(gym equipment humming)
- Good morning, trainiacs. (chuckles)
Just did a salty little workout there.
My goodness.
So what I did there was a muscular endurance ride
where the main work after a 10-minute warmup
was
eight times four-minutes On,
and the "On" was like the fastest average effort
that I could do while keeping cadence super low,
close to like 50,
60.
That builds up a lot of lactic acid, and ouchy
in this area here, lower back.
It's a good strength workout too.
One thing that I really, really struggled
with for probably eight years
after getting into endurance sports
was how to actually build up endurance riding.
I could go out for some rides.
I did some 90 K rides.
I did a half Iron Man before I figured things out.
I did
120K charity ride,
but always, my legs would get achy
and I would just be shattered for days afterwards.
It wasn't just, all right,
ride a little bit longer every single week,
and gradually your endurance will build up.
What do I go through here is five tricks
that you can use all of which, I think,
combined to really help build up endurance
on the bike.
So if you're having issues where the day
after a ride you are spent from riding,
or towards the two-hour mark, you just can't feel good.
You might be able to do the ride,
but you still just don't feel good.
How do you end up building up
that endurance on the bike?
Some are gonna come anytime soon.
Still in a buff here, it's May.
Thanks, Winnipeg.
All right, let's get bike endurance sorted, shall we?
So a lot of endurance athletes,
whether it be cycling or triathlon,
think that before you can start biking a long way,
you have to build up to some sort
of five to 10
or $15,000 bike.
That is not where you start.
That's like the icing on the cake.
It might take you up maybe one mile an hour.
And the general rule is that after you've spent
about $7,000 on a bike,
each additional kilometer per hour improvement
cost you around 2 to $3,000.
But if all you're looking at doing
is learning how to ride longer without tiring out,
What you need to do
is start
riding
longer.
The first place to start
with building up your bike endurance is with the 10% Rule,
but that isn't just where it ends.
The 10% Rule is that, let's say
you can go out,
and day one,
you're able to ride 20 kilometers,
and that's it.
Being around 12 miles.
Well, the next week
you should build up by about
5 to 10% beyond that,
so about 22 kilometers around 13.2 miles.
Take the third week to go down about 60%
of what your previous High was,
use that as a rest week.
So that third week should be just overall,
generally lighter so that you can absorb
those increases in weeks one and two.
And then in week four, come back
and go another 5 to 10% longer
than your previous longest ride.
Now this is going to help you
just get over a lot of the mental blocks
of getting through those rides of increasing mileage,
because it's such small steps
that you're gonna be able to get over it.
Your body's also gonna be able to adapt.
You don't want to go up in 20, 30 40% increments
because that's a little bit too much
for your body to adapt to week by week.
And a big thing to keep in mind
is that these long endurance building rides
should be a low-intensity.
If you're using a Zone:2 Heart rate,
you want to be well under Zone 2,
like we're talking somewhere around top of Zone 1,
bottom of Zone 2.
This is gonna make it easy for you
to have enough energy
to be able to get through those long rides
as you're building up.
And you can bring the intensity in later.
That's the second thing.
So now let's say that you've built up to a long ride,
but you wanna maybe increase the amount
of time that you can spend in that long ride
at a higher intensity,
or you want to be able to go faster.
You wanna, not just be able to actually go
for a long period of time.
You want to be able to go fast for a long period of time.
What you need for that is you need some hip training,
some high-intensity interval training.
And what you're looking to do
with this high-intensity interval training
is build up your FTP, your Functional Threshold Power,
the maximum amount of effort
that you can put out
over the course of 60 minutes
which is a really good correlation
with what you can do for longer distance races.
And you want to build up your VO2 max,
the maximum amount of oxygen
that you can process in your lungs every single minute.
Those two things are going
to raise your cealing
of what your actual fast is,
and how you do this is by doing intervals
anywhere in between about 15 seconds
to two minutes for FTP building
and two minutes to about eight minutes
for the VO2 max building.
And for now, don't really fuss about
whether you're doing 30-second intervals
or six-minute intervals,
or you're doing a 1:1 work-to-rest ratio,
or a 4:1 work-to-rest ratio.
As you start getting out,
you're gonna absorb the intensity
and get faster with whatever you get thrown at.
So if you go in, and you do a workout
that includes these intervals
and you think, "Hey,"
you know, "That went really tough."
That's a good thing.
It's going to end up making you faster
which is going to improve the amount
of time that you can spend
at those higher intensities during your long rides.
So you're going to be able to ride longer.
I've got to go inside.
I'm watering up here.
All right, genius move.
I can just stay in the shade here.
About four years ago,
I had done all of that 10% rule,
and I was doing intervals,
but I would still go out on rides.
And when they would pick up,
and there was that intensity
for a long period of time, I would start...
Wind.
I would start getting really sore,
and I would feel really sore the next day.
Now, part of the reason for that
is that I wasn't doing any muscular endurance training.
Muscular endurance is the ability to
perform an action repeatedly over and over and over
under tension and not breaking down.
It's the idea of making your muscles really durable.
So what you throw at them,
they can handle without breaking down,
without tiring out,
and being able to do that motion over and over and over.
