We do the bulk of our training in zones 1 and 2, so this episode will explain how to define them and—more importantly—how to best train them.
Episode Transcript
Introduction
Trevor Connor 00:05
Hello and welcome to Fast Talk, your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Trevor Connor here with Coach Rob Pickels. A few episodes ago, we talked with Dr. Stephen Seiler about how to best perform high intensity interval training and while that work is always challenging, it’s actually fairly easy to execute effectively. That’s because we have very detailed definitions of our high end intensities or zones. Plus, most of us can wrap our heads around a 30 second all out effort, or a steady five minute threshold interval, but what about a steady five hour effort as hard as you can go? Thats a lot harder to wrap your head around as you walk out the door. What pace of power do you even start at? The fact is that 80% of our time should be spent in Zone One and Two, but most of the research and our training tools focus on the minutia of our work at/or above our anaerobic threshold, the 20%. We don’t have a great way to figure out our Zone Two power or heart rate. Even harder, is figuring out how to pace and fuel a four hour workout, so you stay in your Zone Two, something that can be far more complex and nuanced in any interval workout. Yet, this is where many of us get little guidance. So joining us today to help explain Zone Two training is Fast Talk Labs’ new Head Exercise Physiologist, Jared Berg. Jared has been testing and advising athletes for years and one of the greatest values he brings them is in helping them understand and execute their Zone One and Two training. He’ll explain to us how he figures out each athlete’s lower zones, whether we should train at the top end of Zone Two, or if there’s a value in training in Zone One, the physiological gains of Zone One and Two training, and how to best execute a Zone Two workout. Along with Jared, we’ll hear from Coach Kristen Arnold with Source Endurance and founder of the virtual testing platform Inside, Sebastian Weber. So get ready to go a little slower, and let’s make you fast.
Welcoming Jared to Fast Talk Labs
Trevor Connor 01:51
Well Jared, welcome to the show. We haven’t had you here for a bit, I think it was episode 89 was the last time we had you on the show.
Jared Berg 01:59
89? What are we on now?
Rob Pickels 02:00
331
Jared Berg 02:01
It’s been a hot minute.
Trevor Connor 02:04
It’s been a hot minute. You were at CU sports when we recorded with you, actually at the center.
Jared Berg 02:10
Yeah exactly, in the little fish bowl conference.
Rob Pickels 02:14
That’s a back in the day situation.
Jared Berg 02:16
Yeah, I can visualize that. Everybody walking by us doing a podcast.
Trevor Connor 02:20
But Jared, excited you are now part of the team. You have taken over our services program, so you are offering all the physiological services for Fast Talk Labs and we’re really excited about this.
Jared Berg 02:32
Yeah, and sports nutrition services, which I’m also excited to be be working with.
Trevor Connor 02:37
So anybody who’s interested, take a look at our website. We’ve completely revamped the services. Jared has a lot to offer. So if you have any interest, take a look and there’s my plug for somebody who has been doing my testing for what, 15 years now.
Jared Berg 02:51
Yeah, it’s been a while. Thank you, Trevor. Check
Rob Pickels 02:53
Check out www.fast.labs.com for more information.
Introducing Episode Topics — Finding Aerobic Thresholds and Zone Two
Trevor Connor 02:58
Thank you. I needed somebody to do the radio voice. So let’s dive into this episode. So a few weeks ago, we talked with Dr. Seiler and we focused on high intensity intervals, really getting his take on what we should be doing in terms of high intensity, but as we know, if you’re into the polarized approach, that’s actually 20% or less of your time. The other 80% is nice and slow and Jared, you said, Let’s do an episode on the 80%. We have talked about this a lot on the show, but where I really value having you here is, I get hit all the time with that question of, What is my aerobic threshold? What is my Zone Two? You can give percentages, you can give calculations, but it’s actually a really hard thing to figure out. Ultimately it’s something that you can only figure out in the lab. So the perspective I’m hoping you’re going to give through the show is what you see with athletes when you are testing them when it comes to that Zone One, Zone Two range. How do you figure it out? What are the benefits you see from training in those zones? What are you seeing when you’re testing the athletes?
Jared Berg 04:11
Certainly it’s a big area, when you’re talking about 80% that’s a lot of someone’s training. The 20% some high intensity. You don’t have a lot to work with, but when you’re talking about 80%, especially when you have athletes training 20, 30 hours a week, that’s a lot of volume. So trying to understand what you do within that 80% it can be really important, from my standpoint.
Rob Pickels 04:37
Yeah, and it seems you have to get it right for that 80% to really be worthwhile. One of the big concepts that we spoke with Dr. Seiler about last week was balancing, sort of the stress versus reward equation and that’s where, if we’re spending a lot of hours in this supposedly lower stress zone, it’s probably pretty important to know that we’re actually in the place that we think that we are and I’ve seen athletes go off the rails thinking they were doing the right thing, being 5% off, and it can make all the difference in the world.
Importance of Accurate Zone Two Training
Jared Berg 05:12
Yeah, it certainly can. I think that’s the most important thing to nail down right off the bat, is getting that 80% right. That top end of where you are really training in the 80% area, to where you’re actually starting to hit that 20% and we’re talking about a threshold. We’re talking about physiological markers that defined whether you’re where you’re supposed to be for the 80% of training versus that 20% and that’s what you want to really nail down right now. If you’re trying to do that using just estimates, estimates of max heart rates, typical zone profiles like that. Or if you’re using FTP type testing on the run or the bike, to nail down where that 80% should be. We’re talking 80% we’re talking about the top of Zone Two often, you can be a little bit off. You could be off by that 5% or so, and that can make a big difference.
Trevor Connor 06:12
So let’s dive there because I find this really interesting. Before we started recording here, we had just kind of a quick side comment of that aerobic threshold, that top end of Zone Two and a five zone model or top end of Zone One and a three zone model. Where is that? We have in the show notes, 75 to 80% of FTP. Rob came in and said, “No way.” Jared and I were saying “no, up to 85%.” Rob’s like “No, 76%.”
Rob Pickels 06:41
Less than that, in my opinion.
Jared Berg 06:42
Yeah, you were thinking like 70, 72.
Rob Pickels 06:45
I would say oftentimes 70, 72%, but what’s interesting is the conversation that we were all having, I think as we discussed it a little bit deeper was, the athlete that we were sort of referencing in this, right Trevor. You were going a lot based off of your personal experience and back in the day, listeners believe it or not, Trevor used to be a halfway decent cyclist.
Trevor Connor 07:08
I used to actually be able to go sort of fast.
Rob Pickels 07:11
Somewhat fast, faster than I ever did at my best, but with a threshold north of 300 watts, in a relatively small person at the time. Jared, you were talking a lot about some of the triathletes that you’re working with.
Jared Berg 07:25
Exactly! Now you’re starting to kind of talk about the profile of an athlete, really is kind of where we’re going into and so if you have an athlete, someone like Trevor or more of an endurance cyclist, somebody focusing on longer 100 mile gravel races or Ironman type training events. Their threshold or top of Zone Two could be at a different percentage of their actual functional threshold power.
Differing Aerobic Thresholds Amongst Athlete Profiles
Rob Pickels 07:57
For me, what I was thinking of was more of your everyday athlete, a threshold that’s maybe between, I don’t know 225 watts, 250 watts, or an athlete like myself who has a relatively strong anaerobic system and a relatively weak aerobic system. That is very much going to skew these percentages of FTP that you’re looking at and ultimately, it’s funny, I kind of stopped our little argument by saying, “Guys, this is actually the best argument for why we should actually be doing lab testing” because we have examples of how the upper end of Zone Two, the upper end of your base zone, is in this 20% swing of FTP. How do you possibly get that right without actually just looking under the hood, seeing what is happening, physiologically, taking it literally from the horse’s mouth, taking it literally from the source, getting information that way.
