Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Coley Moore, joined as always by my co-host, Kyle Helson. Thank you, everybody, for listening as always. And I ask you to please consider subscribing to the podcast if you haven't already. And of course, sharing the podcast with a friend or on a forum or wherever if you think it's helping you out, if you're enjoying our content. Also, giving us a five-star rating and a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts really helps out the podcast also. And also, because we are ad-free, if you want to donate to the show, you can... do so at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. We're going to have some show notes up in the website. We'll have a couple links. We'll have a link to the paper that we're going to discuss today. And of course, because we are first and foremost a coaching company, if you have any coaching inquiries, send them to empiricalcycling at gmail.com. You can also send an email to the same place for a consultation where we will answer any questions you want. We can look at your training files. Anonymity is assured if that is something that is important to you, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, at the end of the podcast, we are going to answer some questions based on today's topic. And you can ask a question at Empirical Cycling on Instagram. And of course, up on the weekend, we have AMAs up in the Instagram story. So give me a follow there. And so now, welcome to an episode that potentially is bearing some bad news, but also good news, but bad news first. hundreds of people's power data now. My theory, my eyeball average is that most people cannot hold their FTP for an hour. That doesn't make it not your FTP. It just means you cannot hold it for an hour. I don't have any formal stats on this because that would require a lot of, well, punching into an Excel sheet and then hitting. Please average this data. So I'm not going to do that, but it looks about 40, 45 minutes is the average. Where's Nick Luther when he needs someone to punch in a bunch of data to Excel? Shout out to Nick. He'll get one of his interns to actually do the data entry. He'll be the hero that knows the expression for averaging a column. And so today what we're going to do is we're going to look at a paper that kind of supports my advice. And this is slightly cherry picking, but I was interested in this paper before I knew about extensive threshold type work. So it kind of supports my advice where I say you should always extend your threshold intervals. Kyle, I think that we should probably discuss some context of FTP and TTE here because, you know, I think originally when we started the podcast, we had discussed reviewing like training books and stuff like that. And we had discussed some other stuff. But I think what's really it's going to come down to right now is looking at the origin of like published FTP definitions from training and racing with a power meter. Yeah, and I think most people have probably heard of Training and Racing with a Power Meter. If you haven't, I'd be surprised if you're listening to this podcast, but there are people brand new. So I forget, when was that first published? That was first published in... 2006, I believe. 2006, okay, yeah. And that makes sense because, you know... Early 2000s is when power meters became really available to the general public. I remember way back when they were like late 90s, early 2000s. It was like, oh, like just a thing that a lot of pros had, but most people didn't. And then sort of getting into the 2000s is when they became much more available, like power taps and stuff for mere mortals to possess and to use. So that makes sense. But yeah, that mentions FTP, which is... and that was Andy Coggin and Hunter Allen. But yeah, I think we've mentioned this before, and it's a little confusing because literally like a couple pages apart, they give you two different definitions of what FTP is. Yeah, well, two slightly different definitions because to quote, I can tell the Andy Coggin, writing is FTP is the highest power that a rider can maintain and is in a quasi steady state for approximately one hour without fatiguing. Emphasis on approximately. One page later, method number four for FTP determination is, quote, since by definition, the best measure of performance is performance itself. That's another cognizant right there. Um, the most direct estimate of your FTP will be obtained by simply doing a one hour time trial. And so approximately one hour, one hour. Okay. Now we've got, we're really drilling hard into the one hour thing already. And then, um, and you know, that was from the second edition from 2010, first 12th, 2006. And so, um, I don't think that they did themselves any favors for the future. And I looked at the third edition, which I also have, has the exact same wording. I'm sure deeper in the book, because I know the book, I've just like leafed through it, but I know the book gets more into like WKO 4 or 5 and like, you know, that kind of modeling and stuff. And I'm sure that they've got TTE in there somewhere. But this is, I think, where the popular... one hour equals FTP thing comes from. And I glanced at a couple of the listener questions that we're going to have later. And this is one of those things where a couple of people are asking about like the one hour thing, right? Yeah. And I think even beyond that, it's entered into the cultural lore of cycling and cycling training that FTP is an hour. Like I pulled up this, like if you Google, you go to Google and you type in Joe Friel, FTP. People probably know Friel because he wrote the Psychoist Training Bible, which for the most part doesn't, the original versions don't necessarily talk about power too much because they're older and didn't have as much access to power meters. But if you just Google like, oh, Joe Friel, he knows what he's talking about, right? Joe Friel, FTP, one of the first articles that comes up is this blog from 2015 from TrainingPeak's website where he says, Functional threshold power is defined as the greatest mean maximal power you can currently produce for one hour. Cool. All right. And later on, he says, so how do you measure FTP, which is a follow-up to this, since the best measure of performance is performance itself. DeFriel goes against exactly what Coggin suggests here and says, Even though it's the highest power you can sustain for an hour, it's not a good idea to do a one-hour time trial as a workout. I mean, it depends on how hard you do the time trial, I suppose. But it was just... Yeah, sorry. It's just interesting that you have these two people who are sort of held on, I would say, generally high regard for cycling training, and you can pull these two things written... fairly contemporary, you know, contemporary with each other. And they say, they say two essentially completely different things. Yeah. And so, and, you know, and, and, and I think. Behind that, a lot of the like, oh, don't do a one hour time trial as a workout is like the first one is people always say like, oh, motivation. You know, you're not going to be motivated. And like Friel goes hard into that logic of like you won't be motivated, but maybe a one hour race would be good. But there aren't that many one hour races and there aren't a ton of local 40 kilometer time trials. So you can't do that. You should do a 20 minute test. And that's part of Andy Coggins. you know, methods of FTP testing is like, you can estimate it from these various things. And, um, you know, there's a thousand things. And I remember just from memory, I'm not reading it here is that I, I don't know if it's in the list or if it was from like one of his old blog posts or something. Uh, but he talks about like using a ramp test to, to be, he's, he's like the population average is about 70, 75% of whatever from the end of the ramp test. So that's a place to start looking. It's not the average. It's not where you're at. It's the place to start. And it's like, and so you're gathering data along the way. And I think one of the things that I think should be leaned into harder is with this definition thing is because in training and racing with a power meter, I read a sentence where I was like, oh my God, I've been saying this for years. I don't know if I got it from here because I thought I came up with it on my own. Maybe, you know, mediocre minds, blah, blah, blah. But like, you know, he says that FTP is the point at which over it, you fatigue faster and under it, you fatigue slower. And I read that and I was like, I don't know why that isn't being like said a thousand times because you can look at a power curve and you could see that point. Like visually you can go, oh, there it is. Got it. And I think. Well, all these other ways to measure it. Like if you use critical power, not everybody's critical power is going to match up with this inflection point, even though it's trying to find the inflection point. And like one hour is going to be, for most people, lower than this inflection point. And so for some people, significantly lower. Some people, it is not going to be that much lower. And so I think because my personal standard has always been what's going to work the best for everybody. You know, when we start throwing hard definitions around like FTP equals 60 minutes, then we can really start to cause problems. See, but I think the hard definition of 60 minutes is very easy to remember. And so people probably really like that, you know, like 60 minutes. Oh, it's an hour. Like that's easy to remember. It makes sense kind of if you feel like, oh, this is just this this thing we're defining. oh, this is what you can do for an hour, and then we're going to base things off of that. If you think about it deeper, there is nothing special about an hour. It's special only because of the way we as a society have decided to define time, but there's no like... there's nothing universally special about 60 minutes. Like that could be, you know, if we picked a different definition of minutes or whatever, like that would be a different amount of time. We're changing the units. Yeah. Like, like, right. There's nothing like, there's nothing really special. So I think that, you know, in our very first podcast, you said there's nothing special to 60 minutes to the, or I think the quote is, what is special about 60 minutes to the human body? Right, yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. But it's a nice, easy, memorable thing, which is why I think, especially for a sport where cycling, a lot of times you don't get a lot of quantifiable results. Who won the race? Okay, this is what they won. What was the winning time for the crit? Who cares? No one, you know, like, like, like if you're track and field or swimming or, you know, or, you know, other running like road races, things like that, like you get these nice quantifiable numbers. But in cycling, you don't get very many. So I think that's why the 60 minutes sits like sticks so well is like, oh, finally. I know. I know a concrete number for something and it's 60 minutes, even though it's like, eh, that doesn't really make a lot of sense. Like, you know, it's just as arbitrary as a week, right? Like why do we have weeks? Like seven days? Like that's, I mean, I know there's like this whole psychology behind seven and stuff like that, but it's just not, it's not really anything different. Like your body doesn't have this like. quartz movement in it where it's counting what 60 minutes is. It'd be cool if it did. But yeah, the idea that 60 minutes is this magical number. And really, if you think about a lot of other things about the human body... it being exactly 60 minutes for everyone is kind of silly it's like saying that like everyone should have exactly the same core body temperature when it's like no on average it's 98.6 or whatever but like that means you know that'd be like being upset if i like took your temperature right now and it wasn't exactly 98.6 you're like well that's fahrenheit for the euros by the way yeah it's about 38 celsius i think Um, well, I, but yeah, I, I, well, I think, I think it's interesting to think about how, um, how they, I don't want to say they had to like walk it back, but