Shownotes

Event specificity

01:23 -

• Kolie rates event specificity as underrated, particularly in road racing. He finds athletes fixate on FTP and other hard metrics at the expense of preparing for the actual demands of their event.
• The trade-off he poses: at the margin, would you rather have ten more watts of FTP or more race specificity? In his experience the specificity usually wins.
• As an example, a crit racer came to him with around a 330 watt FTP, built through FTP-maintenance work but with no crit-specific training. Kolie shifted the focus to repeated sprint efforts and strength work. FTP dropped by 10 to 15 watts, but crit performance improved sharply, with the athlete far more comfortable with repeated accelerations and setting up for sprints.
• Mikael's read on why triathletes might see specificity as overrated: for most amateur triathletes nearly everything happens at or below threshold, bar the swim start in short races, so over-specifying an intensity between LT1 and LT2 makes little sense. The bigger event-to-event differences in cycling, between a crit, a road race, gravel and mountain biking, are where specificity matters more.
• Kolie acknowledges specificity is harder to sell because it is harder to measure. A 20-minute test gives a clean number, whereas repeatability, fatigue resistance and durability do not. Even in WKO5 with custom tools, he runs several models in parallel to assess it and it is still imperfect.

Tapering

06:02 -

• Both rate tapering as overrated, at least in terms of the performance gain people expect from it. Mikael's view is that athletes overestimate both the benefit and how much they need to scale down.
• A perfectly executed taper is worth a handful of percent at most. Mikael puts the figure from the science at roughly 2 to 3%.
• Tapering is essentially rest, with enough hard riding retained to keep the skill of pushing the pedals hard. Kolie notes a strength-as-a-skill element: after a week or two without hard efforts, a hard two-minute effort can feel disconnected.
• Kolie points out that very few tapering studies actually control intensity. In a meta-analysis he saw, only two or three of roughly 15 to 20 papers modified intensity as a variable.
• With well-trained athletes, reducing intensity into a main event can be very beneficial. Kolie works with World Tour athletes whose normal training violates many basic tapering principles yet works well. The received wisdom is a reasonable starting point, but chronic fatigue has to be monitored, because good performance is a combination of recent training history and rest.
• Mikael adds that much taper research came from Iñigo Mujika's work with swimmers, who historically did large overload blocks and then long tapers. The commonly cited 10 to 14 day optimal taper may be an artifact of how much fatigue those athletes carried in.

Logical inference

11:47 -

• Kolie offers logical inference as an obscure but underrated factor, pointing to the Wason selection task and the 2-4-6 task. He suggests listeners try the Wason selection task blind, noting that something like 70 to 80% of people get it wrong first time.
• In the 2-4-6 task you have to infer the rule generating the set 2, 4, 6. Most people guess "add two," but the more useful move is to look for a broader rule, such as integers, rational numbers or real numbers, that also produces it.
• He applies the same thinking to training: a specific rule is often a narrow case of a more general principle. Maintaining intensity during a taper, for instance, is really one instance of the broader principle of balancing training and rest.
• As a concrete example, heading into the elite road race at pro road nationals two days earlier, most of the athletes Kolie coached had done nothing above threshold, bar a sprint or two, in the final week and a half to two weeks, because they had been racing so much. Several had the best road race performances of their lives. They did not need the intensity, they needed the rest.
• He recommends an introductory epidemiology textbook as a way in, since epidemiology is largely about logical inference at scale. He credits his wife, an epidemiologist, for getting him into it.

