Originally Posted by
rubiksoval
I don't understand the point of trying to train this way at all. It seems needlessly complicated and non-exact. Breathing rate, as you attest to, can be influenced by a number of things: cadence, adrenaline, fatigue, weather, glycogen levels, etc, etc. If you want a ride focused primarily on AeT, I would think the easiest thing to do would be a two hour time trial and then just using average power from that as a baseline.
But again, I don't know what the point of that would be in regards to adaptations that you could very likely achieve from riding below that power for longer and above that power for shorter.
Also, your body always makes lactate, even at rest.
Thanks! I'm not asking for understanding. That's quite hard to come by. I'm just asking for help. My wife and I are doing some steady-power rides, she in erg mode on a trainer, me on my resistance rollers. The game is to increase purely aerobic power, no contribution from the anaerobic system. We'll train that later. Do you remember, there was some famous coach, whose name I've forgotten, who made his riders train in fall all below AeT because he said if they didn't they would not develop proper capillarization? Which was complete BS except that his riders had good success? So once it was known that this capillarization thing was BS, his training method was dropped. There's been a lot written and studied about this sort of thing over the years. I've read Chapple's base building book. He makes a good case for it. So I'm 75, got nothing else to do this fall, so I'm experimenting. True or BS? One way to find out. But to experiment, the data has to be as clean as possible, hence my focus on staying under AeT. We can only do that indoors.
There was a guy on here, years ago, who did this same thing. I think his username ended in "10". He used a lactate meter and claimed that doing this enough, his lactate levels didn't rise even after a couple hours of it. I'm not about to spend $350 on experiment equipment, though. My understanding of the theory is that the more power you can produce without lactate levels rising, the smaller addition you'll need from your anaerobic system to produce the same power, thus the higher your FTP will be.
I suspect that breathing is the key, but HR also might be a good indicator. My HR at 75% has dropped almost 10 beats in 5 weeks of doing this 4-5 days/week. We did a 10-day backpack in the Cascades right before starting this program. We're also doing strength work 1-2 days/week.
Anyway, that's the rationale. Now for help doing that? Your idea of the two hour TT is good except that I have to do it without HR rising. I'm working on that now, going to 1:45 next week, 2:00 by mid-December, I think, HR if anything dropping. Then I'll be doing 8-10 hours/week of it, about 120 miles on my rollers. THEN I'll start doing some intensity.
I just wish I knew better what to do about my wife's increased breathing rate at what seems to me to be too low power levels. Her MHR is ~165 and she starts breathing more rapidly at 116. The end game is that we're going to start riding tandem again in the spring and we want to be able to make the machine go again.