But is that not dangerous for overreaching? Let’s say my 70% power is about 185W. So my endurance rides should be between 175-195W. That will be between 120-130bpm for me. But If my LT1 is 145BPM and 220W and I will force myself to do my endurance rides (3hr-4hr) at about LT1 (135-145bpm) will this not lead to more fatigue?
No. I know how to add time at different levels and what I can recover from.
It’s not 3-4 hours just sitting at LT1. Rather its accumulating time purposefully at this level. Similar to how Frank at FasCat has sweetspot group rides. It might be a 3 hour ride with an instruction to accumulate time at SST. But its not 3-4 hours at SST.
What I do is simple programming.
I pick a couple days a week to go hard. Nowadays that means getting out on my mountain bike. With our terrain we have a lot of short effort hills which are Vo2max or more efforts. 30s to 5 min gut busters. I’ll do that on a Tues or Wed and call it a nice hard day. 90-120 min usually.
My second hard day is usually a weekend also on dirt but sometimes on road. I look for 2-3 hours with some long climbs. That’s going to be threshold or SST type work.
The rest of the time I try to ride endurance and have found that pegging “endurance” right around LT1 works well.
So far I’ve tried this approach on 6-8 hours a week. What I aim to do is bump that to 10-12 consistently. No expectations that this will be over reaching at all.
Hope that helps.
On Edit…
If I was programming “base” for someone with a road focus, the keys would be some VO2 type work and then I would add SST or threshold work on a second day. Those efforts build over time and fitness. We don’t just start with 5x5 and 3x20. The rest would be endurance and LT1 focused stuff as described. I just happen to be into mountain biking.
Also - long rides matter. Folks doing time crunched and avoiding those regular 3-4 hour rides with “stuff” build brittle fitness. That’s fine if its all you can do and I’ve been there as well. But having regular rides over 2 hours and some in that 4 hour range add another dimension to training and resulting fitness. But not everyone has those hours available.
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Cool; Thx for the long reply. I am in the ball park of 10-15hrs a week training. And I am already convinced that Z2 rides work. But because I mainly focus on gran fondo’s I seek the most benefit to increase my endurance level. So maybe, I will incorporate some more time at or just below LT1. Maybe more in the shorter endurance rides. Also I can watch some HR:PWR decoupling…
10-15 is a good number of hours. Understand your concern on over reaching because might already to be close to “too much”. That’s an individual thing though and am sure you have a good feel for it.
In terms of boosting endurance, my N=1 anecdote is focused riding at LT1 resulted in the LT1 point moving up nicely. In say 4-5 months of this type of programming I went from an LT1 of 165 to an LT1 of 200-205w. FTP (MLSS) went from say 220 to 230. My best ever 40K TT was 238w and I was in phenomenal shape and 100% dedicated at that time.
I didn’t do a TTE test at 200w, but one of my favorite things to do is an hour at 200-210w. That’s how I test my overall fitness year on year and I do it about once a month. When my LT1 hit that 200w mark, the “test” was easy. I stretched that ride out to about 90 min and felt little additional stress. RPE was 4-6. You know that zone where you are putting some pressure in the pedals but it just feels good?
Today (literally today), my FTP is about 220w. LT1 about 165-170w. I’m in good shape but not in shape to push pedals hard for longer periods. If you asked me to do an hour at 200w I could do it but RPE would be 7-8. 90 min I’d start to be unhappy.
Now that we are chatting here, wish I had stretched that 90 min 200w ride out even further just to have the data.
About a month or two after that ride, I did an MLSS test. I held 225-230 for 50 min and it felt good. Really good and much better than I expected. True MLSS was probably 230-235 at that point which would have been in line with my 40k TT all time bests.
Regardless of what we call it, Z2, LT1, etc, this type of riding is the backbone of really good, durable fitness on the bike. Particularly if you are doing longer races. For 20-25 min TT events, or an 45-60 min criterium, a decent rider can sneak by with 4-6 hour time crunched programming. But this thread, I think we are talking about how to train for more durable and longer rides and how to get the most out of it. That’s where LT1 comes into the discussion.
Sounds to me like most everyone that tries this, with enough hours, reports pretty good results. So that’s something. Maybe !!
Also, this probably overlaps with the Mafftone (sp?) type stuff and the ISM stuff as noted above. I really like ISM’s thinking on this but admit the bias.
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Guess which base season I’ve spent more time at LT1…
Z2 power increase a fair bit since this time last year - works for me at least (slow twitcher)
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To all the LT1 posters lately. Would be nice if you all add your definition of LT1 into your post. I’ve seen
- below 2 mmol
- 1 mmol above base level
- 1,3 mmol
(Just want to avoid misinterpretation or talking past each other).
HRV / San Milan talk always leaves me wondering my endurance training. Those 2-2:30 hours or 100km zwift “endurance” rides at 3w/kg seem to match that (~4w/kg here) but even the easier ones (2,5-2,7 w/kg) do not feel easy at all. Yes I know…nobody said endurance should be easy 
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On the latest Fast Talk favorite intervals the San Millan was, for us mere mortals, 90-120 minutes of zone2 with some intensity 
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You can see my shared Lactate test data in the thread linked below.
Definitely agree that longer durations at the LT1 (or higher 2mMol level) are not “easy”.
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LT1 → First rise above baseline/first breakpoint. If I need a mental booster I say 0.3mmol above baseline.
