- Morning, Trainiacs.
How ya doing?
You doing good?
I'm doing great.
Fairly pumped up because not a lot of companies these days,
besides the ones that already had Zwift Rides going on,
have been able to launch Zwift Rides
for whatever they're doing.
But we ended up getting our Zwift Rides approved,
kind of because we've been talking about it with Zwift
for 15 months now.
We just officially now, with what's going on in the world,
said, hey, let's finally do it
and get our Zwift Rides going.
Last week was a complete disaster on that, but this week,
this week is the charm, we're gonna do it.
So obviously with racing being shut down
for the foreseeable future, there've been a huge amount
of online rides, of virtual races, of so many options
for you to go and train online.
Now, I think that's phenomenal, but I think that this
is not a time that people should be just adding things
in blindly, so I've thought and coached
a lot of Our Team Trainiac athletes on how to incorporate
these online workouts, these online races
without setting themselves up so that when actual racing,
the important racing comes back, that you're toast
'cause it's real easy to do that
with what's going on right now.
Also, notice the WYN Republic undershirt?
We're finally gonna get that PG-13 rating back.
(upbeat music)
So, I've successfully not crashed this.
We're 44 seconds away from actually starting this.
What we're doing here is once a week at 12:10 Central Time,
we are doing a one-hour Zwift group ride
that's available for Team Traniac athletes
or for people all around the world.
So I put in a workout, which right now
is a real leg strength workout so like low cadence efforts
and everyone can ask questions.
NTK is behind the camera and she'll
answer questions as we go.
So if you're doing any of these rides,
one thing that I've heard and I've experienced
that will help is lowering the resolution
of your actual TV, your system,
because so many of these pieces of software are like Zwift
are tremendously taxed right now.
They've gone from I think an all-time max of 15,000 riders
at one time to, I believe they have 35,000.
And group rides and group chats, live streaming things,
I've heard and I've experienced with it crashing last week
that it's pretty easy to overload your system,
so we got some tips that lowering your screen resolution
to around 720p and 50 frames per second,
50 hertz as a refresh rate, which you can do
in your Apple TV settings which I'm showing here,
or by going into the menu and the settings
in your Zwift app.
And of course make sure that everything is connected.
As you're logging into Zwift, everything is set up properly,
basically as you normally would with a regular Zwift ride.
But if you haven't done a Zwift ride yet,
essentially what you need to do
is in your Zwift Companion App, oh, we got questions.
- What heart rate do you expect to get on this
particular workout?
- So you gotta go into your Zwift Companion App
or the main screen on the top right and you need to find
the workout that you wanna do in Zwift
and make sure that you're going.
And then what will happen is as you go and you just do
an easy spin before the ride is actually starting,
it will then come in and queue you and say,
all right, now it's time to join your event.
Do you want to join the event?
And if you click yes, make sure you click yes
way ahead of time so that you sit in the corral
and you wait for it to start.
And with a true workout, then the workout's done for ya.
The group is banded together instantly so it adjusts,
in our case, for everyone's different levels.
We have 218 people and we're all together
and we're all at different levels.
Did it.
No technical glitches.
That was good.
I got real friendly with lactic acid
and apparently so do a lot of people.
Who wrote that workout?
Wow, that was spicy, thanks, guys.
It's pronounced spi-cy.
All right, let me actually go run for 30 minutes
and then we'll talk about just like how to fit these
in and out of your training plan properly.
So, all right, Traniacs, before we get into how you
should be slotting your virtual races
in and out of the training plan,
there's something here that I've gotta show ya
so that you understand, basically,
what we're all going through right now.
So this here is a sheet that I put together
to track heart rate variability that I use the data
from an Oura Ring, but you can do this with I think it's
a $14 smartphone app called HRV4Training.
You put it into this and it helps you understand
where you're at in your training.
And what you can see here is red cells and green cells.
Green cells are basally that you're trending upwards,
you're getting fitter, everything's fine.
Red cells are you've trended downward and on average,
you are a little bit more beat up and more likely
to encounter over-training or just not perform well.
Well, you can see at the end of February,
beginning of March, everything's good and I hung on
and like the number that I'm focusing on here
is in column E and I hit 4.04.
This is just kind of like a statistical number
that ends up working out, but it starts trending downward
basically as soon as lockdown hit on March 12
from 4.04 to, worked for a few days, but gradually down,
down, oh, well, I got up towards the end of March,
but right as soon as April hit and it became apparent
that we were going to be in lockdown,
what you can see is lots and lots of red.
I was trending up, and then on the chart
I was trending down.
And at this time, one of the things that we
did with my coach, Dr. Dan Plews, who,
I think he did his PhD in heart rate variability,
he looked at this and he said, why are you so beat up?
Like, you're not training very hard.
We had already backed off the training at that point.
And essentially what we came to is that because there
is this low level of mental stress of schedules changing,
of uncertainly, of when we're gonna travel,
what's gonna happen with races, just this uncertainty
of what's gonna happen three months down the road,
six months down the road, it's all like a low level
of cortisol that adds to your stress
and makes the body not really ready to push
itself really hard.
It's like you're kind of in fight or flight mode
a little bit all day and that is going to make it
harder to recover.
I'll share this document with you here.
This is free stuff.
You can use this on your own.
So then the question becomes, what do we do
about all this stuff?
