 Many of us enjoy the company of our fellow cyclists when we train, but riding with other people often means that your training is less structured. Maybe you don't stay in that easier zone that you were supposed to be in because you don't want to get dropped, or perhaps instead of doing those intervals designed to target a specific energy system, you just wing it with a group and end up hitting a little bit of everything. The question then becomes, is riding with people hindering my progress? Could you be a stronger rider if you didn't have a social life and you just stuck to the plan? It's a question that I get quite frequently and today we're going to be diving into the science to see if we can get some answers. Now there are obviously different types of group rides. Some set out with the intention of being hard. It's understood that riders in the group are trying to drop each other and it's an all out slugfest to see who the strongest rider is. Other rides have the intention of being easy. These are your no drop rides. This isn't a competition. We're just out here for a nice social spin. Although we all know what usually ends up happening. Dude, when I hear the words no drop ride, I take that as a challenge, not a rule. I want to start by addressing these lower intensity group rides first because lower intensity riding is what should be making up the majority of your training. A fair bit of research has been done at this point on the optimal training intensity distribution which is a fancy way of saying what percentage of your training should be easy, moderate and hard. Increasingly results show that the majority of an avid endurance athletes training should be done at a low intensity or what is commonly referred to by athletes and coaches as zone two training. We're talking about 80% of the time or more. This has been found not only in elite level riders but in time crunched athletes as well with less than 10 hours per week to train. Where exactly this zone two lies can vary from person to person and that's a topic for another video but generally we're talking about doing the majority of your training between 55% and 75% of your FTP. And if you're a frequent group rider I think you can see where I'm going with this. Even if the intention of the group is not to go hard and just ride at a leisurely conversational pace getting a group of cyclists to stay in zone two can seem close to impossible. inevitably somebody will start hammering and then a couple people will follow and then a few more and then before you know it you're in the red and gasping for air on this supposed easy ride. So is going too hard a dozen or so times on a ride that was otherwise pretty easy really the end of the world? Well I guess it's all relative but this isn't a philosophy channel. As far as your training goes it is not optimal and I'll explain why. If you were to actually stay in your zone two you would experience minimal disturbance in your autonomic nervous system balance. However going over your first ventilatory threshold or above zone two may act as a binary threshold for A&S slash HRV recovery or in other words turn on your body's stress response. Don't get me wrong you need to stress your body in order to make fitness gains but if you do it too frequently or at the wrong times you could be running into trouble and there is research to suggest that the more disciplined athletes are at staying in this low intensity zone when they need to the greater fitness gains they make. This is likely due to the fact that these riders aren't stressing their bodies day in and day out which can often lead to overtraining and burnout. Instead they're saving that high stress response for when it really matters like a high intensity day and because they do this they're able to perform these high intensity days at a higher quality. The problem with doing an easy group ride that at times wasn't actually that easy is that the ride ends up being neither hard nor easy and you turned on your body's stress response for very little return relative to had you just done a hard day. This is the kind of ride that usually falls in the junk miles category. For those of you who do this kind of ride frequently I know that's probably not what you wanted to hear but it is the unfortunate truth if you consider actually allowing yourself to ride easy unfortunate. So what can you do about this when you're on one of these rides? Well personally when I ride with a group I make sure that everybody's on the same page. I say before the ride hey I'm doing a zone two ride today so if you want to ride with me you're gonna have to stay in zone two. Try it it's good for you maybe send them this video if they're unconvinced uh yeah if you want to actually stay friends with this person I wouldn't do that. Now some people can get on board with that at the start of a ride but inevitably what ends up happening is that you get into it get on a climb the testosterone starts flowing and all of that goes out the window. I'm going to suggest a revolutionary tactic here. This solution took weeks of research and data collection to come up with and many great minds poured hours of thought into coming up with this strategy. Do you want to hear what it is? Okay let them drop you. No that's right just let them drop you. If you're riding with a group and it's supposed to be an easy no drop ride and everyone starts going too hard for some reason then just let them ride up the road or trail and don't apologize for it either when they end up waiting for you. I do this all the time and personally I found that when you do this your fellow riders catch on pretty quickly because it's really not that hard to drop somebody riding at zone two which makes it not that fun either. After a while the people you're riding with will usually stop doing it and just ride at your pace. Cool I'm glad we got that sorted. By the way the poor man's way of determining whether you are in zone two or not is the talk test. If you can hold a conversation reasonably well then you are probably still in zone two but if you can't then you're probably going too hard. As it turns out this simple trick has research to back it up even in well-trained cyclists. There's a significant relationship between the point at which talking becomes uncomfortable and going above zone two. This actually makes this a great trick to use on a zone two group ride because hopefully if you're friendly with the people that you're riding with then you're having a conversation with them. If you're not able to do this then you're probably going too hard or it could just be social awkwardness and you can't think of anything to say. Yeah that or maybe we just don't want to hear you talk about which gravel tire you think is the fastest