Trevor Connor 08:54
I want to emphasize this and hand it to Jared because this is a really important thing to understand. One of the most common emails I get from our listeners, “where is my top end of my Zone Two? Where is that aerobic threshold?” When we’re talking about lactate threshold, we have the arguments about 20 minutes, multiply that by 95% does that give you a good threshold, or do you need to do an hour? But the truth of the matter is all these different ways of testing that lactate threshold, you’re going to be within 10 watts, probably. You’re going to be pretty close.
Rob Pickels 09:27
I would say It’s bigger than that.
Jared Berg 09:29
You could get more air.
Trevor Connor 09:31
You’re still going to get relatively close. You’re hopefully a top end of your sustainable effort. You’re going to get the feel of it. When somebody says, “How do I go out on the road and test my aerobic threshold,” that’s harder to do. Go out and do five hours as hard as you can do five hours, that’s really hard to pace and as you said, 72 to 85% that’s a huge range. So the point I’m making is, we can have those arguments about the lactate threshold, but you can still go out and get a decent feel for it because you’re just trying to go as hard as you can for whatever that length of time is. We don’t have a comparable thing for that lower threshold.
Rob Pickels 10:11
Yeah, Trevor and tacking on to what you’re saying, and this is just my personal style of coaching, oftentimes anything that’s above threshold, LT Two, FTP, whatever you want to call it, I kind of let athletes do what they’re capable of, performance wise, for that unit of time. Four by eight minutes, as hard as you can, which is probably about this percent of FTP, but it’s not percent FTP driven. It’s limited by your ability to actually execute.
Jared Berg 10:36
Performance driven.
Rob Pickels 10:36
Exactly, but when you come down to base, it’s not limited by your ability to execute because for a one hour ride, you’re going to go out for an hour or two of base, you could certainly ride much harder than this prescription, which is why the prescription is so important. So below FTP, oftentimes are this percent, this window, all the way up to FTP, all the way up through sub-threshold workouts and so that’s why it is so important to nail exactly where those heart rates are, those powers are, those RPEs are because you have to be descriptive and prescriptive to people to make sure they’re doing it correctly.
Trevor Connor 11:12
So Jared, let’s throw that to you. How do you figure out that aerobic threshold? How do you figure out that top end of zone two?
Lab Signals for Finding Top of Zone Two Threshold
Jared Berg 11:19
Yeah, I would say before I get into exactly what I do in the lab, I will kind of transition from this discussion a little bit, I will see trends, and we kind of talked about this earlier, where we see somebody who has a really amazing anaerobic potential, their VO2 Max watts are quite a bit higher than their lactate threshold watts and they can get lactates up around 10, 12, millimoles or north of that. I will see that their Zone Two, their LT1 or VT1 is at a lower percentage, often compared to their threshold, their functional threshold power. Where somebody who’s more like an Ironman-type athlete or a long gravel racer, longer type endurance rider, a lot of times they’re top of their Zone Two can be closer to their functional threshold power that they might get in that test and so that’s maybe one of the drivers if you’re going to use some of those estimates, that might be how you kind of look at your own self and characterize yourself as a rider, but going more into your question, in the lab I’m going to look at baseline level lactates. I’m gonna look as my lactate starts to rise a little bit from baseline and then when it has a bigger jump and then I can sort of look at inflection points in the data. Then I’ll also look at what’s happening with the ventilatory data. What’s going on with oxygen utilization? When is the blood starting to absorb more oxygen? When is that total amount of oxygen, related to the amount of air being exhaled, starting to increase? And that type of data tells me where someone’s moving from Zone Two to Zone Three is that’s where we’re finding their LT,, their VT1. We’re also seeing some trends in fat utilization, often where fat utilization starts to drop off. Those are all the signs that I’m looking at in the lab and that is going to be the most optimal way to find the top of your Zone Two, to really nail down where that 80% should top out at.
Trevor Explains a Lactate Test
Trevor Connor 13:26
A lot of our listeners might have seen a lactate test. Some of you might not. So basically what you’re doing is you’re having, I think your test is five minute stages.
Jared Berg 13:35
Yeah, I’ll do five minute stages almost all the time. Sometimes I’ll do longer stages, if it’s a real endurance rider.
Trevor Connor 13:42
So let’s go with that five minute stage. So you do five minute stage at X wattage, and you increase it 20, 25 watts. You do another five minutes, and then you increase and you’re measuring the lactates at the start and end of each of these stages. What you’ll generally see is, for a certain number of stages, it’s a flat line. Lactates aren’t going up.
Jared Berg 14:00
Yeah, baseline.
Trevor Connor 14:01
When you get towards the end of the lactate test, you see it kick up really quickly and lactates start going up and that’s when you know athletes hit threshold, and now above threshold. I remember, you were working under Dr San Milan for a while, I remember him showing me this. The difference between a highly trained athlete and a very novice athlete, the highly trained athlete it’s going to be flat for a very long time, and then just kick up. Where an untrained athlete, they might be flat for a single stage or two, but it starts to creep up actually very early on, even before you get to that steep part.
Jared Berg 14:40
Yes, and I would say as a tester, my trick with that is, I’ll start the higher trained athlete at higher workloads. So the athlete’s not training as much or not as well trained, we’ll start maybe at one, one and a half watts per kilo.
Rob Pickels 14:55
Are you doing watts per kilo still?
Jared Berg 14:56
I do watts per kilo.
Rob Pickels 14:57
Wow, the Inigo rubbed off on you and it is stuck!
Jared Berg 14:59
I like the relative and I don’t always have to do half watt per kilo jumps, I’ll do 0.3 watt per kilo jumps.
Rob Pickels 15:00
Make it, personalize it toward the athlete.
Jared Berg 15:11
So it could be anywhere between a 20 watt to a 40 total watt jump, depending on the size of the athlete.
Trevor Connor 15:12
With all the weight I put on since the last time you tested me, that’s bigger jumps.
Rob Pickels 15:21
No, I know, right? It kills you, et me tell you man , having, having done the tests the Inigo way as well, woooh baby.
Jared Berg 15:29
It’s all muscle though, right guys?
Looking at the Data of a Lactate Test
Rob Pickels 15:30
Yeah, that’s why it’s all lunch muscle. No Trevor, I will say I think that I have seen this phenomenon that you’re talking about and I refer to it as an ‘upward sloping baseline.’ What you want to achieve is say, maybe a series of stages that have lactates that are like 0.9, 0.9, 0.9, 1.0, 1.0 and then it starts to jump, 1.5, 2.5, 5, 8 10, a bazillion, but sometimes what we’ll see, and I see this oftentimes in athletes who are less trained or athletes that spend a lot of time in kind of a tempo zone, is that they’ll come in and their first lactate will be relatively high. It’ll be like 1.3, 1.4 and the next stage, it’s already jumped, but it’s jumped a little bit. Now it’s 1.6 and then it’s 1.9 and then it’s 2.4. You’re not seeing this rapid rise, you’re just seeing these small rises each time and for me, I think that we have to think about the underlying physiology here, and that is, we are grading our force as we pedal from easy all the way to maximum by recruiting more muscle fibers and with that muscle fiber recruitment we tend to start with our slow twitch muscle fibers, and as we push harder and harder, we begin bringing in more and more fast twitch type 2A and then type 2X fibers and we know this. There was a lot of research done back in the 70s where they looked at glycogen depletion in individual fibers. At low intensities, slow twitch fibers depleted their glycogen, but fast twitch fibers didn’t really deplete much. Moderate intensities, slow twitch depleted theirs and fast twitch started to deplete theirs, exercising up around VO2 Max and all fibers were depleting. So I think that we can also correlate the lactate that we’re seeing, the changes in the graph, to the fiber types that are being recruited and in these less fit people, their slow twitch fibers are not strong enough to be doing this workload and so they’re already recruiting these type 2A fibers right from the get go, and that’s why we’re seeing this slight increase in lactate because kind of the wrong fibers are doing the work. If endurance and longevity are important.
