think that people can find good training in the gym, a nice, warm, well lit place you go kind of Tuesday afternoons. You see the same people. There’s a good social thing. I mean, I go every afternoon, not just Tuesday, yeah, and people have great adherence. They have a lot of fun. It mixes things up. They feel good about themselves. And the other side of it too is, you know, because the on bike training is probably relatively low, that we can put more emphasis and focus on the gym side without it being detrimental to somebody’s performance and the workouts that they’re doing. So just wanted to throw that out there. Yeah, I
Grant Holicky 01:44
think one of the things that’s fun this time of year is going to do something you don’t do very often, going with friends to a class at the gym, or going and working out with a friend that has a different routine. This is one of those times of year, like you said, if you go get sore and something hurts, not really gonna be detrimental to what you’re doing on the bike. So try something new. You might end up really, really and enjoying it. And it’s a great time to connect with friends, maybe not always on a Tuesday, but connect with friends, do something different, be social, and go meet them where they’re at. As cyclists, we spend so much time going can’t do that, can’t do that, can’t do that. I’m gonna go do this. I don’t know if I’d go play a pickup soccer game, because I would blow out every muscle in my lower body at this point. But this is the time of year where I’ll go swim for the only time all year, right? Or yoga, or a lot of just things that are different for me, for me,
Rob Pickels 02:39
if I’m recommending something you know, that I love to do, and we’re keeping it a little bit on brand with some gym exercises. I love to do weighted sled work. The gym that I tend to work out in has nice big open area sleds that you can push and pull. But I also love to do this in multiple directions, in multiple planes, as opposed to just going in and doing like a straight squat or a straight dead lift. I love to sort of work on my hip flexion and extension by actually moving something. And it feels good to dig into the ground and kind of drag something along with you. Yeah.
Grant Holicky 03:13
I mean, this is the time of year where, like I said, I can’t go play a soccer game, or I can. I just have to take it easy. But this is the time of year where it’s nice to get back to some of those team sport roots of mine, right, to go play around with some of that explosiveness or some of that stuff that’s different. I agree with
Trevor Connor 03:31
that. I don’t know this is your experience. I know you’re a cross rider, so it’s a little different for you, but October is always for me, the month where I feel the oldest.
Grant Holicky 03:41
Yeah, that was true for me, racing cross because I’m racing cross,
Trevor Connor 03:45
but for me, it’s because the race season has ended, so I’ve come off of whatever high I might or might not be on. But through the summer, it is all about riding the bike. I do get in the gym all through the year, but the summer routine that I do is all cycling specific moments. So my body is out of balance. It’s not functioning as well. I can feel all those imbalances building. So come October, when I get off the bike, I just kind of feel old lack of mobility. So I personally love at that time to just go. I’m going to get as far away from cycling specific as I can so I love sometimes in the fall, I’ll play tennis, same sort of idea, just go do something with completely different movement. When I go into the gym, my favorite thing to do at this time of year is not even build myself a weight plan and just go do a whole ton of exercises. I go these don’t help my cycling at all. Trevor
Rob Pickels 04:36
just walks in and goes, I lift things up, I put them down,
Grant Holicky 04:40
doing curls in front of the mirror. Oh,
Trevor Connor 04:43
God, it hurts. I do that every fall I go into the gym, I see how much I can curl, and then I just cry.
Rob Pickels 04:51
Can I ask you guys, you know, we’re gonna talk about some gym based stuff, some favorites from some guests we had. I’ll say, how do you work with your athlete? When it comes to more serious, heavy strength training like this, and as a coach, this is an area where I feel totally comfortable programming some core stuff, you know, some stability work. But when it comes to real strength training, I’ll call it, I oftentimes recommend that my athletes find somebody local that they can work with directly, one on one in person. Have you? Is that best for you guys? Or do you? Have you found a way that you can communicate effectively on the true strength side of things
Griffin McMath 05:31
I feel so strongly about, other than saying this is what to expect, as far as strength training goes, setting up a cadence or laying out what a trajectory should look like someone should be monitoring that person while they’re learning muscle memory, these body movements and how to work with weights, who can be physically in front of them, who can point to or touch certain areas of their body, where they can say, engage or stop arching here or align your body over this particular joint. You cannot do that virtually, in my opinion, in a way that is safe or does justice for setting up a lifelong safe strength routine.
