Testing for Aerobic Decoupling

[bbarrera]

@RONDAL

What you should start to see as your aerobic capacity grows is that decoupling is reduced for the same power target.

Hmm. that may be individual because I haven’t seen that. Here is an older post talking a bit about it:

Negative HR decoupling. Thoughts?

I even see negative decoupling on 40-50 minute intervals at upper sweet spot / threshold intensity. For example 3 years ago around this time my aerobic fitness was very high. I was doing longer ss/ftp intervals on an outdoor segment, take a look: [Decoupling Negative on 40-55 minute SS-Thresh intervals] And yes my FTP was set correctly, those IF values are good. For reference my LTHR is 162bpm. Without looking I’m sure some of the lower HR were due to functional overtraining as I was going r…

and the pic from that post

a couple of notes:

• that is for a segment that started after a 15-25 minute warmup
• focusing on time period from November 2016 thru April 2017 my aerobic capacity increased substantially in March however I have a December 11th effort at 0.99 IF and -4.3% decoupling

Here are my two ‘worst ever decoupling’ effort on that segment, one happened just 2 days ago:

May 2020:

9.2% decoupling as part of a 3x15 tempo with bursts workout.

April 2021:

8% decoupling on a non-steady state 4x4.5 minute zone5 ‘controlled vo2max’ (not full gas) intervals.