Making aerobic rides more "impactful"

Triathlon Forum
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Please forgive the borrowing of this word form marketing-speak but who out there knows of ways to make aerobic endurance rides (zone 1/2) more useful?

This would be OTHER than upping the intensity, and this is NOT talking about rides that are just for active recovery. This is looking for the best way to maximize your bang for buck on aerobic adaptations.

I will start with:

  1. Up the duration - adaptations start to kick in more the longer you go (e.g., activating more of those fast twitch fibers for an aerobic purpose, etc.). But the problem is that for us non-pros with family and work obligations, there’s a max time we can reasonably expect. You can shunt the long ride to the weekend and wake up early, but there’s still a limit for many of us.

  2. Train fasted - I understand there is evidence that fasted training can encourage the body to start oxidizing fat sooner

  3. Get a coach an d make him/her figure it out :slight_smile:

Any others?

How about tacking on some endurance minutes after you’ve done a hard workout of intervals? This feels like it’s doing more for you because it feels harder, but is it really doing anything extra?

how about two-a-days? Easy training when you’re already a little bit tired?

I hate the word “hacks” (e.g. life hacks) but literally brainstorming hacks right now. Hack your endurance rides!

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Best training hack in the game: Get a Coach.

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edited to include that lol
.

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Depending on time of year, include some Flat Big Gear efforts, start with 20 mins on 40 off building up the duration of the ‘on’. Trying to keep intensity down though. 1-2 gears bigger than you’d normally ride.

Double Bike Days are good too, for folk who are time crunched. Whether it’s get out on the bike in the AM and then a windtrainer session in the evening, or just slotting in an hour on the trainer before Sunday AM’s bunch ride.

Not sure it qualifies as a ‘hack’ though.

Powecranks? 🤣

5

Please forgive the borrowing of this word form marketing-speak but who out there knows of ways to make aerobic endurance rides (zone 1/2) more useful?

This would be OTHER than upping the intensity, and this is NOT talking about rides that are just for active recovery. This is looking for the best way to maximize your bang for buck on aerobic adaptations.

I will start with:

  1. Up the duration - adaptations start to kick in more the longer you go (e.g., activating more of those fast twitch fibers for an aerobic purpose, etc.). But the problem is that for us non-pros with family and work obligations, there’s a max time we can reasonably expect. You can shunt the long ride to the weekend and wake up early, but there’s still a limit for many of us.

Sure, on the surface that seems like a reasonable idea. But what “impact” are you looking to improve? If it’s to prepare for a long race, you should already be building that long ride longer and longer as the race date gets closer. So this isn’t really adding any insight.

  1. Train fasted - I understand there is evidence that fasted training can encourage the body to start oxidizing fat sooner

This is not a thing…

  1. Get a coach an d make him/her figure it out :slight_smile:

The most sensible of your thoughts.

Any others?

How about tacking on some endurance minutes after you’ve done a hard workout of intervals? This feels like it’s doing more for you because it feels harder, but is it really doing anything extra?

how about two-a-days? Easy training when you’re already a little bit tired?

I hate the word “hacks” (e.g. life hacks) but literally brainstorming hacks right now. Hack your endurance rides!

None of these things are “hacks” that are going to do anything for you that make your time spent at endurance paces “impactful”.

Easy training when you are tired is a recipe for injury, not for improving your performance.

6

Drills. You can do single leg pedaling, or focus on different aspects of the pedal stroke at lower intensities and without compromising the workout.

People argue about utility of “smoothing out” your pedal stroke but I think there is something to be learned if you can’t single leg pedal without knocking, or just focusing on making sure your knees are going straight up and down, etc.

7

Please forgive the borrowing of this word form marketing-speak but who out there knows of ways to make aerobic endurance rides (zone 1/2) more useful?

What makes you think that 3-5hr at 68% FTP aren’t rather useful?

8

Please forgive the borrowing of this word form marketing-speak but who out there knows of ways to make aerobic endurance rides (zone 1/2) more useful?

This would be OTHER than upping the intensity, and this is NOT talking about rides that are just for active recovery. This is looking for the best way to maximize your bang for buck on aerobic adaptations.

I will start with:

  1. Up the duration - adaptations start to kick in more the longer you go (e.g., activating more of those fast twitch fibers for an aerobic purpose, etc.). But the problem is that for us non-pros with family and work obligations, there’s a max time we can reasonably expect. You can shunt the long ride to the weekend and wake up early, but there’s still a limit for many of us.

Sure, on the surface that seems like a reasonable idea. But what “impact” are you looking to improve? If it’s to prepare for a long race, you should already be building that long ride longer and longer as the race date gets closer. So this isn’t really adding any insight.

