Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore. Today, we are once again joined by our Empirical Cycling Coach, Rory Porteus. And I want to thank everybody for listening. If you're new here, please consider subscribing to the podcast if you like what you're hearing. And if you are a returning person, well, you know the drill. If you want to support the podcast, you can always let everybody know about it with sharing and a podcast rating, a five-star review, and a rolling review always goes a long way wherever you listen to podcasts. We can take a donation, empiricalcycling.com slash donate, because we are completely ad-free. If you want to support the show, you can always hire us for coachingempiricalcyclingatgmail.com to reach out. And we can also do consultations too. That's where we kind of give you a chat and we give you the tools to plan and adjust your own training. So reach out for that if you're interested. And otherwise, you know, if you're a budding pro or a student or something and you've got extenuating circumstances, we also can negotiate a coaching rate if you're interested in coaching. So if you would like to ask questions for the podcast in the future, Empirical Cycling... on Instagram. And we've got no questions for this episode because I think it's going to be a pretty long one because, well, we are talking about VO2 Max once again on the podcast. And let's get right to it. What is the right VO2 Max training? Rory is smirking because he knows what's coming up. And so, you know, I really wanted to talk about the Wattstock Series and the VO2Max training recommendations that I had made because I think that I've seen a lot of the time that people say that this is the right way to do VO2Max training. And if there's anything that we know from, well, everything, it's that there is really no right way to do VO2Max training. It's that there are certain tools that you can reach for at certain times, and there are some times that may be more appropriate for some training than others. But I really wanted to dig into the possibilities of that kind of training today. And not only that, but also I wanted to dig into the ways that I actually intended that my VO2max training recommendations to be taken or how I thought people would take them based on how VO2max training was being done at the time. And so I think my training suggestions were taken a bit. I don't know. Rory, what do you think? How are they taking? You're accidentally a bit too influential in terms of thinking people would assume this is the one way we need to do this, when in reality you were trying to do a less rigidly prescriptive suggestion for how people should train. Yeah, and you know what's funny about all the suggestions? I went back and I looked in the notes, and other than... being very embarrassed at some of the things that were in there still. Some of the recommendations, nobody remembers. And I will get into why I think that is. But I do want to apologize a little bit for the semi-clickbait title. But it's apt, I think, in this case. But I also wanted to start with some reflections. on that episode and how I think it's gone from that and my personal thoughts on it because I rarely get into my personal thoughts on the podcast but I think they might be informative here. So we'll also go into a couple studies and we are also going to, so we're going to file this under Wattstock because of that content but it'll be kind of like a hybrid episode like some of the later VO2Max series episodes were. and I'll also intend this to be a standalone because the last thing after rereading those notes, the last thing I want is people to go re-listen to that episode even though it is one of our most listened to episodes and I am especially red-faced because of that. So I actually don't like clickbait episodes or titles or anything like that. I think the last Wattstock episode was a bit of an exception because I thought it'd be fun to go in one direction and then to zag at the last second. But I always wanted to keep our titles declarative kind of ever since that era, like Wattstock 23, 24. And I wanted to kind of keep the podcast more true to the values that I actually have as a person and a coach and a business owner who wants his Small. I think it's small. Rory thinks it's not that small. My small influence in the cycling world. And I want it to be positive. And I also decided to stop trying to rip apart studies after that episode because I'm not actually that person. And also, it's too easy to rip apart episodes. And looking back at those notes, I don't think I actually did a very good job. There were a lot of other criticisms I could and should have leveled. and we're going to do that today actually but I'm also going to give that study a little more credit than I did at the time. So we'll get into that in a little bit but it also, I don't know, Rory, do you think that ripping apart studies makes you look smarter? Because I think people seem like it sounds smart and that's another reason I'm especially embarrassed because it was a personality I think I was trying on at the time and it really did not fit me. Well, as far as I can tell right now, assholes are really moving up in the world. So maybe it is a very productive thing to be able to do. Hey, all right. I do like to believe in the power of positivity and lifting people up rather than tearing them down. Yeah, because in coaching, we know the same thing. Well, in coaching, we know it's the same thing. It's like, I've had people say to me, like, you know, I've... I really am motivated by people yelling at me and things like that. And I'm like, okay, if that's true, you're like one in a thousand. Because for the most part, that kind of stuff really doesn't motivate people. It doesn't get the best out of people in my experience. Yeah, I'm a very soft touch as a coach, as I've mentioned before. If someone tells me they'd like to do something, I will find the way to try and make sure they do it. I like leaning into that kind of stuff too. Because I mean, if somebody thinks that something's going to be fun, I want somebody to have fun. If it's like, you know, a week before their A race, okay, maybe we'll have to delay the fun or we'll have to temper our expectations, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, so I actually have very seriously thought about either deleting those episodes, Wonstock 23, 24, or at least just replacing a lot of them, like just re-uploading the audio with something else, something a little... less inflammatory and a little more fair. Because like I said, I cannot express to you the amount of embarrassment I had going back and reading over those notes. I cannot bear to bring myself to listen to them. But in a way, I feel like letting the mistakes just hang out there and showing the change in growth as a person and as a coach and as a... you know person who's read you know at that time I'd probably read you know a couple hundred scientific papers at this point it's probably well over the thousands and I don't know it seems like you know does that seem reasonable Rory kind of letting the warts just be out there? Yeah like you me and Kyle did a podcast talking about how to interpret scientific literature and I hope one of the takeaways from that is that A lot of the time when it comes to how studies are done, not just in sports science, but also in other fields, there's often limitations there that compromise a paper in a way that you reading it might think, oh, then why am I reading this at all? But in reality, the incremental step forward of science is built on top of thousands and thousands of papers that all have that small compromise in them. and that's just the nature of how these things move slowly onward so like yeah it might not mean that we've got perfect science and it does mean that people should be more careful when they are thinking about how to interpret the science in front of them again in all fields but it doesn't mean that these things are worthless. Yeah and And, you know, one of my points in that episode, and we're going to do another one, me, you, and Kyle pretty soon because there was a paper that came out doing a bunch of replication on exercise physiology and sports science stuff that, well, I'm going to have to figure out a non-clickbait way to say, do we have a replication crisis in exercise physiology? I said that in the last podcast. Well, I mean, I need to come up with a title that's kind of in line with my values. But I think that my point in the episode that Yumi and Kyle did previously was that these studies are designed to... Explore the relationships between things, like between variables of like, what's the relationship between VO2max training and VO2max, like different types of VO2max training? What are the main kind of outcomes and what are the secondary outcomes, we could say? And so, you know, when we're thinking about that, you know, as we go through some of the papers that we're going to look through today, one of the things that I think a lot of people would think about is, oh, well, I guess if This study found this, I don't know, increase the VO2 max based on doing this exact protocol. I should do that exact protocol tomorrow. And in fact, when we think about actually doing some of these protocols we're going to talk about, to put it mildly, there's no fucking way that I'm going to have somebody do some of these protocols. So, Rory, we're going to talk about Hickson's protocol today. I did something like this back when I was trying to think, oh, how do you get faster in trading? And so I looked up how to make my VO2max hire, and there was a blog post that for some reason is still in my bookmarks all these years later from Hunter Allen's blog detailing a VO2max intensive bit of training. Surprise, surprise, there's an awful lot like stuff that we still do nowadays. But I was not prepared to try to do it. I think I gave up after two workouts. Yeah, and I remember a long time ago, I tried to do a couple of his workouts from the back of training and racing with a power meter at the point where I had been training really hard for like four months already. And it was like January or February. And those are the last couple of workouts I did before I was completely overtrained. So those are burned into my memory. Eight by one minute, all out. followed by God knows what. Productivity. Productivity off the bike. So anyway, I feel like it's actually harder in a way to make a genuinely positive contribution with the podcast instead of just being like, well, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. I really want to talk about what people should do and ways to go forward instead of just saying, don't do this. Also in a lot of ways, like the stuff that we would say, don't do this, we're going to do them sometimes. You know, it's like not like this stuff is totally off the table. And so even though I sometimes forget to engage in discussions and forums and wherever in good faith, I am still human after all. I am also a cynical city boy. I really want to try to Keep things positive and keep things moving forward and engage in good faith as much as humanly possible, even though my human version of possible is much less than other people's versions of possible when it comes to good faith arguments and discussions. And also, when I hear about the people who listen to this podcast, I mean, we're talking cyclists whose names everybody would recognize. We're talking about... influential coaches on teams whose names you recognize and, you know, names and research that everybody would recognize. I'm glad since then I've gone down the path that I have instead because, first of all, it's a lot less embarrassing. And second of all, it's really genuinely humbling to think that I could be helpful and have minor influence somewhere. And I just have to thank everybody for listening and also for hiring us for coaching and trusting us with your time. Yeah. Hello, famous people. I can't name. Neither can I. All right. Well, that's why they keep reaching out for, you know, for stuff is because we don't talk about them. So, sorry, we'll just have to keep them our secret. But you know who you are. Thanks, everybody. And we'll, yeah, never mind. I don't want to reveal too much. So, this episode, let's go remedy some things. I really want to Think about some of the things that I would have changed in that podcast or those series of podcasts if I had known what I know now. So hindsight being 2020 or even better, you know, I held back on a couple things during that podcast, maybe a little too much because I didn't want to give up everything we do behind the scenes. But, you know, what I laid out. in that episode is also really only part of our considerations for VO2max intervals, and we're going to set up more today. I'm also going to set up more context on why I was giving the specific recommendations I did, and also how I thought people would really actually go do intervals based on my recommendations. And I also didn't know people would take all of them at once, which apparently they have. And I also wanted to address some common misconceptions, I think, about all that stuff. and I think there were also a bunch of specifics that people have kind of glossed over as I see people going, oh, well, I did an Empirical Cycling VO2 block. I'm like, do you need a block? Do you need to start that hard? Do you need to yada, yada, yada? And the answer is no. I guess in a way, it's like if you say something silly on a podcast, 999 people are going to get it and one person is going to be like, oh, that sounds awesome. I'm going to go do that stupid thing. So, you know, some people did all the stupid things. And I expected them to do like one or two. But also I would have done all the stupid things too, which is how I have extreme empathy for people who go, I'm going to hyper-optimize because I have very much done the same thing. And I still do in a lot of ways. My training is horrible. because I'm always trying to squeak out these little things even though I know better. And I think not only that, I think seeing how people have interpreted all that stuff has given me some sympathy for Andy Coggin and Hunter Allen in training or innovation with a power meter because when Coggin develops his power levels, zones, whatever you want to call them, he really meant them to be descriptive and he thought people would continue training that. the way that they had always been