"Only did 7 hours training, that's a proper recovery week" Classic!! That's a pretty damn good training week for me! Congratulations on 20,000 subs, I joined you when you had about 1000, keep em coming Chris!!
heyyyy i have been doing that foundation training video off and on for a few years now after having a herniated disc at L5-S1. It's helped a lot and I'm biking and running and feeling great. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for all the videos, its really interesting for those of us who never raced professionally to see what its like behind the scenes. Hope you're doing well!
You deserve way more subs, i really hope your youtube channel continues to gain traction as i like how transparent you are with your viewers about things like training, mental health and just expressing what you think. Keep doin ya thing!
What a brilliant video. I’m very new to cycling and never looked into training programmes but my body felt dead just by looking at the amount that you did. I know I will never ride pro, but just to get to a Quater of that would be amazing to work towards.
Great video and I am really impressed by the training load you managed while still working for No-showers-GCN. Also thanks for sharing the stretching video. I am in nice pain now :)
Thank you very much for the openness, on your training, on the impact on family, on mental health, on the workout sessions and even the little personal training notes - its great to get a real insight and not an airbrushed outside view
Amazing insight Chris, into a national / elite ranked training programme. That’s some formidable training and shows the level of fitness and ability you clearly have. Thank you for sharing. Best wishes.
Great info Chris, don’t forget most of your viewers maybe on phones so those screenshots may need to be zoomed in more. Keep up the great content look forward to the next instalment.
Ollie Bridgewood's use of Park Tool thread locker as hair gel is not a recommended solution. Also, thank you so much for the mental health shout out; definitely becoming an issue here in Melbourne with Stage Four lock downs in effect. We can't be outside for more than an hour for 'exercise' and no more than five kilometres from home. It's really making the weekend long ride escape a non-event as well as balancing life and family responsibilities with the ever-creeping work day. Keep at it mate - you're going to smash racing once it returns.
Chris,keep it mixed. Don’t lose heart. Life is what it is and our personal plans sometimes come to nothing,not through our lack of effort and if we can roll with the obstacles....great to feel fit again I am sure. It is I guess about the journey and as a Beatle once said. ‘Life is what happens to you whilst you are busy making other plans’. Enjoy your videos thanks.
Amazing Chris. 24 hour WEEK is insane to me, i've been training for 18 months now (using trainerroad) and the longest week is usually about 12 hours for me! My question is - how do you manage fatigue? The old adage "listen to your body" doesn't seem to work for me, because my body lies all the time. How do you separate actual fatigue from "feeling a bit tired but i'll feel fine once im going"? Cheers!
Thank you for the perspective. I need that much time for transit in NYC and never get home before 8pm when I get off at 5:30p. I tend to overestimate the ease of commuting outside of the city, I bet.
Im blown away with all the modern statistics so i cannot comment ,when we raced our training comprised of intervals short sprints ,long sprints,hard climbs ,Mon to Fridays 25 / 30 miles each evening Sundays 120 / 140 miles fast touring ,few people trained on a Saturday ,im laughing now and so are you im sure ,how can we equate the two we cannot.i live in Southern Ireland,great videos Chris good luck with your return .
It's good to see someone else who has a family and full time job trying to work it out.. I find it incredibly difficult juggling everything and it often ends in arguments!
Chris, Thanks for sharing your month with us, I found it interesting to see how much you do/did. It would be interesting if you could do a video on how you use TrainingPeaks and the metrics/charts you find most useful. Keep up the great work mate. :-)
Great video Chris, I’m finding that I am having a hard time motivating right now as like you the National calendar is basically off ....so no racing , I work full time as well and I can tell that I’m feeling a little depressed.... but I’m pulling back a bit to mentally re group a bit , I feel inspired by the rough row you have and continue to hough , so I do thank you for your continued vigilance!! Warmly, Dory
Good run through! I would like to hear more about how to optimise recovery and nutrition. You have mentioned a couple of times that its important to get proper nutrition. How do you get in enough calories, meal timing etc. etc. would be interesting to hear more about.
