Prick, Perform and Peak

Written by James Witts, content writer for Nopinz.

Hands up who trains by zones based on your functional power threshold (FTP) figures? Hmm, that appears to be around 90% of you, if not more. And that’s hardly surprising as ever since power meters became omnipresent in both professional and amateur pelotons and the likes of TrainingPeaks cranked up their usefulness, training to zones that hang off your FTP score has become the norm. FTP is at the core of Zwift training, too, only broadening the appeal. But we’ll whisper it, FTP isn’t the performance panacea you hoped; in fact, it’s time to follow the slipstream of Tadej Pogacar and his UAE Team Emirates XRG teammates and undertake a spot of lactate testing.

Subzero Development

“I dusted off my lactate sensor and it’s been revolutionary. I’ve won 13 races in a row and give much of the credit to recalibrating my training zones.” The words of Nopinz founder and top cyclist Blake Pond, whose undefeated dozen came off the back of lactate testing earlier this winter. Pond’s an experienced sportsman and is arguably at a stage where even the most marginal gains is keenly won. But reprising a relationship with his Arkray Lactate Pro 2 Sports Blood Lactate Meter has proved transformative.

“I’ve had a lactate sensor for a few years since we started developing the Subzero range,” says Pond. “We wanted to prove that the Subzero range of apparel was doing what we hoped – improving performance on the Turbo. So, Joe (Beer, sports scientist) and I developed a protocol to try and overheat me and then observe what happened to my lactate levels.

“We applied the heat protocol when using SubZero gear and without, and measured my lactate levels at different work intensities to see how my body was coping. As we’d hoped, the sensor showed that my lactate levels were consistently lower when wearing the SubZerocooling kit.” And if lactate is lower, that means you can increase your effort, boost performance and hopefully achieve your racing goals

Slipstream of a Tour Winner

Once the SubZero range was out there, cooling indoor rides for optimum performance, Pond’s sensor disappeared deep into his pain cave. That was until he began to read about how UAE Team Emirates XRG are keeping their three-time Tour de France winner, Tadej Pogacar, in really tight training zones thanks to lactate work. Clearly it’s working with the Slovenian tipped to win his fourth Tour title this July.

Pogacar’s focus on lactate testing came off the back of working with Inigo San Millan. San Millian is the director of performance at Basque football club Athletic Bilbao but formerly undertook a similar role at UAE Team Emirates. He’s also a clinical expert on mitochondria (your cells’ energy powerhouses) and metabolism. I interviewed San Millan a couple of years back and he was effusive about the team’s use of lactate testing and lactate work.

“FTP is useful but if you really want to perform at your peak, like all professional riders clearly want to do, then you must undertake lactate testing,” he told me. “It just delivers more accurate results, which means you can really focus in tightly on the physiological adaptation that you’re looking to make.”

Accuracy and optimum outcomes? We’ll have a bit of that. As will the Scandinavians. “The noted Norwegian Method is very much based on controlling intensity with lactate measurements during training to ensure the athletes are working at an appropriate intensity to optimise progress,” says coach Joe Beer, of the method that’s credited with the rise of top athletes like Ironmen Gustav Iden and Kristian Blummenfelt. “Coaches like Olav Bu have worked out precisely how hard and for how long their athletes can work, which results in impressive pace judgment and excellent results.”

Flaws of FTP

The evidence is persuasive that lactate testing results in sharper, more exact training zones because at the end of the day, FTP is only a proxy for lactate threshold and was a term coined by Dr Andrew Coggan in the mid-2000s. Lactate, or anaerobic, threshold is essentially the intensity at which you ‘red line’ and commonly falls between 80 to 85% of aerobic capacity (VO2max). Most well-conditioned athletes can sustain this level of intensity for up to an hour. Vis-à-vis, FTP’s broadly reflective of lactate threshold.

