Recent Flo podcast with Steve Neal

FWIW I do some carb manipulation based on the type of training - increase carbs ahead of big carb burning workouts. And eating protein is a thing after 50 years old. But I wouldn’t call it diet manipulation in the sense that I believe you intended.

For another perspective go look at Alan Couzens Twitter feed. Here is one:

and another one:

Just pull up his feed and start reading from today, April 15 2022, and you’ll see a bunch of posts and links to his older blog articles.

Like I said, its another perspective.

I’ll listen once again to a more recent empirical cycling podcast, but this is where I take issue essentially…From the first tweet:

“If you want to burn more fat, esp in the base phase, dial down the sugar & dial up the fat content of your diet.”

I mean for me upping the fat off the bike would just make me even more fat… :rofl:

Again I’ll listen to more recent podcasts on this topic but I thought it was debunked the argument of having to eat more fat to increase fat-max :smirk:

I would read it as more of a move to a 40-30-30 ratio between cho/protein/good fat rather than just adding more fat.

You’re doing an absolutely fantastic job Chris - I’ve been loving the podcast episodes. Keep up the good work!

So getting out the saddle and hammering it for 10/15 secs out the the corners on a group ride before setting into an endurance pace isn’t harmful to building your Base then provided you are not doing it all the time?

How did your training style continue and evolve in 2020, 2021 and 2022? Still with Steve? What have you learned in addition to all things already said here?

@batwood14

Any updates on your training following the Steve Neal approach over the years? Have you found it to work well long term?

I only did my first build last season and hit my best numbers ever. This past year I took 8 months off the bike so I’m just getting back into shape now. The only thing I’d really do differently is rest more - maybe two weeks on and one week off (easy).

For those that have done this type of tempo training with HR ceiling, how do you progress it? I’ve blocked moderately hard days together e.g. 3x30’, 1x60’, etc. I guess try to raise the power but stay under the HR cap? :thinking:

Sam are you meaning actively watching HR during the intervals or looking after and evaluating how much decoupling before progressing the intervals? If the former I think it’s trial and error and to be honest, I have tried and not bothered persisting with using HR during the work interval due to it’s variability for me indoors/outdoors/tired/caffeinated etc etc

Some days intervals ‘feel hard’, some days they don’t…but priority is just getting the overload in and not sweating the finer detail.

For these type of rides, they always fall in a 10W window — 295-305W with average HR 77-80% of max. I generally start at the lower end of the range and increase the power if it feels the right thing to do.

So, my question is where do you go once you can do four or five days, of say 60-90’ at this intensity, in a row?

Given time is limited, I guess the answer is to increase the power without going over the HR cap? Perhaps starting at shorter durations and gradually extending TiZ…

Intervals

Can you be more specific please? haha

e.g. sprints during the tempo block?
or surges/bursts a la @brendanhousler ?

I can’t, but not because I don’t want to be.

Couple of things, and then maybe someone else can chime in:

Steve’s appearances on podcasts (like a lot of other coaches, etc) was intended to drum up some business, and at least back then (pre-lockdown), it seemed to attract a few new clients. The heart-rate cap was really just a compromise for folks who couldn’t or didn’t want to run through a suite of testing that he used to assess each rider (lactate, perhaps NIRS, biometric assessments). A foot in the door into his process. I’m not sure any single thing that Steve did was revolutionary, but in its totality it was highly effective (for me and a few dozen others on the coaching site, as well as private consults and clients). Most of us were in our first five years of cycling, and didn’t fully understand or appreciate the types of training plans we were trying, the jargon we learned, or really what to do. We constantly second-guessed ourselves. IOW, we were TR users.

From bits and pieces on his coaching site from a few years ago, I can say he likes Billat intervals, but to reduce it down to that would be a big over-simplification. He values race specificity when it comes to intensity. He then works with you to see what you can recover from the fastest. Intensity doesn’t do you any good unless you recovery from it. He’s not going to go down rabbit holes of physiology discussions, other than just to discuss what he has learned with his coaching. He will look back over his database of former riders, assess you, and go “ok, this worked for a rider I had before who was like you, let’s try it”.

