What is steady state?

[turboskiff]

Interesting when you start to think how the Pete Plan meshes with the curve (or not).

[gregsmith01748]

Greg

Fascinating stuff, thanks for taking the time to post that. One thing I struggle to understand is the relationship between the use of the different energy systems and the length of the workout. Is the crossover graph shown valid for even short sessions? Another way of putting this question might be what's the shortest SS session that has any value at all and why?

John

John, that's a really great question, and I'm not entirely sure of the answer. I liked the answer that from the rowing reddit.

I think 30 minutes or longer is useful as a stand alone session. If you are taking short breaks (2' or less), Ithink it's OK make them shorter. I usually do 4x20'/1' rest. That gives me enough time to change my playlist, take a swig of water and towel off a bit. My HR is back "in the zone" within 2 or 3 minutes of starting after a rest. Sometimes it is good to do a long session straight through, especially if you want to rank any longer pieces, but in my mind, I get a better training effect from rowing in a well hydrated state, and I protect my back by having a chance to stretch a little bit.

[gregsmith01748]

Interesting when you start to think how the Pete Plan meshes with the curve (or not).

I think if you take the guidance about making the "steady" sessions nice and easy, then it meshes pretty well. The thing that doesn't entirely mesh is that the ratio of High Intensity to Low Intensity in the Pete Plan is weighted more to the High Intensity than most polarized training plans. Even if you include warmups and cool downs in the low intensity column, if you only do 30 minutes of steady state on the other days, you end up with nearly 50% high intensity and 50% low intensity.

The way I understand it, the same overload principle works for steady state training as it does for the hard stuff. If you start with 30 minute sessions, you will eventually plateau and be unable to continue to improve your pace at a certain HR or lactate level. At that point, the way you "overload" is by increasing the volume of steady state, not by pushing the pace harder. This reaches it ultimate state with elite rowers who will do something like 20 hours of low intensity work per week, while still doing something similar to the amount of High Intensity work that is in the Pete Plan (around 2 hours per week). a 90% / 10% split for elites is not unusual.

I don't now about you, but I don't have that kind of time or dedication. So, what I do is stick to something like 1 to 2 hours of HIT per week, and as much LIT as I have time for. By the way, not all the LIT needs to rowing. Some of it can be biking, running, whatever, as long as you respect the intensity limits.

[JohnAd]

Greg, thanks. One thing I wonder is if I'm time limited (basically longer than 45 mins at the erg is hard during the week) am I better off kick starting myself into the zone by deliberately positive pacing, say by doing the first k at SS + 5, second k at SS + 2 and then settle into SS pace for the rest, at the moment I find it can take over 10mins for my HR to reach anywhere near the zone at my SS pace. I'm such a long way away from elite that doing anything is probably helping but I'm keen to get the best value of training nonetheless and SS would be easier to bear if I could understand the why a bit more and also find some clues as to if I've passed the magic point at which I'm getting the adaptations.

[hjs]

Interesting when you start to think how the Pete Plan meshes with the curve (or not).

I think if you take the guidance about making the "steady" sessions nice and easy, then it meshes pretty well. The thing that doesn't entirely mesh is that the ratio of High Intensity to Low Intensity in the Pete Plan is weighted more to the High Intensity than most polarized training plans. Even if you include warmups and cool downs in the low intensity column, if you only do 30 minutes of steady state on the other days, you end up with nearly 50% high intensity and 50% low intensity.

The way I understand it, the same overload principle works for steady state training as it does for the hard stuff. If you start with 30 minute sessions, you will eventually plateau and be unable to continue to improve your pace at a certain HR or lactate level. At that point, the way you "overload" is by increasing the volume of steady state, not by pushing the pace harder. This reaches it ultimate state with elite rowers who will do something like 20 hours of low intensity work per week, while still doing something similar to the amount of High Intensity work that is in the Pete Plan (around 2 hours per week). a 90% / 10% split for elites is not unusual.

I don't now about you, but I don't have that kind of time or dedication. So, what I do is stick to something like 1 to 2 hours of HIT per week, and as much LIT as I have time for. By the way, not all the LIT needs to rowing. Some of it can be biking, running, whatever, as long as you respect the intensity limits.

In the big picture. A plan like the pete plan will always hit a wall. After a while the hard sessions will be on the edge. So you have to back down or will burn out.

Real SS training is ment to do for a full carrier, trainees will do it year round, the only thing changing is the race build up. The SS remains the backbone.

Pete himself, never did any SS stuff, don,t know how he currently stands in here, but in his prime his endurance work was not Ut2. He also hardly did low rated work. 24 was his minimum.