Trevor Connor 17:49
That’s exactly what I was getting at and Jared, I want to throw this to you because now we’re getting at what is the benefit of that, Zone One, Zone Two training and I love looking at in terms of the graph because we were talking about percentages. The fact of the matter is, you take an elite cyclist, have them ride at 75% of their functional threshold, their lactates are going to be 1.0, it’s going to be flat. They can do that for five hours and they’re still going to be at a one lactate. You take a far less fit athlete.
Rob Pickels 17:50
You take me, Trevor.
Trevor Connor 17:51
Or me now.
Rob Pickels 17:53
Let people know you’re looking at me as you’re saying this.
Trevor Connor 18:05
You have them bride at 75% of lactate threshold, they’re starting at 1.2 maybe, and an hour or two later, they’re up at three millimoles. This is now becoming close to their functional threshold, and after a couple hours, they’re dead.
Sebastian Weber on the Various Factors that Affect us on a Long Zone Two Ride
Trevor Connor 18:41
What we’ve been trying to communicate is that for something that’s a relatively easy effort. What’s going on physiologically is very complex. Let’s hear from Sebastian Weber, who explains just how complex it gets when we start talking about the various factors that affect us on a long zone two ride.
Sebastian Weber 18:57
So the factors, obviously you need to look at is glycogen. That’s one of the first things that come comes in mind. So glucose levels, glycogen levels. Are you fueled? Now, the next thing is obviously, is hydration. You can talk about or think about overheating, that’s the same and then loss of electrolytes is the same. What is not so much as a focus of people is something that you might want to call, or is called sometimes in the literature, a ‘local dehydration’ or a ‘local shift’ in water coming along, obviously with a shift in electrolytes. So obviously, you’re pumping electrolytes back and forth between different membranes and inter cell space and so on.
Benefits of Doing Intervals in a Base Zone
Jared Berg 19:37
So now we’re kind of going into what happens in those training efforts. What does that look like? So that’s where it’s really important to really make sure that you’re understanding where that top of Zone Two is, where your LT1, your VT1 is. All those are kind of interchangeable. You kind of hit it on the head there, when you are at the top of that Zone Two, that is an effort that you should be able to hold for 2, 3, 4 hours. Does it mean that you need to every time? That’s sort of what we’re trying to discuss here right now and you kind of mentioned well now that same effort that gave you 1.2 millimoles might be giving you 1.83 three or four hours later and so would you get better quality with that training if you broke it up into intervals or you did smaller pieces. Would you start to put out more power, drive more watts at LT1 or atop a Zone Two? My answer that question is, ‘yes, you would’ and that is sort of a little bit of the magic that we’re trying to discuss here and what do you do with that 80%.
Rob Pickels 20:53
Yeah, Jared, I’d love for you to continue expanding on that because the thought of doing intervals in a base zone was new to me. I saw that on the outline and so I’d love to hear more of your thoughts because I’m kind of intrigued on how you’re implementing this.
Jared Berg 21:08
Yeah, that’s a great one. So this is a workout that I got back from an athlete yesterday and I loved it because Zone Two doesn’t have to be this monstrous, long endurance type effort, especially on the bikes. The bike, we tend to go longer, put more miles and put more volume in, well I work with the coach who we came up with this very simple, basic, even called boring workout, where…
Trevor Connor 21:32
I got to interrupt you as a guy who loves doing eight hour rides. Yes, it does. It does need be long. It does need to be boring. Why would you do anything else?
Rob Pickels 21:42
At some point you have to be like, “Why am I out here doing this?”
Trevor Connor 21:45
That’s when I’m in my sweet spot.
Jared Berg 21:49
Because that’s fun. Ah man. I love it. So, yeah, so this is a 90 minute ride with 45 minutes right near LT1. So we had this athlete do this workout two weeks ago, and he was like, “Well, my LT1, 129 heart rate, that felt a little bit high for power. So I just kept it around 300 watts.” This is an opportunity. There’s potential here. If you push that 129 watts, I want to see 129 heart rate. I want to see how many watts you can get. So we just gave him this 45 minute piece where he pushed 129 heart rate was his average. He topped out at 135 and he averaged 330 Watts yesterday. This is a 77 kilo professional triathlete.
Rob Pickels 22:35
This is a big boy.
Jared Berg 22:37
Yeah, exactly. So he’s a big, lean, strong triathlete, but the fact that we made this Zone Two, smaller, shorter, more concise, allowed him to get more quality out of it, but you think about it, what if we had him do two and a half hours at Zone Two, which is totally reasonable. That’s a reasonable workout. Two hours Zone Two. Two and a half hours Zone Two. Think about how much energy he would have expended, how much calories that he would have burnt through. How much fatigue he could have put in his leg, how much heat he would have generated. That’s a big stress. So instead, we kind of make them shorter. We do 30, 40 minute work. We take a little break, and then we rinse, we repeat. That makes it a little bit more tolerable, and then we end up with a more productive workout and we can actually kind of work to his true potential, rather than just fatigue him all the time.
Rob Pickels 23:30
This is interesting. Jared, you and I have both worked quite a bit with Dr. San Milan Inigo and he has always contended that you can’t push, oftentimes, elite level athletes to the top end of their Zone Two for long durations, for all of the duration that they’re riding because it is so stressful on their body because they’re so metabolically efficient and that they are doing huge amounts of calories and huge amounts of watts and if you expect them to be able to ride 20 hours a week, they certainly aren’t doing it at the high end of their Zone Two. It’s interesting that you’re incorporating, it might sound different, but it’s almost that exact same mindset. Let’s shorten the base workout so that we can get you to the top end of your Zone Two and I’m sure that this is in conjunction with a heck of a lot more riding at lower intensity.
Jared Berg 24:24
Certainly is.
Rob Pickels 24:25
I’ll shout out to one of my athletes, Billy, you know this. This is for you. We literally spoke about this yesterday about a high and a low Zone Two and it’s not really a concept that I had ever played with a lot in the past, but I do think for some athletes and especially based on the volume that they’re doing, we cannot be sitting at the high end of our Zone Two all the time, especially as athletes get stronger, especially as their volume goes up.
Trevor Connor 24:51
For anybody who’s interested, I’ll put this in the show notes. I actually wrote an article where I interviewed Dr. San Milan asking that question, is Zone Two different for an amateur and an elite and it actually ended up being a more nuanced interview than you would think. He had arguments on both sides. There’s actually some arguments that even though you got a top pro doing Zone Two at 300 watts. They can sometimes handle that better than the amateur at a much lower wattage, which was really interesting conversation. So we’ll put that in the show notes if anybody wants to check that out. Rob, as you were just saying, I was expecting him to go, “oh yeah, no, that kills a pro” and that’s not where he went.
Jared Berg 25:29
You kind of brought the point is there two aspects of Zone Two or two different sort of levels, like a low Zone Two and a high Zone Two. Physiologically sometimes, and I think you’ve probably seen this a little bit too, we might see Fat Max higher than the top end of Zone Two. So that might be that low end of Zone Two where Fat Max is and then where lactate is completely flat in baseline before it starts to rise to this sort of like 1.4, 1.5.
Rob Pickels 25:58
Creeps up just a little bit.
Jared Berg 25:59
Yeah exactly and you’re like, you know what, I’m gonna still give this top of your Zone Two, that’s the top, but maybe before that is that sort of low Zone Two that would be the only sort of physiological markers that I would see that would suggest that there’s sort of some other things that would kind of pinpoint that low Zone Two area.
