After my first lactate test in December, I had no idea what to do with the information. I had just heard somewhere that an LT test was a good thing to do, and the guy doing my bike fit offered the service, so I did it. It seemed kind of random at the time and didn’t really inform my training. In retrospect, though, I’m really glad I did it because it provides such an excellent “Before” snapshot of my poor metabolic health at the time.
After a couple weeks on the bike in December, I found myself wanting to increase my riding time from one week to the next. My goals were mainly to increase hours per week without overtraining/getting injured. I just did random workouts on TR or noodled around on Zwift without worrying about power. Then around February, I started listening to a bunch of podcasts with Seiler. What he said made so much sense to me and seemed like a really safe way to increase training volume. I did almost all easy rides, with wattage gradually climbing from the 120s or 130s in the beginning to the 190s or low 200s today. Heart rate in the range of 110 to 130 over the course a 2 or 3hr ride, vs 183 HRmax. I did 4x8 intervals about once a week but other than that, just easy riding until July. I’ve been doing about 12 hrs a week on the indoor bike these past two months, and just completed my first 3-week VO2 block, so I will be interested to see how my VO2 has changed. One thing these trips to the lab show me is how easy it is to mess up a test.
Speaking of thresholds, I recently bought a Tymewear shirt (I learned about it from Seiler’s Twitter), which supposedly will tell your VT1 and VT2 via a ramp test. I haven’t tried it yet so can’t speak to its effectiveness, but it’s one of the things I’m going to experiment with soon.