when they released the, um, the TTE metric and WKO four in 2015, um, I think that they had an uphill battle. Uh, cause I'm, cause I remember Andy Coggin was part of that rollout. And I remember, um, He fielded a lot of one-hour questions. I imagine he's pretty fucking tired of it by this point. That's why he keeps deleting all of his tweets. I know people with tweet notifications for him, and apparently he's not tweeted in some time. I keep asking, hey, did he say anything? Because he's prone to very definitive statements sometimes, and I appreciate that. It's fun. Probably why our podcast is not so popular because everything depends. Sorry. Anyway, so I remember that because I think the highest value I've seen for a TTE is like realistically tested has been about 83 minutes. I remember at one point I had three clients with a TTE over 80 minutes. Wow. And I was like, wow, this is great. And then we did some confirmation testing above and below and whatnot. And yeah, like verified, got it. And I think it was interesting to see that happen and to see the kind of training that we did to get them there. And between that and I think everything that everybody's talking about with an hour, and especially like with the hour record and everything, like, oh, somebody could just go ride FTP for an hour. And, you know, because you and I had also discussed a little bit, we're thinking about, doing a 10-minute tips on the obvious way to know that the 20-minute test is wrong and these FTP tests are wrong because calling something wrong gets a lot of clicks. I know we're going to lean into it once in a while. But it's basically like if you use the critical power model simply and you assume that your FTP equals your critical power, everybody's got a different work rate over a threshold. And so 20-minute power is going to be a varying range for people. And so I think once you get there, because I remember my very first coach telling me, you could go do an hour time trial to find out your FTP. But he was like, but you're going to fuck up your training for weeks after that. And I was like, oh, am I? And that stuck with me longer than I would like to admit that it did. And now I'm thinking, oh, it's because, well, I mean. now, but also like the last couple of years thinking, Oh yeah, it's because people's TTE isn't long enough. Um, and I think that, that the kind of metabolic implications of TTE and not only that, but I think, you know, if you've been following along with the metabolism series so far, um, I think, uh, we're actually in a pretty good spot because this is one of the very last episodes I wanted to do in the series. Um, and so Because I think now that people have heard a couple episodes on the varying decoupling points along the way between lactate and fat and the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain, and having that level of understanding and kind of seeing how the body might select fuel sources and stuff like that, now that we've got all that under our belt, it's not going to be such a stretch to kind of understand the implications in this paper. And this is the paper. I think I was reading this, well, rereading it because I've read it like 10 or 20 times now. I think I was rereading this a couple of years ago. And this, I believe, was the paper that got me the idea to start the podcast. Because I think I said to you, it would be cool to like break down a paper, like live tweet it or something. And then it was like, well, why don't we just talk about it? Why don't we just break it down? while we discuss. And so that's kind of, I think this paper was it. And this is, you know, where the podcast came from. So I think it's cool to include it now. And I think I'm glad that we didn't do it earlier, because I don't think we would have done a very good job of it. We would have had to do a Redux episode. So this paper is from Veronique Bilat. I'm sure I'm butchering that correctly. The training is called... Sorry, the paper's called Training Effect on Performance, Substrate Balance, and Blood Lactate Concentration at the Maximal Lactate Steady State in Master Endurance Runners. So the intro to this paper, by the way, is one of my favorite ever. And she notes some really good points that the study addresses. And I had to stop myself from just like reading the whole intro on the podcast. Go read it. It's worth your time. Things like, quote, the limiting factors of exhaustion at MLSSV are still unknown. MLSSV, so they're looking at maximal lactate steady state, basically FTP. Velocity, because they're talking about runners, so they're looking at velocity rather than power because they're not measuring power. So velocity, they're doing it on a track. So basic equivalents, blah, blah, blah. To continue, indeed, substrate utilization of this exercise intensity is not well investigated. It is also not clear whether MLSSV corresponds to the speed at which the RER is about 1. That's all carbs. MLSSV does not indicate a given workload, but rather an exercise intensity above which metabolism changes qualitatively. So I think at this point... Everybody kind of gets where this is going. I mean, do you have any predictions, Kyle? Because you haven't seen these notes yet. I don't think you've read this paper. Yeah. Well, I mean, so above which you fatigue faster, like you fatigue faster for metabolism reasons, right? It's not because you like your body is like, oh, no, I just, you know, I have I'm like a battery and I've just I've maxed out my battery. That's not. That's how it works. Well, fatigue is complicated, and that's actually part of what we're going to talk about. Well, that's going to be tangential to our discussion here, but really the mechanisms of fatigue are complex. I read a long, long, it was like a 50 or 60-page review article on fatigue, and it dealt with stuff that's over threshold. Because that's so much more well investigated. And they just say like under threshold, you run out of glycogen, end of story. And technically you don't fully run out of glycogen. Like, you know, you might be at like 40 or 30 or 20% of your stores or something like that. But, you know, it also depends on where you measure in. There's a thousand things. Which glycogen compartment is my first question too. So we'll talk about that in another podcast anyway. So anyway, but. The authors also make a couple interesting points in the intro, and I'm going to just finish quoting real quick here. MLSSW, so the work rate at FTP, or power output basically, is determined by the ability to maintain ATP supply and by the products of glycolysis that may limit oxidative phosphorylation. And so, now they're starting to talk about, okay, so... Can you maintain ATP supply? Can you do it aerobically, right? So FTP is basically what is the highest sustainable aerobic pace you can maintain? I like that. That's a nice, that's almost as good as one hour. Almost as good. A little more, a little more dependsy, but yeah. Yeah. In terms of like, that's almost as good. Okay, and so they also note MLSSW, FTP, is sensitive to endurance training, both in the absolute sense of VO2 max and the relative sense where FTP is a percentage of VO2 max. But one of the cool things is they speculate about substrate utilization. Because they're talking about endurance training seems to yield higher fat oxidation rates at the same absolute intensity. But this paper was from the early mid-2000s. And they weren't sure at the time about higher intensities. And they're also not sure of the effect of FTP training on the absolute or relative effects here. In other words, if endurance training means burning more fat at 150 watts, but it's because the FTP went from 200 to 250 watts, right? Is this due to FTP being higher? Or is it because it's at a lower percentage of FTP? Or is it... Like if you do the same relative percentage, has the substrate use changed? And if it's both or one or the other, how much is due to one? How much is due to the other? How much is it like endurance training is allowing you to burn more fat at a certain low intensity? And most studies that I've seen so far don't really... last long enough. The experimental protocols don't last long enough to actually investigate this. I'm not sure I've seen one. If somebody's seen one, let me know. Send it to me. Empiricalcycling at gmail.com. I'm very interested. I also have not done it that hard, but anyway. Sorry. That's not so surprising given how long some of these studies would have to be. Studies already sometimes kind of take a long time. The longer a study goes on for, the fewer people volunteer for it. It's harder and harder and harder. Like, oh, can we follow around and stab you while you ride your bike for a year and a half? Does that sound good for you? We're going to stab you in the leg once a month for a year and a half. Does that sound fun? Yeah. Yeah, we're going to take core samples. We're going to prick your earlobes and your fingertips. And we're going to really just be invasive on your training schedule. But otherwise, besides our procedure, we want you to train as normal while getting stabbed and prodded and poked. Anyway, so actually, speaking of previous studies, this study, the authors also note that... results of the previous studies are usually reported as a percentage of VO2 max. And that is, especially the papers I've read, one of the big reasons I have chosen not to include a whole lot of papers on the podcast is because it makes the results very, very difficult to interpret. Because as we saw in some of the breakdowns of... The Coyle and Coggin and several other authors, I forget, paper, what is it? The Determinants of Endurance and Well-Trained Cyclists, they reported quite a large range of FTP relative to VO2 max. It was like 60% up to like 85% or something like that. It's a huge range. Yeah, it was quite a range, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, the purpose of this particular study is to determine the effect of MLSS training, FTP training, on time to exhaustion at MLSS and look at any possible changes in substrate utilization. So are they burning all carbs? Are they burning all fats? Are they burning more fats? Is it at lower intensities, higher intensities, et cetera, et cetera. So the test group was 11 masters runners. And they're 43 to 51 years old, VO2 max of about 55. They are well-trained, long-distance specialists. Half marathon average, 83 minutes, which by the Daniels running table translates to a sub-three-hour marathon. Damn. So these are pretty quick old men. Yeah, I would say for masters too, like holy shit. Right? So 11 months a year, they're training. Um, for the last 10 years was five times a week and they were only doing long, slow distance runs at an average of 65 minutes. Like, that's it. It's like, imagine, imagine you're going out and you're doing like, uh, you know, a one and a half to three hour ride at endurance. Yeah. Like five to six days a week for 10 years. And other than that, you race. Um, so. That is the test group that we're starting with. And the same, you know, there's some, you know, questions about, you know, cycling, running crossover here. But so the numbers that we're going to see in the runners are a little different from what we would expect in cyclists, but not by much. So we can actually take this as a really, really good test case for us. So their protocol in the paper is actually a little unwieldy. And it took me a lot of reads to really fully understand it. Also, because my reading comprehension is just not that good to start with. I'm a slow reader. So I had a lot of trouble with this. But if you're a smart, good reader, you'll probably be okay, even though it might be still a little challenging. So here's my summary of their tests. On three different days, they did, and this is another reason it's difficult to recruit subjects. The testing protocol and the two days before the testing protocol are regimented. So now you've got to sacrifice five days of your week. You've got to be at the track at this time. You've got to eat what they tell you, et cetera, et cetera. So day one is a ramp test. It's a step test on the track to begin determining MLSS velocity and VO2 max velocity. And that's how they're going to base the training. And