Planning in Training

I am Dr David Lytman, a health and human performance specialist. Welcome to the Norwegian Method Podcast. Welcome to the Norwegian Method Podcast and thanks to Morton, ladies and endurance fueling for sponsoring today's episode. Check the show notes for links and details of a one-time 20% off code to use at Morton.com on orders of the one-slash 52 collection, a one-week training pack. Welcome back to the second episode of the Norwegian Method Podcast. I'm joined here again by Lulav, thanks for joining me again and today we're going to talk about planning. The remit here was for us to talk to age group athletes and one of the things you gave as feedback to me before was actually how many of these age group athletes are spending significant amounts of time planning, talking about multi-year approaches, all the sort of stuff. I said, "Listen, hopefully it trickles down, hopefully they're starting and if they aren't, hopefully this helps." And let's get into it. So I guess let's start with probably more so pre-planning is testing. I know that your off-season always starts with testing, right? And we've seen the videos, so what would you suggest is an optimal amount of testing and then what do you think is the minimum? So let's give the two bounds within there, so maximum minimum amount of testing. And let's call testing a metabolic profile, so labs, let's call it VO2 max, et cetera. And then once we have that baseline, how do we then go from there and we can go, what you do with Christian and Gustav or we can go sort of a step back as well or perhaps we do both? Sounds good. I think I'll actually let you lead away here because this one is going to, I think the problem a little bit when it comes to planning and so on, they're one of, this is more, let's say, a way when you have reverse engineered, and you're looking at, okay, what you've done the testing, so you have identified a gap, how do you bridge that gap? Yep. And here, of course, there is a lot of different theories for how you should prioritize your training and so on. I think that at the moment you have defined your approach the same way we do that you basically you do exactly, okay, what is the target, what are the goals, what are competitions that we are going to work towards? And then you have identified the gap by doing testing and define, okay, you're looking at the performance model, so metabolic profiling is obviously one part of it, but you do also mechanical power profiling or velocity profiling of often at it. And then when that is being done, it comes down to how do you distribute your budgets? And that is, of course, normally done to prioritization, and then of course you have a lot of different kinds of prioritization models. Some do like traditional prioritization, some do reverse prioritization. Of course, it would depend maybe probably a little bit on what kind of sport you're doing. So, of course, for most Olympic sports whether duration of the events are shorter than one hour and some extending up towards two hours and cycling maybe being the one sport. Let's say endurance sport, combined with sailing that has the longest effective competition time, I would say. Then people are starting to talk a little bit more about maybe you do like reverse extrapolation, so you do like more like the high intensity stuff early in the season to create a fundament for what to come. And then as you progress throughout the season, then you start to do more the specific or they say long, longer duration work. But then of course you have those people that just do traditional prioritization where they just go by base work early in the season or what they call like resource work. And then they start to build in build period where they're starting to increase a little bit the intensity and then you come into the specialization phase before you go to taper. But I would say all models are correct and all models are wrong. All models are wrong, all models are useful, 100%. So then maybe let's think about it a different way. If I'm an age group or approaching you and I say listen, I'm competing the world championships, this will be in October and it's now November of the previous year. So I've got effectively a year, how do you approach the situation there? How would you approach that? I've got 20 hours a week of training and I've got 50 weeks to go from there. So what would that look like from you? Where would you want full scale testing, where would you want to have check ins and those sort of things? So again, first I would understand what is my current status of course. You already define the goal and it's called next year and you probably also have a target that you're going to read that you are aiming for. So maybe you're looking to climb the ranks or maybe even aiming for the podium. And if you're aiming for the podium, then of course then you can look at history a little bit and you know the range of where people are depending on the weather it's on. Yes, they are going a little bit faster, some years a little bit slower, very much depending on the weather of course. But you have a fairly good idea of what is the target. So you already told me one very important thing and that is basically what is your goal. You're an age grouper and you're going for the world championship in Kona. My first question would be do you have experience with racing in Kona from before? Yeah, so let's say that I've raced and I want to go faster by pretty conservative. So let's go, let's say I went 11 hours and I want to go 10.30. And so you've been in Kona and you've been racing 11 hours. Okay, that's super because then you know, Ironman courses are very different. So like let's say a time target that works in one course doesn't necessarily work in another course. So you already said that you want to improve your time by 30 minutes. And when what I would do then is that of course for most people they don't have access to a laboratory where they can do testing and even less where they can do the testing they want to do. You are more or less forced to do a certain kind of protocol that that lab adheres to or believes in. So I would say that that probably will have a very limited value to your, let's say to your understanding of your performance. Well, let's double click on that for a second so I can go down the road and get my VO2 max done. They'll give me thresholds with it. They'll give me paces for that. And let's say they're good enough that they'll do that for bike and run. So now I can get a velocity of VO2 max. I can get velocities at different lactates with heart rates for both running and cycling. So now you have that and you have wattages of course as well. So now you've got a bit of a profile. Let's talk about that and why that might not be as helpful as perhaps some other testing you might do. So first of all, it depends on, we, it's not long time ago since our power meters had an accuracy of plus minus five percent. And then they came down to plus minus two percent and that's not even, that's even less time ago. Now we are in general down to let's say one plus minus one percent. But we also have to understand that that's not always true. If you take even like one brand, one model and you basically take five of that one, you'll find probably bigger variations between them than one percent. One specific one that you are having will probably for a while stay within one, that one percent. But most likely over time it will start to drift because there are bearings and all the things that are getting a little bit worn, many things that are happening to it. But in general, I would say power meters are very accurate and reliable. I don't spend, I don't spend very much time on questioning whether the power meter or the power for a day for Christian was correct or not. Further the problem with metabolic cards is that they have unfortunately an accuracy which is even less, that's not the only problem. That's further enhanced by that respiratory dynamics are highly dynamic. So that it fluctuates quite a lot because your breath is not going to be constantly. So even if you're less say that you're looking at 60 breaths per minute, you're not going to breathe one time every second. Yes, in average you do that, but not, that's not the case. It's the same with heart rate. That's why we measure for example, heart rate variability. And there's also, call it our breath frequency variability. And that means also that even if your volume of air is reported to, for example, 200 liters per minute or let's say your title volume, or to make it simple for myself, let's say your breathing frequency is 50 and your title volume is four liters per breath and means basically now you're ventilating 200 liters per minute or exhaling 200 liters per minute. The problem is that your title volume is not either going to be four liters per breath, it's also changes. And the body is of course very sensitive, very, very sensitive to what's going on inside it, like for example, what is the levels of carbon dioxide and then the levels of carbon dioxide is of course a result of your oxygen levels in your body. So for example, let's say that you are running and you are under, let's say you are breathing a little bit less for very short time, that will automatically drive a higher extraction of oxygen for the same amount of air now, but at the moment basically you start to compensate you start breathing more than it starts to reduce the fraction of, or less edX of oxygen that it extracts from there. And this is not like on a bike where you basically if you like put in more force, you just get more power for the same cadence or you will just start to accelerate. This is not how the body is working because this is more on the call it the supply side. You can see the demand is basically the velocity or the power, you created the demand, you say, okay, this is the power I'm going to do now. And then it takes a little bit of time for the body to respond to this. One of the things that also this is like if you were going to do a test on a bike or you are going to do a test or running on the field, you would never do like one minute ramp, one minute ramp, one minute ramp, one minute ramp, basically to like to exhaustion to understand basically your velocity profile or pole profile or anything like this. This is a little bit of like an artificial setting in order to like say create a robust protocol in order to determine in a standardized way view to max across athletes. We know there are different methods that you can employ that will easily drive up or create a high view to max and just do a ramp, a graded exercise test. But that's not the point. The point is that you are locked into doing a certain