“But my SWAG is revolutionary to the world of endurance sports! And here, I’ve given a new, sexy name to it (even though it’s the same principle that’s existed for 40 years!!!)”
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Yeah, enough click bait that I didn’t post it the other day!
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I think you also need to put it in the context of his tweet below quoting Lydiard, and see where he comes from with all this
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Ha, couzens blocked me so i can’t read the thread. Crazy how quick he did that.
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He’s a sensitive fella, on a mission, to save the world from too much HIIT. And from those who promote HIIT (whoever that may be). The fan boy bubble is welcome but those who dare to ask slighlty critical questions get blocked quickly. You’re really in very prominent company. I was really surprised to learn about a couple of high profile academics who got blocked by him. The questions/remarks were really not that critical or bad. Valid remarks in my view.
Puts everything into perspective what he tweets.
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you aren’t missing anything IMHO
just found this in an article on triathlete.com, a typical Couzens:
Interestingly, this is mirrored in the hugely polarized approach to training that we saw in this analysis from exercise physiologist and tri coach Alan Couzens when he looked at the final 90 days of Iden’s run training going into Ironman Florida at the end of last year. In short, the easy days are so very easy (and there’s a lot of them)—yet the hard days are exceptionally hard. (Note: the training theory we will talk about below involves a much higher proportion of zone 2 training.)
Yes, sure, but the problem is he just extracted time in pace zones from Strava. He ignored completely that Iden spent weeks at altitude and/or did heaps of uphill running. Partly on trails. And several long mountain hikes. All of this inflated zone 1 artifically. I’m not saying that Iden did not plenty of low intensity work but Couzens anaysis is pretty flawed. Still, because of his “reputation” it is cited as fact. He did the same for Blu’s cycling. Came to the same conclusion. However, he completely ignored all the coasting and descending. And this brick workouts where they do bike-run-bike-run-bike-run. The non-bike times were attributed to low intensity.
By the way, some people dared to question these analyses, guess what happend 
Therefore, any numbers coming from him should be taken with a grain of salt.
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Jesus, Alan, like… I get it. But here’s the key: Not everyone can train for 20 hours a week. Hell, a lot of people are lucky to get 6 hours a week! The majority of my training years from 2005 to 2019, I couldn’t do more than 8 hours a week because I was on active duty, and not in a line where working out all day was happily embraced.
So yes, as a coach and an athlete, I know that I need to spend more time doing low end aerobic work, but there’s only so much of that normal people can do. And not every friggin’ coach out there is coaching elites/pros with 20 hours a week to train!
Some of these guys are brilliant and I appreciate all the work and research they’ve done, but they’ve spend so much time coaching nothing but professionals that they forget the very reason the professional sports exist is the grassroots athlete. And most grassroots athletes have to make compromises to the ideal… some intensity is required, but yes, too much is detrimental.
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my take: tweets are ‘ads’ targeting elite triathletes. Its feels like many of his training posts are targeted at runners (for example VT1 and VT2).
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Fair enough, Alan. Thank you for the clarification. (But even then I don’t like the label he throws out there… “competitive” at what level? I’ve never trained more than 10 hours a week with any regularity but have qualified for amateur world championships and Boston and stuff, but I’m just being very literal… poor word choice on his part IMO).
ETA: I have Twitter. I just never use it and don’t plan to start now. 
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I’ve seen too many athletes kick ass big time on 8-10hrs to take this serious. Even in longer events.
And I’ve been training 20 hrs/wk for the last 5 or so years and this hasn’t transformed me into an über-athlete either.
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Well arild has been on tts a few times and he says they are the way they are by tightly controlling those intensities. The beauty of mountain running is you get lower cardiovascular stress while also developing power/torque. Gustav is taking those mountain runs quite easy, I’m curious whst his stryde data says.
Did you ever compile Gustav or Kristian 's training in the pro thread? I follow them, but don’t examine every workout, but they seem to do more steady state than the other cycling pros.
I’ve only looked at the biking a bit. Indeed, mostly steady state. 6x10’ for the threshold work and that’s it. I’m always surprised at the few number of longer bike rides. There are not many >3 h rides. I find this interesting given their performance at 70.3 and IM. Does frequency trump duration for endurance development? Of course, would be interesting to see how they stack up to pro cyclists training similar total volumes.
final minute of ramp is a long way from 5 min power for most. If you can hold that power for 5 mins why would you crash out after 1 min holding it on the ramp. Appreciate there’s fatigue in the legs already from previous stages but you’re probably only above FTP full stop for 5 mins by that stage…
Your max 1 min on the ramp is 133% of FTP which is crazy for 5 mins. E.g. FTP of 374w expected to hold 500w for 5 mins which is inconceivable. That may be the reason for your estimation being a long way off. Probably best to test 5 min power directly and go from there. Or use your 3 min power from a TR VO2max interval and use that to gauge an approximate 5 min power.
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You are right. I was using an approximation that I see a lot on forums and did not check enough its validity.
I checked with numbers from intervals.icu and 5min is usually between 116-120% of ftp, which is much lower.
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Not sure why I’m the one on the response, but my 5 min bests match the last 5 min of the ramp fairly well. The 5 min bests are from a few various strava segments that are long enough… most are fairly short or undulating terrain.
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I’m not ramp testing, but by TR definition last 1-min power = 1.33 * FTP = MAP. So lets go with my current FTP as that has some decent recent efforts. That puts my estimated MAP at my current ~3-min power, from a 6x45-sec (30-sec) max sprinterval a month ago. I haven’t done any max efforts between 2-5 minutes in a long long time.
Which aligns with my “MAP is a ceiling on my 5-min power” claim, and these types of efforts are harder for me than say longer 8-min efforts.
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Acording to Mr. Skiba, the University of Montreal track test adapted to cycling, is a similar ramp, but instead of 1 minute is 2 minutes and the highest power you can sustain for the entire 2 min without fading is your pVO2max.
There are also other ramp test protocols. Another one I have heard of raises power by 20–25 W every minute for men and 15 W/minute for women. TR’s ramp rate is a fixed percentage, i. e. no matter your FTP with TR’s ramp test protocol, you will always “equal your FTP” if you stop at 19:30 minutes (meaning that the FTP calculated from that ramp test coincides with the FTP the ramp test was based on).
Scientifically, you cannot directly compare MAP test results obtained from different tests. That’s not to say one protocol is better or worse than the other. While the post I have linked to earlier claims TR and Zwift use the “wrong” protocol, I see no obvious reason why one should be better than another.
For certain rider types that seems entirely doable to me. While I couldn’t promise you 5 minutes, I bet I could get close if I am completely fresh, well-trained and empty myself. Last season I did 6:50 at close to 120 % of FTP and did not empty myself (I wanted to get into a top 10 of a very competitive Strava segment).
The first ramp test I heard about used 2.5 minute steps of 25W, starting at 100W:
Predates TR ramp. Uses best 2.5 minute power to estimate MAP, and FTP is roughly 82.5% of MAP.
There is a lot of research on ramp protocols, oldest ones I’ve seen date back 100 years for running.
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