The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

How to Train Anaerobic Capacity to Go Fast and Win, with Coach Tim Cusick (#286)

• CTS • Season 5 • Episode 286

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OVERVIEW
Anaerobic capacity is the work you can do above your lactate threshold. Another term for it is Functional Reserve Capacity (FRC), and it acts like a battery that contains a finite amount of energy that runs out quickly and must be recharged before a subsequent use. FRC is your high-intensity, explosive power for winning sprints, creating breakaways, closing gaps, and riding competitors off your wheel. In the final episode in this series with WKO Data Leader and Coach Tim Cusick, Tim and CTS Coach Adam Pulford discuss what FRC is, how to train it, the consequences of focusing on FRC (you may have to sacrifice some FTP for it), and therefore when and how much FRC work to incorporate into your training plan.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

  • Definitions of anaerobic capacity and functional reserve capacity (FRC)
  • Anaerobic Capacity adaptation from 1-2 weeks of training
  • Anaerobic Capacity adaptation from 2-5 weeks of training
  • Why FRC training intensities must be SUPER HARD!
  • Recommended interval workouts for FRC training
  • When to incorporate FRC workouts into your training

Resources

  • Tim at Basecamp: https://www.joinbasecamp.com/tim-cusick 
  • Tim on IG https://www.instagram.com/tim.cusick_coach/
  • Stress vs Strain: Difference Between Stress and Strain - GeeksforGeeks https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/physics/difference-between-stress-and-strain/

Guest Bio:

Tim Cusick is a world-class cycling coach, a leader in data analytics for endurance sports, an educator, and an innovative business leader. Tim works with Olympians, world champions, and more, including Amber Neben and Rebecca Rusch. As a data analytics leader, Tim is an acknowledged expert in the field for endurance athletes. He is the TrainingPeaks WKO product leader, 
codeveloper of WKO5, and Instructor: Advanced Training with Data. As an educator, Tim has presented at USA Cycling summits, TrainingPeaks Endurance Summits, TrainingPeaks University, and more. Tim is also the founder of BaseCamp, which is driven by Tim’s philosophy of bringing together the science of data and the art of coaching. His values-based approach focusing on shared vision and team building allows for the construction of dynamic and purposeful organization development.

HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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SPEAKER_00:

From the team at CTS, this is the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance, even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, Coach Adam Polford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches, and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now, on to our show. Tim, welcome back.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me. It's gonna be I'm gonna miss you now after all these four episodes. It's gonna be crazy tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00:

No, you're not gonna know how to podcast without me, Tim. So last week we talked about how FTP improves alongside VO2 Max, meaning as one goes up, so does the other. And an important strategy to align training is to get FTP high enough, close to VO2 Max, in order to maximize aerobic performance. But assuming we do that properly, it is time to move on to the anaerobic side of things. So today let's discuss anaerobic capacity, what it is, what to expect from the adaptation, and how to train it. Tim, could you get us going with uh some much needed definitions? And I'll first just start with my like general anaerobic capacity definition uh is if you look it up in a textbook or Google it or anything like that, it says the ability to perform high-intensity work without oxygen. But I feel like that's just like lacking, especially in the in the way of cycling, because even when you're going full tilt, you know, full ham, you're still using oxygen in some sense. You're breathing it and whatnot. So could you describe to our listeners uh how we use anaerobic capacity and some of these other tools in the coaching world to help athletes go fast?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, anaerobic capacity, this concept of you know, a good simple way of saying this, and it, you know, we think about it. It is your anaerobic battery. So think about a car, a hybrid car, right? Your aerobic system is burning fuel. It's it needs oxygen and fuel working together to produce horsepower, watts, energy, whatever we want to call it. When we start thinking about anaerobic, like a hybrid car, anaerobic is the battery, right? The booster battery that we have sitting on top of that. And that booster battery is high energy, but it burns down pretty quick. It fatigues pretty quick, and then it will need to be recharged. Anaerobic capacity is just that. What is the size? How much energy is in that battery? And you could actually measure that in kilojoules of energy, you know, is a great way to think about it. And we can even kind of understand the burn down rate of that. So we can measure that battery pretty clearly. Anaeric capacity, there's all different types of concepts to look at that. It tends to be often and frequently modeled. We see it modeled in CP and critical power modeling. We see it modeled in power duration curve modeling, which we do in WKO5. So that's all it is in its simplest process. It's a high burn, high-energy battery that has a pretty fast burn rate. The burn rate, how long that battery will last, it's like your cell phone. Open all your apps at once and burn everything, and the cell phone battery burns down pretty fast. Open just a couple and it'll last a little bit, not super long, but it'll last. So we conceptualize this, my historical approach, as uh functional reserve capacity or FRC. That's data metrics you'll find in WQL5. By uh defining this as functional reserve capacity, a modeled construct, what it does take in is into account is exactly what you just said. Anaerobic capacity is power, it's it's in the absence of oxygen. But if you went out and did a maximum one minute effort, you absolutely know you're breathing, right? And you're doing a whole lot of it. So there's some aerobic contribution to the power output, the energy uh supply that's actually happening. So functional reserve capacity represents that battery both from what's happening in the absence of oxygen and the small amount that's happening with oxygen to produce that. Functional reserve capacity is more of a functional application in that sense, hence the name functional. We can model it easy. We can use it to measure in a dynamic way when we look at interval work and higher intensity work. So it gives us insight into the size of that battery, the efficiency of that battery, and in training, when we do things that we should do, like totally drain that battery at times. If that battery, it's also like your cell phone, if you don't do, if you don't drain it fully enough and let it recharge fully, um, the battery kind of goes bad. It doesn't store as much as it used to.