protocol in a lab, which is fairly out of context for what really you are training for or what you are looking to improve. And secondly, also your threshold, then we can ask what is threshold. No, there are so many definitions of it that it is crazy that it's we don't have a universal language language for it. There are of course some models which are more like scientifically you can or like say reproducibility of the models are much more like maximum like the steady state and so on. But other than that, then there is getting quite fuzzy. Having access to a metabolic or a cart or a laboratory to do testing is something that you don't have. And again, it has maybe a limited value. More important, I would say then, to do the testing or to understand the gap would be to do a let's say at least for the bike to a power profile, but it's also quite useful and to do that in a place where you can also look at the ratio between let's say power and velocity. Yep. So here, the reason why it's important to go out and test on a stretch or on a controlled place, basically let's say you go somewhere which is very you know the environment is fairly controllable. It means that now you can even look at using like methods like virtual elevation and you can even look at your CDA so you can look at the power to speed ratio or yeah, and that gives you one more detail as well. One, you can get your power profile, you have your velocity profile and now you can also look at everything from biomechanics to work economy aerodynamics and these kind of things. I would say that's exactly the same today we have power meters and running which is extremely repeatable. That means you can also go out and you can do a power profile also on the run and then you again then get a velocity profile and you or speed profile and you get power profile. And this sense you can also start to look exactly on there also what's going on there. Are you producing a lot of power for the same velocity as other people are doing or are you equally good there is it more like a limitation in your profile than necessarily in the optimization between the two in the work economy. So this is probably the single the two single most important measures that you can do in order to understand a little bit where to optimize your performance. The optimization that happens on the biochemical side is much more advanced and I would say there are not probably that many people that actually know how to integrate it because it's very often a field where coaches are not normally working coaches normally work with power and they work with speed or velocity while very often you find more the facilities are working in the laboratories are doing the metabolic profiling but the problem is that they don't work with power. So there's a disconnect actually between the metabolic measurements and power measurements but there is actually very little disconnect between the power and velocity because that's the tool of the coach and the athletes. That was a long detour so bring it back exactly into the question what to do now is in November you're going to improve your. Well we'll come to that in one second I think just to further explain a little bit better for people I guess is the VO2 max or lactate tests you'll do in a lab but generally as you say the goal is to achieve end game so VO2 max velocity, maximal effort at you usually within 10-15 minutes so if I'm correct and correct me if I'm wrong you would be profiling that slightly differently which is knowing roughly where you're going to end up so you know that your athlete whoever that is is going to have a roughly this velocity and therefore you use a longer step to have the same rough duration and you probably have a good idea of duration that should be reasonable before you start to see durability issues so you say okay we don't want to go for more than 40 minutes maybe it's 30 maybe it's 20 because we know that there's fatigue it's going to play in and we know that you're going to be roughly in this spot and that's really what you care about is that yes maybe the top but also perhaps around thresholds you probably started it below there use a longer stage so you hit steady state and you have a better understanding of where things are at or relatively metabolic steady state compared to say a one minute interval where things are so volatile so you say a five minute block and you go across this and you use a much more precise way of going listen we're going to end up here we're going to back a couple of steps and it's a lot more the increments are smaller as well is that fair to say yeah that's one but I would also say that I would create a protocol in order also to to say disclose or to identify what is important for that specific athlete and modality as well so for example I would use a different protocol in the laboratory for let's say for a short course athlete versus a while a long course athlete and also depending on modality I would also use different protocols I wouldn't go with one standard protocol I would I would create a protocol which is bespoke in order to exactly get us detailed picture of that athletes profile because again that is much more interesting for me than creating like statistical data because I'm looking to do let's say to drive peak human performance and that is something that you have to do that it's a research project into each individual more less you can't go by okay this worked for my grandfather and this worked my for my father so it should work for me as well and and you're and you're really focused on in there is hitting the the right velocities at those critical junctions call it a threshold that you're crossing call it the VO2max that you're hitting you really are interested in that velocity because that is almost more helpful in some regards because then you can prescribe based on that velocity as well knowing roughly where you're at so you're starting to see the link in the model between velocity and the metabolism which is I guess what I'm trying to get to yeah and and how this actually plays out in the field is that in the lab of course what we get there is that we get of course output numbers and we get like input numbers or input and output numbers they are unfortunately disconnected when you come out into the field they are not the same so for example if you go into laboratory of course some they are closer some they are further away and that is purely a function of actually even how much time you have been using on a treadmill or on a turbo whatever and if you're not used to that there will probably be a bigger gap between your power on the road and the power on the on the turbo for example or on and so on and that means also that you can't necessarily just take and you say hey we found your power or let's say your threshold on the lactate profile to be or even your FTP for let's say if you test it or not turbo inside you can't take the number and just use it out in the field it's not going to be the same exactly and that means also that that means also that what I look for more in the lab are of course exactly to get like very deep understanding of the profile of the athletes and the biochemical and biomechanical efficiency and then I would say that when we move out into the field of course then I have some numbers that I can work on and I would for then for the intensity control this is where I would then know that okay this guy sits around let's say for example you're using lactate so I would know that okay for Christian he sits in around let's say a sometimes of the year depending on where we are and this kind of thing let's say he sits around let's just use a number 2.5 millimeters then I we go out and we know in the laboratory we found that to be 2.5 millimeter would be I say that sits around 350 60 watts whatever and then when we go out we would say okay we know that he is let's say not riding as well in on the turbo as it does outdoors just because of the sheer amount of hours that is training outdoors compared to indoors and then when he is training outdoors we would maybe okay let's let's target 360 and then we just see what the lactate is there on the first interval and then maybe he comes in not now let's say 2.1 millimeter or something just like making up some numbers here but and then we say okay that's that's good just how do you feel and then you said I feel like I'm actually I have I'm not I'm not what the same RPE that I I feel felt in the lab at the same number so I can probably go harder and still not be a 2.5 so okay how much 20 watts okay fine and it goes off again this takes less this whole thing takes less than a minute and I think that's really important to underline again is the appease a really big part of that is that they like people need to be dialing this isn't I've spoken to the guys about this and they say you know we use all the text that we don't need to use it which the whole thought is let's get our internal computer and our internal technology better able to understand our physiology and where I can go where I can't go so the whole goal is to use the technology to be able to not use it right it's not to be reliant on it and be fragile as a result it's to be robust against you know having all this feedback so that your internal feedback is better so he's then saying and the other thing that double click on from what we talked about earlier in the podcast in the in the first episode is the self efficacy of your building in christian there which is what do you think oh your 20 watts okay cool let's go 20 watts and see how it is and empowering him to make that decision based on that is so crucial as well yeah so where we're out is we talked a bit about why we wouldn't test necessarily in the lab in a traditional lab how that test may vary if we're doing it in the field we've got velocity profiles we've got speed profiles that are probably better than metabolic profiles necessarily for the most part of people so now we have an age group who's trying to you know go from 11 hours to 10 30 and we have some variety some idea of velocity and power profiles so I guess how would you build a season for them what does that look like I guess we have obviously a gap analysis we now know where we need to go we need to go there is it a linear thing or is it do we put a period of training in place and then retest how does that look there I would say that I would to avoid any force positive of force negatives stick to the velocity profile and power profile because bad data is worse than no data yes I would say so yes and so when you now have this speed profile or velocity profile or an and power profile then I would basically look at okay where do we want to be and where are