Rob Pickels 26:18
Yeah. I mean, I think that we saw this a lot, Jared, when we were doing work with with Dr. San Milan and maybe you’re still looking at it this way, and Dr. San Milan is the first person that I saw do this, that we would actually graph lactate versus fat oxidation, and we would see pretty clearly wow, lactates at a baseline and then it jumps up and then we would also see fat oxidation is pretty steady and it jumps down as soon as lactate is jumping up. We’re talking about measures from two different parts of the body. We’re getting lactate from the finger if you do it right and from the ear if you do it wrong. Jared’s an ear prayer.
Jared Berg 26:56
I go both ways.
Rob Pickels 26:57
Oh, he’s a swinger. I like you again.
Trevor Connor 27:03
What is your issue with the ear?
Rob Pickels 27:05
I hate the ear. There’s something about somebody wrenching on my ear as I’m riding a bike and my hair is sweaty, and I just I don’t like the ear. There are some people that swear by the ear, though.
Trevor Connor 27:18
Yeah, because I hated being in studies where they’re pricking me once or twice a week and then I can’t type.
Rob Pickels 27:25
No. That’s the best part, is three days later, you’re like, “Why the hell does my finger… oh, now I remember.” It’s the gift that keeps on giving, you remember your lactate test days later. Anyway, my original point, we’re taking lactate from blood samples in the finger or the ear, or comparing that to the fat side of things, which we’re taking breath by breath from the mouth, but what you’re exhaling in terms of your VCO2 and VO2, and so it’s amazing that these two measures tend to correlate almost a 1.0 correlation. It’s at least point nine every time.
Jared Berg 28:00
It’s amazing. It is really good. Yeah, it’s really strong correlation.
Trevor Connor 28:05
Fast Talk Labs is now offering athlete services through Jared Berg, who you’ve met on today’s episode. Jared is an exercise physiologist, registered dietitian and a Certified Strength and conditioning coach. He’s also performed 1000s of lab tests at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, University of Colorado Sports Medicine Program and now for Fast Talk Labs. Jared Berg offers VO2 Max and lactate testing, sweat rate and electrolyte loss analysis, sports nutrition baselines, race day nutrition plans and help with recovery from injury. Visit fasttalklabs.com to see new athlete services and how we can help you go farther and faster.
Landing on a Definition for Aerobic Threshold
Trevor Connor 28:44
So I wanted to dive into the primary point of this conversation, of the benefits of training Zone One and Two that you see in the lab, but before we do that, can I just throw out based on our conversation here, a definition of what we mean by that aerobic threshold, which is that top end of Zone Two and a five zone model, and you guys can tear this apart, but I’m going to start and then let’s land on a definition.
Rob Pickels 29:05
I said, no.
Trevor Connor 29:07
Well, I’m going to do it anyway because I don’t care.
Trevor Connor 29:10
Woah, fighting words. On a lactate test thats Zone Two, I’ve seen two different definitions of it. One is, it’s the point where lactates start to kick up, another one is, it’s where lactates hit right around two millimoles.
Trevor Connor 29:10
Whoa!
Jared Berg 29:25
Yes. So I would I like to use it where it’s the start to kick up.
Rob Pickels 29:30
Thanks God.
Jared Berg 29:31
Yes, because there’s different things. I mean, this is where data interpretation becomes important. Say, if you’re pricking your own finger, you’re getting your own lactates or whatever and you’re like, “oh my god, I saw 1.9, 2.0, 2.0 and then it started to go up. Well, there could be different reasons and why that is, you may went on a bender last night and you have a little extra alcohol in the system and we’re seeing that with higher lactates.
Rob Pickels 29:56
Or the other way around. The best way immediately to improve your lactate profile, total glycogen depletion.
Jared Berg 30:04
Oh, yes.
Rob Pickels 30:05
Lactates through the floor.
Jared Berg 30:08
Yeah, not even low carb. Let’s go no carb.
Rob Pickels 30:12
No carb. I barely make lactate.
Jared Berg 30:16
That was because I was having so much fun with that.
Trevor Connor 30:18
I did a test where I peeked out at three.
Jared Berg 30:20
Oh my gosh.
Rob Pickels 30:25
We’re changing the conversation, but that’s how you know. The glycogen-depleted athlete comes in, their lactates look amazing. My god, you are incredible and they’re tapped out, and it’s four millimolar less, and they are literally falling off the bike.
Trevor Connor 30:40
I did it with Inigo and I’m sitting there looking at my lactate going, “oh my god, I’m so fit” and Inigo, just stops me and goes, “come back in a week.
Focusing on Lactate Threshold One
Rob Pickels 30:46
I was like, “What’s wrong with you?”. Anyway, Jared, back to the first LT1.
Jared Berg 30:53
So, yeah, I like to look at it where you start to see it tick up. That’s LT1, we’re just talking about lactate, but if we’re talking about ventilatory data, we’re looking at gas exchange. We’re looking at when the oxygen utilization starts to starts to kick up as a ratio to the total volume of air being expired. So that’s the other marker, and we’ll also see that reflected in fat utilization. So fat utilization drops off like we mentioned earlier. So all those markers combined help me figure out where the top of Zone Two is.
Rob Pickels 31:31
I’ll say that that upward tick that Jared is talking about to define LT1 is oftentimes between absolute values of 1.5 and 2.0 millimoles, but to say that it’s always two millimoles for people, grossly underestimates the differences that people have.
Jared Berg 31:32
Oh, yeah.
Trevor Connor 31:32
Here’s the other really important point that I’m going to make, going back to the what is the percentage. You look at the shape of that bottom part of the curve before it really kicks up and it’s going to be very different depending on the athlete. You have that top pro, it is flat, flat, flat, and then it really kicks up. You have a less fit athlete, it’s actually going to start creeping up earlier on. So where that zone, that aerobic threshold that VT1 is is going to be very different depending on the nature of the individual. So to be able to say aerobic threshold is 72% or 75% of your functional threshold is just too much of a simplification.
Rob Pickels 32:36
I think that we ended up here because of research. It is time consuming to look at every single profile of every person and I say time consuming five or 10 minutes. It’s not that long, but when you have all of these research subjects that you’re trying to do this for, it adds up to be a lot of time. So what’s easier than that, just defining a number. One and a half or two, then you’re flying through your research data really quickly, and you say, “Oh, we did all this training. It improved power at two millimoles, therefore it improved their base aerobic ability” and then now everybody’s like, okay, great. Two millimoles is base, and it’s not.
Jared Berg 33:16
Yeah and I think it’s interesting, I’m my own subject very often. I have all the tools. I have the I can put the mask on. I can prick my finger.
Rob Pickels 33:25
It’s fun to prick your own when you’re at threshold on the trainer.
Jared Berg 33:29
Yes. My wife walks into the house. I am hooked up to a metabolic cart. There’s just lactase strips all over the place, but what’s interesting is, right now I am a little bit better trained running than I am cycling and so my run is a nice, flat, low lactate baseline. Where my cycling because I’m just not hitting my base like I should, like a good student, and it’s sort of that upward ticking. So I have different profiles based on my sport right now, which is kind of interesting.
Problems of Testing Yourself and Factors for Lactate Results
Trevor Connor 33:59
So I hope this listener is actually listening to this episode because a year or two ago, a listener reached out to me. He had been cycling for about two months and was asking if he should get his own lactate meter because he does a lot of training on the trainer and said, “would this help me?” and I replied to him, “this is really hard to do. There’s no way you’re going to get good results. Don’t waste your money.” and he bought the lactate meter anyway and he did it. He ran himself, pricking his own finger. He ran himself through his own lactate test, sent me the results and damn it, it was a perfect lactate curve.
Jared Berg 34:34
Yeah, hedid a good job. He got good samples.
Rob Pickels 34:36
It can be done. I will say, Jared and I have both pricked a lot of fingers and ears in our day. Even the best of us mess up samples.
Jared Berg 34:46
Yeah, we know what a good sample is, what a bad sample is.
