There was a time where if you wanted to train, you had little choice but to go outside. So, to make it more enjoyable or give yourself a little more motivation, you called up friends or headed out on a local group ride to ensure that you were being pushed. Even good coaches inherently understood this and put together group rides for their athletes.
Today, with the rise of virtual training, athletes and coaches have a lot more options. If it’s too cold to get your friends together, you can find a group on Zwift, ROUVY, or another platform like Discord, where you can ride in a digital world with friends who live hundreds of miles away. Likewise, your coach, who may be on the other side of the country, can interact with you in ways that they never could before.
The big questions some ask are whether these virtual training tools are all additive, or if we’re losing something moving into the virtual environment. Are cyclists losing important skills if they’re riding less in real group rides? Some of Trevor Connor’s favorite memories and best coaching moments were in the studio getting a group of athletes in one space to train together. That has become all but extinct with the new virtual environments. But does that virtual world provide all the same gains?
To help us answer these questions, we talk with coach and ex-pro cyclist Robbie Ventura. His company, Velocity, is working to bring the best elements of in-person coaching and group riding into a virtual environment that enhances the experience for both athletes and coaches.
We discuss what virtual training has done for athletes—both positive and negative—how it has changed the coach-athlete relationship (and even how it is affecting the coach-coach relationship). The day before this recording, Rob Pickels and Trevor did a workout with Robbie and a group of his athletes on the Velocity platform, so we round out the conversation by talking about our experience with that workout.
If you’re interested in trying our workout for free or just watching our conversation on YouTube, here’s our links:
- Create a Velocity Account and try the workout for free.
- Watch the workout and listen to our conversation on YouTube.
Joining Robbie, we also hear from a host of other guests—including Dr. Andy Pruitt; master bike fitter Ryan Ignatz; mental performance coach and ex-pro Brent Bookwalter; founder of Cerebral Performance, Dr. Scott Frey; physiologist and owner of Athletica.ai, Dr Paul Laursen; host of the Mikkipedia podcast on nutrition, Dr. Mikki Williden; and head coach at Apex Coaching, Neal Henderson.
So, get ready for some virtual interaction, 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 Coach Rob pickles, there was a time where if you wanted to train, you had little choice but to go outside. So to make it more enjoyable, or to give yourself a little more motivation, you called up friends to join you, or you headed out to the group ride to ensure that you’re being pushed. Good coaches inherently understood this and put together rides for their athletes. However, today, with the rise of virtual training, athletes and coaches have a lot more options. If it’s too cold to get your friends together, you can find a group ride on Zwift Ruby or another platform. Better yet, using something like discord, you can ride in a digital world with friends who live hundreds of miles away. Likewise, your coach, who may be on the other side of the country, can interact with you in ways they never could before. The big question is whether these tools are all additive or for losing something moving into the virtual environment. Are cyclists losing important skills if they’re riding less in real group rides? Some of my favorite memories and best coach moments, we’re in the studio, getting a group of athletes in one space together to train that has become all but extinct with the new virtual environments. But does that virtual world provide all the same gains to help us answer these questions, we’re talking today with coach and ex pro cyclist Robby Ventura. His company velocity is working to bring the best elements of in person coaching and group riding into a virtual environment that enhances the experience for both athletes and coaches. We’ll discuss with him what the virtual environment has done for athletes, both positive and negative, how it has changed a coach athlete relationship, and even how it’s affecting the coach Coach relationship. The day before this recording, Rob and I did a workout with Robbie and a group of his athletes on the velocity platform. So we’ll round out the conversation talking about our experience with that workout. The whole thing was recorded. So if you’d like to give it a try, go to our website, where you’ll find a link joining Robbie will also hear from a host of other guests, including Dr Andy Pruitt, Master fitter, Ryan Ignatz, mental performance coach and ex Pro. Brent buelter, founder of cerebral performance. Dr Scott fry, physiologist and owner of athletico.ai Dr Paul Larson, host of the Mickey pedia podcast and nutrition. Dr Mickey Wilden, and head coach at Apex coaching. Neil Henderson, so get ready for some virtual interaction, and let’s make you fast. Well, Robbie, welcome to the show. Been looking forward to this episode with you, so this should be a lot of fun. Really excited
Robbie Ventura 02:18
to be here. Listen to you guys a lot. Super pumped to be on the show. Always wanted to be on the show. Never got the nod. So I’m glad I’m finally getting the call here.
Rob Pickels 02:26
You’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right, Trevor. Are you gonna get confused? We go to Robin or Robbie today. So
Trevor Connor 02:32
I’ve already in my head, we have Robbie and we have Rob and that’s how I’m gonna do it today.
Rob Pickels 02:36
You can just call me pickles if
Trevor Connor 02:37
you want. What did I used to call you the I don’t know. I can’t remember I had a good name. You can use words like illustrious, if that was it the illustrious, Mr. Pickles. That’s what I used to call you, and I don’t do that anymore.
Rob Pickels 02:49
There you go. Well, you know me better now, and the shine has faded away a little bit.
Trevor Connor 02:56
So Ravi, we’ll get to this later on the show, but we did a workout on your platform yesterday, pretty early in the morning. Had a lot of fun. Thank you for inviting us on your platform. Yeah,
Robbie Ventura 03:07
it was a good time. I learned my lesson. You know, you don’t mess with Mr. Pickles there on any efforts. But yeah, I had a great time. You guys were terrific. All the athletes. I’ve already gotten a bunch of feedback. People just loved listening to you and hearing you and learning from you all on the platform. So that was great.
Rob Pickels 03:21
Nice. Glad to hear it. Hey, it was early enough in the morning, I didn’t even bother bringing a water bottle. I was just drinking straight black coffee throughout the workout.
Trevor Connor 03:27
That is actually one of the things I love. I took the time I put on a fast talk lab you did, cleaned up my space. Rob shows up in a sweatshirt. This coffee, do
Rob Pickels 03:36
whatever. That’s however old in the morning.
Robbie Ventura 03:39
That was funny. I was like, he had like, a lure. Like,
Robbie Ventura 03:44
sure, not
Rob Pickels 03:46
your cyclist, Robbie, are hardcore. I roll into the workout 15 minutes early, expecting it to just be the three of us. No, no. Like the whole group was already there. I was the last person to show up for a workout.
Robbie Ventura 03:59
Yeah, it’s like a group ride. You know, people show up early, you hang out, you talk, you have some fun, and then you get to work. So I know you weren’t ready for that, but it’s like any group ride, people show up. Some people have the best kits on and look absolutely perfect. Some people like Rob, you know, show up with a velour sweater and helmet on backwards, and you never know. So it’s all good. It’s
Rob Pickels 04:17
not an uncommon thing for me to ride. And one of my favorites, I have Bella checked a sweatshirt. I’ve cut the sleeves off it. I cut a bigger, like, V notch in it, and I like, right now perfect time of year to be riding that just, just so you guys know, you should give it a
Rob Pickels 04:30
shot trying to cut weight. All that material, right? I
Trevor Connor 04:32
actually want to start this episode with a story, because there is now a connection between our two businesses, and I’m gonna give a quick story of the origins of fast talk. So for anybody who doesn’t know, I lived in Toronto for a while, and I used to coach a club up there called the Morning Glory cycling club, and they every morning had trainer workouts. So this is you get up at 4:30am everybody would or maybe five would, about 530 we would all show up to the trainer studio at. Bike shop that sponsored the club. You know, we had 20 trainers in there all lined up in front of these computers. And we had this software that we’ll talk about in a second, called perf Pro that ran all these trainers, and everybody would come in and just do a workout together. And twice a week I went in and ran the workout. And I will tell you, I tried to do the, you know, rah, rah, hey, you’re doing a great job type stuff. And basically they all just said, Trevor, stop. Just not your thing. It’s 530 in the morning. Trevor, I’m trying to figure out, what do I do during the workout? And so I walked into one and said, Why don’t you guys hit me with questions about training and physiology, and while you’re doing your workout, I’ll answer your questions. And that became our routine. I would just discuss training. And after a couple months of that, one the athletes in the group came up to me and said, Trevor, have you thought about doing a podcast? And I was like, Wait, this is how it all began. This is how it all began. He suggested that, wow. And it just kind of got into my head and went, I went back to Vela news and said, Hey, would you guys be interested in doing a podcast, and that is the origin of fast talk. It was doing these trainer classes and just talking about training in the morning and so how our businesses connect. I was very sad to hear that during COVID, the trainer studio in Toronto disappeared. This was something I loved. Everybody loved this. It was as great way for everybody on the club to connect and bond and work out together, and it disappeared during COVID, and it didn’t come back. And I was very, very sad to hear that. And then I heard you bought perf Pro, yes,
Robbie Ventura 06:30
well, for one, we got to find that young man that told you to have a podcast, and you have to have him on your show at some point, because that’s pretty good story. And I’d love to find out why he had that thought to have you do podcasts. I mean, obviously you do a great job, and you were educating these you educating these young kids. And they saw thought that was valuable. But yeah, perv Pro is a software that we’ve used, I don’t know, for over 25 years. It’s just a great, great software. And the person who designed that drew Hartman is just an awesome guy, just a really, really, really good guy. And we not only bought perv Pro, but we had Drew, designing all of our software moving forward as well. So he’s terrific. That’s
Trevor Connor 07:00
great. And so I can’t tell you, when you told me, this is the guts of your tool, how excited I was to hear that, and I think we’ll get to that in a minute. Big part of what we’re going to talk about today is the important social aspects of training. But before we dive into it, let’s hear a few thoughts from Dr Paul Larson and Dr Mickey Wilden.
