[background music] Oliver Bridgewood: Tour de France riders
are some of the fittest humans on the planet, if not the fittest. The tour is a ridiculously hard
physical challenge, but how do they compare to the rest of us? What's the typical resting
heart rate of a Tour de France cyclist? How do they fatigue throughout the event? How do
their bodies recover? How much sleep do they get? Just how big a toll does it take on their bodies?
Thanks to our friends at WHOOP, we've managed to get some exclusive data
from the EF Pro Cycling team who've been wearing WHOOP devices tracking all this
throughout the tour. This data is an incredibly fascinating insight into the physiology of these
elite athletes and how their bodies respond to such a demanding event. I can't wait
to share it with you. It's just incredible what they're capable of. Now, let's dive
straight in starting with heart rate. Now, what is the resting heart rate
of a Tour de France rider? The average heart of human is said to be between 60 and 100
BPM. At the start of the race when in theory, Tour de France riders should be fully rested
and you'd hope at peak fitness, the average for the EF Pro Cycling team was just 41 BPM which
is incredibly low. We also have specific data not just for the team as an average, but for specific
riders, Alberto Bettiol and Neilson Powless. Now, the other riders are anonymized within the
data set we've got which is understandable, not everyone wants to share their things publicly.
Bettiol, a previous winner of the Tour of Flanders, had a resting heart rate of just 37 BPM
on the eve of the Tour de France. WHOOP suggested that he was fully recovered at that point as well
with a 98% recovery score. Now, to put that into context, if Alberto Bettiol was in a hospital bed
wired up to machines, a resting heart rate that low would be setting off
alarms in the hospital. Now, their heart rates are so low because their cardiovascular systems are so
efficient. Their hearts are stronger than the average person, understandably.
These bigger pumps are more powerful and can, therefore, pump a higher volume of blood around
the body with a single beat than a standard pump or heart. Also, the networks of capillaries and
their blood vasculature is also more developed and more efficient as well, also helping with
that lower heart rate. However, Alberto Bettiol as impressive as 37 BPM is resting heart rate,
it's not the lowest that's been reported. Chris Froome has previously been reported to have had
a resting heart rate as low as 29 BPM. Incredible, but even he's not the lowest.
Big Mig, Miguel Indurain, multiple grand tour winner, 28 BPM. Absolutely, bonkers.
Something interesting is that after intense days when their heart is fatigued and constantly under
strain, we see that their resting heart rates actually start to increase throughout the race.
We can see that the resting heart rate of the riders climbs through the first week of
the tour. The first week of this year's tour was especially tough. By stage seven, the average for
the team was 51 BPM. It's significantly gone up. We can also see just how tough the tour is on
their bodies stage by stage. By analyzing the heart rate variability, that's the amount of time
between individual heartbeats, also the heart rate and the heart rate response throughout a
given day, the WHOOP algorithm is able to calculate something called a strain score.
The strain score gives us an idea of each day how much toll that day has taken on the rider's body.
Now, I can see from the data, the riders consistently have a strain score of around
20. Now, that might not mean much to you, but I'm going to put it into context. I wear a WHOOP
and if I have a day where I don't do much at all, if I walk five minutes to the office,
sit on my bum all day doing GCN stuff and then walk home five minutes and then sit on my bum
watching TV the rest of the day, I typically have a strain score of around six to eight.
Now, when I did the recent coast to coast epic ride with Hank where we absolutely destroyed
ourselves, I had a strain score of 20 like these guys have and I was absolutely battered. There
was absolutely no way I was going to be able to ride my bike the next day. I can't imagine being
able to do that every day for 21 stages day after day after day. It's absolutely insane.
We can also see from the data that not all stages are equal. Stage 2 of this
year's race was particularly savage. This is likely down to a combination of the parkour.
It was a very hilly stage around knees as you may remember. Also, because every team saw this stage
as an opportunity to take the yellow jersey, and therefore, the race was completely on.
Now, Neilson Powless on EF Pro Cycling came fourth on stage 2 and as a result, his recovery suffered
the next day. He rode really hard that day and it was just 53% recovered the next day. Even though
he came forth, he fared a lot better than the rest of his team who averaged just 36% recovery.
One of the reasons for this is likely to be that he recovered better than the rest of
his team because he slept much better. Powless averaged nine hours of sleep after that stage,
but the rest of the team averaged just seven hours and that is going to be significant.
Sleep is so key to recovery. Top of the class, Neilson Powless, I hope sports director,
Jonathan Vaughters, gave you a gold star. With all this strain on their bodies throughout the tour,
sleep is absolutely fundamental to recovery. How much sleep do the riders actually get? Even
sleeping at the Tour de France is difficult because the riders often have long transfers
from one stage to the beginning of the next stage the next day. They often sleep in a
different hotel room each night which if you're anything like me, isn't great for your sleep.
There's also media commitments and just getting their massages done and getting all the food in.
It all takes time. It all eats into the amount of time they have to sleep. During the tour, the
team has averaged 7.42 hours of sleep a night. We can also see that Neilson Powless is, once again,
top of the class. He averaged 36 more minutes of sleep than his teammates. Over the course of a
tour, three weeks, that's really going to add up. The night before the tour was also their best
night's sleep. The team averaged nearly nine hours on that night and had a 99%
sleep score. The fact that they can't match this level of sleep performance even though they're
really tired throughout the rest of the tour, is really indicative of just how hectic it can be.
