Inside The Ride with Jeroen Swart - Head of Performance UAE Team Emirates

Welcome to Inside the Ride by MyWhoosh, the podcast that dives deep into cycling, whether that be in real life or cycling esports. We've got a fantastic guest on today, and we're going to introduce him in just a second. It's the Head of Performance from UAE Team Emirates.

But there are a couple of things I want to cover first, because I'm hoping that while we talk about these things, we can get a few little bits of information from the Head of Performance there, Jeroen Swart.

Just to let the community know, we are in the run-up to the Tour de France. We're just days away from the Tour de France starting, 2025, as we record this podcast, and we'll talk a little about that with our guest today.

We've also got some new initiatives, events, and missions happening here on MyWhoosh. There's the MyWhoosh Masters, which was fantastic for season one, particularly for age-group athletes like myself. That starts Friday the 4th of July — so it may start today, when this podcast is released. Keep an eye out for that. It runs every Friday for the next six weeks. To be included in the results you need to do five of the six, so there's a bit of flexibility for you.

The big one we've got to talk about is the MyWhoosh Championships: August the 12th to the 19th, seven stages. This is going to be a test, whether you're at the top or you're a cat 4, even a cat 6 or a cat 4 like myself. There's a one-million-dollar prize purse. Registration is open right now over on mywhoosh.com, so go and do that — you'll find all the information on how to register and what you need to be involved.

And then we've got another new initiative, the MyWhoosh missions. This starts on the 5th of July, in conjunction with the Tour de France. We've got three weeks of events: a road race, an individual time trial, and a social group ride, happening every single day. And we've got some really cool unlocks: a special jersey, the Colnago V4 RS yellow edition, which we did to celebrate Tadej's yellow jerseys of the past, and the MV wheels in that special colourway too.

So go and look at mywhoosh.com to find more information on the Masters, the MyWhoosh Championships, and the missions. I wanted to keep that intro nice and short, because I don't want to waste any time getting on to talking to our guest. Jeroen, welcome to the show. How are we doing?

Great, thank you for having me on. It's our pleasure. I know it's a busy time of year, as I said in the intro. We're in the run-up here to the Tour de France, and I know there's a lot of racing already happening. You do a lot of work in pre-season as well, but even so, I imagine you and the team are very busy in the week leading up to a Grand Tour.

I was actually just about to cancel my entire schedule, including this podcast, and get training for the next 10 days for this million-dollar championship. No, it's very busy — there's a lot that happens in the lead-up to the Tour. But we're very excited to get going, and confident in terms of what we've done and how well we've prepared.

Absolutely. It's been a fantastic season so far, as we've seen with UAE Team Emirates. Before we get into the different topics — we're going to be chatting about training, and I've already sent you a load of questions; we'll talk about bike position, talent identification, your work with your team — first of all, why don't you give us a bit of an intro into you, your work, your background, how you got into the sport, and how you got into the role you're doing now?

I think the overwhelming summary is that I'm a generalist. As the world evolves, we're starting to see that generalists are going to become more and more sought after. What I mean by that is I've got a very broad background. I studied medicine. I raced professionally, mountain biking on the World Cup circuit, for a couple of years. I then did a PhD in physiology. I studied and specialised in sport and exercise medicine — I'm a specialist sport and exercise medicine physician. And I've been involved in performance cycling, from a coaching, biomechanics, and nutrition perspective, since 2003.

It's bringing together all of those disparate bits of knowledge and how they all fit together — I think that's really the key to being a generalist. You're never the best at any one thing, but you're good at so many different elements, and able to identify the stuff that's important in each space and coordinate it in the overall high-performance environment.

That's really the role of a Head of Performance, which is my role with UAE Team Emirates now. We have many experts who are leaders in their spaces globally, and I help coordinate them and influence their input into the overall strategy and performance that delivers in the races.

It sounds like you've got this broad knowledge of all areas. When we had the chat in pre-show, I said this is "one life's cover," and you're obviously not fazed by any of that. But you spoke a lot about the professionals in the sport — I know you do a lot of work with non-elites as well, with the clinical work you still do alongside?

