Training Babble: Off-Road Insights for Mountain Bike and Gravel Cycling
Unlock your endurance potential. The Training Babble Podcast takes a deep dive into the strategy and science behind training for off-road cycling and gravel racing. Host Dave Schell brings over 20 years of coaching and racing experience, including as former Director of Education at TrainingPeaks.
Each episode features interviews with experts and insiders to inform your training on topics like physiology, nutrition, mental toughness, equipment selection, and race tactics. Expect an informative yet lighthearted conversation filled with practical tips to up your performance. Special guests from across the cycling world join to share their hard-earned wisdom.
Whether you're an amateur looking to reach new heights or a coach wanting to refine your craft, The Training Babble Podcast offers a master-class in endurance training. Challenging conventional methods, busting myths, and digging into the latest research, this show equips you with the knowledge to train smarter and unlock your full athletic potential.
Subscribe to the Training Babble Podcast and join our community of passionate off-road cyclists. With tips, stories, and advice from leading figures in gravel and mountain biking, we're here to support your journey to peak performance and beyond. Elevate your off-road cycling experience with us.
Training Babble: Off-Road Insights for Mountain Bike and Gravel Cycling
Fast Physiology with Dr. Phil: Training Principles
Unlock The Secrets to Coaching Peak Athletic Performance
All coaches want to push their athletes to sustain higher levels of performance. But building a training plan that fuels consistent growth AND prevents burnout or injury is an intricate dance.
Join Dave Schell and Phil Batterson as they break down the essential pillars for optimizing an athlete's development. In this 20-minute deep dive, you'll learn:
- Progressive Overload Demystified - It's not just adding more weight or volume. Phil reveals the subtle art of progressing workloads while managing fatigue.
- Why Specificity is Non-Negotiable - sport-specific training creates masterful efficiency. Dave and Phil share killer insights on precise preparation.
- The Power of Individuality - Accounting for an athlete's lifestyle stressors, history and physiological responses is key to crafting the ideal training stimulus.
Whether you're coaching pros, weekend warriors, or yourself, this conversation will shift how you approach merging training data with hands-on physiology readings. You'll walk away with an arsenal of strategies to foster consistent growth while avoiding performance plateaus or injury setbacks.
Listen now to elevate your coaching approach and set your athletes up for durable, hard-earned success.
@CriticalO2
CriticalOxygen.com
Welcome back to Training Bevel. I'm your host, Dave Schell, and today I'm joined by Phil Batterson for a special 20 minute fast physiology podcast. Phil, thanks for joining me again.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Dave. I'm super excited for this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this was kind of your brainchild, I guess, and the idea is that we're trying to be super focused and take 20 minutes to focus on one aspect of physiology and do a semi deep dive. And the other thing is that we're kind of cross promoting where I do an episode, you do an episode, and kind of share it with both our listeners.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, absolutely it's a and I can't take all the credit, it's definitely both of us, as we, you know, met at different conferences and other things like that we start to talk, or, you know, started to get to talking, and we were like, oh, maybe you're super sweet to have these concise episodes as we start to ramble on. Already you know about these specific training principles, or you know training methodologies or physiological principles, whatever, whatever that be. So hopefully, you know, this is going to be a multi, multi, multi part series where we just go back and forth with just different topics and all of that. So I'm super excited to get this one kicked off on on the training Babel podcast, and then there's some other ones you know that are going to be launched on mine as well.
Speaker 1:Yep, absolutely, and we'll, like I said, like so much linking, just linking back and forth.
Speaker 2:I know it just the circular linking of cross links on websites and other things like that Exactly.