they actually have, when they decide the training at these velocities, they have somebody. going alongside you, making sure you're at the right pace. How do I get that job? That person like riding like an electric bike. Yeah, they're literally riding a bicycle. And so the stage speed was based off their PB 10 kilometer time, which a previous study had reported around 92% of you to max. But what's cool about this by the Daniels running formula, 10K time should be in the 37 minute range based on their half marathon. So that's about perfect for FTP determination, right? But we would expect 92% VO2 max might be a little high for FTP. That's a little high, yeah. And what we find is that their FTP TTE is actually a little bit longer. And that's what I expected. That was my prediction first time reading this paper was, oh, I bet they're going to find VO2 max FTP, like 85% of VO2 max, something like that. and about a 45-minute TTE, something like that. So the stages for the RAM test were six minutes at 50%, 60%, 70%, and then three minutes at 80%, 85%, 90%, 95%, 100% of their estimated VO2 max, and then 30-second rest and drawer of blood sample. They did three efforts the next day on track to determine their velocity at MLSS. This is my favorite part of the study. Honestly, it is. 15 minute warmup at 80% of estimated MLSS. You almost never see a half decent warmup in these studies. So grateful for this. Because normally, you know, when you look at a ramp test warmup for cycling, it's like the subject spun for five minutes at 50 watts to warm up. It's like, all right. So somebody had a 400 watt FTP could do this with their like pinky toe. No problem. Then they did 20-minute runs at 5% below, at, and 5% above their estimated MLSS with a 40-minute rest. Ah, I like that too. Yes, plenty of rest. So good. And the MLSS determination method is a little odd to determine. They've got a chart on it. They've got a little graph showing they did this, that, and the other thing. Anyway, but basically, by the procedure, they got it, by the best of my estimation. So then the following day, they did a MLSS V. So they ran at their velocity of maximum light, a steady state, once to exhaustion. So... They all went for an hour, right? That's exactly, yeah. So... What are the pre-training stats that we're going to care about? So based on what they're investigating and what we care about, we care about where's their MLSS, what's the percentage of VO2 max, so what's their fractional utilization, or the FU, as I have it labeled in WKO5. What's the VO2 max? What is their RAR, the percentage of carb and fat use? And of course, most importantly, what's their TTE? So the training intervention... is they did their first threshold block of their whole lives at the tender age of 40 something to 50 something. So they did two days per week. By the way, if you've never done a threshold block and you want to see what it's like, do this protocol. They did two days per week. And other than these two days, they did the same running schedule that they had before. And their threshold... Training runs were supervised by somebody on a bicycle. So the subject started with 30 minutes time in zone and went up to 60 minutes over six weeks. So session one, they split into three efforts. The first session of the week, yeah, three efforts. And session two, two efforts. So the first day, three by 10. Second day, two by 15. Second week, they did the first day as three by 12, then two by 18. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the way up to three by 20 and two by 30 in week six. And they did five minutes, easy jogging between sets. These are what I call extensive FTP efforts. And that's not my terminology. Thank you, Tim Cusick. That's extensive threshold work. I think it's funny because you always get people who ask like, oh, how should I progress? You know, when I started with two by 20 or whatever, like how do I progress? And you're like, I don't know, you just add time. And you just do slightly more the next time. And then as people pointed out before too, it's nice when every effort is the same and every interval is the same amount of time. But if you wanted to do two by 10 and the third one is a 12 or something because that's how you want to increment your time, that's fine too. I don't know, just add time. Yeah, there's no wrong way to do it. And actually, that's one of the questions that we got for the listener questions. the ones I was looking ahead to. So we're going to talk about, you know, what should it feel like and how should you progress and all that kind of stuff. But basically like if you're looking for a template to start with, feel free to modify it, of course, but this is a really good way to start. Like you really cannot go wrong. It's pretty similar. Didn't Tim have that slide of like, you know, a suggested progression or whatever. It's basically this. Yeah, but Tim also works a lot with professional athletes who are riding a ton of volume. And we're going to talk about the contribution of volume to this too later. Basically, the preview is volume really supports extensive TTE work, like a lot. And so anyway, so let's move on with this before we get too deep into that because we could really go down that tangent pretty deep if we wanted to. Not that anybody listening to the podcast would. Well, they would all be surprised, wouldn't they? So, all right. So what are our pre and post metrics? The MLSS as a percentage of VO2 max is 85% plus or minus four. So that's a very likely skew, of course. What is that? That's to the left. So that would be a negative skew. Anyway, it's skewing downwards towards the lower percentages. And that stayed about the same pre and post. Their absolute VO2 max had a slight increase of 3.82 liters a minute to 3.96 liters a minute. I would tell you the relative, but they also lost like a kilo of weight. So the relative went up a little bit. Went up a lot, yeah. That's not what we're concerned about. Basically, it just about stayed the same. TTE average before the study, 45 minutes. Standard deviation, 10 minutes. After the study, 63 minutes. That's a lot. Yeah. Standard deviation, 12. So the spread. No, but that's a big increase. That is a very big increase. It's a really nice one. So they went from covering 10.4 kilometers on the track for test day to 15.7. Oof, yeah. Hold on one sec. I'm going to make a note later because we need to talk about this in terms of time trials. Because I think a lot of people I've trained who are time trialists are like, why do we do all this volume? Well, here's a podcast about one of the reasons why. Yeah. I think it's interesting to just remind people, these people were already doing a bunch of volume. And during this intervention, you know, they kept all of their, yeah, they'd done a ton of volume. And then they kept the rest of it too, right? Like they were doing this two days a week. But the other three days a week, they were doing their long, slow, hour-long jogs, basically. They really liked hour-long jogs a lot. Yeah, average an hour. And so the RER, their respiratory exchange ratio of O2 to CO2, went from about 0.93 or 80% carb use to 0.93, 80% carb use. But there's an asterisk here because, well, before you ask me about standardized meals or anything like that, because this affects RER. Um, the meals, this is another reason people don't set up for studies meals before each measured trial. So dinner the night before and the breakfast the morning of were standardized 57% carbohydrates, 28% fat, 15% protein, 3000 kilojoule dinner the night before 2300 kilojoule breakfast, three hours before testing and a rest day before testing. So there you go. So anyway, figure five of this paper, I will try to remember to put it up in the show notes. There's a really cool inverse correlation of R squared of 0.69, nice, that the blood lactate concentration in the 10th minute of the TTE test actually predicted the TTE. So let's say that again. We have a pretty strong correlation that the blood lactate in the... 10th minute, so you start, and then in minute 10, they test your blood lactate. This blood lactate concentration has a fairly tight R squared that is actually going to predict your TTE. Kyle, I'm going to put you on the spot. Why would this be that a lower lactate level 10 minutes in might show a longer TTE? Is it because you're able to do something? That means you're able to do something with all the extra lactate that you're producing, so you are going to fatigue slower? It's not only that, but it would be... Actually, I'm going to pull the paper up because I forgot what figure five looks like. Yes. Yeah, lower blood lactate concentrations yield a longer TTE. I was just confirming that because I did not put that in our notes. Yeah. Basically, oxidizing lactate is energy, right? You get out of – if you just make a lactate, you get two ATP. But if you throw that lactate all the way through the Krebs cycle, you get 34 ATP. So that's a pretty good deal. And so with higher lactate values, not only does this mean less oxidation of lactate itself. But it also means that if you're not getting this energy from the lactate, you have to use more glycogen. Because otherwise, you need the ATP. Where are you going to go? What are you going to get? And so here's a question is, what kind of factors would contribute? Now we're going a little off the paper, so I don't talk about this stuff. But less mitochondrial density, less... So less ability to turn O2 into direct kilojoules of work, lower capillary density, all this kind of stuff that we associate with really good endurance athletes. So this is just the kind of stuff that we would see with endurance training. So we're getting ahead of ourselves though. And so, yeah, so like the less than lactose oxidation means you're going to dig deeper into your glycogen stores. And not only that, but it means you're going to get into your larger motor units sooner. And also, if there are any associated byproducts associated with this kind of thing, with, you know, going through your glycogen stores more, this also contributes. Because the fatigue is complex in origin, right? So what happens if you have, like, if you have some sort of, like, if you have a motor neuron condition and you cannot generate a large enough signal to get into larger motor units? That's another way to fatigue, too. Right. Um, and so in healthy people, assuming we can get into larger motor units, yada, yada, yada. And we actually, we talked about that in a podcast, like was it watt stock number nine or 10 or something like that? Um, yeah, something like that. I forget. Yeah. Anyway. So it was, that was the one about strength training. Um, so the second big finding here, uh, and this is the asterisk for the above, um, where I said that carb usage did not change the average. But in figure four, we see a strong inverse relationship between the percentage of carbohydrate used at 10 minutes before exhaustion in the TTE test and the TTE. So the longer your TTE, the less carbohydrates you're using. So the question is, how is this different from the average? So Kyle, how can we get the same average but have this pattern emerge? It just means that the people who had longer TTEs to start with, they got relatively longer than the people who had shorter TTEs got longer. Yeah, it's like you can get this pattern, this negative correlation, and have the same average, but without... It's sort of like you can have... you can have the same average of like a left skewed and a right skewed distribution with the same average and the same standard deviation, but they have two different patterns, right? Yeah, yeah. It's one of the reasons why just going off of mean is not always the correct way. Like, that's the reason why, like, for example, the mean for these things might be the same, but the median might be different or the mode. And then like you said, skewness or like the standard deviation size. As we saw, the standard deviation was actually bigger for TTE. after the intervention than before and things like that. So that's why these sort of higher order statistics come into play for all sorts of things. Right. And so, Kyle, I have actually included figure four in our notes. So feast your eyes. And the caption here, by the way, relationship between the percentage of the energy derived from carbohydrates during the extensive run at MLSSV. and the corresponding time to exhaustion at MLSSV after six weeks of training at MLSSV. So we see our longest TTEs here at 80 minutes. That tracks with what I've seen in my experience. And these two values are at about 72% and 74%, 75% carbohydrate usage. Yep. Um, and the R square is 0.517, but we have an outlier at 65 minutes. This person's at 90% and somebody else very close to the actual, uh, the other trend is at like 78%. 