This one is from almost a year ago or so. Haven’t really done a step test in a long time.
Abolute values are not comparable. Earlobe samples produce lower values than finger tip samples. Differences between devices. Individual differences (just take a look at the La curves from the elite marathon runners in one of the other threads. Some have baseline La > 2mmol)
Yes, 90min for the more recreational folks. Scales up. McNulty rarely does more than 4h streches during his base season. But he does them just below 300W! Quite demanding metabolically. He’s a poster boy for ISM’s model.
Equally important, frequency!!! ISM says 3-4 times/week to build! This should not get overlooked.
So once again, everyone has to solve the puzzle individually. Let fatigue/compliance be the ultimate controller (under the given boundary conditions)
And yes, this is not an easy pace. Happy hard describes it well. This is not easy and is in conflict with other currently popular training models. For me HR at LT1 is a bit above 80% HRmax
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Yes, definitely too short, if you’re using Fatmaxxer you can set the sampling rate to every 5 seconds if your phone processor is up to it but if you ever get anyone to load your files into Kubios it will look at 2 minute windows so I guess it makes sense to keep your interval length to an even number. I’ve only got a Galaxy A7 and that copes with it.
Yes, I should have known better…first rise of blood lactate is best definition.
Also pointed out here (with some other controversial formulas shown in the graph at the end).
Yep, agree (while others might say that’s no man’s land all the time 
). Did that last season in pre base…before then doing extensive aerobic (SS from 3x20 to 1x120)…then intensive aerobic….then VO2max…and I think that pre base helped a lot and worked out for me.
But more than 2 hours on the trainer gets pretty uncomfortable for me. I’m not sure if those 1:45 sessions this pre season have been enough any more…
Now (before starting into extensive then intensive phases again) I’m doing a VO2max block at the moment…maybe unconventional order but want to mix things up and see how the outcomes will differ.
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Definitely sounds like some of those longer zwift endurance rides would be a perfect match.
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+1 to all of this 
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Thx for your time to put this answer. Great help.
Fattmaxer work only with H10 I guess? And HRV Logger? I have a Garmin HRM dual.
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Ditto and Ditto. I don’t have the mental focus to spend more than about 90 min on the trainer any longer. I used to do 2-3 hours but had race goals in mind. As much as I think my riding in spring would benefit from a bunch more Z2 / LT1 during winter, just not doing it right now.
I think it was Eric @ Zwift in a podcast suggesting that he aims to keep things interesting so folks will accumulate time and do indoor sessions. But for this discussion, if we think we need XYZ hours for physiology but the brain only wants to do 50% of XYZ then its a standoff.
Request - Would you report back down the road on if adding that VO2max block seemed to help or hurt? Realize it will be anecdote but I’ve been wondering about kicking off a season with a VO2max block then going into aerobic and then finishing off with a peaking or polishing block. While I do not have an A-Race, I generally take a couple weeks of mountain biking in early fall and will “peak” for that in order to enjoy it as much as possible.
This is a good thread!
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I only have access to DFA-1a HRV data from a couple of apps, but both align at 154bpm vs a max of 188 on the bike, so 82%.
It was VERY eye opening as I’d assumed from all the polarised discussions/podcasts etc that LT1 would be something like mid-z2 and hence Pol z1 would be very easy! If my data is accurate then I can ride up to low-mid tempo and still be in z1 and obviously thats far from very easy.
I’m looking forward to adding a lot of volume of this later this year and seeing what happens.
When I was fitter than I am now, LT1 was low Tempo and that is a fast pace on the bike requiring some concentration to keep the average up… It was not an easy ride at all, but I could ride at that level for 1-2 hours without a problem, but HR does creep up after the hour. Now I have lost some fitness and can still ride at that pace, but by the end I am more fatigued and HR ave is 10+ beats over my old LT1.
Time to re benchmark my LT1, and build from where I am, not where I was!
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I have opposite issue:
- have been doing weekly Sunday 4-6hr rides at 190W (IF=0.7) with HR=155bpm (75% of seen max cycling HR). There is very little cardiac drift (<1%).
- now LT1 calculation based on DFA alpha 1 suggests to ride actually at 146bpm, according to intervals.icu this is usually around 175W IF=0.65.
Fatigue has not being issue with (1) but same time over last summer during TBHV + POLHV my FTP has been stale.
Question: what’s the advantages of (2) over (1)?
I think the primary benefit is less accumulated central fatigue for a similar benefit. For one ride, it probably doesn’t matter a whole lot. But if one is doing a lot of volume then keeping the fatigue at bay for all of the endurance work is probably beneficial.
I’ve played around with DFA a1. It kind of confirmed my “talk test” aerobic threshold. The DFA a1 apps make you feel like it’s a switch when you go over .75. I imagine that in reality the aerobic threshold is more like a dimmer switch such that your 175 watt ride isn’t much different than your 190 watt ride. The 190 watt ride will give you a touch more fatigue. Will it make a huge difference? Probably not?
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Indeed, every 5-6th week I tended to lose motivation for week or so, even if still was able to hit power targets on hard POL days. Might have been because of that. Looking back, it was somewhat ugly TSS graph over summer: high but toothy.
Anyway, for coming summer I actually will go even higher volume but will cap Z2 rides to this calculated HR then. Let’s see
Thanks