Dammit. I’m 39 
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^^^^ Darn, 47
Anyway, reason for my post…
Interesting bit around 1 hr 25 that would be of interest to the LCHF thread.
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The acutal show’s website has very detailed notes, here the part on nutrition. No need to listen to it.
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Great, I googled it and listened to it at work so didn’t find the website. 
This has always resonated with me too - definitely if you’re burned out mentally take the break, but physiologically it seems unnecessary.
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I found this: “The power that you reach on the very last step is what your MAP is.”
I think a lot of the time it’s necessary because amateurs go too hard too much of the time. And maybe because even fitting in 8-10 hours/week can mean not getting enough sleep because you’re training after putting the kids to bed or getting up before dawn so you’re gradually digging yourself into a hole.
Probably more a mental thing in most cases. I know an awful lot of people who have the mentality of training “for” something. They’ll enter some big event (sportive, marathon, triathlon) and then focus on it for 3-6 months during which they’re pretty good with their training, nutrition, etc. Then once it’s done they’ll have a few months of lie-ins, eating and drinking all the things they’ve been denying themselves, put a few pounds on, then at some point (often inspired by clothes starting to get snug…) they’ll enter the next event and start again. Guess they’re missing a lot of low hanging fruit, but they’re also a lot healthier than the people who never enter those events at all!
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I have said before, Bora’s head coach is using a more modern approach to Olbrecht’s ideas, so catching back up on Dan Lorang and Sebastian Weber’s podcasts can give some good insight for how to implement them towards cycling. Coach Chad uses some of them as well, using some of the short burst workouts in a few plans, but doesn’t build a block around the aerobic capacity focus like they would. Bays is a good cycling version of his aerobic capacity workout of work around AET, “spiced” with some hard efforts. there are a few other endurance focused workouts in the catalog that start with 3-4 really hard sprint efforts that finish out with endurance.
The physiological reasoning is also being used here in much of these pro training examples where they are doing hard work during the long ride. The result is likely more activation of muscle fibers (getting the fast twitch and intermediate fibers activated) and thus greater aerobic adaption.
As a total amateur in many ways…
I used to think there was an off season because that’s what bike riders did in winter… and it wasn’t really possible to train indoors back then.
40 years later I train year round, but change up what I’m doing. Off season, October through January, now means 2-3 gym sessions and 3-4 rides (in or out). The rides are focused on priming the engine and the gym work has made me stronger and in TR lexicon, a better human.
I’m very keen to find time to do a 20 hour a week plan and see what happens. Hopefully following the pro training will provide insights when that time comes.
Straight from the mouths of horses:
One thing to also keep in mind is that there is a bias towards selecting pros, which are already near their peak aerobic capacity. What’s would also be valuable to us is what those pros did to get to that point. In order to get to the volumes that they are performing, how much intensity did they have to drop. From hearing a few interviews, it would appear that most youngsters who are good at a national level take several years to build up to the volume that the international level pros are doing, but I don’t have any sort of quantitative analysis to demonstrate.
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This one was really interesting for me:
His foundation training is exactly what I’m trying this base phase. After 3 years of >20h/weeks of religously low intensity training I must concede that the last 2 years were pretty much wasted. Yes, I know, these days its fasshionable to say you have to do slow and so. Slow and long. All I can say, yes, it bumped up my performance level. But only in the first year. After that stagnant.
I also came to the believe - as pointed out in the podcast - progression and overload are key. I would not know how much more I could progress/overload with long and slow at already > 20h/weeks.
Hence, I do most of my endurance rides now in the lower tempo range. “Happy hard”, “no man’s land”, “grey area”. Today was 4.5h with 2h in tempo and 2h in upper coggan-zone 2. Want to stress my AeT by gowing slightly above.
Later I will incorporate SST.
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I don’t think “slow” is or has ever been fashionable! “Easy” is fine for the easy days, but they need to be interspersed with hard days. How hard depends on volume, there’s always a tradeoff between intensity and volume, the fewer hours you have to train the more you need to do with them. But even with 20 hours/week you need to be hitting some tempo or SS work, as you found.
Different sport, yes, but Lydiard’s “1/2 effort” or “bread and butter aerobic” was run at between LTHR -30 and -20, or Friel HR zone 2, according to Snell and Keith Livingstone, who have translated Lydiard into heart rate terms.
That HR would put most cyclists between 70-80% FTP. Low power zone 3/upper power zone 2 is a very effective aerobic building area to spend time in (and its in the upper half of the Olympiatoppen Zone 1, low intensity).
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was Friel who stated:
subtract 30 beats per minute from your lactate threshold heart rate, and that’ll give you a rough estimate of your aerobic threshold
Looks like they all agree?
They do all agree.
Aerobic metabolism has never changed – just the terminology that smart coaches use to target the combination of intensity and duration to get the most adaptation for the least fatigue.
Seiler is pretty clear about what he means with LIT. The bulk of it should be well below AeT. Well below. He considers riding mostly @AeT as not within his framework and as one of the main mistakes AGs do. My base periods of the last winters were basically highly polarized.
Can you point to where he says well below? I understand it to be riding ABOVE AeT that is his biggest fault. As in if your avg HR is HR @ AeT, you’re spending almost half of that time above AeT, so just like the MAF cap, he’s said to use the AeT recommendation as a cap. Most of the Norwegian Federation zone 2 is @ AeT, and is included in Seiler’s zone 1.
Only the highest trained individuals can really stay well below and get any sort of work done.
Can you point to where he says well below? I understand it to be riding ABOVE AeT that is his biggest fault. As in if your avg HR is HR @ AeT, you’re spending almost half of that time above AeT, so just like the MAF cap, he’s said to use the AeT recommendation as a cap. Most of the Norwegian Federation zone 2 is @ AeT, and is included in Seiler’s zone 1.
Only the highest trained individuals can really stay well below and get any sort of work done.
Stay well below and get work done if its a 4-6 hour training session. 2 hours, not so much, unless its in the context of a 24 or 30 hour week or something.
HR zone 2 in a 5-zone system is still Olympiatoppen low intensity. Now, their skiers and cyclists don’t do a lot in this zone because, in a 20-30 hour training week, they have determined that there is too much of a fatigue cost for the aerobic benefit.
Once you go down below, say, 15 hours/week (for a cyclist) more of the work can be done in HR zone 2, or say 76-80% of FTP, without building up counterproductive fatigue.
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