Can we take a little bit to talk about strength training in particular.
When did that become for you along your story?
When did that become of interest or a point of interest for you?
The more you always strength training back at that point when
you were training for iron horse.
And was that something from track days, or is this something that you learned
and started to build out and become more dedicated to as your career progressed?
No.
I was really fortunate.
I started my athletic career as a junior ski racer.
I think like you did Jonathan and my original ski coach was a
guy named Warren Cochran who was a legendary figure in skiing.
All three of his sons were on the us ski team.
This is of, I grew up in a really small town in Maine 1200 people.
And so for three, for him to put all three of his sons on the Utah or.
The us ski team was a pretty phenomenal feat.
And so I grew up idolizing the Cochran brothers and wanted to be a ski racer
and a Jew in my eighth and eighth grade.
You were allowed to do high school sports cause our school is so small.
Um, And Warren was a big original barbell guy.
So he introduced me into barbell, training, learning, squats, deadlifts,
power, cleans, that kind of thing.
And I was a really, really skinny kid, um, growing up, I mean, you see this
beefcake now and you're like, yeah,
sorry.
I'm six foot seven, 195 pounds.
So I'm not, I'm not a big muscular dude.
You're a tall
guy.
Yeah.
But anyway, I really took the strength training because I was a really skinny
kid and I was insecure like a lot of kids.
So I just got obsessive about it.
And.
A good friend of mine that I grew up with, we used to go to the gym and we
would literally, you know, we didn't know anything about periodization or training.
We would just go and do squats until we couldn't nail.
We were crawling out of the gym, but that you have ignited something in me.
And, um, and it served me really well.
I ended up, you know, I went, I ran division one track and field, but to
go the backstory on that, my freshman year of high school, I ended up.
That was, I wanted to be a triple jumper, so I don't know how much you know, about
triple jump, but there were meets my freshman and junior year where literally
I didn't even make it to the sand.
Wow.
But that whole time as terrible as I was, I was always in the gym
lifting weights and just trying to get as strong as I could get.
And then sometime between my junior and, uh, their sophomore and
junior year, my coordination hit.
And my, and the stress, everything kind of came together.
And suddenly I was like one of the best people in the state of
Maine, uh, broke every school record for every event that I did.
And I always attributed that to just being strong, physically strong.
And I kept weight training all through college and all through my bike racing
career because, you know, I don't have a prototypical body for, for cycling
being, you know, the height that I am.
And so I always felt like my strength was.
Something that somewhat of a secret advantage.
I didn't really talk about it a lot in my, in my pro days, it was just
something that I did on my own.
And you know, a few people around me that I trained with.
Um, But it was, and I always kind of trained people on the side, like ever
since I graduated college in 1990, I was always coaching people on the side.
I do a number of other careers, um, during that time.
But, uh, 2011 is when I quit my job in, uh, I was working in it for a financial
firm to pursue strength training full-time and kind of the entrepreneurial route.
And, you know, I've since started a couple of businesses.
Um, since then, but strength training has always been the
foundation of, of my success.
And, you know, one of my sayings that all my athletes are sick of
hearing is stronger as better.
You know, I've always been a big believer in just getting yourself as strong as you
could possibly be, uh, for your sport.
And that's, you know, relative, you know, the strength it takes to
pedal a bike is much different than the strength it takes to be like
an, you know, a football player.
Yeah.
Did you ever feel now back in, in the air that you're talking about with the
golden age of mountain biking here in the United States, it was a bit of wild
West in a lot of ways in the sense that it wasn't as, um, perhaps optimized as
you see today, you know, we have, you know, we're, we're talking about chain
loss, you know, loss of efficiency through your chain, whereas back then,
I'm sure that that wasn't a concern.
Um, did you ever feel pressure though, from teams to.
Not be strong to be frail, to be that light sort of athlete.
We didn't really see the Chris Froome sort of rote or body type, very commonly
back then even, you know, I think to the Lance Armstrong era, cyclists were bigger.
Um, they weren't as, as slight and dare, I say, even frail as what we see
at the top level of the pro Peloton and on the road side of things.
But did you ever feel any pressure or did you ever feel that like your
strength training in the muscle mass, that you had was, was hurting you on
the bike, working at odds against that?
No, I never did because it's really hard for me to put on my, so another
backstory when I was in college, I was pretty good at a lot of events.
Um, but not really great at any other than I was good enough to be on the team.
But like, I was never in danger of like going to the Olympics
or, you know, or even being all conference or anything like that.
Um, But the, the coaches wanted me to try to capitalize on because
they, you know, cause I was, you know, it was relatively fast.
I could jump.
Okay.
The only thing I couldn't do is throw and I still never learned
how to throw, but anyway, they put me on a weight gain program.
Um, they hooked me up with a strength coach for the football team.
And I was literally eating seven to 8,000 calories a day in the gym twice a day.
I did this religiously for six months.
At the end of that, I gained a grand total of seven pounds, all muscle.
