Any performance - whether a 30s sprint or a 12hr Ironman - is always a combination of metabolic, muscular and neurological “fitness” (fitness perhaps being a wrong word). Thus, you can be limited by any of these three. Typically in endurance cycling people tend to look mainly metabolic aspects but sometimes the limiter may be in muscular or neurological side of things.
Muscular endurance (or strength endurace - pretty much the same thing) comes into play especially when an athlete does a long period of lower intensity training and then jumps into workouts that require high power output, in this case VO2max-work. You may be very fit aerobically but your muscular endurance isn’t quite at the same level leading into premature failure. Ie. your “legs fall off” before you reach your aerobic ceiling. A nice thing is that muscular endurance is usually faster to develop than aerobic fitness, especially with trained athetes.
So in OP’s case, one option might be that his muscular endurance isn’t quite at the same level as his aerobic fitness. Hard to tell just by these posts but something to consider in future.
And most likely why someone like KM (who focuses on central adaptation based vo2 AFAIK in the context of this thread) suggested I do some priming efforts 30/30 etc. in advance of my vo2 block having just come off 7 weeks of z2…
I disagree. Heart rate is affected by many things unrelated to how hard your muscles are working. Caffeine, adrenaline, dehydration, wearing an oxygen deprivation mask…
HR is a useful indirect indicator of how hard you are working, but it is far from perfect. And your muscle physiology did not improve due to those noise factors listed above. It mostly improved due to work being done by the muscles, AKA power.
Power is the main thing that matters for muscular adaptations, which is the main limiter for many people. Just because you can use HR to do a decent job of training does not make it the right metric. Just a useful one.
Yes, heart and lungs are also quite important as well, but HR is still just an indirect measure of heart volume and lung capacity, again due to the above noise factors. If we have better data for heart volume it would be nonsense to say it doesn’t matter just because HR is useful.
FWIW your intervals charts could be more specific at the analysis at hand. This is what I have WKO for looking at spending time above 90% relative vo2max / above 90% HRmax:
I also look at dFRC / anaerobic capacity because power starts dropping if it gets drained.
Not sure how to calculate the total number of seconds in Intervals once you zoom in, but this would be my first attempt at a few more specific charts in Intervals:
And regarding central vs peripheral adaptations, the HighNorth article someone posted is a great reference. Everyone is different, for myself I’ve seen large increases in overall fitness, durability, and VO2max simply by focusing on peripheral adaptations - more pyramidal training (more endurance rides). However unlike what you posted earlier, week after week I’m also doing some over threshold work. Lots of endurance + stuff has worked really well for me.
Yes but it is only for the entire workout. Not for the selected portion of the ride. And its hard to read the charts. I realize there is a lot of love for Intervals, but I find it hard to read the charts. And I’ve got a bunch of custom analysis pages already setup in WKO, to quickly review specific types of workouts.
Ah. That easy repeatable soundbite regarding HR. Yes we know, and it is a consideration but it doesnt devalue HR as these factors are considered (by most.)
We are taking about VO2MAX, not muscular endurance, although that along with fatigue might be a reason you can’t reach Vo2max.
Lets put it this way, it is more common to spend time around the traditional Vomax power range say about 120% ftp and not spend a single second at or approaching VO2max than HR being in the 90 - 95% and not productively training VO2max.
Did anyone take some crib notes from the Empirical Cycling podcasts? This is the philosophy the OP is following. I feel like this would answer a lot of the points being raised here.
Power - high cadence is priority, due high cadence power will be a little bit lower than normal cadence. You should do high cadence start to increase sv and then find the balance between cadence and power (insight from cory lockwood who had to learn how to generate power with spinning). Goal is to breath like a fish out of water. Decreasing power during intervals is normal and as long as you breath hard.
Progression - start longer and decrease lenght through block. 20 min is usually a cap. More anaerobic riders due huge sprint power are better with longer, more steady intervals. TTers like cory can start hard because they do not have enough sprint to destroy themselves. Cory is doing 3-4 min intervals during the block. If your hr is not going up enough, stop the block and rest.
