Category: Fitness

It seems that I helped introduce Dave Rogers to gadget enabled fitness. In the year that I’ve had my Garmin Forerunner 305, I too have found the battery dead on a number of mornings. Somehow it’s unpluged from the USB port and turns on or was left on. It’s got it’s own port and tends to need babysitting in order to be ready to go when I need it.

Dave is working himself very hard, judging from the heart rates he mentions on the site and given that, like me, he’s 50ish. I’ve been heart rate training for many years now and have developed a good sense of how relative percieved exertion (RPE in the trade), heart rate and my recovery state interact.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I think that Clarke’s “5K and 10K Training” is the best introduction to self coaching I’ve seen. He uses heart rate, RPE and classic hard-easy patterns to build an adaptable framework  for training. For me it’s allowed me to increase my volume and intensity without being burnt out and getting sick as I had in the past. I’m stronger and more fit this year, even though I don’t weigh any less.

My favorite accessory for the Forerunner is Ascent, a Mac-only GPS/fitness program from Montebello Software. It’s been steadily improved and the developers are responsive to reports of bugs and issues. Another great piece of handmade software made possible, I think, by Cocoa and the Mac development environment.

In the last two months, I’ve added two workouts to my menu. Both are well suited to the winter weather and the extensive travel I’ve been doing.

First, I’ve been doing a 20 minute body-weight circuit in which I do 10 reps consisting of 30 seconds each of squats, pushups, lunges and jumping jacks. Each circuit then is 2 minutes. It’s a continuous, high intensity effort that pushes both strength and cardiovascular fitness.

Second, I’ve been doing 20 minutes of 8 second all out sprint with 12 seconds of rest on my indoor bicycle trainer. Using a high level of resistance, it’s similar in effect, but cycling specific.

I’m convinced, based on the work specificity that these efforts will push VO2 max and power. I can’t help but wonder how effective endurance builders they will be based on the specificity principle. While with warm up and cool down, a high intensity workout lasts nearly an hour.

As adaptation to a 20 minute workout is achieved, the question becomes whether to push intensity within the 20 minutes or to keep intensity constant and increase duration.

20 minutes is a convenient and achievable duration for high intensity workouts. By using intervals that allow rest (either as a circuit that rotates muscles or as intermittent sprints) sustaining a high level of cardiovascular effort can be combined with high power output. But I think that continuous power output, what Joe Friel calls “muscular endurance” is different from the VO2 max related abilities to clear lactate during short, high intensity efforts.

Yesterday I tried adding another workout on the bicycle trainer- a steady effort for 20 minutes at highest sustainable heart rate, about 90% of my 12 minute maximum effort on the Cooper Test. It felt about as hard as the 8 second sprint workout. I’m going to try to extend that effort from 20 out to 40 minutes for a full 60 minute workout.

Today I ran 20 minutes of random length intervals, Speedplay, at the suggestion of The 20 Minute Fitness Solution. I ran on the local high school track doing two 400 meter intevals as the longest and a bunch of 8 second run / 12 second jog cycles with a few sprints of varying length thrown in.

While I may just be enjoying the efficiency of these short, high intensity workouts and benefitting from the novelty and lack of adaptation due to my inexperience, I’m beginning to suspect there is something else going on here as they feel very natural to me. They are short, hard and fun.

It may be, as Clarence Bass speculates here that these high intensity intervals bring a higher percentage of muscle fibers into play- including fast and slow twitch fibers. If, as I suspect, I’m not a gifted endurance athelete, but I am strong, I may benefit more from training that recruits the stronger side of my muscular abilities.

This week in Baltimore we had record high temperatures- reaching 70°F yesterday. So I needed to get out on the roads and do some bicycle riding. The 20 min interval session of 8 seconds of work, 12 seconds of recovery works well indoors on a trainer. I was faced with how to push the intensity in a similar way on the bike.

On a quiet stretch of road, I was able to keep an eye on the elapsed time readout of the Garmin 305, but it’s not a reasonable way to ride. Eventually, I figured out that it was about 12 full pedal strokes in 8 seconds, so I pushed for 12 and then let up. On a short ride, I got into a rhythm of pushing 12, resting for about the same, driving my heart rate up to the same zone that I did on the trainer for a 20 minute session. On a longer ride, I just threw in 8 second intervals keep my heart rate up during a longer 90 minute extensive ride.

