 So I'm here with Luke and the first question I have is I'm just doing base Ks at the moment so I've been training for about a month pretty hard but I'm certainly not at my peak fitness or anywhere near it and yesterday I went and rode Arthur's Seat which is for me is a big ride, biggest ride in six months, 135 Ks. I'm feeling pretty fatigued today, I'm a bit concerned like is that going to affect my test? Should I be worried about that, the lactate test we're going to do today? Well I mean normally I'd recommend that we don't do a big hard ride 24 hours prior but having said that, you said it was zone 2, base sort of intensity. The test today is only going to be at 20 minutes, internal duration of which will spend about six or seven minutes beyond threshold so it's not even as hard as a 20 minute time trial test for example. We'll find out when we jump on your resting lactate, if it's under 2 millimoles, tick in the box we're fine and that's considered a resting lactate though. So it was yesterday you did the ride, what time did you finish up? 10.30. So 24 hours? Yeah. So we should be fine. No not really, sure it's going to affect your VO2 max and where your actual lactate threshold is but in the grand scheme of things from the perspective of actually identifying your training zones and giving you specific advice it doesn't matter if you peak fitness or just starting out and we'll see that shortly but it really doesn't matter because it's a true representation of where you are currently at, all those zones change absolutely they will but then we do the test again three months down the track, reassess the zones and then re-prescribe training based on your current fitness level at the time. I was coming in and participating in a lactate test but you said we're going to do a blend of lactate and VO2 so could you just quickly explain like what's the difference between them both and why am I actually going to do them both combined. So if you go to any other lab you can either do a VO2 max test or a lactate threshold test. A VO2 max test is what we did last time, 20 watt ramp every one minute so we want to get you to exhaustion within 12 minutes. The reason we choose 12 minutes or 9 to 12 minutes is because we don't want heat loads stress to play a factor, we don't want that build up of lactic acid to be in the muscles for too long so we want to get you up to your max heart rate basically as quickly as we possibly can but also allowing that you can't get to max heart rate in six minutes it takes a little bit of time. So that's going to be the best test just to get your VO2 max value but the point is your VO2 max value doesn't mean much by itself, it's how can we use that for training. A lactate test we wouldn't worry about the mass we just take a finger prick so we get a small blood sample every three minutes so that's a 30 watt ramp every three minutes so it's a longer test it takes instead of 12 minutes it's closer to 20 to 25 minutes we want to let that lactate accumulate in the blood okay. That test alone is going to give you your lactate threshold but what I like to do is to combine the two together because that's going to give us all aspects of your physiology if we just do the VO2 max test I can see how well your muscles are using oxygen if I just do the lactate threshold test I can see how well you can tolerate that fatigue when it comes in the legs but why don't we measure them both because it's all relevant to the training methods okay so we can build a aerobic capacity so your base case aerobic power which is how quickly you can use oxygen or we can improve how well you can tolerate lactic acid once it's present normally in 95% of people two of those aspects will be pretty good and one won't be but if we're not measuring all three of them it's hard to figure out exactly what you should be doing and that's what we do both at the same time because my understanding in some labs just give you a number and that's a bit of a myth people just think oh you do these tests get a number but you actually once you get the number you actually prescribed a methodology to improve your performance yeah well I mean it's gonna be better for training prescription but also even if we did a let's say we just did a lactate threshold test so what we look for is a two millimole jump so let's say for example I'll start a test lactates one then 1.5 to 2.5 3 to 4 and then we go from 4 to 7 okay big jump we know that all right we've gone up more than 2 so that's gonna be our threshold what happens if it happens halfway through a stage you know it could happen it doesn't because we only take lactate every three minutes we're not getting that continual feedback but by having the mask on and measuring your your respiratory rate every 30 seconds we can pinpoint the exact point it might be halfway through an interval that we actually hit that that lactate threshold number so a lot of the labs here say that they they will give you the numbers but then it's up to you or your coach or whoever it is to actually determine how to turn that into a training zone and we've just come up with a method that works really well that's really easy to understand for everybody so we get our base training zone to stuff we get a tempo we have threshold and we get out so above threshold anaerobic soil work so that we can then give you specific advice based on that all right guys all we can actually see is I'm going to take you over to cams lactate data and we're gonna see that it's actually quite high at the beginning five point three at rest and then it actually went down to two and then down to one point nine again so he's actually gone from rest to exercise and he's and he's lactate to come down so lactate or lactic acid is a byproduct of the anaerobic glycolysis system so if we don't have oxygen available we're going to get fatiguing lactic acid in the legs now cam was saying that he did a big ride yesterday did you do an active recovery at the end you just finish the ride and that was it okay so he actually had residual lactic acid in the legs now fun little tip if you do just ten minutes of active recovery so that's actually below we use 56% VO2 max it would be the equivalent of say cam riding at you know heart rate of a hundred hundred