The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

How to Build VO2 max Year Round! (#293)

• CTS • Season 6 • Episode 293

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OVERVIEW
Should cyclists incorporate VO2 max work year round or focus VO2 max work on only select periods of the year? Coach Adam Pulford tackles this listener question in Episode 293 of "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast". Key ideas include the fact that VO2 max is influenced by training at several different intensities, so you can work on VO2 max without always doing high-intensity intervals. When it comes to high-intensity intervals, Coach Adam provides guidance on scheduling workouts and rest days, provides examples of effective VO2 max interval workouts, and when it makes sense to adjust annual periodization plans to incorporate high intensity intervals at unconventional times of year. 

TOPICS COVERED

  • VO2 max is influenced by all training intensities
  • Why you shouldn't train VO2 max intensity all year long
  • How training intensities work together
  • Sample Zone 5, high intensity workouts
  • Why you should do Zone 5 VO2 work at every two months
  • Other ways to build VO2 max off the bike

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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 Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I drop 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. Here today to talk about VO2 Max training and if you should do it year-round. Today's question comes from one of you, our listeners. So let's hear the original question and start unpacking the advice around it. Hi Adam, I am a 51-year-old competitive mountain bike and road cyclist. I'm trying to hold on to my fitness and work out a plan for this winter. One thing I'm struggling with is should athletes over 50 years old be doing VO2 work year-round? There seems to be mixed messages about this. Please, if you could do an episode on this sometimes, sometime, I would uh appreciate it. I love the podcast and thanks for your excellent advice. Thanks, Stefano. Yeah, uh first of all, um, thank you for listening, Stefano, and contributing to the questions and content. Always good to hear from you and and to hear from our listeners. So thank you. To answer the question, recall on uh some higher level, if you're training aerobically, you're always influencing your VO2 Max in some form of fashion. So I would argue that if you're following a good endurance uh training plan with progressive overload and periodization uh focused on performance, you are essentially training your VO2 Max year-round, or like I said, influencing it. Okay, and that's it that's important. And this is a good thing if you're uh wanting to improve, maintain your VO2 max, and have elements of health and performance and longevity around this, okay? But when athletes and coaches talk about VO2 training like you are, Stefano, it they usually are referring to higher intensity training like zone five in particular on a six-zone system, or maybe some intensity higher than LT2 in a three-zone model. While it's beneficial to have higher intensity throughout the year, especially if you're a time-crunched athlete, it can be confusing on when to put that intensity, how much to do, and how to weave it throughout the year. So let's clear some of this up today. First, VO2 intensity year-round for a 50 plus athlete question mark. So long as there's no pre-existing conditions like pulmonary disease, training VO2 max intensities or maximal aerobic power is not an issue. Check with your doctor first just to be sure. However, the one thing that I am sure of to do with an aging athlete is to give them more rest or easy days after those high intensity sessions so that they're fully restored for the next hard day versus my younger athletes where I can use block training to drive an adaptation. Now, for all of my athletes, old, young, time rich, time crunched, I do not promote doing VO2 intensity year-round, month after month. You need to change things up and understand how physiology works for all of this. So let me explain that a little bit more. So why not VO2 intensity year round, month after month? Recall from one of my previous episodes, you can influence your VO2 Max with lower intensity aerobic training or higher intensity aerobic training that has quite a bit of anaerobic contribution to it. I call this pushing up or pulling up your VO2 Max. Pushing is the longer, lower intensity zone two, or in my opinion, some zone three to do that. Pulling up is the shorter high intensity zone five or low zone six, and we pull that up to raise that ceiling for a short time period to bring it out with intensity versus the pushing, which is pushing that up over a long period of time, which increases durability and sustains our VO2 max for a longer time period. In the end, you need both for best results when it comes to uh performance as well as your health. Now, for a time-crunched athlete, we'd still have the majority of our time spent in that zone two or three throughout a season, meaning it majority of our training should still be aerobic. It's advantageous to use more of the zone three or tempo to add a little bit more aerobic training stress in several training blocks versus an athlete who has more time and they are riding the majority of their time in zone two. Again, it's all related to how much stress can we quantify. And for that time-crunched athlete, a little bit more zone three to get the stress response is what I use as a coach. Now, we may need to use more of the pulling up or higher intensity throughout a year when you're limited on your overall volume. And that's not to say that we should be blasting ourselves with uh high intensity like zone five year round. So why is that? Why shouldn't you be training zone five year round? Okay. My first answer to that is if you always do the same thing, you won't progress as much as if you were to change the routine or stimulus throughout the year. Variety is a principle of training, and it's there in order to change the stimulus, to keep on driving adaptation and keep your body moving as opposed to hitting a plateau. Okay, and this is both physical and mental. If you keep