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Training and Racing with Power, for Multisport
Jan 13: Training with Power, FREE
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Thoughts on AeT Training

Rich's response to an article post here on TrainingPeaks.
If you like, you can participate in a more detailed discussion in the EN Forum

I think it's a complicated way to explain a phenomenon many of us have seen for years and then propose to use that as a training metric or tool. I call it your HR getting more "sticky" as you become more fit. When you come back from a long layoff everyone has seen how your heart rate, PE and watts/pace can be out of whack. In other words, you're riding your bike and you feel Ok, but yourlook at your HRM and its shows a Zone 3 effort. So it feels Zone 2 but HR says Zone 3 or 4. There is a disconnect or "decoupling," as Joe refers to it. As you become more fit this disconnect decreases and Joe's position is that we can use this as a training metric. More specifically, the movement of this decoupling below x% indicates that we now have permission to move on to other training.

I see this as a rehashing of the "you gotta wait to get faster" style of training. It also ignores (unless I'm misinterpreting the article) the science that says the Number One indicator of fitness, at all ability levels, phases of training, whatever, is watts/pace/speed at lactate/functional threshold. I can most easily explain this by using two athletes.

Waiting Walt
Walt throws a leg over his bike or laces up his shoes, does his training at AeT as Joe describes for the prescribed time periods. To frame Walt in our language, his FT at the start of this is 220w and his 10k pace is 8:00. In the beginning he experiences this decoupling. He tracks his data, the gap between the line decreases and at some point the data says he has put in enough time to enter the Build phase, to train more intensely, most likely.

Get Faster Today Tom
Tom's game is much simpler. His FT is also 220w and 10k pace is 8:00. He is completely focused on watts/pace/speed at FT or LTHR. He experiences the decoupling that Walt experiences...but he likely notices it less because he's focused on the objective data of pace and watts. On the bike, he might set himself of goal of x'/wk at Functional Threshold, increasing the watts he dials in on those sessions as he sees his FT increasing through the data in CycingPeaks. He does similarly on the run, focusing on T-pace per Jack Daniels, but is much more cautious than on the bike. He knows that running intensity is more risky than cycling intensity. He still does it, he's just careful.

At the end of 8-10wks our two heroes meet for some field testing and then have a beer afterwards to discuss their training and where to go from here. Walt's data shows that his heart rate is coupled and he can now move on. His FT is 225w, maybe 230w, and 10k pace is 7:45-50. Tom, on the other hand, has lifted his FT to 235-240w and his 10k pace is closer to 7:30. His heart rate has also coupled, though he has to ask Walt to manage the graphs for him, cuz he hasn't tracking it.

I walk in, sit down, pour myself a Newcastle and give our heroes my observations (folks, I think the cold medicine I'm in on is beginning to kick in ).

• With regards to HR's coupling or whatever, our two heroes are both in the same place: sticky heart rates, PE and HR are aligned, etc. Walt was tracking this diligently, holding himself back and sitting at the prescribed intensity. Tom is there too but it "just happened," he didn't pay attention to it.
• However, as Walt and Tom enter the next phase of their training Tom has a 10-15w and 15-20" head start on Walt. That's a lot of catchup, folks. In my experience, even if Walt gets on board the Tom train, Tom will continue to increase this delta even more because he "gets it." He has learned that work works, he's not afraid to work, and he has a significantly different perspective than Tom on what work truly is. Walt's experience, when riding with Tom (mostly likely on his wheel) will be WTF!!!
• More commonly, especially if Walt and Tom are training for Ironman, they now realize (or their little spreadsheets tell them) that they now need to start putting in the volume to get ready for the race.
  • Walt: is now trying to build "fast" at the same time he is trying to build "far." He cannot manage the two simultaneously and spends his lunches sleeping under his desk (I've been there). This is where the Friel Base 1, 2, 3, Build 1, 2 model falls apart, at the IM distance. I learned this first hand as early as 2001.
  • Tom: he has built "fast." He has more flexibility to separate his fast training from his far training. If he wants, he can consolidate his fast, focus on his far, and introduce bits of fast training into or around his far as he assesses his fitness and recovery from day to day. Hell, he has a significant head start on his buddy Walt!!

Folks, I have seen this exact situation played out hundreds of times, year after year between my athletes and their training partners.

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Training and Racing with Power Webinar Series

Training and Racing with Power, for Multisport, presented by Endurance Nation

• Do you own a powermeter but have difficulty finding quality information on how to apply the tool to multisport racing?
• Are you a power wannabee, interesting in learning more about these cutting edge tools?
• Are you ready to take your power training and racing to the next level?
  

Endurance Nation announces a webinar series focused on the unique power training and racing considerations of multisport athletes. The presenters are leading authorities on power meter use for multisport athletes, with years of experience teaching age groupers how to use these tools to further their multisport training and racing.

In the end, any powermeter is only as valuable as the investment YOU make in learning how to use it effectively. Augment your $2000 whizbang gadget with our $99 webinar series and get the most out of your training and racing power investment!

