How can I increase my distance?

Patrick1.0

Infamous wrote:

Surely a big part of intervals is the fact that you don't recover fully after every interval. As well as riding hard for x minutes, you are trying to train your body to recover in the short period of time between sets, you don't want to fully recover after every interval. Otherwise, we would do intervals in our long rides, have 5 mins on, 30 mins off etc.

The aim is to keep the heart rate up, no ?

Yes, that is absolutely the point and I am glad you said that. The idea is that the recovery time you choose is enough time for you to recover to a level. Not to recover fully, that would require you going indoors, sitting down and putting your feet up for ten - fifteen minutes.

The idea of using a hr monitor is not to negate the effects of the session. If you are doing hard five minute efforts and you're really sucking in air after them, to maintain that level of intensity you have to have a recovery that allows you to put that kind of effort in for each rep. The fact that it takes your hr longer to get back down to the level at which you can attack the next rep with a similar intensity does not mean you are cheating the session. It is in fact the opposite. Your hr and the greater length of time it takes for your hr to reach the same point after the reps, is telling you in itself that you are doing the session correctly.

115 is by no means a total recovery point, it is not even close to that. When your heart rate skips down to 115 you will be thinking, shit, I have to do that again so soon? Trust me, I know this dude. You may choose a higher figure for your hr based on your max hr and your amount of effort on reps. But my point remains, for a turbo session where the intesnity of effort in controlled entirely by you, spinning very, very gently allows your hr to really bound back down and then you can go again. The idea behind the stopwatch is the same, it's just allowing you to recover to a point but my point is: why do it that way when you can have the real thing just by looking at your hr? I mean, my resting pulse is down below 40 so 115 is way above that.

If you stick to your "hr ready to go point" trust me, the session will really take hold of you just as much as if you were using a stopwatch but it will avoid the inefficiency of working to an "absolute" figure on your stopwatch which has no scientific link to your body. It stops you guessing, to be frank. If you think about it, by allowing your hr to get back down to the right level, you are allowing your body to use and then clear a percentage of the lactate but not all of it. The overload is gradual, as it should be.

Infamous

Patrick1.0 wrote:

The idea behind the stopwatch is the same, it's just allowing you to recover to a point but my point is: why do it that way when you can have the real thing just by looking at your hr?

Because, as I said, heart rate is innacurate, it takes a few seconds for your heart rate to "catch up" with what your body is doing. And what about cardiac drift and heart rate spikes etc ?

The rests between intervals should (in my opinion) all be the same duration. It should feel like it's "not enough time" after doing 5 or 6 sets, this is when endurance/stamina comes into it. The right sized gaps are what make intervals work, if you just keep making them longer until you are ready to do the next interval, you take away part of the benefit of intervals.

You are trying to train your body to do x minutes on, y minutes off, you're not training it to do whatever it feels like doing.

liversedge

The point to interval training is to maximise the amount of time you spend at higher intensities. if you are unable to recover sufficiently between efforts then you're not going to be able to perform at the required intensity.

Time/Speed over a known course / hill or Power are the only way of measuring this - HR is almost useless.

Patrick1.0

Infamous wrote:

Patrick1.0 wrote:

The idea behind the stopwatch is the same, it's just allowing you to recover to a point but my point is: why do it that way when you can have the real thing just by looking at your hr?

Because, as I said, heart rate is innacurate, it takes a few seconds for your heart rate to "catch up" with what your body is doing. And what about cardiac drift and heart rate spikes etc ?

The rests between intervals should (in my opinion) all be the same duration. It should feel like it's "not enough time" after doing 5 or 6 sets, this is when endurance/stamina comes into it. The right sized gaps are what make intervals work, if you just keep making them longer until you are ready to do the next interval, you take away part of the benefit of intervals.

You are trying to train your body to do x minutes on, y minutes off, you're not training it to do whatever it feels like doing.

Bro, you are not really understanding this.

Fatigue is as a result of mucle damage and the body not being able to use and then move the lactate effectively enough. The idea of intervals is to improve the body's ability to create more mitochondria and to use and then shift lactate more effectively, allowing you to go quicker for longer. It's as simple as that. You are not training to do x minutes on, y minutes off. You can, however, set yourself a goal to be able to eventually do x minutes on at s intensity with y minutes off. That's fine.

The idea of a 20 second, 1 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute... whatever recovery is to allow you to get back to a reasonable state so that you can tackle the next rep. As another method, you can work off declining recoveries but you can do that better yet again with a pulse monitor: instead of going off 115, you go off 125 and so on.

Setting a figure of 115 is not about dampening any training effects. You do not allow your pulse to ever fall to a real recovery point so you stay in the correct zones and you force your body to deal with the lactate build up just in the same way that a set recovery time does. It's just a more scientific way of teaching your body. I believe the problem we're having in this debate is that somebody who has influenced you has sworn by a stopwatch. I used to do everything via stopwatch until a man much older, and much more experienced/knowledgeable explained to me why it is of more benefit to use a hr monitor in it's place. My performances are better for it and the sessions, on average, hurt more than they did with a stopwatch but they're not as inefficient. Before I would be pretty comfortable on the earlier reps and only really stressing properly by the last couple. Now, right from the off, I am hurting as I should hurt for said session. No more and no less.