8%. Yeah. Yeah. So poor, poor guy. Just, just, just, just so many carbs. This guy is so many carbs for breakfast. Um, and every meal, uh, I hope. Um, so. I think it's worth discussing how and why this kind of thing occurs. And this is one of the reasons that we're talking about this at the end of the metabolism series. Probably do maybe one or two more episodes before we move on to something else because I'm getting metabolism series fatigue at this point. But is your fatigue going out longer? I mean, honestly, after the first couple of years of the podcast, I think it has. So I think that what's happening here, it's related to what we discussed with carnitine in Wattstock 33. So carnitine helps transport long-chain fatty acids, which are too big to freely diffuse, across the mitochondrial membrane. And once they're in there, they can get oxidized no problem. They can get turned into acetyl-CoA, and you can grab NADH and FADH2 from each two-carbon moiety that you pluck off. That's cool. Krebs cycle flux, so generating lots and lots of reducing equivalents for the electron transport chain, there can be insufficient acetyl-CoA around. And so carnitine actually grabs the acetyl group and frees up coenzyme A, which can go back to helping with the large lactate flux. So that's basically what happens. And this decreases the longer... chain and fatty acid transport into the mitochondria. But there are two points here. First, this type of training is supposed to alleviate some of these kinds of pressures that we have in cellular metabolism. So we have a pressure, which is there's not enough carnitine. You train, you add time and zone. One of the things you expect to do is add larger carnitine stores because this is going to alleviate the pressure. One of the things you're going to do for like one of the basic things that we do in training, right? Is we ride a lot and we expect to develop more mitochondrial mass. What happens with mitochondrial mass? It allows us to do more aerobic ATP production to alleviate the... the pressure of needing more ATP in some kind of sustainable manner from all this writing that we're doing for some reason, right? Anyway, so the body is smart and it wants to not use its finite resources. Obviously, so that means we want to use more fats. So the second thing here that we've talked about several times before is shorter chain fatty acids like octanoate can diffuse freely. into the mitochondria and get broken down and enter the Krebs cycle too. And so I think it's important here because typically people think, well, people, just the very general people out there. Anyway, so a lot of the training resources I've seen, a lot of people I've heard discuss this, consider threshold to be at 100% carbohydrate usage because, right, we're supposed to be... going through more carbohydrates and creating a lot more lactate than we can oxidize. And so of course we must be using a hundred percent of our oxidation capacity to combust the lactate, right? No, that is not what happens. There is numerous examples in the literature of less than a hundred percent carbohydrate usage at threshold. And this is one of them. Yeah. And it's come up before on the podcast too. Many times. And so, Because this is one of those decoupling points that we've discussed, which is at this point, once you get to the Krebs cycle, it doesn't matter where it came from. What matters is the step four. And it doesn't matter that we're at 100% oxidative capacity sustainably or not, or below it or above it. There's a lot of different ways that we can affect fuel usage. And I've got RER data from RAM tests and all sorts of stuff where somebody's at like 0.8. RER at threshold. That's like, you know, that's only like a third carbohydrate usage. Granted, this person was doing keto and fasted, but, you know, it matters what, you know, all this kind of stuff that's happening. So anyway, so when the authors talk about this thing, they are, They say that the rate of glycolysis was actually not decreased, but it was actually increased, right? So why would this be, Kyle? Because they have a higher absolute work output. Yes, that's why. So if it's approximately the same proportion, that means if we're using, let's say, 80% carbohydrates. at 200 watts, and then we use 80% carbohydrates at 250 watts, it's still 80%, but now it's 80% of that higher number. So right, exactly. The proportion to the FTP relatively has stayed the same, which means more. And now we can put this together with TTE being negatively correlated with the last 10 minutes of lactate concentration. Sorry, first 10 minute lactate concentration. The authors don't make this connection explicitly, but I'm going to interject it here. The authors note that post-training improvements are about lactate clearance, quote-unquote. And at the time, this was really thought to be from the blood. And I don't know exactly the author's thinking here, but the typical wisdom at the time was that there are lactate-producing fibers and there are lactate-consuming fibers. Lactate-producing are type 2. Lactate-consuming are type 1. We know that is an incorrect model now. But at the time, this might be what they were thinking about. But my addition here, what I'm going to interject is that what we know now is, of course, that the lactate oxidation can take place in the muscle itself. And we discussed this several times in the podcast. So that means lactate would be oxidized before diffusion into the blood at the same rate of lactate creation. You know, more mitochondrial mass, you know, is just going to be able to oxidize more lactate. Use up, yeah, use up that lactate. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so lactate having multiple sources, like multiple muscle fiber sources and also multiple places for oxidation, has it diffused out of the cell yet? Okay. So we can look at the same muscle fiber and watch the lactate. Like we can label a couple of lactates. One of them is going to like get produced and then it's going to go into the mitochondria and get oxidized. Another one. maybe let's say one in however many, is actually going to make it to the cell surface and get into the bloodstream. And there's a non-zero chance it's going to circulate and get back to that same muscle and get pulled back in and then oxidized, which I love. It's like the butterfly flaps its wings and then... The lactate effect. Yeah. And this is why I think that... I think if, you know, there's also a muscle mass and a fiber type thing here, which is not to contradict what I just said about fiber types, because, you know, we've discussed previously that, you know, we've seen type two fibers that can oxidize lactate just as effectively as slow twitch fibers, if they're well trained, right? I think what it is here is... There's person-to-person variation on mitochondrial density, capillary density, efficiency, and this is related to fiber type. And this means that each individual's adaptation to increasing FTP time and zone may actually be different. And so why would somebody's individual training response be different? Why isn't it just, we've increased TTE, therefore we're oxidizing? you know, more fats or something like that. Like this is not necessarily always going to be the case. So my first thought is that the training dose was not individualized. So if we've got TTEs between let's say 30 and 60 minutes, which would stand to reason if the average is 45, you know, everybody starts with three by 10. And if you can do 65 minutes, three by 10, it's like, And so I would like to see that done as a follow-up study, seeing if the responses either get more uniform and more patterns emerge or not, because I'm very curious about that. Yeah, that's interesting. And I think that kind of goes back to points you've made before where, unfortunately, there are no miracle intervals that everyone can do. And if you just do this exact same protocol... everyone will get faster by the same amount. And obviously everyone here did do the exact same protocol and they did not all get faster by the same amount. Or, well, we don't know exactly the individual responses because that's not reported. So I would like to know, but also this is almost a 20-year-old study now. So anyway, because I keep thinking about that outlier in figure four. The one guy has 65 minutes TTE, but at like 90% carb use instead of like 80. And so, you know, because I think if we pulled him out, our R squared would get to like, what, 0.75 or something like that? And, you know, because I wonder if that guy didn't respond to the others. The same way the others did because the efforts weren't long enough or he adapted in different ways. Genetically, he's not able to actually add more mitochondrial mass or add more capillary density or add more whatever. Whatever the adaptation is, he might not have gotten it. So he might have just gotten into really, really, really big motor units and had the same metabolism. But his glycogen stores just increased like mad. That might have been his adaptation. We don't know. Yeah. Yeah, that would be interesting. Yeah. Poor guys just doing everything on carbs, though. Well, because carbs and glycogen limitation, that's just one of the things that would limit us for TTE. So this is the list off the top of my head. I've not gone back and edited it. I just wrote it out and kept it going. So glycogen stores and substrate usage would be one. Efficiency. would be one. There's a lot of stuff that affects efficiency, not just fiber type. Capillary density, motor unit recruitment, mitochondrial density, buffering capacity. So when we think about the limiters, what limits, this also means what can adapt, what has the potential to adapt. Yeah. I think it's interesting too, because this gets into the idea that you know, you, you want, you want power or velocity in this case to go up and you want TTE to go out. But if you were taking it and you're like, okay, so we're just going to do a bunch of work to, to get those things done. Well, there are all these different factors that go into each one of these things. And depending on who you are, you could have the same, you know, MLSSV is the other, the other subject study person, you know, subject in this study. And like you just said, in terms of individualizing training, if you wanted to improve any number of one of those things, if you specifically wanted to go after one of those goals, it would be slightly different than if you wanted to go back, go after a different one. And that, that is just like part of the thing that goes into the idea of like, okay, well I want my FTP to go up. Well, like, you know, yeah, sure. You can do two by 20 until you're blue in the face, but like there are other, you know, Seeing this whole bigger picture of like, well, how does that actually happen? Well, if you're blue in the face after doing two by 20, your threshold's probably set a little high. Sorry, easy joke. But I think, you know, because it's like you can almost, and I think a lot of people would be asking at this point, our astute listeners generally, which are all of them, based on the feedback that I get and the questions that we get. Thank you, everybody, by the way, for listening so hard and thinking so hard. I know thinking is hard. It's really hard for me. And so I think I appreciate the thoughtfulness of it. And the question might be, can we modify the training and know what our specific limitations are individually and that we can modify our training to improve certain aspects of these adaptations over others? And the answer is maybe. Because everybody does kind of adapt to different things a little bit differently. Like somebody asked in the Instagram questions