Training Zones and Training Zone Builder - part 1

0:00  Welcome again to this webinar about training zones and training zone buildup part one. Part two is going to happen in five days from now. You're going to get an email. You're going to see the link at the end of this webinar. So you can make sure that you don't miss it. Okay. And again, we're going to send an email to all of you, to everybody who attended. Attendant this webinar, you get an email with the link to the second one. This webinar is being recorded. And the first part is going to be, or the first, yeah, first pillar of this webinar is to talk about training zones in general,

0:39  where they come from and different training zones. Then we're going to look at the training zone builder in the inside software, how that works in general, what's the idea behind it, technically how it works. And then we go to a Q&A. Next week, in the second webinar, we are then going to look more into the practical application of the training zone builder. So after we learned what is the training zone builder about in general and how to use it, next week, in the next webinar, when we are going to look at practical applications, example training zones,

1:16  example applications in different sports, example applications for different training purposes. And again, next webinar, you're going to get an email about it, you get an email invitation, and you're going to get the link at the end of this webinar. Okay, so let's start. Agenda for today. Why training zones and what are training zones used for? Then we're going to look a little bit into training zones in different sports in different countries, just examples, because there are so many. It would be virtually impossible to cover that within, you know, it would take weeks to cover that.

1:51  Then we are going to look a little bit deeper dive technically into how training zones are described and determined. And then we're going to get a step back, you know, take a step back and start thinking about, okay, what is the intention behind training zones in the first place? And then we're going to look into training zone builder, how to create training zones with it, and then Q&A. Next week's Tuesday, link going to follow, email about invitation going to follow, is about, you know, starting where we ended today,

2:26  how to create training zones technically, and then we're going to talk about the metrics which are in the training zone builders, example zones, and then most common metrics, most common zones that you might want to use, and also some misunderstanding that people might have when it comes to defining training zones, and then of course Q&A. Okay, so let's start with today, our webinar for today. Why training zones and what are training zones used for? And I decided to start with this graph because when we looked at and we researched for most common training zones,

3:03  many, many training zones and many, many sports historically are derived from lactate curve testing, like you see here. So, you know, an athlete would go into the lab, or sometimes even a field test, would capture lactate together with heart rate, and then different lactate levels are defined as different training zones. That is kind of, you know, one very common. Of course, nowadays we have percentages of MDP and other training zones, percentages of power duration curves, speed duration curves, stuff like that. All cool. We are going to talk about this,

3:40  but just as an example, basically, why training zones and what they're used for. So, why training zones? Why have training zones become so popular, so common sense, what are the good things about it, and what is maybe not so good about it? So, training zones are useful, especially to understand, especially also for athletes, or to provide an easy understanding that training intensity can be distinguished. It's possible to distinguish between the higher and the lower intensity and everything in between, right? And some training zones more than just have two or three intensity zones,

4:21  some have eight or seven or five or what's there. And it basically helps to cluster that, right? To understand, you know, in terms of communication, also to understand better. And that's the second point. Communication and defining a common language, so that a coach and an athlete can communicate, right? Imagine an athlete comes to you and say, I normally train at 150 watts. I normally run at a pace of six minutes per kilometer. That's my whatever is so training. It doesn't tell you a lot, but when he says or she says,

4:59  I train in zone XYZ, that is my, you know, my threshold zone is 300 watts, my base training zone is 200 watts, my tempo zone is five minutes per kilometer, then you kind of get an idea, there's some context to that, that helps understand what intensity is that. So it helps with the communication, right? It is trying to create a common language and a common understanding, so that the coach and an athlete can talk and the coach and coach can talk when they talk about prescribed training.

5:32  That's a huge benefit about training zones. And it helps to classify training. Think about training logs, right? You will most likely look at time spent in a specific zone, for example, or time prescribed in a specific zone, right? So again, it is useful because if you want to have a relatively quick analyzes as an understanding of, let's say, a week of training, right? You look at a week of training, you look at a month of training planned, a week of training recorded, an annual training plan, whatsoever,

6:09  a first understanding and high level and quite good understanding of what has been done in training would be to, you know, put training into these brackets, into buckets and say, this was low intensity training, this was endurance training, this was threshold training, view to max training, so on and so forth. And understand how much time and how much percent of your training you spent in each zone. Very common thing. Gives you a good understanding what approximately happened in training. Okay, perfect for that.

6:41  Now there's a downside to it. Why are training zones not useful or where training zones come short or what kind of problems training zones can create? And one is that training zones primarily only define the intensity. So the training is somehow reduced to intensity, right? It is a speed and it's normally not including because then we already would be at a workout or a training program. It is kind of ignoring or some habit, some recommendation, but normally all more or less or, you know, ignores the time of the training,

7:23  which is also a problem we talk about time spent in the zone because obviously it is a difference. It is a difference if I pedal at 600 watts, you know, consecutive for 300 seconds or if I do 300 times one second. It should be clear that it is a totally different physiological stimulus. The time spent in the zone gets then kind of difficult because it doesn't really paint the complete picture. Okay, but main problem is it only classifies intensities.