Dr Paul Laursen 07:19
I think the social aspect is critical. Honestly, we are social beings. At the end of the day, I see it in what we’re building in Athletica. We’ve got our customers always asking, Can I get my training program alongside of Joey’s or whatever? Right? Like people want that, and the more we can make the solutions for individuals working alongside their friends in a social environment, the better we’re going to be off, the more users are going to enjoy using the product.
Dr. Mikki Willide 07:49
I completely agree, you know, and I just think of myself as an athlete, albeit aging, most of my near and dear friends have come through my sport, and for us to lose some of that as part of our training to do with whatever it is that we’re doing, I think social interaction is really important. And you know, I’ve got a lot of my relationships. My best relationships come through being an athlete and being able to train and experience an event with my friends, but we spend 99% of our time training the event is just one aspect of it. So to have that social interaction during training, to Paul’s point, I think, is really important.
Trevor Connor 08:28
So the other reason I told this story, and Robbie, this is where I’m going to throw it to you. And really what this episode is about, I’m kind of that old school person. I love that getting everybody into the studio during that workout together, there was just something to it, something that was really fun. And as I said, that doesn’t exist anymore. Up in Toronto, riders just don’t want to get up at 5am and come to a studio. It seems like things are changing. The nature of our relationships in the sport are changing. Granted, cycling is kind of an individual sport. You can do all your training alone, but does seem like there is a value to the relationship. So I’m going to throw that to you as a coach yourself. Let’s first talk about how important are interactions and relationships in endurance sports, in training, in coaching. Yeah, we’ve
Robbie Ventura 09:14
all done a lot of riding ourselves. I was a professional for many years, and I think kind of the athletes goals play a big role in how important those relationships are. If you’re looking at professional cyclists that are doing this for a living and everything that their entire being is about optimizing performance, relationships are still important for them, but maybe not quite as important as many of the athletes that a lot of us work with right now, which are casual racers. Some of them are more serious. Some of them don’t race at all and just, do you know big events, some of them just want to ride for fun. I think based on kind of what your goals are, that relationship component plays a bigger or smaller role as well as your need for social interaction. I mean, some people don’t need much. Other people need a lot. So I think at the end of the day, for me personally, I need social. Interaction. But I also, when I was a professional, loved to kind of hold myself up at a training camp in Arizona and really not talk to many people, but my wife, because I can get in such a routine, I don’t know if that’s necessarily practical for the people or a lot of people that I coach right now, for me, what I’m noticing is that the more interaction, the more social components that we can provide for our athletes, the stickier that our coaching business becomes, the longer, the higher the retention rates the athletes have with the coaches. And ultimately, I think they stay in the sport and enjoy the sport longer, if physical interactions and relationships are part of the mix. But I do see both sides of it, you know, because there’s times where I just want to be by myself and ride my bike and not have any distractions and do exactly what I need. And then there’s other times where, man, I just, I love being on a group ride and talking to people and catching up. I think
Rob Pickels 10:47
that cycling today is almost like when somebody moves to New York and they’re surrounded by millions of people and they’ve never felt more alone, right? Where we go into Zwift, and Zwift is a social app, right? You’re out there hundreds of 1000s of people. I just see them as names. I just see them as avatars. I’m not really interacting with them. It’s like riding the subway to work. There’s all of these people around me, but I don’t know them. I’m not interacting with them. And so I do think that cyclists are still craving some social interaction. When the weather is nice, when they feel safe enough, maybe they’ll go out and do group rides. Maybe you have one best friend that you ride with. I do think that it’s important for people that they don’t get lost, kind of in the abyss, in the sea of the virtual sort of cycling world.
Trevor Connor 11:33
And so there’s the question, are we losing some of that? I mean, I still think in the summer, you have local group rides that people can go on. You have local training races, so you get a little bit of that. But let’s particularly talk about right now, we’re in November, we’re going into the off season and the base season. Is there something that’s been lost, as Rob said, even though you have Zwift and you can get on there and there’s 10,000 other people on there, is it the same? Or are we losing some of that important interaction. Yeah,
Robbie Ventura 12:02
for me, Zwift has really proven the fact that, like Rob said, you don’t necessarily need to talk to people, but being around people, there’s a huge value there. When you’re riding with a group, right? I mean, you’ve all been on group rides, so you have the guy that talks the entire time, you have the guy that says nothing and just kind of disappears. They’re both getting something out of that group ride, right? The guy who just disappears shows up because he likes to be entertained. Maybe he’s learning from other people on the group ride. It’s part of his routine. But believe it or not, he may be getting just as much as the two people on the front that are talking about the Tour de France the entire time, or the guy that’s making fun of everybody. I think everybody has these different social batteries that need to be filled. And I don’t know if I would love cycling if I didn’t have both. One of my favorite things is being out on the trail by myself and letting my mind just go and just not having anyone. I literally wear an all black kid. I don’t want anybody to recognize me. I just want to be I just want to go and do my own thing. My brain just really calms down. But I also need, like I said, these incredible group rides, where I can just have so much fun. I can challenge myself, I can be motivated. I can learn from other people, like you have to have both, in my opinion, if you want to be successful in cycling. Some people need more of one or the other, but they’re both necessary. And I think Zwift, in my opinion, has really proven out that there’s all these different levels of interaction. I mean, there’s, I don’t know how many people are on there? 500,000 a million people use Zwift. That’s the only reason why they’re on Zwift, in my opinion, is because they can be around other people, even if they don’t have to talk to
Trevor Connor 13:29
them. That’s interesting. So let’s talk about the athlete a little bit more. And I’m interested in are there things that they gain from environments like Zwift, and are there things that they lose? An example I’m going to give I was talking with another cyclist a couple months ago, and there’s this monthly group ride in Boulder that everybody used to go to, and we were talking about that group ride, and he just said, No, I don’t go to that anymore. And asked him why, and he goes, Well, it’s dangerous. You can have crashes. I’d rather just ride on Zwift, because you don’t crash on Zwift. So it was an interesting response, but it still made me think about the question I’m going to ask you, is, with these environments like Zwift, where they can get a bit of that group ride and get a bit of that feel, are there things that they gain that we didn’t have before, and are the things that they’re losing by doing that versus going to that, that monthly in person ride?
