Guest: Kelly Moylan Kellie Moylan is a performance coach who works with athletes throughout the world. She has been coaching endurance sports and strength training for over 20 years. Kellie works one on one with athletes in her own gym with the use of Olympic style weightlifting or portions of the lifts depending on the goals and needs of each athlete.
Certifications:
USA Cycling Level 1, NSCA USA Weightlifting Level 2 Coach, USA Track and Field Level 3, Certified Sports Nutrition Coach with NSPA, Certified Program Design with NSPA, Certified Weightlifting with NSPA, Certified Speed and Agility NSPA, International Youth and Conditioning Coach
Host Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 14 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.
Guest: Kelly Moylan Kellie Moylan is a performance coach who works with athletes throughout the world. She has been coaching endurance sports and strength training for over 20 years. Kellie works one on one with athletes in her own gym with the use of Olympic style weightlifting or portions of the lifts depending on the goals and needs of each athlete.
Certifications:
USA Cycling Level 1, NSCA USA Weightlifting Level 2 Coach, USA Track and Field Level 3, Certified Sports Nutrition Coach with NSPA, Certified Program Design with NSPA, Certified Weightlifting with NSPA, Certified Speed and Agility NSPA, International Youth and Conditioning Coach
Host Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 14 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.
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, time Crunch fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford. Your good emails keep pouring in from you, our diehard listeners, and I want to give a continual thank you for that. Today we'll get into some audience derived topics, but you get to hear from another fellow CTS coach, one who has years of experience working with endurance athletes at every level of the sport, with expertise and a wild passion for weightlifting Kelly Moylan. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:
Hey, so where do we start?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, well, first, I think a good place to start is to tell our audience a little bit more about your diverse and unique background, because you know CTS doesn't have many coaches competing in weightlifting competitions. In fact, please, in your intro here, describe what is meant by weightlifting, because that's an important distinction from simple strength training or weight training in general. So, kelly, tell us more about you.
Speaker 2:
Weightlifting is actually a sport. It's in the Olympics. Hopefully we'll stay there. You have a clean and a jerk. It starts with a snatch. You get three tries at a snatch and three tries at a clean and jerk In competition. That's how that works. That's it in a nutshell. It's a lot more complicated than that, but that's how the sport actually works.
Speaker 2:
I was introduced to it in the year of 2003, I think, with a group of personal trainers that I worked with at the time. But when people ask me how long I've been lifting, I don't tell them that I've been lifting since 2003, because I was only introduced to it at that time. I only feel that I've been lifting since 2014, when I actually found the coach and hired him to coach me, because it's such a technical sport learning how to take a weight from the floor to overhead position and dropping under it. It's one of the most technical things I've ever done in any sport. I fell in love with it. I really fell in love with it.
Speaker 2:
I hired Coach Wilflemming. What I did for myself in the years of leading up to meeting him and hiring him was create a lot of really bad movement patterns for myself. So I had to undo all of that and I became a lifter. I wanted to learn how to lift. I qualified for Worlds in the first year that. I did a competition and went to Spain and looked really bad lifting, but I made my lift. So it's not a thing of how pretty it is, it's a thing of whether or not you actually lock out your elbows and can get under the bar.
Speaker 2:
So that's weightlifting. That's what we mean by weightlifting. I'd like to differentiate that from powerlifting. Powerlifting is another sport and it's a completely other sport. It is where people lift heavy weights. They do bench press, squat and deadlifts and they are lifting heavy weights. There's no form involved in this. Going parallel on the squat and lifting the weight up and doing the bench press and making sure you have a full range of motion. That's a heavier weight. These athletes are completely different from what I do, so I'd like to make sure that people know powerlifting is not weightlifting as bodybuilding is bodybuilding, yes, but complete other sport too.
Speaker 1:
So, yeah, thanks for that distinction, for sure, but you still ride a bike too, right?
Speaker 2:
I do. I love my bike. I don't run as much anymore. I have run. I just put running down. When I hired a coach I decided that I wanted to put it down because I wanted to become my own lab rat and learn how to lift. And the years that I put the bike down and came back to it, I picked it right back up. I don't have my upper end aerobic there, but I can work on that. It's the ability to hop back on the bike Never left me. You're the love.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, well, cool. Yeah, I think our listeners are starting to get a background, or a knowledge base of the background that you have and since you spent so much time and poured yourself into this sport of weightlifting in combination with being a coach and applying it to athletes, I think we're going to have a really good conversation today. So, to set the stage for the next two episodes actually because Kelly will join us for today and next week's episode this show will focus more on concepts and education, while the next one will be more application to your training for the audience. So I think both are needed to get our points across, and we'll be addressing a topic that an audience member wrote in about last month, which was more or less a curious comment rather than a question. It came in after a podcast I did entitled Should Cyclists Lift and Ride, on the Same Day, and that was episode number 172. For your reference, I explored the interactions of AMPK and MTOR and some other muscle physiology stuff, but Garrett, the audience member who wrote in, spurred on a good point, the point of which we'll be discussing today. The email is fairly long, so I'll summarize in the body of the message here and read the last part which guides today's conversation.