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Register for the series by January 15th and we will include a one year membership to Endurance Nation, a $99 value!

• Open access to 25 training plans, proven across 3 years and 1000+ athletes, available in TrainingPeaks, WorkoutLog, or Google Doc.
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Special Offer Registration, $99, expires January 15

Schedule and Registration

Sunday, January 13, 2008, 5pm PST: Power Training, for Multisport, FREE

• The specifics of power-training as they relate to multisport, with special attention to the concepts put forth by CyclingPeaks: Functional Threshold Power, Intensity Factor, Normalized Power, Training Stress Score, etc.
• Everything you need to know, explained in a language you can understand.
• Training protocols to make you a stronger triathlon cyclist.
• Transcript and podcast of this event will be made available afterwards in the Endurance Nation Library.
• Register Now!
  

Sunday, January 20, 2008, 5pm PST: Power Racing, for Multisport, $55

• We will introduce the concept of your legs as a bank account, with successful racing simply an exercising in spending from that account wisely so you have $$$ left over to pay the Man on the run.
  
• We will give you a proven power race strategy for your next event: from Sprint to Iron Distance, hilly or flat, windy or calm, we will explain the art of racing with power.
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Sunday, January 27, 2008, 5pm PST: Analyzing Power Files, $55

• Power files with their many lines and numbers can be overwhelming. We teach you how to analyze the data, from rides and races, so you get what you need, and only what you need.
• Tracking performance over time is about analyzing data trends. We cover what a multisport athlete should watch and what it means for their training and racing.
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Power Training and Racing, for Multisport, Full Series: $99, includes Endurance Nation membership, offer ends January 15th.
$89 for Endurance Nation Members

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The Presenters

Rich Strauss, founder of Crucible Fitness and Endurance Nation. Rich has been training, racing, and coaching with power since 2001. Hundreds of athletes have use his power training plans to PR in the HIM and IM distances. Rich has distilled his experience into a simple, easy to understand and implement power training and racing system.

Jason Digman, Coach and Founder of Dig It Triathlon and Multisport. As an expert in power based training and racing, Jason coaches individual athletes of all levels and abilities in using power to its fullest advantage. Dig It athletes not only use the latest technology to train effectively, they have a good time doing it.

Kurt Perham, Coach and Founder of Personal Best Multisport Coaching . Kurt has trained/raced/coached with power since 2000 and helped to guide athletes from first timers, to Ironman World Champions. He specializes in integrating power data into the day-to-day training of his athletes.

Rich Ashburn is an age-group triatlete (M45-49) from Lafayette, CA, competing in all distances since 2002. He has been using power data in his training and racing since 2003, and has brought is day-job skills as an analyst to bear on some of the number-crunching aspects of using power data for training and racing.

Registration Process: after we receive your payment for Sessions #2, #3, or the series, we will email you a link to actually register for the webinar.

Refund Policy: Sorry, we have a very strict no refund policy. If you can not attend a webinar we can apply your registration towards a future webinar or Endurance Nation membership.

Pedaling Technique Summary and Drills

1. The bike goes faster because you apply more watts to rear wheel, period. The rear wheel doesn't care in what manner that power is generated at or applied to the pedals. What matters is what that power is when it reaches the wheel.
2. Your feet are attached to the pedals, attached to straight cranks, attached to circular chain rings and a round axle or bottom bracket. You have no choice other than to pedal in a circle. All you are really in control of is what muscles you fire when as your legs spin through this circular trajectory.
3. Your legs have been engineered to apply the most power most efficiently by pushing against the ground (running, jumping, walking), not by pulling up (activating the hip flexor). Contrary to product claims, there has been no evidence to suggest that the "way" to pedal a bike is by applying power in pretty little circles.
4. If you are thinking about this or that area of the pedal stroke and firing/relaxing different muscles at different times, but the power at the rear wheel is the same or less, you haven't accomplished anything. If you are doing all of this AND applying more watts, then we can talk, but my next question is how long can you sustain this? Another point in here is that nothing is free. If you're applying more watts to the bike, that work has to come from somewhere. It is not gained by efficiency, energy savings, etc. You must do more work in order to output more work. Period.

So how should I pedal a bike?
What I'll now discuss is how you should apply your leg power to the pedals as they trace the circle of a pedal stroke. Divide the pedal revolution into hours of the clock, as seen from the right side of the bike, and into four sectors of three hours each:

• 11-2pm: Imagine you are "rolling a barrel" under your foot. At 11pm you begin to push forward across the top of the pedal stroke/clock face until your foot is in the 2pm position.
• 2-5pm: The power phase of the pedal stroke. You're pushing relatively straight down on the pedals, in the manner your legs have been design to apply force most efficiently. Most beginner cyclists pedal straight up and down, like pistons, applying power to the pedals from 2-5pm. I feel they are missing the opportunity to apply that leg strength across more hours of the clock face.
• 5-8pm: Imagine you are "scraping mud" from the bottom of your shoe. We transition from pedaling down to following through, activating the hamstring and pulling our foot rearward.
• 8-11pm: When your right leg is at 8pm your left leg is at the beginning of the power phase, 2pm. We want 100% of the power applied by the left leg to be transferred to the rear wheel and move the bike forward. However, if your right leg, at 8pm, is "dead" on the pedal, then a percentage of your left leg power is not applied to the rear wheel but instead is used to lift the right leg. Now, this lifting effect is probably less than you think, as your right leg, spinning at 90+ rpm, does have a significant amount of momentum to "throw" it over the top of the pedal stroke. Instead, from 8-11pm we want to "un-weight" the pedal, applying just enough lifting force to make our foot weigh zero on the pedal, so 100% of the work performed by the opposite leg is used to propel the bike forward. Notice that I'm not counseling you to activate the hip flexor and apply power on the upward phase of the pedal stroke.

