Physiological vs Field-Based Performance Testing: Dec ‘23

Hey it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance!

In this festive December edition of our In-Form newsletter, we wanted to answer a question we get from time to time on whether physiological testing is the gold standard, or is field-based performance testing adequate or even superior? Do you need to do one if you’re already doing the other?

This might be something you’re wondering about as you look to track your training progress in 2024, so let’s start by giving some examples of each and then discuss their respective merits and drawbacks, should you be pondering this question yourself.

So firstly, fitness or performance tests include (but aren’t limited to) those maximal efforts a coach might have you do or an article might recommend you try every so often. This could be a 20 minute all-out effort, a ramp test or perhaps a series of sprints. The idea is principally to measure your real-world output, like the power/watts you can produce over certain durations or throughout a particular protocol. 

When we talk about physiological testing, this is different in the sense that we’re examining the physiology behind performance, i.e. what’s going on in your body to produce the output that you see in a race or in tests like those discussed above. Physiological tests will typically look at markers like lactate concentrations in the blood, your ventilatory response to exercise or your muscle oxygen saturation.

Fitness or performance testing can give a better indication of how you might ‘perform’ in a race or event when the right test durations and protocols are used. These tests can allow you to see how your preparations are coming along and whether you’re on track to produce the numbers you need to achieve your goals. 

As alluded to above, it’s important to choose test efforts that reflect or can be extrapolated out to something relevant to your race/event demands. It’s also important to acknowledge the limitations of this kind of testing too, including whether maximal efforts in training are truly “maximal” and how relevant “fresh” efforts are to predicting race performance in events, where it’s often your ability to produce high power numbers with a considerable amount of fatigue already accumulated that’s most important (though this can also be tested!)

Physiological testing on the other hand allows you to look “under the hood” to see how your performance is actually created and what might be limiting your performance being greater. For instance, do you start burning a significant amount of carbohydrates at too low of a power output? Is your uptake of oxygen outstripping your heart’s ability to deliver it? A variety of tools can be used to try to answer these kinds of questions, including VO2 analysers, lactate meters and NIRS sensors to name a few.

Through the process of looking “under the hood", you can begin to understand your own physiology better, and this can help you to make better day-to-day training decisions about what to focus on and where to best spend your limited time and energy. This might mean that your ideal training program looks quite different from someone else’s, even if your measured performance in something like an FTP test is similar.

As we’re sure you’ll have guessed, the ideal scenario is probably to use both together, as this can give you the most complete picture of where you’re at, where you need to go and how you might go about getting there. If the opportunity arises, it can be really interesting to get some lab data on yourself. But, given that real-world performance and not how your body’s physiological values look in a lab is what ultimately decides a race result or a finish position, the fairly simple testing protocols many of us can do in training are very insightful and provide arguably the most valuable indicators of progress and performance potential. We have various further reading materials on the website on the topic of testing, should it be on your mind and something you’re looking to dial in throughout the coming season.

News

Speaking of training in 2024, after many requests, we have just finished developing a new set of ready-to-ride training plans designed specifically for older or “masters” athletes!

These plans have special considerations like longer recovery between harder blocks of training, strength training to address the loss of muscle mass that comes with age, as well as a greater focus on aspects of fitness that degrade most as we get older, such as VO2max. 

If you’re interested, you can check out the line up here on TrainingPeaks: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/my-training-plans/HNP-special-populations

Thanks as always for your time reading this email and we wish you a very Happy New Year! See you in 2024 🥳

All the best!
Tom & Emma