this past weekend because we're recording on Sunday. So that wrapped up at like midday today. And one of the questions was like amount of anaerobic efforts before racing or something like that. And I was just thinking like some people hardly need any. They do long endurance rides, they do some threshold work, they do some VO2s, and they go to race and they can race a crit no problem at all. Other people need a lot more anaerobic work. And so that's one of those things where individual variation is whatever it will be. And a lot of the times we just have to look at it from the high level of performance. Like, what are we doing? Why do we think it's happening? Okay, and the thing is, also, you don't want to get... to drill down onto, you know, oh, I'm not adding too much mitochondrial mass. I'm actually increasing my glycogen stores instead. And so that's why, that's why I need to do this different training. Like we don't know that specifically unless you actually do want to get your muscles core sampled several times a week by some guy on a bicycle next to you. I mean, in which case go for it, but it's not easy training to do. So anyway, speaking of, I noted earlier that VO2Max went up for the group a little bit, and if I'm not mistaken, it was a statistically significant bump. So I think, let's think about this for a minute, because VO2Max going up while doing FTP work is common if, and this is me talking, not the authors, if you mostly do long endurance rides, or long endurance runs like these guys were, and like nothing else. Yeah. It sounds like, yeah, they'd never done really any intensity. So this would be like their first hard foray into non zone two. Yeah. Yeah. And I usually don't see like, cause if somebody gets off the couch or if somebody has never done like targeted intervals ever, FTP will raise your FTP and your via two max for like maybe two to three months. Ballpark. Don't quote me on that. Cause I know somebody will. After that, this study sees the main benefit of FTP work, which is what I usually see, which is longer TTE, especially once you've gotten that couple months of training under your belt. This is the main adaptation of what happens. This is why I always say extend the time. And I mean, in the protocol, it's not like they were not like incrementing up. the velocity throughout, right? It was not like they did three by 10 at 10 kilometers an hour. And then the next week it'd be three by 12, but at 10.1 kilometer, you know, like, which would be the equivalent of you doing two by 20 at 250 Watts this week and two by 20 at 255 Watts next week. Instead of extending the time, you were just like slowly bumping up the powers. Yeah. And I think, um, I think that is actually one of the things that, I've seen in a lot of people's training programs that aren't aware of this specifically. And it's not their fault. I'm not saying that they're stupid or anything like that because otherwise I've seen a lot of these training programs be really excellent. I think kind of expecting and knowing what you should look for on the other side of a training block like this. will help you determine whether the block was effective, right? Because if you are doing two by 20s, you know, until you're blue in the face or not, and you're not seeing your FTP go up, you're going, wow, shouldn't FTP work make my FTP go up? The answer is usually not, especially once you're well trained. And this really kind of shows a good example of that. And so I think there's a couple other things that I've seen in my coaching experience. that we should consider here additionally, which is that the first one, this is the TTE thing. Big volume supports TTE adaptations from extensive FTP work greatly. Because what adaptations would we expect out of big volume? Better efficiency, more capillary density, plasma volume, mitochondrial density, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like the list. overlaps with what we would expect from extensive FTP work. But you can only do so much FTP work per week, but you can do a whole boatload of endurance work if you got the time. Which is what these guys are doing on top of their FTP work. Yeah. And so that's what we see in today's paper. And it actually matches what the authors note in the conclusion. Um, you know, which, cause they're mostly looking at more oxidation of lactate, but now, you know, we're 20 years on from this just about. And so we can, you know, we, we, we know a little bit more. And so now we can see that, you know, this paper was actually like really forward looking. Um, and so, um, and also I think what's interesting in the paper though, is that, um, what we know now too is like, you know, what the things that allow us to oxidize more lactate also allow us to oxidize more fats. which I've said on the podcast several times before. So it's probably not a shock to people listening unless you just decided to listen to this episode first. And this is our first episode you've heard us on, in which case, welcome. And I also suggest going to our back catalog. So I see extensive FTP and volume over time. will also raise FTP relative to VO2 max, which the authors did not see. They did not see that relative increase. But obviously, this is only going to work to a point because, Kyle, back in the day, my absolute peak of FTP relative to VO2 max was 78% to 79%. Kyle, yours was about the same. To the shock of nobody. Yeah. But the thing is, for this study, that kind of makes sense because they actually did see this VO2 max increase with this extensive FTP and volume, where for other people, well-trained, and we would have qualified as well aerobically trained back then, we wouldn't be getting the VO2 max bump from... pushing TTE out. So we would expect to see the percentage actually creep up slightly. Unless you were doing maybe a simultaneous FTP VO2 block. Which, you know, which, well, we're going to touch on that in just a minute, actually. So very prescient as usual, Kyle. Is it prescient or prescient? I think it's prescient. I always thought it was prescient. Anyway, yeah, whatever. We're both probably wrong. Potato. I don't know. Who says potato anymore? Oh, British people. Hello, friends in the UK. Actually, we know some British folks together. That'll be a good heckle. Anyway, so this is one of the things I also see with time trialists, like I mentioned before. So if you are looking to do a time trial. Because, you know, what's the world's time trials? If they've gone out to like, you know, these are the fastest people in the world. Like, you know, the men, like sometimes it's like over an hour, like an hour five, hour, I think hour seven or something like that was the longest one I've seen. Didn't Kung win that one? It was a couple of years ago. I was surprised by the time. Because normally you'd think 40KTT, it's going to be like, you know, like the high 40s, something like that, low 50s if there's some elevation, whatever. But let's say your TTE is 30 minutes at FTP, and that's something you could sustainably do, 35 minutes. Your time trial is going to take you 50, right? Yeah. Now, your first option is instead of doing, let's say, 300 watts, now you've got to bump down to 280. How much time is 20 watts going to get you, right? So what if you could hold 300 for an extra 15 minutes? How much time is that going to? $10,000 in the wind tunnel right there. And all you have to do is just add a little more time in zone. Holy shit. It's interesting, too, because way back in the day, in the tour, a lot of the full-length individual time trials were 50 kilometers, which would then push everyone into that, like, oh, no, it's definitely that one hour you're getting to be, like, you know. Obviously, for some of these people, all they add is time and zone. Well, I mean, the EPO kicks in in the last 10 minutes of a long effort like that. Lance is 500 grams heavier that day for a reason. Also, from my coaching experience, though, some of the best VO2 max training results I've ever seen was when people's TTE was beyond 70 minutes. And this is one of the reasons I usually suggest you look at TTE being longer than 55, 60 minutes before trying to quote-unquote raise the roof, although that does not necessarily mean – because if your TTE never goes out that far, well, you've got to try to raise the roof at some point, right? But usually that's when I see the most immediate improvements. And FTP goes up oftentimes. TTE shortens. Not always, but it's happened frequently. But, you know, anyway, so like we said, but does this mean you have to do only VO2max work when TTE is long? The answer is no, because sometimes you can do it before extensive FTP work is done. Sometimes FTP and VO2max work are intermingled in what I refer to as a mixed block of both VO2max and trying to extend FTP. But, you know, there are pros and cons to this. Like doing both at the same time, because I try to... I'm a trained scientist, so I try to really spread my variables out and know what's going to affect what. And so I think of doing a mixed block as better for people with a heavy race schedule, and so you don't have a lot of time to train, you don't have a lot of time to recover, or you're newer to training, or you're on low volume or something like that. Um, you know, these are good reasons to do both, but you've still got to abide by the same principles of training for both. Um, but to me, at least the drawbacks are that, um, if I have somebody doing both on the other side of it, I have more to test and I don't know what exactly did what, um, because, and here's the thing. It's like, if you're doing VO2 max work while you're doing extensive FTP work and TTE is not going out and you're doing, I don't know. okay volume, maybe not amazing, but okay volume. Um, and then we test FTP again later. Why didn't it go out if it didn't, is there too much fatigue? Uh, you know, um, we're, what happened? I want to know. Um, so it gets harder to see on the other side. And if somebody is racing all the time, then you never get to test. Well, now you're really fucked. So it's like, so, you know, Kyle, I think you see where I'm coming from, though, because, like, trying to control variables in an experiment and, you know, with training, it's very much the same way. Like, if you're going to do a strength block going into, you know, going into next year for sprinting, like, what do we want to see going up, right? Do we want to see your peak power going up? Maybe not necessarily right away, but we want to see your squat going up and your single leg press going up. Yeah. I mean, I think that's another thing, too. There are some more advanced statistical ways you can tease out changing multiple variables at once within certain types of studies, and this is pretty common. But that's in a much more controlled environment where you often get multiple cracks at something. Like if you get one crack at it and you changed a bunch of variables, you're going to have a real hard time. I'm not saying it's impossible to tease out. Um, but it's much more difficult than if you get to walk us in training, right? Like somebody is going to come pay me, uh, you know, a not small sum of money per year to train them to be fast. Like I don't get a hundred cracks at it. You know, we get, we get one and we want to make sure that we're always moving forward as much as possible as, you know, with as much information as possible. And it doesn't mean that things are going to get changed. Doesn't mean that we don't go, Oh, this is, this was suboptimal. And we're going to do it better next time. That happens, of course. It happens with everybody. But, you know, we're not doing experiments here. We're making lunch. And you don't want to have to take 100 cracks at making a sandwich before you get to eat. Right. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's also, too, where some of the stuff where that's why some of the protocols from studies don't map very neatly onto training protocols you prescribe an athlete, even though in some paper it worked great. But that's because it worked within the confines of this paper, you know? Yeah. Yeah, the real world kind of stuff is it's difficult to replicate. You know, kind of the same way that sometimes like a race intensity is difficult to replicate in training because, you know, motivation being a factor and all that. And so I think one of the last things we want to get to here before we talk about listener questions is why would we want to increase TTE besides that it seems to set us up for raising FTP or something like that, right? And besides like, you know, the longer time trials and all that kind of stuff. So I think the biggest thing is that TTE trains faster than your VO2 max. So when it comes to like an always raising FTP thing, you know, like you're always doing VO2 max work with your FTP work. You're always trying to gain a couple more watts. It works until it doesn't. It's the – because it's true. It's the rising tide raises all boats philosophy of like my FTP is higher so I can do something under FTP longer. One of the secrets is that people vary in what they can do under FTP too and you can train this very easily by doing extensive threshold work, also sweet spots included in here, and a lot of endurance training because they all support each other, right? Yeah. It's hard to just keep raising FTP all the time. And, you know, there are some ways to train quote unquote FTP that are really just teaching to the test. And so you want to make sure that you've got a good measurement first. But the point is that like more TTE also translates to better metabolic fitness, right? Because threshold is about aerobic metabolism. Um, and this means typically better fatigue resistance. And it's not, you know, the only thing that we need to think about here, of course, is like, you know, it's not the only thing we need in racing. Um, but I've noticed with a lot of my athletes, um, you know, you know, year to year, you know, like they'll come to me one year and then the next year and be like, well, my FTP is not higher, but I'm racing so much better. so much more depth, so much more repeatability, all that kind of stuff. That's, you know, that happens a lot. And it's like, and, you know, doing extensive threshold work is a big part of it. Yeah. That's interesting too. Cause like, you know, it, FTP and high FTPs get a lot of attention for good reason. There is a certain bar of FTP that you would need to finish Milan San Remo, right? If your FTP doesn't meet that requirement, you won't finish. But once you are more comfortable at the level that you are racing, so obviously that's the first goal, right? But then obviously once you are more comfortable racing it, your cat three crits on the weekend or whatever. Yeah. Having more TTE and being able to do these other things will enable all these other elements of racing that are not just like, well, I'm not getting dropped because my FTP is high enough. So I don't get dropped. That's great. But you're just participating. You're not really racing. Yeah. That's a big difference there. We could talk about that sometime. Well, because racing, the intermittent efforts, create a metabolic load on the muscles. And the load is really just demand for ATP in the muscles. We want to do it sustainably, right? We want to do it oxidatively. And so having FTP and a good TTE is a great way to increase your ability to absorb that metabolic load. And so, you know, you're not going to race cyclocross. or mountain bike, cross country, or any type of intermittent. You're not going to do a points race on the track at a steady state. But this is still super, super, super helpful to your muscles because I hope everybody still listening is no longer training too hard for criteriums, and this is just preaching to the choir. So do you have any thoughts before we get into listening to questions? No, I was – I was thinking actually early on, people may know the author Balat, however you want to pronounce it, from I think some like 30-30 research or something like that. Because I think there are definitely these, I've seen things like Balat intervals or something like that. But I don't recall immediately what those are. But the name is certainly super familiar. Oh, I think if I recall correctly, and I definitely may not. It's about working intermittently at 30-second intervals, like at VO2 max and then down and at VO2 max. So the VO2 max, if you actually measure the VO2, it's going to hit 100% and then drop, hit 100% and drop, hit 100% and drop, and you can do this for 20 minutes or something ridiculous. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. No, I was just thinking this name may sound familiar to people, and that might be why. B-I-L-L-A-T, however it's pronounced. Yeah. I've never heard it pronounced. Yeah, I think that's sometimes a problem with science, right, generally, is that you see these people's names and you're like, well... Yeah, we're all bookworms who don't talk to each other. We only type. Okay, first listener question. Some of these are great. Is TTE a new concept? I just heard a podcast with a famous coach and he still argues FTP is 60 minutes. It's not a new concept. If you look at... coils work from the eighties. Um, you know, they're talking about TTE like, you know, that early, uh, I think they're definitely, definitely knew a lot about maximum light, steady state and all that stuff, but, uh, it's not a new concept far, far, far from it. It's been, it's been in the literature for quite some time. Yeah. I think, I think there is one of these, these disconnects between sometimes people, coaches, more popular science level stuff, like they're not, they're maybe not digging back through as much into the research. They're more looking at much more of the recent literature and things like that. Yeah, well, it's sort of like when you see somebody tweet about, because academic Twitter is just, it's like 10% is like, oh, that's so nice. I'm so happy for this person. And the other 90% is, oh my God, like somebody asked me for a more recent reference than like, you know, on evolution because I, reference origin of species. And they're like, do you have something in the last five years? It's like, I don't think we need to redo this experiment, do we? Anyway. Yeah, so there's that kind of thing a lot. So if you're just looking at the more recent literature, but the thing is, I've had arguments with people online where they're looking at the older literature, and they're 100% behind it, and they don't know that there's new stuff that... shows that it's more complex, especially with metabolic stuff and molecular things. This is usually the case. And so every time I think I've got something down and I go look again, I'm like, uh-oh, I've got to redo my whole conception of this thing. So what is the longest TTE to aim for before moving up zones? Now, we've got several variations on this one. So, Kyle, I think you can... This is a softball. Didn't we just say? Well, not explicitly. We sort of danced around it. That you don't know if your FTP is going up unless you can first really feel it well by RPE, which a lot of people can, but a lot of people cannot. So whatever you've got going on with this, it's worth considering. Like, do I need to test or can I feel it going up? whatever. I usually suggest people just pick a number and stick to it. That's just the way like they did in this experiment. They picked a speed and they stuck to it. That's it. Then they recalculated the MLSS in case it had gone up and it had not. So that's a good way to do it. How to prioritize over-unders and burst work versus straight up TTE during threshold block. A threshold block, at least to me, for practical purposes, does not need to be totally steady. As long as you are increasing time and zone, like over-unders, add more time and zone with your over-unders, and that's it. If you're going to do sweet spot, and regular sweet spot is just boring as shit, or you know you need some sort of variation of efforts to get ready for racing or whatever, do over-unders instead. It doesn't have to be threshold over-unders. Do 20 minutes. Do, you know, 30 seconds over, two minutes under. Something like that. Add time zone. I think that's a good point, too. Like, you know, don't go nuts and do, like, maximal sprints for 30 seconds. Back to FTP or Sweet Spot or whatever. But, yeah, like, a lot of these intervals, like, you know, I think people sometimes get worried that they have to nail an interval exactly perfectly. And if, oh, if I... go up too much or too little like there is some variation in there like your body doesn't isn't really gonna know like oh you went a little bit harder here and a little bit easy here within reason right like getting the work done approximately which is why it's given as a zone usually not like you have to go out and hit 267.4 watts for 20 minutes four times you know um so yeah if that makes it easier or for example if you're indoors on a trainer and every couple minutes you want to stand up and like, yeah, like raise the effort level a little bit, but that's because it makes it easier to get through because it's, there's a foot of snow outside. Great. You know, that sounds awesome. Like if that makes you easier, it makes it easier for you to like get through the work. Yeah. Um, uh, uh, somebody asked an interesting question. Um, FMK. Uh, we said, actually we said like, fuck like nine times on this podcast already. So, uh, Fuck, marry, kill. 404 wheels, 404 drum machine, 404 error not found. Well, kill error not found. Kill error not found, yeah. I don't know they made a 404 drum machine. I don't know they made an 808. Then maybe it's an 808 cut in half, which, you know, maybe that would make some cool sounds, not forever. So I would, yeah, I would marry 404 wheels because, I mean, how much better can wheel aero tech? get like yeah four or four for life why not that's actually yeah that's actually interesting because i feel like that that's that's actually that feels like one of those things where like have you ever noticed how it seems like every time whatever zip head you know flow whatever they keep releasing more and more wheels and like I feel like the variation between each year of wheels is going down. This year we look at wheels. Next year we're going to look at bumblebees. With the wheels, lots of big aero gains were made when we got wider tires and then wider... brake tracks to match so you get a nice like you know more torpedo-y shape and not just like a bulb that was great and then you know you can you can just have to improve yaw and handling and crosswinds and things like that but like you're you're slowly or rapidly running out of optimization there so yeah an old school set of wheels that's probably it's still going to be pretty good you know it's not like you're riding i don't know spinner g's Oh, man. I actually – somebody in the northeast I think still rides Spinergies. If you know him, don't – Don't crash next to him. Stay away. Anyway, so how does bumping up FTP, TTE, affect TTE and other power zones? And what does it depend on? So it depends on the adaptations that are just made to be able to do that power more. And how it affects CTE and other zones, like it usually means you can do more. It's not like, you know, you start with being like, let's call sweet spot 90% of FTP, which is pretty much what I do. I don't think about other percentages. I don't get into half a percentage, 3%, 2%. Like, can we even measure that? I think about 90% at sweet spot and just call it a day. So if you can do an hour at sweet spot. Right. Let's say that's your starting point and you can do 35 minutes at threshold. If you get up to doing an hour threshold, it's not like you can still only do an hour at sweet spot. Right. So. Yeah. So you could probably do at this point, like, I don't know what, 80, 90 minutes at a time, maybe a hundred, something like that. So that's, that's pretty good. That's a good increase. And, you know, and sweet spot work is still threshold work. So if you like doing sweet spot stuff, do that extensively. It does not. This is all about threshold, but you are not precluded from extending other stuff. You also find, as you mentioned, there are variations. If your TTE at FTP is 54 minutes, then you may not be able to hold 80% of that as long as someone else, but if your TTE goes out, that will almost certainly go out. what you could hold, how long you can hold 80% or something like that. So yeah, there's