SPEAKER_00:

That's a that is a great analogy there. Um, especially if you don't if you don't drain it enough, because that's that's the stimulus, right, to improve it as well. So you need to drain it uh as well as let it rapidly um uh uh recharge. And I think like with this, uh folks, for for you listening, I mean, I I want you to understand that this is a metric that's not on training peaks online just yet. Um, but it is uh conceptually, think about it like a one-minute full tilt effort. When we're measuring it, it's going to be the total amount of work measured in kilojoules, like Tim said, that can be done continuously above FTP before you fatigue. So it has to be continuous. That's what we're measuring. Okay. Um, so I want everybody to realize that, and then the model is based off of that. And and um Tim talked about critical power and W prime. I did a bunch of podcasts with um Cody from uh Training Peaks on that, and we talked about how W prime is adjacent to FRC. And you could go philosophically about how critical power is not FTP and FRC is not W prime. Essentially it is, and I would say just think about it simplistically like that, and it's gonna be totally fine, and it's not reductionistic to uh view these two systems in that way. Um, but one thing I want to drive home here is uh we were talking about how the you know aerobic capacity, if you build aerobic capacity, it's gonna raise that FTP and it's gonna raise VO2 max, and a lot of those things are going in line with each other. Anaerobic capacity is very different. Tim, could you talk about the inverse relationship of FTP and FRC?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. So you give me all the bad news. I like that.

SPEAKER_00:

So good cop, bad cop.

SPEAKER_01:

The reality of all training is you have a cost-benefit relationship. Sometimes the benefit's high and the cost is just a little bit. Sometimes it's more equal. So think about we're making energy aerobically and anaerobically. We've talked through that through each series. Now let's think about that as a teeter-totter. So when we raise one, when we do specific, we apply specificity to our training to erase a specific anaerobic capacity, that teeter-totter goes up on this side. The cost is this side could often go down a little bit. And this is the challenge, right, as cyclists, so much because, and when I say in this side, I'm doing it to a camera, you're listening to a podcast, but you can hopefully visualize what I'm thinking. One side's going up, the other's going down. And this is important as we get into these level intensities, um, you know, and and we become because it's you are now when you're working on anaerobic capacity, you're doing a very specific time and intensity relationship. You are focused on a very specific part of your overall energy making capacity, that's the cost. You can, and in my observation, typically will give up a little FTP to gain that. So you have to think about the end desire, demand of your event, what you're trying to get to before you invest in this type of training. Um as cyclists, we want it all. Like we want this concept of yes, but I've gotten this much faster and I'm better aerobically, and my FTP went up, and I'm putting out more power at VO2 max, not to spark the feud there again, but power at VO2 max, max aerobic power. And then um the and now I want more anaerobic power. At some point, all those things, you can't have them all. Simple analogy. I'm gonna date myself for my age here. We used to have performers would come out and they'd spin plates on sticks. Yes, for all the young people listening, you have no idea what I'm talking about, but that's okay. And a performer would come out and they'd have five sticks with five plates on it, and they'd run from one and spin it, and they'd get them all balancing because they're all spinning, and one would slow down and wobble, and they'd run over there and spin that one. Welcome to training all of your physiological systems. That is a relationship often applied by timing. How do we keep all that split, those plates spinning? Well, the reality is if we're gonna really invest in one plate, particularly one that takes a big heavy push, anaerobic capacity, we're gonna spin some of those other plates, they're gonna wobble. We want to make sure they don't fall off. That's cost benefit. When we're investing in this side, we're investing in anaerobic capacity, we're probably gonna lose a little threshold, a little bit of aerobic capacity. And that's very metabolically driven, how you make energy, your glycolytic efficiency, your your the impact of that input, that stimuli, that strain input uh when you're doing anaerobic work is high stimuli, rapid response, higher cost.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, so what type of athlete or perhaps what type of event should athletes want more FRC going into versus FTP? Like when would I for a time-crunched athlete, when would they want more FRC?

