[adam.don]

Hi Evoke,

Over the past year or so I’ve found your content, read both TftNA and TftUA, tried to apply the methadology in those books and experimented with training. I want to say firstly a massive thank you to you Scott, and the whole team at Evoke for what you are doing and the information you are providing, its an amazing free resource to the mountain community.

I have a few questions, I thought I’d inlcude them all under the Aerobic Asssesment but some of them are training methadology related, I can move them if they’re not allowed in here.

1. Variance in Aerobic assessment results

I am a mountaineer, rock climber, runner and ski mountaineer, but the first thing I applied your training ideas to was running, and I trained for a marathon with the principles in the books and online. I’ve done quite a few HR dirft tests over the past year, and I’ve found that I get quite varied results even when testing pretty close togther so I wanted to ask about that. The points bulleted below are factors that seem to affect the test, and I was wondering if you had any advice on them.

– On colder days, my HR response seems very different to that on warmer days. Sometimes on the order of 10-15 beats. I can do a test on a hotter day and have ~5% drift but have my HR be 10-15 beast higher than a colder day that also has ~5% drift. I understand the mechanism behind this, with your body having to cool your blood, however I am wondering since I often train at varied tempeatures (up to a 20C variation some between sessions some days, more as the seasons change), what is the best way to account / compensate for this.

– My HR response indoors seems to be very different, both HR and pace, than compared with outdoors. I will usually have a higher HR for a given pace, and am still able to maintain <5% drift indoors when compared with outdoors. I feel like this has something to do with the cooling effect of hte air moving past you outdoors, but I wondered how to compare or correlate these values or adjust for that?

– Some tests I have done I feel like I am into Z3, I feel the lactic acid building up slightly and it feels ‘fast-ish’, but the drift I get out of it is <5%. It seems to be somewhat inconsistent with me.

– Correlating these tests with nose breathing, I can often breath through my nose quite measured up into Z3 it seems. I did have surgery on my nose as a child to widen the passage due to some obstruction, so possibly this affects the effort at which I can maintain nose breathing. I try to not only focus on the ability to breath but the rate and effort of breathing and mark the transitions, but it can be misleading I find. Any advice on this or have you seen this before?

I know for each different modality, the metabolic turnpoints will be different, but I am wondering about these things in general to apply to whatever modality I do the tests for, in this case running but I would repeat the tests if I amd doing mountaineering focused training or any other modality.

2. Training methodology

I have been implementing a somewhat ad hoc training plan based on the books for a range of my sports, the principles apply to everything, however, I am struggling with learning periodisation.

I have roughly 22 weeks until a large alpine mountaineering trip over the course of 1.5 – 2 months. I am starting training now for that, and I will be focusing on endurance / fitness as well as techincal skills and strength. No worries if you can’t provide much insight into this, but my current plan is as follows.

I’ve been loosely getting back to training over the last 4 weeks, I’ve got the following roughly planned out.

2 weeks left of transition
slowly increasing volume, all aerobic runnign or hiking/mountaineering.
Some general strength work 1-2 hrs a week.

12 week capacity phase
3x 4 week cyles of 3 weeks build, 1 week recovery.
First two cyles are base building, max strength work, and technical skills in isolation.
Third cycle is switch to musclar endurance focus, use cut down max strength as warmup for ME.

7 week Utilisation phase
3 week build, 1 week recovey. Muscular endurance and more specific longer mountainerring trips focused on combined work and skill development.
3 week build, transition to mostly specific, combined work integrating technical and harder combined mountaineering efforts.

2 Week Taper
Taper volume down pre trip, stop all ME, focus on aerobic and techincal skills.

My questions around this are as follows:

1. In general, is there any glaring things missing in the plan or things to change?

2. I wondered about upper body (rock and ice/snow climbing) vs lower body (mountaineering) ME, should I do them along the same progression, i.e. Lower and Upper max strength, then transition into lower and upper ME, or should I try a different timing?

3. I know ME is extremely vital, do you think starting with General GYM ME and then moving into uphil caries in the later block would be a good approach?

