Originally this appeared as an email to my freinds in early summer of 2004

Dear skate buddies,
I as surfing the web this morning, and drinking my morning coffee, I came across one of the best laid out charts I have ever seen describing training intensities and their physical effects.

I have always been of the belief that skaters tend to obsess over gear (should I be on a Maple or a Viking blade? should I race on 85a or 83a wheels?) and what they really need to be obsessing about is the physiological aspects of their training, and how to get maximum benefit from the hours they will put in.

for example: ask most skaters what boots/blades or inline wheels/frames they have tried over the years and what they like and they will talk your ears off in tremendous detail. Ask them how to improve a certain training capacity, and you will often get a blank stare. I am going to memorize this table, I think every athlete should. In this dang fast group of skaters and coaches, you all know this stuff, but this chart is amazingly clear, so I thought it was worth a big email! notice the divide between zone 5 & 6 of training effect! notice the type IIb and IIa fast twitch conversion to slow twitch mimics that happens especially at zones 3 & 4, people race how they train, and this shows why. (there are really 4 types of muscle fibers, fast, slow, and two types of fast that conform to how you train).

I cut and pasted and re-formatted this table into a nicely printing word doc, attached here, but credit goes to where credit is due, this table is originally found at a well done coaches site located at:

http://www.fascatcoaching.com/intervaltypes.html

-Andrew

happy skating, I am now off to do some zone 6 and 7 dryland work this morning, and later today I will do some zone 2-3 hours on my bike... what do I mean? look at the table!

The following text is from the Fastcat site:

How do you set your zones? Well, that is a great question for another training tip! There are as many ways to find your threshold as there are definitions for threshold. If you have a powermeter you can identify virtually the same number laboratory physiological testing would.

Back to the table, you can see there are more checks under some training zones than others. And the most check falls under the zone that (gulp!) is the hardest. But that’s not to say that aerobic endurance work is not important; it is! However, with the race season upon us, your training, presuming you have some aerobic work under “the hood”, would be best spent at intensities you will encounter in your races.

 Now a further refinement: specializing your interval training to your types of events. Say you are a time trialist. Well then your “money” zone is going to be your theshold power. Therefore it would be prudent (insert Dana Carvey George Bush SNL imitation) to spend a lot of time working on raising your theshold power, i.e Zone 4 and Zone 5. Threshold intervals of 8-20 minutes in length or more and VO2MAX efforts of 3-6 minutes. Additionally, tempo workouts, as you can see from the table above force many of the same physiological adaptations as threshold workouts, and are therefore a nice alternative on days following threshold intervals or VO2 workouts.

Conversely, say you are an ace sprinter and criteriums are your thing. The power dynamics of your race are much more variable and therefore should be addressed in your training. Lots of anaerobic capacity and neuromuscular work. Short sprint intervals 5-30 seconds in length and 60 second anaerobic capacity work. Additionally you’ll still need to throw in some VO2 work and tempo/threshold work. After all, you gotta get in the break first before you can sprint for the win. Ahhh, lactic acid, your new best friend!