Yeah. Sport and exercise medicine is often confused in terms of what we do. Sport and exercise medicine physicians are basically individuals who help people optimise their health in a very integrated fashion. So that's taking an individual — maybe a middle-aged person who's got a family history of some chronic disease, whether it's cardiovascular disease or diabetes — and we look at how everything, from your lifestyle, nutrition, stress, and exercise, all impacts your overall risk of developing what we now call diseases of lifestyle.

Then those people who've got established diseases of lifestyle, we help them to either, in a best-case scenario, be cured, or to manage that disease process to optimise their health for the rest of their lives. And then there's the flip side, the high-performance environment, where we work with elite athletes and help them optimise their health. So that's from a sport and exercise medicine perspective, but I end up working with a diverse range of people, from CEOs through to, of course, the team and Tadej Pogačar, the number one athlete in the world.

Yeah. You mentioned Tadej there. I'm more riding indoors now, and I think a lot of indoor riders are just bike riders — not quite the Tadejs of the world, but we just love being out on the bike, whether indoors or out. With your background, we're also looking at these elites to take learnings from what they're doing and try to incorporate them in my training, as someone who just wants to stay fit and enjoy some racing now and again. So hopefully that's what we can drill down to today.

I want to talk about training trends to start with. I'm by no means a Strava stalker, but I do think a lot more athletes are sharing more data than ever, and you guys, as professionals working in the sport, have access to more data than ever as well. I've also been fortunate enough to spend a bit of time with Tadej — we had him on the podcast last year — and a couple of the other coaches you work with.

So I want to talk about some of these key trends, and one of the first is zone 2. Famously, Tadej did a podcast not so long ago where he spoke about his zone 2 numbers. If I look at what's happening with a lot of the elites now — like Brandon McNulty, who rides with you — you seem to be doing a lot more in zone 2, but not the lower zone 2 I'd typically have done historically; a higher zone 2. Is that correct? And maybe give us a bit of background on why, and the benefits.

Yeah. There was a review paper published just yesterday which sought to question the use, or the validity, of zone 2 training, and their conclusion was that for the average athlete, doing high-intensity interval training is more beneficial and is the preferred modality. So the first point of departure is understanding why zone 2 as opposed to anything else.

If you look at endurance athletes traditionally — and if you do a cross-section of a lot of different endurance athletes: cyclists, runners, rowers, cross-country skiers — and you look at the kind of training they do, it tends to be pyramidal. For those who don't understand what I mean by that: as physiologists, we generally break training intensities into three zones, one, two, and three. Zone 1 is really low-intensity training, where you can comfortably have a conversation. Zone 2 is that intermediate intensity. Zone 3 is the higher intensities, where things start to become difficult and you become breathless. That's an oversimplification, but it's just for the listeners.

Most endurance athletes do the bulk of their training in zone 1, less in zone 2, and very little in zone 3 by comparison. So it's shaped like a pyramid.

Now, what do we mean by zone 2 training? Zone 2 is actually quite a broad zone. We define it — or what I like to call metabolic training, because it gives a better indication of what it's doing — as follows: if we do a laboratory step test and look at how your blood lactate responds, we're looking at somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8 millimolar lactate concentration. So it's actually on the upper side of zone 2, and that's what you're seeing in the data.

For instance, Brandon McNulty, an athlete I coach personally, will typically do a session of three one-hour efforts at about 310 to 320 watts average. That seems really high, but if you factor in that these guys typically have FTPs above 400 watts, as a percentage of their FTP we're talking about 75% roughly. So it's not crazy-high intensity, it just seems like it. If you're an average Joe and you think of doing 320 watts — I could do that for maybe 15 minutes. So it's not that high in intensity, but it's higher than the typical models of the past, doing the bulk of your training in zone 1.

Why is it used instead of high-intensity interval training? Because we know from all the research that if you do high-intensity intervals — VO2 max style, anything from one to four minutes close to maximum effort, with four to eight repetitions — that has the biggest bang for your buck. You get adaptations that affect everything from your health and wellness to endurance capacity. All the different things that happen with endurance training, where you spend five hours on the bike, happen from short high-intensity interval training. If you do 10 30-second sprints and nothing else but sit on a chair for five minutes between them, you get about the same benefit as doing three hours of moderate-intensity training per week, if you did that once a week. So it's an incredible training stimulus.

