Why i cant do a proper vo2max workout?

Training
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I give them a lot of guidance… for a hard start, I usually try to be pretty directive because those can blow an interval. For big sprinters, I use a shorter hard start and tell them to keep it under wraps… general guide is 2min MMP, but that’s just a number I’ve used to make sure they’re not going all out sprint crazy. For big anaerobic athletes, shorter hard start, 5-10s. For guys without big anaerobic watts, go a bit longer 20s or so.

For power, it’s just “all out”, keeping in mind you gotta do 20 minutes. My structured workouts in TP use a range from like 130-103% of FTP. It generally takes them a workout to figure it out. And I tell them to expect power to go down over the course of the workout… if they find they can’t stay above FTP for a big portion of an interval, they’re done for the day. 110rpm or more… ALL of them want to lower cadence and do more watts - NO! It’s not about the power.

So now you see why erg mode doesn’t make sense.

It’s nothing magical, and usually amounts to extending TTE type sets AT threshold. For some guys I’ll do more over unders, those are usually the guys who are being stubborn about growing watts. The guys that get BIG bumps from VO2 work, I just focus at threshold more.

Eventually I get everyone into some over unders at least the roadies because I think they’re great race prep and they grow FTP. The FTP over unders are more 105-95 with quite a bit of time at 105. The race prep stuff I tend to do more like 125-85 with shorter overs, and often I’ll add a longer hard start to that. Purpose being simulate a bridging effort then a rotational breakaway. Plus they’re fun, and a really good lactate shuttle.

Sometimes, if there’s not racing around, I might do some intervals above threshold and attack above the curve for 5-8 min at a time, 20-30ish min sets, but that’s pretty rare. I generally think with over/unders and VO2 intervals you’re getting enough efforts above the curve to pull FTP up.

Here’s the link to the channel: https://youtube.com/@rocketmultisport-coachkurt7879

It’s pretty sparse right now but I really only got my website up in November. I like writing a lot more than videos, but the world wants short video tips, so that’s what I’ll have on there for the most part. I’m also being pretty conservative in pacing my content, and hopefully one day I’ll wake up and have 50 articles and 30-40 videos and it’ll be a whole thing… but my focus is a quality product for my 11 current athletes first and foremost. Not sure if I’m going to try to grow a business like Kolie and others with multiple coaches or stay solo… it’s more of a passion play for me and a tertiary income source for my family. But its what I do “full time” now in addition to helping my wife run her gymnastics center, being daddy, and my own training! :blush:

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As mentioned here I don’t really prescribe them by % of FTP, but for reference in my most recent block, I was doing 3 to 4 minute intervals and my power was generally sitting about 110% of FTP or so on average. Hard start was more like 130-150% of FTP or so for 15-20s. My FTP at the time was about 280, and for a 4 minute interval with a hard start, it’d be like 15s at around 380-400W, then I was usually sticking around 310 for most of the working part, but that was usually dictated by whatever felt about as hard as I could sustainably go at 110rpm on my preferred hill. It’s all about getting the breathing going as hard as possible.

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I’m usually about 100rpm and breathing very hard. I’ll have to pay closer attention to how I’m failing these workouts but I’ve been using ERG mode and usually fail them by rpm slowly dropping before giving out. Based on this thread I’m going to do these in resistance mode now and try for higher RPM and keep going unless my power drops below FTP.

How key is this 110rpm thing? The goal is to fail cardiovascularly vs leg strength? Is that what this is ensuring? Thanks for the tips

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Kinda? The high cadence forces a higher rate of blood return from your legs (more contractions) and reduces the force required from the muscles in your legs. The former is part of “maximal oxygen uptake” and the latter helps preserve your legs for future reps/sets.

You can’t really “fail” cardiovascularly because that would be death. That’s not the goal. Something just short of that. :laughing: As I mentioned, what normally happens is you get a severe case of the "I don’t wanna"s which is indicative of CNS fatigue before your legs give out if you’re doing this right.

