“Dose-Response” Relationship: Mar ‘23
Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance. We hope this latest newsletter finds you well!
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, spring is on the horizon, and we’re very much looking forward to some longer days and warmer weather for riding! 🌱☀️
Musings
This month, we wanted to reinforce the important principle of the ‘dose-response” relationship that exists between training and the resulting adaptations.
We’ve always found it can help enormously to look at training load (and especially high intensity training) in a similar way to how dosage works in relation to medication.
Take too little of a paracetamol pill, an ibuprofen tablet etc. and you won’t see any effect…
Take the recommended dosage, and the effects are often very positive and the medicine provides the intended response!
But crucially, take too much and the results aren’t enhanced further. In fact, an increased dose can end up being very dangerous and harmful.
The main point here is that more isn’t always better.
With training, the relationship is very similar. For each athlete at any particular time, there’s an effective “dose” of training needed to bring about a positive response related to maintaining or improving fitness.
Particularly with high-intensity training, there comes a point beyond which there is no additional benefit. You’ve provided as much stress as you body needs in order to trigger an adaptive response. Adding more training stress doesn’t necessarily make the body adapt faster and moreover, any additional stress comes with an exponentially increasing risk of becoming ill, injured or overtrained.
The trick is to apply the right training stress for your current fitness level and your current capacity to recover from that training.
So, try to keep this in mind when you feel a tendency towards adding more load, more intensity and more training stress onto yourself in a bid to get fit fast, or catch up for lost time.
Science
This month, we’ve been reviewing a paper comparing the stress response and recovery time-course between sprints, vs heavy-load strength training:
Key Take-Homes
The full write-up is available here. However, the main learning points were that:
1. Sprint training induces a large metabolic stress (i.e. the body is required to generate energy at high rates, that challenge the body’s maximum capacity). The acute effects of a sprint session, such as elevated lactate levels, return to baseline within a matter of hours. However, we know from other research that full recovery may take between 12-24 hours in order to replenish muscle glycogen stores.
2. Strength training mainly results in muscular damage with effects lasting 2-days or more. The metabolic stress is much less than for the sprint session.
3. Elite-level cyclists who are familiar with regular sprint and strength training don’t appear to experience performance detriment after these types of sessions when performed in isolation
4. We need to be wary of one-size-all approaches to modelling fitness and fatigue (such as the TSS model), because different types of session induce different training stress, with different recovery time-courses.
News
Top of our news this week is Zoe Langham riding an amazing race at the UCI Cycling eSports World Championships, clinching the silver medal in a close finish with the ever-impressive World Tour pro Loes Adegeest. Zoe improved on last-year’s bronze medal-winning performance, and we’re excited to see where her current rate of improvement takes her going forward.
We’ve made some upgrades to our workout library, which now includes progression levels, so that you can easily see how sessions can be developed as your fitness improves.
We’ve also been expanding our offering of training plans, which now include some discipline specific plans, for use in the lead-up to a priority event, and a selection of 2-week taper plans. We’ll be adding new plans to these two categories over the coming months. If there are any plans you’d like to see added, just drop us an email, and we’ll try to create them in order of highest demand!
That’s all for this month!
As always you can find our Cycling Physiology Guide and Hill Climb Handbook on our website too. For those that are already customers, we thank you greatly for your support and feedback!
All the best,
Tom & Emma
