Workout Complexity Bias: Oct ‘24

Hey, this is Tom and Emma from High North Performance with the October edition of the In-Form Newsletter. We hope your riding has been going smoothly since we last dropped into your inbox!

This month we wanted to ponder on what we might call “workout complexity bias”, and try to unpack a potential issue in perceiving more complicated-looking and ‘sophisticated’ workout designs as superior to those that appear more simplistic. 

Let’s be honest; there are thousands of different cycling workouts out in the world, and it’s probably fair to say that a lot of the most intriguing or eye-catching ones often feature a lot of elements like different intervals and constant changes in variables like intensity, cadence, duration etc. We’re sure that many reading this can relate to a feeling that such workouts hold some kind of seductive benefit or advantage within this complexity! 

A general “complexity bias” is a cognitive prejudice that appears in numerous areas of life, and is essentially where something is perceived as having greater value or usefulness because of its intricacy. Conversely, something that’s more rudimentary can be perceived as less valuable.

As with any such bias, it can be very helpful to be made aware of it so that you can avoid falling into the associated traps one might cause! 

In this discussion’s context of workout choice, we as coaches think that choosing simplicity first and adding other elements/complexity only when necessary is the approach to take, where our thinking is nicely summed up in some famous related quotes like:

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

- Albert Einstein

Afterall, who are we to argue with da Vinci and Einstein?

Now, are we saying that workouts that are more complicated by nature are always worse compared to simpler workouts then? Nah… 

The key point, we think, is having an identifiable reason or set of reasons to support the existence of complexity, where immediate examples that spring to mind include choosing more “complex” workouts to enhance psychological engagement of a training session (e.g. for indoor cycling) or for when trying to recreate the exact demands of an event/challenge (for example, creating a structured workout based off of a previous race file).

The main point we think self-coached athletes and coaches should take away from this musing is that in most cases, simple workout designs are ideal vehicles to stimulate good adaptive stimuli and complexity for complexity’s sake isn’t advised. Of course, understanding what you are trying to achieve with a workout is paramount, but with that in mind, keeping what you need to do as straightforward as possible is usually the best move...

Simpler workouts typically encourage/foster: 

• Easier execution (especially outdoors) when terrain and other obstacles might impede the ability to constantly change up your power outputs, cadences etc 

• Easier memorisation of the session

• Greater simplicity in terms of tracking your progress across several weeks/months.   

Shameless plug, but our Complete Workout Library (available for TrainingPeaks and intervals.icu) very much takes this approach, and whilst there are over 120 individual workouts in the power-based library, this variety doesn’t come at the cost of complexity.

What do you think? If you want to let us know your thoughts on this subject, feel free to shoot us a reply.  

News:

We’re very excited to announce that the High North Performance team has expanded with the addition of our new coaches, Ross Howcroft-Jones and Zoe Langham. Both elite-level athletes in their own right, Ross and Zoe bolster our breadth of experience in the art and science of coaching and we’re very pleased to welcome them to High North Performance!

We’ll also be adding several “associates” to the website over the coming month too, where these people will represent our go-to referrals for complimentary performance services like strength and conditioning coaching and sports nutrition guidance. We’ll add more details in next month’s newsletter, but do let us know if you’re at all interested in enlisting some help in these specific areas. 

We’re also pumped that in the near future, we’ll also be releasing some structured training plans for specific gravel, MTB and sportive events in the 2025 calendar, so if you have any particular requests, give us a shout! 

As always, you can check out our current library of plans here: https://www.highnorth.co.uk/training-plans

Many thanks for your time reading this email. As ever, we hope it’s been useful and insightful, and can help improve your training going forward, even just a little bit.

Catch you in the next one,

Tom & Emma
High North Performance

The Value Of Group Rides: Aug/Sept ‘24

Hey, this is Tom and Emma from High North Performance with the August/September edition of our In-Form Newsletter!

In this month’s email, we thought we’d discuss the value of group rides, since we get frequent questions from athletes around whether club runs and social spins are beneficial or detrimental to cyclists who have specific fitness and/or performance goals associated with their training. 

In our experience, group rides are quite often looked upon as antithetical to structured workouts that are carefully built with a specific outcome in mind, as a training file from a group ride is typically much more “stochastic” or variable. This can lead some athletes and coaches to be fearful of group rides detracting from the focus of a training plan, not being purposeful enough, and interfering with a careful balance of stress and recovery a coach or self-coached athlete is trying to strike in a given training period (e.g. a week).

We think that whilst there’s merit and good intentions behind the skepticism of group rides by this cohort, we believe it’s also important to recognise the value that social rides do provide and why they can (and perhaps should) be a part of any cyclist’s program, if group riding is in any way desired by the athlete.

So, here are the main benefits we think group rides provide:

• Social interaction: Riding with others is fun, and cyclists who enjoy the time on their bikes are liable to do it more! All things being equal, more time on the bike usually leads to higher levels of fitness being achieved, so the fact that group riding can significantly increase the level of fun and enjoyment is a massive plus. What’s more, if cycling can add to the level at which we interact with others (something that WFH and other societal changes are making more difficult generally), then the mere fact that our mood, mental health etc can be improved through group riding is going to have a positive impact on training too!

• Accountability: Group rides can be amazingly helpful for ensuring you get in the riding time you want to do! Having a time in the week where you know you’ll be riding and a bunch of people you don’t want to let down is a powerful motivator, and acts as a buffer against other days in the week where you might have to forgo the training you planned to do because of schedule changes and time availability issues. 

• Specificity: Training that is overly structured has a danger of not truly preparing you for the demands of racing and event participation, where efforts are far more variable and unpredictable. A final piece of the puzzle in terms of shaping your high level of fitness into that which is tailored for the demands of competition is first-hand exposure to this unpredictability and being pushed by others. Group rides can provide this racing-like experience at opportune times close to your events, without the need to formally compete. They can act as effective high intensity sessions, even if the specific intensities and times spent at them are somewhat of an unknown quantity. 

• Skills development: Riding at pace in close proximity to others is again another important specificity benefit of group rides. On top of that, there are likely to be higher ability riders to learn from too. Observing them and how they control their efforts, take lines through corners etc can prove very useful to take into races and other events, and could well be something you’d miss out on if all of your preparation was solo. 

It seems clear that when used in the right frequency and at the opportune times in the training calendar, group rides offer big benefits, some of which can’t easily be derived from other sources. 

Of course, trepidation towards the use of group rides in a training program is somewhat warranted and we’d say these are the main issues to watch out for:

• Variety of abilities: Not all clubs and organised rides will be homogenous in terms of ability, and so it may be that you don’t get enough of a stimulus from a group ride itself to stimulate the desired adaptations in some cases. If this happens, tacking on some of your own riding either before or following a group ride can add to the overall load and give you the best of both worlds in terms of the social benefit but also a more controlled session that works on what you need to improve. Likewise, it might be that the group is currently too fast for you and thus you end up working harder than you should do and/or get dropped early. Again, a similar approach of combining this with riding alone/in a smaller group would be a good solution or choosing a different group to ride with.

• Unpredictable: Depending on the time of the season, the randomness of the efforts and the lack of focus on specific abilities might not be the right training for you, especially if you are group riding multiple times per week. In this case, maybe riding with a group every other week could be better, just to tip the balance of your training towards being more structured than unstructured until a time in the training cycle where the need for more stochastic rides increases in importance. 

In any case, hopefully the above points give you a few guidelines to work within when it comes to incorporating group rides into your training and gives you a balanced perspective on whether they might be helpful or a hindrance to you and your individual situation

News:

We have new “mountain” hill climb plans specifically for longer climbs of 20-40 minutes, distinct from our existing hill climb programs which are geared more to shorter hill climb TTs! The new plans should be great for those preparing for alpine training camps/holidays or longer hill climb efforts/events against the clock.

You can find out more and pick up a plan here: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/my-training-plans/HNP-specific-HC

Thanks as always for your time reading our material and please let us know what you think about the points raised and also what might be useful for us to write about in future newsletters.

For reference, you can read all our previous newsletters on the website here: https://www.highnorth.co.uk/cycling-newsletter

Until next time, enjoy your riding and we’ll speak to you again soon!

Tom and Emma

High North Performance

Sickness And Saving Your Races: June/July ‘24

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance with the latest edition of the In-Form newsletter!

In this one, we wanted to offer a few tips for when you find yourself in the unenviable position of getting sick in the lead up to a high-priority race or event… Whilst it can be a worrying and frustrating situation to face, we reckon if you avoid a few common mistakes and follow a couple of best practices, you can often turn the circumstances around and still perform at a high level (perhaps even your highest level) in your target events 💪

So, the first major mistake to avoid (which is almost too obvious to mention) is simply rushing back too quickly in a misguided effort to try to minimise lost training time! This can be an easy trap to fall into, and it usually results in an even greater amount of time off due to unnecessarily dragging out your illness. In such a situation, your immune system is already hard at work and therefore the body isn’t usually able to respond positively to additional stress in the same way it normally would, often meaning that your standard workouts are counterproductive to fitness progression. Instead, being patient and waiting until you feel much better before you start any kind of return to training is a smart move, and almost always results in less time off the bike. Give yourself time to get back to feeling yourself and then ease back into training with some shorter rides at a lower intensity, using your rating of perceived exertion (RPE) during workouts and how you feel post-workout to guide the rate at which you return to a normal training routine. 