SPEAKER_01:

If you're to say a classic periodization schedule closer to the event, because you want to be evolving. Remember, you're moving towards speed. A concept I talked about, you know, you we want power to equal velocity. We'll win races at 100 watts if we can. I'd be pretty happy with that, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Do as little as it takes to win, too. That's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01:

So when we need to go fast, we want speed. So you want that progression to occur. This is very close to race. This is the ultimate, you know, very close to the end goal, uh, end game of sharpening and preparing for performance. Um you need to be careful when you time this because of the cost. Like you don't want to overextend this period at all, very much so risk on shortening this period too much because you don't want to drive down that threshold pre-event, pre-race, whatever. Um, so it's a it's a close to event performance goal, it's a rapid response expectation. Um it's a dangerous little tool. You gotta be careful.

SPEAKER_00:

It it is, and but I'm gonna I'll say this. You can you can go against me if I it's a dangerous tool, but uh it's a fun tool, and you should experiment with it before you get into the main event, so you kind of like know how you respond.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I think it's dangerous because it is fun.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like just like fast bikes, Tim.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_00:

They're super fast, but they'll cost you a lot. So but what I guess what I was getting at as well is like, okay, okay, if somebody if you have somebody do an unbound or a local crit, do they both want FRC equally? Or how should they prioritize that?

SPEAKER_01:

Great question. I should have answered it as you asked. Um absolutely the demand of the event is going to more dictate here. Your your late periodization training, you're more focused on the specific demands of the event, not the limiters kind of of the athlete to think about the classic model. If I'm going into unbound, I'm not really that concerned about FRC. Now, don't get me wrong, you're still contributing. At some point, fatigue will uh institute the recruitment of fast muscle fiber, and that needs to happen, that's going to function anaerobically to some degree. So you need to be prepared for that. But I wouldn't be aggressively trying to improve my anaerobic capacity or functional reserve capacity. I'd be doing just enough work to maintain it because I don't want the cost, particularly in unbound of driving down FTP. Now I'm a crit racer, I'm doing, you know, uh crit series, national crit series, or whatever I'm in, local crit, um, shorter, more intensive events, um, invest away. Like you need to be sharp at this. Most of the activity that will result in performance improvement in winning will absolutely be and occur in this physiological zone and will require it for success. So you need to invest in it. So this is a highly uh the need for this as a training cycle and a heavy investment is highly specific to the event demand.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. And then I will throw in one caveat and go back to what I was saying before is like it's dangerous, but it's fun, but spend some time with it in a time period of your training where it maybe doesn't make sense to utilize it all that much, but use it as like a canvas to understand how your body reacts. Because the main point here is I'm a firm believer that everybody needs some FRC, um, some cyclists and whatnot, because there's even a certain amount of upper end work that will make you durable on the race starts or the hard pushes, um, you know, the super steep climbs of just having anaerobic capacity. When you hit it, it doesn't take away from you. You know, the acidosis isn't um uh new to you, and you can just handle it better, durability if you if in some sense. And so you shouldn't neglect it, even though time-crunched athletes and long distance athletes double down on FTP. Just don't neglect FRC. And if it is a limiter, if if anaerobic capacity is a limiter, which I will raise my hand and say, you know what, if Tim is sprinting again, I'm gonna get dropped. But go to the hill climb, yeah, all day for me. Right. So if it is a limiter, do some FRC work further out from your race so that it's less of a limiter. And that's one training strategy that goes against the timing of what we talked about is like coming into the main event. I sometimes use anaerobic capacity training like early, early in the phase, just so that it's it's a little bit higher uh once I hit it again coming into the main event.

SPEAKER_01:

Excellent advice.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, so Tim, if we follow the non-caveid approach of what I just said there, and we have done proper training leading into the main event, uh what how in general, uh when would you how many weeks out from the main event would you start hitting some FRC work? And in the first one to two weeks, what should we expect?