Hi Chris, this really opened my eyes! A lot of inspiration and insight! Compared with your video at GCN I feel maybe you are the most “restricted” presenter out there. I do have one specific question about training: I noticed many of your training ride is pretty long-ish like 3-5 hours with intervals, which is almost missing in my rides and most of the online “training plans”. It usually suggests something like day1 hard intervals for 1 hour with warm up and cool down, day2 “endurance effort” for 1-2h, day3 rest, day4 “threshold intervals” like 3*10 with warmup and cool down in 1 hour.... things like that. As per this kind of training, the hard efforts and easy ones are separated across days, and no such long ride. I know this kind of “plan” is a compromise to people with a full time job, but that makes me thinking, 1. instead of “training” or “riding” everyday with relatively short period of time, is it any good to do one longer ride with hard efforts one day and rest the other days? Like to get a 5 hour riding time with same amount of time in different effort zones, you can do D1 2h, D2 2h, D3 1h, and also D1 5h, D2 and D3 rest. If possible, 1 big ride with mixed efforts vs. short separate rides at specific effort level, which approach is better? 2. How exactly do you mix the intervals into a 5 hours ride? I understand this is an amateur question, but still want to hear what you think.
This is probably one reason why he was feeling so tired and down while working at GCN. For most of us, this level of training while working full time is simply not possible. Whata champ.
Excellent content (again), I really enjoy watching your videos! Did you also have a special dietary plan while doing all this structured training? If so would you like to share the thought process behind it? Keep up the great work - and maybe do another of these videos where you talk a bit about your corner of the world (like cornwall etc.) while riding bikes ... personally I found that really enjoyable and borderline soothing ;-) Greetings from germany and stay healthy!
A few years back, Matt Stephens did a GCN vid about how he did race prep around a full-time job. Takes more planning and time management, but definitely possible to build fitness around full time job. lots of people have found ways to make it work
i tend to leave training notes as well. usually mention how i was feeling, whether or not i got a sudden burst of power/adrenalin part way through a workout as well as commenting about the environment around my during the session, eg weather, bad traffic causing my to later pace/cadence too often or even the general public - eg too many crowded areas. Today I am scheduled for a 35 min threshold session with 5 X 60 secs at zone 5c - so i will just use the return journey as a recovery
I wish we had power back in the late 70s/80s when I was racing. I often try and reverse engineer my power/performance now to my performance I can recall from the 80s. I recon I had a FTP of around 300 or so but who knows!
Hi Chris, great video as usual and I am sure all here respect your honesty and openness in all that you do. Can you explain what the circulatory breathing exercises/workouts you mention are please?
Really interesting insight Chris into your training. The graphs though I wonder if you could do a little video on explaining them as I don't really understand what the numbers relate too - (time stamp 14:22) your ATL is 157 and your fitness CTL is 104 - but straight after this your fatigue drops and fitness goes up - what or how does this relate to in real world terms ? Just trying to understand the numbers as Strava has a similar function on their platform.
The most annoying thing when using Training Peaks is having your perfectly green-coloured set of workouts for a particular week blighted by a single red-coloured workout. I always feel as though I have let myself and my coach down when I have missed a workout. My thoughts on the change in fitness, going up to 104 then dropping down to 90 at the end of Jan appears to be due to having a much easier week with fewer rides, more stretching and core work along with some missed sessions, however your fatigue level also dropped by a huge amount. I've been using TP myself since June 2019 with a coach and whilst I am probably running half of what i used to on a weekly basis (108k last week) I am no longer running junk miles. Set workouts have given me back hours of free time whilst increasing my pace by almost 90 secs per km during a half marathon from late 2018.
Great video Chris. Thank you for into detail about your training. When I switched to being a roadie, I would just go out and ride. Circumstances in life have pushed me indoors, not COVID, and I am riding on Zwift now. I need help with nutrition but do not want the fads, plant based cycling and others. Any help is appreciated. Not trying to be a pro. Just trying to be the best cyclist I can be. Ciao.
Hi Chris. Do you have a baseline of calories that you eat everyday and then add to that depending on how many calories you burnt in your sessions? Or do you just have a set number that you hit regardless of training expenditure.
Cracking insight into your training - an interesting watch. One question - was everything you described for training put forward by your coach - or did you come up with any of the training sessions yourself?
Hey Chris great videos as usual, I really like the way your channel is going. Im from the Camborne area, is there any hills you can recommend from your Cornwall days for 3-5mim Vo2 max reps?
Hi Chris, I remember you mentioned you ventured into fasting this year and that you did a few rides fasted. What has your fasting and feeding routine been like? Very interested to know, thank you.
