Cycling and Endurance Sport Training Information

Getting the Most from your Training

 By Chris Harnish M.S., Coach

As a coach, I am often asked to evaluate someone’s current training program and offer advice on what do next. This is such a common question, because many of us are excellent planners, with excellent training plans, but our training outcomes usually fall below or even above the plan we’ve set, leaving us stymied. Assuming you have already lain out your season similar to what I discussed in my last article (Periodization), I will take the next step in the process, REALIZATION.

Realization is the process of making a plan happen. Once you’ve been training a couple of months the fitness plateau’s a bit, making it necessary to “change” your training. A good plan at the beginning of the year takes this into account and allows you to simply adjust training accordingly. However, sometimes your plan doesn’t match the effects of your program, leaving you wondering where to go next. Periodic testing can elucidate your fitness status, but frequency is critical.

What are we testing for?

Testing is a general term used for any number of methods for assessing an athlete’s physiological state of readiness, or fitness. More specifically, however, testing is used to determine:

Aerobic Capacity (AC) – One’s ability to utilize oxygen (VO 2 Max) can influence one’s success, and is often used synonymously with endurance, but changes very little over a given training period. However, AC can also be used more basically to simply describe one’s aerobic fitness, which changes dramatically and should be monitored regularly. For cycling, we can express AC as a HR or power output at lactate threshold, a steady state lactate level, or even a fixed lactate level (e.g., 4 mMol lactate).

Anaerobic Capacity (AnC) – Anaerobic capacity simply refers to an athlete’s ability to generate power using stored glycogen (sugar) without using oxygen, which results in lactic acid or lactate production. A higher AnC usually translates into a better sprinting ability and power, but can also have a positive influence on overall cycling performance. We can express AnC as a rate of lactate production per unit of body weight and time for a given average power output (i.e., mMol.kg-1 .min-1 at 400 watts). Peak power output can be used to assess sprint power.

Lactate threshold (LT) – LT, as most of us conceive it, is the highest sustainable effort where lactate levels in the blood are elevated but stable; a more descriptive title typically used is maximal lactate steady state. Long held as the Gold Standard of testing, LT testing is fraught with a number of problems, not the least of which is it’s time and cost. While testing has become more accessible to the masses, LT itself provides no special information in and of itself, nor does it constitute an ideal training intensity. If we’re looking for a way to predict performance over time, fixed lactate concentrations provide an equally effective predictive power. In short, LT testing poses no advantages and a number of disadvantages making it undesirable.

Training Zones – Testing is often cited as being essential for determining and updating training zones. Certainly testing can be helpful for setting zones, but should never be used in isolation from personal experience and training data. Moreover, those of us who train and race with a power meter and continually analyze our data can see these trends (good or bad) in training zones as we move through the season.

The obvious question here is: “WHY ARE WE TESTING?” After all, if we own a power meter we can get a new “assessment” each week, even daily. If we do not, then testing seems prudent, but is it absolutely necessary? No, but routine lactate testing is highly useful; testing can bring clarity to your decision making processes and gives a clear indication how an athlete’s latest block of training has affected their body. In other words, it eliminates a lot of guess work. The right tests can tell you just how effective your last block of training was and what your next block should include and is illustrated below.

How do we test?

Some suggest setting aside a week for testing. On one day, you perform a 30 sec or 1 min test to determine sprinting power and capacity one day; on another day, a full LT test is completed. However, one could obtain as much useful data from a single 1 hr test session by using one or two submax workloads and one 1 min maximal test. Here’s how it works:

Joe Ryder, comes to us for an evaluation after a long layoff of injury and illness, and reports that he needs to be ready for his team’s training camp in February. He uses a power meter in training and racing, and needs a real training plan. His body fat is estimated, and once we set up his bike, he warms-up for 15 minutes, and then performs two 8 minute sub-maximal stages at 200 and 300 watts, respectively. We record lactate, HR, perceived exertion (using the Borg 6-20 scale) and cadence. Our goal here is to achieve one workload near 4 mM of lactate* because that is the marker we prefer to use. After the submax tests, Joe Ryder cools down 10 min and then rests 5 min more. Afterwards, he performs a maximal 1 min test; another blood sample is taken so that we can measure peak (highest) lactate, which is recorded and adjusted for weight and time. For example, the heavier the rider is or the longer it takes to peak, the lower the value, making absolute lactate values misleading. For example, if two riders both peak at 10 mM of lactate after 5 minutes, but one weighs 60 kg and the other weighs 70, the rider who weighs more will have a lower peak lactate.