on doing the same workout, the same routine over and over, your body adapts to it and it will never improve. Okay, so to bust through those plateaus and keep your body guessing, there is a certain amount of variety that comes into the equation here, but it's a longer term. It's it's monthly, maybe a training block like six to eight weeks. It's not a daily sort of uh variety where it people talk about muscle confusion, for example. That is a bastardized term, and I would stay away from that. That that is not that beneficial, especially when it comes to the longer-term goals of an endurance athlete. There are training phases like base and some of the build phases where zone five may not be beneficial because you're trying to stress the aerobic system with low intensity to form adaptations like increased mitochondrial genesis, so improving and promoting uh more mitochondria to build in your body. You want to improve the fat burning ability during this time, increase your stroke volume, expand the plasma volume by doing uh more aerobic training. And doing all of this in that zone two to three allows you to get more training days in with lower stress and fatigue and a balanced autonomic nervous system. When you start to do a bunch of uh training in like zone four or five or low zone six and high amounts of zone six, you start to change the stress response away from the lower intensity training to that higher intensity. So it's an enzymatic sort of response as well as the nervous system response. Okay, so things just start to change. So if your goals are to improve aerobic capacity and do all those things that I just talked about, stay in that lower intensity. Even if you're a time-crunched athlete, you play the long game over time and you'll start to see the the adaptations and the benefits. Essentially, when I have an already fit time-crunched athlete where we need to expand the base, I use a mix of zone two to three for several months, and I take short recovery blocks and keep them going to form those adaptations versus moving on to those higher intensities. And I have some time scales to give some advice about that more here in a minute. But sneak peek on that advice is if you're not doing some of that zone five and above every two to three months. Maybe you want to uh plan accordingly in your annual training plan. More specifics on that here in a second. But please know, just because you don't do zone five training doesn't mean that you're going to detrain or miss anything there. In fact, training below it and above it has benefits at times, just like I talked about with the aerobic and base and build phases. And this is why we need to think about all intensities to improve fully. Yeah, I've preached on the podcast about all intensities matter, right? And you can think about training and training cycles as a continuum versus just a year-to-year approach. Everything builds on self, even though we don't have a perfect graph to always show this. I think a good coach and a mature athlete know this and accept that. What I mean is that year-to-year aerobic capacity, fitness, and ability keep building or layering on top of themselves, even though we don't have a perfect chart like CTL or performance management chart or something in training peaks to exactly show that. Okay. But you know it as a coach and you know it as an athlete. So assuming you take a short break, right, from training at the at the end of, let's say, December for most amateur athletes and many time crunch athletes, you can come back to a normal hard work in January without having to really put in a huge base or a ton of time at zone two. I'd say if you've been training hard and organized for three plus years, that that's exactly where uh my athletes are at. And you can come back to hard training without too much uh issue with that, right? This is because your base is already established and you haven't taken uh significant long breaks like years or months and months or years. Now, the aerobic system is likely pretty strong, and you can do all the intensities to keep layering your fitness and performance. And this is where it can get confusing where people talk about doing, you know, VO2 work or anaerobic capacity in January. That's the reason for it. Everything is kind of layered on top of each other, and your aerobic system should be able to handle that. Okay. And I've talked about why and when you could do that. It's something like a reverse periodization model where you're working on your limiters further out from the competition. So if you're compromised anaerobically, maybe you do put in some anaerobic work in January so that it's not holding you back as much come June and July. Additionally, hitting some zone four work in January jump starts the process uh of keeping FTP maintained if you did take a longer break. Okay, so it can kind of microwave uh that that fitness and that energy system to build back up again. And then weaving in some zone five accelerations uh within the zone four training block, it's a good way to just like pepper in intensity. More on that here in a second as well. Now I say that all with like some hesitation because the way I coach has a very individualized process to it. Okay. Uh I weave it in according to um uh just that individual athlete, what they need to work on, who they are, how they adapt to training. So time-crunched athletes and self-coached athletes take note here with a few caveats, okay? Only do that if you know your body well and take these little nuggets and pieces of advice with a grain of salt. Doing a bunch of zone four and five in January may apply to you, or it may not. But on some higher level, you need to simply think about what key intensity or performance aspect do you want to influence each month. Focus on that for about three weeks and then take an easy block of three to four days or a full week, then move on to change that focus in the next month. That's what I'm talking about in the way of stay long enough in a training block to get the adaptation, but then change it to keep variety going and keep your body adapting without hitting plateaus. That's probably the best advice I can give for a time-crunched athlete. And like I said, this keeps you training different