7:59  Second problem that often happens is that it creates impression that there is a clear boundary, a clear threshold that you could precisely distinguish between, let's say, a base training zone, a tempo training, a threshold, a mute to max zone, or whatever you want to call it. right? And of course, there is no clear cut, no clear threshold between those two zones, right? For example, back in the days, I don't know how it's today, actually, but back in the days when I was using polar heart rate monitors,

8:35  you can set five zones in there, but the one zone would always start at the heart rate the other zone finished. So if my zone one would be until 130 up BPM heart rate, then the next zone would start at 131, right? So there's no room in between and it creates this idea that there's a hierarchy, that's a clear, linear relationship. You go from zone one to zone two to zone three, which oversimplifies things. And now, the third thing is the problem in communication. Remember, we said there's a benefit

9:13  because now you can communicate and you can say, oh, simplified, he was training in this or that zone. On the other hand, the problem is there's so much confusion about misunderstanding about these zones. And my most prominent example would be there's a zone classically in German triathlon and in German cycling, which is WSA, which means like race-specific endurance zone. And in triathlon, this is like almost the highest intensity zone you can ever have. And in cycling, it is, you know, a good step below that in terms of intensity.

9:58  And I use that anecdote or example because, again, it's the same country. It is relatively close sports, right? We're not talking about, you know, canoeing in, I don't know, canoeing in Canada and track and field running in Italy, right, which is different countries of the sport. No, it's in the same country even. And similar ways how to define zone based on lactate and so on and so forth. They carry exactly the same name and are totally different in terms of intensity. And this creates, basically, the fact there are

10:37  so many different definitions and ways how to create training zones, it creates easily a mess and misunderstanding what somebody understands when you say, oh, that is zone one, that is zone two, that is zone four, that is zone six, and then another system might not even exist. So, some things, right, so that's kind of the thing that it helps with communication, but it also creates problems with communication. Okay, now we're going to dive into some examples. I think I have five examples of different zones. This one is in German,

11:13  so I didn't find it in English. This is German cross-country skiing, and what you can see is there's four zones in terms of on the left-hand side, you can see it is, it is, you know, prescribed as I1, it could be intensity, for example, intensity one, two, three, and four kind of mix together, and then there is five, and then there is also race. So, now the funny thing here is why I brought this up, because it starts to mix different things a little bit, because here's a method,

11:47  like here's intensity, and here's prescribed how you should train that. That Xdm means like an extensive, so long, slow distance, like continuous training, no interval training, and an extensive training, so low intensity training, right? And this Im means like interval training. So, it is not only the zone, but it already in the same table tells you how you should train that, continuous training versus interval training, right? That's already in there. And then you even mix in races, basically ignoring that a race could be a mixture of all those zones,

12:26  okay? And then there are guidelines, which is what you normally expect from zone guidelines in terms of the heart rate as a percentage of the maximum heart rate, then very, very common, lactate concentrations, right? And then on top of that, and you're going to address that a little bit, there is, yeah, VO2 max values, right? How many, how much percent of your VO2 max are you going to use in that specific zone, okay? And then there's a description of what happens in this zone, which makes it maybe

12:56  even more difficult to define, because again, it raises that impression that the adaptations in zone number one, and two, and three are really significant different. for example, when you talk about whatever, hero of agitation, maybe it's not, okay? But just as an example, okay, I'm going to bring some more examples with that. Then, next one, Norway, Norwegian Olympic Federation has this zone model, and the nice thing is they kind of combine two. So they have the five zone model, which those funny things, they start with five,

13:31  the Germans started with one. Anyway, it's a little bit similar when you compare it, zone one, you know, 0.8 to 1.5, what may be referred to below 1.5. So it's a little bit similar here, 1.5 to 2.5, and 2.5 to 4, you know, sorry, that is maybe a little bit similar to here, 1.5, 2.5, 2.5, 4, it's very similar, and then they put also heart rate percentage in there, and then they refer it, so they decode it, so they translate it into the three zone model, which is,

14:08  you know, summarizing the lower two intensity zone as one zone, the middle zone as one zone, and then basically, ish, yeah, I don't mean, don't be angry or mad at me, four millimoles and above, you could say threshold and above, right, approximately, zone three model, and then they translate it into an even more simplified model, a binary model, which just say low intensity and high intensity, right, so, nice, nice, nice story to kind of combine things, but obviously then it simplifies, you know, even more, because obviously

