Properly Executing Intervals Is Hard; Keep Your Training Plan Simple

Here’s your workout for today:

Give me 20 seconds at high anaerobic capacity.
Now 10 second recovery at 65 percent.
Then one minute at mid-VO2max holding 100 RPM.
Now rest one minute.
Alright, now give me a series of 10 one-minute efforts at 102 percent of FTP with increasing cadence. But be careful: Do these at 99 percent of FTP and you’re working the wrong system. You’ve screwed up the entire workout!

Okay, perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration. However, the complexity of that routine was probably starting to sound familiar.

Complex training prescriptions are becoming increasingly popular. We ask the question:

Does it really need to be that complex? What do you gain from this complexity?

With the help of seven different experts — coaches, scientists, and athletes — we’re going to try to make three key points:

Human physiology is very complex.
Properly executing intervals is very difficult.
But the prescription should be simple.

Along the way, Trevor will drop his biggest nerd bomb yet, attempting to explain how complex the physiology is. We’ll use the analogy of riding side-by-side to explain why prescriptions should be simple. And we’ll talk about all the subtle ways that top athletes learn to better execute their workouts — numbers are important, but there’s a lot more to it than that. As I mentioned, there was no guest with us in our studio for this recording, but since this is a summary episode, we pulled a lot of segments from past shows.

Our guests this week include:

Legendary mountain bike world champion, and a guy who never gets old, Ned Overend. Ned almost sounded scared when he talked with us about the possibility of training with power or heart rate. Yet, despite having almost no metrics, and no structured routine, he’s developed a remarkably sophisticated system of training.
Next, we’ll hear from Houshang Amiri, head coach at the Pacific Cycling Centre and past Canadian national team coach. Houshang shared with Trevor his thoughts on complex interval routines.
It wouldn’t be an episode on interval work without hearing from Dr. Stephen Seiler, a top exercise physiologist and researcher in Europe, who’s been credited with formalizing the polarized training model. We pulled a few clips from Dr. Seiler sharing his thoughts on interval prescription and execution.
But what about athletes who have grown up with power and pre-programmed workouts on their head units? We included an interview we haven’t used before with 2018 Tour of Utah winner Sepp Kuss. While he relies heavily on power, it’s not as simple as setting a target number before he gets on the bike and sticking to it.
Next we grabbed a clip with Dr. Andy Coggan and Hunter Allen, authors of Training and Racing with a Power Meter which was updated this year. They invented probably the most common training zone model in the world (though they don’t like the word zones.) They talked with us about the value of zone models or levels.
Trevor pulled out an old interview with Trek-Segafredo rider Toms Skujins. Like Sepp, Toms talks about just some of the many decisions that go into effectively executing his interval work.
Finally, we hear from 2017 U.S. national champion Larry Warbasse of Ag2r La Mondiale. Larry talked with us about the importance of seeing your training sessions in a broader context. Otherwise, you can execute perfectly and still get off track.

Let’s make you fast!

Episode Transcript

Chris Case 00:11

Hello and welcome to Fast Talk. I’m your host Chris case managing editor of velonews joined by Revenge of the Nerds aficionado, Coach Trevor Connor. All right. Are you ready? Here’s your workout for today. Give me 20 seconds at high or anaerobic capacity now 10 seconds recovery at 65%. Then one minute at mid vo to max holding 100 RPM now rest one minute. All right now give me a series of 10 one minute efforts at 102% of FTP and increasing cadence. But be careful. Do these at 99% of FTP and you’re working the wrong system. Oh my god, you’ve screwed up the entire workout. Okay, perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration. However, the complexity of that routine was probably starting to sound familiar. Complex training prescriptions are becoming increasingly popular. In this episode of Fast Talk, we asked the question, does it really need to be that complex? Today is another summary episode. It’s just Coach Connor and I with no guest to keep us in line. We do bring in seven side interviews from people much smarter than us. With their help, we’re going to try to make three key points. Number one, human physiology is very complex. Number two, properly executing intervals is very difficult. Number three, the prescription should be simple. Along the way, Trevor will drop his biggest nerd bomb yet, trying to explain how complex the physiology is. We’ll use the analogy of riding side by side to explain why prescriptions should be simple. And we’ll talk about all the subtle ways that top athletes learn to better execute their workouts. Numbers are important, but there’s a lot more to it than that. And if you like a challenge and want a really tough workout, here’s one for you. Take a shot of your favorite scotch every time Trevor gushes over PGC one alpha, make it to the end of the podcast doing that and you’re a better athlete than either of us. As I mentioned, there was no guest with us in our studio for this recording. But since this is a summary episode, we pulled a lot of segments from past shows. Our guests this week include legendary mountain bike world champion and a guy who never gets old net overland net almost sounded scared when he talked with us about the possibility of training with power or heart rate. Yet, despite having almost no metrics in his training life and no structured routine, he’s developed a remarkably sophisticated system of training. Next we’ll hear from houzhang emiri, head coach at the Pacific cycling center and past Canadian national team coach houzhang shared with Trevor his thoughts on complex interval routines. Next, it wouldn’t be an episode on interval work without hearing from Dr. Steven Siler, top physiologist and researcher in Europe, one of our favorite guests, even credited with formalizing the polarized training mind. We pulled in a few clips from Dr. Seiler who shared his thoughts on interval prescription and execution. What about athletes who have grown up with power meters and pre programmed workouts on their headphones, we included in an interview here that we haven’t used before. With 2018 tour of Utah winner set coos while he relies heavily on power, it’s not as simple as setting a target number before he gets on the bike and sticking to it. Next, we grab a clip from Dr. Andy Coggan and hunter Allen, authors of training and racing with a power meter, which was updated just this year. The two of them invented probably the most common training zone model in the world. They don’t even use the word training zones. But that’s another story. They talked with us about the value of zone models, or as I like to call them levels. jever pulled out an old interview with trek segafredo writer Tom scootch. Like set, Tom talks about some of the many decisions that go into effectively executing his integral work. And finally, we hear from 2017 US national champ Larry warboss, who now rides for a GTR limo. Dr. Larry, talk with us about the importance of seeing your training sessions in a broader context. Otherwise, you can execute perfectly and still get off track. With that, take that first shot Oh scotch because PG one c alpha. Let’s make it fast.

