fstrnu

Regarding questions related to why 6 x 10 and 24 x 5, I realize it's counter-intuitive that intervals would be shorter for a longer workout. But keep in mind that these are endurance workouts which means rest intervals are merely microbreaks for comfort reasons. So when I'm on the bike for longer periods I will take shorter microbreaks but more often.

rubiksoval

Or you can just up and do 60-120 minutes straight of sweetspot and not worry about any type of completely random and arbitrary duration or recovery, save for an intersection or dangerous section or the like. Because those durations are random and arbitrary and pointless.

fstrnu

ERG training ==> Reliable effort-to-power relationship ==> Training status <== Performance
Training status ==> Load optimization
Cardiac drift ==> Endurance performance <== Duration
Endurance performance ==> Endurance status ==> Duration optimization
HR ==> Interval performance <== Power
Interval performance ==> Fitness status ==> Intensity optimization <== MSI
HR/CD dissociation ==> Fatigue presence/magnitude/accumulation/dissipation <== Cardiac drift
Fatigue status ==> Frequency optimization

gregf83 

Please stop.

DrIsotope

I continue to find these threads fascinating. Absolutely none of it applies to me, and about 8% of it makes any sense, but here we are. It's like... one day I had a suggested video from the YouTube algorithm, where a vocal coach reacts to a singer. I have no interest in a vocal coach, I do not sing now nor have I ever sung, but for some reason the videos are entrancing. I assume that's what's happening here. Because the posts are progressively transforming into the abstracts from obscure technical papers-- techspeak aimed at an audience so limited, and so specific, that the words may as well not even be written.

Add to that the racer-types coming in and just saying everything the OP says is wrong, and it's like frosting a cake of inscrutability with delicious irony. I hope it never ends.

Carbonfiberboy 

We did some good climbing with our tandem on the Sunday group ride. I planned sweet spot workouts for us on all the climbs. We had three 15'-20' climbs and a few shorter ones. I got just over an hour in HR sweet spot. We both set our HRs at a predetermined SS level, about 3 beats below LTHR. Interestingly, Strava estimated watts for the 3 big climbs and one smaller one near the end were almost identical. I had an IF of .80 for the 2:55 ride. I guess we won the CD derby.

Just goes to show what a wide variety of indoor workouts, both bike and strength, plus Nordic and Alpine skiing, plus the Sunday group ride will do for you. Skiing's been great in our edge of the Polar Vortex and road cycling conveniently cool.. It's been a long time since I felt strong on the bike and it's good to be back.

pdlamb

Do you think the protagonist is a real person trying to write technical English, or is it somebody who's programmed a bot with technical training texts to spit out posts that look like technical English, but they're really jabberwocky?

DrIsotope

I must say, stuff like post #203 give off a real learning algorithm vibe.

Bandera

Instead of posting actual cycling training information and real results why not Ignore this and the plethora of equally bogus threads by the OP, let them wither on the vine of well deserved rejection of bogosity since Mods won't close this mis-informed ship wreck and further well meaning posts feed the OP's Reply-Junky needs.

"Just Say No."
-Nancy Regan who knew as much about Cycling training as an Inthalete

-Bandera

Carbonfiberboy 

Sorry, dude. I always wanted a "Just Say Yes" bumper sticker. While I don't see what hostility accomplishes, I do get prickly when someone attacks me personally. I guess everyone has their own limits. I certainly raise my hand when I see something that's dangerous, but I don't mind that everyone does things differently. Doesn't mean that I have to do them that way. i know a rider who orders 3 glasses of Coke at controls. They have to be identical and all come on the same tray or he won't accept them. This thread reminds me of him

OBoile

Aside from never having watched a video with a vocal coach reacting to a singer, this pretty much describes exactly how I feel.

pdlamb

At the risk of getting philosophical about it -- ah, heck, may as well throw some philosophy into this mess!

One of the unwritten but oft-observed rules of internet fora, going all the way back to usenet days, is that whomever gets in the last word, wins. Mix in the premise that most people participate in these fora to disseminate useful information, and you have the classic "Somebody made a mistake on the internet!" need to correct bogus information.

FWIW, I think the OP has been shown to have incomplete understanding of cardiac drift, no concept of setting or achieving goals, and therefore appears to be demonstrating an excess of spare time and some proficiency at typing (either OP or his/her AI, that is). This thread, and others, could properly have been locked a hundred posts back. But since the thread will be archived and accessed by people who may not read all the nonsense and interspersed sense, it's reasonable to continue to correct fallacies and errors; and perhaps it's also reasonable to comment on the thread's continuance as well.

fstrnu

Fitness is the relationship between effort and power. If you can produce more power for the same effort then you are more fit. If you can produce the same power for less effort then you are more fit. As you become more fit you need to increase power in order to continually challenge the body. If you don't then your body has no reason to adapt.

