CYCLIST AND PARALYMPIAN BILLY LISTER III SHARES HOW HE UTILIZES STRIVE THROUGH HIS TRAINING PREP
Earlier this year we started working with professional cyclist and United States Paralympian Billy Lister III as he wanted to incorporate STRIVE into his training. Billy has a unique story and STRIVE was excited to join his training journey.
At the age of 15, Billy was diagnosed with a rare and acute brain abnormality known as an AVM. He underwent invasive brain surgery at the age of 16 to correct the malformation. After a successful surgery, Billy noticed some complications. He started experiencing some swelling in the brain several months’ post operation, and the swelling led to some loss of function on his left side. In June of 1999 at only 17 years old, he suffered a stroke that caused left hemiparesis – paralysis of the left side.
It wasn’t overnight, but Billy eventually got back on his bike and began cycling. Jumping into competitive training and eventually earning his spot on Team USA! We caught up with Billy to see how his experience has been utilizing STRIVE.
STRIVE: Tell us a bit of background of how you first got connected to STRIVE
BILLY: I actually reached out one day through STRIVE’s contact on their website. Outside of sport and outside of being a fulltime Team USA athlete I also get into sport technology and I have developed a real passion for over the last couple of years – really trying to to pursue other things outside of sport and set myself up for success for post career. Sports technology and human performance is something that I had very much gotten deep into and there’s various forms of that. I subscribed to pretty much most if not all of the daily, weekly and monthly sports tech industry newsletters and various publications that are writing and providing news and updates for sports, tech related companies and startups. It was one of those that I read about STRIVE for the first time and I was like, wow, the sensors and the shorts sound super cool. Really organic in a matchmaking with STRIVE.
STRIVE: That’s great to hear. We love aligning with authentic users and authentic people that know the space a bit more.
BILLY: Really the even more amazing, incredible and phenomenal part is what’s happened since being introduced. Not just from an educated consumer and as somebody who’s in that space, but also from the revelations that I’ve been able to discover about my own body and my own asymmetrical imbalances. Something that I thought I understood and had somewhat of an overall grasp on – especially from the left and right perspective, was very much turned upside down, in a very positive and good way.
STRIVE showed me that so much of the last decade of riding was almost self-reinforcing patterns and bad habits. It really exposed a lot of inefficiencies in my performance. Like the ability to perform at your best but an ability for your body to move and operate at its best, from a linear function, muscular function, and from a neuromuscular function. Once I started using STRIVE, all of a sudden, we saw incredible findings and discoveries from data from a data return perspective.
I love it when you say authentic user, because when I think of like an authentic user, I think of somebody who takes a box that they were just given by Pandora and they open it right away and dive right in and say, okay, how deep can I go? So, that’s exactly very much what I did and have been doing. Looking at what STRIVE has been telling me and exposing and then not necessarily correcting them yet, but still trying to identify everything and it’s really from a holistic body and biomechanical perspective. For me, I’m really so far at the end of the spectrum – really I’m on the 99th percentile. There’s not many more to the greater extent than me, but everything that I’m learning in my own biomechanics and asymmetry is valuable to use.
STRIVE: What’s your plan for the future – will you plan to make tweaks and adjustments or is right now more of an information gathering for your training?
BILLY: You know, it’s less about the information for me at this point. Because at this moment in this exact moment in time, the information data is not as actionable as it will be in the very near future. What I mean by that is, making adjustments or tweaking position – if you lower the front end [of bike seat] by a couple millimeters and raise the back end by a couple millimeters, how does that actually change? From a recruitment of muscle perspective, does that help fix a lot of the overcompensation and more specifically the under compensation that I had in my right quadriceps. It’s more to make those changes. What I’m trying to focus on right now is more anecdotal. I would say qualitative and quantitative.
So like cycling, if you have a left, right imbalance, it’s not always necessarily because you’re one sided, stronger from a hamstring perspective. It could be leading to, from a synergy chain perspective, maybe you’ve got a lot of other restrictions coming from hip flexors, or maybe from shoulders and even though all these sensors aren’t measuring those you can connect the chains. And that’s what I’m focusing on a lot right now is trying to connect all the dots and create that within your mind.
So that way we can really start using the data in the quantity – like how do we make all the qualitative stuff work together. Put in place the foundation very much knowing what my body feels like, what different decisions, what different outputs feel like and then and then trying to start doing more and more testing of how low you can go right the cost benefit of aerodynamics, right. Yeah. It’s aerodynamics and cost benefit to power.
STRIVE: Yeah. So okay, so kind of following up with that, and how you mentioned a little bit earlier about how you’re in San Diego working on your bike development. Do you plan to utilize STRIVE data to make the bike mechanic tweaks and ideally produce the bike that is most beneficial specifically to you?
BILLY: We already have we already are! So it was in conjunction with my bike fitter up in the bay area, one of their physical therapists, and bike fitters, has met with the STRIVE team and been introduced to the software and into the app. We did our last session right before coming down here to San Diego to do all the work with the bike, I had this drive had STRIVE on while I was on the bike, you know, with it on my iPad, looking at it, having it loaded up while I was in the fit studio to see what was happening, from a muscular fire perspective. So we’ve already kind of established that we’ve got this set up to do now. It’s just a matter of capitalizing on that and you’re learning.
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