Training plans

17:22 -

• Kolie puts training plans in both categories, depending on what you mean. Mikael notes he genuinely does not know which way this one goes either.
• What is overrated is over-specificity: prescribing 3x10 minutes at 96% of FTP one week and 97% the next is far too precise. It is better to think in general terms. Am I working muscular endurance, general volume, high-intensity specificity, or technique?
• What is underrated is the larger structure a plan provides. People overestimate how much they will improve at a given point in the season, which undermines their management of training stress.
• During a strong build, big gains are possible, for example 15 watts of FTP and 30 watts of one-minute power. Once racing starts, with race specificity, rest and infrequent racing, those gains no longer come the same way. The usual mistake is to double down on intervals when fitness dips mid-season, which only adds fatigue to an already tired athlete.
• A big-picture plan sets realistic expectations and a hierarchy of goals, making sure key races are reached rested without overdoing training.
• Mikael links this to "false precision," which he flagged as overrated in his own version of this episode two years earlier. He also raises big-picture planning across a season of races: the temptation is to always train for the next event four or five weeks out, a 5K plan then a half-marathon plan, rather than keeping the year's priorities in view. You might do better in the short-term 5K but worse in the autumn Ironman.
• Kolie ties it to diminishing returns, citing a James Steele strength-training paper with a very large, well-controlled long-term dataset. Plotting FTP year on year tends to give a log-linear fit, for example 30 watts the first year, then 20, 15, 10, 10, maybe 5 to 10, which helps set multi-year expectations and decide when to shift focus to other aspects of fitness.

Zone 2 training

26:03 -

• Both rate zone two training as overrated. Kolie says there is no question about it.
• However zone two is defined, he argues it is a narrow case of something much more general. The cellular signals that improve muscular endurance do not hinge on which substrate you burn. They hinge on cellular energy state (ATP, ADP, AMP), redox state (NADH) and calcium signalling during contractions.
• Kolie believes he may have been the first to discuss intracellular calcium during contractions as an adaptation signal, though he does not listen to other training podcasts to be sure.
• The point is that muscular endurance is broadly a single adaptive "program," like building muscle in hypertrophy. There are only a handful of general training programs in muscle: muscular endurance, muscular force, and anaerobic capacity. Training is really a question of which of these you are improving.
• Mikael adds the simplified physiology: PGC-1 alpha can be activated through intensity or volume, and the volume pathway does not care whether you are in zone one or zone two. So zone two often just generates extra fatigue for little extra gain, which can compromise the harder sessions.
• Kolie flags a "TSS false equivalence": sprint intervals and threshold or endurance work can produce similar TSS while being physiologically very different. He also thinks mitochondria and muscular endurance are overvalued relative to central factors like blood volume, vascular capacitance, stroke volume and hemoglobin mass, where the difference between adding 5, 30 or 150 grams of hemoglobin is enormous. Over-indexing on one part of physiology can lead you to improve for reasons you do not understand.

Rest as a training input

33:23 -

• Kolie rates rest as underrated, especially in practice rather than knowledge. Mikael agrees that people know they should rest but do not act on it.
• Kolie's framing is to treat rest as an active training input, not a passive gap between intervals. He considers it a bigger factor in who responds to training than the training itself.
• He cites an upcoming study in which untrained people did the same eight-week program twice with an eight-week washout, testing how well response in the first block predicted response in the second. He had expected a decent predictor, an ICC around 0.7, but it came out poor, roughly 0.02 to 0.4 depending on the metric.
• To Kolie that means recovery, through sleep, nutrition and stress, drives response more than the training does, since the same person can respond very differently at different times of year.
• On the hierarchy of rest (rest days, deload weeks, consistent sleep, naps), Kolie says all of it matters, but the key is managing chronic training stress and chronic life stress. As an example, an athlete on two months' paternity leave, sleeping poorly but with zero work stress, is more fit than he has been in years, setting power PRs in the 5 to 20 minute range mid-race.
• Rest is a passive process with a maximum rate, and other stressors slow that rate. Poor recovery produces one good day followed by bad ones, while excellent recovery allows faster recovery and supercompensation.
• The deeper into a season you go, the more delicate things become and the more doing less tends to beat doing more. Mikael echoes this from coaching: capacity to absorb training is higher early season, so patience early preserves the ability to do more later.

Racing as a training input

42:36 -

• Kolie also treats racing itself as a training input, an idea he credits to Mikael. The fatigue from racing is non-negligible, and ultra events can take weeks to recover from.
• There is also a skill component to racing that cannot be replicated in training: rubbing elbows, setting up for sprints, handling pinch points. One of his athletes calls it "getting the reps in."
• A question Kolie asks newer clients with a deep training history is how many races it takes them to start racing well, in physiology or skill. Their answer shapes the training plan.
• Mikael notes this applies in triathlon too, especially draft-legal racing, which shares elements with a crit. The swim, and the swim start in particular, rewards reps, especially for athletes who are not the strongest swimmers and have to use race craft. Kolie's tongue-in-cheek "specific" session for that is an MMA class where you get kicked in the face.