Same goes for endurance, except that duration becomes the focus. If the duration of your endurance workouts doesn't increase as endurance improves then your body has no reason to continue to adapt. Cardiac drift for the same duration decreases with improved endurance. This is not an obscure concept and is also consistent with related concepts like aerobic decoupling.

Fatigue can cause an abnormally low heart rate. Simple math explains how this results in lower average work interval heart rate and higher cardiac drift.

Everything in this post is both 100% reproducible as well as are also the most likely explanation for these phenomenon when they occur. As with any metric, these become even more reliable with consistent direction/patterns over time.

It's really not rocket science.

fstrnu

One day someone will actually make a point about cardiac drift other than "OP has no concept of cardiac drift" or lists confounding variables applicable only to the outdoors or "I just want to ride my bike outdoors".

Goals have nothing to do with load monitoring. I'll discuss goals as long as you want but not in this thread where it doesn't apply. Load monitoring is about ensuring you are coping and adapting to the load imposed by the program and has nothing to do with energy system prioritization. It can and should, however, inform inevitably required adjustments to any generic load, progression, recovery week frequency, etc.

redlude97

Are you seriously that dense?

fstrnu

Workouts, progression and blocks (test/rest week frequency) can all be defined and followed verbatim. Event, event proximity, rider training status/strengths/improvement opportunities and so on need to be considered in goal setting and plan development. This is not news.

If load monitoring reveals the athlete is coping with and adapting to the plan then GREAT! There's nothing to lose.

But if the answer is that the athlete is not adequately coping with or adapting to the program then adjustments need to be made to load, progression and rest week timing but not to the overall plan which is highly goal-specific.

The whole point is that load monitoring complements training. It doesn't replace it.

In the meantime, I look forward to the daily challenge about what my goals are, what your goals should be and so on. Irrelevant.

Machka 

Go for it!

Carbonfiberboy 

"Confounding variables" are much worse indoors, particularly in your training prescriptions. I absolutely agree with you that cardiac drift occurs. Outdoors, especially on longer rides in varied terrain, there are many confounding factors which confuse the relationship between CD and exhaustion: sun, shade, temperature, fueling, hydrating. Outdoors, exhaustion can be a rather minor CD component in comparison, depending on the training state of the rider. That's the reason that so many serious riders use power instead of HR to determine effort being expended.

OTOH, indoors the confounding factors of body temperature and dehydration are much more regular and thus even easier to confuse with exhaustion, to the extent that they are indistinguishable. I think this is where much of the resistance to your theories comes from.

Number 2 objection might be that almost no one except you will sit on their trainer and do steady state for more than maybe 1/2 hour. I have heard tales of endurance riders who've ridden centuries on their trainers in winter and of individuals who've done thousands of miles on their basement trainers over a long winter. These folks are a very small minority, to the extent that I've never met a person like that, and I've ridden with a lot of people.

Number 3 objection is that sitting on one's trainer and doing steady state is not considered by anyone other than yourself as an appropriate use of trainer time. Everyone else does intervals, judging their fitness not by CD but by duration/repetition and power level, those things being much more reliable indicators than is CD for the reasons I've given above. There's your "load monitoring." Either you can do the interval set or you can't. There's nothing subjective or tricky about that. It's like who wins the race? The rider who comes in first. If you can do the set, maybe next time you make it a little harder.

A good rule when thinking about things is the if one finds oneself with an opinion that is at variance with everyone else's, one's first thought should be that everyone else is not an idiot, so huh, I wonder why that is? Which leads to self-examination, always a good thing.

All that said, I do use CD as a fitness indicator when doing 15'-20' intervals on my rollers. However it's only an indicator. I don't change what I'm doing because my CD is one number or another. I just know that I have to rack up a certain number of particular interval prescriptions at particular times during my training year, and I don't really give a fig about the CD other than patting myself on the back as it comes down. How do I know what interval prescription when? I look at studies, at plans recommended by authoritative coaches and at my personal experience and history.

For instance, this week and next week, I'm doing Z4 intervals as a tune-up for what follows: Z3 muscle tension intervals. I don't know anyone else who does these, but they were recommended by Ed Burke for this time of year and I've had good results from doing them, not to say that I might also have had good results from doing something else. But life is short, only so many years to experiment, and no years at all to waste. I also do low load, high cadence intervals on my rollers. A good use of trainer time is to do intervals that one cannot do out on the road - maybe the best use. I get that that's why you're doing what you're doing, so enjoy and good luck with that. However, I don't expect anyone else to do what I'm doing and you shouldn't either.

redlude97

You have a much better way with words than most of us in this thread. Nailed it

Hermes

Goals drive training protocols. Heart rate response or power does not determine what I decide to do as a cycling athlete. Having said that, the shape of my mean maximal power curve is indicative of which cycling events I may excel at assuming excelling is a goal. Heart rate response or cardiac drift or its more modern term aerobic decoupling do not offer much insight into an athletes capability such as sprinter, pursuitist, time trialist, rondaneer, road racer and etc, Heart rate and its response to heat and other factors may show ones level of fitness.

