- [Host] Morning, Trainiacs. We have a very fun day planned.
So, over the past couple of years, I've kind of become
the zone two guy, the easy training guy.
Sorta funny that a couple of times
when I've dropped some fast races,
would have been particularly after challenge Daytona
where I went 10537 I think?
And the swim was an 850 meter swim.
And after challenge Roth last year, there were a few people
that were like, "Geez, man, really."
Thanks, Gracie!
"Didn't expect you to put out a time like that.
Like, I follow you on Strava and
all your training is so slow.
I didn't think you had that kind of speed."
I'm like, yeah, not all your training has to be fast.
Actually, the vast majority of it needs to be pretty slow.
And even on Team Trainiac, the vast majority of the training
is very slow, easy, ramps up a fair bit in race season,
but, got to get that base training in.
It's just science. There's really no way around it.
But the hard part about it is that, when people first start,
it's very, very difficult,
and we get a lot of questions that are like,
"No, this can't be right!"
In a lot of cases it is right!
But if you want to find out if it's totally right,
that's what we're doing today.
(chill electronic music)
What we've got here is everything we need
to do a little bit of testing to really dial in
what the zones are for a friend we train with.
We've got the VO2 Master VO2 mask to asses his top end,
where his top end is,
we've got a edge lactate meter.
So this is going to figure out his blood lactate levels,
and then we have a bunch of things to clean up.
We're gonna be putting him on a bike.
We're gonna take him through a ramp test.
Throughout, we're gonna be taking all these measurements
of blood lactate, of his heart rate, of his VO2,
and we're gonna figure out the exact zones of where he's at
because he's actually had some troubles
with really high heart rates and he's wondering
what is his low base training zone.
This is how we do it!
Gosh, it's gonna be nice to be the inflictor of pain
for a change.
(crickets chirping)
Been working on my Spanish Duolingo.
I almost know the difference between an apple and an orange.
How you feeling? Scared?
No? That's the spirit.
I'm sure he'll be fine.
(chill electronic music)
(Scott breathing heavily)
- [Scott] That needs to be scrubbed down.
- [Host] How'd that feel?
- [Scott] Good!
- [Host] Okay, so we've got some data here
and I fully recognize that I am not a scientist,
I'm not a doctor I'm not a researcher,
I've just been through this test a few times,
I've witnessed it happen.
It's not rocket science, and if you have the desire
to really start dialing in your zones,
these are some tools that you can get.
You can go online, you can buy the VO2 Master,
you can buy the edge lactate meter is what we used,
and start dialing in what your zones actually are.
So let's look at Scott here.
This sheet that you're seeing,
you might've got if you go to
triathlontaren.com/HRtraining,
you can get this calculator that you punch in your age,
you answer some, yes no questions you figure out
your max heart rate, and then you add in your FTP
and you get your zones here.
But these are a little bit arbitrary.
They're, you know, one step better than just a percentage
of your 220 minus your age, or 180 minus your age.
And what that gives us here for Scott's expected zone
is that the top of his zone two would be 128.
Is that right? Well, we'll see.
So we'll look at the data here and the lactate meter,
not great.
I use this, I use the edge lactate analyzer, which,
I don't know if I'd recommend it, but it's something.
Because everything in red here,
we've got to basically throw away.
I think that there's two measurements that
are somewhat accurate, being at 125 watts and 215 watts.
For context, Scott is 52 years old and his FTP is 215.
What we can look at is a few things here.
We can use this test to say, all right,
what was his max heart rate?
What did it max out at?
169 was what I saw.
I assume that when you do a max heart rate test on the bike,
you can go about two percent higher than that,
and if you take 79% of that number,
that's roughly a max heart rate zone two that you can use.
So we've got the max heart rate of 169,
we add that by about two and a half percent to that,
and then 79% of that is roughly 136!
Also, you can do a top of your zone two FTP.
And for that, what we're looking at is, over here,
in the calculator, we would take his FTP of 215,
and about 76% of that is the estimation
of the top of the zone two, 163 watts.
Now we can cross reference that,
and where was he at that 163-ish watts?
Well, he was at a heart rate of about 135!
So, getting pretty close to say that at 163,
his max heart rate should be around 136?
Yeah, that works out.
But physiologically, like, do we know that that's the top
of a zone two?
Ideally, what you want is, if you've got an accurate
lactate meter, I might be trying something different
than this, you want to test your lactate
and when it crosses 2.0,
that's sort of the barrier between your below zone two
and above zone two.