Trevor Connor 06:07
I agree 100% and there are exercises I will not give my athletes if I’m working with them remote you would like them to be doing like I would still love them to be doing dead lists, but I don’t know what their form is like, Yep, and they’re going in the gym and doing it by themselves, too much of a risk of damaging themselves, injuring themselves. And I actually say this is a good point to put our first favorite workout. So this is Dr Andy Pruitt and Ryan Ignatz. Dr Pruitt actually says that deadlift is one of his favorite workouts. But then we get into that conversation of, don’t just go into the gym and do this. You need somebody to teach you how to do it. So let’s hear from them now.
Dr. Andy Pruitt 06:41
Oh, hip sled.
Trevor Connor 06:42
Okay,
Dr. Andy Pruitt 06:43
so hip sled, hip sled and dead lifts, you bet, and training jerks. I mean, those are all about glute strength and low back strength and explosion. So, yeah, those are my favorites. I think they’re hard. They’re easily to get injured. So I think you need to make sure you have good technique. I don’t like shoulder weighted free weight squats anymore because I had a spine fusion. Why did I need a spine fusion? Probably because I was doing heavy shoulder weighted squats as a kid. So I’m a really hip sled fan, deadlift cleaning jerks, those my favorites. Hit sled is a protected way to do heavy leg work, right? So your back’s protected, either the seat moves or the foot sled moves. There’s lots of different kinds of hip sleds, but it’s all about being protected and being able to do heavy, heavy leg work. The dead lift is basically bending over at the waist and picking something up from the floor, which is heavy, so again, very injury prone. So technique is important. The dead lift just you pick it up and come up to a straight position and back down. The cleaning jerk is basically the dead lift, an explosion into an overhead position. I just love them. Have liked them since I was a kid. I was a sprinter as a kid, I just, I like, I don’t know, I like strong legs and strong butts
Trevor Connor 08:02
because of the potential for injury. Here is this a good thing to go and see a trainer and have them teach you a proper form if
Dr. Andy Pruitt 08:10
you belong to a health club, I’m sure there’s a weight coach there that can help you learn how to do these and learn how to do them correctly and safely. Physical Therapists are all over it. They’re all over those they know how important that musculature is, and they know how important these particular exercises are, but done incorrectly, too much weight, you get hurt.
Ryan Ignatz 08:30
Yeah, I like getting in the gym. I like doing a lot of dead lifting squats, and I like to do some overhead stuff as well, just to keep my upper body more strong. Yeah, very similar.
Trevor Connor 08:41
Is there a common workout that you give to people after you bike fit them? That
Ryan Ignatz 08:45
is a good question. I definitely have worked on some activation warm up type stuff, just for if they’re not going to go into the gym. You know, you have no control over anything of what they’re going to do, but I try to at least offer some of the most simple, basic options for, like a reverse lunge type warm up, just to help activate some of these muscles that we’re trying to activate on the bike. Describe a reverse lunge like a reverse lunge slider, something along those lines, where you’re really engaging that glute, squeezing it and pulling your body up, making sure that there’s some forward lean to that as well. And you’re doing it single legs. There’s also some core postural muscle engagement. There some simple things like that. What about Nordic
Dr. Andy Pruitt 09:27
skiing? Anybody like the Nordic ski in the off season, I will go nordic ski, classic style for a couple hours and then come back and jump on the trainer for 30 minutes. Why would I do that? I want to turn the work I did outside Nordic skiing, into circles, into pedal stroke. I think muscles need to heal doing what you want them to do. So I’ve exhausted them doing something totally different, but I want them to heal and recover on the bike. So I always try to finish my nordic ski days on the bike for a few minutes.