Rob Pickels 34:48
That’s the difference, knowing what a good sample and a bad sample is, but I will say, portable lactate meters, handheld ones, quality is pretty good. They’re not as good kind of as the YSI, CLIA certified laboratory stuff we were using before, but they’re good enough for this, that people are able to have this technology in their own hand. That’s not the hard part. Doing it on yourself, that actually is very difficult. You have to have a process. You have to know what you’re doing. You have to be really good about removing your sweat, not contaminating samples. It’s very difficult to do it on yourself. So if you do want to go down this route, have a friend or a partner or somebody else you know that does it with you, but the thing that I will say people struggle with the most is the interpretation of the data and that is something that working with Jared, you’re able to do is say, “Hey, I got these numbers, Trevor. Let me send them to you in an email. What the heck do they mean and how do we put this stuff into practice? How do I make actionable changes to my training based off what you see?” In my experience, it takes seeing hundreds and 1000s of tests and understanding athletes to truly begin understanding and there’s even now, in the beginning of my career, there were some interpretations that I made that I now know were the wrong way to look at that and I wish that I could go back in time and say, I’m sorry I told you the wrong thing. I now know better and so really, the interpretive knowledge is really what’s key and Paramount here.
Jared Berg 34:48
I would agree because you brought up that point of what yourself, where you had those really low lactates, but you peaked out at three. We to ask the other questions.
Rob Pickels 35:13
Yeah, what the hell is wrong with you?
Jared Berg 36:30
Yeah, what if you ate for the last three or four days?
Trevor Connor 36:33
This is why I can’t sprint.
Jared Berg 36:34
Yeah, exactly. Is there an energy availability issue and within that energy availability issue, is there a macronutrient distribution that is off? So those are the questions we start to ask when we start to see lactate profiles, or is there some sort of systemic inflammation? Did you just have covid? So that you have to think about the big picture along with the data that you’re getting and so that’s something that you kind of want to think about. You could use someone like myself to help you look at the data that you’re getting.
Trevor Connor 37:07
So could I give you the simple answer? I scheduled the test two days after I completed cascades.
Jared Berg 37:12
You were ruined at that point.
Trevor Connor 37:14
I was just done.
Rob Pickels 37:17
You know what was interesting and Jared has tested me outside of the lab at his house, I’ve done testing in Jared’s living room back the day and that was prior to me doing Pisca, I think a few years ago, I don’t remember maybe, and my results weren’t really that great in the whole scheme of things, and it took me a long time to realize why. This is a word of caution to everyone out there. It wasn’t until I did a study with Dr. San Milan, looking at continuous lactate monitors, where I was literally taking lactate samples like six or eight times a day for weeks straight, that I realized caffeine and stimulants, so if I take ADHD medication or if I drink caffeine, my lactate drives through the roof and I rolled up to your house sucking down like an Ozo latte, like I am right now.
Jared Berg 38:10
You used to drink coffee.
Rob Pickels 38:11
I never did back in the day.
Jared Berg 38:12
Yeah, I remember that.
Rob Pickels 38:13
It is amazing how much caffeine drives my lactate through the roof, even just resting lactate exercise everything and I had to take cereal hundreds of lactate measures on myself to actually figure out that pattern. Nobody talks about stuff like that. At BCSM and CU Sports Med, we didn’t have anybody refrain from caffeine.
Jared Berg 38:33
No, we just figured caffeine is going to boost up substrate, fat utilization andglycogen sparing in a long event. So maybe that’s not bad, that’s interesting for you to get that. It just opens up the whole doors for a whole new study.
Trevor Connor 38:46
So Rob, you’re gonna get a laugh out of this.
Rob Pickels 38:48
No, I don’t.
Trevor Connor 38:48
Talk about the testing.
Rob Pickels 38:49
I never laugh. This is serious business.
Trevor Connor 38:51
There you go. Jared asked me to order a whole bunch of new lactate strips because we were out last week.
Rob Pickels 38:56
Nice. Good.
Trevor Connor 38:57
And so I ordered like 200 strips, which, as you know, is not cheap. Then I get a call from the company, “Are you sure you want to order these?” I’m like, why? And they’re like, “These are for dogs.”
Jared Berg 39:08
We all have dogs. I’m sure we could get a whole business. I was at dinner the other night in Des Moines, Iowa, with a couple that trains horses. They’re doing all the same thing. We went from talking about running or whatever that their sons and our daughter is doing.
Rob Pickels 39:25
Do you take it from a hoof?
Jared Berg 39:27
Yeah, where do you take the lactate out of a horse?
Trevor Connor 39:29
I want to know why the animals let you do this?
Jared Berg 39:31
But, they’re doing sodium bicarb.
Rob Pickels 39:33
Oh, nice. As supplementation?
Jared Berg 39:34
Yes, with the horses, but they’re also testing it and they don’t want to do so much. It’s like they’re regulating it. It’s really interesting. I mean, they’re getting into all all the stuff.
Rob Pickels 39:45
I bet you there’s big money and horses physiology.
Jared Berg 39:47
Way more than than humans.
Trevor Connor 39:49
You had one at CU sports, that thing was cool.
Rob Pickels 39:49
Trevor, just knock down a wall, put in horse treadmill.
Rob Pickels 39:51
The big treadmill?
Trevor Connor 39:54
Ah, like the size of a room.
Jared Berg 39:58
I had the same size treadmill at home.
Trevor Connor 39:59
Do you?
Jared Berg 40:00
I just have a nice wood way.
Benefits and Differences between Training Zone One and Two
Trevor Connor 40:01
Okay, so I think we’ve done a good job of explaining the complexity of that VT1, that aerobic threshold, trying to figure out what it is. So Jared, let’s shift gears here. Now, what are the benefits of training in Zone One and Two and so let’s start with the overall, and then maybe separate, is there a difference between training in Zone One and Zone Two?
Jared Berg 40:22
So we’ll first break it down. We talked about those really well trained, high trained endurance athletes, those athletes who are putting in big volume of hours. If we said, “just do 80% of your training Zone Two or below,” well, they’re very motivated. They start doing, they start doing 80% of their training in Zone Two. Towards the top of Zone Two, they are going to be really fatiguing and stressing themselves out. So that type of athlete, we may want to look at somewhere around 40 to 50% of their training is in towards that top of Zone Two, and the rest can be just getting in neuromuscular adaptation, really light, just spinning around, getting around those pedals, long endurance rides, making it where if they’re on the bike they’re at home, that type of training is that sort of like Zone One style training and then 40, 50% are those Zone Two. Maybe that’s those intervals I’m talking about, maybe it’s just a 90 minute piece in Zone Two. That’s the kind of work that we’re looking at for the highly trained, big volume athletes.
Rob Pickels 41:30
And I think that this is especially true if, as we talked about when we opened the show, is your Zone Two, I’ll say above 72% of your FTP, if we’re talking 80% of your FTP, then I think that that’s where we’re at the place where we need to be limiting the upper end and that this Zone One, Zone Two conversation becomes very relevant.
Jared Berg 41:50
Very relevant.
Rob Pickels 41:51
In my opinion, you take somebody whose FTP isn’t quite as strong, maybe their Zone Two is relatively low. I don’t know if there’s a relevancy between one and two for that person or not?
Jared Berg 42:02
Yeah, that’s a good discussion point. I would say that there’s definitely less relevance, but there is still some from my perspective, but when you’re talking about someone who’s training the surgeon general recommended hour a day or 30 minutes to 60 minutes.
Rob Pickels 42:17
Whatever they recommend nowadays.