14:43  there might be a difference if you are lactate 2.5 or 10, even though both here would be called high intensity zones. Just another example how things are done. Now, here's canoe, canoeing sport, in this case, this is from the Canadian Federation, and you don't need to read all of that, but the main difference is that here, the intensity is primarily not prescribed as a lactate or especially no VO2 max is given, and you can see here in the middle is HR for heart rate, that's also not given,

15:20  but the focus is really on speed as a percentage of the 100 meter, sorry, 1000 meter best time, and there's a stroke rate, which in cycling would be the cadence or something. That's kind of funny because you don't find this in running and cycling, really, that you have the training zone with a cadence, so to speak, there, right? And then lactate is listed somehow, but you see that in brackets to be set individual. So heart rate, same comment, not even included, and lactate, yeah, you know, be listed,

15:57  but, you know, it's highly individual. And again, training zones here is based only on the speed, totally ignoring any lactate, VO2, heart rate, whatever value that you might be used to from other sports or depending on what your background is. And then, of course, we need to talk about FTP-based training zones, which have become very popular, especially in the US and especially in the world of cycling, right? And this basically has very classic zones in terms of recovery, endurance, tempo, threshold, VO2max, anaerobics. That's really kind of similar

16:37  to a classic European lactate threshold, anaerobic threshold kind of approach, right? Because if you look at all those zones, they kind of follow the same functionality, right? Endurance up to 75% of threshold, tempo, then around threshold, above threshold, so on and so forth. And the only difference here basically is that threshold is substituted by functional threshold, right? So, but this is basically where it's coming from. And then for cycling specific, there's this extra as the neuromuscular power, so to speak, added. Because, again, historically interesting, why is that

17:15  not existing? Like, you know, until what I'm saying is until zone 6, that's approximately the same you would have done in terms of zones in the past 30 years in Europe, in Germany, in Italy, where, whatsoever in your lactate testing. Zone 7 would not be there. Why not? Because you don't have this high power range lactate test, right? When you have your training and race data from a power meter, you will see stuff, of course, 50% higher, so 150% of threshold and above, because you have this data.

17:48  So the data is there, so it needed a range, and this is what zone 7 does for you, basically. Does it make sense? And then one, we translated here is example training zone from German swimming. You can see very similar again. Now we are from I to IZ for intensity zone 1, which is like recovery. Then we go to 2, which is, you know, the base, long, slow distance, aerobic, and extensive zone. This 3 one would be your tempo or whatsoever, but then there's more like that,

18:25  like there's like, again, tempo zones, which are very similar, and it basically goes up from, you know, lower lactate concentration, you can see here, to the higher lactate concentration, so it's a very similar, very similar approach, and then on top of that, you can see the heart rate, it tells you about what VO2 max that should be, and now, because it's swimming, it goes even into the resting period, which already implies, in contrast to zones we looked at before, which were like, you know, continuous mass, interval mass,

18:57  you know, stuff like that, it already implies that this is all intervals, because it gives you resting time, this is because it's swimming in the pool, and it's kind of a given common sense, that you always have resting intervals in between those things, zones, okay, so many different zones, basically, but you can see the overlapping, right, you can see the overlapping here, from, you know, about the names and how they define lactate and percentages of VO2 max, and something like that, it's all very, very similar to what you

19:31  might have been used to, but there are problems with that, of course, we need to address a little bit, and you need a little bit critical about that, to understand those zones better, as said, those zones, especially the lactate and VO2 ones, and therefore also the ones that is percentage of FTP, because it's a very similar one, so maybe except, maybe all the exceptions we just looked at, except for the canoeing one, which was a percentage of the maximum speed, are kind of historically linked back to lactate

20:07  and VO2 values, so kind of go back to the 70s, 80s, especially 80s, where all this lactate lab testing came up, and, well, the problem is that, especially also in the communication, I had myself just similar cases very recently, is that the lactate and VO2 data you have in the lab is not necessarily what you see in training, which makes a transfer very difficult, because think about it, when I'm saying, when I state that my zone XYZ doesn't matter, happens in a certain lactate concentration, the determination,

20:43  so how this is defined, how this is calculated, is derived from any kind of lab testing, okay, and now the question is, basically, would you really see the same lactate concentration when you're out there, so does the same happen in training, and here's the first problem, which is VO2 max, or VO2 in a specific zone, right, you've seen that training zones are often, you know, based on, or describes a certain percentage of VO2 max, and it goes back to the problem that the training zone doesn't include the

21:19  time, right, because it's only about intensity, right, respect that, now, this is VO2 kinetics, for easy exercise, so moderate, heavy, very heavy, and severe exercise, right, and what is known, and what most of you will know, is that at this above a certain threshold, that you can describe like here, max, molecular, steady state, critical power, name it, FTP, whatsoever, so when you go to see severe or heavy exercise domain, there's no steady state anymore in VO2, but VO2 raises, it increases as a function of time, which is what