and ten very very easy intensity that's actually going to the oxygen that comes into the into your body that's going to metabolize lactic acid and turn and actually turn it into water so water being non-fatiguing so just ten minutes after a ride will be able to bring that lactic acid down we saw it went from five three to two in just three minutes of riding at 180 watts quick update we were at I'm about to take another sample soon at nine minute mark heart rate 150 47 2 VO2 max the values we have here VE is how much air is breathing in so 96 liters he got to 230 when we did the VO2 max test 38 breaths pretty comfortable heart rate there at 149 so pretty comfy at the moment when he gets to two and a half millimoles of lactate currently at 1.9 then we know he's at his zone 2 and normally when he gets to about 4 that would be considered his threshold but we'll keep you up to date with that pick up date 161 heart rate 87% of his estimated maximum 56.6 VO2 122 liters last lactate reading 2.3 as I said when we get to 2.5 that means top end of his zone 2 so we've pretty much bang on it from here we're going to get to 3 fours and then well and truly above that afterwards so keep it up cam somewhere around 162 is going to be that heart rate can working really really hard here you can see here is lactate has now jumped up to 5.6 so you're going to keep counting, you're going to keep counting alright, finger out you're alright, on you, come on in the latter stages now nearly there working hard come on good cam that's the way keep it going keep it up 15 seconds in the stage finish this stage with 361 so we've just finished the test I'm pretty fatigued I can't even talk properly and Luke's downloaded all the data so we're going to go through just over here alright so what do we got here I'm doing a little bit of light stretching whilst yeah yeah yeah so we got some yeah obviously got got your numbers here so test protocol we did a 30 watt ramp every three minutes so starting 180 we go to 210, 240, 270 we're going to a peak values we hit we got 30 seconds into 390 we actually we hit our VO2 max at the end of 360 there which is probably normal 199 litres of air coming in it's a big amount so why do you only hit your VO2 max before the test even finishes? because it becomes a point where I mean in this instance we pulled out about 20 seconds into that stage as opposed to the 30 so we average that over 30 seconds meaning that we wouldn't have got the the whole amount of that 30 second duration of how much air you're breathing in but what will often happen is somebody might have hit their VO2 max you know two minutes prior to the end of the test the reason that is they're breathing in more air but their muscles physically can't exchange the oxygen across quickly enough so we might hit a plateau so which means if we can't actually use up any more oxygen the only way that we can further increase our power output is through the anaerobic pathway which is the lactic acid filling up the the muscles and the legs which is fine but we're gonna fatigue pretty quickly so we hit 200 litres 199 litres of air coming in which is big 70 breaths and more than one a second max heart rate today 181 and your relative VO2 max of 65.9 okay which is which is very good it's I mean not obviously not as impressive as what we hit last time which is off the charts but that still well and truly puts you in that that excellent category I look for sort of 60 60s I say yep you got a lot to work with competitive 70 and above is like you know let's think about winning some races I'm really winning some races okay so I mean a couple of factors one six months in between tests could play a factor but also the test protocol as well being a slow ramp and probably better to throw it to you mate and ask you but it's a harder test isn't it like three minutes trying to hold a workload for three minutes there's a lot more factors that come into play one the major one being lactic acid accumulation in the legs it's in the legs for sort of seven minutes at a high level as opposed to maybe three because we're ramping it up very quickly in the video to test and also along with duration of the test as well because we're doing a so doing a three minute ramp so you're gonna start to the heat load stress and not dehydration so much but definitely heat load stress you're still dripping as we can see now pretty warm a lot more factors come into play so you can't you won't necessarily hit your peak value so last time we actually got 230 litres of air so you actually couldn't breathe in as much air overall and the main reason being which we can go into a sec is that you and you guessed it before you came in is that you couldn't really tolerate lactic acid when it came in yeah okay we're really delaying when it came in because the aerobic base is good but when it came in it overcame you pretty quickly and there was only so much you could do I mean the key take-homes and this is what we've got to do the hybrid test we do both at the same time because I like to look at this lactate graph here which we can jump onto there so lactate graph here as well as our fraction of expired oxygen I'll quickly roll through this first okay so this is the lactate graph we see it came out came down quite a lot from that five three to that two which is due to that active recovery we said started to get the legs sticking over and metabolizing all those that all that lactic acid stuff okay so as I mentioned before we look for two and a half millimoles to be that top-end endurance science you actually hit it 300 watts that's huge at a heart rate of 165 okay so it was really quite comfortable what typically would happen with let's say somebody who was peak fitness all well and they've done their base I've also done their build sort of phase okay what will happen is they'll go from say 2.5 millimoles of lactate then they might go to three and a half then they might go to four and then they'll go from four to like six so to speak as you can see with your data you went straight from two five to five six okay so it's a quite a quick jump from being in your zone two to then actually being at your top end of your threshold your threshold zone is 20 watts from 300 to 320 watts it didn't take really