Robbie Ventura 14:18
Yeah, I think Zwift, exactly what you said, has its pros and cons. I think ultimately, that’s a crazy thing. It’s safer to ride indoors. I totally get that. And I also think that being outdoors, you can learn so much about how to be safe on a group ride, right? Like I always encourage people to go on group rides, and if you know how to ride your bicycle yourself, and you have good skills, you can create a safe environment no matter who you’re with or where you’re at. I really, truly believe that maybe it’s more of an advanced thought or ideology. I think that ultimately, you’re in charge of your safety. You can be around a bunch of people that are crazy if you know how to position yourself right, get in front of them. You know, having out whatever you can always keep yourself safe. So I would encourage him to find a different group ride that he feels a little bit safer on, rather than just. Abandon it all together and ride indoors. But, you know, I think being outside, it’s way more than just, you know, being with other people too. I mean, it’s the number one way to enjoy the world, in my opinion, is to ride outside to see and smell and enjoy all the things that this beautiful earth has to offer. And to me, Zwift can make all the stuff they want, which is good eye candy, ultimately, and if the weather’s terrible, and for whatever reason, you can’t ride outside, I think it’s a great alternative. But if I had my choice, no matter what, I would be outside 100% but I can also understand his point of view around safety. I never actually thought about it as a safety issue, but now that you mention it, you know, if people are nervous and they want to get a great workout and they want to be around others, I can see swift as an alternative. None
Trevor Connor 15:38
of us will deny the value of being outside, but it’s still something that every rider has a different opinion about. Let’s hear from Dr Andy Peru and Ryan Ignatz, who show a few of the different opinions.
Dr. Andy Pruitt 15:50
For me, it’s generational in that I like group rides. I like my buddies, even if it’s a ball busting group ride, there’s going to be some interesting conversation that’s going to have occurred somewhere in that day. So for me to be virtual, and, matter of fact, during COVID, we did our spend, Docs, class virtual, and we weren’t all side by side, and it lacked something significant for me. Now, I used to have patients that would come down way North Canada, that always rode indoors all winter, right? And that would be a community for them. That would work for them. They have no alternative. Me, I’m still going to rely on being able to hear my buddy growing next to me. Fair enough.
Trevor Connor 16:31
Any thoughts on this? Ron,
Ryan Ignatz 16:32
yeah, I would say, you know, if you can do anything in person, that’s always the best, there’s a level of consciousness and closeness and being seen and maybe joking in different ways that there’s no way around it in person and will be the best, but as a opportunity to do something very similar, even if it is virtual, sometimes you can get lost and immersed in that virtual experience that will give you something similar, and especially if you’re in a colder climate, then that might be your best option. You know, you might not have a facility close by, so I do feel like it’s a powerful way to train together.
Rob Pickels 17:11
Robbie, you brought up something that I think is really important, and that was the learning aspect for this individual. Hey, the group ride might not feel safe initially, but we can go out, we can learn how to do better. And I see this learning being really essential to any sort of group activity, right? I’m primarily a mountain biker. Based on my schedule, I tend to ride alone. I can go out and crush what I think is a descent as fast as I could possibly do it. And then I ride with somebody else, and they do it faster, and it unlocks in me, like, wait a second, you can actually go faster, and if I gap over this rock here, then I’ll be able to carry more speed, and suddenly I’m now a better rider, because I’ve been shown this, and I work with a lot of junior athletes, and it’s amazing to watch one kid will do something, and the next kid does it twice as good, and then the kid after that does it twice As good as even he does, and that’s why I think we’re seeing such amazing progression, especially on the skills side of things, but also on the purely physiological side of things, that being in a group with other people teaches you how to do things better, and it shows you what a boundary might be that isn’t a self imposed boundary that we’ve put on ourselves. So
Trevor Connor 18:21
that’s kind of somewhere I was gonna go too, because I want to give my answer to this question. I’m on Zwift a lot. I enjoy the group rides, but here’s what I think you lose in that virtual environment, which is, every time I’m on a Zwift ride, there’s some people at the front who you know are cheating on their weight. They’re putting their weight in 40 pounds lower. This is
Rob Pickels 18:37
just what you’re convincing yourself of Trevor, because you’re not on the front, and maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe that’s
Trevor Connor 18:43
part of it. But basically, the group ride is set by the tone of the people that can just put out the biggest watts per kilogram, and that’s really what the ride comes down to. Where would I remember in my early days of training, I would go to the group rides, and there was always those older, experienced riders who seemed to know everything, and even if you were just sitting there and being quiet, eventually, they would talk with you, and they would start teaching you things. They would let you know when you’re doing something wrong in the group ride, hopefully in a nice way, but they would show you the right way to ride in the group. They would start teaching you a strategy. They would talk to you about training and teach you those things you don’t get any of that on Zwift, the tone of the ride is set by often a very different group in Zwift and Robbie. You’ve been doing this as long as I’ve been doing this. I’m sure you’ve had that experience
Robbie Ventura 19:27
too. Yeah, you know, I’ve been coaching for a long time, and I’ve seen it myself. I mean, group rides that we’ve had for vision quest. Exactly what you both said, more of the learning happens between athlete to athlete than actually coach to athlete, because athletes see other athletes, even for how they ride on their bicycle, how they take a corner like Rob talked about, or how they attack or how they bridge across. And there’s just so much learning between athletes that I think is really important. It’s, in my opinion, as important as the coach to athlete learning process. But also there’s a bond that forms, especially. Especially if you go hard with a group and a group of people, to me, suffering with other people connects you closely with those people. Part of the reason why, when we had postal service training camp, we would do some big, epic rides as an entire group. And I think when you go through some challenging situations, a stage race, a big training camp, there’s a commonality, there’s a respect that’s brought to everybody on that ride, that also kind of connects people. And we need connection as connections as people. I mean, I know that more now than ever, and I think it’s not only the skills, it’s also the consistency. It’s also, you know, someone’s going to show up on a regular basis, therefore making you more consistent. It’s laughing and suffering as a group that also, I think, builds the fun of our incredible sport. That
Rob Pickels 20:40
shared connection is really important, or the shared experience is really important. So
Trevor Connor 20:43
let’s shift gears here a little bit and talk about this increasingly virtual environment and the impact that has on the coach athlete relationship. Are there things that coaches gain from this, and are the things that coaches are losing from this, trying to work with their athletes?
Robbie Ventura 20:58
Yeah, I think in this new kind of world of data, right? There’s so much data crunching that Wk oh four can do for you, or golden cheetah or AI programs. There’s a lot out there that takes some of the work that we as coaches used to do on a regular basis out of the equation, sort of, say, and I think that athlete coach relationship, that connection outside of just here’s your training plan, here’s your training analysis. That’s becoming less and less important, and I think it’s going to continue to become less and less important. What’s really, in my opinion, going to make great coaches have incredible businesses is their ability to connect with the athlete, their ability to teach the athlete way more than just power output and metrics, but all of the elements that are outside of gaining power output, you know, inspiring the athlete, to some degree, teaching the athlete why and how they’re doing things, optimizing different types of elements of speed outside of just power output. That, to me, is going to become the currency for coaching, the experience that the athlete has outside of just the training plan. And that’s a good thing, right? Because coaches will have more time to do that if they can use other tools to help them analyze.
Trevor Connor 22:05
So how are tools like Zwift? How are tools like these different virtual environments? How are they helping with that? Yeah,
Robbie Ventura 22:10
I mean, zoom, for example, is a great tool, right? I mean, during the pandemic, we all got familiar with Zoom. We all got familiar with actually seeing athletes. You know, I think there’s some statistics around local athletes versus remote athletes and how long they stay with their coaches. I think it’s a significant difference, right? If you see your athlete on a regular basis, like at a group ride or a train like that place in Toronto that used to see your athletes, all of them would show up on a regular basis because they would stay with you for a long time, because you actually get to interact with them and see them virtual athletes and remote athletes, I think the retention rates are significantly less. So a big part of these things like Zwift or Ruby or any other avatar based program where you can actually see your athlete or get on a ride with your athlete, helps build some of those connections that you don’t have if they’re not a local athlete. So to me, the coaches have to leverage zoom, they have to leverage Zwift. They have to leverage, potentially, velocity, or other ways to communicate with their athletes on a regular basis, actually, while they’re riding right so even when you’re on a group ride and you have a bunch of your athletes there, you can see them and get to them at some point. But Trevor, when you had the studio and you had all the athletes right in front of you, you could really do a good job of helping so many of the athletes at once, right? Because they were right there in front of you. So trying to figure out a situation where you can see your athlete actually riding on a regular basis, because seeing them means something, right? You can look at their position. You can help them with that. You can see if they’re struggling or not. You can correct things while they’re actually doing it. And I think, to me, that’s going to be important as coaching gets a little bit more competitive with the AI driven plans that I think will eventually become really, really good. I mean, I don’t know about you, Trevor, and I did this at the USA Cycling thing. I don’t know if you listened to my talk there, but I had basically pulled up. I said, I want to get ready for Unbound, and I have 16 weeks, and here’s my threshold, and here’s how much time I have to train. I wanted to be power based, and I did a 20 minute test, and here’s my 20 minute power write me a training plan. I mean, this thing was really, really good. So you have to provide as a coach and as an athlete, you should want more from a coach than just a training plan. When AI can get us pretty darn close there.
