I’m not here to argue and you’re pretty much confirming what I just said. Racing back to back is totally fine and doable for well-trained athletes. In your case, it was a very short race, so you did not built too much fatigue. Try to do 5+ races back to back (think 350+TSS), it would be different story.
I raced many times after bad night of sleep and lack of proper nutrition, and showed pretty good results.
So I’m not arguing with you on that at all. You can see I even said that well-trained athletes should be able to perform at their FTP on most days.
My whole point was that OP is splitting hairs here. And since we’re talking about pretty low FTP numbers and I assume low W/kg here so it is less relevant whether it’s 170W or 160W.
By your own words, a small component of it is influenced by your mental state. “It” being the result of a specific test protocol, which may or may not fully represent your maximum capability.
VO2max testing involves working harder and harder until your rate of oxygen utilization plateaus. Working harder will not make your oxygen utilization increase further. If you don’t try hard enough during the test you’ll never reach the plateau which determines VO2max and the test will be inconclusive.
Some days due to fatigue or whatever the RPE at which that plateau occurs may be higher or lower. But the plateau was traditionally felt to be a fixed value.
What I am saying is that the absolutely value of that plateau - the maximum rate of oxygen utilization - actually varies in magnitude based on psychological factors.
Is this a central governor thing? The idea being that the central governor, based on a number of factors, cuts you off hopefully before you do any damage. But, somewhere in there there is still a value that the “hardware,” so to say, is able to support. So while the central governor is regulating, it has to do it within certain constraints for any given individual.
It’s not completely understood why this happens. The central governor thing you mention is a potential hypothesis, yes.
My perspective on this comes from designing clinical trials in medicine and needing to deal with the placebo (and nocebo) effects.
From that background, it was never really surprising that psychological factors influence physiology, as we see this all the time in medicine. It was more surprising to me that people thought exercise physiology wouldn’t be influenced by psychological factors… as that’s generally not how the human body works.
Any explanation for why we see this in exercise is likely going to be related to physiological explanations of the placebo effect.
It’s all really interesting to me as it’s a great example of how little human physiology we know understand.
Then what’s your explanation for the results in these studies that show psychological factors influence the absolute value of VO2max? Such as the two linked to earlier?
And when you’re doing VO2max testing in the lab then, are you not using a standard protocol for verbal encouragement? Or letting people listen to whatever music they want to during the test?
Because I’m interested in your perspective on this for intellectual reasons…
Take this relatively recent paper for example (which also provides a number of other references on the matter of how psychological factors impact the value of VO2max):
Professionals involved in exercise testing, such as exercise physiologists and sport scientists, should be aware of the role of motivation, especially using verbal encouragement, on performance. Therefore, motivation during exercise testing should be standardized and fully described in testing protocols.
The reason we all go into exercise physiology is because we like to yell at people.
(IU Health is building a new hospital, which means that the Clinical Research Center will also be moving. Our new room is tucked away in a corner, because I am apparently too vociferous when attempting to motivate people.)
Sorry, I don’t see anything in the that review to support the notion that motivation influences the measurement of VO2max - only VO2peak.
ETA: Same goes for the paper accessed via Research Gate… when you have people quitting when their RER is only 0.98, they clearly haven’t gone all the way to VO2max
As I have long told students (or anyone who would listen), exercise at/near VO2max represents an extreme physiological state. As evidence, plasma catecholamine levels will be several-fold higher than you will find in somebody who has just suffered a heart attack, major traumatic injury (e.g., car wreck), severe burn injury, etc. (And yet as athletes we subject ourselves to such stress intentionally…go figure!) I therefore don’t find it all that surprising that most non-athletes want to quit right around the time they actually reach VO2max. It is therefore at that point you need to step in and start whispering in their ear about the importance of not quitting, as Dave Costill first did to (for) me some four decades ago.
You can see psychology in play if you ever do “all out” hill repeats. Add another rider to the hill during one of the repeats and you’ll often find you get your best time, even if it’s your fourth or fifth repeat etc.
Particularly, a verbal encouragement every 20 s or 60 s resulted in higher VO2max, exercise time, blood lactate, RPE and RER than when no encouragement is given or when the encouragement is infrequent (i.e., every 180 s)…
This part onwards is what I’d been referring to. They’re not referring to VO2peak here (or in the parts afterwards).
Again, the influence of psychological factors on VO2max values is why testing protocols are supposed to be standardized in regards to things like how verbal coaching is given.
Always, always, ALWAYS consult the original source.
If you had, you’d have learned that the authors of the reference cited to back up that statement did not, in fact, insist on a plateau in VO2 as an indication that the participant had reached VO2max. Instead, in the absence of a plateau they aaccepted the measured VO2 as maximal based on secondary criteria, I e., RER, etc.
IOW, what the study in question really shows is that encouragement increases VO2peak.
“secondary criteria such as respiratory exchange ratio, maximal heart rate, and/or maximal blood lactate concentration, the acceptable values of which may be selected arbitrarily and result in grossly inaccurate V̇o2max estimation. Whereas this may not be an overriding concern in young, healthy subjects with experience of performing exercise to volitional exhaustion, exercise test naïve subjects, patient populations, and less motivated subjects may stop exercising before their V̇o2max is reached. When V̇o2max is a or the criterion outcome of the investigation, this represents a major experimental design issue.”
As I said before, max is max. You need sufficient motivation to get there, but it is in fact independent of encouragement, and (within reason) test protocol.
The paper in question did accept things other than just a plateau as the marker for VO2max (they needed to meet 3/5 criteria).
However, their inclusion of these surrogate markers isn’t made up - these have been validated in other studies.
The concerns raised in your paper are valid… but I’d point out that the participant population where these concerns about surrogate outcome validity are raised… are not who the participants were who were included in the study in question (healthy young adults without cardiovascular disease who by the numbers seem to be more fit than average).
Regardless, given that this has turned into a discussion about the accuracy of protocols to measure VO2max, I think we may be getting too off topic for this discussion.
Im happy to talk more, but also don’t know if we’ll find common ground either… and may just end up spamming this thread with further vaguely relevant comments