P.S.
We need all empiricalcycling podcast transcribed and converted into chat GPT personalized chatbot.
I’m ok with us having different ideas about it. However, you came here, asking for advice.
When you do exercises to failure, then knowing what your limiter is is important. If your limiter is the cardiovascular system, slowing down your cadence can help. At different parts of my training, either my muscles or my cardiovascular system is “fitter than the other”, and changing cadence accordingly has not only increased my completion rate of VO2max workouts, but I think it has been beneficial to my training overall.
On the other hand, getting yourself to 90–95 % HR max might mean you might need to push yourself way beyond VO2max power.
E. g. close to my peak in 2021 I did an close-to-all-out effort to gauge my performance (close-to, because I needed to ride 30–35 km back home), a 7ish-minute climb and one of my favorite Strava segments. I did it in 6:50 at 117 % FTP and my average heart rate was … 159 bpm. That was after a 15-minute climb at threshold (I was validating my FTP). Needless to say, 159 bpm is significantly below 95 % HR max for me, this is more sweet spot/threshold heart rate territory. The reason was fatigue.
Heart rate is a useful secondary metric, i. e. if your heart rate is 95 % HR max and you are struggling with a VO2max workout, then you are really close to the limit. But unless you are talking about mellow endurance rides, I don’t think it is a good tool to regulate your efforts.
I’m curious, can I ask you for what you find such level of detail useful? I’m a very data-oriented person, but usually I verify during the workouts whether I hit my power targets and check how my average heart rate changes across intervals. (My process is actually more involved, e. g. I keep track of heart rate and heart rate recovery during rest intervals to gauge fitness/fatigue, etc., but I don’t need anything except TR’s (relatively poor) workout analysis.
What additional actionable information do you get out of your charts?
And? How far off 90% HRmax? What if you had done it at 123%? Rhetorical questions.
There is a strong possibility, probability, you werent at Vo2max. We already discussed fatigue as a reason for not being able to do constructive VO2max sessions / work. I suggest it is the number one reason for many.
This thread is not about you or your N+1
The OP uses time in a HR range of 90 - 95% as part (also cadence, breathing) of a valid measure of how productive VO2max sessions have been completed as do many coaches, self coached althletes and software analysis tools.
So why not the expected time at and around VO2max and or non completed intervals.
Hope it helps. Like I said it was my first try at vo2 training, except for some not consistent 30/30s. And last year was my first real effort to train 2 consistently (my z2 riding went from 30min @125w@118bpm to 1hr @ 170w @121bpm). At the end of the summer, after lots of z2, I had all the pieces, except I couldn’t keep up with my friends climbing anything steep for more than 30s-1min. So felt my way through this. I’m sure a lot of it was just getting used to holding the power for that long, but that’s a big part of the progression.
Sorry for the drift, OP. I understand better, now, what you’re trying to do (not using watts). I’ve only used HR for the last 5 years, until I realized that I can’t get it up fast enough for the above threshold, to give me the data I needed, but I could use the power meter on my dumb trainer to tell me where I was, relatively. I guess all I can offer is that, for your issue, I’d probably make a mental note of my power at the beginning and end of the intervals you are completing, and maybe start the net session 10watts lower (that’s only about 3% lower) to help you pace it better…I mean that’s the issue, right, you’re trying to go all out but also trying to figure out how to complete the intervals? eta: must have missed your post about the workout you have planned for today. Seems like you have the right idea. Hope it gets you there.
Data is data. On microscale - time over 90% vo2max is useful to see if your targets are good, because to work by targets you have to had them established by something and corelating them to your physiology not arbitrary number like 120% ftp.
On macroscale - it’s usefull for reviewing seasons or training blocks. For example, I know why particular years were better than others. It’s not single metric but set of metrics and relations between them.
