Summary

In this episode of the RCA Podcast, expert bike fitter and sports physiotherapist Neill Stanbury discusses his recent performance improvements despite a reduced training load. He shares insights on the impact of dietary changes, weight training, and the importance of understanding insulin resistance in optimizing cycling performance. The conversation highlights how strategic adjustments in training and nutrition can lead to significant gains, even with limited time for workouts.

Takeaways

Achieving best performance on reduced training hours is possible. Dietary changes, including reduced sugar intake, can enhance performance. Weight training is crucial for improving cycling power. Intermittent fasting can help manage energy levels and cravings. Insulin resistance may affect performance and energy management. A balanced approach to training can yield better results than sheer volume. Listening to your body is key to optimizing performance. Incorporating strength training can lead to muscle gain and improved cycling. Energy management is critical for endurance athletes. Finding time-efficient training methods can enhance performance without burnout.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Performance and Training Dynamics 03:06 Dietary Changes and Their Impact on Performance 05:56 The Role of Weight Training in Cycling 09:04 Insights on Insulin Resistance and Energy Management 12:06 Optimizing Training with Limited Time 13:48 Conclusion and Reflections on Training Strategies

RCA Coaching: https://roadcyclingacademy.com/

Transcript:

Cam Nicholls (00:00.11) Welcome back to the RCA Podcast where today I am joined by expert bike fitter and sports physiotherapist, Neill Stanbury. Just be aware that this conversation is also designed for YouTube, so please excuse any visual references. Let's get into it. All right, Neil, I wanted to talk to you about your recent performance on the bike because like many people, like many RCA members, I would say you're in bit of an off season phase because we can't train 10 to 12 hours.

You know, all year, it just doesn't happen. So there are periods of the year where you go down to about four five hours per week, which is what you are in right now. Yet you went out and did a bunch ride recently and you achieved an all time best five minute power and an all time best or almost best 10 minute power. And for those familiar with chronic training load, your CTL, also known as, is about 40 at the moment, which equates to about five hours per week of riding versus normally when you're training

For something, you're doing about 8 to 10 hours per week. So how is it that you could go out and achieve all-time best numbers, 5 and 10 minutes is pretty significant, on 5 hours per week of training?

It's been really interesting for me. I don't talk a lot on our channel about the performance aspect of cycling because I'm more interested in the biomechanics and that sort of stuff. But this has been really, really interesting for me. we were talking about it extensively before we recorded this.

I thought there might be some interesting lessons in here for people at home who want to try this as well. So I'll tell you what I did and how this came about. But you're right, I did a bunch ride a couple of weeks ago with a bunch of guys who are way fitter and faster than me. And even sitting in the wheels and rolling the occasional turn, I managed to do an all-time best five minute power, about 340 watts, which for me is... Huge numbers, mate. 66 kilos at the most.

Cam Nicholls (01:49.098) Watch your weight, people will want to know your weight.

Powder weight wise, pretty solid.

Not terrible for an old bloke like me, especially an old bloke who's only riding four hours a week or so, and with no particular cycling talent either. But I managed to do that and I've never done, that's biggest number I've ever done for five minutes, which was really interesting because I've done almost no training.

Is this the A group or the B group? Was it? there you go.

Even rolled a couple of turns with Kavan Wiggo. Just a couple. So these guys are obviously much more powerful riders than me and especially on flat terrain. These guys have got 10 kilos, 15 kilos on me. you know I might be able to be up the front on hilly terrain but on flat terrain I really struggle against these kind of guys. So it's a huge challenge for me. So how did this come about? Now I started noticing earlier in this year that I was sort of waking up

Cam Nicholls (02:38.818) Fatigued more often than not I was jumping on the bike and I had sort of low energy levels that typical sort of mid-afternoon you're feeling sleepy that sort of thing and I thought you know there's a lot of things this could be but one of them is it could be the beginnings of some insulin resistance stuff going on so I've been reading a lot and listening to a lot of podcasts about About sugar and all that sort of stuff and I decided to make some changes to my diet and to my training mode to see what would happen to my body

I've always struggled to put on weight, right? I've been, ultrally, my entire life. I started lifting weights dedicated twice a week without fail. Twice a week doing lots of legs and a bit of upper body. And I slowly managed to put on, over that last sort six month period, about three or four kilos of pure muscle mass, which was helpful. So I'm about three kilos, maybe three and a half kilos heavier than I usually am, down at that 63 kilo mark.

gym sessions are twice a week and you're doing legs in both of those sessions and a little bit of upper body. What sort of sets and reps are you doing? out of curiosity.