Speaker 1:
In the world of exercise physiology, we once thought lactate, an exercise byproduct, was a waste product. Now we know it to be a fuel source for the body, while being a byproduct of metabolism. I believe the same situation can be applied to strength training. Based on my end of one data, I firmly believe that scientists and coaches do not fully appreciate how strength training should be used to develop peddling power. I don't have a particular question, but my thoughts are that the focus seems to be primarily on neurological development and while that's important, it should only be a small portion of the optimal program. And that's coming from Garrett, like I said. So, garrett, thank you for writing in. We appreciate that. Over to you, kelly. What are your thoughts on this suggestion from Garrett?
Speaker 2:
I think we can really overthink things sometimes and remember strength is strength. The thing that I see the most out of any endurance athlete is the lack of structure, first of all, structure being the most important thing. And when you start talking about structuring and programming weightlifting, you're going to be saying the same words that you're going to be saying for endurance programming Lack of structure, lack of intensity, lack of recovery, even. And for Garrett, there is science there, very much is science, and I think it jumps way ahead of where a lot of people need to be in the endurance world of just trying to get into the gym and be regular about it, because the science it jumps us way forward about velocity into velocity and if you really want to measure what you're doing, the velocity base unit is this big, this is it. This is one of them, one of many. It's a breath one unit. I've had this for years. It's just a little thing. It hooks up to the bar and it measures how fast I'm going. I measure it. I like it for my squats. Mainly we use it for my snatch and my clean and jerk In velocity in the snatch and clean and jerk, it all depends on your height as to how fast you'll lift or where you should lift optimally. I like it on loads of my front squat and my back squat because I can get a number that actually gives me a place, knowing I'm supposed to go heavy today and I need to do it at a certain speed. This gives me I need to do it at a certain speed a quantitative place where I can look at it go. I thought I could go five kilograms heavier than this, but this is telling me I need to stay here. It just gives you a place. So there is science in lifting. You know we can.
Speaker 2:
Greg Everett said today on his Instagram thing he said don't worry to. Felt the death on why it's important. It could be as complicated or simple as you want it to be. Don't worry about the minute stuff. The infinite munition is what he said. Actually, you know and you can. You can drive yourself crazy, experimenting and programming and wondering and why is it good? You know? I think that just get to the gym and have a starting point and have a baseline and we'll get more into what to do with that from there. It's really there's no silver bullet in the answer to why is it good for me or what's it doing to us?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I would say that keep it simple. Keep it simple, sweetheart, is one of the greatest approaches a coach can have. And for some of our listeners that aren't on YouTube, kelly did bring up a device that measures speed of movement in the gym, so we'll get to that too, but that's what she was referring to when she brought that up. But I guess, to fully answer Garrett's curiosity here, kelly, first, let's just kind of separate some of these sections here Do you think that there's any energy pathway or biochemical aspect that researchers, physiologists or strength and conditioning coaches are overlooking, such as we did lactate back in the day, when it comes to strength training?
Speaker 2:
And I may not know the answer to that. You know, I am a coach. I don't get into the actual physiology of the muscle and I'm trying to teach people how to lift, so I think that they've got a pretty good handle on it. I mean, Dr Brian Mann came up with the term velocity based training and if you look to Dr Brian Mann, if you look to Mike Johnson, the people out of NCSS those are the people you're asking that question to, and I don't think they've overlooked anything.
Speaker 1:
I agree with that. I've read I mean, brian Mann's been a hero of mine for quite some time in combination with. I mean, I'm gonna post three different articles that will go along with this episode and there's a ton of information there to read more about VBT, which velocity based training, which Kelly's been talking about here. We'll get into the specifics of that, and then I will also post some good articles that gets into some muscle physiology. We won't go super deep into that today because it's not really the point or the podcasting is probably not a great means of doing that. I'll say in short pretty sure, not I'm pretty sure that we've got a good handle on the bio, chemical and energy pathways for adaptation from strength training as it applies to all the other stuff, including endurance and endurance performance. So then is Kelly, is there a biomechanical secret out there that's a stone unturned in your opinion when it comes to doing strength training applied to endurance?
