Welcome to the empirical cycling podcast. I'm your host, Kolei Moore, joined us always by my co-host Kyle Helson. Thank you everybody as always for listening. Of course, if you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe. Of course, I'm giving a five-star rating in an ice review. We really appreciate those, but of course, most importantly, share the podcast. That goes a long way towards supporting us. And if you'd like to give us a quick donation because we are ad-free and sponsorless, you can just go out and empiricalcycling.com/donate. It's listeners who have given us a little raise lately and we really appreciate that. Thank you so much for all of that and all the donations and all the kind words and all the, hey, all this training advice is being very helpful. I'd love to hear that. And I also love when it's not being helpful. So let me know. Try to have that. So remember, if we are, well, there's no show notes up on the website for this episode. That's empiricalcycling.com, of course. And in the last episode, which this is a sequel of, we have a lot of show notes. So we will probably refer to those. So you might want to go check those out and of course other interesting stuff. What is it? Oh yeah, coaching consultation inquiries. We are a coaching company. We do consults. We will answer all of your questions. We are here to coach you if you want. Reach out to
[email protected] if you would like to get in touch about any of that. And of course, we are going to end this episode with listener questions from my Instagram. So that's empiricalcycling on Instagram because you couldn't figure that out. Everybody could, of course, so open the stories. That's where I ask for questions. And that is that. And of course, oh, yeah, we can aim as up in the Instagram stories. We just wrapped one of those up. And yeah, that was a fun one. So thank you all for your thoughtful questions and your thoughtful questions on the overunders. So where are we at with overunders? So last episode. Why don't you summarize what we discussed in the last watt stock? Yeah, so we took a dive into some of the common reported reasons why overunders are good training or maybe superior training to study state intervals, including better lactate, shuttling or lactate transport, or and also things like better lactate tolerance, which is maybe poor nomenclature these days, but at least like, or better lactate utilization perhaps. And it seems like, although there is no direct study that studies a two groups of people, one doing just two by 20 sweet spot intervals versus say one doing two by 20 over under's to say whether or not like things like anaerobic capacity or black tape tolerance go up or down things like that. It appears it would appear from the literature that the reported benefits are not there to make them so special compared to regular traditional threshold training. But that being said, if they're if they're a good workout for you and you like them and you see good benefits, you should definitely keep on doing them. They're definitely popular and they can be a good way to break up the board and if you're stuck on the trainer. Also, if they are more race like and and we'll talk about this for sure. If they more closely match something say like accelerating in a peloton that you're bad at, then yeah, doing them could provide real tangible benefits in that. But that benefit is not you're better at burning lactate because you're generating more lactate very briefly. So yeah, it's a much more specific thing that we're talking about because when I think about overunders, here's I think we briefly touched on this or you mentioned it because I've coached you for a long time. So you know how I assign overunders and have for pretty much since forever, which is that I like overunders for the duration of threshold efforts and longer. So like and so like let's say when would I do overunders, what kind of overunders would I give somebody? So I think what I've seen a lot lately is symmetrical overunders, which are very appealing to like my OCD side where everything's got to be right angles and you know well for me it's like organized piles but still everything's got to be right angles symmetrical. Yeah, yeah, and so you know sort of like the same thing looking at like what should the work to rest ratio be for like to max intervals. One to one to one to two is what we usually hear but in reality it can just be kind of whatever if you need it to be. So yeah, don't have there's not to be six minutes you know if it's exactly five minutes and like 48.2 seconds a great it doesn't. No longer works now. Yeah, because a lot of a lot of my coaching practice is more along the lines of what works and what doesn't and regardless of the theory behind it but you know there's a lot of theory behind you know like you mentioned what overunders are supposed to do and you know the last Wastock 43 was mostly geared at looking at the physiology and the underlying mechanisms behind the adaptations and looking at how their overunders are not unique. There are a lot of benefits to overunders and overunders still as far as I know in theory are only in theory. Like there's no literature that I've seen saying these are better at you know MCT expression or whatever it's all theory. So we broke down the theory and now we're going to talk rubber meets the road which is probably a phrase I should stop saying so I think I said it twice in the last podcast but basically with overunders I don't like to think about interval symmetry. I mean I like interval symmetry and one of the things that I'd like to do with all of the workouts I give people I don't want people to have a whiteboard when they go out. I don't want them to have to like tape a sticky note to their stem so they can actually read the like giant paragraph of text I wrote of like do this interval let this percentage of FTP then you do this then you do this at this different rest lengths and I would rather have something that's really simple for people to think about so it does end up having some form of symmetry but when it comes to programming over unders the biggest thing I want people to do is not blow themselves up by the end of the efforts is number one don't blow up unless we're talking about interoperability we'll talk about that then you kind of do but for you know if we're thinking about like 10 minutes 20 minutes 30 minute over unders longer you don't want to die yeah you get you get way worse adaptations if you blow up and die and have to pedal it zone two for the rest of the interval yeah because more work time is better um so so here's the thing the overs should be manageable and the unders should allow you to recover enough by the time you get to the next over like you don't want it to be a deteriorating function where like oh god I barely hanging on to this then you fail the interval that's not the purpose unless we're talking about interoperability so for over unders like here's a typical workout I would give somebody like somebody's like new to over unders I'll give him like 20 minutes of sweet spot I'll have them accelerate for 10 seconds like not