Altitude and FTP - Page 2

Bienvenue Madame, désolé for the misunderstanding

Have a wonderful camps d'entraînement

Very interesting question being debated here I find.

Anything that allows us to push harder (use our muscles more) is likely to trigger better adaptation. Motivation issue? Push less therefore adaptation is lessen.

Up there though, does the effort just feels harder, or is the sustained hypoxia effect represents by itself an additional constraint from which the body is likely to adapt?

Heads or tails

My my, this truly does seem like a complex subject. I mean if you guys are saying it is, then I believe it

It is true that my threshold power seems to be increasing consistently. Yeah, I admit for me it feels like a snail's pace - very very slow. I want to get to 3+ watts/kg of weight and even after a couple of months of power training I am still in the 'untrained' category for threshold power. Probably bad genetics or some sort of physiological limitations I guess

But compared to those of you having done this for years and stuff, I do probably improve quicker since I am such a novice/untrained/etc and have nowhere to go but to get better!!!

I understood what Mr. Dave said about the perceived effort and stuff regarding the indoor trainer and how that kind of parallels what happens to people who go from sea level to altitude and train. That it may feel harder or wear you out more for certain reasons (maybe altitude if you go up from sea level or heat if you are on the indoor trainer) but your body isnt necessarily getting fitter and your level of performance not getting higher either.

What about people who live at 1800m year round? Is it like that for them? Is it like the indoor trainer thing where because their vo2max is lowered because of altitude that their workouts don't improve fitness as much as if they lived at sea level? I read about some olympic bicycle riders living in the high desert and mountains of colorado.

I guess they must do OK since they live there all the time?

In general they'll have lower FTP's than a similar sampling of athletes(similar race categories for instance) living at sea level. But at least when they race locally so will their competition.

But there are benefits of 'living' at altitude such as increased red blood cell count. And many serious athletes try to get the best of both worlds with a 'live high, train low approach' either by actually commuting to lower elevation training venues if they actually live high or by sleeping in hybpobaric chambers like altitude tents or rooms converted so that the ambient air is at lower partial pressures and simulates higher elevations if they actually live and can train at lower elevations.

I just recently moved to sea level after a decade of living at 1900 meters. My sustainable power for durations from roughly 3 minutes to over an hour went up pretty quickly in my first few of months at sea level but certainly not overnight when I first arrived. That's after three plus years of structured power based training, I was still seeing slow yearly gains but certainly not at the rates I saw three years ago.

The biggest immediate thing I noticed when I moved down to sea level was how fast I could recover from repeated attacks and hard high power bursts. Friend's who've visited from the mountains have commented on the same thing.

-Dave

I would hope you know me a bit better than that. I've been limiting my comments to an area where there is ample research to support/refute physiologic/training stress differences between two environments: sea level vs altitude.


We may be talking around each other here. I understand the concept on which LHTL hangs its hat. However, what I am limiting my commentary to was the inference that a maximal effort over 40K at altitude carries less physiologic stress than a maximal effort for 40K at sea level. Research into the physiologic responses at altitude simply does not support that. Moreover, there are physiologic markers (cortisol being one) in unacclimated, but trained subjects that may suggest that the physiologic responses may be more severe for such an effort at altitude.

Consequent to this, and WRT the indoor/outdoor TSS debate, I do support adjusting FTP in PMC when going to altitude for one ATL TC or more (in order to capture the true physiologic training stress during that period at altitude), yet do not support such a notion with indoor vs outdoor training.

My apology to the OP for the diversion.

__________________
Steve Palladino

http://www.kp.org/mydoctor/steve_palladino

http://eteamz.active.com/FightinBoba...=24&id=4591042

Steve,
It's clear you've delved a lot further into the stress vs. efforts at sea level vs. altitude question and I wasn't really considering the overall load or TSS/CTL question at all. I was just illustrating the difficulty of answering the OPs question about what she might expect in terms of FTP progress with an extended stay at altitude and pointing out why she might see different results than a highly trained cyclist.

My answer still makes sense to me, at least in the sense that it is possible (not assured or necessary) that a trained sea level cyclist who moves to altitude for an extended time might actually see a drop in FTP on their return to sea level (relative to previous sea level FTP) from the lower average workout intensity not TSS point of view.

You're way ahead of me on cortisol levels and the implications of working out high or low so I could be dead wrong but at some level I still believe a watt's a watt and if Andy's weekly L4 intervals at 300 watts turned into weekly efforts at 270 watts for an extended period of time it seems quite possible to me that he might not immediately return to 300 watts on returning to the sea level.

