 Cyclists tend to focus a lot of their energy on the physical side of training, trying to raise their FTP, their endurance, doing the right intervals, riding at the right volume and intensity, etc. But far less emphasis is placed on a critical aspect of human performance, which is the mental component. I'm certainly not immune from this, basically this entire channel is about the physical side of cycling performance. But that doesn't mean that we should ignore psychology, quite the opposite actually. I think a lot of athletes tend to underestimate the power of the mind. My guest today is an expert in this very topic. Dr. Jim Taylor is a leading authority on the psychology of endurance sports. He's consulted with Olympic and professional athletes in cycling, mountain biking, swimming, triathlon, and cross country skiing. He's the author of 18 books, including Train Your Mind for Athletic Success and he's a committed endurance athlete himself, a sub three hour marathoner, Iron Man Triathlete, and world class age group triathlete. In this first part of our discussion, we get into why mental training is so important, what it is and how to implement it, what tricks you can use to deal with the pain and suffering that goes along with endurance training in racing, and finally how to motivate yourself and when training motivation goes too far. Enjoy. As a cycling coach, I definitely focus a lot on the physical side, but you're very focused on the mental side obviously. How important is the mental side compared to the physical side so that people can get an idea of how much they should be thinking about these things? Well Dylan, this is a question I've asked thousands upon thousands of athletes over the years. And before I give you my perspective, let me ask you, how important is the mental side of cycling compared to the physical and technical side less as or more important? Sorry for putting you on the spot here. Sure. Sure. So I have done a little bit of research on the mental side, although I've done far, far, far more research on the physical side. I believe I had a video on how you can improve your mental toughness, which is important for cycling because both in training and in racing, you're going to be putting your body through pain and being able to withstand that pain is important. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that maybe the physical side is 70 to 80 percent and then the mental side would be the rest of that. Sure. I appreciate that. There are basically sort of three piles that I see people voting in on this question. Very few people say it's less important. Probably most say it's as important. But there's actually a substantial number who say it's actually more important. And so I think that they're all important. It's like to perform your best on a bike. You have to be physically fit. You have to be technically capable. Your bike needs to be in good shape. Plus you have to have your mind together because certainly Dylan, at the level you're performing at, you're all sort of genetic freaks. You all put in the time and training. You're all in incredible shape. So on race day, what often separates those who are really successful from those who aren't is what goes on up here. So they're all important. But I will also say that I don't even believe the mental side is more important because you can have all the mental stuff in the world. But if you're not physically capable of going the distance, the mental stuff doesn't matter. But it is an essential piece of the puzzle. And it's one that everybody will say, as I've suggested, it's important. But how much time is spent? I mean, think about Dylan, how many hours a day do you spend on your bike on the physical side? Hours, right? Right. Yeah. Hours a week. Yeah, sure. Hours and hours a week, exactly. So if the mind is, let's say, even close to being as important as the body, does that mean you're spending hours on the mental side of your cycling? Definitely not. No. Definitely not. No. But what I will say is that you do a lot of mental stuff. So for example, Dylan, do you try to motivate yourself? Sure. Sure. Do you try to be positive when you're struggling? Sure. Yeah. Do you try to relax when you're doing a hard time? Yeah. Yeah. There are definitely mental tricks that I do. And there are certain things that I do better now that I'm a more experienced racer than I would say when I was a junior racer. I can think of one example. I think as a junior racer, I really put a lot of emphasis on results. Let's say I was doing a race and I thought I could win the race. If I then got into the race and I was in fifth place, which is still not bad, but it's not winning, and whoever's winning is like five minutes up the road or up the trail, I would kind of mentally give up. And I think probably around the age of 18 to 20 is when I had this shift where my goal for every race was to do as well as I possibly could do for me. And so whether that meant I was in first place or I was in fiftieth place, I was trying to get the best place I could and get the best time across the line that I could. And that actually ended up resulting in better results. Yeah. Great insight, Dylan. And that, for me, is the holy grail in a way because the fact is that we're competitive people in a competitive sport, in a competitive world, and we can get so wrapped up in results, in outcomes. And a lot of people think that if I want to get the outcome I want, I need to focus on the outcome. But the problem is, when does the outcome of a bike race occur? Well, at the end. So if you're focused on the end, and what happens at the end is either success or failure. And very often we tend to focus on what won't happen, what might not happen. We're not focused on what we need to do to get from the