Observation

45:50 -

• Kolie rates observation as easily underrated. Your own performance should be the ultimate arbiter of whether a program is working.
• A plan that worked for the average athlete in a paper or podcast still has to be shown to work for you, and if it does not, you need to find out why. All science starts with observation of a phenomenon, followed by rigorous testing of its cause.
• He cites an old Empirical Cycling episode, one of the least listened to but, he thinks, most important, on a study that knocked out hypoxia-inducible factor: the biopsied muscle showed all the markers of being trained, but performance matched an untrained mouse, and after training the phenotype did not change while performance improved.
• The lesson is the disconnect between cellular phenotype and performance. A lot that affects performance is not being observed, and many measures are gross. So whatever mechanism a study claims, the North Star should be whether your performance is actually improving.

Creatine for endurance athletes

49:17 -

• Kolie rates creatine as completely overrated for cyclists. Mikael would not call it overrated from a triathlon angle, only because he does not see many triathletes taking it, and he does not generally recommend it.
• In his athletes who have tried it, Kolie sees no meaningful performance improvement, just an average of 1 to 2 kg of weight gain from increased cellular water, which most are not happy about.
• He thinks the cognitive and psychological benefits are also overrated, with a less robust literature than the marketing suggests. Creatine makes sense for dedicated strength athletes, but for endurance it does not live up to the hype.
• A reliable effect needs many studies across many conditions and years, and the current depth of literature could easily reflect sampling variance. Cognitive studies are often done in heavily sleep-deprived people, with effect sizes of a second or two on response times, so the effect, if real, is modest.
• Kolie also flags a "game of telephone" myth that women store 70 to 80% less creatine in muscle than men. That comes from a misinterpretation of a whole-body turnover difference and largely reflects muscle mass differences, not a real storage gap.

Progressive overload

53:29 -

• Among the topics he chose not to formally list, Kolie raises training history, counterfactuals, and progressive overload. The first two he treats as narrow cases already covered.
• On progressive overload, the common misunderstanding is thinking you must keep increasing training stress to improve. In reality you should be progressively overloading because your fitness is improving.
• Early season, slow-rolling intensity is reasonable because you are deliberately under-dosing. But as fitness builds, the intervals have to build with it, the same way strength training requires adding reps or load as you get stronger.
• The mistake is keeping the dose static, always a 2x20 for threshold work or fixed over-unders, without increasing time in zone or power as threshold improves. That is fine for the first few sessions but becomes insufficient.
• If you train each rep close to maximum while completing the set, akin to training at 0 to 2 reps in reserve in the gym, progressive overload happens naturally as long as you are recovering.
• On whether to add duration or intensity, Kolie says it depends on the interval type: threshold and below are generally duration-driven, above threshold generally intensity-driven, with a middle ground where he wants the same intensity for more duration. Mikael raises the practical snag of day-to-day variability, where a worse day on a VO2 max session should not mean scrapping the plan. Kolie adds that sometimes the dose genuinely is not sufficient, since 5x5 may not be enough to improve VO2 max, so the dose has to increase before natural overload can take over.

Recovery and off-bike stress

1:00:12 -

• This is where the episode moves on from Kolie's prepared overrated and underrated lists. Mikael had also asked him to flag what he got wrong early in his career, and the answer is emphatic: across all 11 years of coaching, every single year he has underrated the positive impact of recovery and the negative impact of off-bike stress.
• For average amateurs, training less usually means less fitness, but off-bike stress is often what is blocking the improvements they should be seeing. Managing expectations around that matters: maintain through high-stress periods, possibly with slightly less intensity, and the real gains come when life stress lifts.
• For very well-trained amateurs and pros, the adjustment can mean less training, but sometimes more, often more volume with less intensity, modulated by the athlete's feedback and race schedule.
• The theme is flexibility with inputs rather than rigid attachment to specific intervals. Once an athlete is in shape, maintaining fitness does not take much, and more rest is frequently more impactful than more training.