The difficulty is that when you do those sessions, you induce quite a lot of physiological stress. Even for a professional-level athlete, doing more than two of those sessions a week is typically impossible, because if you do three of them well per week, the athlete tends to become progressively more fatigued, and that can lead to illness. High-intensity interval training has a profound effect on immune suppression, so if you're travelling, in contact with people, you're likely to get sick. You can also induce injuries.

So you need different training intensities for professional-level athletes, and zone 2 is an intensity that stimulates the maximum amount of activity in the mitochondria — where we're taking fat and carbohydrate and burning it down to carbon dioxide, water vapour, and energy. We want to maximally stimulate that to get the maximal possible capacity, because it's the most efficient way to convert our substrates into energy. And in races, that means a bigger fuel tank — they go faster. So that's why we're stimulating it. If you've got time to train and you're already doing one or two interval sessions a week, then zone 2 training is going to give you that additional stability.

You almost second-guessed my next question there. The key is "if you've got time" — these professional riders have hours in the day to dedicate to training. So I was thinking about that balance for non-professionals, between building that endurance foundation and the intensity, and where we build that in.

I've always worked on a real simplification: as a younger athlete, I spent all the time — my coach then would just say go out and ride two or 300 miles a week at this intensity. Then we came around to just doing the hard sessions and a long ride on a Sunday, and I felt like we never quite got that balance. I've gone with the mentality now of making the hard sessions hard and the easy sessions easy. But say you've got 10 hours a week — how do you balance that? I did a session this morning, a hard one, after a low-cadence high-torque session last night, and I went into it aching. Am I getting that balance right, or is there a generalised percentage of how we split, say, 10 hours a week between intensity and endurance-foundation building?

I think the key is that you cannot do...

...everything in one week, and you cannot have the same training week in, week out. So your typical periodisation, building from the start of training through to either a competition or a particular goal — that is really the key, because there isn't enough time, even for the professionals, to get the full spectrum of training in.

In this day and age, what we do is train across the spectrum: from very low-intensity strength work, through zone 2 work, through intermediate-intensity intervals, through to high-intensity interval training. That's because physiology is a spectrum, a rainbow. We used to have this dichotomy, and everybody spoke about the lactate threshold, or the anaerobic threshold. But there aren't thresholds in physiology — everything happens on a continuum. There are phase transitions, where you're phasing out one kind of physiology.

One example would be the use of fat as a fuel source. At rest, and early in lower intensities of exercise, you're using fat at a greater and greater rate, and then that slowly declines, and at higher intensities you're using carbohydrate at a higher and higher rate — initially oxidatively, and then glycolytically, so that ramps up exponentially. It's not an on-off situation. It's a phase, effectively a rainbow or spectrum, which is a good analogy. You want to train all the different aspects of that, and training all those areas of the rainbow results in the best all-round performance.

We now talk about durability. It's a concept that's really become an important one. In durability, we're talking about the athlete who can perform at a high level late in a race, after expending a particular amount of energy. To be durable, you've got to have all the different building blocks, and we're still unpacking what those are. We now know strength is an important one. Having a very high oxidative capacity to burn fats preferentially as a fuel source, being very economical — all of those aspects go together to provide durability. And if you're a performance athlete, that's what really counts if you're doing longer races.

If you're looking at the Tour de France, the difference on the final climb is not always the athlete who can do the best performance out of the blocks, or on a one-day race. It's the athlete who can do that performance after suffering, sometimes for four and a half, five, six hours, over multiple climbs, expending huge amounts of energy.

So is that a similar concept to building up resistance to fatigue? What we typically see with cycling esports is the events are shorter — we're talking 60 to 90 minutes — but there are a lot of repeatable short, hard sections within those. We tend to find the athletes who do well are the ones who can repeat that again and again. Is that the same concept as this resistance to fatigue?

Definitely. We used to call it fatigue resistance, and the term now accepted by scientists and the professional community is durability. But you're exactly right. James Spragg was my PhD student — he's now a tutor — and one of the research studies James did as part of his PhD was to look at what affects durability the most, in terms of the kinds of efforts you do.

