The difference will be in efficiency, since your aerobic system is working harder at the higher cadence for the same output. I find this and so tend to let the cadence sort itself out and don't target any particular range. From the reading I've done, self selected cadence seems to be the most efficient. I've no idea whether training deliberately at a higher cadence would be of any benefit.

Something seems wrong with those numbers. That's an enormous difference in HR for a small change in cadence. Did you change cadence during an interval or did you do the first at low cadence and the second at higher cadence?

FWIW I've observed a similar HR delta over a slightly wider cadence range: 85-105. I fiddled with this quite a bit last year on my Computrainer. N = ~10 sessions of 2x20.

read the thread on the amateur hour on track and the related story link. comes up in there

Why?

A 24% increase in cadence is more understandable than an 8% increase.

why not? what would you suggest

Training between ~85%& ~115% of FTP is the most costly from a recovery point of view. You can do shorter intervals at higher intensity or longer intervals at lower intensity more often. You may not be training at volumes where this matters much, but as volume gets higher and higher, this becomes more and more a factor.

when you ride with higher cadence, you put more pressure on your heart rather than muscle, so your body will need more oxygen. Just like driving a car at 50mph, using 3000 rpm will cost more fuel than 2000.
everyone should have his/her most efficient cadence range, to find it, do some one hour 95-100% ftp workout, at some different cadence range(Use your most favorite cadence, for instance 90+-2, that would be 86-88-90-92-94) find at what exact cadence you have the max power output and a relatively low HR. :)

Hmmmm, so this has been discussed a lot on here. to increase ftp intervals between 83 and 95% FTP are best and high enough to push it up, low enough to allow recovery.

At present I'm riding 5-7 days / week with a TSS of 35-45 each ride - I am time constrained, so it is what it is, getting on the bike and banging out 30-45 minutes is currently doable. It would be interesting to know how significantly different changing the long interval to a minute on minute off (as an example) VO2 workout would be - this was suggested the other day

I may once I get away at the end of this week look at changing things up

It appears that Matt is advocating a polarized approach to training i.e. something along the lines of what Stephen Seiler would advocate. After reading extensively about the polarized method I've personally undertaken 3 separate 8 weeks blocks of this strategy but saw poor results. I actually regress in fitness compared to the state I'm in before initiating one of these blocks. For some reason my body responds very well to 3 X 20 @ 90 to 95% IF as much as 7 days per week and poorly to doing 20% of my sessions harder and 80% easy.

YMMV,

Hugh

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

Because he needs somebody who knows what they are doing to tell him he is wasting his time.
85% of FTP is continuous long distance riding territory.
Why you would need a rest after 15mins is beyond comedy.

http://www.google.com.qa/...7T9siN7Vn6U3QsQjkeEA

You work at ringling brothers don't you, I've seen you with the red nose and funny shoes......

Unless you have written a more definitive text, I am pretty sure that Coggan and Allen have found value in intervals between 83-95% of ftp - #clown

By your own link, 'Efforts in this power zone can be maintained for durations between two and a half and eight hours.'

Exactly why would you need a rest after 15 minutes?
Yes it's a good place to spend some time training in, but not intervals.

2.5 to 8 hours, sounds suspiciously like exactly what I said......

Apparently your reading comprehension needs some work

"To perform a sweet spot interval workout, you should ride for twenty minutes at 88-92% of your FTP. Try to perform two of these intervals with at least five minutes of recovery between intervals. When you can complete two twenty-minute sweet spot intervals in a workout relatively easily, you should add a third. Dr. Coggan created the following chart that graphically shows how the sweet spot can improve threshold while limiting physiological strain to an optimal level (credit goes to Dr. Andy Coggan for the diagram)."

Setting aside your reading ability, I think it was pointed out earlier that sustaining training loads of long intervals at high percentages of ftp can impact recovery, so clearly I don't suppose many people are doing 2-8 hours at 85% of ftp but thanks for playing anyway

In my experience (kona Q and top age grouper), polarized training only works well if you have major volume. Ie. You are riding 500+km a week, running 100km and swimming 20km, etc

For most people, I would recommend one V02 max workout (115%+), 1 upper sweet spot to threshold workout (95-105%), and one or two long endurance rides at conversation pace. Combine this with a run after each ride and you are being very time efficient.