training up to that point. And I don't think he thought that his setting a range for power would change the way that people trained as much as it did, because it's really changed the way people train. And so I think if he had known what was coming, he probably would have done more putting guardrails in place. And obviously, mindfulness has not been nearly that. Large. In fact, it's probably been quite small. But we'll parallel that more in a minute. We're going to put some guardrails in place. So, Rory, before we dig into the history of high-cadence VO2max and its theoretical underpinnings and in the literature, do we have any other thoughts before we move on? No. All right. Very good. That was comprehensive. All right. Very good. I've also heard criticisms of the podcast that, man, we really attack things from every angle. It's like, yes, you know, Rory and I and Kyle, we have all been trained as scientists. Rory and Kyle, Kyle really does the most science out of all of us. Rory, you are still- Oh yeah, by far at this point. Yeah, you and me are probably about the same level of science involved at this point. Maybe even me a little more. No, not me. Definitely not me. I help scientists more often than you. That's true. I've only consulted on a couple papers. So yeah, definitely you. Although I consume a lot of science. I think I probably read at least a paper a day at this point, if not more. So anyway, going back to 2009, 2010, my wonderful mother, who loves seeing me ride a bike. Shout out to our mothers. Yeah, shout out to Rory's mother who listens. I think my mother does too. Ma, you should give me a call if you do. I can never tell. She follows along on the Instagram stories and she's like, I don't know what FTP is, but it sounds like you really know what you're talking about. So she loved my cycling. I was really just getting into training at that time and I decided I wanted to start competing. And so she got me a video, a training video from what is now known as CTS. and it was Dean Golich leading a bunch of cyclists at the time and they were three minute max efforts at 120 RPM. And that was my very first like real structured workout that I had ever done. And I'm over there with nothing but a heart rate monitor and like a, I don't know, like a, I don't know, a cycle ops trainer or something like that. Positive attitude. And a positive attitude, a real can-do attitude. And my heart was beating out of my chest. I was gasping harder than I've ever gasped in my life. And I went, holy shit, that was intense. I didn't know what a power-up it was. I was just like, all right, I think they give you recommendations. All right, I can do this without power, just looking at heart rate, whatever, RPE, cool. I'm just going to go do this. And whew, boy, that was tough. And I think CTS still uses these. I did a little Googling on it, and it looks like if they still use them at this point, they're called power intervals, which they recommend at 100 RPM or higher at max pace. And one of the ways, that was my first introduction to this stuff. And I eventually worked with Dean on a project, and he introduced me to the concept of double days. And he also sent me some old coursework he had done for USA Cycling on, you know, on. Block Training, and Viet-to-Max work, and structuring a season, and et cetera, et cetera. And I was really fascinated by this because this is what sparked me to dig deeper was because the rationale at the time for why you would do high cadence is because it causes less muscle damage. And I was like, well, there's no eccentric contractions here. And the tension is not that high, so it can't be muscle damage. But I know if I do a three-minute hill repeat up, you know, a 10% grade, my muscles hurt more than if I do this on flat ground at 110 RPM. And Rory is nodding because he knows exactly what that's like. And so I was like, well, I guess it's not damage, but it's probably just acute fatigue. But why do these seem just as effective if not? possibly more effective than doing regular old VO2 max training. And we'll talk about that. But that is what led me to digging into literature. And that's where I came up with my theory on preload. And so, excuse me, that one's original to me, based on the case I could make for it within the existing literature. And in practice, it works for sure. But I don't... I think there are some confounders in why it might work that we'll discuss. Because I put forth my theory, but I probably didn't do a good job enough. Here's guardrail number one. I don't think I did a good enough job saying that it may not work exactly like this, or this may only be part of it. There may be other stuff going on. So based on the available information, It seems to be plausible, but really to be confirmed in any real scientific sense that this is better or just as good or whatever. Yeah, because I guess one of the first things you think about whenever you think about really hard training is that One of the necessary parts of doing hard training is the fatigue you incur. So why is it in this instance there's a potential to incur less fatigue but get a potentially equal or greater response? And so when you logic that one together, there must be something going on there. And that was obviously your theory for what it was. Yeah, for sure. I mean, and you prescribe these in practice and you've probably done them yourself. Actually, you have done them, Michelle. I know you have. And they seem to work just as well, if not better, whether it's for less fatigue reasons or because you can do more efforts kind of reasons. Who knows? You feel better afterwards, but it's fucking worse doing them. That's true. All right. So where the style of training truly originates, I have absolutely no idea. I will tell you what I do know. There are a couple instances of this type of training in the literature. And Dean is actually a co-author on some of them. I had actually emailed him at some point. I was like, you had mentioned some overtraining study where you basically gave collegiate cyclists a via-to-max block. And I remember Dean saying, like, we just killed these people. And at the end, they had their best performance ever. And it was meant to induce overtraining. and oops, sorry, we gave you your best pursuit ever. That sounds like one of those papers where you look at the methodology and you think, oh, you poor bastards. And then they have the biggest view to max response they've ever recorded in the literature, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So David Martin is the main author on a lot of these papers. and we are actually, I will link all of them in the show notes over at empiricalcycling.com and a lot of them actually don't have don't have a PubMed citation but they are on David Martin's research gate so I will go link the where the least research gate links to I will link those up and they're actually really really short publications really short like a paragraph basically but it's basically like a detailed abstract so None of them, as far as I could tell, actually mentioned cadence. However, it was often described at the time as pursuit training, because especially in the 90s, racing on the track, if there's anything we know about it, the cadences were absolutely ridiculous. There were guys doing low 10s, high 9s in the Flying 200. on like a 90-something-inch gear, like 96-inch gear, and doing like 180 RPM, which is astounding by today's standards. And you can probably make a fair assumption that they're training like this, because this is very much the era of train how you want to race. Yeah, especially, this is also linked in our show notes, the 1999 paper with the lead author Berger, and... because that was specifically on pursuit cyclists. So while the reporting on the procedures was not as detailed as it tends to be these days, based on what I've heard from Dean Golich, who was co-author on a couple of these, and I'm presuming Cadence was a part of it because that's kind of where – I presume this is where he got it. He might have – or probably modified it in some way, you know, based on coaching experience, you don't want to lift exactly what they did in the literature for your, you know, for your clients. And especially where it was called pursuit training, I'm fairly certain it was high cadence. But anyway, so that's the origin of this style of training, this kind of block training, where you focus on one thing, as far as I could tell. And like a lot of studies on high intensity, you know, these are like block, These are that type of block training, focused block training, and not like block training as in you do a three-week block of training and then you take a week of recovery where during that three-week block, you can kind of work on everything. So the definition of block training is a little weird sometimes. So always keep that in your periphery if you see something that says block training. So fun fact, some of these studies were, like we said, meant to try and induce overtraining symptoms. Immunosuppression, see impacts on iron stores, see if different carb loading had an impact, psychological impacts. And the carb loading, by the way, was not ridiculous. It was like moderate versus high, like five grams per kilo versus like eight grams per kilo. Nothing that's like two grams per kilo, which, oof. Generally speaking, these subjects were trained collegiate cyclists, VO2 max of about 60. So definitely trained. and where they were in season, we don't really know. And in the Berger paper, these were pursuit cyclists at the U.S. Olympic Training Center. So they were way better trained. I don't recall if they had their Vita Max reported. I don't think they did. Training varied in duration, one to six weeks. And sometimes, if not often, included double days, like morning 10x3, evening 15x2. So when people get... 7x3 for me, think how much worse it could be. You could be doing 10x3 or 15x2. And in one of them, they had the reducing interval durations, which was one of my recommendations, where they reduced the durations through the sessions 6x5 all the way down to 30x1. And Rory's shaking his head because he thinks it sounds unpleasant. No, thank you. Yeah, so when performance outcomes were reported, like Vita-Max, RAM test, Power, WMAX, PMAX, however it's reported, they, generally speaking, saw about a 6% to 8% overall improvement, which is pretty good. One study reported power improvement, so an average of 360 watts went up to an average of 390 watts, so about 8%. And, you know, 30 watts improvement. For a really, really good response in a VA2 Max block, that's probably the upper end of what I've seen is about 30 watts. But again, this is not like just, oh, yay, I can just add 30 watts to my VA2 Max in the next three to six weeks by just smashing myself silly. They did record immunosuppression. They did record reduced serum ferritin both at three and six weeks. They did record mood disturbance. So it's – and, you know, Rory, you and I, we prescribe these blocks to our clients somewhat frequently. And, like, how bad is it sometimes? Almost always have to put the warning in in week three that – Pull the record if you need to. Yeah, pull the cord, get out of the plane. Yeah. You're crashing. Despite the fact that some people want to keep going, and it's like, your legs will stop you, don't worry. Usually by that point, they don't want to keep going, fortunately. Yeah, having permission ahead of time to bail out, I think, is very helpful with that stuff. And also, like, one of the things that we kind of talk about behind the scenes with our coaches is... making sure that somebody's in the right place to do that kind of work if you think that they need it. Because, you know, having prescribed Fiat Max blocks, you know, for many years at this point, I can say that they don't always work. And sometimes they work against people because the recovery is really not in place. So that is one of our big considerations when we are doing this stuff with our clients is like, is this, does this person need it? And also, can they actually get through it realistically? And what other options do we have? I wanted to get into the specific details of the training protocol in the Berger et al. paper since they have the most detail. So they did a baseline week. Most of the riding was at less than 70% of HR peak, which was from their graded exercise test or ramp test, as it would otherwise be known. At the end of the week, they did two quote-unquote recovery days with morning efforts of three by two minutes. with three-minute rests. Rory's laughing so hard right now. And a evening session, one hour at less than 70% heart rate peak. Cool. Main three weeks of the study, seven to eight interval sessions in the course of three to four consecutive days. Morning session, four by three with three-minute rests, then three by three-minute set with three-minute rests. So presuming there's some space between those two sets. Evening session, two sets of five by two minutes with seven and a half minute rests. Seven and a half? Five and a half? Three and a half? I forget. Refer to the paper. I think I've made a typo when I recorded in my notes. Following each training week was a recovery day, then a pursuit performance test, and then a graded exercise test, and on those three consecutive days, I believe, is how I read the paper. So you did... three to four hard sessions in a row, and then you did a recovery, then you did a pursuit, and then you did a ramp test. So your easy days are a full gas four kilometer average and like a ramp test for like 12-ish minutes. Can I just say, if anyone would like coaching with empirical cycling, it does not look like this. No, it does not. This is not what we're going to recommend. No, in fact, we want to make sure that everybody is feeling really good when they do this kind of stuff and is prepared in every way possible. Yeah. So maybe a question that I don't know if you have an answer to if it was in the paper. Listeners, I have not read it. Do you think that one of the things happening here that causes such a horrible schedule are the requirements for what the athletes are meant to be doing in part of their regular training getting mixed up into this? This paper, they actually were off-season. And this is one of the things that I talk about a little bit in our notes, which is that this was off-season for them. So it must have been like fall based on what I remember the track schedule was like at the