Typically I'll do Bulgarian split lunges and single leg RDLs and I will do some Cossack squats or deep squats as well with like a goblet squat, that kind of thing. This is all just with hand weights and kettlebells. There's no gym equipment involved. I do it all myself at home. Three sets of about eight of the heavy ones and then if it's something like a Cossack squat with a 16 or 18 kilo kettlebell held in a goblet position, I will then do sort of probably three sets of 20.

okay. Quite high reps. That is high reps.

Cam Nicholls (04:11.52) Yep, it goes against the science. Mm-hmm. Although as Aaron the Strength and conditioning coach the RCA says sometimes you're just better off moving some stuff around. Yeah, which is what you know 20 reps as you're moving stuff around. really like

Yeah, so I'll do I'll do heavy like my single leg my single leg split lunges I'll be using a 22 kilo hand weight so on each leg and for that's a third of my body weight well Which is quite a lot and three sets of eight or three sets of ten of those sometimes four sets of eight And so I do a heavy heavy fit the starter then larger volume with lighter load for the other ones Nothing too complex there in addition to the weight sessions. I started doing one day a week of intermittent fasting

Now this is something I've never done before. It was really, really difficult in the beginning, but I was noticing that I was really craving carbohydrates a lot. And I thought it was just due to my training load, right? I was eating very clean rice, that sort of stuff for my carbohydrates, oats, that sort of stuff. I was eating very clean carbs, not a lot of pure sugar apart from the drinks that we drink on the bike, which are essentially pure sugar. And I thought, you know, let's try and move away from the sugar for a while. And I started doing intermittent fasting one day.

Every Monday, I'll just not eat breakfast. I'll get all the way through till about 12 30 before I have lunch and I try and make that lunch a pure protein meal and the dinner if possible pure protein and veggies So almost a zero carbohydrate day just one of the seven days in a week when

When do you have your last meal on a Sunday? Six, so it's about an 18 hour fast.

Cam Nicholls (05:36.654) Typically about 6pm. About an 18 hour fast. It was tremendously difficult in the beginning. Once my system got used to it, now it's easy as pie. I reckon I could go through to dinner without any great trouble. And that's probably gonna be the next sort of iteration of this is to try a 24 hour fast. So probably once a month or so. Just see what Yeah, absolutely. There's no way you can ride and then fast afterwards. It's just gonna be a recipe for disaster.

It's on a day when you're not doing any training.

Cam Nicholls (06:04.098) So I did those two things and the third thing I did was I drastically reduced my sugar intake which was essentially that was basically drinking liquified sugar on the bike. I am just a sugar and cordial guy. I just use white sugar but if you're using a carbohydrate drink that kind of thing I really cut those back. So on my Zone 2 rides even if it was sort of a two and a half hour Zone 2 ride zero liquid carbs I would basically I would eat a little bit of light breakfast at a banana before I went and then maybe another banana halfway through.

get home and have a proper meal afterwards. And I basically cut out the liquified sugar during my rides. The theory being that the liquified sugar is very, it's very inflammatory to your endothelial system and your liver and all that sort of stuff. And what I was trying to do was figure out if I'd been starting to develop a bit of insulin sensitization, which is a common problem. I think it's much more common than we give it credit for, but a little bit of insulin.

Sort of reluctance essentially where your nervous system is is relying too much upon the carbohydrates as an energy source And I was trying to shift my metabolism back towards more of a fat burning metabolism in between the heavy hits of for example when I would do a fast bunch ride or a Vo2 session I would carb up for those sessions and then in between I would drastically reduce the carbohydrates down now This is hard to do if you're doing big loads if you're doing 10 hours a week

very, very hard, but when you're only doing four to five hours a week, it's actually pretty easy. And after about a month of this, I noticed that my endurance was way better. My general energy level on the bike, way better. I was waking up, I was sleeping less, waking up more like earlier in the day, but with much greater energy. And I was having a lot less days on the bike where I got on and just felt kind of dull and fatigued. Most of the rides I would get on and feel really, really good.

So I started noticing after about a month of this that my zone two power output for the same heart rate, about 125 to 130 beats a minute, was jumping by about 20 to 30 watts. So I typically tap along in zone two at about 200 watts. I was suddenly doing about 220 to 230 with the same heart rate. So a really big jump. And this sort of reiterated to me that I was either overtly fatigued, maybe my nervous system doesn't cope with eight to 10 hours a week very well,

Cam Nicholls (08:21.734) Or it was just basically insulin resistance, know, insulin and carbohydrate, like critically dependent metabolism. And so the theory being that if you can switch your metabolism over to utilize both energy sources, you might be a bit healthier and do a little bit better. And this culminated with me doing, I did a couple of VO2 training sessions and then I went and did this bunch ride, got home and I thought, gee, I felt fantastic in that ride. Got home and looked at the numbers and went, that was my best ever five minute.

power by about five or ten watts and it was the best ten minute power I've done for probably around two or three years. Wow. And this wasn't even up a climb this was in a bunch ride rolling turns you know where you're on and off the pedal.

