Recovery State and Techniques for Deciding Base Training Workout Intensities

Mtn Stoke; Good for you for investing a Metabolic test and finding a good lab who knew what you were looking for when you said “AEROBIC” threshold. Most give you a blank stare. Lots of questions above so I’ll try to give answers broadly. You might have to read between the lines a bit but understanding the theory will help you prescribe and control your own training better than a simple yes/no from me.

MOSOP
Only a tiny faction of humans can perform at Mosop’s level. However that attached doc is illustrative in that it shows that even a guy who can string together 26 mile at 4:41 pace does only a few percent of his training at that pace. Most of us could not run 800 meters at this man’s marathon pace. Yet only 2% of his total training time is at efforts above his anaerobic threshold! I use this document to illustrate how wrong is the commonly held notion that the elites must train hard a lot. They train fast but not hard.

Fixing ADS
For those with ADS, you can and should train at your aerobic threshold as often as possible for the fastest gains. This pace may feel ridiculously slow and you may wonder how it can possibly do any good. The reason it is slow as this is the limit of the energy your aerobic system can supply before the anaerobic metabolic process becomes dominant. You can only improve this base aerobic capacity by training at this low/moderate intensity. This is where it is very clear that intensity is no substitute for duration. In fact the more your add intensity the less you can improve this basic aerobic capacity. The higher the volume of this sub AeT training you do the faster you will accumulate the benefits. In your case train as much as your legs can handle right up to 155. See the next section to

RECOVERY
How to gage recovery state is a really important thing. Its the feedback you need to have to determine when to dial back the training load. As Semple said the technology of HRV is promising and I’d love it if it worked 100% of the time. But its just not there yet. Steve and I do a bit of work with various branches of the military special forces. We just returned from such a trip. These guys have all the money in the world and access to all the latest tech stuff. Their human performance staff has tried a bunch of different HRV based recovery tools on the operators. The results are mixed at best for a number of reasons I won’t go into here as its too long.

RECOVERY TEST
As Scott mentioned and my experience, the Orthostatic test has proven to be more reliable than simple HRV tests. An even simpler test is what I call the stair test. We used to use this test when I was ski racing. Its crude but effective. First thing in the AM, put on your HR monitor and step up and down on/off a step at a moderate cadence till your HR climbs to somewhere in the range of 100-120 or so. The step cadence should be easy to moderate effort and you probably only need to do this for a minute. Once you elevate the HR to 100+ immediately sit down and note your HR in 1 minute. The rate of drop in HR will bear almost a perfect inverse correlation to your recovery state. The faster your HR recovers from the mild stressor the more recovered you are. This takes little time, involves very little stress and is very portable. The step height and the cadence need to be the same each test. Establish a base line during a period of low training load and then note your perception when you train following test where the HR recovery is less during the 1 min. A slow HR recovery indicates poor recovery. How poor will only you can decide by testing yourself. You may find that 10 beats slower recovery will still allow you to train as normal but 15 beats means you need a day off. It’s very individual.

I hope this helps,
Scott

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