Total Athletic Podcast

How Threshold Training Actually Works And Why It Matters For HYROX

• Mike Catris

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0:00 | 44:13

We break threshold training down to plain language and practical sets that build speed without constant redlining. Along the way we show why bikes boost running, how cadence drives transfer, and what strong calves do for durability and race pace.

• what lactate threshold really is and why hydrogen causes the burn
• how to structure threshold sets to brush the line and recover
• double threshold day pitfalls and recovery costs
• using bike and row work to build the engine with less impact
• matching bike cadence to run stride for better transfer
• treadmill versus road and when to switch for specificity
• calf and Achilles strength for efficiency and injury resistance
• Zone 2 on the bike: damper, RPM and duration fixes

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SPEAKER_02:

Hi guys, welcome back to the Total Athletic podcast. Just want to say nice to see you, I hope. We finally got some cameras up and working. Third time for channels. I'm the most technically ungifted person on the planet. So being able to get the cameras working, hopefully, I'm saying this like as though they're definitely working and not being able to upload it all. This could come back and bite me in the arse. Now, if you're only hearing this and not seeing it, then I've copped it up for the third time in a row. But yeah, fingers crossed, we shall now have visuals as well as audio. Um, and once again, I want to say a massive thank you to everybody that's sent us messages, given us some feedback on the the podcast so far. Um, it's been really positive. I've been really happy with that and and happy with the response. Great to see the number of downloads and the amount of people listening to it. I think we were both pleasantly surprised and a bit shocked, really, with the upcake uptake.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Shops, massively, weren't we? I was uh yeah, I wasn't expecting it. So uh hopefully we can uh carry it on. Yeah, good.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so we're gonna take a slightly different tangent. We've had a couple of messages from from people giving us um suggestions on what they want us to talk about, and um and also we don't want it all to be completely ring-fenced into high-rocks into what I'm doing with my training, what you're doing with your training. Obviously, we'll touch on that, you know, through personal experience and you know, anecdotally throughout all of the episodes, I would imagine. Um, but it we don't need to just be about that. Um and so we're gonna we're gonna do a little bit of talking around some training principles and some of the some of the questions and content that we've been asked for by you guys. So I think Matt's got um a couple of topics that um were were brought up and brought to his attention. You wanted us to to sort of go in a little bit deeper on that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I thought it'd be a good thing to like say it's things that have been cropped up a lot and also things that that I kind of had a few questions on. I thought, what better to to check on a podcast and me kind of sit here and and ask you a few questions. So I thought it'd be really good to the I guess the the hype word at the moment is threshold and threshold training, and especially in the higher space, it's it is the be all and end all. Um I think everyone's doing threshold training or double threshold days and or should be, or should be. Um I'll be honest with you, I reckon 99% of people doing threshold training don't really have a clue what it is. Um and I I do threshold training, I I think I understand threshold training, and but I was really keen to kind of get Mike's idea on it and uh offer you guys some more kind of value. I know the first few podcasts we spoke a lot about kind of CrossFit and Hyrux as sports, so I thought it'd be good for us to kind of put some time away and give you guys a bit more kind of informative content. So I think we'll brush up on that. And then I was kind of spinning away on the bike last night and thinking, laddy, this is hard work getting my heart rate into a zone two on a bike, whereas I could go on a road and get into zone two in minutes and still be chatting away. And I kind of had a few questions in terms of how how important is kind of I guess output over just what your heart rate is. So I wouldn't mind asking a few questions on the metabolic effects of, for example, things like a hard session on a bike over just how important is it is just heart rate. So I thought we'd brush up on that. But yeah, firstly, fresh hole training.

SPEAKER_02:

Uh yeah, I think a good a good place to start with this, like, you know, we can go really, really, really deep um and and get into the the biology of it and the physiology of it, which I love. I love all like the geeky sort of side of things, and I think you probably do as well. But I think a good good starting place for for me and the the listeners, the viewers, because the cameras are working. Come on, please be working, would be like you said you didn't think you understand threshold training and what it is. Give me what you think it is.