Speaker 2:
The weightlifting has taught me so much about lifting and I've been lifting since I was 17 years old. It taught me, you know, I used to think I knew how to squat. I used to think I knew how to deadlift, but when I came to weightlifting, everything we do in weightlifting is about positions and biomechanics. So you learn about lever arms a lot and you learn about how to maintain your back angle from the floor position to above knee position and what that actually means to an athlete, and how you can get strong just doing that one little biomechanical thing without even adding weight to it, because it's hard for most people especially cyclists.
Speaker 1:
So, in effect, though, what you're saying is developing strength, for an athlete is developing strength. What you're doing is you're isolating movement in the gym in order to get strong there. From that point, that can apply to anything else that you're going to do as a general movement pattern in your life. Correct, including randomizing.
Speaker 2:
Squatting is the most basic, fundamental, primal movement we do. I mean just bending down to get your kid or picking something up at the grocery store. We need to be able to squat because once you can't squat, things are gonna change in your life.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, totally so. If we go in that premise of strength is strength, no matter what type of athlete you're working with, which I think is like one of the most brilliant quotes I've heard in a while, and it came from you.
Speaker 1:
I'll kind of just like rush through some real quick points and benefits of when we're developing strength in the gym. Here's a couple of boxes that are being checked as we go and then I really want you to share with the audience kind of like your process of how you organize your methods when you're working with athletes. So I would say, for those who want further research and you really want that like muscle physiology type stuff, when you're getting stronger, you're improving your rate coding, you're improving your rate of force development, increasing motor recruitment of your muscle fibers. Also, cross-sectional area of muscle fiber is increasing, which is called hypertrophy, and you're also gonna stimulate bone growth, so you're gonna increase bone density. So all of those benefits are happening when you're doing strength training and when you're doing heavy strength training as well. So all of that is really important stuff.
Speaker 1:
Go there, read more all the things. But I think for most of our listeners we wanna know how to do this, not just like that it's occurring. So I think, as we get into now, kind of like working with athletes, my question to you, kelly, is how do we best develop strength and power in the gym so that we can apply it to the pedals?
Speaker 2:
And that starts by showing up Okay, making a program, making a schedule, and also by journaling. I write everything down that I do and I know. I know what my three rep max is. I know what my I don't do one rep max. I maybe done two in my entire career of lifting because I don't need to. I know what's the purpose for me, you know.
Speaker 2:
I can go, I can make a percentage off of my three rep max, and I know I have a three rep max and I have a five rep max. So building building your program so that it has a structure and then showing up in the gym and staying consistent through the year. Hire a coach. I wouldn't know what to do in the gym without a coach.
Speaker 2:
I would be questioning myself constantly and I think that people make the mistake by feeling like either maybe they're not good enough, and that's the other empowering thing about weightlifting at any level, no matter what level you are at, even if you have to start with a goblet squat, I mean you can empower yourself and you can get better at that. So, wherever you're at, start from the bottom and build yourself up. It's such a positive environment and it's meant to be that way. You know we will get into the actual programming of this, but I think the first things first is to make the commitment. If you have it and you can hire a coach, hire a coach that can help you with the movements and the proper movements, because what athlete doesn't like to be challenged with you? Know a thing a number. I love numbers and if I can have a number in hand. I'm like I can get this better. You know, and I think most athletes are like that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I agree with that. I think that hiring a coach whether it is for form, technique or overall program design I think that's a great point If people are curious to do it themselves, because we do have a lot of self-coached athletes listening to this. I think starting with the numbers and committing to kind of like that journaling process and getting organized is a great place to start. You mentioned some five rep and three rep and even one rep max type stuff, and what that means is some sort of maximum with a weight as your potential.
