I understand what you’re saying, but also everyone? says that (almost) any work above FTP (due to slow component, with enough duration) will put you in >90%VO2max zone, which trains your vo2max, right? or at least it’a a crossover training, and you train 2 things at the same time (W’ as you mentioned and vo2max) or you mean it’s just less effective in rising vo2max.
so at the end, by “saving” energy and staying at ~93-94%HRmax I could probably spend more time in the zone than going full out, albeit higher HR and higher % of vo2max, but I guess it’s a bit individual thing what works the best for you ?
Imo, no. You need to manage the mental fatigue as much as physical. If, by lowering your effort by a small %, you can make the effort significantly more sustainable, take that trade off. Consistency over a long period will beat a few VO2 efforts done perfectly (before discontinuing).
For example, in lifting, we typically work 1-2 RIR for the big compound lifts. You get like 95% of the adaptions in exchange for a significant drop in injury risk and systemic fatigue. That tradeoff is worth it, unless you’re a competitive lifter and need to train to absolute failure because it’s part of your sport.
Fwiw I can no longer get to this point with my breathing. I did a ton of CO2 tolerance training last season. No gasping, but my HR is in the right zones though.
What you are describing is defined as sprinting / anaerobic. VO2 is how hard you can go for about 10 minutes. You need to pace that effort and is not all out or breathing like you describe.
yep. last year i wasn’t able to get there (I was riding a lot), now my parameters dropped like ~10% and I was surprised when I was gasping sooo hard (first time in 2 years);
IMHO that’s a myopic view. You want to train your body to produce more power above FTP by stimulating adaptations. “Breathing” (oxygen uptake) is one aspect, but only one of several. You don’t know whether your cardiovascular system is the limiter in all cases. I’ve had VO2max intervals where my legs gave out first. Or, much more frequently, my mental fortitude.
So I’d say VO2max training should stimulate all those adaptations, oxygen update being one of them.
My understanding is that there are multiple schools of thought on VO2max work.
get above threshold and put in the time. I recall reading some old Dean Gollich USA cycling stuff and longer was better.
Empircal Cycling did a long series on VO2. Google AI summary: “Empirical cycling concepts explain that high-intensity, high-cadence VO2max intervals increase cardiac preload by enhancing the muscle pump, which improves stroke volume and cardiac output over time.”
Kolie’s spin seems unique in that he’s focusing on stroke volume. He’s also usually working with well training athlete and it probably takes much more to move the needle for them.
Spend time above 90% of vo2max. I believe that this is old school exercise phys thinking. Lots of studies used this as a proxy for a high workload above threshold. Being exercise phys, they have to latch on to something to measure. I don’t think it’s actually proven that 90% is some magic formula. Michael Rosenblat’s study, linked above, would probably push one towards a lower percentage of vo2max with longer duration.
I also just want to say that there are cardiac benefits to all training and in vo2 work just because heavy breathing may be involved, we aren’t just training the cardio vascular system. We are also training the legs to process this high workload.
Finally, I think we are making this too difficult. There is no right or wrong.
Maybe it’s easier to think of this in the 'raise the roof’ then ‘raise the celing’ analogy. Once threshold work is tapped out, do some VO2. Do any VO2 work. Don’t get too stuck on the details. Also, do the amount that you can recover from in a day or two max. If you do a horrendous session that takes 4-5 days to recovery from, it’s not productive training.
Huh? It most certainly is not. That’s like saying “a meal is when you have toast and eggs at 9am”. You could hit VO2max by doing an all out 10min interval. But you could also do it at 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9min.
And for purposes of these discussion “as hard as you can go for X time” and “all out” are the same thing. People aren’t saying to start sprinting and go as hard as you can for every second until the timer runs out, they’re saying to roughly do a maximum 3 minute (or whatever duration) effort.
