- Morning Traniacs.
Training is underway for the assault
on trying to get to Kona.
2020.
2021.
Something like that.
And we are starting off with a little bit of testing
on the bike and the run.
And this is testing that you can do yourself
to help monitor where you're at in the progress
of your fitness journey.
Are you getting fitter?
Are you getting faster?
Are things feeling easier?
And we're going to do that with very measurable tests
that you can use at home without spending any money.
(finger click)
Fortunately it's not even gonna hurt.
(upbeat music)
All right, so some of you might be familiar
with Maffetone Method training
and that is a method of training that you can download,
you can get your individual Maf heart rate,
M-A-F heart rate by going to triathlontaren.com/hrtraining
by just answering four simple questions
you can get your unique heart rate
that is the heart rate ceiling that you should do
the majority of your training under,
that's your Maf heart rate.
Then, what you do,
is you do a measured amount of time on the bike,
and a measured amount of distance on the run
and you do those times and distances at that Maf heart rate
and if you can bike longer in the amount of time
that you spend on the bike
or you can run in a shorter amount of time
for the measured distance,
and you check this every few months,
you are getting faster.
Let's start it.
I'll explain more.
All right,
so what I'm gonna do is,
you want to do a 30 minute ride in a controlled scenario
like Zwift or whatever training app you're gonna use,
and you wanna do that in a way that is not super variable,
so if you're going on Zwift pick a flat course
like the Fuego Flats,
the desert course here is just fine for that,
and what you wanna do is have a very
easy to execute way of doing this,
like an easy to execute repeatable series of steps
so I wrote down, before I did this,
that I'm doing it in the early afternoon,
I wrote down what I had before,
I wrote down that I'm wearing a shirt,
that I'm wearing a hat,
I wrote down what the temperature's set to in here,
and all of those things are things that could potentially
change your heart rate a little bit
so that you know how to replicate this test
as close as you can as possible.
And you also write down the workout.
So that you do the same warm up each time.
And what we're gonna do for the warm up
is five minutes just easy spinning
and then five minutes where at the beginning
of every minute I'll do a six second surge
and then three minutes of easy spinning,
and then 30 minutes at, in my case,
137 beats per minute.
And you see how far on the bike you can go
in those 30 minutes.
Write that down and you all of a sudden have yourself a test
so that you can go and try it every three months
and see if you can make it a little bit further
with the same heart rate.
So, let's warm up,
and we'll see what I got.
I tell ya, I'm not very fit right now.
(upbeat music)
And there we go.
30 minutes.
Hovering around 137 beats a minute.
I think I went somewhere around,
(mumbling) just under 18 kilometers
but average power is what we'll end up looking at,
so wrap is up with a little cool down spin,
and then tomorrow I'll show you how to do the run test.
I'm a fitness mess.
Off season was no joke.
I take my off season rest seriously.
And I'm paying for it now.
All right, so here we are next day,
now it doesn't have to be next day that you do the run test,
but you want to have it tracked
like what order you do things in,
if you do the bike first and then the run the next day,
or the run first and then the bike the next day,
or you have them separated by a few days,
but you just wanna track that and the replicate it
whenever you do this every quarter.
Also, the run is a little bit finickier than the bike.
I'll explain why.
So I'm here at the local university running track,
it's the the first time I haven't been bowled down
by a bunch of sprinting kids while standing in the middle,
but the reason that I'm here is because
the conditions are always the same
and you can run on the track
the same way you run outside.
If you don't end up running on a treadmill a lot
and then you go and do a treadmill run
you're going to have to be changing your technique,
which then isn't quite as applicable as doing it outside,
and your heart rate's gonna be artificially high.
So, in my case,
I haven't run on the treadmill in like six months
so I come here on the track and it's a lot more realistic.
Then the things is, I gotta do it on an indoor track
every single time.
So track is the first best option,
the next best option is doing it on a treadmill,
but when you do it on a treadmill
you can't really go by the speed of the treadmill,
because treadmills are notorious
for going out of calibration,
in which case you can clip on a foot pod
and use the foot pod to determine your pace
and your distance because those are a lot more accurate
than anything that's gonna be on the treadmill,
like it's almost more accurate than this in a lot of cases,
or the GPS on your phone.
And the last most accurate option,
the last most ideal option is an outdoor course.
And if you're going to do it on an outdoor course
make sure the conditions are the same when you replicate it,
make sure the wind is the same,
make sure the course is the same,
and ideally not so super hilly.
So what I'm gonna do here,
is same sort of thing as the bike.
I'm going to do a warm up of about 10 minutes,
and then I'm going to run 8k
at the same Maffetone heart rate.
137.
And we're going to see how fast I'm able to do that 8k,
and we keep track of that.
Write all of this stuff down.
Write down what shoes you've got,
so that you can use similar shoes,
not going from like race flats to trainers.
Write down what clothes you're wearing,
all of that stuff, so that you can replicate
as close as possible.
Giddy up.
(upbeat music)
And that's it.
I was very unimpressed with what I just did.
