 Hey what's up everyone welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS and today's video is going to be a little bit different. This channel just crossed 10,000 subscribers and as a thank you to you the viewer I'm going to answer some of the questions that you've left me in the comments section over the past couple of months. We're going to be covering topics like block periodization, what cycling workouts are best for weight loss, whether or not you should be lifting on your rest days and more so be sure to stay tuned. 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 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 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 be sure to leave it in the comments section down below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments and if I do another Q&A video like this one your question could be in my video. Alright let's get into the questions. Our first question comes to us from Tom Koonsman and he asks what is your opinion on block periodization? For those of you who are unfamiliar with block periodization here's a quick overview. With linear periodization you steadily progress your training so that your training load is increasing each week but with block periodization you preload the block so that your training load is much higher in the first week of the block. For example if you're focusing on your power at VO2 max then with linear periodization you might do two VO2 max interval sessions per week for four weeks. However with block periodization you would preload this and you might do as many as five of these interval sessions in the first week and then with the remaining three weeks you would just do one of these sessions. Wait five interval sessions in a week? Now for those of you who do your high-intensity interval sessions properly this may sound absolutely insane. Surely you're going to be overtrained and not be able to hit your numbers in a week like this? Well there's actually a lot of science to show that this kind of training may be superior to linear periodization. A study on block periodization of high-intensity intervals took 21 trained cyclists. These subjects were split into two groups. One did block periodization and had five high-intensity sessions in one week followed by three weeks of only one high-intensity session per week. The other group did two high intensity sessions per week during each of the four weeks. The study used a three-zone model and if we look at the time in zones we can see that during the first week the block periodization group spent almost half their time in zone three. This would be efforts above FTP so this is a really hard week. What were the results? The block periodization group saw their power increase during each successive high-intensity session while the other group did not. Block periodization also produced a bigger increase in power at two millimolar lactate peak power and maximal oxygen consumption. The study concluded that block periodization provides superior effects on endurance performance and this is just one of many studies supporting block periodization. Overall the evidence for block periodization looks pretty good and I do recommend block periodization but only for advanced level athletes. Wait so you're saying that if I just started riding six months ago that I shouldn't try to do five VO2 max workouts in one week? No definitely not. This is an advanced level training technique and doing it wrong or when you aren't prepared could leave you in a whole of fatigue that's hard to get out of. I'll be making a video in the near future going over all the science on block periodization and the experimentation I've done with myself with block periodization so just think of this as the preview. Alright our next question comes to us from M. Hagan and he asks how important do you think a power meter is for mountain biking? I'll start off by saying that if you can only afford one power meter you should probably have it on your road bike because you really want power when you're doing intervals and the best place to do intervals is on the road because you can keep the most consistent power. That being said you could just ride your mountain bike on the road when you're doing intervals. However if you're a mountain bike racer and you can afford it I highly recommend having a power meter on your mountain bike as well. As you get closer to race season you're going to want to do some of your intervals on your mountain bike either on the trail or on the road and having a power meter is critical for letting you know whether or not you're improving and for pacing. A power meter on your mountain bike is also a valuable tool for racing because you can analyze the data afterwards and I actually use the power meter for pacing during the race especially for marathon or ultra endurance events. I often tell my ultra endurance athletes to try to hold zone two power on the flats and zone three power on the climbs during a long race and doing this based off of heart rate can be problematic because your heart rate is going to be elevated on race day. Next we have a question from Bill Coffey and he asks is it permissible to do strength training on rest days or should strength training be on the same days as ride days? This is a great question and one I get a lot. A lot of riders and active people in general have a hard time taking a day off. They see that open day and have to fill it up with something. People often see working out every day as a sign of dedication. Have you ever heard someone say dude my uncle is the fittest guy I know? He runs 10 miles every single day. Never takes a day off. This is not good. Even most people who do recovery rides are doing them too hard. Man I'm really trying to get to 500 TSS a week but it's just hard for me to find that kind of time in my schedule. I have found though that if I go a little bit harder and a little bit longer on my recovery days that I can usually hit it. Rest days are unbelievably important because it's during rest that we rebuild and get stronger from the work that we've done and not taking them seriously can lead to overtraining. Rest days include a rest from the gym especially when we're talking about lower body work. There is an argument to