Trevor Connor 04:44

This episode of Fast Talk is sponsored by whoop. This was one of the really interesting things I remember learning about many years ago and one of my physiology classes. I wish I could find the details about this. But one of the things that made German cyclists back in the 80s Absolutely dominant was apparently, they had the athletes living with a team of doctors and physiologists, and quite literally, they would get up in the morning and go down and get a whole evaluation. And then they would be told, here’s what you are able to do today. So it’s just an assessment of how recovered they are, how beat up they are. So they didn’t just have a standard training plan that they had to follow no matter what it was really customized to, to where they’re at every day. And that gave them an edge. And what’s really neat now is essentially, with a product like whoop, you kind of have that on your wrist, you’re going to get up in the morning, that’s going to give you an idea of how recovered you are, how good your sleep was. That’s going to allow you to adjust your training.

Chris Case 05:43

Yeah, it’s pretty fascinating to think about all of the technology that has been reduced and slapped onto your wrist and gives you that feedback immediately daily, and customized to you as as an athlete as an individual.

Trevor Connor 05:57

This is why I was born 20 years too early. When I when I was in my 20s I loved music I’d have to carry around these giant things of CDs everywhere that I went, I was filling up my car. Now I can fit it all on my phone. Same thing back then you would have had to have a bunch of physiologists in the back of your car. No, you can just carry it on your wrist.

Chris Case 06:13

Exactly.

Trevor Connor 06:14

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Trevor Connor 06:40

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Trevor Connor 07:47

Chris was just looking, he’s looking at the outline I gave him normally our outline is a page long. This is like what four pages long

Chris Case 07:53

it is, but we’re gonna try to get through it. And it’s challenged. But we’ll we’re up for challenges.

Trevor Connor 07:59

Well, I hope you our listeners are ready for this one because this is you’re gonna get some true, Trevor nerd bombs on this one. Yeah, I’m

Chris Case 08:07

gonna try to limit those, but there’ll be some. So today’s episode is just Trevor. And I’ve just got coach Connor Chris case sitting around a table. It’s like a fireside chat you and me. It’s another summary episode. But we’ve been talking about this one for a while and comes back to the types of questions we get the specificity that people seem to want from us. And this one, this episode is really going to hopefully help our listeners understand that the physiology of the human body is extremely complex. But the execution, the prescription of what you should do in your training doesn’t have to be extremely complex. So we’re gonna try to cover a lot of things in this episode. But ultimately, you’re going to hear our biased opinion on what really works. And it’s going to go back to a lot of the things you’ve heard us talk about in previous episodes, whether it’s with Dr. Tyler’s polarized model, or things that Sebastian Weber has brought to the program about the given take between the different types of riders and athletes there are in the world and how you train and if you train in one way, it might, you might sacrifice a little over here and, and so forth, or vice versa. So again, this is going to be an episode where not everybody’s gonna necessarily agree with us. There might be coaches out there that say we’re complete, ding dongs,

Trevor Connor 09:40

and that’s fine. And we’re not gonna sit here and try to argue this is our bias. This is our opinion. But we’ve never said we are absolutely right.

Chris Case 09:48

Yeah, but I do think the reasoning behind what we’re about to say is very sound. And what we’re trying to do is actually make things in a way simpler for people and also bring out the best in terms of performance. So we’ve got good intentions,

Trevor Connor 10:05

we hope. And what motivated this. I mean, we really do listen to your questions, and we try to answer all the questions. We’re not always perfect, but we really try. And one of the themes we’ve really been seeing lately that people are struggling with particular, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about zones, and we hope all of you listen to that episode we did a few months ago about zones. What I have been seeing is people have been oversimplifying the physiology. But then when they talk about their training there, they are making their exercise prescriptions dramatically over complex,

Chris Case 10:38

right, we want to switch that around.

Trevor Connor 10:40

And I will give the example of my mentor who’s kind of on the one extreme, he’s a three time national champion. This is Glen Swan, my first mentor,

Chris Case 10:49

Canadian national champions know us, Oh, is he out of New York State, okay.