To answer the original question.... you need to look at why your HR increases with cadence. One very likely reason, is that to spin faster but stay smooth, your "spinning circles". Which in reality is often less efficient because your trying to use less developed smaller muscles like hip flexors and hamstrings, rather then your prime movers, quads and glutes. The 2nd killer, is that as a triathletes, your need your hip flexors and hamstring for run economy. Spinning "circles", for triathletes is even worse than for cyclists.

aIf 86 RPM feels more comfortable to sustain that intensity, ride there. For most, as power increases, so does cadence. For example At IM pace, I'll spin around 90RPM, at Zone 3, 95RPM, at or above threshold 100-105. But climbing, I'll happily mash 70-85RPM sitting up.... why? because I train that was and it feels comfortable. But every person is different. Ride more, at you find your own system. But don't artificially force anything.

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TrainingBible Coaching
http://www.trainingbible.com

This

coggan and allen can't have got the memo that you two are the experts on increasing ftp. what was your book on the subject called

http://forum.slowtwitch.com/..._reply;so=ASC;mh=25;

post 2 then post by coggan

refute them both

That means a lot coming from the dude doing 15min intervals at 85% ftp.

Are you in grade school? Doing the intervals that many recommend as an effective way of increasing ftp. Period, it's true whether you believe it or not in the same way the earth it round even if you're a member of the flat earth society

This is awesome, you come on and offer dvice which wasn't requested, demonstrate you have a reading age slightly lower than my two year old daughters and then attempt to insult me by suggesting that good practice as proposed by the bloke that actually wrote the definitive text on a subject actually isn't.

So from this we learn that you consider yourself more of an expert than Andrew Coggan without actually offering any substantive evidence to support your position. You can't have done well at school as you didn't read the exam question

I believe as you posted, sweet spot intervals are 88-92% FTP, and the stated protocol is 2 x 20mins. You yourself say you are doing 15 min efforts at 85% FTP. As the guys are pointing out this is below the standard sweet spot session. In fairness, 85% FTP is essentially most peoples HIM effort, so 2-3 hours duration should be easily doable.
Perhaps instead of being defensive, take it as constructive advice to make your session a more beneficial by increasing the intensity a little. Especially if you are time constrained.

I'm not being defensive - they simply ridiculed the position that the intervals were pointless, they didn't offer any advice. (I accept your point about the intensity and I do increase it or vary it day to day)


They were then presented with the alternative thread which clearly referenced 15 and 20 minute intervals and was answered by A Coggan and a guy with state and national AG titles and failed to refute it


They haven't offered any advice, they haven't even proffered an alternative, or attempted to refute what Coggan and others suggested worked, they've just behaved like clowns so accordingly deserve to be treated as such. Perhaps if they come back and can offer an adult reasoned argument supported by evidence that bests the examples from the previous thread, they might be worth listening to, otherwise they're tilting at windmills.


I also didn't ask whether anyone thought there was any value in what I was doing, that has previously been asked and answered by individuals that, until I'm shown otherwise, have the greater credibility on the subject.


Question


"If all I do is 15 min or 20 min intervals and single's or multiples of them, do you continue to adapt and increase your FTP?

If I only did for example wu, 2*15min at 85% wd - 50 mins, or same with 20 mins at 95% - and I tested monthly and adjusted those figures (hopefully up) is this the most efficient way of raising your ftp?"


Answer 1 J7


Yes, in my experience. 2 National titles, 4 regional and 8 state titles to my credit doing just this. But most everyone else will tell you no. Graeme Obree had great success with it also.


Answer 2 - Coggan


A.k.a. UniModal Training^TM? I did that during the fall/winter/spring of 2013-2014, just to prove a point and to get ready for a Peaks Coaching Group training camp to which I had been invited. The result was the highest FTP I'd achieved in quite a few years.

https://www.facebook.com/...ype=3&permPage=1


So, I'm not being defensive, I'm just not going to listen to clowns that are going to state arguments the same way my 2 year old does, which is "because!"


As a final note on the subject, the 2*20 protocol seems to have become the defacto standard, though there are two things to be said about this, the first is that there are many alternative ways of skinning the same cat, see example 8 and the fact that there are endless variants on the duration and frequency of sweetspot intervals as well as the fact that I specifically asked about 15 and 20 minute durations in the previously referenced post.


https://www.fascatcoaching.com/tips/sweetspotpartdeux/


the second and more important point, is:


"The underlying principle of sweet spot training is a balanced amount of intensity and volume. From the table above, sweet spot elicits more adaptations than tempo but less than threshold work. The trade off is the key element because day to day an athlete can achieve more positive physiological adaptations by sweet spotting than with threshold or tempo work. The balance lies in the athlete’s ability to recover and therefore repeat and achieve similar wattages day after day with more frequency than full on threshold workouts. The end result is mo’ better training, more TSS, greater CTL, greater TSB and ultimately a higher power at threshold." (quote from fascatcoaching - found from google but a reasonably fair summary of what I am looking for day to day)


If they come back on and offer a valid alternative, I'm game, if they come on and say "thats stupid, because" then they get treated with the contempt they deserve.