As your doing some of your training now on the MTB, how do you find the Stress Score on TrainingPeaks compared for those sessions compared to your TSS score on your road bike which has a power meter.
I couldn't figure this out during the video... how much HIIT in a 20hr week as a % of the total?.... in-fact how much time spent in all zones would be interesting for all I think... I'm always suggesting to others not to "smash" themselves on every ride!
200+ tss for an endurance ride? We are basically the same weight and and power but mine is about 120 for a similar ride. Is my TP calculating my power wrong or are you a monster? haha
TP quite likely isn't calculating yours wrong. What matters most is your FTP compared to the power output. If your FTP and thus derived thresholds are quite different from his (likely), then it can be way off.
I caught onto that - I suppose as ozmadman says, he probably wanted to get back into professional riding so was feeling held back. Hopefully nothing more serious. Edit: Think he kind of addresses this later in the video.
"Only did 7 hours training, that's a proper recovery week" Classic!! That's a pretty damn good training week for me! Congratulations on 20,000 subs, I joined you when you had about 1000, keep em coming Chris!!
Real eye opener to see how training is juggled around work. As someone switching to cycling from other sports it is very helpful.
heyyyy i have been doing that foundation training video off and on for a few years now after having a herniated disc at L5-S1. It's helped a lot and I'm biking and running and feeling great. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for all the videos, its really interesting for those of us who never raced professionally to see what its like behind the scenes. Hope you're doing well!
You deserve way more subs, i really hope your youtube channel continues to gain traction as i like how transparent you are with your viewers about things like training, mental health and just expressing what you think. Keep doin ya thing!
You are so much better on your own channel than on GCN. More relaxed, honest. Wish you all the best.
What a brilliant video. I’m very new to cycling and never looked into training programmes but my body felt dead just by looking at the amount that you did. I know I will never ride pro, but just to get to a Quater of that would be amazing to work towards.
Thanks for your openness and vulnerability, Chris!
Great video and I am really impressed by the training load you managed while still working for No-showers-GCN. Also thanks for sharing the stretching video. I am in nice pain now :)
Thank you very much for the openness, on your training, on the impact on family, on mental health, on the workout sessions and even the little personal training notes - its great to get a real insight and not an airbrushed outside view
Amazing insight Chris, into a national / elite ranked training programme. That’s some formidable training and shows the level of fitness and ability you clearly have. Thank you for sharing. Best wishes.
Great info Chris, don’t forget most of your viewers maybe on phones so those screenshots may need to be zoomed in more. Keep up the great content look forward to the next instalment.
Ollie Bridgewood's use of Park Tool thread locker as hair gel is not a recommended solution.
Also, thank you so much for the mental health shout out; definitely becoming an issue here in Melbourne with Stage Four lock downs in effect. We can't be outside for more than an hour for 'exercise' and no more than five kilometres from home. It's really making the weekend long ride escape a non-event as well as balancing life and family responsibilities with the ever-creeping work day.
Keep at it mate - you're going to smash racing once it returns.
Chris,keep it mixed. Don’t lose heart. Life is what it is and our personal plans sometimes come to nothing,not through our lack of effort and if we can roll with the obstacles....great to feel fit again I am sure. It is I guess about the journey and as a Beatle once said. ‘Life is what happens to you whilst you are busy making other plans’. Enjoy your videos thanks.
Another great video Chris, just shows what can be done when your motivated to make positive changes to your life.
Thanks Chris, very interesting
Amazing Chris. 24 hour WEEK is insane to me, i've been training for 18 months now (using trainerroad) and the longest week is usually about 12 hours for me! My question is - how do you manage fatigue? The old adage "listen to your body" doesn't seem to work for me, because my body lies all the time. How do you separate actual fatigue from "feeling a bit tired but i'll feel fine once im going"? Cheers!
Great video on the importance and impact of time management.
Thank you for the perspective. I need that much time for transit in NYC and never get home before 8pm when I get off at 5:30p. I tend to overestimate the ease of commuting outside of the city, I bet.
Im blown away with all the modern statistics so i cannot comment ,when we raced our training comprised of intervals short sprints ,long sprints,hard climbs ,Mon to Fridays 25 / 30 miles each evening Sundays 120 / 140 miles fast touring ,few people trained on a Saturday ,im laughing now and so are you im sure ,how can we equate the two we cannot.i live in Southern Ireland,great videos Chris good luck with your return .