The problem is, in many cases it simply isn’t. “I’m a big fan of zone two and polarised work [which we’ll come into shortly],” says Pond. “My training zones were based on FTP tests, of which I’ve done many albeit with slightly different results. The 20-minute test, whereby you ride hard for 20 minutes and then multiply that number by 95%, gave me a figure of 356w. The Ramp Test, where you increase power in one-minute steps until you can’t maintain the target wattage, came in at 367w. And the Chris Carmichael test, consisting of two eight-minute all-out time trials separated by 10 minutes of easy spinning recovery, resulted in an FTP of 360w.”

“They’re within 11w of each other, which translates to around 280 watts for the top of my zone two work,” Pond adds. “The problem is, I was feeling pretty knackered in a zone that should be relatively easy and then struggling to hit my numbers in harder sessions.

“When I undertook the lactate test, however, my FTP came in at a much lower 320w. That meant my zone two was quite a bit lower than I thought, too. Instead of 280w, I should have been riding at around 200 to 220w, and staying below 250w, which is actually the top of my zone two. It just shows that FTP figures might not be as accurate as you think, having you push around 10 to 15% harder in base sessions than you should. That is not the way to peak performance.”

Why the discrepancy? For Pond, it’s arguably because he’s naturally a more anaerobic athlete. An explainer needed… We have three energy systems – ATP-PC, anaerobic and aerobic – and it is duration and intensity of effort that dictates which ones dominate. The ATP-PC system generates enough energy for around 10 seconds of really hard effort. Think initial sprint. After that you fall into another anaerobic energy system, which can produce enough energy without oxygen before burning out. Think a two- to three-minute effort on a hill. Anything over that becomes predominantly aerobic in nature so predominantly using oxygen. That’s why with FTP based off a 60-minute result, arguably it’s more valid for aerobic athletes.

“When I undertake the 20-minute FTP test, I’m pretty gassed after 15-16 minutes but because I have a good anaerobic system, I can keep going,” says Pond. “That looks like it contributes to skewing my numbers, which is backed up by me recording my highest FTP in the Ramp Test, which is arguably the most ‘anaerobic’ of the tests I’ve undertaken.”

That adds up. Guido Vroemen is a high-performance coach and told me that the FTP test is more useful for time-trialists and Olympic-distance triathletes (albeit the physiological anomaly that is Pond concedes his TT is strong), whereas it’s less useful for a cyclist competing in criteriums or other road races because of the pace variations. “Different riders with the same FTP will also display huge differences between them if they ride on a hilly course or on a flat course,” he added.

That’s why Vroemen set about creating the ‘Power-Speed Profile’ where you categorise‘critical periods’ of races into: ‘short’, five to 60 seconds, like the acceleration during a sprint and a good indicator of a rider’s anaerobic capacity; medium-long, between one and 10 minutes of maximum power, like successful riders in the spring classics; and long, between 10 minutes and an hour. This attribute is the decisive factor in a long Alpine climb or long TT.

“You then test each of these to more accurately piece together your power-speed profile,” he said. For those who’ve read Coggan and Hunter Allen’s Training and Racing with a Power Meter, it’s similar to their maximal power output charts by time but more specific. “We have a number of tests for each time section, which sounds quite laborious but it needn’t be so. When I’m planning my rider’s schedules, I might add 30-second intervals and recovery segments and take 90% of the best value. Then do the same benchmark intervals within a session a month later to see how that facet of performance and specific energy system is developing.

Training to Lactate Threshold

Combining the Power-Speed-Profile based off lactate testing would be a powerful combination. But so will simply lactate testing and then basing zones off your lactate threshold. There are various protocols out there but Pond used the Ramp Test, which then resulted in the following training advice…

Lactate threshold (LT1 and LT2)

LT1 (aerobic threshold): around 2.0 to 2.5 mmol/L, which occurs between heart rate 118to135bpm and 220 to 270 watts.

LT2 (anaerobic threshold): around 4.0 to 4.6 mmol/L, occurring near heart rate 141to148bpm and 290 to 320w

Onset of Rapid Lactate Accumulation (OBLA)

At a heart rate of 160bpm 360w, lactate jumps to 7.0 mmol/L, indicating that Pond’s entering high-intensity anaerobic work. Above 167bpm (400w), lactate skyrockets, suggesting an unsustainable effort.

