Endura Thermolite: tights do, not sure if bib-tights do as well. And they're water repellent up to a point.rickshaw wrote:Going back to the original point of the thread.
Does the club's bib tights have extra layers to keep knees warm? and if not what alternatives do people recommend.
[Training thread - was Its getting cold]
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It's a shame to let such an eclectic thread die just because the question's been answered! So here's an infusion to get it walking again... I've heard lots of reasons for long, steady 'base' training, but protecting red blood cells was completely new to me. So I dug around and found lots of fascinating facts about the "lifecycle of the erythrocyte" (red blood cell - RBC - to you and me). Among the things I learned were:1. Blood volume increase, the higher you beat the more presure you put the new blood cells under and therefore the more that burst and don't reach maturity.
* Various kinds of stress including exercise push down blood oxygen and stimulate the kidney to release more erythropoietin (EPO)
* EPO stimulates the marrow in long bones to produce more "Proerythroblasts" - baby RBCs.
* It takes about 4 days for these to develop into mature RBCs and enter the circulation. Haemoglobin in the RBCs does the work of carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide to and from the muscles.
* RBCs typically live for 4 months before they degrade and get gobbled up by macrophages in the liver. Most of the components (eg. iron) can then be recycled for use in new RBCs.
I found loads of research into athletic stress and RBCs, most of it focused on 'haemolysis' - which is the break up of mature RBCs while still in circulation. I didn't find a systematic review, but the papers seemed to focus on 'foot-strike' damage caused by physical impact (during running especially) breaking up the cells, or 'oxidative stress' following high intensity exercise. And the some concluded that there was no 'foot-strike' damage, while others concluded that although oxidative stress causes haemolysis in untrained subjects, for trained athletes it did not (link).
I didn't find any research into the negative effects of hard training on pre-mature RBCs at all. So Brian - have I missed something or are you sitting on some top-secret sport science data?
The age at which the RBCs are most vulnerable would make a big difference. If hard work kills the young ones, it would make sense to go easy until a few months before your race season and so build up a stock of mature cells. But if it's the older ones being affected, the best response could be a long taper before competition... then of course you need exercise stress at some point to push the body into making EPO, so there will always be a balance. (Nobody said sports physiology would be simple!)
Tom - interesting, but at a tangent to my point which Brain didn't answer and/or I didn't explain properly, so I'll just try and make that point clearer.
Training stress ~ intensity * time
So doing low intensity training all the time works for pros because they can make every ride long. Works for them, doesn't mean we should all copy it.
My point is that it doesn't work for your average club rider. Doing a 60-90 min ride at endurance pace isn't producing any training stress on the body at all. It could be a useful recovery ride, but that's it. Even to build a base on needs to up the intensity out of that 70% MHR zone.
Using a power meter and Training Peaks WKO+ really helps here as it lets you chart overall training stress as a function of intensity and time, so letting one build a base gradually while not having to do everything at very low intensity
Brain: I'm not saying just go out and trash all winter. Far from it. But I am saying that throwing in some work that's heading towards threshold power is a big win.
Training stress ~ intensity * time
So doing low intensity training all the time works for pros because they can make every ride long. Works for them, doesn't mean we should all copy it.
My point is that it doesn't work for your average club rider. Doing a 60-90 min ride at endurance pace isn't producing any training stress on the body at all. It could be a useful recovery ride, but that's it. Even to build a base on needs to up the intensity out of that 70% MHR zone.
Using a power meter and Training Peaks WKO+ really helps here as it lets you chart overall training stress as a function of intensity and time, so letting one build a base gradually while not having to do everything at very low intensity
Brain: I'm not saying just go out and trash all winter. Far from it. But I am saying that throwing in some work that's heading towards threshold power is a big win.
Tomf - second reply 
It's know that hemocrit levels should fall naturally with intense exercise (e.g. levels should fall over a grand tour, so constant levels are suspicious). I can't give you a formal reference for that, but it's been mentioned in various doping articles.
That's not an argument for only going slow all winter though: for most riders they have plenty of time off the bike to let things recover.
It's know that hemocrit levels should fall naturally with intense exercise (e.g. levels should fall over a grand tour, so constant levels are suspicious). I can't give you a formal reference for that, but it's been mentioned in various doping articles.
That's not an argument for only going slow all winter though: for most riders they have plenty of time off the bike to let things recover.
