There is more than one way to get fast, the MAF / LSD way is about building a fat burning aerobic base with minimal stress 
More MAF progress. My average HR was 7 beats below my MAF HR, so I have some room to play with still.
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Thats really impressive! Have you started doing any cycling MAF workouts or are you still mainly running?
Thanks! I’m still doing about one MAF bike workout per week and focusing on running for another month or so.
I’ve been reading Maffetone’s The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing.
It’s not what I expected. I thought it would be more training and less holistic medicine and lifestyle advice. The diet he is prescribing is basically a paleo diet.
I started a very big thread on the UK Runners World forum back in 2014 re HADD training which was very similar to MAF.
I worked on it myself for a few months and I did enjoy it, although it took so long to get a decent run in.
At the core, Maffetone’s take on low HR training is all about holistic medicine & lifestyle advice. He created the MAF Method to be a lifestyle of healthy sustainable exercise and restorative healing. His only ‘training plan’ was stop doing so much intensity & start doing a lot more low stress activity.
It’s not that I disagree with a lot of what he writes. I was just surprised. The training portion of the book could be summarized in a few pages.
It’s interesting that he calls anaerobic anything over the MAF HR but he also talks about doing anaerobic intervals at 90% of HRmax. In that respect he is right in line with Seiler.
Same here, but I’m 50 and at my MAF HR of 130bpm I’m right about 73-75% of FTP. Means you have a pretty solid aerobic base, if one believes in the MAF method.
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I’ll take it, although theres always room for improvement!
More MAF work and I’m happy to be around 85-90% of my FTP on my Z2 aerobic stuff now. I wish I had this base over the last few years while I was racing.
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Impressive… I’m curious what is your max HR?
My max is currently 182, but the highest I’ve seen this year is 175 on the ramp test.
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I’m really confused, when is Zone2 power not Zone2 and instead upper tempo power?
I think he’s saying his previous Z2power HR is now producing Z3power.
MAF is not predicated on power, it’s all about HR. The infamous Lucho has done enough MAF training to increase his power at MAF from Endurance/Z2 (70% FTP) to Threshold/Z4 (100% FTP). It’s also why he says for athletes in this situation it’s too much stress to keep training at MAF HR, they have to train well below in order to avoid burnout.
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Yep this is pretty much what happened over the last 6 months of training. I’m not overly concerned about power and focus mainly on HR. It is nice to see a significant jump in my power with Z2 HR though. A few years ago my FTP was in the low 200s, so it’s amazing how much you can raise your FTP with MAF work.
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Long slow distance predates MAF, and we’ve known for a long time (late 1960s?) that gains can be obtained from low-intensity work. In the 1980s we learned that gains stroke volume can be optimized at low intensities - you don’t have to go hard to get results. But if you go harder you still get stroke volume gains. Same with some slow-twitch muscle improvements - they scale based on the number of contractions.
Thats why you’ll see improvements to FTP and power at low HR with a) long slow distance, and b) MAF, and c) traditional base training that includes lots of zone2 + tempo + sweet spot. More than one way to get fast.
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Thanks, I can only dream of a MAF power like yours! My MAF power is only about 69% of FTP.
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I realize that this thread hasn’t had a pulse for a few days, and hope that I’m not violating a Do Not Resuscitate order by trying to do exactly that. I usually avoid threads headed by acronyms, but this one has been such an eye-opener for me that I want to 1) thank all who have contributed to it in any way, and 2) ask just a couple of the dozens of questions I have after just six days of my own experiments. I guess my questions are directed particularly to those like @ratz, @stew681, @bbarrera, @Captain_Doughnutman, and others — who have used the basic ideas in conjunction in our TR context, and can likely answer them.
Question 1 is how do y’all handle warm-up — i.e. getting HR up to 180-age? I’m 79, so that target is 101 for me. I notice that @stew681 's HR jumps up to the desired constant almost immediately. Is that simply because his FTP is twice mine and he’s young? It takes me 15-20 min, or 1/4 to 1/3 of an hour workout — to get my ticker up to speed, even when the early watts are at or above where they’ll settle. The initial sluggishness doesn’t persist. In fact, once I’m settled in around MAF my HR is amazingly responsive. If I stop for even 10 sec it quickly plummets. If I stand or even reach for a water bottle or try to type something it heads right up. You can see this in my 2nd MAF workout, using Recess.
The reason I ask is because I would like to track all this over time, and the results are really skewed if I use averages for the whole workout when a sizeable chunk at the beginning has been just getting up to speed. It will tend to make my engine look more efficient than it is, no? Do y’all just include that long slow ramp up anyway? Do you use Workout Analytics to isolate just the main body of the workout and draw conclusions just from that? Or some representative fixed interval (e.g 30 min)? Do you do a separate unrecorded warmup before you start the MAF workout proper? Do you prime the pump with high watts early on until you’re up there?
Question 2 (maybe @ratz can answer if still in earshot): Is there any advantage in using the long slow off-the-shelf TR workouts that vary the intensity even a bit (e.g. Fletcher or even Baxter) over a pan-flat one like Recess? I’m assuming ERG mode and using the % slider in TR to keep HR at MAF just as he suggested. What I did for yesterday’s 2.5 hour ride (up Alpe du Zwift for distraction only) was customize Recess to a 3 hr length at 65% FTP with a 7 min ramp to warm up. Since Recess is flat, when you finish the ride and look it over in the website you can turn off everything but Actual and Target and get a visual from the slope of how much power faded. It eliminates a lot of the noise. I plan to stick with that for a bit for simplicity unless there is a good reason to use the ones that somewhat vary the intensity. Here’s what the 2.5 hr ride looks like.
Well, one more question – more about forum protocol – that @mcneese.chad might be able to answer. Besides this one, there are a number of other active threads right now on closely overlapping themes – recovery stratagems, older rider issues, more and longer Z2 rides, etc. Is there a bin for them that would allow cross-fertilization? I only tried the approach in this thread because I found it so interesting. But at the end of Thursday’s delightful outdoor ride using the same simple stratagem and yesterday’s not as delightful but doable crawl up Alpe du Zwift, it occurred to me that I had ridden every day this week instead of every other day, that my putative TSS had doubled, and that I nevertheless felt better instead of worse than usual, and more enthusiastic about doing it some more, instead of dreading it. The thought popped into my head that the vexing problem of recovery for the older rider possibly becomes way less vexing if there is way less “bad” stress to recover from, even if the TSS has actually almost doubled. What it feels like is that my ancient body is working, but pretty happily — humming along rather than suffering. Adding some real heat down the road sounds like fun too, instead of ominous. Sort of like sous vide for cooking meat. Long slow bath at just the right constant temp for hours — and nothing very critical about timing. Quick short sear at the end. Yum. Oops, already gone on too long. Do let me know whether to reference the MAF stuff in these other threads or what?
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In the first week or two it doesn’t make much of a different for those that need the most help. Just stay in the 10 beat range below MAF via whatever means. After that riding the library is good; just make sure your MAX never exceeds MAF if are doing an aerobic effort. Being lower has it’s reasons. It’s the ceiling you care about. I like the Ceiling of the workout to always be in that 5 beats below MAF range. Let me know if that makes sense I’m on the run right now and will have more time later to clarify.