Notso_fastLane

I found this pretty interesting.

I think I need to bump up my intense sessions a bit, but most of my 'training' is commuting.

Ted Talk on endurance training:

Carbonfiberboy 

Sure you have to have easy days, but you also have to have hard days. Scandinavian endurance athletes train extremely hard when they train hard, easy when they train easy. This is "polarized training," which has a Norwegian source. The three zones are from polarized training theory. Most of us here are familiar with that theory. It's usually put as 80/20, IOW 80% of workout days are easy, 20% of workout days are hard. Few are in the middle. That said, just have a go at it. Yeah, the hard days hurt like the devil. If you don't do the hard days and have that pain, you get nowhere. But he's absolutely correct that if you want really good endurance, you have to have a lot of the easy time. OTOH, to ride crits and 30 mile A rides, you can do just fine working out 6 hours/week, most of the workouts having both hard and easy times.

I'm an endurance athlete and I suffer like a dog when I train. It's obvious that endurance begins when you begin to endure. He makes it seem all too easy. For instance the polarized zones are divided not by HR or power, but by breathing rate, ventilation thresholds, called VT1 and VT2. I do a lot of VT1 workouts on my rollers, trying to stay right at VT1. I'm pretty well conditioned, and find that my legs begin to hurt after about an hour of that. 2 hours is my absolute limit for it. It hurts like the devil. However, that's what he's talking about here: high volume of VT1 work. When his female runner walks rather than runs up that hill, she's holding VT1. OTOH, nothing happens unless you hold it for more than 45'. Endurance comes from enduring. It's maybe harder and more painful to hold that power for very long periods than it is to do intervals with rest periods.

So it's still no pain no gain, but it's not all pain, only the parts which actively make you fitter. One has to do the VT1 work, and the intervals, both. I started running a mile every day at 12, but it was flat where I lived. I never ran hills, and never got much faster. 4 years later, I went away to a college which was in a very hilly area. I started training hard on those hills, totally panting coming over the top, and I got a lot faster and quickly. We also did a lot of long distance road work, 4-6 mile runs, which have to be done at a moderate pace, One has to do it all if one wants to build endurance. I mean endurance like for fast hilly doubles, that kind of thing. It takes a lot of hours and a lot of hard work.

I mentioned that many riders here are familiar with polarized training. Some of us have tried it but gave it up. It's really hard for a non-pro to keep to that kind of schedule, and two days/week of zone 5 intervals plus all the mileage involved in the 80% is not an easy schedule. My legs hurt all the time when I was trying it. There's a reason those folks training polarized are pros and it's called talent. A very great deal of talent is simply the ability to recover quickly. There's no easy way. Yeah, go out at 191 average watts for 6 hours, staying below VT1.

berner

The man who said we have to know our own limitations had it right. For example, I'm more of a sprinter than an endurance athlete. No matter how I might train, I am not, nor ever will be, much good at endurance efforts. Consequently. recognizing our body's natural inclinations is key. However, those inclinations can always be considerably improved.

In professional endurance athletes, the key difference between them and everyone else, as pointed out in the above quote, is the ability to recover and put in another hard effort soon after the initial effort.. One of the very best endurance athletes today is a woman from Colorado named Courtney Dauwalter. In an interview, she said she runs about 100 miles per week. After an ultra marathon, she feels pretty well trashed for a few days but by Thursday she is feeling normal and begins training soon thereafter. There are several videos of her and you might like one of her running an ultra on Mount Blanc which she won with enough energy left to share with the crowd.

Carbonfiberboy 

Absolutely, but don't sell yourself short. I'm also a natural sprinter and suck at endurance. My problem is that I love endurance work even though I'm bad at it. So I just train the heck out of it and can beat most naturals in my age group because they, being naturals, aren't sufficiently motivated. Until maybe 65 I could outsprint everyone in the group. I remember finishing a double with a long hill sprint, just passing everyone. I'd been riding hard, too. Being able to sprint is really fun and it helped that I kept on sprinting whenever I could start a selection or over the final hill. There are examples of pros who reinvented themselves, usually only somewhat successfully, but still.

burnthesheep

I think a lot of people have been rightly confused by TP and other groups using TSS, freshness, and TSB jargon. They misinterpret that as "I need a really negative TSB to achieve". Not necessarily. That's just throwing paint at the wall and hoping you get the Mona Lisa.

I tend to not do a good job taking easy days easy, because it's fun to ride faster and chase a KOM than fart at 180w for 3 hours without ever going over 240w for anything.

But, that's right. You have to have the right freshness to execute the hard work well. During that hard work you have to hit the numbers and durations at those numbers to cause adaptation. Then you have to have chose your numbers and durations rightly for the event you want to do well in. Specificity. Also, the long easy stuff has to be easy enough and long enough. Easy enough to target the right energy system so that other systems don't contribute and throw off the adaption. Long enough to cause heart stroke/shape changes. So, at least 90min of z2 per session for any of it to be worth it.

I think people misinterpret how hard pros ride when they're doing a 4 hour ride day with intervals also tossed in. In between sets and riding to/from the hill/mountain......they're probably in z1 or low z2. Which for mortals might look like a ton of watts still. But to them, it's a talking nose breathing joy ride out and back.