Effectively, FTP is a good cut-off. In science we talk about critical power, but critical power and FTP are very similar. If you do a long effort, a couple of hours, and you stay below your FTP, your durability doesn't really decline. The moment you start doing efforts above FTP, that starts to affect your durability. And that's exactly what you're doing in these indoor races — repetitive high-intensity efforts above your FTP — and that has the biggest effect on reducing your durability.

So even when you do an hour to an hour and a half, if you're doing a bunch of high-intensity intervals, then having to recover, then doing another one and another one, that is definitely going to unmask who is durable and who isn't. Training for durability is going to give the best performance in that situation, in an indoor race.

Okay. The other question I want to get on to: you mentioned the strength integration — strength and conditioning, which I think has typically been done in the gym. But we're also seeing a lot of talk at the moment, in the press and from riders and coaches, about this low-cadence high-torque work, using the new meters on the head units to guide these sessions. Are those two separate topics, or the same topic? And why are we seeing more of this torque training?

That's a good question. It's something that's become more and more accepted, and also validated by the science, in the last few years. When I say "we," I'm talking about myself and my close colleagues — we started using that kind of training 20 years ago. We regularly had conversations on social media with people who lambasted it and said there wasn't any science to support it, but we saw in our work with athletes that it was a fundamental thing, and it's only in recent years that the research has backed that up.

So what we're talking about is exactly as you said: low-cadence, high-resistance efforts, where you can measure on your head unit — whether it's a Garmin, a Wahoo, or any other device — the Newton metres of torque, the force you're applying onto the crank that turns it around. If you can produce a high torque and do that consecutively for durations of four to 10 minutes — for instance, a good threshold for 8 four-minute torque efforts is one Newton metre per kilogram of body mass, an easy one to remember — if you can do that eight times for four minutes, that's a good ability to produce and sustain torque. And we see that translates into durability in races. Late in races, your ability to produce torque is important to produce power, and muscles fatigue; if you can't produce the torque, you're not going to perform.

We also see this in athletes who develop. If we look at under-19 to under-23 to professional to WorldTour athletes, and their abilities to produce torque, we see that it incrementally increases from under-19 through to WorldTour, and so does their durability. So there's a direct correlation between the two. Other studies have done interventions — most recently a study that looked at torque work and what it did to VO2 max efforts — and we see that your VO2 max style intervals improve after doing more torque work.

So both on-the-bike strength work, using low-cadence torque work, and off-the-bike strength work, doing a lot of stability work in the gym, is important for performance. That's been used in the last two years in our team as well, to unlock additional performance — particularly if you look at Tadej's performance two years ago versus now, a good deal of that has been through doing really good-quality strength work.

Just one simplistic question about this torque training, because it's really interesting me and I'm starting to do more sessions that involve this kind of work. I discovered it was on the head unit on my bike, which is fantastic. I've seen some sessions where — and I apologise, we're drilling into detail — we're riding for, say, 30 seconds to a minute at a low cadence, which naturally creates higher torque through the cranks. Or are we talking about slowing down and having a short, powerful, high-torque effort that lasts five to 10 seconds? Or a combination of both?

It's a combination of different durations, like it would be if you were going to do intervals. But generally we're talking about intervals that are about four minutes in duration, up to — for classics riders, for instance — longer. When you're riding on cobbles, look at the cadence of the top classics riders covering a very technical section like the Arenberg Forest: they're riding at a very low cadence compared to what they would on smooth tar, because driving that torque allows them to maintain velocity over the cobbles, where you're otherwise disrupting your pedal stroke. Those guys will do three repetitions of 20 minutes, for example, producing high torque for 20 minutes at a time, then a short recovery of approximately 10 minutes, then doing it again. So it depends on the requirements, but they vary from four to 20 minutes in duration.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And we know Tadej especially had a good season on the cobbles this year, which — when we sat down and asked him about that in the pre-season — he didn't let on whether he'd be spending much time in those classics. So that was good.