Personally, I post to share my experience and participate in discussions. I always learn something. I am not interested in peeing in others punch bowl or having the last word. Having said that, I was surfing the web on the topic of cardiac drift and aerobic decoupling. I found this sight hosted by a cycling coach, who is also a PhD physiologist.

Interestingly, he discusses cardiac drift and aerobic decoupling and references Friel

Aerobic Decoupling: Still just CV drift, and not worth the time

“Cardiovascular drift” (CV drift) is a phenomenon whereby some CV responses begin a continuous time-dependent change, or “drift,” after ˜ 10 min of prolonged moderate-intensity exercise (e.g., 50–75% V̇o2max) in a neutral or warm environment… characterized by a progressive decline in stroke volume (SV) and pulmonary and systemic mean arterial pressures (MAPs) and a parallel increase in heart rate (HR), whereas cardiac output is maintained nearly constant.” Coyle & González-Alonso, 2001

In ESP Tipcast 87 I discussed the irrelevance of aerobic decoupling (AD) as both a measure of fitness, as well as a training tool. In truth, I hate the term because it is not only grossly misleading and strikes me as an attempt to repackage a well-known concept in exercise physiology as a new break through in coaching. Consider the two quotes at the top of this article. The first is from Joe Friel’s original article on AD, the other is CV drift as defined in a review paper by one of the world’s pre-eminent exercise physiologists (Ed Coyle), who I would also rate as a leading expert on endurance runners and cyclists. Aerobic decoupling implies there’s some sort of “break” in the aerobic system, when in fact there’s nothing really changing with the aerobic energy system. If anything, we should call it cardiovascular decoupling, but that would sound awfully close CV drift, and not nearly as new age. In the rest of this article, I’ll put forth a few extra pieces of information to clarify what CV drift is, and why using it as a regular metric makes little sense.

The evidence to date shows that temperature and hydration are both associate with CV drift, but that the underlying cause is actually increased HR, which likely reduces the filling time of the heart; the less time spent filling the heart with blood, the lower the SV will be. What causes the steady rise in HR is still up for debate, but probably relates to an increased spill-over of cathecholamines – often referred to as adrenaline. If you actually block that increase in HR with drugs (e.g., beta-blockers work well), you can often eliminate the drop in SV. Also, if you attenuate body temperature and/or dehydration, you also reduce that SV drop. But is this necessary?

We have long assumed yes, but human performance is complex, and simply limiting say dehydration to 2% or less has been shown to be unnecessary. The fact is, we simply do not know enough about CV drift to definitely say if eliminating it improves performance or training, so for anyone to choose a specific threshold, like 5%, and then start making training recommendations from CV drift is premature at best, and misleading at worst.

CV drift lower SV

fstrnu

@Carbonfiberboy

So you're saying that a control variable is confounding because it doesn't change? Seriously?

Regarding the rest of your post, I recommend googling "TrainerRoad" and "Zwift" and searching this thread for "MSI".

fstrnu

@Hermes,

All I get from your reference is challenging the conclusiveness of something inconclusive.

Studies have limitations.

Internal data is secret.

Everyone is the subject is a study with N=1.

When a variable moves and others don't, it's not because of the variables which aren't moving. Control variables don't confound when they don't move.

Additionally, confounding variables don't influence forever and will come out in the wash over time. Not rocket science.

fstrnu

Decided to delay power increase in favor of first validating frequency. Good thing I did because yesterday's workout (third 6 x 10) was brutally difficult. Cardiac drift = 9%. Obviously, endurance is not declining so first thought is fatigue from suppression but HR is stable. Hypothesis is garden variety poor performance from poor recovery from poor nutrition which has been quite poor and alcohol intake sure didn't help either. Sleep quality has not been great lately either and stress has been somewhat high recently although not bad since prior workout but could still be catching up to me if fatigue accumulation is a factor. I do recall having a nap on Sunday. Regardless, plan is to be as lazy as possible, eat well, etc. and pray that Friday isn't as bad as yesterday. Also, intensity of these workouts is quite high as I'm substituting intensity for time to manage uniform microcycle. Certainly more taxing and different from pure AeT.

rubiksoval

Clearly all this guy wants is to use this site as his own personal blog and the mods are okay with it until he starts whining and reporting stuff that points this fact out.

He clearly knows very little useful information and despite constantly commenting about his grievous lack of communication skills in which he desperately struggles to convey even the simplest of thoughts, he can not take any advice or view things from any other perspective that's not as dysfunctional as his own.

His attention-seeking behavior has droned on for months now. We're all a bit dumber for it, I believe.

Really nothing more to say at this point. Too bad the ignore button doesn't hide his collection of ridiculous threads.

Bandera

OP: Is your signature line "xxxxxxxxxxx" a commercial advertisement shilling for your personal profit on BF?

Edit: Oddly enough that sig line has vanished so the original quote will be replaced by "xxxxxxxxxxx", which must mean "Yes" that was advertising.

-Bandera