Griffin McMath 09:59
- Think too. One of the best things that you can do when someone starts that journey is have them do these functional squats without weights, so that they can truly have that kind of mental focus on those muscle groups, and they can feel it without being distracted about I’m holding X amount of weight, or where am I holding the weight. They can just engage with their core, with parts of their lower body, rather than being focused on what’s in their hands. I’ll
Trevor Connor 10:24
actually say this time of year, as I said, I start with no routine. The first routine that I build for myself, to Griffin’s point, is almost entirely just body weight. It’s unweighted exercise, because I really want to work in that mobility before I start telling my body now, see if you can push some heavy weight. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 10:40
I mean doing a body weight lunge matrix, one set of that the next day, you’re like, oh boy, yeah, I can just picture though, Trevor. He walks in. He walks up to the Dumbo rack. He goes all the way to the heaviest dumbbells, and he goes, I can’t lift those up. And he moves to the next lightest, and he goes, I can’t lift those up. And he keeps going all the way down. Julie gets to ones he can lift up.
Grant Holicky 11:02
No, you see, I always
Trevor Connor 11:04
picture the way he’s walking further.
Grant Holicky 11:07
The heaviest ones can’t lift him up. Goes to the fives and starts ripping curls. But one of the things that I will say about all this with strength work is there’s those simple exercises, there’s some basic programming that I’ll give but this is not my area of expertise. I am not a CSCs. I am not a strength professional, and I do have workouts that strength professionals have given me that include YouTube clips or include descriptions, or include those things that I think can be very, very valuable, but without a doubt, it’s almost like a piece of efficacy. To say this is the ethical approach is to say this is what I know. This is what I don’t know. You need to find somebody who knows this on
Rob Pickels 11:52
that you mentioned YouTube clips or whatever else Have either of you guys used training peaks as new beta strength training workout builder, so
Trevor Connor 12:01
they just gave me access. I’m actually looking forward to giving a try, because I’ve heard good things. Have
Rob Pickels 12:05
you tried it? Yeah, wait, I used it with you. You’ve used it with me? Yeah? I think I was one of the first people they got to use it. And it doesn’t solve my problems of trying to program, but it makes it a lot better, and it makes me feel more comfortable with the things that I am willing right? So anyway, for those that don’t know, maybe I’m letting the cat out of the bag on this one training piece has worked on because their old strength was basically it was useless, like the strength activity, it shouldn’t have even been there. So they are building a new beta thing, and it’s significantly better than it was before. So keep an eye out for that videos. It does.
Trevor Connor 12:40
It does? Yes,
Rob Pickels 12:41
it has a library that you can access that has videos in it that I think were training peak staff in a training peaks location. But you can also build custom workouts if it’s not in the library, and you can associate a YouTube video into your custom workout. And I think your custom workouts just stay on your account like I don’t think the grant sees the custom ones I make. No,
Grant Holicky 13:02
it’s not shared across unless you are sharing. It’s still
Griffin McMath 13:07
not a substitute, though. No,
Trevor Connor 13:08
it’s it’s helpful, but it’s not a substitute for somebody watching you exactly.
Rob Pickels 13:13
So I feel like you have an opinion here.
Grant Holicky 13:16
No, no, I was gonna take the conversation in a slightly different direction and go back to something we touched on before. One of the things that I like this time of year as the trend in strength during the season is a bit more towards higher weight, lower rep, because it reduces a little bit of soreness while still working on strength. This is the time of year, and I thought of it because Rob You mentioned a lunge matrix. This is the time of year where I like to do those higher rep, body weight things, because I tend to be traveling. I can’t get to my gym. I can’t do to those things and just go out and do a full body weight, high rep, you know, 50 squats or a lunge matrix. That’s eight forward, eight side, eight back, and go through that five or six or seven times. This is some of the old things that we would do as swimmers and it again or as team sport athletes that again make me feel like an athlete again. And no offense to cycling, it doesn’t make me feel like an athlete in the same way you ever
Rob Pickels 14:16
see a cyclist try to do like an agility ladder. It’s gold. Jerry gold,
Trevor Connor 14:22
but they should, oh, yeah, I
Grant Holicky 14:25
agree.
Trevor Connor 14:26
This is something to me that’s really important. Of I see too many people get into the gym where they think it is all about strength. How much can you push? How much can you lift? And a lot of those people, they might look good, they might have some nice muscle mass, but when you have them start doing agility movements, the sort of movements you see in sports, they struggle at it. And I think this is the most important work for all athletes, for all people to be doing, is that mobility, that stability type work, so you can actually do the sort of movements you’re going to do in sport.