Rob Pickels 24:19
Yeah, certainly you know, to further what you were saying, all of my athletes at this point are remote, and I make it a point to have face to face conversations with them. You know, we use Google meet, but, you know, zoom, another great platform, because I do think that it’s important. I don’t want to just be texting or WhatsApp athletes. I don’t want to just be talking to them on the phone. I want to be able to see them, because then you can understand emotion. But you know, I do oftentimes feel like there are things that I’m not able to be effective with because we are remote. One athlete was going through a lot of bike fit issues, and I’m not there. We have to go through the process of building a team, okay, who are great bike fitters in your area? Let me sort of ask my group. Group my network to see if they know anybody in your area. Same sort of thing with strength training. I don’t like to program hardcore strength training for my athletes, because I’m not there with them. I can’t see if they’re squatting with appropriate form. And I hate to say it, I don’t want to just trust them, so I’m totally fine on the strength side, with some core, some stability, some balance, some accessory muscle type stuff, right? But, but that’s an area that I feel like being in person is really important. So I think that we’ve had episodes and we have content on building teams around and I think that that has become increasingly important as athletes are becoming remote. But you know, as a remote coach, it is important, in my opinion, that we have this face to face time with people. Yeah, no, I
Trevor Connor 25:39
agree 100% with both of you, and we’ve talked about this on the show. On the show in my own coaching career. When I started, I thought the training plan was everything, and I would just labor over every single workout and every single day, and have evolved to a point that we’ve all talked about, and grants talked about this as well as the training plan is 10% it’s the interactions with the athletes. And Robbie, I agree with you. I have always said I can learn more about one of my athletes in a single ride where I’m riding with them than from a month’s worth of data. And I’ll give an example of this. I had an athlete I was working with who was struggling in races. He was getting popped on the climbs, and he kept asking me, what’s going on, what’s going on, what’s going on. And I would look at the data, and I just couldn’t see anything in the data. I could see no reason he was getting popped. It was all fine. And this is an example. So he was in DC, I was in Colorado, so I couldn’t just go and hop in a local training race with him. I mean,
Rob Pickels 26:33
if you really cared about him, Trevor, you would have found a way. Could have probably
Trevor Connor 26:37
but this is where actually having a virtual environment helped. We found a race on Zwift that had some climbing in. It was the London course, and I said, Let’s go do this race together. And I basically just rode behind him on Zwift. And what I saw is, when we hit the hill, people started attacking, and he slowed down. And what I realized was, this was not a physiological thing. This was not we just need to find the right interval to give you a little more strength on the hills. This was he was anticipating mentally that he was going to get popped on the climbs, and had already quit by the time the attack started. He just assumed he was going to get popped. And what we really needed to work on was his confidence on himself that, no, you don’t need to get popped here. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 27:19
you know, I will say listening to your story one super interesting way of using that platform, but it highlights something that I think platforms like Zwift are missing, and that is a way to communicate over voice, either with the entire group, or at the very least with a one other individual, that you can maybe create a group, right? You two could have linked each other. Now, there are ways to do it. You could have been on the phone together. You could have opened up a discord chat, but that stuff’s all a pain in the butt. How much nicer would it be if you could have actually communicated with that athlete sort of real time through the app? I think it would have been really powerful.
Robbie Ventura 27:51
I thought you were going to say that he’d get to the base of the climb in like last place, and he would have to feather himself through the entire peloton at like 10% higher than everybody else, because I’ve seen athletes that have incredible power. They’re doing the same power as the leaders, but they start to climb so far back that like they have to do 10% more because they’re keep clipping over other guys. So I was waiting for the punch line to be positioned, but it wasn’t. It was mental interesting. But
Trevor Connor 28:14
you’re right. There’s so many different things you see. I mean, the other thing I know you’ve seen a bunch of times is the people that get to the bottom of a 20 minute climb and attack on the bottom. And, you know, there’s this expression and cycling of you only lose the race on the first part of the climb. You never win it there. And that,
Robbie Ventura 28:30
to me, this, the stuff that we’re talking about right now is good coaching, right is really the stuff that, to me, are gonna separate. I feel this is gonna be a massive change in coaching over the next five or six years, it’s gonna really come down to, like you said, not a person who can write a great, detailed plan, right, that the athlete kind of follows or kind of doesn’t, but more so the coaches with experience that have stories like the one you just told that have a lot more in regards to getting people to outperform their power output than actually develop power output. Like, to me, a great coach’s athletes way out perform their power to weight ratio and their overall power. They get more out of themselves than their output. And that comes down to this massive X Factor. And the X Factor component only coaches with experience and a lot of understanding about our sport, because it is complicated at the higher levels. I think that, to me, is going to become hugely, hugely important. So I think, yeah, a way to express that, a way to communicate that through virtual through, like you said, like, you know, Rob does this weekly call with his athletes, but maybe even rob a one to many call, right? So you have a zoom call with all of your athletes. Therefore, not only are you explaining things to one, but you’re explaining them to all, and then they’re all feeling like they’re part of something bigger than just you and them, right? So to me, if you have other people in Rob pickles world that you feel part of, you’re much less likely to lead that group, and you’re also much more likely to learn from them as well. So figuring out a way to get to more of them and to put them together might also be kind of a good idea at some point. I’ve heard coaches doing lunch and learns and all. Kinds of stuff like that. All
Rob Pickels 30:00
of our listeners right now are part of Rob’s big, lovely group. So thank you. Thank you all for being there.
Trevor Connor 30:06
Let’s pause for a moment and hear from Brent buelter and Dr Scott fry about what they think this technology can offer.
Brent Bookwalter 30:13
Yeah, I’m excited about that potential. Personally, myself, I was never a fan of riding inside in any medium like I grew up in Michigan, and then I had a trainer when I was starting to get more serious about training, and had to ride inside on the winters a little bit. But I never enjoyed it. I never felt like I was productive. I would rather be outside and ski pants and goggles with studded tires actually feeling the air in my face and feeling the bike get thrown around underneath me. But I will say that the modern revolutions in technology and the more realistic, lively road feel that some of the new technology has allowed is made it more enjoyable. And if you could add that social component and community component in a realistic, semi realistic way, I’d be way more excited to ride inside, but I still probably take a run up a mountain outside in the cold rain, as opposed to a ride on the trainer any day.
Scott Frey 31:03
I’ve used Zwift with a runner that I have to do some structured workouts where I could really start to manipulate some of the psychological variables, like giving intervals and he wouldn’t be sure how long they were going to last. And it’s been really helpful, because we were able to tether ourselves to one another and kind of execute things that would be akin to motor pacing, I guess. And I think there’s real value in that. Yeah,
Brent Bookwalter 31:28
I would even say on that note, like, as I consider my future and possibilities with more mental performance coaching and training and supporting athletes, you know, I love the idea of being there with them, next to them, and I know, Grant you’re a big advocate and fan of this, actually being on the bike, on the course, next to the pool, having that interaction. So you know, as I consider the power to educate and implement strategies with athletes, if and when the technology does get to that level where you can be there with them, see their face, provide them, encourage and monitor data metrics, like Dr Frey was saying, and even in some cases, manipulate that. That’s the most exciting thing to come out of the indoor riding revolution, for sure.