High cadence is critical to these. Obviously if 110-120 isn’t realistic, you do the best you can. With athletes who I know struggle at high cadence, I do a lot of neuromuscular cadence manipulation before their VO2 sets to help them be able to spin like crazy people. These are spinups, cadence ramps (up to 125-135rpm holding for a minute). I do those as part of their warmups if they’re trainer riders, but also as dedicated sets. Leg speed is totally trainable, and I’ve seen that it can come around pretty quickly for most people. The benefit of improved leg speed and ability to move at higher cadences is improved “snap”, improved sprinting, and the ability to accelerate from the field without shifting twice to give away what you’re about to do. You’ll accelerate faster if you spin up your current gear from 90 to 120rpm and then shift than if you shift and try to drive the big gear up from 65 to 90rpm or whatever.

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Have you seen Cory’s vo2 max block prescribed by Kolie? I wouldn’t be so sure about that…

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I have! Cory gave me something similar. :rofl::skull_and_crossbones:

Fortunately or unfortunately I wasn’t able to do it as prescribed due to time and child care constraints. So I only did three double days followed by a single for nine of the sets. The other four were just back to back days. 13 sets and 36hrs of riding in 17 days. :skull_and_crossbones:

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I still don’t understand why these all-out VO2max efforts are better. From your description it seems you design these workouts to maximize maximum oxygen uptake (rather than e. g. TTE at 118–125 % FTP). Just let me try to disentangle three factors:

  1. Power
  2. Number of reps/time at VO2max and leaving something in the tank
  3. Do these efforts at elevated cadence

As to 1., why does it matter that you reach max oxygen uptake at all-out power? Put another way, why is it advantageous if I spent 15 minutes at VO2max “all out” vs. 21 minutes = 7 x 3 minutes at 118–125 % VO2max? Maximum oxygen uptake is achieved in both cases. (Of course, you could trade power for duration and e. g. suffer for longer at 110 % FTP.) Judging from my experience and the hill that I used to do my hill climb repeats at (PR = 4:22, but training times used to be 4:30–4:50 and might slide into the low 5s), average power across all efforts isn’t that different than the typical VO2max range (not surprisingly).

The second variation is whether you do them to exhaustion: You could alter these VO2max workouts so that you do e. g. an all-out hill climb and repeat it until e. g. your power drops below a certain threshold. Say, you set the threshold to something relatively high (e. g. 110–115 % FTP). Alternatively, you can ask you athlete to stop with 1–2 reps in reserve. I have done VO2max sessions like that all the time (literally 1–2 times a week) before I got a power meter. It was an easy way to ensure I was at VO2max. Most of the time, I could have done 1–2 more reps, but at diminished power.

If you compare that to the VO2max efforts that you prescribe (at least as I understand them), what advantages do these have compared to leaving something in the tank?

The third one is cadence/putting as much load on the cardiovascular system as possible: I think I understand the logic, but I don’t know whether this is a good prescription, at least not for all athletes. E. g. I’m whatever the opposite of a sprinter is, and my fast-twitch fibers fatigue really easily. Cadences that high causes spikes in fatigue (e. g. I can cook my fast twitch fibers with 4–5 low power all-out cadence drills). Also, high cadences are not natural when I do hill climb repeats. (Evidently, this is irrelevant if you do your VO2max training indoors.)

This does not quite match what (I think) I know/understand the purpose of VO2max training to be:

  1. Power doesn’t matter as much when it comes to achieving VO2max, i. e. you can do it at 110 % or 130 %.
  2. Leaving something in the tank vs. emptying the tank: as a general rule of thumb, you should leave something in the tank when doing structured training in order to minimize unnecessary fatigue. That is, if you fully empty the tank, this will have a negative impact on the next hard workouts and workout consistency without having a commensurate benefit.
  3. Cadence: why is shifting as much load as possible on the cardiovascular system always a good idea? I regularly pass through phases in VO2max training where my limiter is strength endurance and my cardiovascular system. Adapting e. g. my cadence allows me to push VO2max power further as I work on my limiters. Put another way, as a cyclist, I want to maximize power at VO2max, not maximum oxygen uptake.

