A pioneering company in the endurance coaching industry CTS has improved the performance of tens of thousands of everyday time-crunched endurance athletes since 2000. Founded by renowned coach and author Chris Carmichael, and home to more than 50 professional coaches, CTS seeks to change lives and ultimately the world, through the power of movement, healthy habits, knowledge, and inspiration. CTS provides free training content, personal coaching, training plans, training camps, and Endurance Bucket List experiences to athletes of all ability levels.
Great series. For those who don’t want to worry about heat training, donating plasma will have the same effect. After donating do an easy zone 1-2 ride so you don’t put your health at risk of fainting due to dehydration. For me, i did that over the course of a month and definately improved my ftp (went from 239 to 245- not a huge leap) but my 5 minute power increased from 250w to around 300w. Just an option for those that don’t want to sit in the heat for what feels like days on end. I live in Florida so heat is everywhere all the time.
From 40+ year old who has a real life but races MTB on weekends....I like where you are going with this but you need to take it further. Ain't nobody has time or patience to ride with a notebook and do those structured workouts. If I have 6 hours a week.....I just ride. You can't have structure on the MTB trail anyway. You will not hold any pace for too long and if you try, you will have other riders that will pull you out of that zone for various reasons. The more important question for MTBers is ....can you do good at your local MTB races by riding MTB only or do you have to incorporate big volumes at lower intensity on say....gravel bike (puke) . If you want to race 20 miles MTB race, you need to ride 20 miles or more at race pace....which is not actually a 100% full on non stop. Far from it. Sometimes you go hard and try to smash both short and long segment PRs, sometimes you just ride with your bodies in zone 2 with splurges of high intensity. I would love to hear your opinion on the matter but with more realistic real life approach and for MTBers specifically.
I'm 57 and I've been running mostly half-marathons (and a couple of marathons) for almost 20 years. I noticed a HUGE decrease in strength and speed after menopause. My cardio and recovery are still excellent. I just experience more overall fatigue. I'm afraid to go "hard" due to fear of injury.
The amount of nuance in your answers is great. Listened to this during a planned easy run and a lot of fluctuations in HR, really underperforming compared to what I’m used to. Your session made me very self-aware and I also identified some elements that might’ve caused it. Keep it up!
Great info thanks Joe and CTS! I’m 66 training consistently since age 59. I do basic calisthenics (pull-ups, bar-dips, ATG goblet squats). 121 reps squatting w/52 lbs. to a 6 inch depth in 99º F heat: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3ZonjXZTLUE.htmlsi=wf8tLz6bTIx2FstS&t=26 34+ years whole foods vegan, on no meds/PEDs/TRT and all my parts work. 😇
One of the best explanations I have heard. I'm trying to figure out what will build the most heart and cardiovascular adaptations with 60 mins/day. I can't go above 85% HR because of joints/tendon strain. Zone 2 feels kind of pointless at low volume, whereas Sweetspot feels too much to do daily. How effective do you think it is spending 80% in upper Zone 2 around 75% maxHR, and 20% doing moderate intensity intervals around 80-85%? What do you think would work best for building heart, stroke volume, and cardiovascular adaptions in 60 minutes per day?
Theres a big difference between a bike shop that just carries parts etc and shops that cater to pro riders and really dont know diddly when it comes to fitting
Important to note; work done depends directly on time and power. Higher power = more work, and longer ride = more work, always. kJ/hour also is just power with different units. Multiply average power by 3.6 to get kJ/hour
Question coach: does doing some low volume intensity ride like 4x5 min at FTP or sprints during off season, helps maintain and carry through the acquired FTP to the next season training? As usually, during off and base phase, we loose some upper end fitness..would appreciate the answer..thanks
The rowing record set from California to Hawaii was set by a boat of two athletes that ate a diet entirely based on fat and little carbohydrate. Basically, you can have good endurance from a fat-based diet.
I agree with this, ie mix is best, but to emphasise a few points and some caveats. First, consistency of training and recovery is far more important than training distribution. You will make more progress with a consistent and well recovered ‘bad’ distribution than an inconsistent or poorly recovered ‘good’ distribution. Avoid extremes of gaps in training or getting over fatigued - the latter is more common for many athletes as they are driven. Second, on ‘optimal’ distribution the science is less clear than what the practitioners do and say. Seiler does not claim polar is best from a physiology perspective, he says that’s what he observes when he looks at elite athlete training across endurance disciplines. Andy Coggan says ‘all roads lead to Rome’ on training distribution. So there is not common agreement. Seiler says much of the science is behind where the practitioners (coaches, top athletes) are. Third, more hours spent training (upper limit may be 25-35 hours per week) for a well balanced distribution and recovery typically leads to more fitness and performance. But Olav Bu says training intensity and recovery gets more difficult to balance (ie avoid under-recovery) the more training you do, around 10 hours / week or more. That’s when training distribution makes the most difference. Its much easier to overdo a middling intensity distribution than a polar one, as one increases it in an attempt to get fitter. Hence burn out rates are higher for those. Seiler is coming to the view that the polarised distribution he sees for many hour trained elite athletes is about ‘training efficiency’ - the stimulus per strain or fatigue. Ie Z2 gives you good stimulus for low fatigue, and while increasing intensity increases stimulus it increases fatigue by more. So when you go for the high intensity stimulus, make it very high and keep it short. Finally, the practitioners say their training is rather aimed at type of stimulus - fat burning or glycogen burning or lactate shuttling or increasing VO2 max . Eg For fat burning you train up to fatmax (around 70-80% max HR for the elites, lower for other athletes) and do so with few carbs. Eg for lactate shutting do over-unders around threshold to teach the body how to use lactate but have plenty of carbs. For lactate tolerance do some extended threshold efforts etc. So its a mix. But aerobic fat burning needs more time in zone (hours) than say VO2 max stimulation (16-25 mins). Hence the polarisation. But the science hasn’t proved that and even Seiler agrees, though his training efficiency point is likely linked to what the top coaches are saying. What all this means on training distribution for time crunched athletes is you will probably want to still polarise a bit but not as much as athletes who put in longer hours. And your distribution will depend on your event (eg iron man will need high aerobic, racer needs more of a mixture), and also there’s a benefit in timing through the season even for racers - ie aerobic build in offseason and getting more race specific as you approach races.