a not a max effort not a sprint just accelerate push just push for 10 seconds and go back to the sweet spot that's it every every five minutes let's start with and then maybe I'll I'll give somebody if I'm really conservative I'll say like two to four by 15 minutes that's it and the next time they do four by 15 cool you get three by 20 now and then you you might get three by 25 like let's add a little interval time and that's the way that I progress over unders is adding interval time because regardless of whatever else is going on I think of over unders as threshold work and they need to be done for threshold durations of time in order to progress them you need to go do them longer so that's how I do these and not to say that doing them differently is wrong because that's certainly not the case for works for you or for you and I have absolutely nobody to complain about that or even try to refute it I can't because if you've got the this works for this reason or just it just works it makes me faster do it but this is the way that I like to think about over unders so that is like a very beginner type approach to like let's see how somebody does going over threshold intermittently so not a bad workout right yeah and and like it's it I can see why people would be a little upset because they want a target not accelerate like I think cycling we really have gotten to the you know oh we can make these really nice pretty graphs of your workout where you've got these different little blocks and there are all these nice nice neat rectangles you know because you you nail this one this power level and then you go back to this other one and then you nail this other one and then go back and so I can see why that would be it's it's easy to prescribe but I can see why people would be like want more information yeah or they one of the things I like about that is that let's me see how hard somebody thinks that they can push and then recover from because I would say 75% of the time people sneak up on on like an acceleration like if I say 10 seconds or something like that like they'll sneak up on an effort that's like oh that was a little much I had a hard time recovering from that one like when I got back to sweet spot and that's how most people do it occasionally somebody's gonna fucking send it and then die and then yeah over the next two or three minutes the power is going to go from like yeah like endurance pace or like not even pedaling and then just like back up to the target I've made a huge mistake and so and so that's hugely informative about about somebody's you know internal pacing governor and and it's also an important lesson to learn like if you're in like if you're in a crit or a race or whatever and you're trying to catch a breakaway and if you absolutely slam it for like 10 or 20 seconds there's a non-zero chance that you're not gonna make it across the break and because you've got to pace yourself but it's also at the same time like in terms of just regular race strategy you've got to think is this the winning break is it worth risking completely blowing up and getting shot out the back of the peloton if I don't make it and that's that's a decision up to you and certainly I could you know advise different people different things about that kind of thing but it's one of those things where having that experience of like you know accelerating and then having to go back to you know not coasting that kind of thing makes a big difference when you actually go out and race so in terms of practical stuff that might be one of my favorite aspects of overunders especially for people who are a little newer to cycling hmm so do you have any so then how give any tips like how hard is like a good level for that acceleration like is it you know obviously you don't want to be like you said full send fucking gasping I would say start at like 40 to 50% of a full gas sprint um and or if nothing else just raise your cadence just over that those 10 seconds like if you're at 90 RPM just like aim okay I'm gonna try to raise my cadence to 110 to 120 and the same gear and then go back that's a good way to start and after that like if you are now the advanced version of the accelerations one is to do it from threshold hmm and that's for somebody who's really good at threshold riding and could hold it for a long time um and it's there's nothing special about that workout I don't really give it that often but I certainly do give it to people especially the really well trained ones um but it's like that but that's a good place to start and so it's ironic that the the progression of the good place to start workout goes right to the this is for really fast people only so here's like the bread and butter type over unders I give people it's usually we can start with like tempo um so tempo is like a good way to get into intervals from like base riding endurance riding early season um and tempo I always assume it's like I usually give it anywhere from like 10 to like 20 or 30 watts over LT1 depending on how wide the ranges between LT1 and LT2 um and I'll just say you know accelerate you know 10 to 20 seconds or something like that same principle and especially for like trackies and crit racers I will usually give people a high cadence target to hit especially on the track so on the track if if I'm working with you don't be surprised if you see um you know 10 second push at 100 RPM 110 to like 140 RPM so typical like you know track cadence range and once you get really good at that we're gonna see I don't know 130 to 160 or something like that um yeah so that's that that's the like the next version of it and and then to really progress that um you know we've got two variables to manipulate well we've really got three four how long are you holding the overs how long are you doing the unders and then how hard are you doing each so we've got a couple levers to pull um so my bread and butter over under workouts there's really two of them and some people do a lot of their sweet spot threshold type work just as these intervals and some people never do them at all and it really depends on how well does this this person need some kind of you know overunders in their fitness and how well does somebody even tolerate just doing steady standard intervals um it's interesting though too and and to think if you even if you're gonna try this let's say you're gonna try it you've never done it before you're pretty new to them and you you low ball the over is a little bit that's fine it's still a sweet spot workout right like oh yeah it's still enough to be workout it's fine yeah you you'd rather probably low ball them slightly than fucking full cent and fail yes um so so here's the sweet spot over under workout that can comprise a lot of people's you know bread and butter training for threshold is a it's a one to four over to under ratio and for me this is usually 30 seconds over to two minutes under or it's a minute over to four minutes under and for the covers usually I go any like anywhere from it's just a pretty rough range of like 20 to 50 watts over threshold and then back to you know sweet spot but here's a thing