Speaker 1:But I but I think it's going to be very beneficial and there are things I mean I could even see we might actually record an episode and then, a couple months down the lines, some new information comes to light or something and we revisit whatever we discussed before, because now there's a new understanding of it. And I think this is something I think over the last I don't know a few years or so, as I've talked about physiology and things like that I always preface it with like this is how I understand things at the moment, and it's always subject to change. You know, and I think for me, over the last few years, my understanding is just changed like so much more rapidly and so you just realize, like, how complex it is. And when we're trying to study physiology, it's like it's reductionist science and we're trying to like eliminate all the variables. But it's really hard with the human body to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a to answer specific questions, you have to be a bit reductionist, but then you try to bring that back out to the you know what the applied side of things, or what we call a translatability of the research into you know coaching practice. So that's something that I have become a huge fan of since graduating and getting my PhD is I. I was really focused on the molecular side of things, you know, doing lab bench work, measuring changes to like single proteins within skeletal muscle biopsies and other things like that, and I'm now I'm trying to answer the question. Okay, so how do we take that research and how do we, as coaches and scientists, use that in order to actually make better athletes?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I think I appreciate that you do that, because I think it is you and I have discussed this before like a lot of these physiologists or exercise science majors spend their entire life studying one thing, and that might be lactate, or it might be O2, kinetics or something like that, and I think over that time you start to look at everything through that lens and start to kind of forget about the rest of the body and stuff like that, and so I think it's good to like pull back and bring it back so that can make those connections to like practical field application.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that sort of research is extremely important, right, because it does give us a compass or a guidepost to point us in the right direction. But I mean, I even have my own biases. I am a skeletal muscle physiologist by trade and I objectively think that the mitochondria probably the most important thing for endurance performance. You know, and you know, if you ask somebody else, they would probably, depending on their field of study and other things like that, they would probably have a differing opinion than that. But I'm always working at trying to expand my knowledge base personally and then using that to, you know, change my thought process and how I actually approach training athletes and getting the most out of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So today I want to start with training principles, and I think this is something that, like, it doesn't sound very physiological or sciencey when we first, you know, mention it. It sounds very basic, but I think it is very important. And when I was starting to coach in 2010, or even reading about training and stuff, um, I think there was like five or six principles that I learned about.
Speaker 1:Um. So some of those are specificity, meaning that in order for your body to adapt, it needs to, it's going to adapt to the specific demands imposed on it, and so if you want to get better at riding a bike, you should ride a bike Um. Another one is progressive overload, meaning that our bodies are very adaptable and if you're not changing the stimulus over time, then your body's just going to kind of plateau and get used to it and you're not going to continue improving, and so you need to continue to change that stimulus over time. Um. Individuality, and that's important in that everybody wants black and white answers. You know we look at these studies and stuff like that and they're usually reporting on the bill curve, but we have to remember there's also outliers and just as with as coaches and our athletes, if we were to apply that same thing, then we can say, okay, well, if I'm coaching 30 or 40 people, then 70% of those people are going to find fall within that range, but then 15% are going to be above it and 15% might be below that.
Speaker 1:And, and trying to keep that in mind, and I think, um, the last one is just reversibility, or, um, um detraining, and that once we stop applying that stress to the organism, then eventually it's going to return back to the baseline, because our, our bodies are constantly trying to restore homeostasis, which is why we do train and why we do get stronger is because your body's trying to like, become adapt and become stronger to handle that stress. But once you remove that stress, then it, our bodies, are lazy at the end of the day, right, and it's like it's going to take, it's going to do the least amount of work possible, like that's how we evolved is trying to be as efficient and economical as possible so that we don't waste energy, and so our bodies see that too.
Speaker 2:Um, so, well before before you keep going. One of uh one of my former advisors. What he would always say is life is just a regression towards the mean meaning that you know your, your body actually. Well, really, in anything in life, you know you are going to try to do something that is the the easiest way possible, the least amount of energy spent. So if you're not continually applying that stress through exercise, whether that's strength training, cycling, running, you know, whatever pursuits you're doing, you're eventually going to lose it, and the rate at which you lose it is directly proportional to the amount of stress that you are aren't putting onto that uh system. Can you expand?
Speaker 1:on that a little bit. Yeah, so the you know, for example, right.
Speaker 2:If, if we're, if we're, you know trying to get if we're trying to get our endurance better right.
