Thanks for this. I’ll definitely give this a go as it is definitely doable 
It isn’t irrelevant but if used as proxy for determining muscular effort, it can be swayed by heat and dehydration and thereby be inaccurate in determining muscular effort.
Guiding training with lactate levels at a given heart rate is also a guide for muscular effort but also swayed by factors affecting heart rate. The point isn’t to produce a particular level of lactate per se, it’s to guide the level of muscular effort you’re putting out.
You’re looking at endurance training in z2 so you’re using lactate HR to say how easy you should ride, but you can just as easily (and I would argue more accurately) use 55-65% of your FTP in any environment.
If the point of your workout was to improve lactate clearance you might choose sweet spot instead.
You’re a little off when thinking about lactate. A somewhat deep dive but not super deep:
Lactate is produced by anaerobic metabolism, that is, without oxygen. It’s not as efficient as aerobic metabolism. Going back to biochem, with oxygen you make like 32 or 34 ATP per molecule of glucose. Anaerobic makes like 2. I forget the exact numbers and it’s not super important, just know that anaerobic is way, way less efficient. But lactate isn’t as bad as we used to say. It just needs to be turned back into energy, that is, turned back into pyruvate which gets used to make energy. This happens mainly in the liver. So in basic terms, muscle makes lactate, goes into blood, goes to liver, recycled, or it gets used by other tissue liver the heart. Now you can think of HR as a driver of movement. Higher HR, more blood pushed through. That makes sense right, you exercise, you need more movement of energy to muscle, more removal of “waste” from muscle, more O2 to tissue, more CO2 removed. So HR is a proxy, for working muscle. Muscle make more lactate, HR reacts and increases. But it’s not the increased HR that is the driver. So just a high HR doesn’t mean more lactate. So, as afar as I know, heat doesn’t change lactate production in muscle. Meaning just because you’re in a hot environment, if you putting down the same watts, you aren’t making any more lactate. The increased HR is likely coming from dehydration from increased sweating, and the body trying regulate body temperature (heat loss comes from the periphery mainly, like feet, hands, head as the body pushes hot blood from the core to the periphery to offload). My point being that HR is affected by a lot of different factors. Which is why I use power as the metric to follow. It’s just one school of thought. Stress is stress. So high heat and increased HR is still stress on the body. So I’m not saying using HR to guide Z2 is a bad thing, just a different philosophy.
Coggan zone training isn’t a thing no. He’s been quite clear his zones are descriptive not prescriptive, see the thread below and perhaps read some of his other forum posts/ blogs
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Do you have links to those papers, they would be good to read.
I’ll do a deeper read later but I don’t see anything showing increased lactate production with heat. It doesn’t even look like they tested that in this paper.
Kind of have a follow on to this thread and didn’t want to start a new thread.
Recently moved into a new house and my office/gym that I work out in doesn’t get much air from the HVAC unit at all. When I start out riding temp will be 73-74 degrees and by the time I’m done it’s pushing 79-81. I’ve got two fans blowing on me but still feel the room heats up quite a bit.
Did Eichorn +2 today, 2x20 sweet spot at 227 watts. First set felt alright and start of the second was okay. Back half of that second set my HR was pushing well above threshold and starting to get towards VO2max. Didn’t adjust any of the power down and had fans on max, but it was pretty tough to get it done.
Am I messing with my training by having this pseudo heat adaption going on? Or just kind of suck it up an suffer through it as long as I can handle.
I’m sure in the cooler parts of the year this part of the house will be cold so may help with my training then.
IMO, yes. Because of the artificial heated environment, you can’t push the watts required for structured training. You’ll make some gains in heat adaptation but you don’t make the muscular metabolic gains not hitting power targets.
A portable A/C is the absolute best accessory for a pain cave that hardly anyone talks about.
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