[gregsmith01748]

Greg, thanks. One thing I wonder is if I'm time limited (basically longer than 45 mins at the erg is hard during the week) am I better off kick starting myself into the zone by deliberately positive pacing, say by doing the first k at SS + 5, second k at SS + 2 and then settle into SS pace for the rest, at the moment I find it can take over 10mins for my HR to reach anywhere near the zone at my SS pace. I'm such a long way away from elite that doing anything is probably helping but I'm keen to get the best value of training nonetheless and SS would be easier to bear if I could understand the why a bit more and also find some clues as to if I've passed the magic point at which I'm getting the adaptations.

Very cool question, and a topic of some debate. There are two distinct camps. One camp thinks that starting fast and getting into the "zone" as fast as you can is better. The other thinks that the opposite. I have seen no formal research about this, so it's really just opinions...So here's mine.

When you start to exercise, you muscles immediately start to use a certain amount of energy and this energy is used to pull a certain number of watts. This is instantaneous. The first few pulls, maybe 20 to 30 seconds, your body jumps starts the process by metabolizing creatine, and then as this is used up, flips over to aerobic metabolism. If you are exercising above your lactate steady state level, you will immediately start to accumulate lactate. It will take some time for this to get from deep in the muscle fibers to your blood stream to impact the measure lactate level, but the process starts immediately. If this process causes the lactate level within the muscles to get high enough, you will start to traverse the crossover curve that I posted above. In other words, you will start to shut down the fat metabolism process. The result of that is that you will generate more more lactate at a lower power level than if you never activated the carb burning part of the process. I wrote a little bit about this on my blog, I called it lactate hysteresis.

https://quantifiedrowing.wordpress.com/ ... w-lactate/

Basically, by theory is that you can hold higher powers at lower lactates if you sneak up on them from below instead of drifting down to them. I have no evidence beyond my own personal experiments to back up this theory and like I said, there are people that I respect a lot that believe exactly the opposite.

[gregsmith01748]

Pete himself, never did any SS stuff, don,t know how he currently stands in here, but in his prime his endurance work was not Ut2. He also hardly did low rated work. 24 was his minimum.

I have a ton of respect for Pete as a person and an athlete. I think he created a really good training plan to get people started down the road to polarized training. I agree that you will get stale on it if you are on it for too long. I try to separate out my thoughts about the plan and his results because I don't put much stock in anecdotal evidence. We have no idea whether the Pete Plan worked better or worse than something else for Pete. He's a terrific athlete, but we have no idea whether this training approach maximized his potential or not. I do know that I made huge improvements on the WP and the PP, and then plateaued, so I started to work on variations to get myself back on the road to improvement.

You've said it before, the only approach that has been shown to yield long term improvement with enough real research behind it is a strongly polarized approach. It's just a time consuming and boring way to get there.

[jackarabit]

Marston is active on the CTC. Competitive with most 37 yr old indoor rowers. Hasn't publicly disavowed his "pencil sharpener" to my knowledge.

[nick rockliff]

The problem is there is no way of knowing what >2.0 lactate 'feels' like

Not too expensive to find out though.

At my peak during 2005/06 I did ALL my training using HR zones set by blood lactate profile tests but was doing two sessions per day most days and many of those where 16k r20 UT2 sessions.

Got me to a >17k 60min PB and a 1.45.x HM at the ripe age of 48.

[hjs]

Pete himself, never did any SS stuff, don,t know how he currently stands in here, but in his prime his endurance work was not Ut2. He also hardly did low rated work. 24 was his minimum.

I have a ton of respect for Pete as a person and an athlete. I think he created a really good training plan to get people started down the road to polarized training. I agree that you will get stale on it if you are on it for too long. I try to separate out my thoughts about the plan and his results because I don't put much stock in anecdotal evidence. We have no idea whether the Pete Plan worked better or worse than something else for Pete. He's a terrific athlete, but we have no idea whether this training approach maximized his potential or not. I do know that I made huge improvements on the WP and the PP, and then plateaued, so I started to work on variations to get myself back on the road to improvement.

You've said it before, the only approach that has been shown to yield long term improvement with enough real research behind it is a strongly polarized approach. It's just a time consuming and boring way to get there.

Nothing anecdotal, I know how and why he trained like he did. I am old you know. In the old uk forum days pete posted every meter he made.

He made up the plan to fit his personal training slot. He trained in his work lunch, so had limited time. The goal was not to reach his personal potential, but to get the best out of his limited time.

The plan is a trimmed down version from the Wolverine plan, not made from scratch. Pete found that l4 work was not needed for heavyweights. Only for lightweights. The idea was that l4 work is a kind of strenghttraining, which ofcourse it isn,t. Mike C certainly was not a close friend from Pete.

His results speak for themselve. Roughly from my memory, but not far off. 500m 120.6 2k 6.09.x unofficial. 6.11 race.
Times up to the Fm in around 1.50 , but this I don,t know for sure.

He was limited in height 5.11 only, but weightwise a heavyweight, around 90kg.