Jared Berg 42:19
I forget too, yeah. So we’re talking about different athlete and then maybe they don’t have the same level of fitness where like a Zone Two doesn’t feel like work. They’re not running as fast, they’re not biking as fast, a stiff breeze can put them above zone Two kind of thing, or a slight hill. So at that point, of the 80% that are supposed to be in Zone Two or below, they might do 60, 70% of that, really only leaving about 10 to 20% for Zone One because they’re not going to get as much out of that Zone One, but there is still some importance with training in Zone One, and I feel like that goes more into the nervous systems. That goes more into you have some parasympathetic drive when you’re actually exercising, and that parasympathetic nervous system kind of helps us control our heart rate throughout all intensities. So if we have some we have some ability to actually engage our parasympathetic nervous system while we’re exercising, that is an amazing asset to have because we always think of exercise as fight or flight, sympathetic, drive, go, go, go, but if we can still exercise and have that, I’m running or I’m biking, and I still sort of feel like I can hum a tune, I’m sitting on the couch and it has that same sort of sensation, that is good and that might allow us to actually do more work with lower heart rates, and then push the potential of our higher intensity training eventually.
Rob Pickels 43:52
Yeah, and just to recap what Jared said because these terms may or may not be familiar to people, between ‘sympathetic’ and ‘parasympathetic’ and Jared, you did say it. I’m just highlighting it. The sympathetic drive is that fight or flight. It is your body is tuned up. It is super geared up for performance. Everything is turned up to 11. It’s helping to protect you. It’s helping to save your life from saber toothed tigers. It’s helping you to win a race. The other side of that is more of that rest, relax, recovery, the eating, that’s your parasympathetic nervous system and it’s oftentimes depending on what you’re doing for exercise, not really being utilized that much. The work that our intestines does goes way down during exercise. That’s the parasympathetic system turning down and what Jared is saying is, ‘hey, there are times you do not want all of your exercise to be really activating this sympathetic nervous system,’ and then we get some parasympathetic drive, things that keep your heart rate lower, so on and so forth, that can be worthwhile and we modulate that by altering our exercise intensity
Trevor Connor 44:56
To add to this, its been a long time since we brought this up, so worth bringing up again. There were some interesting experiments a long time ago that I’m not sure they could do anymore, where they took frogs completely disconnected the nervous system from their hearts, so there was no sympathetic or parasympathetic drive, and their hearts would beat at 100 beats per minute and just stay there. So parasympathetic drive lowers your heart rate, sympathetic drive brings up your heart rate and so everybody’s been hearing about heart rate variability. This is the new thing. Basically, what that’s showing is, when you have a lot of heart rate variability, you have both strong parasympathetic and sympathetic drivers and they’re constantly kind of fighting with one another. So heart rate’s going up and down constantly, where when you’re fatigued and you just don’t have as good a neural drive, you’re going to go towards that just steady, always at the same rate, type heart rate.
Jared Berg 45:52
Yeah, exactly and the other reason you talk about, so that’s a great reason for even the person who’s not training a lot, to still do some Zone One, some easy training. All right, but so if I’m looking at like a runner model and we say, “do all of your training in Zone Two.” I have a I have a son who’s a collegiate runner, and we have his Zone Two right now, somewhere around a 5:50 minute mile. That’s where he hits. LT1, VT1. So if we said, do 80% of your training in Zone Two, he could be running between a 6:20 and a 5:50, minute mile for 55, 60 miles a week. He’s training upwards of 80, 85 miles a week now. So that would really break him down. So now we say, hey, “what do we do?” What we give him Zone Two intervals, or little pieces. A big, popular run that we do is a 50, 50, run. We’re like, Yeah, do 50% of your training. You do a 50 minute easy in Zone one, 30 minutes in Zone Two, and 15 minutes easy in Zone One. Very basic workout, but then we also he’s doing his doubles where he does an easy shakeout run, those are in Zone One and we want those runs to be so easy, where he doesn’t feel like he’s getting a big stress on his body, but he is getting sports specific training. That is the goal there. We don’t want skeletal stress. We want that as low as possible. So if he was to run those at like, a 7:00, 7:30, that’s too much musculoskeletal stress. I want him starting at 8:30, feeling his way down to maybe a 7:50 or so, but keep it just really light. Feel like he’s just doing a little shuffle. Sometimes they’ll call it the Kenyan shuffle.
Rob Pickels 47:46
So I want to tie this into our episode with Dr. Seiler, and that’s where we were discussing again, how much high intensity is enough. We were also kind of reviewing a new paper that he had come out with and I think a big takeaway from that show is this, high intensity interval training is awesome. It is an amazing source of adaptation, stimulus for adaptation within the body, but it is very costly. So we need to, like I said before, balance that. Now what we’re saying is we’re almost taking that very similar concept down into the base zone as well.
Jared Berg 48:19
The 80%.
Rob Pickels 48:20
And it is true, I think that especially as a cyclist, as a show that’s a little bit more geared towards cyclists, we oftentimes think in those terms, but when you do begin to bring in runners and the mechanical stress that’s occurring there, that is another one of those cost benefits, stimulus versus stress on the body equations that we need to be considering.
Jared Berg 48:40
Yep, I agree.
Other Benefits Seen in Lab Training
Trevor Connor 48:41
So what are other benefits that you see in the lab of doing this type of training? I’m going to throw out one because we start to talk about this, this is that shape of the curve, and please correct me on this or add to this, but when you have that very unfit athlete, you’re going to see at very low wattages, their lactate curve is already kicking up. So what I see when you train athletes with a lot of Zone One, Zone Two work is it flattens out that curve. They can hit higher levels before you start to see a kick up and to me, that’s huge. Everybody’s always talking about, what’s my functional threshold? What’s my functional threshold? Thinking that number is really important, but imagine this. Imagine you really flatten out that curve to the point where you can go do a five hour ride at 230, 240 watts and you’re not gonna be fatigued at the end of it. Think about that for a minute.
Rob Pickels 49:30
Yeah, but you’re gonna be not tired and you can’t sprint, Trevor.
Trevor Connor 49:33
Yes, but we’re gonna get to the sprint line and I’ve already dropped you, so I don’t need to.
Rob Pickels 49:38
No, I’m gonna sit on your wheel and draft off you.
Jared Berg 49:41
Oh, boy.
Trevor Connor 49:43
We will find a hill.
Jared Berg 49:43
Yeah, exactly. So what you’re talking about really is performance gains. That’s what you’re talking about. You’re talking about being able to do more work at lower lactate. Do more work at higher fat utilization and that’s what I want to see in the lab. It’s basically, if training is done right, if you’re not overcooking yourself by doing too much high intensity or by always doing top end of Zone Two by balancing out to make your top end of Zone Two higher quality, we’re gonna see your ability to pedal at more watts or run at faster paces at the top of your LT1, VT1.
Rob Pickels 50:21
Yeah, I do think that lactate profile needs to fit the goals and what success is for the athlete, but it is very rare that you would ever say to someone, “no, we shouldn’t be pushing your LT1 any higher.” It’s almost a Universal Recommendation.
Jared Berg 50:36
Get it up there.
Trevor Connor 50:39
So something was very interesting, brand new study that came out. This was by Dr. Sprog, who has worked a lot with Dr. Seiler, I read it last night and it hasn’t actually been published. I read the submitted version and they were looking at elite athletes and some of the differentiators of elite athletes and so they looked at what sort of power can you put out after you’ve expended 2000 kilojoules? Basically, think of that as after you’ve ridden three hours, what sort of power can you put out and said that correlation with performance, correlation with the results, their fatigue power, their power after that 2000 kilojoules or even 3000 kilojoules, correlated better with results than the power they could put out fresh. That’s how important this is.
Rob Pickels 51:28
Can I ask, when you say the power they can put out Trevor, what was that performance test?
Trevor Connor 51:32
So what they were using that was really interesting was the power duration curve. So it’s that curve that you can see in a lot of software like WKO, where it shows your peak five second all the way to your peak six hour, or whatever it is and this curve starts very high and then quickly drops, and then levels out for a while and then continues to drop. So they have a version where you look at the power duration curve from all their training to the power duration curve only after they’ve expended a certain amount of energy and in the better performers, you see those two curves are very close to one another. In the worst performers, you see a significant drop in the power duration curve after 2000 kilojoules and I probably lost half of you hearing this, but it’s an interesting graph and I actually use this a lot, so maybe I’ll throw up an example on the show notes, so people can take a look at that.