is once people get used to these efforts I will tell them to like either start at the power target if they if that's what they want or need but I will often give it to people without any targets whatsoever sweet spot over unders one minute over four minutes under go ride to feel and a lot of people get something like three by thirty two by forty uh stuff like that so that's that's kind of what we build up to and then that becomes a very very typical workout um it can't be and some people never get it some people are just all right go give me three by fifteen that threshold that's it yeah so I what when do I pick one over the other um I mean part of it is like c to the pants stuff but some some people honestly are just great at they they don't need to work the big motoriness they they're just ready like some people don't need to practice accelerating like I said this before on the podcast coach Katie she can do nothing but steady state work and then she will go crush a crit yeah I watched your uh solo break away for like 25 minutes the other week yeah on entirely on plan that's how most solo breaks happen I think yeah um it's also interesting because I think you see some some popular you know workout training plans whatever you google over unders like a lot of them will prescribe them like you need to be over 125 percent ftp like you know quote a quote anaerobic for that for the over and so for some people you know you're whatever 20 to 40 watts the 120 that may be within that 120 percent range but for a lot of people if you're if you're they're going to follow that prescription of 120 percent that's going to be way more than your 40 watts right yeah potentially so it's potentially a very different workout all of a sudden yeah well and I think that comes from I mean I've never seen anything like that before um but you know assuming that you're relaying it correctly I I could see that being from people assuming that 120 percent of video of uh ftp is your via to max and then over that you become more anaerobically based right whatever explanation there is doesn't really work like that obviously but um I could see that being a thing but I think one of the other kind of practical implications of this is that um the overs are actually you know looking at what triggers um aerobic adaptation in a muscle fiber part of it is just contracting and if we tell those large motor units to contract they are going to get better at you know whatever so it's sort of like at um you know looking at that once Dr. D7 paper on cross country skiers we saw a lot of very aerobically active and romically capable fast twitch fibers because if you watch cross country skiers and um you know Jesse Diggins has been killing it lately um and so I every time that that comes up on my Instagram I'm like yes go Jesse um and and you know the um the cadence of like the arm movement and the leg movement it's it's fairly low and the forces are very high so there's a lot of large motor unit recruitment and a lot of repeated motor unit recruitment so this is one of the things I think about when I'm thinking about overunders and like I've got clients who to be frank suck at overunders and any steady state training so one of the things that I think about instead is doing intermittent efforts almost like to bought us but not really um for ftp durations and to me this is just another overunder and because the unders aren't really oxidizing lactate to some people who don't count so you don't have to do this if you don't want to but you know if we're looking at I need to recruit large motor units I'm gonna give somebody like 15 15s or 30 30s for 10 to 20 minutes and it's not like they're going to be crushing it because that's an anaerobic capacity workout because you're barely gonna make it five minutes if you crush it yeah yeah but it's one of those things where if you want to recruit large motor units like do that and you're gonna you know obviously it has a large um uh energetic cost to it uh so you don't want to send it too much you know and you want to make sure that you are recovering from it appropriately because they can to plead a lot of muscle glycogen it can cause a lot of fatigue especially if you kill yourself with it um so it's one of those things where you've got uh picked the right tool for the job because if you're bad at accelerating repeatedly something like this might really work well for you and if you're fine at it then you don't necessarily need it yeah yeah can you imagine being like oh I got 15 minutes of 30 30s and just sending the first one so go ahead oh lord well you are gonna I mean here's another race specific thing if you want to be specific for like cyclical cross or cross country mountain bike yeah a whole shot yeah yeah or like even gravel the whole shot like um starts for gravel races can be very aggressive not all of them but a lot of them can be um and so yeah you want to you want to do something race specific with over unders um something like this like start with an over I always assign these things as starting with the over always like if I give somebody three by 15 with a 10 second push every five minutes I'm gonna I'm gonna have you start with acceleration and end with one it's not gonna be like you know ride for four and four minutes 50 seconds then Dan accelerate like you're gonna start here and if if you're a cross country mountain bike racer or a cyclical cross racer you're gonna be on your cross bike or your mountain bike in a field like standing and clipping it and then the grass is sending that first effort if that's what is appropriate at that time it's not every workout obviously so it's not like you have to do this but it's a great way to practice or can't be um so so those are my two basic over under workouts um and so for yeah so for sweet spot like I said uh one to four over to under ratio at you know at you know some sort of vibes based not too hard but just hard enough over and then you know sweet spotish under and some people that that sweet spot turns into eventually turns into threshold or something and that's that's fine too but it's not it's not that important as over time you should either be progressing the time in the intervals especially if you're starting with like you know 20 30 40 minutes or something like that and if you are unable to progress that you are tired or your intervals are too hard or you need more food or something is off so that's more food right no never um so all right so that's basic over under that's how I like to program it uh those are my very general thoughts on it um sorry if things are not more specific for folks but I think that should give everybody a good place to at least start and have fun uh there's honestly there's no wrong way to do them uh manipulate the cadence manipulate the power kind of manipulate the terrain if you want like there like you can even like a fart like tempo ride where you're kind of aiming for tempo power but you push up some rises you kind of coast down some whatever like that's so much fun and that's basically an over under workout yeah you said there's no wrong way to do them I can envision