1. Rates (time constants, half-lives) of adaptation for all performance parameters are similar (John Holloszy - might want to google that name - would argue teleologically that this is an evolutionary necessity.) OTOH, the magnitude or scope of adaptation is not, nor is the physiological 'cost' of pursuing such adaptations.

2. Don't be misled by those who think they can read lactate curves like goat entrails.

Man....I am glad I didn't have a mouth full of water when I read that. :-)

1. Rates (time constants, half-lives) of adaptation for all performance parameters are similar

Thanks for replying! So if I follow you, it is not the case that anareobic adaptions occur faster, nor that they stay in place shorter?

John Holloszy - might want to google that name

Did, now I only see lots of rats running on treadmills with sweatbands. Has his 60s point that in terms of volume at low intensities, more is more, been contested, or is it an established fact? http://jap.physiology.org/content/56/5/1260

OTOH, the magnitude or scope of adaptation is not, nor is the physiological 'cost' of pursuing such adaptations.

Meaning that intensity is harder on the body but causes changes of greater magnitude?

2. Don't be misled by those who think they can read lactate curves like goat entrails.

Haha, will try not to, considering purchasing a simple lactate meter to get more detailed outside confirmation that training works and how it works, other than observing lower HR at same/higher pace/watts over time.

Sorry to come across as a first year student asking basic questions.

I had a period in 2013 where I went from lower intensity higher volume, to adding in a lot more anaerobic work.

I don't know what happened to my lactate curves but I know that my sustainable aerobic power did not decrease due to it.

Sometimes it is more simple and direct to simply measure that which you are trying to improve.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

We have a section on our website that addresses this. It is straight out of Olbrecht's book.


http://www.lactate.com/...pensation/index.html

According to Olbrecht, changes to the anaerobic capacity happen faster than changes to the aerobic capacity except after detraining of aerobic capacity then there are quick responses to training. There is also the difference of building up anaerobic capacity or lowering it.

For example, base swim training is about 95% aerobic for 1 and 2 minute events but as the athlete gets nearer to the big meet, more high intensity sets are added to increase speed for the major meets. This adaptation, building anaerobic capacity, takes about 2-4 weeks while building aerobic capacity is a slow process that takes years.


Of course some of these goat herders have supervised goats that have won over a hundred World Championship and Olympic medals. See

https://www.youtube.com/...amp;feature=youtu.be

for how one reads entrails. (video is a little dramatic because it was done for a local CC course.)

And here is another

http://systembasedtraining.com/...your-blood-wont-lie/

Mumbo Jumbo or maybe interesting insight - take your pick

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Jerry Cosgrove

Sports Resource Group
http://www.lactate.com
https://twitter.com/@LactatedotCom

The Olbrecht book is long on ideas but short on direct on-point evidence. As such I take it as the informed opinion of a respected practitioner. So while I appreciate the positions and accept that he finds them to be true, I don't take it as the final truth.

The detraining section in Inigo Mujika's endurance book on the other lays out how central adaptations in the heart are on different time frames than peripheral adaptations like forming mitochondria and capillarization. Though I don't necessarily see that either of those adaptations necessarily have a direct relationship to low or high lactate exercise or different time decays of low lactate or high lactate exercise ability.

His opinions also seem to be heavily biased by his work with swimmers, many of whom compete at durations requiring both significant contributions from sustainable and non-sustainable sources of energy.


Don't confuse the time-course of changes with detraining from the time-course of changes with training.

+1

The best predctor of performance is performance itself, training is testing and testing is training, that which gets measured gets improved, yadda, yadda, yadda.

No, it's just that it hurts more to maximize such adaptations, and the scope or magnitude for improvement tends to be smaller ("sprinters are born, not made"). That leaves people w/ the impression that such adaptations are more ephemeral in nature.



I don't know how you got that from that paper, but Holloszy is one of the giants in the field of exercise physiology.



Harder, but tending to cause smaller improvements, at least over the intermediate term.


Save your money.

Olbrecht is wrong.

Evidence please.

Triathletes swim run and cycle.

Possibly Olbrecht's ideas don't translate to cycling anymore than your ideas translate to running and swimming and other endurance sports?

Your ideas are possibly just as biased by your work with cyclists.

Olbrecht has trained a considerable number of top class athletes. You have trained yourself and your wife.

Have you considered the possibility that it is you who is wrong?

