You Don’t Have a Fitness Problem, You Have a Durability Problem

Most athletes focus on how strong they are when fresh. But performance is defined by what holds up as fatigue accumulates.

In this episode, we break down durability: what it is, how to measure it through fatigue resistance, and why it’s one of the most overlooked performance variables in endurance sport.

We also cover how to train it effectively so you can maintain power, make better decisions late in races, and perform when it matters most.

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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Resources:

• Trainright.com
• Durability as an independent parameter of endurance performance in cycling - PMC
• Durability as an index of endurance exercise performance: Methodological considerations - PMC
• 82. HOW TO TRAIN DURABILITY? - Knowledgeiswatt English
• Fatigue Resistance or Durability in Cycling: Tests & Training Tips — High North Performance
• Race Stronger, Longer: How to Build Fatigue Resistance
• Why Every Masters Cyclist Should Test Durability (Not Just FTP) 

Transcript

Durability Versus Fitness

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If you've ever looked down at your power meter late in a ride and watched your numbers fall apart, despite feeling strong at the start, you don't have a fitness problem. You have a durability problem. The good news though is there are specific ways to test it and improve it. Let me teach you how to keep your power up when fatigue is high so you don't dread the final hill climb, the race-winning sprint, or whatever hard effort comes at the end of a ride. Durability is your general ability to maintain a high level of performance despite accumulating high levels of fatigue. In other words, it's how you hold up late in the ride or race. It's very trainable and measurable, and I'll explain how you can use your data to design workouts to test and improve yourself. One method I use is called fatigue resistance training. Fatigue resistance is a term that's almost synonymous with durability and has some specific testing parameters associated with it, at least in my coaching experience. It's essentially comparing your peak fresh power duration to a fatigued peak power duration to determine your durability. I'll expand on that more in a minute. But first, you should know that many performance determinants in the sport of cycling are linked to producing high power when you're already fatigued. And that's why this concept is so important if you're doing long-distance events and you want to not only survive, but feel good all day, no matter what comes your way, and maybe get on that podium too. Even though durability is a pretty hot topic right now in the Pro Peloton, it's both easily overlooked and undertrained for amateurs, masters, and time-crunched athletes. So let's make sure you're not overlooking anything and that you're always durable when you need to be. First up, how we test it? It's pretty simple. We compare your peak fresh power duration to a peak fatigued power duration, do some math, and determine how durable you really are. You can test any power duration, and what I mean by that is it can be one minute, five-minute, twenty-minute efforts. Typically, five and twenty-minute fatigue resistant tests are common. And I do some testing with sprint power too, like 20-second max efforts with my athletes on tire legs. Most people probably know their peak 20-minute power from a latest field test or a race effort. To test your fatigue resistance, you'll do a 20-minute max effort after several hours of riding, where you do a lot of aerobic riding, tracking your kilojoules, which you can measure on your power meter. For various rider types, there are standard kilojoul measurements to aim for when testing your durability. I'm showing them here on the screen for you so you can reference them when determining your exact protocol. For juniors and beginners, you want to ride for about a thousand kj. Elite Pro women or master's riders are going to be between 1,500 to 2,000 kilojoules of riding. Strong amateurs could be 2,000 to 2,500 kJ, and Elite Pro men could be 3,000 kilojoules or higher. Let's take a master's rider, for example. In fact, let's take myself, because I have good clean data, and what's not to love about pointing out the podcaster's own flaws? Here you see my fatigue resistance chart on WK05. My peak 20-minute power this year is 370 watts. My peak 20-minute power after 1500 kilojoules of work is only 303 watts, which gives me a fatigue resistance decline of negative 19.1% and a durability ranking of average. So where this racks in stacks is 0 to 1% is elite or pro typically. 1 to 5% is very good, 5 to 10% is a good ranking, 10 to 20% is average, and 20% or below is bad. That's just to give you some context on the ranking system. To be fair, I haven't done a fatigue resistance test this year, and I don't think I've done one for like five years because I'm lazy and it really hurts. So you can see where an athlete like me could really use some work to improve their durability. Let's look at another example. This time it's one of my elite women riders on a pro Conti team in Europe. She's a smaller person, and many of our races are between three and three and a half hours or 1500 to 2000 kilojoules of work. We used 1500 kilojoules as the work range and did a 20-minute effort. Here you see the test itself with the 20-minute effort late in the ride. The results are shown here. We have 0% decline in fatigue resistance. In other words, she's durable as hell and way better than her coach. Generally speaking, if I have someone ranked as very good or good for their durability, there's no need to train it more. If you have average or bad, then train it. Especially if you're doing races that are over two hours with high power efforts late in the ride. Keep in mind this is a very trainable thing. On a high level, there's a few ways that we can train it effectively. And this includes long zone two rides, high carb fueling and hydration during those long rides to stave off that fatigue, hard efforts in the second half of your rides, and a steady dose of strength training. I'll get into more specific examples of all of those here in just a few minutes. For now, let me really blow your mind with this knowledge bomb. Durability is not directly related to a high FTP or VO2 max. Hear me out on this one. If all you do is train your highest power outputs possible, it won't really improve your durability. This is your fresh peak power, whereas durability is looking at what you can do when you're fatigued. In fact, if you increase your peak 20-minute power, typically your FTP will also increase. In the research as well as in practice, we don't see durability directly relating with peak fresh powers because you're probably increased your anaerobic ability more than your aerobic ability, generally speaking. Remember my data you just saw. Not bad for peak fresh power, but lots of room for improvement on the durability side of things or fatigued peak power. To drive this message home, if I increase my fresh peak 20-minute power, again, say up