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 also fairly easy to execute. That’s because we have very detailed definitions of our high-end intensities (or zones).
Most of us can wrap our heads around 30-second, all-out efforts or a steady 5-minute threshold interval. But what about a steady 5-hour effort as hard as you can go? That’s a lot harder to calculate as you walk out the door. What pace or power do you even start at?
The fact is that 80% of our time should be spent in zones 1 and 2, but most of the research and training tools focus on the minutiae of our work at or above our anaerobic threshold—the 20%. We don’t have a great way to figure out zone 2 power or heart rate. Even harder is figuring out how to pace and fuel a 4-hour workout to stay in zone 2—something that can be far more complex and nuanced than any interval workout. Yet this is where many of us get little guidance.
Joining us on this episode to help explain zone 2 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 is in helping them understand and execute zone 1 and 2 training. He explains how he determines each athlete’s lower zones, whether there’s value to training in zone 1, the physiological gains of lower zone training, and how to best execute a zone 2 workout.
Along with Jared, we hear from Coach Kristen Arnold with Source Endurance and Sebastian Webber, founder of the virtual testing platform, INSCYD.
So, get ready to go a little slower and let’s make you fast!
A note on using the power duration curve to show fatigue resistance
During the show, we talk about a graph showing a decline in an athlete’s power duration curve. The graph above is an example. The black line shows the athlete’s peak wattages when they are fresh. Each subsequent graph shows the best power they’ve put out after they’ve ridden for a length of time that expends 1,000 kJ, then 1,500 kJ, and so on. The less the graphs drop, the more resistant the athlete is to fatigue.
More recent research shows that the power an athlete can put out after 1,500 or even 2,000 kJ correlates better with results than their peak powers fresh.
RELATED: Fast Talk Episode 109: The Metabolic Cost of Your Rides—Is It the Same for Everyone?
References
- Peric R, Nikolovski Z, Meucci M, Tadger P, Marini CF, Amaro-Gahete FJ. A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Association and Differences between Aerobic Threshold and Point of Optimal Fat Oxidation. Int J Environ Res Public Heal 2022;19:6479. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19116479.
- Holloszy JO, Coyle EF. Adaptations of skeletal muscle to endurance exercise and their metabolic consequences. J Appl Physiol 1984;56:831–8. https://doi.org/10.1152/jappl.1984.56.4.831.
- Layec G, Bringard A, Vilmen C, Micallef J-P, Fur YL, Perrey S, et al. Does oxidative capacity affect energy cost? An in vivo MR investigation of skeletal muscle energetics. Eur J Appl Physiol 2009;106:229–42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-009-1012-y.
- Marini CF, Tadger P, Chávez-Guevara IA, Tipton E, Meucci M, Nikolovski Z, et al. Factors Determining the Agreement between Aerobic Threshold and Point of Maximal Fat Oxidation: Follow-Up on a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Association. Int J Environ Res Public Heal 2022;20:453. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010453.
- Messonnier LA, Emhoff C-AW, Fattor JA, Horning MA, Carlson TJ, Brooks GA. Lactate kinetics at the lactate threshold in trained and untrained men. J Appl Physiol 2013;114:1593–602. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00043.2013.
- Spragg J, Leo P, Swart J. The relationship between training characteristics and durability in professional cyclists across a competitive season. Eur J Sport Sci 2022:1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17461391.2022.2049886.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:00
Music. Hello and welcome to fast talk your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor here with Coach Rob pickles. Few episodes ago, we talked with Dr Steven 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 32nd all out effort, or a steady five minute threshold interval. But what about a steady five hour effort? As hard as you can go, it’s 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. 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. 89
Jared Berg 01:59
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 02:09
uh huh, yeah, I do yeah exactly, in the little fish bowl conference. That’s
Rob Pickels 02:14
a back in the day situation. I
Jared Berg 02:15
can visualize that everybody walking by us doing a podcast. Yeah?
