You will need to educate me as physiology isn my strong point…so if heat elevates your heart rate, does that mean you don’t produce more lactate as your heart rate increases?
I’m asking as if I train in the heat…even outdoors, I reduce my power to stay in my HR zone if I am doing a low level steady state ride.
If HR is irrelevant to lactate production if elevated by heat, I can speed my steady state rides up quite a lot. Last time I did that, I was 20-30 beats higher so ended up noodling pretty slow.
I could take my bike to gym and then cycle outside but I get to gym at 05.40 and train at the gym to avoid being outside in the dark and rain. I’m probably being a bit wimpy but I then have to clean the bike before putting it away and I’m not sure where I would do that.
I think I would be fine riding at 140 watts in the gym (maybe 150 watts) for a few hours if using RPE.
I asked someone else this as trying to get some clarity on an area I don’t know, is heart rate not important when looking at lactate production please?
I ask as I thought/assumed that lactate production was the result of elevated heart rate which comes about by elevated power from through the legs. As in, we produce lactate when our heart rate elevates to a sufficient high rate that our body doesn’t have time to use fat so switches to carbs which is what produces lactate as a by product of this elevated heart rate.
But what I’m getting from quite a few people on here is that heart rate isn’t that important physiologically when looking at lactate production, hence using RPE to understand if that body is creating or using lactate when training.
Not sure if it answers the question. Its not Zone 2.
It seems LTHR is pretty much constant irrespective of heat, however LT power decreases in the heat, am I reading that correctly?
" In the HEAT the rate of blood lactate accumulation increased and lactate threshold took place at 175 watts while it took place at 200 watt in the NEUTRAL trial. Due to the increase in heart rate in the HEAT, heart rate at lactate threshold was similar in the HEAT and NEUTRAL environments (150 ± 1 beats/min). In summary, environmental HEAT in non heat-acclimated athletes reduced lactate threshold and may underestimate training adaptations of the metabolic and cardiovascular systems."
The effect of environmental heat on lactate threshold testing. R.M. Rodríguez, R.A. Jiménez
You say that your average power at the gym hasn’t really changed in 5 months.
Based on the workout schedule you posted, I would expect it have moved up a bit in that time. i.e that for that given 140 HR, your power output would be higher now than it was 5 months ago.
Are the Tue sweetspot intervals progressive (i.e. longer intervals / higher power) from week to week?
Are the Thurs threshold intervals progressive (i.e. longer intervals / higher power) from week to week?
Have you considered putting some VO2 or sprint workouts in there?
Have you considered riding at different cadences on some segments of the Z2 rides? e.g. a 10 minute segment at 10rpm higher than your normal cadence / a 10 minute segment at 10 rpm lower than your normal cadence.
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
Im not sure if thats true, it might be, but I have not seen anything supporting that.
There are papers showing the same lactate is produced at a lower power in heat as higher power not in heat, so does that mean the more lactate it produced at the same power in heat. It suggests so but maybe its not a given.
One paper was 21C vs 38C and theres another 18C vs 35C
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.
