There are some people who don’t benefit from steady-state aerobic training – for example, (C. Bouchard et al. 1999) put a large sample of sedentary people through a similar 70%VO2max/40min regime and found that around 10% improved their VO2max and endurance not at all even after months of full compliance. Such “low responders” have a genetically limited training adaptation.

Do you think that a Tabata regime might be more or less useful for such individuals? Is there a possibility that interval training might improve fitness where continuous aerobic does not?

I ask because I’m sort of running a personal trial with a sample size of one on this. My VO2max effort on a stationary cycle is around 140 watts (yes, confirmed by labs). Four years of 75%VO2max*40min*5day/wk hasn’t improved this by so much as a single watt, so after learning about the Tabata protocol recently I’ve been trying to replicate it as exactly as possible: ie, a work interval of 240 watts at 100rpm, which works out to failure in the seventh set. Three weeks into this I perceive a modest benefit — I’ve increased workload once to 251 watts to keep failure in set 7 — but now your article makes me wonder if there’s further improvement to be had, or if that three weeks’ gain was the limit.

In general, folks who are anaerobic dominant can start hard and fast but tend to die quickly b/c they rely too heavily on anaerobic metabolism. You might want to read the long series I’m doing on endurance training methods for more on the topic of actual training.

Given sufficient encouragement and motivation, they can sustain that for somewhere between 3-8 minutes.

But for short periods, say 20 seconds, they can crank out more than that. So in this specific case, the goal would be 510 watts for the 20 second bouts. So that’s 170% of VO2 max.

For shorter periods, 1-5 seconds they might hit higher than that (track cyclists can hit 1000 watts in their first stroke on the bike but they can’t sustain that for more than a second or two).

Hope that makes sense.

Lyle

I don’t understand the 170% of VO2Max though – I would’ve thought 100% was the max by definition. How does one know if they’re at 170% of their VO2Max? If 50% of VO2Max is you say 60-65% of max heart rate, what is 170%?

Seyton: Read it again.

Ralph: Unfortunately, the methods section was shockingly vague in terms of what they did exactly so I can’t give more detail. they simply stated that they tested VO2 max. No other information was given.

Arturo: And? I didn’t say you could’t do it running or that it wouldn’t work. I said that the study used cycling and people fall apart technically with other modes. The words, they mean things.

Pad: 400m running is in a very weird place that some coaches call the Mystery Zone. At ~45 seconds for elite athletes not purely aerobic and it’s not purely anaerobic. So their training tends to involve more of a mix than either pure sprints (100m) or pure endurance sports. They need good top speed, good lactate buffering, good anaerobic capacity and good aerobic development. As well, there are different ways to compete the 400. Some guys come up with the 200, great top speed and they tack on endurance. Some come down from the 800, great sustainability and they train more top speed. It’s a hard event to train for.

Bmack: The point about speed skaters is a good one which is why I mentioned it. As someone who’s been involved in the sport for going on 5 years, it has demands that no other endurance sport has. Even the distances are highly anaerobic and each lap is skated interval style (you work the corners and relax on the straights). So skating developed a lot of workout that alternat things like 15 second hard/15 seconds easy to mimick how we skate a lap. Other endurance events don’t really work that way.