Ten Minute Tips #75: The Art Of Autoregulation (Training To Vibes)

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We've also got a question submission form for very long form questions up at the top of the podcast page on the website at empiricalcycling.com case you couldn't guess that. All right, today vibes training. What do we mean by vibes training? I whenever somebody says training by vibes, I always hear training by auto regulation. So what is auto regulation? Maybe we can contrast auto regulation with structure. And I think I've actually had this experience a lot recently with some of my clients where whatever I put in training peaks, they think I have to follow this plan to the letter. And I've said this on the podcast a couple times recently, I think, but I've always told people who do that, I need less compliance from you. I need you to be able to rock and roll a little bit based on how you're feeling based on, you know, how did you sleep, your nutrition, motivation, all those sorts of things. And especially as we get closer to events, you know, we a little bit of auto regulation always goes a long way there too. So what is the goal? The goal is to do good quality training and recover from that and get the fitness increases outcomes that you want. But the goal is also that with structured training. So where's, will I say, so what's the difference here? The difference, I mean, I was, yeah, I think structured training wouldn't give you the optimum way to get there. Because when whoever's written that training, whether it's you or a coach or a friend, whoever, it doesn't, whenever they wrote that, they were writing it under a certain amount of information and knowledge they knew about what your environment might look like, how you felt, how you're training might develop the weather forecast, all sorts of things for different variables. And if you were able to update with all this information on a daily basis, they might change, tweet the plan ever so slightly. So I think being able to do that yourself, because ultimately, only you know how you feel and all the other information around you. Yeah, it's going to help you get the best. James has some construction going on in the best. Sorry, the best out of you yourself. This reminds me of a parallel that I've learned recently, which is about weather forecasting. I've been reading a very interesting book on stats and it's been, it's been very, very informative. And one of the things that I've learned about weather forecasting is that the further out you are, the less accurate it is. And the closer you get, the more accurate it becomes. And I think that we can make a parallel with like a prefab plan, like a canned plan, like this is going to be your, you know, 12 week FTP booster or, you know, 16 weeks to your first fondet plan, like that kind of stuff. And so that's like a very long term prediction. We think that if you follow this plan rigidly, you're going to get to your goal. But it doesn't have any flexibility or accommodation, really, the same way that you're working with a coach or auto regulating your training would. And the way that we work, you know, we typically plan out a week or two ahead for our clients. So we actually have a very tight forecast window, like a week or two, as opposed to maybe like 12, 16 weeks out. And then as people get there, we oftentimes help them nudge them in one way or the other. Okay, I think we might need a little more rest. I think we can actually push a little bit longer before we take a rest week, that kind of stuff. And so, and so we are basically looking at very, very short prediction windows for our should we call it athlete forecast. And so there's no shorter prediction window really than like when the athlete swings their leg over the bike and starts riding trying to do their workout and going, I don't have it today. Or oh my God, I feel amazing. I think I should do my hard workout for later this week, like right now. Like that's the kind of thing where I think auto regulation really shines. And you know, in coaching, this is the kind of thing that we are coaching our athletes to do. But I think that it's not for everybody, but I think there are benefits. So like maybe we can think about a certain proportion of auto regulation or vibes training, even if you are a coach to athlete or if you have a a pre-fat plan or something like that. And so get a meat. I want to kick this over to you because I think you've got some really interesting ideas on, you know, kind of the upsides downsides of vibes training and auto regulation. Yeah, I think what really applies here is the saying that's very common in arts is that in order to break rules you first need to understand them. Meaning that it's totally fine to experiment do things in a unconventional way or to improvise, but you need to understand what are the trade doubts of what you're about to do and are they acceptable to you? I think that's pre-important in making sure the vibes, the vibes based training is successful. Because for example, now a lot of people are in Spain. And if someone goes to Spain for a week, I'm hard really going to put together training plan. And let's explicitly ask me to because what people want to do most of the time is just just right hard. I mean, you are there for a week. Yeah, it's just smash it. I'm not necessarily everyday, but on most days just have fun. Eat well, enjoy the sunshine. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I had a client doing that right now. And I just told her in Monday that, you know, what we'll just do this thing once you're back. And we'll see where you're like that, how you're feeling. And I'll be just just to that in the meantime, just literally do whatever you want. Yeah. And this is usually where I would try to give somebody some some some guardrails based on their previous experience with this type of stuff. So I've had people do training camps. And like previously they had done training camps, they have written as hard as they could. And you know, it had taken like two weeks to come out of that. And based on somebody's season schedule, if they've got races coming up, that's the last thing I want. Because if we've got to start doing race prep, then I want to control that fatigue. And so I will usually try to give people guardrails in terms of intensity in terms of duration. And maybe altitude guidelines, like if you're riding over this altitude, try to keep your heart rate below such and such. And that kind of stuff is where I think somebody inexperienced with training in the long run can actually do themselves a little more harmed than good. I think it'll be it'll be not harmful in terms of the vibe, because that's that's part of what vibe training is for like maximizing fun more or less. But you also have to have a sense of balance. And so I think that I think that in general vibes training is pretty good for people with unpredictable schedules. Like I've I've had a couple coaching inquiries, even recently, but many over the years, where I think that people's schedule sounded a little too chaotic to actually make a coach worthwhile for them. And so, and you know, a lot of people in medical field, a lot of people like working on oil rigs, stuff like that, like, you know, cool, but crazy jobs. And sometimes, you know, apparently, - Newborn. - Newborn, parents of the board. - Newborns. - Yeah. And sometimes, you know, we've definitely worked with people with newborns before and it's been fine, but sometimes it's like, hey, I think we need to take a little break for a little bit and let you actually catch up on some sleep. So, also people who feel constrained by a plan or a routine. This is actually very, very, very common, where you wanna hit the group ride, if it's nice out, like the weather's great after work, you wanna go out and you wanna do that ride, even though it's scheduled the rest day and oh, the weather looks like it's gonna be rainy all the rest of the week, so I wanna get this ride in today. That kinda stuff is awesome, but I think it's, you know, if you don't know, if you don't have a sense of a good training rhythm in terms of pushing and pulling, then you can certainly overdo it. And this is something that I see with people who don't have a deep