aspects year-round, but allows you enough time in a particular area to provide enough stress so you make the change or the adaptation versus just picking random hard workouts a few days each week year round. Okay. Now, the latter still works, but in my opinion, in my experience, in my observation of other elite researchers, coaches, athletes, and planning out annual training programs for people, doing them with a high quality provides the best outcomes. Meaning, make a plan, stick to it as best as you can, and you'll get a much better result versus just randomly picking high-intensity workouts. Now, speaking of those high-intensity workouts in zone five, this is really, I think, what Stefano is talking about when you know, speaking to that 50 plus, uh, if I have time, I'll show you some example of how to weave that with extra rest days. But for a lot of people listening here, it's really important for you to realize that there's just so many ways that you can use that zone five or low zone six to pull up the VO2 max using high intensity to do that. Okay. So I'm gonna pull up my screen. And for those who are uh watching on YouTube, this will serve as a pretty good example of what I'm talking about. You can take screenshots of this, you can build your own workouts kind of around these similar concepts, but really there's a few ways to think about this, okay? And when it comes to zone five and using zone six, you can really break it down into long intervals at zone five, meaning something longer than like three to five minutes, maybe three to six minutes. Um, and in this case, I'm showing uh a workout example of VO2 max intervals, four by five minutes, with four to five minute recovery in between. So you can see that the percentage of power is on the low to middle end of the zone five prescription. Okay, the longer I go, the more I'm just gonna hug the low end or aim for the middle end on these. And then if we go to short intervals, somewhere between 90 seconds and maybe 2.5 minutes, in this case, this is an eight by two minute with two minute recovery in between, you can see that the percentage of FTP is higher. Okay, so maybe mid to upper slash maybe 5% over the zone five prescription. And again, that's a short, um, short interval. They're still steady, okay, in in both of these aspects. Meaning there's no um, you know, front-loaded or or acceleration at the end. We'll get to that here right now. A front-loaded zone five interval may look like this. I call it front-loaded VO2 max intervals where we put in an acceleration of 20 to 30 seconds at the very beginning, and then we settle into uh uh VO2 max power, which you know, somewhere just over zone four, up to the middle of zone five. The reason I like doing this is it really spikes the lactate, spikes the heart rate up, gets you going, gets the ventilation up there as well. So you get a really good cardiovascular response, and it's a little bit more approachable or doable if you're a type of athlete that maybe uh is not as anaerobic. Okay. So I use that to kind of get things going. And this could be a very good early season VO2 sort of workout where you want the cardiovascular and the and the uh ventilatory response, but maybe the legs just aren't there to see on top of the of the power like they could in something more intense, like the VO2 uh max interval workout with shorter intervals that I just showed here at the 8x2, for example, which is just has higher power in order to get the job done. Finally, what's super popular are the on-off intervals. And uh, if you can see here, I call them squiggly intervals, right? Uh it's just uh on off, on off, and you can you know uh slice and dice this however you want. In this case, it's 30 seconds on and 15 seconds off. This is a very, very good uh workout for improving uh power at VO2, okay, or uh maximal aerobic power. And you can see here the percentages are uh usually 130 to 160 percent of FTP and uh repeat over and over, very short recovery periods. I just did that workout yesterday, kick my butt. You can scale that out a little bit longer, then you start to have to question why you're doing some of this because the ventilatory or heart rate responses, the longer you go, look a little bit more like high threshold, but up to about eight minutes, you're still gonna get a pretty good VO2 response. Just note that the percentage of FTP will should and likely come down for most people on the on-offs if you're doing uh 30 on 30 offs, and if you're extending it out to like a four by eight minutes, which I'm showing right here. So those are some pretty good examples of long and short zone five uh workouts that you can utilize, front-loaded zone five workouts, and then squiggly or on-off intervals. Finally, Stefano, this one's for you, where uh for a 50 plus athlete, I I just I made up uh a workout uh routine similar to some of my aging athletes, where you've got, you can see here, I've got two really structured high-intensity days in a week. Okay. And you've got at least two full days of easy work in between. Okay, and that's that's the key, that's intentional. However, you weave it, that's very much so up to you. But the way I wove it is similar to somebody who's 50 or 55 plus that likely has more time or flexibility around their schedule in the day. It's not necessarily that they're time rich or extensively time crunched, but if they are, um, you can use this format where I don't have a rest day every six days, like a lot of people still working. Maybe a 55 plus is retired or quasi-retired. And therefore, uh, as you can see, kind of like this, uh, I have a rest day in the first week, but then no rest day in the second week. And then finally the third week, I have a rest day. So I'm going about every nine to 10 days with a pure rest day, but the easy days are super easy. Okay, you've got recovery uh short recovery rides of an hour, an endurance walk with some light strength training, and then we hit some high intensity. Okay, then you have two days of uh easy or aerobic, and then we have high intensity again. And I'm using both short intensities midweek and then a front loaded longer intensity in order to uh incorporate that zone five or maybe high zone four and a little bit of zone six. So