Something really interesting is that the team got noticeably less sleep after stage 13, just
6.7 hours on average. I've done some detective work to find out why this might be the case.
Now, this was a particularly tough stage. It started at noon. It was a very mountainous
stage. Neilson Powless, he was in the break and he was on his bike, we can see for 6.45
hours, so a very long day. Many of the riders didn't finish until after 6:00 PM. We can then
couple that with a long transfer which was I think over two hours to the start of the next
stage. This is on mountain roads getting stuck in tour traffic because all the tour teams and
media circus are moving to the next stage as well. This really eats into the potential sleep window.
We can also factor in that EF Pro Cycling team member Dani Martinez won stage 13 for EF Pro
Cycling. We can perhaps speculate that there might have been the odd glass of celebratory champagne
around the dinner table that night which, again, is likely, if it did happen, to have influenced
the sleep performance of the riders as alcohol has a massive detrimental impact to your sleep.
Something else the WHOOP data can tell us about is recovery. This, for me, is one of
the most fascinating areas of the data. Looking at these numbers, we can see how the riders are
recovering throughout the race. Yes, recovering. If you or I were to ride the Tour de France,
I think we'd start with the best of intentions, but we'd probably just end
up just getting slower and slower and slower until we were just miserably crawling in a
ball of self-pity across the finish line in Paris. Astonishingly, the riders appear to actually get
fitter after the first rest day. Yes, fitter. Alberto Bettiol, in particular, stands out in
this regard. Their bodies are so tuned and adapted to high strain and high volumes of training
that even though what they're doing is incredibly hard, as soon as they get this rest day,
their bodies are able to bounce back and absorb that training. It appears from the data that
there may be physiological adaptations as well. Leading into the first rest day, that first week
had been incredibly hard. The average resting heart rate for the team had been 51 but this
actually dropped after the rest day to 40 which was lower than what it was average for the team at
the start of the race, 41. Bettiol, incredibly, he's dropped to just 34 BPM resting heat rate.
The average recovery score on the rest day was 92 and that's just incredible how their bodies
can just bounce back from that. If I had done what they'd done in that first week or attempted to do
it, I'd probably need like months off to recover from [chuckles] that level, that load of work. I'd
just be destroyed. They needed a day. [laughs] Oh God. Fortunately, the riders are human and
we can see that fatigue does build throughout the race. This combined with just the amount of
physical activity that they're doing day after day, also and the fact that they're not getting
the optimum amount of sleep for three weeks, the Peloton is really tired by the end of the week.
Something else that stands out in the data is we can see how much harder
you can make the same stage. This is something that's a little bit obvious and well established
is that if you're riding in the breakaway you can expend much more energy than if you're sat in the
bench. The data allows us to quantify that and see it in the numbers. Nielson Powless
is riding his first-ever Tour de France and he's making a great account of himself. He's actually
ridden astonishingly, in the breakaway on stage 6, 8, 13 and 16. Arguably one of the things that's
helped him do this is probably his better sleeping habits, as that will have boosted his recovery.
I can also see that Powless absolutely destroyed himself on stage 8. Unfortunately,
he didn't win the stage but he did incredibly well in the breakaway. He spent 51%
of that stage in 80% to 90% of his max heart rate and 38% of the stage in over 90%
of his heart rate zone. His max heart rate, to put that into a context, was 191 and his
average heart rate for the whole 4.2 hours of that stage was 165 BPM. That is [laughs] savage
especially seeing as he's done this more than once on more than one stage.
His average power, if you're interested in that sort of thing, was 286 watts. This is for a guy
that weighs reportedly just 66 kilograms. It's serious going for 4.2 hours that. Then we can
compare that to Bettiol who spent only 20% of that stage in his 80% plus heart rate zones.
He had a much easier day of it and it gives you an idea of just how tough it can be to ride
in the breakaway in the Tour de France. We also have several presenters here who've
ridden grand tours here at GCN so I've asked them what their experiences where. Conor Dunne told me
that his resting heart rate started at 44 BPM but by the end of a three-week grand tour his resting
heart rate was around 70 BPM such was the large amount of fatigue that he'd built up. I didn't
ask him about how well he slept but he wasn't wearing a WHOOP so he couldn't really track it.
Interestingly, Dan Lloyd as well, said that his resting heart rate increased
by the end of the stage, and also his max heart rate or the heart rate that he could
sustain at threshold wattages actually decreased towards the end of the grand tour. Interestingly,
this didn't necessarily correspond to the power output that he could produce.
He was still producing the threshold power that he could at the start of the tour but the heart
rate at which he was doing that had dropped, which I think was really quite fascinating and probably
down to the fact that there's been adaptations and increased blood plasma volume as well.
I guess that's another story for another time. I hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into the
physiological data of the riders. Big thanks to EF Pro Cycling for sharing the data and also
WHOOP as well. If you've enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and share it with
your friends if you've found it interesting. Let us know your thoughts in the comments and if you'd
like to see more videos like this, with this kind of science and looking at the physiological data
of the riders then let us know in the comments and I'll hopefully see you in the next one.
Bye. [00:15:09] [END OF AUDIO]