training history. Even people who have a deep training history in other sports usually have a very good sense of auto regulation. So, I think that vibes training is also good for people with interest in multiple sports. So, people who kinda have one foot in cycling, but also another foot in hiking or climbing or lifting or skiing, this is great because then you can put your bike down based on the weather based on, if you've been riding a lot really hard recently, all right, I'll put the bike down, I'll just get into the gym for a week and then I'll be ready for, get back on the bike the week after. This is the kinda stuff that where auto regulation shines. - Action. - Actually, unless that person needs to be told, okay, actually it's nose balls today. - Yeah, so we'll get to the drawbacks in a second, but I wanna, I wanna hype this up for a second. - Yeah, let's go there first. - I actually have a really good story here because for one of my Canadian clients had a couple of cross country skiing races as his A goals in the winter. And I was very upfront with him before we started working together. Like, see, they've been doing this skills like once in my life, so we can, we can try to combine cycling and skiing, but there'll be a lot of improvisation and you'll have to tell me a lot of our skiing because I don't know, I mean, I understand endurance sports generally but not skiing particularly so. And yeah, it was very much ride-based training because I've learned, when you're skiing, you can't always manage intensity sometimes. Conditions are what the I and like, you can't ski easy for example. And yeah, so our training was based on sound fundamental principles like long-term periodization of nature, he rested a lot going into the skiing season and he rested a lot right after it because I actually did it similar to cyclocross season but when he came to planning workouts, planning training weeks, it was really all about how much do you think you can ski this week based on the weather conditions and how tired do you are? Do you think you should go for one hard skiing workout and do you end up skiing harder than intended last week? So it was really all about how did this feel where we are in the season, where we are relative to your skiing races. And which cycling races, once the cycling season eventually starts to care about so we can make sure you're well rested but that was like three or four months of the ultimate vice-based training because he was riding a little bit just mostly to maintain cycling legs but that wasn't his focus. But it's all about how you're feeling and how does that compare to how you should be feeling at this point. I think that's actually a good example also of some of the other roles that coaches can have because I think a lot of people think about when I hire a coach, I'm hiring them for a training plan and all of us have been coached and coaching for long enough that we know that there's a lot more to it than that. And so sometimes you're an advisor for somebody. And sometimes you are somebody who's gotta like pull the leash. Like no, you absolutely need some rest because you are you skied like eight times last week. I don't know how often people skate. There's a double in there somewhere. And you need some rest this week and this is and I don't even need to understand skiing but I certainly understand your feedback and the kind of rough metrics I'm seeing and so it's time for a rest. - There'll be times when you're paying a coach but they won't even give you a proper plan. Like if I've got an athlete who's been sick, I'm not gonna give them more than maybe a day or two day or two's plan because I wanna see how they're reacting. I don't wanna set them six weeks worth of training when they're coming back from COVID or they've been lying in bed for a week or something. So there are times when actually as a coach, it's kinda your job to. - You're certain that the vibe too. - Yeah, yeah, you kinda have to just listen to them and yeah, we're not, we'd be absolutely lying to you if we could say, oh, this is the best thing to do for the next week. Sometimes it's just a day by day thing. - Yeah, yeah, for sure. And also, one of the other things I've learned just talking about from a coaching perspective is you don't wanna set up, if somebody is very, very type A and they will do the plan no matter what it is in training peaks, you don't wanna set them up for potential failure. If you think that, if you put in a workout, even if you say maybe do this, if you're feeling up to it and they'll just do it anyway, then you don't wanna put in that workout. You wanna like slow roll that kinda stuff. You wanna make sure that the bar is pretty low and you're gonna rack up a string of successes instead of hitting a failure early on when they're like ramping back into things. And I think that also this points to somebody who. Who may be in experience with auto regulation in this way, like when they are coming back from illness or a period of stress or detraining, where people ramp into things really fast. Like you said, good to me. And if somebody doesn't understand the quote unquote rules, then they don't know how to break them. So. - Yeah, that happens a lot when people coming back from sickness because people are always so incredibly anxious in the heavies about losing fitness. And I totally get that because from their perspective, I get sick at the wrong time is like the worst thing that could ever happen and it happened only to them of course. But then looking at the entire client's roster, it's just like people will be getting sick inevitably just a question of who's going to get sick this year. So. - Oh, yeah, exactly. So it's very hard for people to just look at their station objectively and understand that. It just pure chance sometimes you get. But my like is sometimes a bit less like it, but. - Another example might be. I think I think. What am I trying to say? Another example might be how long it takes to recover from a hard race? Like I've done races where it's taken me a week or more to recover and get decent legs back. And as I don't think myself, it's really quite hard to kind of compute because you're taking easy. You take a day off after the race, sure, you maybe take a couple of days off and then your kind of instinct is like, I need to be getting back to it now. I should be feeling good. I should be able to do some intensity and. - But they're sure, yeah. Because you have a preconceived expectation. - And I think it's just hard to zoom out yourself when. Yeah, basically, having a bit of objectivity, second pair of eyes can be really important there. Because when you're the person taking that time off, it feels like age is backly. As a coach, you know, a week's not my big deal. It's no big deal to block out a week and say just spin to the cafe or something. But when you're the individual, it just feels like actually quite long time. - Yes. And I've actually got a couple of clients this year where life stress is absolutely through the roof. And one of the things that they've seen is that the training that they put in when stress was low, you know, November to December, January, fish is they're still seeing benefits from it now because as long as you're doing some riding and they're managing the stress and you know and it's like you're you're really not losing fitness and in fact generally speaking most people gain fitness when they get on the other side of these stressful periods whether there are a couple weeks or even a couple months on and off and so the the patients that you have to have to auto regulate yourself can be herculean at some points and it can feel like forever but once you've seen and I think that this is one of the reasons by the way I used to not suggest this but Tim Kusikim on the podcast a couple years ago and this is what his suggestion was and I think it's actually a really good suggestion is if you are inexperienced with this kind of thing getting a coach for a year or two or three and learning the training rhythm helps a ton before you go off and coach yourself if that's what your ultimate goal is because then you can have more like a more objective like you said an objective set of eyes to help you say no I think you need to rest more or okay