See *** for my responses to help clear the air.
I'm going to throw this out one more time in a last attempt to help you understand.
You said base was b.s. ***I did, bc everything adds to your base. The traditional concept of doing 1000 miles easy before intervals & that sort of shit went out the window years ago.
You said everything adds to base. ***It does.
I said it doesn't. If it did, you would build and build and build and you can't. YOU even gave an example of peaking, resting, and building back up. You proved my point. ****By resting I meant 4d maybe a week maybe 10d at most during the begininng of the training season to the last race excluding taper. Those breaks are more for mental vs physical, which I made clear somewhere. Not returning to a period of pure aerobic training. Again specificity or training is what I'm arguing.
You said racing and high intensity doesn't erode your aerobic fitness, yet again, YOU talk about a break and rebuilding. ****See above.
I say it does because, gasp, after a peak you return to BASE to rebuild aerobic fitness. ****Gasp, you return to base training to add to not rebuild. But you can also add to it with SST or vo2. You manipulate the training load with in the training cycle to rest and stress. Day 1 could be hard day 2 could be easy.
So that's the issue and you agree with it in everything except name. ***If you say so, you're the man I'm just the coach.
You can't continue on at a high-intensity. You must, must, MUST return to shore up that aerobic fitness that you've eroded with that high intensity work. ****Here is where you're wrong. You don't have to return to shore it up. But you can return to it to have a period of lower stress training when you are not racing or need to recover. it's not to shore up anything. Again everything you do adds to your fitness and that's what base is. You read Friel didn't you?
That's "going to the well". That's "digging too deep". That's "burning your matches". ****No burning your matches specifically has been referenced as going well above your CP in a race in multiple papers/books. As for digging to deep or going to the well that can be a system of long term over training which demands more rest and less training not shoring up.
You want to go to the well, dig deeper, or burn more matches? Then you beef up that base with lower-intensity work so you can do more. You want to dig yourself into a massive hole (for some reason you think this is difficult. With 17 years of experience I'd have to question the athlete's you work with if you think it's so rare), then you keep up the intensity and neglect that base. ***** It's clear you don't understand base,periodization, manipulating training variables, how to structure a training season(s), peak etc. But question my athletes if you desire. PM me and I'll give you email addresses if you want to chat with them. Maybe it's so rare in them though bc I can design a well thought out and planned training season(s).
You want long-term improvement, then you hit that aerobic work for long periods of the year and you shift the percentages of intensity and volume to manipulate adaptations and reach peak fitness. ****No shit the second part is what i've been saying. Not a return to just base though. That's not what I agree about.
***You've been saying that the intensity erodes base. It does not. You don't need to do X months of aerobic only cycling to enhance your base, you can do that with a variety of training intensities.
Are there other issues you want to discuss?
Dude seriously, PM me if you want to chat with them. Otherwise I'm going to say we agree to disagree an have different methodologies.
Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching Insta