SPEAKER_01:

So, my uh my understanding of threshold training, I'll be honest, when I first heard of threshold training, these double threshold days, and when I was kind of self-coaching myself was uh dangerous place to be four cent sessions twice a day. So I was running twice a day and giving it giving it everything because threshold to me was this is your threshold line. So it's about hitting that threshold line. So my understanding now is threshold is a it's basically a state of the point of where you create enough lactate that you go anaerobic. And at that point is when you see, you do see adaptations, but at that point you're you it's very difficult to recover from those demands. So my understanding of threshold training is that you're pushing your body hard enough to force and create adaptations whilst keeping just under that threshold where you're able to recover from.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think that's that's a really good base point to start from. So when we talk about threshold training, what we're actually talking about is training at or or around your lactic threshold. And what what I can totally understand, and this is the reason I ask you this is because to explain it from your point of view, from an athlete's point of view, but also from a um a non-coaching, maybe uh non-physiology type of point of view. When somebody will see something like threshold training on their program, automatically that's where they'll go to is oh that this has got to be something I try to go as hard as I possibly can. I've got to push to my threshold. Um, and actually not understanding that uh lactate threshold and um your total achievable threshold in training are two very, very different things. And those are different things for different people as well. You know, certain well-trained individuals might be able to maintain lactate threshold or below lactate threshold of sort of 85% of their VO2 if they're well trained. Some people might be closer to 60% of their VO2 if they're not particularly well trained or well adapted to this sort of training. And that's in short, why we do threshold training. So what you're saying is exactly right is threshold training is basically training in or around that lactate threshold. And what lactate threshold is, without trying to go super duper geeky on things, is that your mitochondria in your cells, basically, you'll probably have heard the term mitochondria now, it's become a lot more popular in terminology than especially if you're if you're listening to podcasts on you know cubicum podcast or you know, training podcast, training-related content. That, you know, the the the nuclear power plants of your cells where where energy is created. And basically, our our muscles need energy to exert force to do anything. Um, and that comes from something called ATP, which is adenosine triphosphate. Now, um, in your muscles, you have something called glycogen, and in your blood, you have something called glucose. They're effectively the same thing without going sort of too deep on it, and that and that is a carbohydrate. So carbohydrate is an eight eight-chain carbon polymer that is connected to water. So that's carb, O is carbon, and hydrate is water. Um, what happens then is that eight-chain molecule, you split that in half, you cut you snap that in half effectively, break down that sugar, and that creates ATP or creates energy, if you like. That first initial snap is done anaerobically. It doesn't require any oxygen. Um and it's very, very quick, but it only gives off a very small amount of energy. Call it one piece of energy, because it gives you one molecule of ATP in that initial snap. And what that leaves you with then is two chains of three carbon polymer, which are known as pyruvate. Now, you might not have you might have heard of mitochondria, you've probably heard of glycogen, you've probably heard of glucose, you might well not have heard of pyruvate. Um, you've heard of all these terms apart from that. Yeah, so pyruvate is what gets what um carbohydrate gets broken down into in that initial response. Now, that then needs oxygen to then get broken down. So that's why your initial um anaerobic energy system, which is really, really fast. And you know, if you want to go for a sprint or you're lifting a power clean or do something explosive, you're requiring you're you're using anaerobic um energy system, which means you're not using oxygen. Anything beyond that then requires ox oxidation. Um, and that's then what becomes your aerobic energy system. When we use pyruvate as uh an energy source, what happens then is we get left over with hydrogen atoms. Now, this then creates sorry, when we use pyruvate, it breaks down into lactate. So that snaps again. We we chop off another chain of carbon, which then gives us more energy and leaves metabolic pipe byproducts. And those metabolic byproducts are lactate and a hydrogen atom. Now, lactate gets this really bad rep because back in the day it's like, oh, my muscles are filled with lactic acid, and that's what's causing the fatigue. Yeah, the DOMS and all of this sort of stuff. And that's not actually the case. So lactate is actually an energy source and it's very, very useful. It can actually be put put back into other cells and recycled and used in different ways. That the problem is the extra uh hydrogen atom. Yes. And that hydrogen atom, that hydrogen ion, I should say, rather than atom, is what causes acidosis, which is what causes the acidic feeling in your muscles, and that's the fatigue level. And that's when we're starting to get into what we call lactate threshold, is that you require oxygen or oxidation to get rid of that extra hydrogen atom. Okay, hydrogen iron comes in atom. Um, so every time you're taking a breath in, oxygen comes in, floods into the cell floods into my uh the through the cell membrane, picks up that free hydrogen atom, and then gets expelled either through CO2 or water in your breath. Okay, so H2O hydrogen, two oxygens. And that's when you're getting sort of water vapor in your breath as you're picking up these extra hydrogen ions. So what you're actually doing by remaining in an aerobic energy system is that you're efficiently using the oxygen in your system and you're getting rid of all of the metabolic byproducts, and those metabolic byproducts aren't building up. Does that make sense? Completely. So what then happens when we get to what's called lactate threshold is that you're not getting enough oxygen in your system to deal with those electrolytes or sorry, um, metabolic byproducts, hydrogen ions. So that hydro uh hydrogen ion buildup is then causing acidosis, which is then causing more and more and more lactic to build up. And what that means then is that's your lactate threshold. That's the point where you are no longer using purely aerobic system. You're breaking back into anaerobic and you're struggling to deal with all of these.

