To add to what I posted earlier
If I ever had one ask from posters in forums like this it’s to STOP advocating Z2 training as if all Z2 is the same thing. It’s not ok to give people advice telling them to ride Z2, because this zone is too broad and that advice too vague. Riding up near the top of Z2 while remaining under AeT is really only possible for well trained aerobically efficient athletes. Advice needs to be much more specific when it comes to telling people about easy endurance spins.
Very interesting reading. Does that also imply you’d better get some sugar in while going hard at the end of your z2 training, to avoid muscle cannibalizing? And also take proteins only after all sort of training, never before or during?
At the end of the day, it comes down to the purpose of the session, and what you’re trying to achieve.
If you want to build fatigue resistance, it is better to do workouts after doing “Z2” work.
If your main goal is a hard session, eg. some VO2 work, then it’s better to do it fresh.
If the goal is an easy day, then try avoid doing high intensity.
However, short, hard sprints (not all out, but high cadence bursts) aren’t that fatiguing and help with the neuromuscular power. This is good for the development of your fast twitch muscle fibers, for when you need to suddenly accelerate to a change in pace in a bunch. It’s not the same as the all out efforts a sprinter would do.
Doing the intensity at the end of the session being this session of aerobic threshold what it does is to work the resistance to fatigue and physiologically activation of PGC1-alpha for mitochondrial biogenesis, we have different ways to activate it one is with long sessions LIT (the gesture of pedalling, muscle contraction long in time) or by intensity.
Although each case is different, imagine athletes whose objectives are xc, xco, cyclocross races where the starts are practically at the maximum, in these cases if you have to do intensity at the beginning and often with minimal warm-ups.
Each case is different.
Many are forgetting the heartrate, when it is the best indicator we have at the moment to measure the internal load, the vast majority of my sessions are controlled by heart rate, I would never put an athlete to work 3 hours LIT only with watts, the sessions above the first threshold also go by pulse, where we have two ranges 78-83% of maximum heart rate and 80-88% of maximum heart rate.
Other sessions that we work a lot are sets of 5x5 and 4x8 totally controlled by pulse, we can’t go beyond the set pulse at second threshold.
How do we evaluate vo2max sessions? Through the heart rate, although in these cases if the target is watts we look to be above 90% of the maximum heart rate as long as possible, for this we must know the athlete and adjust these sessions, not everyone likes to do sessions at the same intensity, so we value Bossi intervals, Lisbon, HIDIT, even Over/unders if the kinetics of Vo2max is good, we can spend time above that heart rate.
Ineogo San Millan said in one of his interviews that if you do a hard effort at the beginning of a long easy ride your body switches to more anaerobic work which is ok but people don’t know that it stays in that state for a much longer time than the interval duration alone ( for extra 30min or longer) so you loose much more benefits of the long endurance ride than just the intervals summed time and that makes it effectively much shorter.
So for example same 3h ride with a short hard sprint can be effectively (from aerobics system perspective):
-a 2,5h long z2 ride if the sprint is near the end
-only 1,5h long z2 ride if the sprint is in the beginning
Meaning 1hr is wasted bc your body gets no aerobic benefits when riding with both systems enabled/activated.
Yes there was a GCN YouTube too. If I remember correctly the gist was even a short sprint or hard effort up a small hill could take 20-30 mins to get your body back to the ‘system’ you’re aiming to use.
To be honest cycling fitness seems riddled with contradictions and differing opinions. I’ve also read that ‘base’ training is unimportant for anyone doing less duration than say a tour rider. And reading this forum has already got me confused!!
Base training is important for any athlete and any discipline. But if you only have time for 3 sessions a week or less with a duration of 1 hour or less, you can do more High Intensity (relative to total time). Simply there’s way more recovery time in between sessions. With such a regime, your fitness chart will plateau really quickly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that your performance will stagnate. This is something that comes up almost daily now on the forum…
The fitness chart is build with load as input and load is relative to your actual performance (FTP). If you do the same sessions in duration and intensity for several months, load will plateau and thus fitness will plateau. But if you increase your FTP during those months, the total amount of work is higher. That’s why a flat Fitness curve doesn’t necessarily mean that your performance isn’t increasing. Once again, Fitness will plateau for everyone at a certain moment and the height of that plateau is very strongly correlated to the available training time.
Regarding the bodies ‘energy systems’: if you want to add a bit of intensity to an endurance ride, always do the intensity work at the end of your session. Example: ride 80 min endurance 60-70% FTP as target and when 2 blocks away from home, do a couple of maximal sprints followed by some soft pedalling to cool down.