wrong ways that sounds like a challenge find a way to fail an over under workout but uh okay fair enough um anyway so so that's how I like to do them if you somebody else has a like I said somebody else has another way to do them that's fine um so now we talked about we would um or we mentioned in the last podcast we would also go into different workouts that would like get us better at clearing lactate if that's a thing that you care about um yeah so if you want to do the oak mic my sweet spot over unders as lactate clearance yeah riding at 80 to 90% of threshold under and if you really want to clear lactate my recommendation is you do your overs when you feel like you've just about recovered from the last one regardless of the duration so that is going to get you the most lactate oxidation from your overs if that's something you care about that's how you would do it um and the hope would be to reduce the interval time between so that way you are creating a lot more lactate and then oxidation a lot more lactate um that's how I would do it but like we kind of mentioned in terms of like mitochondrial mass and MCT transporters being part of that uh you know adaptation host or host of adaptations um all endurance riding is going to get you better at clearing lactate like mitochondrial mass associated with high volume is going to be great so if you want a good lactate clearance workout go ride your bike for six hours at endurance pace I'm not kidding I can see people being very dissatisfied with that answer okay that's fine that's my answer but you don't have to be happy with it I don't think anybody really I don't think that's actually controversial at this point though because I've seen a bunch of like I saw a training piece article a couple months ago maybe it was like a year ago um somebody was talking about how you know mitochondrial mass is one of the things that improves lactate oxidation and they're right they're absolutely right about it and you know what else improves lactate oxidation and improves endurance training in general is threshold work threshold work is just spicy endurance work um so and then overunders you know obviously well they're not equivalent because anybody who does overunders can tell you these feel a little different than straight threshold work um obviously yes but at the same time they're they basically have nearly the same adaptations in terms of just general you know aerobic stress um you know with the differences in muscle mass recruited and potentially you know cage manipulation all those kinds of things and so you know um that so those are good lactate clearance workouts you know what else is a good lactate clearance workout VO2 max okay okay yeah so here's one of the things about VO2 max is like I've seen a lot of training protocols at like you know HIT type intervals sets like four minutes over and you know four minutes under whatever they look at like lactate clearance or something um and as long as you're you know spinning your legs easy you're gonna oxidize that lactate um and so it doesn't and then this is here this is one of the philosophical questions for people about their over under workouts if you care about oxidizing lactate at a higher rate you have to recover at a higher rate that means that you're unable to push higher power in between if you don't care about that you just care about like a total amount of lactate oxidize it doesn't matter how long it takes you to oxidize it like if you're sitting there passively and your legs aren't moving it's probably not going to be done by your legs and if you think that causes adaptation then your liver is getting some adaptation your heart's getting some adaptation but your legs aren't um so keep your legs moving and also when it comes to increasing threshold um and like we said about the origin of threshold if you think that lactate is made and then oxidized is the same consequence as if you think that the the way I do where um threshold is a consequence of maximal steady state aerobic ATP production and you know consumption of substrate is secondary doesn't matter which one of these things you believe increasing VO2 max is going to raise that same way as like if you're at 5,000 feet or 1500 meters altitude you've got a certain threshold you go down to sea level immediately you've got more oxygen and your threshold is higher so it's pretty pretty simple um so and of course writing a lot supports VO2 max adaptations so maybe you should go write a lot um imagine uh that is interesting to think imagine you you just did a really hard anaerobic capacity or like VO2 max workout you got a bunch of excess lactate and then some of the things used by your brain which is kind of cool yeah if it's just in your blood like oh every every organ in my body is just gonna have added whole body lactate tolerance feel the lactate burning your brain after like a one minute test yeah um and so for people with wk5 what you can do to assess general aerobic impact positive aerobic impact look at the aerobic adaptation score and go do workouts and see what gives you a higher one uh and because we designed it now i'm not trying to sell the bq5 i don't i don't get a cut or anything like that i got a i got a very very very small stipend for the work i did on that and that was that um but no royalties it's not like every time he mentions it oh my god i wish i would i would have tens of dollars you get a penny every time you mentioned yeah but it's pretty per letter but well that's why we have no ads because thank you donators we get we get more from donations than we would for ads for our listen counts um appreciate that appreciate all of you um so one of the things about uh the training impact scores that we designed it to think about the very general molecular switches um and especially the peripheral ones in the muscle so um wild via two max does not have a great high training impact score aerobically and it usually pings a very high one anaerobically like and that's an easy anaerobic 10 um at the same time we know that it has a very good systemic impact but um but if we're doing like endurance work if we're doing like tempo rides for racing we usually see a pretty good aerobic impact if not a you know you know you go on you do an eight hour gravel ride like you get home like i better say a freaking 10 you know what i mean um so uh so or at least an eight give me at least an eight um so when you think about this uh where am i going to be able to increase my generalized heroic adaptation switches where can i turn them on all aerobic training all the aerobic riding uh if you're untrained anything literally anything sprinting while you're untrained we'll give you a more of a adaptation um milk those new gains baby yeah love the new gains um and like i mentioned in the last podcast so many papers look at people untrained like they're like okay we found these people who are trained we made them rest for four weeks before we did the thing that we made them rest for another four weeks and they did another thing and it's like oh jeez what about trained people anyway so so that's a pretty simple one um what