Grant Holicky 14:58
Oh, and in life, you nail it right. Is that people, not just athletes, people need to be doing
Rob Pickels 15:03
the other thing too is we have a clip from Stacy Brixton, and they bring up an interesting concept that I like to implement, and that is, ultimately, how do we make an exercise harder so that people are doing it in a safer fashion with lower weight? And what they bring into this is the bosu ball, which is it’s a stability platform. There’s a platform on one side, a half a ball on the other, which makes an unstable surface for someone, and that really changes the dynamic of doing something like a squat.
Stacey Brickson 15:34
So I’m gonna go off the bike for this workout, and I like to use a Bosu ball. So those are the pieces of equipment that have one flat side, and then the dome. And I put the dome side down, and so you’re standing on the flat single leg in the middle of the bosu. And what I do, or have my athlete, do, is a single leg squat, but with the ankle heel down. So I’m really forcing that foot into dorsiflexion, so the athlete has to maintain their balance over the bosu ball. Is their weight is really shifting posteriorly. And then I have them imagine that they’re in the middle of a pedal stroke, and that the portion of that pedal stroke, if you’re thinking of a clock face, is from 11 to one, and so is they’re standing from their single leg squat. They’re focusing on recruiting their glute, really firing that glute max to extend the hip at the same time they’re imagining coming from the 11 o’clock to one o’clock position on the pedal to hand off to the quadricep for the power position of the pedal, right? So it’s my way of simulating to the best that I can off the bike, glute recruitment that the athlete can translate to on the bike. And then I keep that BOSU, and I keep my single leg stance, but now I go toe down, so I’m really in more of a planter flex position. And now the weight is shifted over that stance leg, and I repeat that single leg squat, but as they come up through knee extension, now I’m imagining them driving through the two to four or five o’clock power phase of the pedal stroke really dominating with the quadricep. And when they get the hang of that, when they can feel and envision that muscle, coming up and over and then down. I have them alternate between single leg, squat in dorsiflexion, hit the glute, come into plantar flexion, hit the quad. And it’s a really fun biomechanical puzzle. Certainly, I’m looking at strength, but more I’m looking at functional strength. Fantastic.
Trevor Connor 17:36
So how often should an athlete do this workout? I
17:40
think as much as the athletes going to be compliant with it, so would it help if they did it five days a week? Probably is an athlete going to do it? Am I going to do it five days a week? No chance. So if I can get an athlete into the gym and have them do two days a week of functional strength like this, I’m really happy. And as far as reps and sets, I’m more concerned about quality of motion than I am about a rep and set that’s going to change, you know, bring about morphological changes in the muscle. So I do this until they fail to maintain stability in their pelvic lumbo, hip complex, so if they start wobbling on that Bosu ball, it’s done before their quadricep is fatigued, or before their glute is fatigued. So it’s really quality of motion that I’m after.
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Trevor Connor 18:53
Yeah, Rob, listening to her, I think you had a fantastic point there, which is what she’s trying to do is teach cyclists how to do that motion well, also in a situation where they have to keep their balance on this Bosu ball, it brings in a stability component. It brings in a mobility component that you don’t necessarily have when you’re sitting on a bike locked in. So grant any other thoughts here about what sort of work we should be doing off the bike at this time of year.
Grant Holicky 19:18
I just think it’s the time to go do some of the things you feel like you miss a time to go do the things that are fun. Great time of year to go ski right, Nordic or Alpine, like I said, just get in the gym and do some stuff that I love. Rob’s point. It’s the things you can’t do during the season because it starts to just disrupt your training, so to speak, get in there and do something different and feel sore. It’s a nice time of year to get up and be sore because, again, you feel like you did something right.
Rob Pickels 19:48
And it doesn’t matter how your legs feel tomorrow, because you don’t have a grueling Hill session that you have to get out and Right,
Grant Holicky 19:54
right. You can go eat turkey and chill out and, oh, god, my legs hurt. This is. Awesome.
