Basic errors in Dr. Coggans book?

doctorSpoc said:

yes, probably a [censored] poor Threshold workout.. but ave power IS 100% FTP.. Normalized Power?

In this case, normalized power = average power (by design: see the studies by Essen).

doctorSpoc said:

Dr. Coggan's claim is that this is not what this workout is about... i need to see some proof though before i can accept the addapation he claims because on the face of it, it just doesn't seem to be reasonable.

Take a look at the scientific literature examining the neuromuscular adaptations to any type of "explosive" training.

Quadsweep said:

Hey, nobody(Dr. Coggan)[img]cyclingforums.combiggrin.gifOpen ↗[/img] replied to my post below from this thread and how it relates to my original post on this thread.

Without a specific context, it's hard for me to make much sense out of your posted quotes in a more general sense.

With regards to Ric's response, it's true that intense intervals with short recovery will become more tied to VO2max as the workout progresses. That would be the case in a more straight-forward 10x1min L6 workout or the like, where the work power will start to droop toward VO2max power after a couple reps if the recovery periods are too short.

What I think you're missing is that in the L6 workout from the book, the rider only does 3 reps at approx. 1:1 before taking a 5 min rest in between sets. That 5 minutes allows full recovery after just 3 short reps. You have to take the whole workout in context for full understanding.

frenchyge said:

Without a specific context, it's hard for me to make much sense out of your posted quotes in a more general sense.

With regards to Ric's response, it's true that intense intervals with short recovery will become more tied to VO2max as the workout progresses. That would be the case in a more straight-forward 10x1min L6 workout or the like, where the work power will start to droop toward VO2max power after a couple reps if the recovery periods are too short.

What I think you're missing is that in the L6 workout from the book, the rider only does 3 reps at approx. 1:1 before taking a 5 min rest in between sets. That 5 minutes allows full recovery after just 3 short reps. You have to take the whole workout in context for full understanding.

Well said...and one of the advantage of training with a powermeter is that it makes it easier to understand the actual physiological demands of complicated interval workouts such as this one. To wit: if the power is greater than power at VO2max (that is to say, greater than ~120% of functional threshold power), then there must be an anaerobic component. OTOH, if cumulative fatigue prevents the athlete from achieving such a high power, then you can no longer be certain that's the case. Thus, if someone can do efforts more than ~30 s long at a power that is greater than ~120% of their functional threshold power, it is a level 6 workout regardless of the length of the recovery periods.

acoggan said:

In this case, normalized power = average power (by design: see the studies by Essen).

yeah.. that occured to me just as i pressed shutdown and was too lazy to restart and edit my post ( <30sec and all that... )

acoggan said:

Take a look at the scientific literature examining the neuromuscular adaptations to any type of "explosive" training.

"explosive"? this is precisely my point. 150% of FTP (~40% 15sec power)... at least for me, is so unexplosive i can't imagine it having much of any effect on NMP... this is just anecdotal but for me, ~300% FTP (~75% 15sec power) would register as an explosive effort... the micro interval format is what is getting in the way of the intervals being truly explosive

just because i SAY that my goal for a workout is NMP doesn't make it so.. it needs to ACTUALLY be effective to that end to be considered a NMP workout in my books. i'll use this example again.. just because i call "5x30s @ 200% with 3min recovery" an endurance workout doesn't make it so... that's called a mistake... so even if unintended, you get much more Th or VO2max benefit from this microinterval workout than intended target of NMP then IMO it should be really be called an L4 or L5 workout with a small asterisks saying some small benefit for NMP could also had with this workout (...if and only if this can be proved to be so)... the actual real effectiveness does matter.. not only that, why include workouts with dubious and unproven benefit?