other types of workouts make it's better at not producing as much lactate okay we just went over this via 2x um now lactate tolerance so we know there's no really such thing as like tolerance but but the um all the metabolic byproducts associated with lactate overthreshold so how do we get better at this Kyle what is your favorite workout ever favorite your favorite ever workout i know i know i know i know your pumps don't get sweaty at all when you see in training piece and i know that you don't put it off until late in the day at all when you've got one could it be like two by five minute thirty thirty yes and how do you pace those thirty thirties i don't pace them that's the problem flying down no pacing required here yeah just pedal hard until you can't really pedal anymore and then you like squint at the clock and you're like not done yet got it pedaling yeah i know it's a long it's time dilation how does that work the longest thirty seconds ever yeah um no i it makes sense like i mean i i can't i've never had something else to directly compare this to but the feeling that you get after like digging really deep on like that or like a 60 second test or something where there's this like deep intense quad burn like and it's not it's it feels different than just like say doing like high rep squats or you get like a pump it's like a deep like painful sensation in addition to the pump i don't know how to describe it um it it must be some some metabolite you know acidosis something something blah blah well you don't know how to describe it but nobody even knows why it happens yeah but it it is like you know that you know that something's going on though right like your net you're never like oh i can't really stand up i think it's funny that that's your reaction to those because for mine um like i get the quad burn but it's mostly that my quads can't really contract that well and then like once in a while i'll get like a glute cramp or something like that like a small glute cramp or like an addoctor cramp is actually a bigger one for me with those if i'm really badly trained um but it's more like for me systemically it hurts like my whole body wants to shrivel up into nothing oh interesting um and like after every set like i'm on the side of the road lying down my the first thing i do is unclip my helmet and throw it away i'm like i cannot like like i it's the helmet it's interrupting my breathing i have to get away from me sunglasses off jerseys and sifts i don't care how cold it is outside like the chest is out after these efforts i i feel like i have i have a thing where like this happened to the kilo last week uh milton like i finished the kilo like you finish and you're like dying and then it takes like a few seconds for it to kick in so you like mid like mid like cool down and then inside of the track you know it's coming you get to the back side of the track like yeah like lean against the rail to like pull your feet out like i've like toast traps and then like sometimes have to have people help yeah you awkwardly stumble luckily there they had a ramp which was kind of nice you didn't have to like bend your legs to get down uh downstairs to get to the infield but then yeah it was like i took my shoes off and i laid down on the ground because i like you know you you want to think like oh i should should hop on the bike on the rollers like pedal a little bit but you can't like you said you can't contract your legs you're just like i'm just gonna lay on the ground yeah i mean and how many people on the track have we seen uh there's a point to all this by the way listeners so we're we're getting there um how many people on the track have you seen do a kilo like the big sprinters and they can barely stand up on the podium oh yeah they've got the flag they're sitting down the track side like with the flag and like lying down just like i did it uh which is usually why it's like the last event because it kills people and when it's not the last event they are slower in the sprint the next day yeah yeah yeah like the past two years uh elite track nats in the us the kilo has been the first sprint event it's like uh it is kilo kiren match sprint team sprint and so you're like by the time the sprints were around and just fried because you did the kilo and then the kiren like back to back days outch um anyway so so i think we kind of touched on this in the last podcast but the point that we're trying to make is that when you do interoper capacity efforts um like nobody isn't entirely sure what the mechanism is that's happening um but from my coaching perspective the thing that i can say is absolutely associated with improving interoper capacity is when you are doing these efforts that you can barely contract your legs at the end like and this is literally something that i write in training peaks for people it's like you know you're doing these right like for the endurance people it takes a longer like for us like here's here's how mine usually go for like five minutes if i even get to five i'll usually start with four because i can i suck so much um is like my first 30 seconds i do these all seated by the way my first 30 seconds is usually like 950 to a thousand watts yeah my second 30 seconds is like 700 my third is like 450 if that my lap my fourth is like maybe 400 and my last one if i can even like get it is probably like 15 seconds at like 500 450 and then i like just can't even finish the effort um and then i lie down and pray for death i i i'm an idiot and i will mostly because it i think it helps just with like trying to like eek out some cadence i will usually i'll do the first one like standing for a while oh god to get to get on top of it but then yeah like for the rest of them where it's seated like most of the interval is seated for the rest of them but a lot of times i will still do the first few seconds standing just to get on top of the gear but yeah you're like the i'm trying to find it's yeah you're like you know close to a thousand for that first one yeah and then like 700 it just gets like bleaker and bleaker and bleaker yeah and then like in the tail end like of every the every 30 seconds the like last for the last two the last like 10 seconds of those 30 seconds is like 350 watts like 400 watts like you're like really you're you feel like you're trying so hard but you're like i am barely pedaling actually i know um and and here's the thing is like when it comes to these efforts it doesn't have to be 30 seconds on 30 seconds off you can do these at 15 15 you can do this as 2020's 2010's 10 20's like you can manipulate this many many different ways and what i've noticed is um and we'll do a proper podcast it's probably a 10 minute tips because i don't there's not as much hard science on intercapacitus i want there to be um and you know fatigue resistance and all that stuff um but um one of the things that i've noticed is if you give yourself a little more recovery time it gets worse like if you go 30 seconds on like i'm like a minute off two minutes off like that next 30 seconds you can dig deeper yeah you can push so much harder and the pain afterwards