- Woo, good morning, Trainiacs.
It is minus 19 Celsius, minus three Fahrenheit.
But it is particularly chilly today because,
(car door opening)
because I am actually still just wearing a towel and Speedo.
This may look ridiculous,
but I just did a fasted very light swim.
Follow that up right now with a little bit of cold exposure,
a fair bit of cold exposure, to shed some fat.
Things I do for you guys, they might not be smart,
they may look ridiculous, but I actually have some results
from something that I started doing last year
that a lot of you have been wondering about,
with low heart rate training.
And we got some really interesting results to show you
what you can improve with that low heart rate training.
Alright, I just gotta get home.
It's like five minutes away.
I can do this, I can do this.
(energetic electronic music)
(sighs) Yeah.
So that was cold, very, very cold.
I immediately regretted that,
as soon as I got outside the parking lot.
Made it though.
If you are interested in a little bit more
of fasting and why we do that and some free stuff on that,
I'll link to it at the end of the video.
Okay, so a big, big part of Team Trainiac
has been polarized training.
So this means that the vast majority
of your training you do either
at really light intensities, not very difficult,
or really hard intensities, quite difficult.
This is to build your aerobic engine,
the strength of your heart and lungs,
your cardiovascular system,
burn a ton of fat while you are doing the workouts.
This is to make you stronger, faster, better.
So you are building a big base of fitness
and making yourself faster.
This stuff over here has absolutely
shell-shocked a lot of people
because when we calculate our heart rate zones,
people are just astounded at what light intensity is,
how easy they need to go with this easy work.
And the response that I give is this
is an indication of how much potential you've got,
because if you can do all of the workouts
that you've been doing up to this point
and your bottom end, your low zones one and two,
aren't really that trained very well at all,
think about how much better you could be
once they are trained with doing this light intensity.
And I think people grudgingly have been doing the work
but not yet seeing the results,
and they're just kind of trusting
that it's going to end up working out.
I have results to show you.
It's not subtle, Grace.
Come on up. (hand tapping)
Gracie's staring at me, we're back in the pain cave.
All is right in the world again.
What we've got here are two separate
but very, very similar workouts.
The first workout I'm going to show you
is about a three-hour ride
that I was doing five and a half weeks out
from Half Ironman World Championships last year.
Coming into last year, I hadn't done a ton
of just general zone one and two
heart rate-controlled base-building kind of fitness work,
but I still felt really fit.
I ended up doing a personal best at Half Ironman Worlds.
The next workout that I'm going to show you
is a workout that I did yesterday,
about five weeks out from Half Ironman Puerto Rico.
But one of the main differences
is that over the last three months
I have done a huge amount of heart rate-controlled,
low, just general fitness building,
zone one and two kind of efforts.
And there is a significant difference in the performance.
So first I'm going to show you last year's workout.
And if you zoom in on the side here,
you see some of the stats.
It was 106 kilometers,
three hours, eight minutes, 42 seconds,
with a training stress score of 138, normalized power 187.
Go down here.
Average power 174, average heart rate was 130.
Okay, remember these, that the average power is 174
and the average heart rate is 130.
Now let's go to yesterday's workout here.
Three hours, three minutes, 28 seconds, 104 kilometers.
Training stress score of 156.
So on the surface, largely a very similar workout.
The training stress score is higher,
so theoretically this should be more intense for me.
But let's also zoom down here.
Average power 172, so my power average
is actually eight watts higher.
Normalized power is almost 20 watts higher.
But my heart rate was 118,
12 beats per minute lower on average.
And I wasn't really realizing this
until the end of the workout,
but the workout yesterday was six repeats
of 15 minutes at or above race pace,
and then a five-minute rest in between.
And when I got to the final two, I was like,
you know what, this is actually feeling quite easy.
And I kept looking at my heart rate,
expecting it to cardiac drift up
and seeing a massive spike and essentially crashing,
because that's what I remember
these workouts to be like last year.
In this case, I actually performed better
and it took less of a toll on my body
from a cardiovascular standpoint.
If you know a lot about heart rate training,
you know that it's fairly variable
and there are some things that influence it.
Well, let's look at a couple of those things
to start kinda normalizing these two workouts.
Well, last year's workout had an average cadence of 70.
I was doing really low muscular endurance cadence work.
Yesterday's workout had an average cadence of 82.
Typically when you have a higher cadence,
your heart rate is actually higher.
So even though yesterday my heart rate was lower,
it should have been theoretically higher.
And the next thing that I want you
to look at is just the map.
You can see last year's workout was outdoors,
whereas yesterday's workout was on Watopia.
Now, why this is relevant is because
typically when you're inside on a trainer,
your heart rate tends to be up,
maybe about four to eight beats a minute on average,
because all of the heat just kind of traps itself inside,
whereas outside you are easily able to shed
a lot of that heat because the wind is moving away from you.
So again, these two things, cadence and being indoors,
you would think that my heart rate
might actually be higher yesterday than it was last year.
And then finally the most basic of all of this,
look at the average speed.
Yesterday's average speed was 34.2 kilometers per hour,
whereas last year's was 33.7 kilometers per hour.
So a lot of the questions that I've been getting,
like I say, are does this actually work?
How can I possibly go slower and actually get faster?
How can I actually make progress
if at some points I'm doing a seven-minute kilometer,
if I feel like I'm barely moving?
Well, I felt the same thing
for the last three or four months,
just trusting that the science, the study,
the number of pro triathletes
that follow a ton of polarized training
where they build up that big base of fitness
and then come race season they sharpen up
with a bunch of race pace efforts,
I was hoping that it would pay off.
And what we're seeing right now
is that with just about three race-effort kind of workouts
I can take that big base of fitness
and really start sharpening up for the race.
And the ability to execute is going to be so much higher
because I haven't smashed myself
a bunch of times along the way.
I've built a big base of fitness with low zones one and two.
I've built a bunch of speed with the high intensity.
Now we dial into zone three,
which is around the race pace, and execute.
So a few things, if this interests you
and you want all of the workouts
and the periodization that is generating these results,
because I'm doing the same workouts as Team Trainiac,
it's what I use for my training personally,
go to teamtrainiac.com, try out a 14-day free trial.
Next thing, if you want that fasted workout,
go over to, it's gonna be up there.
And if you want some more information
on heart rate training, go there.
Alright, Gracie says welcome home, Trainiacs.
Later.