@@TirnanHealy A few things changed my mind on Z1. Used to think it wasn’t good use of exercise time. Seiler also seemed to dismiss benefits of Z1 ‘recovery’ rides. I see 3 main potential benefits, though bear in mind you have limited time for exercise so the question is where this fits in. First, the pro cyclists spend a lot of their long aerobic rides in Z1 - just look at a lot of their Strava rides at low 200Ws (some lower still). I suspect this is a volume thing - the more volume you do the more polarised your training should be. If you’re training up to 8 hours I suspect you’re better off doing Z2 rather than Z1 for aerobic base. Second, the short recovery ride - pros do this immediately after hard rides and sometimes between rides. It is 30 min and often less eg 10-15 mins. I think this is partly ‘massage’ and partly teaching the mind not to tense up muscles on the bike. I’ve weirdly experienced my hip flexors tensing ahead of a ride even before I’ve got on the bike! Third, you likely benefit from Z1 as part of your mobility work. No cyclist should spend 100% of their aerobic exercise time on the bike. We need to function as humans too, so that should include at least brisk walks and possibly light jogs and swims to make sure we keep our range of motion, balance muscles and see if any need attention, plus a bit of loading for maintaining bone density. At a minimum I’d be doing that.
I cycled raced 10 years then switched to running, what really seemed to work for me was building a really good base in the winter which included quite a lot of hills twice a week, then moving into training races and faster efforts! Think it's important like you say to have variety in training to keep the body and mind fresh! Cheers great podcast.
Carbohydrate is required for those with a glucose adapted metabolism. For those with a fat adapted metabolism carbohydrate is not required. There is no difference between the glucose and oxidation rates for athletes fully adapted one way or the other, there is a difference in capacity however because fat stores have a calorie capacity >50x that of glucose and glycogen stores. Further, eating a mixed diet of carbohydrates and fats leads to sub optimal energy metabolism, so choose one way or the other depending on your goals, lifestyle and whether you want your teeth to rot.
The thing that so many people miss with Z2 training is that it means the athlete spends a lot of time not really pressing on the pedals…..hence muscular endurance, torque and ‘strength’ are neglected. If we ride 5 days a week soft pedalling and then just do short intervals, typically at high cadence on a trainer, then the ‘grunt’ needed to get over short climbs or accelerate out of slow corners soon becomes neglected.
Dear CTS Team, Thank you very much for your great podcast. The episodes on time-crunched athletes in particular really help me. However, as the father of a wonderful daughter, a demanding job and a limited financial budget, I am now facing another challenge that has not yet been addressed in your podcast (as far as I know). I am wondering what is the cheapest and most effective way to train basic endurance at home. I'm actually a 10km runner, but I also enjoy cross training. Is it worth buying a treadmill, spinning bike or rowing machine? Because with jumping jacks and rope skipping I hardly get into the correct heart rate zones and I can't last more than 45 minutes. What's more, my calves are being worked far too hard because I have to train on hard tiles. Best wishes from Germany Johannes
You deserve better 🫡. I got to this video after 48 minutes of being posted and you had 43 views with NO likes or comments!!!! Your videos are awesome and definitely deserve more engagement.
The irony is that after I submitted these questions, I injured my back and won’t riding for a while. But it has really cheered me up to hear my questions answered!! Thanks.
Same thing happens to me. I commit to an event, apply a training plan, ride consistently for 2-3 weeks, kids bring home a virus from school not previously known to mankind....training wrecked...lol
I am having a hard time finding advice personally. I started at 46 by losing 50lbs, reversing early onset peri-meno. I had previously done nothing but sit for a living and want to do things. I started lifting at 47, running at 48. Now i am #over50hybridathlete training for my first Hyrox. Hard for me to understand this deteriorating at 35 I hear everywhere when i am just getting started and better every day. Resources?
Cyclists? Without doubt, these guys are the biggest PED cheaters of all sporting world. Yrs back one was even caught with an electric motor in his bike frame.
Um sorry.. At 35mins single sided pedalling no good, power cranks no good. Why?? After all of illustrations of the oclock muscles positions in the previous podcast this podcast hast has turned into a box of cornflakes! Why is it bad ?? Why would using them cause more problems ? My 30 plus years of experience could commentate some possible problems but im not the one podcasting !! Wheres the meaningful content !!! Oh , “thats probably why they didn’t take off “ Not really saying much !