is so much worse it like it like it helps but it also like doesn't help at all and it's like i i don't it's like would you rather would you rather like you know drown in the sea or would you rather they're drowning a toilet. It's like, I, I, I, there's no good choices here. Yeah. Here's one here. So I pulled up one just for fun. These recent, recent just one, one round of five minutes. seven 60 for the first 30 seconds, five 30 for the second 30 seconds, four 54 40 380. Ouch. Yeah. Yeah. And then, but I got peaks, I got peaks, I got like thousand lot peaks in every one of them, trying to like, you know, send it the first two seconds, but then like, uh, real fast. I have found that that even pacing the start of that doesn't help. Like, even just like pulling it back to like, you know, like six, eight hundred watts, it's like, it, the, the devil gets his due. Like, you're not going to save yourself from it. It's sort of like doing via to max efforts. Like, if you start with a thousand watts sprint every single time you do a via to max effort, like, if you're training for the individual pursuit, okay, yeah, you've got to get up to speed real fast. Um, but at the same time, if you're just looking for the Olympic adaptation, you don't have to just kill yourself. You could, like, if you're via to max efforts, let's say the three minutes at like three inch of watts, you don't have to start at like eight hundred. You can start at like four hundred five hundred or, um, and you're going to get to basically the same spot. And, and the, and these like, and we're capacity intervals are similar in that respect, because as long as you get to the point where you're just kind of dying and you can not really contract your muscles, um, you're doing it right. Uh, and that's not to say that these kind of, kinds of intervals don't have a cost because we're, you know, this is an alternative to an over under, which obviously does have some anaerobic capacity benefits. Like, all that time working over threshold is, you know, it's non-zero. And if you're doing, you know, a minute over a minute under for like eight minutes, and you can do three or four of these sets, and that's it, like because you can barely pedal at the end, like, yeah, sure, you're getting some anaerobic capacity kind of, um, kind of benefits. Yeah, definitely. Um, you know, you could also get the same anaerobic capacity benefits by like doing a couple of five minute interval study or eight or whatever it is. Like, the, the difference between all these different modalities for the same purpose are not that big. And you might want to choose one or the other based on your specific race prep or just your personal preference. Like if you just like, uh, max eight minute effort up a hill, as like an anaerobic capacity interval, and you feel it helps you, and you've got evidence that it does like your one minute power is going up or something like that. Do that. There's always a nod to. Yeah. So, um, any other thoughts on anaerobic capacity before we get to some listening questions? Um, no, but if, if my, if my notes are correct, then, uh, this is actually the, the anniversary week for the podcast. I think it was in 20, it was March, it was like March 23rd of, uh, oh, God, what year was 2019? 2018? What year was that? I don't know. How many, how many years? Um, but yeah, it was, uh, yeah, what year was I don't even remember. That's bad, right? I should, I should know this. I, uh, it was right before the pandemic, I think it was like 20. It might have been like late 2018 or 2019 or something. Well, it would have been, it's March. I remember it's March. It's like March 20th. I see Google tell us, you're not Google sound cod kind of, uh, yeah, three years ago. Oh, cool. All right. So yeah. Podcast is three years old, and we have almost half a million listens. We got to figure out what we're going to do with a half a million years to celebrate 500,000 listens total almost four years. Yeah. So it was, uh, the first one came out in, yeah, 2019, March, 2019. Sweet. All right. So, um, and thanks to the podcast, by the way, I was able to put my day job like just just about eight, nine months left for that, um, even though I was kind of already on my way out, I was producing my, my work days just because I had so much coaching stuff to do anyway. Um, so thank you all kind of listeners for helping that along. Okay. Listener questions. Um, how did the term in the first workout length and frequency of overunders? Uh, well, we kind of touched on that, but yeah, like, um, if you want to do the, uh, I would say start with like 15 minutes of like minute over four minutes under or two minutes over or sorry, 30 seconds over two minutes under, like, take your pick on that, uh, pick some moderate targets and you will quickly get a sense of like, okay, I'll try to do three intervals like this. And if three feels easy to a fourth, if four feels easy to a fifth, cool. Now you've got some good information. Now you can start to progress time in zone, just like you with threshold workouts. Um, our longer formats like 30 seconds over in one minute under effective for more anaerobic riders. See, I don't necessarily think about riders being aerobic or anaerobic. You get better at what you train. Um, I mean, Kyle, you're a fairly anaerobic rider, but if I, if we, you know, determined your FTP and I gave you some over under's, like, do you think that would really be any different than a couple of years ago when you were well aerobically trained? Probably not. I mean, I think some of it too, if you're just naturally pretty anaerobic, like, yeah, it did. Well, okay. Oh, actually, I've got a thought on this. So if you assign your overs as like a percentage of your like five minute power, your one minute power, something like that. Okay. Yeah. Now you're going to have a rough day. So, and yeah, well, oh, because I was just thinking like, you know, we usually tell people not to peg anything like in a direct correlation to FTP, but this is one thing where you can like get a sense of what works for you. Because like, some people are better at going farther over FTP and some people are not like I think when I was doing over under is back in the day, I would do like a minute over at like 350 360 and then four minutes at like two 50 to 270 or something like that. Um, and I would do like through by 30 at these and I would just kind of pace and divides and I would just see the progression every week along with everything else I was doing. Um, but yeah, it was, um, and I was into and still I am a very anaerobic rider, but that's just what worked for me. And so, um, just got just got a sense of what works for you. Yeah, I could see if I did, if the over was particularly short and you did have it relative to FTP or something like that, it could be you could almost get through it without even really noticing. Yeah, yeah, so there there would be like a range there where yeah, if you want, if you peg did as some fraction of five minute power of like a all out five minute test, you might have a pretty bad time because all of a sudden, you know, the first few would be fine and