Speaker 2:We know that volume and intensity extremely important at pushing that endurance up. We also know that, generally speaking, the more volume that somebody is doing or the more stress that they were applying to the system, the more successful they were applying to the system. The more successful they were applying to the more successful in that endurance pursuit they are also doing. But if you have periods of time where you're taking it a little bit easier, you're reducing the amount of volume and your body is actually going to adapt to that stress as well in a negative sense. That's why your, your performance can go up with more volume. And then if you decrease the volume, maybe you'll get a little bit of uh, you know increase because you were over training a little bit or something and you're finally letting off that pressure. But if you continue that long enough, then you're eventually going to come back down and kind of regress towards that mean of of the stress that you are now putting onto it.
Speaker 1:And I just want to mention this as well, and this is something that I think we forget too as athletes, and maybe not as much coaches or physiologists. But it's also kind of a delayed response, and so I'm, as you're talking through that. I always picture this like I tell people it's like steering an ocean liner right, we put in the inputs, but it might, it's going to take weeks before we actually see the outputs or or whatever the effect of that training was. And so, like you just talked about backing off, and I think a lot of people are afraid to back off their training because they don't want to lose their fitness or don't want to detrain. But it's also important to back off, or I always say, come up for error, to actually realize that fitness, and so kind of like, allow your body to adapt and then repeat that progress or that process. Rather, Um absolutely so.
Speaker 1:So I just mentioned I don't know if I mentioned five or six principles, but when we've talked about it in the past on the podcast, I, like you, essentially boil it down to three principles. And so what are the three training principles that you?
Speaker 2:The spouse, the ones, the ones that I talk about the most are consistency, specificity and progression, because I think they that kind of encompasses everything you know, from individuality to recovery, um, to reversibility as well, because if you're not staying consistent, then that reversibility principle is going to come into play, right. If you're um, the only way to stay consistent and specific is to have individualized training programs. So so that's that's kind of why I boil it down to three Um, and that's just what I've found have been the most successful, you know, for me over time. Right, and I say it in the order of consistency, specificity and progression, because I found that, you know, when I am most consistent, I have the ability to absorb more volume and then be able to do more of that sport specific stuff, and then I'm able to progress it a little bit more. But I can't get anywhere unless I'm actually being consistent with things.
Speaker 2:So consistency kind of lays like the lower level of the pyramid, and specificity is a little higher than progression, is a little higher on top of that, and I generally make the mistake of trying to focus too much on their progression, and then what happens is is that you know, kind of chips away at my uh, my base of consistency. And then I get injured or, you know, do something along those lines, get sick, have to take some time off, and then, all of a sudden, my consistency isn't there. And you know, I've essentially, you know, whittled away my, the base of my pyramid, a little bit more.
Speaker 1:And I agree with you completely in that the thing that I've found is the biggest predictor of success with athletes is consistency. In the time that I've been coaching and, like you said, um, yeah, I think for me the the important thing is to find that sustainable workload, whatever that happens to be for that athlete, and it's something that allows them to be consistent weekend and week out. And I think a lot of people get into trouble because they do too much too soon and then end up having to take time off, and then it's like two steps forward, one step back, kind of thing. Um, the other thing I would kind of, I think I would reverse my pyramid a little bit when you, you know, with the, when you talk about specificity being middle and then the progressive overload, I would say the progressive overload for me is kind of the middle section there, um, but I think some people might take this maybe a little too literal or or maybe, like, take it too much to an extreme. For me. I always think about, like, what load has the athlete habituated to? And so if an athlete's been training six hours a week or something like that and we bump them up to eight hours a week, well, it's not like they do eight hours next week and they're already adapted to that load, like it might take four to six weeks for that and so we might keep it eight hours the next week, eight hours the next week, eight hours the next week, but they're adapting because their body was like that's a new stress and I always think about training in terms of novel stress and so, um, and I just want to like speak a little bit more to the progressive overload thing.
