When you, or your coach, are designing “AWC/W’” workouts, maximize your recovery! If your workout goal is to truly emphasize your W’ stimulus, then it makes no sense to start your next interval until you are recovered from the previous one. Easier said than done, but that should always be your overriding goal until you make your decisive move. This again highlights the critical strategy of conserving your energy as much as possible while racing. So how can you use this information in your daily training and racing? First, recognize that your stores of anaerobic energy are likely smaller than you thought they were. The “severe” recovery constant averaged over 7000 s, indicating no W’ reconstitution within the 30 s recovery phase of the trial. Indeed at the 20W recovery level, reconstitution ranged between 370-380 seconds, while it was 452 seconds for the “medium” recovery effort and averaged 580 seconds for the “hard” recovery interval. The time of reconstitution (Tw) was impacted by the intensity of the recovery.Each effort involved a 60 s hard interval followed by a 30 s recovery interval, with each recovery phase at a different intensity ranging from easy (20 Watts) to moderate, then hard, then severe. In 2012 Skiba et al, sought to model W’ use during bouts above Critical Power (roughly equivalent to the functional threshold power you likely have heard about – the power you can sustain for about an hour*), followed by recovery at different workloads. You’ve likely heard this in recent coaching parlance as your “box of matches” in terms of saving those matches during races and increasing the number and burn power of those matches during training. It’s a very useful system, unfortunately, the trade off is that there isn’t very much of it. Indeed, in the nomenclature of power based training we often have an “anaerobic” zone that is generally greater than 120% of your threshold power, and this zone of training is used to try and raise both the absolute size of this reserve, and your ability to recover from those efforts. We typically speak of efforts in the 20 s – 2 minute range as being primarily ‘anaerobic’. Often referred to as Anaerobic Work Capacity or more currently W’ (W prime), it is a short term energy source that uses non-aerobic (non oxygen) pathways that fills the gap when you hit the gas.Įssentially, anaerobic glycolysis is a 10 step process that very quickly produces energy to meet the demands of exercising muscles at a rate that aerobic metabolism simply cannot match. And while their pace is likely a sprint to you and I, the reality is that an individual’s true capacity for those supra-threshold efforts is fairly limited. Watching the first 5 minutes of a pro cyclocross race, it’s easy to believe that they sprint the entire time. Whether on the road or in CX, eventually you need to make one or more supra-threshold effort to free yourself from the pack for that winning break or sprint. After all, rare is the breakaway where you ride everyone off your wheel while doing a steady threshold effort. This makes sense, really, when you think about racing. Thankfully, it is coming more and more to the front of the discussion of what drives performance. Consider that a high lactate threshold power (or functional threshold power (FTP), maximal lactate steady state (MLSS), or critical power (CP)) really sets the entry point for success in racing, if yours isn’t sufficiently high, you probably won’t be in the pack to make the final selection.Ĭonversely, anaerobic efforts – those short and demanding 20-90 s efforts – while often discussed as to their importance, have been a bit of a black box. It is often discussed in both lay and scientific literature, and has been written about time and again by myself and others in the Toolbox family. Over the past decade or so, lactate threshold, and the mechanisms therein, has risen to be the de facto gold standard of performance coaching and analysis. Lars van der Haar going anaerobic on the 1st lap
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