maybe you're being a little bit lazy this time instead of you know maybe you should go go out and do some VO2s here and there where where if you are early in your training career it can be difficult to be more objective about that kind of thing and when I consult with people this is the kind of thing that that I tell them about is like this is what I'm suggesting to you is going to be so radically different from what you've been doing that you should really ease into it and have objective metrics for how you're feeling and how your fitness is progressive and here's some timeline goals for you know it like are the VO2s working here's when you might know is your endurance improving here's how and when you might know that kind of thing so I think we should probably talk about how a people might do auto regulation more successfully like because I think that one of the things that one of the expectations that this might set up is that there's no structure whatsoever and I don't actually think that that's quite the way it should work I think there should be like we said a degree of vibes so some people are more along the lines of 75% vibes and some people are more along the lines of 25% vibes and either way I think that one of the best strategies for doing successful auto regulation is having a list of priorities for your week or for your training block so in a very very general sense we can think about training in terms of coming back from your offseason so very general prep building fitness and then race specificity so we can think about these three very general training periods and within each recognizing where am I in each and what are my goals here is my goal to increase my FTP and my TTE is my goal to improve my sprint is my goal to improve my top and repeatability is my goal to work on my technical skills all these kinds of things you need to know where you're at and what you need work on and when I feel good what do I do first what's my secondary goal what's my tertiary goal that kind I can just skip and if I don't do it at all who cares yeah I agree with that but I think it's really important to prioritize and unlike what's the most important thing because I mean there's always so many things you want to work on yeah four come important exactly I want to work on my FTP and my sprint and my repeatability and yeah yeah exactly say for example my client russ just used towards people doing long stuff so for some clients my set the goal of you know what this month you need to do at least one six hour ride or longer and that that's the main thing because if you're about to do 15 hour race you really want a few of these rides in your legs whenever they happen sweet sweat helps FTP work helps keep training might be important depending on where you're planning trays but six hour rides is almost like non-negotiable that's it's almost like there's a good argument to be made for specificity oh yeah yeah that's a good one yeah yeah um so I think that that's a good example like so if you are heading for a long gravel race let's say your main race is unbound and this is something I usually advise people and this is one of the things that we do as coaches is we think about what specific needs this person have if they're if they're regularly doing very long rides and that's just part of their training routine then we don't necessarily need to prioritize these long rides because they've got plenty in their legs especially the deep where the training history goes the the less important building that fitness is because you kind of have it um but on the other hand if you are like you said if you're not quite there in terms of that level of fitness then prioritizing that even once a month is hugely beneficial um so I think the other thing here is balancing the fatigue from these main training goals right yeah it isn't um I think the super long rides is an interesting example because at some point there is a bunch of diminishing returns like in theory I could tell people go ahead and do 10 hour ride because your goal is 15 hours long but are you learning anything new that you wouldn't learn on like six hour rides seven hour ride probably not but that's going to be so much more miserable potentially and so much more I would say there's a couple edge cases I'm aware of from our clients where um one of uh one of Katie's clients did a lap of his the state he lives in and it was going to be I think 30 something hours but at hour 25 or 26 or something like that I think he got like really bad knee pain but that's something that you wouldn't know uh and sometimes you will get something like that if you're used to doing five six hour rides and you do a seven or eight usually it's not that big of a stretch but if you do eight to 10 you might actually find one of those weak points if your ultimate goal is 15 so I think every once in a while like something like that just just to see if there's an edge case but I'd say the odds of that are moderate to low uh because I think most people if you can do a six hour ride you can do a 10 hour ride I think you're right about that yeah and I think uh the feedback from these rides is really valuable like if you do six hours and you feel like if you really had to you could do another six more because well that's what you're planning to do then that's cool but uh four hours into six hour ride you can't feel your hands I mean that's a huge huge huge problem yes um so let's talk about managing fatigue uh so with these long rides like James was saying like the recovery from it can be longer than expected and I think if you are this can come down to preconceived notions I think if people have preconceived notions that just because the you know you carried space on the calendar and suddenly you start the weekend on Monday then your legs are fresh that doesn't really work like just just think about shifting your your cone of focus on the week from like from Saturday to Friday and you'll go wow I had two really long hard rides why would my legs be good on Tuesday uh and so that kind of thing helps but um having some kind of more objective way to gauge your recovery helps a lot if people are newer to auto-regulation so one of the things that I really like to do for people looking at gauging their recovery is to do a very very short FTP effort like three to five minutes um you know maybe not in the first two days after your super long hard training goal ride but maybe day three four five you do that and you see how it feels because usually FTP is going to roughly stay FTP within five or ten watts and it's going to feel pretty decent and I think if actually James you're back hopefully the construction is coming down a little bit but we're talking about uh James had to run to manage the construction site downstairs uh but we're talking about the control guys all right um James the foreman uh the we're talking about using a short FTP efforts to gauge fatigue after like a really hard goal training ride or race so what do you you've been doing this recently James why don't you talk about your experience with it? Yeah I mean it's so useful because I think I found the often my motivation levels are a higher place than maybe my legs want to be. So I'm keen to get back to some harder training and then yeah, if you're riding the same bike, same parameter, there's nowhere to hide, either the legs feel good riding a certain number or you can do it blind, blind paste and what does FTP feel like? Either kind of works fine I think because yeah, as long as you're honest with yourself, they're both going to give you an idea of kind of way or act in relation to those numbers. And yeah, I think certainly if you're experienced and you have a good gauge of what FTP feels like, you've been doing some longer FTP efforts, you should know how relatively easy, just a few minutes, three, four, five minutes FTP should be. And yeah, I think I've had times where I've been a bit tired, I can still ride up at my FTP for five minutes, but I know it's maybe not as easy as it would be if I wanted to do, you know, 40, 60. Exactly, a long time here, you get a gauge after five minutes, was that Jill? Could I do that another half an hour no worries or am I a pretty pleased to have to stop at the end of that? You can't down