Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore. Today, we are joined by our coach, Rory Porteous. And I want to thank everybody for listening. Ask you to please subscribe if you're new to the podcast, and if you like what you're hearing especially. And if you are coming back, we really like having you back. Thanks so much. And also, happy 2024. Hope everybody had a good holiday and a good new year. So if you want to support the podcast as a returning listener, you can always donate to the show at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. Sharing the show is always free, of course. Thanks for doing all of that. Love to see the show linked and referenced. And also, if you're going to reference it, it would be great if you go back and double check because we've been misquoted a handful of times. And I hope today we are not misquoted because... Oh boy, this is going to be a fun episode. 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And if you want to consult, also shoot me an email, empiricalcyclingatgmail.com. help you plan your training to coach yourselves, talk about things that went wrong, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, that's enough of the pitch. If you want to ask Instagram questions for the podcast episodes or just the weekend AMAs, give me a follow at Empirical Cycling and go ask a question. We got a whole bunch. I'm looking forward to answering our listener questions. So thanks all of our listeners for their thoughtful questions and even the sarcastic ones. Those are always fun. So I had this idea. Last year, Last year, it was like a month ago, not even. Somebody asked me something on the Instagram AMAs, and I answered somewhat flippantly, but I kind of meant it. I said, well, there's really no such thing as actual training zones. And I got a lot of comments, you could say, on that. And so I thought it would be really fun to do an entire podcast episode on that. So Rory and I have a slightly different thought on training zones. And Rory's a bit more... I'm a bit more practical with these things than I am, and I'm a bit more kind of a scientist nerd on this stuff, as usual. So I hope we have a very good discussion. No pressure. Rory, nice to have you back. Thank you. So, Rory, give me your thoughts on training zones, generally speaking, like both power and heart rate. So I think the first thing to bring up. with regards to what we're talking about when we think about training zones is these are usually built around a selection of different zones and how many zones you're talking about is going to depend based on how are you modelling power, who's come up with the idea, sometimes even what sport you're talking about. We're obviously going to talk about cycling mostly, but different sports and different people, different coaches all use some different model. Some of these are very rigid models, like the original Coggin power zones, which are basically just, you know, was it five, six zones that are just a percentage of FTP, straight down to things like the WKO eye levels, which are essentially it's the Coggin zones below FTP, and it's a customized set of zones that reflect your physiology above FTP. I think the problem with All of this, and kind of, I think part of the reason why you wanted to be able to talk about this is it's way over complicated for what it needs to be, and I think it drives a lot of confusion amongst athletes and also coaches, partly due to Poor naming of different zones that don't do the thing that the name of the zone maybe suggests. Well, for some people it might, and that's part of the problem. Yeah. But also people not fitting within any particular zone, even when it comes to things like the WKOI levels, I can speak for myself as being someone who doesn't fit nicely into that model. And I think this drives a lot of confusion for people in terms of how they can actually utilize them, or should they even utilize them. So yeah, I think that's a general summary of what a training zone is. Yeah, and I think part of the thing that I also wanted to discuss was that, I don't know how prevalent this is anymore, but way back in the day in like 20, when I started training for real, like in like 2010 through 20, 13, 14, 15, when I was just kind of starting to think about, you know, the kind of underlying stuff of this. Everybody was debating, should you, like for VO2 max efforts, should you go max or do you just have to hold a steady state power? Or can you just ride at 110, 120% of FTP or just be like be in that quote unquote zone? Like what drives adaptation? And I remember having a coach who would just kind of, he would give like over-unders. It would be like one minute at like your five minute power and then four minutes at your tempo power or something like that. And I would, you know, go out, do these workouts and I would accumulate maybe 20, 30, 40 minutes over, you know, like in the overs in my VO2 zone. And he would go, okay, you got a lot of really good VO2 max stimulus. And I was like, I don't know that I did. Honestly, I didn't feel very stimulated of my VO2 max. But that's one of the things about taking a training zone model or theory to a logical extreme. Like if you do like one minute in your VO2max zone, have you actually trained your VO2max at all? Yeah, and this like persists through the entire zone model and it really doesn't matter which set you choose because If you think about everything we talk about with regards to things like FTP or sweet spot progressions, like the zone model doesn't account for that sort of workload that you're having to do to actually elicit the adaptation, which in those cases is simply do more than last time, but that's never going to be defined within those actual training zones themselves. And so you end up in this, I think this is, you know, one of many things that has contributed over the years to things like the 2x20 sweet spot. or 2x28 FTP workout just being like the workout. And for years, that was the only thing anyone ever did because when you look at the zones, why would you actually want to do anything different? Because they're not trying to encourage you to do anything different. Yeah, actually, so you bring up a really good point there that training zones lack a duration component. Yep. And, you know, whenever somebody talks to me about FTP, A lot of people are like, oh, I need more FTP. And this could be an episode in itself about, you know, more watts or more TTE, like holding your FTP longer, which is a really good marker of endurance. And so that's one of the things where, you know, without even thinking about duration, you can just get into the rut of just doing the same exact workout. Like how many people have we seen, like just this last week, like that we've spoken to or that we've seen on forums? or in various discords where somebody's like, oh yeah, I'm just doing 2x20 or 3x15 at the same power week after week after week after week and nothing's happening. It's like, of course nothing's happening. What did you think was going to happen? There's no other dimension to this. This is a two-dimensional thing, not a one-dimensional thing. Yeah, and I think that's why you end up in a situation where Cyclists like to think too hard, I think most people will agree. I think it's a requirement. Yeah, I mean, that's why I coach. And the impact of that is that people start to try and get really into the weeds in terms of what's going on in any particular zone or intensity or whatever. And that's another one of those things that just drives some of that confusion a bit more. I think we're going to talk about it a wee bit later on, I think, but amidst all this, like, when I think about training zones, I basically think of three, and like the three zone model is its own thing, usually not attributed to anything to have power, it's usually things like lactate or ventilation rate, but you can think of it in a power terms as being You know, we have what's usually considered endurance base or around LT1. Below that, you are basically wanting to ride for a long time and feel just about as good at the end as you did at the start. Above LT1 to around FTP, that is a duration where you want to ride until you're starting to reach the limits of what you're capable of doing. Right, muscular fatigue, yeah. And then over FTP, it's usually going to be, I have a time duration and I just want to go as hard as I can for that duration. And that's the way I use zones. I use that for everything. But it's not something I'm typing down for people. It's not something that I'm like plugging into WKO and trying to figure out because that would be absolute nonsense. It's a way I try to teach people about, you know, here's what we're doing in different stages of training. Here's why all these different things are important. But all of that is lacking any context when you look at other power zone models, which are just, here's a percentage of FTP. And here's the adaptation you get out of it. Supposedly. And that was actually my original thought when I said there's such a thing as training zones. Because a lot of the data in all of the Wattstock episodes on adaptation. We've been looking at muscular adaptation. We've been looking at calcium. We've been looking at AMPK and energy state. We've been looking at redox state, et cetera, et cetera. And all of this stuff, you get a stronger signal in larger motor units, of course, as you push harder for the same duration. And there's a paper that's been going around a lot that You know, it's from, I don't have it up, it's from like what, the 82 or something like that? And they basically had rats run at different intensities until the rats would fatigue and then they would like do them in intervals. And what happened was they looked at markers of mitochondrial density, like how much, was it suctionic dehydrogenase or something like that, or citric synthase? One of the Krebs cycle slash ETC markers, And it was going up with increasing exercise intensity for the same duration. Now there's our time component again. And so when we just think about the muscles, like if, I mean, this is why FTP is also threshold work. We're getting basically the same adaptation, but we are actually encountering a component of fatigue at different intensities. And this is actually how I think about this. Do we want to encounter muscular fatigue or not? And this is how I've been thinking about and planning training for many years now. And so if you want to reach muscular fatigue, well, you better get there and you better be fresh. You better be able to do it better than last time. And if you don't, well, then you don't. And you just want to get a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of time without accumulating too much fatigue. And that's really the big way that I tend to think about this. Please give me your thoughts on that. Yeah, it's quite interesting. When you sent me the paper, which, for the audience, to be completely honest, I didn't read before we started the call. That's why this is a 10-minute tips episode today. We spent 10 minutes prepping, and we mostly talked about the title. The title and my DIY plans. But to give an idea of how long I think this has been stewing around in Coley's head, the very bottom of the paper says he downloaded it in 2018. But yeah, if you, I'm sure this will be included as part of the show notes, but if you go in and just look at like figure one, for instance, and it's very clearly, it's essentially just different running intensities for what I assume are rats, basically charted out and According to how long they lasted, but also how much cytochrome C was found when they did a muscle biopsy, I'm assuming. And it kind of goes the way you expect, in the sense that when the rats are running really slowly, they last a very long time, but there's not that much training effect, and then it just sort of gradually goes up. But they maxed out the rat's running