“One of the first and most cited early studies to do this was by Seiler and Kjerland in 2006, which I call the study that launched a thousand misunderstandings .”
because:
“If you, like so many, simply gloss over that word ‘sessions’ in the abstract, you come away thinking that you’re supposed to spend about 20% or so of your time in the heavy or severe domains with most of that above 10K pace when, in fact, the athletes in that study spent only 6.4 and 2.6 % of their time (that’s 9% total) at heavy and severe intensities, respectively. They spent less than 3% of their time running fast, not 17%.”
Indeed.
It continues with a dissection of the published studies, definitely worth a read. It concludes with:
“I’ll finish by repeating the take-home message. Based on 15+ years of research studies, the TID that seems to produce great endurance performances, based on time or distance, is a PYR approach, where the clear majority of running (often more than 85 or 90%) is moderate - slower than marathon pace - most of the rest is in the heavy domain - roughly up to 10K pace - and only a few percent is above 10K pace. If you graph your time or distance spent at all intensities over a week or more of training, by heart rate or power for example, this will look like a line or curve where more time is spent at any lower value when compared to any higher value.”
I find the section about the requirement for volume really interesting. This part on capillary density and stimulus via shear stress. A nice theory why volume is important. Once again, would be interesting to know what the minimum effective dose is. And if this volume could be split.
and here one of the mentioned studies. Moderate training which caused capillary growth was at 64% Vo2max. Upper zone 2 … a rough estimate though. And only active subjects. However, may bridge to the ISM thread.
I hope this is not too much of an offtopic, but here the power numbers of Valverde in the last stage of the Tour Basque Country:
The most impressive thing for me is how Pros unleash their best effort towards the end.
Based on this thread it almost looks like they rely on their “talent” for power numbers at durations up to an hour and gear their training towards building the endurance needed to perform at the end of a race.
Many amateurs chase FTP without building an endurance base beneath it. So their ftp is only valid in the first hour and not 4 or more hours into a race / event.
Late to the party here, but, I listened to Mads Würtz Schimdt of Israel SUN podcast Rytterjargon (Riders´s Jargon), an episode with his coach and DS Nicki Sørensen. Mads puts up a lot of his training on Strava, and is pretty old school about training and riding the bike (=outside). However, this year he has adopted, from his coach, race prepping workouts such as “The Mad Veterinarians intervals” where he does 4x(4mins on, 1min rest). The ON part is done all out . He said this is good for mentally getting ready for the spring classics.
Got a win in Tirreno this spring as well…
There is an article at the beginning of this thread about the development of Will Barta. His coach was trying to improve what he called the “tired 20” which is your best 20 minute effort after 2500 kJ of work. For a pro, that ability is far more valuable than the FTP number you get after a short warmup at the end of a rest week.
It is for a GT rider, but not necessarily everyone. Also its a concept that doesn’t really exist. What they are looking for is TTE and Threshold performance. It isn’t like there is a tired 20 interval session.
The generalized notion of a “tired 20” is a fatigue resistance (FR) workout. An FR workout is where the main work is done later in a session. For example do 90 minutes of zone2 (1620kJ of work for 300W FTP) and then do the main set. Coach Tim Cusick includes FR workouts in his off-the-shelf training plans, so some sweet spot intervals while fresh, and some after doing zone2 work to increase fatigue resistance. FR workouts are briefly mentioned in the book Training and Racing with a Power Meter and there is at least one workout example (Joe TriGuy in weeks 5-8).
It is for every pro if you take avg power output of average pro rider and look when the winning efforts are done you need be able to push the power after a lot of kJ. ISM underlined this ability when discussing Tadej (ok maybe bad example as we talk about GT rider but proves the point) that probably many cyclist can match his numbers when fresh, but his real ability is to push them when tired.
And there is 20 min session when tired as it checks exactly this - how your numbers change after certain kJ. It is also build into the WKO and many couches do this as part of the training (not every session of course). It is also great mental excercise.
Ehhh no. It is Fatigue Resistance (or a shifted TTE w/e you wanna call it), but just doing the ‘work’ later in the session doesn’t make you any better at doing work after having ridden. I think that’s a common fallacy, though. Doing intervals later in a workout is great way to test that FR, but I see no way how it would improve that number from a physiologic standpoint. Psychological maybe. There is just no mechanism that would prove that doing work after XXX kjs burned alters the work after the fact.
I think the point of this is testing how much power a rider can produce after x kJ then adjusting training accordingly to improve it…I agree just riding hard at the end of a ride doesn’t necessarily improve anything.
. He said this is good for mentally getting ready for the spring classics.
if you take avg power output of average pro rider and look when the winning efforts are done you need be able to push the power after a lot of kJ. ISM underlined this ability when discussing Tadej (ok maybe bad example as we talk about GT rider but proves the point) that probably many cyclist can match his numbers when fresh, but his real ability is to push them when tired.