Trevor Connor 02:19
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. Yeah, and
Jared Berg 02:32
some sports, 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. Yeah,
Jared Berg 02:51
it’s been a while. Thank you. Thank you, Trevor. Check
Rob Pickels 02:53
out www.fast.labs.com for more information. Thank you. I
Trevor Connor 02:58
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, you know, I get hit all the time with that question of, What is my aerobic threshold? What is my zone two? And you can give percentages, you can give calculations, but it’s actually a really hard thing to figure out, and 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, 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
Yeah, that’s certainly. It’s a big area. When you’re talking about 80% that’s a lot of someone’s training, right? 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 2030, 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. And one of the big concepts that we spoke with Dr Seidler about last week was balancing, sort of the stress versus reward equation. And you know, that’s where, hey, if we’re spending a lot of hours, 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.
Jared Berg 05:12
Yeah, it certainly can. I think that most important thing to nail down right off the bat, is getting that 80% right, that top end of where you are in that, you know, really training in the 80% area, to where you’re actually starting to hit that 20% and that basically, it’s, we’re talking about, like a threshold. We’re talking about physiological markers that defined whether you’re in that, you know, 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, you know, estimates, estimates of max heart rates, you know, like typical, typical zone profile, like that. Or if you’re using FTP type testing, or, you know, on the run or the bike, to nail down where that 80% should be, you know, and we’re talking 80% we’re talking about the top of zone too 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, you know, 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? And 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% so no
Jared Berg 06:41
less than that, in my opinion. Yeah, you were thinking like 7072 I would say
Rob Pickels 06:45
oftentimes, 70 72% Yeah. But what’s interesting, right? 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, 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. I used to actually be able to go sort of fast, sort of somewhat fast, faster than I ever did at my best. Yeah, you know, but with a threshold north of 300 watts, you know, in a relatively small person at the time. And Jared, you were talking a lot about some of the triathletes that you’re working with exactly
Jared Berg 07:25
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, say, like, you know, someone like someone like Trevor, or like a more of an endurance cyclist, somebody doing, you know, long, focusing on longer 100 mile gravel races or Ironman type training events, their threshold, or top of Zone Two is could be at a different percentage of their actual functional threshold power.
Rob Pickels 07:56
Yeah, for me, what I was thinking of was more of, I’ll say your, your everyday athlete, right 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, you know, that is very much going to skew these percentages of FTP that you’re Looking at and ultimately, it’s funny, I sort of, 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 mall, taking it literally from the source, getting information.
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, you know, 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. It’s bigger than that. You could get more air. 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. It’s 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. Yeah. 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, or whatever that length of time is. We don’t have a comparable thing for that lower threshold. Yeah, Trevor
Rob Pickels 10:12
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 it’s limited by your ability to actually execute. Performance driven 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, I 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. So
Trevor Connor 11:12
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?
Jared Berg 11:19
Yeah, I would say, before I get into, like, exactly what I do in the lab, 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, they can put out, like, their vo two Max watts are quite a bit higher than their lactate threshold watts, right? And they can, they can get lactates up around, you know, 1012, millimoles, or north of that, I will see that their zone two, their LT one or VT one is at a lower percentage, often compared to their threshold, right, their functional threshold power, where somebody who’s more like an Ironman type athlete or a long gravel racer, longer type, you know, endurance rider, they’re going to have a lot of times they’re top of their zone too. Can be closer to their functional threshold power that they might get in that test. And so that’s maybe one of the drivers of if you’re going to use some of those estimates, that might be how you kind of look at your own self and say you’ll characterize yourself as a writer, but going more into your question in the lab, I’m going to do things like, I’m going to look at baseline level lactates. I’m gonna look at 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, right? And 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 someone’s moving from zone two to zone three is West, where we’re finding their LT, one, their VT, one. That’s and 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, to really nail down where that 80% should top out at
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 13:36
Yeah, I’ll do five minute stages almost all the time. Sometimes I’ll do longer stages, if it’s a real endurance rider. So let’s go with that
Trevor Connor 13:43
five minute stage. So you do five minute stage at x wattage, and you increase it 2025, 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. And what you’ll generally see is, for a certain number of stages, it’s a flat line. Lactates aren’t going up baseline. And when you get towards the end of the lactate test, you see it kick up really quickly, and lactate start going up. And that’s when, you know, athletes hit threshold, and now above threshold. Yes, but I remember, so you know, you were working under Dr Salma Lambo. I remember him showing me this. The difference between a highly trained athlete and a very novice athlete is 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 14:39
Yes, and I would say, as a tester, my trick with that is, I’ll start the higher trained athlete at higher workloads, yep. So it’s like where the athlete’s not training as much is 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? I
Jared Berg 14:56
do watts per kilo.