Next, using HR-based metrics like resting HR and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) to give you a bit more data on how you’re recovering is often useful. Whilst these metrics shouldn’t solely be relied upon to assess your recovery, it can give extra supporting evidence to how you subjectively feel and thus what approach to returning to training might be best. If you have the means to do so, tracking HRV before the important phases of your season is really useful, so you have a more reliable baseline to compare against in moments where you might feel illness or fatigue setting in, so try to get ahead of that if you can. Tracking resting HR under normal healthy circumstances is good too, so that you can monitor this during your recovery and compare each day to healthy values.

Thirdly, when you feel like you’re past the worst of the illness and starting to train again, using what we might call “bridge” workouts can be good. These are training sessions which aim to make the transition back to your habitual sessions, especially higher intensity ones, more gradual and easy to absorb. They often look like condensed interval workouts, where variables like the interval durations or the amount of reps and/or sets are reduced, so that there isn’t as high of a stress, but enough intensity to reacquaint yourself physically and psychologically to workouts you would usually have been accustomed to in the build up to a race. It should ensure you can get back to this normal approach to a target event without any further setbacks. Given a best practice for most cycling race tapers is to maintain or even modestly increase the intensity of your rides, this approach can be particularly useful in safely getting you back!

Next, see if you can use the time where you’re not quite ready to train hard yet to work on and optimise other important components of high performance, like technical skills and nutritional strategies. These can be done in shorter and/or lower intensity workouts and shouldn’t add a great deal of stress to your training but could have a huge positive impact on your race-day performance.

Finally, it’s worth bearing in mind that if you’ve missed out on some training time due to sickness, it may be wise not to overdo your taper leading into a goal race or competition period. Instead, you could use this different situation to your advantage and complete a 2-3 day harder training block a week or so out from a target race, making this training both challenging from a duration and/or intensity perspective and fairly specific to the demands of your event. If you taper off for too long of a period, combined with the lost training time, you may lose a little too much acute fitness to make a top performance possible, so try to ensure you’re doing enough to maintain and ideally progress your fitness, whilst still honing your “form” by sufficiently reducing fatigue and bringing about a level of freshness. 

News:

Speaking of racing, we have discipline-specific plans ready to go for hill climbs, MTB marathon/gravel and MTB XCO, amongst others. If you have some later-season important races to prepare for, these could be of help, either to follow closely or for ideas/inspiration. There are also short taper plans to help you optimise the final few weeks before a target race, which can be reused as many times as you like going forward! Here’s the link you need: https://www.highnorth.co.uk/training-plans

On the High North Running site, we’ve also just launched The Complete Workout Library for Off-Road Runners too, so if you’re also a runner (or know someone who is), the library of over 80 structured workouts could be a great edition to your training resources arsenal! You can check it out here: https://highnorthrunning.co.uk/store/p/workout-library

Thanks as always for your time reading the newsletter and we look forward to sharing some more news and advice in the next edition. Best of luck with your riding and training until then! 👋

Tom & Emma

Approaching New Workouts: April/May ‘24

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance, back with the newest instalment of our In-Form newsletter 👋

We hope your riding, training and/or racing has been going well of late as we get into the heart of the season for many of us! If you fancy doing so, please feel free to send us a reply and let us know how you’re getting on! In this edition, we thought we’d offer some practical advice for approaching new workout designs for the first time, since it can sometimes prove difficult to execute them well if you’re not careful to avoid a few common pitfalls. 

The way many cyclists will approach a new workout is they’ll see a generic target % of FTP linked to the intended adaptive stimulus of the session… and won’t give it a great deal more thought than that! For example, a VO2max-focused workout may come with something like a “120% FTP” instruction, and typical threshold sessions might be roughly 100% FTP. Whilst these targets may be correct for you, they’re just as likely not to be!

Now, it’s probably fair to say most of us have had an experience akin to the following: 

Find new exciting workout > jump on the bike or trainer pumped to try said workout > fail workout > leave frustrated and disappointed when it proves impossible to complete 😫

It’s also true that sometimes, these targets and workout designs prove simply too easy for the intended purpose or adaptive response, which isn’t an ideal situation either!

To help avoid these kinds of issues, we’d offer the following advice:

• Firstly, take %s of FTP/CP/LT2 etc with a pinch of salt and be ready to go up or down with your intensity targets during the session, based on your immediate feedback and sensations.

• Next, keep the entire block of intervals you are trying to complete in mind, especially early on, so that you can be sure the intensity you are riding the earlier efforts at is something you can maintain for the whole set.

• Moving on, to borrow a term from the strength and conditioning world, think about your “reps in reserve” and try to complete a set of intervals feeling like you have 1-2 reps/intervals in your pocket!

• Take the pressure off the first time you try a new workout design and don’t worry if you start out too easy - you can always add more reps or increase your effort as you go, but it’s hard to salvage much from a workout where you blow up half way through! 🥵

• Related to the above, allow “headspace” for your efforts to get harder as you go - they’ll almost never get easier, and if you’re close to a 10/10 on the RPE scale too early, there will be no space for the workout to get tougher!

• And finally, a common pointer we always like to remind riders of is to try and use a target RANGE rather than a fixed, singular number. This gives you scope to increase or decrease your effort as needed, and doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re failing if/when you fall slightly below your target (which is likely somewhat arbitrary anyway!)

Do you have any of your own tips that have helped you with new and novel workouts? We’d be interested to hear them, so do get in touch if you have any tips up your sleeve!

News

Since the previous newsletter, we’ve been hard at work on various bits and bobs…

• Firstly, Emma recently penned an article on heat acclimation, specifically for cyclists. This should be a timely read for those looking to optimally prepare for races, events and challenges throughout the summer and even into early autumn. You can give it a read here: https://www.highnorth.co.uk/articles/heat-acclimation-for-cyclists

• Next, we’ve just put together a number of new cyclocross plans for those already eyeing up success the CX season 👀. These are available in the TrainingPeaks platform and can be found here: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/my-training-plans/HNP-specific-CX. We’ll be continuing to expand our discipline-specific plans over the next few months, as well as creating plans towards specific events, so if you have any requests, be sure to get in touch. 

• We’ve also recently put together a tech “deep dive”, soon to be on the Bikeradar website, where we took a look into the geeky bits that make up the new Favero Assioma Pro MX off-road power meter pedals. That should be live on Bikeradar shortly and should be a good read for those interested in adding power measurement to their mountain, cyclocross and/or gravel bikes!

• For those who run, there are also new articles to find on our sister site High North Running, so be sure to take a look at the blog over there and sign up to the Keeping Pace Newsletter if you haven’t already! 🏃‍♀️

• Finally, we have capacity for our training consultations and custom training plan services right now, so if either of those sound like something that could benefit you, do hit us up by replying to this email or using the contact form on the website.

That’s a wrap for this edition and hopefully there are a few nuggets in there for you to take away to improve your riding! 🚀 

We look forward to sharing more tips and news with you next month and thanks as always for your time reading through our emails.

All the best!

Tom and Emma

Respecting Rest & Recuperation: Mar ‘24

Hey there, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance and we hope that your Easter weekend has been a good one?

Here’s this month’s In-Form newsletter, swooping in at the last minute! 💨

In this edition of the newsletter, we wanted to talk about a principle we often find ourselves sharing and reminding athletes of in our day-to-day coaching and consulting work, and that’s respecting recovery.

When we as ambitious cyclists ponder on how we’re going to go about improving our fitness, our minds tend to go straight to questions about what we can do to optimise the part of our training where we induce a stress:

Which interval sessions should we be performing? Are our steady rides long enough? Should we be riding more or less intensively than we currently are?

Of course, this is a huge part of the puzzle and it’s also arguably the most nerdy and interesting part too! 🤓 

However, seldom do we give the same degree of thought to whether our training program, over a given week or month for instance, features enough recovery to allow us to positively adapt to the stress we’re imposing though…

As coaches, we see time and again training programs that are hyper-detailed and precisely laid out (which is great!), but where we simultaneously struggle to find sufficient recovery time balancing out the stress part of the equation! 

Fully appreciating the level of physiological impact coming from your workouts each week is one thing, but it’s easy to forget about the many other stressors that are present in our lives too (including work, family life, quality of sleep etc), all which contribute to our “training readiness” and the body’s ability to get stronger in response to our workouts.

We think it’s prudent to go back and look at training you might have planned for yourself with a consideration for rest and recuperation and try to critically evaluate whether you have the balance right… 

If any questions arise in your mind about whether things may be leaning a little too far in the direction of too many workouts and not enough rest, we’d definitely recommend trying out a week or two with a bit more recovery than you’d usually allow yourself and see how you feel, particularly if you have a habit of getting burnt out or feeling like your progress has stagnated. 

As we’ve mentioned in articles and previous newsletters, a lot of what good training is about is hitting on the right dose of training for you as an individual, suited to your current global stress environment. We’ve found that quite often it’s the case that athletes ARE riding enough to stimulate a positive adaptive response, but aren’t quite resting enough to see the response fully come to fruition.