Save your money for what? WKO 4?

Stop trolling.

I still have a few questions for you to address in a previous thread :)

Thanks, checked the website, very informative! It is a fascinating thought that you could micromanage training adaptions through frequent bloodwork.

I am curious however about how people tend to trust different kinds of arguments --> "have won over a hundred World Championship and Olympic medals"

No denying thats impressive, but in itself not "proof" for details in the underlying theory. To extrapolate, it could be that he gets to work with exceptionally gifted genetic outliers. Random controlled studies on the other hand provide more proof in the scientific sense since they better isolate factors, but are perhaps less immediately useable precisely for that reason

Would be interesting to know if the controversy stems from different cultures. Does Olbrecht do the academic circuit these days, going to conferences and publishing papers? If not, I can understand how active researchers view him as an outsider.

But then again, who wins in a "my medals against your citations" contest?

Personally my goal is to make the most out of my time training based on sound advice, and as a novice athlete, there is just so much to learn!

Olbrecht wins the medal count...best I can muster is this:

"2002- Scientific/technical consultant for a select number of elite cyclists, triathletes, and/or their coaches. Collectively, these athletes have won approximately fifty US National Championships, eight Pan American Championships, eight World Championships, and four Olympic medals, and have set two World Records."

I like to at least think that I do better at my day job instead of my hobby:

https://wustl.academia.edu/...ggan/CurriculumVitae

Seriously, you are totally over the top rude. It is totally fine to argue the findings of different studies, but you are offering no evidence based arguments and are just personally attacking a guy who I am sure has 1000x more experience in this than you. Go back to reddit.

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Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
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True, for the world championship athletes. But they seek him out, not obviously all elite athletes. And some of the elite athletes have left. Olbrecht is in the process of working with many in Australian swimming so there will be more. Will have to see how this goes.

A few years ago he had about a thousand athletes he worked with, mostly age group swimmers but several triathletes and rowers as well as runners and motocross riders. Few pure cyclists but a couple of the teams have approached him. I do not know where that stands. He was trying to reduce his time with the age group swimmers.

He is not in academia and has a day job so all his work with athletes is in addition to his job. So there is little room for publishing though he has data from thousands of athletes some over periods as long as 10 years

Van Lierde approached him when he was an age group swimmer.

I present his ideas as an alternative to the ideas that are prevalent here. They explain a lot and are based on published models of exercise metabolism.

I have also linked to Shannon Grady's website. She is slowly developing a lot of successful athletes.

So take it for what it is worth.

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Jerry Cosgrove

Sports Resource Group
http://www.lactate.com
https://twitter.com/@LactatedotCom

Strewth - where do you find the time to train!! (CV stuff)

These days? 5:45 to 6:45 a.m. (while my wife and two kids sleep).

Andy

Would you mind elaborating a bit? Are you saying that the rate of improvement is similar but there are greater gains to be made (in terms of improving race performance) for aerobic, therefore people spend more time there? In other words, you spend more time working in zone 2 rather than zone 4 not because the rate of improvement is different, but because the total magnitude of improvement avaiable is higher in zone 2? And also because zone 4 training hurts (a lot) and has a high recovery cost? Thanks in advance.

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Simplify, Train, Live

That's pretty much it. Specifically, if you look at the literature on the time-constant for improvements in neuromuscular power, anaerobic power, or aerobic power, you find that it is essentially the same in all cases, i.e., 7-10 d or thereabouts. What differs, then, is the overall magnitude or scope of possible improvement, as well as the physiological strain associated with overloading the different components/abilities.

Thanks Andy, that makes sense. That is an important distinction (time course vs magnitude) and I think lots of people get those confused.

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Simplify, Train, Live

Hang on... Are you guys saying that training in zone 2 yields greater improvement (presumably over the long term) in aerobic capacity than training in zone 4?

I believe they are saying one can expect to improve your aerobic more over the long term than your anaerobic capacity or 5 second power.

Training in Zone 4 or Zone 2 will both improve your aerobic power.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

I don't think so.

First, one has to define anaerobic capacity. Olbrecht has spent almost 30 years working in this area so I would not cavalierly say he is wrong. He uses a definition that is different from that often used in the academic literature. His definition is the maximum amount of pyruvate that can be produced per second by glycolysis. It is frequently called VLa Max to be comparable to VO2 max.

