At the moment, the focus is still on cycling. We’re analyzing the data we have from athletes that follow our polarized plans cycling plans in an effort to better understand the differences in performance outcomes between pyramidal and polarized training intensity distributions.
At the moment, the best way to prepare for your triathlon races next summer would be to go through Plan Builder. If you have any questions about preparing for those triathlons or about Plan Builder, please just let me know and I’d be happy to help!
In the context that the older athlete has gravitated to the LSD ride. Thus there doesn’t need to be a focus on the low intensity side of the equation as that’s already there but the high intensity is missing.
I’ve noticed that my efficiency is always lower on rides with low HR and low power. I think that’s just because there’s not a linear relationship btwn power and HR (at least not btwn 50% FTP and 75% FTP) Efficiency is always absolutely horrible on recovery rides - to the point that it’s pretty much meaningless.
IMO, the best bet is to only compare rides (ie workouts) that are practically (or actually) identical.
And, as always, take anything HR-related with a bucket of salt
Where I found that doing 60% FTP from the start, my heart rate takes 20-30 minutes to stabilize. So my rule of thumb for decoupling is to toss out the first 30 minutes of any workout, and that set end time based on the workout (outside it varies due to traffic coming back into town).
(I don’t use Intervals much, and haven’t tweaked my default warmup time)
There are other good reference points and suggestions - but I’d add - I think to really track decoupling you should try some longer sessions. The historic number quoted has always been two hours is the real minimum for meaningful data - this likely varies per person, but try to get a 2:30 or 3:30 duration in there as a better reference
There is interesting side-question: where do you go once decoupling reaches around zero for any duration within allocated time for LSD (lets say 4x 3-6h per week)? Especially if I still want to limit only 2 intense days per week. Maybe introduce 30min Z3 blocks into those Z2 rides? Or it does not matter, long-term benefits are still happening regardless?
Hard to say without looking at some examples. It did decrease, perhaps you hadn’t been doing efforts like that and your body got used to it? So hard to say.
Sure but if there is consistent decoupling at 90 minutes… I don’t track but I do take a quick look after every ride, at least for the longer endurance portion of my 2hour mid week workouts.
Also for decoupling the rule of thumb is to get it below 3-4%. It’s only the first two that are slightly above 4%, the rest of the rides there is nothing to look at.
Having gone down the rabbit hole on the various videos, etc. ISM highlighted somewhere that his Z2 is within 70-80% of your observed max heart rate (not theoretical heart rate). That might be a narrower, more helpful range than % of FTP.
Also per ISM, I find the talk test to be really helpful (assuming it’s accurate, which I’m taking on faith for the time being).
So trying this all out last weekend, I periodically recited the pledge of allegiance aloud while on the trainer. Felt like 75-80% of max heart rate was about as far as I could go on the upper limit. My family thought I was crazy.
No - I’m saying you aren’t seeing a high level of consistency in your numbers at the durations you are riding, so I was encouraging you to ride longer to help stabilize the numbers and hopefully get you a more reliable trend line
I honestly stopped looking at decoupling with such a fine eye a while back - but below is a similar view of the rides I’ve done indoors with a low VI over the last month - I’ve included shorter durations so you can see the variations I see on those, as well as the longer ones
I have a standard route I do for a couple of hours mid-week with a standard endurance effort near 130bpm.
My decoupling on the ride varies a lot week to week, beyond improvement from better fitness. For me it is due to my low HR in the first 30-40 mins some days. Sometimes it remains stubbornly low and makes the decoupling high when it springs into life. So similar to @WindWarrior , I need longer than the actual warm up for decoupling comparisons.
Last three months of my “Endurance Zone 2 - 100TSS” rides, using Intervals-icu defaults(?) of 20-min warmup and 10-min cooldown which isn’t the best for my rides but good enough for this discussion:
all outdoors on flat terrain, except for 2 in the gym during heat waves. One route takes 18 minutes before getting out of the city, another route is 10 minutes, and another is about 15 minutes.
Some pretty large swings in average temperatures. I’m fully heat adapted by mid-late July, and the one on the bottom is beginning of August.
Anything below 3-4% is NO decoupling to my eyes. So when I look at my chart above there are only two outliers - 15.6% while recovering from crud, and 5% after poor sleep. The rest I’ll wave my hands and claim no decoupling, nothing to see. Hope that helps.
Despite its origins, there is interesting information about your ‘engine’ from looking at any long-ish steady state interval (single interval) from endurance to sub-threshold. By definition working below threshold you are in steady state physiology, of course after you start the interval there is some ramping of breathing and heart rate, and then it should stabilize.
“Whole ride” decoupling is flat out wrong in my opinion. There is a reason Intervals-icu added the warmup and cooldown setting.
But yes, if you use incorrectly use Intervals-icu (or any other tool), then I agree.
I’m not sure I understand your second point. In my experience spending majority of each week doing endurance rides appears to have played a large role in building a stronger aerobic engine. And one benefit I see is a stable engine - decoupling under 5% - on long tempo (90 min) and long 30+ min just slightly below (or at) threshold. There is a TrainingPeaks blog from a coach talking about using decoupling to review intervals, again individual intervals, not the entire ride.
There is a lot of variability between athletes above endurance, the point is to figure out how your engine responds and if its less stable then there is benefit to doing something about it.