Why not?
In my opinion, it goes back to how our legs are designed. They are engineered to apply a great downwards force and comparatively little upwards force. Why waste energy trying to put a relatively small muscle to work (hip flexor) doing something it isn't really designed to do anyway: apply a great deal of power upwards. My experience has been that your leg realizes it is getting worked on the upstroke and compensates by resting, or producing less power, on the downstroke. The result can be a net decrease of power to the rear wheel.

I call all of this Clock Face Awareness: by performing the drills below you become more aware of where you are applying power through the clock face and can therefore choose to emphasize one area/muscle group while deemphasizing another.

Isolated Leg Drills

Purpose: To divide the clock face into sectors, focus on them one at a time, and increase your awareness of what you're doing in each sector. ILD's increase your awareness of these sectors, enabling you to choose to do or not do "something" with each sector.

Drill: After a good warm up and a couple short, hard efforts to loosen up the legs, transition to ILD's:

• Right Leg, Over the Barrel: Shift to a lower gear, lowering your cadence, and unclip your left leg. Pedaling only with the right leg, think "rolling the barrel" as your foot traces 11-2pm. Begin at lower cadence and increase your speed/cadence. At some cadence you'll experience a ratcheting of the pedal. Work to eliminate this ratcheting so that it occurs at higher and higher cadences. Do this for 30-60" seconds or stop when fatigue becomes to compromise your ability to perform the drill correctly. These are skills drills, we're not worried about your fitness here. Clip in, recover, spinning easily.
• Left Leg, Over the Barrel: same drill, pedaling with left leg. After 30-60", clip in, recover.
• Right Leg, Scrape Mud: same drill, thinking about scraping mud from the sole of our shoe from 5-8pm on the clock face. Again, start a lower cadence, increase until you experience the ratcheting effect, then try to eliminate. Over time, try to increase the cadence at which ratcheting occurs. After 30-60", clip in, recover.
• Left Leg, Scrape Mud: same drill, left leg.

Focus Boxes

Purpose: To transfer the awareness of the sectors above into the entire pedaling action.

Drill: Perform immediately after ILD's. Divide the pedal stroke into four sides of a box. Then, while pedaling at a normal cadence, focus on one side of one box at a time for about 30". A sample focus progression might be: Right Top, Left Top, Right Bottom, Left Bottom, Right Up, Left Up, etc. The sides of the boxes are:

Top = 11-2pm
Down = 2-5pm
Bottom = 5-8pm
Up = 8-11pm

Spin Ups

Purpose: Increase the coordination of muscle groups through the pedaling circle.

As you do ILDs and Focus Boxes, it quickly becomes apparent that cadence plays a role. Specifically, what is easy to do at low cadence becomes more difficult at higher cadences. Pedaling requires Muscles A and B to contract and relax in a coordinated fashion: A contracts exactly as B relaxes. Your muscles can achieve this coordination when the movement is relatively slow, at lower cadences. However, at higher cadences your muscles can no longer fake the funk. A contracts before B relaxes. The result is often seen as a bouncing in the saddle at high cadence: your leg is trying to push down past 6pm, lifting you a bit from the saddle. SpinUps simply take you to this bouncing point and make you sit there for a bit, forcing your muscles to learn how to work together in a more coordinated fashion.

Drill: Do these at a low speed or resistance. It should feel as if your cranks are not even connected to the rear wheel through the chain. Again, this is a skills drill, not a fitness session.

• Shift to an easy gear and increase cadence to where you begin to bounce in the saddle (usually 100-110rpm). Then back your cadence down a hair and spin there for 30-60. You'll notice that in addition to your legs feeling like they're spinning out of control, they also feel rather tense, like something is still contracted when it should be relaxed. This is exactly the point we are trying to take your body to.
• Recover by shifting to lower cadence gear.
• Repeat several times, trying to take the cadence up a bit higher each time.
• 4-6 SpinUps is usually ideal.

After the drill just ride the bike at whatever cadence feels comfortable for you. You'll notice that this self-selected cadence has likely increased a good bit, just from this simple drill. You should also feel much smoother.

In summary, the bike goes faster when you put more watts to the rear wheel. You do this by pedaling the bike in a circular trajectory at the cranks. By becoming more aware of your pedal stroke you can choose to manipulate where and how you activate your leg muscles as your foot traces this circle.