Watts Doc #61: Quantifying Diminishing Returns

We talk about things we wish we knew earlier about training, racing, and coaching. Nutrition, skipping workouts, setting process goals, finding your strengths, athlete feedback, and more. We also find out what our listeners wish they had known sooner.

Following up from the last episode, our coaches dig into the balance between training stimulus and recovery capacity, with practical ways to diagnose which is a potential performance limiter. We also touch on low volume athletes, very well trained ones, overlapping stimuli, periodization, short and long term tradeoffs, and more.

We walk through an analysis done on almost 15,000 people with data up to nearly 7 years in length and after finding similar trends in Kolie's client and personal data, we apply what we can learn about diminishing returns to our training expectations, season planning, stimulus and recovery needs, our ultimate potential, and what it means for interpreting scientific literature.

Our coaches discuss what panic training is and how it manifests, common reasons for it to occur, ways to plan now to avoid falling into the trap, and ways to pivot before and even during panic training mode. We touch on all sorts of related topics like nutrition and panic dieting, setting milestones and assessing realistic goals, the impact of social media, and a couple ways to rethink training or goals to fit your season, plus answering your listener questions.

Our coaches dig into non-FTP related aspects of training and physiology that that lead to better race results, and workouts that can be done for each. We specifically consider road racing, criteriums, mountain bike and cyclocross, plus gravel and ultra racing, and a couple things to train that can easily apply to everything.

This episode we make our case for why endurance and recovery rides can and probably should be paced easier than expected, even for time crunched athletes. We look into the issues that can occur from riding too hard, then delve into physiology, power and heart rate zones, RPE calibration, fatigue and energy management, and more. Plus we answer your listener questions.

We take a deep dive into the published literature on durability. First a critical look at the paper coining the term, the next establishing a widely used measurement, and another on the definition and differentiation of several aspects of endurance performance. Then discussing aspects of measurement and trainability, plus the relative statistical strength in the literature vs typical interpretations. Finally some advice from coaching experience, and answering your listener questions.

This is a critical look at how our coaches use data, like its use in creating a logical framework, the challenging parts of analytics and data in decision making, and how much "the science" can really inform our decision making. Plus we discuss the seeming need for heuristics over nuanced takes, the role of the scientific process in coaching, our favorite metrics, and answer your listener questions.

We dig into a recent study showing a disconnect between equal muscle glycogen recovery and unequal high intensity interval performance due to delayed recovery fueling, despite equal total calories. We start with some background on glycogen's structure and the importance of fueling before discussing the outcomes and conclusions of this double blind, placebo-controlled crossover study before speculating on mechanisms and potential applications to trained cyclists, and connect it to common current nutrition practices.​

To celebrate over a million podcast listens we let you ask us anything, and we answered. You asked training questions about how we would refocus the US's cycling governing body, improving climbing, book suggestions, how long it takes to return to peak form, indoors vs outdoor duration equivalents, partial ROM lifts, if you need to be in a caloric surplus when training, tempo workouts, and more. We also answer more personal questions like our lift PRs and a game of FMK, music and food, plus updates on how and why our own training and competitive goals have shifted over the recent years.