Training & Nutrition - base building

I heard that the proper way to build your base for the summer was to start now and do 12 hours per week of trainers or rollers at below 75% MHR and not one beat more. At any exercise for 6-8 weeks (although boring) do not exceed the 75% of MHR and the capilaries would push farther into your lungs and make oxygen delivery more robust when it was time to turn up the heat in the summer.

Is this close or do I sound like a crackhead?

:love:

The lung capillary theory is one I have not heard before, and I have read quite a bit of training and phisiology literature.
The strict base with no speed work is the old school way. Now most racers do some intensity during their base period, but for most it will be less than during other phases.

You might want to read Chapple's Base Building for Cyclists.

If you are pro racer who can put in big hours by all means do the long slow distance and heart rate controlled thing. For mere mortals with real lives the best way to build base is to ride in the Sweet Spot (see link) and add intensity as you approach target events.

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

Here is a quote from Circlip from another forum about Base miles. I am not sure if his explanation is correct but it sounds good to me.

"That shouldn't be taken to say that a very effective program couldn't also be structured around a large amount of early season LSD. However, assuming someone aren't coming off an extended period on the couch with an endless supply of potato chips, then it's probably worth noting that over the years the terms "base training" and "base miles" seem to have gotten iappropriately tied into the LSD concept. Base simply refers to building and fine-tuning your aerobic engine. Intensity levels higher than LSD are more efficient (per hour of training time) for this purpose, so long as recovery is adequate.
If you have large amounts of free time, you could probably build a great program with large LSD components. However, if you're under 10 hours per week you should also seriously look at some newer-school concepts of building base through more "sweet spot" or tempo riding.
So why do professionals spend huge hours early in the season doing what (for their relative ability) is LSD? The answer is that most riders and racers (aside from these professionals doing long stage races) aren't hampered as much by aerobic efficiency as they are by aerobic capacity. These pros need the aerobic efficiency to tap out that final 1%-2% in their potential, and it takes many saddle hours to achieve this i.e. no shortcuts. For the rest of us, we're nowhere near to maximizing our aerobic capacity, and so our training is better to be focused on this instead of trying to squeeze out the last bits of efficiency.
Where 15 years ago everyone wanted to train like a pro, assuming that would also give them the best results, it's now a fairly commonly held belief that training like a pro doesn't necessarily scale down well to a smaller number of available training hours, and for riders who aren't doing 20+ days of ~200km racing. Current methodology for "real" people has come somewhat full circle in that regard.
Then again, there's many different ways to build and execute a successful training program, and it varies by individual. Although you can collect ideas from other people to experiment with, the biggest challenge is to find a program that works for you specifically."

If you are pro racer who can put in big hours by all means do the long slow distance and heart rate controlled thing. For mere mortals with real lives the best way to build base is to ride in the Sweet Spot (see link) and add intensity as you approach target events.

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

This is why competent coaches are valuable. Arthur Lydiard of New Zealand developed the technique of "long STEADY distance", NOT, "long SLOW distance" in the field of running. I believe this is comparable to sweet spot training in cycling. As noted in fascat, "you build base (in part) by riding tempo". Tempo is not slow.

The coach of perennial NCAA XC power University of Colorado, Mark Wetmore, was a student of Lydiard's techniques. Wetmore continues to turn out teams that challenge for the national championship each year.

A great read is "Running With the Buffaloes".

Before there were HRMs, people thought about long hours and capillary building. There is some truth in it (but I don't think you build capillaries in the lungs). When HRMs came along everybody jumped on periodised training schedules; which also include plenty of base miles.
THEN power meters came along, and even more sophisticated training programs were developed.

It all depends on what ya want to do. A tourist has a different set of goals than a racer.

imagine base training like a pyramid, the bigger the base training (http://http://cadseen.cyclemistk.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=BKTP02F1) the higher the peak :)