we currently and also because you probably already are fairly fast partly if you're done 11 30 already then and you're looking to bring it down to 11 hours yeah yeah go 11 30 to 11 or we can go 11 to 10 30 then of course you probably have a quite long training history as well so you can compare a little bit like okay what is your what is your profile now maybe you've done a profile before if you have done that as brilliant if you don't have then of course you still probably have done quite a lot of efforts that are let's say close to exhaustion or quite good so you can start to compare that a little bit what what it looks like now and let's say now you have a profile where and this is of course where we start to come into domain where people ask yeah but what is a good ratio what's a bad ratio between when you have a profile what what should be between five minutes and 10 minutes and 10 minutes and 20 minutes for example I think we will have to come back to that a little bit later more practical cases but normally let's say you find another guy that you are training with for example then you can at least start to compare a little bit between the two of you and when you comparing between the two of you you can maybe say oh we know that you are strong and endurance and this look this is your profile oh that's quite interesting maybe this is good and you're also looking to get better so maybe both of you actually are looking to actually make your profile flatter so let's call we're gonna distinguish between I'll let's say a more horizontal or flatter profile and a more vertical profile more vertical profile or first two being faster and then having less endurance or the other way around so basically a flatter profile more endurance yeah more vertical profile so horizontal profile more more endurance profile and a vertical profile a more like short duration athlete so you're looking you're doing an armament so obviously you don't you really don't need that kind of high end power or like top speed or whatever you are really looking to have something that that allows you to run fast for a long time cycle fast for a long time swim fast for a long time and without basically tapping too much into let's say your carbohydrate stores because you're gonna you have to spend them wisely over the day in order to go the fast possible so then the way I would prioritize it is that for example if I see and I say that you for most triadies I would say that they they probably have a fairly flat profile either either through genetics or through training right I'm either alive there they've either had that all their life that's why they ended up in triathlon or some propensity towards that yeah or they've ended up there through training either way and I would say that maybe not so much because of genetics I would say more just and you could maybe say that genetics is a part of the reason but I would say more a little bit what you actually just prefer doing in your training because basically your profile is heavily influenced with what you do in your training and let's say that you really like those long rides where you're pushing like semi-hard or something like this that's gonna have a huge impact on your profile just touching quickly back on this maximum like the steady state and the time to exhaustion for anything to have like an impact on your profile the reason why maximum like the steady state or metabolic steady state is a very effective point is because we have a limited amount of energy and time available to do something with our profile and the higher intense do you go the shorter the time to exhaustion is gonna be at the moment let's say that duration that you're targeting is long enough that you really are stressing dominantly your aerobic system that is also then going to influence mostly also your aerobic system too of course the higher you go the more often impact it will also have on your aerobic system too but basically the body will always try to fix let's say your problem or basically demand that you are trying to solve the the most sustainable way easiest and most sustainable way that means that for longer duration obviously the body will not if you do like long rides and you do them also like semi hard you can't really have a very powerful aerobic system as a function of that so you will typically train down your aerobic system if you like do a lot of that kind of training especially close to exhaustion but in order in order to have an improvement basically what we're looking to do is to make a dent in your profile or velocity profile so let's say that what I mean by a dent is basically if you know plot for example a line between your short medium and long duration power so let's say that we for the sake of simplicity we use 5-minute power 20-minute power and 60-minute power and you do those kind of efforts then basically for you to to influence your profile you are looking to make a dent in that one so basically you're either pushing up your 60-minute power or you're able to ride at 60-minute power the same power you you did for 60 minutes yesterday you are looking to ride now that longer tomorrow I wouldn't probably advise doing that but anyway and the same thing actually if you're trying to do something in the more less in the short duration domain than even not five I would say even five minutes a long duration but let's say you want to bring up your aerobic power you are looking basic to increase let's to see exactly that your power actually now increases in a really short domain and what I can say immediately is that you do this repeatedly and you do this in a like our correct prioritized way you will also basically see that your lactate constant let's say that your lactate accumulation rate actually goes up as well I'm hesitant to call it lactate well you can call it lactate production as well yeah lactate production but you will basically see that your lactate production comes up for the same amount of time so when you do a maximal effort then you know that also your anaerobic system is getting more powerful but basically for the let's say for your short really short duration power to come up basically normally your anaerobic or let's say the glycolytic power or anaerobic power including the rest of the anaerobic systems have also to become more powerful as well there is a fairly good correlation between this guy if there is not a correlation in these two then it is purely because there is a let's say a stars to become a decoupling between efficiency or let's say the metabolic or let's say anaerobic part of it and the power output of it which is not good or maybe it is good because your efficiency is increasing but that depends on which direction it goes so without further due back to to the profile so basically then if you are riding a lot you have a very flat profile you can imagine that if you now just do traditional parallelization and your time constraint then you're to make a little bit like a fun anecdote or yeah or to simplify the little bit your 60 minute power cannot be higher than your 30 minute power yeah 30 minute power can't be higher than let's say your 5 minute power and if yeah that's impossible if you do all out efforts true all out efforts and you are the state you're going to them are the same and even then even if you're not equally rested going to them even then still your 5 minute power should be significantly higher than your 60 minute power and so but if the drop or let's say the ratio between these becomes too low so let's say your 60 minute power is very close to your 30 minute power like doing rides trying to improve a 60 minute power will be very difficult so what you have to do is you have to start with a short adoration and start to race race that short adoration power first so you create some room for your longer duration power to increase the difficulty with this is very often that when you first increase your shorter adoration power is that you actually might actually reduce your longer adoration power and then when you try to switch back you are just back to square one and this is of course a little bit why you need to put in just enough of a maintenance work when you first developed that less a shorter adoration power so that you don't lose that when you are now trying to bridge back your less a longer adoration power and the same way also when you're trying to like lift your shorter adoration power you're trying to do just enough work that you are maintaining your longer adoration power and that would dictate a little bit how I would then like let's say let's say do my let's say my season but what we also have to be aware of is that of course doing more like high intensity work means also that people very often are more prone to get sick injured and other things as well so I would always if I had a longer offseason I would always start doing anyway some call it like base work or whatever like this just to get back get the movement patterns back in and then gradually start to bring in bring it more into that intensity as the weeks passes by and you're getting more ready for that even though you are far away from your competition and then start to look at okay what how long time would it likely take to change this characteristics and how much time do I have do I need in order to start to harvest on what I basically then develop in order to maximize that on race day we are brought to you today by Plasmade Plasmade is a proprietary liquid performance in recovery supplement formulated using only one active ingredient French maritime pine bark extract aka PBE PBE is an adaptogen which triggers your body to produce a stabilized form of nitric oxide which is a powerful vasodilator improving blood flow to muscles and the brain Plasmade is for use pre and post-exercise augmenting other energy and hydration supplementation used in addition to all of this Plasmade also has powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects which aid in recovery from training and competition for your 25% discount on Plasmade and to learn more head to the show notes yeah I think I'll touch on a couple of things there there was a concept we used to talk about a lot in strengthening conditioning called anatomical adaptation and it's the equivalent of base phase for endurance athletes and I think that's really important it's a really cool way to think about it is the tissues aren't ready and the tissues are what's going to break down especially in an age group athlete especially in somebody who's trying to do triathlon like the most common injuries overuse injuries you need to reintroduce things very slowly and then be able to bring intensity later so at the moment we have a we've got a