..remain unconvinced. it still doesn't seem reasonable to me that this workout would be an effective NMP workout and still see no reason to include it under L7... just for kicks i tried a mini one.. IMO this is an L4-5 workout...maybe some AWC?... but maybe there is some NMP magic working somewhere, but it sure didn't feel like it.. i need hard evidence to be convince of the NMP benefits you claim

as for the RAAM guy.. i can maybe see a workout like this getting someone used to riding mixed pace... maybe.

doctorSpoc said:

"explosive"? this is precisely my point. 150% of FTP (~40% 15sec power)... at least for me, is so unexplosive i can't imagine it having much of any effect on NMP... this is just anecdotal but for me, ~300% FTP (~75% 15sec power) would register as an explosive effort... the micro interval format is what is getting in the way of the intervals being truly explosive

just because i SAY that my goal for a workout is NMP doesn't make it so.. it needs to ACTUALLY be effective to that end to be considered a NMP workout in my books. i'll use this example again.. just because i call "5x30s @ 200% with 3min recovery" an endurance workout doesn't make it so... that's called a mistake... so even if unintended, you get much more Th or VO2max benefit from this microinterval workout than intended target of NMP then IMO it should be really be called an L4 or L5 workout with a small asterisks saying some small benefit for NMP could also had with this workout (...if and only if this can be proved to be so)... the actual real effectiveness does matter.. not only that, why include workouts with dubious and unproven benefit?

..remain unconvinced. it still doesn't seem reasonable to me that this workout would be an effective NMP workout and still see no reason to include it under L7... just for kicks i tried a mini one.. IMO this is an L4-5 workout...maybe some AWC?... but maybe there is some NMP magic working somewhere, but it sure didn't feel like it.. i need hard evidence to be convince of the NMP benefits you claim

as for the RAAM guy.. i can maybe see a workout like this getting someone used to riding mixed pace... maybe.

How many times do I have to repeat myself? The neuromuscular adaptation(s) being sought here is not an increase in maximal neuromuscular power. Until you realize this, there's no point in continuing this discussion.

doctorSpoc said:

it still doesn't seem reasonable to me that this workout would be an effective NMP workout and still see no reason to include it under L7

The racing context in which this workout is discussed as an L7 workout is crits. A typical crit would have an NP near one's FTP and with a similar power profile to the recommended workout (e.g., short accelerations in the 150-200%FTP range and short recovery durations). The metabolic demands of such races are similar to an isopower ride at or near one's FTP. But, what about the neuromuscular demands of such races. Are you saying that the neuromuscular demands are likewise similar to an isopower FTP ride? If the NM demands are different, how would you train for them? It seems to me that you are completely focused on max NM power and that is only a subset of L7 training. In your world, one needs only one L7 workout because there is only one objective.

RapDaddyo said:

The racing context in which this workout is discussed as an L7 workout is crits. A typical crit would have an NP near one's FTP and with a similar power profile to the recommended workout (e.g., short accelerations in the 150-200%FTP range and short recovery durations). The metabolic demands of such races are similar to an isopower ride at or near one's FTP. But, what about the neuromuscular demands of such races. Are you saying that the neuromuscular demands are likewise similar to an isopower FTP ride? If the NM demands are different, how would you train for them? It seems to me that you are completely focused on max NM power and that is only a subset of L7 training. In your world, one needs only one L7 workout because there is only one objective.

acoggan said:

How many times do I have to repeat myself? The neuromuscular adaptation(s) being sought here is not an increase in maximal neuromuscular power. Until you realize this, there's no point in continuing this discussion.

i think you are not really picking up what i'm putting down... i am not convinced that such minimal NM training stress will be sufficient to cause addaptation in NMP what does that have to do with maximal of other NMP addaptation?