Trevor Connor 10:53

He’s never done an interval workout in this life. He got his form by he set up a Tuesday night training race, a Thursday time trial. So there was his high intensity work on Tuesday, his threshold work on Thursday, and he would do long rides as his friends on the weekend, he got a good exercise prescription. Mm hmm. That would fit with the sort of interval prescriptions we’ve been talking about, but never did a single interval. Because he hated them.

Chris Case 11:17

Yeah, it also sounds it not only is that sort of, quote, simple, but it sounds perhaps more fun and appealing, because you don’t have to go out there and slaughter yourself by yourself on a hill do repeats or whatever your your interval of choice is. It’s racing, it’s with people. And that’s what he said. He said, Hey, I

Trevor Connor 11:35

find this more fun to be I can never push myself as hard in intervals as I can when I’m racing people. Yeah. So there’s a logic to it. You may not have heard of Glen Swan, but I’m certain you’ve heard of Ned over. And he’s a world champion cyclist and still tears up the local cat ones in Durango and his 16. Decades of success proves he knows a lot about training. But we interviewed him a few years ago, his approach was to keep it simple.

12:03

And be honest with you, I’m I’m really just guessing here because I don’t train with a heart rate monitor. I have a very unstructured, well, maybe not unstructured is the right word, but it’s a low tech training method. methodology. I am pretty much a perceived effort trainer. So when I go out and do intervals, I’m doing based on my perceived effort over the length of the interval I’m doing. And and I use group rides, and chasing Strava segments, you know, for either a PR or KLM, or for a high finish on the Strava. Segment as as my kind of drive for interval training, and I don’t use a watt meter or a heartrate monitor.

Trevor Connor 12:51

Do you think there’s a danger with some of these younger athletes who have all these numbers? As they’re going out and doing their workouts and time trialing staring at wattage staring at heart rate? Do you think there’s a danger in not learning the feel and affecting their performance?

13:11

Yeah, I think that in the same way, that when I’m doing a group ride, it pushes me harder than when I’m doing intervals myself, or it pushes me in a different way. And I think that when you’re in a race, if somebody, especially in a race, if somebody is looking at a watt meter or a heartrate monitor, they’re restricting themselves when they may be able to push themselves beyond kind of the numbers they’ve seen in training, to whether it’s make or break or, or stay away from somebody or I think they if they put those kind of parameters on themselves, that that may hinder the performance are capable.

Trevor Connor 14:01

Let’s get back to the show and talk about what is complex. The first part of this

Chris Case 14:05

episode is going to be

Trevor Connor 14:08

sort of Trevor is nerd mom I’ve ever done. Well, hopefully

Chris Case 14:12

it’s not that. I’m going to try to keep

Trevor Connor 14:15

Oh, no, no, no, no, hopefully it is going to be the biggest nerd bomb I have ever done. This was planned. I was like, I didn’t sleep last night. I was giddy.

Chris Case 14:26

Oh boy. Oh, boy, I’m in for a challenge, because I’m going to try to keep you on track and keep you rolling. We got I’m going to put you on the clock. How about that? Instead of instead of one minute, I’m going to I’m going to be generous. You’ve got five minutes to go through. What do we got here? 1213, maybe 15 different points that you want to make, hey, it’s probably 25 there, half of them are still in your head.

Trevor Connor 14:51

So before the timer starts. What we’re going to try to do here is show just how remarkably complex the physiology is so it to cover In five minutes, you have to look at this as every single sentence I say, we could do an episode or two, just explaining that one

Chris Case 15:09

sentence and in some ways we have we’ve done some episodes on some of this stuff. So when we can, we’ll try to reference those episodes. Yep. But in the meantime, we’re gonna take the 10,000 foot view on what’s going on. I got the stopwatch. Oh, God, are you ready?

Trevor Connor 15:26

Let’s do this. Are

Chris Case 15:26

you well hydrated?

Trevor Connor 15:28

I am. Well, hi, hold on. I’ve got my tea.

Chris Case 15:30

What kind?

15:31

This is a gunpowder,

15:32

gunpowder tea, good and bitter. All right, well, on your mark, get set,

15:39

Okay,

Trevor Connor 15:41

so we are talking about the different ways in which we improve what’s going on with your physiology. And let’s start really simple. We have those three fiber types. Your slow twitch what are called your your fast twitch two a your fast enough to be when we’ve had Dr. Siler in here, and we’ve talked about the three zone model, it has been pointed out that in some ways that zone one is already really working the slow twitch, when you move into zone two, that’s where you start recruiting those two a fibers. And once you’re in zone three, as you’re really hitting the two axes, your big anaerobic fibers. And so there is some argument that you just need to kind of target those fibers. So that’s a really simple, nice way of looking at the the physiology, and we could just leave it there. And we’ve used that sort of very simple way of looking at it to talk about a lot of our episodes. But even that starts to get a little more complex, because when you go out and do a long ride, even your slow twitch muscle fibers will fatigue. And they’ve shown that you start cycling through muscle fibers. So you could be going out at 150 watts initially just using your slow twitch muscle fibers, but three hours in at 50 watts, you’re starting to recruit some of those those anaerobic muscle fibers and of those two A’s and even some of the two X’s you also see over time transition in fiber types. The two A’s are the what are called the big imitators because they can either act like a big anaerobic fiber or they can start acting like an oxidative fiber. The other key thing to remember is as you go up in intensity, it’s not like all of a sudden now you’re only using your your two exes, you continue to recruit all your muscle fibers, you just recruit more and more as you go up through intensity.