power profile with offices and we've done a bit of base building now we're sort of all right we've got let's call it 11 months to Kona and we've got a bit of an idea of how we want to go about it you know I'm a flat profile therefore I'm going to start by raising the ceiling you know a little bit so if we use a house analogy you know my floor is too close to my ceiling I need to raise my ceiling a little bit before I raise my floor again so now okay I have this trajectory how often am I testing or is it actually you don't need a test you can use race or you can use training data in a much better way or as a way to not have to tape it down as we talk so I think that again now we just said that okay lab is something that's going to be unavailable to most athletes or not as quite not quite as helpful as we'd love to believe yeah so that means that you are done limited of course to your power meter and your GPS and there are two ways to go about this one is where you have like a standardized set in cycling or running or or actually you need a couple of standardized sessions in in cycling and you need a couple of stride standardized session in running and the same for swimming so those would be indicator sessions so we say we do call it whatever you want workout and we do this every now and again we look at the metabolic profile of that so a is the velocity changing or if the velocity is constant is our heart rate decreasing our internal measures decreasing as well well actually not metabolic profile because we are not doing metabolic profile we are only doing power profiling or velocity profiling okay sorry so indicators of intensity I guess are they changing so is lactate changing or is heart rate changing or something like that changing for the same output or is the output improving oh yeah yes so if you have access to a lactin meter that's actually quite that is quite a very practical tool because if you of course we have talked about of course all the caveats yep or pitfalls with a lactin meter and many of them exist for heart rate as well yeah the record yeah and then and then but let's the benefit of course if you do a lot of lactin measurements is of course that you add robustness to the measurements because at some point you're gonna get several measurements that are probably gonna be around where they are actually yep and you get some outliers and if you now see that of course your power starts to increase for the same lactic concentration that is in general a good indicator of course again we can complicate this by saying ah maybe there is we are more hydrated or higher plasma concentration or plasma volume not concentrated by volume but let's for the sake of simply keep it simple then generally an increase in power duration for the same lactic concentration is a good indicator of that the aerobic system is getting more powerful so your sustainable power output is getting better and vice versa if it it goes the other right other direction then most probably your aerobic system is getting more powerful all your fitness is just deteriorating but so for these indicator sessions people are looking to improve yeah work done in a given time frame so half hour power is increasing so more work in the same time or more distance covered or something yes yes as simple as that stopwatch yeah distance be done and I would even say that these are actually brilliant power you can also use power profiling or velocity profiling sessions as well where you go out and you you have a session and then in this session instead of having like today let's say you do you're going to have a high intensity workout or whatever so let's say you have a high intensity workout today and now instead of going out and you do a couple of like certain intervals you maybe you do like progressive intervals and you do them quite like more like ramped so that you start off like more easy on them and then basically you build towards like like a five minute all out at the end of that one that gives you a very good idea exactly of okay what have happened to my five minute power now have it improved have it have it is a stable or is it have it gone down a little bit and this is what is important this is important to do not only for that single one you have to do it for least two power outputs I would say maybe three three different ones or one short like like five minutes or we can even be two minutes but then but at least one short one medium and one long duration and normally spanning of let's say if you do if you read some of the papers that are written on critical power modeling and if you want it to let's say comply to most of the methods that are used to do power or let's say power profiling then you would try to stick between two to 15 minutes on this one there are models or where you can go outside of this and in reality you really don't need a model you're just looking at the raw numbers you're just looking at as long as you're keeping the durations the same to all like fairly the same when you're going all out then basically you will just look at how which direction is a curve tilting have you grown the whole curve basically all your power outputs have become better fantastic this is brilliant you're really responding well to your training if you have started to tilt your pivot your curve then of course it's then you are more like coming more into the specialization where you're starting to trade a little bit more less of the high intensity training more into let's say your longer duration training and so on and are they doing this within a couple days so they do the short duration one day and the long duration another day or are they doing it across one session so they say listen to a one minute five minute then a half hour or how would you do it really doesn't matter as long as you keep it fairly consistent so for example of course you wouldn't maybe get like a true a true say 20 minute all out let's say if you do it like Asa of course you can always try to structure this in a smart way also you do so you do in in in which order you do them but let's say for a sake of simplicity you do it as a one minute or let's say two minute all out and then you do a five minute all out and then you do a 10 minute all out for example all you do at five or 10 and 20 minutes really doesn't matter but either you would keep them apart with the same kind of training schedule over a couple of days so let's say you do it over a week so you do one Tuesday one Thursday one Saturday for example and all you could just do all of them on the same day but keep but let's say the preconditions and the way you execute it has to be the same for it to be as comparatively as possible and probably even best on if you do it sometimes outdoors and sometimes indoors that's gonna skew your assholes so that's also something to keep in mind and then again also if you do it let's say in the winter season indoor in a trainer and then you are starting to spend less and less time on your turbo as summer starts to approach and then you get back on the turbo and do it also you might get deflated number two because you don't have the same amount of our spend of the turbo so you're a little bit like say call it out of turbo training so I would again we are looking to make things perfect that might not be possible to make perfect so you have to make the best out of it but this profile is something I would look to do on a regular basis and I would say that like like early this season you'll have much more response so I would say that every four weeks is probably good so you don't waste more time than necessarily on where you could have just make adjustments and the reason you do that is to then change prescription going forward so it's not testing for testing sake it's testing so that a prescription improves A based on how we've adapted so I've seen a pivotive my curve that I don't want to see or I do want to see yeah and let's double down all that's changed some stuff yeah and also then I can prescribe intensity at a different rate because now my curve has changed as well so it is both about prescription but as well as feedback so it's it's feed forward and feedback mechanisms for these people as well exactly really important to remember that I would say you're effectively talking about two things which is let's keep a situation sterile let's taper for two weeks and then go to a lab and do a V2 max test or whatever or go do whatever testing protocol I want or let's never test and go in the field and just look at my field numbers and how do they change and that's the spectrum we're deciding between and you have to choose where you lie on that you have to control as many variables as possible but it's good the more variables you control the harder it becomes and the more maybe valid it is but the less real world it might be and the harder it is to start balancing that particularly if you want to keep training through it because if you spend you know one in four weeks tapering for a test every four weeks you spend half a month wasting time and not getting better so so we need to balance the two I think is is the key thing here and and sometimes maybe early in the season you may actually go listen I'm going to use intuition because I know my body and I know what things have changed and my hour about my hour of my hour long power has gone up a bit so I'm going to change my prescription without necessarily doing another test right just so that I can keep training through and I don't have to tap it down for the test because I'm getting such good indicators that these things have improved and I would say that I wouldn't even taper for this because this testing you can just do as a part of your training like a normal training because as long as you keep the training leading into this the same every time you do it the conditions are the same and you're just looking for improvement you're not looking for bragging numbers where you're just looking to produce the absolute highest five-minute power or ten-minute power something like this you're just looking exactly of how much have my five-minute power changed since last time and how much have my five-minute power versus my 10-minute versus my 20-minute power changed or whatever power number yet that you are aiming for you're just looking for the delta delta change in this and that is what really matters so the most important thing is to keep things consistent and then also one other thing just to add to that and then even if you live in a place where you don't have to be very much on a turbo you can be outdoors training temperature is going to change throughout the system as well exactly and that's going to influence also your power output if it's like