You mentioned something else there, which is the data. Not a lot of people know, but you can get those torque values on a lot of the head units available. But it brings me on to the question of technology, data, and monitoring. I know you guys, and the people you work with, use the Ultrahuman rings — mine's on the way as well, I've recently ordered one. But whatever the device — Whoop, Wahoo, Garmin, TrainingPeaks, Ultrahuman — there's more and more data available, not just to the elite but to riders like myself. We're talking about HRV, CTL, ATL, and you mentioned durability as one aspect too, and you mentioned right at the start that we can't break the training down into a week.

So what data is the most useful? HRV, as an example — I can see some mornings it's lower, some days higher, but other than that I'm not taking a lot of that in; I don't know what to do with it in the morning. What are the core values you see that wannabe athletes like myself could utilise? And secondly, what is the predominant bit of data you're using with the athletes to look at that fatigue aspect when you're going through a pre-season?

Yeah. The thing that's important to note is that there isn't a gold standard. For decades, physiologists have been looking for a single measurement everyone can use to identify, every day, what you should or shouldn't be doing. And there isn't one. So we have to look at a whole spectrum of data.

Broadly, there are external load metrics and internal load metrics. External load metrics are typically what you're applying to the body in terms of stress, and everybody's familiar with TrainingPeaks. TrainingPeaks has your performance management chart, which has chronic training load, acute training load, and training stress balance — and there are variations of that on other platforms. That's an external load metric: it takes all of your power data and shows you what you've been doing. But it doesn't take into account you as an individual, your genetics, the stresses you're under. Are you an 8-to-6 office worker, or do you have all day, like a professional cyclist, to recover? The things that affect us day to day — relationships, various other stresses, did you get enough sleep, your lifestyle — all affect your ability to recover from training.

So you need what we call internal load metrics: how is your body responding to training? One of those — a segment that's really burgeoned in the last 10 years — is wearables. We use Ultrahuman, the Ultrahuman air rings, and those rings capture a huge amount of data. They capture your resting heart rate at night when you're sleeping, your sleep metrics — how well, the quality and quantity of your sleep — HRV, heart rate variability, how much change there is between every beat of your heart. And, not always, but in the majority of cases, more is better. So we measure HRV, we measure body temperature, we're taking all those metrics.

We're then taking a self-reported wellness questionnaire. We actually just finished a research study, which we'll publish in the next month, where we looked at two or three seasons of data from a bunch of different athletes — external load metrics, internal load metrics. They also did something derived from the Lambert submaximal cycling test. Rob Lambert, a good colleague of mine, developed that; it's a 15-minute test, 18 minutes in total, that you do on an indoor trainer. Pros don't like doing it, so in response we developed a three-minute test they can do in their warm-up. It looks at the relationship between the power they're producing, the heart-rate response to that power output, and their perception of effort — how does it feel?

In addition, we have a general wellness questionnaire we use every week: how stressed are you, how well did you sleep, how fatigued do you feel, what's your overall wellness — and it quantifies those into a score.

If we look at the research study, the thing that gave the best indication of whether you're going to perform well, or should rest, is actually your TSB — your training stress balance, your acute-to-chronic workload ratio. So if you're in a very negative TSB, you're probably going to feel tired and should rest. But the second most important thing that identified when somebody needed to recover was simply: how do you feel, and how tired do you feel? We all carry around a supercomputer that computes all the different things that happen to us daily and gives us an output we can express just by asking, "how do you feel?" That is the most important thing. If you don't feel good, listen to your body and rest. So that's something we measure, and we also quantify it from week to week to see how it evolves over time.

Then there are all the others, including sleep metrics and HRV. HRV you can divide into two different measurements. There's the HRV which is your average in your deepest sleep — that tells us the most about your general wellness. If you're going to get sick, your HRV while sleeping is going to drop; if you're getting fitter and healthier, it'll go up. But the thing that tells us the most about whether you should train that day or rest is if you measure your HRV after you get up, then go back to bed, lie down with a chest strap on, and measure your HRV for one or two minutes, comparing that on a daily basis. That data tells you more about whether you should train on that specific day. So all these things are quite nuanced.