21:55  you can see here, right, the dashed gray line, in the heavy exercise domain, VO2 goes up this time, so, therefore, if you only give the information about the intensity, which would be the intensity that triggers that reaction, you cannot really say at which percentage of VO2 you arrive, because, because it depends on the time, right, let's give you an example, at this heavy exercise intensity, the VO2 that the athlete reaches is different at the beginning of the exercise towards the end of the exercise, because VO2 is not steady,

22:35  it's not stable, it increases all the time, and now you might say, okay, wait a second, this is all very picky, I'm just here to learn about the training zone builder stuff, fair enough, but we need to cover that a little bit, because you will run into the same problems with the training zone builder, in terms of misunderstanding, because this is exactly what you're going to see in the training zone builder, percentage of VO2 max, and it changes with time, for this very reason, what you see

23:03  here. The next big problem is about the lactate, everybody is familiar and knows this chart here, which is plotting the lactate concentration of the y-axis over the speed or power or whatever, so over the intensity, and what this graph technically tells you is that, conceptually speaking, so to speak, is that lactate is an exponential function of the intensity, right, these days we are very familiar with exponential functions, that is what it does, and the low intensity lactate is more or less constant, and if you, once you hit a

23:42  certain intensity it goes up more or less exponential, okay, so, that is known, and that basically prescribes the, the, the, the more less common sense, that lactate is a function of intensity, a change of intensity, and therefore, if you only stick to this one, you could prescribe a training intensity, like in this case where this blank arrow is, let's say we say in this graph 4.2 meters per second, you can say 4.2 meters per second, the lactate concentration is whatever, 2.5 in this case, right, so 2.5

24:26  is my training intensity for lactate, and therefore the speed the athlete should run minus 4.2 meters per second. If you only work with training zones and intensity, that's true. The problem is this. Now we're changing again. Now on the x-axis we have time, sorry, that isn't German, time is on the x-axis and lactate is on the y-axis. And just look at, let's say, 160 watts. 160 watts, or 170 watts, you can look at both, right? 170 watts, you can see that even though the power is always the

25:02  same, so the intensity we prescribed is 170 watts, but the lactate concentration is different for every single time that it was measured, right? Each black dot is one measurement, and you can see it's not the same for any point of time. That can happen. So how do you define that? How do you define if you say my training intensity is 6 millimoles? Yeah, 6 millimoles is what? You know, after which time. Same goes for the, let's say, for the 160 watts. So forget about that the lactate

25:37  concentration erases or increases all the time. Let's look at 160 watts, which is in this case approximately maximum lactate steady state or anaerobic threshold, right? Because the lactate stabilizes. Now, let's say we prescribe a training intensity 160 watts and we say this is 4 millimoles on lactate. Look at the red arrows. After two and a half minute, 160 watts is still below 4 millimoles and after five minutes is above 4 millimoles of lactate. So, same problem, right? Same intensity, different lactate concentration, just because the time is different.

26:15  Long story short, the issue here is lactate is not a function only of power, it is also a function of time. which then, historically, or not historically, let me take this back, they would say in a practical application, in a practical application, when you look at the scenario, somebody goes into a lab, does a step test and get training zones, right? and you apply those training zones, right? The guy from the lab takes, it's no offense because anybody, that's just technically the case, the guy from the

26:47  lab takes whatever the recommendation for training zones from cycling, triad, running, swimming, running, federation, doesn't matter, and says, okay, base training zone is at two millimoles of lactate. The problem is, it depends on the protocol, because for the very reason what we just looked at here, that's, you know, if you wait longer, 160 watts, you wait longer for the same given intensity, the lactate rises this time, it increases this time, for the very same reason, you get different lactate curves, depending on how long is one step in

27:24  your step test, and this is what you see here, this is intensity on the x-axis, and the light blue curve is a step test for five minutes, and the dark or darker blue curve is a step test for three minutes, and what you see is the lactate curve shifts to the right, so you have for the same given, look at the lines here, four millimoles for example, at four millimoles of lactate, for the same lactate concentration, if your step test is five minutes or three minutes, you get

27:56  a different speed, so then the question rises, okay, how good is then the prescription of, let's say, training zone, like we've seen, four millimoles of lactate, it's only valid, like four millimoles of lactate as a training zone is only valid if you know how it was tested, because if I would plot a curfew for eight minutes step duration or two minutes, a curfew would be different, okay, and then in training it gets even worse because in training, the next thing what happens, this is lactate concentration after the

28:33  end of exercise, so you stop the exercise and you measure lactate immediately afterwards, which is what happens in a step test, right, you go at whatever, 200 watts, wait for three minutes, measure the lactate, because you immediately afterwards, you go to 250, wait three minutes, measure the lactate, because immediately afterwards, you go to 300, what would happen if you would stop the test after 250 and continue measuring lactate for every minute, this is what you see in this curve, right, the lactate concentration at a high intensity

