 Hey what's up everyone welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS and today we're going to be talking about how to improve your endurance as a cyclist. Improving your endurance is something that's useful for almost every cyclist whether you're trying to complete your first century or still have enough snap in your legs to win the sprint at the end of a race. This video is going to cover a range of topics from how to structure your training to whether or not going to the gym improves your endurance to what you should be eating on the bike to keep you going all day and whether or not fasted training has an effect on endurance. The last tip is probably the most important and it has nothing to do with your physical preparation so be sure to stick around for that. If you're new to this channel I make weekly training, racing, and gear related videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of training and racing experience that have gotten me to the top of the ultra endurance mountain bike game in the US and as a cycling coach at CTS. If you want to learn how to get faster or just more about the science of training in general then be sure to subscribe and if you have a training question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video then be sure to leave it down in the comment section below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. If you're going from being a couch potato to riding regularly then your endurance is going to improve dramatically no matter what you do and probably the best advice in this situation is to simply ride your bike more. Ride your bike more? Is that what you tell the athletes you coach? For more seasoned riders however you start to realize that there's only so many hours in a week that you can dedicate to riding so the question becomes how do you arrange these hours to improve your endurance? Let's start with the high-intensity work. The reason why high-intensity work is important for endurance is because it significantly improves your FTP. If two riders are riding in a group and it takes 200 watts to stay with that group the rider whose FTP is 250 is going to stay with them a lot longer than the rider whose FTP is 210. This is why even if you're training to ride all day long you shouldn't ignore high-intensity work. Before you get into your high-intensity work though you want to make sure that you have a solid base of endurance fitness to work from. Think of the high-intensity work as the icing is the cake to boost your performance right before a big event. A review on the best practice for training intensity and duration distribution in endurance athletes stated that an established endurance base built from high volumes of training may be an important precondition for tolerating and responding well to a substantial increase in training intensity over the short term. Once you do start incorporating intervals into your training program about two months before the season starts you want to make sure that you're planning them appropriately in your training week. That same review stated that two high-intensity training sessions per week seems to be sufficient for inducing physiological adaptations and performance gains without inducing excessive stress over the long term. It's important that these high-intensity days are scheduled at times of the week when you're the freshest so after a rest day for example this is because you want these workouts to be as high quality as possible. Once we have our intensity for the week set then we need to schedule our endurance rides which are lower in intensity but equally important. A review on high-intensity versus high-volume training stated that both high-intensity and low-intensity training are important components of the training program. They went on to say that short-term periods of high-intensity interval training can elicit improvements but also that important adaptations appear to occur with low-intensity continuous training that are not observed with mixed or high-intensity training. When training does not have an appropriate blend of both high-intensity training and high-volume training inserted into the program performance ability can stagnate. So how do we arrange these endurance rides throughout the week? Is it better to spread the volume evenly throughout the week or have at least one longer ride in there? The answer is that you want to have at least one long ride in your week and two is even better. Even if your total weekly volume is the same having one long ride in there does a couple of things. First it teaches your body to use fat as a fuel source instead of carbohydrates as your glycogen levels deplete. This has been shown in fasted training trials where subjects trained in a low glycogen state and saw a lower reliance on carbohydrates. I'll touch more on these studies in a minute. Of course you can also do this by riding longer and depleting your glycogen that way. Also once your slow twitch fibers fatigue towards the end of a long ride then your fast twitch fibers are forced to do endurance work which they don't like to do. If you've got a tight schedule if you can fit in at least one really long ride during the week that'll help tremendously with your endurance. If you want to see more videos about how to arrange your training schedule I've made quite a few of them and I'll leave them linked in the description below. Now let's get into whether or not lifting will improve your endurance. Common sense would dictate that a strength activity that doesn't tax your aerobic system that you do for a relatively short amount of time wouldn't have any effect on your endurance. However when we look at the science it actually appears that it does. This study on whether strength training improves cycling economy and competitive cyclists assign subjects to a lifting group which performed heavy squats three times a week on top of their normal training or a control group which just