What we've done over the last four years is work with our partners — our partner in this data capture and analysis is Analog — and Analog has helped us build our own unique software system, which eventually they'll make accessible to the public, to our competitors, and to other teams and athletes, but which we currently have exclusively. That platform takes all of this data — from our self-reported wellness, to the Ultrahuman air ring data, to all the data we produce from power meters and core sensors that measure body temperature during training — and puts it all in one single interface, where we can look at the relationships between them. It also uniquely incorporates AI, and we can ask the AI to look at the data and give us unique insights. That's starting to generate more and more from data we otherwise wouldn't have known about before, and unique ways in which all these different things interact.

It's really interesting you mentioned AI — I want to come on to AI in a second. So you've got all that data, and it seems the secret behind the success is having access to all the data and analytics, and the self-check wellness, combined with your expertise. It's clearly doing a great job with the athletes you're working with.

From a practical point of view, how quickly are the coaches and athletes able to react to that? Is this something the athletes do waking up in the morning — the HRV check, answering this wellness — and if the score isn't there, you're adapting the training on a daily basis? Or is it looking at the trends over a longer period?

It's both. We look at week-to-week changes, and the system actually flags them, because in our team, between the WorldTour and the Gen Z team, we've got 40 athletes we're looking at — 42 officially — and one or two more we're looking at long-term. It's a huge amount of data for any individual to look through. So the system identifies and flags individuals who have, for instance, a very low TSB value, or an HRV that's suddenly deviated from the average outside a particular range, or have just reported, using the app on their phone — the phone prompts them to do the self-reported wellness — that they're feeling dreadful. That generates an alert.

So we have that responsiveness to alerts, but we also look at the trend over the duration, from week to week to month to month, in response to what we know the intended stress is. Sometimes we want an athlete to be stressed, because stress results in adaptation, and adaptation results in improved performance. But sometimes there's a disconnect, and that's what we're looking for: the disconnect between the intended effect on the physiology and the measured effect. That's why internal load metrics are so important.

That leads onto this next question of AI, because I'm one of those athletes who's got access to all this data. I'm actually using an AI-based training tool at the moment, because we've just done an integration with Xert, one of our partners now, so I'm trying out this AI. I've put the MyWhoosh Championships as one of my goals, which is in six weeks, put in the time, and it's accessing some of my data. But I'm also one of those athletes who, post-training, gets that question of "how did that feel?" and I kind of just skip it — but it sounds like that's actually a really critical part of the process I'm missing. So that's good to hear.

The next step, it sounds like, is AI being able to take all of this data — and I know it's already happening in some spaces — so it can get from me, average Joe, plus answering these wellness questions and how I'm feeling every morning. As I said before we came on, I did a torque session yesterday, and I've done a session this morning just because — I felt terrible this morning, sore and achy, but I got on and did it anyway because it's in the plan. If it was my own choice and I wasn't in this, I probably would have just gone out and done two hours steady. The data looked okay, the training program was telling me this is what I should be doing, but in my head I knew that probably tomorrow I'm going to feel even worse. We think AI is going to bridge that gap for people who don't have access to this kind of technology that you and your guys have.

It will, eventually. At our level it's going to make our lives easier and give us insights we can then decide whether to act on or not. And at the lower level, where an athlete doesn't have a personal coach, it's going to make a difference. In your example this morning, a well-trained AI model would have told you — if you'd actually completed the questionnaire and given it the information, because the thing is, they can only act on the information they're given — it would have probably told you, "hey, rather go out and do two hours of easy riding," and then eventually that will improve the training adaptation. So it's going to be across the spectrum, from the everyday athlete to the highest levels of performance.

Yeah, that makes sense. I want to move on to another topic, and I don't want this show to become totally self-absorbed, but again, I think every cyclist who's been riding a long time can relate. Something we're seeing in the pro peloton — and we're all guilty of taking these things we see in the pros and trying to put them in our own setup — I've moved to shorter cranks, I've already moved my saddle further forward. We're seeing all these developments and changes, and some push-back in some respects, with the UCI making changes around wider bars and other aspects of frame geometry.

I want to talk about a couple of things: the saddle position, because it feels to me people are moving further forward in the saddle if we talk about road racing, and crank lengths — because myself and Matt, the co-host on this show in the past, Matt Smith, spoke about this before; he went shorter, I've gone shorter. Can you give us a bit of an inside scoop on what's happening in terms of crank lengths — the benefits first of all — and then we'll talk about saddle position.