I seem to have a lot of time on my hands today so thought I'd explain my issue with them.

That is a big jump in heart rate for the same power for an increase of only 7 or 8 rpm.

What are you using to measure power?

If you are regressing in fitness, it's possible probable that even though you are following a polarized model, that your overall workload is lower. How many kJ were you doing per week in the under a threshold/SST model, vs. the polarized model?

Andrew, there are a couple ways you can increase your FTP.

One is to train close to and around your FTP which will yield fast results but may also break you down if you don't carefully manage the time on task and the load.
This is the place interval training lives.
Also the easiest way to maintain if on short training hours.
You are training with elevated lactate levels and this is the devil that will break you.
This is also the reason why you need the rest periods in interval training.

Now the lactate system can be though of as sitting on top of the aerobic system.
So even though training the lactate system will get you higher, so will training the underlying aerobic system as it gives the lactate system a bigger base to sit on top of.

The aerobic system can further be broken down into aerobic fat and aerobic sugar.
Again any lift in either of these processes will get you higher as the sugar sits on top of the fat and the lactic sits on top of the sugar.

At any level under FTP by any decent margin, there is simply no reason for rests, it's simply not interval training territory.
You can maintain it until the fuel runs out in the case of sugar and until you are bored shitless and get a sore bum in the case of fat.
Hence my comments.
You can spend a lot of your time here and it makes up the bulk of your training. Whether you need more fat or more sugar training can easily be gleaned from the shape of your heartrate/lactate curve, with a bias to suit the events you are aiming for.


Please note that I have tried to use very simple explanations here, because you obviously don't have much of a clue. (snarky remark because, well, you started it)

For anybody that does know, I apologise for using the generic lactate term as this seems to be the most comprehensible by the masses, even though it is strictly incorrect usage.


In answer to your original question re cadence, one reason a higher cadence leads to a higher HR is that you are not efficient at spinning that high because you simply don't do enough of it. Once you learn to time all those muscles in sync, your HR will drop and be very similar to your slower cadence, but it will never reach as low because the lower cadence tends to use a little bit of anaerobic power, which being without oxygen, doesn't require as many heart beats to fulfill.

Some studies show lower lactates as well which at first glance would seem to contradict this, but if you run the study at a power level much under your capabilities, then there are plenty of resting muscles to metabolise the lactate so there seems to be a lower level. but if you run it at close to FTP and for a decent length of time, then the lower cadence always comes up with higher HR and lactate levels.

All hour records have averaged around 100rpm.

If a lower cadence really gave you a lower oxygen consumption, then you would find that hour record rpm figure would be much lower.

So in short, you don't spin well and your testing is not comprehensive enough to tease out reality.

If you're doing it indoors, and the high cadence interval second, then *part* of the increase may be due to heat/humidity causing your body to work harder.

As mentioned, higher cadence relies more heavily on your cardio system and lower cadence more on you muscular system. So, by varying cadence in training you can put some variation into what system you are stressing/training more. Therefore it is good to do some variable cadence efforts in training to put a bit more focus on where you are weak.

For example, if your heart rate goes up 10 bpm with just a 6 rpm cadence increase, some high cadence work might benefit you, even if in a race you are going to use a cadence of 86. That is not to say that kind of increase in HR is not necessarily bad, but it means you have stumbled on the point where you are shifting to more of a cardio based power output and you can use that knowledge to your make your training more effective.

In races cadence depends on what type of race it is. For a time trial, grinding way may be the best way to over the course most quickly. In crit or road race where quick accelerations are needed, riders need to find a cadence that allows them to quickly accelerate which may or may not be the one that would be most efficient at a steady state (generally a high, but not too high cadence). All racers benefit from having a range of cadences they can comfortably operate at so they can deal with special situations and fatigue.

Actually in each of the three 8 week blocks where I performed polarized trials, I had to significantly increase my kj of total work in order to match
the weekly TSS I'd been generating just with daily sweet spot training. One of the interesting things I noticed during my trial was that on the second easy day in a row I'd start pissing away blood volume. Normally I never need to get up in the middle of the night to urinate. During polarized training every second easy day/night I'd be pissing like a race horse. I do find Seiler's research/arguments compelling and have been surprised and disappointed to not see positive results from polarization.

