Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast! As winter approaches, it's the perfect time to talk about indoor riding. When the weather gets rough, we take our rides indoors on the bike trainer. It's a great way to stay in shape and improve your outdoor riding.
This week on the PurplePatch Podcast, we want to share some tips to help you maximize your training on the bike trainer. Instead of focusing on the usual technical aspects of bike training like FTPs and critical power, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon shares practical skills to make you faster, smarter, and a true craftsman on the bike.
Matt takes us through the benefits and limitations of indoor riding to gain a better understanding of what indoor training offers and what elements of training can only be gained outdoors. Matt covers the different smart trainers available on the market, the three P's of indoor training: posture, pedaling, and power, terrain management, and the importance of end of range work and neurological conditioning.
Our goal is to help you get faster and have a great time doing it. If you have any questions or want to continue the conversation, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. If you'd like personalized coaching on the bike trainer, we offer complimentary sessions where I can coach you through a workout. It's a two-way video platform, so I can see your metrics and provide feedback. Just reach out to [email protected] to set up a session. It's absolutely free, and there are no strings attached.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 04:52 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
04:52 - 39:35 - The Meat and Potatoes: Weaponize Your Bike Trainer This Winter
Matt Dixon 00:00
I'm Matt Dixon. Welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sports into their lives.
Matt Dixon 00:32
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast, as ever, your host, Matt Dixon. And yes, it is getting that way. Winter looms, and therefore, we thought it was a good time to revisit indoor riding. Yes, it is the time of the year when we don't brave the elements and instead get inside, sit on the trainer for hours on end, daring and dreaming about when the sun comes out again. Look at the indoor bike trainer. It's a great workout, but it is important as it represents a great opportunity for you as a bicycle rider to uplevel your outside riding. If you do it right. There is no short-term success in improving your bike riding. But what I go through today is about as close as you can get to amplifying how you ride your bike outside by sitting inside, no matter how strong you are, no matter how tough you are. This is an opportunity for me to educate you today on how to weaponize the use of your bike trainer so that you can get more speed out of that toughness, that strength, and that fitness. Let me repeat that. What I want to try and do today is open up a guide where no matter how tough you are, how fit you are, or how strong you are, you get more speed out of it. That's our mission. That's why we talk about weaponizing the bike trainer. I'm not going to bore you today with the old, sterile stuff that you read in the media. I'm not going to talk about FTPS and critical powers and all of that. I want to give you some actionable skills that are accessible and that will yield a speed return greater than any fitness development you can gain. If you put the lessons into practice, you will get faster. You will also get smarter. You'll become a craftsman on the bike. And by the way, that's really fun because when you go out and train with your buddies, they're going to be very annoyed, and they're equally going to be amused at your newfound speed. What's he taking? Don't worry about that. Just get better at building your craft. Let's do it just before we get going, as now is the norm; we bring you today's show for free and promotion free. And so if while you're listening and you're thinking, Hmm, I'd like to maybe have a little bit of a taste of that, I want to continue the conversation, or maybe you have some follow-up questions. If you want to ask anything else related to today's topic, feel free to reach out. You can have a complimentary consultation where we'll chat with you about any of your questions. All you need to do is reach out to [email protected]. That's the email address. [email protected] and all of our programming can be found at purplepatchfitness.com. That's the website I will say today because we are talking about the bike trainer; I would like to extend a personal invitation to you if you'd like me to coach you through a session. Our video platform is pretty special. It's pretty unique. But the nice thing about it, unlike Peloton, which is just that one too many with rah rah rah, and hey, I'm happy to do a bit of rah rah rah occasionally, but this is two-way video. So, in other words, you can see me as I'm coaching you through executing a workout, much of which we're going to talk about today. But also scarily, perhaps, I can see you and your trainer, if you have a smart trainer, is connected to the platform, so therefore I can see your metrics. I can see your Cadence and your heart rate. If you've got a heart rate, monitor your power production, and I can control the grades and give you feedback. So that's the opportunity for me, no matter where you're at in the world, to actually coach you. If you would like to have a complimentary session where I coach you, feel free to do so. All you need to do is reach out to [email protected], and we will set you up with a session. You can come and join the crew. You get a flavor of both the coaching and a little bit of the fun, and even some people say stupidity because why not? We'd like to have a little bit of fun while we are taking your performance very, very seriously, and we can sort you out. So feel free to reach out to us. It is absolutely free, no strings attached. And if you don't like it, go on your merry way and continue on in your mediocrity. All right. Barry, the producer, thank you very much. Let's do this. We are going to get on with it. It is, ladies and gentlemen, the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 05:01
