Freewheel Foundations

Gains aren't just about working out. It's about diet (grains) and smart workout / recovery plan (brains)

• Maintenance

• Maintenance Calories / Macros and no more

Workouts in this phase should minimal stress. Tempo at most, and should not be for extended durations. The goal is to activate the systems, let them run at a comfortable pace and shut them down.

• 1 hour ride at tempo

This is going to be the most complex stage by far because we're trying to accomplish more than one thing here. While most people focus very heavily on wattage or speed, the problem is that it's not that simple. I can generate enough watts to move at 22 mph, but at a greater strain because of my body weight. As such the use of watts / kg has become very common since it's a weighted measurement (pun intended).

The goal of increase phase training is two fold:

• Increase lean muscle mass

While you will gain weight initially, the point is that it should be muscle mass added to the system. Muscles, as opposed to fat, require calories on a daily basis to exist. If we add muscle, it increases the amount of calories we burn at a minimum. We take this with a diet built around a protein only increase, and you're building long-term success for weight. If we do this correctly we will effectively increase wattage over time as well as lower the total body weight. This is a net-increase to watts/kg

This is essentially the source of a lot of contention people have with weight loss. There are a lot of people who start cycling / running / for weight loss. They have a lot of success and then all of a sudden just stop.

• Maintenance Calories + 500 calories

Work here depends on the type of strength you're looking at building:

• High Intensity Interval Ride

• Legs

• Dead Lifts

• Lat pulls

• Bicep

• Preacher Curls

• Inverted Grip Curl

Typically for me this is the phase directly after increase. Once you've established a certain threshold, you need to extend the tiem frame in which you can accomplish it. This is a slightly different regimen of training, but your diet should not change significantly. Since we're going to be stressing the body for longer periods of time, we're going to be striating muscle in a different fashion. We're looking at slow vs fast twitch muscle fibers, so protein is definitely still necessary for recovery.

• Maintenance Calories + 250 calories

• 40K ride @ FTP (Time Trial pace)

Today I wanted to talk about a few specific things:

• Giving yourself the emotional permission to slow down

• Derived from procrastinate on purpose by Rory Vaden

• CarboRocket Half Evil (333)

Solid review of my new Karoo 2 bike computer, a discussion on UCI rule changes and other random stuff that happened to come up in discussion

Cycling is hard enough, but managing Garmin, Strava, Ride with GPS, Komoot and more can be even harder. Today we'll talk about how each of these tools can be used and how we have our own setups

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Getting your first bike

Cycling is a game of eventual specialization where each bike aims to maximize wattage in their specific field.

When you’re getting started though, doesn’t that provide kind of a catch 22? Rule of thumb for your first bike:

Get a hybrid mountain/road bike or a gravel bike. This will let you experience both sides to some degree and figure out if you’re a road hog or an off-road trailer.

When Upgrading

After you figure out what you like, there are divergent paths for each specialty. Let’s talk about them, what defines them, and what to look for in an upgrade

Specialties

Bike specialties come from a mix of terrain and stresses on the bike from those terrains.

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Metrics!

This week we talked about things! Lots of things! No lovely planning though!

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Training to me has a lot of parallels to JRPGs:

While we would normally play a JRPG for the story and enjoyment, we would train for VASTLY different reasons:

Each of these things tend to create a singular focus, which we don't really notice at first because we're fixated on a goal. For weight loss, or any of these, we may see some early results. Weight may come off, blood pressure may drop, but eventually that progress will slow. This begins what I like to consider the first parallel with JRPGS:

Just like in any JRPG (Final Fantasy etc) you inevitably get to a boss that completely pwns you. In these games, it's time to go kill things over and over and over again until we raise our level, and then try it again. Hopefully not getting pwned this time.

Even JRPGs realize that "holy crap, people actually paid for this so it has to be kind of fun". In order to facilitate what we call pacing in that industry, side quests are introduced to take your mind off of how painfully dull whatever you were doing was

The fact is these are all deviations in focus. The goal is to make you focus on something in the near term, something more immediately achievable, while driving you in the direction you need to be going.

In Fitness, I like to refer to these as moving targets. I like to think of my goal as being made up of 30 / 40 smaller goals with their own metric:

When weight began to slow down, I embarked on varying side quests dealing with each of these other measurements. Week-by-week, or day by day in some cases I would set a goal for each one and keep moving along that way. You'll find that over time what was your original goal metric will begin moving again as summation of all of the work you've done to hit your moving targets

Make Side Quests For Yourself

JRPGs are also fantastic at throwing in completely self-contained games in which we can lose hours and hours of time. Gwent in the Witcher III, Blitzball in FF X. While they're tangential to the whole experience, the point is they keep you engaged.

In a parallel with fitness, I see Mini-Games as cross training. Find things you can do that are NOT DIRECTLY RELATED to your primary discipline and start working on them. You'll find that you can quite possibly become just as absorbed in that discipline as you were your first.

It leads into its own rabbit hole of moving goals and side quests for cross-training goals, but you'll find that you're never bored with working out. There's always something else to do

While we talked about how to maintain the bike last week, today we’re discussing some of the things you need to in order to keep yourself in working order as you keep training

The Effort Cycle

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Topics discussed:

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This week, Darrell Breeden and Brandon Miller cover safety for Cyclists

Topics discussed:

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