There's two ways that you can build up muscular endurance.
The first way
is what I was doing this morning.
It's with those low-gear intense intervals.
So we're talking like 50 to 70 RPM High Tension.
For people who have done it,
they say that it's longer than a treadmill minute,
maybe even longer than a microwave minute.
That doesn't sound physically possible.
And by doing intervals with this
Low-Intensity,
it puts additional strain on the muscles.
It takes strain off
of the cardiovascular system
and puts it on your musculature.
By doing that,
it's like strength training specifically
for your legs, for your bike muscles.
That's how you translate strength in the gym
to strength.
And strength endurance on the bike
started about 70 RPM
with intervals of 30 seconds to one-minute,
and then gradually work your way down
from 70 RPM to 50 RPM,
from one-minute intervals
all the way up to 20-minute intervals
from low-intensity up to high-intensity
as your muscles become more adapted to it,
And you resist that likelihood of injury.
Into here,
for the muscular, endurance, strength training portion.
Now, when people start thinking,
all right, "I'm gonna strength train for endurance sports,"
and that's gonna help.
They typically go into the gym,
and they do strength training,
and traditional strength, training methods.
They use machines,
They use dumbbell press,
They do squats.
They do things that you would associate
with weightlifting and bodybuilding,
but that isn't designed for muscular endurance.
You know what is designed for muscular endurance?
A kettlebell.
When the Russians were using kettlebells originally,
the purpose of it wasn't necessarily massive amounts
of strength building or bodybuilding,
or muscle hypertrophy, growing muscles.
It was a muscular endurance movement.
The kettlebell swing was designed to be high high-reps,
so that you build up that lactic acid.
You build up that muscular endurance
to be able to take those loads
over and over and resist fatigue.
That's why I really love kettlebells
because A: it builds up muscular endurance.
B: It actually improves cardiovascular training
more than traditional strength training
so it helps us with our endurance.
C: With about 60 to 200 bucks worth of kettlebells,
You can get yourself a complete home gym and save money
on a gym membership
or thousands of dollars worth of equipment at home.
And D: it's a safe way to put load on your body
because you don't need huge amounts of weight.
So you can load yourself really well
without putting yourself at risk.
Now, the fifth and final thing
is to use
what I call a timed-carb approach.
When you're taking carbs upon carbs upon carbs
on every single ride or run or swim
that you go into, your body starts relying on those carbs,
and it lowers its ability to burn fat as fuel.
Commonly, most Western people who eat a Western diet,
even if it is healthy, just tends to be
rich in processed foods and rich in carbs.
So they'll burn
roughly around
0.4
grams
of fat stores every single minute.
Now, if you use a timed carb approach
where every time you go and do a low-intensity ride,
you restrict carbs before and during.
And I don't want you to go out
and do these things fasted.
And I don't want you to go into it as like,
"All right, Taren says I gotta restrict carbs.
I'm gonna go out and do my next
four-hour ride without carbs."
Build your way up
from a 90-minute ride
without carbs before or during to 1:45
to two hours, to two and a half hours, gradually.
And what's gonna happen is,
you can increase the amount of fat stores
that you burn at like 1.6 grams of stored body fat
that's getting burned per minute.
This is four times
more energy.
And when you end up doing the math
of how many calories you start with,
how many calories you can safely eat during a ride,
and then how much body fat
you are turning into energy every single minute,
then you look at how many calories you're burning
every single hour.
If you don't have that nice ability
to burn fat as fuel,
you are just gonna run out of calories.
And that's where you start getting a lot of the achy legs.
You start getting people that have muscular failure,
and in an Iron Man,
can't really run at all
because their muscles are just shutting down.
Their body is shutting down
because there isn't enough energy on board
to actually do the task.
So I'm not saying go keto or low carb.
I call it a timed carb approach,
where before low-intensity rides,
you still eat during low-intensity rides and runs.
You still eat, but you just restrict the amount
of carbohydrates.
You take a protein and fat source for those workouts.
Simple as that.
Have all the carbs after.
In my case, it wasn't until I ended up getting
that increased ability to burn fat as fuel,
that I started feeling like I could ride
for hours and hours.
And at any point in time, somebody could say,
"Hey, do you want to ride for three hours?"
Yeah.
"Do you want to ride for five hours?"
Yeah, I can do that at any point in time
without having to build up to it
because I am not running out of energy.
So with all of those five things in place,
I guarantee that you can get up to a point
where you can go out for training rides,
for rides with friends,
for
rides in a race where you go out,
and you hammer for long periods of time,
and you don't feel like you're gonna fall apart
during or after.
You're not just hanging on for dear life.
And this is when riding gets really, really fun.
Now, if you want to know how to do this,
if you want a training plan that is designed
around all of this, that gives you indications
of what workouts to take,
what nutrition, how long you should be riding
a safe buildup,
how to increase the intensity,
how to put in those 32nd intervals
and the six-minute intervals.
All of that is done for, you can use our training app.
You go to app.mymottiv.com
You can try it for free for 14 days.
And if you like it after, you can use it
for all of your year-round training
as well as your race preparation training.
That's all for today, trainiacs.
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