the seconds to press the lap button then, yeah, that's a pretty good indication that you're, you need more rest and likewise throwing in some short sprints, both those things are quite low for tea costs, they're not generating very much for tea, you kind of think they're just kind of like warm up efforts really, and they can tell you certainly how you're feeling that day, but you can see the trends of those things, you know, if you do it over three days and you see those numbers go a certain way, then it might give you indication of how you're responding to that training at the moment or whether you're resting appropriately. Yeah, and I think the sprints are a good shout-out to especially for those of us who are kind of sprinty folks, where we are in touch with how snappy we feel, the neural drive, how easy the technique feels, because I can tell you for sure that when I've been very, very tired and I've been trying to sprint, it almost feels foreign. Like, you know, when you go do a squat and you probably shouldn't be in the gym, and the motor pattern feels really foreign and you're like, you're thinking about raising your core too much, you're thinking about, like something just feels a little off, it's pretty easy to tell that if you're in touch with your, with your neural drive, let's say, for sprinting and the technique. So, and also the numbers in general, you know, like I remember at the peak of my sprint training, I would do a couple seated sprints to warm up, and if I saw anything less than about, I don't know, god, I forget exactly, but I think it was anything less than about 1600 seated peak. I was like, oh, this could be a rough day and I probably shouldn't train. But if I saw something like 17, 1800, it's like, oh, all right, we're going to set some good numbers today. This is feeling breezy. Let's do this. So, having objective stuff like that really helps to regulate vibes. And also, it's like, it's sort of like using a power meter to, as a feedback tool when you are riding at threshold. Like if, if you're trying to learn to ride an FTP by feel, your power meter is a good feedback tool. If you're like, okay, 250 feels good, 260 feels all right, 270 feels holy shit. All right, I'm going to call it somewhere between, I'm going to call it like 260 ish plus or minus five. And that's all you need. And same way here, you're using these more objective tools to train yourself, okay, I feel like this off the bike and I felt like this on the bike, I'm starting to see relationships between the two. And as you get much more experienced, you can put those tools down because you are better at predicting how you're going to feel on the bike based on how you're feeling off the bike. Yeah, great because I think that, you're briefly touched on that, but I think the suggestion bias is very real, but you expect to feel a certain way. And some people just can't tell the difference between what they are actually feeling and what they think they should be feeling at this particular point in training blogger in the rest week. So I think having some actual numbers sort of ground to ground everything in reality is very, very useful when learning to adjust. And especially when second circumstances are a bit unusual and you can't stick to your regular training pattern by the vads, when trying to stretch the training block around the holidays, Fannie, I have the reason really. Weather, especially here, and well, actually down here in North Carolina, it's very nice up there in Massachusetts right now, this is this is smart weather. So let's talk about training content because I think this also is a big factor in terms of vibe training where I think some people, and they'll probably make themselves known when they listen to this, some people have never done structured training and they have gotten very, very, very fit indeed. And there have been lots of local fast people, there have been world tour people who've never done structured intervals. And like, and that's that's all well and good, but that's certainly not the majority of people. And so at some point, just doing group rides and going out doing long rides and racing will stop working in terms of keeping your progress moving forward. And so there are usually for most people has to be some sort of balance between going on the fun group ride and just getting on your mountain bike and smashing off road for a little bit and racing and structured training. The balance between those things, it has to be somewhere, maybe it's more on the 25% vibes, maybe it's on the 75% vibes. But at some point, if you want to see long-term progress, most people really do have to do some structured training. And you can even do structured training unstructured. We'll talk about that probably in another podcast, but in general, I mean, like if you want to do some VO2 work, maybe you don't want to do a 5x5 or whatever. Maybe you just want to go do some hard hills between two and eight minutes and that's going to be plenty. And okay, oh, look, my last hill, my time up this hill is improving or my power up this is improving. And like that can be a marker of objective progress, just fine. I think that's harder to gauge, more objective progress, but it's certainly not impossible. And you've really got to make sure that you've got some metrics in your periphery to judge that progress. There is something similar to minimum effective dose, but I didn't know something like the least structured viable workout. Something like that. Where you really think about what you want to do at the most basic level. Like if you are doing a threshold workout, then yeah, you want to spend time at threshold. Does it really matter how exactly you structure that time? Matter is just I'm extent you don't want to do 60 intervals one minute each. That would be questionable. But I mean, I often tell people, especially the ones living in mountain mountainous areas, just give me 60 minutes at F2B using any combination of intervals. And usually what happens is they do a 35 minute effort, then they do a 15 minute effort, then they do like a 10 minute effort. And okay, there you go. Exactly. For all the practical purposes, that's exactly the same as being three batch benty in that mode. Like I have a new client. For practical purposes, I know people are going to go, oh, they're not exactly equivalent. And I know they're not just yeah, just go with it here. We're vibes vibes. Yeah, exactly. I was, I'm working with the client who lives in Denver and he was doing a threshold workout through by 20. I look at the map and I see he turned around halfway up the mountain. I was like, if I don't do right all the way up and go all the way down and just I know you have fun, you know, you don't have to turn around precisely after 1200 seconds. There's no magic to that, you know. But I think what is quite important to say is that that vibe style training still has a clear purpose for that session. It's not like you're telling this guy, okay, just go out and whack it around, do some, do it, you know, you might end up with a 20 minute threshold effort and a load of two minute anaerobic capacity efforts and sprints and things. So I think that's something that is maybe something to avoid if your training on vibes is to kind of fail to target a specific the Garyville Fitness. enough and you can kind of be just doing a bit of everything all the time, maybe a kind of like race simulation type training or ways. Yeah, group right type training too, yeah, similar. Which can, yeah, there's a place for it, but I think you need to be, you need to be careful if you're going on vibes because that stuff is pretty fun, but I think you're unlikely to see so much long-term progression from it. Yeah, there's actually a podcast we did maybe about a year ago now. It was called Practical Proxies for Stimulus, I believe. And oh yeah, here we go. Ten minutes, tips number 49. Go check that one out. And if you are thinking about training like this and you're thinking like what markers do I have? What am I looking for, practically speaking, to know that I'm getting the right stimulus for the type of fitness that I'm trying to improve, whether it's VO2s, whether it's endurance, whether it's, you know, threshold, whether it's repeatability of some sort