I’ve been reading Vern Gambetta’s weblog for some time now.

Functional Path Training: Variation: “The human organism is highly adaptable so it must be continually challenged with new stresses and increasingly challenging movement problems to solve.”

As a pioneer in Functional Training, he stresses that conditioning programs- endurance or strength need to be designed as preparation for the activity itself. At first, I thought this meant staying away from weight machines and using medicine balls and agility drills, but I’m beginning to think that the idea has much broader implications.

As I’ve explored some of the websites that favor high intensity interval training for general conditioning (Hillfit, The 20 Minute Fitness Solution, Mark’s Daily Apple) I’ve begun to understand that we may have been damaged by the “Aerobics Revolution” just as we have with low fat dieting.

Mark’s Daily Apple » Blog Archive » A Case Against Cardio (from a former mileage king): “Unfortunately, the popular wisdom of the past 40 years – that we would all be better off doing 45 minutes to an hour a day of intense aerobic activity – has created a generation of overtrained, underfit, immune-compromised exerholics. ”

There’s a strong emphasis on relatively low intensity, extensive training across the fitness literature. It led me for years to take long fitness rides, keeping my heart rate down. In reading Joe Friel and Brian Clarke last year, I began to get some idea of work volume and hard easy training, but in the end, my fitness over a good bit of the year was stagnant, especially when training time was short.

I now think that the problem is that the professional atheletes that these approaches have been developed for can stress themselves with very large volumes at the moderate intensities. I can squeeze in a 3 hour ride on some Sundays, but not all. And I can’t get more than about 10 hours of duration in a week. Once I’m adapted to the 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1 hr training week, I can’t get anywhere since I’m adapted to it. At first I thought that there would be some adaptation since more work could be done during the same time, but I’m now seeing that such gains will be limited.

As a 50 year old who’s been active for years, my limiter is no longer my 2-3 hour endurance at 60-70% of VO2 max. And I would probably gain little developing my 3-5 hour endurance even if I had the time. My limiters are strength and oxygen utilization (VO2 Max). I need to stress those systems to force adaptation and improvement in my ability to hike, run and bicycle.

Returning to Vern Gambetta, cycling through different activities that empahasize different abilities, while maintaining the overall base is likely to be the most efficient and productive means of functional conditioning. I think he presents some of these ideas in a practical way in this article: Rethinking Periodization.

On Sunday I wrote about how I tried to do a 20 minute interval session with my usual strength training routine, failing to get my heart rate into a cardiac training zone. I ended up going on to an 8 sec work / 12 sec rest indoor training session on the bike.

After a bit more research couresy of Hillfit again, I did my usual Pilates routine followed by a body weight conditioning effort for 20 minutes. All while wearing my heart rate monitor, the record of which is above. The first half is the Pilates and it’s clear that over 20 minutes my heart rate stayed under what I have marked as Zone 1, my recovery area. In the second half I did 10 cycles of a 2 minute circuit: pushups, squats, lunges, jumping jacks. My rate rose into Zone 3 and bounced around there depending on how continous my effort was. It was challenging both from a strength and a cardiac perspective.

I’m now pretty convinced that this kind of 20 minute workout can provide a strong training stimulus, although it won’t build endurance for long efforts. From my simple exploration so far, it seems that moving body weight is the key. Only the body’s prime mover muscles will develop enough power to provide the cardiovascular stimulus. Effort has to be continuous, or at least rest has to be incomplete to push heart rate toward lactate threshold.

207 Hours in 2007

Last Febuary, needing a new heart rate monitor, I invested in a Garmin Forerunner 305. It’s an oversized watch unit with a built in GPS unit, wireless heart rate monitor and, with a bicycle accessory, cadence sensor. I chose it because it was flexible for running or cycling and, most importantly, because I would finally be able to track workouts on the computer.

While Garmin had finally started supporting the Mac with it’s software, I ended up using Ascent from Montebello Software. Based on appearances, I presume that Ascent is a Cocoa based program that integrates with Microsoft TerraServer and Virtual Earth for mapping. While the maps and the workout data displays are nice, what I find most useful is the journal function

Since Feburary, I know I’ve lost a few hours of recording because a dead battery in the Garmin. And when I do my 15-20 minute Pilates stretch and core strength routine, I can’t wear the monitor. Weight training and any swimming haven’t gotten recorded either. So I’m tracking running and cycling for the most part.