Patrick1.0

liversedge wrote:

The point to interval training is to maximise the amount of time you spend at higher intensities. if you are unable to recover sufficiently between efforts then you're not going to be able to perform at the required intensity.

Time/Speed over a known course / hill or Power are the only way of measuring this - HR is almost useless.

Power is the only real way to monitor performance. Recovery points are different and a hr monitor is useful there.

And you said it - to maximise the time you spend at high intensity.

I would also say that hr is effective enough in judging how hard you are pushing. If your hr is 185 then that's what it is even if on other days you would have a pulse of 175 for the same power output. HR monitors really are very underrated because you can't get anything better than your own pump for determining the work you're getting through. Remember, training is about stressing and then recovering. A hr monitor just allows you to see what extent you're stressing to. You can judge efforts/recoveries accordingly. Once again, power output and time taken is the best way to judge perfromance but if you're achieving the same heart rate for x session as you were for z session then it has done the exact same thing to your body even though you might have been quicker on x session.

This is why power meters display your hr too.

Anyway, to avoid further debate, stick to what you feel most comfortbale with. I was only defending my training principles but I can't be bothered to carry on. I am happy enough using a hr monitor to judge recovery. At the end of the day, the results are what speak for us all and there is no one right way to do things.

Infamous

Patrick1.0 wrote:

Fatigue is as a result of mucle damage and the body not being able to use and then move the lactate effectively enough. The idea of intervals is to improve the body's ability to create more mitochondria and to use and then shift lactate more effectively, allowing you to go quicker for longer. It's as simple as that. You are not training to do x minutes on, y minutes off. You can, however, set yourself a goal to be able to eventually do x minutes on at s intensity with y minutes off. That's fine.

The idea of a 20 second, 1 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute... whatever recovery is to allow you to get back to a reasonable state so that you can tackle the next rep. As another method, you can work off declining recoveries but you can do that better yet again with a pulse monitor: instead of going off 115, you go off 125 and so on.

Then why have any structure at all ? Just do fartlek type intervals, or do intervals in your long rides whenever you feel like it. The recovery part of the interval session is about training your body to recover quicker/better. Again, it's my opinion that this is achieved better when you keep to a set time.

Patrick1.0 wrote:

Setting a figure of 115 is not about dampening any training effects. You do not allow your pulse to ever fall to a real recovery point so you stay in the correct zones and you force your body to deal with the lactate build up just in the same way that a set recovery time does. It's just a more scientific way of teaching your body. I believe the problem we're having in this debate is that somebody who has influenced you has sworn by a stopwatch. I used to do everything via stopwatch until a man much older, and much more experienced/knowledgeable explained to me why it is of more benefit to use a hr monitor in it's place. My performances are better for it and the sessions, on average, hurt more than they did with a stopwatch but they're not as inefficient. Before I would be pretty comfortable on the earlier reps and only really stressing properly by the last couple. Now, right from the off, I am hurting as I should hurt for said session. No more and no less.

How is it more scientific ? HR is too innacurate to be scientific.

I don't know what you are talking about with the stopwatch, I believe that a power meter would be the only truly accurate way of doing intervals, but that is not viable for most people.... and a HRM is rubbish for intervals so what else is there apart from a stopwatch ?

Do you work for a company that sells heart rate monitors ?

Patrick1.0

Infamous wrote:

Patrick1.0 wrote:

Fatigue is as a result of mucle damage and the body not being able to use and then move the lactate effectively enough. The idea of intervals is to improve the body's ability to create more mitochondria and to use and then shift lactate more effectively, allowing you to go quicker for longer. It's as simple as that. You are not training to do x minutes on, y minutes off. You can, however, set yourself a goal to be able to eventually do x minutes on at s intensity with y minutes off. That's fine.

The idea of a 20 second, 1 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute... whatever recovery is to allow you to get back to a reasonable state so that you can tackle the next rep. As another method, you can work off declining recoveries but you can do that better yet again with a pulse monitor: instead of going off 115, you go off 125 and so on.

Then why have any structure at all ? Just do fartlek type intervals, or do intervals in your long rides whenever you feel like it. The recovery part of the interval session is about training your body to recover quicker/better. Again, it's my opinion that this is achieved better when you keep to a set time.

Patrick1.0 wrote:

Setting a figure of 115 is not about dampening any training effects. You do not allow your pulse to ever fall to a real recovery point so you stay in the correct zones and you force your body to deal with the lactate build up just in the same way that a set recovery time does. It's just a more scientific way of teaching your body. I believe the problem we're having in this debate is that somebody who has influenced you has sworn by a stopwatch. I used to do everything via stopwatch until a man much older, and much more experienced/knowledgeable explained to me why it is of more benefit to use a hr monitor in it's place. My performances are better for it and the sessions, on average, hurt more than they did with a stopwatch but they're not as inefficient. Before I would be pretty comfortable on the earlier reps and only really stressing properly by the last couple. Now, right from the off, I am hurting as I should hurt for said session. No more and no less.

How is it more scientific ? HR is too innacurate to be scientific.

I don't know what you are talking about with the stopwatch, I believe that a power meter would be the only truly accurate way of doing intervals, but that is not viable for most people.... and a HRM is rubbish for intervals so what else is there apart from a stopwatch ?

Do you work for a company that sells heart rate monitors ?

No, I am, however, tired of the debate so do what you want to do, OK?