super hot one day when you're going out that's going to most likely impair your power output so things will never be perfect and that's a little bit the thing that we just have to live with is the same on race day you can't predict race day you can you can have some you can have some ideas about what you want to do on race day but you just have to adapt on race day anyway so I think take things as a training take things as a learning and then try to things to try to make things as systematic as possible but there will always be uncertainties of course so now we have good testing we're testing early on we're testing more right so roughly monthly as we adapt quicker and we've got 12 months does that I assume that then pushes out a little bit so maybe you're testing six weekly and then maybe every two months as you get closer to to race day to those testing frequencies does that change how you're programming or just what you're programming if that makes sense so yes it changes the power numbers or the run paces but doesn't change what you're doing within the season or how are you blocking that sort of training for these guys or girls and so on now of course when we are back to Olympic racing things are back a little more okay so but for Christian Gustav of course when we were switching more behind or between let's say short course long course and especially when we went from short course to long course then we're of course much bigger changes to the program but when when you stay on let's say one course and this is what you're aiming for then of course you can standardize things a little bit more and that is actually also there's a lot of value into that don't change something just to change something or to make things fancy or this kind of thing because that's not going to make you better most likely it's just going to make you worse so for for for an athlete that let's say that now you have a change in your profile and exactly like you you say if you now have an improvement in the profile that actually looks like or it is growing let's say especially let's say the whole profile is increasing and you are still far away from a competition brilliant just continue to do what you do because you're responding like very well all over the place if you start to see that you are getting less response in one domain than another domains now and you you are still far away from a competition then you have to look at the consequence of that of whether that will be a common limitation at some point of the season then you have to start to do smaller changes to a policy avoid that you and of course this is now we we are talking about things now that ends up causing a lot of questions because things are still where we are we are specific but unspecific so historically coaches have talked about staleness a lot right so if you read all texts they'll say ah the athlete got stale or how do we avoid staleness or you know overtraining is is probably a more modern version of that but what you're talking about here is okay I want to for some reason the training I've done in my response to it regardless of what it is has brought up my 60 minute power but yeah now I'm actually flattening my curve too much and I'm still eight months away from nine man for whatever reason now I have to actually raise my five minute power again or at least micro dose some of that in there to try and even out that curve or I will get flat because otherwise I can't keep pushing that up as you said so that that's what we're talking about it's not it doesn't have to be more complicated than that is just have a look at these curves are they moving the right directions what if you carry on the same trajectory of that improvement and that's not what you're going to do but let's assume it is where are you going to end up based on the time course right because now we have a time course which is where do I start where am I going to and then where am I in that journey and let's extrapolate those out and try and make sure that I get there as I want to get there right so we don't need to be in Iron Man shape eight months out that's not helpful and you don't want to profile that looks like an Iron Man eight months out you want to profile that looks like an Iron Man probably one month out and then do it with sharpening taper and go on race day yeah yeah I think so if you're okay again we talked in the first episode a little bit about Kip Choge and I think we mentioned that he had a utilization 94% on the breaking on the breaking two so that of course gives you an indicator because we can also say that your view to Max when we talk about utilization then we know that in this case if he could run out 94% for the full race or let's say I lead I it would be interesting to see this dollar like more like in detail I think these are extra extrapolated data but let's for the sake of simplicity let's just go by that I think that if you measure his view to Max at the end of the race and and and where he was staying those ratios would probably not be the same but fresh tested yes that's what what it looked like when they tested okay this is the velocity you have to go out to to to break two and this is your view to Max so then we say okay that is happening at 94% of your view to Max but nevertheless if we just go simplified a little bit now and then we say okay that's the case then we can say that well if you are profile and in this case it was 94% for two hours so you would say okay if your view to Max then is let's say a certain number and the amount of oxygen you're using are two hours versus your view to Max is 94% then we can surely just convert it's not straight into power numbers instead so we can basically say hey now a view to Max is something that's very equivalent to let's say three to five minute power but let's say for the sake of simplicity we use five minute power so if you are two hour power sits in a 94% of your five minute power you are you're perfect you perfect for a marathon or not a lot else so now so now if we but if he wants to run that let's say he wants to run sub two hours in Berlin you're right yeah or in and then it is next attempt now we need to improve that view to Max yes exactly otherwise he has to get to 95% 96% and one of those things is more likely to change in the other one exactly to be in an other world I mean he's other world anyway but to get even closer to unheard of numbers if you want to get to 95% 96 that's a little bit harder than increasing his view to Max yeah and that's the same thing here as well so you already have now having an indicator so let's say that you are doing a profiling knowing you look at your five minute powers your 60 minute power obviously 60 minute power should be then in this case like for example for Kichogi if you we used him if we said that the two minute the two hour power or so 120 minute power 120 minute power was then at 94% of his five minute power then basically 60 minute power will obviously be at even higher fraction of utilization of view to Max or let's say your five minute power then then his 120 minute power so the thing is here that of course here you already have a number you can use at least 94% and for your for your sake you can look at then 95% and 6% and if you are there then I would say that you are eight months out you really have to work on your five minute power like you say that's most likely going to be the most effective way to do something about this you don't want to lose the power output at your 60 minute power but you can actually reduce the volume of training you're doing at that quite significantly you can probably reduce it probably 30% depending of course on how many hours you're putting in of training actually I didn't ask you that in the initially way I was when you said are you going to improve your marathon by because that's an in that's like we talked about you have the performance metal you're maybe making the gap and you of course we need to know your budget so how many hours are you training yeah so we haven't talked about that yes so we have to come into that but how many hours are you training yeah well we'll get to that but you better really good point which is you can reduce volume significantly on the stuff where you've already you're already close to Max particularly eight months out right now we can really work towards okay let's drop let's cut that volume let's spend some more of our budget whatever that is time energy emotional energy all of it right resources on that so no I think that's that's a really good I think that's helpful I mean we can't give everybody's perfect example but I think that's really really helpful there so you would then be working on so traditional periodization models work on a macro cycle often a year sometimes quadrional cycle so an Olympic cycle which is not really relevant to most age group athletes but let's talk about the macro cycles often a year so corner to corner effectively for these people a lot of people or maybe they have to qualify for corner again if they didn't go fast enough in corner so now you've got corner to corner you have to have at least one race in there so you're going to break it up into probably two smaller cycles then you usually have a meso cycle of roughly a month but these it sounds like you're going to change for these people right so these meso cycles will be different and then we have our micro cycle which is for most people a week we're going to double click on that in a little while we'll get back to the week thing this is something we mentioned earlier and I'm excited about it but how would you build those blocks so the blocks obviously usually will for you a non-linear right they're not necessarily like one month and they're not necessarily traditional in that they focus on a specific thing as much as they are as a result of the testing is that fair to say so they would say yeah this is of course where things is more complex because there is a lot of let's say evaluate or yeah thoughts or evaluations that goes goes into this because this is also something you have to look at in let's say in light of the performance model and how long time does it take to change what you have identified as the most important of let's say when you make a priority list and you look at the gaps what where will you where are the most to be gained and how long time does it take to change it it might be that those things that takes that are where the most to be gained are like quick fixes well then you can wait then you can wait about you have to focus on those things that are where you can get most gains but it also takes longer time to to do something about so there's a combination about how much time does it take and how