As I understand it the first deflection point should be equivalent to LT1. I have looked at my ramp tests and also performed a modified version with 3 minute steps. From a single measurement I have found it difficult to identify a clear LT1 heart-rate but by looking at a couple of tests I think my LT1 could be in the upper 130’s, probably about 138. My max HR is ~170bpm so roughly 80% of that. Translated to %FTP it makes more sense; My FTP is 243 and 138 bpm is at ~180w which is 75% of FTP and lines up nicely with Chad’s sheet.
I think going off % of max HR or FTP is a more reliable way to estimate LT1, vs trying to eyeball a chart.
In a previous job I had 20+ years ago, I spent a decent amount of time trying to determine a mathematical approach to identify breakpoints is charts. It’s very hard to do reliably. The human eye has a way of seeing trends it wants to see, that are not there when you try prove it using appropriate math.
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Agreed. I also don’t think an exact percentage of max hr nor FTP is very important when building the aerobic base as long as you’re in the ballpark. I usually close my mouth and breath thru the nose for a minute to make sure I’m not riding to hard.
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Out of curiosity, I did a controlled test on the trainer. I rode at 65% of HRmax. I came up with 157 watts average for a 10 minute interval. That is 57% of my FTP.
Filed under FWIW.
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did my first long seiler z1 ride on the weekend for 4 hours was curious after all this reading in the forum. First 2 hours riding at about 120bpm average power around 175 and the last 2 hours about 140bpm @ 130w, was pretty amazed at that drop off. It was hot so perhaps that altered things, but i was amazed after the first 3 hours i basically had to soft pedal to keep my heart rate under 130.
Not really done many of these long slow rides before so thinking its definitely something to get on top of.
Also…70% max HR feels like tempo to me, definitely not ‘endless conversation pace’. 60-65% was more manageable.
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Give it 6 weeks of consistent training and it will all improve. Seiler says 65% so I’d stick with that for a while.
I’m in my 2nd year of polarized and I’m in the 5th week of my base phase. I did 4.25 hours on the bike yesterday and felt fantastic. I broke many Strava PRs and for the first time was hanging with the faster guys on climbs where I usually get dropped.
For some reason I get this ridiculous bump in aerobic fitness doing base miles. Last year I got a 20 point bump in FTP after 6 weeks of base. This year I’ve gone up maybe 15 watts since November and I’m just getting started.
FWIW – Have been making a conscious effort to do a lot more of my time at the LT1 point. After about 4 weeks can feel a difference my outdoor riding. That’s the only change I’ve made so feel like fitness is heading in the right direction. Will give it another month or so and repeat the LT test and see if anything measurable has happened.
Another key to successful Endurance rides?:
When you are not metabolically efficient (how well the body utilizes fat as an energy source) your heart reacts dramatically to small increases in intensity.
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This blog post by Couzens has probably been posted many times but I just found it and I think it’s worth reposting as it illustrates the benefits of polarized.
In particular, this chart illustrates what I felt last year after “forcing” myself to do long slow base miles for 11 weeks. I say forcing because, damn, it was hard at first cruising around at low intensity. Now that I’m much fitter and I’m going faster at 120bpm, it feels easier. I regret not owning a lactate meter to use to gauge my progress. This is also what Seiler has said in podcasts - that in six weeks he sees amateurs improving their lactate curves to more resemble that of professionals.
I got a 20 point boost in FTP last year after base miles. This year I’ve gone up 15-20 points since November and I’m not even done with my base phase. This shit works!
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One of the first books I read in 2016 was Base Building for Cyclists and it makes a similar case.
I read the Couzens blog post a bit different, and would say it illustrates the benefits of a traditional base approach and training outside where you naturally get some anaerobic work. From the article:
after 8 weeks of pretty much exclusive base training. With the exception of some short (30s) efforts at ~vVO2 intensity & a little unstructured intensity in the form of hill work, this period was almost exclusively base focused (less than 80% of max HR). Looking at the athlete’s power histogram from that time period, only 8% of the work was at greater than 275W.
However I can see how you might view that as support for polarized.
If you take outside base training and move it indoors, then based on my own experience (and Couzen’s comments above) you might want to add in some intensity. Personally I’ve found that after increasing training load from 5-10 hours/week, the benefits of aerobic workouts are maxed out around ~8 weeks which nicely maps into TR’s traditional base 1 and 2.