Since the Journal tracks by day, week, month and year, today I finish the first calendar year with the system. Since I didn’t have the unit during January, I’ll need to extrapolate the missing data.

During 2007 I totaled 207 hours of activity. That’s about 19 hours a month or a bit less than 5 hours a week. Of course there was a good bit of variability with months ranging from 22 hours in April to a low of 14 hours in August. During the year I realized that time was a constraint- family, vacations and business travel making many days unavailable for exercise. One of my adaptations was to use those weeks as rest weeks and pile up extra activity in the week before if possible.

It’s clear that I could do better simply by being more consistant on easy days. I can also be a bit smarter about matching time to intensity. For example, when I have a couple of weeks during the summer with limited travel, I can use the flexibility of my schedule to move to lower intensity, longer duration workouts. During the tough travel times, I can do consistent days that are shorter, but higher intensity. Overall, though it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to push total training time above 250 hours.

Am I more Fit This Year Than Last?

When I set up this new weblog, I made my categories into goals. My fitness goal was simply to be more fit this year than last. I didn’t set objective criteria at the time, but there are a few that emerged. Of course, there’s weight. Today I was at 156.5 pounds. Last year, I was at 160.5, so there’s an objective improvement. As well, I’ve taken about an inch and a half off my waistline, so my fat loss may have been more that the 4 pounds of total weight. Psychologically, my stress level is low and I’ve had fewer colds and viruses this year than in years past.

I’ve tracked fitness somewhat using field testing as suggested by Chris Carmichael. My 12 minute Cooper Fitness Test, my running test has improved from 1.125 miles last August to 1.38 miles last month. Based on the standard calculations, that means that my VO2 Max has improved from 29 to 34, a 17% improvement. I haven’t had a long enough interval to judge my progress on the Carmichael 3 mile maximal effort cycling test, but based on my riding speeds, I expect that I’m faster there. I’m doing base miles at speeds of 13 to 14 mph this year rather than 11 to 12 that I was doing early last year.

Sadly, I’ve just managed to get myself into the average category for age. I’m not a naturally gifted endurance athelete and for years my exercise was always just recreational- hiking or long cycling. I have no trouble training to go long, I just can’t go fast. So while I’m clearly responding to training stimuli, I likely lack the genetic capability to ride or run really fast because of my limitations in oxygen use efficiency.

But knowing that my clear limiter is VO2Max and not strength or endurance gives me a focus for training this year. I’d like to see to what extent I can use last year as a platform to get another 10 to 20% gain by this time next year. If I take off another 6 pounds and put on some more lean weight, my strength to weight ratio should be better and performance should improve.

In the end, I’m deeply grateful to be able to be working on my athleticism as I enter my 50’s rather than dealing with the onset of chronic illness of aging.

On the local bicycle club mailing list I saw this link to an interesting report on very short intervals. There are links to the thesis there, so one can review the data itself. The investigators first examined the physiological effects of very short, high intensity intervals, comparing first 8 s work followed by 12 s rest vs 24 s work and 36 s rest. There was little difference physiologically, but the 8/12 sequence was preferred by the subjects. In the following 15 week training study the 8 second / 12 second 20 minute interval training was compared to a 40 min standard cardio workout at 60% of VO2 peak..

For some reason I was very interested in trying it. This morning I put on the heart rate monitor and tried to use my strength exercise as the stimulus- working hard with light weight for 8 seconds, resting for 12 and going continuously for 20 minutes. It didn’t work at all, because as I always find with continuous circuit training I feel the effort, but my heart rate never gets very high even though I’m working hard. I get to audible breathing, but I remain in at a low level of aerobic exertion based on heart rate.

Not wanting to give up, I gave it 20 minutes on the bike. I picked a resistance on the trainer that felt like work for 8 seconds followed by “just turning the pedals over” for 12 seconds. And the workout was quite intense. It’s seems like it’s quite self regulating to get one working very quickly just above lactate threshold. The rest periods are no where near long enough to recover and and the work periods I kept to short of painful, since I was going to be doing this for 20 minutes. Over about 10 minutes then, my heartrate stair-stepped up to about LTHR and slowly moved moved beyond it in the second 10 minutes.