But to answer your original question, I'm working totally in the realm of inference and uneducated opinions so I wouldn't bet the farm on it...

-Dave

I told ya, *interesting* question

Seriously, some concepts that are apparently simple often hide a bunch of complex processes. Besides, threads like that one are good occasions to challenge few myths.

we may... (euh well, I may) have made allusion to the level of maturity of your FTP and I hope I didn't make you feel *slow* per se. Reason why this allusion was repeatedly brought on the table as you could see, is that it is at the heart of this subject.

In order to provide you with a decent answer, we had to confirm this assumption as to where exactly you were in your development as a cyclist.

You may feel slow for now, especially visiting these sites and comparing your numbers with those who have trained for years, but you'll certainly get there. And the decision you made to purchase and use the right tools early in your involvement will help a lot.

that's it.

No, no apology needed. It is not a diversion at all because I am super curious on what you guys are talking about here.

My own totally unscientific, um, intuitive thought was kind of like what boba said about a watt being a watt. I mean if you do a train regularly with 60 min TT's and threshold work at 1800m then it would seem odd if it was less effective for your fitness than doing the same regular 60 min TT's at sea level. Yes? No?

So for example if the same person did 10 hours of threshold work at 1800 meters and that produced a 1w increase in your FTP - would you expect 10 hours of threshold work at sea level for the same person to improve their FTP by 1w also? more ? less?

Sounds like maybe living & training at high altitude may not be so great?

Oh I think you guys are being pretty generous answering my questions actually. no offense taken and lets be honest - i am slow but working super hard to get faster

The tools help more than I can say. Now instead of 'oh today was a good/bad day' of riding, I know exactly how much and what i have improved.

Would you go through this routine again? It would seem as though you're closer to the expected non-acclimatized value for your adjusted FTP.

Aye, but:

1) that is just a general rule-of-thumb to help people make sense of the absolute vs. relative question (i.e., unless preparing for competition in a specific compromising state/environment it seems best to "go big", i.e., attempt to achieve the highest absolute training intensity);

2) any gain you might achieve by doing so will still be small, and most importantly;

3) TSS is intended to be an predictor of (primarily metabolic) strain based on the stress that is applied, not a (direct) predictor of the resultant training effect.

Sure: for the last ~4 mo, I trained, on average, for 1 h/d, 3 d/wk, on the ergometer at ~80% of my altitude-adjusted functional threshold power while breathing 14.8% O2 (simulating just over 9000 ft). I then slept in the altitude tent (also set to simulate ~9000 ft) for the last 9 d before traveling to the race.

I developed this approach on my own (based in part on constraints of my normal life), have used it previously, and have found that it is effective in inducing at least some degree of acclimatization (based, e.g., on changes in my ventilation during exercise in hypoxia).

I do agree that at best I fall mid-way beteween the two ranges provided by Bassett et al.'s meta-analysis even after following this protocol. That could be because the exposure isn't 24 h/d as experienced by those subjects, but is probably more related to the fact that I experience mild-to-moderate exercise-induced hypoxemia during high intensity exercise at sea level (in keeping with Steve P.'s allusions to individual differences).

Perhaps the best way to answer these questions is, to quote, "specificity, specificity, specificity". The concept of specificity not only applies to training methodology, but also to training environment.

__________________
Steve Palladino

http://www.kp.org/mydoctor/steve_palladino

http://eteamz.active.com/FightinBoba...=24&id=4591042

Interesting. Out of curiosity what tent do you use?

I noticed 'issues' developing power at over 8,000ft on a couple of rides in the Sierras this year that weren't directly explainable by accumulated fatigue. As soon as I got back down into the valleys (below 6,500ft) it was much easier to get the power back to where I wanted it. One thing I did find 'odd' was that I based my planned average power on average altitude and estimated time (altitude 7,600ft and 198miles). During the first 100 miles, even above 8,000ft, holding the planned average power was easy. During the last 50 miles holding the power below 7,000ft was easy, above that it was hard but once I returned to lower elevations it was easy again...

I find this discussion fascinating as I am used to encountering it from a competitive running perspective. There seems to be very little support for the idea of training at altitude being preferable to sea level for improving sea level performance. In fact, it's usually thought to do bad things to sea-level runners like cost top speed and induce muscle loss. At the same time the sport has been consistently dominated by athletes hailing from the high altitude regions of Kenya, Ethiopia, and even Mexico. And the high altitude is always credited as being the key to the immense talent coming from these regions.
So the conventional wisdom boils down to: Gebrselassie gets fast when he runs at elevation, and I would just get slow. Genetics is cruel.
Not sure how much of that conventional wisdom is true, or what part of it if any applies to cycling.