Yeah. Crank length has become a very hot topic in the last year, year and a half, at a professional level. Within our team there's been a move to shorter cranks, and at that level there are a host of advantages.

The first is that the peloton has been riding faster and faster, and the average speed on many stages, if they're not on a climb, is going to be 50 kilometres an hour. At that speed, aero is a huge factor. Having a shorter crank arm means that at both top dead centre and bottom dead centre, the foot isn't moving to the extremes — so you've got a smaller area in which you're developing drag.

It also affects the position of the rider, because positions in the professional peloton have gravitated to exactly what you're pointing out: moving the saddle further forward and the handlebar lower to achieve a more aerodynamic position. But what that does, at the top-dead-centre position, is move the hip into a shortened range, which is a suboptimal position for the muscles to work in. By going to a shorter crank, you're able to move those muscles back into a more functional position. That means you generate more power throughout the pedal stroke while being in a more aerodynamic position.

Then there are additional benefits. If you look at how much energy you're consuming to move the leg — particularly the lower leg and the foot, around a larger circular diameter with each pedal stroke — and how that affects your energy consumption over a Tour de France stage of six hours, 200 kilometres, the benefit is an improved economy with a smaller diameter, achieved by having a shorter crank arm.

And there's one additional benefit: if you're entering or exiting a corner, you're able to pedal until later into the corner and pedal earlier out of it. In the peloton, the accordion effect that happens in and out of corners becomes important — being able to avoid accelerating out of a corner as hard. Every time you avoid that high-intensity acceleration — which, as we spoke about earlier, with durability, is time spent above FTP — you improve durability by doing so.

There is a trade-off: a shorter crank produces less torque, because torque is the force you're applying at the axle of the pedal multiplied by the length of the lever, and the lever is shorter on a shorter crank. So you produce less torque, and for any given power output you have to compensate by producing a higher force. So these professional-level athletes have to do more torque work — which we were already doing. So it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing: by doing more torque work you can use a shorter crank, or if you use a shorter crank you've got to do more torque work, and more strength work off the bike, to compensate. You lose that torque, but you can train yourself to accommodate for it.

For the average rider, there's not really that much benefit. You or I are riding at average speeds of 30 kilometres an hour — less on a huge mountainous ride, more on a flat route — and at that speed the aero gains aren't as pronounced, because aero gains are exponential in relation to velocity. The faster you go, the more you've got to concentrate on aero. So the loss of torque by going to a shorter crank arm, especially if you're not doing as much strength work on and off the bike, isn't really that beneficial. And you're not racing in and out of corners, unless you're a criterium racer, and you're probably not in a very aero position a lot of the time like the professional-level athletes are. But because the pros are doing it, the everyday Joes want to do it too. The net result is that everybody wants a shorter crank, and Shimano, SRAM, and Campagnolo can't keep up with the demand — they're sold out wherever you go. So it is a trend. There are definite benefits at pro level, there are limitations to those benefits at an average-Joe level, and probably we shouldn't be doing it.

Well, I think you've pretty much answered the next question, because I've put my indoor trainer, which I used to race on MyWhoosh, on shorter cranks as well, purely because it matches my outdoor setup. But if I was purely riding indoors, maybe I wouldn't go short, and we'd just keep them as we're used to. There are no power benefits other than the torque differences, and we're not catching pedals on corners when we ride indoors. It sounds like there's probably not a massive benefit, even if you're racing at a high level indoors, to using shorter cranks — other than matching up for when you do ride outdoors. Is that right?

You're probably better off indoors with a longer crank. The reason is that indoors you don't have the total mass of the bike and the human being moving through space — you only have the mass of the rear wheel and the flywheel of your trainer, which are the inertial masses. In indoor training, there's a subtle deceleration that happens in the pedal stroke at top and bottom dead centre that you don't have on the road at high speed. That little deceleration is best overcome with a longer lever, because otherwise you have to produce more force. So indoors you don't have the long durations — durability is not as big a factor, to some extent it is, but you're not talking six-hour races — the aero aspect and the cornering aspect are nullified, but you do have the deceleration effect of the wheel and trainer. So, indoors, probably not such a good idea, but everybody likes to have everything matching up.

