All of the above, as well as everything else.
1 Like
What I’m asking is, how would you use this concept to change training? Are you saying everyone should do light zone 2 instead of VO2 work, because they accomplish the same thing? Or do whatever you feel like as long as it’s something from zone 2 - VO2 for example? I’m just wondering what the real world application of this is.
The “real world” application is to stop obsessing in pursuit of the perfect plan and get on with the business of actually training.
7 Likes
Fair enough, I’m probably not the target audience then haha. I’ve gone a bit off the reservation with training, taking a bit of a Michael Pollinesque approach to training lol. Ride lots, sometimes hard, not too much.
So switching the dreaded threshold workouts with for me much more tolerable vo2max intervals?
So should a <15hr/wk athlete always use the max available time (other than rest periods) or is there a time/reason to ramp volume week to week?
1 Like
It’s not semantics, it’s energy systems. The point is that endurance athletes, by and large, have a skewed and incorrect definition of how workouts of certain powers and durations affect physiology. See below…
My athletic background is a 100/200 runner. My academic background is ex phys + coaching → medicine. T&F sprinters do:
- Sprint workouts - 20-60 m repeats (3-8 seconds) with ~3 min rest. All out. Typically followed by plyometrics and heavy compound lifts.
- Race-like intervals. Typical workout would be 3x200m (depending on ability/gender, this is 20-30 seconds) with 10-15 min rest. 400 runners may do over-distance intervals here.
- Maintenance intervals: total distance 1200-1600m. Think 8x150, 6x200, 4x300, or something similar. Typically 2 min rest.
There is no place for long slow distance. So what’s rhe point of saying this with endurance sport? It demonstrates that as @The_Cog said, just about everything we do as cyclists falls into the same overall category of work, and in that category, all roads lead to Rome…some just get you there faster.
This, or course, has always been an issue, and has only gotten worse with social media (not just training: lose 30 pounds with these 3 simple hacks doctors don’t want you to know!). All anyone falling into these trappings needs to do is read this excerpt from Once A Runner:
“What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.”
People just can’t deal with the banality of training and want The Secret.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
10 Likes
When it comes to training… for me the challenge as a coach has never been the what to do… but when to do it.
Add in the team dynamic of trying to get 14 people to be their best on one specific day of a calendar year and it can seem downright impossible. Even the same “recipe” can garner different results. It’s maddening.
Most of my interval work is sprintervals and short glycolytic/anaerobic. Lots of endurance and I use that term loosely because it includes some tempo and threshold work.
This is the issue for many of us. I have x hours and deal with various levels of stress and personal life. If I have had a tiring day at work it definitely impacts what type of workout I do
That wasn’t exactly the type of mental fatigue I was talking about, although this type of mental fatigue does definitely get to me.
The mental fatigue I most often struggle with is the ability to stay on the trainer for more than 2 hours (mostly in the winter). Like, once I make it to the 120 minute mark I start to crawl out of my skin. I actually can get to two hours relatively easily and regularly do (I’ve done it 3x this week) but once I hit that invisible line I am just DYING to get off the bike. Today I did 2:45 on the bike and I hit the mental wall a little early at about 1:45 and I felt like that last hour was just a full on mental grind.
This also has a downstream effect, because I find the more I have to “force” myself to stay on the bike, the less I feel like doing my bread and butter 90-120 min workouts during the week.
Some weeks are better than others, some worse … but I feel I’ve got to get my 10+ hours a week in to get the kind of results I’m looking for. During the summer this is much easier (obviously) because I have the time for 3-5 hour rides most weekend days and enjoy them.
Anyway, as a wise person once said … “nobody cares, work harder”
1 Like
Any reason you didn’t mention specificity? As in, training for the effort you want to excel in? XCO vs. gran fondo for example.
And with your 3 categories, is there still any good reason to train with a power meter? Other than maybe measuring progressive overload a tick more precise than by time, distance, vertical climbing speed etc?
1 Like
These are great questions! I’m also interested in the responses!
Power is just less influenced by environmental factors and thus more comperable. Wind, weather, road surface, etc influence speed (which then affects time and distance), where as power just measures how hard you pressed the pedals. If you want to keep a good record of your training, power is the better measurement.
Primarily because the issue of specificity is ancillary to the point I was trying to make.
Within “group 3” workouts, though, I think that the specificity is often overrated, at least/especially when it comes to duration. Rather, it’s more about the overall training load/level of aerobic fitness.
Reading between the lines, IMO it has never been about carefully regulating the intensity of individual workouts.
Let me repeat that for emphasis
IMO it has never been about carefully regulating the intensity of individual workouts. That’s why, for example, our book was titled Training and Racing With a Power Meter, and not Training and Racing By Power, (Note: this is where TR gets it woefully wrong.). Rather, with respect to “type 3” training, the benefits of using a power meter reside in 1) quantifying the overall training load (ad you mentioned), and 2) determining what is working and what isn’t (i.e., is my power over X duration going up, or not?).
5 Likes
Could you maybe describe this one in a bit more detail? As a recreational I think I never did anything close to that. Above you mentioned that you don’t consider typical VO2max training in that category, which is often already RPE 9/10 for me. So what could be even harder and more “puky”?
3 Likes
FRC training: 40s - 1min all out. No pacing just max.
Basics of the concept explained here:
1 Like
Interesting thread and a useful intervention, thanks!
Hope this is not too much of an off topic, but cannot help asking. @The_Cog , you’ve been around for quite a while and historical developments are always interesting. So, in your opinion, what’s been the driver of what could be called the “zonification” (compare: Reification (fallacy) - Wikipedia) of endurance training, exemplified for instance by the attribution of very specific adaptations to the zones, etc, during the past three decades or so?
Remember, it’s 9/10 RPE OVER THAT DURATION. Not directing this at you but I have been on so many threads here where duration is left out of the discussion altogether. I can go near all-out for 3 mins. If I were to do that effort for 30secs, it’s not 9/10 anymore.
Consider this: you can achieve VO2max over a duration of an hour, 2 hours, or more. When you take a longer FTP test (>45 mins) and you go to failure, you have gone to VO2max.
Naming 3-5 mins intervals “VO2max intervals” is a coaching convenience.
An all out sprint.
Overall, one of the points he is trying to make is you hear “i’m training this system, or that system” or “it’s different systems” often. The marketing material around Progression Levels doesn’t come out a say it that way, but it is implied (and it is certainly how they are interpreted by users…“do some threshold intervals and work a different system–or different part of the system—than Zone2”…“need to do some VO2max intervals because that part of my system is being neglected by all the SST I’m doing” <---- those aren’t a thing. All the same (single) system.
1 Like
What @jarsson said: short, really intense efforts, with lots of rest in between.
A couple of examples:
-
Rick Sharp’s classic study demonstrating improvements in muscle buffer capacity with training that I cited above used 10 x 30 s all-out/4 min off. (Note that by “off”, I mean that the participants would get off the Monarch and wander around in the back of the trailer that served as the HPL annex at the time, huffing and blowing and dripping sweat, disturbing the rest of us grad students who had desks in the vicinity.).
-
Back in 2004, the expected birth of our first child conflicted with master road nationals, so I trained for my wife’s specialty, i.e., the individual pursuit, instead. My go-to level 6 session was 4-6 all-out 1 km efforts, after I would pedal very slowly back to the starting point. I’m very much a slow-twitcher, so basically 1:15-1:20 on, followed by 10-12 min of rest.
5 Likes