Why Do We Need Cycling Endurance Training? Does it really help FTP and VO2Max?

This was a great Cat 4 Question emailed in. We've all heard the analogies about pyramids and foundations, but let's look at what is really going on, and then HOW it affects your FTP and VO2Max.

To be brief, yes, riding endurance will help you with those really hard efforts.

Here's his question:

Why does base, or endurance cycling, matter? All through athletics the answer I get has always been an analogy about building a house or a pyramid; something to the effect of, “the wider the base the higher the peak.”

I think I gleaned the answer from a 5 second trainer road podcast statement, “the harder an adaptation is to gain, the longer it takes to lose.” I take this to imply that aerobic adaptations take the longest to improve, but will be kept the longest. This in combination with a Stephen Seiler statement that almost all efforts over 60s are primarily aerobic leads me to believe: Base is important because almost every effort requires some combination of the aerobic and anaerobic systems with the former being the primary contributor. Therefore building a large base is critical to overall long term improvement in almost all levels of performance.

If I’m right - great, it would be nice to hear this stated plainly somewhere. Then maybe people will stop skipping endurance rides! If I am wrong - great! I am glad I asked. 12 years in endurance sport and I have always received an analogy as an answer, absent an explanation.

Here is my answer, but full reply in the video:

If you go back and look at physiological adaptation of training (this chart is not 100% accurate) from zone 1-7, some highlighted areas that zone 2-3 hit are:

increased mitochondrial enzymes
increased muscle glycogen storage
increased lactate threshold
interconversion of fast twitch muscle fibers from long rides

Enhanced capillarization in the muscles: They help to connect your arteries and veins in addition to facilitating the exchange of certain elements between your blood and tissues.

Development of slow-twitch muscles fibers

Trains body to more efficiently use fat as primary fuel source.

Ultimately, these endurance rides contribute to improved aerobic capacity (vo2max), lactate threshold and muscular endurance

Reduced VLamax (maximal lactate building rate). The higher your vlamax, the sooner you experience build up of blood lactate accumulation,and therefore fatigue sooner at a lower % of vo2max than a similar cyclist with a lower vlamax

Threshold riding achieves this at a greater effect, but we can only do some much FTP work, plus it's way more fatiguing. So you can get a lot of quality, insanely good endurance quality!, and a low cost to the rider.

THAT SAID, to get the greatest effect, the rider really needs to progress from 3 to 4h rides, optimally hitting 5 and 6….can utilize high torque to stimulate this

So who cares? Why base?

Almost every effort has a LARGE component of aerobic work. Take a look at a power file from a savage pro/1 RR...it will be very hard to handle those watts if you haven't really trained your body for a long time.

Why do people skip the endurance rides or easy aerobic work? These types of rides are hard to measure in terms of metrics, like putting a value on biologic durability. These will surely be figured out down the road, but for now, it is intangible and hard to put an exact WHY to it.

Which is why I believe so many people just pass on it. They don't spend the time on something that they can't read about and grasp tangibly or in terms of metrics.

Lastly, some things to consider:

100% Money Back Guarantee; Amazing For Recovery AND Hard Efforts!

Have a great week and good luck with your training!

[joe]

More specifically you are training your type 1 muscle fibers to use lactate as fuel, and the better you train them the more efficient they get and the more efficient you are at clearing lactate. A great example of this is Dean Karnazes. Has completed some incredible endurance feats. They tested him in a lab and found he burns lactate as fuel at an incredible rate and just doesn’t build up lactic acid, and his threshold for feeling fatigued, sore, etc is off the charts, aiding him in seemingly running forever

[craigg]

Brendan - Great summary and video. I am always amused by conversations on forums and IRL about the importance of 'base' without understanding what the actual goals and expected adaptations are from long endurance rides. I, personally, dislike the LSD moniker as a #nocoast endurance ride is not slow and is definitely challenging. In addition to the expected adaptions I have found that by pushing my long ride out to 4hrs 3x/month, I haven't had a huge FTP increase, but my ability to do hard (above FTP) efforts late into rides has improved, my ability to repeat hard efforts has improved and just in general fatigue resistance is much better.