So, if you fit this profile and you’re thinking “hmm, that sounds a bit like me” then your homework is set! Hopefully you’ll find that in taking a little step back, you can benefit from a really easy way to actually improve your fitness yield 👍

News

Tom recently spoke to Simon of the GoOff podcast about hill climbing and coaching - you can check out the show and episode here.

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As always, we have our range of premium resources available, including the Cycling Physiology Guide, The Hill Climb Handbook, and our ever-expanding range of training plans (which we’ll be adding some more MTB-specific plans to in the coming weeks).

Thanks as always for your time and we’ll see you next month - happy riding until then!

Tom and Emma

The Trap of Blind Adherence: Feb ‘24

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance and it’s already the second In-Form newsletter of 2024!

In this edition, the topic we wanted to quickly ponder on was what we might call “the trap of blind adherence” and hopefully this little lesson can make a big positive impact on how you approach your goals for 2024…

So, in the context of training for cycling fitness and performance, ‘blind adherence’ relates to executing a plan PRECISELY as it’s laid out, without a single deviation from the instructions of the pre-planned sessions that comprise it.

On the surface, being 100% adherent to a plan that’s been carefully laid out over many weeks and months towards a clear goal may seem like exactly what you should aim to do! And this would be true in an ideal world where you could guarantee your plan is just right for every single day to come…

But there’s the rub - we simply don’t live in a training utopia! 😔

Unfortunately for us, there are countless numbers of infinitely complex systems in the wider world, our own lives and within our own bodies that are constantly influencing our ability to train and recover from training. This fact renders the training planned for several days time (especially for several weeks time) speculative and an educated guess at best, and this is an important fact to grasp no matter who has put the plan together!

Now, we often draw analogies between training and car journeys, and we’re going to do it again here! If we plot a road trip route from one location to another, we can always see a very small bit of the road ahead of us, and that’s enough to make a good decision on whether to proceed as planned or not. But, we have little to no idea what we might come to further into the journey, despite knowing what is theoretically the most direct way to go.

The important skill here is constant re-evaluation of the current situation and assessment of the suitability of the pre-planned route, whether towards a destination during a car journey or progressing towards an event or fitness goal through a training program. 

It may be that what was planned days, weeks or even months ago is spot on for you today, and in that case, it’s simple - follow the plan! But, when circumstances have changed from what was expected when the planning was done, it’s important to critically evaluate what’s in front of you and be confident and courageous enough to make the necessary changes. Sometimes, this means checking your ego at the door and doing less, and sometimes it means kicking yourself up the arse and doing more. You WILL make mistakes and poor decisions, but each one will be an opportunity to learn and optimise for the future! 

The key takeaway here is that a training plan is a general direction, not a step-by-step recipe in almost all cases, and these “best guesses” at the right workouts and training loads in the future shouldn’t be seen as gospel. Don’t beat yourself up about the fact you’ve had to deviate, and instead pat yourself on the back when you employ common sense and make informed decisions based on real-world information in the here and now. The most successful athletes and coaches have this skill down to a fine art; knowing when to stick and when to change things up. 

We hope that’s helpful 👍

News

This month’s been a quiet one for us in terms of new launches of articles, products and the like, but we are busy at work helping athletes progress through their training programs and giving nuggets of wisdom through our consultations as per usual!

Given the day of the week, we thought we’d do a throwback Thursday to an existing article you might not have seen but is one of our favourites, which is Pro Cyclist Workouts: Real Training Sessions By Real Pros Analysed - let us know what you think if you haven’t seen that one before.

It’s also worth mentioning again that we’re working hard on our sister site highnorthrunning.co.uk, which if you’re even peripherally interesting in running you should definitely check out! We have a newsletter you can sign up for there with even more training tips and info.

Finally, we will have a new article coming through soon on low cadence training too, which you’ll be able to check out on the blog when that goes live: highnorth.co.uk/articles.

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That’s a wrap, so thanks as always for your time and attention - we’ll see you next month in the same place 👋

Tom & Emma

Establishing Foundational Aerobic Fitness: Jan ‘24

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance with the first In-Form newsletter of the year! 🎉

To kick off 2024, we thought it’d be timely to send a little reminder about the importance of establishing a good foundation/base of aerobic fitness, and highlight the simple mishap many of us make of riding too intensively in what we think are “low intensity” rides.

Around this time of year, we like revisit some of our favourite books and resources, as well as dive into some new ones and a particular publication we like is Training for the Uphill Athlete, which is a great read if you’re into the physiology of exercise, even though it’s not cycling-specific. It dedicates a decent part of its pages to talking about what’s sometimes called “aerobic deficiency syndrome”, which is very much related to our point above about building a base.

The salient point the authors make is that a lot of amateur endurance athletes (like cyclists) ride that bit too intensively and in a way “impatiently” to properly build this base up from an appropriate level for them, which manifests in training above the first threshold and too much in between the first and second thresholds.

Whilst many cyclists won’t be able to capture the actual physiological first threshold for themselves through testing in a lab with expensive equipment, it’s possible to use field-based estimations like the talk test to help estimate your individual first threshold and ensure you’re being conservative enough with the intensities you’ll use to patiently train at the right level to raise this important first threshold. 

In fact, in Training for the Uphill Athlete, this part of the training cycle is called the “Patience Phase” (a term coined by famous coach Dr Phil Maffetone), which is something we feel is apt and good to keep in mind, especially for those who are particularly aerobically “deficient” and may need to start from the ground up by riding really quite slowly! 

Through being impatient and overzealous, or just by innocently not giving the first threshold much consideration, it’s easy to end up spending a great deal of time and energy training a little too hard to increase our base fitness effectively…

It’s then inevitably frustrating (and sometimes devastating) to realise this foundation is lacking down the line when the transition to specific, high intensity training, designed to achieve a “peak” your fitness for a goal race, doesn’t quite deliver on its promise! 

A greater base, patiently built, will ultimately allow you to perform a greater quantity of high intensity training, to a greater level of quality and serve to enhance your recovery, both inter-workout (between sessions) and intra-workout (e.g. between efforts within a single session) too. 

News

We’re really excited to let you know about the launch of our new website highnorthrunning.co.uk! 

If you’re also a runner, interested in running training science and practice, or just know someone that is, we’d love for you check out the initial articles we’ve posted and sign up to the email list to be notified when new material is added!

Back on the cycling side, we have also just released a number female specific plans for both “base” and “build” phases (with “peak” plans coming soon too), which are now available through TrainingPeaks. 

You can check out the plans here (you’ll find them below the Masters plans on the following page.

Thanks as always for your time and support and we wish you all the best with your riding over the next few weeks - we’ll catch you on the next edition!

Tom & Emma

Physiological vs Field-Based Performance Testing: Dec ‘23

Hey it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance!

In this festive December edition of our In-Form newsletter, we wanted to answer a question we get from time to time on whether physiological testing is the gold standard, or is field-based performance testing adequate or even superior? Do you need to do one if you’re already doing the other?

This might be something you’re wondering about as you look to track your training progress in 2024, so let’s start by giving some examples of each and then discuss their respective merits and drawbacks, should you be pondering this question yourself.

So firstly, fitness or performance tests include (but aren’t limited to) those maximal efforts a coach might have you do or an article might recommend you try every so often. This could be a 20 minute all-out effort, a ramp test or perhaps a series of sprints. The idea is principally to measure your real-world output, like the power/watts you can produce over certain durations or throughout a particular protocol. 

When we talk about physiological testing, this is different in the sense that we’re examining the physiology behind performance, i.e. what’s going on in your body to produce the output that you see in a race or in tests like those discussed above. Physiological tests will typically look at markers like lactate concentrations in the blood, your ventilatory response to exercise or your muscle oxygen saturation.

Fitness or performance testing can give a better indication of how you might ‘perform’ in a race or event when the right test durations and protocols are used. These tests can allow you to see how your preparations are coming along and whether you’re on track to produce the numbers you need to achieve your goals. 

As alluded to above, it’s important to choose test efforts that reflect or can be extrapolated out to something relevant to your race/event demands. It’s also important to acknowledge the limitations of this kind of testing too, including whether maximal efforts in training are truly “maximal” and how relevant “fresh” efforts are to predicting race performance in events, where it’s often your ability to produce high power numbers with a considerable amount of fatigue already accumulated that’s most important (though this can also be tested!)

Physiological testing on the other hand allows you to look “under the hood” to see how your performance is actually created and what might be limiting your performance being greater. For instance, do you start burning a significant amount of carbohydrates at too low of a power output? Is your uptake of oxygen outstripping your heart’s ability to deliver it? A variety of tools can be used to try to answer these kinds of questions, including VO2 analysers, lactate meters and NIRS sensors to name a few.

Through the process of looking “under the hood", you can begin to understand your own physiology better, and this can help you to make better day-to-day training decisions about what to focus on and where to best spend your limited time and energy. This might mean that your ideal training program looks quite different from someone else’s, even if your measured performance in something like an FTP test is similar.