But that’s kinda the point of his whole post. People say “VO2 training” when they really mean “supra-threshold training”, of which VO2max improvements are a part of that. As well as anaerobic capacity, capillarization, and a bunch of other things. But not all above FTP training is VO2max training and when I do VO2max training I want my VO2max to go up.
You could go out and do several anaerobic workouts (30-90s max efforts) and see an improvement in power output over 4 minutes (what people might refer to as a VO2 interval) without any improvement in your actual VO2max. You might even improve your power at VO2max. But your VO2max didn’t change.
Breathing is just the proxy measure for the oxygen debt your body is in. It doesn’t mean that the breathing is your limiter and by getting into that gasping for air state you’re not trying to make your body better at getting more oxygen out of the air. But I guess I’d say how do you know what the limiter was when “your legs gave out first”? It definitely could have been that your cardio system wasn’t able to deliver enough oxygen to your muscles and they gave out.
This sentence makes no sense though. VO2max IS maximal oxygen uptake. O2 uptake isn’t ‘one of them’, it’s all of it, it is it. If your O2 uptake didn’t increase then your VO2max training didn’t work. By definition.
Not sure what you are arguing here. To clarify what you are responding to… what you quoted was a reply to another poster that stated, “the interval is all out” and “don’t pay attention to the power meter.”
The poster wanted a definition of VO2. So I gave him one. A well trained, genetically gifted person can hold VO2 max pace for around 10 minutes.
An all-out 3 min effort is not VO2 max pace. But yes, you can do 3 minute repeats at VO2 max.
As a coach if you tell someone to go all out… they will go as hard as they can as long as they can. (I coach teenagers, ask me how I know )
But let’s say they understand the assignment and pace a 3 minute “maximum effort.” That is not VO2 either. That’s like telling a track runner to do 1k repeats at his 1k PR pace. You can’t repeat that and especially not after a 1:1 recovery.
I guess it comes down to how someone describes that effort, which is personal, and where the confusion comes. Just putting this out there… but a better descriptor for cycling might be “10 minute power” rather than all out.
That feels like we are talking semantics. When we say VO2max workouts, we have very specific workout types in mind.
By your definition
To me VO2max workouts are a very specific class of anaerobic workouts, and they do stimulate improvements of O2 uptake. No disagreement here. But that’s not the only thing they do and if your legs go out before you reach max O2 uptake, then you gotta train your legs until O2 uptake is the limiter again.
Put another way, my primary motivator is increasing my performance on the bike (traditional, long VO2max are AFAIK most relevant for 5–10-minute efforts), not maximizing my VO2max. The latter can help improve performance, but it isn’t my primary metric. In my experience, VO2max training substantially improves my ~7ish-minute all-out efforts, they tend to be around 117 % of my FTP (across several seasons measured on one specific climb).
No, that feels different. In fact, I had my first VO2max workout of the season and it was my leg muscles that were struggling. My cardio vascular system is great. (I’m in a very weird spot training wise: I’m above Sweet Spot PL 10, and spending ~90 minutes at 94 % FTP in 3x30 minute blocks feels easy. Not bragging, just giving context. With threshold and VO2max I’m around PL 5.)
I have heard this several times on this forum in the context of VO2max training, and this seems very dangerous as a workout prescription (save for very select times). That’d cause a boat load of fatigue and disrupt my training cycle.
…But if you do 3min repeats at VO2 max then by definition you just a 3min effort at VO2max. You’ve just created a definition of ‘power at vo2max’ and then used that to say something else is wrong. But your definition of ‘can hold the power for 10min” is made up. If you can reach VO2max at 3min power and at 10min power then they’re both ‘power at vo2max’. Power at VO2max is totally dependent on what test you use to measure or achieve VO2max.
I mean maybe newer athletes but it doesn’t take much time to teach someone (even teenagers) how to pace something. I swam all through high school and we got pretty good at pacing efforts in the 1-5min range to within fractions of a seconds of eachother.
Then maybe you shouldn’t be doing 1:1. It’s hard to do multiple max efforts if you’re not recovering well enough between them.
