And even wiser men have long said, “More is always more… until it’s not”.
IOW, contrary to the inherent assumption of Banister’s impulse-response model, the relationship between training load and performance is not linear. (The PMC avoids this erroneous assumption.)
In any case, I think you are at least unconsciously aware of this and other issues (e.g., limitations of TSS) by the fact that you keep referring to the “dose” of training, quotes included.
Bottom line, the TSS/CTL paradigm is clearly imperfect. Rather sadly, however, more than 20 y on it is still the best we’ve got* (in part because too many would rather criticize than contribute).
*Publicly, anyway.
“Overload” just refers to doing more than you have done before, i.e., an increase in the intensity, duration, and/or frequency of training. Of course, the crux of your question is what happens when manipulate more than one variable at a time, e.g., increase intensity but decrease volume. That’s a tough one, but you already know the answer in your particular situation (this time, anyway…it turns out that training responses are not very reproducible, at least on an individual basis).
Is there an advantage to tailoring the overload to the specificity of an event? E.g. long threshold vs VO2 for 100mi gravel events where TTE is more important?
won’t speak for the Dr. but if your TTE is already good, you might want to do vo2 in prep for a gravel event anyway in order to raise your ftp ceiling and then commence work on TTE. it depends on what you need and when
and even then, my basic understanding is that you want more PCr stored in muscles + high glycolytic capacity. I’m not a physiologist so someone please correct me. Said in simple terms, its one reason why track sprinters have such large legs.
I’ve been using Athlytic app on iOS, and a year+ ago played around a bit with FasCat Optimize. Optimize goes a step beyond Xert IIUC, in that it attempts to factor in some recovery metrics. Athlytic does as well, without using/adjusting TSS.
Thinking on the anecdote trying the Hickson protocol, althoug it is impossible to impact isolated one specific “area”, within type 3, can we do any distinction between ones that are more focused improving VO2max vs improving fractional utilization over a given time?
This leads me to another question: which are/is the more important physiological factors that limit the fractional utilization? Thanks in advance.
Yes, you can almost certainly bias things toward improving cardiovascular vs. muscular metabolic fitness to some degree by manipulating your training. The thing is, there is considerable overlap, and you need both, so at the end of the day, it’s all good.
Far and away the most important factor is mitochondrial respiratory capacity.
ETA: Re. point #1: once upon a time, I reasoned that since I could maintain ~90% of VO2max for >1 h, I should focus on raising my “ceiling”. 18 wk of 3 d/wk Hickson intervals later, I hit my highest VO2max ever (5.45 L/min at 67.5-68 kg). I then raced the Texas state TT, and got my butt kicked.
Moral of the story? Train for performance, and let your physiology sort itself out. In particular, don’t underestimate the importance of specificity (specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity…is there an echo in here?).
True! But for a 40k TT or a crit race, it is maybe easier to ‘find’ the specific workouts you want to do to improve your performance. What if you do very long gravel or granfondo events (5-8h events with A LOT of climbing). What do you want to specify their? Endurance? Climbing? And even those climbs could be 60-90min climbs or 5-10min over FTP climbs. What do you focus for those races? Build an aerobic engine and then 8weeks of specific intervals that mimic the hills/mountains in that race?
If so, in no particular order my general recommendations would be 1) just try different things and see what works, 2) find something or somebody trustworthy to help guide you, and/or 3) develop sufficient understanding of exercise physiology principles that you can guide yourself.
What I would definitely not recommend is continually jumping on the next bandwagon that comes along (“Maffetone”…“40/20s”…“sweetspot”…“polarized”…“lactate testing”…“zone 2”…“Norwegian double threshold”…etc.) and/or expecting miracles, as there none.
