Can Endurance Athletes Do Too Much Endurance Training?

[@sebherrod5344]

Endurance makes you fit, intervals make you fast. I usually know when endurance rides are too long when you start to see HR decoupling, but the fitter you get the longer it takes for decoupling to occur

[@SR-fm1ft]

You’re now one of my favorite channels, hope the algorithm agrees! These videos are great man keep it up💯

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

That’s great! Glad you like it! Thanks!

[@318ishonk]

When interviewed by Dr. Stephen Seiler about their 35+h/week training, Niels van der Poel and his coach said they hit a ceiling in terms of max. endurance rides when they tried to go above 6h/ride for several weeks (or something in that region). Apparently the body could not recover well enough, despite the two days off training per week that Niels did. But we'll never know if Niels would also have won that many gold medals in his speed skating discipline if he rode "only" 2h endurance rides per day and not 5 to 6. And also this is just one athlete and by no means representative for many riders.

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

That’s good insight. I should have looked into the Niels van der Poel training.

[@jason200912]

The dumby should have just done weighted squats

[@318ishonk]

@@jason200912 I remember elite road or track sprinters from east germany in the 80s saying something like "you don't need to expect olympic medals if you're not riding your bike 200km/day". Sprinters, mind you. And 200km/day is also again ca. 6 hours/day.

[@jason200912]

@@318ishonk they also thought aero positions don't help, smoking is healthy, drinking water in an event is bad, etc.

[@ZeroTwoDarlingXO]

Solid content. Your channel will blow up. I don't know when but in time it will get the attention it deserves! Keep it up Drew! This is gold.

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

I sure hope so. Glad you found it and like it. Thanks!

[@pl4free]

I find that 5 hours is the sweet-spot for me just because in the spring I start with 4-hours endurance rides and then the body adapts, so in the summer I want a little more. But it really comes down to what you train for. Ultra endurance athletes or athletes who train for very long one-day races/rides will have to go beyond that. But yeah, 8-hour endurance rides really wreck you more than a good 5x5 VO2-Max training or an over-under :D In this context, the real question is: when you already adapted to the 4-hour rides, what is better 4 hour rides with a bit more intensity (say 140bpm vs 130bpm avg) or same intensity with more volume 130bpm but 5h vs 4h. Maybe a healthy dose of both is good. One week this, the other week the other...

[@solma1]

i would think finding your zone and sticking to it is the most important. e.g. 139-146bpm for me is optimal and i just stick to it whether the ride is 2 hours or 5 hours.

[@jeremyleake6868]

This is exactly the thing I’m experimenting with. I only have time to do 2.5 hour low intensity rides during the week - I do three of them. I was doing them top of Zone 2 (for me 75% max HR). My power at that HR was increasing over months and then levelled out. I didn’t appear to be advancing. So I’ve experimented with the equivalent of over-unders (normally associated with LT2) around my LT1. The light switch theory suggests that’s not a good protocol. But guess what, when I now do my Z2 at 75% my power is higher. So I’m not sure LT1 is quite as binary as some people think. (Coggins certainly thinks its a continuum). I suspect going above LT1 a bit is a little inefficient and that it may be more optimal to go longer at LT1. But if you’re constrained by time the overs unders protocol adds value over time limited top Z2 training. But I wouldn’t push it too far as I suspect as you get to top Z3 it becomes a much less efficient way of doing aerobic training.

[@PerryScanlon]

Very interesting detail. There sure are questions about the black and white views being taught.

[@thomalger]

Hi Drew, I love the content of the channel. In the ultra-running community, at least back when I was doing that. They would do two long days a week back to back. And the thinking was after 5 ish hours of running, you're really just beating yourself up more than the gains you're making. While also increasing the risk of injury. When I'm training for 8+ hour gravel races. I use that same style to get ready, and then as it gets closer to the race, one day will be shorter and harder, and then the next day would be a Z2 day to basically deal with the fatigue at the end of the gravel event.

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

Yep. That all makes sense for sure.

[@josemanuelvalverde9342]

Interesting research review. Keep going in this line

[@donwinston]

I like to ride 60 miles in my normal ride. I've found it doesn't matter if I ride zone 2 or greater. The next day I can't do it without feeling weak and miserable. But I can ride 30 miles at zone 2/3 pretty much every day as long as I take a day off once or twice a week. I'm old (61) so maybe I don't recover well.

[@markusseppala6547]

Have you tried riding the lower end of Z2 like closer to 60%? I can do much higher volume at 60% than 65%.

[@ASGundogs]

I’m glad you mentioned Friels rule about “2hrs or the length of your goal race.” If you think about it though- that’s actually really valuable. EG If my local Cat 3 road races are 2.5hrs at 240np then being able to do 240w straight average for 2.5h with no cardiac drift would tell me my base was ‘complete’.