As we’re sure you’ll have guessed, the ideal scenario is probably to use both together, as this can give you the most complete picture of where you’re at, where you need to go and how you might go about getting there. If the opportunity arises, it can be really interesting to get some lab data on yourself. But, given that real-world performance and not how your body’s physiological values look in a lab is what ultimately decides a race result or a finish position, the fairly simple testing protocols many of us can do in training are very insightful and provide arguably the most valuable indicators of progress and performance potential. We have various further reading materials on the website on the topic of testing, should it be on your mind and something you’re looking to dial in throughout the coming season.

News

Speaking of training in 2024, after many requests, we have just finished developing a new set of ready-to-ride training plans designed specifically for older or “masters” athletes!

These plans have special considerations like longer recovery between harder blocks of training, strength training to address the loss of muscle mass that comes with age, as well as a greater focus on aspects of fitness that degrade most as we get older, such as VO2max. 

If you’re interested, you can check out the line up here on TrainingPeaks: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/my-training-plans/HNP-special-populations

Thanks as always for your time reading this email and we wish you a very Happy New Year! See you in 2024 🥳

All the best!
Tom & Emma

Integrating Strength & Conditioning: Nov ‘23

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance with the latest edition of our In-Form Newsletter 👋

This month, we wanted to share 4 simple tips for those looking to integrate strength and conditioning (S&C) into their cycling training programs. With time and energy at a premium for most of us, the idea of adding another training modality into the mix can seem questionable, but there are ways to successfully pull it off and in turn you can reap the benefits that strength training can offer.

So, the first piece of advice would be on frequency of S&C. If you are adding strength training into your program, you want to be sure that you’ll see meaningful improvements and adaptations from your investment! Well, as a general guide, try to aim for two (sometimes three) strength sessions per week for development of strength. When you’re looking to maintain previous gains (and perhaps focus more on your cycling-specific training), try to get in one-two sessions, where the second one can be of a lighter intensity if you’re trying to rest or save energy for other forms of training.

Secondly, try not to overcomplicate your S&C work, and keep things very simple, at least initially. It’s easy to get lost in the forest of strength training advice out there, and there are almost endless exercises (and variations on these exercises) you could do! As a cyclist using S&C to make you a more well-rounded athlete and to help improve performance on the bike, you don’t really need the level of nuance that a pure body builder or weight lifter is concerned with. When starting out, stick to simple exercises like squats, deadlifts, lunges etc (and some upper body presses and pulls too) when it comes to your heavy lifts.

Our third tip would be to use a core strength routine as your warm up for your heavier load S&C and combine them into the same session. Developing good core stability should be a priority for cyclists both for direct performance improvements via better power delivery, but also indirect benefits via the reduction of injuries and soreness when riding (e.g. lower back pain). Trying to fit in distinct core and heavier-load strength sessions can get really tricky for the busy cyclist, so combining them into one session and using core work to prime your muscles for heavier lifts can work really well and make your strength training very time efficient.

The final point we’ll raise here surrounds when to schedule your S&C sessions in a typical week/microcycle. It’s important to recognise that S&C work can be quite fatiguing and certainly early on, often results in some significant DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness). One less-than-ideal way in which cyclists try to integrate S&C into their programs is by scheduling sessions on their rest days. This at first can seem like a good way to avoid any clashes with the primary cycling activity, but what will in fact happen is that those important days marked for recovery and adaptation no longer off the body the rest it needs. Instead, more fatigue is piled on and a week can become devoid of any proper recovery time at all! We’ve found a better way is to schedule your S&C sessions on “training” or “stress-inducing” days, which could include a ride (or other cross-training activity) too, or just the S&C depending on how much time and energy you have to devote to training that day. The key here is ensure there’s a clear distinction between days where you’re putting stress on the body and days where you are letting yourself absorb and adapt to the previously-imposed stress. 

If you are looking to start S&C work (or restart after a long break), it’s highly recommended to see a good personal trainer who can demonstrate proper form and technique. This will help you avoid injuries and aid in you getting the most benefit from the reps and sets you do. 

Should you be interested, we have some simple home-based and gym-based strength training plans available through TrainingPeaks, which are designed to slot into existing cycling programs you might be following. 

News

We’re excited to have published a new article all about the Norwegian Method of training, geared specifically towards how this in-vogue approach could apply to and help cyclists improve their fitness and performance. The article includes an overview of what the Norwegian Method is, what example workouts and a typical training week might look like for cyclists, as well as a dive into the nuances to be aware of and pay attention to. We’d love for you to give it a read here.

As always, we have a range of other resources available on the site, including our popular Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide, The Complete Workout Library and a variety of ready-to-use training plans. 

Thanks a bunch for your time reading through our emails and we hope you got a few good takeaways from this one. We’ll see you on the next instalment.

All the best!
Tom & Emma

Training-Specific Weight Loss Tips: Oct ‘23

Hi, it’s Tom and Emma with the latest edition of our In-Form newsletter…

Musings

We thought we’d focus a little more on nutrition this month, rather than “training” specifically. With Emma being a qualified sports nutritionist, and having fairly recently written our Optimal Cycling Nutrition Guide, this is an area we want to provide more guidance in, since it’s so closely related to training and performance. 

The topic of weight loss is a particular area we’re asked about often, so we thought it’d be worth outlining some key points when it comes to achieving successful weight loss while training. 

1. Aim for a modest rate of weight loss

The first and most important point to note is that you should aim for a modest rate of weight loss. Rapid weight loss is never something you should be looking to achieve. 

This is because having a large energy deficit (the difference between what you expend and consume each day) can not only undermine your ability to complete your training sessions, but it also has longer-term impacts on your health and ability to sustain any weight loss. 

More specifically, maintaining a large energy deficit over a period of time causes your body to enter an energy conservation state, where certain bodily processes (such as the menstrual cycle in women) are suppressed. These processes remain suppressed for a period of time even if you start eating more or training less. Not only can this be harmful to health, but it increases the likelihood that you will gain weight over the longer term, because your baseline calorie needs are reduced. 

Aggressive dieting can also result in a loss of muscle mass, which causes an additional drop in baseline calorie needs, and makes weight loss even harder to sustain. 

Overall, a safe rate of weight loss is around 1lb or 0.5kg per week at most, which translates to a calorie deficit of no more than 500kcal per day on average. 

2. Periodise your nutrition around training

Our next tip is to periodise your nutrition around your training, so that you are still providing adequate nutrition to perform and adapt to your key sessions. 

High-intensity interval sessions require a good supply of carbohydrates, so you can try to time your meals so that the majority of your carbohydrate intake for the day falls before and during your high-intensity sessions. You might also aim for a smaller calorie deficit the day before an interval session to make sure your muscle glycogen levels aren’t too depleted. 

In our view, the best days for a larger energy deficit are when you plan to do low-intensity endurance training. On these days, you can get away with having a lower carbohydrate availability, since fat will be the primary source of fuel at this lower intensity. The calories burnt on long ride days are usually quite high too, making it easier to achieve a higher energy deficit. 

For more detailed information on how to periodise your nutrition around training, we have a full article on this topic here. 

3. Cut calories mainly by cutting down fat and alcohol

There are all sorts of different dietary approaches that can help you achieve a calorie deficit, such as intermittent fasting, low-carbohydrate diets and so on. All have been shown to have some success with certain people, and in general whatever you find easiest to sustain over the longer term will be the best strategy. 

However, as an endurance athlete, having an adequate carbohydrate intake is important for fuelling high-intensity sessions, as mentioned above. Moreover a good protein intake is needed to help maintain muscle mass while in a calorie deficit, and also helps you feel full. 

We’d therefore generally recommend that you focus mainly on cutting down fat and alcohol, with just a modest reduction in carbohydrate intake, and a slight increase in protein intake. 

Generally-speaking a good target is to aim for ~15% of energy intake from fats (don’t go below this, as fats are still important for health and performance). Carbohydrate intake can be in the region of 3-8g per kg body weight per day, depending on the type of session you’re doing and your overall energy demands. Protein should be around 1.8-2.4g per kg body weight per day. 

4. Lighter is not always better

Finally, remember that a lighter body weight doesn’t always equate to better performance. Each person will have their own ‘optimal’ body weight, and for some, this might be a higher percentage body fat than for others.

As always, we have plenty of training resources available on our website, including our Complete Workout Library, the Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide, the Optimal Cycling Nutrition Guide, and our Hill Climb Handbook. 

We also have a selection of training plans, which you can view here. If you need advice on which plan would suit you best, just drop us an email!

Until next month, best of luck with your riding and training!

Tom & Emma

Fatigue Resistance/Durability: Sep ‘23

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance 👋

We hope that September’s been treating you well! Here’s this month’s edition of our In-Form newsletter…

Musings

We’ve been thinking quite a bit about the concept of ‘fatigue resistance’ or ‘durability’, which is the ability to continue producing high wattages towards the end of a ride or race. 

It’s an important ability for many different types of cyclist to have, particularly since winning moves are often made in the closing stages of a race. Fatigue resistance is often overlooked though, as it can be quite hard to test and improvements in your ‘durability’ aren’t necessarily reflected in ‘fresh’ power data (e.g. from a 20-min max power test). 

So, we thought we’d give you a bit of an insight into some interesting data we have on this subject…

We’ve recently been performing an annual review for some of our athletes who are coming to the end of their competitive season, and the following data from one of our riders demonstrates this point nicely…

Fresh power data:

In comparing maximal power data from 2022 to 2023 so far, we can see our athlete improved or maintained their power over most key durations.