time at like 90 minutes or something like that, or two hours. Yeah, this isn't something that's been done to exhaustion, which I think a rat would probably do a good enough job of telling you when it's exhausted. Yeah, just get off the wheel. But you can clearly see that these poor rats reach a point where The intensity is high enough that they're not able to do more than some of them don't even get to the 30-minute marker. Out of a total of it looks like they run them for at least 90 minutes. But, you know, this is kind of what we're talking about in the past in terms of, like, volume being a very key driver of your ability to improve, and it's your ability to do more than you did last time, because as these rats found out, they did. So the little squares where they last 30 minutes can probably approximate that to be FTP-ish in terms of rat running speed. And they couldn't do it anymore after that, and it's not even the highest point on the chart. It's the highest point for that time period, but if they did a lower intensity, they see greater emergence of mitochondrial adaptation, which again is why we talk about quite a lot. The importance of those, you know, just sub-maximal type efforts that let you go for a very, very long time. It's why a lot of my athletes, especially right now, will be very used to doing quite a bit of sweet spot work because we've got the time to do it. And so we can make use of that time. Yeah. And so this paper really illustrates the continuum of intensity. And there's, and this is, you know, why Pretty much everybody who's ever looked into this has reached the conclusion that, you know, you can make up a little bit of, you know, a little bit of your, like if your time crunch, if you can't ride for more than two hours at a time ever, you can make up for it a little bit by doing some sweet spot and threshold type work. I mean, this is literally an equivalence. It's not a complete parallel, like it's not a complete one-to-one, like it's not like we can look at these and say, Training Ride at 90 minutes at this intensity is exactly equal to this training ride at this intensity for 30 minutes. What's really lacking here, I mean, because we're looking just at muscular endurance, we're looking at glossing over things like capillary density and VO2 max and stuff like that. We're missing a couple other components of adaptation that we're going to talk about in the podcast, like, you know, in the next couple months. Just thinking about muscular endurance, this is where all of that comes from. And this is a pretty good paper to illustrate. I actually saw like, I don't know, three, four, five people linking it on various forums over the last like two, three months. And I was like, oh yeah, I remember that paper. This would be a really good idea to bring up on the podcast one of these days. Yeah, I'm just scrolling down through some of the charts. Figure 4 is quite an interesting one because they've actually laid on max percentage of VO2 max and correlating that to some of the running speeds that the rats have been doing. And you can see like a nice relationship where it's essentially showing for depending on the muscle, but also whether it's red or white. So for people who might not know. Slow twitch or fast twitch. Yeah, slow twitch or fast twitch. And it's essentially showing how the relationship in terms of adaptation changes in those muscles depending on how intense the actual exercise is. Yeah, because it kind of reflects motor unit recruitment. Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the big points that I've I've got on this, and people who have been listening to the podcast for a long time will, this will sound very familiar, even though I don't think it's a refrain that I've hit for a little while. When we think about training thresholds, this is why Rory and I and everybody here at Empirical Cycling and a lot of other coaches, we are definitely not unique in this, always go for underneath these thresholds. And so, which is, I mean, one of these reasons why is like, like the example I've used a thousand times is like, if you do like three by 10 minutes at like 10 watts over FTP, and that's like a fairly maximal effort for you, maybe 20, call it 100 and whatever, 5%, something like that. You've now done a tiny bit more intensity stimulus. And so is it a Better muscular adaptation than doing 3x10 minutes at 10 watts below FTP? Unequivocally, yes. However, what if we did 10 watts below FTP, but you could do 6x10? Now we have way more adaptation. And Kyle mentioned this in the last podcast where he was talking about the kind of area under the curve. And this is not a bad way to think about this. So we've now lowered the height axis. And we are increasing the duration. And now, voila, we have more adaptation. I mean, it makes perfect sense. And the same goes for riding endurance. If you've got six hours to ride, if you're riding like just barely within an inch of your life, you accumulate a lot of fatigue. And a lot of that fatigue is not even going to be like muscular fatigue. You know, your muscles aren't tired. They know the difference. The rest of your body is tired. The other thing to account for here is that we're talking about an individual workout and that's not even thinking about how all of this fits in together within a larger weekly plan, monthly plan, etc. You could manage that 3x10 workout but you might not be able to do much the next day depending on just how well you can cope with an effort like that. But on top of that, the example of 10 watts below I think is a good one because if people are Not going about things like FTP testing correctly. Going 10 watts below is going to be a really safe way to be able to let you be able to do an FTP effort in a manner that's not going to accidentally result in you doing something over FTP. And that even goes for if you're testing smartly and doing things like a TTE test to try and get all that data you can. Because sometimes you just have a good day. And sometimes... That's just as bad as if you had done a bad FTP test. So being able to do that, sneaking under the line of where you expect that intensity threshold to lie is important. It's why I think actually the best part of that FTP test, which if... People Don't Remember, it's essentially the way I give it at least, is five to ten minutes of what you're assuming sweet spot is and then up to FTP and hold to exhaustion. I think that point where you go above sweet spot is actually the important part of the test because that's where the athlete's actually going to learn where RPE actually sits and where FTP actually sits. That's the point where they understand, you know. I can do more than what I was doing before. And it also teaches them what just a bit easier actually means. Because if you're going to then go and do a whole bunch of sweet spot workouts, it helps with the confidence of letting you go and do two hours if you're getting to that stage. But yeah, even for things like sweet spot workouts, keep it on the low end. Sweet spot's a weird range where everyone uses a different number. Go to 90%. Yeah, set it and forget it. Pick a number and just stick to it until your FTP goes up. To full disclaimer, I use 93 because I've always used it and I'm stubborn. You son of a bitch. But the reason other people should use 90 is because you're just subtracting it. Why are you special? I have ADHD and I have patterns that I have to fall into. But yeah, take 90%. AD, OCD, alphabet soup. Interrupted constantly. Sorry. No. Subtract 10%. That's your sweet spot. It's very easy to remember. And, you know, again, this is coming back to those things of if you do the 10 watts below FTP for your FTP workouts and that doesn't feel good, that's an instant indication that something's off. You know, maybe you didn't sleep, haven't eaten, you're tired from everything else in your life. But give yourself these opportunities to, basically, opportunities to not fuck it up. Like, give yourself the best chance to have the best workout that you can by just being a little less ambitious than, you know, straight at FTP. Yeah. And realistically, FTP is actually a range physiologically. And my estimation is it's about 10 watts wide. And this is partly experience. This is partly in theory. And so you want to be on the bottom of that range. Because when you get to the top of that range, the amount of fatigue you accumulate is very large indeed compared to at the bottom of the range. And so you always want to be a little bit conservative. And I know it hurts people's egos. I'm so sorry about that. Oh, no, the number's not as big as I thought. Everybody loves big numbers. But it's better to do big durations. at a number that's reasonable and accomplishable instead of just flogging yourself with very, very high intensities because you think that, oh, I'm going to get more stimulus. No, you get more stimulus by going a little lower and a lot longer. Yeah, and this is to try and drag us back on track to what we're actually talking about. I think this is another bit of a flaw with trading zones is, yeah, A lot of these zones are a range in reality, but I think that results in people thinking harder is better, which is what we've harped on a lot about, particularly with regards to things like endurance rides, where people just insist on making sure that they are at, what's the endurance zone, 76% of FTP. Or as so many people call it, 200 watts. Yeah. Stop it. Or 250 or 280. I have to keep telling. My guys too. My God. But that's another one of these things that has had, I think, a bad influence in terms of how people train, is people automatically assume, you know, they're correct in terms of what we've just discussed about, about, you know, the absolute watts being higher is going to lead to, on its own, a more significant workout in terms of the adaptation that can result. We're not talking about training as a single workout. We are talking about it in terms of, you know, that wider macro scale plan in terms of how it all comes together to deliver you to your chosen event. And that's a perfect lead-in for what I was just thinking about we should talk about next. And because I mentioned fatigue earlier. And so there's two ways to think about the fatigue here. And one of them is when you accumulate fatigue and it affects your next workout, or whether you want to be fatigued during your workout and what kind of fatigue is manifesting there. So when we're thinking about accumulated fatigue, because this is what you just mentioned, you know, and I'm thinking about what's a high quality workout, like, like, let's say, let's take, let's take somebody doing like 10 hours a week. just for an example. And somebody's doing three harder workouts a week. So Rory, you sound like you're doing about 10 hours a week these days. You just moved, a very lot of stress, a lot of painting, you're a new place. And the question is, like if you ride at 70% FTP for like a one hour endurance ride as opposed to 60 or even 50, is that going to really affect your FTP efforts the next day. I'm just doing the math to see what that would actually be for me. So it's basically, I'm going to expose my relay. I've got nice numbers for my numbers, so that's easy for me. My lack of fitness. So it's a 40 watt difference for me to ride at the bottom between the top. And I can say for my first ride of the year that I did today, I was below even that low number that I'm looking at right now. So I behaved. But when you're in there training, like, I mean, and I'm doing this right now. I'm doing, like, you know, short rides every day, you know, doctor's orders. And so what's really happening is I, like, and I'm like, I've got to do this experiment now. I've got to, like, see what happens with efforts and see, you know, if riding endurance too hard is detrimental. And, you know, for the amount I'm riding, the answer is no. Like I could, like if I'm doing 200 