again, it gets in that uh kind of mixture or slurry of the higher intensities in order to get the job done. But this would be something that I would use early season to introduce intensity, start moving the needle on that, and do so in a way that allows the athlete to come fresh to the bike and get the job done. So here's a key point, and I already mentioned it. I I probably wouldn't go longer than two months without hitting some zone five intensity. And that goes for time-crunched athletes, okay? So a couple reasons why, three reasons why. If you don't use it, you lose it. But that's a longer term sort of thing. Don't let that cause anxiety in you, okay? Meaning if you don't do zone five for maybe like six months or 12 months, okay, you're start you're gonna start to not have that ability anymore. But every two, maybe three months, you're not gonna lose that ability all that much. Okay. Keep this in mind too. If you don't need it, don't train it. Okay, if you need more aerobic capacity, use a mixture of zone two and three in order to form the adaptation and do your training. Okay. And just know that if it's two to three months of no zone five, you're not gonna detrain there. Okay. Finally, this advice is based on how your physiology works. Why two months? Why two to three months, right? Three months is a pretty good time frame to think of uh the physiological roll-off or impact your training, meaning what you did in the past one to three months is helping you now, especially in the way of intensity and specificity. So, in order to maintain power at VO2 max or maximal aerobic power for an older athlete or time-crunched athlete, hitting that intensity or a block of that intensity, a block being two or three weeks of focused uh zone five, low zone six sort of stuff, every two to three months is some pretty good general advice. Now, same thing with zone six on anaerobic capacity, where you don't want to go too long without doing it, but you can also pepper this into an endurance block a little bit easier without having the fatigue issues. Um, and you do that just by maybe like four by 15 to 20 second sprints once or twice a week during an endurance ride. You're not gonna ruin the endurance ride, you're not gonna change the metabolic responses all that much, but you're going to maintain some of that anaerobic capacity and sprint power. And for 50 plus, it really time-crunched athletes and a lot of amateur athletes, doing that's gonna um maintain the sprint ability, which is really important, especially if you're gonna be racing or or you have performance goals. Okay. Now, let's think about some other ways to maintain or build VO2 Max because there's some strategies that you can use off the bike as well. With that being said, my advice is don't forget the gym work. Okay, strength training increases and maintains lean body mass. This influences your VO2 max in a positive way. So doing some hard gym work two to three times per week while you're riding just aerobically call it zone two on the bike for a few weeks or a month is a good way of adjusting the training modality and intensity to influence your VO2 max versus, like I said, blasting yourself with zone five year round. Okay. This also can help you improve your uh durability and some of the other aspects that are needed to push the power at high intensity. For aging athletes, I really encourage incorporating strength training into the training plan year-round for both performance and health. Finally, uh, and to kind of summarize this, what not to do. First, don't only do zone five training year round. Second, don't only do the same zone five workout. Like I just gave you the visual uh examples. There's a lot of ways that you can manipulate the higher intensities to get more out of the training. Long, short, or squiggly. Think about it in that way. Finally, and thirdly, don't use the same exact training plan as you did last year. There's always ways that you can improve it. There's always ways that your life is changing. So you can't just like rinse and repeat, even though you can keep some of the broader strokes the same if last year worked for you. But don't, but I really encourage you to get creative, change things up, and provide your body with uh a different and perhaps better way of doing it. Finally, what to do is have a plan for the year, right? And I talked about that at length in my annual training plan episodes. Number two, cycle your training with intensity and volume. Generally speaking, when volume is higher, intensity should be lower. When intensity is higher, volume should be lower. This pushes and pulls your VO2 up in both ways and stays away from doing both at once, which can be uh kind of a non-functional overreaching and cause more injuries. So try to stay away from that, even though there's a time and place for that. You just need uh to be under a watchful eye while you're doing uh training phases like that. Additionally, you want to plan your gym work so that it benefits your cycling performance. And I did an episode on that, but basically doing heavy work in the gym while riding aerobically can maintain those aspects of VO2 max in the short term by preserving and building lean body tissue. Finally, don't forget to just use general variety month to month and year to year to prevent staleness, burnout, and boredom. So that's my general advice on if you should do VO2 training year-round. There's just so many ways to think about it and come at it with different angles. And I and I hope that I provided you some good advice in a fairly short, uh packaged way. So thanks for writing in today, Stefano. And if and if a listener right now has any question, head on over to trainwrite.com backslash podcast, click on ask a training question, fill it out, send it over, and we'll do our best to answer it on a future episode. That's it. That's our show for today. I hope you liked it. If you want more or you want to take it to the next level, you know where to find us. Trainwrite.com. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast. We hope you enjoy the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainwrite.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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