long to go from being a zone two easy aerobic ride to then being threshold okay you got a really big aerobic zone it's actually 108 to 300 watts of massive aerobic zone but then a very small threshold zone which is purely because of the training you've been doing yeah okay so that alone if we said I'll be riding 280 watts and I'll be aerobic so like for a four hour ride it's so long as heart rate stayed under 165 as well that's where you're gonna be a little bit careful with the two because you've got a steady heart rate the hot if it's a hotter day your body's under more stress to produce the energy because you're gonna send blood to the skin to start sweating and all that sort of stuff so based on today's conditions 300 watts but what I like to do with the longer rides is go by heart rate because it will account for all those external variables dehydration heat load fatigue from a previous ride that sort of stuff your heart rate doesn't lie so to speak it's a pretty good represent representation of where your body's at but yeah 300 being the top end yeah so that'll be quite a lot of it's a quite a lot of watts mate but there's such a fine line for you particularly between two and a half to five point six millimole lactate was the space of one stage it's quite a big jump so what that really tells me I mean even without going further we will see without going further you need to do threshold work so what that would be what that means is spending time at all slightly above your threshold so your threshold power is very 20 so we want to do if it's generally a two to one three to one four to one at or above threshold so an example would be 20 minutes at 330 watts it's gonna hurt yeah 10 minute recovery that'd be a two to one or a three to one would be you know nine minutes on three minutes off okay so so more more work than rest or four to one would be a 12 on three off for example okay so we want to what we want to do is accumulate lactic acid have a partial recovery and then get it back in there again okay by doing that you're gonna force your body to actually become better at tolerating clearing that lactic acid so instead of going from two five to five six we go from two five to three five then to four and then we jump up beyond that the two recommendations one would be the longest style ones I just said like 20 on ten off but also back to the original training recommendation and we can sort of see them this graph here it's a gradual incline and then when we hit this point here which is actually your threshold it's quite a sudden sharp increase okay what's that did we would have been talking yeah no no stress so what actually happened here is and this is only two minutes after we hit your end of zone two so it's it's literally a two minute bracket this is all about aerobic power so this is it's a slightly different training focus but this is the that would be the four under what one I was telling you about last time okay so it's a one to one work to rest two on two off three on three off four on four off and we want to have that rest because for this adaptation we actually want to try to get rid of lactic acid in the system as much as possible okay because lactic acid two ways we can improve fitness we can prove the aerobic ability to use oxygen or we can improve our tolerance that lactic acid which we saw before okay look there's some crossover effect of course but they do have actually in theory their polar opposite adaptations okay one's aerobic one's anaerobic yeah so for this one to improve our aerobic engine we don't want lactic acid in the system because it actually starts to shut off the mitochondria in the muscles that they're what they're what use up the oxygen okay so having a one to one work to rest ratio because we're going at say 400 watts very very hard above threshold a lot of lactic acid are coming in four minutes yeah agree absolutely but then by having a four minute recovery we get rid of most of it okay which means those mitochondria can function fire again before we do another effort so on and so forth okay so one's about trying to keep the quality of the session high but always have lactic acid in the system so we have a shorter recovery for the goal of delaying that big spark in our blood lactate and the other one is actually anaerobic focus which is trying to give us more mitochondria so there's more chances of that oxygen to actually diffuse across the muscle and blood to create aerobic energy and they're the two factors where I can see doing the most or getting the most benefit which is sort of in line with what you've currently been doing your aerobic base is great look this is awesome you know in the ones into the low twos for quite a long time aerobic base tick tick well again it comes down to when do you need to be fit by? In a month. Absolutely. Yeah I normally recommend starting to put in some of that anaerobic stuff threshold style stuff eight weeks prior to an event yeah generally with a real big focus on specific threshold four weeks prior so that means trying to get out on the same terrain that you're going to race at if you know there's going to be 30 second steep hills get out and do 30 second steep hills you know trying to replicate the race as closely as possible if you've got four weeks then I would up to how three months season though it's three months so it's kind of like rolling into the season as opposed to being that kind of thing. Yeah well that's right I mean in terms of our recommendations we try to if you can do 110% of expected race time for your zone two ride and it's quite comfortable then you've got a good enough aerobic base that's the general now if you've got to do a 500k event you've got to be smart you know you're not going to go into a 500k training ride but under normal circumstances if you're going to go do I know for example I'm not sure when this is going to come out but Amy's Grand Fondo's next week or the week after 120k's if somebody's expecting to do that in three and a half hours your longest ride would be somewhere about four hours. It's not going to hurt you but it's not necessarily going to benefit you any more than doing an hour and a half to two hours potentially. And be better off doing aerobic work. It's going to be more