much what's the reward of doing it and then when you look at this then you start to exactly you get a priority list of the things that you want to look or what you want to change and this will drive the length of the meso cycles or how many meso cycles you're going to repeat now we are just excluding the count we do that you're not going to do a lot of competitions so that makes it of course much easier if you want to do competitions then of course that can be a part of the strategy as well but again to not complicate too much then I would say that depending on what we need to work on that basically dictates the length of the meso cycle and do you have a rough rough ballpark figures on timelines on these things or is that too hard to say for example let's say that we want to increase your let's go purely by your pole profile now so we know that for example like increasing your five minute power is something we can do and that will be the equivalent of your view to max so the belief the long hold belief of that view to max is genetic and it cannot be very much changed is as false as it can be I would say we can easily change view to max for a person by 50% and then the same thing also goes with five minute power because obviously if you can increase your five minute power if you start out with you haven't been training and you're starting out or you're training very little and you start out at let's say 200 watts it's not a problem for people to bring this up to 250 300 watts and then you all add more than 50 percent increase so with volume of course you're not going to get it for free you have to work for it obviously nature is smart and just to be clear as well when you say 50 percent you mean from from lowest to highest value you're not necessarily meaning you can double Christian or Gustavs at any point no no there we are probably closer to a maximum maximum now at least for the time that we spend on the training and the other thing is that's with the tradeoff right so you've gone from for instance going from Ironman back down to Olympic distances we're going to sacrifice a lot of our two hour power four hour power six hour power with the view towards increasing five minute power and that's how you've balanced that scale and conversely going back you'll do the opposite today's episode is provided by VO2 master your solution in making informed training decisions and unlocking advanced insights into human performance upgrade your training and metabolic assessments with the user-friendly VO2 master analyzer VO2 max RMR CPET with the reliability accuracy and portability that you want use the code all our method that's OLAV METHOD during checkout at VO2master.com to get a free assessment kit with the purchase of your first VO2 master analyzer so now we've got an idea of duration so you said we can quite quickly turn over five minute power or VO2 max we can quite quickly improve that what's the timeline to improve something like 60 minutes or two hour power I think that five minute power the reason why that's very effective to to to to increase is that again you're looking to improve something that last for five minutes so to crossly over simplify it basically the time it takes to improve or to work on your five minute power is much shorter than it is for your 60 minute power of course nobody will limit themselves just to do like one five minute all out and that's it you would of course breaking down into micro into also everything you would use of course the whole session but very often it is it is quite quick to improve your five all as a shorter duration power than it is to increase your longer duration power just because of the share amount of hours or or time that is needed in order to repeat that kind of effort of course that again you wouldn't you won't do that go out and do like 60 minute power today you do it in two days time again and another two days time or like three times a week or whatever you're gonna break that also into intervals and maybe you're not gonna do a 60 minute all out either you are just looking at maybe like when you do as a intervals longer duration intervals and and you accumulate let's say a lot of work around your 60 minute power insider session then of course that's maybe a little bit more but it just it increasing the longer duration power it just requires more time or like like just in a single session it takes more time you can't think you it will be much harder you like increasing your five minute power will also actually in most situations also influence not only your five minute power it's gonna influence your 20 20 30 60 minute power everything yeah it's not like there is one thing without other thing but at some point when you're getting more closer to let's say that that peak performance for yourself this is when you have to start to pivot the curve and basically increasing your five minute power unfortunately will start to compromise your 60 minute power because you have to choose where to spend more time to grow it further up so this is why I normally divide between growing the curve and pivoting the curve like growing the curve is basically where everything just grows up and everything gets more powerful like your short medium and longer duration power and then you get closer to race where you start to pivot this curve towards exactly what what is the target for the for the race that you're doing so five minute power obviously is very quick to or not yeah but it's it's fast do something with I would even say that everything down to the pay but if you now are looking to improve your time from from 11 hours to 10 30 you are an athlete that are spending quite a lot time on training I guess so how many hours are you spending on training let's call it 20 hours a week 20 hours a week ok that's brilliant then then you're really like invested in this so if you spend 20 hours on training and that is a sustainable situation for you so you have a good balance in life with that so we are not looking to reduce those hours actually because if you're like running around all the time you don't get enough recovery and it's kind of things it might not be the best result to train 20 hours we're getting getting ahead we'll get there that's a couple episodes time so then then even now again then say okay yes this is a sustainable situation then with 20 hours a week then you got plenty of time to train that means that you've got a big budget to invest into different kinds of training and then I would say that most of you you you you are having probably several sessions that are also quite longer in duration as well maybe upwards just four hours for example and then eight or less eight months from the race and if now let's say that your 20 minute power is 90% of your five minute power then I would say that we need we need to take a little bit of that time that you're now spending on the longer duration workouts you to do yeah and to to show the stuff and I would maybe even advise on bringing down the volume slightly to and the simple reason for that is because not much because the benefit of having a big volume is of course that at the moment we then also have more room to to to to trade away some volume to for more recovery as well and if we can recover more for that let's say that five-minute session then or not five-minute session but the session where we are trying to increase or five-minute power shorter duration power we very often say five-minute power now just don't don't mistake that because it can be like it could be like one or two or seven or but anyway the point is that you have like three different durations of power and then we are just using five minutes just to keep it simple so you've got a ton of budget to spend yeah you can spend extra resources recovery yeah because the training impulse from the sessions for five-minute is quite high yeah and not necessarily very long but it is a very high impulse a very significant impulse so that is going to take more recovery than say an hour long easier ride right absolutely yeah you might decide that hey instead of spending you know we might make the session 40 minutes and spend the extra 20 minutes instead of riding easy somewhere else on recovery yeah spend it that way and keep it really simple it's just that that's maybe what we where we'll trade some of that off yeah and and of course I wouldn't I would probably not advise on trying to increase your five-minute power by going five-minute all-out and then trying to recover from that and then do another five-minute all-out and try to recover from it because that's not going to probably be very productive I would probably try to stay away from going to exhaustion actually for most of the training sessions that you do I think that's a really important point yeah the number of times I think that some people are wiping themselves off the ground absolute mess is just it's unsustainable in the context of a professional let alone somebody who's got a job or something else on the side is just keeping that making sure you can go the next day exactly the reward to do for doing that is is very small of course it's important to of course train your pain tolerance and an ability to really like dig a hole through the ground and then try to dig a hole through the hole but that I think is something that you have to be very sparingly on and I would even their consult with somebody but it's general to hear that for example like if you talk with Christian, Gustav, Jakob Ingebrickson and many other athletes you're very often here that they actually say that the times that they actually go to exhaustion or whether you are trying to like bring out their A-game in training is actually very seldom or never especially when you if you're doing a little bit more of races because basically that's not the way you're looking to perform and basically time to recoverals from a session like that is un proportionately longer than it is to just keep it a little bit shorter a little bit lighter and but the benefit you get not like yes surely you can get a little bit of more benefit in that single session but the problem is that you're not going to do a single session you're going to do 20 hours of training and you're looking to keep that sustainable that means basically trying to perform better and better and better for every session you go more or less of course you're going to be sometimes a little bit worse sometimes better but in general the trend should be positive and that means that you have to basically be very careful with the intensity because the cost of messing up is injury and one of the best predictors of performance is injury free time and being able to stack week on week month on month a year or