Trevor Connor 20:01
That’s actually a good segue to, even though we’re focused today on the off the bike type work, to a clip that we have from Adam St Pierre, who asked what’s his favorite workout in the off season. He just brought up runs that almost don’t feel like runs, as you said, to just have some fun. So let’s hear from him. Now,
Adam St. Pierre 20:19
for myself and my own enjoyment, I like a long run in the mountains, you know, something, something you could barely consider a run where you’re just crossing street fields and going up and down in in high alpine terrain. Whether that’s the most effective workout, it sort of depends on what you’re training for. For me, I’m training to keep my soul fulfilled.
Trevor Connor 20:38
Do you think there is a value to that for actual training,
Adam St. Pierre 20:42
I think that there’s a value to doing workouts that make you happy. And I think sometimes, you know, some athletes get too carried away with doing the the most specific workout. We know that specific workouts are necessary for for performance, but you also can’t neglect the reasons you get into sport. So if you get into sport because you like running or you like riding your bike, then you have to make sure that you keep that, that inner child happy. I know, I’ve had conversations with Rob in the past where, you know, he said, Well, I’m never going to race mountain bikes because that’s what I do for fun. And I think that’s that that’s an important distinction to know about yourself. Like, you know, what do you do for fun, and what do you do for performance? And can they be related? And I think absolutely they they can and should be.
Rob Pickels 21:26
What sort of favorite workout do you have for John? You
Adam St. Pierre 21:29
know, John’s a really interesting athlete to work with. I’ve been working with him for probably close to 10 years now, maybe, maybe even more. I started working with him back in our bcsm days, Rob and we’ve sort of gone through a lot of iterations of training. John’s an athlete that likes to do his own homework. So we’ll have some pretty, pretty good philosophical discussions. The most recent involving the the how to skate a 10k you know, Niels van der Poel thing. So like, John’s kind of bread and butter workouts are kind of long threshold, long sweet spot, kind of steady state efforts, just below threshold. And that’s, it’s interesting, because he feels like that’s his weakness, but I think it’s an area where he’s really strong dude can just crank out, you know, tempo or steady state workouts, super, super steady rider, not a real surgery kind of rider. So he survives on a pretty steady diet of those. If I asked him to do, you know, more of a vo two Max style workout, shorter intervals, maximal effort, long recoveries, he hates that. He hates long recoveries. So knowing that, even though there are times I would like him to do something like seven or eight by three minutes with with a full five six minute recovery, particularly that he’s doing a lot of his training up at eight, 910, 1000 feet, he’ll just never do it. So I’ve learned to stop asking for them on
Rob Pickels 22:47
those long threshold efforts that you have John doing. What does that specific workout look like? Is it a 15 minute, 20 minutes of straight D are you doing over unders? How does that work out?
Adam St. Pierre 22:58
Yeah, a little bit of everything, like in the Leadville build up. We sort of started with with longer, steady efforts, anywhere from a 12 to a 30 minute climb. John also likes, I mean, he knows his terrain. He’s from Aspen. He knows every climb in the valley and how long it’ll take him, and what’s good for sweet spot and what’s good for surgery or efforts, what’s got too much technical terrain for interval training. So sometimes, you know, he’ll go chase a Strava fkT or chase some some personal PRs on different climbs within, within those kind of workouts, we like to use that as a way to track progress, right? Like in his lead Bill build, even though he wasn’t feeling great, he was still PR in and getting Strava course records on climbs that he’s done hundreds of times in workouts. So, yeah, anywhere from, you know, a 10 or 12 minute effort on the shorter end up to, you know, a 30 ish minute effort, depending on the climb some of his, you know, his sweet spot, or just sub threshold workouts. We’re doing 90 minutes to two hours of work in a session, like three by 40 minute or six by 20. You know, a lot of volume of sub threshold work. And then, you know, put in a 45 minute to an hour, warm up and cool down, and you’re looking at a three four hour session. We’ve built up over the last decade to the point where, you know, he’s training well over 1000 hours a year, 20 to 25 hours, you know, on the bike or on skis. Most weeks that being said, He’s taken, three weeks hard recovery here laying on the beach on Cape Cod. So
Trevor Connor 24:24
when would you have them do this workout? Is this something you do all year round, or is there a particular time of year? It’s
Adam St. Pierre 24:29
interesting, because we transition from ski season sometime around, usually April is a pretty late MONTH for training, where we’re transitioning from skiing into biking, and then usually around kind of late August, September, we sort of transition from biking back into skiing, although he’ll keep a significant volume on the bike in the fall. We just try to add a little more running and roller skiing to get ready for winter. But he’ll do this type of workout both on skis and on the bike. And the nice thing about sort of the terrain he typically does it in is the. Recovery is typically required because you get to the top of the client now you sort of run out of Hill eventually. But yeah, he does this workout, or some iteration of it, probably 25 times a year, you know, half on the bike, half on skis, and then typically, we’ll do, you know, a different workout for the second intensity of most weeks, whether that’s, you know, more threshold, or just above, or we did some over unders leading up to Leadville. Try to be prepared for the the attacks that tend to separate that field, just because he was, he was worried about that particular aspect of the race. So then we do something like a 20 minute steady effort with some 32nd to two minute surges in the middle, you know, to go, go above threshold, and then focus on recovering while still riding at a pretty, pretty high power output.