Here’s the answer: unlike tempo and endurance (for which Steve felt everyone should do at all stages), high intensity was very individualized, so much so that he likely wouldn’t answer this question. What he prescribes one rider would likely be very different to another. Therefore: I don’t know what he uses. He uses it all. :man_shrugging:

You will find a lot of his riders are fairly coy about what he had them do. Part of that is the individual nature of the work, and part of that is that Steve is trying to protect his “intellectual property”.

One of the very first things he would do (without being confrontational) is question the veracity of what you wrote above. Can you really do that? Did you do it w/o a drift in HR, drift in lactate (or maybe now something with Moxy)? If you did the above tempo and everything was flat as a pancake, great. If you held the power but things weren’t flat then you didn’t really do it. This is a fundamental difference in philosophy than you either embrace or not. He is a “balance point” guy. It’s not that he thinks anything magical or different is happening at these lower intensities, it’s largely a fatigue management strategy because it’s a time in zone game. Who cares about 15 mins at 90% FTP when I can do 120min of mid-tempo (that’s obviously contrived and not really realistic, I’m just trying to make a point). They are the same adaptations, so more minutes is…more better :-). So many folks think they can do that by feel but there are dozens of thread on here that strongly indicate that most less experienced riders simply cannot.

I don’t remember seeing anyone come on his site who could lay down 60’ of what they defined as threshold (much less how he defined it) without drift.

But if you can, cool. Time to start slamming some intervals or using races to get your intensity, which by and large is what happened anyway, because ppl would do tempo and endurance until the season started. Early races (bookended with endurance riding) ended up being the intensity, for better or for worse.

The main thing I learned from participating on his coaching site was that I could get very fit on 10-12hrs without doing hardly any intensity. Maybe times have changed. I don’t know. And most of the hard stuff I did was cross racing or unstructured hard group rides.

Just going to add to what @tshortt said (he knows way more than I do) but I’ve studied all of Steve’s postings extensively and have done the tempo training. I also started a topic on the Fasttalk forum where Steve helped me a little and answered various questions.

My understanding would be that you progress to more time in zone rather than raise power.

I’ve asked myself many times, what is Neal’s tempo training and why does it work. My conclusion was that it is a stand in for threshold training. I call it threshold lite. It’s a bit less fatiguing and you can really extend time in zone (TTE) and also build a good amount of training load during a build phase. Personally, I think training load and TTE are things that the average amateur often doesn’t think about.

At some point, it comes down to what are you training for… 45 minute crits, marathon mountain bike races, or 6+ hour gravel events. Do you need more TTE?

Are you continuing to respond to tempo training? Usually after building out TTE (no matter the method) you try to raise the roof (VO2, MAP intervals that Steve likes).

Also, what is your periodization? Are you training for cross season? Usually tempo training is a build leading up to the racing reason, maintaining freshness, and sharpness. Tempo training is fatiguing and not meant to be done all year long IMO.

There was an interesting podcast a while back with Luke Ways (Balance Point Racing) and Jameson Plewes. Ways comes from the same school of thought as Steve Neal. At the elite level of training, they aren’t doing tempo training as Steve has described it for us mortals. It’s a more traditional high volume polarized approach focusing on limiters. Lets remember that tempo training originated in Steve’s cycling gym.

And for what it’s worth, I had a great response to my tempo build. I added 20-30 watts to my FTP and felt way stronger on the bike than those 20-30 watts would suggest.

I’ll throw my 2c in … but I agree with almost everything @tshortt said.

If you can do 1x60 or 1x90 and recover well … why aren’t you moving on to 2x60, 2x75, 2x90, etc? Also … I think the “generic” HR cap is 83% of HR Max. If you keep doing this, and you are truly getting to 2x60 or 2x90 multiple times per week at tempo without your HR getting progressively lower while in zone, then I would say it’s probably time for a good old fashioned Vo2 block.