Jared Berg 52:22
Yeah, it’s interesting because they would actually do a long test after?
Trevor Connor 52:29
No, it’s just taking all their data.
Jared Berg 52:31
Okay. They’re just analyzing data.
Trevor Connor 52:32
Yeah, this is Pro. So they’re doing a lot of racing. The theory here is, they’re after 2000 kilojoules, they’re at the end of a race, going pretty hard, and so those athletes who are winning the races are performing better are still able to put out max power at the end of the race, where the ones who aren’t performing well aren’t able to put out max power at the end of the race, they’re fatigued and can’t do as well and you see that in the chart. To continue with this, the point that they made was you saw high correlation with training below that aerobic threshold, amount of time spent training below that aerobic threshold and that fatigue resistance, the ability to still put out that that power later on.
Jared Berg 53:17
Got it. It’s interesting.
Trevor Connor 53:18
But what else? What other things do you see?
Jared Berg 53:21
I mean, I would definitely go back into talking about just that power of of training. Don’t disregard Zone One training and think that it’s not effective. I would never call zone training like “junk miles.”
Rob Pickels 53:36
Yeah, the term ‘recovery’, it has negative connotations and that’s why I try to do like a low base, high base because hey, base is good. This is just a different version.
Jared Berg 53:48
So think of it like sports specificity training is what Zone One training is to me. Obviously high intensity training is also sport specific, but when you’re able to do it without stress, with that parasympathetic drive, that is really effective sport specific training that has a lot of value. It allows you to hit those big volumes and maybe like you’re talking about, do more work later in a ride in a race and have a bigger resistance to fatigue just because you are just so comfortable around those pedals. You’re so comfortable shuffling along at an easy pace that you can start to do more at the top of your Zone Two. You start to do more sub threshold, you can start to do more maximal efforts later in a race.
Rob Pickels 54:33
I will say, Jared, you just touched on something that I want to maybe describe a little bit more deeper, you’re talking about even though you’re doing work at this lower intensity, you still see more power at the top of your Zone Two and this is a concept that’s really important for people to understand. Let’s say I’m just pulling numbers out of the air. Let’s say the top of your Zone Two is 200 watts. A lot of people think to improve that, they have to go around riding 200 watts all the time. That is not the case. You can ride 175 watts and go out and do that for three months and then come back in the lab and guess what? The top of your Zone Two, it’s not 200 watts anymore. It’s 225. Even though you were 25 watts away, you still got this big bump and your fitness even improved. So you were still riding at 175, but now the top of your Zone Two is actually 225 and you’re still getting benefit from that. You don’t have to be banging your head right up against that wall and oftentimes in prescription, I personally find it worthwhile to be a little bit conservative, knowing that people are going to try to be a very upper push that they can.
Jared Berg 55:39
Yep, I would agree and I think that has a place in someone’s training cycle throughout the year, where you get a lot of value in that and then you maximize the returns on that and so you can use that in a certain part of your training phase and then you can spend some time pushing some of those top Zone Two efforts and then you get, not only the gain that you just got from being conservative and really just getting that volume up there, now you started to get some quality work to top of Zone Two and then that 200 went to 225, like Rob just mentioned. Now you to push that 225 that extra little bit to 240 and now you’re sort of riding right where you want to be by the time you’re starting to really work on some VO2 Max efforts or sub threshold and that’s how you think about a training program and that’s what I love to assess when I do some work in the lab. I see that baseline laboratory values and what they’re doing as far as performance and then I can see them after they’ve cycled through some really brilliant training phases and come back and retest in four to six months.
Rob Pickels 56:44
Real quick before we get too far away from it. I want to circle back to something that Trevor was talking about before, and that was, oftentimes we can see athletes that have that upward sloping baseline and a benefit of a lot of Zone One and Zone Two training is that that upward sloping baseline becomes flatter into a more optimal lactate profile curve, but the opposite is also true. We can take somebody who’s pretty fit, who has been doing a lot of Zone One and Zone Two training and if they go out and add in a lot of tempo training, their baseline begins skewing toward a upward sloping baseline and at that point, it doesn’t anything to do with their fitness because their FTP can be great. Their numbers can look good, but because they have now really decreased the percent of Zone One, Zone Two training in their training diet, then their baselines begin looking not as optimal anymore.
Jared Berg 57:37
Yeah, this could be a totally different discussion, but it kind of goes into when you sort of establish sort of what drives different physiological happenings or markers with muscle fiber types and we start to train those tempo and those sub threshold, are we starting to sort of say, hey, those type two A muscle fibers, those intermediate muscle fibers, are we sort of asking them to be a little bit less aerobic and start to use glycogen a little bit faster, a little bit even more efficiently and start to respond a little more towards the high intensity, versus when we really do those really easy Zone Two workouts, where we’re trying to get those type two aos intermediate muscle fibers to almost look and act a little bit more like type one muscle fibers. They sort of bring up their mitochondrial density a little bit more. They sort of awaken some of those qualities. They start to get blood flow better to those energy factories and so we’re basically capitalizing on the plasticity of those muscle fibers.
Trevor Connor 58:44
That’s one of the things that you see constantly in the research. Is one of the major adaptations you see in elite endurance athletes, is getting those type two muscle fibers to work aerobically.
Jared Berg 58:55
Yes.
How Does Nutrition Factor into Zone Training
Rob Pickels 58:56
So Jared, we’ve really been talking about your expertise in laboratory testing, but the other area that you’re particularly versed in is in dietetics as well and so I’m wondering from you how do we roll nutrition into this conversation?
Jared Berg 59:13
Exactly. I’m super excited that I get to add that to my practice as a registered dietitian and sports dietitian, it’s really valuable to not just be always talking about exercising and how do you really work and tire yourself out or do more work and deplete yourself? I get to actually go and decide, how do you nourish yourself? How do you energize all the awesome work that you want to do on the daily or get yourself fueled up for a race. So there’s lots of ways you can use that type of training that I have and education that I have around nutrition and the physiology. I would say, most pragmatic would be the fact that with physiological testing, we can look at how much energy somebody is expending at the top of their Zone Two. Where does the top of Zone Two correlate with a race type effort and then we can make some really good calculations as to how many carbohydrates somebody’s expending at those efforts and then we need to be able to figure out what exactly considering how much storage they might have on their body, how much nutrition they need to take in hourly in order to meet the demands of their their events and that’s really race specific right there, but also on the daily, if the energy’s not there, the performance isn’t going to be there. You can’t make something out of nothing, so we have to understand how many calories is somebody burning on the daily, on the weekly, and how much is their nutrition keeping up with what they’re expending. So we talked about if somebody’s always training top end of Zone Two for 80% and then doing some amazing 20% high work, what does that look like for a caloric expenditure? Well, for a high level athlete, if they’re training three to four hours a day, that could be, I don’t know, five to 6000 calories daily. Are they able to meet those workload demands with nutrition? So that’s something that I love to be able to work on and that’s just like math right there, but then go into other stuff too.
Coach Kristen Arnold on Challenges of Measuring Energy Needs
Trevor Connor 59:22
Let’s hear from Coach Kristen Arnold and some of the challenges we face with measuring energy needs.