Let me add an advantage of these types of workouts that I don’t think you have mentioned, but one that comes from my personal experience: if you ride outdoors and do hill climb repeats, you also want to work on things like pacing. When you want to ride a short, steep hill, unless the road is perfectly straight and the gradient consistent, you will have to vary power, and doing an all-out effort is easier to pull off than staring at your stem while taking turns, trying to hit a particular power target. But that seems to be a practical advantage, specific to outdoor riding, not something physiological.

PS Please don’t read my post as “me arguing that my approach is right”. I’d just like to understand the underlying thought process. I used to do a variation of what you seem to prescribe in the past and liked it.

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All out power at high cadence is probably lower than what you can do if trying to do max power. You’re aiming for a feeling of all out max RPE at 110+ rpm with breathing maximized. Because of that, power is probably lower on average than if I just went out and did 7x3min where power was primarily the concern. And having done a bunch of 6x3 and 7x3 workouts prescribed by power, I don’t always reach fish out of water breathing even at powers higher than what I can do for VO2max intervals.

Simply put: this alleviates fatigue which allows more sets which provides a larger stimulus toward the adaptations we are looking for (e.g. stroke volume).

I think you’re misinterpreting “all out”. I finish these intervals and then sit by the side of the road breathing incredibly hard for 3 or 4 minutes, and once breathing and HR are back under control, my legs are good and I go ride more. I did days where I did a set as part of a 3-hour ride and I did days where I did two sets within four hours of total ride time. If I didn’t have “gas in the tank” in my legs, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

Something that needs to be clear: time riding at “VO2max power” is NOT equivalent to time at VO2max. It’s a stupid name for a power zone. The goal of these intervals is to spend as much time as possible at MAX BREATHING RATE with max pumping from the heart to achieve maximum O2 uptake. That’s best done with longer intervals, IMO. 3 minutes is as short as I go. Usually more like 3:30 to 5 min. I’ll do 3min intervals in the second set of a day or maybe the third set of a back to back where fatigue might be a factor.

To reiterate: 7x3 at “VO2max power” is not necessarily a VO2max workout, in my opinion.

A lot of athletes struggle with the high cadence but it has little to do with fast twitch vs slow twitch. You can become conditioned to “comfortably” spin at 110rpm for 20 minutes of a workout over not much time. The point is blood return from the legs, and minimizing leg fatigue. You’re maximizing the NUMBER of muscle contractions to get blood pumping back up to your heart from your legs. More blood flow, more O2.

There’s a reason your HR is higher doing 150W at 120RPM than it is doing 150W at 90rpm. And that is something we want during VO2max training.

If spinning at 110rpm is difficult, then that is something that needs to be worked on. 110 should be challenging, but most athletes should be able to hold that cadence for a while. I’ve done a 5 hour century averaging 103rpm. That is way less fatiguing for me than riding at 75rpm at the same power. I have helped a number of athletes raise their comfortable range of cadences even before I started formally coaching and I can’t think of one who didnt improve because of it.

One guy I beat up climbs spent six weeks driving his cadence higher, came back next race and beat me. Turned around and thanked me for the advice and workout ideas and said he couldn’t believe the difference in his climbing. I mean he went from a midpack fair climber to beating me at 4.3W/kg and another guy who is closer to 5W/kg up a decisive climb in six weeks just by raising his climbing cadence via spinups and cadence ramps. He always had the power, he just couldn’t express it at low cadence up a hill.

All that to say if you can’t spin sustainably from like 80-110/115rpm, it’s something you should work on IMO.