All right, today we're talking about the bike trainer. So, let's set this up a little bit. Most triathletes, most people who ride their bikes when winter looms, go inside and sit on the trainer, and that's normal, but unfortunately, the vast majority of riders out there absolutely underutilize the opportunity. They tend to look at training with an indoor trainer as just a time-efficient workout. So it's time on the saddle where they're driving to boost their metrics, their FTP, or the elements that make up critical power, and they do intervals that are really hard, and typically, they execute it while they're either watching some gamification type platform or they've got a Netflix show or something like that, and they're just chasing avatars or watching crime dramas or something like that. But the truth is that they're missing a huge opportunity. If you know how to take advantage of the indoor trainer, you can get so much more out of it than just priming your physiology. So, the goal of the show today is to help you turbocharge your indoor riding in a way that actually delivers real-world performance benefits. So, using the indoor trainer so that you get better with your outdoor riding is a critically important component. Another message that is going to be woven into this is that no matter what your riding environment, the truth is that simply focusing on physiological metrics, such as your functional threshold or just your straight power meters, is a surefire pathway for underperformance on your bike. And so if you want to get faster, if you want to actually get more of a yield from your strength and fitness, and then we want you to go beyond the power, which is just a measure of output, how much work you're putting in and what you're able to generate. And so you need to go beyond the what's if you want to do that. And we want to think about becoming more efficient and more strategic about how you use your energy to ultimately give you what we're going for, which is more wheel speed. And so, yes, indoor trainers are highly valuable tools. They can improve your riding performance. They also bring improvements in safety and other components like that. But approaching your indoor trainer as a tool to upgrade your outside riding changes your whole mindset. I don't want your indoor trainer to just be a convenience tool. I want it to be something that actually helps you become a better bike rider. And so before we get in, I think that we should take a step back and say, well, that all sounds very romantic. That sounds like a wonderful investment. I should just do all my riding indoors if it helps me get better outdoors. But let's first highlight some of the limitations of riding your trainer indoors because it's not a solve-all situation here. Alrighty, we have a lot of people that only ride their bikes indoors, and then they go outside, and they race outside, and that is going to be a limiting prospect. And I understand and appreciate why it's tempting to always ride your bike in dots. There's no impact on traffic. It's very, very convenient. It's a time-efficient tool for training. And so I am all in on the bike trainer. But if you ride your bike trainer only, you are going to severely limit your riding potential as well. So, I'm speaking out of two sides of my mouth here. Use the bike trainer to improve your outdoor riding, but if you only ride it indoors, you're going to limit your riding potential at the same time. And we need to acknowledge that there are things that you just simply can't really develop and improve on a bike train. And so let's go through some of those first because I think it's important. The first is the bike trainer fosters an environment where you don't need to have situational awareness, so you don't need to have 360-degree understanding. There is a reason as you become a better bike rider, and the actual action is stabilizing and balancing the bike, shifting gears, and managing terrain. A lot of the stuff that we work on today slides into the unconscious or the subconscious, and then you have more capacity to understand the environment around you. The challenge is, if you never ride in the environment, you're never going to improve that component, and that can become actually more dangerous. There is a reason that the less experienced outdoor riders are the folks that tend to ride through the glass, that tend to hit the sticks and the potholes and tend to actually have more interactions with traffic, and that's because more seasoned riders have great situational awareness. So if you never. Get to that environment; you're never going to improve that component. So there is a safety component to actually riding outside a little bit, and you should consider that there are also many interactions