watt FTP efforts three times a week and every other day I'm riding like one to two hours at 140 watts, which is like way too hard for me for endurance, it's not going to cost me that much. Should I ride at like 100 watts because it feels easier and nicer? Yeah, sure. And this is really just the thing about I'm not accumulating that much fatigue. Now, if I were riding 15 hours a week, and I were doing 140, 150 watts, like 75% FTP for my endurance rides, I would absolutely be feeling that fatigue in my FTP efforts. And so does that sound kind of reasonable to you, Rory? Yeah, I think it's partly how much are you riding in any given week. and a second point that's completely flown out of my head because I was checking something. Was it how tired you are after your hard work? That's what I was thinking. It's how much you're riding each week because obviously the more you do in any given, essentially the more kilojoules you burn per hour, you know, the more demand that is for you to have to refuel and recover afterwards. But the other part that I've now remembered is when it comes to looking at your entire season, As a whole, the difference for someone who does eight hours a week riding at the top of endurance is going to be far less than this athlete I've looked up on Strava called Corey Lockwood, who last week did 35 hours apparently, and although it looks like he was riding only 200 watts at Zone 2, which to point out, that's Corey Lockwood, who has a bigger FTP than you. But almost anybody. Yeah. Him and Filippo. So, full disclosure, Corey's FTP. Corey's given me permission to discuss his numbers, so his FTP is currently a nice round 450 watts. Arsehole. But he's a good example there, because he's sub-50% when he's riding his endurance rides, and he's a very, very high-volume athlete. If he was riding at, what would that be? If it was the 0.7 times 450. If he was doing his zone 2 at 315 watts, as the zones would tell him. That's 150% of his kilojoule burden that he's already got. Yeah, that would be, you know, he's done by spring. And that's part of why. you know knowing what the intensity you should be doing for that sort of easy ride is very important it's because you need to be able to make sure that when it comes to looking at your entire season not only are you going to be in the best shape for your races but you're going to reach the end of the year around where your season break should be and that's the right time for it to happen and you're ready to go straight after it and that's the that's the nicest overall balance you're able to bring to yourself and your training is to not screw yourself up by the time the next 11 months passes. Yeah, and by trying to get in every single watt that you can, it's, and this is why I say that it's, I think more about fatigue than I do about training zones and adaptation and all that stuff, because, because the fatigue is a more, it's a more real and immediate part of training. And if you are going for every watt in your training zone, I mean, The number of people I see doing recovery rides at one watt below their zone two. That's the meme, isn't it? It is. If I haven't made that meme, I will for this one, because it's so frustrating. And I love when I do consultations and I'm looking at somebody's files and I see somebody doing recovery rides and they're getting like five TSS. They're under 100 watts, or even somebody like with Corey's watts, I'll consult for somebody and I'll be like, oh, you're doing your recovery rides at 150 watts. This is absolutely phenomenal. Yeah, ever since we did that episode on how to take a rest day, I've never had so many good recovery rides come in from athletes. I think the lowest TSS I got for a ride was three. Great, perfect. I've had so many people who said, oh, I went trampolining with my kid. Perfect, great. That's exactly what I want you to do for your easy days, is not look at the bike. Yeah. Okay, so now let's think about, because that's like the kind of big picture fatigue. Now let's think about more acute fatigue and workouts and workout quality, because this is something that I tell people, All the time when we're having conversations, you know, talking to my clients, talking to consultees, and it always comes down to what constitutes a quality workout. And like FTP and sweet spot workouts are so simple to think about because, like you said already, more than last time. So if you can do 3x15 this time, next time maybe you do 3x17 and you've got more time in zone. Great. Now, if next time you were like, all right, I'm going to do 3x17, and you get through the first two intervals, and the last one, you are dead after five minutes, that is not progression, that is regression. And even though it feels harder, and it definitely is harder than last time, for sure, the thing is, it's because of fatigue. And your muscles know the difference between actually working to their actual true limit. and not. And what's happening is you are actually not getting as much adaptation, even though it feels harder. Yes, I've got an example of this, just quickly looking up. So I had an athlete who, lucky shit, managed to get a holiday to Taiwan, I think, Taiwan or Thailand. I'll be upsetting someone there and I apologize. I think you're going to upset a lot of people by confusing those two places. I think it's Taiwan. But he went out, I told him, gloves are off, go ride your bike, have fun with it. And he came back, having done a whole bunch of good rides, and said he was feeling fresh, said I'm like, what would be a normal riding week, after like a couple of days off, just to make sure he's feeling okay. Basically just picking up exactly from where we were before we finished, which was I estimated he could probably, if he felt good, do an hour of FTP. So I set him a 3x20 workout, and he managed two 20-minute intervals and an 8-minute interval. There you go. And that was a sign of fatigue, because I was fairly confident based on the training he's done. that he should be able to do that 3x20, because as I think I've mentioned before in the podcast, I like to set intervals where I can predict what will happen, because if it doesn't happen, I know that there's something up there, and hopefully it's not me. But he did a bunch of rest, he got a slightly scratchy throat after that FTP workout, so he didn't do a cyclocross race that he was thinking of doing, just rested over the weekend, felt good the next week. The first ride back was three and a half hours, so he clearly was feeling good. Following week, repeated the three by 20 workout, and he nailed it. All three intervals, actually added watts each interval, not much, like one or two watts each time, but clearly was feeling good as he got into it. And that was the impact of, yes, he had a wee bit of illness, but he rested his legs, he felt a lot better by the time the eight days had passed between those two workouts. So that's the value of knowing what it is you're expecting to be able to do, and then making sure that you're actually fresh enough to be able to do it. Yeah. Yeah, so okay, now let's shift gears a little bit to in-workout fatigue, because we've been kind of touching on it. And this is another gripe I have with tempo. I'm so sorry, tempo lovers. I was just talking to somebody recently. about, he was like, I just love, you know, doing long tempo efforts. And at one, and he's talking to me and he's like, I feel like I just need to eat more and I can, you know, I feel like I could probably do, you know, however many hours at tempo. And I just feel like I'm not, I'm like bonking. I can't eat enough. And I'm like, yeah, that's one of the issues there is with tempo work. And here's the thing, you're not getting to actual muscular fatigue. And that's an important point when we're thinking about things like AMPK signaling and like threshold. So when you actually get to that 8, 9 out of 10 RPE when you're doing like a 3x20, that's a great place to be. It's a really great place to be. But if you are bonking before you even get there and your legs aren't really tired and your whole body is just kind of bleh, like that is not great training and it could be great training easily. And so this is one of the things about having a really good quality session is I'm always thinking, do we want to get our muscles, our legs to be tired at the end of these efforts or not? And that's the difference between like a threshold sweet spot day or an endurance day. And that's really the major difference for me, like in practical terms, thinking about Training Zones and Adaptation. It's like, it's all the same adaptation, kind of. You're getting into bigger motor units when you are doing threshold work. But during threshold work, I want to make sure you are fatigued. And doing endurance work, I want to make sure you are not. Thank you for adopting my three-zone model. I don't think it's yours. How many times over how many decades have somebody been like, two inflection points, lactate curve, yada, yada? Yeah, the tempo thing's interesting because I don't actually know what Tempo's meant to represent, other than a weird gray zone between Endurance and FTP. Well, I'll tell you exactly where that zone came from, though, is Andy Coggin doing fart-like Tempo rides. Oh, so over and then on. Because all of these zones were originally, yeah, yeah, so originally it was, all these zones were descriptive, and people who remember the Andy episodes will remember him talking about this, and that's where all these things came from. Like, the, like, I don't know if he regrets any of this stuff. I forget what we talked about. But it's like, that kind of also set certain expectations as well. And, you know, like we talked about on the podcast many times, if you go look at the adaptation chart in training and racing with a power meter, like, it's all the same adaptations. You just get a little higher dose as you go up in power value up until you get to, like, you know, a threshold VO2 max-ish. Yep. is why it's essentially there's a graph version of that Coggin chart. It's the famous one that's missing a column, isn't it? Oh, yeah, yeah, like with the orange top. But there's a graphical version of that that's basically adaptation versus fatigue, and this is essentially how you end up getting sweet spot out of it, because sweet spot's that nice middle ground where the two balance out quite nicely. But yeah, like Temple's an interesting Oh yeah, Fast Cat, that was Frank Overton, yeah Yeah, that's it Temple's this weird grey zone where a lot, it's the zone most athletes end up in because they're not, usually it's because they're not thinking about it and they're just out having fun riding their bike and that's great But In terms of a zone that we can utilize in training, I'm looking at one tempo workout, that's the only one I prescribed last year, and it was for an athlete who I know a bunch of listeners are aware of. Yeah, actually this workout for Rory is such a rarity, it's like on a pedestal under glass and it's got a plaque on it. It was, the title was written in all caps to signify it. But, yeah, it was the last day of good weather for him to be able to ride outside. So I was like, just go ride at tempo for as long as you can. Like, actually utilizing, you know, the go-to-fatigue component of, you know, how training is meant to be. So we're still getting something out of it. But from memory, I think he just decided to see how long he could ride at 300 watts for. The number of people I know who have done that. Well, he did 100 miles. So, he did pretty good, four hours. Pretty happy with that, in terms of like, where he's training. He's in the Midwest of the US, that's really flat. Was he an STT bike also? No, he didn't have his TT bike at that point, but 53 meters of elevation gain. Oh, I think I've done more than 53 meters of elevation gain in my house today, between the two floors. Jesus. To offer a reason for why that ended up