Rob Pickels 14:57
Well, the Indigo rubbed off on you, and.
Jared Berg 14:59
I like the relative and I won’t. I don’t always have to do half watt per kilo jumps. I’ll do point three watt per kilo I’ll do, you know, I’ll make it, make it, personalize it toward the athlete. So it could be anywhere between like a 20 watt to a 40 watt per kilo jump, total watt jump, depending on the size of the athlete, with
Trevor Connor 15:18
all the weight I put on since the last time you tested me, that’s, that’s No, I know, right?
Rob Pickels 15:23
Kills you. Let me tell you, having, having done the test the Indigo way as well, baby, it’s all muscle though, right? Guys, is that what? 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, right? And you know what you want to achieve is say, maybe a series of stages that have lactates that are like point nine, point 9.9, 1.0 1.0 and then it starts to jump, 1.5 2.558 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, you know. And for me, I think that we have to think about the underlying physiology here, right? And that is, we are grading our force right 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 two a 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 vo two Max, and all fibers were depleting. And 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 two a 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, that’s
Trevor Connor 17:49
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. You take me, Trevor or me now, let
Rob Pickels 18:22
people know you’re looking at me as you’re
Trevor Connor 18:24
saying. 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. They’re actually starting to get towards this is now becoming close to their functional threshold, and after a couple hours, they’re dead. 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 know, you’re pumping electrolytes back and forth between different membranes and inter cell space and so on.
Jared Berg 19:38
So now we’re kind of going into what happens in those training efforts. What does that? 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 LT one, your VT one is, right? All those are kind of interchangeable. And so yep, you kind of hit it on the. Head there with, like, when you are at the top of that zone too, that is an effort that you should be able to hold for, you know, 234, hours, right? 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, like that same effort that gave you 1.2 millimoles might be giving you 1.83 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, you know, drive more watts at LT, one, right? Or atop a zone two? You know, 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 20:54
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. Yeah,
Jared Berg 21:09
that’s a great one. So this is a workout that I got back from an athlete yesterday, and I loved it because, you know, 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, while I work with the coach who we came up with this very simple, basic, even called boring workout, where
Trevor Connor 21:31
I got to interrupt you as a guy who loves doing eight hour rides. Yes, it does. It doesn’t 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? Yeah, that’s
Trevor Connor 21:45
when I’m in my suite.
Jared Berg 21:48
Because that’s because that’s fun, man. Sorry. So I love it. I love it. So, yeah, so this is a 90 minute ride with 45 minutes right near LT one. Okay, so we had this athlete do this workout two weeks ago, and he was like, Well, Mike, you know my LT, 129 heart rate, that felt a little bit high for power. So I just kept it around 300 watts, where? And we’re like, you know, this is actually, this is an opportunity. There’s potential here, right? 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. Like this is a 77 kilo professional triathlete, so a little bit. Yeah, that’s a big boy, 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, all right, but you think about it, what if we had him? Do you know, two and a half hours at zone two, which is totally reasonable, right? That’s a reasonable workout. Two hours Zone Two. Two Two and a half hours zone two. Think about how much energy he would have expended, how much like calories that he would have burned through, how much fatigue he could have put in his leg, how much heat he would have generated, right? That’s a big stress. So instead, we kind of make them shorter. We do 3040, minute work. We take a little break, and then we re 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. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 23:30
this is interesting. Jared, you and I have both worked quite a bit with Dr Samuel on Inigo, and you know, 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, yes, right? 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 too, you know. And 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 certainly is. And 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. For anybody
Trevor Connor 24:51
who’s interested, I’ll put this in the show notes. I actually wrote an article where I interviewed Dr Sal Milan asking that question, is zone two different? 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. 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, Yeah.