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

Yep. Gotta stay focused on whatever it is you’re training for.

[@vincec3590]

Agreed; guess that's why a lot of top professional road cyclists train on very long rides of 5 to 7 hours every week? It's because most of their important races are also in the 5 to 7 hour range

[@Henry-gv8gj]

@@vincec3590 yes and as CTL increases the volume of red blood cells in your body increases if your recovery is adequate Therefore a professional cyclist will want to maximize their training volume Zone 2 training increases aerobic efficiency and you can do lots of it everyday This means that a professional cyclist seeking to maximize their performance will do as much zone 2 as they can But some volume has to be dedicated to intensity so that you can do more than just pedal super hard all day You will not see anyone doing 50 hour weeks because you can't recover from that much training zone 2 is still hard Pro crit racers will do 20+ hour weeks at times because while in the end their race is only 75ish minutes and it usually ends in a sprint if you can get to 200 meters to go having nose breathed all race you will be able to access more of your max sprint power than someone who has a higher max sprint power but was near threshold the whole race

[@jeffreythompson6282]

Great Content, keep it up!

[@thayerkids]

Good one! Food for thought.

[@Clauds43]

Many good points were tackled in this video rather than just the repetitive go slow to go fast. One that sticks to me is really that you just need to do the zone 2 for you to recover for the interval day. But to contradict this statement is what about the idea that volume is king? No matter how structured you're training is if you're just doing 8-10 hrs a week you can't beat some who just ride their bike for 20+ hr/week unstructured.

[@jason200912]

Research says no. After a few hours in a single day session youre actually reducing your gains. And if you push yourself that hard you need a 3 day minimum recovery and protein repair.

[@PerryScanlon]

Hopefully somebody will study HRV response to zone 2 duration. Cortisol response sounds more complicated to study but potentially more useful.

[@josemanuelvalverde9342]

As for the taxing of endurance rides on the ANS you can see it on the evolution of DFA alpha1. When you start feeling fatigued (this obviously depends on the aerobic capacity of the athlete) alpha1 goes below 0.5. This is the critical value that marks in a fresh state the transition at LT1. So the ANS can be taxed versus the end of a long endurance ride as if you were doing threshold intervals. Personally, l try not to prolong my endurance rides much beyond alpha1 goes below 0.5

[@ambulowan]

And how do you do that? How would you know?

[@josemanuelvalverde9342]

@@ambulowan you may install a field data in your garmin. Alpha1 HRV

[@ambulowan]

@@josemanuelvalverde9342 Does Wahoo have that also? Would the measurement even be precise enough to measure something like that?

[@joolski]

Great video, and the first I've seen on this subject. I was very lucky to have a really great trainer when I was a junior (back in the 80's) who made us log our HR before bed and when we awoke in the morning. More than 10% over resting HR in the morning, we'd go easy otherwise we'd push. Now I know this is pretty simple, but back in the 80's we didn't have the data we have now. At 16 I had a resting HR of 39 to 45, even now as a 55 year old my RH is 50. As a result this got me into the habit of logging my HR and using it to gauge when I could train hard, or keep it easy. I bought a book called 'Training with the Heart Rate Monitor' by Hottenrott. I had invested into a Polar HR monitor and I was hooked. Yeah it was Janky but it did provide some interesting data, and one of the things are started to notice was the bump my resting HR after exercise. For me it was most pronounced in the Winter after long club rides, at what we would now call an endurance ride. My conclusion was that the body has to go through repair process that allows for the body to activate back to the endurance state in a short period of time. The best way to think about this is cafe legs :-) I hate to stop on a ride, I just want to keep going. When I do stop, I'm itching to get going again as it takes me a while to get going again. Some people can stop and come out the gates blasting. We are all different. But what I've notices is that my mates with a low HRV (in that it's not got a bit variance) don't suffer from this issue I however have a massive range of HRV variance and I do suffer from cafe legs. So what's the point I heard you ask. Well, when we looked at our post exercise HR mine dropped back to resting, and remained within 5% of my normal resting HR, mates with HRV with little variance would see a pronounced peak after the exercise, and would show up as stress on the Whoop app. Even when they were just resting. So perhaps HRV and post endurance response are linked ? Who knows, just thought I'd share.

[@andrewgallant7899]

Dylan couldn’t look less enthusiastic

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

He always looks that way. Resting bored face.

[@matthewjohnson12]

Maybe Dylan should be drinking his fifth cup of coffee as well😂. Good video Drew, sorry about the wrist.

