- Training for cycling has evolved massively
in just a short space of time.
So when we were out at the Tour de France recently,
we thought we would try and find out
exactly how you train like a pro in 2017.
And when we were on our visit
to the Cannondale-Drapac squad,
we caught up with their head of performance,
a man by the name of Keith Flory,
to find out how he monitors his riders,
how he makes sure they're gonna be at their best
when they need to be,
and how he does it all remotely.
Now the first question I asked was
given that I didn't have a coach personally
with my last few years of riding when I was full-time,
I wondered, I wondered how things were
at the Cannondale team.
- So all of the guys on the team have coaches,
and they'll either be internal coaches
or a group of external coaches,
and that external coach might be the same coach
that you've had for five, 10 years, or might be new.
So, every rider has a coach
either internal or external.
- Okay and so how, as the performance director,
do you have to keep a track of all that?
How does that work?
- Yeah, we have the TrainingPeaks suite of products
that we capitalise on and use with them
on a daily basis.
And one of my roles is basically to track
all of the training and the racing data
and to plug that into our informed decisions
on each and every rider basically.
- Okay so, so the training will get planned out
by a rider's coach,
who might not have anything to do with the team,
but you effectively keep control
or can see everything that goes on?
- Yeah, so we have a working dialogue with all coaches.
We meet, we talk, we communicate based on
the athlete being in the centre of the relationship.
And then we're, you know, from the team side,
we're looking at what the team's goals are,
and then we're communicating that
with both the rider and the coach,
and trying to develop that relationship
as a real partnership really.
- So the riders can still have external coaches
because it can all be internally monitored
from within the team.
And monitored on a day by day basis.
You see, when I was riding,
if I had a bad day
and I didn't do exactly what I'd planned to do,
there was no way of checking up.
Not so now.
No, no, there is a traffic light system.
- We have the homepage set up for all of our team,
so all of our riders are on there.
And then each of them has prescribed training
through each of the forthcoming week.
And when they upload their data
that will basically come up with a colour coding system
about whether they've achieved
what the prescribed training was set
or if it wasn't.
So it very quickly allows me to look at the screen and go,
right, green dots across the row for one rider.
And there might be a red dot on one of the riders,
which might flag an issue
which we then need to follow up and question basically.
- [Si] So do you follow up every red dot?
- [Keith] We try to.
- Crikey.
How do you train like a pro?
Don't slack, for a start.
Although, I did ask Keith,
and he said that if the weather is really, really bad,
he would excuse if you'd knocked off a couple of hours.
So that is something of a relief then.
Now, when you're training in power,
it gives you a whole load more insight
than if you just had speed
and hours in the saddle to look at.
But that insight also means that you have
a whole load of acronyms.
So you have TSS, for training stress score.
You have CTL, for chronic training load.
Then you have TSB, for training stress balance.
And what I was really interested to know
was how exactly Keith uses these
to the benefit of his riders.
- Trainers stress score is based off threshold.
And it's based, so a hundred points
on a trainer's stress score is,
relates to an hour of threshold, or there, thereabouts.
So, that will give you an indication
of how hard somebody's working.
And so, a four-hour ride, medium intensity
might give you a training stress score of 150, for example.
200 approximately.
So then you can track that over the week,
and you can actually see how much intensity
they've done within that framework.
So for all of those metrics,
you can look at them individually,
which gives you a really good insight.
But then what really helps is being able to look at...
You use the dashboard feature that TrainingPeaks has,
and build on that looking at the
performance management chart,
which allows us to look over a longitudinal view.
So you get a real context.
So from that performance management chart,
we can look and see the ongoing trends,
whether it's positive or negative.
And if it's negative, we look to address it.
And if it's positive, and everything looks on track,
then, all's good in the world.
- Now, I know what you're all thinking.
How does this apply to me?
How could I learn from the pros
to make me better as a bike rider?
- I think the golden rule is consistency in training.
And that doesn't have to be the same training.
But it has to be planned.
It has to be structured.
You have to consistently apply yourself.
Work with a trainer or a coach,
and they will help you shape that.
And then just commitment.
Commitment to the cause basically,
and just getting the work done.
There's no magic bullets in training.
You just gotta get it done.
- Okay, now I think this is probably an impossible question
to answer, but I'm gonna give it a go anyway.
If there is one session,
that in your experience,
it's been really effective for pro cyclists,
what is it?
And can we recommend it for GCN viewers to do?
And me, basically.
I wanna have a go at it as well.
- There's many sessions.
And people respond differently to different sessions.
But, one that brings people up quite quickly,
certainly towards going into a block of racing,
is doing something called doing a 40-20 effort.
That's basically 40 seconds on, 20 off.
Over and around about 10 to 12 minutes.
Then recovery, and then repeat a number of times.
Some of the pros will do it
three, four times.
So that will be a large block of work.
And the 40 seconds on will be around about
120 over threshold, 120%.
And then their 20 seconds off is off, basically.
You'll soon realise the effort.
- My word, rather not have asked
that question now in hindsight.
That sounds absolutely brutal.
Even one set sounds utterly, utterly terrifying.
Well, I don't know about you,
but I have very much enjoyed that insight from Keith.
So thank you to him.
Perhaps next time though, we'll ask how you can do
a recovery ride like a pro.
Y'know, that may very well be more up my street.