17:19

But do we have time we have three minutes left. Okay, so

Trevor Connor 17:23

let’s look at another thing that you’re really trying to train. We’ve talked a lot about fat and carbohydrate metabolism, you’re really trying to affect what fields you’ve used. And we’ve had people like Dr. Holly on the show that have said, if you don’t have the carbohydrates, you can’t do high intensity and high intensity work relies on the carbohydrates. But as a cyclist, we really need to rely on fats for fuel, because as far as a bike race is concerned, fat is unlimited. Carbohydrates are limited. And if you are really using those carbohydrates in a race, you’re gonna bog fat utilization kind of follows a bell shaped curve, it has a peak, which is a little bit below right around threshold, and it actually starts to the client. I have heard physiologist that say once you’re above threshold, you’re not burning fat at all. I’ve heard others that say no, you continue to burn fat, you’re always burning fat. It’s just now your your ratio is completely different. You’re burning a ton more carbohydrates. But the idea here is if you really want to hit burn, improve that fat metabolism, it’s not necessarily at the highest intensities, right? If you want to improve though, your ability to use carbohydrates for high intensity, you need to do high intensity work. that then gets us into this whole idea of lactate metabolism because you only produce lactate when you’re burning carbohydrates. And a big part of training was Cycling is improving your ability to maintain lactate levels. That’s not just reducing how much lactate you produce, but actually improving how much you clear, even when you’re sitting on the couch you are producing lactate right is clearing it as quickly as you’re producing. That’s why you can have a lactate steady state at many different intensities, as long as it’s holding steady. And I think we did an episode on this. We talked with Dr. nugo saw Milan about this, but there’s a lot of research showing that actually, the optimal point of clearance when your body is that you know really really clearing that lactate and improving that system is that 95% of your lactate threshold. So it’s a sub threshold of what people think of as sweetspot work. Yep. And that’s why, you know, for time trailers, training that lactate clearance is critical. If you’re doing a 40 k TT you can’t build up lactate. And that’s why when we had Sebastian Weber in here talking about how do you train a time trial as he was saying sub threshold high low cadence work and we had a lot of people got kind of upset by that they’re like but that sweet spot that’s not threshold that doesn’t fit. But you have to look at what are the different systems we’re trying to train and right now we’re talking about that lactate clearance. Next we can talk about efficiency versus vo two Max and you got 20

Chris Case 19:54

seconds left. I

Trevor Connor 19:55

have failed miserably. We haven’t hit the good stuff yet. I’m trying not Apologize. So we won’t even touch on this one. But we could talk about improving efficiency versus zero to Max, which

20:06

says here, let’s not even go there.

Trevor Connor 20:08

Yeah, because it’s controversial. Mm hmm. There was one fascinating five years study.

20:15

Everybody. Do you hear that? Yeah, yeah. Done. I miss my face you off? No,

Trevor Connor 20:19

you’re not I’m going. We’re continuing. There was a five year study that showed that some cyclists improved and efficiency over time, some proven vo to max but you never saw somebody who prove right on both. Yep. Which is fascinating. We will save that for another time. That

Chris Case 20:34

was a conversation or a topic that came up in conversation with Joe Friel, if I’m not mistaken, when it came to runners, Yang shorter talking about that, yep,

Trevor Connor 20:43

you’ve heard us talk a lot about PG C, one alpha, there are a ton of different pathways that affect our training affect our body’s ability to produce work, both robotically, anaerobically, we didn’t want to talk about all of them. Mm, you know, I’m a geek, but we know our limits for the show. But you’ve heard us continuously talk about this PG c one alpha pathway, because you

21:07

have a tattoo of that on you on your forearm don’t

21:09

you probably

Trevor Connor 21:12

probably should get it. We picked that pathway, because it’s kind of this funnel. And it’s been shown that it’s the master regulator of endurance adaptations, and everything kind of goes through this pathway. So and we’re going to talk more about this in a minute. But in some ways, you know, we talked about what intensity should be going at, there is a bit of an argument of does it really matter because it’s all actually hitting the same pathway, we’ll get to that my time is out. Last thing that you have to look at when you’re talking about what you’re doing with your training is autonomic stress, and reactive oxygen species. I actually just wrote an article about this, and we should probably do an episode on this. But when you do a lot of aerobic work, especially when you do high intensity, very fatiguing work, you produce a lot of Ross reactive oxygen species. And it has this interesting kind of bell shaped curve to it, or we were talking before, try not to throw too many words out there. But hormesis, in that if you produce a certain amount of Ross, it actually promotes adaptations. If you want to produce a certain amount, it’s going to help your training, you produce too much. And it actually shuts down your immune system and your body doesn’t adapt and you start pushing towards burnout, right. So that’s another thing you have to look at is how much we’re awesome. I’m producing

Chris Case 22:29

a lot of balancing acts taking place in what we’ve talked about. And that one in particular,

Trevor Connor 22:34

with the Ross, right. And the reason I just tried to get all that into five minutes and explain all that, and probably confuse everybody, including myself, is to get across this idea that the physiology is remarkably complex. And as you said, it’s a balancing act. All these different things are influenced differently by our training. And so really focusing on one might actually have a negative effect and one of the others, you have to look at, am I really trying to improve my fat metabolism? I’m trying to prove lactate clearance, am I trying to Am I building too much Ross, you have to look at all these things is this giant mill you that doesn’t quite fit together. And where we are heading with this is we got a lot of emails where people are talking about well, I was just above or just a little below my vo two Max and my lactate threshold. So I was in this zone, therefore I was training this system. And that’s just not the way the body works. It’s not this case of I am now my vo to maximum. So I am just training vo to my eyes, right? Or I am, you know, in my threshold zone. So I’m just training my threshold.