It was really strong, but it was, and it was great, but, you know,
I didn't really, you know, they were thinking when we started this,
I'd put on like 15 or 20 pounds.
And so I'm the classic hard gainer in terms of like,
you know, putting on muscle.
So it always makes me laugh when people say they don't want to, you
know, cyclists, especially that say they don't want to strength, train,
cause they don't want to bulk up.
And like bulking up is way harder than people think.
Yeah, we should be so lucky to look like Arnold Schwartzenegger as
soon as we touch a weight, right?
So actually if you're doing everything you should be doing on the bike,
you're not going to gain weight, like being in the gym twice a week, doing
if you're doing proper workouts.
So for us cyclists, how, and I know that this is a really tough question
to answer, because we could go on endlessly on this, but maybe you can
pick some like specific aspects of this.
How should our strength training look different or be different
from that of a person that is just going to get strong at the gym.
So for those of us that are prioritizing performance on the
bike, how should our strength training look differently to theirs?
You know, I see strength training, almost like skills training
for a mountain biker in that.
There's there shouldn't really be any conditioning aspect aspects.
So like, I don't have any of my athletes do like what would be called like a
Metcon type workout, you know, I'm really teaching them how to be strong.
And that goes in there's a lot that goes in behind that, but like, you know,
bracing properly recruiting, you know, recruitment patterns and things like that.
Teaching them.
How to recruit maximum amounts of muscle fiber from ready to give him,
excuse me, any particular movement, um, and how to execute that safely
and be, and be repeatable so that it transfers well to the bike.
So I really kind of hammer home with, with all the athletes that I work
with that like, this is skills work.
Every rep.
Should be done with the best technique that you know, how to do and just know
that, you know, nobody's ever done the perfect deadlift, but that doesn't mean
we stop trying to do the perfect deadlift.
So I really liked the, you know, I borrow this from yoga.
I used to kind of make fun of yoga people talking about, Oh my
practice, I just roll my eyes.
Like when I really kind of broke it down and thought about it, you know,
that's what it should be a practice.
Like you're striving for that.
Perfect rep.
Every single time that you're in the gym.
And every time you go into the gym, that's a chance for you to
work on that skill of being strong.
Uh, so like my workouts and my fleets, you know, they'll, they'll tell
you that, you know, the workouts, they don't leave the gym, you know,
dragging their butt on the ground.
Like they almost leave more energized than when they came, because you
know, we're, we're doing, you know, Various specific movements.
Uh, we're doing usually heavier weights, lower reps with
long rest periods in between.
So that we're getting the maximum adaptation that we
can with the time we have.
And then the bike is where they really kind of put the fine
edge on that blade, so to speak.
Yeah.
And you mentioned something interesting on the met con side of things, so.
If I could put that into a literal context.
So you're likely not limiting rest periods to being really short and
encouraging people to do like max reps in a certain amount of time, and then move
on to the next and move onto the next, because they're stressing that system.
They're already stressing their bodies in a similar way on the
bike with interval training.
So I assume that you're giving more rest in just like you said, focusing on form.
Yeah, focusing on forum and, um, you know, we're not developing energy
systems in the gym necessarily.
I mean, we are, you know, to a certain extent we are, the ATP is
CP system for the, you know, for those fast explosive movements.
Um, we are developing those to a certain degree, but really that stuff
is mostly going to come on the bike, the specific stuff's going to come
out of the bike, you know, in the gym.
It's really about teaching them.
You know how to move, how to generate force while they're
bracing under a load, for example.
So like, you know, farmer carries things like that.
Being able to move while maintaining stability kind of sounds like,
you know, diametrically opposed things to do, but that's what
we do on the bike all the time.
Think about when you're out of the saddle sprinting, what are you doing?
You're bracing your core.
You're gripping the handlebars super hard.
And you're trying to put all of that power into the pedals.
So.
So you're trying to move really fast by, but also you're trying to lock
other things down so that you're assisting the muscles that are moving.
So it's, it's, you know, again, it's, you know, it's that skill it's that being
able to, you know, to lock everything down and still move and more importantly,
still breathe, especially in our sport.
Um, you know, especially for mountain bikers, um, You know, think of, uh,
you hear it all the time of, uh, people like going through a technical
section or something and they, you know, they hold their breath.
Yeah.
Let me get out of it.
And they're
hyperventilating, you know, you don't even realize that you do it.
It just happens, right?
Yeah.
All right.
So try to make the training in the gym, kind of simulate that where, okay.
We're going to work super intensely, but you still need to be able to breathe.
You still need to be able to move and still need to be able to transfer
that power where it needs to go.
Awesome.
Very cool.
Um, you're a great source of knowledge on strength training
for cyclists in particular.
And I would encourage everybody to give our, a follow on Instagram
and get in contact with them.
If you have questions for him, he's just fantastic for it.
So, and thanks for making people safer and healthier in addition to making,
you know, helping them get faster.
Cause that's a super, you know, Really important thing, especially
for us average, Joes and Janes that are listening to this that
have to go back to work on Monday.
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