time. And so who knows what off-season pursuit cyclists were actually doing for their regular training. Not this. Not this. That's for sure. But were they doing a bunch of riding? Possibly. Were they doing absolutely nothing at all? possibly. At the time, man, I wasn't training at the time. I was alive, but I was not involved in the cycling world. I was actually a martial artist. And I believe what I've heard is that off-season was a lot of base miles. That makes sense for the time. Yeah. And that's a guess. I have absolutely no idea really. But yeah, this is not getting mixed up with the regular training. This is like... training block of its own. And so how trained these people were at the time, I don't really know. And that's one of the confounders that we're going to talk about later. So after their main three-week interval sessions, they did two weeks of taper. First taper week, three recovery days, and then they do three pursuit performance tests and a graded exercise test. Second taper week was a recovery day, two performance tests, and then a graded exercise test. And they also did a profile of mood states. And since that was the main outcome that they measured, basically how grumpy did they get? It was not actually that simple. I actually am not in any way, shape, or form qualified to talk about this result from the paper. I have no idea. I read it. I didn't really understand it that well. I would have to brush up on my psych stuff. Apparently, they didn't actually see that much change. But they noted that this contrasts with other literature. Maybe this is related to the subjects. I don't really know. The paper kind of speculated, but also didn't sound like they really knew either. So their performance outcome, this is something I am very qualified to talk about. Their pursuit got 6.7% better through the training on average. And they gained another 2% after the taper. in a very, very similar range to all the other publications on this style of training. So whenever I, because one of the things that I've seen occasionally is that somebody says, oh, this has never been published. Like, this has never been in the literature. Like, here you go. There are multiple instances of this in the literature, in the published scientific literature. And I think it's just, you know, maybe it's like, David Martin, I don't know if he does that much research anymore. I also don't know how well people would take to this kind of training because the HIT craze happened, then the Zone 2 craze happened. So there's been other stuff for people to do in the meantime that everything seemed to have its own sort of promise of magical gains. There you go. There's a little bit of, you know, Vieta Max block training in the literature, looking at some good outcomes in performance, but also some kind of, how would you say it, collateral damage? Bodies on the floor. Although they seem to be in a good mood about it, all things considered, so maybe it wasn't that bad. Hey, if my pursuit were getting that much better, I'd be in a really good mood too. So now let's talk about the game of telephone because I think some things have been misinterpreted. And when I was writing out our little outline here, I just came up with a couple examples off the top of my head. So like one of the big ones these days is grip strength as a predictor of longevity. So cool. Let's do a bunch of grip training. because having a strong grip will obviously be a predictor of longevity. Cool. But what it's really meant to be is a surrogate, like an easy-to-measure surrogate for muscle mass and for neural drive. And your hands are extremely sensitive to neural drive. So it's like something got missed. in the communication. You get the one little bit, but you forget the other little bit. And like another one is like, I've seen this one misinterpreted less frequently, but I have seen this one a couple times, which is that when you hear training to muscular failure is a hypertrophy signal or near muscular failure, because you can be a couple reps shy, especially if you're kind of new and still get the same kind of growth. And so let's do a bunch of Sprints until your legs lock up or anaerobic capacity efforts until your legs kind of turn to jelly. That'll be a hypertrophy signal, right? My legs are fatiguing for sure. But what's missing is that there's not enough mechanical tension across the muscles. And it's implied with this kind of stuff that you are lifting sufficiently heavy weights when you do this. But again, some pieces of the information go through. and some pieces don't. And so the game of telephone I think has happened a little bit with these pieces of information but also I think that the game of telephone has been played a little bit with like the start hard advice. That was part of my recommendations and in my notes I specifically said you want to start about maybe 10 to 20% harder than you otherwise would and then just hang on. I didn't know how to set up the context for this at the time, but we're going to do it now. So I mean, I set up the context at the time in terms of like training logic, like in terms of your physiology, if you do this, this other good thing will happen. So one of the other reasons, the coaching reasons that I made the suggestion is because I coach quite a few people who are never sure if they're actually going hard enough. And so if you aren't sure about that, and we need to learn pacing, especially of these harder efforts, you know, starting harder than you think you can hold will do one of two things. Number one, your power is going to fade as you go. Your heart rates and your breathing are going to stay high. That means that, okay, now we've got a max effort. That's good. If you can hold that power through the whole effort, suddenly, uh-oh. We are 10% to 20%. We're going 10% to 20% harder than you were previously. And you can still do the whole effort. Maybe you've got more. Let's raise another 10%. Let's see what happens. In an ironic sense here, it was a way to try and ensure that there were no guardrails when people were doing the actual intervals they weren't going to lock themselves to. a little bit less than they should be able to do given all things are going right for them. Yeah, and usually when I've programmed this type of training for my very experienced athletes, one of the things that they almost always default to, especially if they're really good at pacing, they're going to pace it pretty evenly for every single effort. And the power will come down, sure. Like, you know, first effort for three minutes might be 300 watts, and then it'll come down to 290. You know, 290, 280, 270, something like that. And, you know, heart rate's going to be about the same. That was one of my other recommendations was to check the heart rate afterwards just to kind of see if it was in the right range. You feel like it was in the right range, long, steady efforts, breathing hard, high heart rate, like, you're golden. You don't need to, that's, to me, that's like the platonic ideal of a VO2 max workout. You know, kind of regardless of the cadence also. but I did specifically advise that you don't start with a max sprint. We actually did look at one paper on that where there were two different ways of pacing. One way of pacing was like steady across the board and one way of pacing was like we're going to start you as hard as you can and then you're going to fade to like 200 watts. Actually started at like a thousand or something. The kilo methodology. Yeah, the kilo methodology. Worse actually because that would not be a very fast kilo. Not if it took four minutes. Also, that would be a very fast pursuit. So the – that actually knocked the thought right out of my head, Rory. Oh, yeah. So both efforts, like starting with the max sprint and the evenly paced one, if I recall correctly, had the same kilojoule output. It was basically the same workload. It had basically the same heart rate. And the VO2 max was a little tiny bit lower in the steady effort. It ramped up a little slower. But, you know, it wasn't that massive of a difference, especially for a one-off effort. Because if we are going to do these efforts iteratively, and this is where the scientific literature does not tell you what to do on the bike, if you decide to do a 1,000-watt sprint to start, just hang on to 1,000 watts and just hang on, hang on, hang on, even as you're pedaling 200 watts and doing squares at the end, that's not a fun way to train. That's a lot more fatigue than really is intended for this type of workout. And that fatigue will put the rest of your set in jeopardy. And if you're doing a double day or you want to do two days in a row or you've got any other training coming up anytime soon, this is going to put all that other stuff in jeopardy in terms of quality. So you want to make sure that you are not burying yourself. And I think that this is one of the things that people confused with. I think at the time, Jim Arnold had some blog posts on VO2 Max and he was doing some stuff with harder starts. and intermittent efforts and things like that. And he would do a harder start. And from what I recall, he would settle down into what was a more typical effort for the time, like 110, 120% of FTP. Do you recall, Rory? I did some of his, I can't remember what he called them precisely. It was like a declining intermittent workout where the idea was the interval itself would be like 10 to 12 minutes long made up of 40 second on periods and 20 seconds off periods. But the idea was you started really hard for like the first two and then dropped a little bit for the next two and then dropped again to like a steady state for the remainders. Yeah, like intended as part of the design. Yeah. Well, and that's something I would, for those type of efforts, I would want somebody to auto-regulate and then we'll see where you're at. and maybe we'll try to get you to push a little harder next time. That's something where I think, because somebody like me, at my fittest aerobically, I would be able to probably go way harder than most people could on that type of effort. So that's one of the individualizing kind of things that I really like to do in coaching. So anyway, but... One of the reasons that those harder starts, I think, were a little more popular at the time was because of the EPOC and the VO2 kinetics priming, quote-unquote. So EPOC is the elevated post-exercise oxygen consumption. But basically, you rack up some oxygen debt. and you have to breathe harder and have a higher heart rate because of that, a hard start. And that will, you know, raise your VO2, your consumption of oxygen during that particular workout. Even though maybe technically EPOC is only after an effort's done, I forget exactly the technical definition, my bad. But I've never really been a big fan of thinking about the EPOC and like the O2 kinetics priming type stuff because At least to me, it seems like it's a lot of minutia for not a lot of realistic gain, you know, because what's it going to get you in a, you know, three to five minute effort is like, what, maybe another little bit of oxygen consumed, maybe your heart rate gets higher a little bit by like five, 10 seconds. like not a big fraction to me. And if you're super into hyper-optimizing and that works for you, I mean, that's fine with me, but just the way I see it, that's not really a practical use of energy, especially if you're going to be doing a lot of these efforts. So I think in reality, if you can pace a V8 to max effort evenly, that's totally fine. In fact, in a lot of ways, it might even be preferable. And so I think that another part of the start hard and then go max advice is that for a long time, people in the cycling world assumed that VO2 max power was a thing. Like this is contextual for the time. So I like to think I helped kind of start to debunk the myth that like you... that there is a certain power at which you are at that, you know, your VO2max power, quote unquote, because you can hit VO2max at a range of powers. You can hit VO2max with a really short effort. You can hit VO2max with a really long effort, depending on how well-trained you are and a bunch of other factors. And so that was the, what, Adami paper, I think, that we looked at in detail, I think kicked off the VO2max series where You know, different lengths of ramp tests, like different ramp rates, some of them would be too short to really hit VO2max, some of them would be too long to hit VO2max. So there was a range at which you would hit VO2max, and the power that you hit at the end, you could basically calculate based on a pretty rudimentary critical power W' model. So if you've got a certain amount of W' and you hit your critical power at like X time, then you spread it out over yada yada, and then you're going to hit this power that, you know, you can predict it pretty much. That's one of the other reasons that, contextually, at the time, I really wanted to get that advice out there, is to get people away from the idea that, oh, if my FTP is like 300 watts and my Vita Max power says it's like 350 watts, so I've got to do all my Vita Max efforts at 350 watts. Like, that is not at all the case. All you need to do is go hard and make sure you're breathing hard while you're going hard, steady, and voila. Good enough. So was that also complete or do you have thoughts here before we move on? No, like just to add to the bit about like ultimately how you execute on these is probably most important for you to do it in the way that allows you to be able to do it. I often recommend for clients, and this is something I do for myself, is start. 