SPEAKER_01:

It would be pretty tight and close. Again, depending on the event. I I you know, for me, I like to keep this. It would never be more than six, my approach, and more likely four or five. It depends how much taper, where we're at with some things. Um, but this is a rapid response uh uh training zone. In those first two weeks, your neuromuscular improvement is the driver. You simply, at that level intensity, the motor unit recruitment, the coordination, the synchronization, your brain, and by synchronization, you think about your brain has to talk to the muscle, and the muscle has to send a signal back that actually gets faster. It's not only more synchronized, it gets faster. So you can move faster. Things, your brain, everything's responding faster. That because that recruitment is in the correct order and quicker. And you just you feel snappy. I mean, you get energized. I'm quicker. Um I've got more punch, I'm punchier. And it's funny, like, I I've had this conversation a couple of times. Like, do you just get stronger? Like that immediate neuromuscular improvement, that neural coordination improvement, you just feel stronger. Like, and bam, that comes really quick, particularly when it's built on a well into a well-designed, you know, online plan. That neuromuscular improvement is probably go back to your point, the one that kind of spreads out over all the other performance demands the most, because that neuromuscular improvement also will have a positive impact on your overall efficiency. And you could break that down between physiological and actually biomechanical, but that's a whole nother podcast.

SPEAKER_00:

It it it is, but I think here's how I describe it to my athletes is if we haven't sprinted in a while, and I tell them to go do a sprint, they're like, man, I just was all over the place. Yeah. And I'm like, Yep, but tomorrow, if you go do a sprint, you'll be fine. And and this is the neuromuscular connection. What's actually happening is if you don't recruit the motor units uh in the way that Tim is talking about, meaning like low to high, and then get all of them by going close to max, if not maximum, and going at speed, if you don't do that in a while, the brain to muscle synapse uh gets underutilized, right? And then all of a sudden you start to go super hard again and you start to shoot acetylcholamine that innervates nerves and muscles to coordinate and synchronize everything again for the big muscles and fast moving uh aspects of your body to move. And so that's why it's a very quick, even like from one session to the next. That's what happens in the gym, that's what happens in jumping, that's what happens in sprinting. And sometimes you just need to dust off the cobwebs to not feel like Bambi when you're sprinting again. Do a sprint, open up, good to go the next day.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a great example. I mean, that, and I think people, because the neuromuscular coordinate, the neuromuscular improvements in this phase are crucial. Um, because I think they give you the biggest bang for the buck across the board. Don't get me wrong, there's some other improvements that are important. I know you're going to talk about those in a moment, but here's an example, right, that I always give. Let's say I picked up a softball, I had a ball here in my desk, a tennis ball, whatever, and I was to throw it with my right arm, it might go 50 feet. If I was to throw it with my left arm, it might go 20. 20, right? Because I'm right hand dominant, I'm right side dominant, and that's the coordination, the way my brain is talking to my arms. That's what it knows. But if I went into the gym and I was going to bench press 100 pounds and I put 50 pounds on each side, you know, assuming the bar has no weight, and I bench press, both arms would probably do pretty much the same load management in that. So it's the difference we mistake strength and coordination so much, like, oh, I can't sprint, I'm not strong. Well, maybe you just haven't done the neurological work, the neuromuscular side, and taught your body proper recruitment. Because if I spent months trying to throw a ball with my left, it would improve and eventually over time, it would probably come pretty close to my right. This phase in a very condensed little way, that's what you're investing in. You don't get stronger necessarily, but you get so much better at the coordination side, it feels and pretends and performs like strength. And what do you care? Like, I don't really care if it's I'm stronger, I'm more coordinated, I'm faster. Yay, right? And that's what you're doing. So it's a great investment in here in places.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. So that first, you know, one to two weeks, I see a lot of people just uh improving very quickly and feeling that snap, like you talked about, which is super important. That next like two to four weeks, and I would say this one's I mean, it's not more crucial, but uh, because you need the first two weeks to get there. But the the next two to four weeks, this is where it gets a little complicated, but there's like some muscle chemistry and muscle physiology that starts to occur. And you can uh uh sift through the details with me here. But there's there's two main drivers of this um when it comes to the enzymes that actually improve anaerobic capacity. And the first one's PFK, and that's phosphofructose kinase. And it's man, without getting super deep into this, it's a rate-limiting enzyme when it comes to anaerobic glycolysis. So anaerobic glycolysis, that's referring to the without oxygen going really hard aspect of when we were talking about anaerobic capacity. So correct me if I'm wrong, Tim, but there's there's no uh chart in WKO5 that tells me uh how much PFK is going on, is there?

SPEAKER_01:

There is not.