Susie Sanchez 32:11
Hi, coaches. This is Susie Sanchez. I’m the director of dei and membership programs for USA Cycling. This year we’ve announced some exciting changes to USA cycling’s coach certification and license renewal program with partners like fast talk labs, we’ve made our coach education program much stronger and more clear. All coaches need six to use by the end of 2024 to renew their licenses. Learn more and get started on great courses from Fast Top labs at Learn dot USC, cycling.org, so
Trevor Connor 32:39
what I’m finding interest about this conversation is we started with, what is this increasingly virtual environment doing to athletes? And I think we kind of saw pros and cons to it. It’s convenient, it’s safer, it can be enjoyable, but you lose some of the interaction. You might lose that ability to interact with that experienced local rider, who’s really the one that teaches everybody else you learn some of the skills part. So it seems like it’s kind of a 5050, proposition when you’re looking at it for the athlete, but we just been talking about it now in the coaching realm. So the coach athlete relationship, and it seems like this virtual environment is actually offering a whole lot of tools and benefits that can move the coach, from just being a training plan builder to the really valuable parts of coaching, that interaction, seeing the athlete, all those things that you just can’t see in numbers. So we’d love to continue this conversation of, you know, what are other ways? What are other tools that the coaches can get out of this to really help them be better coaches for their athletes? You know, I kind
Rob Pickels 33:40
of want to use this, maybe this statement I’m going to make is a good segue into your topic here, Trevor, but you know, we were on the velocity platform yesterday morning, as we mentioned before, with Robbie. And I want to bring up the importance of coach Coach interactions, right? We’ve talked about athlete athlete, we’ve talked about Coach athlete, but Coach Coach is really important too. And you know, we were talking about the workout you had written the workout for yesterday. You were explaining why you did the way that you did, and I brought up a variation that I like to do, and Robbie’s like, hey, I want to steal that from you. And my response was, like, yeah, man, it’s not stealing. Like, go for it. Like, this is how we learn, you know, I take stuff from Trevor, Robbie, I’m gonna steal stuff from you. You know, this is how we all make ourselves better, and you know, for me, it’s, you know, coaches can silo themselves right from, maybe from a place of fear. Sometimes I think that, like, Oh God, I can’t talk about what I do, because they’re either gonna steal it, or they’re gonna think I’m a fraud, or whatever else. Man like, no who cares? Like, share that information, go out and learn. You know, let’s have these conversations with people, because it’s not just about that particular workout, right, that you’ve written, you know, it’s something that I love about Trevor, the platform that you’ve made with fast talk, right? Is that, you know, we have a lot of coaches on this show, core group. Me, you grant. I mean, I learned so much from you guys, but also bringing on people. Robbie, who has way more experience, both as a professional athlete and as a coach, I’m constantly learning. I’m hoping that I’m teaching. It’s this back and forth flowing of information, and I just want to highlight that coach, Coach interaction. Don’t silo yourself. Don’t just read fast talk labs.com to get your information, but also go out and share that information with people and see what they have to share with you. Rob,
Robbie Ventura 35:23
I mean that to me, is the mark of a good coach. When I talk to coaches and they are open and honest and forthcoming with information they want to help you, they understand that they don’t have it figured out that there’s still always so much to learn if athletes out there that are listening to this, if your coach is open to other coaches, to other testing methodologies, to listening and learning continuously, to sharing what he has with other people. That’s a good start of finding somebody that you want to use. And you said it perfectly Rob. It’s really about our coaches as a community, sharing with each other, learning from one another, and ultimately building a better and better product. I mean, I think all of us are kind of in this group for sure. Wanna help coaches do their job better. Wanna help athletes be more successful. And the best way to do that is to give information freely to everybody, because it’s really the nuance that separates coaches that makes a great relationship. It’s your understanding of the athlete. It’s taking that time to really care about your athlete. And to me, I’m never intimidated. I was so excited that a bunch of vision quest athletes got to learn from you guys yesterday. It was phenomenal. I felt it was a it was an honor to have you guys teach athletes that I work with. I wasn’t at all worried that they were going to leave me or scared. It was more about an opportunity to give them more. And I think that’s really the mentality that athletes and coaches should be thinking about. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 36:42
I actually think that’s a really good point. And for any coaches who are listening, my strongest suggestion to you is trying to keep a bunch of secrets isn’t going to help you, because, you know, unless you coach Pacha and say, Hey, I’ve got a bunch of secrets. Yeah, a lot of people are going to try to hire you to coach them, but you’re probably not going to have time for them because you’re spending all your time with the gotcha. But for most of us, if you have a bunch of secrets, athletes don’t really know who you are. They don’t know if you’re a good fit for them. They’re not going to hire you. I mean, I can tell you, when I was doing that perf pro class, I got a lot of athletes out of it, and I was sharing everything, and they were just going, I like the way you think that seems to fit with the way I want to train. And they’d come and say, Please coach me likewise. Fast, Doc, as you point out, I don’t have a secret left. I’ve shared everything on the show, and I don’t have athletes now going, Oh well, he’s told me everything, so screw him. I’m not gonna hire him. I have more athletes reaching out to be coached, not less because of the show. You know,
Rob Pickels 37:35
we’re taking this in a slightly different direction, but I do want to share this to show the lengths that you can go right where? Robbie, I think what you’re really bringing up is an athlete centric view of coaching, not a coach centric view. People that have a coach centric view of coaching, it’s all about the coach. The coach knows the best, the coach has all the information. I don’t want to share my information with you, Trevor, because I’m the coach and I’m the most important, versus an athlete centric where it’s not about me, it’s not about you, it’s about the athlete. And I want to learn from you so I can help my athlete better. And I mentioned before that athlete, you know, is having a lot of sort of bike fit and some musculoskeletal issues. I’ve gone to the point to say like, Hey, we’re in the off season right now. I don’t know that what I can provide you is exactly what you need to move forward as an athlete, we can retool our relationship a little bit to open up some resources for you to explore this area, because that’s really what you need, and I can’t help you with that right now. And then, once you get that figured out, maybe we re look at our relationship again. We pick back up some more, because again, it’s all about that athlete and letting other experts come in and do what they do best without fear of being like, Oh my God, this source of revenue is about to leave me. Like, no, no. Like, let that sort of bird fly away and, you know, let it come back or whatever else.