no, unfortunately there's no hard and fast rule of like, oh yeah, you can, you can always hold your, your 80% of FTP for 115% of the TTE of your, you know, FTP. Yeah. Because they'd be nice, but the slope, the slope on the curve is different for everyone. Yeah. And the, you know, it's at the lengthening tide. No, this is not going to work. Lengthen-solve boats? No. You know what I mean. So, okay, here's an interesting one. WKO jumps between FTP with a TTE of over 60 minutes and a slightly higher FTP with TTE about 30 minutes. Which one is it? If you do not have a third data point with which to corroborate the model, because I'm sure it's probably a 15-20 watt difference or something like that, depending on... where it is on the 100 to 450 watt scale, go test it up by RPE. That's my serious recommendation. Or just go... You should have actually a mean max power point in there somewhere that you can kind of put your finger on. Because the thing is, usually... And I mentioned this in a webinar previously. Before I see FTP go up, I usually see it go out. And that might be a function of the way I train people. It might be a function of the volume that these people are doing. It might be some function of something. But that's not unusual. And sometimes we just do extensive FTP work and we take a rest and FTP goes up. When we're done, that works too. It's just that... So you should have – well, this is why – one of the reasons I like to work the way I do is because if we establish threshold and we do extensive threshold work and then we retest, you can go retest by doing a 35-minute time trial. Why not? If it's like barely above what else you can do and it's like you look at the inflection points, you go, okay, now I got it. So if you want me to take a look at your data, email me for a formal consultation. It will cost you a few bucks, but I will look at your data. and we can discuss. Does cadence matter much on these longer intervals? My cadence drops as the effort gets longer. Not really. I think some people, when they get into larger motor units, as they fatigue, it's just something about the trainedness of those muscle fibers, especially when it comes to the sarcoplasmic reticulum energetics, might just be happier at a lower cadence. It just happened to me too. I have really only theories at this point. Kyle, ideas? Yeah, I would think that or two, like you said, as you shift into the larger motor units or as you get tired, your body's going to try to find whatever it can do to be more efficient. So for whatever reason, that's what your body has decided is going to be the most efficient. Trying to fight it is probably actually not a good idea. The body is not going to go out of its way like that to pick something that makes you worse. Yeah. I mean, if it becomes a serious problem, like you're all of a sudden down at 50 RPM and now you're like... coming up on a climb and you're just going to, you know, crawl up at like 20 RPM or something, well then obviously that, that is an issue that, that might be, um, a problem, but within reason, like, no, it's, that doesn't like worrying about, Oh, I don't have exactly the right cadences. Someone else is kind of silly. And also, you know, um, if you've seen the force velocity curve, uh, or as people are calling it these days, the torque velocity curve for whatever reason, uh, same deal. Um, So it has an arc shape. And that's, you know, we're usually looking at that for like max values. However, the same thing occurs at sub max values. So threshold, you know, sweet spot, endurance, all that kind of stuff. So because I remember a couple of years ago, I had Bill Renfro programming a chart. I asked him, I said, I want to see the frequency of how much time somebody spent in a certain, you know, eye level. in WKO5. And so that's what I have. And it basically shows that the frequency chart shows that same less frequent up to much more frequent distribution. Same as right up at the top. And so as you get away from what your normal optimal cadence is or what your body decides the optimal cadence is, you're going to produce less power. That's all there is to it. So it would be interesting. to note if doing extensive work would change this effect. So if you have something like that, I don't know, tag me in a post or DM me or something like that because I want to post it on Instagram because I think it's cool. Tell me your experience with this. If you're starting with a high VO2 max, will more mitochondria mean more aerobic power as an FTP and or longer TTE? This would be one of the expected things. Yes. So I would say it's one of the adaptations we would expect, but it's not like the only one. Like we kind of mentioned before, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. And so if we dig down too deep onto one particular thing, it might steer us wrong, or it also might just not be enough of a full picture. Sorry. It's all right. uh, here's an interesting one. What is the ideal intensity duration relationship as in 20 minutes at a hundred percent versus 60 minutes at 80%. Um, that's an interesting one because there isn't one, obviously like if your FTP is on the way up and you're doing extensive FTP work, let's say we do like, you know, like two three week blocks. And just like these guys, your FTP TTE goes up from 45 minutes to 60 minutes. Um, sometimes we see FTP go up and the TTE shortens to like 35 minutes, 40 minutes. That's okay. But we're always in a different spot. And so there's no ideal. I think the ideal would be if you're at your genetic max, like if your FTP is as high as it's ever going to get, having your TTE be like 85 minutes would be pretty awesome. I would say that's the ideal. I want to see... Wout with an 85 minute TT. Maybe he's got one already. Who knows? God. If you've got his files, by the way, you can leave them in my office anonymously. Just drop them accidentally on your way out and your anonymity will be assured. I don't know where I got these. I'd love to see them. At what point does adding time and zone become unhelpful to FTP development? I mean, we kind of got this, but we kind of also didn't address this exact question directly. At whatever point it is. Because FTP development, I think most people think about it as going up. But I also think about FTP as having that duration dimension. So I want to see it going out too. I think that's something that's, I think, unheralded. by a lot of folks is just doing this stuff. And I'll, I, by the way, everybody who's written in saying that you've like changed your training to the way that we've suggested. And I said, Oh my God, I'm so much faster now. Thank you so much, by the way. Keep those coming. I love those. Kyle, should TTE work be done year round? Almost certainly not in the same way that you wouldn't do the same. Like, like, Would you do the exact same training year round of any kind? Endurance riding. That's probably about it. Endurance, yeah. So, you know, that's like, isn't that the same question or almost the same question as FTP training year round? Like TTE training is adding time in zone at Sweet Spot or FTP, something like that. So in order to do that year round, you'd have to do FTP training year round, which is. People have tried that, and if it works for you, that's great. Well, I think also if we expand our definition of what TTE training is based on what we've said in the podcast so far, I think we could say that if you're doing long endurance rides in the winter, yeah, that could extend TTE for sure. Yeah, that is a type of TTE training, yeah. Yeah, so some of the longest TTEs I've ever seen, by the way, I had people doing a certain – dietary protocol we were trying out and it had a huge impact on TTE. Oh my God. Um, people hated doing it. So don't do it so much these days, but you know, it is in the toolbox. Um, so, but should you, well, here's the thing is also when you get into race season, one of the things that I do with people is I give a range of, you know, intervals. Like if it's threshold intervals and I'm like, I decide 12 minutes are probably going to be about fine for today. It doesn't matter that much, 10, 12, 15, whatever. I'll say, excuse me, I'll say, give me two to five and stop when you need to like stare at your stem and concentrate to keep the power up. And then not only do we, does somebody get a little bit of maintenance dose, but we also get information. on somebody's TTE at this point because fatigue greatly affects TTE. And so by, you know, doing a little bit of work in season, we wouldn't expect full, you know, long TTE. We wouldn't expect somebody to go out and do like, you know, five by 20 minutes at threshold in season when they're tired. But if they do, it's like, oh, maybe we need to reassess your threshold or maybe something like it gives us information. you should have an idea of where your TTE is year round, I think. Um, well, especially in season and while you're training, but before, um, you know, Oh, hold on. Somebody's blowing up my phone right now. I'm looking at these questions. Um, all right. Snooze. Um, let's see. 

How much time to add when splitting TTE into intervals, as in for 40 minutes, is 3x15 not enough? Kyle, what would you recommend to this person? Sorry, is 3x15, I mean, if your TTE is 40 minutes, are they saying is 3x15 going to increase their TTE? I think, because you haven't seen as many training programs as I have, and I think what I've seen a lot of people do is they'll pick, us just an arbitrary amount of time and zone. And like, they'll just always do that amount or they'll change it a little bit with no seeming pattern. Cause that's what I'm always looking for. So I'm always, I'm always looking for patterns and the people I coach are always looking for patterns when I'm giving them too. It's really fun. But, but yeah, it's like, so I think, I mean, yeah, it's three by 15. enough, I would say, or is it not enough? It doesn't matter. Just add more. I think that's the point. Yeah. I was thinking, when are they doing this 3x15? Is that like, okay, I know my TT is 40 minutes. I just did a test. Next week, I'm going to do 3x15. Great. What are you going to do the week after that? So is it enough? It's like a maybe, right? It depends. Yeah. And like, what are you doing? What's your aim? Are you just there to do, are you doing maintenance? Are you building? Are you, you know, is this your first workout? If it's your first workout, yeah, sure. That works. Yeah. And if you look at that protocol, we just talked about that a lot of them started off with, with TCEs sort of in that range and, and they started off with what three by 10. So, but they, did not stay at three by 10. They purposefully progressed higher. And so, yes, three by 15 is a great place to start. Um, yeah, they added three by four minutes a week, 17 next week. Yeah. Yeah. Four minutes a week. Um, and they found 15 minutes over six weeks. So if you do two, three week training blocks with the rest week in between, which these people did not, by the way. Um, but you know, they were only had two hard workouts a week and that's it. So, um, We could estimate somewhere between five to seven minutes TTE gained per week if you're adding time in zone like this would be a reasonable expectation. Is there going to be variation on that? Absolutely. So determine what yours is. What factors do you weigh heaviest when deciding recovery time between long intervals? I usually suggest the same as in the study, five minutes or longer. It doesn't matter. Like recover, get ready. That's it. Within reason, right? Like five minutes, seven minutes, whatever. As long as you're not like still dying and like gasping for air or feeling like you're going to cramp up or something. And then as long as it's not so long that you're like, well, I sat here outside of 7-Eleven for 50 minutes. You know, I have to warm up again. So, why did extensive threshold increase my FTP in watts, like 25 to 30 watts? I think that means initially. But now, only affects TTE. Well, we've kind of touched on this. Because this is the point where you need to do some VitaMax training and raise the roof. That's really about it. And if VitaMax training... Congratulations! Yeah, you've hit the point of what you did previously is not going