of effort. And or even if it's just race specificity. And sometimes for race specificity, just going out and doing that unstructured kitchen sink group ride is exactly what you need because I've certainly worked with folks where doing structured workouts, you know, the most structure in the world doesn't quite match the race demands, whether it's with how hard you dig deep or whether it's with the stochasticity of the efforts or whether it's even just the mental preparation for riding at a pace that you are not dictating to yourself. Because that last one I always had a hard time with when I was racing. I don't want to go hard right now. So knowing what you're looking for and what you're trying to get out of it is a very, very good thing to have in your periphery. And so if you are doing a less structured workout, but you have a specific goal for it, knowing how to achieve that goal is the right way. And so for our clients, when we do set up these more vides-based interval sessions as ironic as that sounds, we do have specific goals. Like give me roughly 60 minutes of time at FTP with a 10 minute minimum. Or go ahead out to the group ride, but I want you to sit in and contest the townline sprints. Or go ahead out to the group ride and I want you to try to beat everybody up the hill. Or I want you to attack early and see how long you can hold it. Because sometimes that's going to be more specific to our goal or whatever the case may be. Or even options for the ride, okay, here's a few different kinds of workouts and do which I want you feeling today. But at the end of the day, the common theme is that there is still some kind of design around the training session. It's not completely ducented. Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the things that I think happens with our clients when life's going off the rails and they miss a session or two in the week and they get to Saturday. They're like, all right, I got good legs. Which one of these should I do? You're like, well, based on the week you had, I might do the more moderate workout, but you can also do the hard work out if you want. And letting somebody auto-regulate like which one of these two or three sessions they're going to do on that day that they've got the good legs, that's also totally fine. That's a good way to auto-regulate as well. So I don't think that there's any necessarily wrong way to do it, but when you pull back to and look at the big picture, I think what you really want to be seeing is you are achieving the goals and the stimuli that you want for that week or for the training block. I think, and this is something I've dealt with a lot with our clients, but also a lot with people that we can salt with is figuring out what your priorities are in terms of balancing having fun and doing unstructured stuff versus seeing progress. Because I think in general, if you do 100% structured training plan adherence, yeah, sure, some people are going to see plenty of progress, but oftentimes you will not see the best progress like that. Because again, we don't know what the life is going to throw at you for curveballs and stuff. So I think overall, just being more in touch with your legs and how you're feeling and your motivation, I think is a skill that is necessary for good auto-regulation. And I don't necessarily think you have to be a Zen Master at it in order to start doing some vibes training. Because as you go, you will hone it if it is something that you are trying to pay attention to. And I think that for some folks, if they're not paying attention to it and it's not in their periphery, then I think that's when the fun can be overdone, let's say. I mean, yeah, I agree. Although I was thinking of cases where it's the exact opposite where people also happens yes. Where people have no idea how little they might need to keep seeing progress. I mean, it really depends on the individual station, but sometimes you see people in the recovery too. Yeah, and the recovery. But sometimes people see people sweating about the details why it's just like to do, been riding for six months, just anything will work. So, you know, let's focus on making sure you're having good time and in keeping it sustainable then sweating about, I don't know, five or ten boards, whether you could have ridden harder than that. Yeah. Yeah, I think having fun and structure, they're definitely not two separate things. Like, the best case scenario we can make both of those work pretty damn well all the time. And yeah, there'll be times when it's fine to tweak those things. And, you know, I certainly encourage my athletes to let me know when they got something they want to be doing, something they're motivated for, a group ride, a group workout, waste to make sessions more fun. I'm all for it. You know, I don't think it's the case of saying good training, structured training is like staring at your power meter 24/7, living like a monk eating salads. You know, you need to enjoy your riding and, yeah, the flow. You know, I want you to do the rides that you want to do because ultimately it's going to have a lower psychological cost. You're going to be really motivated for it. And yeah, even if it doesn't give you anything extra, you know, life's too short and not to have a bit of fun along the way. So, yeah, you've got to have a bit of that in there. What I'm hearing is that you shouldn't do life on Erg mode. Yeah, I think, I think no Erg mode is, um, it's pretty, it's pretty well respected around here. Let's have its uses before anybody misrepresents our position on Erg mode again. Um, so, let's talk about downsides of lives training, of auto regulation. I think the, probably the number one thing I see in terms of a drawback here is that people wanting to prioritize fun too often when they're not quite recovered. We've already kind of touched on this, but I think that touching on this specifically and been pointing directly at it will be useful for folks because I think if you really want that endorphin rush and you want to, also the social aspect of cycling is not to be under sold either. If, you know, going to the weekly hard group ride is really motivating for you, like, you can do that year round, but sometimes it's going to work against you if you have other goals. Like if you are really trying to peek for a race, go into the hard Wednesday night ride. It's not always the best thing to have the best legs for your Saturday A race. So there has to be a push and pull at some points. And I think that leaning too far to the vibes will potentially burn the candle at both ends. Yeah, I mean, going back to what I said about my own experience with my own motivation and legs kind of not matching quite up to that, I think if you're someone who's highly motivated, training to vibes is dangerous because you probably want to do more than your capable of doing and you probably are holding back. But on the flip side, if you're someone who struggles with motivation, going to vibes might not be the best thing either because, you know, your vibe most of the week might just be to lie on the sofa and watch Netflix. So I think it's, yeah, there's, there's, there are definitely people who can pull it off. But I think if you feel like your motivation lies at quite one end of the spectrum, then training of vibes should be, yeah, you should be a little bit, maybe more cautious about it and having a bit more structure, like we've talked a bit about having a kind of certain percentage divide based training. Maybe you want to go on the side of having a little bit less and kind of being a bit stricter on yourself, whether that's to take a day off or to make sure you get a ride on that day even if you're not feeling either of those things. Well, maybe not necessarily stricter on yourself, but have a clear, I don't know, time period where you can do what you want, but after that period of the show, training camp in Spinova Tower, you'll take enough time off. And the hard part is to actually take enough time off. Not to oversell this, but I think working with a coach can be really, really helpful for some folks. And we certainly get our fair share of coaching and consultation inquiries from folks who are overdoing it and want to be reassured that taking rest is okay. And what's