HARD TRUTH: WHY CYCLISTS OVER 40 SLOW DOWN & HOW TO BEAT IT | RDMN PODCAST CLIPS

1.Offsetting VO2 Max Decline With Age

So if we move on to the second component of Aging which you felt was important it's the decline of vl2 Max what are our strategies around offset and that yeah number one is consistent training you got to get out the door and train consistently you can't be hit or miss you can't go one week ride five times the next week you ride two times and then take a week off it's not going to happen your VO2 max is going to go down no matter what you do with those rides you're going to lose VO2 max rather rapidly in fact so that that's the first step it's got to be consistent number two you got to get a lot of volume in you need to put in the miles jump miles are Okay at this stage you need to get out there if you want to ride your bike to work every day to get some more miles in that's great I highly recommend doing that you can fit that in on top of your other writing that's going to make you a better cyclist all together I don't care what they call it it's riding a bike is what it is and we need to get more volume in so that's the number two thing to do I was reading a report from world tour physiologist Alan cousins and he was talking about to maintain uh vl2 Max above 50 after the age of 50 requires 12 errors per week of Zone 2 aerobic training and that shocked a lot of people that the volume was that high and he said that news gets worse as you get to the age of 60. and by the time you get to the age of 70 if you want to be holding the vl2 max of over 50 you effectively need to be training with the same consistency diligence and discipline as a professional athletes my next birthday is 80. your Scrooge you need to train like Superman what am I supposed to do I'm not sure you've been quite that simple but you can put a number on it but everybody needs to be training at a high volume um you know I would say you know what does a high volume mean I don't know if I can do it like Alan did and put a number on for an age group um I've just always done whatever what I've enjoyed doing on I'm writing now around something like about I guess 12 to 13 hours a week and my VO2 max is is hung in there very very nicely over the last few years doing that and when I compare it with when I go back and look at the research it says in what a 80 year old VO2 max should be average population uh they've got me as some kind of Superman off the top because my numbers be huge but that's standard but by the normal standard we're talking about here it isn't all that great but that's just the way it is getting older you've got to expect that to happen but you've got to be consistent and you've got to put in the volume and I think that's a good point about you're saying around 12 hours seems to be your limits there is a lot of feel and intuition in that I ride you know slightly more than I write around 15 hours but I notice if I dip from if I go from 15 hours to 17 hours it goes from being Fawn to being quite laborious and it all of a sudden feels like work so I know around that 15 hours is my sweet spot for you know a physical benefit but also enjoyment and sustainability yeah I understand in the wintertime I increase my volume up to around 16 or 17 when I cross train so I'm not doing more than just riding my bike in fact my bike volume actually comes down for my business summer but the cross training goes up and so I wind up with the volume which is relatively High and um that then I think that's a big benefit that that brings me into the spring and summer with a nice base of aerobic fitness that I can now transfer to the bike and now I can start doing higher intensity stuff which is the third phase of becoming keeping your VO2 max high is you need to be doing high intensity you know and I would recommend no more than twice a week too high intesty workouts twice a week is adequate for everybody so what would be an example of a high intensity workout that you would suggest in season for an athlete well it's again it's going to depend on the athlete but the most common one is VO2 max intervals aerobic capacity intervals so something like let's say five times three minutes at 90 to 100 percent of your vgo to Max with three minute recoveries between them doing that uh once a week and then going to dinner group arrived another time a week that would give you two hard workouts in a week and it's going to do a lot to maintain or even improve your VO2 max I used to be coached by former World Tour writers with Sky Michael Barry and I remember asking them how to paste this vl2 Max efforts and he said to me go to Lucy Jesus effort go to Lucy Jesus that's kind of the way it is there's there's some suffering that goes into that the way to find out what what you got to have as I'm sure you're aware of a power meter helps you a lot in doing a workout like that heart rate is not very good for for something you know three minute interval four-man interval heart rate's not gonna do any good at all so that's a waste of time you need a power meter on your bike and if you have a power meter then you got to find out what is my VO2 max power so you have a reference point and the way you do that is you do an all-out five-minute effort and see what your average power not normalized car but your average power was for that five minutes and that's your VO2 max power now when you come back to do this workout like five times three minutes or five times uh four minutes or four times four minutes something like that now you do all those at 90 to 100 of that number you found on that five minute test and I guarantee you over the course of a few weeks that's going to give you a much higher VO2 max this is a question I've always wanted to ask you Joe and I it slipped my mind last time we talked I'll be doing efforts like this in say get ready to start the season January February time and the first set of these I do the weather here in Ireland it doesn't get super super cold but it could be down at two three degrees Celsius is there a harm in doing those sort of full gas capacity VO2 max efforts in that cold temperature we sort of joke and say oh the efforts got into my lungs because you'd have a terrible cough after the effort yeah yeah I would suggest you don't need to do that you probably don't need to do that type of workout in urban capacity intervals more than about six to eight weeks at the at the most what's going to happen is you're going to get a nice increase when you first start doing them and that increase will be kind of like Jagged kind of like ratcheting up and you'll keep getting your VO2 Maxwell since to be going higher but once you get to about six or eight weeks for a good athlete that's as high as it's going to go from that point on is you're now taking risk of being injured from doing that a workout like that repeatedly Beyond eight weeks you need to do something different cut that work on work on your time trial intensities so something more around your threshold instead of your VO2 max this was an extract from my conversation with Mr Joe frail if you enjoyed this extract you should please check out the full video which is up here and don't forget to subscribe to the channel foreign