Cassius wrote: ↑February 18th, 2022, 6:59 am
Tsnor wrote: ↑February 9th, 2022, 11:28 am
Endurance performance scales with time spent in zone 1/ Steady State. You are currently doing " three SS (~10k each)," In addition to the comments above, if you have the time, make the SS session longer. Good target would be 90 mins vs the 50-60 your using now (or 15-18K vs 10K).
Adding distance can increase the effort level. If you do add time/distance to your steady state you will need to monitor how you feel and see if your HR drifts up in the last 20 mins or so. You may need to drop your SS pace as you increase distance to meet the SS goal of little/no ANS impact. You may want to ramp up by adding only 10 mins/session (or 2K distance) a week until you get to your new SS target.
Just spotted this, thanks for the additional feedback.
My current SS pace is around 2:12, based on 5k PB of just under 1:56, but that's guesswork. I haven't got into heart rate monitoring yet, which is a whole new thing.
What is "ANS" impact?
ANS is autonomic nervous system.
If you are rowing 1-3 times a week then don't worry about ANS stress. Drive your steady state workouts as hard as you like. If you are working out 4 or more times a week then keeping the steady state slow becomes important.
Hard activity puts stress on the autonomic nervous system and leads to one set of exercise adaptations (vo2 max, etc). Long slow steady state sessions put very little stress on your ANS and leads to a different set of adaptations (more mitochondria, blood volume, heart changes, etc). You want both. Doing more than 2-3 hard sessions a week overloads your body, this is true for both olympic athletes and recreational erg'rs. Goal is to keep the long slow sessions below the level where they cause ANS stress. If you go too hard (4+ hard sessions/week) you'll find (1) 6 to 8 weeks of great gains (2) a performance plateau, rising resting heart rate and bad trends in heart rate variance measurements followed by (3) symptoms of overreach and overtraining. If you go just right you'll find lower resting heart rate, long term sustained performance improvements, etc.
If you are not using a heart monitor and are working out 4 or more than times a week then you can use the "can you speak conversationally" test. If you can talk on the phone while rowing 2:12 splits then you are all set. If you are puffing every few words then back off a bit. Worse thing you can do is perform the slowest workout that triggers ANS stress - worst of both worlds. And the ANS stress stuff seems to be knife-edge not a smooth continuous range. So avoiding getting close to the edge is a good thing.
Aside. If each week you row hard and cycle hard and run hard the sum of all your hard sessions should still fit in the "max 3" hard sessions / week limit. Makes training plans interesting for triathletes.