Olbrecht's dissertation was on the use of energy systems by different types of swimmers and how to measure these energy systems. He worked with several hundred swimmers. His work with swimmers and other athletes since then has focused on these concepts and how to employ them in the training of athletes. So Wrong? I doubt it. Especially with such a success rate.

The anaerobic capacity for the average couch potato is higher than it is for an endurance athlete. Raising this capacity beyond what is innate is almost impossible but not unheard of. Long low level workouts typical of endurance athletes tend to reduce this capacity way below their innate max. However, a swimmer with a high VO2 max will reduce this capacity during base training by long endurance sets but will quickly regain it within 3-5 week of more intensive sets. But an endurance athlete such as a marathoner or cyclist may slowly lower this capacity to the point that it will not return quickly to innate levels.

For an athlete with a high VO2 max but competing in short events, they will usually have a high anaerobic capacity but not as high as a pure sprinter. If such an athlete (800 m or 1500 m runner or 100 m or 200 m swimmer) wants to compete in longer races, they will have to reduce this anaerobic capacity in order to be effective. This may take several years depending on the length of the event. But in a training cycle it is possible to increase and decrease anaerobic capacity in lesser amounts depending on what is desired. It will not be possible to turn a top level 100 m swimmer into a top 1500 m swimmer in a short time but may be possible over several years. So anaerobic capacity can be trained up or down depending on the event. Often the training to increase anaerobic capacity is done after it has been reduced by other types of training.

One would never want to decrease aerobic capacity for any reason but it happens with detraining and can happen with some training sets. Increasing aerobic capacity is a slow process except for initial responses after detraining.

All of this is discussed in Olbrecht's book, The Science of Winning. Obrecht uses a model of energy metabolism developed at the Sports School at the University of Cologne. This model was developed in the 1980's and it was found that optimal energy usage was dependent on the length of the event and the relative strength of the aerobic and glycolytic systems.

This is not a topic seen in a normal book on training but is an essential part of The Science of Winning. And it is essential for the proper training of athletes even for endurance events such as the Ironman as well as for shorter events.

But of course he is wrong. All those poor athletes and coaches who have been led astray.


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Jerry Cosgrove

Sports Resource Group
http://www.lactate.com
https://twitter.com/@LactatedotCom

Wanna bet?

Half-life of increase in VO2max in response to training = 10-11 d:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7219130

Half-life of changes in submaximal blood lactate levels in response to training = 10-11 d:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3182159

Changes in neuromuscular power in response to training = similar time-course:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20213468
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9351694

Changes in 90 s power/maximal accumulated O2 deficit in response to training = similar time-course:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9351694
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11960926
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8897392

No.

How much?

I am not sure you understand Olbrecht's definition of anaerobic capacity and model of metabolism which he validated for his dissertation. And continues to use very successfully. It is easy to mock anything especially if one does not understand it. I would suggest an attempt to understand before passing judgment. This model was developed at one of the best universities for exercise metabolism in the world and is not necessarily Olbrecht's alone. Others use it but mainly for training athletes and less so for academic publishing.

Here is a graphic of his model which obviously doesn't contain any of the mathematical relationships.



We explain the model and the reasons for the various parameters at

http://www.lactate.com/lactate_threshold.html

This model is available in the published literature. Here is an extensive discussion of it by Mader. The article has lots of references to previous publications.

Mader, A. (2003). "Glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation as a function of cytosolic phosphorylation state and power output of the muscle cell." European Journal of Applied Physiology 88(4-5): 317-338.

I am not sure how one would decide who won the bet. Obrecht's ideas are discussed in detail in his book, The Science of Winning which can be purchased on Amazon as a Kindle ebook (I personally get nothing from the sale of the ebook. Amazon gets the major share and the publisher the rest.). So interested readers of this site could decide for themselves.

Also I am not sure what the literature dump was about. I glanced through the 4 or 5 that I have copies of and could see no relevance. The first is about initial increases in aerobic capacity in VO2 max in unfit individuals and as such is not relevant for this discussion. (Olbrecht has a very similar chart in his book so obviously you both agree on something)

Changes in VO2max after initial training is a slow process and I doubt anyone has a half life or the actual time period for its development. It takes years to reach one's full potential and then this max declines due to aging processes.

MAOD is not the same thing as Olbrecht's use of the term anaerobic capacity though they are not completely unrelated. When I get time, I will read them in more detail to see what is there. But as I said, there are a couple, I do not have.

