carlosflanders wrote:
In my view these are too hard. Object of VO2 max interval is to use as much aerobic capacity as possible and train heart and stroke volume. Going at 120% you're probably using way too high a proportion of anaerobic work. Too much acidosis as well - that kills training effect. Do these at 110-112% and you'll get just as much training effect without the extra strain on the body. You can shorten the recover period a bit as well. Leave the very hard intervals to tuning up for a peak. In my case hammering my VO2max intervals brings on asthma. Knocked the level down to something sustainable and I got faster. I coach a couple of people every year and the biggest problem I saw was training too hard and a fetish for suffering. Changed up the levels to something more sensible and aerobic capacity improved.
The worst advice I have ever seen is to do your VO2max intervals as hard as possible.
Suffering is overrated. Train smart and leave the suffering for the last laps of a crit or that nasty crosswind section of a RR when everyone is getting guttered.
None of the above is really correct. Only if you can't complete the workout as prescribed might it be argued that you are going too hard during VO2max intervals. Far more common, in my experience anyway, is people not going hard enough. For example, if you're not driving your heart rate to within ~10 beats/min of maximum during the earlier efforts, you're not pushing things as much as you think (hard to get heart rate that high during the first interval, whereas due to cardiac drift you may end still end up in that region despite the intensity not being all that high).
Last edited by:
Andrew Coggan: Apr 16, 17 5:56