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Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 13 years and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.
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Topics covered in this episode:
ASK A QUESTION FOR A FUTURE PODCAST
Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 13 years and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.
Links
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform
GET FREE TRAINING CONTENT
Join our weekly newsletter
CONNECT WITH CTS
Website: trainright.com
Instagram: @cts_trainright
Twitter: @trainright
Facebook: @CTSAthlete
From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance, even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now onto our show. Welcome back, or welcome to the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford. Today we're talking about block training. It's an awesome topic and thanks to you, our listeners, for queuing this one up. What do I mean by that? Well, for those who have listened to our podcast before, you know that you can ask any training question you want by going to trainrightcom backslashpodcast and click on that button that says ask a training question, and those questions get sent over to me. Then I work with other CTS coaches coaches who are outside of our network nutritionists, psychologists, athletes, physiologists everybody within our sphere to answer those questions and curate shows based on what you, our listeners want to hear. So let's go right into it. The question that was recently submitted I think it was a couple of weeks ago was this I heard you refer to quote threshold block in several podcasts. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that, when you would incorporate that into training and why you would incorporate that? Thanks, Alex. All right, Alex, this is awesome. This is a great question and great topic. Block training is something that I use frequently and it's a very effective method of training. In fact, we're just going to go only with this question today and we'll go very practical on it and give a few examples. So here it is.
Speaker 1:Block training is a way to organize your training in a method that uses consecutive training sessions and back to back days targeting specific energy systems to overload that system. The main goal with using this method of training is to maximize volume at intensity or time and zone. However, you want to say that to drive adaptation. I use this specifically with time-rich athletes who have big race seasons, elite athletes or athletes that have a non-9 to 5 job. So people like doctors, swap police, entrepreneurs, odd hours or jobs where you have chunks of time, free time, to train and recover. So we'll get into some of the specifics here in just a bit and some actual examples. But on top of this, the way I organize it in my head is I deploy this method of training for three main categories of training, that's, aerobic threshold and VO2 max. Typically I'll use block training for elite athletes or time-crunched athletes who start racing in the spring, and I'll start these blocks around December and cycle through the end of March when racing starts to increase. And I just said, yeah, I use this for time-rich athletes, not time-crunched athletes, and I'll get to maybe, why it's not always the best for time-crunched athletes all the time, but you definitely can as a time-crunched athlete, you just have to make sure that you do it properly. So let's take a look at a few examples. And what I'm doing on my end of things is I'm doing a quick screen share for anybody who likes to listen to this, like a few of my athletes I've been talking to lately. If you listen to this on YouTube, here's your visual example of what block training looks like for an athlete. For those listening, I'll verbally describe this, but I really would encourage you to go over to YouTube and just take a look at what I'm showing you here, because it's going to really shape up how this structure of block training is used most effectively.
Speaker 1:A couple of things that I want to give a shout out to real quick. I drafted up this podcast or the answer to Alex's question here first, and then I started looking on the internet for anything that was existing in the way of a visual that I could provide for listeners here, because why reinvent the wheel? Right In my head I was like man, I've got some podcasts from CTS coach Dean Gollich that I could dive into. For some of this I went to Google first. Just so happens that he wrote an article that's on Fast Talk Labs, which they do a great job of showcasing great information over there too. Dean wrote this specifically for them and it's perfect. The article itself. It goes deep into what block training is, but this visual is the way I do it. We have a couple of differences between Dean and I in the way that I would shape it up, but this is pretty much. It Also just so happens that Dean is a good friend. He's a mentor. A lot of my coaching success goes to Dean. I spent a lot of time with him, bothering him from time to time and he's moved on to other stuff beyond endurance athlete side of things for right now, even though he still closely works with some elite endurance athletes. Anyway, shout out to Dean for this. But this is where I've got the visual that I'm showing here in this article online Again for our listeners. Go to our YouTube channel, check it out.
Speaker 1:What's going on here is block training. Very simple examples. Here is we start out with a rest day on Monday, we go hard on Tuesday, we go hard on Wednesday. Then we go easy on Thursday, we go easy on Friday. Then we have some endurance of varying degrees on Saturday and Sunday. That's for an aerobic block. There's some nuance that's going on here, with high cadence and intervals going on to get the full effect of what Dean's talking about when his aerobic phase. Read the article.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to go into it right here but I think for a lot of our listeners for lactate threshold, this is exactly how I do it for a lot of my athletes. Again, Monday rest day You're going into the block of training fresh. You never want to start a block of training un-fresh or fatigued Day hard For the threshold block we're going. This is what I consider extensive threshold development, Four by 15 minutes. Recovery is whatever it takes to get down the hill, but typically five to seven minutes, something like that, In a couple of hours of ride time. Wednesday same workout, Four by 15,.
Speaker 1:Why what we're doing is we're trying to squeeze out the maximum amount of time and zone that, physically, the athlete should be able to produce if everything's set up properly from a training zone standpoint. So if the FTP is set up properly, we should get right around 60 minutes of time in zone for threshold work on any given day. Okay, Same workout. Back to back days yes, you can do it If you're taking care of yourself, recovering properly, eating plenty of carbohydrates, staying hydrated, all of those good things. So it's a very aggressive way of driving adaptation by delivering fatigue to the system and overloading the glycolytic energy system via threshold training.