being, that was one of those cases where athlete morale is important, because I was about to force him to take his end of season break. So, sometimes you can do dumb shit. Oh, yeah, if you're going to take a rest. Make sure there's a reason. Yeah, blow out the lines, go ahead, do it. I mean, And I assign tempo stuff all the time as fart-like tempo. Like, with tempo stuff, unless somebody's right off the couch, if somebody's off the couch, I will definitely assign tempo. Like zone three, like, you know, like over first, you know, LT1 kind of threshold. Super fresh to start with type. Yeah, because you get a lot of stimulus out of that and you get, you know, it's less fatiguing because you're less well-trained and you... You know, especially early season, you get a ton of adaptation out of that. It's pretty rapid, and it's a good stepping stone between riding easy and actually riding hard, and a lot of people kind of want or need that stepping stone, and that's totally fine. But after somebody gets to like sweet spot threshold work, temple work, unless we have a very specific need, and oftentimes we do, I really don't use it that much. Because I'd rather think about getting somebody to proper muscular fatigue, and I'd rather them do it in like one to two hours with sweet spot or like 30 to 60 minutes, maybe sometimes 70, 80 with FTP, than like doing five, six hours at, you know, at tempo and not even getting a muscular fatigue, like them being like, oh, I've ran out of food and I'm out of daylight. Yeah, like it's... At a certain point, there's more effective workouts you can do. And there's things, you know, it's the bang for the buck thing. In terms of, you know, a sweet spot workout is at most going to last three hours, probably. Warm up, cool down, rest intervals, and then the actual intervals themselves. FTP, hour and a half to two hours. And that's something you're able to manage. the fatigue from quite easily, as long as they're getting the endurance side, which is what allows us to give people extra endurance after they do these sorts of workouts, is being able to teach them the importance of not riding at the top of the zone. Yeah, so that's to kind of wrap up this section. That's why I think about this in terms of fatigue, either how much fatigue are you accumulating doing this riding, and how much is that going to affect you in one, two, three days' time, or even, you know, like you said, throughout the season, like a whole balance of intensity and low intensity. And I also think about it in terms of, do we want to get to muscular fatigue on this ride? Those are the two ways that I really, I think about, you know, quote-unquote training zones, because, you know, like we discussed, It's a continuum of muscular adaptation in terms of better muscular endurance. I have nothing to add. Okay, that means I did a good job. I'm not doing a good job of disagreeing with you. Ah, Rory, son of a bitch. But I think, because one of the things that a lot of people told me when I said that is, You know, these are good for, these are good for common language. To talk about training intensities between athletes and coaches and, you know, and, you know, podcasts and athletes, for instance. And, you know, we are certainly like not, not using these kinds of things. But, I mean, there's also a reason that I've never said, I've never really said like, oh, go do a Zone 2 ride on the podcast because I think about this. I think, I don't want somebody in Zone 2, I want somebody riding at. What a reasonable endurance pace is. I don't give a shit what the power is. Yeah, understand that every time I've said Zone 2 throughout this podcast, I have noticed it, and I've hated myself for it, because I don't think like that. That's one of those things where it really is just stubbornly driven into my head. That's the lingo. Yeah, I can sort of see the understanding in terms of being able to talk about these things by giving them a name to a particular intensity. But I think the ultimate problem here is that very often the intensity doesn't match up with what the usually percentage of FTP is meant to be describing it as. And I think that's why these zones as a construct to facilitate training, leaving aside the whole descriptive versus prescriptive part, is actually more harmful than not to how people develop their understanding of training, specifically because people get that wrong idea and they're not doing literally the mental work of actually learning what intensity should feel like. You know, one of the benefits of working with a coach is if they're doing a good job of trying to build up a picture of you as an athlete, so essentially doing some sort of... Set of Power Tests, which is usually sprint, an anaerobic interval, a quote-unquote VO to max interval, and an FTP effort. At some point, they might try and get you to ride for a long endurance ride just to see, you know, how long do you feel and how do you cope? Where does it start to feel rubbish? But part of the purpose of those tests, and I'm pretty sure it's the case that in all the tests I use, the descriptors are in there to try and... Coax, something in the athlete's mind, is what should this feel like? What is it you're actually meant to be thinking about while you're doing any sort of particular intensity? Which is why I think I've mentioned previously, like, my descriptor for FTP is essentially... Your legs are working, your breathing is up, but not out of control, and you're having to concentrate quite hard. And the real thing there is you can feel out FTP eventually, but for a lot of people, I think it's that concentration element that they actually need to understand. And that is something that isn't taught to you if you're just sticking to a power number, or if you're letting Erg Mode tave cover, because you're not actually then thinking other than just... You know, in the case of Erg Mode, it's don't slow your feet down. And so, like, I think there's probably a much better way for us to actually go about describing how particular training intensities are meant to feel and using that as the zone descriptors rather than it's 60 to 70% of FTP or whatever. People Want to Use for Whatever Zone They're Trying to Describe. Yeah, I mean, this is why we coach the way that we do, is because between power, heart rate, and athlete feedback slash RPE, we can easily and quickly triangulate on many, many, many things. We can triangulate on fatigue, we can triangulate on mental stress, on improving fitness, on... You know, like, you name it. Like, it's really easy to do, and it's easy to adjust workouts, and we, you know, yeah, no, I don't want to talk about that. I was going to start talking out of school, but I don't, well, we'll keep some of those things a little hushed for now. Until such time as, well, we have some people coming on the podcast to discuss such things in the next couple weeks, so. That's going to be crazy. Anyway, let's talk real quickly about the upper level of intensity and fatigue, because I think this is another thing where it's going to be real quick for us to describe. We'll discuss it for a minute, and then we're going to get to listener questions. So, especially with riding over threshold. Oh, zone 3 of my zone 3 model. Yes, your Zone 3 model, yes, of course, yeah, you invented it, good job. The Porteous model. Trademark. Somebody like me, and actually in a little bit I'm going to be talking to somebody who's got very similar power numbers to what I used to have when I was aerobically training. busted all of the models of this stuff. And a lot of people out there do that. And it's people with really good Pmax, so really good sprint power, and really high anaerobic capacity. And so I remember back when my sprint was like 1,500 watts, and my one minute was like 750, 800, something like that. And my five minute was like 400, 420, like over 400. My FTP, like 280. I was like destroying the like zones over threshold. I like they had nothing to do with me. And I remember at one point, one of my coaches was trying to get me to ride at certain intensities for lower durations. And I was like, dude, I'm breathing through my nose doing this. It was like, do, you know, do Summit Ave reps, which was like a two-ish minute hill at your at your like access road pace, which was like a five minute effort. And I remember doing that and I'm like, I'm just going, I don't even need the rest that he gave me. I'm just, I'm just going up and down, up and down. I'm like, I could do this two minutes on, two minutes off all day. Well, not all day, but for quite a while. And it didn't feel like it was doing much. And the answer was kind of really because unless you're super untrained, doing something like that probably isn't going to do much for you. You kind of see where I'm going with this, Rory? Loosely. Okay, so, so like, let's think about anaerobic capacity, like, or like a zone six kind of effort. Thinking, because I've seen, I don't see this often, but I see it sometimes where somebody will give somebody like, I want you to do 38 seconds at 628 watts. It's awfully specific. It's because it's right out of the WK05 off the ice intervals. I just looked at the eye levels chart. It's copy and paste. There's a boundary at 39 seconds. Yeah. And here's the thing. It's like, this is why over threshold, I rarely give power numbers. Because the idea is to smash yourself. And if you're not supposed to smash yourself, if you're supposed to pace it, at some point, your legs should fall off your body. And that's the idea. is either teaching pacing or go kill yourself and go home. Yeah, but speaking to the subject of zone models, eye levels are interesting in this regard because they're meant to reflect a full picture of you as an athlete and what you're capable of. And so for people that don't know, eye levels are basically, FTP and below is basically just the Coggin power levels, which you can look up. and eye levels are custom fit to your power curve and your ability to perform over FTP. So an athlete who's very anaerobically capable will be capable of doing a lot more over FTP as you might expect them to do. So these are the people for whom a Viotamax effort For someone like Coley, for example, is potentially 150% of FTP. Whereas someone who's more of a time trial or phenotype, where anaerobic capacity is not that big, that's the sort of person where 110, 115% of FTP might actually be where. They end up falling for their VO2 max intervals. And all eye levels are trying to do is wrangle that difference to show exactly what it is an athlete should be capable of, provided you have all the maximal data to allow them to do it. And also if you look at the eye levels, one of the things about it is it also provides a time. Yeah. It provides that dimension. Yeah. That's the important part of the over FTP component here. Yeah. And so when I'm... When I'm looking at giving somebody efforts, like if I'm thinking, should I give somebody 30 second efforts, 45, 60, 80, what should I do? I look at the time duration of that model and I think, do we want more, do we want to push things out or do we want to push things up? That's really another kind of way to think about that kind of training, but none of it has to do with like what percentage of FTP, like what power zone it is, because the power zone is send it. That's the power zone. Go for it. There's really no real thought behind it other than that. I was going to say, a descriptor I usually use, especially for anaerobic capacity efforts, like full gas efforts, I tell people if you are getting to the point of contractile dysfunction, especially if you're doing anaerobic capacity, like 30-30s and stuff like that, I want you to feel like you can barely pedal hard by the end of the set. That's the idea. If you're not getting there, well, then push harder. And it's that simple. And I've had a lot of people ask me, like, what power should I aim for? And I'm like, this