My HR is well within Z2 range as is my power. I can talk a sentence at a time but I certainly wouldn’t be able to pull off a monologue.
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Know your breathing rate?
See when your breathing rate starts to go up
I’ve been struggling with power vs hr on Endurance level rides returning from two months off the bike due to hip replacement
Learned about a term decoupling from the Matchbox podcast. They offered a few different standards to determine the effectiveness of your base training by the decoupling point where your hr climbs out of Z2 while riding in Z2 power.
My solution is going to start at 100% intensity during Endurance rides. When my hr crosses 130 I’ll start lowering the intensity to try to not exceed 135.
TR may say I failed the workout but if I can steadily increase the time before decoupling I’ll call it a win. May screw up my AI FTP detection but I’ll see.
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I did 4 hours non stop at Z2 yesterday. My HR stayed +/- 4 beats of 135. My legs still felt lactic after hour 3 and I was tired when I got home. Ate well, drank well, mild weather.
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What you write here makes no sense to me: the effort/power/heart rate band seems completely ill-defined to me.
- Riding at constant HR ≠ constant power ≠ constant effort. Heart rate drifts over time, especially if you are pushing yourself. So which is it?
- Then you write “near the top of Z2”, which I reckon you could interpret as 70–75 % FTP.
- Then you bring in lactate concentration: how is helpful to determine your effort?
- You write that you want to work hard enough so that you can still talk in sentences (“Carry a conversation” definition): is that really possible at 75 % FTP?
Here are a few problems I see:
- Basing your efforts off of heart rate is difficult if you are close to inflection points. I regularly pace outdoor endurance rides off of heart rate (my mountain bike does not have a power meter). My inflection point occurs at around 133–135 bpm where small increases in effort can greatly increase my heart rate.
- I don’t think the zone you are describing is ideal if you want to move away from TR’s time crunched model. I’d rather do a 3±hour endurance ride at 0.60–0.63 IF than a 2-hour endurance ride at 0.7 IF. But e. g. during the week I don’t have a choice, my schedule makes that decision for me.
- Heart rate depends on a whole host of things, e. g. how well and long you have slept and rested. And what workouts I have done prior. E. g. I often tack on an endurance ride to a hard workout to get extra Z2 time in. My heart rate then is significantly elevated compared to me doing the same or a harder workout when being fresh.
Overall, your scheme seems overly complicated, IMHO pushes you into the wrong zone and I don’t see a huge benefit to implement a “heart rate erg mode”. Even if you wanted to do this, why don’t you just do this yourself? I do this every time I do my endurance ride outdoors (although I typically aim lower).
Why don’t you train your proprieception then? Wout van Aert and other pros can do that precisely, because they have been staring at their power number and heart rate for so long. To a degree so can you. Learning to pace your Z2 efforts is probably easier than pacing in other circumstances.
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This! It’s really easy to ride at a certain HR. it’s really ok if you drift by 5 bpm. None of these zone or levels are scientifically set in stone.
Sometimes I think ISM has just confused everybody a bit with his lactate measured zone 2.
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My argument is ‘this is a skill you can train and be a better cyclist’.
Your reply appears to be ‘but some people find this hard so make a computer do it for us’.
I’m not convinced this means you understand my proposition.
I’m also gonna ignore the point about power match as it doesn’t seem to make any sense.
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It’s not ISM that’s confusing everyone. I’ve listened to many of his hours-long podcasts, talked, etc. ISM gets it. He makes things surprisingly simple, in my opinion. His talks with Dr Attia are fantastic.
Most people just don’t understand what’s he’s saying. I mean, I even don’t get a lot of the complex biology stuff. But the lab stuff, the measurements, the interpretation of lactate response, lactate dynamics….I’m starting to get. Just barely. After 5+ years of reading. And 3 years of metabolic testing at home.
The problem is that most everyone, who don’t really have any experience measuring things like lactate, or VO2, etc… are only speculating on how they interpret San Milan’s work.
I’m intrigued not because he’s a pro-level coach, he’s a fantastic researcher.
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But doesn’t that support that it sounds very complicated? I just wonder if lactate measurements complicate basic aerobic endurance training. Don’t some athletes process lactate very quickly and thus have lower blood levels compared to other athletes?