No, you add breaks so as to make an effort no all-out. That’s why you have e. g. 4x10 or 3x15 threshold efforts, which are easier on you than 1x40 or 1x50.
It isn’t made up, I think @Jolyzara was referencing the typical powers you see in the power-duration curve (correct me if I am wrong @Jolyzara). Depending on the power (110–120 % FTP), you get a time, and that should be in the 6–10-minute range.
For myself, I could reliably do ~117 % FTP for around 7 minutes in the middle of a ride across seasons.
Sure but VO2max is a major driver in cycling performance (all else being equal) and when performing VO2max intervals you are trying to improve your VO2max. That doesn’t mean you ignore everything else or nothing else matters but the OP was about VO2max intervals with the intention of driving VO2max stimulus.
And for myself, my VO2max training has driven both my 3-10m power up but also my FTP and nearly every other metric up more than any other form of training.
Threshold training and VO2 training are different though…For threshold I’m adding rests so that I can push out my TTE and do more time at FTP. For VO2 I’m adding recovery so that I can go max and then recover and do it again, and again to spend more time at max O2 uptake. Your 10min threshold efforts should not feel like VO2 efforts and the rests should not be accomplishing the same thing.
But he didn’t say 6-10min or whatever, he said “It’s the power you can hold for 10m” that’s your VO2max power. It’s just an arbitrary number he pulled out of an arbitrary range when power above threshold varies so much between people that the ranges based on a percentage of threshold are a risky way to prescribe intervals.
But that’s my point. It isn’t one power and it isn’t one duration. So trying to say that the definition of VO2 is the “power you can do for 10min” is just wrong. I don’t know why that’s being pushed back against so much.
It becomes a bit of a discussion of definition at that point, because at the one end VO2max trains O2 uptake (central adaptations), at the other end you need to train O2 utilization (peripheral adaptations).
I believe both are part of VO2max training. Some seem to believe that only the uptake part is VO2max training.
Put in another way, I think your body stops increasing the uptake side if there is not enough demand, i.e. when the peripheral side is not able to utilize all the O2 that the central side can provide. That is the point where only training the uptake plateaus. So both are part of VO2max training.
In that I agree that the “VO2 work should be just go all out fish out of water breathing”-view is indeed a myopic view on training.
Maybe I’m misreading but the tone of your posts, but they seem very negative. Not sure why… But anyways, I clarified in a reply to you that 10 min was about the pace that a well trained, gifted athlete can hold. “About” implies it might be slightly more, might be a little less, but it is not an arbitrary number. That is what Dr. Jack Daniels used when coaching me and a group of runners in the early 2000’s. It is in his book “The Running Formula” and is also the general description i have heard from coaches for the 25+ years I’ve been doing this. But if you don’t believe me that’s fine, but I do recommend you read the chapter on VO2 Max workouts. It talks about pacing and how much recovery to take.
As for using % of FTP as a way to prescribe intervals, here’s a great blog post by Steve Magnus on how when we do “VO2 workouts” we actually aren’t (and it doesn’t matter).
In the end though, if you think doing max 3 minute intervals with full recovery is “VO2” then we will have to agree to disagree.
So, for example those were my only intervals last year, ~11-12min at 105-106%FTP (red lines are at 90 and 95%HRmax).
(and I understand that that 105-106%FTP is a bit arbitrary, but it works for me for that 11-12min climbs. if I do 8mins intervals, I’d rise my power)
As you can see, 2/3 of the time was above 90%HRmax.
Were they full out? probably not (maybe only the last one), because I was able to do 4 of them with 6-7min rest inbetween. (but at least they were paced quite well, very close to my max power/best time on that climb).
I didn’t do any other intervals that year (and my rides had similar climbs/efforts, 10-15mins). my VO2max got to 62-63 (garmin, and I’m M44).
So my question was, are shorter intervals better? (less time above 90%HRmax, but more intense).
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