Robbie Ventura 38:50
Just to highlight a story we’ve been doing, you know, Sebastian Weber’s inside testing at Vision Quest at our lab for 1213, years now. And we have several coaches. We have great relationships with a lot of coaches in the area that send their athletes in for testing, and so much so that I’ll give recommendations based on their metabolic profile of things I think they should work on, and I work with the coach to help not only educate the coach, but talk about some of the things I’ve been seeing in that data. So it can really work nicely. I think coaches can really do a good job of supporting other coaches. I mean, like you said, there’s certain coaches that are better at certain things, like I had an athlete recently just call me and say, Hey, I’m doing this ultra distance cycling event. And I said to him, you know, I could help you with some metabolic testing, but there’s other coaches in this area that really specialize in that area that I’m going to direct you towards, just because I believe it’s the best for the athlete that athlete centric view. So I think it’s great. I think if more coaches felt this way, there’d be more coached athletes, and I think the athlete would get a better product. Anyway, Trevor, we
Rob Pickels 39:49
went in a totally different direction than you were trying to go. So
Trevor Connor 39:52
let’s train back on the rails. Conversation. No, actually, Rob, I was glad we went down that road, because. It does segue really well into kind of the conversation, I admit, we’ve been avoiding a bit, because I know that we wanted to get here later in the show, which is velocity and so Robbie, I’m going to start with a very quick story here. Of couple weeks ago, I was in Bentonville. You were there as well. USAC was doing their level two and level one upgrades for coaches, and you have this tool velocity that you’ve built. As you said, you’re really trying to help coaches. You’re trying to give tools that coaches can use to work with their athletes. And has become such a valuable tool for coaches that in this two day course to upgrade coaches to the highest levels for USA Cycling, you gave a presentation about the tool as something that they can use to help their athletes. So that really had an impact on me to see that USA Cycling is going this is a great tool for coaches. So definitely want to talk about our workout yesterday, because that was a ton of fun. But tell us a little bit about your tool and what the motivation behind this was. Velocity
Robbie Ventura 40:59
was kind of born through COVID to some degree. You said it earlier about your group in Toronto using perv Pro. Our company was one of the first group’s vision quest many, many years ago, I think we started in 98 we started doing those copy trainer group rider sessions. And it really, to me, was a huge component of why we grew and why our company is still around today, because of the community that these group rides and these group indoor sessions produced. I mean, we live in Chicago, we have a crazy winner. A lot of people train indoors. We’ve been training indoors for a long time. Our winners aren’t as forgiving, maybe, as Colorado winners are. And basically, once we started to build these centers, they started to pop up all over Chicago. I mean, it just it went like wildfire. I think there was 36 indoor training centers at one point in the Chicagoland area, where I’m from, and COVID pretty much wiped them all out, except for ours. And the only reason why ours survived is because we had numbers. We had a critical mass that some of these other training centers didn’t have. Our governor completely stopped indoor working out it. We didn’t have any option at that point. They literally put signs on our door and no one can come in. So I started doing zoom classes to try to, you know, keep our business around. And at some point we had like 70 or 80 people on these zoom classes. We had actually get a bigger account to handle more people. And not only this was the cool part about it, not only did we get the local people that were coming at the facilities, but all the remote athletes that vision quest coaches were also able to come to these things. And it was because of of those remote athletes that were like, holy cow, I finally get to be in the facility like all the other V curs that some guy was like, Hey, you should try to figure this out. So we got drew Hartman from perv Pro. We got another guy, Nick Sigel, from this company up in Canada called power watts, or CPX, and we got them together to really produce something that took all of my 20 some years of experience riding indoors and put together something that I feel can really give coaches the opportunity to have these training centers without paying any money for brick and mortar, without having to buy trainers for everybody, without having to have a scheduling system, without having to have bathrooms and provide all these other logistics, even Parking for people that live in the city. Now you can create this studio based environment at any time with anyone for zero overhead, just your laptop, and that’s all. That’s all you really need. So we built the product, and I really, in my opinion, I’ve been talking about this today a little bit. It helps coaches to do a few things. One, it really helps them teach athletes to coach, really coach athletes while they’re actually doing a workout. We talked about how difficult that is, even if you’re on a group ride, to be able to coach more than one athlete. Really gives you that opportunity to do that. It connects coaches with their athletes in a big way. They can actually see them, they can adjust positions, they can do a bunch of different things. But also, as we talked about earlier, it gives athletes the ability to train together, to feel that connection that we all talked about that was so important that’s very difficult, even on some of the other virtual products that are out there. So we went for it. We raised some money, a lot of great investors. We have a great board of directors. We have the CEO of SRAM, Ken luceberg, is on our board. And we have just a lot of great people involved in this product. It’s one of the most fulfilling things ever, not because I believe it’s going to be the next Zwift, because it’s not. It does exactly what I wanted to do, which is help coaches do their job better, and teach athletes what I think is very important, which is beyond power output, beyond duration and intensity, but all the other stuff is what the program is built to do.
Trevor Connor 44:19
I got to say, I mean, we had a ton of fun. Yesterday. You asked me to put together a workout that would test the tool a little bit, and so I came out with those variations on over unders that we’ll talk a little more about in a second. But what I was really impressed by besides the fact that you are the master of this, I know I’ve done a few of your workouts now, dude,
Rob Pickels 44:39
you’re absurdly like, come on, he’s so good, you
Trevor Connor 44:43
know, how to work the room. We were glad you were there, because Rob and I probably would have been just joking around and horrible workout.
Rob Pickels 44:49
No, dude, you’re one of those people. Sometimes I just sit there and I stare in awe of people that are really good at their craft. And, dude, you’re legit, honestly. Well. Thank
Robbie Ventura 45:00
you. I will tell you the magic that you two brought to that class. I mean, I had a bunch of athletes that I normally use. They’re like, they want you guys to do more, and I’m not going to push you to do more, because I know that maybe that’s not the direction you want to go. But people would love to work out with you both. Well,
Rob Pickels 45:15
that’s probably work something out. I would
Trevor Connor 45:17
describe yesterday as Rob and I were kind of the clown act, and you are the person who kept the train. We were the entertainment.
Robbie Ventura 45:29
I thought the content. I thought the workout for starters, was spectacular. I loved it. And here’s the beautiful thing about the workout, you tell athletes to go do that workout. We sent 10 athletes to go out and do that on their own. Let’s just say you put it in training peaks. They either do it after they do it on their computer. They go do it on their whatever. I will promise you both this that no way shape or form what they have gotten out of that workout even a 10th by doing it on their own. Having you explain physiology, having you explain the real world atmosphere, having you explain when you should do the workout, how you should do the workout, how you should adjust the workout, things you should be thinking about when you’re doing these intervals. That was the gold that’s what’s missing. That stuff right there that you guys were able to teach these athletes while they were doing the workout was worth so much more than if an athlete just had to go. I can’t even explain to you how important and how much different that workout would have been had Rachel Cantor, a girl that was in the class, go do that workout. I don’t care how much you write in the comments. Trevor, you could have wrote everything you wanted. There’s no way she can even comprehend it. But ultimately, during the actual interval, to say what she needed to do was just magical. And I think that’s the future. I agree
Rob Pickels 46:37
real quick here with you, Robbie, where, like you said, it doesn’t matter how much you write in training peaks, you’re never going to get across all of the nuance that was included in the workout that Trevor wrote. And so, you know, as a coach, what do I do? I just write really simple workouts in training peaks that people can actually go out and execute. And I think that that’s important, that people are able to execute what’s asked of them. But yeah, I mean being in this environment where you are actually communicating directly with people, where you’re giving accessory information, right? You are giving guidance on what the rider ought to be doing in that moment. But also, this is the reason that we’re doing it, and that provides so much information, safety and confidence for the rider of Well, I’m not just doing this to do this, right? And, you know? So, so here’s the thing, right? Robbie, people can people can compare what you’re doing to peloton, right? That’s another great group online platform, but when you take these classes, you see that, okay, the underlying reasoning and knowledge of what’s happening on the velocity platform is 11 out of 10, right? And sometimes it feels like, on peloton, you’re just doing it, to do it. You’re doing it because it’s hard. There’s no good reason, you know, it’s just like, let’s go to the music and let’s suffer, but to hear Trevor from you, like we’re doing this for this reason, it’s gonna help you in the future in this way, like that’s the goal that you don’t get anywhere else. Well,
Trevor Connor 47:59
when you asked me to test the tool, I picked a workout, and I said this multiple times yesterday during the workout. It’s one that I give my athletes right before they’re trying to be on top race form. And I said this actually trains the things that are gonna make or break a race for you, but you can’t see any of it in the data. You can go out and do the workout by yourself. You can send me the data, and there’s so much of it that you just can’t see. And what I really enjoyed yesterday, what I was really impressed by when I was trying to test the tool, for you, is the number of coachable moments your tool allowed. So for anybody who hasn’t seen this, if you’re the coach running the workout, everybody is on video, so you can see everybody doing their workout. Caveat
Rob Pickels 48:42
to that the people that choose to be on video are on video. You don’t have to be on video if you don’t want to be
Trevor Connor 48:47
but it’s a great tool that Robbie can sit there and watch and see, you know, who’s struggling, and he can motivate them. He can encourage them. You know, we’re saying Robbie is the master, because there were 30 people there, and different points, Robbie was talking to each of them and giving them encouragement and helping them out. But there’s also a ton of other things that you’ve built into this tool that we could use. Let’s give you an example the workout that we built. It’s a simulated kind of race finish where you’re on a hilly race, and it’s basically the last three climbs of the race. So the first climb is kind of steady, just sub threshold. The second climb, you’re going to start having people surging trying to get away. So it’s an over Under Workout where you have to go a little over threshold for two minutes or a minute, and then you drop down to just below threshold again for a few minutes. And the idea is you have to respond to those surges, but then you can’t rest. You’re still on that climb. You’re still racing. And then the last climb just has a series of 10 second all out efforts with 50 seconds, again, just sub threshold. And it’s finding that How Hard Can I attack, how hard can I respond to an attack, but then continue to go back to threshold. Because if this is a race and you go so hard that you blow up, and you’re still five minutes from the finish, you’re done. Race is over. So that first part where it was just steady up the climb, if somebody went and did this by themselves, they’re just going to ride steady, and you’re not going to get a ton out of it, but Robbie and I built into it changes in the grade, because he can actually control the grade. We gave cadence goals, because that was one of the things that we talked about throughout that part of the workout, is the best climbers are really good at controlling their cadence as the grade changes on a climb, you don’t want to drop down to 30 rpm and suddenly have somebody attack, so you need to be holding that consistent cadence. We played a lot with that, and then you had this one point where the all the data on the athletes screen disappeared, and it’s now still watching you, and you’re everybody’s getting a score of how well they execute the workout. You have to say, at that intensity, try to keep it about, I think you put a target about 70 RPM, but you can’t see it, so you got to do it by feel, which is such an important thing to learn. So we just, you know is this was a 10 minute segment that was just at a steady power. But again, if somebody went out and did it by themselves, it would be boring. We were able to build so much into that, have so much fun with it. It was really engaging. Yeah, and then when we got to the over unders, really talk about the idea here is do the over as hard as you can without blowing up. You can’t drop down to 100 watts. You got to finish that over and immediately go down to 90% of threshold. And talked about the value of that and why that’s important, and learning how you know what is the your limit? How high above threshold can you go? And we talked about the difference between Rob and myself. Rob is a sprinter. He can go really hard. I’m a time trialist. I can’t go that hard above threshold, and so Rob might kill me for 30 seconds. I then have to just try to time trial back up to him. I can’t respond to him. And Robbie, you did try to respond to him. And I loved what happened there where you’re like, Yeah, I’m done, yeah. Robbie’s
Rob Pickels 51:45
like, Trevor, what happens when you fail this workout? How do I adjust my workout? Right now?
