End of Year Wrap Up and tips for Kicking off 2025 on the Right Foot

Summary
In this episode of the Training Babble podcast, host Dave Schell reflects on the past year, expressing gratitude to listeners and sharing insights on coaching and training strategies. He emphasizes a minimalist approach to coaching, the importance of flexibility in training plans, and debunks myths surrounding base training and zone two training. Schell advocates for simplicity and effectiveness in workouts, encouraging athletes to focus on performance metrics beyond just FTP.

Takeaways

• Focus on doing a small amount of things well.
• Be flexible with your training plans.
• Quality time on the trainer is essential.
• Zone two training should be viewed as endurance work.
• Simplicity in workouts leads to better tracking of progress.
• Workouts should be flexible in intensity and volume.
• FTP is not the only measure of success.
• Performance at races is the ultimate goal.
• Consider other metrics like five-hour power.
• Engage in various aerobic activities during winter.

Transcript

Dave Schell (00:08.334)
Welcome back to the Training Babel podcast. I'm your host Dave Schell and we are back for one last show of the season before we enter the next year. So first off, I just want to express my gratitude to everybody that's been listening. I started this back in 2019 after I left Training Peaks where I had started the coach cast there and I enjoyed doing podcasts so much that it was something that I wanted to continue doing.

And when I first started doing it, I didn't know if anybody would listen. But it was something I enjoyed doing and it was an opportunity for me to go talk to people I found interesting and learn about things that I was interested in. And so today, here we are five years later and closing in on 10,000 listens for this year, which I think is unbelievable. And so thank you to everyone doing that and donating your time and listening to me ramble. Super appreciate it.

The other thing I would appreciate is I would love to cross that 10,000 listen mark this year. And so if you would be willing to share it with people or leave a five-star review so that other people can find it, that would be amazing to be able to cross that. And so I wanted to end this year by doing kind of a year wrap-up and then give you some tips to help you tackle 2025. And so the first place to start here is I want to say...

that I consider myself as a coach somewhat of a minimalist in that I think it's important to focus on the things that matter and do those things well and do them consistently. And I think you're gonna get a lot further if you do a small amount of things well versus a lot of things inconsistently. And so on that note, first thing I wanna say is be flexible. So this time of year,

We're getting really excited about our next season. We've started to come up with our races. We want to start training, set our sights on these goals. And then it gets cold and we're stuck inside and we get sick or our kids get sick or we have to travel for the holidays. lots of things come up. And so it's okay to have that roadmap. Just know that there's going to be detours along the way. And in my 15 years of coaching, I've yet to see.

Dave Schell (02:30.338)
annual training plan go exactly to plan. Something always pops up. We create that plan just so that we have line of sight, but we have to be prepared to deviate from it when things pop up and life is always going to pop up. So don't beat yourself up over it. Don't get stressed. Just be flexible, deal with it, and do what you can, anything you can to be consistent. The next thing that I want to say is don't worry about quote-unquote base training.

I feel like this is something from the 80s. And it still continues to come up, this idea that we just need to do a lot of long, easy riding in order to prepare our bodies for the more intense training down the road. That just doesn't make sense for the most of us. If we have six to eight to 10 hours to train each week and we're stuck inside on the trainer,

then we're not gonna get very far by just doing a lot of easy riding all the time. And so what I would suggest is if you're stuck inside on the trainer, let's make that quality time and kind of flip it on its head and make it about very focused work straight into the point. This is where you can work on thresholds, you can work on VO2 max, you can work on other stuff on the intensity side of things, especially if you're doing ultra endurance races.

So one of the principles of periodization is that you should do the training that's most specific to the event closest to the event and the stuff that's least specific from the event further out from the event. And so if you're somebody that's doing ultra endurance races, that's five plus hours, then it makes more sense to work on the stuff that's not specific to your event like sprinting and VO2, anaerobic, work on that when you're on the trainer.

and threshold as well. And then once it gets warm, once we get into February and March and you can get outside, that's where you can build the volume. And it's going to be a good opportunity for you to take a break from the structured training and from the intensity because you'll be close to burnout at that point anyway. And so use this winter as an opportunity to be focused on the bike. And you can also supplement when we, you know, I know I just said, don't think about base training.

Dave Schell (04:55.724)
But when we think about bass, you can also supplement with other aerobic activities, whether it's skiing or fat biking or running. You can supplement with that stuff over the winter that doesn't require you to be on your trainer for three or four hours. The next thing that I want to say is that there is no magic with zone two training. That's right. I said it. There is no magic.

I know that it's been really popular over the last three or four years. Every time I get on YouTube or Instagram, it's all about Zone 2 training. Now I think it's starting to switch back to the O2 Max, but I think it's good because for a long time there was all of this focus on intensity. And I see this pendulum swing back and forth over the years. And so now it's swinging back to the endurance side of it and the aerobic bass.

And so with that, it's created a lot of anxiety for athletes who are afraid that they're doing zone two too hard or that they're not doing it right. And I guess I want to start by saying, can we please stop calling it zone two? Let's just call it endurance. And the whole point of endurance work is just to work on your endurance. And it doesn't have to be strictly zone two. It's going to be mostly zone two, but when you go up a hill, might creep into zone three and four.

And if you have a tailwind, it might be zone one, and if you've got a headwind, it might be zone three, and it's okay. We just want it to be a pace that you can maintain for a really long time. The other point of zone two is it needs to be easy enough that it allows you to recover from the intense work you did earlier in the week and set you up for success for the intense work later in the week. And so the intensity doesn't matter as much as the amount of time.