I don't see any reason in continuing the discussion until a time when you can provide some sort of proof of your assertions...they don't seem reasonable to me... is that unreasonable?

my tougher crit profiles also often average out at about FTP (go figure?).. but so what? if power demands of crits only varied between 50-150% FTP, crits would be a peice of cake.. the power demands in my crit profile are typically between 0-300% FTP with several peaks into the 375-400% range. even the difference between 150-200% of FTP is huge... much less the difference between 150% and 300%. also, is it inconcievable, that someone with better developed NMP or AWC might need greater proportional training stress in that area in order to cause addaptation in NMP... maximal or otherwise? that doesn't seem unreasonable to me... and yet you are willing to believe a completely unproven and to me unreasonable assertion that 150% of FTP (and even accross the board for everyone) will cause a reasonable addapation in NMP... well sorry, when i hear something that doesn't have the ring of truth to it, i need some sort of hard emperical evidence in order to believe it... that's a little thing called critical thinking.

doctorSpoc said:

i think you are not really picking up what i'm putting down... i am not convinced that such minimal NM training stress will be sufficient to cause addaptation in NMP what does that have to do with maximal of other NMP addaptation?

I don't see any reason in continuing the discussion until a time when you can provide some sort of proof of your assertions...they don't seem reasonable to me... is that unreasonable?

my tougher crit profiles also often average out at about FTP (go figure?).. but so what? if power demands of crits only varied between 50-150% FTP, crits would be a peice of cake.. the power demands in my crit profile are typically between 0-300% FTP with several peaks into the 375-400% range. even the difference between 150-200% of FTP is huge... much less the difference between 150% and 300%. also, is it inconcievable, that someone with better developed NMP or AWC might need greater proportional training stress in that area in order to cause addaptation in NMP... maximal or otherwise? that doesn't seem unreasonable to me... and yet you are willing to believe a completely unproven and to me unreasonable assertion that 150% of FTP (and even accross the board for everyone) will cause a reasonable addapation in NMP... well sorry, when i hear something that doesn't have the ring of truth to it, i need some sort of hard imperical evidence in order to believe it... that's a little thing called critical thinking.

I feel like Don Quixote...

One last attempt: under my schema, level 7 training is training aimed at inducing neuromuscular (instead of metabolic) adaptations. These include - but are not limited to! - an increase in maximal neuromuscular power.
Thus, even though the maximal power requirement when performing microintervals is "capped" by the average power that can be sustained*, they still qualify as level 7 training because they are intended to induce specific neuromuscular adaptations.

acoggan said:

I feel like Don Quixote.......because they are intended to induce specific neuromuscular adaptations.

Don,
I sure don't want to fan the flames, but in lay terms what sort of neuromuscular adaptations are you targeting with these submaximal microinterval workouts?. Is it better neuromuscular endurance? Better use of phosphocreatine as a fuel source? I guess I've always thought of neuromuscular power as being synonymous with peak power but I can see that's too simplistic. Is the goal to extend and flatten the high end of the mean maximal curve?

Sancho Panza

daveryanwyoming said:

I sure don't want to fan the flames, but in lay terms what sort of neuromuscular adaptations are you targeting with these submaximal microinterval workouts?

In lay terms, you would expect such training to result in better motor control when required to frequently, rapidly, and significantly vary force production.

acoggan said:

I feel like Don Quixote...

One last attempt: under my schema, level 7 training is training aimed at inducing neuromuscular (instead of metabolic) adaptations. These include - but are not limited to! - an increase in maximal neuromuscular power.
Thus, even though the maximal power requirement when performing microintervals is "capped" by the average power that can be sustained*, they still qualify as level 7 training because they are intended to induce specific neuromuscular adaptations.

first of all... "Says who?" [img]cyclingforums.comwink.gifOpen ↗[/img]

- the intentions of the workout are irrelevant... if the workout doesn't effectively achieve it's indended addapations of the category it is slotted into, it should be removed from that category because it would have been placed there in error

- if this workout is effective in acheiving its goals... prove it and then i will gladly come on side and concede that yes it is correctly labeled and it should be left right where it is

