Fatigue Resistance/Durability: Sep ‘23
Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance 👋
We hope that September’s been treating you well! Here’s this month’s edition of our In-Form newsletter…
Musings
We’ve been thinking quite a bit about the concept of ‘fatigue resistance’ or ‘durability’, which is the ability to continue producing high wattages towards the end of a ride or race.
It’s an important ability for many different types of cyclist to have, particularly since winning moves are often made in the closing stages of a race. Fatigue resistance is often overlooked though, as it can be quite hard to test and improvements in your ‘durability’ aren’t necessarily reflected in ‘fresh’ power data (e.g. from a 20-min max power test).
So, we thought we’d give you a bit of an insight into some interesting data we have on this subject…
We’ve recently been performing an annual review for some of our athletes who are coming to the end of their competitive season, and the following data from one of our riders demonstrates this point nicely…
Fresh power data:
In comparing maximal power data from 2022 to 2023 so far, we can see our athlete improved or maintained their power over most key durations.
This athlete is already at a very high level, and we weren’t expecting huge changes in their fresh power numbers. Our main focus for the year had been on improving threshold power and endurance, so it was nice to see the biggest improvements over the longer durations.
However, while it was cool to see maximal power outputs trending in the right direction, it could be argued these improvements were relatively small.
Fatigued Power Data:
When we turn to look at this athlete’s maximal power numbers after they have expended 40kJ/kg body weight (roughly a 3-hour race), we can see some more sizeable improvements:
These patterns are also seen when we look at peak power numbers after 30kJ/kg and 50kJ/kg, with improvements in max power output typically being in the region of 15% or more.
There are two key points to take away here:
Firstly, don’t be too disheartened if you’re not constantly seeing big improvements in your fresh power numbers; it doesn’t mean your fitness isn’t improving!
Secondly, it’s important to test your fatigue-resistance or durability, if this is something you’re trying to develop in training. Simply testing your fresh power numbers often won’t tell you about improvements in your fatigue-resistance.
For a lot of cyclists soon to be entering the base training phase through the late autumn and winter, developing fatigue-resistance will be a key training goal.
To help, we’ve just put out a new article outlining how you can test and develop your fatigue-resistance.
News
Alongside the post above, we’ve also just put out another post on Zone 2 training, titled ‘Is Zone 2 Training Overhyped or Under-Appreciated? This article follows on nicely from our earlier article on the thoughts of Dr Iñigo San Millán, who is coach of Tadej Pogačar. It aims to critically review some of the differing viewpoints around Zone 2 training; acknowledging that not all coaches and sports scientists agree that Zone 2 is as great as it’s often made out to be!
We have capacity to build some new custom plans for you, so do get in touch if this is of interest! Our custom plans strike a nice balance between fully-supported coaching, and our pre-build (but customisable) plans and seem to work well for those looking for a more individualised program on a tighter budget.
As always, we have plenty of training resources available on our website, including the Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide, the Optimal Cycling Nutrition Guide, and our Hill Climb Handbook.
We hope that was useful for you! Thanks for your time and we’ll catch you in the next newsletter soon.
All the best,
Tom and Emma
High North Performance