This is up for debate…it depends which school of thought you subscribe to as to whether this is actually going to make a difference or not…
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Having an aerobic base is important for any athlete of any basis. Its the back bone of being able to build fitness…but that being said, if you are a really time crunched athlete then you only really have the intensity lever to pull to create stimulus you need to develop.
EDIT @MedTechCD beat me to it 
I’m sure. From the little I’ve seen, even the allegedly top scientists in the field agree that there are a lot of opinions and debate still. That was the gcn video with Milan.
I could of guessed it was from ISM…
My (very recent) experience is that it seems to depend a lot of where you are in your base phase. In the first few weeks, I would avoid any intensity during dedicated endurance workouts. Middle of base phase, start introducing some intensity in the latter part and to the end of the base phase, it’s more like ‘do it when you feel like it’.
What I experienced at the start of this winter season is that it can take quite a bit of time before your base work starts to deliver. But I have never seen it deliver as good as this season. It’s the first winter that I was really dedicated to doing a good base phase. Duration and frequency of my low intensity running was increased gradually, but it took over 9 weeks before I actually saw some speed improvement. And once it kicked in, it looks like a never ending path…
This is 18 weeks of dedicated base training with very little intensity. All done on a HR cap of 122bpm. (my MAF HR = 180 - minus age)
In the beginning, speed was barely improving, but frequency and duration was. Now I’m still increasing duration and almost daily I find that my avg pace is a couple of seconds better. Even on 2 - 2.5hr running, there’s almost no decoupling when looking at both power and pace versus HR. I could easily do a high intensity effort at the end of those long runs.
Remember two points:
Aerobic fitness
High intensity fitness
Hi! Is the Run Stats 2 graph built with the standard GAP, cadence and Power(?) with an applied filter of HR? Can you tell me what are the measures of the Run Stats 1 graph (Frequency, efficiency and tempo(?)) Thanks in advance!
Both graphs are made from the Z2RUNxxx Custom Activity Fields:
Click on the Help icon beside the metric to get more info and/or check this thread:
Exactly the convo I was thinking of. IIRC, it was on Fast Talk. And as explained by others in this thread, the aim of the session determines the placement and type of the intensity.
This was my primary thought in this thread. I find that people often aren’t patient enough for the rewards. They bust out far too early. Depending on the person/athlete, I tell them to give me 6-8 months, and if they do then there comes a day when I get an message, “You won’t believe what just happened.” After that is a longer period of strengthening in the foundation of aerobic capacity, as aerobic power and anaerobic capacity & power are built as needed.
…which means that training can provide more consistent stimulus (still assuming adequate rest & recovery of systems).
❝Prolonged inflammatory responses in the muscles are still ongoing 96 hours after hard workouts.❞
~Oliver Neubauer, PhD Recovery and the Immune System
“During the first 1 to 2 weeks of a new training cycle the body adapts quickly to the new stimulus. In the next few weeks the power of this same stimulus to provoke an adaptation will progressively fade to end up completely after 6 weeks (fig. 3). We therefore call week 1 and 2 of the adaptation process the “fast adaptation phase” and weeks 3 to 6 the “stabilization phase”.
…Why wait 6 weeks before introducing a new stimulus or a new training load? Why not change the training plan after 2 weeks when the stimulus has induced its fast adaptation? The reason is that weeks 3 to 6 are necessary to stabilize the adaptations brought about in weeks 1 and 2.
… For the improvement of the endurance capacity to take place, thousands of small cellular parts need to be rebuilt and/or newly produced. Some of them will be rebuilt quickly while others will require more time. If the training load is increased too soon, only the cellular structures that can adapt quickly will be able to follow the imposed training rhythm. All the others will fall behind; they will not be rebuilt or, at worst, be irrevocably lost. As a consequence, there will be no homogeneous development of the endurance capacity and, in due course, this may result in the swimmer breaking down and becoming overtrained.”
The Science of Winning: Planning, Periodizing and Optimizing Swim Training, Jan Olbrecht
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PS: Essential listening, IMHO. Training structure, periodisation and the science of winning with Jan Olbrecht, PhD | EP#198
Who would have thought. Have heard of course to increase load in a managed way to prevent overtraining, but this…crazy.
What’s often not appreciated is that nothing is linear. What’s more, every part has it’s own timeline, which is usually longer than anticipated especially once items are compounded.