Exactly. And you've literally thrown a spanner into the works there on what we're doing with the indoor trainers. But all right, I want to move on to the next topic, the final topic, because obviously we're an indoor platform. We know yourself and the team are utilising MyWhoosh on a regular basis — I often see Jay and Tadej riding around the MyWhoosh worlds as well. I just wonder, because myself and Matt have discussed this before, whether MyWhoosh and the data we have on riders, that coaches can access, what that might look like in terms of talent identification, or how that becomes useful for people like you working in the space. So where do you see MyWhoosh sitting in terms of that, and what do you think the...

...future looks like?

Yeah. MyWhoosh generates a huge amount of data, and we come across really talented athletes in these indoor races. A great example is Michael Frink, who came from MyWhoosh into a WorldTour professional contract because of his achievements on MyWhoosh. So there's that element. We look at the performance of the athlete across their power-duration curve, their durability, and various other factors when we look at talent identification.

But the biggest thing about talent identification that most people miss is that looking at data in isolation, in terms of a point in time, is not as good as having a longitudinal perspective. Whenever you have two athletes, especially if they're developing — if we're looking at teenagers, 16- and 17-year-olds at the moment, to identify the guys we want to get onto the team in the next couple of years — those athletes are either early or late developers, and they've either been exposed to a huge amount of resources and training, or they haven't.

So if you compare two athletes at the same point in time, one might stand out as an exceptional-level performer, but the other one might be more talented. We therefore have to look at how fast they're developing, and what their environment is like. Are they from Switzerland, an extremely high-resource environment, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with access to every analytical tool and bit of performance equipment? Or are they from a country where they're not — and a great example is del Toro, coming from Mexico. If you looked at his data two years ago, you would not have said this guy is going to be second in the Giro a month ago, because he hadn't been exposed to the level of training, equipment, and nutrition that he is now.

So you have to look at them in their own resource environment, and the rate of development, and then look at what happens when you bring them into a high-resource environment. The guys developing the fastest are the ones you want to identify as a potential super-performer in the future, as well as having a good performance at that particular time. That's real talent ID, and it's a difficult thing, because there's a lot of subjectivity to it. It's often difficult to obtain all the information you need. So talent ID is a real art, where you bring in a huge amount of different material and information to try and make decisions.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. The great thing about MyWhoosh is that we talk about this a lot — we're trying to take cycling to non-traditional places. Cycling, for better or worse, has had its epicentre over the centuries in Europe, professional-level cycling at least. We're seeing more and more riders from further afield, non-traditional cycling countries, like Mexico, and many other territories. Those are the individuals and the talent we're trying to reach as well, which is why we remain a free platform. I know we're very popular in South American countries, in Asia, in the Middle East, all over the world, because it's low-cost but accessible. And we're also building up this data and profile, which could potentially be utilised by individuals like yourself, and scouts within professional teams, in the future.

Indeed. Having access to all that data — I think in the future that's going to be a global phenomenon. The individual or the organisation with access to the info and the data is the one that's going to be standing out in terms of performance.

I really appreciate you taking the time to speak to us. It's been fascinating, I've learned so much, and I'm going to have to re-evaluate what I do with the crank lengths on the two bikes now. I know it's super busy as you lead up to the Tour de France — best of luck to the team, to Tadej and the rest of the team, and yourself. I hope we can get you on again in the future, because I know you've got a lot of interesting knowledge, background, and data to share with us. Thanks very much.

Thank you. It's been enjoyable, and I look forward to seeing you again in the future. Enjoy the Tour de France — it's going to be a great spectacle.

Great to chat with you there, from UAE Team Emirates. Don't forget to join us again for more shows in the future, where we're going to cross the boundary of in-real-life cycling and cycling esports. There's a lot to talk about in the next couple of weeks, with the run-up of the qualifiers for the UCI Cycling Esports World Championships 2025. And of course we've got the MyWhoosh Championships coming up very, very soon, so don't forget to go and register for that. Lots of other great things happening here on the platform. I've been Cybraly. It's been great to chat with you again, and we'll see you soon for another Inside the Ride, by MyWhoosh.