In my experience the more complex a coach makes training the worse they are. The vast majority of sessions don’t need anything more than a warmup, some blocks of work and a cooldown. Complicating it with lots of fancy intervals just adds more ways for it to be done poorly.
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You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but that’s not why at all. I am glad your workouts seem to work for you, but obviously I disagree with a lot of what you’re saying here. Any “lazy coach” or athlete can make workouts that smash their legs. Cheers.
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Can confirm. The average 70kg cyclist has about 50-60,000 calories of fat stored on their body. Myself personally who’s closer to 80kg and 12% BF would have 70-75,000 calories of fat stores.
It’s why healthy people with a normal BMI can survive 2+ months without eating any food at all.
Even if I rode for 15hour straight without eating anything at all somehow, I’d use only maybe 5-10% of my fat stores.
Starving to death is hard. You have LOTS of energy stored in your fat reserves.
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Look it’s a common hurdle in coaching that once you start discussing something people all lose track of what kind of athlete we are talking about, a couple of messages back and forth about what jonas vingegaard is doing to beat pogacar before someone chimes in on how that is too difficult for their 12 year old son to follow. Yes of course it is, we are not talking about workouts for 12 year olds.
Again we are talking about “the ideal metabolic flexibility cyclist” so the idea that the training is too complex is laughable. At the end of the day it’s pedal your bike to the power indicated on the screen, not rocket science.
If this idea were true then I guess there is no reason to eat any fat at all, we have plenty in reserve, right ?
In practice it doesn’t work like that because the ability to metabolize from reserves is limited. and with a long ride finishing at 5pm and another one scheduled for 10am the next morning you better believe guys need to eat supplemental fat.
To be fair, you are the person who said simple workouts are the product of lazy coaches. Had you left that last paragraph out of your post, you wouldn’t have gotten the responses about workout complexity that you received.
I stand by that assertion, the obsession with sweet spot that we see being propagated is the successor to the obsession with stacked VO2max blocks both of which are meerly symptoms of this certain coaching service getting lazy and not being able to offer insight or any kind of custom workouts at scale. Client starts asking questions or looking for more improvement, shut them up with 6 weeks of successive V02 work, that will get them to stop messaging you looking for nuanced trainings. They will be too busy burning out of the sport.
So I stand by what I said you should fire your coach if they are following this modality, better off using TR.
ISM doesn’t have any secret training techniques. He got lucky to latch on to a generational rider plus, maybe, they have the best designer drugs there is in the United Arab Emirates.
ISM hasn’t been able to turn McNulty, Kuss, or anyone else into a “completely other level of rider”.
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If you’re talking about EC, they don’t give six week VO2max blocks.
They also aren’t obsessed with Sweet Spot at all.
Sweet spot is simply sub-threshold training, and it has its place in most training plans for average riders who are riding 10 hrs per week or so. As volume scales up, the necessity to ride at sweet spot, or tempo goes way down. So for someone like you riding 20hrs per week, there’s limited utility and your pros probably don’t do a lot of it until they’re training for climbing.
SST is frequently used as a volume substitution, and it is a reasonable one. That said you can only get so far riding 8hrs per week and doing a bunch of SST. Part of that is the metabolic flexibility bit of it.
Every rider is different, and what they need is different because of schedule, training history, event specificity, etc.
So to flip that back on you, saying any one thing is a reason to “fire your coach” is every bit as lazy as a coach that programs the same thing for every rider under the sun. You are talking about a very small subset of riders - the ideally metabolically flexible rider - so casting things around about lazy coaches based on that one thing is kind of absurd because most people participating in this discussion aren’t seeking that, or even capable of seeking that for any number of reasons.
You can stand by what you said, but it makes you look every bit as inflexible as the coaches you’re criticizing. Whatever your ax is that you have to grind there, I don’t know, but you’re pretty wildly mischaracterizing EC’s coaching. Seems like there’s a personal thing there, maybe your ideas were challenged and you didn’t get the responses you liked? If so, I can certainly see why.