a year it's not about one session it's about how that one session fits into a week which fits into a month which fits into a year so that at the end of the year you're better by a significant amount so it's yeah that extra 5% really bearing yourself probably isn't worth I mean it definitely isn't worth it yeah and I think also for age groupers you might not be injured but you will maybe stagnate so you don't get the development that you probably could have and that's why it's also important when you are looking at your fertilizations when you're looking at the mesocycle fertilization of course there you are also going to have what I there I would like to clarify one thing very early on and that is there is no such thing as high quality and low quality or that there shouldn't be because everything should be quality we've got quality coming up yeah in our training podcast we won't touch too much on that but so so so we are not we are not talking here about everything you do should be high quality and that means that basically if your key sessions are being influenced by a lower or let's say what's supposedly going to be a low intensity session then that is not good quality in your planning or in your training the way that it should be set up is that you need to make priorities in your training so in the mesocycles you want to have micro cycles and in the micro cycles that you're looking at like your workouts and the workouts should be there in order to exactly try to influence your profile and the direction that you're looking to influence it so for example if you're looking now to increase the short duration power you have already said that okay I'm gonna have a little bit more like high intensity sessions here now and then when you're gonna have a little bit more of this high intensity session that means basically not you're gonna skip all the other sessions because you're still looking to maintain that longer duration power that you have developed you're not gonna you don't want to lose that so you're not gonna make like a huge shift towards high intensity training it just means that you're trying to be a little bit smarter about it and maybe dosing in a little bit more of it again step by step so then like one way for example do I like trying to increase your 5 minute power is I think there are two parts that are super important to it one is of course like the purely like the physiological part of it you need you need to put out power that is in the domain of your 5 minute power maybe slightly high because you bring it down to shorter intervals the other part of it is that you also have to be motivated to do that because it doesn't matter if you have the most like oh this we have done so much research on this kind of a micro interval tabata training or whatever that you have there and you are not motivated to do it then just forget it you're not gonna excel probably very well on it you have to do you have to develop start start with a good micro interval session that is a good thing like good basis a good practice is always start with something that is well documented that we're working so tabata intervals is works well then really the way to quantify this is to look at okay how can if so if you're using a power meter as a tool to control the intensity then you're actually just looking at okay let's say my 5 minute power is 400 watts basically what you're looking at doing now is that okay you already say now I can do 400 watts for five minutes before I basically completely exhaust that if I go in one go okay simplified now what we are trying to do now in this single session here now is to accumulate as much time as possible at 400 watts not with the highest possible heart rate all this because that's not gonna bring you faster to the finish line it's basically more power that's gonna bring you more power for longer duration that's what's gonna bring you to the finish line faster most likely so I would say rather there okay go out with something that is really good like so for example like runners does training is two blocks of 13 intervals on off where 30 seconds is basically around 120 percent of FTP and then there's 15 seconds out 60 percent of FTP and then you repeat this for 30 seconds for 13 times and then you have a set break between there of let's say a couple of minutes three minutes and then you repeat this for another block now you have accumulated effectively over 20 minutes of work at your let's say above your view to max so the thing is here that that when you then do that then how motivated were you actually for this session was it like did you really enjoy it brilliant then go again go again and just like take the learnings that you got from this session and try to improve on it like we try to relax a little bit more while you're still putting out the same power number try to breathe more effectively things that you basically know are good for basically sustainability or the ability to excel on these kind of intervals and then you're looking to basically improve on that if you're not motivated okay what did you not like was it basically too too many micro intervals was it is it easy for you to maybe bring down the power a little bit and then rather do longer intervals with a slight longer break or something like this to basically again you're looking to basically and this can the benchmark here in this session is basically now in this case 400 watts for more than a little bit more than 20 minutes let's say it's 22 minutes you're basically how you achieve those 22 minutes at 400 watts is your basis this is if you have a 60 minutes session with a warm-up and a cool-down basically how can you structure those 400 intervals now in a way is it three minutes on one and a half two minutes off three minutes on again doesn't really matter as the way you basically find something that really motivates you to put out that power because it's not your heart rate it's not your view to that's gonna bring you make your fast and raised day in this case when you're sitting on a turbo it surely is the power that you're putting out and of course eventually the ability to sustain that power also in an aerodynamic position as well yeah and I mean the difference between a 30 15 or a 2010 I don't think anybody thinks it's significant I think they're talking about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic if anything with the differences is almost negligible as you said the goal is as my accumulating time above 400 or 400 break it up how you want to break it up and if you find that variety something you enjoy break it up and and make it more variety week to week and if you don't want variety and you want the same thing to benchmark yourself then keep it the same exactly and you can even inside a session start out with longer duration intervals and then you can make it shorter shorter and shorter ramp it up and down to whatever you want yeah and then the goal exactly like you say you want to let's say make a progression on that one for next so you're able to accumulate 20 20 minutes this week go for 21 minutes next week exactly right the point the point of the day I've been most excited about micro cycles so how would you think about a micro cycle I mean the most simple micro cycle and the one that's used universally seven days because the work week is seven days so aside from work which is going to be the biggest constraint and the easiest answer is always going to be just keep it seven days or perhaps push it to 14 so you have the smallest repeating cycle which is the definition of micro cycle might be two weeks right for some people because they want to run you know and I keep sure he uses it sort of longer run every second week and then one week does interval more intensity in that long run so it could be two weeks well let's say it's not a multiple of seven why would you change it and what factors go into that and so again that would actually be for me a function of budget so it will look at how can I expand my budget because you can you know we just talked about intervals basically what we are trying to do is that we are just looking at it now on a more on a macro scale an interval on a macro scale because you have hard days easy days hard days easy days and then maybe you have a little bit like two days there are maybe a little bit easier and then you go hard as so you can almost look at this as basically an interval a break an interval a break a set break an interval and a set break so basically this is again basically what we're just looking at how can we not accumulate now the most work per time inside the session we're looking at how can we now accumulate the most work per week or per smallest for paying cycle right yeah 10 days seven days whatever it is well actually I wouldn't say seven days I would actually look at it even at a longer scale so basically you're you're looking just looking at how can you on a macro scale look at how can you actually get the most work done so in a year then so yeah how do I achieve the most in a year not you achieve the most week or in a day or in a session yeah exactly and then and then basically from there of course limitation actually for Christian Gustav Isad actually there we have to be cautious because we are at limit of how much energy they are able to get in so how much food actually comes into their body but the thing is that how I would look at my cycles is depending a little bit on what I do the funny thing is that actually for Olympic racing I would be able to have a longer cycle okay before I before I repeat it for Ironman the problem there is that there you're gonna have typically at least closer to race you're gonna have like longer sessions where you really you are starting to work more on your race power and the problem with those sessions actually is that you are actually also taking out quite a lot of calories yeah so for example if you go for four hour ride and you are putting out let's say 270 watts that means basically now you are doing effectively around thousand thousand kilojoules an hour and if you can put that back in there's no way you can put it in place that's a race pace yeah that's that's that's four thousand that's four thousand kilojoules and if you have now let's say you have a biochemical efficiency of let's say 20 percent that means basically that the amount of calories that you are actually now burning at the same time is more in the range of 12 1300 kilo calories per hour and we also know that basically if you take in one like if you take in one calorie of carbs you're not gonna store that because of processes that happens in the body in order to be able to utilize that you are maybe left with 70 percent of that calorie that