[AdrianVaju]

Thank you, that make a lot of sense. You just convince me to change a 1.5h hard session with a 6h endurance ride.

[TrkJustin]

Responding to every comment, what a beast. I liked the video

[jordywilliams]

‘Training for the new alpinism’ and ‘Training for the uphill athlete’ By Scott Johnston and Steve House are 2 books that go into the details of exactly what endurance training does and why basing most of your endurance training on steady, easy hours is essential to all endurance athletes.

[LyfeisByke]

Great content! The longer and more frequent z2 rides have changed the game for me. Z2 also made my intensity days easier to complete with much higher quality.
Listen to Peter Attia (the drive podcast) episode 201 with Iñigo San Milan on a great breakdown of the importance of zone 2 for endurance athletes.

[TracKnGravelDeWd]

Oh man this is really good. When I started racing again I was being coached and would often use one of my endurance days as an extra "rest day". The coach was like no u need to do that and if your tired drop an intensity day. My primary is track racing so I was like that makes no sense. He didn't have a great explanation and It's too bad this video didn't exist when we had these conversations as I would have progressed much faster if it was made clear to me.

[asablack]

Such a great video, no shortcuts to build endurance!

[rileywoodruff]

Best cycling chan on Youtube. Can't believe you don't have more subs! Will do what I can to help you grow!

[flavforpar]

Great information!
Thankful for your videos

[jonnyallen]

Really great summary and approach. Sums up what I'd been trying to understand for a long time. More of these please!

[jusuflazami]

SUPERIOR EXPLANATION, there are more stuff to this by the way, enhanced Efficiency, Increased Heart Volume, Stronger Hear Muscle Tonus, Preservation of Mitochondras as opposed to Destroying mitochondrias after Intervals due to acute acidosis, Improoved net body Alcalisation etc 😁

[tripswithgriff]

Another great video - thanks.
Do you have any info on when/if those benefits of endurance rides might stop or slow as we age? I know all the Friel stuff about losing vo2 as you age and the need to regularly 'use it or lose it', but can we still get these benefits to the same extent as we ride into our 50's and 60's? Do I need MORE endurance work to reap the same adaptions as a youngster or is age just a number when it comes to mitochondrial biogenesis?

[angelsaulovelazquez]

can the same benefits of a long ride happen for example if you do a group ride and it has 30-45 min of hard hard efforts and then you extend the regular 2:30 ride into a 4:30-5 hour ride by riding the rest in zone 2? or does the entire ride need to be zone 2
thanks

[JFomo]

I suck at endurance rides because I always want to ride fast. I need to be told it's ok to ride slow and to have people over take me.

[richardmiddleton]

60% of the protein you eat gets converted to glucose so you can still have glycogen in the muscles without consuming carbs although the process is slower so you will be limited in how often you train at threshold or above.

[billszymanski]

Nicely done. Should I monitor z2 with hr or power?

[annukun]

so in a nutshell of i train aerobic zone (endurance) 90 percent the time....eventually i should be riding faster and get fitter according to what you say right? also my max heart rate is 185 so ill ride more than 146 HR during enduarnce right please explain thanks!
example my aeribic is 17.5 mph one ay i should be riding at 20 mph all day right!!! if i kep training at enduarnce..also last byt not least sometimes i ride on the trainer for almost 2 hours i heard 2 hours on trainer is like 3 hours on the road right?

[delkim]

So you are prefering Z2 endurance rides over Z1? Should I still be doing Z1 rides then?

[michaelwtapp]

At around the 8:25 mark you talk about the fatigue of a 5 hour ride vs. a six hour ride. Are you talking about 5 hours as the moving time or 5 hours as the total duration of the ride. On Sunday I did a ride that was 5.5 hours of moving time and the total duration was 8 hours. Yesterday I was pretty fatigued. In hingsight I was thinking if I consumed more calories on the ride day I would have been less fatigued on the recovery day. It sounds like what you are implying that if you do a ride for around 6 hours you are going to be fatigued the following day no matter what. <- Is that right? Thank you for the intel!