As we're heading into the winter and a long base season, it's the perfect time to consider why we dial our training back to lots of easy work.
The benefits of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) are profound. Research has well documented the benefits of HIIT for improving VO2 max, Functional Threshold Power (FTP), lactate buffering capacity, and many other adaptations. While HIIT is an essential component of any athlete’s training programme and they should be incorporated regularly, more is not always better. For many athletes, the best way to continue improving is likely to increase training time at lower intensities. While it may not seem like it, low-intensity training has profound benefits, including improving your FTP and top-end performance.
Riding Harder Isn’t Always Better
It seems logical that to increase your FTP, you would need to train at high intensity, right? The line of thinking is that to get fast you’ve got to go hard all the time — a common pitfall for many cyclists. It’s important to understand that every workout has a cost-to-benefit ratio.
COST: the physiological strain that it places on your body plus the time it takes to recover
BENEFIT: the total fitness you can gain from the session
WE WANT WORKOUTS THAT GIVE US THE GREATEST BENEFIT AT THE SMALLEST COST
Intervals have a huge benefit but also come at a great cost. If you do too many intervals, you may see rapid improvements for a short time; but over the long term, you may end up overtrained, stagnant in your progress, or at risk of injury. This is why intervals should be used with caution.
Comparatively, Zone 2 training also has a huge benefit to your fitness, but at a much smaller cost. Training within Zone 2 can be repeated daily with little risk of overtraining, and regularly exposing yourself to this stimulus over time will yield great results.
How Does Zone 2 Training Improve Your FTP?
It’s all in the cells. Exercising at low intensity for prolonged periods of time instigates repeated muscle contraction, which increases calcium levels within the muscle. This activates a pathway for aerobic adaptations including the creation of new mitochondria. Mitochondria are responsible for aerobic metabolism, and with more of them, your FTP can increase. Studies have found a significant correlation between time spent training at low intensity and Ironman competition performance, thus indicating an increase in lactate threshold.
However, it is important to include a combination of both modes of training in your programme. However, since low-intensity training is much less taxing than high-intensity training, you can improve your fitness further by adding more low-intensity volume with smaller risk of overtraining.
Adding More Zone 2 to Your Training Plan
If you were to compare a professional cyclist’s training to that of an amateur cyclist, you’d find that many amateur cyclists do more total minutes at high intensity than the pros! Only 5-15% of a pro’s total training time is spent at higher intensities — the rest is spent almost entirely within the low-intensity zones.. Clearly, riding at low intensity is an effective way to train! But this doesn’t just apply to the pros — it applies to you, too.
Current evidence suggests that there is no added benefit in doing more than a couple of high-intensity sessions per week, as anything beyond that will not create any additional beneficial adaptations but can, in fact, increase the risk of overtraining and fatigue.
This applies to pros and amateurs alike. Therefore, perhaps the best way to continue improving is by adding volume in Zone 2.
For the time-crunched athlete, this may not be what you want to hear, but there is no magic interval workout that can replace time on the bike. Every athlete should take a look at their training distribution to make sure they are training enough within Zone 2. Ideally, approximately 80% of your training sessions should be low-intensity Zone 2 sessions.
This will allow you to make additional gains with little risk.
Combined with appropriately prescribed interval workouts, adding low-intensity volume to your training will yield beneficial results in every aspect of your cycling, including your top-end fitness. While it may seem contradictory, going slow can help you go fast!
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