is also a pacing exercise. And so once we get one or two workouts in, we can start to estimate some power targets for you and maybe talk about pacing a little bit. If some people need to pace, some people don't, some people can just send it, each one. And then once based on their feedback, now we've got a really good way to think about targeting these efforts. But it's not based on a percentage of FTP or even on the PD model in the eye levels. It's really just go for it. And besides, the WKO5 model will only describe the data that it has. So if you were getting more fit... The model doesn't know that. The model's not predicting you should gain 10 watts in this range today. It doesn't know that until you tell it that you've done it. As Tim Cusick likes to tell people in the Facebook group, if you're not feeding the model, it's just going to give you garbage. Garbage in and garbage out. But I want to actually take a wee bit of issue with the PD curve model and the eye levels it produces here, because you still get issues where the data Doesn't end up adding up, because sometimes, and I'm speaking from personal experience here, an athlete can have an exceptional effort that has fed into the model. And it doesn't matter how many efforts they try and do around that effort, the models to try and fill it in and make the model fit a wee bit better. That could just influence the model in such a way that it starts to throw off zones. So I'm looking at a 420 watt effort I did for four minutes in 2022. And according to the eye levels, I can do 401 watts for a minute and 36. So that's an example of why you still, even when you have these really customized zones, need to be able to look at it with a discerning eye and understand whether or not it's actually describing your capabilities as an athlete. Because in my case there, it didn't. And trust me, I tried very hard to try and make that model make sense. It was just this big yellow spike in this curve that, you know, all-time effort felt great. But, you know, that completely threw off. Those eye levels as a means of doing a little bit of that assessment to see here's what I could potentially do if I was doing something like anaerobic capacity intervals, for example. Now, the upside there is that it didn't matter because the intervals that I was being prescribed by Fabiano at the time were just to go all out as hard as you can. So we're not actually relying in terms of what the power being described there actually is. But if you are an athlete who is relying on the accuracy of eye levels or utilizing the optimized, what are they called? Optimized interval targets. I was not involved in those. You can't blame me for that. I don't rate them. If you're on your own and you're trying to train yourself, sure. If you're a coach trying to give them to other people, please don't. Do your job. I think, yeah, my overall point here is we can make these models as smart as we want to, but at the end of the day, you have to evaluate whether or not they're truly going to add to your training. And again, that's my problem with the models, no matter what we look at here, is oftentimes they're... I think it's really not I look at the mean max power curve more than I look at the power duration curve, because I look at what an athlete has actually done. So as an example, the warm-up I give people before their FTP test is there's a small ramp in there where I'm bringing them up to what should probably be a round sweet spot, and then I throw what should be a VO2 max intensity at the end of that ramp just to give them a wee one-minute kick, just to get things moving. I don't look at the power curve to set any of those. I look at what their actual power tests have done. Because I want to be able to know that, okay, if the athlete can do this for five minutes, they can definitely do it for one minute. I don't want the hypothetical power that WKO thinks they're able to do. Yeah, well, I like to look at that just to, because I can eyeball and see if the model needs work. Like if somebody needs to retest a range and the model is maybe potentially less accurate. But anyway, that's, we're getting into the weeds of You know, another attempt to kind of update these training zones. And I don't even know, besides the optimized intervals, that many people actually use the WKO5 model for training zones. I remember a long time ago, Tim Cusick was talking about targeting interval repeats starting at 90% of somebody's previous best duration. And that is actually a So there's a better way to do that kind of thing. If you're going to go do three-minute efforts, go look at what you've done at your best for three minutes, and then see if you can do 90% of that for repeats. That's a better place to start than thinking about zones in terms of percentage of FTP. But whether that's optimal or not, that's a whole other discussion. ways to individualize your training zones, quote-unquote, utility of them, you know, accumulated fatigue, acute fatigue, balancing fatigue, you know, adaptation, aerobic adaptation, and let's get to some Instagram questions, shall we? So go give me a follow on at empiricalcycling on Instagram if you want to ask a question. Of course, the first two questions are, do they even exist and are they real? Do we have a one-sentence answer for that? Let's see if we can put a bow on it. No. Okay, yeah, me neither. All right, you suck. No, I mean, like, my answer is kind of no, because I don't think the Porteous model exists, but that's because my model is just, here's how hard you should be going for these durations, but I don't think... Endurance is a thing beyond, it's the pace that you just feel good at the end of a ride. Tempo is just, as I said, it's a bit of a grey, misty area in the middle, that apparently Andy Coggin put it there because he was doing fartleked style intervals. Threshold's real, sweet spot's real, but those are really just variations of the exact same thing. It's, you know, if we're telling people to do... FTP minus 10 watts for their FTP interval, Sweet Spot's just FTP minus another 10 watts. That's where most people are going to end up falling out in terms of where that ends up landing, or 10% or 7%, based on what we said at the start. Over, FTP is just as hard as you can. Again, it's a duration game, it's not a power game. Next question. Are zones 3 and 4 interchangeable, provided you challenge TTE at that power and duration? Well, in the Corgan model, 3 is tempo. Yeah. Here's the thing. Right now, as badly trained as I am aerobically, I could probably do my quote-unquote zone 3 for maybe 3, 3.5 hours, if I feel right. And I will genuinely reach muscular fatigue. And this is me like riding like six, eight hours a week. And if I start to train myself and get way better, I'm going to be able to exceed that very, very, very rapidly. And so like if I were going to be training this and I can't ride more than three hours, let's say, I'm going to just go do what I can do for three hours. I'm not going to think about zones. And so that's where I would really think about it in terms of interchangeability is like Sweet Spot and FTP are somewhat interchangeable. They're also somewhat not. There's a lot of use cases for each, but a lot of times, as long as you are getting towards your TTE, your time to exhaustion, as long as you are getting exhausted doing them, you are doing it right, and that is mostly interchangeable for most people. If you are a 10-hour-a-week athlete, you do not have the time in any individual ride to waste your time doing tempo. You can probably do your sweet spot workouts and your FTP workouts and make use of the hour and a half to two hours that you probably have for your longest day. I would mostly agree with that. I think if you are kind of stuck, you can experiment with doing your shorter endurance rides a little harder. and seeing if that fatigue is too much or if it's fine or how long you can take it. You may actually never have a rest week because you're only riding six, eight hours or whatever, but as soon as you start to push those easier rides harder, you might suddenly need a rest week. And so this is kind of a fuck around and find out kind of thing. But generally speaking, I agree with Rory. I think if you are stuck, then you should listen to our How to Break Through a Plateau podcast. I think most people have listened to that episode already. But I think it's far more likely that people are going to find the answer to why they specifically have plateaued in that podcast than adding a bunch of tempo work. I don't think that's actually going to be the answer. I think for us, for the people we coach, when we find a point where, oh. The usual's not working, or we are actually starting to butt up against something. That's when, like, athletes that are doing things well benefit from that sort of, you know, let's load up a wee bit more fatigue than we'd normally do to try and bust through that plateau. Yeah. I would actually rather... Experiment with adding a fourth interval workout in a week than riding endurance a little harder. Make it a proper interval session. You wrote an article on TrainingPeaks a few years ago of, I can't remember the exact title, but it was basically about manipulating training density, where you basically did this exact same thing with an athlete, where you gave them for a couple of weeks, I think, four sweet spot workouts. I was like Sweet Spotter FTP a couple days in a row. It was like three days in a row in a long ride or something like that. And it was like someone was really lacking shape. And I knew that if we loaded them up real quick and at a sustainable rate, that shape would come back really, really quick. And that was a quick hack to do that. But the question is, in the long term, For the people that we coach a lot of the time who are super high volume, et cetera, et cetera, that's a rarity for people. I've gotten a lot of people being like, can you talk more about people riding 8, 10 hours a week? And I'm like, okay, we can do that. So that's where a lot of this is coming from. So thank you for all your kind feedback. Just a note on that article, if anyone does go look it up and decides that they want to try that. understand that, and I know because Coley's mentioned this before, the TSS numbers in those workouts are nonsense because they hadn't set the FTP for the athlete. Did I mention that? I didn't even think about it. I would have hit that if I knew. Yeah, so don't try and exactly replicate what you see in a screenshot because that's not actually what Coley did with the athlete. Sure. I've forgotten. Okay. Is riding sweet spot a good way for time crunch athletes to replace big volume endurance? It's better than nothing, but it's not a good replacement. It's not a replacement. I think it's good. It's better than a lot of people have. It's better than not doing it, for sure. But if you think that, okay, I can do two hours of sweet spot today. That means that I'm going to be able to do my six-hour ride. I couldn't say that that's equivalent for most people. I think for a handful of people, maybe, but that would be a rarity. Yeah, if you are, I literally can't ride more than two hours on any given day, then yeah, being able to get up to the point where you can ride a lot of sweet spot for those two hours is going to translate quite nicely to some gains when you ever get to do a longer ride, but it's not going to be the exact same thing as... doing that longer ride. Yeah. Usually when I'm consulting with people, I suggest that whenever they get the opportunity to go out and do a longer ride, especially if they've got a long event as a goal, like if somebody's got a six, seven hour gravel race and they really don't usually do more than two and a half, three, I'm like, you know what? Once in a while, you got to go out and you got to do a five or six when you can and just go do it and it'll be way better than, even if it