The Training & Nutrition Secrets Of Tenacious, Tough, Aggressive Professional Cyclist Svein Tuft.

Ben Greenfield (0:01)

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Svein Tuft (0:04)

Getting yourself into that zone, or whatever it is for you that is, helps you just focus on that one goal for the day, then that's what you need to do. I never have a good result when I'm always forcing and trying to make something happen, whereas if I let go and just go with intuition, then that seemed to work the best for me. What starts to happen is you lose like your physical power, but you have so much experience, and a lot more knowledge at your side of like where to expend that energy. So they kind of balance each other out.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition.

Voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Ben Greenfield (0:59)

Whatever it is for you that's the natural movement. Get out there when you look at all the studies done.

Studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

SPEAKER_3 (1:11)

All the information you need in one place. Right here. Right now.

On the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Ben Greenfield (1:33)

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and you may remember a guy named Barry Murray, who I've interviewed on the podcast before, particularly for the very popular episode we had called Five Simple Steps to Turning Yourself Into a Fat-Burning Machine, where Barry goes into everything from ketosis to metabolic efficiency, to all the things that you need to do to your body to be able to get it into a condition where it can go for long periods of time using fuel very efficiently.

Well, Barry, whose opinion I highly respect, recently contacted me and told me that I must look into this professional cyclist named Svein Tuft because this guy was doing things that a lot of other people weren't doing, and he was also an older cyclist who had figured out how to get good performance despite being older than a lot of his professional cycling peers. So I looked into Svein and found out that this guy is known as one of the most tenacious, toughest, most aggressive professional cyclists in the Tour de France.

And he gets injured, he bounces back, he's got this spirit of against all odds tenacity, and perhaps most amazingly, he actually began his entry into the world of professional cycling many years later than most professional cyclists even do their first race. So an extremely unorthodox cyclist. And he also has some very unorthodox training and eating methods too that I wanna delve into on today's show because Svein is actually my guest in today's episode. He's gotten off his bike at least long enough to join me here in front of the mic. So Svein, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Svein Tuft (3:29)

Thanks for having me. Quite an introduction.

Ben Greenfield (3:33)

Well, I was actually pretty surprised. You got your start into pro cycling, which is a super hard sport pretty late. How old were you when you actually became a pro?

Svein Tuft (3:44)

Yeah, that's a very funny story. But my first races were when I was 23

Ben Greenfield (3:53)

Okay, and you're getting most pro cyclists starting off about when?

Svein Tuft (3:57)

Well, a lot of the European guys are starting anywhere from 12 to 13 years old. They're racing pretty solidly, you know?

Ben Greenfield (4:07)

Yeah, it would be like a professional tennis player starting to play tennis when they're like 15 or 16 years old or something like that, probably about that same core layer. Why did you start so late?

Svein Tuft (4:20)

Well, you know, I never grew up with cycling, and I knew nothing about the sport up until the age of 22, 23 And I spent, geez, quite a few years. How I got into cycling in the first place was I really loved climbing mountains. And when I was younger, I didn't really have a lot of money.

So I bought a pretty cheap bike at like a secondhand store and started doing trips into the mountains that way.

And as soon as I started that, it was like I was hooked. I was hooked on traveling by bike. And that started basically like a four-year journey for me, traveling up to Alaska and down to the United States. I went up to Alaska two times from British Columbia, but it was more of a lifestyle thing. I would work when I could, when I could find some work and building log cabins and all kinds of different jobs.