Establishing Foundational Aerobic Fitness: Jan ‘24

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance with the first In-Form newsletter of the year! 🎉

To kick off 2024, we thought it’d be timely to send a little reminder about the importance of establishing a good foundation/base of aerobic fitness, and highlight the simple mishap many of us make of riding too intensively in what we think are “low intensity” rides.

Around this time of year, we like revisit some of our favourite books and resources, as well as dive into some new ones and a particular publication we like is Training for the Uphill Athlete, which is a great read if you’re into the physiology of exercise, even though it’s not cycling-specific. It dedicates a decent part of its pages to talking about what’s sometimes called “aerobic deficiency syndrome”, which is very much related to our point above about building a base.

The salient point the authors make is that a lot of amateur endurance athletes (like cyclists) ride that bit too intensively and in a way “impatiently” to properly build this base up from an appropriate level for them, which manifests in training above the first threshold and too much in between the first and second thresholds.

Whilst many cyclists won’t be able to capture the actual physiological first threshold for themselves through testing in a lab with expensive equipment, it’s possible to use field-based estimations like the talk test to help estimate your individual first threshold and ensure you’re being conservative enough with the intensities you’ll use to patiently train at the right level to raise this important first threshold. 

In fact, in Training for the Uphill Athlete, this part of the training cycle is called the “Patience Phase” (a term coined by famous coach Dr Phil Maffetone), which is something we feel is apt and good to keep in mind, especially for those who are particularly aerobically “deficient” and may need to start from the ground up by riding really quite slowly! 

Through being impatient and overzealous, or just by innocently not giving the first threshold much consideration, it’s easy to end up spending a great deal of time and energy training a little too hard to increase our base fitness effectively…

It’s then inevitably frustrating (and sometimes devastating) to realise this foundation is lacking down the line when the transition to specific, high intensity training, designed to achieve a “peak” your fitness for a goal race, doesn’t quite deliver on its promise! 

A greater base, patiently built, will ultimately allow you to perform a greater quantity of high intensity training, to a greater level of quality and serve to enhance your recovery, both inter-workout (between sessions) and intra-workout (e.g. between efforts within a single session) too. 

News

We’re really excited to let you know about the launch of our new website highnorthrunning.co.uk! 

If you’re also a runner, interested in running training science and practice, or just know someone that is, we’d love for you check out the initial articles we’ve posted and sign up to the email list to be notified when new material is added!

Back on the cycling side, we have also just released a number female specific plans for both “base” and “build” phases (with “peak” plans coming soon too), which are now available through TrainingPeaks. 

You can check out the plans here (you’ll find them below the Masters plans on the following page.

Thanks as always for your time and support and we wish you all the best with your riding over the next few weeks - we’ll catch you on the next edition!

Tom & Emma