SPEAKER_00:

Um But we know it's there, right?

SPEAKER_01:

We can measure some glycolytic glycolytic efficiency, which may or may not uh you know give insight. That's you're talking about very tough things to model here.

unknown:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, but there is a like a glycolytic capacity uh uh uh measurement and stuff on WKO5 and things like that.

SPEAKER_01:

Glycolytic capacity. I said efficiency, sorry, thanks for the correction.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, uh yeah, and VLA Max, and we can do there's some cool models in there, okay? But it we're not we're just conceptualizing. We know what happens like in the cell, we know what happens from a physiological state, but this this is important, and the stimulus needs to be enough for that enzyme to come through. And this is where I say a lot of people don't go hard enough when they should. And we can use analytics to make sure that they're going hard enough to get that driver going, to get PFK going into the system. Additionally, there's another enzyme called LDH or lactate dehydrogenase. And this is the final step in like anaerobic efforts, and it helps to convert the pyruvate into lactate, and that's and that lactate then goes into fueling um these long the aerobic glycolytic energy system that Tim was talking about. So to bring this all back in, when you got a sprinty athlete who front loads an effort, power's going real good, and they're like, Yeah, let's go, but they hate dragging that out longer into the you know the three and the five minute sort of genre of things. You they need to do that, okay? But their PFK and LDH probably optimized. It's grand in a high FRC athlete, they have a lot of those enzymes going wild in their system. For me, somebody like me, I don't know if I got any PFK and LDH going on in my system because I'm happy if I see over a thousand watts on a on a on a nice day. So with that said, the where I should be working right on my physiology, or where a lot of people really need to focus on is this two to four weeks in, uh, going deep, and we'll go through some example workouts here, but this is where the the switches get flipped to get the enzymatic um uh stimulus occurring to develop deep anaerobic capacity. Tim, did I get that right? Anything that you want to add on?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, actually you got a correct better than I could have said it, but you said what the key things you flip the switches for this response. Like, and imagine that's like a heavy Tavel switch, and you gotta push it really hard, and then suddenly it'll just go click and you begin to get. And that's the hard work you need to do. And it is the ability to switch this on. That's the training intensity and volume targeting that you're really looking at.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, in that two to four weeks, I mean, this is this is where I start to uh monitor the athlete, make sure and I rear I monitor the athlete and I look at a few things to make sure they're they're holding up. I might stretch it into week five. Um, and this is where like physiologically what's occurring is phosphocreatine levels are increasing, and that goes in line with the PFK and the LDH um uh uh to enhance the capa the anaerobic capacity. But in that fifth week, I might look to more like repeatability of the power. Like, can I repeat that very good in a high quality sense? And this is goes back to like buffering capacity and dealing with acidity and all this kind of stuff. And after that, though, I'm gonna I'm gonna pull the plane up because go longer than that, I it gets dangerous.

SPEAKER_01:

Very well stated.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. And if you're even thinking about eight to ten weeks of FRC training, I would call you a silly person. You need some rest, you need to balance it out, and you need to use concurrent aerobic training, in other words.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I know the only thing I would couldn't agree more. That's again a very short uh block for me. Like it might be a cycle and a half with some rest. It depends on your resting schedule, and if we're two, one, three, one in that stage. So there's you know, some elements in there, but it's short, it's intensive, it's very purposeful. And, you know, it is the time where you're, you know, most of the interval sets are max. Like you're going at max. Now it might be max uh knowing there's a couple more intervals, but it's still max, like you're pushing that ragged edge, not only in the overall interval load, but in the individual intervals themselves.

SPEAKER_00:

So for a self-coached athlete listening to this, and they they're you know gearing up for uh some good FRC work and they're gonna go out there and do it tomorrow. What percentage of FTP should they target, Tim?

SPEAKER_01:

For me, I'm a little higher here. I think, and it depends, it depends. Let me answer. You really should be going as hard as you can go. And as hard as you can go with the expectation of finishing the workout. So I am a believer when you get into this phase of really pushing. So if you want to put a percentage to that, you know, we could say um I might, I typically I'm gonna go off script here a little bit in the sense of the classic zone model. I want to be 130 to 135% of FTP or above. Now, classically in a seven-zone model, I think that's 121 to 135. Um, and that's where all of that has impact. But I want my athletes to go back all the way to the first episode. I like riding in kind of the bottom of the aerobic zone and not here's where I want you, if you can get to the top, to find a way to fight to your top. I think once we invest in this, we want to switch on all of those positive impacts. It's a heavy switch to push. It takes a hard, hard effort.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow, that's a more concrete answer than I was anticipating from you, Tim. I thought it would be a very, it depends and individualized approach, which you you did say that. And and I will say, I mean, that was an awesome answer, mind you. But I I think what what everyone needs to learn from what Tim Sim is like it's hard. It's max. Yeah. And this is where I prescribe in RPE. Sure, there'll be a percentage of FTP. And yes, I do individualize that based on how they make how my athletes make their power. Um, and I'm usually also going to what was their max, say it's a one minute, I'll go to what they've done in a one minute for maybe the year or the past six months. I'll make that the top end and then drop it down to probably like a 130%, like Tim said. Um, and that's how I designed the workup, but like max is max. RPE, this is where this really prevails. And I would say don't hang on to a number necessarily because if if we're doing it right, you might go beyond it, right? Yep.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, it's funny. You said a couple of things like we talked earlier about, I think it was episode two, about first we use a power meter meter to calibrate our feelings, then we use our feelings to calibrate power. Here's another great example of it. If you're my two cents, everybody, if you're looking at your power meter, you're not going hard enough. Like this is a classic case where the number is descriptive. When you're done with the interval set, load it on up to training peaks and take a review and be like, hey, cool, I did this. The prescription is hard. And that's why I said 130 and one, I want that or above. Like, that's the minimum. I don't want to prescribe 121 as a range because I don't want the athlete doing that. Like more. Everybody's, even a highly aerobic athlete can do more, get closer. And I find that pretty much everyone can perform in that 130 plus range, but there's where then we see repeatability become an issue. I also very focus on like when I'm in phase, what you have is one to two weeks and two to four weeks, which I agree with. Honestly, most of my intervals, I'll do two things I'm doing. One one minute is a mainstay here. Sometimes I'll do 75 seconds for a manipulated finish, like a standing, because I'm going to recruit while you're full of lactate, we're going to recruit some additional muscle, make it even more sucky and painful. Um, so there might be some elements like that, but say one minute. One of the things I'll measure in sets is the drop-off rate that happens after around 40 seconds. Physiologically, when we're going max and we're really thinking about this concept of being anaerobic, we're burning that anaerobic battery down pretty fast. At around 40 seconds, the phone is flashing the warning lights. That's when you really start to hurt because all the signals are we're running out, we're almost empty. And that last 20 seconds, and it's not always, but yeah, it's actually always kind of look at 20 because it's just a block of time. I want to see from hard start to drop off, like how hard do they start? Where do they drop off from like five seconds in to 40? That usually has one angle. I'm doing it for the camera, that might have a certain slope, but it's the slope from 40 to 60 that really tells me where the athlete's at. And then I'll manage through coaching advice more than a power number. Like, hey, here's a slightly better way to execute that that's still max, or you know, here's a different approach or a different terrain, even can impact, and then uh still try to hit them the same numbers, but maybe not, and the drop-off is the control element for me that I'm looking for. If they can manage that drop-off more, that you know that gives me an indicator of to race of physiological and psychological readiness.

unknown:

Yep.

SPEAKER_01:

Like that athlete's not ready to suffer in that last 20 seconds the minute, they're probably not ready to race. And that's a tough message to send athletes, but there's a relationship there that's true.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep, it's very true. Um, so you described, you know, one minute is kind of a mainstay, maybe out to 70 seconds. Do you have a short uh like below 60 seconds or when you're doing FRC intervals? Um so what would be like the very minimum duration that you would use for an FRC interval?

SPEAKER_01:

I like my minimum would be 30 to 40 seconds, depending on the athlete. There's a there's a lot of bare because you can put out more power, obviously, for that at times sustain a higher power output. And here we're playing in the range where power is probably more I shouldn't say this because somebody I'll get hate mail, but power is almost probably more impactful than the specific length of the interval. But that really depends on the athlete. Like if I find you can do more intervals at 30 seconds and get 100 watts, 150 watts more out of doing it that way, um, I'll I'll lean into that a little bit more. Um I because uh you as a coach have the responsibility to get max too. You're asking the athlete for max, you have to find the uh the interval environment that allows them to get the most out of that type of intensity.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep. And how many intervals like per session would you be doing uh as an example workout?

SPEAKER_01:

I start low and move high. And often sometimes like meaning I I want to I always want to err on the lesser side of that. One of the things you said earlier, if you're thinking for everybody thinking targeting, even after what we've just talked about, you said it, but you didn't put enough emphasis on it. Your history is the greatest indicator of your anaerobic capacity interval format. So I will always base that on what's the athlete history. Meaning, I might go back to a previous year where they've done some workouts. I'm like, wow, they really can only do four times one minute and they crap out. I might do a little more and then manipulate the rest environment. There's a real complexity here. Am I trying to build capacity or do I want to push a little power? I might change the rest in between. Generally, I'm going for max. So I would start four to six one minute.