with the machine itself, with the actual handling skills of a bicycle, that you just simply cannot Foster and improve on the bike trainer. And so how and when you're braking, balancing on the bike, managing different environmental factors, such as riding in the wind, even riding around corners, standing out of the saddle, really effectively. These are things that you can't really develop. Inside the bike trainer, you can apply some of the theoretical concepts. You can work on standing form, but to become a better bike handler, you have to ride your bike outside. And then a third component that I think is really important is that you don't get riding on an indoor trainer; at least, most of the bike trainer setups are many of the stabilizing muscles that actually come into play with outdoor riding. When somebody is on a static indoor trainer only utilizing the main muscle groups, they're not getting the stabilizing effect that occurs because the bike is always moving outside, and you are interacting with the different gravitational forces, the lateral forces of cut, of cornering, even keeping the bike stable in the wind, etc. And your core and stabilizing muscles are always engaging. And if you never use those outside, when you actually go outside, particularly if you're doing something like a half Ironman or an Ironman or a big Gran Fondo, you're going to get very, very stiff and tight. And that's going to have an interaction on how you're performing on the back end of the bike ride, or particularly if you're running off the bike. And so, don't undervalue the importance of doing some mileage outside of all of these factors. So ultimately, your best solution here for riding performance is to have a combination, or a mix, of some indoor riding and some outdoor riding because there are also, equally, some things that only indoor riding can truly provide. So, if we've talked about the negatives, why don't we shift gears and say, okay, the whole theme of today's podcast is weaponizing your indoor bike trainer? That's great. So what are the benefits? Well, I've already mentioned one of them. It is, of course, much, much safer, and that's really great. However, when you lack the requirement of situational awareness, that means that you can amplify the specificity because 100% of your focus can be dedicated to the action of the training. So rather than you thinking about traffic or random stops and starts with stoplights and things like that, inconvenient terrain changes when you don't want them, maybe some inclement weather, you have a highly effective environment to place all of your focus and willpower into the specific intervals that you might be doing, and that's a thumbs up. So, you get to have an increased specificity. You also have a safer environment. It's also a highly effective venue for structured workouts, particularly intervals because you can have a dose and response at a very specific timing that isn't necessarily influenced by terrain, wind, and other factors. So that's great. And you can also, interestingly, really isolate and dig into some very specific skills that are critical. The indoor bike trainer with awareness, with focus, with prioritization, is a great venue where you can actually foster and improve things like your posture, how you're actually sitting on the bike, whether that's in your time trial position or your road position, or how you're actually pedaling the bicycle. Yes, there is an art and a science to how you should be pedaling, and it's also a great place where you can learn the tools of the toolbox of how to become a better bike rider, particularly utilizing variance in Cadence, that's your leg speed and your gear selection. And so there are some critical skill developments that you can do inside that then transfer to outside, and that's great. And then, finally, the bike trainer is, of course, highly specific and particularly valuable for the time-starved athlete. Now, I'm not a massive fan of saying one hour on the train area equals two hours outside. I don't believe that one hour on the trainer is one hour on the trainer and two hours of riding outside is two hours of riding outside, but it is a particularly potent tool that you can use to get a great ROI on, whether you're thinking about skill development, interval training or anything else. And so when you weigh up when you have the combination of some indoor riding to really work on these environments where you can play. All of your energy and your focus on skill development in specific intervals are powerful. But then you want to take the mindset and the skills and the improved posture outside and apply it in the real world, where then you also integrate your situational awareness and your actual application onto the ribbony roads that you're going to go and ride outside. So that's your potency as you go from there. Now, if we go back to indoor trainers, they used to be what you would call dumb trainers. In other words, you would typically take the wheel off the trainer and you would lock it on either side of the axle. It would have a resistance against it, and you would shift gears and just simulate riding your bike. And, of course, what you get there is a different form of tension on the bike. You just do loads of intervals, and it's great. And so that's why you have the origins of things like pain cave because it's not very fun. It's not very variable, and it doesn't really apply to real-world bike riding. But over the last few years, everything