continued endurance training during this period. The results showed that the weight trained group showed a 17.2% increase in time to exhaustion while the control group saw no significant increase. The reason that lifting improves cycling performance is for a number of reasons but the most notable for improving endurance are delayed activation of less efficient type 2 fibers and conversion of fast twitch type 2x fibers into more fatigue resistant type 2a fibers. In a nutshell what this means is that your muscles become more resistant to fatigue less fatigue means better endurance. Now incorporating gym work into your program can be tricky because it takes a lot out of you especially if you've never lifted before or it's been a while since you've lifted. This is why you want to incorporate gym work into the off season and then taper it off to a maintenance level or cut it out completely once you get into the race season. As with your interval work during the season you're looking for about two gym sessions per week during your off season. I have a couple older videos on gym work for cyclists but I plan to do an updated version of these videos going over everything from what to do in the gym, how many sets, reps, etc and of course go into the science so be sure to stay tuned for that. All of this means nothing if you don't properly fuel yourself on the bike. For those of you who watched the men's road world championship race this past weekend you got to witness this when Vanderpole bonked with 11k to go and went from being in contention for the win to off the back in a matter of minutes. You can be the fittest rider in the race but if you run out of glycogen you're going to have a hard time keeping up with your four-year-old nephew on his tricycle. So how do we ensure that this doesn't happen? Well this internet blogger told me that if I eat a lot of butter and bacon that should help. I think he called it keto or keto or something like that. Anyway it seems to make a lot of sense. Exactly what and how much do we need to eat to prevent a bonk. Unfortunately it's not as simple as giving a blanket recommendation that'll work for everyone. A study on marathon fueling techniques stated that regardless of what research demonstrates or how complex a formula may be each athlete must be treated as unique. An endless list of factors all affect fueling needs. Unfortunately no clean universal formula exists to calculate such precise expenditure. The reason why it's hard to recommend a fueling strategy is because the correct fueling strategy is different for everyone. Some people's guts can handle more food than others while they're riding and some people can simply get by with less calories. However there are some general recommendations that you can use as a baseline. Carbohydrates are your fuel source as an endurance athlete. Carbohydrate consumption has been shown to significantly increase endurance performance. The question then becomes how much carbs do we need? This review article on carbohydrate intake during exercise performance found that one gram of carbs per minute or 60 grams per hour is the limit of how fast carbs can be absorbed even when large amounts of carbohydrates aren't ingested. This would suggest that you want 60 grams of carbs per hour or 240 calories any more than this and you're just risking GI distress for no extra fuel. However combining different carbohydrate sources such as glucose and fructose have been shown to increase carbohydrate oxidation rates by 20 to 50 percent because fructose can utilize a different transport pathway. This review confirms these findings stating that a 2 to 1 multidextrin to fructose ratio appears to be optimal and benefits endurance performance. If you combine 60 grams of multidextrin or glucose to 30 grams of fructose then you could potentially bump that absorption rate from 60 grams per hour to 90 grams per hour. How much can you bump up your carbohydrate absorption by just drinking a beer? So how do you do this? Well it's important to make sure that the fuel product you're using has multiple sources of carbohydrate. For example this flow formula's drink mix that I've been trying out lately already comes with this ratio so you don't have to think about it and some other drink mixes do as well. Now I want to stress here that this takes trial and error. Different people respond differently to eating on the bike and you want to try out your nutrition strategy before race day. A hard training ride is also a good time to train your gut to handle higher carbohydrate loads. You don't want to be trying it for the first time on race day. If you want to see me go into even more detail on ride nutrition in a future video let me know down in the comments and I'll add it to the list of videos that you guys have been requesting which includes a hydration video. No I haven't forgot. Some riders have also tried fasted training as a means to improve endurance. The theory being that if you ride with low glycogen stores then you teach your body to use more fat as a fuel source and you spare your carbohydrates. And there is some evidence to suggest that this may work. This study examining the sleep low method took 21 triathletes and split them into an intervention group or a control group. The intervention group would do a high intensity interval session which would deplete their glycogen stores and then restrict carbohydrates overnight to induce low carbohydrate availability in the following morning's low intensity training session. The control group would perform the same workouts but their carbohydrate consumption was spread evenly throughout the day. The result was that the sleep low group improved their 10k running time, submaximal cycling efficiency and time to exhaustion at 150% of peak aerobic power while the control group saw no significant improvement. However it's important to note that not all studies on fasted training show benefits and in fact the