then start really tapping into your, you know, like exhausting your anaerobic capacity and you'd be having a rough go at it, but yeah, I think within reason, um, yeah, if you're slightly more anaerobic, you may be able to bump the number up a little bit higher, but if it's to field and that's probably okay, as long as you don't, like you said, it's hard, but sustainable. Yeah, hard, but sustainable is a good way to approach it. Uh, what's basically a couple of questions on like, what's the relationship between how long should you do over unders versus what you can do, like steady state for like FTP or sweet spot? Um, and the answer is, uh, I've actually thought about this a lot and I don't really think about the relationship between those two things. So like if somebody can do an hour of like threshold work that doesn't make me think they need to be able to do at least 40 minutes or an hour or whatever of sweet, of like sweet spot over unders, I take the two things as, you know, kind of, they, they, they both to me are like threshold workouts in a way, but also I don't think about the relationship between those two. So, um, that feels like a little bit too into the like, oh, if you, in order to be good, you have to exactly be able to do this prescription. And you're like, well, that's not, yeah, rarely is that true. Like, oh, all good riders can do this exact same thing, this exact ratio of things or whatever it is. Yeah. Um, how do you fit over unders into a threshold block? Um, so, you know, with the, uh, you know, with my viewing over unders, you know, the longer ones anyway, not the inner capacity ones, the longer ones being like threshold, you can just substitute a regular steady state threshold day for over unders. Um, and just work on those kind of in a vacuum and work on your steady state stuff in the other day or two other days or whatever it is. Uh, but that's it. Just, you can just add them in and I don't have any, like if I'm talking to somebody one-on-one life I'm consulting with somebody, I will typically be able to recommend, oh, you should do this kind of over under or that kind of over under or this specific workout. Uh, and you might want to do one of these in one steady state threshold day, like that kind of stuff, like specifically, if I know who I'm talking to and I know what the goals are and what their weaknesses are, that's really easy to determine. Um, otherwise, you know, it's, it's not that important. Just have fun with it. There you go. Have fun. Yeah. I think it's a good point. Like, within reason, there's no reason you couldn't take what was supposed to be a two by 20, two by 30 sweet spot workout and change it to over unders as long as, yeah, you know, it feels good and not like so beat up that you're not going to make it through. Yeah. Uh, don't add them though on top of all their work. Yeah. Uh, if you're working on TTE, do you have to do over unders? No, absolutely. No. You can do a few things you have to do, right? Like, I mean, just the idea that like, oh, all, all elite time trialers do this. They ride their bike a lot. You know, I don't know. Like, yes, some of them should ride their bike more. Um, how much does Corey ride his bike? He rides his bike a lot, doesn't it? Yeah, 25 to 30 hours a week, typically Jesus. Yeah. Uh, and that's cutting down a little bit, um, for reasons we're going to, and a podcast with him later. Um, are there any differences in adaptation? And if I like over unders more than straight threshold, um, I think as long as, yeah, it's like we said, as long as you're doing them to like threshold type durations and you're progressing them like you would threshold time. No, they're not really. Um, let's see. A lot of questions on that. Um, uh, oh, are they good for mental variation, novelty or both? Yes. Absolutely. Like, if you are always looking for a new type of workout, there's no better way to approach, you know, manipulating all the different variables and having fun with it as overunders. Like, they have the most things that you can adjust in order to make a workout. Oh, that's what you should do. You should write up something that's like the over under workout generator where it like, if you're bored with your sweet spot work, you hit, you hit like a random eyes and like, do you remember that app that used to be, um, urban spoon? You would put in certain restaurant qualities that you want for your area and you'd hit like go and it would like suggest things for you. Yeah. Oh, okay. Cool. Um, that's what you need. All right. Call him and write it. I was going to say some, I don't know, some entrepreneurial spirit can go out there and there's your million dollar idea. Someone's going to make money off of it. Yeah. Charge, um, charge $4.20 to use the app. Um, 69 cents a roll. Like, oh, you don't like that one. 69 more cents if you press the, you would have 138 cents. Um, okay. So what adaptation? Oh, can I do my FTP test as overunders? It's easier than sitting straight at threshold. Um, well, it's more fun. A lot of the time, but, um, one of the things about FTP testing is like, like, let's say you're doing threshold work and you are good at, you know, accelerating every couple of minutes from threshold. The accelerations are going to increase your average power. Um, like, let's say you're doing it at like 250 watts and your accelerations add like 10 watts. Does that make your FTP go from 250 to 260? I don't necessarily think it does, but also I think the difference at that point is academic and, yeah. And like, you know, you can look at the power, like power curve is the power curve. Like if it's like 260 and you feel like it's 260 fine, if you're using it to assign threshold work and 260 feels a little high, then it's not. Um, but there is a point at which, um, like, if you're doing like 15 15, it's like a lot of like mountain bike or type people, um, crit racers, like there's a lot of people who can actually put out threshold type power doing intermittent nephers, like 40 20s or whatever. Um, and does that make that power invalid? I don't think necessarily it does because we're looking at a constant metabolic load and the aerobic stress of recovery between the workbounds in a single muscle fiber that's being recruited repeatedly. It still adds up to, I mean, my, my conception at this point is it still adds up to a sustained metabolic load. And while we're not getting some adaptations like we're not contracting for those durations, um, so we kind of have less calcium, like, can K signaling and stuff like that. At the same time, we're probably, you know, having about the same NPK signaling and all the other stuff. So, so yes and no, um, it really, like at this point, the questions are becoming more academic and the practical thing is if you do these, do you get stronger? Yeah. You just don't want to do it like NP buster style where you just like send some 30 or something. Yeah, don't use normalized power for these. Use average power, especially if you want to try to get a threshold sense from them. Um, uh, any cadence tips? Yeah. I love manipulating cadence on over unders, especially the over's high cadence