Why? I dunno. I’m not a physiologist or a coach. It would seem to me like you need a “novel” stimulus at that point.

If your HR is getting progressively lower in zone at a certain wattage, then kick it up 5-7 watts and start over at 4x20 and keep building.

The thing I will emphasize, re-emphasize, over-emphasize that @tshortt said is in working with with Steve, I was stunned and delighted how fit I could get in 10-12 hours a week. And I’m not talking about fit just for cycling … I’m talking about fit in life. My body fat was the lowest it had been since I was a collegiate football player, my core was stronger, my body was healthier … everything was better. I can get into why I think that is separately if you’d like.

A couple other notes and/or observations about Steve …

  1. I think every client is an experiment for him. He is like a mad scientist (and I mean that in a complimentary way). So I think this is why it’s hard to pin his methods down. Also, I think he’s a savant. Sometimes I don’t think he could really articulate why he was doing what he was doing to neophytes like me. When we were initially working together, I would say, “why aren’t we doing more intensity?” and he would respond “we can do more intensity if you want” … lol, which is not really what I asked. So there was a bit of working through that kind of stuff.

  2. I believe Steve’s default approach (although he never said this explicitly to me in this way) is based on “more time on bike is more better” … so he does these LONG tempo intervals that deliver these massive kj burns and then LONG Z2 rides at a lower-than-you’d-think wattage and then he wouldn’t schedule recovery weeks … until/unless you asked for them. In this way, you never tipped over the edge, so to speak, but we’re always looking over the edge that just pulling back for a day or two got you recovered. But he listened to you intently … if you said “I feel screwed” he’d pull you back dramatically. The 83% HRmax threshold and the “balance point” he used if you had a lactate meter are these physiological markers (my interpretation, not his words) whereby it you crossed them they would incur a physiological cost that would prevent you from riding more or necessitate a recovery week which is less time on the bike, etc., etc., etc.

Every time I said to him that I had extra time to train in a given week, he’d say “I’ll take it”

Steve once talked to me about a client of his that was always arguing that he needed to go harder, but Steve said “I don’t know what he’s complaining about … since working with me he’s 12lbs lighter than he’s ever been and he’s never injured.” — that should give you/me some insight into how he thinks. He trains you in a way that mitigates injury … thus you can have more time on the bike,

I’ve wandered far off the topic at this point, but I’ll sum up my thoughts with the following exchange we had in 2019:

Me: Why aren’t we ever moving the watts higher?
Steve: Why do you want to move the watts higher?
Me: Ok … what do we do when I can easily do 2x90 at tempo?
Steve: Then we do it two days in a row.

Could you share a link?

Way better post than mine (not that it’s a competition LOL). This is all classic Steve.

The thing I forgot that your post reminded of is that Steve really really really wanted YOU to figure it out. He wanted to show you some things, and then you solve the puzzle. I’ll be honest, it was frustrating at times but in retrospect I think it is a great way. SO MANY ppl wondering why no intensity, why no this, why no that. LOL. Meanwhile they’re getting better (ppl posting numbers on the site, etc.)

@AJS914 I’m with you on the “whys”, etc. Honestly, Steve himself might not be, not really sure. But I think it’s what you’re saying.

If love to hear more if you dont mind. I remember hearing the Flo podcast with Steve Neal a while back and fixated on the idea of raising fatmax because I’d been struggling to lose weight for a while. I don’t mean to go down the fatmax route, but I’m curious about your experience here about getting fitter on and off the bike.

If one is interested in the Balance Point type of training, any podcast with Andrew Sellars will also have great info. (He’s done a few.) Just search “Luke Ways” or “Andrew Sellars” on your podcast app or on youtube. They are all disciples of Jeurg Feldmann like Steve.