Trevor Connor 25:47
We recorded that not recently. So Rob, I’m trying to remember who’s the John that you were talking with Adam about that up. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 25:54
Adam coaches an athlete named John Gaston, who’s based in Vail or Aspen or something like that. He’s an incredible ski mountaineering athlete, which is a little bit of an I don’t want to call it an underground sport, but a sport that people are less familiar with, where essentially you are sprinting up a mountain on skis and then you’re sprinting back down a mountain on skis. And John’s one of the best and has transitioned into mountain biking as well, and has done really well at Leadville, either like winning or top five or something like that. Really recently, I forget, but really great athlete, and Adam’s done some pretty amazing things with him.
Grant Holicky 26:28
I want to throw a piece of this out there. I have an athlete that I coach and very successful on masters, sec cross national champion, very successful on the bike in the summer. He goes through a four month no bike rule every off season, and schema and Nordic skiing and Val pines, huge part of what he does. But he’ll go over and he’ll do cyclocross masters worlds here in a few weeks. And then I looked at his program the other day, and is like seven months off the bike. And usually his goals are a little over the top, like it doesn’t quite hit seven months, like after five, he wants to get back on the bike. But it is amazing how much we can cross over, from a fitness standpoint, from one endurance sport to another endurance sport. And it’s important to remember that.
Rob Pickels 27:12
And I will say anybody, any cyclist who’s looking to transition into backcountry skiing or schema, remember we do not really work our hip flexors throughout the year. And when you start hiking up hills with skis on your feet, your hip flexors are going to be blown up. So make sure you’re doing a little bit of training there for your hips before you get on the snow.
Trevor Connor 27:33
You will not be walking a couple days later. It’ll be a struggle. So here’s the next question I have for all of you, because I’m a big believer, particularly this time of year of mostly body weight stuff. How do you feel in general, about doing really heavy lifting? I
Grant Holicky 27:47
love heavy lifting. Heavy lifting is rad. It
Rob Pickels 27:51
feels good like send it in the gym when you’re doing the red it’s pretty Gnar ready,
Grant Holicky 28:01
my question, I really like heavyweight stuff. I think it’s one of those things that for such a long time endurance athletes didn’t do. There was this fear of it. But man, there is nothing that will get your feet in contact with the ground, like heavy lifting, and really just get them to work.
Griffin McMath 28:19
Tis the season get bulked, like, bulk
Rob Pickels 28:21
Wow, yeah, I agree. You know, I think that strength training is important through the season for the athlete, you know, but as we’re in, like, the prime competition season, I’m backed off on that stuff. And for me, oftentimes now is the time that we’re getting people really back into and I mean, obviously this is with reservation, right? You need to lift heavy when your body is ready and able to lift heavy. It doesn’t mean you’re going from a break of no lifting straight into one rep max lifts, but I do think people should be working toward that, and if I’m not wrong, then people like Lee povy probably agree with me. Let’s hear from Lee right now.