Robbie Ventura 51:50
That that was so, that was what I was gonna say, like, Trevor. Like people fail during workouts, right? Trevor really made it. What I really liked about yesterday’s ride because I was learning as well, which is, I just love to learn. As I said, Trevor Rob blew me up on that last acceleration. Should I, like, take the rest of the workout off? He’s like, You know what? You’re supposed to fail in this last set. Part of the goal here is to repeat this workout and see if you can get a little bit further at those same or higher intensities. Like, he gave the workout way more context about failure, about success, about hey, maybe you want to fail at some point during this workout. And this is what I want you to do. I want you to keep those high intensity numbers up there. And if you can’t manage the 90% you want to back it off a little bit so you can manage it all the way through like there was so much learning that would be impossible to have happen. I mean, I might be able to learn about this over the course of a year, but I got it all in one workout. And not only did I learn about this workout, I learned how to manage other workouts because of the content. And the nice thing about this is, what Trevor said is this workout now is in the on demand library. You go to fast talk labs portal, you can actually watch this workout and do it again and see if you can make it a couple more. And you can even see your score from the last one on the leaderboard and see if you can beat your score from the last one. So once the live workout is done, you can still access that. And the cool thing about accessing that is maybe you learn something from somebody else, like maybe Trevor talked to Rachel about when she gets out of her seat, get a little bit further forward on your bicycle, or have a little less bend in your elbow, or whatever he was commenting on, that you can look at yourself and go, whoa. I needed that adjustment as well. So, like, we talked about, like, I think there’s learning that can happen continuously, and I think it needs to happen like that, but the workout itself, you know, having co hosting, so now you can bring on, you know, like, you can even do one of your fast talk labs podcasts on there. And bring on Alan lamber, bring on Sebastian Weber, and have them talk themselves to one of their favorite workouts. So I’m just thinking about more workouts for fast talk in the future, because you guys did a really nice job, dude.
Rob Pickels 53:44
I was so breathless during that I could barely talk. No way could I record a podcast. Good lord,
Robbie Ventura 53:50
you can lower your threshold, Robert from 520 back down to 475, and be fine. You know, it’s
Rob Pickels 53:55
a joke, because every time he talks about my threshold, the number gets higher. So
Trevor Connor 54:02
it is where I got to say, anybody who’s interested, I mean, please come do our workout. We had a ton of fun, but join one of Robbie’s workouts. Robbie is the master here. He invited me to one in the summer, and he does all this, and it’s great, like he knows all the athletes. And he was saying that to him while he was doing the rides, and you could just see him giving encouragement, talking to each of the different athletes on the platform, which I really enjoyed. And here’s my giant embarrassment, you invited me. This was more of a kind of easier, just sub threshold type workout. I was getting ready for a race, and I wanted to do some super high intensity. So I’m like, I’ll show up, but I’m not actually going to do the workout. He says, when you were having the one minutes at threshold, I was going up to like, 200% and killing myself ago. Nobody’s gonna notice this. This is a virtual environment, and like the second, first or second time I do it, Robbie’s like, Trevor, you’re going a little over the goals here. His
Robbie Ventura 54:55
screen turns red, so like, when people go way too hard, the screen for the coach is really easy. If you’re a coach watching the athletes, because if they’re blue, they’re under, if they’re green, they’re doing in the right zone. And if they’re red, they’re above. Trevor’s thing was blinking red. He was like, What’s going on here? I thought he had his power set at like 100 watts or something. I thought maybe he missed on the FTP, but he was doing his own thing. And that’s, I think that’s okay too, because, you know, Robert, let’s just say there’s a threshold workout for Thursday that we all want to do it together as a group, but really Robert only wants to do tempo that day. He can just drop his threshold 10% or 15% get all the skill development stuff, get all the fun, get all the gamification elements. But the whole workout gets blunted by 10% because he dropped his threshold. So you can adjust like you did. You know, you still had fun in the class. You still learned a lot, hopefully, but you got your workout in as well. So I think, to me, I often think that riding with others being coached, learning something might even be a little bit better than doing exactly what you’re supposed to do to optimize power output, like at the end of the day, power output for people, eventually, unless they have more time doesn’t get that much better. But if you have athletes for 10 or 11 years, and you can work on their aerodynamics, you can work on their conservation of energy, you can work on them being smoother. You can work on their Terrain Management. You can really extend their ability to grow for significantly longer. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 56:14
so Robbie, if I understand this correctly, the workout that we did with you, you’re making that available for free, and I think you’re even going to put it out on YouTube, correct? Yep, yes. So anybody who’s interested, we’ll put the links to that in our show notes. So if you’d like to check out the workout, if you want to kind of a, as you said, this was kind of an episode of fast talk while doing a workout, if anybody just wants to check that out, we’ll also have it on YouTube and go the show notes for this episode. We’ll have the links to both the workout and the YouTube Trevor. The
Rob Pickels 56:43
problem with this is we have faces for radio, and I’m not sure that being a YouTube influencer is in our future, but it’s always been my goal, I guess. Well, look at Robbie’s hair. He makes
Trevor Connor 56:52
up for both of us. Get out of here. No, it’s
Trevor Connor 56:54
so funny.
Rob Pickels 56:55
It’s a good thing. Grant isn’t here? Grant?
Robbie Ventura 56:57
Yeah, you guys all got good looks. You kidding me? And I think the most important thing is a coach resonates with an athlete. I mean, that’s why peloton has such a diverse amount of people. Some people like my energy. Some people think I’m just I talk too much, and I totally agree with them. We have a lot of different coaches that do classes for us on vision quest, and they’re all completely different, men and women, athletes and people that are a little quieter and just kind of let the workout breathe a lot certain people that are really good at certain things. So as a coach, don’t think you have to know physiology like Trevor, or don’t think you have to know have experience in the medical field like Robert to be a great coach on this platform, all you have to really do is care about your athletes, take an interest in them, understand what their goals are, tell stories about the workout that you’re doing, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and then add those coachable moments and those tools. The platform is really based around helping coaches to do their job better, not to coach in a specific way. We’re all very different. We all have different ideas on how things should be done. Nobody competes with you. You have your own portal. Whatever the coaching group that you have, you get your own portal. You can coach any way you want, all your workouts get recorded in an on demand library. You could put strength training on there. There’s running as well if you’re a triathlete. So understand that we’re not telling you how to do your job. We’re just giving you an opportunity to do it better. Yeah, I
Trevor Connor 58:12
think that’s a really good point. You are right? This is everybody’s different, and like I said when I tried to be you, when I first started running those perf pro classes, literally the athletes, they were just telling me, Trevor, Stop, just stop. That’s just not your thing. And I found my thing. My thing was talk about training, talk about physiology, which led to the podcast. So I agree with you. Every coach who does this, they can find their way, bring some music, just play the music and let them enjoy that, and just give pointers when you can. There’s a lot of different ways to do it, so find your own style. Before we wrap things up, let’s hear from Neil Henderson about how he’s been using the virtual environment and tools like velocity to aid his coaching.
