Introducing Intuitive Endurance Training: Making the case for flexibility and training by feel

Summary
In this episode, Dave Schell discusses the concept of intuitive endurance training, which involves listening to your body and structuring your training based on subtle cues like fatigue, soreness, and motivation. He emphasizes the importance of considering subjective factors like how athletes feel during workouts and how they handle training. Dave also talks about the origins of the idea and how it can be beneficial for athletes. He highlights the need for flexibility in training and adapting it to individual circumstances, as well as the importance of monitoring motivation and taking breaks when needed.

Takeaways

• Intuitve endurance training involves listening to your body and structuring your training based on subjective cues like fatigue, soreness, and motivation.
• Considering how athletes feel during workouts and how they handle training is crucial for effective coaching.
• Flexibility in training and adapting it to individual circumstances is important for optimal performance.
• Monitoring motivation and taking breaks when needed can help prevent burnout and maintain long-term motivation.
• Consistency, lots of easy rides, and occasional hard workouts are key components of intuitive endurance training.

Transcript

Dave S (00:01.197)
Welcome back to the Training Bible podcast. I'm your host, Dave Schell. And today we are going to do something a little bit different. Today, I will just be on my own because I can never get enough of listening to myself talk. And if I don't lose more than 50 % of the listenership, maybe we'll do this more often. But really I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about something that I've wanted to discuss for a long time, but it really hasn't come up with any of the guests I've had on.

And so what this idea is, is intuitive endurance training or the idea of just kind of listening to your body and structuring your training and your season around those subtle cues that are coming, whether it's fatigue or soreness or high energy or motivation, listening to those things and helping that, having that guide your training along the way. And so this idea came up, gosh, I want to say it was probably around

2015 or so. And it's something that I've always leaned heavily on. You probably wouldn't know that by listening to this podcast. Usually we're talking about power and best bike split and all the data points. But really as a coach, I consider myself pretty holistic and I really do my best to try to marry the objective, which is the heart rate data, the power data, things along those lines.

with the subject of how people are feeling, and I tell athletes all the time, that the most important thing to me is how did you feel during the workout? What are those comments? Because that's going to help me learn about how you're handling the training, when we need to push it a bit more, when we need to back it off. And oftentimes those things just don't come through in the data as much as we want them to, whether it's through something like Whoop or HRV, monitoring things like

A lot of times it's just the comments that give us the most insight into how you're handling the training. anyway, I've always kind of considered myself pretty holistic as a coach and that's kind of how I coached. And around 2015 or so, friend and coworker, Cody Stevenson, was part of a documentary where he helped coach, I want to say four athletes through Dirty Kansa.

Dave S (02:29.413)
what's now unbound and all these athletes, none of them had power meters. I don't know if any of them had computers. can't quite remember. so Cody had to do everything based on RPE or perceived effort and he was successful. And we had this discussion and we were talking about this idea of kind of intuitive endurance training and really just like going by feel and doing what your body needs on any given day.

And jokingly at that time, Cody had said, you need to write that book. I would, but I just don't feel like it or something like that. so that kind of stuck in the back of my head for, I mean, again, this was probably in 2015. And so I had always kind of considered that. And I guess another kind of side story here is I used to travel with Joe Frill, who was the author of the Training Bible series. So the Cyclist Training Bible

the Triathletes Training Bible. One time we were traveling and he told me why he even wrote that first book and he was in the hospital with a cycling injury and so he wasn't able to ride. So it was just something that he started as kind of a project to keep himself busy while he was in the hospital. So he kind of started it as an exercise just to kind of write down how he thought about training and what he had learned over the years.

Over time, it became a book and I would hope you'd be familiar with that at this point. If you're not, definitely recommend checking them out because it kind of kicked everything off. And so I like it kept rattling around in my brain where I kind of wanted to do the same thing as just as an exercise. Maybe this book would never see the light of day, but it would just be a good exercise to kind of document what I think about training, what I've learned over the years.

how what I've learned informs my coaching today. And so fast forward, last winter on a snowy winter day, I got bored and started typing just to see what would come out. And pretty soon it started snowballing and it turned into this idea. I essentially wrote the book, Intuitive Endurance Training, which I hope to release.

Dave S (04:53.972)
I don't know, it's finished at this point. People are reading it and providing feedback. I don't know when it will actually be released, but now that idea is kind of out there in the world. And so I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about what is intuitive endurance training and how can you use it and why do I think it's beneficial? And so, like I said, really it's this idea of listening to your body.

and using it to inform your training decisions day by day. And so if you've been training for any amount of time, you know, three plus years, you're probably familiar with the ideas of periodization and alternating hard and easy workouts and things like that. And when I first started training, I used to think that training was so black and white.

that I had to follow the plan and if I was tired, if I was sick, I would really stress about not being able to get a workout in and think that it was going to derail my entire training process. And then I started traveling a lot for work and I was forced to take days or weeks off the bike in between these training sessions. And so what I learned over that time is that a lot of

probably didn't matter as much as I thought it did. And really it was probably a benefit that I was taking more recovery than I would have if I was left to my own devices and able to train as much as I wanted to. And

Over time, I started to become a little bit more lax, more flexible with the training and really thought that training should form around somebody's life. I've always considered my job as a coach is stress management. So whether we're talking about on the bike stress or we're talking about life stress or not getting enough sleep or other things going on, it all matters. And it all comes out in how your body

Dave S (06:52.332)
adapts to the training and how it responds.