Have you ever worked with Kolie or any of his coaches? Or is this grudge all based off of r/ velo conversations?
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ISM also hasn’t been able to provide actual scientific evidence that being “ideally metabolically adaptable” is a performance benefit, even though in theory it probably should be. He has been directly challenged on this point (heck, even on this forum!) by other prominent physiologists and has failed to provide any kind of evidence whatsoever that his training method is superior, other than pointing to Pogacar’s results… which are just as likely a function of Pogacar being a generational rider as they are of ISM having broken through anything. Hence why Pog actually improved somewhat markedly this year in spite of no longer working with ISM.
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You definitely need to eat fat, no one is suggesting otherwise.
Rather, it would be pretty unusual for someone to need to go out of their way to take in adequate fat.
And because your stores are so large, specific daily intake is less important than like average weekly intake. Because you have a giant reservoir of it.
You were suggesting that athletes should be careful to ingest fat post workout. There is no scientific evidence for this that I’ve ever seen.
If there’s something new that’s come out recently on this matter, please share it!
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I understand what you are saying but have you considered that the fat reserves are not available to fuel exercise ? They are there to be weighed or could release X massive number of calories if you burned them in a large bonfire. All the guys training big volume swear by their high quality olive oil and whatnot and trust me you get an extra glug or two on your pasta when you are riding the sufficient levels of high volume.
No. You definitely use your fat reserves to fuel exercise. I wouldn’t be able to compete in the 1000km+ events I do otherwise.
All the guys training big volume swear by their high quality olive oil and whatnot and trust me
I definitely don’t do this lol. I’m sure some people do though.
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Look, I have seen the training data from top pros (even some now formerly coached by ISM) and no that is not Pogi. Even if we accept your idea of the ideal metabolic flexibility cyclist their workouts are far less complex than anything you posted above, and mostly consist of fairly basic intervals with a bit of event specific stuff before big races.
Regarding your notion of “ideal metabolic flexibility cyclist” ISM has yet to provide any evidence of this being superior, funnily enough the season Pogi stopped being coached by him he had what is probably the best season of any cyclist ever 
You make a good point, but it’s normal to gain essential information from a consultant and then internalize it into your own process and then fire that consultant. Doesn’t really indicate much awry with his methods. I’m certain in fact that UAE has continued to expand on this and in fact this expansion should be the focus of much of our efforts as we try to understand modern cycling.
If riders he coached consistently improved under his methods then maybe I would buy this.
The fact that he cannot back up his ideas on metabolic flexibility and the fact that Pogi immediately improved after he stopped working under ISM leads me to doubt his methods work the way he says they do.
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Nothing is “awry” with this methods, they’re just not secret sauce. They’re really not doing anything that’s not already done by hundreds of coaches elsewhere, much like “polarized” training was not a new concept when Seiler coined the phrase.
As to fat, yep, athletes need it, but generally not at the expense of carbohydrate as you are alluding to. Where it goes haywire is when you get endurance athletes who are training big volume who are waking up and having coffee with butter and MCTs for breakfast, not eating till noon, and then wondering why they can’t train effectively. So it’s possible to go overboard with this stuff worrying about being fat adapted. Many endurance athletes are wired to go overboard with things and frequently do, at the expense of their performance.
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Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Moderation is for cowards.
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Just to counter whatever that was above, I’ve really enjoyed my year so far with Empirical Cycling. Added a TON to my long power, completed some massive events, and just did a 315 mile solo unsupported ride a few weeks ago pretty much on a whim. Mostly fueled by gummy bears though, not sure what the olive oil thing is about.
Anyway, just wanted to say to my knowledge, EC is not a cartel. Maybe a cult? Cult adjacent?
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JK. It’s seriously been a great experience.
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You’re def in a cult. But we all know r/velo is becoming a 347 cult, there’s a new prophet in town
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