This athlete is already at a very high level, and we weren’t expecting huge changes in their fresh power numbers. Our main focus for the year had been on improving threshold power and endurance, so it was nice to see the biggest improvements over the longer durations. 

However, while it was cool to see maximal power outputs trending in the right direction, it could be argued these improvements were relatively small.

Fatigued Power Data:

When we turn to look at this athlete’s maximal power numbers after they have expended 40kJ/kg body weight (roughly a 3-hour race), we can see some more sizeable improvements:

These patterns are also seen when we look at peak power numbers after 30kJ/kg and 50kJ/kg, with improvements in max power output typically being in the region of 15% or more. 

There are two key points to take away here: 

• Firstly, don’t be too disheartened if you’re not constantly seeing big improvements in your fresh power numbers; it doesn’t mean your fitness isn’t improving! 

• Secondly, it’s important to test your fatigue-resistance or durability, if this is something you’re trying to develop in training. Simply testing your fresh power numbers often won’t tell you about improvements in your fatigue-resistance. 

For a lot of cyclists soon to be entering the base training phase through the late autumn and winter, developing fatigue-resistance will be a key training goal. 

To help, we’ve just put out a new article outlining how you can test and develop your fatigue-resistance. 

News 

• Alongside the post above, we’ve also just put out another post on Zone 2 training, titled ‘Is Zone 2 Training Overhyped or Under-Appreciated? This article follows on nicely from our earlier article on the thoughts of Dr Iñigo San Millán, who is coach of Tadej Pogačar. It aims to critically review some of the differing viewpoints around Zone 2 training; acknowledging that not all coaches and sports scientists agree that Zone 2 is as great as it’s often made out to be! 

• We have capacity to build some new custom plans for you, so do get in touch if this is of interest! Our custom plans strike a nice balance between fully-supported coaching, and our pre-build (but customisable) plans and seem to work well for those looking for a more individualised program on a tighter budget.

As always, we have plenty of training resources available on our website, including the Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide, the Optimal Cycling Nutrition Guide, and our Hill Climb Handbook. 

We hope that was useful for you! Thanks for your time and we’ll catch you in the next newsletter soon.

All the best,

Tom and Emma
High North Performance

Tapering Do’s & Don’t’s: Aug ‘23

Hey it’s Tom and Emma with this month’s In-Form Newsletter 👋

Musings

This month we’ve been thinking about tapering do’s and don’t’s and some common mistakes that crop up repeatedly. 

Here are some tapering tips we’ve collated from the scientific literature, practices of top athletes, and our own coaching experience…

Don’t taper for too long

Mathematical models of athletes’ fatigue and form levels generally support quite a long taper period. Based off this evidence, you’ll often see older training advice recommending around 2-weeks or more for the taper period. 

However, in practice for most athletes, this can be too long and result in a decrease in both fitness and form (i.e. performance) on race day.

The optimal taper length will depend on what type of event you’re targeting, as well as how quickly you tend to recover. Athletes who recover quickly (e.g. elite and high-level athletes) may need as little as 3-4 days to taper, whereas amateur and/or older athletes may need around 10-days. 

The type of event makes a difference too, with longer events generally benefitting from a longer taper. 

You’ll also want to consider how hard the training was leading into your taper. If your training load has been higher than normal, then you might want a slightly longer taper period. 

On average, we like to take around 7 days of tapering for an average well-trained but recreational-level cyclist whose training load was not notably increased leading into the taper, and who is gearing towards an event lasting roughly 2-3 hours. 

Don’t take extra days off

One mistake we commonly see is taking lots of days off the bike during the taper period, which can result in heavy legs on competition day. 

In our experience, it can be best to stick quite closely to your usual riding frequency. So if you usually ride 5 days per week, try to still ride 4-5 days per week during your taper. Research looking at the practices of top athletes also supports this principle. 

Do include higher-intensity

The same research looking at tapering practices of top athletes also suggests that it may be beneficial to include some higher-intensity riding during the taper period. 

This may seem counterintuitive, as high-intensity training isn’t exactly restful! However, in our experience, this high-intensity riding is appropriate for athletes across a range of ability levels and ages, and is beneficial in helping minimise fitness loss, priming the aerobic system for racing, and helping keep the legs feeling ‘activated’. 

Successfully completing a high-intensity session leading into your event can also provide confidence that your taper is going well and that you can expect to be in good form on race day. 

Generally, we like to include an abbreviated interval session (perhaps 50% of your usual high-intensity volume) around 4-5 days before an event. We’ll also often include a short ‘openers’ session 1-2 days before the event. This openers session will include just a few short efforts above threshold, stopping well the point that these efforts start to feel challenging. 

Do reduce ride duration

You might be wondering how you can taper your training down, if you’re not taking days off and you’re still including higher intensity riding. One of the best ways to do this is to simply make your rides shorter than normal. 

Generally, you’ll want to aim to be completing roughly 60-70% of your usual ride volume. 

Do polarise your intensity

Simply speaking, you want to keep your easy rides really easy during the taper period, and go hard in your high-intensity sessions.

So, alongside the high-intensity sessions described above, the rest of your riding should be mostly at a Zone 1 or low Zone 2 intensity (e.g. below ~60% FTP, ~65% Max HR or a 3/10 effort level). 

News

• We have a new article on the website that sums up all the training advice gleaned from interviews with Dr Iñigo San Millán (coach of Tadej Pogačar), and also provide some extra notes on nuances that might have been missed in these discussions. For anyone interested in Zone 2 training or lactate testing, this is one for you! 

• We also have some new strength training plans, designed to complement your on-bike training, which are available here. These include both home-based and a gym-based versions. 

As always, we have plenty of training resources available on our website, including the Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide, the Optimal Cycling Nutrition Guide, and our Hill Climb Handbook. 

Thanks again, and we’ll catch you on the next edition,

Tom and Emma

High North Performance

Musings On Burnout: July ‘23

Hi, Tom and Emma here 👋

We hope you’re having a fantastic July, and you’ve been managing to get plenty of time on the bike. Here’s the latest instalment of our In-Form Newsletter…

Musings

This month, we’re thinking about burnout…

This is quite a topical subject, as many cyclists will be entering the latter half of their competitive season, which can be a time where the accumulated mental and physical stress of training and competition can build toward the point of burnout. This can be physical or mental, or a combination of the two.

It helps to be aware of the signs of burnout, so that you can take steps to temporarily cut back on training and/or reduce other stressors in your life, before things go too far. 

Some key signs to look out for include:

• Low/irritable mood

• Lack of training motivation

• Difficulty sleeping

• Reduced libido

• Reduced or elevated heart rate, both at rest or during training

• Increased or reduced heart rate variability

• Inability to complete sessions that you can usually complete quite comfortably

• Persistent feeling of ‘heavy legs’, even after a few days of recovery

If you’re noticing two or more of these signs, taking 2-4 full days off the bike to allow both a mental and physical rest from training can be a good move.

During this period you can either rest completely, or engage in some active recovery off the bike (such as walking or swimming). This can also be a good opportunity to spend more time with friends and family, which can be compromised during the race season, and can really help with mental recovery! Focus on eating and sleeping well, and (where possible) reducing other life stressors too! 

If you don’t get any relief from the symptoms after a short training break, then it may be wise to explore other potential causes with a medical practitioner, as these symptoms might indicate an underlying condition of deficiency.  

Some tips to help avoid burn-out in the first place include:

• Allowing appropriate recovery around events. This needs to account not only for the physical fatigue from the events themselves, but also the stress from travelling and mental toll from nerves and internal/external expectations, which can all add up to a LOT of fatigue! So, if you’re racing frequently, try to keep the majority of your training between races focussed on recovery and fitness maintenance. 

• Try to plan racing and non-racing blocks. For example, repeated cycles of 4-weeks of racing, and 3-weeks of training. This allows both for a regular break from the stresses of racing, and also an opportunity to focus on building fitness between racing blocks, so that your racing blocks can just focus on recovery and maintenance, as mentioned above. 

• Consider one or more strategic training breaks. There are different ways you can approach this. One example would be to plan a 3-day break (like the one described above) 4-weeks out from any top-priority event. This acts as a nice ‘failsafe’ to help ensure you don’t need to take a training break in the 1-2 weeks leading into your event. Alternatively, you might prefer to take one or two training breaks, perhaps after a major event. These can be a little longer (e.g. 7-days), and might even include some unstructured riding. But importantly, any riding should just be ‘for fun’, and shouldn’t have any particular structure or training goals.

• Think about if/how you might be able to reduce any non-training stressors, such as poor sleep or work stress. These factors all contribute to your overall fatigue levels. 

News

• There’s a new article on the website where we review a relatively unknown concept of ‘carbohydrate unloading’ (where carbohydrate is intentionally restricted to reduce body weight for select shorter cycling disciplines). 

• We have capacity to take on new custom plan clients, so get in touch if this is of interest. With our custom plans, we’ll put together a bespoke plan to suit your individual strengths, limiters, competition demands, training availability and other life factors. We can either build a one-off plan geared towards a specific event, or we can plan recurring 6-week training blocks, where we’ll check in with you every 6-weeks to provide feedback. Our custom plans work well for athletes who don’t want day-to-day coach support, and/or those on a tighter budget. More info can be found here. 

• If you prefer to plan your own training but have a few nagging questions or want to get a second opinion on your training and future plans, then we also have some availability for consultations. More information about our consultation service is available here. 

As always, we have a wide range of training resources, which you can find under the ‘products’ and ‘resources’ tab on our website. 

That’s all for this month, so we’ll catch back up with you soon!

Tom & Emma

Less-Common Nutrition Tips: June ‘23

Hi there, it’s Tom and Emma with this month’s In-Form newsletter!

Musings

In line with the launch of our new guide Optimal Cycling Nutrition, in this month’s newsletter we’ve got four lesser-talked about nutrition tips to help optimise your training and racing: 

1. Most cyclists are aware that consuming carbohydrates in a longer ride or race is performance-enhancing, because it helps replenish carbohydrates that are being used during the ride. However, fewer people know that carbohydrates can also provide an instant boost to the central nervous system, helping enhance performance in a similar way to caffeine. Even just rinsing some carbohydrate drink around your mouth for 5-10 seconds and spitting it out will do the trick! Taking a small amount of carbohydrate a few minutes before starting a race can therefore be a good strategy for most types of race, and even helps boost performance in shorter events such as hill climbs, time trials, cyclocross or circuit races, which are so short that they don’t challenge the body’s internal carbohydrate stores. Rinsing your mouth with a carbohydrate drink can also be helpful if you experience stomach issues. 

2. If you struggle with stomach issues when riding in the heat, another good tip is to avoid energy drinks. That’s because, in the heat, we generally need to drink a lot of volume, and if you’re hydrating using energy drinks, then you can end up taking on a large amount of carbohydrates too. The gut has an upper limit on the rate at which carbohydrate can be absorbed during exercise, and if you consume more than this (because you need to drink lots), you can end up with some uncomfortable, and in some cases race-jeopardising digestive problems. A safer bet is to stick to sugar-free or low-sugar electrolyte drinks, and take in your energy through gels, bars or other foods. 

3. Another tip when it comes to hydration is to be aware of environments that are more likely to dehydrate you. We all know that sweat rates are higher in hotter weather. However, many people don’t appreciate how much sweat is lost in cold/wet weather too, when wearing lots of layers that often aren’t very breathable. Altitude is another environment where fluid losses are higher. This is because altitude causes increased fluid loss in the breath, and also an increased rate of ‘diuresis’ (i.e. urine production). 

4. Finally, if you’re looking to accurately estimate how many calories you’ve burnt during a ride and you ride with a power meter, this is super easy if you know one little hack… The work done in a ride equates almost exactly to the number of calories burnt. So if you’ve done 1000kJ of work, then you’ve burnt 1000kcal! This is because 1 kcal = 4.18 kJ. At the same time, the human body is roughly 25% efficient in converting kcal burnt into watts on the bike. So for every 4kJ of energy burnt (roughly 1kcal), there is 1kJ of work done in turning the cranks on the bike. Knowing this trick makes it very easy to spot the days where you might need to eat a bit more, and the days you can eat a bit less.

News

• With the main hill climb season in the UK rapidly approaching in September, we’ve been hard at work producing some hill-climb specific plans, for use in the lead-up to and during the season. These come with a free chapter from our popular Hill Climb Handbook, providing guidance on how to pace a hill climb effort, as well as 30% off the full guide. For those looking for something more bespoke, we also have custom plan availability, where we’ll build you a plan from the ground-up to suit your specific physiology and needs. 

• We have a new article on our website, which gives a detailed review of the different approaches to power profile testing, the pros and cons, and some real-world examples using actual data from athletes. If you’ve ever wanted to understand your own strengths and limiters in more detail, without the need to list a lab, this article is for you!

• And as mentioned above, our biggest news this month is our new guide “Optimal Cycling Nutrition”, which aims to provide all the need-to-knows to help you optimise training adaptations and enhance performance. If you’d like to learn more about any of the subjects above, as well as many other topics, you can get our guide here.

That’s it for this month! We really appreciate you checking in.

Tom and Emma

Hyper-Specific FTPs: May ‘23

Hi there, it’s Tom and Emma with this month’s In-Form Newsletter!

Musings

This month, we want to talk briefly about the use of a single threshold power value within your training, which is something we’ve been asked about quite a bit lately. 

Cyclists will commonly state, for example, their Functional Threshold Power (FTP) value to the nearest watt (e.g. 267W or 303W), i.e. a remarkable level of accuracy!

As much as a specific test protocol will indeed spit out a single value, the concept of pinning down your FTP to the nearest watt and using this religiously in your daily training is a little problematic… 

FTP in particular can be defined in a number of different ways and fundamentally, it’s a performance measure - it assesses the power output you can generate on a given day, under given circumstances.

This power output can and will vary day to day and over the course of a ride, depending on variables such as fuelling, hydration, time of day, phase of menstrual cycle, fatigue levels, environmental conditions (e.g. temperature, humidity, altitude) and so on. 

So the idea of having one fixed FTP value doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

In reality, cyclists have a threshold range or zone, which fluctuates often and will be higher towards the beginning of a ride, and gradually lower as muscle glycogen is depleted, and fatigue builds (in most cases). This variation of course also applies to other more physiologically-based threshold measures such the first and second lactate thresholds, and critical power. 

Knowing this variation exists is key to pitching your training at the right intensity…

Importantly, it can help you be kinder to yourself on days where your threshold happens to be at the lower end of the range, and to make sense of the differences between your indoor and outdoor abilities, for example.

So, how do you know you’re working in the right intensity range without having a fixed FTP value?

Well, one part of it is paying close attention to your perceived effort or ‘RPE’!  

Your breathing rate, the sensation in your legs, and what’s happening to your heart rate all tell you information about how hard you’re riding, and whether you’re above or below your threshold at any given time. 

If you want to stay below your first threshold (e.g. within Zones 1 or 2 in a Five or Six Zone model), you should be able to easily hold a conversation, the effort level should feel comfortable and your heart rate should be largely stable (you might see a small amount of upward drift, but only 5-10bpm over several hours). 

To stay below your second threshold (FTP/second lactate threshold), you should try to work at an intensity that feels challenging but sustainable for longer periods of time, and you should still be able to speak short sentences. 

Stepping over the second threshold, you should notice an uptick in your breathing rate (so that it’s hard to speak even single words), and a more rapid escalation of your heart rate. The discomfort in your legs will grow minute-by-minute, and you’ll only be able to hold this workload for 15-20 minutes at most. 

In summary, try to put a range around a calculated threshold for use in your daily workouts to help you not over or undercook the intensity of your training, and practice listening to your body!

News

• For those living in the UK, we’re excited to report that we now have facility to offer physiological testing (e.g. VO2max, lactate and muscle oxygen saturation monitoring) in our new lab near Harrogate. Click here for more info.

• We now have a wider range of free training plan samples available here.

• Finally, we’ve been beavering away in the background to produce a new cycling nutrition guide, which will complement our existing range of guides and handbooks. This is nearly complete, so keep your eyes peeled for the launch in the next few weeks!

That’s it for this month. As always you can find our Cycling Physiology Guide and Hill Climb Handbook on our website too. For those that are already customers, we thank you greatly for your support and feedback!

All the best!

Tom & Emma

The Breakthrough Workout: Apr ‘23

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance and welcome to this month’s In-Form newsletter.

Musings

With many athletes now building towards your their higher-priority events, we thought we’d talk about a particular type of session that might be useful to include in your next training phase… 

We like to call this the ’breakthrough workout’. 

This is a training session that’s notably harder than a regular workout, and is designed to create a strong adaptive stimulus and challenge you in a race-specific way. 

One example could be a long-duration ride, performed at a Zone 3 intensity as much as possible ( where Zone 3 is on a 6-7 zone scale, and is harder than the Zone 2 intensity that would usually be used for this type of endurance ride). 

This could be a good breakthrough session for those leading into a sportive or gran fondo. 

Another example might be long duration workout that incorporates blocks of supra-threshold efforts towards the beginning and end of the ride, which could be a good specific breakthrough workout leading into a road race. 

In either case, the duration can be adjusted to suit your fitness level and the length of the event you’re targeting. 

Lower-priority races and events can also be used as breakthrough sessions too.

What’s important here is that the session is notably more challenging than your regular workouts, and also simulates key demands of your target race or event (such as sustained Zone 3 riding in a sportive, or supra-threshold efforts towards the end of a demanding ride in a road race). 

Workouts like this can be particularly useful for time-limited athletes who complete a similar training load week-to-week, as it allows for a big adaptive stimulus and a jump up in fitness, which can be hard to achieve from a flat training load.

Other big benefits of breakthrough workouts are that they allow opportunities to (i) test and optimise race nutrition under more race-like conditions, (ii) work on mental preparedness for racing, (iii) work on pacing strategies (iv) work on technical skills at a race-like intensity, and (v) identify any remaining performance limiters. 

As these sessions are very challenging, we wouldn’t recommend incorporating them more often than every 3-4 weeks, and you’ll want to make sure you have planned in adequate recovery afterwards. 

