Yes, I was 100lbs overweight and had serious inflammation issues. The best we can figure is my gut biome was messed up from too many years drinking meade, a restaurant diet and the stress of making films.
So I started fasting, and cycling and lost the weight in a year. Then, as I became more fit I started cycling more to 4k miles this year. So, with that - my HR couldn’t break 132 before - and now is at its high at 154 when racing.
I use a Wahoo chest strap as I had troubles with the optical wrist versions. OMG, even different sports bras caused troubles with the HRM. But I think I have that handled now! ha!
Optical monitors work ok for me indoors, but not outdoors. Even so, I wear a Garmin strap indoors, and don’t bother with HR outdoors, mostly because my Fenix 3 no longer works with HR. It picks up my 4iiii cranks just fine though. It’s like 7 years old. I’m never doing long slow stuff outdoors anyway…I don’t have the self-control. I ride gravel exclusively, and I love powering up little hills all afternoon.
Aerotune does something similar and is much much cheaper, and available direct to consumer. (They also do on road aerodynamics testing though I’ve not tried that).
Or Sentiero analytics has a (currently free) basic / beta website which also estimates VO2 max, vlamax, zones, fat-carb usage etc. based on some power inputs for specific durations.
Both are based on the same research you mention, but can’t speak to accuracy. Resulting zones looked reasonable for me though
Plenty of fun ways to do that with Xert and keep things simple to achieve your goals.
Set ATP to Continuous. Set a Slow improvement rate if you wish to gradually increase your training load. TL increase is the single biggest contributor to improving fitness but keep in mind recovery is where that improvement actually happens.
Ride as you wish.
For your “80% easy/easy” select easy endurance workouts (3:00:00 focus) with mostly blue intervals. The bluer the better. Aqua is fine. Green moves you into sweet spot territory (hard endurance).
For example, over/under LTP intervals like Lucy in the Sky or at/below LTP like Back to Blue.
You can do these workouts while wandering around in 3D world if the EBC app controls your trainer and Zwift is only paired to power meter.
Or run EBC while watching the Session Player with a BTW (Bike the World) video. Select from Sessions to do that. Or free ride outdoors to similar focus duration (20:00 and higher) by monitoring watts/HR/RPE or some Xert data fields if you have a Garmin.
Once a week do your HIIT workout or ZRL event as your “20% hard/hard”.
If not getting a BT once a month from HIIT efforts, ride a BT workout to failure in Slope mode to assess any signature change.
Decide which day(s) you want to rest or if feeling stretched just take the day off. Remember, recovery is key.
No need for a VO2max test or zone anguish with an easy/easy, hard/hard approach.
Over time you’ll feel fitter and be fitter regardless of what measuring tools you use. Monitoring the XPMC chart will do. You could slice and dice your data at intervals.icu if so inclined, but a 3 zone/3 level strain model doesn’t require that amount of detail.
Any chance you’ve followed Katie Kookaburra’s journey?
Ultra-endurance is well beyond my scope but to each their own.
Enjoy the ride.
I just tried signing up to Sentiero but it doesn’t seem to be working. The emails confirmation that they send you goes to a blank page when clicked to confirm.
OK. But with me the update button was greyed out so non- functional. I’ll give them another go but it did also say my test period had ended despite only having signed up 5 minutes previously
My confirmation email worked OK but it did say that my rest period had already finished and I needed to email them for a monthly sub. I’ve emailed them for an explanation but don’t expect a response until next week now.
Hello,
I admit to being interested in this code, however, do you know how to estimate the VLamax with high reliability without taking lactate from the start?
