TrainingPeak's Joe Friel - Twitter Q and A

TrainingPeak's Joe Friel - Twitter Q and A

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Ahead of Joe Friel’s talk at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester this Sunday, we caught up with the elite endurance coach to ask him the best fan questions posted on Twitter.

Joe Friel is co-founder of TrainingPeaks, British Cycling’s official supplier, and author of The Cyclist’s Training Bible and The Triathlete’s Training Bible.

Find out more about Joe’s talk.

Joe Friel: Three things. 1) Spend more time listening to your athletes than talking to them. A coach’s job is to determine what is standing between the athlete and his/her goal accomplishment. The answers will be found in observation. 2) There are no new ways of training that must be protected as secrets. Give your information and knowledge away. The more you give, the more you receive. 3) Pay close attention to what those who disagree with you say. You may discover some day that they were right.

Joe Friel: To measure the progress of your anaerobic endurance, note the progress of your power output for intervals over several weeks. The numbers should be rising. To measure aerobic endurance improvement, do a weekly ride of 1-2 hours steady in HR zone 2. After the ride, divide your normalized power for the z2 segment by your average HR for the same segment. That is your 'efficiency factor'. It should generally be rising over time but there will be a few setbacks along the way.

Joe Friel: Perhaps the best for most cyclists is strength training, especially for the ankle, knee and hip extensors. Heavy load exercises such as squats, lunges, and step ups will improve the ability to apply force to the pedal.

Joe Friel: I’m asked this question several times each year. I wish I had an answer for everyone working shifts. Each athlete and their work circumstances are unique so the challenge is to determine what training patterns best fit the rider’s situation and plug that into their lifestyle and then repeat it with small tweaks going forward.

Joe Friel: I’m tempted to give Eddie Merckx’s reply to a similar question: "Ride lots". That’s not too far off the mark. You’ll need to gradually build volume to approach what the event demands of you for those seven days. Along the way, include lots of separate hill training, again simulating the types of climbs expected. It may take the better part of a macrocycle (perhaps 20 weeks) to prepare properly.

Joe Friel: Focus on intensity. As the workouts get shorter, they need to become harder if you’re going to stress the body enough to cause aerobic adaptation.

Joe Friel: As with the earlier question, do short, intense intervals in each sport. Anaerobic endurance intervals would be one type. As you get closer to the race (last 12 weeks or so) do more race-like intensities for longer intervals.

Joe Friel: For the aging athlete, the focus must be on training density – how closely spaced the hard workouts are. At some point after age 50, most athletes need to have more recovery days between the high-intensity sessions. Hard-easy-hard-easy may work when in your 30s and even 40s, but at some point it will need to be hard-easy-easy-hard-easy-easy.

Joe Friel: I’d start by including your doctor and a sport-savvy physio in the discussion. The short answer is that it will be a long, slow process that shouldn’t be rushed. They will fill in the details since they know your situation.

Joe Friel: It really depends on your chronic diet. It you have a high-carb diet then you need a meal high in carbs before a race. I’d prefer my athletes to eat something like potato since it’s more nutritionally dense, but it’s really not a big deal since this is not a daily occurrence. If you eat a high-fat chronic diet, then you would eat what you normally have for meals the day before.

Joe Friel: Well, I guess it depends on what the sport is. If the sport is fishing, then no problem. But if it’s ultra-marathon running then it will completely upset your bike training and performance. If it’s something inbetween, say like doing a sprint-distance triathlon, then the impact would be rather minor. But realize that if you have high goals in the sport of bike racing, seriously participating in other challenging endurance sports during the build up to your race season will be counterproductive.

Joe Friel: I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that most TrainingPeaks users do not have a power meter. Most probably have HR monitors. I suspect only a few use only RPE to gauge intensity. But the bottom line is that you don’t have to have expensive equipment to use TP as a planning and analysis tool.

Find out more about Joe’s talk at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester.