The Strong Savvy Cyclist & Triathlete Podcast

As endurance athletes we tend to take a lot of what we do for granted: going out, pushing our limits mentally and physically, and looking for the "next big goal" to strive towards. None of that is possible without a lot of systems in the body being healthy and functioning well.

In this episode, Joshua Bradley shares with us his journey from high-tech startup CEO, to IBD and Crohn's patient, and his incredibly journey from finding the bike as a way to build health and resilience, and his path to living a life built around his health, family, and daily activities that include strength training, running, and riding.

The return from a serious injury involves far more than the physical healing, yet it seems that we often still forget this. In this episode Dr. Lisa Lewis shares with us insights and advice on how to best see these challenging times as ways to improve ourselves on many more levels. You'll hear from HVT Summer 2023 Intern Jordana at the end as to her reflections and thoughts on this conversation, and why she wishes someone had shared these things with her when she was going through her serious injury and recovery process.

Summer is officially here, and that means it's time to hit the heavier weights (by RPE, or course!) and to get in some plyometrics alongside, to help get your power and strength on the bike or run up! But this goes against pretty much all "common knowledge"! In-season should be just my sport and "core work"....Not if you're looking for your best performances! But the Amount of heavy lifting and plyometrics you do matters, as does the quality of each. In this episode Jason Fitzgerald of StrengthRunning.com shares with us how to think about strength & plyometrics, as well as how to best dose them for the results you want, and deserve!

"Hey Coach, I wanted to ask you what pre-workout supplement do you think I should use?"..... "Hey, Quick Question, I just saw this new sports supplement 'kill the burn' that's supposed to help your FTP- what do you think?"..... The world of sports performance has rapidly been changing as more and more companies (both small and big) have entered the sports supplement market, to the tune of BILLIONS of $$$ being made each year.

So, what supplements are actually worth you hard earned time and money? This Episode covers 3 must-haves for anyone looking to improve their in-sport performance, as well as one supplement which some many consider giving a try.

***DISCLAIMER: You must consult your physician before taking any supplements to ensure that it is safe and healthy for you. I am not a Doctor, Dietitian, or Nutritionist, and these are only my opinions. You should seek professional guidance in order to determine what is right and safe for you.***

How should you train through your season (in strength training)? Should you skip your strength when you feel little sorenesses or tightspots, and just foam roll the crap outta them? Should you snowplow through and just "lift heavy $h!t"? Tony Gentilcore shares with us some fantastic and easy-to-use tips and advice on how to keep your strength training on point mid-season, so that you can look, feel, and move better than ever!

As Masters Athletes, what are the areas we should be looking for special considerations in our training? What are some things that we can do to improve our fitness and outcomes? We cover 3 important areas in this week's episode: 1. Are there special considerations for your "Aerobic Window"? 2. Special considerations for setting your training intensities 3. Special considerations for Strength Training --Please note that this week we do not dive into Peri- or Post-menopausal issues in this episode.

When we start to ride our bikes, or practice endurance sports, it often hits us as a bit of an addiction: How far can we go? What new roads and trails can we find? Where DOES that road at that last turnaround point for your 70 miler actually go? But as we progress, we begin to look around (mostly up) to see what the best around us are doing to see if we can emulate their progress (ok, ok, we want to do a bit better). While some may look to get as fast as possible, as quickly as possible, others, like co-host of the Wise Athletes Podcast Joe Lavelle, are eyeing optimization for longevity. Not this year, or next year, but the next 5, 10, or 20 years.

Joe sat down with us to talk about his journey as a podcast host and his quest to optimize for longevity: How he fell into road cycling through one of life's twists and turns, eventually found track cycling, and how he looks to reap the rewards, one step at a time, from the low-hanging fruits that are being offered to you at each step along the way.

As we venture on our quest to get in shape, get faster, or lose some weight, it seems everyone around us- especially those we love and whom we care for their opinions- have "thoughts" to share with us...which often undermine our very commitment and dedication to where we want to go. This short episode tackles a few of those objections, and shares tips on how you can keep on track.

What does it take to not only see fitness gains, but also more life in your current and future years, as a Masters Athlete?

How can you stay motivated for your longterm goals, while committing to your short term goals, that often don't seem to be in sync? This episode we talked with Dr. Jim Slauson in a deep-dive into how you can progress from being a Masters Athlete, to a Grand Master Athlete- one who not only has fitness and strength, but much more life, enjoyment, and balance, as you head towards Dr. Peter Attia's Centurian Decathlon.