Chris Case 23:40

They’re not these distinct silos, right? Everything’s a blend,

Trevor Connor 23:44

I brought up the PG c one alpha st everything kind of funneled through there. Because in some ways, all training produces some of the some similar games. They used to be there’s all belief that there was a central conditioning, which you influence when you went out and did long and slow. And then there was peripheral conditioning. And that’s kind of been tossed out. And part of that was discovery of this PG c one alpha pathway. They said actually, it all just goes through the same funnel, so do threshold work, do sprint work. And they even did studies on Sprint’s, and this was more in in untrained individuals, but showed Hey, they went out and did sprints and their endurance improved. So it’s just not that simple. It’s not I’m in my threshold zone. Therefore, I’m doing threshold training. If you are in your threshold zone, that whole giant physiological soup that I just gave you. It’s all been influenced and it’s all being influenced in different ways. And yes, when you’re in that threshold zone, that’s when your lactate clearance system is a little more maximal, that’s when you’re really stressing that that ability to use fats, that’s when you’re pushing some of those fast twitch muscle fibers to work more rope okay. So it is optimal for improving your Your threshold, but it’s not a simple process that’s going on.

Chris Case 25:03

Yep. Let’s put all of that complexity behind us for now. And because of that complexity of the human body and the physiology, it doesn’t mean that your prescription of what you’re doing should actually be simple.

Trevor Connor 25:19

Yeah, you would think when I’m explaining all that complexity, you would just kind of throw your hands up in the air and go, this is so ridiculously complex, I have no idea how to train. And what we want to get at with the rest of this podcast is, now that you understand the physiology is remarkably complex, don’t simplify it, don’t simplify it down to zones. And this zone is just training the system. What’s very counter intuitive. And, again, this is where we’re getting into our bias. I’m going to try to explain how this this complexity actually leads to. I think the best training is a very simple exercise prescription. And remember, we had Dr. Siler on the show who basically said the same

Chris Case 25:59

thing. Yeah. And in your opinion, there’s a keystone here, there’s this PG c one alpha pathway. And because you can come at it from all these different directions and affect it in different ways that is central to what you’re about to get into.

Trevor Connor 26:16

So let’s take that whole physiological meal you that we just talked about, throw most of it out, we’ll cover in more detail, this whole reactive oxygen species and the training at 95%. For better lactate clearance, hopefully, we’ll touch on that in future shows. Sure, let’s just kind of zero in on this PG c one alpha. So I called it the funnel. Basically, it is the master regulator of all endurance work. And I’m going to tell you, I’m not going to go too much into the details of it. But there are two great reviews out there that really explained this by two Titans in exercise physiology. One was written by Dr. Larsen, that was in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science and sports, written in 2010. And it’s a great review where he talks about the importance of this PG c one alpha pathway, and then how to influence it. And we’ll we’ll actually go a little more into detail about what he says in his study. The other one was written by doctors Kofi and dr. john Holly who had had on the show in the past, and it’s again a review that was written in 2007. And he really details this the importance of this PG c one alpha pathway, and puts it up against the the pathway that’s really important for strength athletes who are looking for hypertrophy, that’s a different pathway. And he does show that the the pathway VGC one alpha pathway for endurance training, actually mutes the other one, which is why if you go out and do a lot of endurance work, you never gonna look like Arnold Schwarzenegger

Chris Case 27:45

can attest to that.

Trevor Connor 27:47

Going back to this pathway, so I’ve said it’s kind of the master regulator, everything funnels through it. There is a little bit of truth to saying, Who cares what you do go to sprint work, go to two bottles go do long, slow. It’s all going to promote PGC, one out this this pathway. So who cares? Do whatever you want to do. least that’s what it sounds like we’re saying, sure. It’s it’s not quite that simple. physiology is never quite that simple. But I’m still going to use this pathway to explain why the training is actually simple. In the the review by Larson, he shows that there’s actually four pathways that stimulate PG C, one alpha. So the first one is mechanical stretch or muscle tension. Mm. Which when you’re riding the bike, that’s what you’re doing. Yep. Second one is an increase in Ross. So that’s why I was saying before that you’re looking for that armies is that optimal release of Ross because if you get enough, it’s going to promote pgcbl alpha. You do too much. It shuts system down.

Chris Case 28:50

You think Goldilocks? Not too much. Not too little. Not too hot. Not too cold? I don’t know is that Goldilocks? Right?

Trevor Connor 28:57

I was Goldilocks. Okay, and so recover. You’re looking for that bed? Not too hard. Yeah, yeah,

Chris Case 29:02

exactly.

Trevor Connor 29:03

Okay, so the other two pathways are the ones that that we really want to hit on for a second. One is an increase in muscle calcium concentrations.