has changed, and not everyone in the riding community is up to some of the things that you can do, so we still have, as an opportunity, a wonderful venue to do all sorts of intensity. We can do long and relatively boring endurance work outside. We can do very high-intensity, short intervals. We can do medium intervals, whatever it might be. So, with all of the specificity of classic interval training or endurance writing, you can do it inside. And that all exists, but now, with the advent of the smart trainer and some of the new platforms that are in play, you can actually apply real outdoor riding skills and Terrain Management that can be practiced on the smart trainer, and it's going to improve your power delivery, and thus speed through the variance of terrain, and that becomes the greatest yield. No matter how fit you are, no matter what your genetic gifts are, all of us are given a certain amount of visit of gifts, size of our engine, muscular strength, endurance, and resilience, no matter what our genetic gifts are and how much we work to develop over the course of time, our fitness, our power output, etc, the biggest yield that you can get for speed is becoming a master of the craft of how to actually take all of your genetic gifts and your hard work and your efforts. Therefore, your level of fitness has actually developed. How do you apply that to grades that are going uphill, where gravity is not your friend, cress, where gravity is becoming your friend, and downhill grades, then, when the wind is in your face, the wind is at your back, etc., how do you apply that fitness to give huge speed return, and these new platforms actually enable that, and that is incredibly exciting because that's where the biggest return of investment is. Whenever we see people become craftsmen on their bicycles, they leverage their fitness and power to the best of their ability. That's where they go from good to great, from mediocre to good. In other words, they uplevel, and that's a really powerful thing. And so it becomes a great opportunity. And it's only been for the last couple of years that this is really a reality, and we're sitting here right now, sitting in front of us with this opportunity to grow, to improve, and to learn on the indoor bike trainer, and it's passing many people by, that's the truth of it because we're stuck in an old school mentality of thinking about the bike trainer as just a venue to do intervals. And that's a shame because you can get a lot faster from just becoming a better craftsman, and then, of course, you layer the intervals on top, and you get really fast, and that's where the fun lies. So, let's talk about the benefits of indoor training. Well, just as I talked about, it teaches you how to maximize speed relative to your input, and that's a really good component. It also offers controlled conditions for riding, posture, pedal stroke, Cadence, and gear management. That's a good thing. It provides safe, repeatable feedback to enhance your outdoor skills, so you actually can get a yield of Am I doing it right or wrong repeatedly over a pattern, and it can actually help match your inner animals. I like to call it your intuitive sense of effort relative to a specific output or power. And that's a really good thing. And so it is a highly ideal venue to have any sort of specific interval, but also layer on outdoor riding, great. So, with that background, what are the Golden Rules for you this winter? If you're planning to spend a lot of time on the trainer, what are the golden rules for indoor training?
Matt Dixon 20:07
What should you focus on to make sure that you do weaponize it? Well, the first thing I'd say is to think beyond your power, your FTP, your watts per kilogram, and all of the output side; all that is is a measurement, okay, that's not the yield. So your success over the course of the winter is not just about more power, more power, more power, because that's a really challenging and incremental gain. Once you get up to a certain level of fitness at the purple patch, we focus on what we call the three P's, and that is your great posture on bike number one. So, in other words, oh, okay, how am I sitting on the bike making sure that you're not carrying unnecessary tension in your shoulders, in your neck, and you're sitting quietly, subtly on the bike with just a strong core where you're actually sitting there, no matter what level of fatigue, you look like a ballerina, poetic and so great posture. Number one. Number two, we think about great pedaling, the different forms of pedal stroke, and how you actually really think about maintaining a lovely phrase that I like to talk about, constant tension on the chain, not allowing any micro decelerations flowing through, and introducing variance into how you're pedaling depending on whether you're doing high force, to whether you're doing lower force, whether you're doing high Cadence or low Cadence, etc. So pedaling is the second one. And then finally, output, it's power. So you have posture, pedaling, and power. These are the components that we think about. And as we go through the key here, let's just go through each of them. The key is always riding great with great upper body posture. So, let's talk about posture. First. We think about this that starts with your upper body, always ensuring that your upper body and your elbows are subtle. You see so many people sit on a bike trainer with locked elbows, and they sit there with very stiff so from