SPEAKER_01:

So my understanding is by working at your threshold, you are creating the lactate and the hydrogen, but you're working at an intensity, which is allowing you to have the physical adaptations while still being able to manage and clear that lactate hydrogen as an efficient level. Absolutely. And that's where you then go anaerobic and what we call redlining.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so you hear the term redlining very often, is when basically what that means in can mean many different things, but from a physiological point of view, what redlining means is that you've you've tipped those scales too far that you're no longer getting rid of the byproducts quickly and which and am I right in saying once every few weeks, once a month, it's actually quite good to redline.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

I guess actually actually during your threshold sessions is not a problem to get there. Like the last rep. Yeah, or if you're resting, so you say you were doing something like um a four by four protocol, a four by five protocol, a four by six protocol with a four, five, six minute rep. Yeah. Where you might get to that point towards the end of that rep on round three of four, or around and a little bit earlier, round four of four. And what you then do, because you're then resting for a couple of minutes, is oxygen floating into the system flushes out that the metabolic byproducts. And again, you're teaching yourself when you're teaching your system to deal with those metabolic byproducts more efficiently. So it's not necessarily like this line that you never cross. You never think in physiology is sort of fluid. It goes, you will be anaerobic, and using anaerobic energy at every point during this whole process, during during your aerobic sessions as well, right? You'll be using carbohydrates for the vast majority of these sessions, but you'll also be using fat. You'll also be, you know, just because you know, people turn around and say, Oh, fat is your your energy system when you're at rest. Well, actually, you're you're probably only using 60-70% fat when you're at rest. You're still using carbohydrates. So there's always these like little grey areas and and and watermarks between the the two. Um, so I think um when when you when you think of threshold training, it's not this line that should never be crossed. It's almost a matter of getting as close to that line as you can recover from within the the remit of that session. Makes sense.

SPEAKER_01:

So I find my if I was to give you a that was a bang on thresholds, say I was doing a I'd know six by six run at my threshold pace. When I go back and I I'm a bit obsessed with my heart rate data. So every minute I'll be looking at my heart rate. And what I find with a perfect threshold session for me is I may start that six minute and it'll build up from a 120, 130. And what I find is by the last minute of that each rep, six-minute rep, my heart rate just pushes in into the 170, 171, which is me just going anaerobic and going over that threshold.

SPEAKER_02:

And that's basically being calculated for you, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And that's exactly right because perfect. And if I if I go, especially on a double threshold day, I've once or twice in the past, if I was doing a six by six, for example, and I get to that last react and I feel great, all right. Come on, let's send it. And I push that level a little bit too far, and my heart rate maybe goes to 175. When I go back to do my second threshold session later in the day, I am, I've got nothing left. But just having that last minute to 30 seconds, just that threshold, I find is perfect. I get the adaptations and feeling arcs, but I can recover from it. And if I go a little bit over, or vice versa, too far under in the heart rate doesn't get, and again, everyone's heart rate zones are different. But my heart rate doesn't really get above 160. I come away feeling I haven't, I don't feel I've pushed the needle enough there.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think like what you've explained there is a really good example of um when I turn around and say, like, this line doesn't shouldn't be crossed, it's a line that you want to be as close to as possible. It's brushing, it's brushing that line, yeah, and overstepping it by one or two BPM for 20 seconds is not gonna end you. But going 45 seconds to a minute to 90 seconds at 5 to 10 BPM over the top of that, and tell me then in your two-minute rest period, and you've got to go again how quickly your heart rate gets back up to, you know, if you compared your first four or five um six-minute efforts and you you look to your so you look to your watch every minute, and you like you said, you go 120, 130, 140, 150, 160, just touching 170 and done. Well, the next one, what probably happen is you'd go 125, 132, 140, 150, 160, 170, and then done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the next one you'll probably go 130, 135, 140, and you'd be the that you'll get that heart rate will start increasing earlier, not necessarily going up and beyond that threshold, depending on how hard you push. But if on your third or fourth set you accidentally, or you being you purposely just decided to go too hard and thought, oh, actually, my heart rate hit 180 there for that last minute, the next set, you probably get up to 140 dead early, and you probably get up to 170 a lot earlier than where you were, yeah, and then struggle to maintain it. And that that's what we sort of call redlining. And that's when you look at, not to go back to the cross-up, crossfit and high-waxing too much, but when you look at the um some of the the great CrossFit athletes, Rich Roning, for example, he would be somebody that could stay at that threshold for that long during a CrossFit workout. And he could redline and stay there for that little bit longer, that little bit longer. Um, or he could hit that red line and recover that little bit quicker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's that's the difference, right? And that's what threshold training is. Threshold training is putting you in and around that space that's, you know, if you if you want to have an idea of what your threshold, lactic threshold would be, it should be something that I would imagine is between 30 and a 30 and 60 minute best effort sort of pace.

