Hello,
i improved my LT1 with a lot of base work over this year so it came very close to my LT2. There is just a little gap between these two and as soon as i pass it i get flooded by lactate. My lactate curve shows also a sudden rapid rise at this point but still i can reach very high lactate levels at an all out effort.
Any suggestions how to stretch the area inbetween LT1 and LT2? More medio training or would HIT be the right approach?
Hope somebody can help me.
Jason
I would say more high intensity.
Floor seems good, raise the roof.
When is the last time you tested your Vo2 max with a ramp test. What type of racing do you do?
Is not a long time ago. 1 month maybe. 1 minute ramp test with 25watts increase. cant remember now exactly but reached 425 watts or so. 73ml min kg vo2max.
I plan to do zwift racing (longer and shorter ones) but also timetrials in real life in future.
How close is LT1 and LT2?
And how are you classifying?
The gap is only 40-50 watts from LT1 to LT2. And after i pass LT2 i accumulate lactate as crazy. a very steep curve. I classify with 10 minute / step lactate test. LT1@260watts LT2@310watts
LT1 is 1 mmol above base line?
baseline is around 1.3 mmol and LT1 happens around 1.7 mmol.
I don’t find the gap very narrow. Especially with 10min steps, those higher wattages will be tough.
I agree with that.
Marathon runners are notorious for having a narrow gap. This is from the breaking 2 project. Of course, I don’t know how running speed scales with cycling watts. And LT2 is always a moving target with its myriads of definitions (only 3min steps!!!):
The blood [lactate]-running speed relationship in the incremental treadmill test. A : the individual athlete blood [lactate] profiles along with the mean response (in bold). B : the response of a representative athlete showing the selected values for lactate threshold (LT) and lactate turn-point (LTP). C : the mean ± SD running speed and blood [lactate] at which LT and LTP were identified.
Warm up. Start riding with a power at or a little below your LT2. If your two minute trailing average HR starts to exceed 90% to 92% of your max cycling HR, reduce power by 5W. Go like that for an hour. Do that once a week for 5 weeks.
That will move LT2 closer to MAP.
Come back here in 6 weeks and ask how to move Map higher. 
So extensive threshold training…
I would say long sustained efforts at the highest percentage of MAP that can be sustained. And then, whatever you could sustain, that is FTP. Most TR won’t know the power they can sustain before attempting to sustain that power. I know that was certainly true for me.
But over the course of 5 weeks I was able to add 10% of MAP to the power I could sustain for an hour (at the HR I described). That amounted to over 40 watts. That’s a lot of improvement in a very short time.
Good suggestion, however if LT2 and MAP are currently close then it may not work. Just testing your unstated assumption. Before setting out on threshold work it might be best to determine fractional utilization, just in case it’s high.
Oh yeah I’d say that’s true. But if LT1, LT2, and MAP are all close. Well, high five (I mean, assuming you’re not sedentary).
Thanks for all the interesting and informative replies.
I’ll try the approach Brennus mentioned. I hope i don’t loose too much of my MAP power, we’ll see.
It would be also interesting to bring LT1 so close to LT2 that then both stimuli for base and for moving LT2 closer to MAP would get applied, no idea if this would work. If so it would end up in a pretty “diesel” physiology probably…