YMMV,

Hugh

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

How do you know the water you are dumping is from your blood volume?

What basis were you using to judge your progression/regression on?

I had good luck with 15:00 intervals @ 85% of FTP in the past. I think it was new years day 2011 a bunch of us attempted 15 x 15:00 @ 85% with 1:30 easy between. It was epic. Pretty damn hard, but fuel well and it was within reach.

That's a lot different than what the OP suggested.

I've also had very good results doing 2x20's at 93-95% of FTP. I found I was able to do them every other day and recovered sufficiently session to session. This winter I'm going to experiment with some polarization and introduce Seiler's "Magic" 4x8s. What I've noticed so far is that I'm not sufficiently recovered 2 days after 4x8s to do 2x20s at 95%. I guess i'll try my 2 day after at 90% and see how it goes.

There were some posts in the cycling physiology forum (https://groups.google.com/...m/cycling-physiology) attempting to explain how or why those 4x8s are so good, but I just wonder if enough controls were put in place to truly differentiate 4x8s from 8x4s or 2x16s. Supposedly the HIIT sessions were "self paced". Does that perhaps mean folks didn't push themselves hard enough in 4x8s. Who knows. They also tried to explain it as hyper activation of PCG1-a.




That still doesn't explain the better results they reported from 4x8s over other durations.

Means as hard as you can without blowing up before the set is over.

They were all self regulated so the parameters were the same for folks doing 4x8s vs 8x4s, yet his study found the 4x8s to give better gains (over 8x4 and 2x16s). It's not clear why.

Here is another interesting study:

http://www.researchgate.net/...uman_skeletal_muscle


Personally, I think tolerance to long steady state efforts plays a part in TT performance and thus doing repeated efforts in the range of 90-100% of FTP helps you to better mentally withstand those efforts even though short hard efforts SIT or HIIT clearly improve mitochondrial respiration.

There is a decrease in the power I can output for 20,30 and 60 minutes as well as great durations. Interestingly, over a period of weeks my 8 minute power decreases as well. This when I'm doing doing the Seiler 4 X 8 at maximal sustainable power for 20% of my sessions. My best 4 X 8 sessions are the very first ones done after a good long block of 2 or 3 by 20s at 90 to 95% FTP. I've tried both decreasing the time between hard days and increasing it with neither being successful.

YMMV,

Hugh

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

Fortunately there is this concept called periodization:)

I asked because I have also noted the tendency to suck up,water like a sponge and an increase of weight after hard training. Particularly when the bout of hard training comes after a period of little or no training.

Not sure I believe it is all blood volume though. I also tend to eat a lot as a response to hard training and get thirsty.

I'm inclined to believe it's more multi factorial, the body knows it's got to re build and respond so it sucks in everything and retains it.

More scope for water retention in muscles than increased blood volume?

You can store roughly a metric shit ton of water in your glycogen stores so yes water storage with increased training is certainly multi factorial in nature. When athletes go on very restrictive diets they will blow off a good deal of "water weight" as they burn down their glycogen stores. It's that easy first few pounds we all lose before reality sets in. Training hard in a glycogen depleted state is no fun at all.

Hugh

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

Polarized training work fine for all level.

Often on slowtwitch perfect is the enemy of the good. Also, people have shitty reading comprehension. You are very time-crunched and want to cycle at a moderate to high intensity level every day that is repeatable. People bash on 85% intervals, saying that you need to do a higher % of FTP and longer duration of intervals. And yet there is general consensus that if you do 2x20 at 95%, say, you will very quickly run yourself into the ground.

Some options given your constraints:
1) ride at higher % of threshold or VO2Max, but do this every other day, and then in between take bike recovery days or swim/run instead.
2) ride daily at a sustainable % of FTP, which is what you are doing
3) vary your approach

My guess is that you (like me and most on this forum) are relatively un-trained, and you will improve greatly with either approach. The key is that you train regularly for months on end. Some people prefer option 1, others prefer option 2. Whatever approach you adopt that fits with the rest of your life and enables you to train consistently will result in large gains. At some point you will plateau, at which point you change your training approach.

It is really not much more complicated than that.

I have similar time constraints: very intensive job, two little kids, not a ton of time to train. I take option 1 using trainerroad's plans and have had great success. Have increased my FTP 20W in just two months.