  1. Train fasted - I understand there is evidence that fasted training can encourage the body to start oxidizing fat sooner

This is not a thing…

  1. Get a coach an d make him/her figure it out :slight_smile:

The most sensible of your thoughts.

Any others?

How about tacking on some endurance minutes after you’ve done a hard workout of intervals? This feels like it’s doing more for you because it feels harder, but is it really doing anything extra?

how about two-a-days? Easy training when you’re already a little bit tired?

I hate the word “hacks” (e.g. life hacks) but literally brainstorming hacks right now. Hack your endurance rides!

None of these things are “hacks” that are going to do anything for you that make your time spent at endurance paces “impactful”.

Easy training when you are tired is a recipe for injury, not for improving your performance.

Excellent, thank you for joining in! This is exactly what hte thread needs.

But that said, on a lot of these conventional wisdom would agree with you but i’m not sure that you’re right.

First off, fasted training is a thing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29315892. TBD though whether it’s helpful, and that’s the whole point of this thread.

Second, on your point about the long rides, i’m sure you’re right that long-duration performance matters more for your longer durations races. But there might be benefits for all of us. I listened to a podcast where some knowledgeable coaches were opining that improved aerobic performance is ALWAYS better, you need to spend a lot of time baking your cake (accumulating easy hours) before you get to eat it (i.e., crushing it and digging deep in very demanding trainings or competition) and that in fact a German team sprint team that set the world record in 2013 had spent most of their time accumulating easy minutes.

More broadly i think specificity is probably overrated and there is a lot more to it than just training at your distance, over and over and over.

Finally this is more of a macro philosophical point, but: I agree with you re: training whne you are tired but only to a point. Maybe this is semantic but the hwole principle of overload is predicated on and depends on training when you are tired. that’s why cycles are structured build Build BUILD rest rather than just b (rest) u (rest) i (rest) l (rest) d (rest) or something along those lines. It’s all about the fine balance fof course but you understand what i mean.

But this is why we poll the crowd! The more opinions (even those that call me an idiot) the better :slight_smile:

9

https://fascatcoaching.com/tips/training-zones/

There’s a reason there’s a part of that chart is lit up in orange.

Also, aerobic is a lot more inclusive as a word than just your “fart around town” power.

As a time crunched person I find riding a few hours of gravel non-stop at upper tempo and into SS for as much as I can handle/focus on gives me the best bang for the buck since I can’t do massive hours of z1/z2 stuff.

Imagine if you have a chance for a 3 hour ride making that a gravel race simulation.

I also find that the best bet is if I can ride non-stop. All fluids with me, eat on the move, route with super short stops or turns only if necessary. I feel it maximizes any “long duration” adaption versus stopping for a few minutes all the time.

Not sure why, but sometimes feel like a long ride is busted if there’s a stop longer than a minute or so max. Maybe it isn’t physical so much as mental thing.

Especially if you ever race anything that far. You need to have the mentality of “I’ve gone this far dozens of times” so that you’re focusing on intensity and strategy instead of just battling yourself to finish it.

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Absolutely agree that for me anyway, they are!

I’m just looking for things like, sometimes i don’t have three hours. Is there a way to make a shorter (than 3 hours ride) better.

And thanks everyone else for the thoughs too.

11

Excellent, thank you for joining in! This is exactly what hte thread needs.

But that said, on a lot of these conventional wisdom would agree with you but i’m not sure that you’re right.

First off, fasted training is a thing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29315892. TBD though whether it’s helpful, and that’s the whole point of this thread.

Second, on your point about the long rides, i’m sure you’re right that long-duration performance matters more for your longer durations races. But there might be benefits for all of us. I listened to a podcast where some knowledgeable coaches were opining that improved aerobic performance is ALWAYS better, you need to spend a lot of time baking your cake (accumulating easy hours) before you get to eat it (i.e., crushing it and digging deep in very demanding trainings or competition) and that in fact a German team sprint team that set the world record in 2013 had spent most of their time accumulating easy minutes.

More broadly i think specificity is probably overrated and there is a lot more to it than just training at your distance, over and over and over.

Finally this is more of a macro philosophical point, but: I agree with you re: training whne you are tired but only to a point. Maybe this is semantic but the hwole principle of overload is predicated on and depends on training when you are tired. that’s why cycles are structured build Build BUILD rest rather than just b (rest) u (rest) i (rest) l (rest) d (rest) or something along those lines. It’s all about the fine balance fof course but you understand what i mean.