to 400 watts, in theory, my durability would actually decrease. Run the same math equation, and my percentage decline would go from negative 19.1% down to about 26%, or from average to real bad. Now let's talk about why durability has been overlooked. I think it's because high-intensity interval training, threshold training, VO2 Max, and other things have been more in vogue recently. We haven't paid as much attention to durability in the past as we do right now. But for the record, those who have been coaching, racing, and directing athletes for years, it's not a new concept. However, better ways of measuring it, training it, and testing it have made durability more easy to understand in the modern-day endurance sport. On top of that, better research and communicators of that research, such as Dr. Gabriella Gallo, have shown how durability is linked to performance. In this post, Dr. Gallo summarizes research by Andy Jones showing all aspects that go into durability. I've done two longer interviews with Dr. Gallo, which I'll link to below. In that conversation, we discussed other aspects that contribute to durability, including fueling, equipment, or efficiency of equipment, how much training the athlete has done both in current times and accumulated years, heat, cooling, and altitude effects, freshness, status, mental toughness, and more. Overall, there's a lot that goes on into being durable, more than just testing yourself after several hours of riding. But testing it, like I just showed you, is the first step in knowing if you need to improve it. The next step is specifically training it. And I'm going to give you several examples of how to train your durability, which will improve your fatigue resistance for performance, but also improve other elements that Dr. Gallo and other top coaches talk about too. So here's how to train it specifically. If you're a beginner, anything you do will improve your durability. Volume rides, intervals, anything that will increase your CTL FTP view to max will also improve your durability. This may sound like I'm going against what I just said about fresh power doesn't correlate with durability. But in your first year or two of riding, I'll be honest, you just need to focus on getting more fit, developing good training habits, and building both aerobic and anaerobic capabilities. It's not to say that durability training is bad, it's just that anything will improve it when you're that green, because you're so new to the sport. So just change it up, do some fresh intervals, do some fatigued intervals, and don't get too bogged down in the details of all of it. Have fun, get fit, enjoy the journey. If you're an advanced rider, there are some more specific things to do, such as strength training. Cyclists are getting the message about the importance of strength training. If you break your muscles down in the gym, rest and get stronger, you'll hold up better through anything, including a long ride. Strength training doesn't take the place of cycling, it's a concurrent training strategy that helps you to ride better. A steady habit of two times per week of strength training year-round is what I recommend. I've done several messages about this before, so check the links below for more detail on strength training for endurance athletes. Other ways to improve your durability is doing hard efforts late in a ride. So short, say two to five minute VO2 efforts like full gas at the end of a group ride will certainly help. You can do long hard heel climbs like 20 to 30 minute efforts. Do these two at the end of a long ride, but try to finish with a long climb at uh say zone four or slightly above, then descend back home and rest up. Sprints, also great. Do sprints on tired legs, full gas, a la four to five hours deep into a ride or whatever is your long ride. The first time you do it, it's wild. It'll feel so terrible and weird. The more you do it, the better you get at it. And when you get the opportunity to do it in a race, you're ready for it. You're ready to win. Or just beat your best friend. And let's be honest, there's a lot of glory in that too. You can also do specific durability workouts like two main sets. One early when you're fresh, one late and fatigued, but aiming for the same power if you can. You can also do a main set early in a long ride, aka pre-fatiguing intervals, then ride endurance for several hours. And what actually happens here is you've increased the internal strain for several hours of riding after doing those pre-fatiguing intervals. And I use this strategy a lot, and it works to develop both good fresh power and lasting durability. Main set late in a long ride is another good strategy. This is good for that power late in the game for sure. Just need to be disciplined to ride steady endurance and fuel well before those late efforts. Next, you can design a course with a heavy backloaded climbing day. For masters riders, try to have at least 1,000 to 1,500 kilojoules of work before you hit the hard climbs so that you start getting used to that level of work and what it feels like. For more advanced riders, 2,000 to 2,500 kilojoules before you hit the gas. And this will train you well for the next time that you do a test for your durability or the next time that it happens in a race. So if it's such a thing, why is durability sometimes undertrained? Well, it's hard. And not only like hard, hard, like challenging effort and generally not fun, but logistically hard as well. Doing around three hours of riding, then hitting a hard hill climb, then riding home is tactically hard for many who don't have that time or the terrain to do it. Those who are time crunched, my advice is once you're about six to eight weeks out from a competition and you're doing a long ride, try to throw in a hard five to twenty minute effort toward the end almost each time you do a long ride, if you can. It doesn't matter if it's a hill or a flat or whatever, just do it so that it's there in your training and you get it done. This will help train durability on the day you're already fatigued. And practice sprints at the end of the ride. What I mean is like don't just mail it in because you're in the final 30 minutes. Sprint, man. Go full gas. See what you got because you're probably gonna have to do it in a group ride or a race at some point. But still have a proper cooldown too. Going hard on tired legs is really not fun for anybody I know. But if you do it, you'll improve your ability at it. You'll get tougher from it. And the next time you have to do it, you'll be much better at it. So do what the cool kids say to do. Do hard things and improve your physiology and your mindset along the way. That's it for today. I hope you liked it. If you have never tested or thought about your durability, please try some of the strategies I talked about today. It can be as simple as testing yourself after several hours of aerobic riding to determine if you're durable or not. If you find out you got a lot to work on or you get confused along the way, that's where CTS can help out. Coaching, consults, and training camps. Links below for all of that, and we hope to hear from you soon.