costs you a day of training, like if you got to like skip Saturday so you can do more on Sunday occasionally. That would be preferable for me, especially if you've got a long race goal like that. So, next question. You're going to love this. How can I tell I'm not riding VO2 max intervals too hard? Too hard. They last longer than two minutes. Longer than two minutes. Around five. at most, I find for most people. Yeah, two to five, up to six, I would say. In a rare case, I have somebody who experimented with like a real, like true max three by eight. He had like zero anaerobic capacity whatsoever. I can see why that would work for them. Yeah. So, yeah. It's more common that people will occasionally do them too easy. I think you see this a lot on a certain forum for a certain thing that shall remain nameless. It should be noted they're doing it because it's a percentage of a zone. Ah, yes, yes. And for some people that works fine, but for a lot of people, like if it were me, I'd be like, I'm breathing out of my nose. What am I doing here? Oh, nope, it's okay. You're in the zone. So... Like to give an example. Sorry, I was reading the next question. Give your example, and then we're gonna, this one's gonna take a while. So I have someone who's just doing some VO2s right now, and his power went up by about 10 watts every interval, and that's not ideal in terms of what we want to try and elicit throughout a block, ideally like 10 or more watts loss, as long as you're not plummeting between intervals. which would suggest you need to rest more between rather than anything else. That's not ideal because it means that you're not necessarily getting that extra push that we want from that sort of block but it's not the worst if it's your first workout of that type and you just want to be able to feel it out a little bit, get used to that feeling without having to completely drench yourself and go. Carbon Dioxide. I have deliberately given that kind of thing to people a lot this year, where people were like, I want more lead-in to like VO2s and harder work and stuff like that. Because previous years for, I would say, not everybody, but for a couple people, we would just go from like threshold to VO2s. And a lot of people are like, they love it, it's fine. Occasionally, somebody's like, can we get a little more? Lead Up Into This, A Little More Foreplay Before VO2s, and that's exactly the kind of workout that I give them to kind of sneak up on that kind of max and get used to that kind of work and pacing and cadence and stuff. I've got someone who's ready for VO2s right now, but we're not ready in terms of where availability sits, because they're lucky and they get to go skiing every weekend. So the answer to that is I've given them one VO2 workout last week and one this week. Not because I think it's going to lead to the adaptation that I want to see, but because I want them to get good at the intervals, much in the same way we talk about how you can get good at the FTP test. Yeah, okay. So, I hope you're sitting down. Rory, our next question is, everything we need to know about this Zone 2 craze? Well, as we've already discussed, we don't like to say Zone 2, even though we keep accidentally saying it. Well, as far as I can tell, though, I guess I'll start. Actually, I can start on this. I think that the recent obsession with, I'm going to try and say Endurance Rites here, is that... Although it may be as hard as Tempo, maybe over LT1. Depends on who you ask. Again, another fatal flaw of this. Even if you ask the same person, it's... By the way, I have asked this person to be on the podcast. I've had so many people to be on the podcast. I get so many requests for it. All of them have said no. So all those famous people talking about this stuff that you want me to talk to, they have all refused. I don't know. So knock on their doors. Be like, hey, go on the Empirical Cycling Podcast, please, if you would like to hear us talk. Yeah, so like... The understanding, and I'm going to use a certain company's vernacular here, is that general base, as it has always historically been, was that long, steady distance, you know, stick it in the little ring and ride your bike as much as possible. And therein lies the heart of kind of what it's come to be known as Zone 2 training, which is just the exact same thing of ride your bike really easy, but do it a lot. And that's kind of all that's being pitched here. Like, it's being sold as this magical thing that turns you into a Tour de France champion. I would suggest that spectacular genetics have more of a role there, especially when you look at the rest of the team. But I think a lot of people overemphasize Zone 2 as a training methodology. When, in reality, that's just the platform in which all training is built on, regardless of what time of year it is at any given time. Because if I look at just about any one of the plans of my athletes, they're going to be doing as much Zone 2 as we can basically fit in. They've done it again. And we're going to see where can we fit intervals on top of that to try and augment that training, try and drive the improvement in the direction we want, as has been discussed before. During Tim's episode in particular, one of them. Like the more endurance training you can do, the more you're going to augment your ability to adapt in other directions. And that's kind of all this is. I think of it the same way when people talk about polarized, which is also not a thing. That's a structure for how you plan out training. It's not a training plan, which people keep. Trying to Think It Is. But, you know, you can do a polarized Zone 2 training plan that features a bunch of sweet spot because that's just what a training plan is. So, I looked up an article and it says, the commonly known Zone 2 lies just below your aerobic threshold, an intensity at which you are burning large amounts of fat. At this point, your body will begin to utilize more and more carbohydrates and then begin to decline in metabolic efficiency. So basically, this is all to improve your quote-unquote fat-burning capacity or capability. Now this, I take great umbrage with. And if you've been listening to the podcast, you will know where I stand on this stuff. Watchdog number 40 goes into this a bit. And like we've been building on that episode ever since. in terms for the adaptation series. And especially today, because I consider this kind of a supplement to the adaptation series, where the mechanisms that drive adaptation have nothing to do with what fuel that you are using. And that seems to be a big thing with this. And it also, if you ask me, misunderstands, I'm not going to say whether it's deliberate or not, I don't know what this person knows, but it also misunderstands muscle fiber types. and it misunderstands that Type II fibers can also be extremely good fat burners. We have looked at papers showing that on this podcast. And it also assumes that lactate comes out of Type II, 2A and 2X fibers and goes into Type I fibers, which is not always the case. You can easily have very well-trained Type II fibers that will consume all the lactate they make. And so a lot of this... Stuff is like thought about in terms of what substrate you're using and fiber types. And the reality is, like we've seen in this, you know, the paper that we looked at earlier, it's the same stimulus for the same adaptation and the intensity determines how many fibers or potentially the duration also determines this because of the, you know, because of the slow component and increasing. What am I trying to say? Increasing motor unit recruitment for getting into fatigue. So I don't buy this adaptive mechanism at all. I think the main thing I'd want people to take away from any sort of discussion around endurance training, got it right, is just ride your bike and ride it easy. Augment what you're doing with the intervals that you want to, that will help you achieve your goal during any particular training block. Because ultimately, if the goal of like Zone 2 as a fad is to get you to ride your bike more, I think it's very successful in that if it makes you actually do it. If like people talking about this makes you ride your bike more, then I do actually consider that a grand success. But what I don't want people to do is to assume that... It's this magical new thing that is changing the world of cycling, because it's the same thing we've been doing for years. I didn't start giving people endurance rides in 2020. I have been giving people that for a long, long time. Yeah. So actually, the article that I just found, I read that quote from, is not from a certain person, but I did find the one that is. And so, yeah, so like, to quote, in this training zone, we stimulate type 1 muscle fibers. Okay. It's a really selective electrical signal being sent to your legs. Yes. It says, therefore, we stimulate mitochondrial growth and function, which will improve the ability to utilize fat. This is. It's true, technically. It's also true that if we do threshold training, if we do VO2max training, if we do sprint training, we can also elicit these same improvements. Because it's got nothing to do with utilizing fat. You don't get better at burning fat by burning fat. Like we've said a thousand times on the podcast, so sorry. I know this is probably upsetting a lot of people. They're like, oh, this guy doesn't have a PhD. You're right, I don't. I do know my biochemistry, or I like to think I do. I have a PhD. It's about Mars. If you'd like a Mars... You actually do know biochemistry. Hold on, no. I'm happy to do it with Kyle. Don't spoil it. God, asshole. No, we're gonna... Like, you understand biochemistry just about as well as I do. And don't shake your head. Yes, you do. And so... And so, like, I don't know, like, because I feel like at this point, because you've heard pretty much all the podcast episodes, and so, like, if you were going to disagree with me on anything, you'd be like, dude, you totally fucked this up. Well, a large part of it is I think a lot, I don't know if I've said this in the podcast, but I've definitely said it to other people, is I think getting really into the reads in some of this stuff is overcomplicating things for the sake of overcomplicating it, and really what actually matters is what Andy Coggin has always said, which is Performance is the best predictor of performance, and that is also going to be the case when it comes to starting to guide and drive your training. The reason a lot of endurance training works is because a lot of endurance training works, and I don't think people need to overthink that much beyond that. For the layman, certainly, I think for coaches, that's a slightly different perspective, because I think being able to guide and understand how these things work helps you as a coach understand how it fits all together. But I think, again, kind of what I've said throughout this podcast, people overcomplicate things or people get confused by the way things are set out. Well, that's why every time we dig deeply into a mechanism of aerobic adaptation in the muscles, the answer, how do you do more of this? It's either ride more or ride harder longer. That's for threshold work. There's nothing else to it. It's very, very simple advice. When the empirical cycling coaches talk, we're never thinking really about like, oh, how do we get more out of this, get more of this adaptation? Like we're, we're more thinking about, you know, kind of wheels on the ground, you know, very basic, like actual regular coaching stuff in terms of like managing fatigue, managing intensity, and how do you, how do you fit these workouts into this schedule? And this person doesn't want to do this. So how do we get this, you know, how do we do this workout in a different way? Like, that's the kind of stuff we talk about. It's never like, all right, is everybody's, are everybody's people like burning a lot of fat today? Like, I