29:05  and a short duration goes up after the end of the exercise, just basically because it takes time for the lactate to arrive from the muscles up in the earlobe where you measure it, okay, so again, in a practical application, this can be an additional problem because what lactate concentration do you refer to? It's a step test at the end of the step, there's a previous step that's maybe already increased lactate concentration, and in a training application, you're maybe looking at an isolated speed, and that isolated speed in the

29:39  step test was maybe for intensity. In a training scenario, you're maybe looking at an isolated five-minute effort, but because in the step test, there was already an effort before that, the lactate concentration would be different. And in a training scenario, maybe measure one or two minutes after the effort, just for the sake of logistics or what happens in real life, versus what you see in the lab. So many, many problems or things to consider or take into account and be aware of when we talk about prescription

30:14  of training intensities based on lactate. Now, you say, okay, you know, the good thing is, if you don't do lactate, the good thing is, you do it all as percentage on FTP, which has the upside that you don't run into these lactate problems, right? So you don't have to deal with lactate concentrations in practical application and training in the field, which is the big upside, okay? Okay, that's good. However, here's also some things we need to look at, and I took one of the most prominent and

30:48  hopefully most easy to understand example, and this is, for example, zone number five, prescribing VO2max, okay? So zone five, the name is a little bit unlucky, so to speak, because the question is, is that zone five named VO2max zone because you reach VO2max or you train for VO2max, which is different because you can train VO2max also with zone one, two, three, four, and six, and maybe also seven, but maybe the name VO2max implies that you train VO2max, well, maybe not, maybe not more, less, or different, or better

31:22  than the other zone, but anyway, VO2max zone, what it's called here in this table, by this gentleman, 106 to 150% of FTP. Now, is that a good way, if this already brings us to the training zone, is that then a good way because now the upside is we don't have lactate, so we don't have individual physiologic responses, right? That's the downside, the upside is you don't have to deal with lactate, okay, but we don't have individual data. so here's problem, you won't run in with that, and some

31:57  of you might have seen that before. If you have two different athletes with two different metabolic profiles, you could also say two different types of athletes, two rider types in cycling or whatever, right? the endurance type guy, the guy with the lower anaerobic capacity, which is known and really nicely described in the literature, has his anaerobic threshold, represented here by this red triangle, very close to Biotomax, right? This is something known, some people describe it, you know, the utilization of Biotomax, or the ceiling versus their threshold,

32:36  I don't even call that, but it's known, right? It's common sense that when you have an endurance kind of athlete, anaerobic threshold is relatively close to the Biotomax, and if you have more like a splinter type of guy, the anaerobic threshold is further away, it's at the lower percentage of Biotomax. So now what happens if you prescribe training, let's say Biotomax, training, so the 115% of FTP. In the case of the sprinter, sorry, the endurance athlete, 150% of, let's say, watts is watts, and this is 4%

33:12  above Biotomax, because the Biotomax is already, yeah, the threshold is already at 90% of Biotomax, right? It's very close, and now if you just go 50% above, of course you are exceeding Biotomax. In the sprinter, it's different, because in the sprinter, in the higher anaerobic guy, the threshold is further away from the Biotomax. So if this guy does the so-called quote-unquote Biotomax interval, he's actually 16% below Biotomax. Graphically speaking, this looks like that. Anaerobic threshold, plus 15%, one guy exceeds his Biotomax, and the other guy is below

33:56  his Biotomax. And you could say, well, I'm not interested in Biotomax, but hey, wait a second, this is the definition of this training zone. The definition of the training zone is Biotomax training zone. And for one guy, we are talking about 104%, for the other guy, we are talking about 84%, which is 20% difference Biotomax, in the same individual quote-unquote prescribed training zone. Okay, so now we spent some time being really critical about training zones, so let us maybe go back a step. Let's go back a step

34:36  and think about what was the idea behind this training zone in the first place anyway.

34:44  Excuse me. And the original idea of a training zone is similar to the Biotomax training zone actually. The idea of why it's called Biotomax training zone because we want to understand at which intensity we maybe reach Biotomax. And maybe for some people that's even the most efficient way to train Biotomax, but that's a different discussion. And for the lower intensity zones, the intention was maybe or could be one logical exploitation could be. At the low intensity there is a low lactate concentration and therefore we assume that we

35:23  have a good fat combustion and this is why we define, why we determine, why we prescribe low intensity training at a low lactate concentration because we want to burn more fat and you measure lactate and when you have low lactate you can have a lot of fat combustion therefore this is a fat zone. Or you can say at the upper end, on the very right-hand side because they are I want to have an anaerobic training stimulus and lactate is something that comes out of the anaerobic metabolism