- i say just in passing, that it might be good if the workout isn't actually effective in the intended area of addapation, but does have an unintended benefit and minimal addaptation in other areas it should be be removed from the category it is in and placed in the category of primary addapation and the minimal addapations in other areas noted

i'm not really concerned with why this workout was placed in L7 in the first place, my only concern is, is it correctly labeled in the here and now and i haven't seen any convincing evidence that it is correctly labeled...

i'm not debating whether sub maximal efforts will result in NMP addapation.. i'm debating about the lower bound of the training stress that will result in effective addapations of NM. i'm debating that i think in all likelyhood efforts with such low NM training stress won't result in effective NM addapations.. i.e. i think that in all likelyhood this workout is so [censored] poor at inducing NMP addapation that it's would likely be more effective at the incidental, unintended addapations than the intended ones and it is actually better placed there.

that being said, if you can demostrate to me that it is effective i would gladly add it to my repetoire of workouts, but i'm very, very sceptical about this workout's effectiveness in NMP addapations..

bottom line, i need hard emperical evidence to believe your assertions.

[quote="doctorSpoc"]first of all... "Says who?" [img]cyclingforums.comwink.gifOpen ↗[/img]

Says me, the guy who invented the classification system and who introduced people like you to microintervals.

doctorSpoc said:

- the intentions of the workout are irrelevant

doctorSpoc said:

- ... if the workout doesn't effectively achieve it's indended addapations of the category it is slotted into, it should be removed from that category because it would have been placed there in error

doctorSpoc said:

- if this workout is effective in acheiving its goals... prove it and then i will gladly come on side and concede that yes it is correctly labeled and it should be left right where it is

doctorSpoc said:

- i think in all likelyhood efforts with such low NM training stress won't result in effective NM addapations

doctorSpoc said:

- .. i.e. i think that in all likelyhood this workout is so [censored] poor at inducing NMP addapation that it's would likely be more effective at the incidental, unintended addapations than the intended ones and it is actually better placed there.

that being said, if you can demostrate to me that it is effective i would gladly add it to my repetoire of workouts, but i'm very, very sceptical about this workout's effectiveness in NMP addapations..

doctorSpoc said:

- bottom line, i need hard emperical evidence to believe your assertions.

acoggan said:

In lay terms, you would expect such training to result in better motor control when required to frequently, rapidly, and significantly vary force production.

Thanks, I think the filament is beginning to glow 🙂 It's that power continuoum thing again. Peak power is a form of L7, but so is rapid acceleration anywhere along your power curve. So as someone else posted frequent jumps out of crit corners could be considered L7 work during an overall L4 or so race and microintervals like those described give you that same sort of overall sustainable effort (AP at or below FTP) but the microinterval accelations give you that L7 twist.

Would it be accurate to say that the microintervals capped at 200% of FTP for reasons of sustainability also stress the "neuro" in neuromuscular? IOW they help teach the nervous system how to quickly recruit muscle fibers?

acoggan said:

In lay terms, you would expect such training to result in better motor control when required to frequently, rapidly, and significantly vary force production.

<sarcasm> why would you ever need to improve the motor control of "single leg knee extensions"? </sarcasm>

cyclingforums.comshowpost.phpOpen ↗

doctorSpoc said:

<sarcasm> why would you ever need to improve the motor control of "single leg knee extensions"? </sarcasm>

cyclingforums.comshowpost.phpOpen ↗

Your reply makes no sense, because in the post above I referred to technique, not motor control.

EDIT (for the benefit of others): I consider technique something that can be taught, and something that one can conciously alter. The adaptations to which I have been referring are neither.

daveryanwyoming said:

Thanks, I think the filament is beginning to glow 🙂

Glad to hear it - the recent storms have apparently led to a power outage north of the border. 😉

daveryanwyoming said:

It's that power continuoum thing again. Peak power is a form of L7, but so is rapid acceleration anywhere along your power curve. So as someone else posted frequent jumps out of crit corners could be considered L7 work during an overall L4 or so race and microintervals like those described give you that same sort of overall sustainable effort (AP at or below FTP) but the microinterval accelations give you that L7 twist.