don't think it's ever come up. No, like even like, so to give people a little bit of context in terms of like how empirical cycling works, we have a monthly coaching call and this, this month's last week was the first one where I think we all turned up straight after holiday break and just like, Don't know what the fuck we're going to talk about today. And we still managed to get a really good conversation out of a bunch of things. I can't remember what we talked about at the start, but the end of it is like, how do you think about improving our ability to obtain and analyze data from athletes? We're not thinking about the physiological stuff, unless that's something we very specifically want to talk about. But we're never talking about it in the context of, here's how we can elicit the best adaptations. for this rider because they burn no carbs. We're thinking about the wider scale of here's a training problem I encountered or here's a thing that I've developed in WKO or whatever it is because that's the actual things that are making us better as coaches. It's not this person consuming nothing but lard on a six-hour ride. That'd be pretty good. Are you referencing that consult I did recently? Perhaps? If I am, it's entirely subconscious. Oh, man. I've been thinking about that one a lot. I'm like, I cannot believe... Never mind. Oh, okay. I remember this. Yeah. The other important thing that the Empirical Cycling coaches discuss is good memes, which is about 80% of our actual private chat. That's true. It's been very good in the past couple of months. All right. Everyone else joined. All right, this is a softball for you and me. For the next question, this is being lobbed right over the plate. Tell me more about Zone Zero. Now, Zone Zero is what I like to call the nap zone or the sleep zone. And there is actually, it is possible to do too much of Zone Zero. But for the most part, the more you can get, the better it's going to be. And it's very, very helpful. It's actually the most helpful. Without Zone Zero, you actually wouldn't get anything out of your training. Zone Zero fixed my marriage. It's fixed so many things for so many people. And if you are lacking Zone Zero, actually, if you do nothing but Zone Zero, you may actually get very, very fast indeed. Rory, the fastest he's ever been after nothing but zone zero for the last couple weeks. Zone zero and paint fumes. Oh, now you're talking. All right. Next question is, when heart rate is way off its usual range for a given power zone, is it time to call it a day? Okay, so we didn't actually talk about heart rate zones. No, we didn't. I knew this question was here. I was so excited to get to it. Yeah. Go off, Rory. Go off. So heart rate zones are effectively, as far as I can tell, were back-modelled onto what were effectively Coggin power zones, where it's not one-to-one with the percentages, I don't think. But I'm pretty sure that someone worked out a rough guide of, if I'm at this percentage, then my heart rate's at this percentage of max. And it's absolute nonsense. If you think about threshold, for example, you're doing a nice steady threshold interval to exhaustion, like an FTP test for. for argument's sake. What you will probably see if you look at the traced graph is your big blue line or yellow line for power and that's going to be nice and flat until all of a sudden it falls off a cliff at the end and you're going to see heart rate come up very quickly in the first five minutes and then it's just going to plateau but gain a beat or two every few minutes until you reach the end of the interval. And this is called decoupling. Yeah, but what's the zone there? What's the boundary for what elicits FTP? Because you can end up doing the same thing but sweet spot, and your heart rate will still get up into that quote-unquote FTP heart rate if you were going long enough, because gradually you're going to fatigue enough that... You know, heart rate is picking up to that stage. For most people, I've got a couple clients where it very rarely decouples, and if I see decoupling, I get worried. I'm like, this guy is really, really tired, or this woman is really, really tired. Yeah. But that's a rarity. Most people, we're going to actually see quite a bit of decoupling, and so, in reality, it's impossible to define a threshold heart rate. Like, it just is. Like, it's, you know, you can define it in certain ways, but when you are actually riding at threshold, It's one of the steadier states in exercise, but it's not steady. No state is actually steady. Something's always changing as you go on, and that's just by necessity. You are recruiting larger motor units, and they're getting a little less efficient. They need more O2. So your heart rate has to match the demand for O2. And this is one of the things that annoys me about heart rate zones in general, is just that The body can ask for blood or can ask for oxygen. And these have various uses, like your skin will ask for blood if it's very, very hot out, and this will increase your heart rate. Does that mean that you are now out of your zone? No, it doesn't. Does it mean that you probably can't hold it as long? Probably. Think about what some people think of as their indoor FTP. And in reality, it's just they're not cooling very well. But you might be 20 to 30 watts under what you could do outdoors, but your heart rate's in the same place. But, you know, that... And your muscles know the difference, as we've said, or I've said a bunch. That physiological gap is simply your body overheating indoors. And it's like a good way for you to tell you to buy another flow of lower flan. But it's not telling you anything about what your body's doing in terms of that metabolic load as part of the interval. Yeah, and I've heard people say that it represents an increasing internal load, like an internal strain, like what's that, stress and strain? Stress is the one on the outside, strain's on the inside. Stress is what you're applying. Yeah, so does it show increasing internal strain? I would argue not necessarily. Sometimes, sure. A lot of the time, what more strain? You're recruiting larger motor units. They need a little more O2. But this is a metabolic state that you can maintain for a while. I don't see any extra strain being applied. And if you look at the muscular adaptation, we're going to get some in larger motor units. But that's really it. I don't see any extra strain being applied. Now, if you want to think about cognitive load. Sure, like now have somebody do an FTP test and solve multiplication problems, or long division. Is long division even a thing anymore? Well, you're a psycho. I do it because the only way I can distract myself sometimes through intervals is to try and do kilojoule math, to try and work out how much I've got to do, how much I've done, what would get me to a nice run number, how many seconds is that? This is a PhD in action, folks. All right, let's get to a couple more questions. We've got a bunch more, but... Can I just say very quickly on the heart rate stuff, I think when it comes to trying to use heart rate data to help you understand the intensity side of things... There's no heart rate threshold power. However, you can probably expect FTP is going to be about 90% of your max heart rate. That's what I tend to see as a trend for most people. So if you're trying to work out for, you know, if you're scared of going into an FTP test and just doing it, and you want to try and find that ballpark figure, Do a stepped workout where you start at what you think it might be tempo, and add 10 watts every 10 minutes. And part of it is you're going to feel out where FTP actually lies, and that's the important part of doing that. But you'll see a point where heart rate starts to noticeably pick up quite a bit more. Or a decouple. Yeah, and that will potentially guide you in on where that approximate intensity actually is. Oh, potentially, yeah, for sure. And that's actually something that, you know, it's an approximation, but I also had a thought about, I had a somewhat sarcastic thought, which was that if you think that training at like 90% of your max heart rate is the best way to train your VO2 max, then threshold training is your best VO2 max training. I should say, when I say 90% of FTP, that's round where it is. That doesn't mean do your FTP intervals at 90% of. Heart Rate Max. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like, and now we're overthinking things. Yeah. Don't do intervals to heart rate. Now we're getting into the same problem that we told people not to do. Yeah, I mean, it's better, yeah, doing to feel, feels way better than heart rate, but it doesn't mean that you can not record heart rate. If you, I, all my clients, all of our clients, as far as I know, always record heart rate. It is necessary part of, I pester people that don't. Yeah. Let's see. Are more zones better or just more convoluted? I've kind of described how much I hate it, so I think it's worse. I think even in the case of eye levels where it's adding additional use, it's still too much in reality. We've got another question. Eye levels or Classy Coggin? I mean, if you have to pick one, pick eye levels, but if you have to... If you don't have to pick one, don't pick one. Yeah. How do you explain zones to people that are notorious 5 watts below top of zone riders? Well, I think that's what we've been trying to get at today. Use the Porteous 3 zone model. You folks should see his face. He is so plain face. He's just like, no, really. Like, I did it. It was mine. I'm going to write these out, and it's going to be my first and only Instagram post. Yeah, I'm like, do I even follow you? I have no idea. A bunch of people follow me. I don't know why. Well, because you're famous now. Yeah. Among like a hundred people who are super fans of the podcast. Most people. I love all of you people, by the way. Thank you. Most of my random followers I get seem to be on Strava. Keep them coming. It makes me look better. If not to prescribe training, then what's their use for self-coached people? So this is something we didn't really talk about, but we kind of talked around it, and that's because the zones are meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, don't look at power zones as, here's what I did in a ride, look at it as a collection of rides within your training, such as within a training block or throughout a full year. to try and do that larger macro scale analysis of what it is you've done and how much riding you've done. The most effective things I do, this is something I did for consults, is looking at how much time people spent in their endurance zone and in their recovery zone and looked as part of that, trying to take out as much as possible freewheeling because that unfortunately ends up in the recovery zone as well usually. We're trying to show people how you've spent your time up until now, what has been the balance there. Now, the issue there, as we've discussed throughout this, is that if someone is a top of Zone 2 rider, it's still going to show up in Zone 2, no matter what they do, just as it would if it was someone who rides at the bottom of Zone 2. But because we aren't steady state, because power will fluctuate. on any interval by about 20 watts as a nice tidy standard deviation. You'll usually see that people who are riding their endurance too hard spend more time in tempo accidentally, and so they accumulate more of that chart, whereas the people that are doing it really well accumulate more of the recovery zone. because they're riding nearer the bottom of it. And so you're able to see a nice balance there because ideally you want it to slope down and not being too much of a wee pyramid and not a slope upwards, which implies you're doing too much tempo instead of too much zone two. But you can also look at it as a way to see how weeks compare to each week. I've got a... I've got a chart in WKO