4 Cycling Experts: Exactly How To Train Over Winter

Anthony Walsh (0:00)

Welcome back, I've had a chance over the past 1,400 episodes to speak to some of the greatest minds in cycling, from world tour coaches to sport scientists, about how you should actually spend your winter. In this video, I've pulled together their collective wisdom on base training, from intensity to duration and frequency. I've put in their thoughts and what I've learned myself from coaching riders inside our Not Done Yet coaching group. If you're about to head into the dark months, if you're about to come head to head with the slow winter miles, I encourage you to watch this first because it could totally change the way you consider approaching winter training and base miles. Your polarized training model, emphasizing a significant portion of training at lower intensities.

And I happened to, when I came home from that, I was searching around for what's the most googled questions relating to cycling and cycling training. And the most googled question is how do I cycle fast at a low heart rate? So I thought this would be a nice place to start. Can you explain the physiological mechanisms that allow cyclists to achieve higher speeds while maintaining lower heart rates through your approach?

Stephen Seiler (1:13)

It's a great question to kind of, you know, you kind of have to know what are the limiting factors for endurance. We have this model that we, that maybe we've used a hundred years to figure out. And that is that number one, we have to be able to move oxygen from the air we breathe to, you know, through the lungs, into the blood and out to the muscles. And you can't use more oxygen than you can deliver. So that's the first kind of truth about endurance training is in endurance performance is good endurance athletes can deliver relative to their body size a lot of oxygen out via a really healthy set of lungs and a healthy heart that's probably pretty big relative to their body. And it has a big stroke volume. So every time it beats, it pushes out a lot of blood. And then that blood needs to have quite a lot of oxygen in it. That's an advantage. That's why we go to altitude sometimes. That's why if you're anemic, that's a problem because every liter of that blood carries a certain amount of oxygen.

And more is better. So then we get to the muscle. And that's where you use oxygen, right? And you use oxygen in these little things called mitochondria.

And more is better. More mitochondria equals greater ability to oxidize fat, greater ability to keep the intensity, you might say, to use a lot of fat and avoid producing a lot of lactate and hydrogen ions. So then we start talking about this idea of how big is your aerobic capacity and what percentage of it can you use without it costing you a lot, without producing these metabolic byproducts that make it harder to produce force.

That's kind of the simple summary. So a lot of the training that happens is about building mitochondria, it's about building capillaries, and making that musculature as effective as possible at using fat and then using carbohydrate without generating a lot of these by-products that actually inhibit muscle contraction, that cause fatigue.

Anthony Walsh (3:45)

So can you ride too easy?

Stephen Seiler (3:47)

Yeah, I think so. For sure, I think you can, when you're riding so slow and you're about to fall over, I think there is a lower level, but it will depend on the athlete.

For example, me, I'm an old dog pushing 60, but I don't do much of anything under 150 watts as training.

But in that area of 150 to 175 or 180, that's what maybe I would call zone 1 for me. And then when I bump around 200, I'm in zone 2 And when I've been reasonably fit, then 220 was that LT1 power for me. And so I have used that conceptually in my head, this idea of sometimes I'm in zone 1, sometimes I'm in zone 2 But let's remember, the signaling process is not just intensity, it's intensity times duration. So to qualify your question, you say, well, how much? I'd say, well, are we talking zone 1? I might do 3 hours in zone 1 or 90 minutes or 2 hours in zone 2 Does that make sense? So it's a sliding scale. Yeah.

Anthony Walsh (5:07)

Well, given that that is quite an arbitrary line that's drawn between zone 1 and zone 2, and historically, we've prescribed recovery rides in zone 1

Is the whole idea of a recovery ride a fallacy? Is recovery only happening passively?