Just to clarify: when I said “Empirical Cycling style” Vo2max training, I meant doing a dedicated block, focused on Vo2 intervals, doing a Vo2 workout every 2nd day (total of 10 in 3 week block), doing them as hard starts, with high cadence, no ERG mode, etc.
And no, I didn’t do them back to back. I had recovery weeks between them.
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You don’t have to apologize for not internalizing the entire podcast record. The fact that their ideas function more as a meme and social phenomenon rather than a distilled scientific paradigm is on them. In fact, the fact that the owner is here, commenting for you to onboard directly with a coach in order to interpret their ideas, is—at least to me—a symptom of how counterproductive it can be to have a business that will always have financial pressures involved in, or in this case, partially controlling and producing content in popular science.
It’s like if the famous Carl Sagan, instead of using his platform to give long-form educational lectures on space and the fabric of the cosmos—highly distilled ideas that make you think, grow your wonder, and develop a love for learning (pedagogical teaching)—instead presented a highly undistilled, long-form mess in front of a live audience. In such a format, it would be difficult to find any coherent paradigm, yet a new listener might get the impression of consensus simply from the mass of “fans” in the audience. Then Carl turns around and says, “Oh, my little listener, you must send me an email to truly understand the cosmos… $$$.”
Is it a long-form podcast out of necessity—to educate the viewer? Or is it a circus that takes a very simple process (like reading a few journals and preprints), convolutes it, turns it into a whole song and dance, presents it in an undistilled, difficult-to-navigate swamp of information, and ultimately makes it necessary for you to hire one of their coaches just to interpret it? It doesn’t make me happy to see a perversion of the process.
Across all fields, the best ideas are simple and fully distilled. Every coach should be educating you to eventually personally supersede and replace them—a tale as old as time itself.
my2c if you’re not literally in monaco hiring instagram girls to go on dates with the UAE development team staff then the cutting edge of the sport probably already moved on past meme V02blocks, no offence. There has been a new signaling role found in previously well described molecules every year for the last 2 years… all the certainty that this has shattered the idea of consensus is laughable in 2025.
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My understanding is you don’t want to do back to back VO2, even with recovery weeks between them. 1 -2 blocks per season is it. The gains come after the block, absorbing the work through rest (and not necesarily right away) and the post-VO2 threshold, SST, Tempo helps realize more and develop those gains.
There’s a good chance you’re over-doing the VO2 part to your own detriment if you did three blocks in a row, even with recovery weeks in between.
You made it through that? Congrats lol
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Yeah I deleted my comment because I realized I don’t actually want to have a discussion 
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Well, good work, @KlemenSj I guess I would share your frustration if I did all that work and did not see any improvement in 3min or 5min power. The only advice I have has already been mentioned by other forum members…but just to reiterate…the type of adaptation you’re chasing can take a while to show up. It’s not an enzymatic or transporter adapation that can take place over the course of 48 hours but a real, structural change to the cardiopulmonary system so that can take a while to show up.
Also, as the forum has already mentioned, make sure you pay attention to your recovery level prior to 3min or 5min test. Compare similar tests but also tested at similar form/fitness.
And, finally, if you’re really stuck at a certain VO2max plateau and you want to try a low-risk VO2max training technique that has really worked well for me, consider this:
Since when is BFR “low risk”?
Suggesting amateur athletes try it is irresponsible.
See 35284924
@Twowkg can you give me the timestamp in the linked presentation that you think is the most risky? I’ll review it…
So you’ve done 30 vo2 workouts in the past 12 weeks? Nothing but vo2 blocks since before xmas? Or am I still misunderstanding this?
“A total of 1,672 individuals reported an adverse event following BFRT use out of 25,813 individuals. Commonly reported adverse events were numbness, dizziness, subcutaneous hemorrhage, and rhabdomyolysis.”
“Blood flow restriction provides tremendous opportunity with a potential for accelerated exercise rehabilitation and injury prevention. This modality could be used in the military setting to help injured active duty personnel expeditiously return to deployable status. Further prospective randomized controlled trials are warranted to further support BFRT safety; however, from this literature review, it can be concluded that BFRT can be utilized safely in the proper patient population when administered by qualified professionals who have undergone the appropriate training.”
If you want 5 minute power to go up, train for higher 5 minute power. High cadence Vo2s trying to improve heart stroke volume aren’t necessarily going to make that happen, though they might (and often do in my experience with them).
But there’s something else going on here IMO.
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How do you feel when doing a 5min max effort? What is the limiter? Breathing, burning legs, empty legs, hr to the max?
Just for the interested forum reader, this is a quote from a meta analysis of blood flow restriction training…not the Guelph study. It is some other thing.
Anybody that is interested, give the Guelph research a look. Don’t let biased commentary scare you away.
5 minute power - and especially durations shorter than that - might not give you the real picture if you have actually improved you VO2max or not. Although most of the power is created aerobically, anaerobic capacity plays a big role in these shorter durations.
Personally, I find that hard aerobic training hampers my anaerobic capacity for a while. Yes, that anaerobic power does come back with enough rest and some “sharpening” but it might be hard to see improvements initially. Say for 5 minute all-out effort, you improve your VO2max by 10 watts but lose 20 watts due to lowered anaerobic capacity and thus the 5 minute end result is down by 10 watts. Using just one metric to measure improvement can be quite challenging.
And when the measurement becomes the target, you really have to be careful to not lose sight what’s actually important for your performance. If improving 5min pmax (or even shorter duration) is your main focus, then you’ll probably want to change your training quite a bit.
There’s an excellent thread about Ashton Lambie’s training for sub 4 minute pursuit to give you some contrast what training for shorter distances might look like: Ashton Lambie breaks four-minute pursuit barrier - #21 by AJS914
Also, your VO2max might not be the limiter. Maybe the limiting factor is more on the neuromuscular side? In that case something like strength training, both in the gym and on the bike, will likely yield better results than hammering high cadence VO2max intervals to the infinity.