to thing that gets you... What's that saying? What you did to get to the level you're at is not going to be the thing that gets you to the next level. Something like that. Yeah. Somebody come up with something concise for that training adage, because we use it all the time. Yeah. But that's good, though. If that phenomenon is good, you shouldn't be upset. That means you did the right thing, and you did effective training, and now you are... You get to move on to something else, right? You accomplished the goal. You finished your FTP quest. Yeah. FTP quest. Yes, congratulations. Here's your magical belt to wear as an accessory. It gains you TTE plus 10. Yeah. Boy, that was nerdier than it probably should have been. Anyway, yes, I have played Skyrim. At what point should I graduate to higher powers when I hit X minutes time and zone? RPE too easy? Yeah, you can, once you hit whatever end of your training block you've decided, retest and see what your TTE is. Or especially if your RPE is getting too easy, definitely that is a big clue that like, oh, maybe my threshold is a little higher. And some of my more experienced athletes, I'll just say, well, you go tell me what it is. Give me a two by 20 at threshold and you tell me what it is. It's a super easy way to test if you can trust somebody's perception of their threshold. So that works. Why is TTE ignored as a metric by mainstream cycling media slash brands slash et cetera? Kyle, ideas. I don't know. Maybe it's less cool as like a nice round number of like 400 watts or whatever Mac, you know, you're. ftp is it's a little bit harder to explain because you already have to have the knowledge of what ftp is and then you have to think like oh actually you know you have to okay so then you have to bust some myths and say it's not just for 60 minutes it's for this and then i i yeah i think it just it's somewhat less concise to explain and it probably sounds less cool. Like everyone wants to know, like how much can you bench bro? Like that, like FTP is like the cycle of that. And like, that's just a nice round number, you know? Yeah. I think it's like, um, it's sexy, right? It's like, it's like talking about your FTP is like sex and TTE is like sex ed class. It's like, it's like, It's not as immediate. That is fun. And also, there's some explaining to do. Like, oh, well, you've got to think about this. You've got to think about this. Once you understand the concept, it's super simple. There's nothing to it. Absolutely nothing to it. But, yeah, the education aspect of it is very different because FTP has taken on such a life of its own at this point. It's got an aura around it, for lack of a better word, term. But it's... Yeah, it's just, I think also one of the other things is that it runs counter to their training philosophies. And I've gotten in public arguments about this kind of thing with people before where I think I joked like, oh, I'd rather have somebody have 20 more minutes of TTE than 20 more watts of FTP, which was a pity offhand comment. And of course it depends, but like sometimes it takes years to get 20 watts of FTP. Right. And you can gain 20 minutes of TTE in like, you know, just a couple blocks of training. So it's a no brainer for me. But, you know, I think one of the reasons also that it's not it's not talked about is because it's difficult to measure because you have to have somebody go right at their FTP for however long. And you can I would say you could. Well, I had an idea. If any training platforms that would like to consult with me on this idea, I will sell it to you for a not small sum. It's a good one about determining TTE. So we will move on from here. What do you look for to assess how much FTP training is too much? What's the next step? Kyle will determine there's too much FTP training. Well, if you're not recovering, that's too much. If you wake up and you dread the fact that you have 3x22.5 that day because you cannot physically imagine yourself being able to complete it, then it might be too much because you may just be in such a deep hole that you're phoning it in and you can't do it. So that's too much. Too much would also be if, like, you really zone in, hone in, and really focus on FTP training and then realize that, like, oh, at races, like, you're not getting dropped, but you don't have enough super threshold work in to be able to follow moves and actually, like, stick brakes and stuff like that. Well, then maybe you've been, you know, hammering away at FTP too much and you need to reconsider other things that go into this bike racing. Yeah, because it's like a big thing, but it's not the thing. Unless you're doing the hour, I suppose. I suppose, but maybe doing some over-threshold work gets you ready for the hour. Who knows? Yeah, it's very individual. That's coaching 101. You've got to figure out where the person is at, figure out the demands of the event, and draw a line between the two. What is this person good at? What do they need more of? It's a basic assessment of stuff. Most people need more aerobic power no matter what. But some people need to sprint better or whatever. Anyway, my last WKO5 webinar on balancing aerobic and anaerobic training goes into that. So no need to rehash it any more than we already do. 

Oh, here's an interesting one. So is it best to first extend the lower end of the zone, sweet spot, and then FTP, both concurrently? I say concurrently. If you're happy doing one over the other, do that. But I always find value in doing some FTP work, even if somebody's primarily a sweet spot person, because when FTP doesn't feel like FTP, that is a sign of fatigue. And so I always like to kind of keep an eye on that kind of thing. yeah that makes sense i think other thing too like sometimes you can definitely be splitting hairs if you're like oh sweet spot versus fdp like they're they're kind of the same but like on the other hand yes if if you know and we talked a little bit about this with with like you know potentially you can have your um rpe metric be messed up a little bit if you're just so used to hammering away at one intensity. Yeah, you were right. And then as soon as you, yeah, as soon as you leave that intensity, you're like, oh my God, it's so hard. You're like, wait, wait, wait. So that probably means you need to spend some more time at different intensities. Potentially, yeah. Let's see. Should you try to max time and zone every workout or leave some in the tank? This is a great question. I usually tell people to stop when they have to stare at their stem and concentrate really hard to keep the power up. That, to me, is like you've probably gone about a minute or two too long at that point. Yeah. I forget. Was it – I think it's appealing to be the idea like I'm going to fucking bury it every workout, but that's a really, really unsustainable training philosophy. It is. And one of my athletes misread a workout that I had given, and they went out and did nearly twice as much threshold work as I had assigned, and it was like weeks of recovery. I'm not joking. Yeah, no, like it's one thing if you, you know, every once in a while you have to dig really deep, but it's – you know, for a minute here and then you're done and you're done, you're done. But like, you know, you're like, Oh, that was really hard. But like if every day you're walking, you know, if every day you got to like have two cups of coffee and like a bunch of smelling salts before your FTP work, like that's not good. Your FTP is probably set too high in that case. Just, just speculating. Yeah. All right. So that's it for our questions. Any other things that might be worth touching on? I think it's cool that more people are getting into the idea of having more time in zone. Yeah, because you can imagine, generally your body responds to the stimulus that you provide it, and so your body is really good at adapting to what you do. if you just do two by 20, I think we, and we mentioned this too, like, you know, why, what's, what's special about two by 20 episode. Yeah. Um, it's not that there's something special. It's just, but this is like a good place to start. It's not that it's the place to end. Yeah. So actually I'm scared to go listen to that episode in case we said something stupid, but if, um, I mean, it's our second or third episode, which is, it's almost guaranteed you said something stupid and wrong, but at the same time, I, you know, we're evolving as we go, I think. Um, but yeah, we should do a reaction video of you listening to us. Oh, please. No video. Oh my God. I'm lucky. This episode doesn't have any edits. Cause otherwise like people would see the video being cut, like some sort of like John Woo action sequence or like a, be like Michael Bay fight. Like just like, Oh my God. Like people get dizzy watching it. Like a strobe life. Hey man, reaction videos are big on YouTube these days. You want a lot of clicks? You got to do reaction videos. And I'm a sucker for them too. I've seen a couple. Mostly I like it when an expert breaks down something. Yeah. Like that opera singer who breaks down like Devin Townsend and stuff. Awesome. So good. Anyway, so yeah, adding time and zone. It's really... It's really not a big deal. It's one of those things where like it should be a big tool in your toolbox and you should also know kind of how it fits into the overall picture of training. Like it's not guaranteed to raise your threshold, although it might in a lot of cases. And at some point it's probably going to stop. And so being ready for that and kind of knowing what to look for is going to be, I think, a huge leg up for a lot of people. Yeah, definitely. And I think, like you said, it's a tool in the toolbox. And if you haven't done it at all before, then do it. But also, if you've been trying to raise FTP raw wattage or something like that with your 2x20s, like, yeah, next time, this gives you another way and a potentially more sustainable way to feel like you're getting good work in and also see positive results more quickly than just trying to, like... brute force your FTP up higher and higher and higher. Yeah, because I think the last thing would just be that if you've never added time and zone for your threshold efforts before, add it now. Because if you've been hammering the same durations of intervals and hoping their FTP will go up, there's a non-zero chance that adding more time and zone and then taking a rest can bump up your threshold. It might also not bump up your threshold and it's going to raise your TTE. And in which case you go, Oh, I got to fit in some of you to max work somewhere. So, um, I think that's a, probably a really good place to leave on. Yeah. All right. Great. Thanks everybody for listening. Um, again, we, we are a coaching company, empirical cycling. Uh, we have a couple of coaches. Um, I'm the head coach and founder, I guess I saw myself referred to in an email as the founder of empirical cycling. That's cool. Never been a founder of anything. Um, so, uh, shoot me an email empirical cycling at gmail.com. If you have any coaching or consultation inquiries, uh, We can coach you anonymously. We will consult anonymously. I will consult anonymously if any large organizations want to give me a pile of money to help them with their modeling. That would be really fun. And also remember, we're an ad-free podcast, of course. So if you want to donate to the show, empiricalcycling.com slash donate. We've got show notes up on the website. I'm going to try to remember to put a bunch of the figures up there, but we're at least going to link all the papers that we discussed. And if you have any questions or comments, just shoot me an email too. And on Instagram, of course, that's where we got all our listener questions. On Instagram, Empirical Cycling, of course. We do the weekend AMAs up there. And I've been toying with the idea because a couple of people have asked, should we do a Patreon for the questions? Part of me says yes, part of me says no. I kind of like the kind of free-for-all that there is right now. If I have like 50,000 Instagram followers, I'm sure it would become a problem. But at the moment, 3,000 is really nice. Only fans. Only quads. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. See you next time. See ya.