Prior to the first baseline assessment…you will need to refrain from consuming caffeine for at least 2 hours
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Is that so? Because the Informed Consent says:
In addition, you are to refrain from performing other forms of exercise during the testing and training weeks, including all forms of resistance and endurance exercise.
What is the length of the low intensity workouts? I realize it’s a bit squidgy, but if we could have more clarification about what regular training means, that would be nice. Three 40 minute TTs in 6 weeks sounds not fun.
One would think compliance would be an issue with such a long TT and not a lot of motivation to go all out.
I’ve aged out of eligibility but I also wouldn’t be willing to give up my outside rides for two months.
Compliance through the Xmas holidays might also be tough for participants though maybe less people will be traveling over the holidays due to covid19.
The training is all individualized from the baseline assessments, and the workouts are designed to be very achievable, no matter your fitness level. We don’t want anyone to ‘fail’ a workout. Your job is just to maintain training consistency throughout the plan, because we know that’s probably the most important thing of all.
There is not a quantifiable fitness cutoff for the study. The requirement could be re-stated as “riding consistently for the last 6-mo and previously familiar with structured interval training”. Coming from an off-season is totally fine, as long as the last 6-months haven’t been entirely ‘off-season’.
You’re right, it’s not so. My bad! I’ll correct the previous post. Put down those dumbbell for a few weeks!
As short or long as you want. We have premade low intensity rides of 30min to 2hrs I believe. But you can go longer or shorter, as well as adding volume after the HIIT workouts if you desire. The main criteria is that you complete the 2x HIIT workouts each week. Fill up the rest of your typical training volume with low intensity riding. Because again, we know consistency and volume of low intensity is more important than intensity of low intensity, in a polarized training plan.
What can I say, Science requires your personal sacrifice 
Plenty of excuses not to do it, but only one way to succeed: just do the work. Challenge yourself!
Yeah we really don’t know what to expect, but we’re trying to be as flexible as possible in terms of when people choose to start the training plan. Based on the interest we’ve received so far, seems like a few people at least are willing to give it a shot! Thanks everyone who has already registered!
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Sounds cool, sign me up!
Oh wait, I’m 46… 
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Is Erg mode a must for this study, or is a dumb trainer with a power meter acceptable? SMART TRAINER is capitalized multiple times, so I suspect the former.
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Yeah, we’re limiting it to trainers capable of Erg mode, to try and ensure data quality. I know there isn’t much difference if you’re good at holding your power targets. But one of the points it could matter is at the end of the incremental ramp test, which has a large bearing on our study design.
These academics always seem to think they know best. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? Anyway I hope you get lots of participants and loads of useful information out it and hopefully the results will scale up with age.
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Great! I’ll probably sign up in about a month.
Last question (I think), is it possible to post the workouts on Strava or on the personal TR/TP account?
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Will you be making the individual workout protocols public so that some of us who are old and decrepit could do them and see how we compared at the end of it to the study groups?
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After the study is over, will you release the full protocol, workouts used, and your definition of “ FTP”? Would be interesting for those of us aged out of this study to have the option of doing this as a “TR Plan” in the future
We have to ensure privacy, anonymity, and blinding as best we can on our end with this kind of an open set up. We would encourage you not to post your training data publicly during the study, but the data belong to you , and you can certainly post it privately to your own training accounts.
Not during the study, to preserve blinding. But we can certainly make it all public after.
I definitely want to make everything transparent after the study is completed, but I’m not sure it will be as valuable as you hope. Our “FTP” number has nothing to do with your actual FTP, or the conceptual ‘anaerobic threshold’ that FTP and all the other threshold metrics are trying to approximate. It’s just an individualized power number that we have to set as FTP in order to program the workout intensity.
I feel like some of you think we have some magic, esoteric workout designs hidden away… I promise you we’re not nearly as creative as Coach Chad 
The study workouts are designed to be very simple, barebones, classic workouts that you’ve probably seen a thousand times. Doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective!
You can be sure that any insights we gain from the study can be integrated into future TrainerRoad workouts and training plans.
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Have you done a power analysis to determine whether your planned sample size is sufficient to actually differentiate between the different interval protocols?
I’m also curious about training load as well. I could be a participant as well since I’m in the middle of base and could experiment ~10weeks required for this.
What about participants who are using power match with ERG? I’m using dual Assiomas powermatched to my KICKR Core? Would I have to use strictly the power data from my smart trainer?
Dang I signed up, then realized I wouldn’t be able to go out mountain bike riding on the weekend.
That’s gonna be a no from me dawg.
Same, I was going to sign up but with ski season coming up, I don’t want to miss out on some prime snow activities.
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Sounds awesome - I’m in!
(Thanks lockdown / pandemic / global meltdown for destroying my desire to ride outside anyways…)
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It looked to me like the “personal information” page of the registration was indeed HTTPS.
Yes of course, it’s the site of the University of Toronto after all. I would be very surprised if it wasn’t.
However, the first one isn’t and honestly I don’t find acceptable in 2020, even if it doesn’t manage private data.