that I don't know if I ever made public but it's essentially a stacked bar chart trying to show week by week and how much time people spend in each zone and it's a good way to at a glance see here's how much endurance work they did and for me I'm pretty sure it's just Coded as Recovery plus the Endurance. And then there's here's much threshold work you did, which is anything from tempo to FTP, and also a specific one that is tempo to sweet spot, trying to find, you know, where roughly is the intensity distribution being spent in there. And then there's one for above FTP. But it's a nice way when you start to look at block to block, you can see the progression time as people start to maybe Maybe they don't have more time available to them in total. So you start to see that the stacked bar doesn't get any taller, but the distributions within the bar change. And so you're able to see, you know, how is the time actually being utilized? Have we done the extra time and zone that we want to accomplish through each week? And so that's the way zones are quite useful, is if you start to look at them not as a hyper-specific. As perhaps descriptive rather than prescriptive? Yeah. If you do what none of us actually do and treat them in the descriptive manner they're intended, then they can be quite useful. However, bear in mind all the downsides we've mentioned here. in terms of what they're actually able to tell you, particularly at higher intensities. And that's way more complicated than I do it, because I look at total volume, and I look at interval sessions within that volume. And so I think my analysis is even more simple than yours. And then I go in and compare interval session to interval session, like are these certain aspects being progressed or what's the progression happening, et cetera, et cetera. So it's basically the same analysis that you got all fancy about it because you're smart. I don't know if you're able to share a WKO file as part of the upload, but if we can, I'll forward it on. The one thing I'll note is if you do try and load it. I will try. It is quite a computationally expensive thing to do. So look at it in terms of like 90 days and not all your training through history. Okay, I'll try to upload that. Just a handful of questions more. There's kind of two. One is a little tongue-in-cheek. But I assume once and a lot of people do this, which is, if I leave zones and training peaks the same after a break, does that mean my fitness stays the same too? Obviously no, thank you so much for that question. But the serious one that's very close to this, do training zones change with muscular fatigue, like gym doms or CNS fatigue versus fresh? Yes, and that you won't be able to do the power that you want to do, but no, because you're fatigued, not because anything's actually changed. Right, so the difference is, and this happens with people who are overtraining, I occasionally have the unfortunate pleasure of consulting with people who are overtraining, and if I start with, when's the last time you took a break, you know what's coming for you, if you reach out for one of these things. Especially if you're signing up for coaching with us. Yes. Especially if you're signing up for coaching with Rory. He's notorious for like, you're taking a week break on our first week. But I love that about you. So the thing is, like, if you measure in the moment, yes. But the question is, does that yield the same adaptation? The answer is no. So if you can basically, if your new FTP is your old sweet spot, because you are absolutely wrecked. Does that mean that you can do two by 20 at your old sweet spot, new FTP, because you're tired and get the same adaptations out of it? The answer is no. Like, absolutely not. Your muscles haven't really gotten less fit. You are just tired. And so your muscles know the difference. And I've said that a thousand times. Listen to the AMPK episode about that. That kind of illustrates it very well. But like, here's a quick example from that episode, if I recall it correctly. Which is that AMPK activation in simulated altitude, or actually real altitude works the same, AMPK activation is lower. Your threshold is lower, but the signal that you are sending is lower because the power is lower, because the muscles, having been trained at sea level, are now not working nearly as hard as they're capable of. And fatigue works in a similar way, where you are, it's basically like pulling your engine timing. Like, something's wrong, you're making less power, this is to protect whatever, and so, you know, please go schedule a service appointment, basically, if we're going to use the car analogy. For people that don't understand cars like me, it's like when you ride the turbo without a fan and your body doesn't let you produce as many watts because it needs to cool you down. Which we just talked about. So, yeah, and the thing is, Like muscular soreness is not overlapping with fatigue. And, you know, the best mechanism I've proposed, I've heard from soreness is muscle spindle stress on the outside of the muscles from swelling. And maybe, sure. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you are fatigued. And so you can be sore for quite a while. and have fine workouts. So I wouldn't say that that's necessarily a one-to-one, but like, yeah, like central nervous system fatigue, that's very real. Like if you can't send the neural drive to recruit more motor units, then that can certainly elicit things. But like, realistically, you've got to work to the best ability that you have been able to work in recent history. Like if you are, like if your threshold is like 250 watts at an hour, and now you've been racing a lot, now you can only do 200. 40, 230 watts for like 40 minutes, you are fatigued and you need rest. It's not like your muscles are like less, you know, trained because you've been racing, et cetera, et cetera. It's why we always emphasize the importance of understanding that mental load of, you know, what an interval should feel like. Because if it feels harder than it should to do the right number. then that tells you you're probably a bit tired and if it feels the same as it normally would but you're 20 watts down again you're probably a bit tired so it's that always paying attention to your body you know if you're a self-coached athlete like and you're using training peaks I think even the basic training peaks will let you put in post-ride comments like just quickly firing some notes and you know It doesn't even have to be something you go back and look at, but it's a good way for you to formulate in your head, you know, how did I feel this actually went? Because that's part of what I want my athletes to do, is actually rationalise once they're done, how did that go? How did I feel it went? Because it's just as useful for them as it is for me, because it means that they're actually. Processing the Workout Themselves, and it's not just a process of telling me how it went. That part's very important, but them understanding it also is. And this is something that I actually counsel self-coach people to do all the time, is because a lot of the time when I consult with people and I'm going through their files and I don't see any comments at all, and I tell them, you should leave yourself some comments. You should leave yourself some comments, you should use the RPE thing in TrainingPeaks, you should use the emojis. the relative, what's that, the feeling? RPE skill. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the one. Oh, overall mood? Overall feeling, yeah, whatever they call it. I just think of it as the emojis. Those are super, super useful, and they also come into WKO5 as like raw numbers, and they're super, super easy to look at. Like if you're tracking your motivation, if you're tracking your sleep, if that's an issue. Like a lot of stuff you can track that is going to help you kind of triangulate on what's going on. And so all of this kind of gets to like, I mean, we're kind of going beyond, like we're way beyond training zones at this point. But it's way more important the actual, the training training and how you are handling the training and the fatigue of the training than what's actually going on. Sticking to the basics, like endurance riding, threshold, VO2 max, it's so, so, so simple to do all of those right. And you don't need to necessarily overcomplicate it by thinking about heart rate zones or whatever. If you feel good, but it's a little warm out and your heart rate's a little high and you're going fine, then keep going. There's no reason to stop. You will improve your training so much, especially as a self-coach athlete, by just being honest with yourself about who things have gone and how they're progressing. Because you can have a very well put together training plan, but maybe there's just not enough rest in it, or maybe something's happened at work that caused you to stress out. And just being honest with yourself that, oh, I should not do this workout, I should push it into next week and take a chill day. Like, that'll do wonders for you more than actually doing the workout would. Yeah, for sure. So, that's going to be the end of our questions. Thank you, everybody, for asking the questions. Oh, actually, we've got a couple more while we were discussing those. Let's see, should we include this? I mean, ask it and then delete it if we can. All right. Can you describe the continuum in as few markers as possible? Yeah, zero markers. Markers? I think in terms of threshold. Oh, right. But here's the thing. I think about those thresholds in terms of accumulating fatigue, like we've discussed twice, three times now already. And realistically, that's how I think about it. Three zone model. We have two markers. The point where, after which, you start to feel tired at the end of your workout, and the other one is when you start to feel really tired after the end of your workout. I think you better patent that really quick, because this thing has legs, like, this is useful. Somebody's going to steal that if you don't, you know, get some IP on it. I'm entirely open source. Thank you so much, Rory. All right. Thank you, everybody, for listening. So if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Shoot me an email at empiricalcyclingatgmail.com if you would like to consult with us. If you'd like to be coached by us, we are always taking on athletes. We're always doing consultations. We love those. We love to help people. That's why we're here, after all. And Rory's throwing me the peace sign. No gang signs, Rory. No, I'm saying I think I can take on two more athletes right now. Whoa! And this is not artificial scarcity. I know what his roster looks like. This is real. I have a mortgage. If you want to work with Rory, please reach out if you want to work with me or Katie or Megan or Corey or anybody. All of us, we are potentially taking on athletes, especially Rory. Shoot me an email, empiricalcycling.gmail.com If you want to ask questions, Weekend AMAs, Empirical Cycling on Instagram. If you want to shoot us a donation, we'd really appreciate that, at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. And what else do I plug at the end of these episodes? Weekend AMAs. Done. You used to sell bath products. I don't know if you do that anymore. You said you'd give someone a free console if they bought a full bath. The Threadless store, yeah. I haven't plugged the Threadless store in. Well, here's the thing about the Threadless store. It's like every piece of merch that got sold, we got like a dollar, and Threadless gets like 19 of those $20. It's not even worth it. We could do our own shirts, but man, you gotta plug that stuff hard, even if it's a cool shirt. So, oh well, sorry about the merch, everybody. If you want more merch, hit me up and let me know. But anyways, we've been harping on this bullshit a long time. All right, go home, everybody. Thanks for listening. Bye.