Speaker 1:I think there's lots of ways we can attack it. You know we can do it with extending the intensity some more time at intensity. We can do it with just like general training volume. We can do it by decreasing rest intervals. And I also think that as you get further into a training block, those that same intensity or that same time at intensity becomes more stressful than it was at the beginning of the training block. When you're a fresh and people, you know if we're just training by numbers and stuff, people might lose sight of that, but it's like Always taking into account like RPE, I think like speaks a lot to that. It's like if you're doing the same intervals three weeks in and the RPEs hire things like that our rates higher. It's like your body's working harder for that, and so that's more stressful than it was two weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I, I 100% agree with that and I have a little bit of a background in like weightlifting as well. So the weightlifting portion of things is like progressive overload. Looks like you know you have your workout that you're going to do, so you're doing bicep curls, bench press, tricep dips or something like that. And the idea of progressive overload is that every single time you go back into you know the the gym, you get like one more rep, or you get or you lift five extra pounds or something like that. But what I've learned from discussing a lot with a lot of coaches on my podcast is that progressive overload, like you just said, isn't always going in and getting one more rep or lifting five more pounds or you know doing something else. It's sometimes it's just doing the same workout, but now you're under a little bit more fatigue, right, because that's still going to be a stress.
Speaker 2:And something I do want to add and this is something that I really like, as we stand to gain the most from what we do the least. So so you know, in terms of this, isn't progressive overload? I don't think. But this is the idea of like if you're always doing, you know, say, zone two stuff, and then you go and you do high intensity interval training. You stand to make a lot because the stress of going from zone two to that high intensity is a lot more than your body is used to. So if you go and change it you're going to bump up and then, as you adapt to that, you know your, your body is going to again reach homeostasis. And then you switch it up and do something else and, um, you know that it gets a little bit more nuanced than just simply switching from zone two to high intensity stuff. But that's just something that I thought about when you said you know, like the like, when we're trying to actually make gains, we need to program the stress that we're trying to actually uh, elicit.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and I and and not lose sight of, I think, the whole athlete and everything that's going on with the training plan and I I guess this is something like my soap box that I've been hammering for the last you know like years is, I think, with training stress score and stuff like that, which is something that came about with training peaks, is like people start to play this numbers game and it's like it's just always about a little more training stress, but it's like it's not taking into account the stress of your life and where you're at in a training load or if you're at altitude or what the you know if the ambient temperature has changed. You know you started changing training in the spring and all of a sudden it's in the summer and like now it's 90 degrees. Yeah, it's like it's it's not accounting for those things, and so I think it's a great base metric, but it's not the only metric.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, and when it's something. Something that I've always struggled with is is, and I really like the use of power as a mechanical variable, but one of the things that power doesn't take into account is how your physiology is actually responding to it. So having a mixture and I don't know how training you know training stress score on training peaks works I know there's some. Some times you can use power, sometimes you can use heart rate maybe you can use a mixture, but I definitely think that there is a time and a place for using both of those, especially when temperature is changing and other things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I've used it a lot with um mountain bike, I think you and I've talked about this before where it's like there's a lot of coasting time but your heart rate doesn't come down. So that tells you your body's still working, you know, and so I think sometimes it can be a more accurate picture of how much stress there was. And this also gets into this argument about like a stress versus strain, meaning like internal strain versus external training stress, sort of in. We don't need to get into that, hey, but but, but people like to make definitions for everything.
Speaker 2:I would call both of those stress right. One of them is mechanical stress, one of them is internal physiological stress. Right, and the physio, the physiological stress, is really how your body is reacting to that mechanical output. That's that's actually occurring, right, and that's going to be affected by a number of different things Temperature, hydration status, fueling status, sleep status, stress in everyday life, other things like that, rather than you know, just simply, 200 Watts is 200 Watts, is 200 Watts right, like, but how your body responds to it is certainly different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And now the last kind of piece of this training principle thing that I want to touch on in the interest of keeping this to 20 minutes is is a specificity, and this is something that I think is super important, and one of the things that I learned like I started as a personal trainer and I think I learned this then is the said principle that specific adaptations to impose demands meaning your body will specifically adapt to whatever Demands or stress is imposed on it, and so I think this becomes really important once we get kind of into our race prep phase or whatever, and we know that people like to do cross training and stuff like that, and I think it can be beneficial, especially like just for some, like different movements and stuff, especially for cyclists.