Genetics

1:04:21 -

• With Kolie's own lists finished, the rest of the episode works through listener-submitted topics. The first proposes genetics as underrated. Kolie finds it very hard to tease apart from off-bike stress, recovery practices and the training plan itself.
• He has seen big improvements where he did not expect them and none where he did. Distinguishing genetic predisposition, which he does think is real, from poor recovery or the wrong inputs is nearly impossible until everything aligns.
• He notes most amateurs training four to six hours a week would almost certainly be fitter on 12 to 15, but you rarely get to run that experiment.
• Mikael thinks genetics matters hugely, while also noting that some athletes overestimate their genetic ceiling and others do not realise how much potential they actually have. As a coach, what he dislikes is using genetics, or others doping, as an excuse, because that mindset itself shuts down potential improvement through the biopsychosocial side of training.
• Kolie's illustration: his own untrained FTP is maybe 180 to 200 watts, while he coaches people whose threshold has, as far as he can tell, never been below 373 to 380 watts. But leaning on genetics implies more is out of your control than in it, and he disagrees. You can usually still improve sleep, stress management, perhaps meditation. He has coached athletes who thought they were at their genetic limit and saw large gains once a missing type of training was added.

Lactate-guided training

1:10:21 -

• The next listener question raises lactate-guided training. Kolie rates it as a good way to turn your fingers into a pin cushion. Having done well over a thousand finger pricks, he no longer does lactate testing on athletes because he finds nothing actionable in it beyond what RPE and the usual metrics already give.
• It gets sold as something fancy and exclusive, which lends it an unearned promise. He does not accept that high-level athletes succeed because of lactate training.
• Mikael adds that lactate concentration at a fixed intensity has a high coefficient of variation and poor test-retest reliability. He rarely uses it, and when he does it is a specific step test, because multiple measurements make the inflection points more certain. The exact concentration at the first inflection, 1.5 versus 2.0 mmol, does not matter because it varies too much to train off.
• Kolie notes the old OBLA marker of 4 mmol works as a population average, but the individual range for threshold runs from about 2.5 to 8 mmol, so concentration itself is not the point. Threshold definitions are highly open to interpretation, and many people place their first threshold too high, for example claiming 250 watts when FTP is 290. Riding below a correctly identified first threshold often feels boringly easy.
• Both criticise the statistics. Visual inspection of step tests does not satisfy journals, but D-max calculators produce garbage for individuals, and Bland-Altman plots are routinely misused by focusing on bias while ignoring a range that can span 40 watts. A 40-watt error at n=1 is very meaningful, whereas a 5 to 10 watt range would be practically equivalent.

VO2max intervals and work-to-rest ratios

1:18:42 -

• The next listener question, from Ashley, asks about VO2 max intervals with a 1:1 work-to-rest ratio. Kolie calls the work-to-rest ratio a scientific artifact. Papers fix it to control variables, not because it is the best stimulus, so copying protocols too literally misreads the science.
• His usual VO2 max guidance is to go as hard as possible on each interval while completing at least the minimum of the set, for example three to five by five minutes, taking more recovery if needed, because intensity is what matters. Sub-maximal targeted-power intervals may need to be shorter, since the first effort often will not reach VO2 max.
• For very well-trained athletes he finds time at VO2 max does not reliably drive the stimulus. Being at VO2 max is a consequence of the work being done, not the cause of adaptation, much as time at MLSS is a proxy for the work driving muscular endurance.
• In his experience, steady intervals beat intermittent ones (30/15s, 40/20s) for VO2 max improvement, even when time at VO2 max is roughly equated.
• This is one of the few areas where Mikael differs. He leans toward shorter intervals for triathletes, who tend to have low anaerobic capacity and a narrow margin above threshold, and he finds 1:1 work-to-rest acceptable rather than too easy. He also leans on the substantial literature for intermittent intervals. Kolie, who tends to do the opposite and gives shorter intervals to athletes with more anaerobic capacity, keeps an inherently skeptical view and returns to performance as the test: if you are improving, you are not doing it wrong.