After a while Pete himself did not use his plan anymore, although the basis of his training remained the same, lunch hour work, base was faster aerobic stuff 30/60 min. He got his best 2k form around the MAD team relay 100km record, which still stands if I am not mistaken. Pete did a lot of HITT work in those days.
That 10 man wr team, had people like Benton and Smith in it to name a few. Was a very strong team overall.

[Bob S.]

Pete himself, never did any SS stuff, don,t know how he currently stands in here, but in his prime his endurance work was not Ut2. He also hardly did low rated work. 24 was his minimum.

I have a ton of respect for Pete as a person and an athlete. I think he created a really good training plan to get people started down the road to polarized training. I agree that you will get stale on it if you are on it for too long. I try to separate out my thoughts about the plan and his results because I don't put much stock in anecdotal evidence. We have no idea whether the Pete Plan worked better or worse than something else for Pete. He's a terrific athlete, but we have no idea whether this training approach maximized his potential or not.

In his initial plan, a key feature was the idea that it could be done during lunch hours. It seems likely that this had a strong influence on at the high-intensity/steady-state ratio. The WP is in contrast to that, with mostly steady state. Its key feature, the L4 work, was the main thing that Pete left out when he adapted it to his own use. The L4 is not SS in the usual sense, i.e constant rate, but it is long and relatively low intensity - and time-consuming.

http://www.concept2.com/files/pdf/us/tr ... nePlan.pdf

I have always been too lazy to study the WP. When I was doing some reasonably serious training, I often used the Interactive Programme starting in the early fall and then sharpened up with 2-3 rounds of the PP in the last few weeks before the 2k competitions, Long Beach at the end of January, and Crash-B late in February. I had to do a different approach in the 2015 season. I had had to cut back to no more than 2-3 sessions a week on account of aging and the first 3 months of 2015 were taken up with doing time trials alternating with a session or 2 of steady state all-in-one pieces.

Bob S.

[gregsmith01748]

Henry, By anecdotal, I wasn't doubting your memory or knowledge of the training. All I was trying to say is that it is a description of how the training worked for a single person. And since there is no way to compare it to how that same person would have done with a different training approach, it's hard to draw conclusions from that person's results and the method of training he used.

I'm really sorry I brought the whole thing up. Like I said, I think Pete is an incredible, world class athlete and I meant absolutely no disrespect to him (or you).

[JohnAd]

Greg, thanks for your great response to my question, hadn't really realised this is an open question. I think your hysteresis idea sounds pretty plausible and a good case for going at it from underneath. So if we accept that theory it implies all else being equal for SS we should aim for that constant pace which takes us to the threshold at the end which is fairly easy to say if not apply without the right tests. I'm still confused as to what triggers the adaptations we want, with muscle adaptation I think I know what that feels like but the aerobic stuff just feels like a leap of faith sometimes. To link that in with the Pete conversation, is it possible to get decent aerobic training with 45' sessions just by increasing pace carefully to tickle the threshold or is SS training only really valuable once you start going over an hour. I tried an hour SS on Saturday and it did feel slightly different afterwards (and not just from the chaffing, that was a new thing for me). That has me thinking that using the same SS pace for both 45 and 60 mins on the erg doesn't seem right if the aim is to stress the aerobic system to produce adaptations.

[gooseflight]

I'm really sorry I brought the whole thing up. Like I said, I think Pete is an incredible, world class athlete and I meant absolutely no disrespect to him (or you).

No need. Excellent contributions to a healthy discussion.

Unfortunately we don't have a lab rat study: PP versus steady state, although that remains a tantalising prospect. Even the Interactive Plan is not a valid comparison because it's not that biased towards steady state either.

Anecdotally(!) we see cases of people doing well on a diet of steady state but of course we cannot say whether or not they would have progressed equally (or better) on a different plan.

From my own experience hjs has it right in that one must eventually run out of road on the PP and progression -- the bedrock of all good training -- falters. The question then is what to do next

[gregsmith01748]

Greg, thanks for your great response to my question, hadn't really realised this is an open question. I think your hysteresis idea sounds pretty plausible and a good case for going at it from underneath. So if we accept that theory it implies all else being equal for SS we should aim for that constant pace which takes us to the threshold at the end which is fairly easy to say if not apply without the right tests. I'm still confused as to what triggers the adaptations we want, with muscle adaptation I think I know what that feels like but the aerobic stuff just feels like a leap of faith sometimes. To link that in with the Pete conversation, is it possible to get decent aerobic training with 45' sessions just by increasing pace carefully to tickle the threshold or is SS training only really valuable once you start going over an hour. I tried an hour SS on Saturday and it did feel slightly different afterwards (and not just from the chaffing, that was a new thing for me). That has me thinking that using the same SS pace for both 45 and 60 mins on the erg doesn't seem right if the aim is to stress the aerobic system to produce adaptations.

The lab standards for determining improvement in aerobic capability is performance on a time trial (20 minute, 6K, 60 minute). The physiological marker that is used is generally mitochondria density in muscles.