Speaker 1:If you're always sitting on a bike and always, you know, using the same muscles and peddling in the same way and stuff like that, it's good to like exercise other muscles, but when we're talking about aerobic adaptations or physiological adaptations, specificity really matters. So speak to that a little bit in that, like you said that you're a muscle physiologist by trade, so like, speak to that a little bit and why that matters. As far as the yeah, sure, nice, yeah.
Speaker 2:So specificity is going to dictate. So there's a few things that are going on from a physiological perspective. Right, we can elicit the same physiological adaptation to, you know, to our muscle, whether that's increasing mitochondria, increasing capillary density, whether we're cycling, running, you know, stair climbing, whatever it is. However, the way that our body actually kind of accesses that physiology is going to be specific to the sport that we are actually doing. So something that we see time and time again, as if we do a view to max test or a maximal exercise test on a cyclist and we do one on a runner, they score the best when they're doing their test on a treadmill for the runner and on a cycle or a gometer for the cyclist. When you switch them view to maxes I can't remember the exact percentages, but they go way, way down because the the way that are, that those cyclists and runners are accessing that physiology is a lot different in the way that their muscles are contracting, you know, from a neuromuscular perspective, making them more or less efficient at whatever exercise they're doing.
Speaker 2:Cyclists are extremely inefficient at running because they don't do it right. Right, runners are extremely inefficient at running. They inefficient at cycling because they don't do it. So it's you can still get all of these physiological benefits from exercise, but in order to actually be good at the sport you're doing, you need to train at the speed that you're going to be racing in the environment, that you're going to be racing on the device you're going to be racing with, so biking, obviously, running. If you never run in the shoes that you run in, no matter what they say in terms of 4% or 2% or whatever the heck it's if you never run in those shoes and you just go and throw them on the day before your race, yeah, it might help you a little, but it's not going to give you the most best Suffocity in the best bang for your buck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would even take this a step further, but I guess first let me just say I was reminded of this recently in starting to use a moxie monitor and you and I were at the endurance exchange and we were doing something like a live test and it's like somebody had it on.
Speaker 1:I think they had it on the rectus from Morris or maybe the vestus lateralis but all of a sudden they stand and you see everything change and it's because the load had shifted to different muscles and so it just like was such a good reminder, like if you need to train the way you're going to race, and so like I've seen people like doing Zwift races and stuff and like out of the saddle the entire time, and it's like great, because you're racing in a virtual world where all that matters is what, but you'd never get away with that outside, you know, and so that's one aspect of it. But I think the other thing is just like being so specific so that, like you're in the same position, you know where the water bottles at, you're racing the same time of day, you're eating the same stuff, that you're going like just being as specific as possible as you can to how you plan to race is going to prepare your body to handle that stress.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think I think you can get away with being less specific earlier in the training phase. So, like you know, during base training and other things like that, you can like, by all means, throw in some some cycling if you're a runner or you know, do other things like that. But as you do get closer and closer, you do have to get more sports specific. I tell this example quite often is like I used to when I was. I was training for some trail running races and what I would do is I would I could only really work out in the morning, so I would go to go to the gym that I was a part of and because high intensity interval training was a big thing back then, I would do high intensity interval training on the treadmill and so I would do, you know, 30 minutes. You know, like, run as fast as I can slow down, run as fast as I can slow down, repeat that, you know, do that three times a week, something like that. And then I would go and I do some lifting and then on the weekends I would go to the mountains and then I would, like you know, do just crazy amounts of vert. Then I would go and do my races, and the races were not high intensity interval training, they were not crazy amounts of vert. So every single time, almost like I think it was like six or seven races in a row I'd get to about the three quarters to you know, 90% of the way done and I would like cramp up like crazy. Everything would cramp up.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't because my hydration was bad I was always really good with hydration and feeling and other things like that. It wasn't because I wasn't strong enough, like. I was certainly strong enough because at that point I was, I was deadlifting a lot of weight. I was like probably the strongest I've ever been. But because I was not doing that sport specific training re leading up to my race, my muscles were just like what the heck are you doing to me right now? You went from you're doing kind of punchy sprints up a hill to trying to run six minute miles for 15 to 18 miles, yeah, and we're not used to this. So something was happening where you know I would. My muscles were just kind of in crisis mode and that's what, essentially what cramping is right Is your muscle doesn't know what to do with it and it's just like whoop and then it sucks.