And so really think about zone two or endurance as kind of the buffer to all the intense workout that or the intense work that you're doing. And so as you're setting up your plan, you've got your two or three hard workouts each week, and then the rest of it should just be kind of endurance work. And I like to make this flexible with my athletes. And I tell them that there's almost always room for more zone two. And what I mean by that is we make it flexible. And when they

Dave Schell (07:19.562)
if all of sudden they can get outside on a weekend or something and they have the time and energy, they can extend it for an hour. But there's no reason to force yourself to do it on the trainer. Save that mental bandwidth or willpower for later in the season when it really counts. The next thing I want to talk about is complexity does not equal effectiveness. And this I bring up because I think it came about with

all the smart trainers, as smart trainers started to become more popular and everybody started to have them. And then we had the indoor training apps. I think it started with Sufferfest, which is now Wahoo X. And then we've got Zwift, we've got Exert, TrainerRoad. Everybody started getting these smart trainers. And so as these apps started to come out, they would create these really complicated workouts.

I always say, like in the case of Zwift, taste the rainbow because every color is associated with a kind of intensity zone. And you'll look at some of their workouts and it's red and blue and green and purple and yellow and orange. And there's just colors everywhere. But if we think about this, these indoor training apps are very akin to like a indoor trainer class, an indoor cycling class. So if you take a Peloton,

where you've got the instructor at the front of the class and they're up and they're down and they're clapping and having you do all kinds of stuff. It's about keeping people engaged and helping to pass the time quickly inside. But what I would say to most people is that this type of work, even though it can be effective for the newer athlete, if it's somebody who's been riding their bike two or three times a week, then anything's going to help them improve.

just adding a little bit of intensity regardless of what it is. It's going to help them improve. But if you're a more experienced athlete, then there's probably more effective ways to spend your time. And so I'm a big fan of simple and repetition. And what I mean by that is if you are doing different workouts all the time and they never look the same and it's touching on every zone, how do you know you're improving versus

Dave Schell (09:41.078)
If you do something simple, then you can repeat it week in and week out. And then as you get better, you add more intervals or you increase the intensity. And so you know that you're getting fitter at that workout and that you're improving what you're trying to improve. The next thing I'll say to that is, I know I said this in a previous podcast, is that workouts should always be flexible. And what I mean by that is,

not only in the target watts, so reading the target watts is plus minus 15 watts so that some days you might be on the bottom, some days you might be on the top, or as you warm up you might be on the bottom and then with each interval maybe it gets a little bit higher, but also with the number of reps. And so I will set my athletes, let's say it's two to four times 10 minutes, and so the first week I would expect them do two of them.

Aim for at least two and then stop when you start to fall off. And the goal would be to increase it to three and then eventually four as they get stronger. If we're completing every workout 100%, then we're not being challenged. The goal is not to make every workout green. The goal is not 100 % compliance. The goal is to find your limits and then work just beyond, just beneath that and then extend those limits out over time as you get stronger. And so,

There's a lot of value in doing the same workouts, week in and week out, and being able to see that progression over time. Just like when you're doing strength training workouts, as it starts to feel too easy, you either add weight or you add reps. Well, your on the bike workout should be the same. You shouldn't be able to complete them all easily. If you are, then you're not being challenged. So you need to change that. And...

once you are completing them easily, you either, you need to change the stimulus, either make it more intense or make it longer. And I know for a lot of athletes who are time crunched, you just don't have that much time. And so then to extend the workouts. so other things you can consider doing is increase or rather decrease the amount of recovery in between intervals, decrease the warmup a little bit. Like, so think of other ways that you can maximize your time.

Dave Schell (12:07.374)
without making the workout longer. I know a lot of my athletes might only have an hour each weekday morning to do a workout. And so we have to get creative in how we're going to create that progression.

The next thing I'll say and kind of end on this note is you are not your FTP. I just posted something recently on Instagram saying that it's time to define success beyond FTP. I see this all over social media. I see it on YouTube. I see it everywhere. FTP is the gold metric that everybody wants to improve. And we start to think that if our FTP doesn't go up, then we didn't improve.

And so what my experience has been is if an athlete's been training pretty consistently and effectively for three to five years, FTP may not change a lot, but you improve in other ways that are harder to measure, such as efficiency, race smarts, nutrition, other things that are going to make you faster at your race. And ultimately, performance at the race is the goal. I'll also say that if you're doing really long events,

you know, Unbound 200 or Leadville 100. While FTP is important and you want to have it as high as you can given your genetic limitations and your availability to train, it's not the only metric. And as an example, I had an athlete, a very strong athlete a couple of years ago that his FTP, and granted we hadn't been measuring every week, so.

I don't know how accurate this is, according to how we track it, his FTP had gone down 20 watts or so. But his five-hour power had gone up by 20 to 30 watts. And so what do you think is more important at a race like Leadville? Your 20-minute power, if that's what we're using as a proxy for FTP, or your five-hour power? And so I think the issue...

Dave Schell (14:18.122)
with defining ourselves by our FTP is that then we do things to improve that. And if we're using 20 minute power as our test or a proxy for FTP, then we do a lot of workouts that improve that 20 minute power. But that doesn't mean that your FTP actually went up. It just means that your 20 minute power went up. So rather than do that, focus on the things that are going to improve your performance at your goal races, whether that's

five-hour power or look at the duration of your climbs. How long do you need to, is it 20 minutes, is it 30 minutes and work on that power? But don't use this 20 minute power or this FTP as your only measure of success. With that, thanks again for listening. It's been an awesome year. I would love to hear from you so you can hit, you can reach me at Kaizen Endurance on Instagram.

If there's anything you want to hear about next year, please let me know. If you have any questions, we'd love to hear about that as well. Again, thank you for listening. Best of luck to you in the next season, and we'll talk to you soon.