Peter Attia has a wealth of content relevant to UA. Nutrition, metabolism, exercise science, among other topics. His feed is a great place to start.
Adam Fern
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ParticipantAdam Fern on January 8, 2020 at 11:02 am · in reply to: Iñigo San Millán Interview: Mitochondria, Zone 2, and metabolic health #35732Participant
Hi @jeff,
Just some anecdotal reference data from my own experience:
I started working with a UA coach back in Feb 2018 while in the depths of ADS. My first metabolic test indicated my AeT at 120-125 and AT about 165. Fast forward to Jan 2019, I had lost 30 lbs and logged about 275 hours of training (>95% of which was Z1-Z2, and a good chunk of that was fasted training) and my AeT had risen to about 150 with virtually no change to AT. A couple of months ago I did my own aerobic decoupling test to test AeT and concluded it had increased a bit further to 155.
As Scott said, VOLUME and FASTED TRAINING in the low aerobic regime will pay the biggest dividends in increasing AeT. Once fat adaptation is well-established, the benefits of fasted training begin to wane and volume becomes king.
Happy training,
AdamParticipantI attached a screenshot of my PMC for the last 28 days. In it you can see three big weeks of training and the corresponding trends of my CTL/ATL/TSB. The tail end of the chart where form starts ramping up is my taper period. I’m running a 50-mile trail race this coming Saturday.
The red circle shows a big day (this was a 30-mile trail run with about 8500 feet of vert). With it, my ATL jumps to almost 140 and I see a healthy jump in CTL also (over 10%).
The blue circle shows the following day when my TSB tanks because of the huge workout I did the day prior. You can see from the dot I did a ~50 TSS easy workout despite my TSB being almost -60.
The black circle shows three days later when I did my first moderate workout of about 100 TSS when my TSB was -25/-30.
The chart illustrates the way the TP algorithms work, which make sense when thinking about fitness and your body’s response to training stress:
- Training stress impacts fatigue the most. This is the body’s acute (immediate) response to the training stimulus, hence the metric Acute Training Load. You do a hard workout, you feel tired. Easy.
- Accumulated training stress is how fitness is built. Chronic exposure to training = improved fitness, hence the metric Chronic Training Load. The more training stress you expose yourself to, the fitter you become. Easy.
- Your form, as is somewhat intuitive, is a balance between how fit you were when you completed yesterday’s workout and how hard the workout was, hence the metric Training Stress Balance. If you’re extremely fit, you can accumulate more fatigue with lesser impact to your readiness to compete/train again, i.e. your form. If you’re unfit, big workouts will have an appropriately big impact on your form.
TP is an awesome tool for nerds. Data is power! Remember…
“That which is measured, improves.”
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.Participant@land as Scott said above, I would not “un-skew” the TSS values from long, easy days. At my all-day HR, I can count on an hrTSS of 40/hour for the duration of the event, e.g. 10 hours = 400 hrTSS.
To address @tradigan21 question, per UA guidance, I add 10 TSS per 1000 feet of elevation gain if I’m carrying less than 10%BW. I add 20 TSS per 1000 feet if I’m carrying more than 10%BW. So, to use the example above, if I climbed 8000 feet during those 10 hours with a small pack, my adjusted TSS would be 480.
To @valerie_ie: when your fatigue skyrockets this just means the TP algorithm is responding to your completed workout. From TP’s website: your form (TSB) today is equal to the difference between yesterday’s fatigue (ATL) and fitness (CTL). As your CTL increases with increasing fitness, the impact that big days (400, 500, 600 TSS, etc) will have on your form is less even though it has the same impact on fatigue.
The key to getting value out of TP is consistency. Both in terms of logging every workout as well as being consistent in the assessment of each workout’s TSS. Remember that the PMC metrics are not comparable from athlete to athlete. As long as your TSS values are proportional to other workouts you’ve completed, that’s what matters.
As purely anecdotal evidence:
My CTL is about 80.
My big weekly workouts usually come in around 400-500 TSS; weekly TSS is usually 700-800.
I typically see ATL values north of 120 after my long days; this drops rapidly because of how the ATL algorithm is weighted.