29:15

Ooh.

Trevor Connor 29:16

So when you use your muscles, basically, if you if you remember your high school physiology, calcium is released into the cytosol. That’s what causes the muscles to contract and then it’s sucked back up. And that keeps happening every single time your muscle contracts, that does break down over time, and you’re sensitive. And that then promotes this PG c one alpha. The other pathway is the a MP k pathway. And that pathway is promoted by when you you see a drop in the muscle store of ATP and an increase in the muscle store of ATP. That first one that calcium concentration pathway really just takes lots of time at the bike doesn’t take intense There’s your long, slow.

Chris Case 30:01

Yep,

Trevor Connor 30:02

yep. That other pathway, they NPK, you need to hit the muscles hard, you need to do big anaerobic depleting work. So this is talking about clearing out that watt prime that we’ve talked about in previous episodes, you can do that through sprints, you can do that for two bottles, you just have to find the right execution, so that you just beat up those muscles. And there’s no anaerobic stores left in your system. Larson goes on, in his his review to say that a these two pathways affect PGC, one alpha differently. Mm hmm. So it seems that the effects from the calcium pathway are much slower, but don’t seem to have as much of a limit where the effects from the amtk are very rapid, but do seem to plateau quite quickly, which is consistent with what we’re always saying that high intensity work, absolutely improve quickly. But then you plateau. Yep. Where you need much more time with the endurance. But the other thing that he showed is that they’re additive, that these different ways of influencing PG, C, one alpha, add to one another. So if you just only did the one the ISO distance hitting that calcium, you’ll get so far, sure. Not far enough. Yep. If you just did hit the NPK, you’re going to plateau very quickly.

31:21

Mm hmm.

Trevor Connor 31:21

You combine the two in just that right mix? And that’s where you really start seeing the biggest gains? Yep. And once again, so you know, again, we’re talking about our bias, you know, we’re big fans of the polarized approach, what is the polarized approach 80%, low intensity hitting that calcium concentration pathway, combined with doing some high intensity work, really hitting that a NPK pathway and getting that additive effect? Mm hmm. So how does this lead to saying that the work is actually the prescription is quite simple. There’s a lot of different ways to really hit that amtk pathway. Sure, it doesn’t need to be overly complex, it just needs to be executed, right? Mm hmm. It doesn’t need to be overly complex how you hit that calcium pathway, it’s just lots of time at the bike, low intensity, sure. And then you are hitting that additive effect.

Chris Case 32:14

I think this follows logic, if you just come off of the winter, and you’ve taken a break, and you just start writing, and you’re riding long, slow rides, you gain fitness, if you just went out in twice a week did super hard rides, you’d gain fitness. But we’re talking about putting all the puzzle pieces together and really optimizing your training and getting to the next level so to speak, right?

Trevor Connor 32:41

We’ve talked with my old coach who sang Mary pass Canadian national team coach several times. Now, of course, I already knew his opinion on this, but as to sharing what he felt about complex animal prescriptions. So it seems like workouts are getting quite complex, they have this whole a minute of this and 20 seconds of that then 30 seconds or two minutes of that, etc, etc, etc. What’s your feeling about this? Does interval work need to be that complicated? Or I mean, do you get greater gains having really complex workouts like that? Or do you think they should be kept simple,

Houshang Amiri 33:17

extreme amounts of training should be kept simple training is complex, but that complexity is coaching for coaches not for athletes, training has to be presented to that is as simple as possible. I am not fan at all doing mixed intervals, your interest has to aim on certain goals, what are you developing, what is the goal is it speed is anaerobic, the speed strength, whatever it is, there is no need to mix this make it complicated to 10 seconds of it of one minute or certain words, drop it to certain words. By the end of the day, you are working on one energy system. And if somebody says I got to work on to energy to some of this training session, is your training wrong? That’s not going to happen. You know, so somebody asked me if he is strength training helps you I said strength training helps no matter what you do, even if you do it wrong. But if you do it correctly, you gain much faster in a shorter period of time. So that’s my feeling about those complicated intervals that’s completely unnecessary.

Trevor Connor 34:39

Let’s get back to the show where I tried to give an analogy explaining why prescription should be simple.

Chris Case 34:45

So give us an example. That really helps us understand what you’re talking about here.

Trevor Connor 34:53

Okay, so yeah, let’s step back because I’ve now done my giant nerd bomb. I was actually out for a ride. With an athlete who came to Boulder to get tested, Mm hmm. He’s actually one of the listeners of the show and, and really enjoyed having him here. And we went out, he wanted me to show him a bit of Boulder take him out for a ride. So we’re out in the bypass riding together. And I was thinking about this at the time and thinking about the what we want to do with this episode, and realized that my ride with him was his amazing analogy for what we’re trying to communicate. Because I was getting extraordinarily frustrated. I was trying to ride side by side with him. And I could not get him to ride side by side with me. And Chris can tell you, Chris, and I go for a ride, we can ride on the bike paths, we can ride on the roads, and we’re just side by side and it seems very fluid and we’re constantly lots of cars come in or something out. Yes.