Pond will blush but those are impressive figures. That’s partly because he’s a lactate recycling machine. Again, a physiological explainer needed… Lactate is a by-product of glycolysis, the process which you break down glucose for energy to fuel your endurance performance. For years, it was demonised and blamed for the burn that was often followed by the bonk. But that’s an outdated view as lactate’s actually a fuel, which is turned back into glucose via a process known as gluconeogenesis.

For all athletes, lactate does build up when working hard and at some point, the body can’t clear or reuse it, hydrogen ions rise, blood acidity rises and your power output drops.

“That’s key because if you take trained and untrained people, trained people have just learned how to use that lactate better,” says Beer. “It’s one of the biggest changes in the metabolism of trained athletes, but it’s not because they’ve overloaded on intervals. It’s because their aerobic system uses lactate better. And that’s been shown to be optimised by polarised or 80/20 training.

Peak via Polarised

Many of you will be aware of this concept – especially if you’ve followed Pog’s career – but this is where you train at low intensity for 80% of the time and at very high intensity for the 20% remainder. This ratio was formalised by noted sport scientist Dr Stephen Seiler, whose endurance epiphany happened over a decade ago with his paper, Intervals, Thresholds and Slow Distance: The Role of Intensity and Endurance Training. Seiler analysed previous studies into training intensity and duration and concluded that this 80/20 split was the Holy Grail of endurance sport, the thinking being that training low for the majority of time lays an impressive aerobic foundation, so strengthening performance factors like the heart, lungs and fat-burning. You then train around 20% of the time hard to really elevate your lactate system with some input from the ATP-PC system.

Pond’s an advocate, which is why nailing his zones more accurately via lactate testing has proved such a game-changer. “In a three-zone model, that means zone one training,” he says. “In a five-zone model it’d be zone two”.

“Whilst I always use power I also like to monitor my heart rate and see how that’s responding to the effort, generally this means staying below 72% of max (136bpm) for my low intensity aerobic work. Then my high intensity work is all done at 160bpm plus. This would be threshold and VO2 max efforts”.

According to polarised proponents like Beer and Pond, this split is key, citing that many athletes plateau because they’re constantly tired due to this ‘middle-of-the-road’ training approach, meaning they lack the energy to spend enough time to maintain high intensity efforts. In short, neither maximise aerobic or anaerobic adaptations.

Once you’ve defined your zones and trained consistently, your ability to clear lactate at higher intensities should improve. On a graph, you’d effectively shifting the curve to the right (whereas a shift to the lift would denote a lack of progress, if not regression). This either involves undertaking another lactate test – note: ideally a competent partner will take your blood for you via a pinprick – or paying close attention to the other metrics.

“Once you’ve dialled in your heart-rate and power zones off the back of lactate testing, you might notice that a session where you’d stick to 220 watts feels that bit easier and is reflected by a lower heart rate,” says Pond. “So, you could nudge this session up five -10watts and see how your heart rate responds. You can then adjust your zones to take into account this progress.”

And that’s the beauty of precise zone training—it maximises your time. Once you know exactly where your zones lie, every session has a clear intent. Base work stays truly aerobic, hard sessions are hit at just the right intensity, and you’re no longer wasting time in that murky middle ground of ‘junk miles’. When life’s busy and training time’s limited, this efficiency means you’re not just working harder—you’re working smarter.

Which ultimately is what lactate testing is all about. When you’re short of time but performance focussed, you want every session to count. While basing your training on FTP is a great entry point into focused training for endurance athletes, really dialling into your physiology via a droplet of blood work will guarantee greater gains for the same training hours. And if you don’t want to splash out on a sensor or don’t fancy the thought of an untrained friend stabbing your finger, hit the lab. It’ll be worth the outlay when your results fly.

–  This post was written by James Witts.

James Witts is a writer who specialises in endurance sport and sports science. He has three books on his palmares including The Science of the Tour de France and Riding with the Rocketmen. He also writes for a broad range of consumer publications including Rouleur, Cyclist, The Observer and 220 Triathlon.