Case Study – A remarkable 12 months Part 1

Guy started working with us back in January. He had raced a little bit over the previous 2 years achieving a Cat 2 licence but really wanted to push on and be competitive in National level road races.

A fairly general goal, so we take a fairly general look at what that will take.

Current Ability (January 2020)

To get a detailed look at his metabolic profile, like a human MOT, we used INSCYD. Couple those results with his training history and we had a clear picture of his current physical abilities.

A national B road race is ~3000kjs. Guy was averaging just over 3700kjs of training per week and 5000kjs on a good week. Not enough.

To score points in a Nat B you need to hold ~3.5w/kg for the duration. Yes its not as simple as that but if you can’t physically hit that benchmark you wont score points consistently. For Guy 3.5w/kg was 276w. He’d only ever held that for just over 1 hour and his 3 hour power was closer to 230w.

His VO2max score was modelled at almost 60ml/min/kg and his threshold 4w/kg. So he has the capability to hit those numbers, just. When looking at his Fat/Carb combustion chart his fuel tank for a 3 hour ride is 185g/h which = 276w.

Training Program

Our focus was on building training load from 3700kjs p/w to 7000kjs p/w through consistent gradual increase. Within the week hitting 3000+kjs on the long endurance ride and doing 1 or 2 top end VO2 workouts to stimulate strong aerobic AND glycolytic response. That meant the rest of the rides needed to be fairly low intensity.

The second major focus was on nutrition. Specifically on the bike to ensure he was fuelling enough for the work. A common mistake is under fuelling on the bike especially on long rides when even lower intensity is producing high energy demands. 3000kjs is a lot of energy!

Guy was faultless in getting the work done, he got wet, he got cold. He didn’t complain, he asked questions and he listened.

Lockdown and Gains

When lockdown hit we all needed a boost so we changed up the routine. Jake’s Giro was a 3 week grand tour of tough sessions. Originally designed as a nice distraction from lockdown, it turned out to be the biggest 3 week training stimulus of the year (for everyone that took part including myself). It include a lot of threshold work something Guy hadn’t done much so far this year.

After an easy recovery week we decided to put his grand tour legs to use and go for some local KOMs. In that week he hit a new 1min PB (+50w) and 5min PB.

We retested with INSCYD in April and the results were fantastic.

Almost 50w increase at threshold and a VO2 max of 70ml/min/kg. In 4 months that’s HUGE.

Guy’s reaction.. “great, if I can improve that much in 4 months how much more can I improve if I work harder!”

In part 2 we’ll explore what working harder meant. It wasn’t doing more intense intervals.