for like track people and crit people is what probably when I get a track racer, I'm like, oh my god, I love these here high cadence for your overs. Great. Go. Yeah. Yeah. People like at, and also it, the, that kind of stuff helps people, it helps me get a sense of how fatigued somebody is because a lot of the time, those like high cadence stuff, even if it's not like an over, even if it's just manipulating cadence to get somebody ready, like, you know, 30 seconds of high cadence, two minutes of regular cadence, I can tell somebody's tired by how easy it is for them to do the high cadence stuff. You know, there's a lot of information you can gather from that. Yeah. That makes sense. Um, uh, adaptations you get from over unders that you necessarily don't from threshold intervals. I think actually getting into bigger motor units is probably the biggest one. Um, although there's not, you know, obviously any hard science on that, but I would say that's probably the, the, the fun one so far. And also, especially if you just aren't good at accelerating or going over threshold, and then, you know, riding steady state underneath, and that's, especially if that's a skill that you need. Like, if you're in a race, and you've got a 20 minute climb and people are going to accelerate and like, you're going to have a hard time with that. And you don't want to try to just diesel your way back up to them. Practice this for sure. But dizzling up the side of the road is kind of fun sometimes, you know, so that's your, that's your climbing style. All right. So after our little technical glitch, so all of the rest of the Instagram questions are pretty much along the same line. So if we didn't get to your specific question, and you think that it was significantly different from all of the other ones that we covered, let me know. I apologize ahead of time. DM me an Instagram and I will try to answer your question for you. Most likely I'm just going to say the same difference. Even with your, you know, slightly different take on the question, but I will still answer it anyway. So, so yeah, thank you everybody for the questions. You know, I, I think we kind of addressed a lot of what, what got asked ahead of time, but I wanted to kind of address them anyway in case there was any other differences. But yeah, Kyle, so any, any wrap up thoughts on, on overunders and their specialness and, you know, alternative workouts and, you know, kind of, you know, wrapping up thoughts for this, this 10 minute tips. No, I mean, overunders are fun. I kind of, I've always kind of like that, you know, break up the boredom slightly more fun, like type things. So if they work, if you do them, you know, unfortunately, there's nothing miraculous about them versus other types of, you know, higher intensity aerobic workouts, but they're, they're great. And they, like you said, they provide you a lot of flexibility so they're like a good, I don't know, genre of workout to like play with and to kind of feel out. And then, and like, like you said, as you get closer to race season, there may be a little more race-specific. And so you can feel like then you're also, there's a skill component to them, be it accelerations, higher tempo, or higher type of higher cadence, things like that. That's good. Or, you know, if you're cross country mountain, by click it down harder gear, lower cadence, stuff like, you know, lots of little knobs, you can turn to make them fun and still worthwhile and not just two by 20 until, you know, you die of boredom. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah. And so if you want to think about, like, aerobic capacity, do some aerobic capacity workouts. Or if you want to, if you want to do an over under kind of tweener workout, then you can do that. You know, as, but as soon as we find a study that really looks at over under workouts and, and they're, you know, their consequences versus other different types of workouts, yeah, we're going to do a podcast about that. So if anybody actually has one, of course, all my searching around, probably, I bet there's a couple people going, oh god, why didn't I see this study? Because they're, there actually was one that I was thinking about and I couldn't include it because the, this is what you want in a paper is the methodology section was vague. So it wasn't entirely clear if the intervals had like how the rest intervals happened between the overs and unders if there were any at all. I looked at the study that the paper referenced as having been based on and I see recovery intervals where the heart rate gets down to, you know, at 90, 95% max, then the heart rate gets down to 120 before they go again. And so that's what it said it was based on, but obviously if we're going to have a confusing methodology section, it's not going to be good to include or base any kind of good conclusions on. So yeah, it's hard to hard to suggest workouts based on. Yeah, confusing. And people have different readings of this paper too. Some people are like, yeah, that's a strict over underworkout. There was no rest in between. And actually, what I thought was interesting is that there was no difference between those two things anyway, really. And actually the steady state ones were slightly better in terms of their adaptations, but don't even start. But anyway, yeah, so that was like the only other really real paper where I was like, this is kind of it, but it's really, it's really not it. This is now like what two and a half hours of podcasting on overunders. So I hope everybody had a good listen. And again, as usual in our conclusions, if it works for you, do it. And if it doesn't, don't. But you really want to make sure that you have that good feedback loop of having evidence of something actually does what it's supposed to do. And that, you know, if over, if you think overunders are supposed to increase your threshold, make sure that they are. And if they are, then I am absolutely no need to complain about that. So, yeah, so thanks everybody for listening as always. And thank you for all of the lesson of questions up at empirical cycling on Instagram up in the stories. We can amaze this weekend. We're a lot of fun as usual. So thanks for all of those questions. So you can be followed over there. And of course, if you are a fan of the podcast, you've already subscribed and all that good stuff, you've left a nice review. Please share the podcast. Even if it's going to be a little controversial, which that's fine too. Sorry if you don't agree. But I'm glad I'm thinking you right now. So that's what it is. So if you want to donate to the show, we have no ads empirical cycling at dot com slash donate. And of course, if you would like to reach out for coaching or consultation, if you want to hire me for consultation and tell me why I'm wrong about overunders, I'm fine with that too. If you want to argue for an hour, we can do that. That sounds like a lot of fun. So yeah, empirical cycling at gmail.com is going to reach out for any of that. With that, you will see you all in the next episode. Thanks everyone.
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