10, 20 watts below what you think you can do and like ramp up through the interval like finish strong not finish the final 30 seconds 100 watts higher than what you were doing strong but you know You, by the middle of the interval, hit the what's that you think you're going to be able to do, and then it's pushing harder towards the end. I actually find when it comes to the high cadence stuff, that actually helps quite a lot mentally, because it becomes less about thinking about high cadence and more about just thinking about pushing your legs faster, which I realize is very much the same thing, but there's a mental trick there. I'm getting stronger as I go and that makes it easier to spin your legs faster. Yeah, well, and contextually, another thing that I think is good about thinking about cadence is that for a couple of my clients, they tell me that it's easier for them to push hard when they're just focused on cadence because a lot of people have power stuck in their head and they're like, oh my God, this power is 20 watts lower than normal. Oh no. But now I'm going to drop my cadence and I'm going to raise the power and it's like, okay, now we're gathering fatigue and your second set today or your set tomorrow or your whatever else is going on, that's going to suck, potentially. And oftentimes it's 50-50, but over time, if somebody really slacks on the cadence in like a really focused block, like man, the fatigue really ramps up. you know that's one of the other pacing things that you can do pretty much at any point especially if you are getting back into those efforts like I usually tell people to like their first VO2 max workout back for the season it'll be like you know what start the first one at like maybe 10 or 20 watts over FTP just get that out of the way get used to pedaling hard again and see if you want to bring it up another 20 watts and maybe by the end work up to like 90 percent max effort maybe if you're feeling good and then we'll kind of See where we're at and figure out what to do next time. Yeah, I'd say especially if you're new, one thing to really focus on is something I see quite a lot in clients' workouts who haven't done many of these kind of high cadence filters is it's obviously this is limited by what's around you, but it's best to do it on steady terrain, not meaning flat. but ideally not undulating even on a hill where like there's some gradient movement it just knocks you out of that rhythm and that's when you have to start fussing with your gears more and more it is the sort of thing that if you can Bring yourself to do it when the weather's nice on the turbo and then go out and finish the rest of your ride outdoors after. But having that steady resistance, be it from a hill or a flat or the turbo, helps a lot because quite often, I'm sure you've seen this, is people have the hill they want to do, the gradient is maybe fluctuating by 5% from bottom to top and in between. and you'll see their cadence go up and then all of a sudden their cadence drops because they've had to put it into bigger gear. And then they spike the power and yeah, it's not steady and... It's the ugliest intervals you've ever seen. Yeah, to the point where depending on the terrain once in a while, I'll be like, where are the intervals in here? Yeah, it can get bad. Yeah. Okay, so let's move on to... my intention and the context for all the recommendations that I made way back then. So what I genuinely honestly expected people to do was to keep doing efforts at like 105 to 120% of FTP because that was so prevalent at the time and it had been for years that I really wanted to provide different ways for people to try to modify that type of interval set. to improve the stimulus that they got. And so something like, well, I think we're going to use a 5x5 minutes at 110% FTP as a kind of our example set here. And this is the way that I expected people to modify this kind of thing. So like, I think... 

Yeah, I guess people – I didn't think that people would take my suggestions as the quote-unquote correct way to do efforts. I thought that they were going to like be like, all right, I'm going to do 110% at FTP or 110% of my FTP forever and I'm going to do them with higher cadence and man, I feel like I get a really much better stimulus here. So cool, I'll keep doing that and that's what I thought people would do and so I'll go through all of the things that I suggested. and we will go through all of them including the last one where we will take that retrospective on that paper that will, well, you know which one. So let's go through these. Raise the cadence, number one. A higher cadence is going to increase your O2 demand. We looked at a paper on steady efforts with higher cadence and this seems pretty cut and dry. And so you would have greater oxygen consumption, greater VO2 for your efforts. and hopefully it might get you to VO2 max even and that would give you a potentially better training stimulus. And so if your normal 5x5 didn't quite work to get you to VO2 max, then raising the cadence would almost always get you there and not only that, it would make the same power harder because anybody who's done high cadence VO2 effort will tell you you cannot do as much power as you can at your preferred cadence. You know, if you, if going uphill, normally you're at like 80 to 90 RPM and you are on a flat ground going at 110, your 300 watts uphill is going to really become like 270, 280 watts on the flat. So that's what I expected. I did not set that up well. So as many things that we were going to talk about, that's my bad. You know what they say about expectations? They make an ass out of you and me. Oh, because you assume. Yeah. Yes. I think that's one that works better in writing. Otherwise, I'd be like, what did you call me? Okay. Next recommendation was to shorten the recovery intervals. And it seems like everybody forgot about this one. Weird, huh? So, one of the reasons that I suggested this is because if you are doing 5x5 at 110%, this is pretty easy for you. Shortening your recovery intervals will make the later efforts much harder. And this comes straight from the Hickson protocol. Six by five minutes with two minute rests was what he used. And, you know, if you're really going max, this is not quite the best strategy, but it's certainly doable. You'll have to do some serious pacing. of your efforts if you want each one to be max. And I would expect the last one to have kind of crap power with two-minute rests, but could certainly be doable. And so what I expected people to do was take five-by-five minute at 110% FTP. And if you're doing like 10-minute rests, maybe you shorten them down to like seven, then five, and then three, and maybe even two, God forbid, one. Boy, you should probably pedal a little harder if you're doing one-minute efforts, fine. I don't reach for this one anymore. I used to put this kind of stuff up once in a while, especially while somebody was really fresh, but it's just not something that I've ever really found utility in these days. So, Rory, have you ever tried this kind of stuff? I don't think I've ever prescribed it like this. As I think I've said a lot in the podcast, I usually describe... the rest period between VO2s as whatever you need to be motivated again but I did do some VO2s last week or at the weekend at this point I've forgotten where I think I kind of accidentally did this I did like a three and a half minute effort and then got a little bit too far up the road in the space of like a minute and a half so I just started the next one again that one was about two minutes long so I then died, got to the next bit of hell a minute later and then did a minute and a half. So I kind of accidentally did this. The main thing I found was that I couldn't do the duration. It was less that I was incapable of achieving the intensity. And in that way, it makes it a harder interval set to complete because ultimately one of the things we're trying to accomplish is the time demand to maintain this and the shorter intervals. Even if you can do like a wee block of three intervals like I did back to back to back, it's still probably less efficient and less pleasant than just giving yourself whatever time you actually need to be able to repeat what you did the first time. Yeah. Or more or less repeat for the first time. Yeah. And you know what's funny is like a workout set like this would be totally fine for a stimulus. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be except number one, it's going to hurt. and number two, it's actually harder to compare apples to apples. I mean, if you are like, if like 110% of FTP is hard for you for five minutes and you're like, all right, I'm gonna do this 110%, I'm gonna go hard five minutes and it's not gonna be max, but it's gonna be hard enough. I'm gonna rest for like two, three minutes. I'm gonna go again as long as I can. Maybe I get three and a half, four minutes. I'm gonna rest again, go again. Like you could do this and you could be like, all right, I'm gonna. Increase my time and zone here to increase my stimulus. But it gets harder to compare with other workouts. And it also gets harder to say, I have improved X watts. Because another thing that we're going to talk about later is this could also be improving your anaerobic capacity. And so you would need to tease out that variable too. So this is one of the other reasons I prefer to just stick with kind of steady efforts, rests mostly as needed. So you've got a really good apples-to-apples comparison of workout-to-workout. So speaking of going hard, next piece of advice was go max, not go max Verstappen even though spa is this weekend and I'm super excited. But Rory is not a fan of F1. He just rolled his eyes into the next. I used to be. Okay, sorry. I'm actually a Williams fan, so anyway. All right, Rory's on the Williams bandwagon. Let's go. So we just kind of talked about some specifics, but for our example workout, let's say your 5x5 was at like 300 watts as 110% FTP. So what I would suggest is for that first effort, somebody starts around 330-ish watts, not 700. Not 1,000. Not even 500. Not 400. Like 330, maybe 350 watts. And just hang on. At some point, you might or probably will fall under 300 watts because that would be your potential average. Maybe it's a little higher. And that's fine. And so... Would you say... So we're talking about like this little bit of starting hard. What time period are you assigning to this? Because I would say that most people... for like this sort of intensity. They do 400 watts because they just have to get the bike back up to speed, but that lasts all of three seconds, whereas the hard starts we're maybe talking about are first 30 seconds. Yeah, it's like, try to hang on to this target, and as you cannot hang on to that target, keep your effort level the same even as the watts start to drop. And so, yeah, like you might hang on to that target for about 30 seconds, maybe a little longer, maybe a little less, depending on how far into the set you are. But, you know, it's not a bad way to approach it, especially if you are not sure about what really constitutes a max effort, like we talked about earlier with pacing. So, and this is, again, none of these are requirements to do a good V2 max effort. I mean, like that Hickson protocol was like, you know, in most of the scientific literature, you know, whatever you hit your W max in your ramp test, You'll just do efforts at that power. And there's plenty of people who improve their VA2max like that. But what we've found in coaching is that unless somebody, if somebody's really well-trained, we'll kind of talk about these asterisks a little later, but if somebody's really well-trained, you know, you cannot get away with just kind of going namby-pamby on these efforts. You've really got to put in a genuine hard effort to really see some movement. It's kind of the same way as we talked about in the FTP Decision Tree episode a couple episodes ago, or maybe that was the last one, where at a certain point, you know, early season doing FTP training is going to raise your FTP. And at a certain point, it's no longer going to raise your FTP no matter how many efforts you do. and that's when you need to start going harder and the same principle in my opinion applies here. So next piece of advice was to check your heart rate afterwards and not during and at the time I was actually in a way I was thinking about the way I analyzed these efforts of using the heart rate getting to about the same spot. each effort be like, all right, this, you know, even though the watts were declining, I can see objectively from my coaching chair, this was probably equally hard efforts all across the board. These were probably as equally as effective. But I was also throwing a bone to the old school Just Go Max crowd that, of course, would always just train with heart rate and power meters were newfangled and stuff like that. That was another thing I was thinking about when I made that recommendation. Of course, I didn't say so in the episode. I probably should have. I mean, what was that episode? Like two hours? It probably would have been four if I had done all these caveats in there because this is going to be probably a two-hour episode as we are. Oh, yeah, we're already at about an hour. So, yes, that would have been a four-hour episode. It's always good when you get the addendum notes in six years later. Only I had known. Oh my fucking God. Sorry. I'll get to it eventually. I'm sorry. I'm only human and I'm way too human at that. So one of the other funky things about heart rate is that as you train, your max heart rate will drop a little bit. And so I think a lot of people will think that their max heart rate is the highest heart rate they've ever seen. Like, I remember the highest heart rate I had ever seen was in a July crit in like, God, it was 2011 or 12 or something like that. It was a million degrees out. We were racing on the surface of the sun. It was actually a really cool circuit. The sun has a lot of really interesting neighborhoods. And nobody really knew anything about cooling yourself at the time. And so I was sweating profusely. I was over, I was, I was basically cooking myself as I raced and my heart rate probably hit like 198, maybe 200 and something like that. And this was super early in my training. And after that, my max heart rate was somewhere in like, generally speaking, it was most often in like the mid to high 180s. I think I might've brushed 190 once after that. So yeah, like. If I was thinking, man, I got to get my heart rate up, it doesn't work like that. Because that max heart rate you've ever seen is not your true max heart rate. I think about your max heart rate as relative to the effort that you're doing. So if you're doing a set of VO2s and you have seen a max heart rate on a RAM test of like 190, but your VO2s are only getting up to like 182, As long as you feel like you're in the physiologically right range, that's totally fine. And that's just the way that the heart works. Because as you are doing the efforts, especially high cadence, increases your blood return. It's going to increase your stroke volume. And so your heart needs to pump a little bit less frequently to achieve the same cardiac output. So that's all there is still. It's also a time of season thing. Usually people hit these maxes in like March. versus, you know, you get to summer, you could be doing some really hard efforts in training or races in a way like 10-peat smoke lore. Yeah, actually, I was going to say, people usually hit their max heart rates like October, November, when we start doing testing after their off-season break. It's like, all right, show me your one minute right now. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, well, that's when you start training. Yeah. Yeah, but like, you know. I peak in October. Yeah, don't we all? Apple season, pie, Halloween. The season peaks in October. The year peaks in October. So usually what happens is, yeah, like people will set their highest heart rates for the year in like, yeah, November after they take that break because they are the least well-trained, their heart's the most sensitive to the adrenaline and the cortisol and the yada yada, the stress hormones while you are exercising. And so, and you've got the least amount of blood volume. So of course you're going to see a high heart rate. It doesn't mean that it's always going to be like that. So I also know some people who will like take a bunch of caffeine to raise their heart rate for their efforts. So they're like, man, my heart rate's not getting up. It's like, you know, it could be a sign of fatigue and it can also be a sign of fitness. But you do not need to manipulate your heart rate with gargantuan quantities of caffeine. It's the cycling equivalent of seeking a passive income. Just chugging monster energy. All right. And now we get to our last recommendation was don't do intermittent efforts. So that is, yes, the 3015s paper. So at the time, 3015s had taken the world by storm, by absolute storm. And I was not happy with the lack of critical thinking around that type of effort. and of course my critical thinking skills at the time were not as honed as they are now and now they are not as honed as they will be in five more years so I might say something embarrassing again but you know what we're gonna go with it and we'll do another addendum notes in five years if that seems to be the case so I still think that my methodological qualms with the paper generally hold up but One of the things about the real-world rubber meets road part of that paper is that I didn't think that for well-trained people that this type of effort would really raise their view to max that well because mountain bike and cyclocross exist. Because if you've ever raced a cyclocross race, your heart rate is like pinned to the max. for the entire race. Unless you are some sort of super pro and, you know, you're racing in a group of five and you're waiting for that moment to attack, that happens sometimes, sure. But for most people, you are just, you know, going hell for leather for the entire race. And your heart rate is pinned and, you know, I've never seen from somebody well-trained racing cyclocross, I've never seen their VO2 max improve. And this is like the definition of a massive dose of these on-off intervals at very high heart rates, not seeing the outcome that you would expect to see if this really worked with people who were well-trained. This was the original thinking I think Jem had behind those declining intermittent efforts. I should say, I don't think Jem believes or uses this sort of thing anymore. His rationale at the time, I think, was trying to maximize time at heart rate above 90% of max. And I think he had a VO2 master as well, and he was looking at the actual VO2 compared to max. Oh, that was after, okay. Yeah. Yeah, so the thinking of those intervals was if we just keep spiking the effort sufficiently until you really couldn't do it anymore, you could potentially do a 25-minute VO2 max effort. Well, that was, and I know of an instance in the literature where that was, the case was the, I have no idea how to pronounce this name, Veronique Bilat. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that correctly. I'm not going to get that one. Yeah, she's French. She's an excellent researcher. I've read a ton of her work. I think she's retired now. I don't really know. But I've read so many of her papers. And this was one of the things that she did with runners. Like she strapped a, I think a Cosmed. Like they've got like a, or yeah, they've got like a backpack VO2 max machine, like a gas exchange analyzer that you could strap on. And she had people running around the track. doing kind of over-unders for like 30 minutes, racking up time, you know, at 100% VO2 max and then down a little bit and then brush it again down a little bit or something like that. Or maybe it was 90, I forget exactly. So, I mean, there's certainly precedent for this kind of stuff. And, you know, I just, in my practical experience, it just never saw it really work. Now, it worked in the paper, right? Yeah, sure. But one of the things that most frequently happens is you catch cyclists in the off-season. And you know what happens when you're coming in from the off-season? Anything works. And so digging back into that paper again with the experience that I've got now, what I saw is that is that I think my bigger qualms with it, more than methodological at this point, are in the interpretation and the presentation. Because there's a couple things that I think I understand why they were done, but I would personally disagree with those things at this point. And then, of course, the – and they're all forgivable. Certainly. I can understand many rationales for why they were done. However, I think the media storm – okay, it wasn't really a storm. We get media storms these days, but like at the time, okay, not a storm. The media coverage of it, and especially for people who just read the title and go, oh, this is great. It's like superior adaptations with yada, yada, yada. And in the abstract itself, it says there was no group difference in change of VO2max. 

Right? Okay. So let's dig into this. The liters per minute between the two groups, P is 0.49. So we've got a 50% chance that this result was due to chance rather than anything else. Liters per minute per kilogram, P is 0.28. However, for one of their figures, They only have seven lines in one of the groups. So the N is either seven and nine or the N is either nine and nine. And if it's seven and nine, P is 0.28. If it's nine and nine, P is 0.23. And yes, I had to run those stats myself. So yeah, so the actual group size unknown. Yeah, figure one, it has seven individual lines for the 3015s group and all the rest have nine. So I don't know what happened there. I don't know if they calculated missing two people. They don't. mention it as far as I remember. Maybe they did and I missed it. My bad if that's the case. But I didn't think that there were any notes of bad data or dropouts or anything like that. So I'm not entirely sure why that happened. However, you know, they said no difference in this. And I would agree. I agree. Statistically, there's no difference between those two groups and between the changes. So they still reported an effect size. Rory, when's the last time you had P of 0.5? and you reported an effect size. My inclination is that if you have a 50% chance of your data being not real, you'd maybe not publish it at all. Well, it's not that the data's not real. The data's real. But like, yeah, if it's 50% chance that your result is just due to chance, I would not want to publish an effect size. But they put up an effect size. and they not only put up an effect size, they put up an effect size for the VO2 max because that was one of their main outcomes that they were looking at. So for liters per minute, they have an effect size of like 0.19 or 1.8 by memory and for the liters per minute per kilogram, the effect size is even larger which is some probably, I don't know why that happens but that's one of the reasons I wouldn't want to interpret it. you know do the relative VO2max I would want to do the absolute VO2max because you of course probably less error once you add in weight as a denominator and yada yada so yeah I just I wouldn't have reported that effect size because once you do you see that effect size you go oh okay look the effect size was greater in the in the 3015s group but it's You've got either a 1 in 2 chance or a 1 in 3 chance that this result is not due to chance. So I'm not the biggest fan of that. But I could see why they would put it in because if this is a real effect, how big is it? You know, I think if P were like 0.09 or less, I'd be like, okay, let's report an effect size. But let's also like report the P-value and be like, eh, it's trending towards we need more study, yada, yada, which I think would be the fair way to do it. And what they definitely found was a significant improvement in VO2 max power, as in ramp test power and 20-minute power. And so one of the things that... This points straight to, which I don't think I was tuned in enough at the time to see this, but looking back now, I saw it immediately. This points to an increase in anaerobic capacity in the 3015s group since improving your W-prime. will move your ramp test performance up, and it'll also improve your 20-minute performance. I mean, and it's also possible that there was a motor unit recruitment effect too, since this is what we would see with like 20-minute power improvements with strength training in cyclists with no VO2 max improvement whatsoever. And so we've got similar VO2 max improvements, but we've got better 20-minute power and better ramp test power in our 3015s group. At our capacity, easy. easiest, most parsimonious explanation we've got, in my opinion. So despite that, I still am not the biggest fan of the methodology, and I probably, last time we talked about this, didn't note that even the authors note that their testing protocol was not great. They were like, yeah, we did this on the same day. Not optimal, but that's what happens sometimes in science. Despite all that, I liked the paper better than I did at the time because it found what at this point I would expect it to find, which is the group that was doing the intermittent efforts had a better improvement of anaerobic capacity than the group doing steady efforts, even though I think the group doing steady efforts didn't really push as hard as they probably could have or should have. But when you are doing that kind of RPE study, it's like... You don't have an objective way to control somebody's power output too. So, you know, I get why they did it the way they did, but I think that there's a couple weaknesses in the study that really leave the interpretations of it, I think, a little more confident in the results than I think they should be. It ultimately feels like this is more I don't want to say interpretation, but I'm going to say interpretation problem from how was this framed within the results of the study themselves. So I'd also like what were they actually assessing for when it came to their methodology? Did they have the tests available to be able to confidently say the words anaerobic capacity? My understanding from your notes, which I'm reading in advance, is that they don't mention anaerobic capacity once. But are they not mentioning anaerobic capacity because they weren't thinking about it or because it's not something they weren't actually testing for and didn't have the confidence to talk about? Well, since we hadn't chatted about this before, I just now did a search on the paper and the word anaerobic appears once, which is in the original Tabata, the Tabata reference. What? I just said it isn't there. Well, it's in the Tabata reference. And one of the things that I was thinking about, you know, as I kind of mulled over, you know, the kind of concepts that were going to go into this episode, I was thinking that the original version of like high intensity intermittent efforts was Tabata. And you know what he was after? He was after anaerobic capacity improvements, and he found by accident VO2 max improvements because he was using VO2 as a stand-in for anaerobic capacity. And it escaped me at the time, five years ago, but it didn't escape me before that, and it's not escaping me now. that that should be an expected effect. And that's something that you would have to measure and control for if you are going to really think about just the VO2 max efforts. But I mean, you know, if we're going to talk about interpretation, I mean, the title is Superior Performance Improvements in Elite Cyclists Following Short Intervals Versus Effort-Matched Long Interval Training. You know, the superior performance really comes in the form of... Looking back at it now, I think the title is more appropriate than I did at the time because performance is like, how much power did they put out? Sure. Vieta Max, same. But I think this is where the media interpretation probably bugged me the most and I was probably taking it out on the paper more than it really deserves. And so, again, super embarrassing for me. But anybody who's... worked with me as a coach will know that as soon as I fuck up, I am going to be like, yo, that is my bad and I'm so sorry and here's what we're going to do to fix it. So this episode is what we're doing to fix it. Apologies to Norway. Apologies to Norway. Some excellent science coming out of Norway. And some excellent science from the same author coming out of Norway. You know, you got to kind of take the quality of the paper, each one as it comes. And I've, you know. Anyway, so I think the interpretation I saw was like, wow, you get way better VO2max improvements. And you really don't. You really don't. The paper itself does not say superior improvements in VO2max. Otherwise, I'm sure that would have been the title. You know, frustrated and ambitious and trying out the, I don't know, the heel personality, I guess we could say. If we're going to continue the kayfabe metaphors, where he's not into it. Okay, sorry. No wrestling metaphors. All right, we'll stick to F1. So I think, yeah, that's really my biggest issue is that anything on anaerobic capacity, has not been mentioned. And up until this point, as far as I know, has never been mentioned until I'm talking about it right now in terms of this study's result. But also I didn't, after that episode came out, I didn't really hear people talking about this study as much, which is funny because it's like, it is still data that we can look at. And even though I would have set it up differently, I understand why they were setting up like that at the time. And I think that there are still You know, there's still valuable stuff that we can take from it. Like, both groups had statistically the same improvement in VO2max. Right? Okay. So, we can also compare this to the Hickson's study. Rory is about to feel so bad for these people. So, I think we've talked about this paper on the podcast before. If not, well, we kind of mentioned it earlier. It was a 10-week study. So one of the longer studies. And it was the endurance training group was six by five minutes with two-minute rests. And they showed a 25% average VO2 max improvement of untrained people. So as far as I know, this is the biggest VO2 max improvement ever published in the literature, especially for the study duration. This protocol was not only 6x5. This alternated three days a week with a 30-minute time trial on the treadmill. For 30 minutes, you run as far as you can, and then they increased it to 40 minutes, and then they would have one day of rest per week. Rory, how does that sound as a training protocol? Pretty awful if you have to run. Yeah, extra awful if you've got to run. Also, if you're starting from untrained. Yeah, I think they were recreationally trained. I think they were probably physical education students. It's not like they were sedentary, as far as I know. Yeah, straight off the couch and into a 30-minute TTE. Yeah, I should memorize a lot more details of that paper, but I haven't because I look at it so infrequently. But regardless, you know, we're looking at, God, what was it, like a couple percent improvement? You know, in VO2max over... I've got the paper up. Hold on. Figures, figures, figures. Where's that table? Yeah, VO2max improvement was, you know, probably like two points, one and a half to two points in terms of milliliters per minute per kilogram. So, you know, 70... 