SPEAKER_00:

Now the and how much how much time in between?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, full recovery. So uh anywhere, depending on the athlete, from five to eight minutes. Um there's some occasional things like I have some workouts that are really specific to performance, like crit sprints, where I'll limit the recovery a little bit more from that because it brings down the power, but it really is more specific to the demands of being in that crit. So to mimic that demand specific, I'll give up a couple of watts. But in general, it's that type of spread. Because again, max is the indicator. I want you to.

SPEAKER_00:

And you'll drain the FRC uh quite rapidly when you do that too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Yeah, you need to restore that battery in between enough to be able to pull because the the the what flips the uh uh the anaerobic enzyme switch is draining the battery, restore it, drain the battery, restore it. That's the driver. You get the neuromuscular response, that better coordination we've got just from going harder. But the real uh response in the enzymes we're talking about, they need that drain restore. And it never restores fully up in five to seven minutes. It gets back up. There, you're ready enough to go. And that that sawtooth drain that we we can see in certain charts, that really is what you're driving. You want to just empty it, restore it as best you can, empty it, and that's the goal of each interval.

SPEAKER_00:

Now I'll go off script here and pull it almost back to episode one because we talked about how say FTP and FRC are inversely related. But would you would you say that if somebody has trained aerobically well, would the anaerobic battery or FRC does that recharge more quickly in a highly fit person, or is it just genetically driven? I'm a fast twitch person, so my anaerobic is always tuned up and ready to go. What does the aerobic side play in recharging the anaerobic?

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, that's a great question. So, conceptually, as humans, we have a pretty tight range of how we burn that battery down. That's reasonably predictable in modeling. It's the restoration of that battery which gets very difficult to predict because of all the variables of which you're now talking about one key one, the athlete, uh one of the key variables, the athlete's aerobic uh fitness, their aerobic capacity. As a whole, I'll make that this statement. Your aerobic capacity and having aerobic fitness improves your recovery in all elements of training. Like it is an aerobic exercise. You recover, it's not like you recover just because everything stops. There's activity going on in the system that's driving that recovery, the response to the breakdown, which is exercise. The more aerobically fit we are, the more that recovery is optimized. It happens better and faster, and therefore improves our ability to do work and do more work at higher intensities, and actually improves the adaptation to the stimuli, as long as we don't have too much fatigue and we've properly rested in cycles. So that's where go all the way back, and again, I forget what episode two, that's probably one of the biggest challenges of the time-crunched athlete, because they don't have quite the time to really invest in fully developing that aerobic capacity. And you still then um have to deal with some of the impacts of that. And as you get into higher intensity, which then the athlete will feel like, well, I'm doing more work. This is good. Actually, you could do more work yet if somehow you could have spent some more time through your foundation phase doing aerobic and improving that aerobic capacity and fitness.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, exactly. And I and I think that just speaks to uh the complexity of some of this physiology and some of the questions that came from our audience. I mean, these were rich questions, and I mean it spurred on four, actually five podcasts. And and so I even if you're a crit racer, you need aerobic training because that will make your anaerobic better. And if you're a gravel racer or an altar racer, you need some FRC to make you more durable when the hard times come. So it's it's not just one intensity, it's not just one metric, it's it's all of them. It's all the stuff that Tim talked about.

SPEAKER_01:

My example of spinning all the plates, right? This is this is when we think about it endurance athletic versatility. Like we tend to get very focused in training, and we're looking at this and we're doing that, and we have a neat little plan, and everything else is working great, but the map is not the territory, right? There's this reality is then you get into a race and things go bananas. Like hard start, I'm in a group, everybody's now going too slow, and somebody started this little hill, and we all charge up the hill at 600 watt. Great athletes are versatile athletes. So, what you're investing in, even though there's areas you're doing a lot more focused due to your limitations and the demands of the events, um, but you need to be versatile too. Don't fall for the concept, and you were great to keep bringing this back up. Don't fall like this one answer is me, or wow, the demand of the event is unbound, and I'm targeting 11 hours, and I just need to go in 140 watts, you know, to achieve that. You still need to be versatile to deal with the dynamics of any event you're going to be in. And investing some capital and keeping all the plates kind of spinning is usually a worthwhile thing to do in your, you know, endeavor, in your in your training, in your athletic uh event performance. It's important.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Um, and with that, Tim, I mean, I I feel like we've created almost a handbook of uh, you know, how to adapt, uh, what to expect in that adaptation and some example workouts along the way. So I really uh appreciate all the hours that you've spent with me uh in making the outline and jumping on this podcast and going late into the day. So uh I really do thank you. Um and I hope our listeners, well, I know our listeners will get a ton from it. So thank you for taking time uh to share your knowledge with all of us. Well, thanks for having me on. It's been fun. Yeah, well, before I let you go, um, you know, I'm gonna speak to all the caps that you do wear. Um in my original episode number one, I talked about uh uh an educator and uh analyst at WKO5. We threw out a lot of nerdy terms, and I know that there's a ton of nerdy athletes listening. Um, if they're curious about using a tool like WKO5, uh, how do they do that? Where do they go? Uh, and who should use it and who maybe should not use it.

