EVOQ.BIKE Cycling Podcast

Blog of All Episodes: http://evoq.bike/blog/cat-4-questions 4 Cat 4 Questions! Please Like, Subscribe, and show some love by sharing the content! Episode 2: 4 w/kg, Indoor Vs Outdoor FTP, Fasting and High Intensity Intervals, Cyclocross Training, C4Q Ep2! Email YOUR Questions To Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE

You may not be targeting 300 mile rides, but there are gems in here on mindset and nutrition for when you're hitting that uncharted territory. This episode is fire if you want to ride farther. Thank you @WhityWhit. HMU Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE

4 Cat 4 Questions! Please Like, Subscribe, and show some love by sharing the content! Episode One: Tapering For Race, Caffeine Gels, 5am Cycling Workout Fueling Suggestions, Tapering For A Big Gran Fondo Event Email YOUR Question To Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE Blog of All Episodes: http://evoq.bike/blog/cat-4-questions

https://www.evoq.bike/blog/cycling-interval-workout-guide Of course, the answer is it depends but a lot of people have now downloaded wko5 or messing around with it and they see optimized intervals. They see extensive aerobic or intensive aerobic and they look at it like “3 by 30 something minutes, do I have to do that?” Yes, it’s really helpful! But the true, race specific answer is: yes for some and no for others. Race specificity is one big thing, but we'll get into that. But first, think about when or where are you in your training Cycle? If you're doing base miles and you're looking to do some extensive aerobic work and you're riding below FTP, you're pushing your time out towards your time to exhaustion, or TTE. In this case, you want to be doing those longer intervals, especially if you're only Riding tempo wattage. There's really no reason to make tempo rides into intervals like 4 x 10 minutes unless you’re new to cycling, or in your first year of real training. Instead, just go out and ride Tempo, and you're going to see yourself doing 45 minute "intervals" very soon. If you're riding with your friends during base miles, just really try to be that person who says, "Hey, let's really pedal this time,” even if we're chatting. Let's ride. As you do sweet spot intervals, those are going to be harder, and while you might be able to just go out and crush some long ones, I’d recommend that you build up to that, and make sure your execution is spot on. Start with 4 x 10m, 2 x 20m, and move out towards 1 x 40m. Those are big jumps but ou get the point. You want to try to get close to around 150- 200% of your TTE, but that's definitely category dependent. Tim Cusick from WKO put out some good guides as to where you want to be duration-wise for sweet spot intervals. If you're trying to build FTP and you're doing 2 x 20m or 2 x 25m, you still want to go out to 40 minutes, 50 minutes, and even an hour! That is just really building aerobic power. If you're going to spend the time going through an FTP block, do it the right way and really do those intervals; you have to muster up the motivation and we'll talk about that. If you're not motivated to do it, you're not going to do it well, so don't spend your time doing it. If you want to build your FTP and you want a bigger engine, which is a good thing to have, then say "hey, in this block when I have these longer intervals scheduled I'm going to Buck up and I'm going to do it!!!" So yes, you do need to go longer than 20 minutes. If you're coaching yourself or working with a coach that uses wko, the algorithms that run the Power Duration curve need to be healthy, and there's a whole WKO webinar on how to maintain a Power Durations curve. It needs longer duration efforts (up to 40 minutes minimum) to provide you with accurate output data, so if you're basing your training on any WKO metrics (FTP, FRC, optimized intervals, etc etc), you need a healthy curve. My last video a couple times ago talking about that you still need to double-check the work of the computer because you don't necessarily want to base your intervals off of just optimized Intervals because you may have already beat the Power Duration curve; we won't go into that in this one. But yeah, you need a healthy curves so do longer intervals. Then you can ask yourself: Why? Or what type of racer am I? Check out the blog for more.... https://www.evoq.bike/blog/cycling-interval-workout-guide