2.7 to 73.6 on average. So yeah, it's like small compared to 25%. But I mean, also like the VO2 maxes in the Ronsdat paper are like 70s, not like 40. So, you know, it gets harder to make those improvements as you get better trained. So speaking of anaerobic capacity, we need to talk about confounders in VO2 max training because this is one of the Biggest things that we think about when we are assigning VO2 max training, like what does this person have coming up? What makes the most sense? What system are we really trying to target? How much interim capacity do we want? Is it early season? Do they not have so much? Are we trying to build it? Do they need to work on something? Do they need to work on one of these things that we'll talk about? So like we talked about, high cadence seems to save your legs to a very large degree. And it will essentially let you do more hard efforts than you might otherwise. Be able to do, like doing double days, or if you want to go beyond a certain amount of work, like, you know, we usually talk about kind of 20 minutes of intervals being plenty. I mean, you don't have to stop there. If I let people choose where to stop, they'll usually stop around 25 minutes of interval time. So it'll be like eight by three, five by five. If we're doing longer, it'll be like three by eight, something like that. Rarely do people want to go longer. But Rory, one of the things that we've seen in the literature. is that if people go longer, you get more stimulus. It's just really hard to do. Like, what was that, the Siler paper, it was four intervals. I know you know this one really well. And it was like four minutes, eight minutes, and 16 minutes. I think there was one other, it might have been two minutes. And the eight-minute interval group, if I recall correctly, had better improvements in VO2 max. and last time you and I talked about it you were like yeah because they did twice as much work as the 4x4 group and so vague memories of this yeah I mean so like there's that there's also you know you know we talk about kind of 20 minutes of interval time on you know like double efforts and whatever but like they were doing 30 they did 30 by 1 at some point they did they started with 6x5 they did 10x3 so it's Stuff that, especially if you're really looking to increase your aerobic capacity, being able to get more time in does seem to be a big factor, but from a coaching perspective, forget what's in the literature, from a coaching perspective, what is a reasonable dose? You know, if you're going to do one effort or one day of VO2s for the week and you can really dig deep, okay, maybe you want to do six by five. If you've got other stuff to do, maybe that's not the most practical way to do it, and you'll get that extra stimulus time in a little while. And maybe 4x5 is plenty for you. Maybe 3x5, you're seeing good improvements as you go. So those are the coaching aspects of thinking about VO2max training, where you don't have to go max, max, max, max, max. You don't have to maximize everything. You don't have to do everything to the nth degree. If you're seeing improvements, whatever you're doing is going great. I mean, I've consulted with people where they're like, well, this is what I'm doing. I like doing this and I'm seeing good improvements. I look at their files and I'm like, yeah, I agree. You're seeing good improvements. And here's the ways that you would want to modify that if those improvements stop to stop, you know, coming at the same level or you kind of plateau. But, you know, that's one of those things where I'd want to meet people where they're at. And I think, anyway, so thinking about confounders. It's really difficult to say at this point without a lot more research that if my preload theory is correct for higher cadence, it seems to work pretty well, but we don't really know, like we said before. And so maybe it's the ability to cluster more stimulus together from less fatigue. Maybe it's both. Maybe it doesn't matter. We need some proper science on this. And we don't at the moment have any, but we do have the couple studies that we've talked about. and that I've linked in the show notes where we see solid improvements and, you know, in a way it's like, I mean, it's better than those 30-15s, you know? So if we want an apples to apples comparison, it's one of the reasons that I prefer them. We tend to see better improvements too. But one of the studies mentioned above measured blood volume. And one of the things that happened was blood volume increased. through the study. And as we know, this could be a factor as well, particularly in early season training. We talked about a couple of Wostoks ago, the origins of noob gains, and it's basically increase in blood volume. A lot of plasma volume and red cells kind of lag behind that, but they eventually come up if the blood volume stays expanded for long enough. So it's like, you know, that's a factor. So if you are early season, and you are doing harder training, you will probably find more blood volume improvements and more improvements in general by going harder. So that's one of the things where you are in season makes a big difference in the improvements that you would expect to see. Does this make sense to you, Rory? Because I'm sure it does, but do you want to elaborate on this one? Yeah, I suppose there's a converse way to look at this in the sense that if we're trying to improve someone's anaerobic capacity, we're probably going to start them out with the intermittent work rather than the flat interval work because we know that in many ways, not least backed up by that Ronstadt paper we've just talked about for a bit, that that is potentially a more efficient way to do it than to get someone to do the sort of VO2 intervals that we talk about. Yeah. And so really it comes down to what do you want to see improve? You know, if we've got somebody super, super well-trained and I want to really focus on the cardiac improvements, I want to focus on that central aerobic capacity, you know, I'm going to lean in one direction. But if we want to improve anaerobic capacity, and especially if it's early season, like here's one thing that happens a lot of the time is early season, if you are Like if you're sick or your season gets delayed, and I'm like, man, we got to improve VO2 max, but we also got to improve anaerobic capacity. We got a short run-in to this person's first event, and I don't want them to be so on the back foot that they can't handle accelerations and things like that. So reach for the 30-30s, reach for the 30-15s, reach for the 40-20s. There's nothing wrong with that, and contextually, in a lot of ways, it's superior to separating the two, because, you know, especially like that, you can kill two birds with one stone, when otherwise you might need two or three workouts to get all that stimulus in. Yeah, if you're in a time crunch situation and you want to get ready for a crit, doing a bunch of 30-30s is probably going to be your best option in the very, very short term. Yeah, time crunch in terms of timeline, not in terms of, like, hours per week, to be clear. Yeah, you've got two weeks to get ready. Yeah. And so this is like, this is one of those things where knowing that VO2max intervals don't just improve VO2max or potentially can improve more things than VO2max is something to really consider. And that's, you know, one of the ways that confounds the issue is the way we measure this stuff. Like if we measure VO2max with a graded exercise test, with a RAM test, We can look at the power output at the end, and then we can look at the VO2max as well, and we can say, okay, did anaerobic capacity likely have an improvement? This is where we would need additional testing in order to get a basic critical power model, but when you are looking at this kind of testing, You know, I understand why they did 20-minute effort instead. Because that's, you know, in a lot of papers, that's a pretty standard test, is like, let's do a 15K time trial, let's do a 20-minute effort, et cetera, et cetera. So, and if you're looking for performance in cyclists, a lot of people still measure it with the 20-minute effort. So, it makes perfect sense to do that, especially in the, you know, kind of cultural context of cycling. Yeah, it's like a known standard at this point. Whether or not that standard reflects what we think it does is like a different question. But if you're trying to look at how things perform and be able to compare them to other papers, it's a useful way of being able to do that in the same way that we're talking about at the start of this very, very long podcast about why we tend to stick to very similar interval durations when we're... giving people VO2 max work is simply so that it's much easier for us to compare and see whether or not things are going as it should. Yeah. And another confounder here is that neural drive and motor unit recruitment also matter. And we mentioned this already, like, you know, I think there was a paper measuring like 20 minute or 15k time trial or something like that in cyclists doing strength training and not doing strength training. And they saw an improvement in that, you know, in their time trial power. But they did not see an improvement in VO2max between groups. So, you know, there you go. And, you know, thinking about definition of VO2max, I mean, this is why we, in the original requirements for VO2max put out, like, what, like a century ago now or something? Almost. More? That you need to have sufficient muscle mass being used. And, you know, it's like you won't hit, God, one of the VO2max episodes, we talked about this, looking at one leg cycling versus two. In one leg, the same person hit like, what, three liters a minute? And in two, they hit like four. And in four, they hit a plateau. And that plateau is a requirement to say it's VO2max. And if you don't see that plateau, it's called VO2 peak. And this is one of the reasons that the muscle mass being used can also influence the VO2max measurement. So in the same person with the same cardiac capacity, we will see running have a higher VO2max than cycling, have a higher VO2max than swimming. And it's because of a little bit of its posture, but also a lot of it's just muscle mass being used. I've learned recently that people use their arms in swimming. I'm still not sure what arms do, but I presume they are used for propulsion. And legs not so much. I think that's ridiculous. But we need to find better ways to swim if we're not using our legs that much. So that's why swimming, our muscles are smaller. In most people. I'm sure there are some gym goers who... I don't know. I've seen swimmers delts. They're like third wings. Yes, very true. So... 

