This is the issue I battle with some of my club mates who I don’t coach when they’re talking to some that I do. As you said, those guys haven’t gotten any better since I’ve known them, they can only compete in one way (sit in and sprint) in one type of race (short crits). If there’s a hill or a breakaway or the race is longer than an hour, their race is over.
The point that my athletes understand is about stagnation. I also tell them when they ask that all those guys putting out the bro science in our chat don’t know how much better they could be if they trained properly because they have never tried it.
Most anyone who trains for races has enough anaerobic capacity to survive and potentially do well in a 45 min crit. Once you get above that or add other factors, you separate the wheat from the chaff.
Thanks for sharing. It interesting that your profile seems to be relative strong sub 5m and relative week above that. Have you always been like that? Or is a function of your recent training?. Old
Yeah I have more of a puncheur style maybe, so anything under 8min and I can go quite hard.
I just set a new 5min record the other day at 400w (5.26w/kg) and also did 3x8min intervals where the last one I managed to set a new record at 375w for 8 min (4.93w/kg).
I haven’t don’t anything above 8min for over a year I think, so I can probably put out a bit higher 20min or so than last year
But one thing that REALLY has worked for me this summer is volume
It may not really show but I’ve been doing around 13-16 hours a week for this whole summer pretty much, doing one hard session a week, the rest very strict zone 2.
I’m too scared to tell, people gonna say it’s junk miles
Jokes aside.
I just ride. Mostly with my girlfriend, and to keep her in her Z2 in the draft, I cannot go too hard
So some days it’s average 160w and some days it’s 190w.
Never aim for anything above 200w unless I am actively doing some “high Z2”, and then I’ll push into 210-240w and do longer intervals there. Mostly do this if I am abroad and climbing.
The stagnation discussion is very interesting to me.
Most of the people I began riding with are all more or less the same level.
I also went from very average, to stronger than most of my peers. Not a boast, just an observation. I’m not an exceptional cyclist by any metric.
I did this with lots of endurance/Z2 and a very small amount of intensity. It certainly wasn’t genetics. I probably had just a single slow twitch muscle fiber in my entire body when I began cycling.
Most amateurs do vastly too much intensity.
There’s a billion posts / articles / videos / podcasts endlessly explaining that a majority of endurance training needs to be low intensity. Yet, a huge proportion of amateur athletes still do endless intervals and smash every group ride etc.
It used to frustrate me. I’m not sure why…
Now I just smile as those same folk huff and puff up every incline on every ride. Always racing, always competing, but never improving.
Volume is empire.
The single most important aspect of endurance training.
I’ve done lots if volume, mostly easy, with a bit of intensity and stagnated. What I don’t think I was doing was taking enough rest. Hope to rectify that going forward.
Estimated fat oxidation? Possibly/probably retention of CO2 as the body attempts to compensate for CO2 “blown off” during the intervals.
Indirect calorimetry is an old, but still quite valuable, technique. Nonetheless, it has its limitations, especially when attempting to utilize it during non-steady-state exercise. In particular, the differing kinetics of VO2 and VCO2 can really put a wrinkle in things.
(BTW, did you know that glycogenolysis shuts off almost instantaneously when a muscle fiber stops contracting? That’s crazy to think about when you consider the role of metabolites such as Pi and AMP in regulating phosphorylase and the much longer time course for restoration of resting levels, but it is in fact true.)