shoulder down to wrist, it is a straight pillar, and those become stiff, and that is a habit that many people integrate on the trainer. They're sitting outside. They just choke back, they lock the elbows up, and they're sort of resting on their elbows in many ways. The challenge with doing that is it's a little akin to riding, driving in a car, and removing all of the shocks, and you're bouncing up and down the road, so when you have locked elbows and your shoulders moving up towards the ears, it's very stiff. Firstly, not only are you reducing economy, it's actually costing you more miles per gallon in terms of energy, but it's also an inhibitor of number one riding safety because now you're bouncing up and down the road, and if you do hit a pothole or a stick, it's much higher, higher likelihood that you bounce off the bike, and that's not a good thing. But also, with that negative posture, it's impossible for you to do the following: go around the corner, stand out of the saddle, control the bike in the wind, and many other factors. So you are, by definition, just with that simple habit, poor posture, you are a worse bike rider. And so if the bike is static, the only way to ingrain that as a habit is every time you're riding your bike, inside, hold yourself accountable and build the habit of great posture. The upper body is very quiet and relaxed. Shoulders supple if you're in the time trial position, allowing the tension on your neck to drop down, allowing your ears to drop between your shoulders, so that you're more aerodynamic, and you get comfortable sitting in positions for a long time, and when fatigue starts to strike, you're able to retain really good posture. So that, in itself, is not only going to make your outdoor riding better and safer, it's going to help you navigate when you do go and apply those outdoor skills, standing, cornering, braking, riding in different wind, etc. And that becomes really important. The second P is pedal stroke, and we think about riding for the most part, you see a lot of more junior riders, less experienced riders, stamping on the pedals, making it very quad heavy the muscles at the front of the pedal stroke, but a better way to think about your pedaling. And, of course, this is on a podcast where most of you are listening to me and not watching me, so it is challenging to apply this education. And over the airways, as you want to call it that. But I'm going to do my best tip. The majority of your power in the pedal stroke comes from the upper muscles of the leg. So, in other words, your glutes, your quads, your hamstrings, etc., so everything from the hip to the knee and so, for the most part, the fulcrum of your pedal stroke starts at the hip and then your femur, that big upper that big bone, it's the upper part of the leg, all of the muscles surrounding that. That's your engine room. That's where the origin of your pedal stroke is. Most scenarios dictate that anything under the knee can just be a response from the fulcrum, which is at the hip. So, in other words, think about it like a garden hose outside when you whip it 10 yards down, which it just whips at the end there. That's what your ankle is doing. It's just tracing the origin of the pedal stroke. And so with the pedal stroke that you're applying when you're riding your bicycle. You can use that and employ and improve it so that you're getting, yes, you're always going to get most of your power from the front of the pedal stroke. That's where you're biomechanically most efficient. And there is going to be the pressure, but you want to even it out so that you can get constant application of the chain and so you're not just stamping up and down like pistons. In fact, your pedal stroke is more elliptical in nature, almost sliding back and forth where you're still getting most of the power from the front, but the retreating leg, the one that is opposing, also gives a little bit of an unweighting of that rear leg as it comes up the back so that you can maintain constant tension of the chain. One of the things you can do over the course of this winter is to become an artist of your pedal stroke. A great way to do that while you're riding is just to close your eyes and feel it under the arch of your foot. And you should feel this constant tension. There shouldn't be a chunk, chunk, chunk of your pedal stroke. It's more of a
Matt Dixon 27:07
and it's doing that. And the nice thing is you can get feedback on this just during the warm-up as you go through it. Don't worry about single-leg drills or anything like that. Just focus on one leg, then think about the other leg, keeping the opposing foot clipped in, and feel and think about this phrase: constant tension on the chain. It's going to help you. So if you can achieve those two things, which is upper body, really quiet, really supple, and then your pedal stroke, constant tension on the chain that's going to radically improve your efficiency, and that becomes really powerful. So just those two things, the two, first of the three, P's, posture, and pedal stroke are going to help your miles per gallon. It's going to help you get more output relative to whatever fitness you gain, but then the third, and remember, it's power. The third is really where the magic occurs, and it's built on the shoulders of great posture and great pedal stroke. Now, this is power, but it's not like what you might think because I'm not talking about just getting more power and being able to generate higher