On one hand it’s super easy - talk test. This is straight from ISM. I’ve triangulated my LT1 / Aerobic Threshold with:
talk test
middle of coggan zone 2
DFA a1
They all put in the range of 125bpm. Easy peasy!
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What’s complicated is observing the biological processes and trying to understand the why.
What’s simple is the actual practice of doing it. Put away the tv, tablet, and any other distractions and just listen to your body. I’ve done so many ramps and endurance rides that I know how it feels to start breathing hard. I know that deep ache in my chest and stomach that for me is associated with the build up of lactate and now I can see it in the metabolic cart data. I’ve always known that feeling, but now I have observed and quantified it. I’ve practiced intensity control for the sake of intensity control. My first SSB program was a dumb trainer and power meter. You’d think I was in erg mode by the power graph.
Knowing that you’re riding at a low intensity does not need to be complicated at all. Everyone here is shooting blind because the technology isn’t cheap enough yet. But when accurate metabolic carts and real NIRS-style lactate wearables are commonplace, these discussions on identifying metabolic boundaries will become much more nuanced.
My point is to practice intensity control and listen to yourself. It may seem abstract, but it’s real.
Same here 
@timon I don’t think there is such a thing as “perfect z2 training” and the last 2+ years I’ve been doing a lot of endurance riding. In 2022 I did about 320 hours of endurance riding, out of 400 hours.
2 years of riding at roughly the same FTP (+/- 10-15W), with a lot of efforts and intervals from 90W up to 350+W:
the only real inflection point I see is at 275W where the curve flattens out. My FTP is set at 272. My endurance rides have mostly been averaging 170-200W for the past 2 years, where I often start out and settle in at 170-ish or 180-ish watts for 30-60 minutes and then slowly increase to 200-210 watts for a negative split. There are a couple of really small stair steps at those watts on the curve, but IMHO it is an artifact of how I ride endurance and not a reflection of some inflection points.
FWIW.
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Here’s my most recent Zone 2 workout. My son is visiting for the holidays and has the Kickr, so I’m on Fastback Rollers. Its weird riding with no inertia. I changed gears midway through due to the power not staying constant on the rollers.
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New year, new Z2 Dylan style thread
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The amount of brain-power invested in optimization and seeking perfection boggles the mind.
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Think I agree with you here on the graph. Much overthinking in this thread.
IIRC it was Kolie on his podcast often pointing out something like „it’s all a continuum“ maybe even questioning the concept of hard thresholds.
Coggan said it 20 years ago in his original power meter training course for coaches, and I’m sure somebody said it before that.
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In my experience it depends on the purpose of the ride. For easier Z2 (up to about 0.63~0.65 IF), I don’t think a power meter is necessary. But if you want to go closer to Z3, I benefit from having a power meter. In higher Z2, I do incur more fatigue, too.
Curious. I definitely think I see a more rapid increase in heart rate with power when I transition from upper Z2 to low Z3. The inflection point shifts as I get fitter, too. (The heart rate drift also diminishes or disappears, too.) I have not tried to plot power-vs.-heart rate, though.
Since I don’t have a power meter on my mountain bike, I won’t be able to test this with my most recent rides, though.
Early base in the Friel model is when you’ve taken an actual off-season, and therefore a quick drop and increase in FTP. Why bother using ftp when you can use HR? Again, I think people miss the context and get lost in details.
??
I don’t quite understand how your reply relates to the quote. I primarily use heart rate, because I prefer to use my mountain bike in the winter (slower = safer), and my mountain bike doesn’t have a power meter. I keep tabs on my FTP, so that wouldn’t be an imposition.
Pacing endurance rides with either power or heart rate as a primary metric isn’t that hard. For low Z2, it doesn’t matter to me. For high Z2, I’d prefer to use power, though.
I think this is going too far. Yes, there are no hard definitions, no 0-1 binary answers. But on the other hand, zones do make sense. For practical purposes we have to determine how to slice up the power spectrum into zones, and just like setting speed limits, there is some arbitrariness involved. But that doesn’t mean that setting a speed limit is useless.
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