So we can tell that, I think we've got the one result here
that is right around there, and it would have climbed
from that.
So, yeah!
Getting up to that 135 beats a minute seems about right.
What we also had on was the VO2 Master mask,
and that's where I think we can actually get some more
accurate data, and this is the test result of the VO2,
and what we're looking at is we're looking at a spike.
When does he start using a significantly more
amount of energy and where we see that is that
is the 12 minute mark.
That's where things tend to basically tick up.
Here, The VO2 max, the amount of oxygen that he's using,
is increasing, and it ticks up at that 12 minute mark,
and we go back over here, and where is he at the 12 minutes?
He is roughly at the,
because we're in four minute intervals,
at 155 watts, 135 heart rate.
So, everything is pointing to, yeah.
He does not have a significantly different zone two
than what we'd expecting.
If you go with the math test,
if you go with a max heart rate,
if you look at the VO2 data,
if you look at his FTP data, everything is pointing towards,
he is just like most people.
So what does that tell us about him and you?
If you are saying like, "I just can't lower my heart rate.
something is wrong!"
In a lot of cases, not a lot is wrong, you just have to
adjust your training.
So, in Scott's case, what I would tell him
and I'm going to tell him is the same thing that I told
a guy named Robin who's on Team Trainiac.
What he was saying is,
"You know what? I'm at my top of zone two effort level
for my heart rate, my watts are really low
and all the friends that I normally ride with,
they seem to be going along okay and it doesn't feel
like I'm working any harder, but here you are,
telling me to hold back."
So in Robin's case, what happened was,
there was somebody that he was training with a lot,
and because Robin had to stay at his own two effort levels
for the long rides, he would end up getting dropped.
Fast forward to a year after that,
and he was all of a sudden kinda getting close,
and then this year, now his watts at his zone two
effort level are so high, that he is dropping
the training partner that he had.
So the training partner got quicker right away,
but then leveled out because he wasn't doing that zone two,
he was pushing harder.
He was letting his heart rate climb,
whereas Robin just year after year improved over and over.
And he's still just at the start of this two years
of solid training, and he's just at an effort level now
that has eclipsed his original training partner.
And I asked Scott, like, what does a typical training week
look like for you?
And he said, "Well, you know, it's kind of like
our moderate ride, I go on rides with the guys,
and you know, sometimes it's hard and sometimes I do
a spin session.
Sometimes I'll load up a trainer road,
workout with a lot of sweet spot work,"
and what I'm seeing from him is exactly what I see
from most people.
That the easy stuff is not easy enough, the hard stuff
is not hard enough, so what happens with him is
his heart rate just instantly climbs
into that moderate intensity training,
and he doesn't actually adapt to it because it's too hard
to adapt in an easy sense, and its not hard enough
to go hard enough, to go faster.
So what I'm going to advise him to do is
135 beats a minute, and this isn't like an exact science.
If you need it exactly down to the heartbeat,
you need to go into a lab and you need to constantly
be testing this because it changes literally day to day
and week to week.
It's not like, bang on exact, no matter how fancy
your testing is.
So in this case, everything points to around
135 beats a minute being the top end of his zone two,
and I advise him that over the course of a year,
that he should do 80% of his training under that intensity.
And sure, he's probably gonna feel fairly slow in year one,
but year two, he's going to increase that,
over and over and over.
And then 20% of his training, in a year,
is going to be at a very high intensity.
We're talking 10% or more above his FTP,
and do intervals at that intensity level
that lasts somewhere between 30 seconds and six minutes.
That's your sweet spot for increasing the speed.
And this stuff 100% works!
This is exactly what I do, and I actually
just had one of those Instagram pop-ups that was like,
"Two years ago on this day, you did this,"
and it was bike ride that was a zone two bike ride
where I only held 134 watts
Today, most of my zone two bike rides would be
at around 170 to 180 watts.
So this is just what happens.
It's really hard at the start to do zone two training,
and you might be riding with your pals, and like,
"Nope, nope. Terrace calculations are off.
No, all the calculations out there are off,
I am the precious flower, I am different,
all of these statistics, completely wrong.
Not going to work for me."
We just prove that,
for a guy that has exactly that same challenge,
where he's got a high heart rate for most of his workouts,
and he's got to bring it down, he needs to take his medicine
and do a lot of low heart rate training
to end up getting there, because everything says
he's training at a heart rate that's too high.
Sorry, Scott. I know you're probably watching this.
Thanks for suffering! That was really good!
I poked you with a needle a lot.
If you found this interesting, Trainiacs, and you want to
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