output, more what's on the screen; it's more the distribution of your power to give you speed return, and this is where you can add to your toolbox of yourself as a bike rider. So, let's talk about this now. As I discuss this, let me set the level here a little bit. In order for this to really be effective, you're going to want to have access to a platform that can simulate variability in terrain. The very best platform out there, by the way, is Velocity; that's its name. That is the platform that we use at Purple Patch Pro. Twenty of your training sessions are built in Velocity with videos so that we can coach you through these sessions. But the platform itself is Velocity; that's its name, okay? And it is, by far, I say this: I don't have any vested financial interest in Velocity, but I will tell you this: of all of the platforms out there, this is the only platform, and it is head and shoulders from an educational standpoint and skill development standpoint. There is nothing else like it. I don't have any vessel interested in them succeeding or not. It is powerful. It's the reason that we've integrated it, and I'm going to try and explain a little bit why on this so Terrain Management, the way that the platform works, and it's very, very smart. They have great algorithms here to simulate your rolling resistance as you're riding. And what I can do as a coach is I can shift grades, so 0%, 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, so the degrees of the grade go up, and then we can have cresting and having descents as well. But it's not a light switch. It doesn't go from 0% to 1% because what the algorithms do is they understand the speed that you are riding simulated on the bike. And so if I go from a 0% grade to a 4% grade, if you think about what happens outside, if you're going from flat road to a hill, you're carrying speed, let's just say, 18 miles an hour riding along a flat road, and as the grade comes up incrementally, you feel the grip of gravity as it starts to work against you, and that tension on your chain increases As you're losing speed, and the hill has its way, and on the platform, it works like that, a little bit like a roller coaster going through and starting to feel the grade coming up. Conversely, if you're riding up a grade of 4% and you're going to transfer to a negative one or 2% grade, the same applies. You feel the tension releasing. Doesn't just release like this, releasing, and gradually gravity becomes your friend. So what does that mean? Why is that important? Well, no matter what output you're doing, just like you're riding outside, we get to help you learn how to use variants of Cadence, the proper utilization of changing gears, and the combination, of course, blending together gears and Cadence for you to actually navigate riding up a hill, cresting over the top of The Hill, riding through the dip of a roller managing to vary different grades so that you get a better speed return for whatever power you're riding at. And this absolutely smashes the myth, if you're thinking when you ride your bike outside, that you just want to stick to a single cadence, or you want to, as they talk about, flatten the course. In other words, no matter what happens with the grade going up downhill, you hold one power. It's a myth. That's a sure way to blow yourself to pieces or go very, very slowly. This is a way for you to distribute your power to the third P in a smart way to yield the best speed return. And so when you have simulated terrain like that, not only does it make it really fun, it's incredibly empowering. So, as I'm recording this show today, I just finished coaching a class where we had, in person, about 20 athletes because that's how many people sit in our studio in San Francisco. And then I had another 50 athletes or so globally, all over the place, two-way video. And we went through a moderate output, what we call zone three. So somewhere around a six out of 10, and their whole game was they had to keep the same power. But what I did was constantly vary the terrain, 0%, 2%, 4%, 5% negative, and 1%, rolling through that multiple times over the course of 13 or 14 minutes. And what we did there is that I want your output to be exactly the same, but you're not going to change gears, as what I was teaching them there is how they can manage their output by just using Cadence. Now, next week, what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring them back, and we're going to do the same workout, but I'm going to have them fix 85 rpm, and now the goal is the same zone three output, but this time, they're going to have to only change gears the whole time, so they're getting to moderate and manage their speed return through gears, holding the power exactly output. And then, of course, the third week, we combine it together. Now, I want you to try to get the best speed return and distribution of the work over this variable terrain to see if you can go faster using shifting power. When you're going downhill, probably slightly less power going uphill, a little bit more power, fat, pretty even power. Using gears and Cadence and what starts to occur as you go through this process and you repeat that educational process is why we call it bike school. You get faster because you start to learn, ah, I've got feedback loops here, and that is it. That's a really, really powerful tool. So, Terrain Management, I've gone on for five or 10 minutes now, just on this piece, but that's the third piece. So, the