I have down mostly the "hard" part really well. I'd say I'd put myself in there with a lot of folks on a ratio of output versus time spent actually training. I do not have down the "80" part. I'd love to with more time in the future. But, what I do with the little time I have means I can rip the legs off some guys who ride 2x the hours per week but mostly only focus on their "80" part.

hubcyclist

I dunno, I think there's something to the negative TSB thing. I know Joe Friel advocated that TSB of -10 to -30 is the area for productive training, and in my recent experience that's been true. Last winter to early spring I had some great gains when I had my TSB below -10 and then leveled off over the summer since my TSB hovered around zero, and now I've done 5 weeks of consistent sweet spot training where my TSB bottomed out at -20 and I'm hoping to bump up 10w for the next phase.I think the whole thing is to stress your body enough for a few weeks, recover and adapt, get back at it.

burnthesheep

This is why I track TSS by myself in Excel, so I can do so BY ZONE. Ain't no way in hell I'm going to be able to hold lower than -10 TSB for three weeks straight AND be able to do z5 intervals every other day. Those sessions will either suffer, bomb, fail, or not be productive.

So, when I track TSS by zone, I can see that my TSB go negative........for a zone. To me, that's the aha moment. Not that my overall TSB is negative to impart a change. But that the TSB for a zone has gone negative. To me that says "I'm now stressing that energy system a lot and frequently enough to impart a change".

So, if I was doing a "challenge fondo" like Haute Route, I'd want to see Z1 and Z2 go really negative on TSB. If I was preparing for a crit, I'd expect zones 5 and up to go negative.

I also in between doing things make sure I don't neglect things. If I see some zones sagging on my time-chart of TSS, I'll toss in some workouts or rides to bring em up.

That's how I do it.

Carbonfiberboy 

And I thought I spent too much time over minutia. Guess I was wrong. So during what time period? The last 2 weeks before the event? There was a National RR champ who did that for the last two weeks, can't remember the name. Massive volume.

burnthesheep

For a longer event (since I usually do 1.5hr or less races) I would need to add volume over maybe 1.5 month. I like to get to my fondo length then go a little past it and be able to add in a few small efforts.

So, TSB might be really negative at beginning as I start longer easier rides. Then go normal in middle. Then negative again a week out. Then a little taper.

Same for short events, but for an hour or 30 min race I can ramp up intensity quicker than long z2 volume.

Again, I ain’t winning anything. But, I have a good value on the time I can train.

DaveLeeNC

What is "TSB by zone"? Are you somehow dividing up each ride by zone in some manner? Or what exactly does that mean?

Thanks.

dave

burnthesheep

So, if you get TSB overall from trainingpeaks, I assigned a weighting to each zone's contribution to TSS per workout. Once you've done that TSB by zone would just follow the same math they use to get it overall. The sheet just does it 6 times, one for each zone.

Then, if your overall TSS per week is lets say 400. You might have 40 for Z1, 60 for Z2, 20 for Z3, 150 for Z4, 100 for Z5, 30 for Z6. Then, over time you've got you ATL and CTL for those (the 7day and longer moving averages).

If you normally ride 400 TSS a week with that breakout but are going to do a "challenge" finisher fondo of some long distance.........I'd probably start ramping up the Z1/Z2 and see that go negative while the others go positive a bit.

It just makes no sense to me to say "to adapt I need negative TSB". Ok, but doing that might make you miss good quality work for tougher zones.

I don't feel you can track really negative TSB overall if you're not a pro and also try to have really high intensity workouts several times a week.

Saying you'll do negative TSB overall also doesn't take into account event length. Why would you want a person who normally rides a lot of Z2 club stuff who wants to do a 30 min crit have an overall negative TSB if they won't have the energy to do some very very hard workouts?

That's just my thinking. I may be wrong.

I wouldn't achieve 80/20 by trying to do 80/20 every week exactly the same. Perhaps there's weeks at 90/10 or 95/5 leading up to weeks at 60/40 or 50/50 or even heavier on the intensity right before an event.

I'd periodize the 80/20 balance.

Carbonfiberboy 

Thanks. That's about what I've been doing. I'm a little different in that my A rides are 9-10 hours and I probably can't train anymore than you can, in my case, age limited. So I have to train smart. Always looking for new ideas.

redlude97

TSS is based on normalized power so it is weighted towards intensity, another option is to track using Xert which has a low, high, and peak XSS(similar to TSS) and corresponding low, high and peak training loads and determines your freshness(TSB) from that that accumulated XSS Xert Strain Score ? Xert

Its a lot easier than that though, just plan on only 2-3 really hard days per week, and backfill the rest of the rides with as much volume and intensity as you can handle and have time for and still recover from. The "really hard" can change throughout the year as you approach your A events, they might be SS intervals during base, threshold and VO2max during build, and sprints and/or over unders etc during a peak phase.

caloso

TL;DR

Your easy rides are too hard and your hard rides are too easy.

DaveLeeNC

Got it - thanks. dave

work4bike

I'm finding that training easy is way more beneficial than most know. I started doing this in response to a running injury I was having a very hard time of recovering from; I was almost ready to stop running all together.

I started an easy running program, meaning I was running at about 65% of my max H/R. At first it was so easy, I couldn't believe I was doing any good, but I kept the faith and kept at it. After about a month I could see big results, I think because I was able to run day after day, which is important, because consistency in running is the most important thing to improve running. You can't run day after day when you run at a moderate intensity, despite it feeling relatively easy. That's the thing, moderate training, where most of us train at feels easy, but overtime the stress on the body builds up. A couple of things I've noticed is that my H/R is more consistent, I have less cardiac drift and overtime my speed has increased while staying at a low H/R.

Here's a very good article that also references the guy in the OP's video: https://www.runnersworld.com/advance...tensity-ratio/


And this approach very much applies to cycling, it's not just a running thing.

Very important excerpts from the article...

The toughest part of this training, at least for me, was going so damn slow. I can't emphasize that enough, keep it easy and do it day after day and soon I literally couldn't wait to go on a run.





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