I think that there was a study on low cadence training that actually illustrates this to a decent degree. It's kind of another kind of confounding effect on either anaerobic capacity or neural drive and motor unit recruitment. And we'll link that in the show notes too. They said there was greater improvement in aerobic capacity after a polarized training program, including low cadence intervals, than a freely chosen cadence. And this is one of the things that really needs to be analyzed with a critical lens. Because if you just take the abstract and you just take the title, you would go, wow, wow, I didn't know low cadence was going to improve my aerobic capacity. I thought the empirical cycling guy said it was going to be high cadence that improved my aerobic capacity. I mean, in a lot of ways, a lot of stuff can improve your aerobic capacity. If you're not that active, walking will improve your aerobic capacity. So we can dig into that study a little bit. I don't want to spend too much time on it, but they characterize their participants as professional cyclists. But given their characteristics, like their VO2 max and the power outputs that they had, I'd say professional is a stretch, charitably, it's a stretch. And they also see similar VO2 peak improvements between groups, but they see more ramp test power. And seeing similar VO2 peak between groups does not tell me there's a greater improvement in aerobic capacity. That's figure 2D for looking at change in Wmax versus change in VO2max. So Wmax is your final ramp test power. Your VO2max, or your VO2P, as they should have called it, is the peak value of VO2 during that test. And they reported that P is less than 0.05 for this R value in this scatter plot comparing these two variables, right? So I asked a smart person who knows statistics, what does this p-value mean for this? And I was told that this p-value of less than 0.05 means that the slope of the line is statistically significantly not a slope of zero. Rory is having a moment of, okay. So they're saying statistically. something happened. Statistically, this is not flat across the board, is what this is saying. R is 0.5, so there's a modest correlation. It's not great, it's not amazing. Once we bring it down to our R squared value, 0.3, which means that 30% of the improvement in ramp test power is attributable to the change in VO2 max, or VO2 peak, rather. And so... The interpretation that the low cadence group got better aerobic capacity improvements is not the way that I would prefer to interpret this. And so once again, we've got to read between the lines with the reported data. And in fact, it took me a while to actually figure out because of how the data was reported that because at first I didn't think that they had reported the R value of that plot. They just said P is less than 0.05. Okay, cool. But they actually did report it in the results section, and I had to go dig for that. But it was reported. And I just think this is another case of not, you know, we're either seeing improvements in anaerobic capacity, or we are seeing improvements in neural drive. from the low cadence, like we would with strength training. We just don't really know until we tease apart those variables with further study. So, you know, if we wanted to read into trivial effects that probably aren't even there, if there was a slightly greater improvement in VO2 peak in the low cadence group, it was, in my opinion, more likely due to better motor unit recruitment driving it, but the Data don't really discern between that and anaerobic capacity. But especially in this particular test group, I would say that it's very likely that it's an improvement in just being able to recruit a little more muscle mass if we are to say that there is a difference there and a slightly superior effect. But statistically, we actually cannot say that. So in all effects or for all purposes. It's kind of the same conclusion as in the 3015s paper. And so to me at least, the takeaway is that you can tweak your intervals based on how you do them between you can bias them towards central aerobic work and you can bias them more towards muscular work as in like VO2max versus anaerobic capacity and anaerobic endurance, I guess we could call it too, or some aspect of endurance. This is going to come with trade-offs between fatigue and the amount of stimulus that you want to create. Which brings us to our last section here. Rory is very relieved, and I'm sure you listeners are too. Other perfectly fine ways to train your VO2 max, which yes, we here at Empirical Cycling also use. And Rory will be like, yeah, we use all of these things as we go. Starting with the literature being pretty clear that pretty much anything works right off the bat. Like we said earlier, early season, you could do anything and you're going to find improvements. And if you are untrained, you'll probably see larger improvements. If you are well-trained, you're probably going to see smaller improvements, kind of getting back to a certain plateau. And remember, similar VO2max improvements in both Ronstadt groups and in both low cadence groups. Statistically, the same. But if you start at lower intensities, like if you just start with endurance training, you're just noodling around on your bike in the fall, in the winter, at some point, those VO2max improvements are going to stop. And you need to increase the intensity if you want to keep improving your central aerobic capacity. And at that point also, you start wanting to improve your muscular endurance. You want to start getting used to getting ready to race and things like that. Start folding in some other things to your training no matter what. And this is really one of my biggest issues with a lot of studies is that they get well-trained people coming in from the off-season. And I know it's an issue, but what can you do about it? Because if you want to get somebody who's been trained at this point, you're going to have to catch them in season and be like, hey, I'm going to take you out of season for one to two months. We're going to do a training protocol that's not going to help you. Race probably. It may improve your VIA to max. It's going to be kind of lower volume compared to what you're used to doing. And it'll probably hurt your performance by the end of the study a little bit, and you're not going to be in great shape to go do whatever racing you've got to do next. So how does that sound to a professional cyclist? Probably not good. So that's one of the issues with just a practical issue with doing this type of research on well-trained people. I probably should note there are instances where depending on probably rider discipline most of all you can have Some studies working with professional athletes where it is actually part of their regular training that they're trying things. So I'm thinking specifically right now of Mehdi Cordy and the work he did with British pro track athletes during his PhD where that was all trying to make them as fast as possible at the time. Like that wasn't off-season. Yeah, for sure. And that's even harder to negotiate. Yeah. Way harder. That is putting their lives in the researcher's hands, which is why you can imagine no one wants to do it. Yes. Yeah, it's putting, yeah, you're putting, like, you want to win a gold medal, and you're like, here's this totally new protocol. Okay, what we're going to do, one of them was, we're going to do isometrics on the bike. You're not even going to pedal. You're going to push on the pedal while it's not moving as hard as you can, and then you're going to go do a couple squats, and these other people are going to do a full-strength program. I believe the description in the paper I'm thinking of, and I think you're thinking of, is a modified ergometer, which was, as far as I'm aware, code for stuck a metal bar through it to stop it moving. When I used to do these, I would... At a specific angle. Yeah, I would take a ratchet strap on a fairly big gear, so I wouldn't actually put that much force through it, put a ratchet strap, I would wind it through a couple spokes on my wheel, and then I would tie it to a column that was holding up an entire floor of a house in order to stop my pedals from moving. And it worked. It wasn't just that, though, because I remember my favorite detail from that paper, so the thing for people who've obviously not read it. to imagine is they are sitting on a bike trying to produce as much force without the pedals moving as possible. But they wanted the athletes to remain sitting in the saddle at the entire time. If they got up out of the saddle, it was a failure. And so they put a weight attached to a strap, stuck it between the saddle and their ass. And if the weight fell off the saddle, it's because they'd gotten too much off the saddle. I forgot about that. Like, fantastic study design. I mean, yeah, if you want to have as few confounding variables as possible, there you go. And it's cheap. Otherwise, oh, we're going to put a pressure sensor in the saddle. No, you're going to sit on something. All right. So, where were we? So, yeah, that's one of the issues with a lot of studies, but it is informative for us. because it means that, like we said earlier, if you've got a short timeline, like you've got like a month between being really, really sick, like you were out for a month, you're off the bike, and now you're getting back to it, you've got a month before you want to start racing, and you're clear for high-intensity exercise, why wouldn't you do something like this? Why wouldn't you do some intermittent efforts in order to build your anaerobic capacity and your V2 max at the same time? I mean, and you'd probably see some pretty rapid improvements. I think it would really, the only mistake would be to think that you would get them later on too. Because the improvements definitely will plateau at some point with doing that kind of stuff. So you would still have to do appropriate recovery with this stuff too, because this is not something that you would want to do with block training. You would not want to just focus on just this for a little while. I mean, you could. I would argue that you would want to do some other stuff too because, I mean, one of the other things that I've heard worry for block training is I'm going to do an anaerobic block. So you've done all this training, you've done all this endurance riding, all this threshold VO2s and all the tempos and all the hill climbing and you've gotten ready and I'm getting ready to race. and now I'm going to do a month of just short efforts. Does that sound optimal? Sounds like it's going to make you tired. And very likely, you're probably going to lose some of your muscular endurance at that point too. It's just something that needs some topping up. So anyway, later, as you get through your season and you are and or you are also very advanced. And we talked about this a little bit on the FTP decision tree episode. The you need to go harder philosophy really holds up as you become more advanced and keep wanting to make improvements, although it does need concomitant rest. So the study on pursuit cyclists off-season is a pretty good example of potential improvements that you would see. If you are fairly well trained and still have some headroom to grow and you do a block of VO2 training, you know, on average, what I see from a block is like 15 watts improvement. Although at 6% to 8% at 300 watt FTP would be a 20 watt improvement. thereabouts. I think 20 to 30 watts, if I see that, I'm ecstatic. And a lot of the time, one of the reasons that I give people blocks the most often these days is they are professional cyclists. And they have to be in shape in like March, and their season ends in like October. So we don't have a lot of time to kind of spread VO2s throughout. We got to get you the improvements. And oftentimes, with my pros, I don't even test them. Like, there's no performance test. There's no FTP test. It's, we see the interval powers going up as you train, good enough for me. Why would we need to formalize this? And so, like, so, you know, in WKO5, like, somebody's modeled FTP is going to be, like, 20, 30 watts lower than it really is just because their hardest effort is, like, a 20, 30-minute FTP interval that they did four of, you know? So. is another reason to point back to being able to auto-regulate to understand exactly what the particular intensity you want to achieve feels like and basically matching that up with a number on the head unit. And if you're very good at it, you can tell if your FTP's gone up or down quite quickly. You don't need to go through the full Kolie Moore test. or anything, you know, like that. You could probably work it out in 10 minutes. Oh yeah, for sure. And I can nail my FTP in like 5 or less. 110. Right, eh, come on, give me like... 140. I was gonna go do a couple efforts later today, so last I checked it was like 180. 180. I just call it 200 for ego's sake. It'll be 380 when you add the 200 watts from the motor on your bike. That's true. I was going to ride the other one today. Anyway, a 20-watt improvement on a 300-watt FTP would be roughly in line with what we see in the literature, about 7%. 6-8% is the range. That's pretty normal if you can make it through the block. Like we saw, if you are immunocompromised, well, we didn't really see, we didn't dig into these papers, but if you are immunocompromised, if you're not recovering well, if you don't have sufficient ferritin stores, if you are anemic, you're probably not going to get any improvements from this kind of stuff because high-intensity stuff will have a large demand on your red cells. That kind of high-intensity... Even though you're not a runner crushing them in your feet, there's still a cost. And we see a bit of this cost in some of these papers. And so when we go to plan our workouts, acknowledging our confounders from earlier, we can take advantage, like we said. So like threshold training can also improve your view to max. Like early season, if you start doing some FTP intervals and you go, wow, my FTP is really improving every time I go out and do FTP intervals. Fantastic. I mean, that's, in an ideal world, it would always work like that. You would always do FTP efforts and just raise your FTP. I'm going to do FTP efforts for a year and get my FTP to 400 watts. I wish it worked like that. But at some point, you've got to reach for VO2s. So, I say that because that is, knowing that, that is one of the ways that we do VO2 max training. Endurance Training is one of the ways we do via to max training. And if you need to work on your climbing, like I've talked to a lot of people who are good time trialists, they come from the track or they live somewhere flat where they're really good at putting out power when they're doing 30 miles an hour, sorry, 50 KPH, or they suck at hill climbs. They suck going uphill. They're not that good at Pushing Big Wands, they're not that good at climbing steep stuff. So you go do a 6x5 on a steep hill with rest as needed, good chance you're going to be building your VO2max, but you're also going to be working your specific ability to climb steep hills, and you're probably also working your motor unit recruitment, and you're also working your anaerobic capacity. And so... To me, these are better at building VO2max earlier season, but later season, to me, they're more of a specific tool to address a weakness or a specific need in a race that's coming up. So to me, that's where I reach for these kinds of things. And especially if you are looking at increasing your muscular endurance over threshold, especially if you're going submax for these reps, you can bash out a lot of reps. if you're not going max. So, Rory, thoughts on these ones? No, nothing to add to that one. I can't remember. You said I'd say, yes, we do this. So I'm just going to say, yes, we do this. Yeah, okay. The 3x8s, we do these too. It's similar to the submax version of the hill climbs that we just said, but most people would probably not do this on a hill. Well, some people do if you've got an 8-minute hill around. Not everybody does. and so a lot of the time I see these being done on the trainer mostly quite honestly and so you just want to go smash three by eight you know earlier season it's going to work pretty well later season you probably want to go a little harder than you think and eight minutes is a