start to the finish. And I watched your video about Leadville, and you really talked a lot about in there about just staying on your plan, staying focused on what you needed to do. Listening to your body, fueling well, all those things. Because it's so easy to go to the dark side there, and maybe you're not doing as well as you want during certain times. But it's a long race, so things could change. So a really key thing, and a very basic, what I call a mental tool, is focusing on the process. Because, paradoxically, by focusing on the process, as you just alluded to, when you focus on the process, you're more likely to ride well. And if you ride well, you're more likely to get the result you want. So there are a lot of little tools and tricks you can use. But a real important thing for me is that all cyclists do mental stuff. But mental stuff is not mental training. Just like going to the gym every three weeks, or getting your bike once in a while, that's not cycling training. That's not strength training. That's doing some cycling and doing some strength stuff. And so my mission has always been to help athletes to recognize that you need to approach the mind and train the mind the same way you approach training the body and training your riding skills. So that's my basic approach for mental training. The great thing, though, Dylan, about mental training, it doesn't take hours a day. Most of it you can incorporate into your cycling training, indoors, outdoors, time in the gym. Or you can also take maybe 10, 15 minutes, a couple of days a week, where you might do imagery or goal setting or breathing, meditation, things like that. How about we kind of start getting into what the difference between doing mental stuff and doing mental training is? Maybe some examples. Yeah. So a great example would be, let's say self-talk is one of the most powerful mental tools there is. What you say to yourself matters. If you say, I don't think I can do this. You're probably right. Whereas if you say you can do this, it doesn't guarantee you can do it, because you might be beyond what your body is capable of. But at least you have a chance. You want to practice self-talk and use it regularly. And of course, positive self-talk and start to use it and train yourself that when things get hard, which is, of course, when you need the mind most often, that's when you've ingrained it from training and then can use it into a race. So being really aware of what you say to yourself when you're training, especially, of course, when it gets hard, a tough climb, you're maxing out, your legs are burning, you're dying, but you want to finish the workout because that's going to give you the gains. So what can you say to yourself makes a difference? So for example, if you practice a lot of negative self-talk, oh, this hurts, this is terrible, I hate this. What are you getting good at? Negative self-talk. What's going to come out in a race? Negative self-talk. And it's going to hurt you. The other side of that, of course, is that if you practice positive self-talk, then you get good at that, and that's going to come out in a race. Now, when I talk Dylan about positive self-talk, I don't mean during a hard workout saying, I love this, I'm having a great time here because you're not. And I just wish a hard end or a workout. And it wasn't fun. But if you can say some things that are positive and realistic, like I'm getting stronger, I'm striving toward my goals. This is going to end soon. I'm going to get through this. I'm going to be stronger for this. Practicing those things change the way the experience of a hard workout is. Because a hard workout is, by definition, physically hard. It hurts. It's tiring. Indoors can often be boring. So the challenge then is being able to accept that and not again love it. Because there are very few athletes, even the very best cyclists, don't love every moment of the bike, but they know it's a part of the process of what they need to do to achieve their goals. So in training, being aware, when you go to the dark side, a little Star Wars metaphor there, when you go to the dark side going, oh my gosh, I'm going negative here. And when you go negative, it makes it harder. It hurts more. There's been a lot of interesting research on pain, for example, that when you connect negative thoughts and negative emotions with pain, with a hard workout, you feel worse. The opposite of that, of course, Dylan, is when you associate positive thoughts and positive emotions with it, you feel better. You feel less discomfort and it becomes more manageable. It still hurts, it's so hard, but it becomes more manageable. One of the tricks that stuck out to me when I did my research on the mental toughness video, one of the tricks was just learning to embrace pain, not as a bad thing, but as a good thing. Pain is not the enemy, pain is the goal. It's kind of like this mindset shift or cyclists and triathletes and runners and endurance sports in general have this culture of embracing suffering. And they're suggesting that that is a good mindset to have to deal with the pain of training or of racing. Without a doubt. And really, your attitude toward hard training and hard racing will often dictate your ability to make it through those tough periods and to make it to the end. Because we are evolutionarily wired to not like pain. I travel back in time with my clients a lot to the Serengeti 250,000 years ago when we first officially became homo sapiens, human beings. And the fact is, is that back then, if we experienced pain, that was a bad thing because the next thing they often followed was death. But the reality is, is that what worked on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago to help us survive doesn't help us in 2022 cycling world