Hmmm... I may have missed something but I think the point that Brian was making (and Tom's followed up) is that endurance pace training raises blood volume (and hence, eventually, number of RBC's) by bringing about a response to the body's demands to get more oxygen to the muscles for given effort (along with more blood vessels to carry the blood).
Using WKO+ is helpful but all it tells you is the overall stress, not the intensity. What Brian seemed to be arguing is that at some point increased intensity is counter-productive in that it gives you fewer RBC's and not more. What seems unclear is at what level that happens. I can see a logic whereby 90mins at endurance pace might be more useful for this physiological process than 90mins at tempo or sub-threshold - but only if this balance tips at quite a low intensity. Most of the training stuff I've read suggests endurance pace as being 70-80%MHR - so above the 70% level that Brian suggests. Brian?
Using WKO+ is helpful but all it tells you is the overall stress, not the intensity. What Brian seemed to be arguing is that at some point increased intensity is counter-productive in that it gives you fewer RBC's and not more. What seems unclear is at what level that happens. I can see a logic whereby 90mins at endurance pace might be more useful for this physiological process than 90mins at tempo or sub-threshold - but only if this balance tips at quite a low intensity. Most of the training stuff I've read suggests endurance pace as being 70-80%MHR - so above the 70% level that Brian suggests. Brian?
Hi Arthur - yep, I use WKO+ so I know how much increased intensity ups the TSS - it's interesting stuff. But my question (and it is a question - I'm only going on what I've read) was really about what's most important at this time of year - overall stress or the process of increased blood volume which Brian talks about, and at what level of intensity does the latter process diminish?
I went mad back in the summer and (as AndyJ kindly put it) blew my pension fund on SRM's. I'd found the Garmin very useful the past two years but had vaguely planned on shifting on to training with power. Since I move up in vets racing from the oldest in the 40-49's to being the youngest in the 50-59's next spring, I reckon it's my biggest chance at glory, so have a Winter Of Suffering lined up. I got enough data during the tail-end of the season to know where I'm starting and have set some serious but (hopefully) achievable targets for the upcoming months. All fascinating stuff, but then I'm a complete nerd.
I agree with Arthur's contributions to this thread and his general message that 'slow in winter' is simplistic and not the best use of an amateur's time. But I'm going to disagree with this point in a slightly roundabout, and hairsplitting way.My point is that doing 90 mins at endurance pace isn't long enough to provoke a training response in an already fit rider.
If there's one thing I *hate* about the whole 'build a solid base in winter' mantra it's not the training advice itself, but the misleading physiological picture it promotes. All this talk of pyramids, building blocks, firm foundations and so on, makes fitness sound like building a house - dig out the foundations, aerobic ground floor, anaerobic upstairs, lactic tolerance roof, psychological chimney, whatever. But you can't set a piece of fitness in place and build on it - the body is a collection of systems in dynamic equilibrium and nothing stays where you put it. Everything tends to return to default, untrained state unless you continually maintain or develop it.
So a 90'@75% session does have a training effect on a fit rider - it maintains aerobic fitness better than no training at all, by delaying deterioration in aerobic condition. In fact I reckon it could be a useful summer session, and not just for recovery.
Maintenance is a useful idea. One way to look at seasonal training (which I guess is what half of this thread is about) is as an attempt to develop complementary systems (mainly aerobic and anaerobic pathways) which unfortunately have conflicting training stimuli (you can't train hard and soft at the same time, and even if you did so on successive days the effects would still interfere).
A sensible response is to alternate between bulding and maintaining each system over several phases. So for me, winter training is about aerobic development with anaerobic/speed maintenance. And that means doing a few AT and even flat-out sessions a month as well as the steady stuff, on the principle that you can drop frequency as long as you keep the intensity of your maintenance sessions. Come summer and it's the other way round - build speed, maintain aerobic - although it also makes sense to flip back into 'winter mode' after key events if you really want to optimise a long season.
On this view, even if I were training 25hr per week as a pro I would still want to include fast sessions in winter. If you want year-on-year improvements you have to try to maintain your gains year-round. Especially as training effects on muscles are very specific, both to speed and force of contraction. A racer who just goes steady all winter is going to have to rebuild their neural recruitment patterns to make their pedalling efficient at high cadences and forces when they start racing again.
Maybe the housebuilding analogy isn't so bad after all, but the bricks are made of mud and you have to keep shoring them up or the whole thing slowly slumps back to the ground...