Click to open most web pages related to cycling or triathlon and you're certain to find a number of articles touting the performance benefit of some kind of "new superfood" or "must-have" food. Following these articles can have you constantly shuffling your weekly menu, and constantly stressing about what you are or are not eating. In this episode we cut to the core of what foods we've seen help support hard training and racing over the last 10 years. Simple, easy to grasp, and even more important-easy to include in a sustainable and reasonable diet.

What do you get when you have a highly accomplished endurance athlete with a PhD in applied Physiology and who is an Registered Dietician? You get Namrita Brooke, with some absolutely stellar guidance on how to improve your nutrition for better performances. This week Dr. Brooke shares with us insights as to how we can best cut through the fluff in the media to figure out what and how to apply the latest research, the top 3-4 pillars for masters athletes, and much, much more.

How do you keep your strength training adaptations through the entire cycling & triathlon competitive season? It's both simple, and easy...but it takes a little knowledge and effort. Here's how!

Open your computer or smart phone these days, and you're bombarded with articles, social media snippets, and programs touting the latest and greatest "bio-hack" or "training tip" to help you get stronger, fitter, and faster. While some of these may hold some truth, and value, they are often another distraction from the ACTUAL thing you need to get results: Adaptation. In this episode expert cycling coach Tim Cusick shares with us deep insights into the importance of adaptation in the training process, and how he builds programs to ensure that the results they're after come to fruition. Get ready to hit warp speed on your results from your training, as we talk Adaptation!

There is a up and coming "trend" in strength training which is being called "Auto-Regulatory Training" in the research community. It's been mentioned in the Dr. Andrew Huberman Lab Podcast series with Dr. Andy Galpin, as well as through a number of recent articles. But what is Auto-Regulation Training? Is it really new? What do you need to know in order to use it best? 

"How do I improve my results?"

This is a question we all ask ourselves, whether it's in our cycling and triathlon performance, or professionally. While there are a number of ways we can improve our results, the crux of this question boils down to the core of: How do I become a better decision maker? In this episode we talk with Cheryl Strauss Einhorn to learn how to improve our decision making process by improving the process itself, and learning how to better tackle and recognize our blind spots, biases, and poor practices.

Wanna have your best year yet? These 5 steps will help get your on the fast track to a season filled with consistency, recovery, performance, and looking & feeling your best....but you need to start now!

Steven Moody has been a triathlon coach for over 20 years, over that time he has carefully sculpted his craft to allow each and every athlete with whom he works with to have a unique and powerful athlete-coach relationship. In this episode Steven gives you an insight as to how he thinks about the athlete-coach relationship, and gives insights and tips as to how you can improve your results, and your relationship.        A part of that, is building the level of trust to follow your coaches advice and guidance to take time off form training, structured training, or even doing any of your primary sports and instead, trying something different. 

If strength training is supposed to be good for endurance athletes, then why is it that we all seem to know one (or three, or five) others who have gotten injured from strength training? This episode talks about the top 5 general reasons why cyclists and triathletes get injured while strength training.

Breathing can have a far broader effect on your performance than many think. In this episode Mike Robertson shares with us insights as to how incorporating breathing into your strength programming can improve posture, recovery, power, and even mobility. 

Over the last few weeks while I've been recovering from my injury + surgery a few key items kept coming to mind, that I'd like to share with you... simply put: Recovery IS performance. Take a listen to this weeks short episode.

This episode is one I'm very excited to share with you, as I'm joined by Erin Carson of EC Fit Boulder, and Chris Peden of Combined Athletic Performance, to discuss strength training for endurance athletes. We cover a number of topics including Breathing, how we program strength training, as well as the role of strength training in an endurance athletes training regimen, and much more!

If you enjoy this episode, and have a question you'd like to have us discuss in future Coaches round tables, or here on the podcast, click on the "question" associated with this podcast episode, and let us know!

The last decade has been quite a wild ride: from cyclists & triathletes finally beginning to embrace strength training as a necessity, to weathering a pandemic, there have been lots of lessons learned.... This episode shares with you 10 Lessons I've learned in the last 10 years, that can help you get on the fast track to success, whether you're an athlete, a coach, or someone who just enjoys endurance sports. 

Each discipline of cycling has it's own demands on the body...this means different physiological needs, and to some degree, some nature or G-d given abilities are needed in order to succeed in some disciplines. This week we take a mini-dive into the reasons why Track Sprint riders are a completely different beast than the rest of us, and how you begin to weed out your Critical Concepts to help get more from your strength training and in-sport training!

