That Triathlon Show | EP#169 - FTP, VO2max and VLaMax

Training
411

@tofel
Just one cap. It’s basically a cap on tempo. So you ride a lot of tempo and endurance with Steve’s approach. But of course that means different things to different riders and coaches. In this case, the tempo HR cap is used for tempo intervals or tempo sessions. But you can also use it for outdoor rides when limiting intensity on a hill (nothing really new there, just his version of that).

The maximum that cap would be is something like 82% of maxHR. For me, that’s basically TR SweetSpot. If you don’t do the tests, you would use that. But that’s basically too high still for most ppl (which was the point I was trying to make in my previous post). So at that point you would want to either do some lactate testing, or if you don’t have a lactate meter, maybe his 30-min aerobic test. It’s up to him and you. Also, it’s time to get out the HR strap. You will use HR and power…and respiration, cadence, RPE, you know…coaching stuff.

@tofel
Not sure I would say it has slowed down. It’s like steering an aircraft carrier, not a MiG. It is a very slow progression. And I don’t assess (other than how I feel) as often as I did with FTP testing, etc. I believe when the progression starts to slow I will introduce some intensity, but that is where things get even more individual. Also, it depends on whether you’re talking about progressing FatMax, LBP, MAP, VLaMax, VO2max, repeatability, stamina, how often I’m eating on a 100 mile ride, the percentages of fat/carb usage at various intensities, 30-min aerobic HR test, a time trial, or something more specific to your goals that Steve would cook up.

My earliest results with any of the above was at about 3-4 months in.

The thing I’ve like the most about it is that I’m being “semi-coached”. I don’t need one-on-one individualized, totally tailored, talk to me every day coaching ($$$, and for me just overkill). But I want more than grabbing an internet training plan and just figuring things out by sucking a lot or mimicking the fast riders.

3 Likes
412

this may be of interest

1 Like
413

I got as far as 1:35, then had to stop.

Weber claims that only a small fraction of the O2 in arterial blood is extracted by muscle “even under hard exercise”. This is simply false - in fact, during maximal exercise, almost ALL of the available O2 is extracted by exercising muscle, e.g., femoral venous O2 content will be close to ZERO.

That’s a pretty fundamental misunderstanding. In fact, I’d say that it is rather shocking.

ETA: Gawd, it’s like watching a train wreck…in the very next breath, he claims that O2 uptake by muscle, not delivery by the heart, is the “bottleneck” limiting VO2max. This is the opposite of reality, i.e., the capacity of muscle to take up and utilize O2 exceeds the ability of the heart to pump blood, such that VO2max is primarily limited by convective O2 delivery.

I’ll stop myself here, and let @empiricalcycling or @SpareCycles give their $0.02.

414

I… thought you were joking that he said that. His misunderstanding may be that measured between the coronary artery and vena cava typically there’s “only” a 40-60% difference, but that’s because the blood that’s been depleted of O2 across the muscle bed has been mixed with blood going elsewhere. He also mentions that the bottleneck is the muscle extraction, which is simply not the case. I’ve already got a response in this episode for O2 extraction, and WD#21 for a little more info on the pO2 dynamics.

415

Do you mean the difference between arterial and coronary sinus blood? Extraction by the heart typically runs ~60%, and doesn’t change (much) with exercise. Between arterial and vena caval (actually, you have to go all the way to the pulmonary artery before mixing is complete), extraction is only about 25% at rest, but rises to 75-95% during maximal exercise.

416

I heard “most people” and did not hear him say “trained athletes” - would that make a difference? Assume “most people” = untrained or recreational athlete.

With only 5 years of riding, why do I see good gains after taking an off-season break and restarting with a lot of aerobic endurance and then laddering up to threshold over 3-5 blocks? Moderate volumes, say ramping 5-6 hours/week to 8-10 hrs with a peak of 12 hours? Also seen a strong response to doing low cadence tempo. Averaged across the years, my training volume has been pretty low - maybe 5 hours/week.

417

The only exception I’m aware of is when someone is in a severely pathologic state.

418

The fitter you are, the more that O2 delivery matters. This is why blood doping and EPO are so effective.

Also note that VO2max and performance - even over a few minutes - are really two different things, and don’t necessarily change in lockstep.