We often find a breakthrough workout works well on the lead-up to a recovery week. This is a strategy we adopt when incorporating breakthrough sessions in many of our specific-preparation plans, which you can view here. 

News

For those of you who use Intervals.icu to plan and analyse your training, our popular Complete Workout Library is now available in Intervals.icu format! 

Intervals.icu is a fantastic platform for deeper analysis of your training data and we throughly recommend checking it out if you haven’t already. 

We’ve also got 3 new articles on the website this month which we’re excited to let you know about:

• 10 tips to improve your ramp testing, including advice on the use of ERG mode, using appropriate protocols and recognising the limitations of testing too!

• A round-up of the essential skills for the self-coached cyclist

• Our advice on avoiding ‘coaches block’ (i.e. that feeling of overwhelm when faced with a blank training calendar, much like how writers describe the problem of “writers block”).

That’s all for this month. 

As always you can find our Cycling Physiology Guide and Hill Climb Handbook on our website too. For those that are already customers, we thank you greatly for your support and feedback!

Thanks again!

Tom & Emma

“Dose-Response” Relationship: Mar ‘23

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance. We hope this latest newsletter finds you well!

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, spring is on the horizon, and we’re very much looking forward to some longer days and warmer weather for riding! 🌱☀️

Musings

This month, we wanted to reinforce the important principle of the ‘dose-response” relationship that exists between training and the resulting adaptations. 

We’ve always found it can help enormously to look at training load (and especially high intensity training) in a similar way to how dosage works in relation to medication.

Take too little of a paracetamol pill, an ibuprofen tablet etc. and you won’t see any effect…

Take the recommended dosage, and the effects are often very positive and the medicine provides the intended response!

But crucially, take too much and the results aren’t enhanced further. In fact, an increased dose can end up being very dangerous and harmful.

The main point here is that more isn’t always better.

With training, the relationship is very similar. For each athlete at any particular time, there’s an effective “dose” of training needed to bring about a positive response related to maintaining or improving fitness. 

Particularly with high-intensity training, there comes a point beyond which there is no additional benefit. You’ve provided as much stress as you body needs in order to trigger an adaptive response. Adding more training stress doesn’t necessarily make the body adapt faster and moreover, any additional stress comes with an exponentially increasing risk of becoming ill, injured or overtrained. 

The trick is to apply the right training stress for your current fitness level and your current capacity to recover from that training. 

So, try to keep this in mind when you feel a tendency towards adding more load, more intensity and more training stress onto yourself in a bid to get fit fast, or catch up for lost time.

Science

This month, we’ve been reviewing a paper comparing the stress response and recovery time-course between sprints, vs heavy-load strength training:

Power Production and Biochemical Markers of Metabolic Stress and Muscle Damage Following a Single Bout of Short-Sprint and Heavy Strength Exercise in Well-Trained Cyclists

Key Take-Homes

The full write-up is available here. However, the main learning points were that: 

1. Sprint training induces a large metabolic stress (i.e. the body is required to generate energy at high rates, that challenge the body’s maximum capacity). The acute effects of a sprint session, such as elevated lactate levels, return to baseline within a matter of hours. However, we know from other research that full recovery may take between 12-24 hours in order to replenish muscle glycogen stores. 

2. Strength training mainly results in muscular damage with effects lasting 2-days or more.  The metabolic stress is much less than for the sprint session.

3. Elite-level cyclists who are familiar with regular sprint and strength training don’t appear to experience performance detriment after these types of sessions when performed in isolation

4. We need to be wary of one-size-all approaches to modelling fitness and fatigue (such as the TSS model), because different types of session induce different training stress, with different recovery time-courses. 

News

• Top of our news this week is Zoe Langham riding an amazing race at the UCI Cycling eSports World Championships, clinching the silver medal in a close finish with the ever-impressive World Tour pro Loes Adegeest. Zoe improved on last-year’s bronze medal-winning performance, and we’re excited to see where her current rate of improvement takes her going forward.

• We’ve made some upgrades to our workout library, which now includes progression levels, so that you can easily see how sessions can be developed as your fitness improves.

• We’ve also been expanding our offering of training plans, which now include some discipline specific plans, for use in the lead-up to a priority event, and a selection of 2-week taper plans. We’ll be adding new plans to these two categories over the coming months. If there are any plans you’d like to see added, just drop us an email, and we’ll try to create them in order of highest demand!

That’s all for this month!

As always you can find our Cycling Physiology Guide and Hill Climb Handbook on our website too. For those that are already customers, we thank you greatly for your support and feedback!

All the best,

Tom & Emma

Understanding Allostatic Load: Feb ‘23

Hey! It’s Tom and Emma at High North Performance,

We hope all’s well and that your training is going smoothly, as most of us are busy laying down a foundation for the year and season ahead!

Let’s get into this month’s edition of In-Form:

Musing

This month we wanted to talk about a concept known as the ‘allostatic load’ and how this needs to be considered when planning your training. 

Allostatic load refers to the cumulative physiological ‘wear and tear’ that results from the body's efforts to adapt to chronic stressors over time. These stressors encompass all of our daily activities, and can include physical (e.g. both training and non-training activity), psychological (e.g. work or financial stress), and environmental (e.g. altitude, and temperature) factors.

If the stress response is activated too frequently or for too long, it can lead to a state of chronic stress and result in long-term negative effects on health and well-being.

Chronic life stressors also directly impact the ability to train and to adapt effectively to training. Studies have shown, for example, that inadequate sleep can slow down recovery, and increase the risk of illness and injury (for paper review, see here). Conversely, we can see the power of sleep in a recent study that suggests that even a 20-minute nap may help enhance antioxidant defences after exercise, potentially helping to promote recovery. 

We often work with time-crunched athletes who already have a high allostatic load from work, family commitments, and often limited sleep. With these athletes, it’s very important to make sure the overall training load is appropriate. It’s not simply a case of filling all available time with training, as this can lead to overtraining, maladaptation and illness! 

Another common scenario is when athletes travel to extreme environments (e.g. altitude or heat). In these cases, there’s a sudden upward shift in environmental stress, and training needs to be reduced accordingly, until the athlete has adapted to the change in environment. 

Some tips for monitoring your allostatic load include: 

1. Being mindful of any acute changes e.g. change in environment, job, moving house etc., and proactively reducing your training load until you’re feeling more settled.

2. Taking a daily measure of heart rate variability and/or resting heart rate - deviations from the norm (whether higher or lower) for more than a day or so can be a sign of increased stress.

3. Being aware of sleep. Lack of sleep can contribute to a higher allostatic load, but can also be a key indicator that your allostatic load is high if you’re struggling to get to sleep or to stay asleep.

If you suspect your allostatic load may have increased for any reason, then it’s often wise to reduce your training accordingly. The key exception to this would be if your allostatic load has increased as a result of a planned and purposeful increase in training load (such as to build a fitness peak ahead of a key race). 

Science

In this month’s paper review, we take a look at a novel interval design that aims to improve the amount of time spent riding close to VO2max or maximal aerobic capacity.

High-intensity decreasing interval training (HIDIT) increases time above 90% VO2peak

This study compared three different interval sessions to look at the time to exhaustion and the time spent above 90% VO2max among 12 amateur level cyclists. 

The three interval designs were: 

1. Long intervals: 3-mins ‘hard’, and 2-mins ‘easy’ until the point of exhaustion.

2. Short intervals: 30-sec ‘hard’ and 20-sec ‘easy’ until the point of exhaustion.

3. Progressively decreasing intervals: interval length starting at 3-mins, and then decreasing to 2-min, 1-min, 45-sec, and finally 30-sec. Once 30-sec intervals were reached, these were repeated until the point of exhaustion. Like the long and short intervals, a 3:2 work:recovery interval was used, so for example, after the 3-min hard interval, there was a 2-min easy recovery period, after the 2-min interval, there was a 1-min 20-sec recovery, and so on.

In all sessions, the 'hard' intervals were performed at each athlete’s 5-min max power. The ‘easy’ intervals were performed at roughly a Zone 3 intensity (83% of each athlete’s critical power on average)

Our detailed paper review is here. These are our key take-homes: 

1. The progressively decreasing intervals allowed notably more time to be spent riding close to VO2max before the point of exhaustion (roughly 5-mins vs 3-mins for the other two designs).

2. The total time spent close to VO2max was quite low for all designs, so in practice, we’d probably recommend doing two blocks of efforts, separated by 5-mins of easy riding, but stopping each block before the point of exhaustion.

3. There was considerable variability in the athletes’ responses to the different interval sessions, and some did favour one of the other two designs. This highlights the importance of including some variety in your training and that individualisation of training prescription is vital.

News

• First up, we have a new article looking at the discrepancy between indoor and outdoor FTP. If you want to learn more about this, and see why TrainerRoad have dropped the ball a bit, we’d love for you to read it here.

• Next, we’re pleased to report that we’ve added to our training plan library, and now have more volume options for our VO2max, threshold power, ultra-distance and ‘anaerobic booster’ plans. If you’re interested, you can check them out here.

• Finally, we hope you’ll all join is in wishing our coached athlete Zoe Langham, as well as other riders from the Wahoo Le Col team (whom we are partnered with) all the very best for the UCI Cycling eSports World Championships tomorrow! You can watch the action on Zwift’s YouTube channel.