Thanks Chris, impressive stuff! Take care of yourself my man.
I dunno how it's possible to do a 4 hour ride before 9am but that's dedication. Must be so hard to juggle training with work / kids.
It's good to see someone else who has a family and full time job trying to work it out.. I find it incredibly difficult juggling everything and it often ends in arguments!
Great training information and insight into balancing everything in life.Keep the vids coming.
Chris, Thanks for sharing your month with us, I found it interesting to see how much you do/did. It would be interesting if you could do a video on how you use TrainingPeaks and the metrics/charts you find most useful. Keep up the great work mate. :-)
Really appreciate your sharing !!!!
Great video Chris, I’m finding that I am having a hard time motivating right now as like you the National calendar is basically off ....so no racing , I work full time as well and I can tell that I’m feeling a little depressed.... but I’m pulling back a bit to mentally re group a bit , I feel inspired by the rough row you have and continue to hough , so I do thank you for your continued vigilance!! Warmly, Dory
Good run through! I would like to hear more about how to optimise recovery and nutrition. You have mentioned a couple of times that its important to get proper nutrition. How do you get in enough calories, meal timing etc. etc. would be interesting to hear more about.
Would be gereat to hear the mental health discussion video. Cheers for the look at this block.
Hi Chris, this really opened my eyes! A lot of inspiration and insight! Compared with your video at GCN I feel maybe you are the most “restricted” presenter out there. I do have one specific question about training: I noticed many of your training ride is pretty long-ish like 3-5 hours with intervals, which is almost missing in my rides and most of the online “training plans”. It usually suggests something like day1 hard intervals for 1 hour with warm up and cool down, day2 “endurance effort” for 1-2h, day3 rest, day4 “threshold intervals” like 3*10 with warmup and cool down in 1 hour.... things like that. As per this kind of training, the hard efforts and easy ones are separated across days, and no such long ride. I know this kind of “plan” is a compromise to people with a full time job, but that makes me thinking, 1. instead of “training” or “riding” everyday with relatively short period of time, is it any good to do one longer ride with hard efforts one day and rest the other days? Like to get a 5 hour riding time with same amount of time in different effort zones, you can do D1 2h, D2 2h, D3 1h, and also D1 5h, D2 and D3 rest. If possible, 1 big ride with mixed efforts vs. short separate rides at specific effort level, which approach is better? 2. How exactly do you mix the intervals into a 5 hours ride? I understand this is an amateur question, but still want to hear what you think.
Awesome drill
hi chris wow i'ts planning of lionel sanders triathlon hahaha good work 👍
4 hours before 9am when working full time!!! 😩
This is probably one reason why he was feeling so tired and down while working at GCN. For most of us, this level of training while working full time is simply not possible. Whata champ.
Excellent content (again), I really enjoy watching your videos! Did you also have a special dietary plan while doing all this structured training? If so would you like to share the thought process behind it? Keep up the great work - and maybe do another of these videos where you talk a bit about your corner of the world (like cornwall etc.) while riding bikes ... personally I found that really enjoyable and borderline soothing ;-)
Greetings from germany and stay healthy!
A few years back, Matt Stephens did a GCN vid about how he did race prep around a full-time job. Takes more planning and time management, but definitely possible to build fitness around full time job. lots of people have found ways to make it work
Looks like you’re enjoying your life this year. Even with the lack of racing so far.
Really really interesting video.
i tend to leave training notes as well. usually mention how i was feeling, whether or not i got a sudden burst of power/adrenalin part way through a workout as well as commenting about the environment around my during the session, eg weather, bad traffic causing my to later pace/cadence too often or even the general public - eg too many crowded areas. Today I am scheduled for a 35 min threshold session with 5 X 60 secs at zone 5c - so i will just use the return journey as a recovery
I wish we had power back in the late 70s/80s when I was racing. I often try and reverse engineer my power/performance now to my performance I can recall from the 80s. I recon I had a FTP of around 300 or so but who knows!
Hi Chris, great video as usual and I am sure all here respect your honesty and openness in all that you do. Can you explain what the circulatory breathing exercises/workouts you mention are please?