Speaker 1:
What you've done before, I would say, in the world of cycling. It's kind of like doing our 20 minute cycling test or a field test of some kind. We have to know where some maximums are and then dial it back and get organized with our intensity going from there. All of that stems into some of this velocity based training, which you've already mentioned a little bit. But, kelly, do you wanna give us a quick history of where this three rep, five rep or just rep maximum comes from and then apply it to this velocity based training that we're going to get into next?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So it kind of goes back to Tutor Boppa's way of periodization and I think most cyclists know who he is and his terms of. In his periodization with strength was to use percentages of your one rep max, and what they used to do was there's like a calculation of the five rep max. If you can do three at this weight, you're gonna be able to do five at that weight, which I've actually tested, and it's pretty off. I mean, it'd be a hard thing for me to say that I can do what it says I can do. I know what I can do and I know what I can't do. So he had a way of terming that and there are a lot of lifters still use percentages. But Carmela Bosco, who was an exercise physiologist, came along he's out of Spain, I believe and he came and created these same traits with velocity only it was returned as starting strength, speed, strength strength, speed, accelerative strength and then absolute strength. So these things, all these different terms I'm not gonna get too far beyond that but were put together with percentages.
Speaker 2:
There was a study done I believe it was in Australia in 2014. Where they measured athletes percentages and they did velocity as well, and they found in that study that the percentages that they did, I mean you could do 70% on one day. The athlete comes in. Now you've got everything to take into account. You've got fatigue, you've got work, you've got just don't feeling it today, you know, and 70% can feel like a house sometimes. So they found in that study that there's an 18% plus minus on either side of the percentages.
Speaker 2:
So that's a big change. So with velocity-based training you've got this device now and you know where you want to aim. And most of my squatting is done for absolute strength. So I know I'm going to move that weight at 0.5 meters per second. We can get into. During season you might not want to go that heavy, so we might want to get a little bit lighter. So they're moving the bar faster, like for a competitive criterion rider or a track cyclist. They probably would only do absolute strength at one time of the year and do speed strength another time of the year because they want to get out of the saddle or they want to be able to move and turn the pedals.
Speaker 1:
So just to kind of recap that much so far, because it gets a little complicated when we're talking to athletes in this way, because I mean, traditional strength training is essentially sets and reps throw some weight on, move it away, we go. But what Kelly was just saying here is, historically we've done that Recently we've been exploring that there's a huge variability in the way that that is monitored from a load or a training stress standpoint. If we want to use some terms from cycling, that would effectively be saying that the power meter that you're using would swing 36% total if you have an 18% plus or minus of what you could do on the given day relative to the field test that you just did. So that would be, in my opinion, a poor tool to measure or monitor exercise intensity by alone correct.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, well, look at it this way If you have an athlete who's going by RPE, some days it could feel like a tank. It's just going to feel like I can't move this fast. But with the power meter, it allows you power as power. It shows you where you're at.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So I think the analogy that I'm trying to use here, kelly, is like we had a decent method of quantifying load or intensity based on previous field testing in the gym, but now we're getting smarter and we can test and quantify speed of movement and apply that to training and it does a much more successful job of making an adaptation to the athlete when we're trying to prescribe what's being done. So essentially, we're going to say, okay, use this load, use this weight, but do it at this speed. Now, in training velocity based training and that's really what we're talking about with Brian Mann. He has kind of like poured his life into, is that right?
Speaker 2:
Yes, that's correct, and you know the whole point of it is. I don't expect any athletes that I work with to go buy a velocity based training unit because of the fact that I'm working so much on positions with them. At first, velocity based training should not even be used until the point that you're actually comfortable with the movement. So it's positions and movement first, okay. Then speed comes into play and then the weight comes into place. You've got three things there, in that hierarchy.
Speaker 1:
Love it, love it, okay. Well, I would say, let's just go right into that, because what I don't want this podcast to be is the catalyst for everybody listening to go out and buy a velocity meter. Yeah, exactly, it's really what we're learning from the lab and what we're using from these high tech devices to apply to the everyday movement. So, kelly, let's hear from you, let's explain your process, because what you told me as we were developing this podcast was your philosophy is train fast to be fast. So tell me about your process and how train fast to be fast gets woven into that.
Speaker 2:
So I, you know, I start off with positions and movement and everybody's so different. I get some athletes that are so good at it and they move so quickly for me up right away. Some take longer than others. You know the whole point of the velocity based training and teaching. That is so that when people hear rep max they tend to think it's go for broke, and that's not what it's about.
Speaker 2:
And I like to process things so that if I have an athlete coming into, going into the gym three days a week or two days a week, whichever it may be, I want to make sure that they're doing the same movement on day one, same movement on day two, same same same movement on day three, so that they become so familiar with these movements. It becomes flawless. With that we can start adding speed to that and the speed isn't like you think it may be, because with the unit, with the velocity based unit, I've learned that it's just it's more in the more in the asset, it's not the decent, that's fast, it's just the pushing up and in a good, flawless movement. So with that we take that and we build it. It doesn't become how much weight did you push today is how much weight did you push today at point five meters per second? That's how that goes.
