This article crossed my desk from Chris Carmichael Head Coach of CTS that I wanted to share with you to which I want to add one additional critical factor.
Keep your nitric oxide levels elevated!
You can do this by getting sun exposure and by consuming 2 servings of PureClean Performance’s proven beet juice infused products daily. They are truly fitness in a bag.
I have 1.5 scoops of CHOCOBERRY BLAST™ in my daily smoothie, 1 BEET'UMS™ almost every day after dinner or a cup of UNBEETABREWTM as a late afternoon pleasure or prior to a work out especially when I am going hard.
The benefits-improved stamina, lower heart rate per power output and even increased power.
And in times of immune concern, remember beets enhance cellular immune response, reduce inflammation and lower blood pressure which all enhance our ability to ward off and lessen the effects of viruses.
Now on to Chris’s post.
Normally, this is a topic we cover in the fall, but with the current public health crisis leading to the postponement of events and potentially to limits on the ability to train outdoors (Italy and Spain have banned cycling for training or recreation for the time being), it is a relevant topic for the times.
Coaching is almost entirely about motivating and inspiring athletes, and there are a number of ways to accomplish that. Personally, we prefer to emphasize the positive by inspiring athletes to achieve lofty goals. Sometimes, however, motivation can come from the desire to avoid negative consequences. So, even though there are certainly bigger risks right now than losing fitness, let’s talk about why you should keep training and how much you training you might need, in the context of what actually happens your bike collects more dust than miles.
What Is Detraining?
Detraining, or the reversal of physiological adaptations that were the result of training, starts quickly and progresses rapidly. Short periods of inactivity are relatively easy to compensate for and are in fact beneficial for athletes for recuperation, but after about two weeks the impact of not riding your bike gets progressively more detrimental.
As you sit on the couch and your bike hangs dormant in your garage, here’s what’s going on in your body:
Within 2-7 Days: Your blood plasma volume starts dropping, reducing the water compartment of your blood. This means you’re losing the adaptation that helps keep stroke volume high and provides fluid for temperature control (sweating).
The amount of glycogen – the storage form of carbohydrate – your muscles can store starts to decrease as well. Consistent training is a signal to your muscles to maximize their glycogen storage capacity, and to your cardiovascular system to maintain high blood plasma volume.
These adaptations start declining quickly, but can also return quickly when you start training regularly again.
Between 2-4 Weeks: This is the timeframe where you lose a lot of hard-earned fitness. Over the first four weeks of detraining VO2 max can decline between 4-14%, and initially that’s mostly due to a reduction in maximum cardiac output (remember that reduction in blood plasma volume?).
You see this when you experience higher-than-normal exercise heart rates after a few weeks of minimal exercise. After the first three weeks or so, a decrease in your ability to extract oxygen from the blood also contributes to the reduction in VO2 max.
That decreased ability to pull oxygen from the blood is indicative of two other changes caused by a lack of exercise. After 3-4 weeks you see about a 3% decrease in red blood cell mass, which reduces oxygen carrying capacity. This is natural because your body adjusts red cell mass to your demand for oxygen; lower activity levels mean you can get all the oxygen you need from fewer red blood cells.
Your body also adjusts to the shift in resource demand with changes inside your muscle cells. Mitochondria are essentially the powerplants of your muscle cells, and they process carbohydrate, fat, and lactate into usable energy. One of the most important adaptations to endurance training is an increase in the size and number of mitochondria; and within 3-4 weeks of minimal training, you start losing that adaptation.
To make matters worse, the drop-off is greatest in the endurance-oriented slow-twitch muscle fibers, whereas your fast-twitch fibers retain their mitochondrial activity for longer.
Does Experience Slow Down Detraining?
Athletes often ask whether the 20 years of cycling they have in their legs changes the way they adapt to training and detraining. The answer is yes, experience matters.
Take the detraining-related losses of mitochondrial volume and power at lactate threshold. Compared to sedentary people and novice endurance athletes, after 8-12 weeks of minimal exercise, an experienced but detrained athlete will still have 50% greater mitochondrial volume and higher power at lactate threshold.
There’s also evidence that the capillary density that enables well-trained athletes to deliver oxygen to working muscle cells faster reduces from its peak density but remains elevated compared to non-athletes.
3 Steps to Avoiding Detraining
The way I see it, fitness has momentum. It takes time to create the adaptations that make you stronger and faster, and you can ‘coast’ through a short period of zero training before losing that momentum. But as you know from riding your bike, maintaining momentum requires less effort than gaining it, and the same is true with fitness. Holding on to what you have is easier than you may think, and it’s certainly easier than starting over.
Step 1: Reduce frequency. You can reduce your number of weekly rides by about 30%, which means a rider can go from riding 6 days a week to 4 days, or 4 days to 3.
Step 2: Reduce volume. For most people, this goes hand-in-hand with reducing frequency, but the point is that you don’t have to make your rides longer in order to compensate for reduced frequency.
Step 3: Maintain or increase intensity. This is the critical part. You have to give your body a reason to keep your performance markers from falling, and intense efforts provide the stimulus necessary. That doesn’t mean you have to do 3-4 days of structured VO2 max intervals every week to keep from detraining; I’d recommend 1-2 interval workouts, one longer endurance ride with some strong climbing efforts, and one fun and hard group ride. And the biggest takeaway here is that lollygagging along isn’t going to do you any favors if you’re already experiencing reduced training frequency and volume.
To return to my preferred method of positive reinforcement, the opportunities here are that you can avoid a significant drop in performance pretty easily, even with postponed events and potential restrictions, and that you can set yourself up for big performance gains when the season resumes.