Been a solid three months
since I've really focused on anything
like heart rate training fitness related,
with the off season all I've been doing is
just kind of training however I felt like.
That was slow.
That was tremendously slow.
I'll explain how slow when we dive into the files.
So, Traniacs,
let me dive into the results of those two tests
and how you can start using those tests.
All you need is a heart rate monitor
and a piece of paper to write down the results.
So let me start with the bike.
What I've pulled up here on the right side of the screen
is just basically the 30 minutes that I did
that heart rate test.
That's the main thing that you want to track.
You wanna track the results of that
30 minute heart rate test.
And if you've got a smart trainer
that gives you a power reading,
that's the way that you wanna do it,
because it's this nice controlled environment
that's easy to replicate over and over.
Now, what you wanna look at is the average power
that you held based on your average heart rate.
So I was targeting holding 137.
Took me a little while to get up there,
so the average over that half hour ends up being 136,
and I held 179 watts.
Why that is significant is
because I can start looking back and saying,
"all right, well I wanted to keep my heart rate
"under 137 beats a minute in Challenge Roth last year,
"but in that case I was able to hold 204 watts
"for five hours."
Let's take a look at what happened with the run.
Even worse disaster.
In the case of the run here,
what I've pulled up on the right is the period of time
that it took me to run eight kilometers.
And I hit the average heart rate bang on,
I did 137 beats a minute
and in this case what you're looking at is
how long it takes you to run eight kilometers
and the pace that it takes you to run that.
So in this case it took me a little over 49 minutes
and my average pace was six minutes and eight seconds.
And I like doing that on the treadmill
because 8k is 8k.
There's no question about it.
There's no inaccuracy on a treadmill,
there's no inaccuracy of where exactly you stopped
in maybe a side walk if you're running outside,
it's also a very controlled environment,
so every single time you do this it's going to be the same.
Now, putting this back to where I was at in the summer,
I was able to run basically the entire marathon
at around 140 beats a minute in Challenge Roth,
and in that case my average pace was five minutes.
When I get really, really fit,
that's what I'm able to do.
I'm able to run at 140 beats a minute or less,
at around a five minute kilometer.
So this tells me that right now my heart rate,
my low aerobic capacity is not super finely tuned.
And here's why that's super important.
So despite a lot of people liking,
showing off the super, super fast stuff,
the 400 meters on the track,
the one kilometer repeats,
even at a sprint distance race
that you are going crazy fast
at like an hour long sprint distance race,
it's still more than 90% an aerobic effort.
A low, kind of like accessing your aerobic capacity
and not strength, not speed,
not greasy fast stuff.
You have to have a huge base of aerobic fitness
and that, when we start getting up to an ironman,
a half ironman, it's basically entirely aerobic.
So you want your aerobic capacity to be really finely tuned.
Never mind being able to go fast at a top end,
you want your low end to be able to go fast.
And that's what going to be able to give you
longevity in a race so you don't break down.
If you can just stay at an aerobic capacity,
at a very low level heart rate,
but go faster at it,
that's how you do better in triathlon.
Now how we use this test is you start doing
a lot of low heart rate training,
particularly in the off-season and the base building season.
If you're in the northern hemisphere that means October,
November, December,
doing a lot of low heart rate training,
getting that low heart rate really nice and strong
and what's gonna happen is those times in the run
are gonna come down,
you're gonna get faster at the same heart rate,
and your power at the same heart rate
is going to start going up.
So all of a sudden, at the same effort levels,
you're getting a lot faster,
and that's when you can start
layering in little bits of speed.
Talking with my coach,
who also does some consulting for us on Team Traniac,
Dr Dan Plews,
he says to me that right now,
basically until we get this sorted
and I can get closer to those paces
that I did in the summer,
we're just gonna focus on nothing but
low heart rate training.
So what you're doing is,
if you're really focusing on this stuff,
you can do this as frequently as every couple of weeks
and see how you're progressing.
If you just wanna check in,
you can do it as infrequently as every two to three months,
and it's going to give you a barometer
that is like an exact measure of how fit you are
at your nice low level aerobic capacity,
which makes a big difference in how you do in a race,
and this is how you can measure it exactly,
without thinking, "Oh well,
"you know I was kinda able to hold this sort of pace,
"and it felt like this,"
like, no!
Bang on, here's what you can do to measure this yourself.
Forget about all the gizmos and the gadgets,
and the training stress scores,
and the critical training load,
and where you're at.
Some number in a piece of software
isn't gonna tell you how you perform,
performance is gonna tell you how you perform.
So there you go Traniacs,
that's it, that's what I've gotta work on right now,
that's what I would encourage
a lot of you to work on right now,
and start doing that test right now
so that you can give yourself a starting point
and you can track how you're going
to do throughout the year,
and when things start getting demotivating,
when you're not sure if you're on the right track
you can check back in to this test,
see how you're doing,
and actually get a measure of how it's going.
So go do that.
Check it out.
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and this is a first time actually watching our channel,
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Later Traniacs.