a realistic minimum dose? And honestly, some people are genuinely shocked at how little structured training you need to make some meaningful long-term progress. And I think that the better trades you are, there's still a push and pull in that stuff, where you might think that the more trained you are, the more you need to really adhere to a registered structure, but I don't think that that's necessarily the case. And in fact, the better trained you are, I would hope that you are so in touch with your legs that you can rock and roll within a pretty general structure and always get to like race day with some great legs. I think that's a really good example of what I think goes well by I think when people have a lot of experience in their legs, it can be a bit of a different station where people get a bit too entrenched. Like, this is how I've been always doing and it worked for me so far. And they might be resistant to change, but like, if you've been doing only one, things only one way, how do you know that's the right way for you? I agree with that. I think that this is one of the other things that where having a sounding board will benefit you, whether it's a coach or a more experienced teammate or something like that doesn't have to be us. And I think that probably the last thing we touched on this already is what's the right way to put this? I think when things are stressful, trying to get on the bike a couple times a week, at least just to maintain some kind of exercise routine can help a lot because I think that it, one of the harder things to distinguish is rest inertia from actual low motivation for some reason. It's like, if you've got some shit going on in your life, like, you've got a funeral coming up or it's like, you know, you're working 80 hour weeks or something like that, that kind of stuff's like, am I motivated? Am I just not motivated to get on the bike? Like, why would you be at that point? On the other hand, if everything's kind of fine and you're like, man, maybe I'm just dehydrated. I don't know, should I get on the bike today? Like, those kind of like internal monologue of indecision, it's like just swing a leg over the bike and see what you got. Doesn't have to be every day, but start pushing yourself down that path and see if it is indeed you need more rest or if you are just or if the rest inertia, rest inertia always got me when I was doing endurance training. Like an interest week by the end of the rest week, I was like, yeah, I think I'm good to just like, never pick up a bike again. And then my coach would be like, dude, you haven't ridden in three days. Come on. All right, get on the bike and then I'm like on Friday and then Saturday, I'm like, I cannot wait to get out of my bike. Another thing is that you might simply need to eat tomorrow. Also, yes. I've been tracking my intake for a bit more than a year now and sometimes I stop tracking just to make sure I don't come to the pentaton on the app. But just based on how long it takes me to get ready for the ride, I can tell if my nutrition has been more or less in the right direction the last few days or not. Because it takes me two hours to find motivation to dress up. It's way, it's way, way, way off. Yeah. And also, if you want to hear more about that, I would recommend listening to the last podcast I do with Tim Podlegar. Second time he's been on and it was a great conversation. I hope it was very informative for everybody who listened to it. So I would just say, I think that's why as a coach, I find it very helpful to know the mood and motivation of my athletes. They're like, you can add metrics on training peaks and there's always the two. I push for the most because, yeah, they're very tied. Overreaching under fueling, it's all interlinked. So if those things are starting to go and you do find that your vibes have left the chat, then, yeah, probably the answer isn't to keep pushing. Maybe it's have a day off, have an extra snack, take it easy on yourself. Because, yeah, I think it's all very interlinked. So yeah, if you do find your vibes are really, are, are, are waning, then it, it maybe is, maybe that you're kind of just doing a bit too much. Yeah. And I remember one of the, one of the articles I wrote, I was, I, I lumped cyclists into three very general categories. And one of them was, was the more casual cyclists who will ride when the weather's good and will not ride when they're tired, not feeling it. Or, and, you know, and like generally speaking, this is the kind of cyclist where you don't really need to worry too much because if they're not feeling it, they're just not going to do it. But in the middle, this is where, you know, people can adhere to, adhere to rules and structures that are not necessarily going to work for them all the time. So, um, and so I think that also, at least making sure that when you do a workout, having objective metrics to make sure that you are seeing some progress. Because I think one of the one of the most insidious things about less structured workouts, we touched on this sort of, but I want to, I want to highlight it directly, which is that it can be difficult to gauge progress. And if you don't have ways to watch the progress, then you could do the same workout over and over again, because you cannot compare apples to apples, you can really be spinning your wheels when you don't want to be. So, watching for some kind of metric to track, whether it's time up a hill or time and zone, like, you know, if you're just going to go out and do five minute efforts up a hill, you can go, all right, I'm going to do try to do three minimum, maybe I'll try to do five or six maximum. But if it's, you know, I got extra time today, maybe if I feel amazing, I'll do eight, then I'm going to be like, fuck, for a couple of days and I really need some rest. Like, that's the kind of thing where you can auto-regulate on the ride, but having a little bit of structure, like, this many reps, this power minimum, like, that kind of stuff can go a long way. And I think that if you pass fail workouts that are not progressive, this is a similar thing where I'm going to do, you know, five by three at a hundred and fifteen percent FTP, and that's just going to be my VO2 workout. How are you able to track progress as you go? You can't really. So this is one of the things that we, I think, where our training recommendations in terms of feel and RPE and objective metrics can help you assess progress as you go. And so this also is very helpful if you are doing less structured training. And I think if you're doing training that's too random to see progress, at least have, I don't know, at least try to see if things are not getting worse. Like, yes. If you're doing, if you're writing them the hills and it feels like you are out or above to be and you look at the numbers, it's like 80 percent of your supposed FTP then it's a problem, likely, very likely. I agree. All right, listen to questions. Let's get to the first one here is, oh, okay, this is a good one. Can you auto-regulate live in a session? Like as you're warming up and your changes, and your perception changes positively or negatively? Like we did kind of talk about this already with short FTP efforts and sprints and stuff like that, but yeah, absolutely. Like one of the things that I usually recommend to my clients is if you're not really sure, head out and see what's in the legs as you're warming up. And if the legs are good, that's great. If not, then that's not great. Then turn around and no harm no foul. Yeah, likewise, even if you do get deeper into a workout, you've got to know when's the right time to call it. If the plan was five by five, you just finished number three or number four and you're done. you know, you're done. Don't kid yourself about fifth one's going to happen even if it was down on the bit of paper or on your computer screen whatever. Yeah, and you can also assess why that might have happened. Like if you PR that first five-minute effort by like 30 watts, of course you're not going to make it much more than like three reps. At the same time, I think a lot of people right now are starting to write outdoors after the indoor season. So maybe we need to set expectations around what is close enough because, for