Jared Berg 25:29
And 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, you know, 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, you know, 1.4 1.5 up just a little bit, yeah. And you’re like, you know what, I’m gonna still give this top of your zone two, but that’s the top, but maybe there’s that before that is that sort of low zone two that would be the only, like, sort of physiological markers that I would see that would suggest that there’s sort of, like, 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, right when we were doing work with with Dr Sam Milan, and maybe you’re still looking at it this way, and Dr Similan is the first person that I saw do this, that we would actually graph lactate versus fat oxidation, and we would see pretty clearly like, 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. And we’re talking about measures from two different parts of the body, right? We’re getting lactate, you know, from the finger if you do it right, and from the ear if you do it wrong. Jared,
Jared Berg 26:56
I go both ways. Oh,
Rob Pickels 26:58
he’s a swinger. I like you again, yeah.
Trevor Connor 27:03
What is your issue with the ear?
Rob Pickels 27:04
I hate the ear. There’s something about somebody like wrenching on my ear as I’m riding a bike and like, my hair is sweaty, and I just, I don’t like the ear. There are some people that
Trevor Connor 27:16
swear by the ear, though, yeah, because I hated being in studies where they’re pricking me once or twice a week, yeah, and then I can’t type.
Rob Pickels 27:26
No. That’s the best part is, is three days later, you’re like, Why the hell does my finger up now I remember, yeah, 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, right? But what you’re exhaling in terms of your VCO two and VO two, 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. It’s
Jared Berg 28:00
amazing. It is really good. Yeah, it’s really strong correlation.
Trevor Connor 28:06
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 vo two Max and lactate testing, sweat rate and electrolyte loss analysis, sports nutrition baselines, race day nutrition plans and help with recovery from injury. Visit fasttoclabs.com to see new athlete services and how we can help you go farther and faster. So want 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, no, and you guys can tear this apart, but I’m going to start and then let’s, let’s land on a definition. I
Rob Pickels 29:05
said, No, well, I’m
Trevor Connor 29:07
going to do it anyway, because I don’t care Whoa, fighting words on a lactate test, that 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.
Jared Berg 29:25
Yes. So I would I like to use it where it’s the start to kick up. Thanks. God yes, you know, because there’s different things. I mean, this is where data interpretation becomes important. Like, say, if you’re grabbing, you’re pricking your own finger, you’re getting your own lactates, whatever you’re like, oh my god, I saw, I saw, you know, 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, you know, alcohol in the system, and we’re seeing that with higher lactates, or
Rob Pickels 29:56
the other way around, the best way, amazing. Immediately to improve your lactate profile, total glycogen depletion. Oh, lactates through the floor looks
Jared Berg 30:07
like super Yeah, yes, yeah, I guess so. Just not even low carb. Let’s go. No car, no
Rob Pickels 30:12
carb. I barely make lactate. Yeah? That was because
Jared Berg 30:16
I was so much fun with that. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 30:18
I did a test where I peeked out at three.
Jared Berg 30:23
Oh my gosh, and that’s and we’re
Rob Pickels 30:24
changing the conversation, but that’s how you know, right? Is the glycannupleted athlete comes in, their lactates look amazing. You’re like, my god, you are incredible. So much. And they’re tapped out, and it’s four, it’s four millimolar less, and they are literally falling off the bike. Yes,
Trevor Connor 30:40
I did it with the new go. And I’m sitting there looking at my laptop’s going, oh my god, I’m so fit. And you go, just stops me and goes, come back. And I was like, What’s wrong with you?