SPEAKER_01:

And would you say that's I guess moving on to my next question on that is if we look at hierarchs athletes, for example, threshold training a lot of the time is redden because that is number one, it's 60% of a high-arks race. Yeah. And number two, that feels like 100%. Yeah. Two, it's probably the easiest method of doing threshold trading in terms of numbers because you've got a pace, you've got it is when do you see say you were doing a double threshold day? Do you see a benefit in doing threshold trading outside of running? For example, having an erg threshold session or even a threshold session. It could be, for example, a I don't know, a row and a sled session and even having the sleds at a threshold. Is that of benefit, or would you see benefit just through running?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think I think that this is probably one of the things that, you know, since we started working together in a in in a short space of time, what you'll see with the some of the program that I'll give you, I know we're we're not running for a little bit because you knee anyway, but when you are capable of running, not all of your conditioning will be running and not all of your threshold work will be running. Because yeah, it will be the majority for you will be running, but you will also get threshold rowing sessions, threshold biking sessions, threshold threshold mixed modal sessions. The the difference being it's a little bit trickier when you're looking at mixed modal, at getting to a heart rate or a perceived exertion. Maintain and maintain. You see a lot more of that. Exactly. Yeah, you'll see spikes, right? And and what will tend to happen is, you know, we we did a block of training. Um we do it a couple of times a year where um we do a miko on a Monday, which a Miko, for those that don't know, is is an every minute on the minute protocol where you row on minute one, you bike on minute two, you ski on minute three, and we do burpees on minute four rather than the normal protocol would be to rest on minute four. I mean, you repeat that for a number of rounds for a number of calories. And what I found was that as long as I didn't get to that point where I was working for sort of more than 45 seconds in that minute, my heart rate stayed relatively low because I could recover in that 15 seconds. But more importantly, because the next movement was different, I was still sort of recovering because it wasn't, does that make sense? Yeah, I know. And that's and that's why when we talk about your high rocks, for example, you can actually go harder than you think you can on the run. Because although you're fucked when you get to the next station, it's a different movement. So you're not actually fatigued in that movement. Yeah. Your heart rate might be high, and you're gonna get more fatigued more quickly than you would if you were doing that movement fresh, but you're a lot fresher for that movement. You are for Reddit. And that's why I think that there's some low-hanging fruit in terms of doing some mixed mode or certainly some different modalities for threshold work.

SPEAKER_01:

And do you think that would transition well into running still if you were to do threshold sessions outside of running? Would you see that transition over?

SPEAKER_02:

It certainly can. I've seen some really good results in bike sessions to running where you know somebody's got a knee injury, or we want to limit the eccentric loading. And by eccentric loading, I mean like sort of basically the pounding of the pavement, where your body is reacting to a stimulus, so i.e., your foot hitting the floor and muscularly you're contracting to stop yourself going through the floor or continuing to bend that knee. And what that looks like is different for different people. But what I would normally do as a starting protocol, depending on the athlete, would be to get them at a cadence on a bike erg or a spin bike or a WAP bike, something like that. If your cadence when you're running is 180 steps per minute, which sort of is common, then what I'd be looking at on a bike erg is 90 RPM. Yeah. Something like that. Okay. Where you're basically 90 RPM means that you're effectively going through 180 steps. Um so your cadence is similar. Okay. Now, for most people, they would find that really hard. And they'd have to go on a on a dampener or a gear or um twist on my fingers.

SPEAKER_01:

What I've found is I've personally the last six months invested into a six months here. For someone who's half decent at higher ups, I'm not very sharing my wattage numbers on a bike. It's embarrassing. And even just my embarrassing numbers, the the transition I've seen over to my trading in general has been incredible. But one thing I've learned, especially this week, is I was probably doing a lot lower, still hitting the numbers I needed to hit, but at a much lower RPM, probably an RPM of around 70. And you're allowed to download six or seven, or like that. Which actually, if you transitioned that into a run, I'd probably have to run a seven-minute kilometer to turn my legs over.