For many of us, the challenge of cycling is not only about getting faster and fitter, but also about our evolution and growth as a human being; being pushed outside of our comfort zone, and to achieve new levels of abilities through our on-bike endeavors. And while power meters, heart rate monitors, and social apps like Strava and Zwift allow us to measure our outputs, what often is not measured, is how we use (or don't use) the process to improve.

Joanna Yates is a MTB Skills Coach out of Sedona Arizona, who is a living example of embracing the process and using the process, not the output, as a measure to growing towards our full potential. We hung out to talk MTB skills development, how to use the bike to become a better version of yourself, and the importance of stepping up to the challenges with a cool, calm, and collected energy. 

Why do endurance athletes rush into heavy lifting? Well, much of it has to do with our misunderstanding of how strength training works, and the processes that need to happen for us to safely and effectively lift heavy stuff. This weeks episode will help you have a better understanding of why we should ramp into heavier weights, as well as why your energy system trainings (intervals), seem to have a much faster time to improvement (because they do!).

When it comes to building top performances (regardless of whether you're a pro or a "recreational" endurance athlete), there are a lot of considerations that go far beyond your primary sport, and training "for sports results".  Kriss Hendy of Strength for Endurance and I sat down and talked how endurance athletes can get a lot more out of their training, not just through strength training, but by having a better understanding of you, as a whole. 

We cover:

• Why you cannot just do a "lower body + core" workout...Gotta train the whole
• High performance begins with learning, and mastering, the basics
• You cannot out train poor tissues and postures
• The importance of learning how to land (before you hit those box jumps)
• Global health keys to pay attention to

and much, much more.

Connect with Kriss:

Back in October, Vern C. replied to an email I sent out to the HVTraining Newsletter with a great question: Does Squatting Make You More Quad Dominant? Should he instead do deadlifts to activate his posterior chain?

This weeks episode, as promised, I give Vern, and you, a deeper dive into this question, helping you understand why these aren't quite the questions we should be asking... 

If you haven't heard of Zoe Backstedt yet, you may not be much into the juniors levels of racing. But I really hope that todays episode with MULTI-DISCIPLINE and Multi-World Champion Zoe, and her performance team, will help you understand the massive wave of changes to how training is done for performance in cycling are happening.... and it's all coming as a trickle-up from the juniors. Thanks in large part to forward thinking coaches and parents, who, instead of relying on "research to tell them what works", would rather look for inspiration and ideas from other sports and realms of performance, to identify trends that are working.

In this weeks episode, forward looking folks are Strength Coach Chris Peden and Magnus Backstedt, who have sought out far better ways to help Zoe attain her "best self", through practicing a variety of sports, utilizing consistent strength training (not how everyone thinks or does it), and allowing Zoe to focus on the overall goal of ENJOYMENT of the process, not just results.

This interview is such a breath of fresh air in todays world of "research based practices" and "technology driving performance", as rather than taking a reductionist point of view, Zoe, Chris, and Magnus look for things that will help keep it fun, stay on track of the overall performance goals, all while allowing Zoe to be her best self, and have quite a bit of fun while doing so!

How do you know the strength training program your following is any good? We take a look at the top 3 ways that will help you know if your strength training program is good for your cycling and triathlon endeavours.

This week we answer an email asking a question many cyclists and triathletes have: How do I choose a strength training program that will actually help me?

We go over the 5 step crucial, yet simple, steps that you should take, when choosing a pre-made strength program. 

Breathing- if you ain't dead, you're doing it right.... right?   Well, not so much. Turns out that your breathing can significantly reduce your performance, and limit your recovery. Figuring out how to train your breathing, and not with some gimmick technology piece that doesn't work, can seem complex and overwhelming. This week Steve Neal shares his 30+ year experience coaching with you, to help you understand why breathing is important, what you can do to improve it, and how to easily implement it.

There are a few questions in history which remain unanswered: Why does Vanilla get such a bad rap? Which came first: Chicken or egg? And ho is a cyclist or triathlete to fit it all (strength training, cycling, recovery) in?  In this episode we take a detailed question on this subject from an HVTraining email list subscriber, and break it down, step by step, to help YOU learn the thought processes necessary to ensure you get the most out of your time and energy training.

In part 2 of this interview with Dr. Stuart McGill, we talk about the so often neglected/ overlooked lynchpin to performance and getting pain-free: move well 24/7/365.

Simple, but not easy. 

Pick up a copy Dr. McGill's Book: "Back Mechanic" to help gain better understanding of back pain, and how you can improve your daily habits to prevent it. 