Rob Pickels 30:47
Yeah, go have a donut and come back. Anyway, Jared, back to the first LT one.
Jared Berg 30:53
So, yeah, I like to look at it where you start to see it tick up, right? That’s LT one, right? And then also, so if that’s what we’re just talking about lactate, right? But if we’re talking about, you know, 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
and I’ll say that that upward tick that Jared is talking about to define LT one is oftentimes between absolute values of 1.5 and 2.0 millimoles of octant. But to say that it’s always two millimoles for people, I had grossly underestimates the differences that people have. Oh yeah, here’s
Trevor Connor 31:53
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, out of shape. 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 VT one 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. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 32:36
and I think that we ended up here because of research, right? It is time consuming to look at every single profile of every person, right? And I say time consuming five or 10 minutes. You know, 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, is base, and it’s not,
Jared Berg 33:15
yeah, yeah. And I think it’s interesting, you know, I’m my own subject very often. You know, I have all the tools. I have the I can put the mask on. I can prick my finger to prick your own
Rob Pickels 33:26
when you’re at threshold on the trainer. Yes,
Jared Berg 33:29
yes. My wife walks into the house. I have 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. Right where am I cycling? Because I’m just not hitting my base like I should, you know, 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.
Trevor Connor 33:58
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. Yeah,
34:33
yeah. He
Jared Berg 34:34
did a good job. He got good samples.
Rob Pickels 34:36
It can be done, you know, I will say, you know, Jared and I have both pricked a lot of fingers and ears in our day. Even the best of us mess up samples. Yeah, we know what a good sample is, what a bad sample is, and that’s the difference, knowing what a good sample and a bad sample is. But I will say, you know, hey, portable lactate meters, handheld ones, you know, quality is pretty good. They’re not as good kind of as the YSI. You know, 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, right? 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 you know, like 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? And 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. Yes, you know, I now know better. And so really, the interpretive knowledge is really what’s key and Paramount here, I
Jared Berg 36:19
would agree, yeah, because you brought up that point of what yourself, where you had those really low lac dates and you but you peaked out at three, yeah? Like, we got to think about what’s got to ask the other questions,
Rob Pickels 36:28
yeah, what the hell is wrong with you? Yeah? Like, what
Jared Berg 36:30
if you ate for the last three or four days? Are you just why I can’t? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, is there, is there an energy availability issue? And within that energy availability issue, is there a macronutrient distribution that is off, right? So that 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? Did you 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 know, like you kind of want to think about you could use someone like myself to help you, you know, look at the data that you’re getting. Yeah. So
Trevor Connor 37:07
could I give you the simple answer? I scheduled the test two days after I completed cascades. Yeah, you were you told you were just done. I was just done. Yes, you know
Rob Pickels 37:17
what was interesting? And Jared has tested me outside of the lab at his house I’ve done testing into his living room back the day, you know. And that was prior to me doing pisca, I think a few years ago, I don’t remember, maybe my results weren’t really that great in the whole scheme of things, and it took me a long time to realize why. And 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. I
Jared Berg 38:10
used to drink coffee.
Rob Pickels 38:11
I never did back in the day. Yeah, I remember that. And 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. And nobody talks about stuff like that. Yeah, at bcsm and CU Sports Med, we didn’t have anybody refrain from caffeine. No, we
Jared Berg 38:33
just figured, you know what? Caffeine is going to boost up substrate, fat utilization. Is it glycogen sparing, you know, in a long event. So maybe that’s not bad, you know, that’s interesting for you to get that. Yeah, it just opens up the whole doors for a whole new study, you know. So, Rob,
Trevor Connor 38:46
you’re gonna get a laugh out of this. No, I
Rob Pickels 38:48
don’t talk about the testing, never. Wow. 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, good. And so I ordered like, 200 strips, which, as you know, is not cheap, no? And then I get a call from the company, like, Are you sure you want to order these? I’m like, why? And they’re like, these are for dogs. Dogs.