Original Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALNOLzpp2M0 Full blog: www.evoq.bike/blog  email questions: Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE   How many athletes do you see get dropped every time the surges come?   Burst workouts are a great workout to have in your cycling diet.   The bursts help you adapt to having to go out of one zone that is moderately intense, and surge, just like a bike race or group ride would do, but then give you the ability to fall right back into pedaling the bike.    You stay connected to the fast group, whereas others start to get gapped off, and then have to burn a match to get back on.  Having this capability allow you to ride with faster riders, and stay up towards the front.   One thing to note: it’s not the burst that is hard. All of us can ride at tempo or even threshold and sprint for 15 seconds at 120% FTP.  The hard part is going from 120% FTP back into 90-105%!! Watch the video, and I’ll highlight some files that show this.  Take a look at this video so you can make sure you're getting all of the benefits from threshold bursts so that you're next burst workout is optimized and as successful as possible.  Cycling Burst Workouts Start with tempo… 3 x 8 minutes at 88-90% FTP, with a 15s kick to 120% FTP every two minutes.  Elongate these out to however long you can ride tempo for. 2 x 20m, 2 x 30m, 1 x 45m, etc.  Sweet Spot bursts: same concept, except instead of tempo at 88-90%, ride at 92-94% and then burst. These aren’t easy! BUT SO FUN because you’re flying down the road!  Read for some cycling Threshold Bursts? Same concept, but ride at 98-105% FTP and then burst to 120%. These are hard, but they are a great FTP builder before you start smashing VO2Max interval blocks, and they will help you ride with people faster than you!!  Next time the strong riders burst and surge hoping to detach everyone, be one of the riders that sticks with the group!   Many times, it’s surviving the first bunches of surges where the strongest riders just want to jettison the weaker ones and whittle the playing field down. Only then, does the racing and tactics start.  Common Cycling Burst Errors Watch the video, but yes, we all feel mighty and strong in the first few bursts. Do not exceed 120%! That is not the point of this workout. If you can hit 120% for 20 minutes of bursts, GO LONGER.  Biggest error, is as mentioned, is not falling right back into the power zone that you just left. Focus on dropping the watts in a smooth manner.  Focus Paints Success.™ Execution of workouts is key! Get that extra 1% optimization of your time and intervals.  And yes, taking any and all kudos that you’re willing to share!

Have you done these? Shout out to Patrick for getting me into these again this year! Full Blog here: https://www.evoq.bike/blog/underspeed...  Challenge your neuromuscular connection by riding outside of your comfortable cadence today.   Power range is 90-98% FTP. If you feel good push a little harder than tempo, BUT THE FOCUS IS ON CADENCE.  Prioritize cadence over watts, I can't stress this enough.   Warm up and then 4 x 10m on, with 5m recovery between.   Interval 1 and 3 are Underspeed with cadence at 50-60 RPM. Interval 2 and 4 are Overspeed, with cadence at 105-115 RPM.

There were a lot of questions from the Instagram post (@BrendanHousler and @EVOQBIKE) where I asked what people wanted to take away from this race. TONGA Part 2, the onboard GoPro Footage Coming Soon! Main Topics Discussed Are: Taper 1:15 Start List 1:46 Mental Prep 2:20 Nutrition (night before, midrace, breakfast) 4:24 Prerace Strategy 9:57 Hit me up with questions Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE https://youtu.be/TDEWtwtITc0 for the video version! Check out our channel!

www.evoq.bike Have concrete goals.   Understand rest.   Don't obsess over metrics that don’t achieve your goals.   You are not your FTP. INTENSITY won’t do diddly for you if you don’t have the endurance to match. Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE

A look back so that you Do Better Than My Pro JMSR 2019. Just wasn't prepared for this type of event and got SHELLED last year. Take some tips with you so that you do better than I did! www.evoq.bike/blog brendan@EVOQ.BIKE

Full post: https://www.evoq.bike/blog/peaking-for-cycling-race The question below came in about peaking for a bike race, and how to know what to train, and when to train, when you aren’t trying to peak. But really, we first need to look at what a peak is, how one achieves it, and if w even need it! Thanks Michael for submitting the question; it’s a great one that isn’t discussed much when we talk about peaking and achieving top performance for a bike race. In this post we’re going to discuss: What Is A Cycling Peak & Training Through “B Races” Peaking For An “A Race” 8 Week Training Block To Peak How To Train When Not Peaking Falling From A Peak Overtraining Hey dude, I've been wanting to know a lot more about everything that has to do with peaking throughout different points in the year for different A races, and how to train when you're not trying to peak for a race. And also knowing when you're at a peak or falling from it. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like that's more of an uncovered topic. So I thought maybe you could inform other people who follow EVOQ on it at the same time if you haven't done this already haha. I've just been worried about peaking too early, or not knowing when I'm peaking and overtrain, or not peaking at a race because I've been training too much. Also don't know how to kinda take time off and then build to peak by the next race.