35:53  and therefore high lactate concentration for me means anaerobic training. So long story short the idea behind training zones is to get an understanding what is approximately happening at that intensity or at a specific intensity okay but the problem is that these training zones as we just discussed the training zones come from like lab testing so there is more like an historical background okay so what I'm trying to say is maybe lactate as I said here is a proxy for approximately the fat combustion should be high here

36:42  and approximately the anaerobic energy contribution should be high there right and we use lactate or people use lactate for that because that was the metric that has been available and it's not necessarily the best metric to do the job that's not the reason why the zones are prescribed and we're going to show you some examples and you will see what I mean the zones the reason why the zones are prescribed like they are is not necessary because this is the best way to do it but because

37:19  this is the metrics that are available let me go back to this one FTP based training zones Not saying they are good or bad or better or worse than lactate training zones that's not the point but why do we have FTP based training zones because it was a task it was a goal to prescribe training zones based on FTP right FTP was developed invented whatever you want to call that and then the question was okay how to utilize that because it's a proxy for threshold and historically

37:56  threshold has been used to define training zones so it's obviously logical that we use FTP in the same way to prescribe training zones as we said this is why it's very very similar okay so the reason why we have FTP prescribed training zones is because we have power meters in cycling and we can determine the FTP for whatever definition it is or accuracy along that discussion you can determine the FTP and therefore we have the ability to create training zones for that and this is why those

38:31  training zones list FTP next example European endurance sports European federations prescribe training zones based on lactate not because it is necessarily the best way to strike training zones no because it's the only quote of the only could have a hard rate in VO2 it is the most accessible metrics that they had right anaerobic ! Lactate threshold was invented found discovered whatsoever and then we had the idea okay let's prescribe training zones based on that and here we go not because it's necessarily the best thing out there

39:09  but because it was available from lab testing and lab testing is done regularly this Olympic sports ! right if it's still not clear what I mean oh sorry that's a typo it's not meter best time or meter right if you still don't know what I mean look at CANOO why is training zone prescribed as a percentage of 1000 meter speed because it's the best way to prescribe physiological adaptations meter speed percentage no because it is easy accessible it's easy accessible this is why it's prescribed like that

39:47  so this means that all the training zones that you find are primarily based on what is technically possible and available right and not what is the best what is available what tools do I have right and then I go from there or to say in a negative way if my only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a name so if I only have lactate then I can only prescribe training zones based on lactate if I only have percentage of meter speeds and I can

40:22  only prescribe it by then okay and so this leads me to the next point that is sort experiment how would training zones actually look like if we would not have those restrictions how would training zones look like if we would not have only lactate or we would not have only percentage of or percentage of best time or heart rate or VO2 just think out of the box how would you prescribe training if you would not have these restrictions what you would be doing most likely is look

41:04  at what is the goal of the training like we did already maybe fat combustion is a goal maybe high anaerobic ! Strimolus is a goal maybe to write VO2 Max as a goal whatever okay so you would think about what is the goal of the training and then instead of using a proxy like a lactate or percentage or something maybe you want to look at exactly that and then you would be thinking but there are some restrictions right so for example maybe I want to have a

41:37  training intensity which is in the ballpark of VO2 Max but my restriction is maybe I don't want the lactate to be too high could be a very common problem to solve let's say in triathlon training right or you could say I want a training zone for base training for long endurance training which triggers high fat combustion I want high fat combustion but I want to train there for hours so my concern is how many carbohydrates I use right or my concern is well I want high fat

42:14  combustion but I also know from scientific literature that I need a certain percentage of VO2 max so I would take this into

42:24  and now we are talking about some examples how we do that base endurance metabolism I just mentioned that right what would we do for example target fat metabolism and we would be interesting how much carbohydrate is burned how much fat burned because that is what you're interested in and aerobic stimulus for example mu mix right another way classic one would be threshold training right training at your anaerobic lactate ftp max lactate steady steady steady structure whatsoever what would you be interested in you come from a lab

42:55  testing background you would be interested in the lactate concentration maybe maybe this is the first training you would prescribe after rest day and you maybe prescribe times minutes so more than half an hour total and therefore you would be interested in how much carbohydrate to understand if you need to fuel for the next upcoming days classic other example would be as I mentioned VO2max interval right maybe my aim is to prescribe intensity and when you say intensity you actually have in mind an interval different to a

43:27  training right you say I want to have VO2max and this for you already implies it's an interval and the idea is to trigger your VO2max to send the athlete to arrive at VO2max and you do that as a goal but as I said you might be interested in okay what is actually the average VO2 for example which yet reaches and how much lactate ejector produce what lactate concentration another one would be recovery now we want to recover from this interval so the question you could ask is

44:00  okay I prescribe like we've seen intensity zone in German cross country I would be interested in these values VO2 and lactate after a certain distance or after a certain time duration because as we've just seen lactate and VO2 changes over time right so if you would start from scratch you would have all metrics available to you no restrictions then this is most likely what you would be trying to do for this rep training and this leads us to the training zone builder because basically the training zone

45:07  builder was created to do exactly that let me explain your training which you call base training your 2 max interval recovery tempo training your own words whatever you have in mind when you think about this training right that's your communication that is right that is your name and maybe zone or tempo doesn't resonate with you because you come from a different country you come from a different sport tells you nothing temperature maybe you call it medium because you are coming from Italy okay so that's your name

45:45  and then the target for example fat metabolism VO2 max !