Jared Berg 39:09
I’m sure we could get a whole business. I mean, I was at dinner the other night in Des Moines, Iowa, Des Moines, yes, with a couple that trains horses. Okay? They’re doing all the same thing. We went from, you know, you know, talking about running or whatever that are, that their sons and our daughter is doing a hoof, yeah, where do you take the lactose
Trevor Connor 39:28
down a horse? Why the animals let you do this? But
Jared Berg 39:31
they’re doing sodium bicarb. Oh, nice. Yes, as supplementation, yes, with the horses, but they’re also testing it. And they don’t want to do so much. They’re like, it’s like they’re regulating it. It’s really interesting. I mean, they’re, they’re getting into all all the stuff. I bet you there’s big money and horses way more than than we’re doing humans,
Rob Pickels 39:49
Trevor, just knock down a wall, put in horse
Trevor Connor 39:51
treadmill. Yes, you had what at CU sports, that thing was cool. The big treadmill, like, size of a room. Yeah, I
Jared Berg 39:58
had the same size treadmill at home. They do. Yeah, that’s just a nice wood way. Yeah. Okay,
Trevor Connor 40:02
so I think we’ve done a good job of explaining the complexity of that VT one, 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, those really well trained, high trained endurance athletes, right, those athletes who are putting in big volume of hours, right? If we said, You know what, just do 80% of your training zone two or below, well, they’re very motivated, right? 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, 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, get making it where, like, if they’re, you know, they’re on the bike there, at home, you know, that type of training is that sort of like zone one style training, and then, yeah, 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. Very relevant. In my opinion. You take somebody whose FTP isn’t quite as strong, you know, 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? Yeah,
Jared Berg 42:02
that’s a good discussion point. I would say that, um, there’s definitely less relevance, but there is still some from my perspective. But when you’re talking about someone who’s training, you know, the surgeon general recommended hour a day, right? Or, you know, 30 minutes to 60 minutes, whatever
Rob Pickels 42:17
they recommend, I
Jared Berg 42:19
forget too, yeah. So we’re talking about different athlete, and then maybe they’re not, you know, don’t have the same level of fitness where, you know, like a zone two doesn’t feel like work. They’re not running as fast, or not biking as fast, a stiff breeze can put them above, you know, zone two kind of thing, or a slight, slight Hill. So that at that point they may do that 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, right? 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, like the nervous systems, okay, 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, you know what, I’m running or I’m biking, and I still sort of feel like I can, you know, 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 so, 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. Things are 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, right? 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. But a long time since we brought this up, so worth bringing up again. So 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, correct? So parasympathetic drive lowers your heart rate, yes, 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. Yeah,
Jared Berg 45:52
exactly. And the other reason you know you talk about, so that’s a great, great reason for even the person who’s not training a lot, to still do some zone one, some easy training, all right, but start looking at like a runner model, right? And we say, you know, do all of your training in Zone Two. Like I have a I have a son who’s a collegiate runner, and we have his zone two right now, somewhere around a 550, minute mile. Okay, that’s where he hits. LT, one. Vt, one. And so if we said, you know, what do 80% of your training in zone two, he could be running between a 620, and a 550, minute mile for 5560 Yeah, 5560 miles a week, right? He’s training, he’s training upwards of 8085, miles a week now. And so that is like, that would really break him down, right? So now we say, hey, what do we do? What we give him zone two intervals, or, you know, little pieces. A big, popular run that we do is a 5050, run. We’re like, Yeah, do 50% of your training. You do a 50 minute easy in Zone 130, minutes in zone two, and 15 minutes easy in Zone One, very basic workout, but then we also like he’s doing at least, you know, his doubles where he does like 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, right? We want that as low as possible. So if he was to run those at like, a seven 730 that’s too much musculoskeletal stress, bro. I want him starting at 830 feeling his way down to maybe a, you know, 750 or so. But keep it just really light. Feel like he’s just doing a little, 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, you know, 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, right? And so we need to, again, 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 the 80% 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. Yep, I agree. So
Trevor Connor 48:41
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, 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, 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. Like everybody’s always talking about, what’s my functional threshold? What’s my functional threshold? That number, 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 232 40 watts, and you’re not gonna be fatigued at the end of it. Think about that for a minute, Yeah, but you’re
Rob Pickels 49:31
gonna be not tired and you can’t sprint. Trevor, yes,
Trevor Connor 49:35
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
Jared Berg 49:40
off you. Oh, boy, sucker, yeah, exactly the hill, 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, right? I you know, 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 LT, one. Vt, one? Yeah, I
Rob Pickels 50:21
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 LT one any higher. It’s almost a Universal Recommendation, get
Jared Berg 50:36
it up there. Yep, for sure.