SPEAKER_02:

That's you'd have to overstride and jump to get your pace. Do you see what I mean? And and it that's a really good thing to think of that as it's specificity, right? So I wouldn't necessarily get um a crossfitter to sit at 90 rpm. I'd have them probably sitting at 70 between 70 and 80 rpm. Because they're having more leg power. Because they're not trying to get better at running. They're training. Yeah, and it's it's more effective, it's more efficient way of getting good on the bike. But what our training is is not to get you better on the bike.

SPEAKER_01:

There's no bike in high reps, just to get you better at running. Because weird, I was listening to a podcast last night and can't remember what the topic was about, but it looked into I think he was looking at like kind of the next breed of athletes into high-rucks, and it was interesting. He said, What's your biggest kind of your biggest thought on training in training for higher-ups and not everyone agrees with, and his was the amount of bike work and the transition of bike work into running itself. And he said, All you've got to look at at the moment is two of the best runners in the world, Elliot Kipchogee. He does hours and hours a week on a bike. And then number two, Alex Lee, who's just run two 206 saline marathons, and he's not even a runner. But what is he? He's a triathlete, and it's it's suddenly becoming a lot.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, what it'll allow, um, and there's there's probably two prongs to this. There's probably more, but there's two prongs that I can think of to this. Somebody more intelligent will think you'll set on more prongs. Um, there's two prongs to this, right? Is one, what we've just talked about, is that you're using very similar musculature in a very similar cadence if you're doing it right to running. So therefore, and and if you're sitting at a certain heart rate, you're sitting at a um a certain um threshold or percentage of threshold, percentage of VO2 max in that session, there's going to be a training adaptation there, there's going to be a mitochondrial adaptation there, um, there's going to be an energy efficiency adaptation there. So the actual physical training side of things. But secondly, as I spoke about a little bit earlier, taking away that eccentric load. So if you're looking at Ed Kachogi, who's um, you know, tried to break it or broke the two-hour marathon um in the breaking two sort of documentary. And they they went through all of these sort of different things where they were arrowheading people in front of them and changing pacemakers and doing it on Lonzo track, which was flat on a day that it wasn't windy and all of these other things, right? But still, unbelievable pace, right? How many miles do you think that guy's run in a week? You know, you're you're talking gazillions of miles, right? Now, it doesn't matter if you're literally the best runner in the world, which these people are two of the best runners in the world. You can only recover from what you can recover from. And it is an awful lot easier to recover from a bike session than it is from a running session, because there's no eccentric load.

SPEAKER_01:

And I think that's why it's so popular at Hyrux now, because high rock running is running. I think where the goes so wrong with Hyrux is there's running plus eight other format. Like, so there is so much training. You can you need to be doing your zone two work, you need to be doing your threshold work, you need to be doing your VO2 work, you need to be doing your strength work, you need to be doing your muscular endurance work. How can you then do 100k of running a week on top of that? You you can't, and also you don't need to. So I think a lot of people are starting to jump on this thing. If I take away five hours of my training and put that towards getting better at bird bees and put those hours of running into the bike, I then got more energy to focus on things that I personally have never run more than 50k a week. And that's still a lot. Yeah, but it's like that that's probably half of what a lot of people are competing against are running. And how good are you at the running competitive? Better. Yeah, I state the only thing I am halfway. Yeah, but it's but it's true, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

But it's not, it's not half to you know, taking the humility out of it, your your running times are incredibly fast, right? From in high runs, right? Um and the there's there's certainly a carryover from the fact that you don't you you don't need to run 50 plus, 70 plus, 80 plus kilometers to get better at running. What you need to do is do the right running sessions at the right intensities and actually make sure that you can recover from those running sessions.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So that's what it's I found, especially in the summer, where I kind of did my first season in the high rocks and thought, I don't actually run. I always go into a run club on a Wednesday night on a track and that was it. So I've spent the summer doing a lot, and I love running. I do, but I've just never done it. So I spent the summer doing a lot of easy zone two runs whilst the knee was good and it was great. I don't know if maybe I built a good base up over the summer or what, but since probably September when the season started, I can safely say I haven't done one zone two easy run. All my easy work's been on a bike. I do a threshold session, I do a kind of a trap session, and it like you said, it's doing the right efforts on the runs. As long as you're doing your zone, your zone one, zone two work in the summer, but I don't necessarily personally don't necessarily feel the need. Some people will say it's just good to be running.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think my my argument would be on that is if you are not great at the skill of running, and and people often get this mixed up, right? Running is a skill. Um, the same as skiing is a skill, the same as biking is a skill, the same as rowing is a skill. And you you need to get better. If you need to get better at running, i.e. you're not an efficient runner, your stride pattern is inconsistent, your cadence is all over the place, your breathing patterns are wrong when you're running. Then I would suggest do more zone two running because you just need to get some.