4. Do you think the length of the total ME block is long enough?

Sorry about the mass of questions, I know some of this might fall into getting a training plan or talkign to a coach, so no worries if thats the case. I’m happy to get any answers you are able to, and will think about getting in touch with a coach if I need it. Many thanks, lots of appreciation for all that you guys and girls do.

[Scott Johnston]

Adam:

Welcome to the Evoke community. We are glad you found us.  That is a pile of good questions and I will do my best to provide answers but most of the answers will of necessity be general in nature.

1) Variation in aerobic assessment results:  

As you have grasped temperature affects HR drastically and there is no way I know of to account for the variation with varying temperatures when assigning intensity, especially with swings of 20C.

By ‘indoors’ I assume you mean on a treadmill.  While some of the variation in HR to Pace could be due to convective cooling outside, it is also very likely that your treadmill’s speed readings are not accurate and so you are not comparing apple to apples.  Only laboratory grade treadmills like the Woodway will provide accuracy and repeatability.  This article shows the fix I use https://evokeendurance.com/treadmill-season/

Your “feels like Z3 to me” comment:If it feels like Z3, feels fast and feels relatively hard then it is very likely Z3 (unless fatigue is the cause).  Do not become too data driven.  You have a very sophisticate built in feedback system in your nervous system.  Pay attention to the sensations in your training and try to correlate those to HR in a GENERAL way. We are not machines and so complex that to expect 100% repeatability is unrealistically.  From what you say it is possible that your AeT and AnT are quite close together and that is why on some days Zone 2 feels harder than others.  Fatigue and recovery status play a big role day to day.

2) Training Methodology

1) Your outline of the plan looks very solid.  Best not to get too detailed with this plan, like locking yourself into a weekly schedule 6 weeks out.  It is a waste of time to try to get too detailed that far in advance.  I like the way you have laid out the areas of focus.  The ME work is going to be the vital component that will really pay off in the mountains so before you have at least 8 weeks of a solid ME progression using steep weighted uphills carries.  A star machine is ideal for this.

2) Upper body ME should be done in as climbing specific modality as possible.  Cranking out hundreds of pull ups is great upper body ME work but doing something like weighted climbing on lower grade routes will probably pay off better.  Something like laps in a gym with a weight vest on a grade you can do 10minutes continuous climbing (climb up, climb down) will be a good session for alpine climbing.  Rest and repeat.  This can be done in conjunction with lower body ME work.

3) ME:  If you had a longer time frame then starting with the Gym ME and moving to the weighted steep hikes would be ideal.  Give the time you have I would stick with the most specific training which is weighted hikes.

4) You will see gains in ME in the first couple of workouts but getting in at least 8 week will be very helpful, 12 weeks even better.

I hope this helps.

Scott

 

 

 

[adam.don]

Hi Scott, thanks a lot for the replies. I tried to post a reply to you, but I am having trouble with the Forum saying I have already replied with a message. I’ll try to fix it but I hope I haven’t doubled up, anyawy, this was my response.

—

Thanks Scott, I really appreciate the responses. I’ll do my best to try ‘feel’ out my metablolic zones while using the HR zones as a guide. I think I am getting better at that as I get more experience in this type of training so I’ll continue with that. I guess being conscious of heat increasing HR for a given metabolic stress and trying to relate that day to day will help me more than just blindly following a number for a zone.

Ok thanks for the feedback on the my training plan, I think I’ll really focus on the ME block when I get to it, and I have a gym membership so I can do the majority of my uphil caries on the stair master. I do have a couple additional questions re ME and the plan

– Do you think 1 session per week, and just increasing the load and / or time is the way to progress, rather than two sessions per week (especially since I haven’t done any structured ME before)?

– When I transition to ME, should I entirely stop Max strength / other strength work? Or should I try to do a bit as a warmup say or an entirely seperate session contiuing it on? I suppoe when I move from max strength to ME, I can cut down the amount of strength work I am doing and then do some for a warmup, and maybe some conditioning strength (like the Knees Over Toes Workouts) as a supplement?

Many thanks Scott, I am so glad to have found this community, I look forward to spending more time in it and learning and applying as much as possible. I also wanted to say I love the podcast, and all the articles you produce, keep doing what you’re doing, we all greatly appreciate it and the mountain community is a lot better off for it.

[Author]

Posts