Trevor Connor 50:38
So something was very interesting, brand new study that came out. This was by Dr sprog, who has worked a lot with Dr Seiler to the point 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 Oh, that’s how important this is. Can
Rob Pickels 51:28
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 it’s 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 maybe I’ll 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. Yeah, it’s interesting, because it’s a power they would actually do, like, a longer, a long test after, no, it’s just taking all their data. Okay? They’re just analyzing, yeah, this is Pro. So they’re doing a lot of racing. So the idea is, the theory here is, they’re, 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. So and 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, got it. It’s
Jared Berg 53:17
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, that power of of training. You know, don’t disregard zone one training and think that it’s not effective. I would never call Zone training like junk miles.
Rob Pickels 53:35
Yeah, the term recovery is probably it has negative connotations, right? And that’s why I try to do like a low base, high base, because, hey, bass is good. This is just a different version. Great.
Jared Berg 53:47
Ace, yep. So, so think of it like sports specificity training is what zone one training is to me, when it’s, you know, obviously high intensity training is also sport specific, right? 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 a lot of value. It allows you to hit those, those big volumes, and maybe, like you’re talking about, do more work later in a ride in a race, and, do you know, and have a bigger resistance 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 too. You start to do more sub threshold, you can start to do more, you know, maximal efforts later in a race, I
Rob Pickels 54:33
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 right? And you’re still getting benefit from that. You don’t have to be like, 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
Jared Berg 55:39
they can yep, I would agree. And I think that has a place in someone’s training cycle throughout the year where it’s like, you get a lot of value in that, and then you you sort of like, you maximize the returns on that. And so you can use that in a certain part of your training phase. And then you can be like, You know what? Now I’m going to 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 you went 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. You know, by the time you’re starting to, like, really work on some via two Max efforts or sub threshold, and that’s how you think about a training program and and that’s what I love to assess. When I do some work or some 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. And, you know, four to six months real
Rob Pickels 56:44
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 right 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 it doesn’t have at that point, doesn’t have at that point, doesn’t anything to do with their fitness, right? 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. Yeah,
Jared Berg 57:37
this could be a totally like different discussion, but kind of goes into what you when you sort of establish, sort of what drives different physiological, you know, happenings or markers with muscle fiber types. And, you know, we start to train those tempo and those sub threshold, are we starting to like, 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, you know, less aerobic, and start to use glycogen a little bit faster, a little bit even more efficiently, and and start to, you know, 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, right? They sort of bring up their mitochondrial density a little bit more. They sort of, you know, awaken some of those qualities. They start to get blood flow better to those energy factories. And so you kind of like, we’re basically, like, 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. Yes,
Rob Pickels 58:55
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, you know, how do we roll nutrition into this conversation?