I’ve been pretty imprecise here I’m sure, but that’s the gist. Kolie knows volumes more about the whys behind a lot of this stuff from a physiological perspective. I am far more practitioner than scientist.

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Not sure if this will help anyone, but I just did a block of vo2 work, I did 3min intervals first week, 5x4min 2nd week, and 4x5min third week. Aside from the 3min stuff, which I did really conservatively in erg mode, I did these in standard mode and just kept it in roughly the same gear and cadence (100+) so the effort stayed high throughout (which is weird given the power drops across intervals). Earlier this week I did a 3min test and got 366w (124% of my currently set ftp), which for me is an all time PR.

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Then you could e. g. up the power to 125 % or tack on another interval. To me that’s dialing in the intensity correctly. With intervals at fixed power, I’d rely on the number of reps and subtle changes in power to reach max oxygen uptake.

Nope, that’s exactly what I was picturing. And for the record, this is harder than when I did hill climb reps, I made sure to always be able to safely ascend and descend (slowly). I would not have felt safe digging as deep as you described you would.

I don’t want to go back to myself too much, but that isn’t the case for me. My self-selected cadence range at speed (= high inertia) is 97–104 rpm. Spinning at 110 rpm isn’t a problem, but 120+ rpm at high effort becomes very taxing for my fast twitch fibers. At that cadence, most times of the season, my legs will then give out earlier than my cardiovascular system. At self-selected cadence, it depends on the time of the season whether my limiter are my muscles or my cardiovascular system. Again, N = 1 talk.

Yes, agreed, and I asked above whether I should aim for improving VO2max rather than VO2max power as your limiter could be muscular rather than cardiovascular. Shouldn’t the goal be to address your limiters rather than focus on one aspect, which could not but need not be your current limiter? Why should I focus on oxygen uptake when it isn’t limiting my performance?

Also, thinking about specificity, when riding I commonly dip into VO2max power doing lower cadence (think 70–90 rpm), high torque efforts to get over kickers and small inclines in order to prevent loss of momentum. (During VO2max intervals, since I do those exclusively indoors these days, my cadence is much higher than that: normal = up to 110 rpm, preferably around 100ish rpm, low = 90–95 rpm — basically all within one gear. I do all workouts above endurance power in resistance mode, not erg mode, so I have to shift gears.)

Off the trainer, I’d look for a 4–5 minute hill, yes, but not much longer than that. I have one just like that very close to work/home, so this is what I used to use in the past. I still climb it regularly to get to another campus, but not at all-out power — I don’t want to be all sweaty and smelly when I teach :wink:

On the trainer, I think people settled for shorter intervals, because it is easier to incrementally increase the difficulty by tacking on 3 minutes rather than another 5. Going from, say, 15 minutes to 18 minutes is more likely to be doable than increasing it from 15 minutes to 20 minutes. But that’s just a guess.

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Not if I want to do it again later that day and again tomorrow. You’re worrying about maximizing the value of a single rep/set. I want to maximize the size of the overall stimulus for the entire block.

Yes, of course. How do you know VO2max isn’t your limiter?

This VO2max training isn’t intended to be race specific. If that type of training is race specific, then I would put it in a race specific training block. Again, I’m not trying to make your 3-5 min power better with this. If I wanted to do that, I’d have you worry about POWER, and not breathing/cadence/RPE.

Training VO2max is base or early “build” season, aerobic work. Maximizing 3min power for your race would come later if I were periodizing your work.

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Look at the question I posed previously: I understand that you maximize the value over a single workout, and perhaps you can keep that up for a block. But in my experience, squeezing the last bit of juice takes a disproportionate toll out of me, i. e. I have to pay a disproportionate price in fatigue.

Hence, my alternate scenario where you limit the number of reps by a “failure condition.” (I have seen that e. g. on Chris Opie’s Youtube channel a few years ago where he did hill climb repeats until his power fell below some ridiculously high threshold (500 W, I think). Going all out both, in terms of power and having nothing left in reserve would put me in a hole.