Kristen Arnold 1:00:52
The metric I am still feeling as a moving target, is estimating energy needs or calorie needs for cyclists and this is because cyclists have a unique opportunity, ones that use a power meter, that we can measure the kilojoules that is almost a 1:1 correlation with kilocalories burned on the bike and this is unique compared to an athlete in a sport like soccer or really any other sport that doesn’t have some kind of metric measuring their power or their energy output. I’ve asked probably 12 to 15 dieticians. I’ve asked several professional groups. There is definitely not a consensus in a textbook or anything like that, so at this point, it’s just best professional experience, but essentially, we can estimate calorie needs better with a power meter than we can without, with an asterisk there, so energy calorie needs are always an estimate and it is indirect. We measure indirect calorimetry even when we’re doing oxygen exchange. Standard equations that measure energy or calorie needs use really rudimentary metrics like your height, your weight, and your age to measure. There’s going to be a huge margin of error for that, especially for athletes we’ve found. So any kind of app or wearable that’s measuring your calorie needs for the day is going to have a huge asterisk by as far as what your body’s actual energy needs are for the day. That being said, we are developing better equations and better ways to measure that. So for example, I have several athletes that have a whoop strap and when I do the calculations on my own, using the standard equations and then also using kilocalories or kilojoules burned on the bike, it’s very close. It’s within 5% usually of a whoop strap. So that’s actually one of the more potentially accurate ways to measure calorie needs. I would love to hear more about this and what are some takes of how to as accurately as we can measure energy needs for athletes in cycling.
Other Important Data Outside of Lactate
Rob Pickels 1:04:09
This conversation, we’ve really been centered around lactate, in terms of laboratory testing, and that’s doing a disservice I think to the other half of the equation, and that is using breath by breath data to understand total caloric expenditure and then also the ratio of fat and carbohydrate there. Jared, I think you’re entirely right where, different athletes are going to have different efficiencies. It’s going to take a different amount of energy to say, put out 200 watts into the pedals for different athletes. And then not only is there that difference, there’s also the difference of how are they fueling that energy that they’re burning to do it? When we’re guesstimating, it’s a guesstimation on top of a guesstimation and maybe we can ballpark it, but we probably can’t nearly be as accurate as we can if we’re actually testing things, but no matter what, even if we do just have to ballpark it, it’s worthwhile to work with someone, I think knowledgeable, who can do the math, who can kind of figure out these equations for you as an individual.
Trevor Connor 1:05:09
For any of our listeners who are new to this, I’m not going to go into the complexities of it, but when you’re burning carbohydrates primarily as fuel, the ratio of carbon dioxide that you’re producing to oxygen is very different from when you’re burning primarily fat for fuel and that can be measured. So we can look at that ratio and determine what is your balance right now between carbohydrates and fat as your as your fuels and that then gives an indicator of at each stage, at each given level of power production or heart rate, are you a fat burner or are you a carbohydrate burner? And that then influences what you should be consuming.
Jared Berg 1:05:50
Exactly. Something that really I find interesting in my practice when I’ve started looking more heavily at energy availability, is sort of a down regulated metabolism. We kind of touched on this with the inability to hit high lactates. Also see this with super high fat metabolism and the inability to go into high or almost completely carb metabolism and so when I see that, I suspect that this particular athlete has a down regulated metabolism and what I can do by increasing calorie intake, increasing carbohydrate intake, I’ve never seen anybody gain weight. All I see is somebody pedal at higher watts, run faster, they perform better. So basically, we up-regulate their metabolism to do more work.
Concluding Today’s Episode
Trevor Connor 1:06:41
Well Jared, it’s been too long since we’ve had you on the show. I can’t express how excited we are to now have you part of the team, if not to just be able to come downstairs and get you to test me here, which is going to make it much easier. Really looking forward to a good future with you and seeing what you do with this program.
Jared Berg 1:07:00
Trevor, thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be working with all you guys and it’s just so much fun to to be able to collaborate and just the professional development that we all get to work on together. We’re all in this practice. We’re all we’re all learning and we’re excited to be able to share with anybody who wants to listen in.
Trevor Connor 1:07:20
This to our listeners won’t be the last time you’re going to hear from Jared. Hopefully we’ll get you in on more shows when you’re ready. We might even challenge you with a potluck. Think he’s ready yet Rob?
Rob Pickels 1:07:31
Welcome to the **** show.
Jared Berg 1:07:34
I’m a little nervous.
Today’s Episode Forum Question and Takehomes
Trevor Connor 1:07:35
All right, guys. So before we dive into the take homes, we’ve got a forum question. So all of our listeners out there, please go to our forum on our website at fasttalklabs.com and give us your answer to this question. And the question is, “Not everyone can get into the lab to have their Zone Two range properly tested. How have you been able to figure out when you are and aren’t in your Zone Two and Zone One ranges?” So that’ll be up in the forum, looking forward to your answer. To your answers.
Trevor Connor 1:08:04
All right, but let’s finish this out. So Jared, it’s been a bit. We finish out each show with our takehomes. Our one minute, what’s the most salient, important thing you want our listeners to learn from this episode? So take a second, give us some thought. What’s your big take home message?
Jared Berg 1:08:23
I would say the big take home message would be, just because you can train at the top of your Zone Two, and call that your 80% doesn’t mean you absolutely should. There is value in training lighter and training in Zone One. There’s neuromuscular adaptation to be gained, there’s more specificity and it can also make your Zone Two that much more productive and at the same time, be mindful that of the work you’re doing and feel yourself appropriately.
Rob Pickels 1:08:55
Yeah for me, it is that Zone Two because kind of by definition, you can do it for multiple hours, that intensity has to be very prescriptive to make sure that people are doing it “correctly.” We can certainly figure this out based on performances and based on some assumptions, but that may or may not be the most accurate way of going about that, and the most accurate way is to actually be looking under the hood, inside the body with some laboratory testing, but the way for that to actually be accurate is to have somebody who is knowledgeable interpret that data because it’s not always straightforward. Very rarely do you get the example textbook lactate curve, and that’s okay. Not everybody is going to have a graph like that, but what do you do when the graph doesn’t look like that? So this is an area that seems simple, feels simple, but is really not simple and having a knowledgeable expert is highly beneficial to making sure that your training is as productive as possible, with as little stress on your body as possible.
Trevor Connor 1:10:03
So my take home is actually very similar to Rob’s, but I tried to say this earlier. I didn’t like how I said it, so I’m going to make my take home a retake at what I was trying to say.
Rob Pickels 1:10:13
A “re-takehome.”
Trevor Connor 1:10:14
A re-takehome, there we go. It’ll be a first. So I’m going to go back to that, you can do that 20 minute test or the one hour test and the point that I’m going to make, yes, there are all sorts of arguments and debates and we’ve had those discussions about it, but if you give that test result to a Neil Henderson and Inigo Sam Milan, I’m going to say…
Rob Pickels 1:10:20
*Whispers* Or Rob Pickels or Jared.
Trevor Connor 1:10:38
Or Rob Pickels or Grant Holicky.
Rob Pickels 1:10:41
Not him. He’s no, no.
Trevor Connor 1:10:41
Good point. Jared, we’ll say a Jared. No Grants, but the point being, you give a good coach that test. You go out do your 20 minute effort, give a good coach that test, they’re going to be able to estimate your threshold power pretty close to what you’re going to see in the lab. There is no such test to figure out that VT1, that aerobic threshold. There’s nothing that I can think of that you can say to an athlete, “go out and do this and I can figure out what your VT1 is.” That’s as you said Rob, we need to get under the hood. We need to look at your profile as an athlete if you really want to know what that is, and I think it’s an important thing because as we just talked about, that’s where some of the most important training happens. That’s where you see some of the biggest alterations in that lactate curve towards being a better endurance athlete. Well Jared, thanks for being on the show. Itwas a pleasure.
Jared Berg 1:10:42
Mine too. Thank you.
Rob Pickels 1:10:58
Thanks buddy.
Trevor Connor 1:11:14
That was another episode of Fast Talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in Fast Talk are those of the individual. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a rating and a review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at @fasttalklabs. Join the conversation at forums.fasttalklabs.com or learn from our experts at fasttalklabs.com. For Jared Berg, Kristen Arnold, Sebastian Weber, and Rob Pickels, I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening.