As August winds down, and fall hastily approaches, many of us feel that we SHOULD be looking forward to the cooler days of fall, and the longer endurance rides that it often entails....yet that excitement to get out and ride is waning, and the appeal to stay in bed a little longer seems to be winning more often than naught.

This episode shares a few thoughts on End of Season Burnout and fatigue, and offers a few uncommon approaches in how to deal with it. While some are uncommon simply in their timing, others just aren't main stream (yet).

Links to the Stronger After 50 Strength Training program, Steps 1-3 now available on TrainingPeaks:

Strength Training is no longer "new" to cyclists and triathletes... Head out on nearly any group ride or masters workout and you're bound to hear others talking about their strength training, or at least something they've read about strength training for their sport. 

When it comes to strength training there is far more to it than the mechanics... In this episode we talk about the 4 Phases of Strength Training that nobody talks (or even thinks) about, yet has massive impact on what results you may get.

Mikael Erickson is known by many as the host of the very popular That Triathlon Show podcast and founder of Scientific Triathlon, a fantastic resource for endurance athletes.

In this episode Mikael reflects on his last 7 years and over 325 episodes of podcasting, and shares his thoughts on how we've progressed, and where things may be going.

Surf on any social media page or even on popular fitness blogs, and they'll sell you the idea that in order to get to high performance you need to do some crazy complex workout program. Oh, and don't forget the ego boosting or busting super complex exercises that get tons of likes on Instagram and Facebook (Hello high box jump and heavy squat and deadlift!). 

But if you're after real performance enhancement, and peak performances, it's actually a very different story. 

You can't handle the truth! Because it's way simpler than those great liars...(errr marketers), tell you it is. -Hat tip to Seth Godin on this one. 

The title says it all: Nobody asked me to share these concerns, but this is an episode I've been thinking about doing for over a year now. And, well.... it seems that the time is right for these concerns to be shared so that we can all begin having important discussions about them.

There are not definitive answers given, just some observations from some guy who's been in and around the fitness and performance industries for a bit.

Don Larkin is a strength coach based in Harrisburg, Pa, who has been working with endurance athletes of all ages and abilities for over 10 years. We sat down with Don to talk about how to be a more savvy consumer of information and "advice" that we see given online every day, that can lead us astray from what we actually need, or need to be focusing on. Questions covered include:

• How to actually improve fitness & strength
• Why strength training is often skipped or neglected by endurance athletes
• How to look at yourself or your athlete as a whole
• How to be a better coach to your athletes
• What you need to identify early on in a strength training program or swim/bike/run program to help an athlete improve and stay healthy
• How to interview a coach

And perhaps most importantly, the critical skill of building a quality network of professionals with complimentary skillsets, and not hesitating to refer out.

This one's a great one!

Connect with Don

So you are strength training cyclist or triathlete....The big question is almost always: How often in a week should strength training take place?

5 days a week?

3 days?

This episode you get the no-nonsense answer.

Vern Gabetta has been coaching for over 50 years, and has penned more than 10 books on the subject. Over that time he has seen many fads and popular approaches come and go, all the while continuing to build strong, resilient athletes and human beings under his guidance. In this episode, Vern shares some of his wisdom on becoming a better coach, helping us understand the difference between statistical significance and coaching significance. 

We dive into the world of "specialization" and discuss whether it's helping us push training forward, or perhaps not having as big of a positive effect as we would think, and some various ways to help us learn more about movement, the human body, and how to develop strong, healthy, and lifelong athletes. 

This is a great episode that you won't want to miss!

Connect with Vern:

This weeks episode is a short one, as I share the focus for 2022:

Instead of more (books read, content produced) We're going to go deeper, and re-read some of the most influential books read, re-take the best courses, and produce a few new courses ourselves. 

It's not minimalism, but rather the ability to dig 8 inches wide, and go 5 miles deep. 

When it comes to making cyclists stronger on the bike via strength training, it's important to look at strength training from a different lens. Chris Peden does that...but he wasn't always a cyclist- far from it in fact.

In this episode Chris Shares his experiences that brought him to cycling a bit later in his athletic career, how he views strength training for endurance athletes, and some fantastic insights to help you get far more from your strength training, rather than just more weight on the bar or more reps. 

This one's a fantastic one!

Connect with Chris:

I've managed to pick up a case of Strep throat, so this weeks episode is a short, quick hitter with a few topics I've had the last week in the weight room.

Make sure to subscribe, as we've got some phenomenal guest interviews coming up that you won't want to miss!