I don’t think Seiler has studied really short intervals - just speculated based on old observations of what happens during a single workout.
If you have some spare time this podcast episode goes into some detail about rest periods.
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The ones that’ll give the best response are on the ones you can keep on top of and do consistently. A single workout isn’t going to make a difference. But if you can repeat it time after time , it’ll bring about a response.
Unless you’re on top of an event. You can experiment on yourself and see what works. If it stops working try a different combination of intervals and rest periods.
Unless you’re an elite athlete be content with ones you can do that give a good enough improvement. You don’t need to seek the “perfect” interval according to a study. You’re looking for a “good enough” interval that works for you.
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+1
From what I’ve seen, they are also the ones that you like crushing the hardest.
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Oh, my! Old/Dead got all defensive, suddenly! 
The main thing I was pointing out is the difference in study populations. The Bacon study looked at subject where the initial fitness level of the subjects had to fall within the range of untrained/sedentary to recreationally active. The Rosenblat study looked at moderately trained individuals and it just so happened that the VO2max range of the Bacon study left off (on the upper end) where the Rosenblat study started (on the lower end). There is a little overlap but the separation of the populations make the conclusions of the two meta studies very interesting to me.
Similarly, the Ronnestadt presentation looks at populations of athletes that are more on the upper end of the performance spectrum. So, to the extent that there are differences in the conclusions of the research presented in those three instances it’s interesting to consider them through that lens.
Old/Dead, probably your biggest flaw is that you consider nearly every exchange on this forum as an attack against you. Trust me, it’s not the case. You’re just a spec on the internet. I’m just a spec on the internet. We’re just two tiny cogs in the cosmic machine whose gears happened to grind past each other. So, settle down, bro.
Take the time to read/listen & consider before you criticize. You probably didn’t listen to the podcast DaveWh linked…because you didn’t know it was in fact a metastudy of similar topic to the metastudy you then linked. You almost certainly didn’t listen/watch the Ronnestadt presentation because you didn’t know that he references & discusses the very metastudy you linked. You don’t know that Ronnestadt doesn’t even refer to any of his own work until deep into that presentation. Instead of listening and considering you immediately engaged in ad hominem attacks on Ronnestadt…that presentation presented data from Billat, Seiler, Wegner, the list goes on. I don’t think it’s fair to paint all those authors with the same ‘reputation is less than stellar brush’. BUT IF YOU DO…isn’t it absurd to know that the same author you first linked is in that group? Ha!
So, settle down, old/dead. This is not about you. 
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Prepare to be chastised, how dare you call into question our all knowing?!
Er Muh Gah. @Cleanneon98, you settle down, too! 
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I’m just a bystander! 
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It’s a little comical that we get into these kids of debates and feel like we have to take a strong position on something.
Do long intervals. Do short intervals. Just do them hard enough where you feel like you might fall off the bike 
One of the problems I see with many short interval formats (like Taylor) is the intervals aren’t hard enough. The shorter the interval, the harder it should be. Like the original Tabatas. The work interval is waaay higher than 120%.
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You’re right, it’s not about me, and it’s not about you. It’s about the speculative hypothesis you put out there, which on this forum will soon become gospel.
As for Ronnestadt, there is a basis for what I shared, i.e., I didn’t just make it up.
The more you know…
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Every hypothesis is questionable until it’s discussed or researched, and it’s not up to one person to dismiss potential community discussions because they think they know what’s best for the forum.
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Who’s dismissing any discussion? I dismissed the idea, and I did so for the reasons I mentioned. If Brennus or anyone else wants to try to defend it, they are free to do so. Instead, he chose to get all defensive.
We need to stop fat shaming each others intervals.
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At risk of being off-topic…
Back in the old days, before I knew what a bike was, we’d do workouts we called ‘work capacity workouts’, which were vO2max training sessions.
Basically: set an interval timer to go off every 2 minutes. Pick a circuit of non-specific, high-intensity exercises (burpees, mountain climbers, pullups, jumping knees-to-chest, etc.) and perform them for around a minute and a quarter, resting during the remainder of the interval. Rest times get shorter as fatigue grows (because it takes longer to complete the circuit). 10 intervals for a total workout time of 20 minutes.
Done twice weekly, this sort of thing gets you really fit really fast. Of course, you lose this vO2max fitness quickly once you stop maintaining it…
I find it interesting that we always used non-specific moves to do this workout, rather than the actual movements involved in our sport(s). I’m not sure what the reasoning was, but I guess we thought of it as a general-purpose cardiovascular workout rather than sport-specific training.
Performed at maximum level of intensity, interval lengths of less than 2 minutes were more than adequate, and it probably would have been impossible to go longer except for gifted athletes. We tried to make the exercises as full-body as possible, with no sport-specific skill component that would require fine-tuned technique.
So I think the intervals need to be longer if all I’m doing is using my cycling muscles (and limiting myself to 120% ftp). But if you get everything else working too, 3 minutes like in Spencer +2 which I did a few days ago becomes impossible.
Sorry if I’ve taken this too far off topic.
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That’s One coach’s opinion. I think there’s a whole nation of very successful XC skiers that would beg to differ…
Oh, lordy, is that true. 170% of min pwr @ VO2max? Yikes. So if I use the ronnestadt/seiler VO2max estimate (best ~6min power from an incremental test) I’d be doing 20/10’s at 550W. That’s a hard workout.
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Not hard enough, and also the rest intervals are too easy.
If not mistaken, the idea is to not allow the HR to fall much during the rest.
If you treat the 30s/15s as go and hard as you can repeatedly and keep the rest intervals productive, it’s a very tough workout. In my experience much more painful than trying to do 4x5min
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Back in my rugby days, we’d do a drill as follows:
- set up 2 big tackle bags 5 yards apart.
- start on the ground
- tackle the first bag to ground
- get up, turn around, tackle the 2nd bag to ground
- rinse and repeat
- team mates would pick up the bag and have it ready for the next tackle
- do for a minute, and fit in as many high quality tackles as possible
- take a break while your teammates took their turns
- then go again
It was a pretty brutal drill. Everything hurt afterwards.
By the way…just a reminder…often discussions about Tabata forget what that paper actually showed. Maybe it’s germane to this thread. Long duration threshold work improved VO2max as much as the Tabata workout did.
The heart is a dumb muscle. It doesn’t care what causes the requests to arrive saying beat faster. So high intensity cardio to improve the hearts capacity can come from any exercise, and benefit any other.
Peripheral adaptions how ever are specific to the muscle. I have seen somewhere where they exercised just one leg or the other. It was only the exercised muscle that adapted.
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