SPEAKER_01:

And especially outdoors. Because again, I naturally run well, so I don't feel I need to be outdone. I listen to, I kind of psych myself out sometimes because I listen to Instagram reos and podcasts, and I say you need to be outside running because you need to feel the floor. You need to, and I think, shit, I I run on a treadmill five times and that's it. But for me, it works because I've got a gammy knee. It takes a lot of the force out of my knee. And actually, my my running technique seems to be fine. Actually, by being on a treadmill, it takes out any external variables of tripping over, rain, wet, ice. But again, like you see, for a lot of people, they just tend to get out and run.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And I think that that that comes down to how good a runner are you. And I don't mean in terms of times, but normally it'll go hand in hand that the faster, better runners are better runners in terms of economically and in terms of running form. Um, you know, people like Paula Radcliffe, who was a world record holder in the marathon, did the majority of their running on a treadmill. You know, don't get me wrong, she was going out and running on the road a lot and doing all this sort of stuff. It's not a set thing that you need to be outside to run. If you if you are capable of running on a treadmill like you run on the road, then there's no reason not to read.

SPEAKER_01:

One of the only things it's I like to do is maybe a week out from a rage, just getting outside and doing some, as we call it, strides, just to remember what that pace feels.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I definitely prescribe to that. I think I don't think there's anything wrong with going out on the road and doing all of your running outside one way. Um, there's there's there can be something wrong with doing all of your running on a treadmill, especially if you're not the best runner in the world. Um, and I definitely think that if you do the majority or all of your running on a treadmill, then you should do some outdoor or running track running or whatever you know that might be. Um real running, if you want to call it that, not non-treadmill running for a week or two pre-race. Um, because it's sp specific. Yeah, you know, you're not you're not doing the high rocks on a treadmill. Um, so you need to know what that feels like. You need to know that does it affect you in terms of recovery? Are you finding it harder to recover from that? Do you overstride when you're running compared to when you're running on a treadmill? All of these things that, you know, you only know if you know, and you only know if you've done it a couple of times. I think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing zone two work on a on a bike. And I would certainly in a position that you're in at the moment where we're recovering or or rehabbing and a knee issue, a quad tendon issue, where at the moment you're doing all of your, we're subbing all of your running out for either bike, air bike, or concept two bike um at set cadences and set sort of paces.

SPEAKER_01:

Set set cadences which I can't reach because my ability on an epic and a 60 bike is awful.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And and how exciting is that? Because it means that you know there's room for improvement on something. Um, so I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Certainly, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing zone two work on your on your on a bike, especially if you're heavier. It's one of those things that the heavier you are, the more eccentric loading and impact is going to impact your recovery from running. And I think that, you know, this is another episode in itself as well, but I think that's something that we need to address, or high roxers and runners, runners would probably be doing as anyway, proper runners, by which I mean athletes, athletics athletes, will be doing a lot of pliometric work, be doing a lot of ankle stiffness work, we'll be doing a lot of Achilles prehab and foot prehab work. And I think doing those sort of things, if you're not that efficient at running, will make a big difference in terms of preventing injury. Creating good shock absorbers, by which I mean your calves, soleus, um, VMO, um, around your knees and ankles is going to make a big difference. Because how many people go out and do a high rocks or a or a half marathon and their calves are in pieces the next day?

SPEAKER_01:

Do you know what? It's funny. You should say that I was speaking to people that they've like, I guess people new into the fitness industry or new into high rocks, new into running, and or people that only ever run. And the amount of people with the kidneys injuries and touch wood, I haven't, and I said, Do you do any gym work, any calf raises, any isometrics? And they were like, What's that? And it's funny, coming from a bodybuilding background, as much as I hated calf raises, it's something that I've done every week for the last 15 years, and it makes sense. I've obviously got very I don't in terms of being a bodybuilder, they were probably the worst part of my body part. Very genetic, very genetic body part thing. But as a runner, I've obviously built such maybe not strength and size, but durability in my calves and Achilles. And I listened to something the other week, and it was something about it was it was a 10 or 20% increase in performance in your running if you've got strong calves because it was where it all goes for.