Heat training for general performance

1:25:17 -

• The next listener question is about heat training for general performance gains, such as hemoglobin mass, rather than heat adaptation. Kolie expects measurable, possibly meaningful gains for athletes with very low training volume, but above roughly 10 to 12 hours a week he doubts you would find general performance improvement, since volume and intensity already push you close to maximised adaptation. Any gain there is more about tolerating internal heat strain.
• His standards are whether an effect is measurable, noticeable and meaningful. A 5-watt threshold gain can be measurable yet unlikely to change race outcomes.
• Mikael raises the substitution cost, since 40 to 50 minutes in a hot bath is time not spent on the bike. Kolie counters that downtime and decompression are underrated, and quietly sitting in a hot bath for 20 to 40 minutes may aid recovery through reduced mental strain, even if the heat stimulus is modest.
• On the recent science, Kolie reads the VO2 max gains in trained athletes as small, for example 70 to 71 ml/kg/min, and not clearly translating to performance, with hemoglobin gains around 35 grams that sit within margin of error. Much of the heat and altitude literature measures things associated with performance rather than performance itself.
• Mikael senses a hype cycle around heat training and wants more studies and practical experience, but allows that a novel stimulus can give good bang for buck once, as a single block rather than year-round. Kolie adds the substitution principle again: training fads, from fasted training to high carb to zone two, often "work" because of what they add or remove, such as more food or more rest, rather than the headline mechanism. Both land on sleep as the higher-value use of the time.

Weight: is lighter faster?

1:33:01 -

• The final listener submission is  "lighter is faster." Kolie's answer is to a point. He has worked with riders whose names listeners would know who tried to get too light. Below a certain body fat the body can behave as if in a deficit even when energy intake looks adequate.
• He credits the bodybuilding community for understanding this better than cycling. For those riders he advises reaching very low weights only briefly, about the duration of a Grand Tour, then coming back up, because recovery is otherwise badly impaired.
• Amateurs tend to diet too fast and too aggressively. Early gains come from falling glycogen and water, then they end up empty and under-recovering. Even reaching the target weight, staying there long-term rarely brings meaningful improvement, and athletes often need to return to their previous weight and diet back slowly with resistance training.
• Mikael notes most triathlon bike courses are not hilly, but on the run lighter is roughly linearly faster, until it is not, until, as Kolie puts it, your shins turn to chalk. Both note the discourse has partly swung to rejecting that weight matters at all, which is also wrong.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Kolie’s website, podcast (Empirical Cycling Podcast), Instagram
• The Wason Test (here you can try your own logic!) 
• Coaching Thoughts: 15 Underrated Factors for Triathlon Performance | EP#440 - Mikael’s own list of underrated performance factors (for triathlon)
• Coaching Thoughts: 11 Overrated Factors for Triathlon Performance | EP#439 - Mikael’s own list of overrated performance factors (for triathlon)
• Training Talk with Kolie Moore | EP#271 - Kolie’s first appearance on That Triathlon Show
• Training, coaching and podcasting with Mikael Eriksson and Kolie Moore | EP#359 - This episode with Kolie interviewing Mikael originally aired on Empirical Cycling and was later republished on That Triathlon Show
• Watts Doc #61: Quantifying Diminishing Returns
• Watts Doc #58: Creatine's Actual Effects On Cycling Performance
• Watts Doc #50: Hypoxia And Muscular Adaptation
• Watts Doc #40: Endurance Adaptation Is Not Substrate Oxidation
• Much Ado About Zone 2: A Narrative Review Assessing the Efficacy of Zone 2 Training for Improving Mitochondrial Capacity and Cardiorespiratory Fitness in the General Population - Storoschuk et al. 2025
• Long-Term Time-Course of Strength Adaptation to Minimal Dose Resistance Training Through Retrospective Longitudinal Growth Modeling - Steele et al. 2022
• Limited reproducibility of individual physiological adaptations to repeated endurance exercise training - Odden et al. 2026