As a time-crunched athlete limited to 10 hours/week that means after about 8 weeks of aerobic base building, its time to introduce more intensity in the form of sweet spot and longer duration tempo while still doing aerobic maintenance workouts (pyramidal distribution). By doing that I’ve continued building my aerobic capacity before switching focus to anaerobic capacity interval training (longer vo2max intervals).
Thats what I’ve seen from my own limited experience and data. For context to my comments, it has only been 5 years since getting serious about cycling, and due to “life” my journey hasn’t seen consistent training over those years.
Mentioned this before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve watched a handful of local riders invest up to 15-25 hours/week using a more traditional base approach. All workouts were outside which means some unstructured intensity from hills and group rides, leading to a more strongly polarized distribution although a few were definitely pyramidal. The results were impressive.
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I agree with what you are saying. I don’t even think Seiler is a pedantic when it comes to being pure polarized. I’ve heard him say that cyclists often fall into a pyramidal distribution especially if you are a racer. Races often represent hours at tempo/sweet spot.
Seiler doesn’t disagree with periodization either. Winter can be 98/2, 95/5, other parts of the season can be 90/10 or 85/15 depending on what is going on. His main point is to basically do the majority of your training in Z1 and to stay out of the middle.
I never once hit 15 hours in a week. Last week was my closest at 13 hours and my 2019 weekly average week was 7 hours.
Interesting what you’ve noticed about 8 weeks. Last year I was flying around 8 weeks breaking PRs left and right. I definitely noticed the improvement of the lactate curve and the extra watts. I didn’t get noticeably better after 4 more weeks of base.
My base is still polarized/pyramidalish - I haven’t teased out exact distributions but I do a 3+ hour group ride every Saturday which gives me about 20 minutes of threshold and probably 20-40 minutes of SS/tempo. If I look at that intensity within the context of a 9-12 hour week I’m right in there with 89/11 to 92/8.
My main message to people reading is that the LSD miles are not junk miles. Shifting the lactate curve really works. You don’t need to mash the pedals with SST week after week ending up fatigued and needing rest.
I have been thinking that I would clip base a little shorter this year - just do 8 or 9 weeks and then try a little SST on Tuesday and some Seiler style intervals on Thursday. After all I’m just an experiment of one but it’s a lot of fun to have found stuff that works for me.
I’m also going to get Inscyd testing this spring so it will be interesting to see what my VLAmax/Fatmax is and what the prescription would be for my specific numbers.
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I’ve read through this and lotta good ideas in here but some people are still struggling a little, and it might be helpful to see a little reminder: there is no “one right answer” to these questions taken outside of the context of (i) what you’re like and (ii) where you’re trying to go.
Here’s what i mean, using myself as an example.
The first context, athlete characteristics: I have found over the years that I do not recover all that well. I can spin up quickly, I can go a lot above FTP, but the next day i’m maybe staying in bed. I once won a Zwift race and dudes who I beat were out training the next day, I could not. I was just easy spinning. I’ve got a lot of matches to burn but it takes a lot out of me. A stage racer I am not, never was. Maybe never will be. Tempo and Sweet Spot are hard also. In an SSB plan, if i did sweet spot on Tuesday, then an endurance ride on wednesday, i probably will not be ready to do another SS ride on Thursday. Maybe for one week, but not week-in-week-out. Just no way. Even endurance can be hard. If i do too much Z1/Z2, even then I end up needing rest, if i accidentally go too hard! I’ve never done a muscle biopsy or a lactate test, but i suspect i’ve got more fast twitch muscle than many and a relatively strong anaerobic system (vs. aerobic).
Second context, demands of sporting event: i’m a mtber primarily, which requires a lot of repeated hard and short efforts. You are never really riding–or very, very rarely riding–at any consistent intensity. Rather it’s all over the place. You need to be able to be burning matches above threshold, although endurance is also important.
So looking at SSB, in general trying to follow a plan like this is tough for me. One reason is recovery time. SS tends to be hard for me and takes me a day or so longer to recover than the plans generally provide for. So i’d have to add extra days in between. For me these “moderate” days are basically hard days in terms of how much recovery i need.
So i think you see where this is going. For me to keep making progress using SSB, i’d be adding extra recovery days, meaning fewer days of doing work. Consequently, in order to make progress i’d need more stress. I would need to make these “moderate” days harder, either by adding more SS per session or by making it higher intensity (threhsold or higher).
The second consideration is thinking about the demands of the event. Remember that your aerobic (lactate and pyruvate-burning) and anaerobic (lactate-producing) systems basically “fight” to determine what is your MLSS / FTP. If you have a strong anaerobic system, your FTP will actually be lower, assuming the same aerobic strength. All FTP tells you is where they meet, not what goes into producing it.