That’s it for this month. As always you can find our Cycling Physiology Guide and Hill Climb Handbook on our website too. For those that are already customers, we thank you greatly for your support and feedback!

All the best,

Tom and Emma

Time-limited Periodisation: Jan ‘23

Hey from Tom and Emma at High North Performance,

We hope you all had a wonderful festive period, and you’re now starting to pin down some targets and ambitions for the new year. Let’s get into this month’s edition of In-Form:

Musings

So, naturally at this time of year, the concept of periodisation tends to be on the minds of many athletes and coaches…

Training studies, and the practices of top-level athletes suggest that it can be useful to periodise training volume across the year, as well as on a smaller scale, such as every 4 weeks. 

As an example, a good strategy can be to gradually ramp up volume throughout the year, and then taper this down when you come into your competitive season. 

You might also periodise volume over a 4-week block, gradually increasing this over the first 3 weeks, and then taking a recovery week in the final week. 

However, these distributions require a high training time availability and flexibility - this availability needs to exceed the amount of training volume you can comfortably tolerate week-on-week in order to see benefit. 

That’s because one of the main purposes of volume periodisation is that it allows you to apply periods of training overload, and then reduce volume to allow your body to recover and adapt.

If you’re time-limited, and can comfortably string together multiple weeks of training at your highest training time availability, does it really make sense to be periodising your training like this, so that some weeks you’re not training as much as you have time to? 

In these circumstances, we think that a better approach is to implement a flat training load (sometimes referred to as a ‘basic week’), which makes the best use of your available time. 

This means, if you have 8-hours per week to train, you aim to complete close to 8-hours per week most weeks, without worrying too much about periodising your volume. This will keep your fitness level at least maintained, or likely slowly increasing.

Then whenever you have the opportunity for extra training time, you can increase that volume to create an overload of training stress and stimulate a more sizeable boost in fitness (given appropriate rest following the overload).

With this periodisation strategy, ‘recovery on demand’ is often a good approach to take. So rather than planning a recovery week every, say, 4-weeks, recovery weeks are used when the athlete starts to show signs that they are fatiguing. Or if it’s been quite a while (e.g. 7-weeks) since the last lower-volume week, a reduction in training might be planned regardless to help maintain mental engagement/motivation. 

Here’s a great article by Alan Couzens on this topic, which we go back to regularly. 

Science

In this month’s paper review, we opted to write about an older (2014) paper, which we’ve found is very informative on a number of different areas: 

The Road to Gold: Training and Peaking Characteristics in the Year Prior to a Gold Medal Endurance Performance

This paper takes a deep-dive into the training data of 11 XC skiers over the year leading up to their most successful gold-medal winning competition at the Olympics or World Championships. 

It’s rare to get such detailed insight into such elite athletes, and we think there are some interesting learnings that arise from this paper. 

Our detailed paper review is here. These are our key take-homes: 

1. The world-class athletes in this study didn’t do more intensive training (in terms of volume) than you’d typically see from average-level athletes. The key difference between the training of elite and amateur athletes was overall training volume, which amounted to 700-900 hours/year in this study.

2. Towards the beginning of the training year, the athletes’ training was more pyramidal, and became progressively more polarised as they got closer to their main competition (for an explanation of these terms see here).

3. 86% of total endurance training time was spent at a ‘Zone 1’ intensity below 1.1mmol/L lactate. This is lower than most athletes will perform their long endurance rides. We believe this is done to minimise metabolic and muscular strain caused by the high power outputs sustained, even at low lactate levels. This supports a theory that high-level athletes who ride at a high absolute power outputs may need to reduce the power they perform their long endurance rides at e.g. down to ~50-60% FTP, whereas less well trained athletes (and potentially also female athletes) who ride at lower absolute power outputs may benefit from slightly higher powers (e.g. 70-80% FTP) in their long endurance rides.

4. The athletes didn’t conform to science-based ‘best practices’ when tapering for their key events. This is probably due to the high density of races leading up to the Olympics/Word Champs. We set out some pragmatic best practices for tapering in a condensed racing season in our detailed paper review.

News

In all honesty, this last month, we’ve mostly been busy reviewing our athletes' past year of training, and percolating ideas for how we can improve upon things for next year!

That being said, we wanted to give you a heads up that we’ve got some exciting new premium resources in the early stages of creation, designed to be affordable and digestible products specifically for self-coaching athletes (and coaches too). 

The first of these should be launched some time in the first part of this year, and you’ll be the first to know when they’re live 👍 

-

That’s it for this month! A quick reminder for those looking to start their training for 2023, we have a selection of conditioning plans that could be a good starting point if you’re fairly new to training, or have had an extended break. If you already have some residual fitness, our base plans could be a good fit.

As always you can find our Cycling Physiology Guide and Hill Climb Handbook on our website too!

Thanks,

Tom & Emma

Base Training For Non-Professionals: Dec ‘22

Hey, Tom and Emma here 👋

Time is flying - here’s December’s newsletter instalment! 

Musings

The traditional concept of ‘base’ training is that it involves high-volumes of low-intensity riding, which seeks to build your general aerobic fitness, economy and endurance, and in effect sets a strong foundations upon which to build your ‘higher end’ fitness later in the year. 

While many elite and professional cyclists still follow this traditional high-volume training approach, for most this simply isn’t feasible…

So what should base training ideally look like for the non-pro cyclist who doesn’t have the capacity for high training volumes at this time of year? Here are 4 tips from us:

1. Prioritise fun and skills development

When your key goals are still several months away, make sure your training is engaging to avoid the risk of a motivational slump further down the track when your training is likely to be far more impactful on race/event performance! During the base phase, we recommend having at least one session per week where you’re riding for fun rather than ‘training’. 

2. Avoid too many “taxing” sessions

Similar to the first tip, it’s probably best to avoid doing too many sessions that are mentally and physically very taxing. This probably means mostly avoiding sessions like VO2max intervals, and longer anaerobic power efforts, for example. This is because we want to preserve your training willpower until closer to your target events so that you can be in peak shape at the right time. 

3.  Target sessions that will help with subsequent training

Rather than looking for quick improvements in things like threshold power, through the base phase we’re looking to develop aspects of fitness that will set you up to complete better training when your target events are a little closer.

We recommend including 1-3 sessions per week that focus on Zone 3 riding (75-95% FTP), with the aim of building your muscular endurance and developing the aerobic capacity of your muscles.

1-2 times per fortnight, you can also include a little riding at or slightly above your threshold power in order to begin acclimating yourself to higher intensities, where Zwift racing or unstructured ‘fartlek' sessions can be good ways to do this in a fun manner!

4. Take the time to do some strength training

As you’ll probably be doing less high-intensity training, and you’re not racing, this is a great time to introduce some strength training, if you have the time. 

We recommend doing this 2x per week, beginning with lighter weights and higher reps (e.g. 15-20 per set), but gradually working towards heavier weights, and roughly 4-8 reps per set, and 3-5 sets per exercise, taking plenty of time to recover between sets. Good exercises include squats, deadlifts and calf raises, plus some basic core strength work. Always consult a strength and conditioning coach before undertaking any weight training to make sure you’re lifting safely.

If you’re still feeling unsure on how to plan your base training phase, we have several autumn/winter training plans specifically designed for the base phase, which you can check out here. 

Science

Effects of including sprints during prolonged cycling on hormonal and muscular responses and recovery in elite cyclists

We’ve typically advocated keeping power well-controlled when completing endurance rides, aiming to keep your power below your ‘first ventilatory threshold’ (VT1), or typically between 55-75% FTP or 60-70% Max HR, at an intensity where fat oxidation is maximised. This is because improving capacity for fat oxidation is a key goal for most endurance rides. 

However the study linked above, which is by Bent Rønnestad and colleagues, looked at whether inclusion of sprints within a long endurance ride can enhance the adaptations you’d usually expect from such a ride. 

You can read a full review of the paper here, including a description of the methods used, consideration of any study limitations and a more in-depth discussion of the key take-aways. 

However, the key points from the paper were that:

1. Adding sprints to endurance rides may have some aerobic benefits, and doesn’t seem to cause notable fatigue in elite cyclists. However, we’d recommend that less well-trained cyclists take care with sprint training to avoid accumulating too much fatigue, which may impact subsequent, and more important sessions.

2. It seems that adding sprints to endurance rides may not suppress the stimulus for improved fat oxidation, and in fact may enhance this training effect. We suspect though that this may be conditional on the sprints being structured into blocks within an otherwise well-controlled endurance ride, and not sprinkled sporadically throughout the ride. So structured riding is still important!

News

• We are excited to collaborate with Wahoo LeCol as their official training plans partner, where members get access to discounts on a while range of ready-to-ride programs. Check them out here.

• As part of this collaboration, we’ve also produced a new indoor-specific autumn/winter training plan for those who quite understandably prefer to stay inside when it’s dark and cold!

• Finally, we also have a new article on the pros and cons of sweet spot training in the base phase - check that out here.

That’s a wrap - if you have any feedback or comments, do get in touch at info@highnorth.co.uk. 

As always, you can find all of our available products and services on our website, including our popular physiology guide, and hill-climb handbook. 

Thanks,

Tom & Emma