(How To) Cardiac Drift - A Different Way of Looking at Indoor Training
Please keep in mind that this thread is intended to merely introduce a few alternative metrics or ways of looking at metrics which may or may not prove valuable as an aid in helping ERG mode users to manage workout intensity, duration and frequency.
It is not specific to any event type and does not presume or prescribe any particular workouts, interval structures, training schedules, periodization, etc.
These things are all still up to you or your coach to determine according to your goals, events, circumstances, etc.
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I base the determination of workout intensity, duration and frequency on three metrics:- Cardiac drift
- MSI
- Internal:external load ratio
Here's why, starting with cardiac drift, which is the metric I'd chose if I could only have a single metric:
Perhaps even more compelling than obvious physiological support and its use by successful coaching outfits, the relationship between cardiac drift, endurance and fatigue is reproducible/empirical.
Increase workout duration or frequency and cardiac drift goes up. Decrease them and drift goes down.
Better yet, there is a near-perfect association between cardiac drift and problems I have had with recovery in the past, even before I was tracking cardiac drift.
From a purely analytical perspective, cardiac drift provides additional insight into the distribution of heart rate over time than average heart rate alone.
And, at fixed power under controlled conditions indoors, otherwise confounding variables are more reliable and consistent within and between workouts.
MSI (maximum sustainable intensity) is obvious. You must continually challenge the body in order for it to adapt and MSI is nothing more than a fancy word for "challenging". MSI is the maximum power you can sustain across all intervals of an interval workout.
The most natural, intuitive and widely-used performance metric in the history of cycling is the internal:external load ratio, whether people know that they are using it or not. Indoors under controlled conditions, it merely becomes an even faster and more reliable indicator.
Here's how, again starting with cardiac drift:
If cardiac drift is < 5%, increase endurance workout duration. If > 10%, decrease duration.
If cardiac drift is increasing, decrease workout frequency, especially when there is a coinciding increase in RPE or decrease in average heart rate.
Perform interval workouts at MSI. If you have too much left in the tank at the end of a workout, increase the power of the subsequent workout.
Use the internal-to-external load ratio (I:E) to monitor whether your training is working, whether you received adequate stimulus, and to predict recovery requirements. A decrease in I:E is an indicator of improved fitness. This can happen in two ways; (1) You are able to more with the same effort or (2) you are able to do the same with less effort.
While possibly counter-intuitive, the ability to do more with less effort is a reflection of the effectiveness of prior workout and subsequent recovery. What this means is that, today's lessor internal load may have been inadequate since it was less than the prior workout internal load which produced the improvement.
Conversely, if improvement is indicated by today displaying a "more for the same" relationship, then, using the same logic, today's stimulus was likely good and calls for the same amount of recovery as followed the prior workout.
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Please disregard the below as I'm just trying to save it temporarily until I can work the meat of these posts into this OP. Sorry for the inconvenience:
Last edited by fstrnu; 02-18-19 at 12:58 PM.
Reason: Re-write