I am cautious to put a lot of weight on that study simply because i know my own response to a gxt. No f’n way would i do 3 per week for 9 weeks and actually expect any level of consistency.
This was my original beef with TR’s notion that you could do a ramp somewhat frequently. They take a LOT out of me… and i doubt I’m unique to this.
Which doesn’t show that they caused the biggest improvement in lactate clearing. Just showed where their peak lactate clearance likely sat at that point in time. That then raises the question why, what’s happening at that intensity that causes more lactate take up. Is it simply more recruitment of muscle fibres that are able to take it up than lower intensity?
Ha! Yeah. It’s like a tub full of opaque liquid. We know there is an ingress hole and an egress hole below the liquid surface. All we can see is the relative level in the tub & we have to infer what’s happening to the ingress/egress.
But, of course, this says nothing about what the eventual adaptation would be. Everything in the Menzies study is consistent with my existing understanding…the inspiration for this thread was the fact that Neal (et al) showed similar monocarboxylase transporter adaptation without doing any work at or above threshold. That was contrary to what I would have guessed.
And I thought that was funny. I’ve spent many, many hours of my life really hitting some intense, painful intervals for the express purpose of up-regulating MCT. And it very often sucked. So the idea that I could just as well have been riding tempo made me laugh. That’s all.
Fuel for the fire… tempo/medio is what sebastian weber/nscyd will promote as the target intensity to lower vlamax. He proposes that it is through increasing lactate utilization but i don’t think he’s tried to specify the mechanism.
Former norwegian triathlon coach arild tveiten responded to some posts on a thread on slowtwitch a few years back which said he had his guys living in that zone during the winter to push up lt2.
Or even just Z2 volume as that gives a big kick to the slow twitch muscle cell improvements necessary to improve the lactate take up. Over / unders is like a poor man’s version for those who aren’t putting in Z2 volume as it’s boring.
I’ve read the methods in this one several times and recalled being confused by it the first time I ran across it years ago. The intervals seem to be crisscrossing MLSS by 0.5km/h every 3 minutes but I actually read it as alternating 3min intervals above and below MLSS separated by rest periods, otherwise it wouldn’t be intermittent. Chasing down the study they referenced for the interval protocol here, it has quite deliberate recovery periods where participants ran at 90-95% HRmax, then weren’t supposed to begin the next effort until HR got down to 120bpm. So I’m not reading this as continuous over/unders.
I still have yet to see a “true” over/under workout in the literature.
Apologies but I have to disagree. For me the training protocol is pretty clear, there was no rest period. I’m not a native speaker but intermittent can mean alternating. The paper was published in 2008, also something to consider.
I find the paper odd for various other reasons. All it shows is if you’re new to sport it does not matter how to train. You always improve. Even with only running twice a week for 20-30 minutes (actually,this is something that is not clear for me. They did nothing on the other days?)
While physiologically probably not different to cont sessions, OUs can help mentally (for example when working on fatigue resistance late in workout) or may take less of a toll on a runner’s body.
Yeah, the paper is pretty clear that it is continuous running, see Table 1.
And, from the discussion section:
The design of the INT training group was chosen for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was our aim to modify the training bout intensity without dramatically altering the type of training (i.e., high-intensity intervals). Secondly, we wanted to keep the duration of each training bout the same for each group, so interval repetitions exceeding 0.5 km•h–1 would have made this difficult.
here we go. haven’t listened to it yet.
I keep seeing this notion thrown out there, but is there any data to suggest this?
In my experience, z2 is great for overall capacity, but has a very different effect on my lactate curve than tempo/ss/threshold.
biopsy from the Neal study.
And just as I was about to get bathed in lactate came this podcast and smashed all my beliefs 
I’m trying to give it a listen but there are so many other interesting things going on this morning! 
Pardon the comment, but this table without context isn’t helping much.
Going to listen today…
well be sure to check the show notes as well…lots of good stuff there.
Context is 7 weeks of only training at 75% of VO2 max 3 days an week and the balance of lactate production vs. Lactate clearance significantly shifted in favour of latter.
The studies are easy to find, this is just one example.
A table with no headings and what looks like no comparator? 75% of vo2max is typically > z2 as well.
You implied z2 was superior or equivalent to threshold work at increasing the rate of lactate metabolism, saying poor man’s version of z2.
What you’ve posted doesn’t support that statement.
Bioteknik…see the first post of this thread for the data.