Jared Berg 59:13
Exactly? That’s definitely, 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 like always talking about exercising and how do you, how do you really work and, you know, tire yourself out, or, you know, do more work and deplete yourself. I get to actually go and decide, how do you nourish yourself, right? How do you, 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, you know, there’s lots of ways you can use that type of, you know, the type of, I guess, training that I have and and education that I have around 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 during, you know, at the top of their zone two, right? 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, how many you know, considering how much you know 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, right? And that’s, you know, really race specific, right there, but also on the daily, if the energy’s not there, the performance isn’t going to be there, right? You can’t make something out of nothing, so we have to understand, you know, how many, you know, 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, like, if somebody’s always training, you know, top end of zone, two for 80% and then doing some amazing, you know, 20% high work. Like, what does that look like for a caloric expenditure? Well, for a high level athlete, you know, if they’re training, you know, three to four hours a day. That could be, I don’t know, five to 6000 calories daily, right? Are, you know, are they able to meet those, those workload demands with nutrition? And so that’s something that I love to be able to to work on. And that’s just like math right there. But then go into other stuff too. Let’s
Trevor Connor 1:01:42
hear from Coach Kristen Arnold and some of the challenges we face with measuring energy needs.
Kristen Arnold 1:01:48
The metric I am still feeling like 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 one to one correlation with kilocalories burned on the bike. And this is unique compared to an athlete in a sport like soccer, or, you know, 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, right? So energy calorie needs are always an estimate, and it is indirect, right? 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 like, 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. So yeah, I would love to hear more about this and what arson takes of how to as accurately as we can measure energy needs for athletes in cycling,
Rob Pickels 1:04:09
this conversation, right? We’ve really been centered around lactate right 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. And you know, Jared, I think you’re entirely right where, you know, 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 right? And so it’s, you know, 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 right. 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 you know, given level of power production or heart rate, are you a fat burner? Are you a carbohydrate burner? And that that then influences what you should be consuming
Jared Berg 1:05:50
Exactly? Yeah, and then something that’s really I find interesting, that, in my practice, when I’ve started looking more heavily at at energy availability, is sort of a down regulated metabolism. We kind of touched on this with the inability to hit high lactates, right? Also see this with with super high fat metabolism and the inability to go into high or almost completely carb metabolism. And so when I see that, I sort of 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, right? So basically, we up regulate their metabolism to do more work. Well, Jared,
Trevor Connor 1:06:42
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 1:06:59
Trevor, thanks for having me. This has been, it’s, I’m super excited to be, yeah, to be working with all you guys, and it’s just so much, so much fun to to be able to collaborate and just, you know, the professional development that we all get to work on together. We’re all, we’re all in this, this practice. We’re all we’re all learning, and we’re excited to be able to share with you know, anybody who wants to listen in and this
Trevor Connor 1:07:21
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, because ready yet. Rob,
Rob Pickels 1:07:31
welcome to the show.
Jared Berg 1:07:34
I’m a little nervous. All right,
Trevor Connor 1:07:36
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@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. All right, but let’s finish this out. So Jared, it’s been a bit we finish out each show with our take homes, 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 in training. In Zone One, there’s neuromuscular adaptation to be gained. There’s more specificity, and then 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, quote, unquote, correctly. And 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, you know, 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, right? Not everybody is going to have a graph like that, but what do you do when the graph doesn’t look like that? And 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. People with as little stress on your body as possible. So my
Trevor Connor 1:10:03
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
Rob Pickels 1:10:13
say, retake home.
Trevor Connor 1:10:14
A retake. Retake home. There we go. 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 then you go, Sam Milan, I’m going to say, Rob pickles, or rob pickles or grant holicy,
Rob Pickels 1:10:41
not him. He’s
Trevor Connor 1:10:41
no 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 VT one, 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 VT one 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. It
Jared Berg 1:11:38
was a pleasure. Mind you. Thank
Rob Pickels 1:11:39
you. Thanks. Bonnie,
Trevor Connor 1:11:40
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 radio and a review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs. Join the conversation@forums.fasttalklabs.com or learn from our experts@fasttalklabs.com for Jared Berg, Kristen, Arnold, Sebastian Weber and Rob pickles, I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