46:04  training is you are interested and you want to base this training zone on and now there are restrictions how many carbohydrates did I burn what lactate accumulation did I have what lactate concentration did my athlete have how much of this VO2 max did you utilize this is the questions you are asking what is happening in this training zone and this is what the training zone builder is the training zone builder is allowing you to define exactly these things you can basically give a name to a zone

46:44  and you can you know define a master metric and then you can ask those questions you know what happens to whatever carbohydrates or whatsoever okay and this is exactly now I need to switch screens here excuse me excuse me if I'm not looking directly at you anymore because there's a camera you know what I can switch cameras maybe you should be able to see my screen now correct anybody is not able to see my screens and please right here in the chat okay so this is the

47:25  new version beta of inside you have this possibility here in the enough bar to change back to the old one and if you have rights to that as an admin you do have rights you can select training zone here and this brings you to the training zone builder basically and here you can add templates you can see very different templates there are templates that are public or global which is what you could call the default training zones and again the aim of this webinar is to show

48:03  you in the first step how to utilize that so I start with what I just said I'm going to add a template so first you give a name to the template the name of the template that's already for part two of this webinar so for next Tuesday the name of the template could be whatever running training zones or running training zones for marathon runners ! and you could have another template running training zones for 10k runs or off road or whatsoever right then you add a description

48:42  this context so that you understand what it's for and you select the sports which sports you wanted for right this goes back to the sports that you are using in your software okay and then you can put it active which is basically meaning until it's not active you and you cannot see it okay okay quick one more questions please at the end of the webinar okay now you give it a name okay like whatever base training you can give it approvision exact for base training zone and

49:20  technically is that something like a reference system reference system means nothing different sounds very fancy it's nothing different as how would you want your training intensity to be displayed so now this is running so you can choose from all different kinds of measures of speed meters per second kilometers per hour miles per hour or pace minutes seconds per kilometer per mile whatsoever okay so this one base training I want to have it in minutes and seconds per kilometer and now you choose this master metric so the

49:55  master metric again think about what was the aim of that training what is the aim of that training what you are trying to target okay let's say many people would come up and say I target fat metabolism I choose something different which okay let's do it like this second I call it aerobic okay aerobic training per definition then I should have something let's say where the energy contribution the target is energy contribution of percentage so how much of the energy comes from aerobic metabolism let's put it

50:35  to percent percent okay a little bit a silly training zone you would not probably do that but I think it's helpful to understand the idea behind it okay and then you can give it a lower end because in this case you could do whatever and the upper is which is kind of reverts because the aerobic energy contribution gets less this high intensity so the lower speed will be percent right because that's anaerobic energy contribution and the upper one would be here okay and I don't give an

51:17  additional value of a compresent and now I want to understand okay what's happening here what's happening when I define this intensity I want to know how many carbohydrates are burned and I would like to know how many fetus birth I would maybe like to know how many calories in total I've burned that's how it works let me give you another one percent FTP that would be a classic one right so I do a zone now and this is something what I really recommend for example I'm trying to

51:49  go here is start with zones that you are familiar with so if until now or you are familiar a lot with percentage of FTP then start the set you can do that again we start this that and then you have it here where is it anaerobic threshold percentage of the speed of power anaerobic threshold so this one here to target at 70 so down this could give you the speed or cycling power output at 70 percent of your threshold so what would you be interested in what is

52:33  that well a classic definition is phase training so you might also be interested in which is the percentage of carbohydrates and which is maybe the percentage of fat you burn there and because it's primarily aerobic training you might actually be interested in how much of your bio to max your ugl life maybe that's not what you're doing maybe you are coming from lactate lab test kind of background so then again let's choose maybe kilometers per hour because maybe that's what you have on your treadmill and okay

53:05  and then very straightforward we choose lactate concentration and we want to find the zone three minimums lower one is 2.5 upper one is it was one of the zones that we've seen you know one of the zones that we've seen in the many definitions of the federations right skiing swimming they had zones like 2.5 to 4 minimums okay and then I don't know what you're interested in because that depends on how was the definition oh maybe maybe an interesting piece connect these two here we go how about

53:43  that how about I define a zone based on three minimums of lactate and I want to see how much percentage of FTP is that or threshold is it and I can do the same here here I define 70% and go to lactate concentration so what I just did here I kind of linked two ways of defining zone one way I define the zone as 70% of threshold and one I define it as three minimums lactate and then compare to the other what would be the lactate concentration