Trevor Connor 29:01
What is your favorite base season workout? I don’t
Lee Povey 29:04
know if this is going to appeal to your audience, because I’m a track sprint coach, so it’s doing really heavy gym sessions. So for me, I think having a bulletproof back is really important for track cyclists. So variations of deadlift, be that straight leg deadlift, I would personally start with a hex bar deadlift and then move through normal deadlift to straight leg deadlift. I think that is an underused and underutilized exercise for cyclists, endurance cyclists too. I worked with USA tri and like USA UK triathlon, and they did a lot of preventative Strength and Conditioning for their athletes, and it was really successful,
Trevor Connor 29:47
fantastic. So when would an athlete do this type of work? Is this a year round thing? Well, I was asking for favorite base season workouts, a bit of a setup there. But is it just a pure base season, or is this a. Than you would do all year round
Lee Povey 30:00
to keep in touch with some kind of strength training all year round just has so many health benefits that it’s worth it. Now, if you’re talking Tour de France cyclist and you are worried about body mass on a outdoors climb, then you’re gonna have to be very careful about when you may implement it for 99% of us, and especially masters athletes and developing young athletes, I think you keep it in all year round. It does vary the volume and vary the white and
Trevor Connor 30:28
what is, in your opinion, the biggest benefit of this particular workout, retaining
Lee Povey 30:32
muscle mass, injury prevention, if you’re talking for injured athletes, obviously, for Sprint athletes, is power development. Without the muscle mass, you can’t produce enough power. And for Masters athletes, it’s bone density and retaining muscle mass, which have huge health benefits. Peter at the lifespan expert, will talk about the two biggest markers for health as you get older are deadlift strength and VO two max. So be strong and have a good half sister.
Trevor Connor 31:03
So Griffin, I’m actually going to throw this to you, but I want to hear from both of you at the end of that, Lee talked about how this sort of lifting, heavy lifting, isn’t just important for athletes, it’s important for everybody who’s considering longevity and wants to stay healthy longer. What’s your feeling about this? This
Griffin McMath 31:21
is one of the reasons why I brought up earlier functional squats in the movement, and one those movements alone and then increasing weight responsibly is incredible for longevity. It’s also really great specifically when we talk about cognitive health and function. So from that aspect, so when it comes to thinking about health across the spectrum of life. This is one of the exercises that I’m a big fan of people learning. Now, if someone is not an athlete, even if someone is, we get to mid age. In addition to this, I typically like to see someone doing fall prevention or learning how to fall and learning how to do some of these things, because when we start to do this, we do increase that risk as well. So I think those two aligned end up building off one another. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 32:05
you know, it’s interesting in a previous life, or maybe the life prior to my previous life, I did a lot of phase two and phase three cardiac rehab. And what we saw oftentimes was what put people into assisted living facilities was oftentimes not a drop in like cardiovascular health, it was a drop in their strength and their ability to do activities of daily living, and so for anybody like we’re talking about, not just athletes. Focusing on strength is hugely important to keeping your function throughout life, as we deal with just general aging, as we deal with disease, but as we try to maintain our wellness as long as we possibly can, and women
Griffin McMath 32:45
changing hormones, bone health, I mean, this is crucial.
Trevor Connor 32:48
There was a fascinating study I read a long time ago when I was doing my public health courses where they showed that in elderly, when they start doing that shuffle walk, where they don’t lift up their feet, there is an incredibly high correlation between that and mortality within two years. And so it’s correlation. Can’t necessarily say it’s causal, but I do think keeping up that strength, keeping up that mobility, is really important for longevity. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 33:14
definitely. And even, you know, some of those movements can be really simple, right? A sit to stand in and out of a chair, right? That’s a great, simple movement. And when you’re able to do that really well, do it with some light dumbbells in your hands. And when you’re able to do that really well, do it some light dumbbells in your hand. And then when you stand up, press those dumbbells overhead, right? These are mimicking, literally, the things that people need to do every day. And you add a little bit of weight to it, and suddenly it’s strength training. One
Griffin McMath 33:39
of most brilliant professors that I learned from in med school would teach us that you yourself, unless you trained your front office staff in this to take down these notes, you yourself should always greet the patient in the lobby, because their ability to get up from the chair and watching their gait until they get to the watching their communication, how they are with coordination of all their things. There were so many pieces of information we typically collected before we even got into the patient room that directly pertain to what we’re talking about. Right now, you’d see the shuffling. You’d see, you know, things related to their spine. You would see how, like if they were late even, or how they got into the parking lot if they were disoriented, there were so many different data points that we would collect. So by the time that we sat down, our progress notes for the visit already had a huge paragraph of information, especially for older population, interesting.