for the 200th time. Alright that's easy rides but now let's talk about hard group rides. These are rides that are meant to be one of your hard days where you're actively trying to hurt each other. No we're not talking about that relationship you had back in college we're talking about the Wednesday night world championships of the town that you live in where the finish line is the city limit sign for some reason. I would also throw small group hammer fests with two to five riders weekday night training races and Zwift races in this category. Are these rides better or worse for you than doing structured intervals? Well I'm not aware of any research that had subjects do structured intervals and compare them to a group that did hard group rides to see which came out fitter. Well that would be an interesting study I think it'd be hard to control for because a hard group ride is often inconsistent with zones all over the place and the pace being well uncontrolled. I think that gets to my first point though which is that a hard group ride isn't targeting one zone and the quality isn't always the same depending on the week you could really be pushed to your limits or it could be a sparse week and the ride could be somewhat easier. In theory you could just do more of the pulling when the group is weaker but in practice I think we know that when the local hitters come out it's going to be a better workout. With this inconsistency in mind we do have some research that we could use to make educated guesses about the quality of these rides. Let's take this study on different high intensity periodization models for example. In the study they had subjects either increase their intensity over a 12 week period, decrease their intensity or have mixed interval intensity throughout the study period. Now obviously this doesn't perfectly represent group riding because the mixed intensity groups still did structured intervals just in a random order over the study period. I do think that given the limited data we have on this though that this could give us some insight into the effectiveness of the training of somebody who just uses the weekly group ride as their intensity. These rides are often a mix of zones, sometimes they're in one zone more than the other and the next week that might change and instead of there being some sort of progression to this intensity it's probably going to be more so dictated by who shows up week to week. So what did they find? Well looking at the various performance metrics all three groups saw improvement and at least given the size of this study a significant difference was not observed between the three groups. However the group that did the mixed intensity did have the most non-responders and the fewest high responders. What does this mean? Well I do think that had the sample size for the study been a bit larger then we may have come out with the conclusion that mixed intensity is less optimal. That being said the difference is probably small. Can we apply this to group riding? Well if this is the case then I think that it makes sense that if you rely on group rides for your intensity that's probably less effective than doing a periodized intensity approach that targets specific zones. However let's remember that during a group ride we also have something called social facilitation which means that in the presence of others we're able to push harder than if we were alone. It's been shown that the introduction of competitors does increase the intensity that subjects are able to ride at. This seems to be the case both with virtual and live competition although live competitors seem to improve results even more. That being said this improvement from social facilitation seems to be affected by how competitive a person is. These are not really surprising results. Competition makes you push harder and live competition seems to be better than virtual competition at least if you're a competitive person. I'm sure we all could have guessed that. It doesn't add up bro. If that were true then why does everybody on Zwift have a world tour pro level watts per kilo? So can we utilize social facilitation in our training to make better fitness gains? Could doing the hard group ride actually be more effective than doing a solo interval session simply because we're able to push ourselves harder? I think that the practical answer to this question is absolutely but you need to employ the hard group ride tactically. I do see the potential for stagnation if you do a hard group ride year round with very little variation. However if you were to go through a diligent off season and base season where you rack up time in the gym and ease your zone two miles and avoided the weekly group hammerfest and then in your build phase or part of the training right before your peak you start to sprinkle in these group rides as race specific high intensity days I do think you could have a recipe for success especially if those group rides are similar to what you're training for. For example a crit racer going out and doing the local hard weekday night group ride in the month or so leading up to the race season is perfect because it's specific to what they're training for and it also gets them used to riding in a pack which is a skill that they need to succeed at their goal which is crit racing. If that's not what you're training for then you can always find riders in your area that are training for the same thing and try to do a race simulation ride with them. For example let's say that you're a marathon mountain bike racer then you may actually do this on the mountain bike over the course of a long ride and try to do it at race pace with riders that are at a similar skill level to you. Marathon and ultra endurance racing is my personal specialty and in the past I have done race specific days by doing a long ride that ends with the local hard group ride. I might start the ride with some intervals ride a couple hours at zone two and then at the end of the ride when I'm tired get in with a group and that social facilitation will push me to continue to get some quality work in. That's the sort of training ride that I wouldn't attempt until you're at a high level but the point that I'm trying to make is that you can get creative with this and you don't need to live like a hermit in order to train properly. On the contrary I think strategically planned group rides at the appropriate time of year can have huge benefits. Thanks for watching if you're looking for a coach or online training plan to take your own training to the next level then check the links down in the description below. If you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a like subscribe and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.