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Christian
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Hi Scott,
thank you very much for your reply! That clarification was really helpful.
As always: I enjoy how you give general guidelines but also tell the details and exceptions. 🙂Best whishes
Christian“You can’t bludgeon yourself into fitness.”
I love it! 😀 Admittedly, because I catch myself trying to do so from time to time. But it has become rare and I know better now. They say you cannot grow the gras by pulling at its leaves – but .. it is tempting. 😉
@Adam: I’ll share my experience and maybe you can draw something from it. If not, that’s perfectly ok.
Each person is different but some time ago I intensively pondered how I could flee a similar cycle of overstressing and exhaustion. There is a slogan “what gets measured gets managed”. So I thought, if I put all my focus on recovery, maybe I could shift my mindset to beat yesterday in terms of recovery instead of performance.
Consequently, I did an orthostatic test every day, tracked my sleep each night, wrote a journal of my body sensations, my emotional feelings and made that the benchmark to strive for – sleep better than yesterday, feel better than yesterday, become ill less frequently, etc. Instead of climbing mountains I watched documentaries about the mountains to at least imagine how it would be to be there. I have a wildflower meadow nearby and after rainfall it smells slightly similar to that fresh air we breathe in the alpine, but it’s only a short walk away. I also found it motivating to become better and better at noticing even more subtle sensations of lingering exhaustion, because I think training that is not turned into gains via enough recovery is more or less wasted time and effort.
Over time I noticed a psychological mind shift: Instead of being proud of how hard I can push myself, I now have a much more caring relationship with my body. I wasn’t sure whether one can point a type A personality at a different target. For me it proved to be possible over the course of about a year – with several relapses, of course. However, every mistake made me a bit more competent in reading my body. In the process I figured out that currently a 1-1 cycle with a recovery week of 50% is what feels best for me. And miraculously the aerobic threshold in my drift tests started rising. 🙂
I hope it is only a matter of time until you figure out the best way to train for your body. And I hope it is a valuable journey!
All the best
ChristianHi Bjorn,
I also asked myself your question 1) and 2) about the distribution of volume and I find your post interesting as it suggests there might be a connection to muscle fiber composition.
Unfortunately, I don’t have enough experience or knowledge to answer your question. In fact it feels like a missing piece to me. I can individualize intensity with the drift test, I can individualize volume by logging my fatigue levels, but what’s the naviagtion light for training frequency?
However, I can contribute an interesting article that I have read just recently which may contribute to the topic and your rehabilitation situation: https://athletesacceleration.com/the-plight-of-the-elite-fast-twitch-athlete/ . In the Uphill Athlete book it says we fast-twitch people need more Z1-Z2 aerobic base training. Combined with the “fast-twitch people are neurologically overpowered”-hypothesis from the article, I personally would not do ME training to not compromise aerobic development.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery!
Hi @pvoosen, thanks for your reply! It helps me too to think things through and understand these concepts precisely.
- I decided to write 5 bpm instead of 5% because 5 bpm of 95 bpm is 5.26% and 5 bpm of 100 is 5.00% … so the percentage value changes as you move the slope triangle along the line although the slope is the same. I wanted to refer to the bare slope without messing about with percentages.
- You may be right and TrainingPeaks does not adjust for duration. It was just a guess and after seing your research on the topic I would take my assumption back.
- But I completely agree with you, some compenstation for duration should be performed! An activity that produces 5% fatigue in one minute is definitely of different intensity than an activity that produces 5% fatigue over two hours. So to my mind only fatigue per duration can serve as a reasonable indicator for threshold intensity.
Hi pvoosen,
I thought about your post and I would agree:
When performing a 1 hour drift test and comparing the mean HR of both halfs, then the ratio it is equivalent to the HR drift per 30 minutes.The duration of the entire test and specifying the slope of the HR drift curve seems to be a source of confusion. I hope I can illustrate this with the above chart. In fact, we are always talking about the same slope but in different units.
As Shashi said it is more reliable to compare two means than to compare two single data points. At TrainingPeaks they say “Aerobic Decoupling values for efforts under 20 minutes in duration aren’t as valid” (https://help.trainingpeaks.com/hc/en-us/articles/204071724-Aerobic-Decoupling-Pw-Hr-and-Pa-HR-and-Efficiency-Factor-EF-). So in my drift tests I compare means and try to go as long as possible. Afterwards I adjust the percentage according to the duration of my test, to be able to compare drift tests of different duration. I assume TrainingPeaks does this duration adjustment of their pa:hr metric under the hood.