be made that you can do upper body work on your rest day and I can certainly see the reasoning here. However exercise stresses your nervous system not just your muscles so I would suggest that you have at least one day a week where you don't do any activity. And when it comes to lower body work the absolute worst time to do this is during a rest day. Lower body weight lifting is extremely stressful on your body and in particular your legs obviously and is about the furthest thing from recovery that I could think of. Remember that you can do a recovery ride that's at a low enough intensity that you're not acquiring any significant amount of training stress but you can't do a recovery gym session. If you're going to the gym then you're adding to your training stress. I've got a whole video about recovery days and how to properly do a recovery ride and I'll link that in the description below. Our next question was asked on my weight loss video and says so okay for the food part of the weight loss journey but what about cycling? Is it more efficient to do long rides at low power or do quick rides with power intervals? This is an excellent question and the answer is both. Longer lower intensity rides will burn more calories simply because you're exercising for a longer period of time so these are great to include in your training plan but shorter more high intensity rides will have a higher excess post exercise oxygen consumption or epoch. One review on exercise intensity and duration on epoch stated that evidence has accumulated to suggest an exponential relationship between exercise intensity and the magnitude of the epoch for specific exercise durations. So who cares right? Well along with epoch comes a higher energy expenditure so basically once you're finished exercising you're still burning more calories than if you hadn't exercised at all. Beyond weight loss you want to do rides on both ends of the intensity spectrum anyways to improve your overall performance. 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. So for both weight loss and performance it's a good idea to vary the intensity of your rides. For our last question Blazdrager asks has there been any research made about whether or not eating healthier or as unprocessed food as possible improves regeneration or performance? The answer to this is yes and I have two videos related to this topic one about weight loss and one about antioxidants and I'll link both of those in the description below if you're interested. Basically unprocessed foods that haven't been stripped of their nutritional value like whole fruits and vegetables improve your recovery without undermining adaptation to exercise. Let's get into some quick examples in the scientific literature. A study looking at the effect of tomato juice on oxidative stress took 50 male track athletes and divided them into two groups a control group and an experimental group that drank tomato juice after their workouts. They tested both groups in a 12-minute time trial before and after and found that those drinking tomato juice ran significantly farther than they previously had while the control group saw no improvement. The tomato juice drinkers also showed a reduction in markers of oxidative stress leading to the conclusion that the antioxidant lycopene in the tomato reduced oxidative stress and improved performance and it's not just tomatoes many studies have shown this for various whole foods cherry juice has been shown to increase antioxidant capacity after a marathon leading to aided recovery and in another study reduced symptoms of exercise-induced muscle damage that study showed that strength loss after eccentric exercise was 22% with a placebo but only 4% when subjects consume cherry juice blueberries are another rich source of antioxidants and have been shown to reduce inflammation after two and a half hours of running and the same has been found with lemon juice. Okay so if the nutrients and fruits and vegetables have been shown to improve your recovery then obviously all I got to do is take a vitamin pill and I'm good to go right? I don't even need to eat my veggies. No. Certain vitamin supplements are not only not effective for improving your recovery but may actually undermine your performance by reducing the adaptation to exercise. In a review on vitamin C supplements effects on performance the authors found that vitamin C supplements actually impaired performance in three human studies. The authors went on to say that large doses of vitamin C appear to reduce training-induced adaptations. They also stated that vitamin C from five servings daily of fruit and vegetables would be sufficient to supply vitamin C needs without undermining training adaptations. And another review on vitamin supplementation and athletic performance stated that deficiency will impair performance and correcting the deficiency will show benefits but in athletes that are already meeting their antioxidant needs there doesn't seem to be any improvements with supplementation. On top of improved recovery eating healthier or unprocessed foods will help you lose weight because these foods have a much lower caloric density. That's it for today's video and lastly I just want to say thank you to everybody who's been watching, liking, commenting, and subscribe to this channel. As I said at the beginning of the video I just passed 10,000 subscribers this week and I'm honestly blown away by the response. I've only been making videos for a little over four months now and I definitely didn't expect it to grow this fast. Also I've just started a new partnership with hand-up gloves. I've been on their gloves for a while now and I absolutely love them and they make some pretty rad stuff. Not just gloves but other clothing as well. I'll leave the link for them in the description and using that not only gets you some sweet gloves but also supports me and the channel as well. If you like this video be sure to give it a like, share it with a friend, and subscribe. And if you want to see more racing and training content be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you want to follow my training be sure to check me out on Strava. And finally if you're looking for a coach shoot me an email at djohnson at trainright.com.