Neil Henderson 58:53
I’ve been involved in this end of things as a coach for quite a long time, way back, starting with compu trainer studio setups. We actually, when I was at Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, I think we set up four trainers in one area temporarily as a little bit of a starting point, and grew that up to eight compute trainers in a little separate area. And had kids, you know, coming in at adults. Had the whole mix, the entire spectrum of folks, where, in person, we could actually see them and ride with them and teach and coach in ways that we couldn’t necessarily do on the road. So that really opened up a whole new realm of things and that connection. Then we got into some smarter trainers. You know, the Wahoo KICKR studio that I opened in 2013 in Boulder again, extending that and being able to bring in a broad range of folks that you could ride with. So whether I could have a session with like a world champion right here, and somebody who’s a brand new cyclist right next to them, and these two folks are doing the same relative workout in that way, and I could be coaching and teaching both of them something totally different while they’re doing the same thing. And so that side of things, I think, was really exciting. And now we’ve gotten to the point where a lot of times people have. Now separated from one another, and a lot of the virtual training side of things, and so the ability to build fitness with what we do in in that virtual world, you know, on a trainer, on a smart bike, in those ways, for sure, I’ve had seen the growth and the opportunity in that helping develop workouts and things with the suffer fest, which then came under the Wahoo umbrella later on in the Wahoo system training. But these elements are things that can help develop that fitness. There’s that connection sometimes that we’ve lost. Now, I would say, in the modern realm, with a lot of things, you know, you have some social aspects with certain different software platforms out there, especially the virtual worlds like Swift. Then you have folks that are just doing things on their own, closed off a little bit, they might get a coach’s specific workout, so they’re doing that, you know, power duration type of thing, but they’re losing out on learning something about riding or or not getting connection with others. And so I think there’s pluses and minuses on both sides. We can use these tools to develop incredible capacity to ride and be able to produce power output, but we lose out on actually developing riding skills a lot of cases, especially folks that are kind of stuck in ERG mode all the time and just turn their brain off and just pedal and wail and make watts. And so there’s, you know, again, pluses and minuses on that side, and then that connection with others. Again, sometimes people are just doing all on their own, even in those virtual platforms, without any connection with others. And then others are almost using it exclusively as a social platform and not doing any real specific work. They just jump on Zwift, and they go ride whatever their friends are on or some other folks are doing, and they just follow along. So each of these different aspects have you know, I’d say some value, and you just have to look at what your purpose is in a get in training session, the velocity platform has kind of opened up a bit of reconnecting with folks that we coach. And so again, we can have specific workouts, things like that, that. Again, we can build that capacity. But one of the things we are definitely pushing with those sessions is not using ERG mode, so the rider has to actually be shifting to hit both the power and cadence targets. So a lot of times in platforms, in the past, you know, power was the be all, end all, and cadence, sometimes we had suggestions. But in the velocity platform, especially the gamified aspect of it, where we have those selected intervals that are being scored both on power and cadence, we are now able to have a little bit more encouragement to be doing the right thing as a rider. When we have group sessions, live sessions, I’m able to give somebody those cues as they’re riding. I can see the cadence. I can see the power if they’re exceeding or not meeting the cadence target. Able to give them that immediate feedback in that way, as well as that. Are competitive type folks, that gamified aspect of both the power and cadence settings being scored really does help people kind of stay engaged in the workout. It also gives us that ability to just see them, you know, have a little quick catch up chat, see how they’re doing physically in those ways that, again, I can’t see on Zwift, unless I’d have to set up a separate thing, or most of the other platforms, you don’t get that same live interaction. So there’s been a lot of pluses for us, and we’ve, you know, we’ve recorded all of our workouts since we started last year, and so our library, we’ve got over 80 different sessions with myself and two of our other coaches at Apex coaching, who have built into that. And we’ve been able to build some additional aspects, some training plans that just use the velocity platform for our cycling workouts. We’ve also added some strength, mobility and stability sessions as well, so we’re getting that little bit bigger picture of all those aspects and cycling and things, of being able to help our athletes be more capable.
Trevor Connor 1:03:33
All right, I think it’s about time to round things up. But before we dive into our take homes, we have a question for our forum, and that question is, what would you like to see in the future to improve your interactions with other athletes and coaches? So go to our forum. You’ll find that question, and please give us your answers. All right, guys, enjoy the conversation. I think it’s time to get to our take home. So Robbie, you’re new to the show. This is where each of us gets one minute to kind of summarize what we think is the most important message to take from this episode. So Robbie, let’s start with you. Sure
Robbie Ventura 1:04:06
I love coaching. It really brought to me something that I couldn’t get from professional cycling, and I just really want coaches I believe in coaches. I’ve always had coaches my whole life. My dad was my first coach, and I just want all coaches to do their job at a higher and higher level and react to all the technology that are coming our way. And to me, what’s going to really be important for us as coaches is to connect us with our athletes in a better way, to also connect our athletes together in a better way, and to really teach the nuance of our sport, beyond power, beyond intensity, beyond duration. I think there’s a lot more for us to teach and now with velocity and some of these other platforms, we have tools that allow us to do that, to bring our athletes together, to actually give our athletes the skills, the knowledge and the understanding to become significantly faster than we are powerful and tools like velocity is 100% focused on helping you as coaches to teach your athletes all the knowledge. Knowledge that you have in your head, and to give you a vehicle for you to do that properly. So if you’re interested in it, please reach out to me, to velocity, and we’ll get you all taken care of.
Rob Pickels 1:05:08
Rob, yeah, Trevor, I think that we’re in a world that is increasingly alone. Order food through an app. You don’t have to call and talk to anybody anymore. We’re living in a virtual world like Zwift, where we’re riding with other people, but are we really riding with other people? And I think that no matter who you are, whether you’re an athlete, whether you’re a coach, whether you’re a content creator, there is so much information in the world that is best learned and shared with face to face interaction. And you know, we ended talking about velocity, but this show isn’t about velocity, so to say, but apps and platforms like that are great ways for people to be able to interact with other individuals across the world, across the globe, right, and share this information. And I think that that is hugely important for our learning and for our improvement as both athletes and people. So I encourage everyone, don’t silo yourself. You know, get out there and learn and have some fun with some other individuals.
Trevor Connor 1:06:02
Yeah, so I think both of you touched on some really interesting take home. So I guess mine is going to be we’re looking at this increasingly virtual environment. I think we’ve seen pros and cons for the athletes, but when it comes to coaches, you’ve kind of seen this evolution of the coaching world where there was a time when really, if you wanted to coach an athlete. It had to be in person. And there was real value to that. You then saw us move to this remote coaching where I really think you saw this rise in the training plan coach, and I think that sort of coach with AI training plan development, now they’re going to really struggle to be a coach nowadays. You have to be offering more. And I think we need to find these tools. When you are a remote coach, you can’t just go and pat your athlete on the back or go for a ride with them. You need these tools that are going to separate you from just the training plan and Robbie, this is my little plug to you. You asked me to check out velocity. I went into it skeptically. Was really impressed with the tool. You’re not paying us at all here. It’s just, I think you have a tool that gives something to coaches that they can really use to help out their athletes. So thanks for coming and talking to us about this and sharing it with us. Thank you
Robbie Ventura 1:07:09
guys, and hopefully you understand that this will be a super fun thing for you guys to do once in a while. Heck, I would come to your classes. I pay to come to your classes, so please just consider doing another one at some point down the
Trevor Connor 1:07:18
road. Definitely will. Will do All right, thanks. Robby, it was fun having you on the show. Thank you. That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed on 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 or 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@fasttalklabs.com for Robbie Ventura. Dr Andy Pruitt, Brian Ignatz, Brent buelter, Dr Scott fry, Dr Paul Larson, Dr Mickey Wilden and Rob pickles. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