helping us to thrive and push ourselves and achieve our goals. So in an odd sort of way, we're resisting billions of years of evolution by embracing pain. But the fact is, it's also really important to be able to distinguish between exertion pain and injury pain, because there's some times that the pain is telling us we need to stop. And if we don't, then we're going to hurt ourselves. And by the same token, the very nature of training and racing on bikes is that it's going to hurt. So being able to recognize those differences. And when it is just exertion pain to be able to say, this is part of the deal. Let's do this. Let's keep it going. This is going to help me get where I want to go. So if we could get a little bit, a little bit more specific for a moment. So one of the, one of the biggest stressors that I find when I, I I tell an athlete, you know, what their training is for the week is if I have an FTP test for them to do, that's one of the most stressful workouts. They're the most nervous for it. A lot of times they don't complete it because maybe they shot for a number that was too high and then they couldn't hold it. It's a very mentally challenging thing to do because, I mean, you know, depending on the person, oftentimes I'll have them do a 20 minute test. 20 minutes is quite a long time to hold a very hard effort. I'd like to see what you think about this and maybe then get your opinion on some other strategies you could use to prepare for for something like this and then get through an effort like this. But, but one of the strategies that I suggested in my video and that I saw research on was this idea of chunking, chunking, meaning breaking the effort or the race or what have you into small, smaller chunks. So it seems more manageable. So for example, in a 20 minute test, maybe you break it into five minute chunks, which is you're breaking it into quarters and you think, okay, I just, I just need to make it through the next five minutes. Don't think about how you've got 20 minutes to ride at this super hard pace. Just think about how you've got five minutes left. And then when you get through that chunk, just think about how you've got five minutes left. Do you use that? And then what other strategies would you use? Yeah. So I can personally relate to this because I did an FTP test last week. Um, I did, I did a ramp test, um, because I, I admit that doing 20 minutes, um, on the edge is just really not something that is pleasant at all. It hurts a lot. And, and certainly, um, certainly don't, not surprising your, your athletes is one thing. Don't just say, oh, we're going to have you do a FTP test tomorrow. You, even though it causes anxiety, it's better for, for cyclists, um, to be able to have a couple of days to sort of come to peace with the fact that it's going to be hard. And so, so helping them prepare in that way, chunking is a really great tool. I think a coach can play a huge role in, in mentally preparing their athletes for these kinds of tests. In terms of positive attitude, in terms of, in a way, sort of lending them some of your confidence and, and then also giving them some tools. So, um, you know, a lot of practical things they can do are beforehand leading up to an FTP test is doing imagery. So imagery is, is another incredibly powerful mental tool that you hear about being used a lot into gymnastics and tennis and things like that, but it's actually a really powerful tool, um, in cycling. Now, of course you're not, you're not going to imagine your shouldn't, you're not going to lay down and imagine yourself doing a 10 hour gravel race. But what you can do is, is take it and, um, a race and, and look at some key parts. And so maybe the start, maybe there's going to be a really tough climb, a tough descent, um, and then maybe the finish. And then imagine yourself, how you want to feel, what you want to think, what your attitude is, what kind of emotions you want to experience. And what that does, it programs your mind to think in those hopefully positive ways. And there's been, as you, as you know, from your own research, um, imagery is one of the most widely researched, um, areas in sports psychology. It's also called visualization. You can call it that if you want. And it works. It helps performance, whether endurance sports or technical sports, having a very clear sense of, of I'm ready for an FTB test is another thing. Like, Oh yeah. So I can maintain 250 Watts or whatever your goal is, um, because if, if, if you have a cyclist who truly doesn't believe they can do it, then they're not going to probably put themselves out there that long. So I think a coach can also help with just setting a realistic goal is like, what is a reasonable FTP we can aim for here? And, and then they're going like, Oh yeah, you know what? I think I can do that. Music, another great tool to use. Music has an incredible impact on us physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, having a really good playlist when I'm doing a hard ride on Zwift. Um, I'm a metal guy. So I've got ACDC and Def Leppard and, um, Sammy Hagar and, um, that music really has a big impact in a couple of ways. First of all, it's a, it's a little bit of a distraction. It takes a little bit of the edge off because we're not quite paying attention to pain because we're listening to the music, but also it changes our physiology. It gets our intensity up. It gets us fired up. It gets us excited. And so music is a really, really great tool for an FTP test. One last thing is if you're doing it on Zwift and you've got a pacer, it's a lot easier to follow somebody than it is to just do it yourself. And there's been wonderful research down in the human performance labs where they've had people follow on a screen and avatar of a pacer and of