So bottom line, any interested readers should evaluate these topics for themselves and not use your quick judgments to disparage them as the last word.


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Jerry Cosgrove

Sports Resource Group
http://www.lactate.com
https://twitter.com/@LactatedotCom

How much are you worth?


The cited studies directly support my initial statement, i.e., that the time-constant for increases in various physiological determinants of performance are essentially identical.

Are you two arguing over the same question... or just going at it?

Correct me if I'm wrong:

Coggan summary: Time course is the same for adaptation in both, but aerobic has more capacity to improve... so spend more time on Aerobic (but don't count anaerobic out completely).

Jerry: Olbrecht says Both aerobic and anaerobic contribute to performance.

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I talk a lot - Give it a listen: http://www.fasttalklabs.com/category/fast-talk
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The above poster has eschewed traditional employment and is currently undertaking the ill-conceived task of launching his own hardgoods company. Statements are not made on behalf of nor reflective of anything in any manner... unless they're good, then they count.
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I am not sure what the disagreement is about. Coggan says Olbrecht is wrong. I don't believe he is wrong. Nothing in the articles that Coggan listed in any way contradicts anything that Olbrecht says. They are irrelevant or consistent with what was said about him. Of course, no one is absolutely right on everything and Jan is the first to say he is constantly learning new things.

My only objective is to introduce the ideas he has been using in a very successful career advising athletes at all levels but definitely with lots of high level ones. It is not just Americans that do not understand what he is recommending, there are plenty of Europeans who do not understand what he doing. I sat in a bar once at ACSM talking with two of the most distinguished exercise scientists from Germany discussing lactate testing and they had not a clue about Mader's ideas. All they could say was that the 4 mmol/l measure was not a good test and that is what they associated with Mader.

In the early to mid 80's Jan, Michael Lohberg (swim coach of Bonn swim team) and Oram Madsen (a recent Ph.D from Cologne at the time) all went off to St. Croix to set the swimming world on fire using the ideas developed by Mader and others at Cologne. They failed.

Lohberg ended up in Florida where he became a successful swim coach. Madsen went home to Norway and became involved in Olympic sports. Olbrecht went back to Cologne and finished his Ph.D.

In the mean time, Mader solved the problem of why people with the same lactate results performed differently in the same events and why they reacted differently to the same training approaches. He found out that the anaerobic system was causing these differences between athletes. He essentially discovered what was behind the lactate threshold or maximal lactate steady state depending on what definition is used.

This led to the model of metabolism I mentioned above and which Olbrecht validated with his Dissertation. Mader was his thesis adviser, Along the way Olbrecht validated something he calls a distance test and which people here call the FTP. He did it for swimming and the test is well known in swimming circles as the T30 for the time to swim 3000 meters or the distance one can swim in 30 minutes. Olbrecht rejected this type of test because it did not tell one what was behind the result. One needed to know the aerobic and anaerobic contributions in order to know how to properly train the athlete.

The question is how to test for the anaerobic component. Testing for the aerobic capacity was well established but not for anaerobic capacity. Testing for the anaerobic system is more problematic but does not mean it is not a factor in training and performance. This led to a unique test which I linked to above. The test is briefly described in this video (made for a Community College video course)

https://www.youtube.com/...amp;feature=youtu.be

But one needs the model of metabolism to use this test so other less precise tests for anaerobic capacity were developed for athletes that were not elite.

Also how does one train the anaerobic system to the proper level. This is an issue too. There is never enough aerobic capacity and the athlete is in a life long effort to raise VO2 max as we see here with questions about which zones and how much to train in each. But anaerobic capacity must be adjusted for the event to be optimal. This means training it up or down depending on what is required.

For distance events this usually means lowering anaerobic capacity but it cannot be lowered too much even for Ironman length events. There is confusion here when this comes us as most seem to think that anaerobic training is trying to make the system stronger when in fact most of the training for the anaerobic system is to make it weaker.

So is Olbrecht wrong? I doubt it except that no one is absolutely right on everything. I will keep on presenting his ideas on threads where it is appropriate.


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Jerry Cosgrove

Sports Resource Group
http://www.lactate.com
https://twitter.com/@LactatedotCom

You could (should) have stopped right there. Acoording to jerryc, though, Olbrecht claims otherwise. which is why I have tried to set the story straight (w/ plenty of references to back me up).