Speaker 1:And I feel like this just gave me an idea for our next or one of our next fast physiologies is like why do muscles cramp?
Speaker 1:And I think that's something I deal with a lot of times with athletes.
Speaker 1:Everybody thinks that more electrolytes or hydration or something, but in my experience and it sounds like in yours too it seems like when you push the muscle past the point that it's conditioned to and I see it with mountain bikers all the time, where we do our best to replicate the torque and stuff with low gear work and you know stuff like that on the trainer but then you get to a race it's the first race of the season, you're going a little bit harder for a little bit longer or whatever, and people cramp like every single, like it's usually the first one or two races, and that's been my experience, and so, anyway, something for us to come back to and discuss down the road for sure and I just want to tack on this too is this is something I see a lot with cyclists too is I live in a hilly area we're in Colorado and so there's lots of hills to climb and stuff, and some people love to climb, and so it's like they, every time they ride, they want to ride up hills, which I think can be good.
Speaker 1:But if you're training for a race that's going to be flat and really peddly, then you need to do flat, really peddly stuff because you need to train the muscles to be able to pedal for that long. You know, and like, my example of this is, I did a gravel race in Michigan that was like 160 miles and I think it was 1000 feet of gain over 160 miles.
Speaker 2:So it was flat, you know.
Speaker 1:And yeah, about nine hours in I was cramping so bad because my muscles hadn't like.
Speaker 2:I've never asked my muscles to pedal for nine hours straight before you know you're going up and then you're coasting, and then you're going up and then you're coasting, and it's slightly different, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that is hilly for Michigan. I will tell you that I grew up there, so yeah, and so, before we end this episode, what are some of your actionable takeaways or just some takeaways as far as training principles here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to emphasize to people you know do especially if you're a self-coached athlete or you know a coach who's coaching athletes is meet the athlete where they are in order to keep them as consistent as possible, don't?
Speaker 2:You know?
Speaker 2:Don't try to just shift an athlete to something completely new.
Speaker 2:If you're getting somebody new in, take what they're already doing and just make slight tweaks over time, and maybe over the course of a year it'll change to something that's more commensurate with what you actually do. But try to keep that athlete specific, as consistent as possible, and then really lean into the specificity leading into a race. It's that is going to be the most important thing that you do in order to realize an athlete's full potential is become as specific as possible. Probably, you know, six to 10 weeks before a race, as you start to become more and more specific. Outside of that, your athlete can be a little bit less specific and I would actually encourage less specificity in order to reduce the risk of overuse, injuries and other things like that. Again, with the idea of keeping the athlete consistent, because if you keep the athlete consistent, they'll be able to build volume, build fitness, they'll be able to tolerate that specificity when you start to implement it and then, overall, they'll be able to progress in terms of their load, their intensities, and you know their, their performances.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I agree with all that. And then I think the thing that I would add is just in terms of the progressive overload. I think it's really easy or tempting to always think about volume or more intensity, but I think there's other ways you can do it. So again, just to reiterate what I said before, like just taken to mind that like the load this week is not the same load three weeks from now when we account for cumulative fatigue and stuff like that, and so it doesn't always have to be more, but just doing the same under fatigue can also be progressive overload and more stress on the system. So you can find Phil at at critical o two on Instagram or critical auctioncom, oxygencom on the web. Anywhere else they can find you Phil.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, my podcast is critical oxygen on Spotify, apple, youtube, all that fun stuff, so go ahead if you're interested in any of the physiology. My whole goal in and Dave is going to be on the fast physiology talks for that one too, so we'll we'll cross list it, but go ahead, let me know if you have any questions in terms of physiology or anything like that. That's literally what I'm here to do is help you optimize your physiology and maximize your insurance potential. So this is what I'd love to do. So please do not be a stranger.