Chris Case 35:46

You pick up on cues. It’s symbiotic. You move over when you need to you don’t want you know, it’s just it’s not it feels natural. He wasn’t

Trevor Connor 35:53

getting that. And I admit I was not as patient as I should have been at some point. I just kind of went, you know, you can ride beside me. Because we’re trying to talk and he’s talking 10 feet behind me and 10 feet in front of me and 10 feet. Yeah, I mean, it’s conversation impossible. Yeah. So I tried and he tried, he really did try to ride side by side with me, but he couldn’t really do it. And what I realized is, this is a great analogy. Because if you think of this in terms of training, the the exercise prescription here is incredibly simple. Go out ride side by side. Yeah. But it’s only when I’m riding with a very experienced riders, like some of the pros and boulder are going out with Chris, that were able to execute it. And when you think about it, there are so many little things. What happens when you see a kid on the path? What comes with somebody coming out of the way what is when you go around a corner? Yep. How do you deal with cars? How do you deal with with rocks in the road? And what you realize is just to do that simple prescription of ride side by side, you are making constantly, several times a minute, little decisions, figuring out absolutely, what I need to do. Now to make sure we’re side by side, there’s even just figuring out, what’s the pace that we want. I noticed when you ride with somebody who’s inexperienced, there’s going to sit there and a half wheel, he can go faster and faster. And if you ask a pro mobile, I’ve talked to a lot of pros who have said that’s one of the most frustrating things in the world for them. And I was thinking about this ever since that experience with this athlete and realized, that’s one of the cues. If you want if you’re running side by side with somebody and you want to speed it up, you go a little bit ahead of them.

Chris Case 37:25

And then they pick it up to

Trevor Connor 37:26

they either pick it up to say or that’s fine. Or they don’t and say that’s their way of communicating. I don’t want to go faster. Sure. And then you slow down and go back to their pace. And by doing that, you never say a word. But you find a pace. That’s right for both of you.

Chris Case 37:39

Yeah, this is this is the thing about experience that comes into play here. You ask a pro, what they’re thinking about, or what all the things that they’re trying to process while doing this. They might not have thought about it. It’s just second nature to them. It’s it’s learned through experience, and it just happens, right?

Trevor Connor 37:57

You have no idea how much in the last two weeks, I’ve been thinking that we do derive side by side realizing this is incredibly complex. Yeah,

Chris Case 38:05

yeah, it’s like a lot of behaviors, a lot of things that we do, you do it enough, you don’t think about it. But the

Trevor Connor 38:12

prescription there is simple ride side by side. And it’s remarkably hard to execute. Now imagine if Chris and I were going out. And let’s say we had this third fictitious person who coached us and said, what I want you to do is, I want you to ride side by side for 45 seconds, and then I want Chris to half wheel for 30 seconds, then I want you to ride 10 feet apart for another minute, then I want you to pick up the pace and ride side by side for 15. Just share, just you know, you get the idea. This will be hopeless. Mm hmm. And you would not have a good ride. And the likelihood of executing this in any effective beneficial way is is even with great riders would be low. Right? Yep. And this is this is the analogy. And when I think about interval work, so when I’m talking about the complexity of the physiology, I’m thinking about in this analogy, that’s all these little factors of the the kid coming the other way but bends in the road and cars and rocks on the road and all that sort of stuff. You’re dealing with a remarkably complex meal you have things on on this path. The prescription is the right side by side. That’s like your exercise prescription. What is remarkably complex and where you should be focusing your energy is in the execution. And I don’t think you can execute Well, when you have too complex a prescription. My bias there’s gonna be coaches out there that are cringing right now saying no, I want my pyramids and ramp ups and 30 seconds of this and 20 seconds that look if it works for you. Yeah, just my bias. Sure. But to give you an example, one of my favorite workouts that I give a lot of my athletes is just simple. five by five minute intervals, right at or just slightly below threshold with one minute recoveries,

40:06

Mm hmm.

Trevor Connor 40:07

And when I get a new athlete, it usually takes about a season before I can actually get them to execute it right. And that is a remarkably simple prescription. Mm hmm. But I’m looking for a particular heart rate response, I’m looking for them to be consistent interval, the interval where they’re their average wattage is the same, I’m looking for them to be steady. Putting all that together. And it’s not, the prescription I give them is not a just right at 310 watts, I tell them, here’s what I want to see with your heart rate. Here’s what I want to see with your power. Here’s the field that I want to see. And it takes them a year with me constantly giving feedback to learn how to effectively execute a remarkably simple prescription.

Chris Case 40:47

This makes me think of the third episode with Dr. Seiler and interval work where he talks about some of those complexities and some of the difficulty of execution because you’re not a robot. So you need to go out and you have to understand the pacing, that’s going to bring you to the specified heart rate at the end of the interval, the first one’s going to be a little bit lower, and then the subsequent ones you need to, to ramp it up. And then you’ll sit and plateau at 91 to 93% of Max heart rate or whatever that figure is. And of course, you could have gone out too hard. And if if you’re seeing that you’re not able to sustain a particular level in a particular in one of the repetitions then maybe you need to, to stop or back off. So there’s a lot of nuance in there. And again, it comes back to that experience thing. There’s a there’s a feeling component here, there’s an understanding of the numbers that may have been presented to you by your coach that you have to understand. So yeah, that’s that gets into some of the complexity. And that episode, again with Dr. Siler, a great one to listen to, to understand a little bit more about the the execution and the difficulty of executing what we’re talking about. We did a whole episode,

Trevor Connor 42:00

Episode Number 75. With Dr. Steven Siler talking about intervals and why the prescription should be simple. So it’s hard to pick a clip, instead, here’s a couple of his key messages. So if you tell somebody to go and do intervals at 88% of Max heart rate, it’s going to be different things for different people, what I’m kind of getting at here is trying to just find a simple number and say, do your interval work at this number. And that’s going to have this particular training adaptation is actually a much harder thing to do than you think.