weird it's a weird duration for some people for some people who are kind of more diesel-y eight minutes is totally fine to do a max effort at and be Be going pretty hard for the entirety of the max effort. But for somebody like me, eight minutes is pretty long. If I'm breathing that hard, I really don't want to do that much more than five or six minutes. Eight is kind of a stretch. And so this is where I would reach for this depending on the person and depending on where in season we are. Because if it's later in season and I want somebody to go max, max, I'm going to give you three or four minute efforts and you're going to do a bunch of them. and you might even do a double day. I think I'd rather do maximal 12-minute efforts than 8 minutes. Well, because 12 is long enough that you can pace it and so it doesn't hurt. It's like the difference between hurting and suffering. You like to suffer. Oh, it can hurt. I like to hurt. It hurts more when you're doing two. You do a steep two-minute hill climb. I mean, what was my best two-minute, like 500-something watts? I mean, just, ugh. Just the dry heaving at the top. And doing a 12-minute effort, I'm like, I get to the end, I'm like, that hurt, but like, man, two was pain. But that's part of having a big interim capacity. I can have a proper full hill climb dismount at the end of a 12-minute interval. Okay, fine. Whatever. We're going to stop arguing about this. We're going to the same place anyway. So 30-30s, 40-20s, intermittent efforts. Also great building VO2max early season and also good at building anaerobic capacity, which we've kind of talked about ad nauseum, so we don't have to go too far into that. Sprint interval training. In the literature, this also works at building VO2max, also works at building anaerobic capacity, especially early season, but also builds the skills of sprint specificity as well. especially as you go out to like 30 seconds with these efforts. And depending on how hard somebody sprints, this is another big P-max anaerobic capacity type thing. If you can generate a ton of power and you don't have a massive anaerobic capacity like me, if I do a 20-second sprint and then I try to do a short rest, after three or four, dry heaving, just the worst. So anyway, so that's a non-exhaustive list of all the VO2 max training that we also do. So Rory, does all that sound familiar to you? I'm sure it does. Not to lead the witness. Yes, we do all this. I would say like, even within all these different examples we've just gone over, we will deliver them in slightly different ways maybe, or we'll maybe combine them in theory. depending on what we want to accomplish, depending on like hopefully what you've picked up on there is a lot of this is time and season and training age dependent in many cases like even within like the 3x8s for instance you could do those in a whole bunch of different ways you could add the high cadence stuff if you wanted you could make it a really heavy effort up Steep Hills, again, combining the steep hill climb stuff if that had a specificity reason for you. There's a lot of ways in which you can skin these cats. So don't lock yourself to one particular one, but also know why you want to do one particular one. Yeah. Yeah, and that's part of that kind of gap analysis that we do. It's like, what can this rider do? And what are the demands at the event? And what do we need on the way? What are they good at? What do they need to work on? And that's just pretty standard coaching practice. So anyway, so to get to our practical takeaways, so that was just a bunch of examples, but for our practical takeaways, there's no real right way to do beta-max training because as we have laid out for two hours now, it really depends on what your goals are and where you're at. where you're at in season and what improvements you expect to see. You know, if I am super, super, super well-trained and I start doing a bunch of 30-15s and my anaerobic capacity is really high already, I'm not going to expect much improvements on anything. So, yeah. So, everything is a tool in the toolbox. Some tools are better suited for certain circumstances and certain people than others, and others are suited for other situations. And generally speaking, my overall training philosophy is to try to do the lowest fatigue intervals that will get somebody improvements. That is where I start. Doesn't mean that's where I always end up, but that's where I start. What's the least fatigue? and the most improvement that we can get. What interval set is going to accomplish this goal? And often it's beyond VO2max. So no matter what you need, number one, you need to get through your sets. Like you need to finish a workout. If you are going so hard that you cannot actually get to your last effort or even your third effort, rethink your pacing strategy. I think most people know that intuitively. But if you need permission to not absolutely destroy yourself in your first effort, permission granted. Yeah, this is aiming to do five-minute efforts and the following efforts you're doing three minutes and two minutes, not aiming to do five-minute efforts and you're doing four minutes 30 every time. Four minutes 30, pretty good, probably got it spot on. But if you're crashing out by minutes, then check your recovery. Check the intensity of your first one in particular and work out what it is that's restricting you. Yeah, and also do what's fun. If you like shorter efforts, do shorter efforts. Who cares? If you like doing longer efforts, do longer efforts. Who cares? I typically, like if I'm giving somebody a double, I'll usually give them longer efforts in the morning, shorter efforts in the evening. I have a couple clients who like it the other way. And I have absolutely no reason to argue with them on that. I'm like, okay, great. We'll do short in the morning and long in the evening. I think part of it's psychological where the time between efforts is more dreadful in the evenings. And you're like, man, I just want to get this over. I want as few rest intervals as possible. So if you're anticipating 10 efforts in the evening. That sounds awful. But if you're anticipating three efforts in the evening or four, it sounds doable. So all of the available literature, and I have not read all of it, but I've read a lot of it, may suggest fun crossover methods to improve VO2 max and anaerobic capacity in a short build, but really not much of it is going to tell us what well-trained cyclists need wants to do. what they should do once they've made those improvements. And we kind of alluded to this in the decision tree episode as well, where I think, practically speaking, what the literature does tell us is that the response is dose-dependent. And I say this with great caution, knowing now that what kind of bumpers we need to set up for people, is that If you are not seeing any improvements, you first have to look for your recovery. Make sure that your recovery is appropriate, your nutrition, your sleep, your caffeine, your stress levels. Dial it all in. If it's not good, then work on that stuff first before you go mucking around with your intervals, before you start going to try to like 6x5 from your 3x4x5. Yeah, I've had clients who like hit their intervals perfectly. Like you wouldn't look at the workouts and think anything was wrong, but it was like the off-the-bike recovery wasn't right. And so even though the workouts were good, what we were looking at between workouts didn't indicate what we expected to happen. Yeah. And this is, I hate trying to sound salesy, but this is one of the things that you can benefit. from with a consultation. If you're really having trouble and, you know, you want some advice, we're happy to take a look at this for you. And it doesn't have to be us. There are a lot of coaches offer this service. So if you've got somebody else you vibe with better, please seek them out too if you're having issues. So I think overall, you know, my Biggest takeaway that I can say for a certainty in all of this is that lowering the fatigue cost with higher cadence efforts is realistically a very worthwhile and time-tested strategy that comes from well before my time. And so I still don't think everybody needs to do this. There's a time and a place for this. So start small and watch your power improving. Especially watch your power. If you're doing normal cadence, if you're doing steep hills, whatever it is, compare like for like as much as you can. Like if you're on the trainer, but you really like to do steep hills and your trainer power is kind of low and also you're a little heat soaked, you know, try to cool yourself off and compare trainer intervals to trainer intervals. So when you're improving, stop, try some rest, adjust your off-bike stuff. if you think that there's something holding you back there. And then after you rested, keep going. I mean, if you've ever seen like, if you've ever read that like a starting strength training program, it's very similar to that. You kind of pack on the easy improvements as you go until you can't really do it, take a little rest, then try it again, see what kind of improvements you can make again. And you will kind of see like a, like a kind of a decreasing improvements as you go. And then at some point you're going to get stuck. And then once everything else is taken care of and you are riding your endurance appropriately easy or short at least, you're giving yourself enough rest, your nutrition style, then your sleep, everything, then and only then can you think about increasing the dose. And if you're like, I don't have any problems with that and I think I could increase the dose, try it. One of the things that we always warn our clients when we are increasing the dose with our clients is this may suck and this may not work. And if it doesn't, we're going to try something else after we determine why this probably didn't work. And then we're going to figure out what else can we do. There's a lot of strategies to improve V2 Max and a lot of strategies to improve fitness and having multiple tools to reach for is always fantastic. I can usually, like if you're going to try a block, which by the way, I'd say 90% of people that I talk to probably don't need a whole block. If you've been doing it and it works for you, great, you don't need to go back. But if you are relatively new, if you're relatively untrained, if you are not sure about your recovery, don't do it. I would say, what, one out of every 10? Times, I think I'm going to give somebody a VO2 block, I pull the plug on them in about two or three workouts. What's the rate for you, Rory? Probably about the same. I tend to throw a VO2 workout in at the end of someone's block, and then I have something to compare to at the start of the block, so I can get a really good first sight of how's this probably going to go. That's smart, I like that. depending on things like workout quality and just how knackered they were at the end of a previous block. Yeah. Yeah. So oftentimes, you know, you can, you can, you can check yourself as you're going with VO2 max type training. And if you feel like you are getting some confounding effects, like if you think your VO2 max is improving, but it's really, you think it's just your anaerobic capacity. Uh, you can just, you can, you can wait a little while, you can stick the course, because at some point your anaerobic capacity is going to stop improving. And if you keep seeing improvements, okay, cool, your VAT max is going up. There you go. Uh, but early, early on especially, it's really hard to tease the two apart. And, you know, we could do a whole other podcast, and we are way over what we thought we would be at right now. So, um, we're going to skip that. But, um, I guess the last thing I want to mention here is that with great training stimulus comes great recovery. And we can never really forget the side of that fact is you have to recover. And that is one of the things that holds back a lot of people when they start to increase the training intensity. And it's one of the things that I see most commonly when I consult with people is we talk about recovery. I'd say probably half of my consults. So definitely a thing. So Rory, final closing thoughts? Yeah, like there's a lot of ways for you to skin this aerobic cat to steal a cog. Rory says that with one of his cats sleeping on his desk. She's asleep. She can't hear me. I was telling my other little ginger cat how our orange towels were made out of the last cat that misbehaved. But no, there's a lot of ways for you to do VLtoMax intervals and ultimately it's coming back to do the thing that works best for you and make sure that you're actually assessing whether or not it's working for you. because we always come back to that. It's like, don't just do things blindly. Don't just follow the plan because that's what it says. Make sure it's doing what you think it should because if it's not, there's a whole load of fatigue getting ramped up with not a lot to really come out of it. Yeah, yeah. I always like to say that your plans are not written in stone. Yeah. That's the very first thing I say to people when I bring them on as a new client. Yeah, and I also think that, you know, unless you're flying by the seat of your pants like me, well, for me, my plan is written in water. It disappears the second I think of it. Most plans are written in sand. You know, they stick around for a little while and sometimes something will come wash it away. That's a horrible analogy that we've overextended, but regardless. Yeah, I hope everybody's taken something out of this episode. I hope we've made some clarifications. I'm sorry we're not taking listener questions. We are dead on our feet as is. And so if you'd like to reach out for coaching with Rory, myself, or any of our other wonderful Empirical Cycling coaches, please email me or check out the website, empiricalcycling at gmail.com or empiricalcycling.com. Head over to the contact page. There's a little background info that I would love to have from you before you reach out. If you want to consult, same thing. Just say that you want to consult instead of looking for coaching services. And if you would like to support the show, a five-star rating and a glowing review wherever you listen to podcasts always goes a long way. And I guess it's now tradition, Bert and I will say hi to our mothers. So, hi, Ma. Hi, Mom. All right, everybody else, go call your mother and we'll see you next time. Bye.