It's not a big bunch ride, so it's not like a three hour bunch ride is it? Because you would have suffered. But this is on the pedals, it's about an hour isn't it?

Yes.

Cam Nicholls (09:12.586) about an hour on the pills really, really, really hard. Yeah, so I thought that was really interesting. So my take home from this is that perhaps training more is not always the solution. If you're trying to increase your power output, sometimes it's a healthy idea to look at your metabolism deficiencies. And if you are a person who is exhibiting some of those traits, things like craving coffee in the morning, not being able to function with high energy levels without stimulants throughout the day,

That mid-afternoon crash in energy waking up tired and you know bleary-eyed and and and not sort of feeling energetic until mid-morning that type of thing often a sign of insulin resistance So yeah, this this is really really interesting for me It's been a real eye-opener and I feel way better with a little bit of extra muscle mass less training load on the bike and more weights and perhaps that's the other take-home message here is that the the weight training super critical

Super critical for some people. I didn't realize how much I was missing out on until I really got diligent with it. I used to do some leg weights probably twice a month, you know, just to keep it going. But this has been for six months, continuous, two days a week, and it's made a huge difference. So a lot of kind of all these things coming together, you can kind of think of this as kind of a metabolism rebuild that I tried to do. Very, very interesting for me, and I don't think I'll ever go back to the way I was before, which was just lots of riding.

lots of sugar and constantly going up and down, yo-yoing in my performance, I felt much more steady with my performances with this sort of dietary and training change. Interesting. Yeah, so there you go. Interesting kind of anecdote for you that people at home, hopefully there's a bit of interest in this and yeah, if you guys have got any similar experiences, I'll be very interested to read the comments on this one, because I reckon there might be a few people out there with the same problem as me.

Yeah, well I've got a similar story and that is that I haven't been doing any of the diet things and I haven't been fasting. I need to get back into that because I used to do it but I've actually implemented a workout that's been going around the RCA community recently because one of our members was stuck on a boat cruise with his family for 10 days.

Cam Nicholls (11:25.902) stuck.

Yeah, he was training for a seven-day charity ride So he's doing big volume and all of a sudden he only had access to a gym bike So one of the coaches shared a research paper and the research paper Demonstrated actually Maintaining FTP and improving sprint power over a three-week period where you're just doing endurance training But incorporating a one session which includes 30 seconds Yeah, so I've dropped off on

30 seconds all out.

I'm not in a three week transition phase, I've been in a 16 week transition phase since my last event. I've been doing about five hours per week. once a week I've been doing this sprint session. So it's 30 seconds all out with a four minute recovery. You do five to six. Yeah, yeah. And you can break them up into two sets. So you could do three sets of, sorry, two sets of three reps with a, you know, like a 10 minute recovery in between.

many of those do you do in a second? Five to six.

Cam Nicholls (12:19.598) And I recently went out and did a bunch ride. Had done a bunch ride for three months and I normalized for 90 minutes. So there's some durability in there as well. Cause I was able to pull turns at the end of the ride, which surprised me. 310 Watts, I normalized power and my FTP now would probably be 330, 340 pushing it. I would have thought so. I was very surprised at that myself. And I feel.

the one change for me was just purely implementing that one workout. I guess the take home story is, if you're only doing four or five hours a week, there are probably ways you can optimize what you're doing, whether it's a workout, whether it's nutrition, fasting, going to the gym. So you can still go do the group ride with your mates, pull some turns and not get dropped off the bar.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I don't think Massive volume is is potentially the answer for a lot of people, you know If you if you're time-starved and you're still looking to optimize your performance like this is some of the best performances I've ever done and with very little training a CTL of 40 and in a really really low-load almost no structured training just a couple of VO2 sessions with some 30 15s that you've mentioned before and some bunch rides and I'm still still feeling as good as I've ever felt and the one bonus here is

Lots more free time to do other things. Exactly. Because you're not always out on the bike.

Exactly. And you probably a bit of freshness in there as well might have contributed.

Cam Nicholls (13:41.838) Yep, absolutely. Yeah, so an interesting case study, mate. You and I have both similar experience by the sounds of things. There you go.

Cool, thanks for sharing. Hope you enjoyed that conversation with Neil Stanbury. We'll catch you in the next podcast.