SPEAKER_02:

It's literally the shock absorber. Yeah. Right? It's like turning around and having a Ferrari engine, Ferrari wheels on a Ford Fiesta suspension. Yeah, yeah, that's great, wouldn't it? So, you know, you you put all this work into your engine and doing all of these threshold days and doing all of your um VO2 work and all of your lactic intervals, um, and you're you're running around on a pair of twiglets and you're expecting them to just take it. Well, you're only as strong as the weakest link in your chain. And if you're not working on connective tissue, um effectively what your Achilles is is a massive sprint, right? So when you're running, your foot hits the floor, you get what's called a stretch shortening reflex, where the Achilles or the calf stretches, shortens, and then rebounds. The more, the the stronger and stiffer that your Achilles is, the less energy gets lost in that stretch and shortening. Okay, the looser and weaker your Achilles or calf extension of the Achilles is, the less efficient you will be because the more energy gets absorbed through the floor, through your foot, through your knee, through your ankle, through all of these different points in the chain, even up as far as your pelvis. So stiffness in the bony tissue side of things is a good thing. Stiffness when you're like, I'm waking up, oh god, I feel stiff and this hurts and this hurts. That's not what I mean by stiffness. What I mean is by tendon stiffness is a good thing. Um, because it improves your ability to react to the floor when you're striding.

SPEAKER_01:

Um now we I know we've gone on a massive tangent there, but I just about to say one thing we promised, what we knew we would do is talk about something and then branch after 10 minutes, and we've done that already. So I think we sorry, but talking about threshold, let's stop there because I then this works perfectly into my second question, yeah, which goes into I was spinning away on a bike last night and something came into my mind, and I thought, brilliant, we'll talk about it tomorrow. So, my my second and final topic for this podcast is when we're doing zone two work and we're running. If you're a good runner, your limiting factor for that zone two work is your fitness. If you go above this certain heart rate zone, it's you it's easy to kind of manage it. When you move that zone two or zone one work onto a bike, especially for someone who's lighter like me, I find my limiting factor isn't my fitness, it's my power, strength, endurance in my quads. And so, my my question for you is it's easy to say, and we all say it, go and do your zone two work on a bike, but I could run at a 130 heart rate for five hours and talk to you, and it would be happy. I wouldn't be talking back unless I was on a bike next to you. For me to sustain 130 beats per minute heart rate on a C2 bike, I have got to absolutely send that and I could probably hold that for about two minutes. So for me to give up the same effort, effort feel, let's say, of a zone two run, I'm probably going at a zone 0.5 bike. So my question is, how much do we have to take that into account when doing a run? So when taking out zone two run work and replacing it with zone two bike work, how much do we need to factor in, I guess, the the metabolic effect of your quads burning? And like we mentioned before. If I did an hour's easy run, I would probably burn 800 calories that's same. If I do I don't know why that's happening. Carry on. If I was to do an hour's easy bike at the same intensity level, I'm probably burning half of that and my heart rate is slower. Is that okay? Or do I just need to be sending it even more of the bike to get to that same zone, if that makes any sense whatsoever? Yeah, sure. So I think sure a lot of people probably think the same thing.

SPEAKER_02:

I think one of the things that when you when you look at this is what what is the limiting factor in getting you to that heart rate? And is it the fact that your quads are burning and that's what's stopping you getting there and staying there? In which case it's localized muscle fatigue, which is generally because of a lack of muscular endurance or a lack of efficiency in that muscular tissue. So when we talked earlier about the the mitochondria and using glycogen and creating energy, it's something that is is quite a localized thing. Um so when when that's going on as a process, certain muscular tissue is going to be more efficient than other muscular tissue. And that tends to be the muscular tissue that you have trained and have built up. So what's probably happening is that your quads, if that's what's blowing up on a C2 bike, are inefficient. That's creating aerobic energy or maintaining aerobic capacity. So what my suggestion would probably be, and I don't know how much you've tried this because it was actually a uh a zone two bike session that I didn't write for you, you just done it as an extra, so not you. Seriously. Yeah. Uh on the first week that he's gone. Uh is that you probably need to go for longer. And what you'll find then is that you're you're actually so fit in terms of your cardiovascular system that you can maintain at what feels like an easy pace for an awful lot longer before your heart rate starts to struggle.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, build out. If we looked at a I would maybe be at 80 beats per minute for the first 20 minutes. Yeah. And I'm looking thinking, Yeah, that's level. I can walk and and it yeah, it would take 30, 40 minutes of a bike session for my heart rate to get above 100. But by the end of that hour, hour and 10, it may be at 120, 130. But the average for that whole session would maybe be 100. So it's okay.