When I work with athletes, it's really about finding out how much time do they have, you know, without having to burn the candle at both ends. So it's like we're trying to find what is the reasonable amount of time you can train every day, every week. And then we try to maximize within that. But within that, we're also trying to pay attention to how are you sleeping? How are you recovering? How's your motivation? Because these things all play a big role

how you adapt to the training. so what I've told athletes over time and kind of how I try to work with this is every time we're looking at a week, we might identify our one or two key workouts, which are typically going to be your interval workouts. Maybe there's three for certain people at certain times, but generally there's going to be a couple workouts that are intervals that are your key workouts. And those are the ones we want to get done. And so I tell people,

I really don't care when they happen. We just want them to happen. And so if it's scheduled on a Tuesday and you wake up and you're just not feeling it, maybe you didn't sleep well, maybe you haven't recovered from the weekend, then make it an easy day. And let's try to push that interval day to Wednesday to make sure that it still happens. And that would lead to this next idea that I think a lot of times we don't know exactly how we feel when we first wake up. So you might wake up, you're sore, you get out of bed, you're walking around.

everything's tight, your blood hasn't really started moving yet, you're not warmed up, so you're not sure how you feel. And so I think that getting on the bike or if you're you know, warm up for 15, 30 minutes and just see, do the legs come around? They might start feeling like crap and then after 15 to 30 minutes, they start to warm up, you really start to feel good, and then you're good to go with that interval session. And so I preach that flexibility in that as well.

Dave S (08:57.181)
And so really paying attention to that and thinking that you as the athlete know your body best and that us as coaches, we're doing our best to anticipate how you're going to respond to each workout, how you're going to recover, how you're to feel within a week, within a training block and so on. But ultimately everybody's an individual and they're going to respond and adapt differently

training, whether even if it's the exact same training, everybody's going to respond a little bit differently. And so it's really important to adapt it to you so that it's going to have the most impact for you. Now, the last thing I'll talk about with intuitive endurance training, and I think this will be probably turned into a series, but I want to keep this first one short more as just an introduction to the idea is planning a season. So like I said, when, if you're familiar with

training and you've been training for a while, you're familiar with the idea of periodization and there's this idea that it should follow a very rigid kind of structure and it's like you start with your base phase and then after your base phase you have your build phase and then after that you have your peak and performance stage or taper. But for a lot of people that might not make sense and especially for the athletes that I coach in the northern hemisphere that are dealing with snow in the winter and stuff like that, it's

A lot of times it's not practical to ride your bike on the trainer for three to five hours and do a typical base stage. And so the way that I kind of work with my athletes is I almost call it opportunistical periodization and that if we're inside on the trainer, I want to keep it short and sweet and focused. We might do some very focused work, whether it's pedaling drills, we're doing some intervals, stuff like that, but like really try not to have people spend more

90 minutes or two hours on the trainer because it can lead to burnout. And then once we get to the spring and it starts to warm up a little bit, people can get outside. At this point, I feel like people are probably ready for a mental break from the structured training. And so what I'll tell people is like, okay, now you can actually get outside. You can ride longer. So now it's just about riding your bike. Just go out, ride as much as you can, take advantage of the weather, enjoy. And then as we get closer,

Dave S (11:17.474)
to our races, then the intensity and the structure starts to come back in as we really start to prepare for the demands of event. And so, again, in this lens of intuitive endurance training, rather than adhering to this very strict structure and just following linear periodization because that's what it's supposed to do, like thinking about how can I make this make sense for me and in the place that I live?

while also taking into account motivation and the fact that it's a finite resource. Like if you're using all your motivation in the winter to knock out your three and five hour endurance rides, by the time you get to your first race, you might be burned out and just not excited about riding your bike anymore. And so that's a very real thing that happens a lot. And so I think it's important to monitor that as well is

really listen to that motivation. And if you're finding yourself where you're at a point where you're having to talk yourself into training and you're like having to bargain with yourself and like, it's probably time for a break. Take three to five days and just like, you know, do whatever you want. You're not going to lose that much fitness and it's probably going to help you in the long run. Like get that motivation back so that you can finish the back half of your season strong or the race is strong, whatever you're, whatever is coming up

your calendar. And so guess I'll part with this last piece here is my final motivation for recording this was that recently Laughlin Morton from Education First won Unbound. And there was an article that came out that said essentially his training leading up to Unbound was that he just went out and did whatever felt good, whatever felt good for that day. And so I think there is a lot to be said for that.

Perhaps I'm putting myself out of business as a coach, but I still think we have a role as being that objective voice because sometimes being a highly motivated athlete.

Dave S (13:24.412)
we just wanna push through and so it's helpful to have that objective opinion that can kind of guide you and provide the voice of reason. But one of my biggest training philosophies is ride lots, mostly easy, sometimes hard. And I really think that's what it comes down to. I don't think it has to be that complex.

I don't think there has to be all these crazy secret workouts or anything like that. It really just comes down to managing your stress, riding a lot so you can build your aerobic endurance as much as you can within the context of your life. That's where the mostly easy. So thinking about that kind of zone two zone three type of trainings that just long endurance rides, which aren't the sexiest. And then sometimes hard to two to three days a week, you're knocking out your intervals where it's whether it's going up climbs hard or.

working on sprints or if you're mountain biker doing what I like to call fart legs, just go as hard, when the trail tilts up, you go as hard as you can, see how hard you can go for two to three minutes and then long recoveries after each. Again, it just doesn't have to be that complex or that complicated. Now where it does, there's a little bit more nuance, is really thinking about like how does all this fit into your life

working on different things over the course of the season, especially when you're preparing for the demands of the event. But at a very high level, I think if you just stuck to being consistent, riding lots, mostly easy and sometimes hard, you'd see a lot of progress there. So that's going to conclude this little mini episode. If you have any questions about intuitive endurance training,

Go ahead and shoot me a DM. You can find me on Instagram at Kaizen Endurance, or you can always find me at my website at kaizenendurance .coach. That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this. And if people don't all fall off, maybe we'll do another one in the future. Thanks.