Really interesting insight Chris into your training. The graphs though I wonder if you could do a little video on explaining them as I don't really understand what the numbers relate too - (time stamp 14:22) your ATL is 157 and your fitness CTL is 104 - but straight after this your fatigue drops and fitness goes up - what or how does this relate to in real world terms ? Just trying to understand the numbers as Strava has a similar function on their platform.
The most annoying thing when using Training Peaks is having your perfectly green-coloured set of workouts for a particular week blighted by a single red-coloured workout. I always feel as though I have let myself and my coach down when I have missed a workout.
My thoughts on the change in fitness, going up to 104 then dropping down to 90 at the end of Jan appears to be due to having a much easier week with fewer rides, more stretching and core work along with some missed sessions, however your fatigue level also dropped by a huge amount.
I've been using TP myself since June 2019 with a coach and whilst I am probably running half of what i used to on a weekly basis (108k last week) I am no longer running junk miles. Set workouts have given me back hours of free time whilst increasing my pace by almost 90 secs per km during a half marathon from late 2018.
hey chris awesome as always, do you track nutrition as well? would be interesting to see. thanks for the awesome content
Come set a pb up trenance hill in st Austell Chris! I'm a few seconds ahead of you now! Putting you in third
Hey Chris, what do you use to track your sleep in TP?
Thank you for that Chris. All very interesting. No way I could keep that schedule or hours. What were the breathing exercises, were they beneficial?
Great video Chris. Thank you for into detail about your training. When I switched to being a roadie, I would just go out and ride. Circumstances in life have pushed me indoors, not COVID, and I am riding on Zwift now. I need help with nutrition but do not want the fads, plant based cycling and others. Any help is appreciated. Not trying to be a pro. Just trying to be the best cyclist I can be. Ciao.
Hi Chris. Do you have a baseline of calories that you eat everyday and then add to that depending on how many calories you burnt in your sessions? Or do you just have a set number that you hit regardless of training expenditure.
+1 for this question
Interested in this too
Cracking insight into your training - an interesting watch. One question - was everything you described for training put forward by your coach - or did you come up with any of the training sessions yourself?
Hey Chris great videos as usual, I really like the way your channel is going. Im from the Camborne area, is there any hills you can recommend from your Cornwall days for 3-5mim Vo2 max reps?
Need some tips and guidance in how to train for 100 mile ride all flat but windy I have 5 weeks to prepare. ? Thank you Chris.
Saint Piran, Oro Pro Nobis.
Hi Chris, I remember you mentioned you ventured into fasting this year and that you did a few rides fasted. What has your fasting and feeding routine been like? Very interested to know, thank you.
What application is that? You showed with results in the table.
As your doing some of your training now on the MTB, how do you find the Stress Score on TrainingPeaks compared for those sessions compared to your TSS score on your road bike which has a power meter.
Can you add the link to the foundation work/stretching routine you mentioned? Cheers
It's there now Lucas! 👍
@@chrisopie87 lovely thanks a lot, loving all of the videos ever since you left gcn so helpful x
Was this a race prep kind of month?
1100 TTS 🤯
I couldn't figure this out during the video... how much HIIT in a 20hr week as a % of the total?.... in-fact how much time spent in all zones would be interesting for all I think... I'm always suggesting to others not to "smash" themselves on every ride!
200+ tss for an endurance ride? We are basically the same weight and and power but mine is about 120 for a similar ride. Is my TP calculating my power wrong or are you a monster? haha
TP quite likely isn't calculating yours wrong. What matters most is your FTP compared to the power output. If your FTP and thus derived thresholds are quite different from his (likely), then it can be way off.
Have you ever tried or considered yoga?
Was working for GCN a problem?
I think it is for someone who actually wants to ride their bike for real and not just for filming!!
I caught onto that - I suppose as ozmadman says, he probably wanted to get back into professional riding so was feeling held back. Hopefully nothing more serious.
Edit: Think he kind of addresses this later in the video.
And here I thought I was doing well when I could hit 10 hours per week!
You are... From my perspective 😁
Listening to some of these videos and also hearing Emma Pooley talk about her time at GCN, it doesn’t sound a great place to work...
Poor old Chris, no hair gel.
See useful hack in "There's Something About Mary."
24 hour training week 😱 besides a full time job
Crazy how many hours pro cyclist put into training. Sad how this year screwed so much up.