419

I’ve got an engineering background and never took a physiology or biology class in college. Struggled to follow your podcast so went looking for answers. This pic made a lot of sense to me, as an engineer:

image
image1266×1424 256 KB

Source: Exercise physiology 10 | PPT

mm mercury measures the partial pressure, not actual o2 usage but ok. And trying to chase down normal oxygen consumption by muscles here is one search term “average oxygen content of venous and arterial blood” and trying different search terms I find stuff like this:

image
image764×748 96.3 KB

Source: Responses to exercise | PPT

and

Cardiac output and arteriovenous oxygen difference are the two factors that determine the overall oxygen uptake. At rest 5 ml of the 20 ml of oxygen in every 100 ml of blood is extracted, producing an arteriovenous oxygen difference of 5 ml. During exercise blood flow to the tissues increases, and haemoglobin dissociates more easily; therefore the arteriovenous oxygen difference widens during exercise. With aerobic training the tissues become more efficient at taking up oxygen; therefore the arteriovenous oxygen difference is still greater in trained individuals.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/arteriovenous-oxygen-difference

Sure all makes sense, just not easy to go find which means maybe its time to break down and buy an exercise physiology book. Any suggestions?

1 Like
420

No book covers it sufficiently, or none that I’ve seen anyway and I have quite a few that touch on this in some way or other. Some papers out there measure femoral O2sat as low as maybe 5-10%. pO2 in cells at FTP is about 3-4 torr, and there’s very little inhibiting O2 diffusion so the flux is as needed. The reason not all O2 is extracted from the blood is obviously equilibration between tissues and blood and there’s no active mechanism to get out more, but mostly that not all tissues are maximally respiring. If we did have all circulating blood passing through maximally respiring tissue, the venous pO2 would be about 1 torr.

If we were actually limited by extraction, oxygen vector doping would be useless. In fact, if we look at untrained vs trained individuals, O2 extraction difference is pretty low, say about 80% for untrained and 90% for trained (whole body). We even see very poor correlations between vo2max and avo2diff (0.2 or 0.3 R^2 iirc). But VO2max and Qmax for untrained is 50% that of those trained. This is the opposite of what we would expect to see if utilization were the limiting factor.

I’ll see if I can dig up a good review paper somewhere. If you want to look for one or just any study, I bet you’ll find some good ones by Calbet or Montero.

421

This has been and is my understanding also.

But why do 80% of people say they stop the ramp test because their legs get tired, and only 20% say it’s due to heart/breathing reaching the limit? Need to HTFU? :confounded:

422

well when you can’t get enough oxygen in your cadence will drop. then your legs will give out soon after. but the point where your cadence drops significantly is where you should end it for an accurate measurement

423

Because what limits VO2max and what limits performance are different things.

424

Peter Wagner and Russ Richardson (who trained with him) have also done a lot of work in this area.

Really, though, it’s been known for over half of a century that O2 supply, not utilization, is the limiting factor. This raises the following questions:

  1. why does Weber believe otherwise, and

  2. what might this say about the validity or interpretation of VLamax, etc.?

425

It comes from a cart before the horse understanding of metabolic pathway regulation that has downstream effects that go all the way to training types. And oftentimes when those principles go well, it’s a figuratively true, literally false kind of situation, where you train in such a way that there are the expected results, but the actual reasons they happen are different from the assumptions. Validity of vlamax is kiiiind of a thing, but again, for different reasons than assumed due to incorrect interpretations of regulatory mechanisms.

426

I suppose that is the charitable way of looking at it.

427

Let us all take a deep breath (pun intended :hugs:), it is clearly not a very scientific video. As @empiricalcycling wrote, from a black box perspective what is not wrong, O2 goes in, and a significant amount of O2 comes out. If there was nothing to improve in that box, we’d have no peripheral VO2max adaptations. What is unfortunate, he concentrates on them, as if there was no or only little room for central adaptations.

Let us make each other faster!

1 Like
428

Except that a significant amount of O2 doesn’t come out of the legs at VO2max, even in an untrained person. This is a fundamental misunderstanding on Weber’s part. It is the sort of error in thinking that leads to people, e.g., wasting time doing one-legged pedaling drills to try to get faster.

429

What I don’t understand is, If Weber has got it so wrong how is it that Jumbo Visma, who utilise INSCYD and, I believe, use Weber as a consultant, seem to be getting it so right?

1 Like
430

It’s Bora I think, not Jumbo Visma…