But this is why we poll the crowd! The more opinions (even those that call me an idiot) the better :slight_smile:

What you are asking in the OP though is if there is a way to get more out of that time spent at endurance pacing. The answer to that is really “no”. You can do more of it, sure, and get that benefit. But there isn’t going to be a way to make any single “unit” of training at endurance more “impactful” than it already is. That’s the point of building long rides up. And yes, the vast majority of your time (talking a whole training cycle here i.e. 4-5 months worth) will be spent at boring aerobic pacing because that’s how you build the engine. The stuff you do to actually make you faster is a much smaller amount of time. That podcast is obviously exactly right, and is nothing more than the conventional wisdom the endurance world has come to rely on.

I didn’t say fasted training wasn’t a thing. I said that doing it to encourage fat oxidation wasn’t a thing.

And yes, of course we do plenty of training while we are tired. It’s how you do the overload. But that needs to be managed in an intelligent way. Simply going out for an easy bike ride the afternoon after a hard morning run is not necessarily going to improve anything for you. It might, or it might not, depending on what you are doing in your training cycle at the time. But just throwing it in there just because isn’t always the right call.

All I am trying to say here is that there is no free lunch. You aren’t going to improve upon the “impact” your basic aerobic training is already giving you.

We recently had a guy in here who was looking for every shortcut to getting himself to a lofty 70.3 time goal. The answer was the same. There are no shortcuts or hacks. Just hard work.

12

Absolutely agree that for me anyway, they are!

I’m just looking for things like, sometimes i don’t have three hours. Is there a way to make a shorter (than 3 hours ride) better.

And thanks everyone else for the thoughs too.

So, maybe 2 hours? Is this a hypothetical question, or is it based in a real need of yours?

What’s your longest event duration you’re doing? That’ll dictate a LOT of this. If it’s only a 30min Cat 4/5 crit or a sprint tri or sprint du you can get by just fine.

2 hours is simply too short to deem it an endurance ride without intensity. For me.

Unfortunately, the more on the trainer you can do the stronger you’ll be if limited to 2hrs max at a time. No freewheeling, and maximal focus on the work at hand. You’ll burn more KJ per hour even considering most people’s outdoor power is higher. There’s simply no stopping. Your “rest” between intervals should be a solid 150w+ or so too, no lollygagging at double digits or 100w.

Your group tactics will suck if you’re a bike racer, but the trainer prisoner works OK for a triathlete or TT racer so long as you get outside once in a while.

If you’re a bike racer, I’d say be content doing CX or 30 minute crits and get used to LOTS of tabatas, 1:1 work, and gut busting HIIT.

I think time crunched folks need to put the hammer to the right nails. Don’t expect to be regional time trial champ or long course tri champ. Crits, CX, sprint tri. Intensity. People with time for both intensity and breadth will still win out, but you can at least scare them pretty badly.

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I was lucky to do a few long rides with the German National Team before the Worlds in 2015. Degenkolb, Knees, Geschke, Greipel etc. We rode 5 hours easy a couple times, and their easy was pretty easy, 200-210w for me. In the last hour both days they did 10 standing starts, basically sprint from a stop for 10 seconds.* They claimed it for hormones!! We also stopped halfway for coke with no ice, black coffee and cake, so who knows. I still do those standing starts, no cake, coffee, coke mid ride though.

*Their 10 sec accelleration is mind blowing.

For IM, you can make them more impactful by doing them more often.

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I make mine more impactful by just enjoying being outside riding my bike and fantasizing about what I’m going to eat afterward.

15

I kind of use that approach with running.
I try and take advantage of outdoor riding by my work over lunch, and my body does not react well to early AM runs, so I plan for a 2 mile brick after my rides. Laid back Z2 just to get some work done in the run. I then have a long run broken up on Fridays with an AM run and lunch run. So far, I keep setting running PR’s and feel great on the run (evident in Escape from Alcatraz last weekend where my last two miles were my fastest while people were sucking ass back to the finish line).

For riding, I’m in the same boat where I cannot be gone for hours on the weekends and weekdays I have work and family. My trade off is like I said, bump the stand alone runs for bike rides. I ride 6 days a week and most are 1 hour rides over lunch. They are not killer, but not easy. Then aim for a long ride on Sat or Sun, whenever the weather works best.

Other than taking half days for work to get rides done that do not impact family time, it’s a hard shuffle.

Oh, and I find trainer rides give you a little boost as you can’t coast hills on a trainer. :slight_smile:

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I’m just looking for things like, sometimes i don’t have three hours. Is there a way to make a shorter (than 3 hours ride) better.

Steve had some good ideas. The actual range of aerobic is pretty wide. I just choose 68% bc that’s what my fingers typed when I randomly stabbed at the keyboard. If you’re around that # you could also ride at 73% or 78% and be fine.

You could find a rolling route if you always ride flat, or vice versa.

It seems that the one thing that many time crunched athletes do is sacrifice aerobic development for intervals. While those training 10-12h/wk will often have to make that trade off due to the limited # of hours they train, aerobic development or the lack of it is what ultimately determines success or lack of success.