SPEAKER_01:

Great question. So WKO5 is an advanced analytical tool, and there's a lot of things that you can unlock with it. Um, but it there's a learning curve. There definitely is, you have to invest in understanding of concept and how to make the system work, how to work within the, you know, analytics are complex. Once we master it, it's great because it can crunch a whole bunch of data and gives us clear insights. We call that, you know, actionable intelligence. That's what analytics, that's the end output. Analytics help us make better decisions. So you can go to trainingfeaks.com, you can certainly download WKO5. Um, it has a two-week free trial. So if you want to experiment and see what you see in there. If you go to the help section, there's actually a robust WKL5.com website, which talks about how to use the software, the concepts are in it, there's guides to how to get started. There's actually a full-on coaching with WKL5 guide in there, which is a very helpful guide, even if you do or do not use WKL5. I mean, of course, we'd like you to use it, but it kind of lays out some really good concepts in just coaching and developing coaching strategies and how to utilize. Um, just know that you're gonna have moments of frustration because it's a learning curve. Um, it is not as easy to use as training peaks because you're looking at data presented in deep analytical approach. So it's not necessarily just a chart showing you what you've done. There's a lot of analytics going on in there, showing you some complex concepts and ideas.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yep. So if you do have time that you want to invest in and uh explore deeper analytics, I'd definitely do it. Um, but it's not for everybody. I have some uh very smart athletes that uh understand it uh greatly and they use it and they're like it's a little too much. So I guess, coach, I'll just let you do this. Uh but then I have some other people that pick it up like that and then Matt, this is great. And they they love Zoom sessions with me and just uh understand it more. Um so it's a it's a pretty cool tool. I wanted to mention it here because Tim uh is a big uh driver of that. And last episode we did talk about uh joinbasecant.com. And I know uh Tim has um a bunch of stuff coming up on that, particularly some like indoor riding opportunities. Uh Tim, you mentioned that before, but when does that start? Because it's usually around like the Thanksgiving holiday time period, right?

SPEAKER_01:

December 1 this year falls neatly on the calendar. Uh you know, you you can find us riding online, you can join our community. There's things that you can do. Um it it's a pretty crazy, it makes for crazy winters, but it's fun. It's a a lot of community, a lot of learning. There's a whole group of people in there. Shared values, you know, learning, growing, exercising, sweating, all that. It's great.

SPEAKER_00:

And entertainment. Uh, because I I know uh me personally, I don't ride indoors all that much, but when I do, I want some entertainment and I need somebody to cheer me on. And uh I've joined, I've joined uh uh Basecamp in Tim and heckled with him um uh a few times. So if you need somebody to just kind of kick you in the butt and uh virtually go along uh with them, check out uh Tim and Rebecca, and I think Amber might be on the bike this year. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Amber's not on the bike this year with us on our Swift rides. Um we have a whole group of new people. You can look at Swift on Swift.com and there are forward slash events, forward slash basecamp, and you'll see all of our future rides coming up in Swift. Come join us one. It's just jump in and join us. All the rides are coached. Uh I do the 10 a.m. ride, which I've seen you on sometimes. It's great, Rebecca Rush and I do the 10 a.m. ride and always have some fun. We always have some crazy dialogue and learning going on. So come on out and go.

SPEAKER_00:

Coach AP is just suffering from all the FRC work. So uh but yeah, check them out. Uh in in all honesty and in um uh genuine terms, they do a good job over at Basecamp. So check that out. WKO5 is for all the nerds out there. And speaking of nerds, Tim, thank you again. I really appreciate all your nerdiness. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainright.com backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast that'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart. Train right.

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Adam Pulford

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