Speaker 1:But notice what we have in here on Thursday and Friday One hour recovery rides, Okay. So we go big, we swing for the fence. Tuesday, Wednesday, then super chill Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we get back to some volume, to normal volume for, like I said, time rich athlete, athlete people who have like goofy schedules. Dean writes three hours on Saturday, three hours on Sunday, for a grand total of a 12 hour work week. There, from a training standpoint, you can see how he then cycles this by bringing two days easy like a rest and recovery ride, and then we start in on another block of threshold work, this time three by 20, with a couple of hours of Total endurance time on Wednesday. On Thursday we're going back to the 4x15, and that's the midweek block where we're stressing the system. They were overloading progressively. Note how 3x20, that's still 60 minutes of work time, but we're lengthening that interval time. We're just progressively lengthening each time. We go with an easy day on Friday, we overload with either a group ride or volume on the weekend. Then we have a block of recovery before starting the next Block of threshold work 2x30 on Wednesday, 3x20 on Thursday, and you get the drift here. You get what's going on. We overload with some volume over the weekend and then finally, week 3 of this progressive block training or this block of threshold, is a recovery week when there's just short easy sessions. Longest day is a couple hours.
Speaker 1:What I really love what Dean built in here is a Saturday, Sunday rest day both days. For a lot of people that's just blowing your mind. There's a total time of five hours for the whole week and Saturday and Sunday are both off. That's a reset, that is rest, that is recovery On a recovery week completely acceptable. I really encourage everybody to open your mind up to taking a Saturday, Sunday off or a Sunday off, especially during a recovery week. It's amazing, Again, visually here, or if you're just listening.
Speaker 1:What I'm trying to drive home here is there are blocks or chunks of training that are really aggressive. Then there's blocks or chunks of time in the training where it's super, super easy For my athletes. I might go three days in a row because some of the principles of block training is to go until you really can't. For some of my elite athletes they can handle three days in a row of threshold training like this. Or maybe I have a long ride or a group ride on that third day. Just really get them tired. Then we rest, then we do recovery, then we do easy and then we go again.
Speaker 1:This block style training. It doesn't work perfectly with our normal six days of training in one day rest period. Essentially, it goes into what I meant by careful with being a time crunched athlete. When you're deploying block style training, what you can do is really get yourself into a pit of fatigue by going really hard two or three days in a row. But because you're so limited on time, you might bait yourself into keeping going hard because you only have so much training time. That can be a pitfall for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Again, I think that was a good visual example from Dean Gollich in the way that he writes block style training. But I'll say this it's very effective and you'll make good gains if you follow the program and get your rest. But the risk of fatigue is very high. If you don't stick to the plan, if you don't take true easy days or easy blocks, you'll rack up more fatigue than you planned on. This is why I think it's a little risky for time crunched athletes Because training volume is so low, you can bait yourself into doing three days or four days of hard intensity in a row and you say I'm not too tired, I can keep on doing this threshold work.
Speaker 1:But then it's the weekend and then it's group ride time and then you just maybe I'll just not do the recovery block and then you go into that. That's a slippery slope. Another way to think about this is it's unlike polarized training where you have bigger contrast between the days, or like Tuesday hard, Wednesday easy, Thursday hard, Friday easy, and then a hard day on the weekend, Something like that. So block style is meant to progressively overload in these shorter chunks of time to get you really tired in a specific way before you take that recovery block. All right, but the key concept here and the only like if you don't hear anything else from this podcast is don't forget the rest, Don't forget the recovery block. That's specifically what I should say. Okay.
Speaker 1:And again, it's the pitfall for the time crunch athlete, where you're dealing with a different set of circumstances where, because the volume is not so high, you can really drill yourself three, four days in a row if you really want to get aggressive and that is very aggressive, mind you but then it's oftentimes harder to take our recovery blocks. Okay, but if you do this, you can still do this with time crunch athletes. I still do this with my athletes, who have 68 hours of time, but I'm in touch with them. Okay, I'm looking at their files throughout, where text messaging like hey, should we scrub this day? Should I just fit this over? Should I get this recovery chunk over here? And that's really the what I want to encourage everybody to do so if you're not working with your coach. If you've got the block style stock program going on, go for it. Just make sure to take the recovery blocks, Okay. So, in summary, and take this thing home.
Speaker 1:Block style training is a method of training where you go hard on back to back days, sometimes back to back to back, to aggressively overload an athlete with a given energy system. When you do this, you need to be sure to take the recovery blocks on the backside of those intensive blocks and be careful when you're doing this method of training, because it's really easy to induce more fatigue than you think is going on by not sticking to the program or adding more intensity on or if you're not staying in touch with your coach along the way. So, Alex, great question, Awesome topic. It's a subject close to my heart and kind of reconnected me with Dean a little bit here. I'm going to reach out to him and tell him we used his articles. So that's super cool.
Speaker 1:Again, thank you to all of our listeners who are submitting great questions. Keep them coming. We'll do our best to pump these out in the near future. Come back and listen to our next round of podcasts, because we have some really good stuff coming up. All for now, Thanks to everyone. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.