To clarify… not statistically different is not the same as saying statistically the same. Looks inconclusive statistically, with a clear bias in favor of the pol group confounded by wide confidence intervals.
Effective enough to have it attempt in an n=1 trial that we need to confront as unique snowflakes.
Which is exactly what I told MI-XC. It’s likely that the only reason we don’t see superior adaptation in the POL cohort is that the study was underpowered. So now I’m arguing both sides with myself. Nice, Brennus. 
Vae Victus.
Right, and even without lactate you can see it in the power graphs. For example a set of u/o from Carpathian Peak +2, here is a completed one I grabbed from a thread (its not mine) and clearly its from a Kickr with power smoothing enabled by default:
I don’t have access to TR prescription, however I believe the over/unders undulate between 95% and 105% FTP.
Here is my first set (16 minutes) of Carpathian Peak +2 with PowerMatch (Stages meter) on a Kickr 2017:
the color bar is 95% to 105%. You can see the sine wave like pattern of the TR workout.
and here is a recent Outside 20 minute effort at around 1.06 IF:
a little higher, but basically looks similar. And Outside 5-minute interval at 1.03 IF:
They all look about the same to me. Versus say Outside 30-minutes at TR sweet spot (high tempo / lower threshold at .92IF):
I’d say the TR Carpathian 16-minute over/under (PowerMatch) looks just a little bit higher than the 30-minute outside sweet-spot (.92IF).
I’ve got a recent 65 minute “sweet spot” at 90% but hopefully my point has been made. Just looking at the power graph they all look more alike than different. And I’d wager the lactate response was similar for all of them, even though most of those were outside versus the inside Carpathian Peak +2 Over/Under workout.
Right, I’ve done a lot of variations of these:
although my coach modifies them because I’m old and feeble and have low recovery budget. And we do stuff like go way over for 1 minute and then a longer under at 85% or 90% (love those, my n=1 is they are gold for increasing my threshold power without actually working at threshold).
The 85% plus 1 minute way over sounds wonderful…do you have an example of what a workout like this would look like?
The problem with 105%/95% outside of lactate testing is that the difference between your ftp and LT2 can easily be 5%. Thus you may just be doing unders, or you may just be doing overs and doing bugger all for “lactate clearance” and your MCT transporters may be on holiday.
Welcome to exercise science where most studies are done by under-funded graduate students performed on small numbers undergraduate subjects.
Once your ego recovers from the long form test
This is one of the standard FasCat over/under, from that article linked above:
A lot of room for customization depending on target event and personal strengths/weaknesses. For example add a repeat within a set:
Or even higher power, this one is lower zone6 similar to the 130% in the article linked above:
Not criss cross, but the FasCat ‘sweet spot with a knock’ would be controlled high power for a minute to simulate covering an attack and reattaching with the break attempt so you immediately follow that with an 8x longer sweet spot effort 90-92%. There are a lot of variants, and no sciency words in the description. But they have been incredibly effective at pulling up threshold without doing a lot of threshold work.
Hope that helps, checkout the article linked above.
While I have no idea about up-regulating the lactate shuttle or mct1 or mct4 adaptations 
and have never tested lactate 
I do agree with the discussion about understanding adaptations in order to design more effective interval programming. My coach is up on that stuff, I keep things simple and think of it this way - pushing more power requires more muscle fibers and therefore more opportunity for more adaptations (theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ_QUh0lmj4). I might be wrong on that over-simplification as its not sciency enough, but that theme song was a hot disco era dance number in high school lol and my job as an athlete is to be the monkey on the bike and keep track of programming that works. I say more analogies, more music, more fun 
Oh, and @Brennus I’ve seen your PLs on Strava and approve of the TID 
Disagree… i know you’ve spawned a lot of good conversations on finding true ftp but as long as ftp is sufficiently close to Cp the overs are not metabolically the same as the unders.
This means ftp doesn’t need to be set on a specific tte, but just below Cp (to factor in the error in the estimate).
how long does it take for lactate to respond to intensity increases? Something like 30-seconds, like HR?
A vlamax test is only a 20 second effort, but it may take several minutes after the effort to reach the peak. Of course that is a maximal effort but since anything over Cp is no longer steady state, increase in lactate will last longer than the duration of the interval.
you realize I’m going to pull out the “I’m a simple engineer and going to spitball this” with my hand wavy STEM guy thing, right?
30-sec power:
heart rate dynamics:
relative vo2 esimtates:
aerobic vs anaerobic estimates:
dFRC (kinda like W’ anaerobic capacity) estimates:
With Carpathian Peak +2 its 2 minutes climbing above to 105% and then back to 100% FTP, and then 2-minutes descending to 95% and back up to 100% FTP. For 16 minutes.
Vaguely like traveling up and down between minutes 6 and 8, maybe pushing a little higher the next 2-minute over from 7 to 9, depending on how much the 2 minute under drained blood lactate. Or 8 and 10, or 9 and 11. A little yo-yo action along the 2nd to the top curve below:
Brisquely waving hands and declaring ~4mmol is good enough first order approximation.
In situations like this, I like hand waving and glossing over the details.
Y’all can shoot me down, I’m an engineer not an exercise physiologist.
my first order hand wavy thing for lactate dynamics on Carpathian Peak +2’s first set would be something like this:
16 minutes going over under the Trial 4 MLSS curve. Lets give it a little upward bias for @Bioteknik point even though dropping below threshold the muscles will start using lactate as fuel and it will reduce somewhat for 2 minutes. Without pulling out my INSCYD data just a wild guess on lactate dropping to 2mmol after 9.5 minute recovery before the 2nd set begins.
Sorry my trackpad skilz are not good at drawing a squiggely sinusoidal red line that go up and down around the “trial 4 = mlss” curve.
Consider this interesting data posted by @GarageLab
If this were data from a single athlete, what would you say their FTP was? MLSS? CP? Let’s say you slap a ruler on the 3min step size curve and see that the 4mmol line intersects the lactate curve at 237W.
Now, you give the rider Emerson…which amounts to 3min at 225, 2min at 248, 3min at 245, etc. Where is the rider clearing lactate? Where is the rider producing lactate? Answer to the latter: during the interval. Answer to the former: during the rest period between intervals.
I agree with your sentiment and that’s a well considered argument. Probably my own personal results confound my opinion of CP. I’ve never been able to hold my 5-point CP for very long and I’ve generally maintained my FTP at around an intensity I could hold for 40, 50, 60 minutes.
FTP of roughly in the 225-240W range? Well trained as a cyclist or not? I’m slightly confused by the curves because the “10-min step size” would put threshold somewhere around 200W by my untrained eye. But around 235 on the 3-min step size.
maybe, just maybe in the 3min at 225. Unless 225 is threshold. I don’t have details on Emerson workout.
That IS data from a single athlete. That’s why it’s such a great chart.
If the goal is to minimize lactate clearance from the overs.
To me, i see most ftp protocols spit out an ftp that is above mlss, but below Cp.
Not sure about carpathian peak, but my memories of mary austin, palisade, leconte is they put your lactate levels at what would be just barely sustainable, hence their high failure rates. So i would expect one to be flirting with the top plot, and not the mlss one.
I dont see how much true clearance is happening in the unders… only a little bit at 95% of ftp. Again. Why nobody really does those workouts any more.