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

@matthewjohnson12 true. He doesn’t drink coffee at all! Total weirdo.

[@sdrapermail]

"stress upon your ANS is good" say it 3 times

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

I think I did. Haha.

[@markrahman9320]

With the "lightswitch" methaphor, how do endurance rides with sprints sprinkled in factor in? It seems to me like it makes sense to put those at the end of the endurance ride (if it's a good idea at all). Not to train sprints/top end per se, but to get all the benefits that I often see cited to those efforts.

[@calumramsaybrown]

6:46 Laursen doesn't agree that there is a lack of studies investigating increased endurance volume. That citation is by Costill et al., in a paper written over THIRTY YEARS ago.

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

Guess Ill put the research articles in the description from now on.

[@cracked229]

I ride with a dude who trains 25+ hours a week, year in and year out and it's mostly endurance w/ group rides but he is soooo fatigued year round I can and have accidently dropped him and I'm nothing special. I also train with plenty of guys who train < 10 hours per week but it's mostly very focused intervals and they are beasts. They might not do so well at long races (4+ hours) but anything shorter is fine. I think amateurs, especially age groupers with full time jobs, a wife, kids, etc are making a mistake trying to put in 20 hour weeks because that's what pros do. So much focus on volume but almost no focus on what wins races, especially in the USA which is having great 1-10 minute power.

[@jordanforsgren2597]

On z2 days should we worry about staying in HR or power zones. For example if we’re riding in z2 power but hr is creeping into tempo should we just ignore power and watch hr?

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

I’d stay more focused on HR. I give myself a HR ceiling and try to stay below it for most of the endurance rides.

[@jeffreythompson6282]

@@DrewDillmanChannel One weird observation I had recently was when I did a big bike packing trip that was mostly Z2 over the course of two 10+ hour days. I saw my HR pretty low that second day and towards the end I was pushing against a "hard stop" so pushed pretty hard to get home in time and my HR just would not elevate - My upper Z2 is usually like 145 bpm, and the funny thing is the highest I saw was 153 on a ~8 min basically FTP output climb where I'd normally see like 180. This is with a power meter so I know it wasn't just high perceived effort. Basically I'm saying HR may not be a good measure when going way beyond the normal range.

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

@jeffreythompson6282 yea. I see what you’re saying. In that case you’d consider both your heart rate and power since your already in a pretty fatigued state at the start of the ride.

[@johes21]

I would say you should focus on effort/RPe, and scrap power and HR. Easy is easy, no matter what your HR or power tells you.

[@randnism]

No backward hat Dillon appearance 😢

[@ReVoltaire]

I was waiting fit backwards cap Drew to appear 😂

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

Couldn’t afford his appearance fee!

[@randnism]

Been enjoying your content Drew - you've got some great content. Really love the race footage. Thanks for sharing!

[@jakebailey146]

I've heard Dylan say that riding on the trainer is the same as riding outdoors. But I don't think this is true. 3 hours on the trainer where you are constantly pedaling at a specific Zone 2 power (especially if you are using erg mode), feels significantly more fatiguing than doing a 3 hour endurance ride outside. What do you think about this Drew?

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

Yea I agree with you. Dylan don’t ride the trainer. Gotta keep that in mind as well. Ha.

[@christopherYecoYoung]

I have heard, for running, you do not need to run more than 20mi for a marathon. So is this similar?

[@akatgif]

I ride the mountains between Malibu, Hollywood Hills and Angeles national forest. My gearing is front 36t × 28t rear 11 speed. I actually need at least a 34t rear cog. My rides are cut drastically shorter because I don't have enough gear. My legs are like diesel engines. 😅

[@pheel.the.fletcher]

Get that rear cog replaced!! :)

[@jason200912]

Try a triple chainring and a massive 36 or up to 52t 12 speed cassette.

[@JeremyCaissie]

Dude that intro 😂

[@philadams9254]

"more is more ... until it isn't" - Rick Murphy

[@tellit_one3613]

Your horse shoe needs to be flipped man. Pouring all the luck out!

[@christopherYecoYoung]

This could be why he broke his hand in the last race 😮

[@JohnDough-yr2zt]

My friend Bill says that Levi overtrained.

[@automotive474]

I think you are not correct when you extrapolate to "if we were able to do only interval training it would be great and it would maximize our fitness". You forgot about sustained efforts such as climbing and time trials, you won't be able to handle those optimally with just HIIT.

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

Yea, I think I meant intervals as in all intervals at varying intensities above endurance, not just high intensity. I agree with your statement.

[@jason200912]

Change your channel name to Johnson Dylan

[@filmaynard]

Yo Dylan, get some sleep. 🙂

[@DrewDillmanChannel]

🤣