To me that is the most challenging aspect of my training: if I go too hard on my first hard day, then this often impacts my other hard days. Usually, I won’t be able to handle the last hard day even though in isolation, I should be able to handle the workout.

By feel: the sensation of running out of strength in the legs is very different from running out of breath. When I run out of strength, I try to finish the interval at best power. Basically, my head asks for more power, but my legs will no longer react. Often I can feel a slight tremble in my muscles. It isn’t a matter of will power then, it is involuntary. When I switched to a dual-sided power meter and had to remedy a power imbalance caused by my one-sided power meter, I could even tell that my weaker right leg ran out of steam more quickly than the left.

When I run out of breath, it is usually game over for me, reducing power targets won’t help. My breathing is labored, etc. etc. But I don’t have the same sensation in my legs.

During the season, I usually seesaw between the two when I edge up my power targets.

I understand, but I still don’t see why you should focus on VO2max (as in oxygen uptake) rather than VO2max power. The point of training is to up my power in certain power regions, not necessarily to increase oxygen uptake. The latter is only relevant insofar that it obviously helps with the former, so if it is a limiter, then of course, you have to work on it. But if it isn’t, why should I focus on it?

Just a minor nitpick: wouldn’t 3-minute intervals at 120ish % improve your repeatability at that power rather than max 3-minute power? (Although I do think that starting my structured training “career” with hill climb repeats did make me relatively good at 5–7-minute VO2max efforts.)

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Vo2 max is not a power, it’s a physiological state

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Cheers friend, I’m sorry I don’t have time for continued back and forth here on this.

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Yes, I understand. In my posts I have carefully delineated between VO2max (as in e. g. achieving VO2max) and VO2max power (zone). The latter is also well-defined if you work within the Coggan’s power zones (which we do in this discussion), and you would commonly train in the VO2max power band to achieve VO2max (= maximum oxygen uptake).

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The way I see it, the high cadence prescription posits a conjecture that increasing cadence during vo2 work is a means to an end, that is, to increase stroke volume. This probably comes at a cost of lower interval power, but overall the cost/benefit ratio is argued to be positive.

More specifically, the higher cadence is argued to be favorable both acutely (thanks to venous return increase and concomitant Frank-Starling mechanism increase) and chronically (thanks to less peripheral fatigue that allows for more vo2 work within a block). Together, they are thought to lead to more eccentric hypertrophy stimulus in the heart in comparison to more traditional, power driven, intervals, ie. they result in superior stroke volume gains.

The larger pump is then believed to have a positive impact on all things aerobic later on, and this includes the so called vo2max power.

Logical and worth a shot imho. Especially if one thinks legs limit vo2 work. Capacity to ride hard also at high cadences is a welcome bonus.

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Polarised training avoids this scenario by limiting the number of hard days compared to easy days. If you are doing two hard VO2 max days a week then you have time to recover between them and can go all out and do more during them. The theory being you’ll get a bigger bang for you buck from those 2 sessions than more sessions that gravitate towards hard rather than very hard.

If people are failing their very hard workouts. It may not be the structure of these very hard workouts that is the issue. But that the density of the hard sessions is too high.

Maybe the OP needs to look at the frequency of their hard workouts which may be impacting ability to complete VO2 max workouts?

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That’s not been my experience, in fact it is the opposite. I have completed 3 or 4 Polarized base block MV, and balancing intensities was definitely harder for me. Polarized blocks are bitter medicine, but they work for me. (In the polarized vs. sweet spot debate I’m firmly in the “both” category :grinning:)

I find polarized workouts are way harder than their sweet spot equivalent, and my margin of error is much smaller.

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Well of course they are, that’s the point, that you can really work those high intensity sessions rather than gravitate to intensities in the middle.

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What he said (with all the fancy science-y terminology). :laughing:

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