three primary tools that you have are to improve your posture. Improve your pedaling and distribution of power. Those are the three P's, and if you think about that, and nothing else when you go and sit on the trainer, you're going to get faster. So, let's just think about one other opportunity that you have on the bike trainer, and we call this the purple patch special source. But you can utilize it. You don't need to be a purple patch athlete, there is a great understanding of utilizing variants of Cadence when you're riding your bike outside. Most of the time, when you ride your bicycle, you're going to spend 90 95% of your time in a relatively narrow range, somewhere around 70 RPMs or revolutions per minute, up to maybe 95, and even in there, most of the time when you ride along the flat road, you can be somewhere between 80 and 90 rpm. That's pretty typical. Great. But there is a powerful training tool that you can do, best done on a trainer, where you work on what we call end-of-range work. And what I mean by the end of the range is, if your low end of that normal range is 60-65 to 70 RPM, upper range, 95 to 100 rpm, doing specific intervals at the low end of that range and the high end of that range. So, at the low end, we call it strength endurance. It is a powerful bridge between the strength training you do and the spike-specific intervals that you want to do, where you do consistent work at a very, very low Cadence. How low? Well, it starts from 60 to 65, goes down to 50 to 55, and even goes down to 40 revolutions per minute. It has very strong, high torque intervals and is the absolute catalyst for improving your riding performance, which is hugely important. Everyone should do low cadence work on the flip end, have neurological efficiency, and improve their pedal stroke by doing relatively low power and high cadence work. We call it neurological conditioning, which is really good for smoothing out the pedal stroke and is very effective. We
Matt Dixon 37:05
just do a little bit of that. It also becomes a tool. If you're ever finding yourself in a place where you've got a strong tailwind, then keeping relatively low power at high speed and being able to sit comfortably at 100, 105, or 110 revolutions per minute without your heart rate blowing up. You want to train it so you become better. So that's a real outdoor application, but the real catalyst that has low Cadence, strength endurance, and is powerful. So that's a lot of information, and you might listen today and think, goodness me, I haven't even thought about any of this stuff. It's really hard. If you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out to us, and we'll try and help you a little bit. But do you know the best way to really improve this experiential learning? So I talked about this at the top of the show, but this is a genuine invite if you want me to teach you this and then just hop in for a free session. Reach out to us. We'll set you up. We'll make sure that your train is set up. And if you have a smart trainer, particularly at your house, it's so fun and rewarding, but you're going to get faster, and if you can carry that away, then it's going to help you. And so much like in our webinar, where we offer everyone a free consult, and many, many people took us up. That's good for us because if we get to help people have a great off-season, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, that's super for the sport. Helps people. And if we can help you understand how to weaponize your trainer, purple patch or otherwise, that's good for the sport. And so feel free to join me. It's a lot of fun, and it's a personal invite, two-way video; I don't think you'll regret it. Okay, just remember this as a final message: improving your fitness is not enough for this if you want to gain outsized performance gains, and then I encourage you to focus on mastering bike handling, your posture and pedaling, and Terrain Management and use it to enhance your outdoor riding. Become a Better bike rider. It's so much more fun than just trying to chase power. And if you want breakthroughs, this is it. We have a strong reputation with all of our pro athletes. We always used to get asked how you generate such great bike riders. This is what I'm talking about here. This is it. Because we weren't fitter and we weren't stronger than anyone, we just helped our bike riders distribute that power across the terrain, and that's the speed game. So, if you want to beat your buddies up the hills, this is what we're talking about. Upgrade your skills and get smarter, and it can give you a better speed of return. I hope that helps. I feel very excited to help you in the live bike class. We'll see you soon. Remember, reach out. [email protected], take care. Guys, thanks so much for joining, and thank you for Listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel on YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also, share it with your friends. It's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, if you have any questions, feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. In fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in improving us. Simply email us at [email protected] or leave it in the comments of the show on the purple patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community with that. I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, do whatever you do, and take care.
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