Speaker 2:
Understanding that and what that is, hopefully, will keep people from going into the gym when they're heard, when they're told rep max, don't. Don't do that. Give yourself a four week period. Five week period where you build, build, build. Then give yourself a week in there where you can deload your weights and then go for it and see what you can do with good movement. Only Only the good movement counts. So that's it in the nutshell, where I start with my athletes.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So I guess, to recap there, you first start with good form, meaning it's the position of the bar, it's the movement pattern in general, and what you're trying to do is create a very good movement pattern before you move on to anything else when you're working with an athlete, and then from there you work on speed or the velocity of movement, as soon as you can do, either body weight or the lighter bar or something like that, if you can move that quickly with good form. Now we move on to the third step and that's when you actually add load or you start to add weight to the movement correct.
Speaker 2:
Yes, that's correct, and then deciding which exercises we do depends on the individual and what their abilities are with racking a bar and how low they can squat.
Speaker 1:
All that yeah, and I would say one quick story to illustrate this is I remember when I was first learning how to power snatch, for example, or hang snatch. Can you describe what a hang snatch is for our listeners?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, hang snatch or hang clean would be going from the above knee position to vertical and then snatching. Usually it can be a power snatch or a full depth snatch or clean, but the hanging is from the hang position above the knee.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, sorry, I probably could have specified hang or power, so I kind of put Kelly on the spot there. But essentially what you're doing is you're taking the bar from your hip, from a hang snatch standpoint, and you're putting it directly over your head. Okay, it takes a lot of power, a lot of speed to get that done. My quick story is when I was learning this from Dennis Klein and this was in college he was very strict about good form, then develop speed before you do anything else. And it was like months and all we would do is use like a broom doll, like just a light piece of wood.
Speaker 1:
And that's all we were doing for months and months and months and, of course, everybody in the program. This is a strength and conditioning concentration that developed us into CSCS from the NSCA. But like I know what he's doing now, I didn't. At the time I was just I wanted to add weight and see what we could do, and we had fancy force plates sitting over there and I wanted to measure everything. But effectively, you know, he taught us well and I still have that good form today, even though I know I can't load myself properly because I would injure myself if I just threw on a bunch of weight, right, even though I can still do the form really well.
Speaker 1:
But that's the point that Kelly is trying to communicate here is to bring it back down to, like cycling, performance. If you want performance, that means you want to be fast, you want to pedal your bike fast, you want to go fast and you want muscles that can produce force and power to do that. And so, for our listeners, if you're very interested in that adaptation, you need to move things fast. You don't need to just lift things heavy. Okay, in fact, you need to go fast before you can go heavy, and I think right now it's popular is lift heavy stuff. Right, and that is there's benefit and there's there's things there that can be gleaned. But, kelly, any more that you want to add to that with this kind of like popular concept of lift heavy stuff.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, learn your positions. It's taken me years and it took me until this past year at Southeast regionals. I got a three kilogram total on my total and it took me five years to get that. You know it took me five years to get that and because I was, I am constantly. You know there's an age thing going on there, but still there's also a learning curve there.
Speaker 2:
Of you start putting the heavier weight on the bar, your positions will change. So just take your time, get in there and learn positions. If you can't go to the floor all the way on the deadlift, raise the floor, start higher so that you've got that position proper. As you strengthen it in a position that's just below your knee, you will strengthen that and you will find the range actually gets better because you're taking a muscle to its end range. You don't want to go to the point of distorting your spine, you want to take your muscle to the end range, do the contraction and then add some speed to it. Clean pulls are the best example of that. Learn how to do some speed into a pole, because the studies are showing that just athletes that do clean pulls they develop power quicker than anybody.
Speaker 1:
Well, we're going to learn. We're going to learn how to do this more next week, so I would say, for now, let's keep it there. I mean, certainly we covered a ton of information today, including all the benefits of strength training being more than just neuromuscular adaptations, by the way, and the benefits are abundant. Okay, we'll talk more about some of those in the next episode, but I would say, let's let the seeds planted for today. Let's let those seep in and don't worry, if you liked what you heard today from CTS coach Kelly Moelyn, come back next week because she's going to walk us through with examples of how she takes her good form, speed and load steps, applies that to an actual athlete and the end goal is for you to apply to your training, to develop better pedaling power. And, kelly, thanks for joining us on the time crunch cyclist and for all of our listeners. Come back next week to learn more and I'll see you in the next episode.