SPEAKER_02:

And what I find with a lot of my CrossFitters is that we'd very rarely give them running a zone two because very few of them would be able to run out of zone two. Right. They'd have to run so slowly to stay at zone two because they struggle to uh to maintain, they they they'd be up in zones three, four, five.

SPEAKER_01:

So a lot to come into the bike work, it's it's it's a new skill. It's like if you just start if you were a world champion crossfitter and you'd never run, same sort of issue. The issue I'm having on the bike is because three months ago I'd never been on a bike in my life.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I I would suggest so. Um, and the fact that you are very fit. Um, so I think that what what what my prescription for that would probably be is um go a little a little bit harder, but I mean, you know, what were you sitting in at RPM wise?

SPEAKER_01:

Trying to trying to hold at 80, but realistically it would probably be at about 75.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so get up to 19 on a lower dampener.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Right. On a lower damper.

SPEAKER_02:

Then you're getting less. Yeah. So you you you could be down at damper one. But you'd find that um you'd get less localized fatigue there for starters because it's less um exertion to move those pedals. Um, but secondly, it's got the carryover to you running, right? So if you were running at an easy pace, your cadence would probably still be the same. So you'd probably still run at an easy pace at a whatever your cadence at 180, 100, somewhere between 170 and 190, I'm guessing. Yeah, I know. Um and if you were running a five and a half minute K, if you've ever run that slow in your life, which would be like a PB for me, um, you would probably still be around the same cadence. You'd just be shorter stride, less of a lean forward, right? So you're you're not falling forward so much. So why change the cadence on the bike and increase the uh makes sense.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I I know this is directed at me, but I'm hoping this yeah, no, like we're talking in general. I've spoken to so many people in the same kind of scenario as me where they're training for high rocks, running, whatever it may be, and have kind of been on Instagram, being on podcasts, being on YouTube, where everyone seems to be talking about the bike and getting on the bike and thinking, shit, I'm I'm way off it here, or oh, this is really easy, or kind of yeah, it's it's we've spoken about before mass moves mass. So it's always for someone like myself who's a lie to athlete, it's gonna be harder to hit those higher numbers than someone who's heavier. Because yeah, so yeah, I'm hoping that that kind of gives everyone a bit of bit of insight because I know it's not just myself who used to have these uh these bike issues. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_02:

Um I I feel like we did all right on that one. I didn't go off on a massive tangent as like talking about we should have so yeah, fresh show training into how stiff your Achilles could be, should be into how much bike work Elliot Kachomi does.

SPEAKER_01:

We've yeah, we've we've done well at Brian. We've done we've done really well at keeping it. Um but at that point both of our cameras had now uh switched off. So yeah, it's been too fast to round this that round this episode up. Yeah, what we'll do is for the last 20 seconds or so when there was stuff we've got noises.

SPEAKER_02:

I don't know, there's noises going off everywhere. Um, what we'll do is I'll put some like cool b-roll of map doing some fucking Iroxy stuff in the last couple of bits rather than us talking and then get my editing skills on. Um but yeah, before we round that one off, want to say again, massive thank you to everybody for now just listening because you can't fucking see us anymore. Um, but also thanks for suggestions, thanks for messaging and letting us know what you want us to talk about. If you don't already, please subscribe um and like and share and do all of that good stuff. Um, because uh we found out or I found out that on the first episode, the reason we got so many downloads was because we got so many subscriptions on the first um number of hours and the amount of shares was outstretching our reach. So the amount of people that don't follow either of us that ended up listening to it was because other people had shared and put it on their stories or whatever. So yeah, chuck it on your story. Yeah, I'm pretending I know what all the algorithm and stuff is and means. So yeah, really appreciate it, guys, and we'll uh see you next time.

SPEAKER_01:

Lots of high rocks. We've got what Manchester coming up end of January, we've got Glasgow coming up middle of March, we've got London the end of March, and then we've got Cardiff the end of April. So anyone looking for plans leading up to that, might how how can they how can they get hold of them? Oh, don't ask me.

SPEAKER_02:

Um yeah, we got uh through Total Athletic Performance, formerly the Athlete program. Um either drop one of us a message on Instagram um or go on to the Total Athletic Performance uh Instagram page, which used to be the Athlete program page, uh, and that will have uh links to all of our HIROX plans. Um, or if you wanted personalized programming, you can reach out to Matt or myself and we can work with you directly. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01:

Brilliant. Thanks very much, guys, and we'll uh yeah, speak to you all soon. Cheers, Gam.