We are just inundated right now with all kinds
of Zwift Rides and Zwift Workouts
and the Ironman Virtual Training.
How do we possibly, actually do any of these things,
stay somewhat motivated, and not burn ourselves out
because we are going a little bit too hard.
Well I think that there are a few rules of thumb
that I can offer that I'm instructing all
of our Team Trainiac athletes to follow.
Back over there.
So first off, we've done videos that I'll link to at the end
about how to adjust your overall training.
But let's say you wanna step into our out-of-a Zwift ride.
Totally fine.
That's really easy to do because a Zwift ride
tends to be a submaximal effort where your intervals,
where your rest, it's all allowing you
to ideally complete it one after the other, after the other,
going through it and not being just completely spent.
And those are the workouts that you wanna do.
Those are the workouts that are really easy to bring
in and out of your schedule,
so those you really don't have to think about.
But it's those maximal efforts where instead of, say,
let's say your building lactic acid in a workout
and then the rest is designed to let it go,
and then you build it up, and then you drop it down,
and you build it up, and you dropped it down,
and then in the hour or two after the workout,
essentially you've worked your way through it
and you're totally recovered, a race is more like you
are at your max, it's maxing you out,
you're doing muscle damage, you're completely depleting
your glycogen, you are going all out.
That is going to take a lot more out of you
and it's going to require a lot more foresight
into how you deal with it coming into the race
and what you do after the race.
So this is my setup on TeamTrainiac.com,
which is the training app that we have,
that we have 600 and something athletes
from all around the world doing, and a lot of them
have done this when it comes to Zwift Races.
So most of these races are on a Saturday or Sunday.
And what they might be saying is, in this case,
look at the Sunday workout, or even the Saturday workout.
This weekend is the Ironman Half Ironman Distance Race,
so it's gonna be a lot longer and more intense
than either one of these workouts that we've
got slated in here.
Friday is pretty much always on Team Trainiac
a lighter day that's preparing you for the weekend.
If the race is Sunday, make Saturday
a little bit less intense and carb load
just like you would for a race.
Make sure that you're coming into that Sunday race
the same way that you would a normal race
so that your glycogen levels are nice and topped up
and you're not starting on an empty tank.
Treat the race morning the same way as you would a race
so that you're coming into those online races
with a full tank.
You're not gonna delete yourself right from the word go.
Then let's say the race is Sunday,
forget about the workouts.
Whatever is on your schedule, if these maximal effort
online races are motivating you, do 'em.
Scrap whatever's in your training plan,
whether it's Team Trainiac or, I'm not telling you
what to do with your coach, but in my opinion,
whatever you can do that you find very motivating
right now is more important than a proper fitness
kind of training plan because we're not gonna need
real proper training fitness for months,
maybe until the end of the year or next year,
so might as well stay motivated right now.
So slot that in, forget about the workouts
that are prescribed, but here's the key.
In the following couple days after,
whether you've got workouts from Team Trainiac
or you've got your own workouts, again, I would recommend
making the two to three days after lighter.
So changing those to very, very low intensity,
chopping the duration by about 40% so that you
can completely recover.
Treat it like you did a race because if you have maxed
yourself out, built up a huge amount of lactic acid,
completely drained your muscle glycogen stores,
that's gonna take more than just a couple hours
to recover from.
Those maximal efforts,
those require a little bit of planning.
So make sure that you're taking a couple easier days
coming into them and then a couple or three
easier days after.
And that is going to give you a much higher likelihood
of taking that online race and having it not dig you a hole,
having it actually motivate you, and actually absorbing
that race as something that can position you
to progress in the future.
If you're just constantly smashing and smashing
and smashing, as you've seen, even with the best designed
training program in the world, and the best monitoring,
and the best physiologist and PhD's who are published
in things, we're in a very low level of stress right now,
but that low level of stress,
it just kind of builds and builds, and builds and builds,
and adds to your fatigue and demotivates a little bit,
so we've gotta be really conscious to make sure that we're
not pushing too hard into a place that we
can't actually recover from,
ruining our long-term motivation, potentially getting sick,
potentially get over-trained all before we've
actually had a season to even worry about.
Now if you also wanna monitor your readiness to train
through something like HRV, what I like if for is that it
gives you more of a leading indicator a few days
ahead of time before you start feeling
muscle aches and pains, before you get injured,
and before you tend to get over-trained,
before you get all the signals that you can actually feel,
gives you more a leading indicator so that you
can get ahead of those things before they become an issue.
You can to to TriathlonTaren.com/HRVTraining
and use something like a WHOOP strap, Oura Ring,
the HRV4Training App.
Put in your email address to TriathlonTaren.com/HRVTraining.
It will guide you for how to actually do that.
It'll give you the whole thing.
It's free.
It's like, I mean, it's a spreadsheet.
It's nothing fancy.
So that's it, Traniacs, go check that out.
If you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below and do whatever it takes
to keep you mentally engaged
and still motivated right now.
Don't worry a whole lot about fitness
because we got nowhere to show it off.
Worry a lot about your mental state
and as far as just staying motivated is concerned,
whatever it takes to do that while not pushing too hard
is the key.
That's it.
Thanks to all the Trainiacs for out for this Zwift Ride.
Stayed tuned.
On Instagram we'll be announcing,
hopefully doing them every week.
Later, Trainiacs.