For the overwhelming majority of people endurance sports tend to reward those who did a decent job picking their parents & can put in a high # of hours. I’ve seen very few athletes training >15h who didn’t improve more rapidly and to a greater degree then someone who put in 10 or less. Sure there are exceptions but they are just that.

In one of the 80/20 debates that was on ST years ago, one of the biggest things that stood out to me was that as someone progressed from beginner to jrs to senior to national level to world class it wasn’t the increase in intensity that they did. Often as a % of overall training load that often decreased, what stood out to me was the increase in total training hours that accompanied each step up.

Anyway food for thought and a bit off topic & beyond recommendations to spice things up

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I think many people short on time short change their long rides by not keeping an honest pace. A pro can ride a lower % for longer because they have time.

So, like DD said above…it’s up to 80% or so. My 80% for a couple hours would be near 230w.

If the training plan says “EM”, I take that to mean endurance miles. What can I chew for 2 hrs, 3 hrs, etc. at the highest % up to that 80%?

Lots of the people I seem to follow on Strava seem to take “EM” rides to mean “enjoyment miles”. Which is fine. But stopping each hour for a 15min cafe’ or convenience store stop and sucking wheel on the group ride at 120w for 75% of your ride ain’t going to do anything to contribute towards your “time crunched aerobic capabilities”.

People on big hours per week can afford to have the weekend club ride be lower on the aerobic scale. Time crunched people can’t.

Like I said above, optimize it. Minimize stops, minimize freewheeling, minimize wheel sucking, optimize the % power, etc…

It can be social, but ride with gaps or ride 2-up until you need to go single file for traffic or safety so you both do more work.

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So, like DD said above…it’s up to 80% or so. My 80% for a couple hours would be near 230w.

If the training plan says “EM”, I take that to mean endurance miles. What can I chew for 2 hrs, 3 hrs, etc. at the highest % up to that 80%?

I personally like that approach balanced with longer rides at ~ 68% ftp.

Most people don’t realize how hard those last few hours of a 4+ hour ride at ~ 80-83,84% FTP really is even though it’s aerobic effort.

If I said go ride 4.5h at 80% of FTP it’s not the first hour or even 2nd hour that’s hard (if it is you’re doing training wrong). Really even into that 3rd hour it should be ok although most will be thinking this is starting to become more difficult. As you roll into the 4th hour at 80-82% it feels like and your breathing sounds like an interval and as your roll towards 5hs your breathing is more and more ragged, every little rise starts to suck a little bit of joy from your life.

yet the next day you shouldn’t be too knackered from say 90 miles at 83% FTP. It’s a great way to build fitness as is 90 miles at 65%. Just depends what you’re trying to do and/or when you’re trying to do it.

19

So, like DD said above…it’s up to 80% or so. My 80% for a couple hours would be near 230w.

If the training plan says “EM”, I take that to mean endurance miles. What can I chew for 2 hrs, 3 hrs, etc. at the highest % up to that 80%?

I personally like that approach balanced with longer rides at ~ 68% ftp.

Most people don’t realize how hard those last few hours of a 4+ hour ride at ~ 80-83,84% FTP really is even though it’s aerobic effort.

If I said go ride 4.5h at 80% of FTP it’s not the first hour or even 2nd hour that’s hard (if it is you’re doing training wrong). Really even into that 3rd hour it should be ok although most will be thinking this is starting to become more difficult. As you roll into the 4th hour at 80-82% it feels like and your breathing sounds like an interval and as your roll towards 5hs your breathing is more and more ragged, every little rise starts to suck a little bit of joy from your life.

yet the next day you shouldn’t be too knackered from say 90 miles at 83% FTP. It’s a great way to build fitness as is 90 miles at 65%. Just depends what you’re trying to do and/or when you’re trying to do it.

DD - this is almost exactly what I did during my L rides (5+ hours) to prep for my last IM.

And it’s like you said, 80%+ for 2, or even 3 hours is pretty much cake.
(assuming you’re somebody who races HIM’s in the 80-85% on the bike, and then runs well afterwards - you’re already doing this anyway.)
But man oh man, those last 2+ hours were really, really hard to hold 80%, and then I’d crack, and crawl home at < 70.

But, over the course of a 4-6 weeks of doing a L ride like that every weekend, eventually I got thru 4 hours at 80%, then 5, then a full 5.5 hr ride, AND then ran well after.

It also proves the point which Chris G (RIP) made so well about riding a bike, in general:
(assumes you’re riding fairly hard, not just noodling around)

*“The fun/no-fun line on a bike is 3.5 hours. *
*Anything under 3.5 hours = FUN! *
*Anything more than 3.5 hours = not so much fun” *