Precisely - and since there's raelly no reason to train this way other than to obtain that "twist", they really should be considered/discussed under level 7, not level 4 (or whatever the average power happens to be).

daveryanwyoming said:

Would it be accurate to say that the microintervals capped at 200% of FTP for reasons of sustainability also stress the "neuro" in neuromuscular? IOW they help teach the nervous system how to quickly recruit muscle fibers?

Excellent, and thank you - with your permission, I'd like to use that explanation/description from this point forward ("NEUROmuscular"😉.

acoggan said:

It would seem to me that someone with as much coaching experience as you lay claim to would already have all the empirical evidence that they need to be convinced that people can - indeed, must - adapt to rapidly flucuating power demands if they wish to do well in mass start races vs. just TTs.

...who, me? i think you're thinking of TiMan... i have many years of racing experience as a Cat 1 rider, but i'm only a level 1 coach and have only coached three riders in my life, and that's including myself! i do fancy myself a pretty good critical thinker who can sniff out BS pretty good though...

acoggan said:

Your reply makes no sense, because in the post above I referred to technique, not motor control.

EDIT (for the benefit of others): I consider technique something that can be taught, and something that one can conciously alter. The adaptations to which I have been referring are neither.

that is so disingenuous given the context of my previous post where i say this:

"that's sounding more like an L7 workout to me too... although i don't really ascribe to "pre-fatiguing" since from my understanding NMP is going to be pretty much genetically set and what you are really doing when doing an L7 workout is primarily practicing technique and hard wiring the co-ordination of muscles etc... so IMO the pre-fatiguing is a good test of NMP under reall world conditions but not really optimal conditions for addaptation... i.e. IMO minimal fatigue and full rest between intervals is best during addaptation and then on race day you're legs just go on auto-pilot and do what they did during practice..."

the guy bites my comment and then tries to use it against me...

http://cyclingforums.com/showpost.php?p=3128799&postcount=67

doctorSpoc said:

that is so disingenuous given the context of my previous post where i say this:

"that's sounding more like an L7 workout to me too... although i don't really ascribe to "pre-fatiguing" since from my understanding NMP is going to be pretty much genetically set and what you are really doing when doing an L7 workout is primarily practicing technique and hard wiring the co-ordination of muscles etc... so IMO the pre-fatiguing is a good test of NMP under reall world conditions but not really optimal conditions for addaptation... i.e. IMO minimal fatigue and full rest between intervals is best during addaptation and then on race day you're legs just go on auto-pilot and do what they did during practice..."

the guy bites my comment and then tries to use it against me...

cyclingforums.comshowpost.phpOpen ↗

This is beginning to remind me of the showdown between Andy and a certain track sprinter i haven't seen around here much lately. 😄

acoggan said:

... - with your permission, I'd like to use that explanation/description from this point forward ("NEUROmuscular"😉.

No worries, have at it.

O.K. you've given me rope so now I'll hang myself. We're all on this forum to talk about power or dE/dt, we've gotten our head around the mapping between various power levels and the primary metabolic processes that they target. We've also gotten around to an understanding that it's a continuoum and even if we're targeting one metabolic system the others are affected to some degree. And if we were all time trialists we could think of steady state efforts at our target durations and pretty much be done with it.

But we're not all time trialists so with this microinterval discussion we're now talking about dP/dt or dE^2/dt^2 or developing the ability to accelerate from one power to another. Pretty important stuff to the crit rider, points racer, miss and out racer or mass start anything racer. The contentious workout sounds like L4 work, but it's a silly way focus on steady state L4 so the only reason to do it is to work on snap, acceleration or in other words dP/dt. Maybe there's not a perfect bucket in the 7 level schema for this kind of workout but it comes closer to L7 based on the "neuro" training it targets than anything else so that's where it fit in the book.

Close enough summary?