themselves. And they found that they're much more able to maintain a higher pace when they're just following somebody rather than having to generate it themselves. Yeah, I also did a video on music and surprisingly has quite a big impact on performance. And this is probably not surprising to people, but music with a higher tempo seems to create better performances and then music that the people actually like to listen to creates better performances. So don't listen to something that's slow and that you don't like listening to when you're doing an FTP test, listen to something that's that's fast paced and that you enjoy. And I think that a huge component to to training is motivation, which you touched on. But I want to dig deeper into that. There are athletes that have absolutely no struggles with motivation. They can always get on the bike. And then there are athletes that do struggle to get on the bike and with just motivation in general. So maybe you could expand upon that. Yeah. So Dylan, motivation is the foundation of everything. Because if you don't have the motivation, if you don't want to get up in the morning, if you don't want to get on your bike, nothing else is going to happen. You have to have the motivation. So one thing I start off with, like why you motivated to do this. And surprisingly, there are a lot of different reasons why people ride bikes and why people compete. And it can be for the success for, you know, for most of us who aren't going to be the very best in the world. There's the satisfaction of overcoming your limitations and challenging ourselves and growing and pushing ourselves. A lot of people cycle because of the social component. Some people use cycling to self-medicate and to make themselves feel better. So the first step is to figure out why you do it. And if you're competitive, then, you know, it's obviously results, but really asking yourself, why do I do it? Because if you can't really tap into what the fundamental core motivation you have is, then you're not going to be in it for very long, because motivation is probably the hardest thing for me to deal with. Because I can, I can give somebody the tools to motivate themselves on a given day or for a given workout. But ultimately it has to come from within. So some basic motivational tools are setting goals. So there's a robust body of research that shows that when people set goals, they're more likely to perform better. You somehow are wired to set goals, strive for goals and achieve them. Another thing is the people around you. So some people, a great tool is to have a cycling club or have your group rides or things like that. Another really important thing, especially during a workout, is reminding yourself why you're doing it. Because training hurts, that's the reality. And again, we're not wired to want to hurt. And so when you're hurting, to be able to go remind yourself, okay, I'm hurting now because this is going to help me to achieve my goals. So we're giving yourself a reason why. I want to go to worlds. I want to go to nationals. I want to finish this century ride, whatever it might be, whatever your goal is, being able to tap into that when things get hard. So again, using these different motivational tools on a regular basis, so that you become good at them. So that's your go-to, that's your natural response when you are starting to feel a little bit unmotivated. I also want to turn this around a little bit, because yes, we all know people who are absolutely maniacs when it comes to motivation. They never get unmotivated. But that can also be a problem. Because that causes over-training very often. And it's really important to see, to include it in your motivation, listening to your body and periodizing and not just going red line all the time. And you've done a bunch of different videos on periodization, for example. And so really being in touch with your body and listening to your body. Because I know I'm fundamentally a very motivated person, but they're going to be set in some days when it's like, I really don't want to do that. I really don't want to work out or do a hard workout. And then I listen to my body and I don't think I'm lazy. I think I'm being smart, because our body has a tremendous capacity if we're motivated people to tell us when we need to back up. And that a part of that motivation is to rest and recover. Yeah, I've done, I've done a video on over-training and what the signs and symptoms of overtraining are. And one of the biggest symptoms is loss of motivation. And I think that if you are generally a motivated person and you don't have a hard time getting out of bed and getting yourself onto the bike and training, that's not usually an issue for you. But now it has become an issue for you. You should take that very seriously. That's not something that you should ignore. Right. But that's really hard to do if you're a highly motivated athlete and you see rest and recovery as weakness or not doing a workout. As weakness, but part of the education of an athlete, as you well know, is being able to see that they're going to be those days when I'm just not that motivated or I'm stressed out, I've got stuff going on with work or family or whatever it might be. And that I can change things up a little bit and I can be flexible and I can take a day off or just do an easy spin instead of doing a hard of intervals or whatever it might be. So ultimately though, it gets back to tapping into that core motivation of I just love being out there. I just love pushing myself. I love hanging with my buddies. I love that feeling after a really hard interval ride of getting off and my legs are shaky and it's like, wow, that's, that's, that's cool. Thanks for watching. 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