example, for FTP workouts, if someone does that within about 10 watts of the target that, in my book, that's definitely close enough. And I think we can think of similar examples for the types of workouts that you really shouldn't have expectations. Then doing workouts, outdoors that's going to be like in the rug mode. Yeah, like you shouldn't expect that your outdoor workouts look like perfect square waves. That's just silly. And I mean, even the average lap power is going to be a bit random because you know, you'll get distracted for a minute, a few seconds, that's fine. And within a couple of watts is totally fine. Like if you're within five watts or if you got a stop light pause and it drops your average a little bit, like, who cares? Like, did you accomplish the goal of I was riding at my threshold for the appropriate amount of time, even if I took a 20-second rest, close enough. Like this is not an exact science. And is it okay to substitute, you know, if you're feeling tired, you plan to do some thresholds at K to knock it back to do some sweet spot or some tempo, I think it really depends. You know, that's probably something that you should talk to your coach about and have a bit of a plan about. Or if you don't have a coach and you're doing it yourself, think about what's coming up, you know, if you. Yeah, what's the goal? Have some rest coming up anyway. And it's okay that you're a bit tired and you can push through. Maybe that's fine. If you don't have that luxury or you're coming out of, yeah, you're coming out a bit of a whole fatigue-wise, then you probably want to be more cautious if the legs aren't way you expect them to be. So, yeah, there are times when I think it's fine to substitute a hard work out for something a little bit lower and a little bit less intense. But a lot of the times it will be okay, we expected, you know, I thought you were going to be good here if you're not and it's more rest that's what you need. Yeah, 100%. All right, next question is. Okay, well, more of a comment than a question. So, you're saying the group ride isn't junk miles. Group rides have never been junk miles. I think if it's your only training, it's not going to get you as far as you possibly could for most people. But it's not junk miles. I think if that's the only riding you do and you're looking for progress, then yeah. But the thing is, what's your goal? Whether something is junk or not depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to just go out and smash group rides and have fun, then every group ride is a high quality ride. But if you're looking to maximize your fitness and win a race, always group riding is not necessarily going to work towards your goal. Okay, next question is, any usual with, quote, ride easy a lot, sometimes hard, unquote, which is what vibes training is for me. I'm so vague. Yeah. Hypothetically could be perfect, but at the end of the day, we, yeah, a lot and a little that's very subjective. And also, you're the one making those judgment calls how honesty being with yourself. And yeah, also those things mean, those things are different for everyone. So it's, yeah, I can't say. Yeah. One thing I see happen sometimes is that people see their performance trending down, regressing, and then they are like, well, that that was vibes based training. So that's okay. I mean, I really know. Yeah, I think if, I mean, this kind of goes towards what we were talking about before, which is having objective ways to track your fitness. And if your goal is to improve your fitness, that's great. If you're, if you are training hard and your fitness is actually not improving, then that's a red flag. Like if you're okay with your fitness getting worse and you just want to be smashed all the time from your rise, I mean, okay, but that's not going to be a very pleasant way to go about the rest of your life. So yeah, and also one of the other things that we haven't really touched on here is the recovery environment. Like are you able to recover from these things? I mean, we've talked about recovery in general, but I think that as life stress increases or as sleep quality and amount decreases or as adherence to good nutrition decreases, like you're not getting enough or you're not getting food at the right times. Like if you're if you're a perpetual lunch skipper, then your legs are likely going to be hit or miss and more missed and hit when you know, you compound all these things. So I would I would be cautious about having a general role to follow like this, like ride a lot and sometimes right heart. I mean, in general, that's fine, but like we mentioned, some people need to be held back from their instincts rather than encouraged forward. And so get a meaness, you and I actually know this person. So I'm going to I'm going to just say that this is somebody who should probably be holding themselves back. Okay, oh, here's a good question is when to drop power versus when to stop the workout altogether. We kind of talked about this just a second ago, James. Why don't you dig into this a little bit more in terms of like, why don't we talk about different ride types like threshold ride. If you like actually, why don't we put this in context of where we are in periodization. So I laid out a couple very general phases, getting to know you training after you take your mid season break, building and then race specificity. Then if I'm in that way, I think the closer you are to races and the more potent, the more carefully you want to be because if you feel that you need to drop the power by at a 5-10% and you're a races in, I don't know, two weeks, three weeks. That's a very, serious sign that you need to take it away easier. But if your races are like, I don't know, three, four, five, six months later, then there's so much more flexibility because I mean, sure, you can still dig yourself into a massive hole, but a bad workout or two doesn't really matter in the long term. I would say I agree, but a time when maybe you can break that rule as if you're doing some maintenance training in the season, then yeah, if you plan to do some threshold, but you're still not quite recovered from your last race or hard ride, then yeah, maybe just dropping it down and doing some sweet sport or tempo might just be fine for maintenance dose. Yeah, especially if the goal is just keeping the legs open too. If you just got to keep the engine warm and you know, you got you got a mid race, you got a couple races past weekend, you got a couple races coming up, and you know, if you just take the entire week easy, you're going to really be in a bad spot come Saturday. Then yeah, like Wednesday, okay, you plan, let's say like, you know, two by 15 FTP and you're like, "Oh, not good today, but I'll do two by 20 tempo." Close enough and enough to keep the engine warm. And I would say that also when you're getting off the couch and you're coming back into fitness, this is another place where you know, you're not fit, so your fitness can be hit or miss. So this is a place where I think that you could easily make some adjustments with this. So if you're not feeling sweet spot, then riding some tempo and knowing that just getting in some work, whatever it is will make you more fit. That's good to know in the context of your season, but I think also when you're building, you want to make sure most workouts are high quality and improving on what you did last time. I think that's where it's most critical. And then in season, you do kind of have to watch for what is the actual goal of this workout. Because with the fatigue of races in your legs, likely you're not going to be able to do what you could do in a build when you were making sure that you had great light-frippy workout. So there is a, and this is one of the things actually that I most commonly consult with people on is how do I maintain my fitness in a busy race season? And it's, you know, sometimes you got to play whack-a-mo with the good legs. And that's part of vibes training for sure. All right, two more, I think. First one, when doing intervals by vibe, RPE creeps up and power creeps down. How do you regulate this? I think it depends on the type of interval. Like if you are doing threshold workouts, the RPE is going to creep up. You should keep the