results are somewhat mixed. This review on fasted training concluded that despite reduced reliance on carbohydrate utilization there is no clear evidence that fasted training increases performance and this conclusion seems to be echoed in multiple reviews. If you're preparing for an ultra endurance event where the chances of running out of glycogen are high then fasted training could be beneficial to you. However if you do decide to try fasted training make sure that you do it strategically. You never want to do your high intensity sessions fasted because you want those sessions to be as high quality as possible. Save your fasted training days for your lower intensity endurance rides. The last tip is probably the most important for anyone doing extremely long events or really any kind of racing or pushing yourself in this sport for that matter and that is developing your mental toughness. Mental toughness in general has been associated with higher performance in sports. In this review on mental toughness in sport they found that research into the relationship between mental toughness and performance has consistently shown that better performances are associated with a higher level of mental toughness and that elite athletes have higher mental toughness than lower level performers. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise but I'd argue that it's even more important for endurance or ultra endurance athletes. Over the course of a long day on the bike you're going to go through waves of feelings. Oftentimes riders hit a wall either physically or mentally and the natural reaction here is to quit. However most of the time this will subside and you'll start to feel better. No matter what happens out there nothing will feel worse than getting a DNF and if you can just make it to the finish line that'll erase any pain or discomfort that you may have felt that day. Yeah man I just wasn't feeling it today so I pulled out but you know it's no big deal. I'll probably just go home and think about this obsessively non-stop and get pissed for the next month or two. Now obviously you don't want to do damage to yourself but if you're thinking about quitting because you're not feeling good on the bike at that moment then you need to take a step back and assess what you need to do whether it be fuel or slow your pace down or fix that flat or whatever it is. You'd be surprised at how you can turn things around. I'll give you guys an example. Last year at Dirty Kansa I was with the lead group until about mile 110. At that point two riders went up the road including the eventual race winner Ted King. I decided to go with them and this turned out to be the mistake of the race. The pace that they were setting was too high and I'd blown myself up after about 20 minutes and got dropped from their group and the next group on the road. For about 60 miles there I was really hurting and I started to develop gut issues so I wasn't eating which caused me to go in and out of bonking. At mile 180 it got so bad that I actually stopped on the side of the road where a farmer gave me food and water. With about 10 miles to go I was caught by another group but then things started to turn around and I started to feel good again and I actually won the sprint out of this group and managed to finish in ninth place. I can't tell you how bad I wanted to quit. For about 60 miles I felt the effects of bonking, cracking, overheating, and a whole list of other bad things that happened to cyclists on long rides but I didn't quit and I can say that I got a top 10 finish at dirty cons of that day. You can be very strong physically but surviving a long race or even a short race for that matter when things start to turn requires immense mental strength and it needs to be worked on just like everything else. Whatever happens out there get yourself to the finish line. You'll be happy you did. Alright that was a lot of information so let's do a quick review. High-intensity work is important but you want to make sure that you have an endurance base built up before you jump into it and you want to do around two to three high-intensity sessions per week. When planning out your weekly volume, having one really long ride in the week is better than spreading your volume evenly throughout the week. Weightlifting will enhance your endurance by increasing the fatigue resistance of your muscles. You want to start lifting in the off season and then taper that back during the season. Fueling is very important and your body can process 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour depending on the carbohydrate source. However, fueling strategies are very personal. Some people's guts can handle more food than others and some people simply need more or less food than others. Fasted training has shown mixed results in the literature but it does seem to decrease your reliance on carbohydrates which could be important for ultra endurance racing. If you do decide to try fasted training make sure you do it strategically and do it on your lower intensity days. Finally and most importantly develop your mental toughness and a no-quit attitude. Bad things happen to everyone over the course of an ultra endurance event or really any sort of cycling event for that matter and the ones who are successful are the ones who pick themselves up and keep going. This has been a longer than normal video and statistically only 20% of you are still watching so if that's you then thank you. Honestly dude I stopped watching after like 20 seconds when you started quoting that first study. Talk about a snooze fest. If you like this video be sure to give it a like share with a friend and subscribe and if you want to be notified every time I put out a video be sure to hit the notification bell as well. If you're looking for a coach if you sign up through CTS be sure to use my code CTSDJ to save $40 by waiving the registration fee. Details are down in the description.