54:16  70% of FTP what would be the percentage of FTP as three minimums of lactate right so you can do it like that another example like example here let's say very popular we would do FATMAX right we want to define FATMAX give me the speed or power would it be in cycling I can select several ones right so for example you can say FATMAX my athlete is training on the road and there is minutes per second but you also sometimes train on the treadmill in the studio and

54:50  therefore also want to give me a kilo meters power no problem you can have several of those references okay now we want to go percentage of not fat but FATMAX here it is this is percentage of the keto calories at FATMAX so I say my target is I want to target 100% of FATMAX should not be lower and here now it's a catch of misunderstanding this is the kilocalories of fat and FATMAX means the maximum amount of energy the maximum amount of kilocalories the athlete can take

55:23  from FAT so there is nothing higher than 100% because that's the definition of FATMAX right okay this is your FATMAX zone what you're interested in well let me tell you some athletes can do FATMAX zone for hours because their carbohydrate combustion rate is not that high for other athletes that's a problem so I choose carbohydrates maybe you come from an FTP based background so it might be interesting to understand which percentage of FTP that is because it's not the same for everybody some people have their FATMAX

55:58  zone at 60% some other people at 72% and because it's an aerobic training you maybe want to understand what is the view of max and because it's a little bit about maybe losing body fat you want to know maybe about what is the total energy the lactic is work here you go and so this is technically how you create those zones right the physiological values here carbohydrates lactate so on and so forth is always calculating for the target zone and that's important to understand and last thing

56:37  to show is also before we come to the Q&A is that a specific which is this additional value let me give you something more specific okay so let's say I go back to VO2 max okay for example could be VO2 max power or give me another one because we talked about that maybe lactate at seconds okay so what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to get my athlete maybe do something different maybe do minutes okay so I'm trying to get my athlete to lactate concentration

57:24  of 6 millimoles in an interval that lasts minutes again when you create this you have a specific training in mind I would not call it a workout better but it diffuses into that area right you have an idea right or in running as this is running example you could say 6 millimoles of lactate at meters right classic intervals on the track so we want to know because maybe that's something you do that's something you find in the textbook whatsoever you want to know the lactate concentration in 1000

58:01  meter intervals give me the speed that I need to run that the athlete needs to run to derive at 6 millimoles of lactate choose whatever you want to see that in you choose the lactate concentration and the target is and you say okay it should be and 7 and now you pick this additional value in this case it's distance distance and it is meters now what you get as a target you get the speed in minutes per seconds per kilometers the pace you get the pace of the

58:37  athlete that elicits a lactate concentration of 6 minimums this is the maximum lactate concentration afterwards not necessarily the one that you measure immediately after but you can measure 2 or 3 or 4 minutes afterwards okay so you get the pace that the athlete runs needs to run to arrive at 6 millimoles of lactate and now you can choose whatever you want right you can say I want to know how much of this do I trigger my BLM it's a very important metric I want to know what is

59:06  the lactate production rate that leads to that and maybe how much of the energy comes from anaerobic metabolism because that is you know this has a significant anaerobic energy

59:20  one that is maybe more cycling specific for example you can say well yeah 4 minute intervals right 4 minute intervals at you know typically would be 100% what people call VO2max actually this is not VO2max this okay now it's running so it's speed this would be percentage of VO2max power that's what people normally mean because again VO2max is max so you cannot go at 110% right if VO2max is the it cannot go to which is 110% so what you mean is the power that equals VO2max here you

59:55  go VO2max power target lower maybe upper maybe okay that is what you target that's what you want and going back to our training zone example maybe you want to know how much percentage of FTP settings because for some people it will be 120% of FTP for another one it will be 140% of FTP right and then you want to understand how much lactate was accumulated and how much of the energy comes from aerobic anaerobic metabolites and that's your training zone okay so this is technically why we do have the training zone builder

1:00:39  and it is also how you operate it okay and with that I think I've come to the end of part one of the training zone builder webinar exactly exactly exactly one hour sorry for that excuse me without Q&A but we stay on here for Q&A so whatever question you have please bring it up and besides that there's a second part which is then going to into more examples so today let me summarize we covered what are training zones useful for what is the up and downside communications

1:01:23  misunderstanding and so on and so forth and then thinking out of the box taking one step back and think about how we in the best possible way how would we how would we want to prescribe training zones and then we looked at how you can actually do exactly that defining training zones free of all the mutations using the training zone builder technically speaking how do you do it and next week hope you join again we are going to look at examples a little bit like we ended today

1:02:00  how would you set different training zones for different for different sports and different goals of training okay that was that I'm going to end here and we are going to talk about Q&A so thanks thanks a lot for that and yeah please send in your questions some questions are already here I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one

1:02:34  and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and I'm going to go to the next one and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and