Alan Couzens Profile picture
Feb 12 7 tweets 4 min read
Spectacular look into #WhatItTakes to achieve world beating levels of fitness.

Hint: It's all about that #AerobicBase
1/ "Purify" your aerobic season.

If you're going to focus on building your aerobic metabolism, focus on building your aerobic metabolism.

Don't give your body mixed messages!
2/ Find joy in the process!

99% of your athletic life is training and it's likely the epic training experiences that you'll remember most.

You have limited control over whether you win or lose a given event, but you have complete control over crafting those experiences.
3/ Fuel the work!

"Aerobic season is food season!"

I think there are a lot of athletes who don't realize that the thing truly limiting the amount of training they can do is simply that they don't eat enough. Either through fear of weight gain or just poor planning.
4/ *After* the aerobic base is laid, a period of high volume, intensity controlled (via lactate monitoring) threshold work.

It is not difficult to see the parallels with the similarly successful Norwegian approach here.

High volumes of work at just below the lactate threshold
5/ Finally, use that massive work capacity that you've built to push the top end performance to new levels

Don't 'muddy the waters' here. Train very hard to push the top end or very EZ (to recover so that you can push it again!)

This is the sexy training but you have to earn it
6/ Don't stay with the anaerobic work too long!

Even if you have a massive aerobic base, your time at the peak is limited. You have to return to "base camp" periodically to keep topping up your reserves.

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More from @Alan_Couzens

Feb 11
So, now that we're all agreed on just how important having an #AerobicBase of strong #FatBurning is...

Just how do we go about building one?

A brief thread... 👇
Above you'll see data from 10 recent metabolic tests for athletes that I also have training data for.

They range from
- recreational athletes <-> elite
- super strong #FatBurners of 11kcal/min <-> athletes with very poor max fat oxidation rates of 2kcal/min..
You can see their average training intensity for the 12 mo before the test plotted against their test results. The first takeaway is obvious..

Athletes with a strong ability to use fat as a substrate spend more of their time training at a very low intensity than those who don't!
Read 8 tweets
Feb 9
So why do we build the metabolic base first?

aka

Why *don't* we do intervals in the winter?

- a brief thread 👇 Image
Above you'll see one of me early metabolic tests from ~16 years ago.

The black is my fat burning, the gray is my CHO burn.

As you can see, in my threshold zone, fat burning dropped to zero and every minute at 280-300W cost me ~20kcal worth of CHO stores, i.e 1200kcal/hr!
Below is another test from an elite Ironman guy.

Even though his threshold is higher than mine, he was still burning ~7kcal/min of fat in his threshold zone, i.e. even though riding *harder*, it was only costing him 13kcal/min (780 kcal/hr) from his CHO stores! Image
Read 5 tweets
Feb 3
A follow up to yesterday's tweet on how we can use nose-breathing to identify the right intensity...

Where most athletes get it wrong...

A brief #physiology thread
As we continue to increase the intensity of exercise after moving from nose breathing to quiet mouth breathing, eventually we encounter a second breakpoint in ventilation - the transition from quiet mouth breathing to loud mouth breathing...
At this point, metabolic acidosis is starting to increase and the body's response to it is to "blow off" the increasing carbonic acid in the form of additional CO2...
Read 7 tweets
Feb 2
Why quiet breathing through the nose for the bulk of your training is the key to knowing that you're at the right training intensity:

A brief #physiology thread... 👇
The #AerobicThreshold or first rise in the lactate curve is a key training intensity.

Primarily because it usually coincides with the highest rates of #FatBurning coupled with relatively low CHO oxidation, so the athlete can accrue a lot of work with minimal metabolic fatigue
My buddy @feelthebyrn1 always said that he could feel the AeT as:

"the first deepening of the breath"

In my experience, most athletes don't do a very good job of identifying this point & mistake their AeT for a point further up the curve. So, what should you be feeling?
Read 11 tweets
Dec 22, 2021
I received a qu:

"How do I get started testing my #HRV?"

So, a quick thread 👇
1/ Ask Santy Claus for a high quality bluetooth heart rate strap like the Polar H10

polar.com/us-en/products…
2/ Get one of the validated #HRV apps on your phone.

I recommend either

HRV4Training (hrv4training.com)

or

@myithlete (the app that I use - myithlete.com)
Read 7 tweets
Dec 12, 2021
Some more detail on each of these...

A thread:
1. Adaptive training/Recovery on demand

2021 was the first year that I completely did away with planned load:recovery cycles (3:1, 2:1) etc & only added recovery when readiness scores were low.

This led to⬆️ load for strong recoverers and better response from the load for all.
2. Less aggressive load ramps

Due to employing recovery on demand, swings in the load (both between weeks and months) were reduced compared to previous seasons.

Taking recovery with each week/block led to more gradual but consistent increases in the load.
Read 5 tweets

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