specific yeah potentially so how much time do you have to train and you're going to monitor fatigue and recovery yeah I mean I do crits as well and I don't ride more than I might do a three hour tops but you know that's just because you're riding with your mates so to speak but from a performance standpoint you know I've been keeping sort of two hours being the tops but even an hour and a half potentially. You can keep doing it keep increasing the volume you might get two, three, five percent benefit tops but if you go do short stuff and aerobic style stuff that the four on four off or the 20 on 10 off add it around your functional threshold power I could see as quick and significant 10 or 15% within four to six weeks just by training a different sort of energy system which will be specific to the race. So in terms of your zones obviously I'll send these for you but you're aerobic zones quite a bit it's a very big one because you don't want to base. So 120, 60, 165 heart rate 180 to 300 watts a big, big range. Threshold is very small 160, 60, 172 heart rate 301 to 320 watts all right we want to get that close to 300 to say 350 watts by doing more of this threshold stuff where you're right at that limit or slightly above okay and then your top end zone VO2 max or above threshold is 173 to your max heart rate today of 181, 321 to 360 watts okay. Yeah, I mean I think the biggest one, probably two main ones, the big thing that you do a fuel test, you do a 20 minute time trial test, step test whatever it is and you get your zones from that. You can normally get a pretty good FTP generally you know within a couple of watts right. What I really struggle and what I'm still trying to figure out myself but if there's a possible way to do it but what you can't find is that aerobic heart rate zone it's not possible unless you physically measure blood lactate how are you going to do it it's not a percentage of anything okay. Some people their aerobic heart rate will be you know 70% of their FTP others will be 80% yours is very high because your FTP is only 20 watts above it so yours is like 95% right. That is going to be very varied between an individual okay. Whereas your FTP you can do a fuel test on that because it just goes as hard as you possibly can and you know that's going to be your FTP anyway. Okay so that's a pretty easy one to pick. So one you can't really get your aerobic zone to heart rate and equations work it's a bulk over 60% of people other 32% rubbish yeah. Rubbish equation. We had a guy here a 38 year old hit a max heart rate of 213 the other day okay his threshold is 204 heart rate. The above is max but it's not is fine you know what I mean so he benefits from actually getting his heart rate up that high. The other reason why a lab test especially the hybrid test that we did would be better than a field based alternative is that again it comes in the strengths and weaknesses. You go do a 20 minute time trial what does it tell you? It tells you FTP right? How are we going to improve that FTP? Do we need to do aerobic stuff? Do we need to do volume? Is it going to be VO2 intervals above at 95% VO2 max? Does it need to be more threshold style work? We don't know because we don't get the lactate graph we don't get that fraction of expired oxygen graph okay. So you know what your FTP is but then you don't know specifically for you which one of three ways you should focus on actually improving it. Yeah definitely I mean we've had a guy coming in 2016 he came in with a VO2 max of 68 which is still very very good he was a runner all we did was long slow just massive on his long slow base case. We he was doing 10 hours a week when he we did the test didn't even coach him just gave him recommendations and what he did was two high intensity sessions a week at that 95% VO2 max so for you that was like that 400 watts on three minutes and then three minutes off within four months his VO2 was up to 80 and that correlator he was a runner he was doing a 39 minute 10k then he went to do a 35 minute 10k after that. We had an athlete who is just did a very very good race at it's a triathlete up in Cairns he won the age group in the 355 for a half iron man when he was working with us he was doing 23 hours a week training which is quite a lot with 80% of that being base case he came to me and sure enough his aerobic capacity his base was fantastic so why do we want to go and train base well we don't need to so what we did was actually cut him down to 8 hours a week his FTP went from 270 to 300 watts in three months by doing a third of the training. I'm not against volume don't get me wrong but a lot of athletes are already good at volume that's what they do your body's going to adapt to what it does so if you already do have a big couple of years a couple of seasons of long base case under the belt you're probably already going to be very strong in that aspect so why will we go and chase two or three or four percent gains when we can change your training get more high quality intervals if that's what you need which in your case you do do actually a third of the training begin get more performance result likewise we get athletes who do have a poor base and we have to do the volume but it just comes down to rather than working on the misconceptions of the industry like this is what we do 80% aerobic 20% aerobic we use 220 minus or 80% of that get more individualized get specific to what you need to do and that's it we don't have any fancy training it's not like we do anything spectacular it's just personalized training based on what you need to do if you came to me without this testing and asked me to get you fit I could do it as well as anybody else out there but I'd be guessing and I don't like to do that whereas this is quite simple it tells us exactly what to do my job is easy I look at this and I just say I know that this training session does this this and so on and so forth and then we just have to figure out what's the most specific training for your event and how long we've got and you just do it it's not actually that hard so I've just wrapped up with Luke some very good insights for my training over the next month preparation for the criteria season just dropped my keys I'll catch you in the next video