F2000 wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 10:36 pm
Many thanks on your excelent explantion. Now, that you talk about it, sure i do suffer from lactic acid buildup, but i think the main problems is mucle fatigue. So far, i have done only slow miles HRT zones 2-3. But i do know, from the previous year, that muscle fatigue is the main problem. Now, i ask, what should i do now to train for that?
You need to break it down. Some of the things you are working on:
1) Aerobic fitness (this has many subcategories such as stroke volume, oxygen uptake, capillarization, mitochondria, so I won't discuss here)
2) Flexibility/weight/biomechanics (I won't discuss this here either, whole separate topic)
3) Muscle fiber endurance (will discuss here)
4) Muscle fiber count (will discuss here)
5) Muscle fiber type (will discuss here)
Muscle fiber endurance
-Goal: Increase the resilience of the muscle fibers you already have
-How: Stimulation of these muscle fibers. Basically this means
lots of slow miles (short, hard rides has the effect of building excess type 2 fibers and also jeopardizes your aerobic fitness). You want to break down your existing fibers, and then through the process of repair, they regenerate but stronger (adaptation). To achieve this, every ride needs to be of sufficient duration/intensity to cause the breakdown. But this overlaps with your work on aerobic fitness as well, so you have to be strategic in allocating your time and intensity. If you focus solely on muscle endurance (such as going too hard for too long), you may jeopardize your aerobic fitness, and vice versa.
Muscle fiber count
-Goal: This is increasing the volume of your muscle fibers (both type 1 and type 2).
-How: Your body generates more muscle fibers when it decides it needs more muscle mass to complete work (critically, this ties into fiber endurance - when your body can no longer do more work based on your current fiber endurance level, it builds more fibers...see the link? So if you have really poor fiber endurance, you may be building excess fiber count, and these fibers will also be weak. BUT, there is a benefit to starting off with a higher fiber count, so once you develop their endurance, you end up with, net, a larger number of high endurance fibers). This is an adaptation to stress that your body recognizes that based on your current number of muscle fibers, it is not capable of effectively doing the work. There are two elements here. You need more
type 2 fibers for hard segments such as climbs...for this,
hard riding (don't focus on cadence), such as intervals or climbs if you are an experienced rider. If you are untrained or poorly trained,
weight training is the ideal way to "catch up" on your type 2 muscular strength. 4-6 reps x 6 sets of squats to failure, maybe 2-3 times a week, for maybe 2 months, will really help in getting you up to speed.
For type 1 muscle fiber count, longer, hardish rides (such as sweetspot).
Muscle fiber type
Unless you are in the velodrome, you need more Type 1 muscle fibers. You can alter the proportion of your muscle fibers with specific training. This means
lots of long slow riding. If you go too hard too often, you end up building more Type 2 fibers.
These three elements should be packaged together in a training regime that targets all 3 elements, together with your goals for overall aerobic fitness. You can't only do 1, or 2. A polarized program with 80% low intensity and 20% very high intensity is a general rule of thumb that balances all 3.