You only have to spend a few minutes looking around the endurance world or watching athletes on YouTube before you’ll here them mention the word threshold.
Normally it’s followed by them explaining their session, something like “I’ll be doing 4x 10 mins at threshold on the bike today” and that kind of thing.
Now this can be very, very confusing to most people, and can be quite risky, I’ll explain.
One of the main risks here is that the term “threshold” has a few different interpretations and meanings.
And the use of the different kind of thresholds will be different for the different kind of athlete or event you are training for; I’ll write this article with Triathletes in mind, but it applies to cyclists as well.
For example, Threshold for a short course triathlete is very different to threshold for an Ironman athlete, and in my opinion a lot of the pros we all follow need to explain this a lot better. Or some of them don’t understand it themselves.
What does that mean? Let’s look at a short course triathlon that will take around one hour or less for some. We can train our system to stay as close to our “anerobic threshold” for as much of that as possible.
If we tried to complete an Ironman at Anaerobic threshold, we would blow up just after the one-hour mark and be in a bad state for the rest of the day!
So, let’s keep this simple and focus on two different thresholds and how they can apply to you as an age group athlete.
“The anaerobic threshold is commonly thought of as the point at which lactic acid – a byproduct of energy being made from glucose – starts to build up quickly in the blood.”
This system is basically our “red line”, most people could train and stay in this period for an event of around 60min, a highly trained athlete could stay there for longer. But for most people the hour mark seems to be the limit.
“Generally speaking, your aerobic threshold (AT) is a steady-state effort that you could perform for hours. If you’re working out in an aerobic range, your breathing will be light, and you should feel like you can keep moving for hours.
In more science-specific terms, AT is where the level of lactate in the blood first starts to rise, and the level of effort at which anaerobic energy pathways start helping out with energy production.”
This is where most of us should aim to race a 70.3 or Ironman.
So, you can see the danger here, if we follow along with some basic information, we find online or our favorite athlete on YouTube and start building threshold sessions, while training for Ironman the results could be disastrous.
Training those systems:
Both systems can and should be trained. For Anerobic threshold, those efforts are often harder and faster, and the aim is to be able to get as close to that “red line” and hold it for as long as possible.
Sessions generally look like 6x 4 mins at threshold (example 110% of FTP) with rest periods that get shorter as we progress through the session. Shortening the rest period helps our system basically get more efficient and tolerate the pace more.
Other workouts like VO2 max efforts all work towards this as well, more like an “engine building” workout.
For Aerobic Threshold for an event like Ironman, we can get really specific here quite easily.
We want to be able to train our upper aerobic system as we progress through the training process. Meaning we are more efficient for longer.
We can measure that efficiency in a few ways, but the most accurate is with the use of a Blood Lactate test. Where we test the amount of lactic acid in the blood. As we build tolerance, we can push a little harder and faster without creating more lactic acid.
Once we dip over that Lactate curve we are then starting to push into the Anerobic system.
Aerobic threshold done right means we can basically keep fueling ourselves with carbs and just keep going and going!
A typical Aerobic interval session would look more like 3x 20min at Aerobic threshold, (eg 70% of FTP). So, you can see the effort level is much, much less.
We would also fuel these energy systems quite differently as well and that is another topic which we have covered before and will keep adding to.
Planning how these systems are trained is something that needs to be paid attention to and is one of the most common faults I see as a coach, I’ll explain.
We need to factor in rest and work, hard and easy sessions during our training periods. We cant just go out every day and do Anerobic threshold sessions, the body will simply not handle it. What we tend to see with athletes doing that is they make very quick gains to pace and feel great, then start to break down.
This normally is met with illness, injuries or just a general plateau in the gains we were making. We need to have the session, fuel it, work hard during it then factor in some easier sessions, allow the body to make the adaptions we have just asked it to make. The we can repeat it. And we keep building that way.
This is a very basic outline of two very complicated systems and is designed to help de mystify the “threshold” world so if you need more help with this please get in touch as we are happy to help.