I almost always do some light workout/active recovery the day after.Using the form guidelines on TP to determine when you are “recovered” are only guidlines. For me, I’m recovered adequately to do some moderate workouts (80-100 TSS) within 2 or 3 days following a big day when my TSB is in the 30s. In those intervening couple days I can do low intensity core workouts or short aerobic runs.
Participant@steve thanks for the reply. I’ll send an email with further info but this PubMed article is a great primer on sleep stages and how sleep patterns change with age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19956/
Slow-wave sleep (SWS, stages 3 and 4 of non-REM sleep as determined by EEG), or deep sleep, occurs predominately during the first third of the night and is when the endocrine system is producing GH. The endocrine system is active throughout the sleep cycle, signaling with different hormones during different sleep phases to accomplish different things.
Here’s another PubMed article that highlights a study that showed a strong correlation between exercise fatigue, an increase in the amount of deep sleep and, interestingly, a decrease in REM sleep during the sleep cycle following the exercise: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689288/
Additionally, the podcast referenced by @aaron above with Prof. Matthew Walker is excellent. It’s a 3-part series, but the first part discusses items relevant to this discussion.
Thanks,
AdamParticipant@sws I’m certain of that. Two young boys is enough, let alone all the other stuff!
Participant@Aaron indeed! I have listened to it. Peter Attia has lots of good stuff on his podcasts. Dr. Walker is a legend in the sleep science world.
ParticipantGot it, thank you, Scott!
Steve, are you avoiding me? 🙂
ParticipantIncidentally, in a totally unrelated vein, how the heck do I upload a profile photo for the forums? Can’t seem to find it anywhere in My Account or in the Edit profile page within the forums….
ParticipantAdam Fern on May 15, 2019 at 2:59 pm · in reply to: Stair Mill vs Stairs for Aerobic Pace Workouts #22060@vencislav.popov and @johnepearson
As I reread your posts and think about this more, I see the point you’re making. The reference frame of a stairmill/treadmill is moving, but it’s still Newtonian, i.e. not accelerating. Perhaps the argument I’m making would apply only if the stairs were accelerating away from you, rather than moving at a constant rate.
The realization I had was by thinking about doing squats (just for example) in an elevator traveling down at a fixed speed. The amount of work I do, or the change in my CG w.r.t. to floor of the elevator is still positive, despite the elevator’s downward movement.
Thanks for the alternate perspective. As a purist, I still don’t know if I’ll count vert on a stairmill as real vert, though! 🙂
ParticipantAdam Fern on May 15, 2019 at 2:25 pm · in reply to: Stair Mill vs Stairs for Aerobic Pace Workouts #22055@vencislav.popov and @johnepearson
With respect to your cited articles (thank you for linking those, btw) and Ph.D, I disagree that effective vertical gain on a stair mill is the same as real stairs (or hill) outside. I also disagree that the work done is relative to the stairs, not the earth. Granted, a large part of expended effort is just from mechanics of turning your legs over, but in terms of a purely physics perspective, stair mills are less “efficient” for racking up vert.
Work can be defined as a change in total energy, e.g. increasing potential energy by traveling uphill. If I climb 1000 meters up a hill, I have increased my potential energy by a factor of 1000 (m*g*1000 – m*g*0). In other words, my CG, my body, etc, has moved away from the center of the earth. On a stair mill (I’ve done a rough calculation at my own gym), in the time it takes me to take one 9″ step, the stair moves about 5″ down so my CG (measured at my chest) is raised 4″ with each step. (The remaining stair/body travel happens during the dead time when both feet are on the steps traveling downward.) To expand on this example, if I took 1000 9″ steps outside, I will have moved my CG 750′ away from the center of earth. Taking 1000 9″ steps on the stair mill equates to an equivalent CG gain of only 333′.
As we all know, metabolic inefficiencies and human mechanics make this whole discussion quite contrived, and the actual physical work done represents a small amount of total (including chemical i.e. metabolic) energy expenditure.
Love the discussion!
AdamParticipantScott,
Thank you for the thorough reply! I’m certainly not looking to “train my hematocrit,” rather was curious about the natural, physiological factors which cause the body to increase/decrease hematocrit and its implications on aerobic performance.
I’d say you addressed those things quite well.
Thanks again,
Adam
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