So in other words, you can raise FTP by strengthening your aerobic system OR by weakening your lactate-producing system, and SS actually does both, according to the physiologists who focus on lactate (e.g. Jan Olbrecht). So if you’re doing a block of SS, you are strengthening your aerobic system (i.e. Vo2max) because all endurance training strengthens it to some degree, but you’re also weakening the anaerobic system. You might come out of that block with a higher threshold, but actually LESS ability to easily work ABOVE threshold.
Again, you can see where this is going. As a MTB racer, I don’t want increases in MLSS at the expense of punchiness because I’ll actually be worse off. I’ll have a higher threshold but fewer and weaker matches to burn. Overall, I’ll be slower. You can say “all else equal, higher threshhold is better” but remember, all else is so, so rarely ever equal. SS is considered good “bang for hte buck” because it’s high TSS per “unit” of recovery, essentially, but for me it’s bad bang for the buck because it’s low Vo2max impact per unit of negative impact on anaerobic potential.
A training program based on the above would basically be like, hard days as often as i can recover from them, however many that is. These hard days will be focused on efforts at or above threshold, because i want to increase Vo2max as much as possible with as little as possible negative impact on the lactate-producing system; i want that to stay strong. most weeks the hard days will be threshold or just above; every other week or so there will be anaerobic intervals to keep it sharp. All other days are endurance, generally pretty darn easy so that i don’t compromise my hard days. I usually do two weeks in a row that are substantially harder than even the mid-vol TR plans, followed by a rest week that’s pretty substantially easier than the TR-programmed rest weeks.
What does this look a lot like? I basically just backed into what looks a lot like a polarized training program, starting from the bottom up (“here’s what works for me”) vs. top down (e.g., “program is better”).
And to be clear, i’m not sh%tting on TrainerRoad. it’s a great and intuitive system and they very clearly are solving for accessibility. They picked FTP because they can lead anyone (even the newest, most beginner cyclist) through a ramp test just by syaing Push Push Push, get a reasonable estimate of FTP, and then base a reasonable training program off of it, which will work for the vast majority of people. It’s great for what they set out to achieve, but just like anything it includes compromises.
TLDR, gotta do what works for you. Try to figure out what spices are in the soup of your FTP. Think about what you’re trying to achieve with training, what kinds of demands are you trying to prepare for? Of all the different competing priorities, which is more important for you? what do you want to be better at?
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You are my spirit animal lol.
lol
sorry such a long post though. I wish i had been able to be more succinct
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Good post. Thanks.
"your aerobic (lactate and pyruvate-burning) and anaerobic (lactate-producing) systems basically “fight” to determine what is your MLSS / FTP. If you have a strong anaerobic system, your FTP will actually be lower, assuming the same aerobic strength. "
I have never heard that before? What is the biochemistry?
It sounds more like witchcraft to me 
Haha!
I wonder if it is simply a case of trying to come up with some explanation for the fact that you can’t train to be great at everything at the same time?
In the weightlifting world, people used to talk about “muscle confusion”, where doing lifting and cardio together would limit your gains in both. Turns out that, guess what, it is simply that if you’re too tired from killin’ in one, you’re too tired to kill it in the other.
Talking about VLa Max, when it goes down your aerobic power increases and when it increases your aerobic power will decrease. You can target it with certain sessions, fully rested 1 minute intervals are going to increase it and low cadence sweetspot work will decrease it for example.
So depending on your event it may be useful to have it lower or higher. The other function of course is V02 max, which should always be as high as possible. So unless you V02 max has reached it’s full potential there is still room to improve your MLSS without lowering your VLa Max.
Sebastian Weber is the biggest name coach on this, he reportedly uses this technique on athletes like Sagan to lower his VLa Max and increase the MLSS for the classics. Then works on increasing it for the tour so that he can sprint more effectively.
After that, you can get into conversations about glycogen sparing if you have a lower VLa Max and higher FTP and whether this will actually allow you to perform better at the end of a long race, or whether having a higher potential sprint at the end, at the cost of endurance, will actually serve you better, but that seems quite off topic for the thread.
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Thanks. That doesn’t really answer my question, though.
Back when I took a class in ex fizz (which I will admit was a while ago), we were taught that the glycolytic system didn’t really change with training, as its capacity is far in excess of the ability of mitochondria to process pyruvate.
So, how does “VLamax” go up or down with different types of training, and how does this “fight” with the aerobic adaptations?