42:31

Oh, I agree. And and that’s kind of why our research has moved in the direction of is just to give athletes a basic prescription, and then let them solve the prescription or kind of, even in papers described it as an equation. It’s like giving someone an equation and say, Alright, solve for x. And x in this case, just becomes your average power. For that interval session. You solve the equation, I say, I want you to do four times eight minutes. With two minute recovery, I want you to have the highest average power for the workout that you’re able to maintain it kind of a training max. So that’s, that’s I’ve given them an equation and how they solve it. So that has kind of become our way of doing this in the laboratory. And I think it works out pretty well. Because if we give them the prescription, then yeah, then we don’t have to, we’re not really telling them I want you to be at 91% of heart rate, or I want you to be at four millimolar lactate, we’re just saying solve the equation, but then what we find is that they tend to fall into some kind of typical ranges for heart rate for blood lactate for perceived exertion and so forth.

Chris Case 43:53

This might take us a little off track but is there anything to replace experience to help athletes understand the feeling that you have when you’re on the edge should go you know, like you were saying flex a little above or flex or bring it back down? Is there anything that replaces experience?

44:13

I know I think at least some experience you know what I hope we can do with these these messages is that we can help people to get be on the right track with just the prescription itself and some basics but then within that prescription I think they need to do it that first time and maybe the second time and start to get a feeling for what is what’s four times eight feel like and what do I Where do I need to start? What’s the initial power and initial feeling and then guide you know, go from there. It’s really important for me to say there’s nothing magical about any of these and I’m not trying to sell one. So once a while Steven sells the four times eight, that’s his that’s the Seiler intervals or whatever. No, four times eight was one of the Models we’ve used, and it turned out seemed to result in good adaptation. But it maybe could have been seven times six, or, you know, you know, I’m saying it, we think it’s more to do with the total duration that we’re prescribing that that actually is a constraining factor that helped that we can use as coaches or, you know, to prescribe and help our athletes be where we want them to be. And then I need to backup now, because we get so focused on the individual interval session that we forget the forest here, we get so focused on the tree, that we forget the forest in the forest is this, let’s let’s say you train five times a week on average day weekend weekend. So that’s about 250 sessions per year, if my math is right, plus minus, and let’s say you do an 8020 model where you say, Yep, 20% of my sessions are going to be seriously hard. All right, then that’s around 50 hit sessions each year. And then you may end up doing a few more than that. But a minimum, typical, reo listeners are doing 50 to 100 hard sessions per season or per year, as part of their training, right. So we have to think about is, when we’re prescribing this, we’re trying to prescribe a an interval training prescription base, that gives us the signals that we need over time, over these hundred sessions that they may be, without stressing more than necessary. So I always get back to this issue is, is I want to create a signal, I’ve got to live with some stress, yes, we’re gonna stress the system big time. But we don’t need to stress the system more than necessary, then it becomes unsustainable. This is about the big philosophy, this is the big picture. And sometimes we forget this because we get so focused on the individual details of the workout, that maybe are not as important as we think. And we forget the big issue, which is, hey, I need to make sure that these hundred hard workouts I do in a year have some there’s a plan here and that there’s a sustainability built into them. So that I’m, I’m progressing.

Trevor Connor 47:20

Let’s get back to the show. Right. And just to go a little deeper down that rabbit hole that you’re talking about. I think that that was a great observation. Talking about those five by five minute intervals. One of the reasons I love those is remember, we earlier in the episode talked about training, just sub threshold is great for improving lactate clearance. So when I want to improve that side of an athlete system, this is one of the intervals I give, when I have a new athlete, they’re always just tell me what power to do it at. And that’s the problem. One day, 290 watts might be right, another day, 290 watts might be too high another time, it might be too low. And I’ll actually put this clip in. But we had that episode where we talked with Sepp coos about his training, and he says he goes out, he’ll he has a target power for a workout. But he’ll see how the first interval feels and then he adjusts. He says some days, power needs to be lower. Some days the power needs to be higher, realizing that 290 watts might be the right one time, but it’s not the right the next time if you just go out and blindly do every interval up to 90, you’re not as optimally hitting what you’re trying to hit.

Chris Case 48:28

Yep. And Dr. Seiler mentioned the you know, some days you might only be able to do three, right some days you might be able to do five so there’s not only the the watts themselves, but the number of repetitions where you have that variability there and you can play with that to customize the workout on that day and based on your sensations and the numbers.

Trevor Connor 48:49

Sep Cuse 2018 winner the tour of Utah’s growing up with power and relies on it heavily. He talked with us about how he uses it really got into the complexity of the execution. He told us he starts with a simple targets owner intensity, but then there’s a lot of on their own decisions along the way.