power steady. I don't necessarily agree with the idea that you need to keep your heart rate in zone as the primary regulator of what some people call, quote unquote, internal training stress. I think that it can be an indicator in some cases, but I wouldn't say it's reliably always an indicator. So I don't necessarily think that heart rate should be the primary metric. I think if you've got, if your threshold feels like threshold for those first two by 15, keeping that number for the second two by 15 is the goal. I don't care where your RPE and your heart rate go. Sometimes these things are just going to be coupled. Up to a point. So on the heart rate to zero, but true. That would not be good. But I mean in terms of decoupling, this is where I usually give an RPE goal on an absolute scale. So I don't want you to dig any deeper than 8 out of 10 on this workout. Sometimes we're at 9 out of 10. Rarely for a threshold workout, what I say really go to a 10 out of 10 because that can get ridiculous deed with somebody who's very well-trained. We might not need that much stimulus. In fact, usually we don't. So I think that the RPE and the heart rate creep, they're normal parts of training. If you are doing VO2 max efforts, this is a little different where I think that watching your breathing and your effort are the two primary indicators, your heart rate should be high for all of them. And your RPE should be high for all of them. The power will drop a little bit. But as long as you feel like you can push hard, keep going. Now I think with anaerobic efforts, especially if you're really trying to push out big power for sprints, 30 second efforts, one minute efforts with long rests, this is where the quality of the effort matters a lot. And I think if you feel like you're trying to push hard and your RPE drops, like I can't actually push that hard, that last one minute wasn't that hard, that's the time to stop. OK, last one. If you feel generally very tired, but legs OK on the bike, how do you decide between workout and rest? I would say it's a cute-- I think there's a difference between feeling tired off the bike acutely and chronically. If it's a chronic issue and you're feeling tired off the bike for weeks on end, you need to address that because, yeah, your body's telling you something. I mean, your body's telling you something even in the short term. But you know, you can have a bad night's sleep and then still knock out a great race or workout, even if you might feel a bit sad part before that. If you've got good legs, then I think it's fine to use them. So yeah, for me, it depends on is this-- are you just tired on the day or have you been tired all week? Because if it's all week, then yeah, I wouldn't say just ignore that. Yeah, and then it comes to my acute fatigue, just feeling a bit off. Clients often ask me, like, how do you do that? If you should proceed with the plan workout or not. And in most cases, I just say, you know, part of our goal is to calibrate what feels like-- what it feels like when you-- it's not great, but you can still do that workout. And what feels like when, OK, it's too dicey, it's like 50, 50, really we can do it, and probably it's not even worth trying. So I think-- and to calibrate, you kind of need to just try and see what happens and take mental notes so you don't keep trying forever. But this definitely is some trial in there. I'd also say it depends on what's coming up next. If you're feeling tired, but you've got a few days off plans and/or life's low stress, yeah, maybe it's fine to push through. If you're feeling tired, you're rest of your family is sick, and you've got some night shifts coming up. Yeah, I think maybe you don't be a hero. It's going to bite you in the ass. So yeah, it's a good answer. Let's put a name on that. Your anticipated recovery environment. If you know that your recovery is going to be shit in the next couple days, then you-- and if you've got a goal coming up, you have to be careful what the good likes. You've got to be really careful. Because if you do go out, you have that one good workout, because the stress is high, you're feeling open and activated. That's great. But it's going to take you longer than you expect to recover. And if this is like Tuesday or Wednesday, and you've got a hard workout, like a key workout Saturday planned, then you want to be really careful. I would skip that weekday workout completely, right easy, and get to Saturday feeling fresh and motivated, because if the stress is going to keep up in the following week, you're probably going to take you another week to recover from that properly. So you've got to be careful with that kind of stuff. Because this is one of the things I tell people all the time is if you are-- if the stress is high, and your recovery is going to be slow, you probably have just one day of really good likes. And you've got to be really careful with how you deploy them. Yeah, and just thinking about the tendencies, it's extremely rare for people to skip hard workouts when they could have done it. So if in town, just take it easier. When a doubt sit it out, this is the opposite of when a doubt lead it out. I've never regretted skipping a hard workout, even if afterwards, I think, oh, actually, I wasn't getting it all, or actually, I'm recovering better than I expected. It's that you lose very little by skipping a few known again. Certainly, net, you're going to gain. And I think that the net gain is in the recovery. You can do all the hard workouts you want, but if you don't recover from them, you're not going to see the fitness improvements that you want to see. And this is, I think, probably the best advertisement for vibe training that there could possibly be is you are really making sure that you're recovering well from your hard workouts. And even if you are not working out as hard as you think you possibly could be undercooking it by like 5%, or even 20%, is better than overcooking it by 10%. Because that whole that you dig can be very deep indeed. Yeah, exactly. I think when people just-- I didn't try to do the workouts regardless. It's more about maintaining the feeling that I've done everything I could have. And I think it's a sign of-- I was going to say sign of maturity, but I'll not be right to foot this. But it's maintaining the fatigue security blanket is whatever. Yeah. It's definitely a sign of someone advanced cyclist, and advanced athlete, whatever, when people can accept that skipping the hard workout is for the better, and they don't stress about it. I remember when I was total noob, it would be like raining horribly. And I had a hard workout on my calendar. I would be just looking at the hourly weather forecast for like, I don't know, most of the day, and just debating whether it's just ifiable to skip that workout. In the end, at the end of that season, I didn't really want to look at my bifurcation months. Yeah, because you get to like 8 o'clock. Am I just going to do my workout yet? I was thinking about how am I going to ward my excuse? So the coach finds it acceptable that I skipped the workout. It was all in my head, really. But that was just horrible. And so you guys-- Yeah. And with us, we're not going to shame anybody for skipping a workout. Oh, the weather was crap. And I really wanted to do this outside of my favorite hill. OK, yeah, for sure. We can work with that. It's when people are really overdoing the training and not really paying attention to the recovery. That's where maybe five training is probably the worst. So all right, I think that's enough for today. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Reach out to [email protected] if you'd like to work with us or any of our other excellent handpick coaches again. We have many, many years of collage experience, lots of individual seasons, coach, lots of wins, lots of success. And also, it's just lots of getting people to their goals, even if they're not raising. So if you want to be part of that, shoot me an email. If you want to consult with us, also shoot me an email. It goes to the coach who will raise for students in the uproars and go give the podcast a shout out to somebody else. That's the real algorithm that's bored about. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time.