I think it’s a nice way to build intensity on a trainer while stressing the aerobic system primarily. I could see pushing the workout over time to longer than 20 minutes, since I felt a modest amount of fatigue after the workout. I’ll see how ready I am tomorrow, which is the true test of workout intensity, but tonight my guess is that it’s a moderate, not a hard workout and I probably could do it again tomorrow.

It’s 47*F in Baltimore and sunny. I took advantage of the weather to go out on a slow recovery ride (1hr 20min). Yesterday I ran 7.5 miles on tired legs and this was the best break I could imagine. Since it was a recovery ride I brought the Nikon P5000 and stopped a few times to grab some shots. I thought they might serve as sketches to remind me of the scenery. I’ve watched these potential images go whizzing by during training rides before, but never stopped to capture them. Wearing my yellow tinted sunglasses always makes them look even more appealing.

Last year I didn’t start putting in milage on the bike until early March, so I had come up with a plan to ride 6 months and run during the rest of the year. I planned on cross training so I wouldn’t go completely out of riding or running shape during the year. I knew that I needed to keep up some running as it’s my best option for fitness during business travel. In October I switched over, putting the bicycle aside and started building mileage. As I finished up 3 months of mostly running, I had built to a 12 mile long run, taking me just about 2 and a half hours. My fitness, at least for running was measurably increasing.

My most important realization was how much I was gaining from higher intensity intevals approaching VO2 max. And with running, it was easier to get there given the weight bearing nature of the exercise and my low efficiency as a runner. Running is great during the winter because I feel comfortable running at temperatures and in weather conditions that keep me off the bicycle.

Having taken a few months to focus on running, I’ve decided to try to take January, February and March to build a base that will have me ready for intervals in April through May when the weather is better, but time is often short.

I decided to call the end of September the end of the 2007 cycling season. With all of the Jewish holidays, I lost momentum and started thinking about how I’d work to maintain fitness over the winter months. I bought the Garmin 305 GPS/Heart Rate Monitor at the beginning of Febuary, but it wasn’t until the last week of Feb that I started riding regularly. So I count March-Sept as my cycling season for the year.

It capped a year of more consistent endurance training than ever before. I made some large gains between March and June. The summer ended up providing less fitness gains because of travel and my own inconsistencies. I also think that I failed to step up intensity sufficiently during those months. Next summer I’ll be doing more rides around lactate threshold for longer periods.I confirmed my suspicions that consistency is the most important aspect to progressive gains. In order to induce physiological adaptation, you need to stress the system. Once adapted to a certain level of exertion, no further gains are made. In the end I’m limited by time, so only by getting faster and putting in more effort in the same time will I ever progress. If I can start March with the same kind of muscular endurance that I have now, I’ll be riding farther in the same training time, forcing more adaptation.

As it turned out, I averaged about 18 hours a month during the season. It’s less than the 6 hours/week that I had targeted. It still puts me on track for a 200 hr training year which I think is pretty good for a first year’s effort.

April was my best month with 22 hours. I got in a few 8 hour weeks, but there many weeks where I had only an hour or two recorded. Still, it’s many more hours than I put in last year, when I was mostly doing long Sunday morning rides and not much else. With a flexible work schedule, it’s only travel that makes it impossible to train.While I’ve experienced gains they are less dramatic than I had hoped for. My usual 2 hour 15 min endurance ride now feels like little effort compared to the beginning of the season. This morning I did it with an average speed of 13.4 and an average heart rate of 130. At the beginning of the year, it would have been at about 12.4 at that heart rate, but more importantly felt like a bigger effort. Tonight I know that I could easily ride the same route tomorrow, it’s now a moderate ride, not a hard ride. If I can hold that kind of fitness over the winter, I can start in March riding at that speed, putting in more consistent miles with less stress. That is why the training is cumulative year over year, I think.

The Garmin 305 worked. I have a full journal of speed, heart rate and time for the past few months. No escaping the truth about what I’ve done. And there is the evidence of the progress there.

Adding shorter daily rides worked. Getting out for just 45 min or an hour maintains the status quo. If those short efforts are hard and frequent enough to be a training stimulus, gains are possible.

Rest and moderation worked. I had no injuries and little in the way of viral illnesses. Steady incremental additions with every third or fourth week being easier kept me pretty eager to get out and ride.

Having running as a backup worked. When I traveled I either did very long walks combined with photography or morning runs before work. In years past, it was either use the hotel gym equipment or go without. It’s almost always possible to run.