I hope I could help a bit. 🙂
ChristianHi Tamas,
wow, thank you for your post! Your results are really inspiring. I hope that in a few years I can tell a similar story … and never get tired. 🙂 Keep on and godspeed with going even bigger and higher!
Hello Scott,
thank you for your reply and your latest lecture! It helped a lot indeed, in particular your thought experiment where we increase speed step by step and imagine what takes place in our body. I imagined an armada of vacuum cleaners, one in each muscle cell, where the cells with bigger vacuum cleaners help out the cells with smaller vacuum cleaners.
I don’t know if you know the old series “Once Upon a time… Life”. It would be cool to have an episode about endurance – of course with some vacuum cleaners involved. 🙂
Hi Brian,
thank you very much for your reply! You are absolutely right, lots of context is missing and I am completely aware of it. The reason is that I do not want to make this a personal thread about me (I think this would belong in a private coaching session). I rather wanted to reach out to the evoke endurance community, share my experiences with negative drift and maybe find people that made similar observations.
My last post was meant to share what I found out, namely that I see a linear negative drift for slow paces and a kind of negative logarithm shape when I am not recovered. And if I go too fast, my drift is positive of course.
Have you ever observed negative heart rate drift in your training?
Kind regards
ChristianHi Mark, hi everyone,
since my last post I collected some more data. And as promised I want to keep you posted.
More and more I come to believe that there are two sources of negative HR-drift. The first is the warm-up effect you mentioned, Mark, for really low intensities. And the second is not being recovered and having to walk progressively faster to get and keep my HR up. In the second case I observe that I have to go faster and faster to keep my HR up and then I kind of “bounce back” and experience pronounced positive drift a little later.
Hi Mark,
thank you very much for your response and for bringing your expertise to the conversation! 🙂 I got a bit cautious with heart rates because unfortunately I drove myself into overtraining using the MAF-formula and I observed positive drift at a rate of 90bpm already. But you are right, at the moment I am quite slow. If I guess my AeT at 50 s/lap, then 80s/lap would be 50% below my AeT and therefore I might indeed be just seeing a warm-up effect.
Your input inspired me to plan some slow drift tests without warming up to better understand the dynamics of the warm-up phase. At some point the negative drift must come to rest. Maybe I can find out how long it takes me to warm up at certain speeds. It is so exciting to understand and feel your own physiological state. I will keep experimenting and I’ll keep you posted! 🙂
Hi Sashi,
I tried to attach a Microsoft Excel file, but …
From my perspective it makes sense to not allow .xlsx files in a forum for security reasons. I can send you the file via email if you want to put it somewhere on the evoke endurance webpage for the community to download it.
It is mainly the formulas that are worth sharing. It took me some hours to figure out the solution to the mathematical problem so I hope sharing them saves other people’s time and effort.
And I think it is nice to drift test, without the need for a smart watch, without a training peaks account, without uploading your private data to the cloud, … it is simple to use and on your local laptop. 🙂
But to keep the forum thread on topic:
Do other people also experience negative drift if they go really slow? Or is it just some of us? And what would this tell us about our physiology?Positive drift makes complete sense, but negative drift feels counterintuitive. I am curious to find people that know something about it or have made similar observations during their training. Maybe together we can solve the puzzle and understand where it comes from and what it means. 🙂
Hi Sashi,
thank you for your reply and for you question!
What is my target heart rate in these tests? It’s a whole journey! 😉Test 1: Shot in the dark
Warming up to 95bpm and holding it. Negative drift. => Let’s aim for 100bpm next time.
Test 2: Strange result
Tried warming up to 100bpm, but 90bpm felt fast already, so keeping 90bpm instead. Negative Drift. But lower HR at a faster pace? => Try again.
Test 3: Serious doubt
Warming up to 100bpm and keeping it. Negative drift. But higher HR and lower pace? => How valid can this drift test thing actually be? Let’s challenge its reproducibility.
Test 4&5: Challenging the test
Warm up to lap duration of 80s and keeping the HR that stabilizes at that speed. => The connection between pace and drift seems to be reproducible.
Test 6: Finding AeT pace
Warm up to a lap duration of 55s and keeping the HR that stabilizes at that speed. Slightly negative drift remaining. => My AeT pace seems to be a bit higher.My conclusions from this testing journey
– The connection between pace and drift seems strong and reliable.
– Drift does not have a reproducible connection with HR. (Thanks to Scott’s Tuesday Training Tip I now know that I wasn’t recovered for test 2.)
– I now train by pace whenever possible to avoid the risk of going too fast (like in test 2).