you actually think so 0.7 percent of that so it means that basically the ratio between what you put in and what you get out also of food is also highly dependent on what kind of food you're eating fats of course is a very good ratio carbs is is is a much worse ratio but the point is exactly that when you do more like RMS specific training the problem is that you are running into domain where you can easily end up stagnating because you you you you you are able to do so much work on a day that it's almost becomes like difficult to eat enough to sustain that and if you do that then for many days in a row then you are going to go into the visit and then it's just a matter of time whether before you start to stagnate or where you go stale as you say or you you basically get overtrained and of course in some sense is hopefully you're just getting a warning that oh I'm so tired today I'm not able to do my training and you end up skipping your training and you're getting back to it yeah exactly because you are you now are like getting forced to take a break you're able to to get and you are eating naturally and you're able to recover and get back into energy balance but this is of course the difficult part of it because it's difficult people are only used to think of these kind of things in terms of budget because if you just think in terms of volume you can have a high volume but you do very little work for example and if you do very little work then of course the calorie demand for this is then also equally smaller and if the calorie demand is equally smaller then basically you will be able to sustain that easier also by normal like eating and a little bit more eating but arm and training then typically you you probably have to to repeat rest days of more after to bring you back into balance you maybe do a couple of days and then basically you need to bridge in for example more like a recovery day just to be able to bring you back into balance you're lending you are actually effectively putting in a credit for a couple of days and then you you you you you pay that back on on the recovery day when you do more high intensity high intensity stuff or medium to high intensity stuff then it limits a little bit self basically time to exhaustion limits the whole thing of course even if you don't go to exhaustion and it's even less time so that means that basically the amount of work that you're able to put in is effectively much less than when you do like like the arm and training the problem with Ironman is the intensity such that it can be sustained for so long that you have this perfect mix of intensity and duration such that you just end up absolutely burning all of the resources versus as you say high intensity stuff which is limited by other factors right so there's almost no limit to Ironman intensity theoretically aside from the ability to put calories back in which is basically the model you work off and actually that's also one of the things like there you know I'm a big fan of physics and there of course you have the laws of thermodynamics which I really like because it makes it easier sometimes to black box stuff and just understand whether something really makes a difference to performance or not but you have also when you talk about intensity we also have the power law so crossly simplified it means basically for if you increase your intensity for two and a half just two and a half percent okay are you able to feel the difference of two and a half percent so there's a two and a half percent basically means that 200 watts that's not much of change of power if you have a 10 percent increase that that means basically 220 watts if it's a 5 percent then it's 210 watts do you feel the difference even between 200 and 210 watts maybe most likely not two and a half percent that may basically means that if you actually go to the difference between 200 watts and 205 watts something that you won't most likely be able to feel very much of the difference of if you basically look now at your power profile and you move the cursor the so let's see if we have a Strava account for example so in Strava now you move your cursor over the power profile that you have there and you actually now look you just say okay so let's say you look at 200 watts or let's say you go higher depending on where a little bit also where you're let's say your what you think your FTP sits for example but let's say you go around your FTP and then let's say your FTP is 200 watts for sake of simplicity let's now find that power that sits five watts higher so two and a half percent higher typically you see that the time to exhaustion on two and a half percent higher is going to be almost 50 percent shorter if you go two and a half percent higher than that again then you see another reduction of 50 percent if you go two and a half percent higher then you get another 50 percent in reduction of that grossly speaking but the point is that intensity has like a second power impact on basically time to exhaustion and then also of course like your training load compared to duration so that's why for example the higher intensity you go it will naturally limit itself it also explains why it's harder to recover from yes exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's great I think we've really nailed planning here so work back from the start so what's the goal how do we get there where are my deficits and how to address them and then start out profiling profile yourself regularly work out what's your rate of adaptation and what are those adaptations and are they the right trajectory or are they going to hit too early or too late and how do you tweak it how do you change the balance of higher intensity lower intensity work within that block and those blocks need to be as frequent as required based on your confidence in the training you're doing to make the effective changes you think are happening and based on your you know how confident you are from the training metrics you're seeing you may be able to see that in training that you feel you don't need to test again but remembering the testing is about both feedback and feed forward as to how you prescribe or how you're being prescribed to your intensity specifically and then micro cycles are related to the work you know think about how that budget so for most people they will be time limited or emotional energy limited or those things where you know Sunday's a day where they can go along and they can go long more than that so that makes a ton of sense we love that's been really good that that was a lot longer than I thought it would be on planning but very valuable and that's not a bad thing I think that's I think planning is probably the thing that age group is do the least and the thing where they could have the most benefit is actually doing more than just yeah this week I have training it's like well where does this training fit within this month or this year or this goal period right and it might be that most people are probably going to have two cycles a year let's be honest they're going to have to qualify for Kona then race Kona as well most people would race two race a year minimum most and many more so and I think also the further way you are from a race as well the more important it is also the thing of when you are on that session itself because now we just set okay there are some let's say you set a power target in a session and you're trying to achieve that you might some days be able to achieve it easily other days is barely and other days you won't be able to achieve it and that's of course the natural variation that is in the body and this is of course important to be aware of so what I would always say that is important here because we haven't talked about the balance inside of micro cycle between the different sessions but I think it is very important to always be thinking ahead so when you are in that specific session how is this influencing my next session am I am able to actually progress on my next important session my next key session or actually am I digging myself to the floor here and I'm going to be completely like exhausted and if you're unsure better hold back a little bit today because you have so many more sessions to come on where you can learn from then basically digging a hole through the floor today and then basically you are not capable of doing your next that you're not you're not learning as effectively as if you're holding back a little bit when you are uncertain you're better off holding a lot back now with more like say inside a session that dial back the intensity rather a little bit more than try and just stick to target because the difference between lowering your let's say your power output by one or two percent or something like this is so much better for motivation the psychological part of it and also let's say purely let's say the long-term physiological benefits then then trying just to do like oh I feel I think I'm super strong and then you go you over over estimate your capabilities and you blow up in internal in the session one the total amount of work now you have done in that session if you blow up after your first set that's already a 50% reduction and that's not very good advancement then to go bring into the next session so this is very like intensity is very fragile or much more sensitive and you need to always think a little bit ahead in like in the session the intensity I'm going out I'm able to do like this set here and I will be able to next set or do I have to dial back a little bit there's one and the second part of it is going to be when you are inside a set I'm up digging my completely self to the floor here and then and then and then I I want I would probably need like the saturday session with a Thursday today and the saturday session I I'm not sure if I'm I'm motivated even to do that then dial back and make this session more like good so that you're ready also for that Saturday session consistency is all the time is is key yeah awesome yeah that's a great note to end on so thanks again for listening into this episode of the Norwegian Method podcast and that's episode two all done and dusted everything planning so hopefully you enjoyed that one please send us there any questions that you do have as we've said before via DM on Instagram to the Centauratech Instagram account via email to [email protected] or if you're listening on Spotify put it in the Q&A section down there and we will get to it in our final episode of the season again if you haven't subscribed yet please do so rate the podcast as well and share it with a friend now of course we will see you back here next week where we were touching on everything racing so see you then