Trevor Connor 34:32
So I think this is a good segue to our final favorite workout. This is one we recorded a while ago when we had the Sarah cycling team on the show. But to this point, I think keeping the body optimally functional isn’t just about strength training. I think there’s other sides to it as well. And here we have a conversation with the team about their love of using yoga almost every day to keep their bodies functional. Let’s hear from them. Now, I’ve
Jennifer Real 34:57
been doing a lot more yoga lately, and I. Do it for recovery days. A lot of times on my recovery days, I’ll either do a really easy spin, or sometimes I just don’t really feel like being on the bike, I’ll go do some yoga. And I think it’s been really great for stability and neuromuscular changes, I think, in a way, to just really control the body better.
Chris Case 35:17
And how often are you doing that? A week? I
Jennifer Real 35:19
would say, probably only maybe once a week do I actually spend 45 minutes into a whole yoga class. But I would say, almost every day I’ll probably spend 1015 minutes doing some yoga, stretch type work,
Chris Case 35:32
and the longer yoga sessions that you do, is it a particular school of yoga that you like to follow, or is it a particular instructor that you like to follow, or neither of those things. I
Jennifer Real 35:43
have a cycling coach, and her sister is a yoga instructor, and so I do a lot of those yoga classes from her studio.
Griffin McMath 35:51
I think it’s really important for people to note when we talk about yoga and all of the health benefits, we’re really starting to build enough data on yoga within the research community to start to get specific about what we mean when we say yoga, the type of yoga, whether there’s heat involved, whether this is restorative, the type is really important. So when we’re talking about favorite workouts in the gym, get really clear on what you’re trying to use yoga for, so that you’re using the right one for you. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 36:21
I have tried many, many forms of yoga, and they have all had the same effect. The instructor comes over, tries to put me in the right position, then shakes their head and walks away.
Griffin McMath 36:31
I’ve actually been told to not do yoga by certain physicians in the past because I so my connective tissue is so flexible that I needed to spend more time lifting weights than I would yoga. Also, because it’s distracting to me, I’d be like, I should, it’s a competition in yoga. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 36:47
I think that this is a really valid point when it comes to yoga. And, you know, I think that mobility is really important for people and stability. There’s a back specialist by the name of Stuart McGill. Amazing information. We should have him on the show at some point, I think his stance is like, hey, yoga is perfect for some people if that’s what they need, and it’s horrible for other people if they have that and they need strength or whatever else, right? So in general, I think, yeah, yoga is a great restorative exercise and or can address some deficiencies that people have, but whether it’s the perfect thing for you specifically, maybe there’s an expert out there that can help you know, define your needs.
Griffin McMath 37:23
And there are forms of yoga that we used to use in patient care that were targeted towards people from everything from PMS or migraines to restorative for someone undergoing radiation treatment. There were there different things to consider. So I think if you already know that you’re a little bit of a special population for some reason or another, or you have another health goal, get specific about what form of yoga you’re using before we
Trevor Connor 37:46
wrap things up today and let you enjoy your turkey. We have a question for the forum. This one should be pretty obvious. What’s your favorite strength or stability exercise? Well, everyone that was our Thanksgiving episode.
Rob Pickels 37:58
Thanks. Trevor. Happy Turkey, Daddy.
Griffin McMath 38:00
I’m so thankful for all of you.
38:02
My
Trevor Connor 38:03
turkey day was a month and a half ago. So you guys, whatever grant
Rob Pickels 38:06
is suspiciously quiet right now,
Trevor Connor 38:08
he’s just shaking his head at me. Happy Thanksgiving. Everyone that was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast, be sure to leave us a radiant review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs. Join the conversation at forums dot fast talk labs.com or learn from our experts at fast talk labs.com for Dr Andy Pruitt, Ryan Ignatz, Dr Stacy Brixham, Lee povi, Adam St Pierre, Jennifer real, Dr Griffin, McMath, Grant, hollice and Rob pickles. I’m Trevor Connor, thanks for listening. You.
