Inline speed skater needs help

Forgot to mention: my max heart rate is 190 determined by doing hard one minute intervals. HR of 190 was the highest achieved at the end of one of the intervals.

dthompson said:

...Any suggestions? Training plans?

I'd strongly recommend a training philosophy based on first raising your sustainable metabolic power and then building on top of that for the specifics of your sport. Arthur Lydiard had tremendous success with runners ranging from short distance track and field specialists to marathon runners with that same basic approach. Many cyclists use that same basic approach by building sustainable power during winter and preseason prep work and then transitioning to high end work specific to their events.

Charles Howe has done a very good job adapting Lydiard's ideas to cyclists with a very nice framework for the demands of different events. You can read a summary with a link to his full power training guide here: trainingsmartonline.compower cycling training.phpOpen ↗

FWIW, I've done a fair amount of in line skating including some 10K and marathon distance events and have coached and taught nordic ski skating for over a decade. The sports are very technique intensive as I'm sure you know. The 30 second intervals you describe certainly provide specific physiological benefit for developing anaerobic capacity and tolerance to short hard efforts. There's a time in the yearly schedule, specifically as events approach for that kind of work from a physiological perspective. But the main reason we use those sort of drills earlier in the yearly cycle for ski skaters is as technique drills with the emphasis on good form, complete weight transfer, etc. IOW, your sport demands a lot in terms of technique and some of the common drills are as much skills and coordination training as physiological training.

IMO there are far better ways to target weight loss as you simply don't burn very many calories in a set of 30 second bursts. Those long 20 to 30 minute metabolic base building efforts burn a lot of calories and as long as you only replace a portion of what you burn every day you'll lose weight. IOW, weight management typically works best when it's a combination of increasing your daily caloric output and being mindful of your eating habits and avoiding the temptation to over eat after workouts or throughout the day. You've got to replace your spent glycogen and make sure you have a balanced diet including some (but not as much as many athletes seem to think) protein but you don't need to gorge after workouts and can still trim calories here and there by watching portion sizes and making good food choices throughout the day.

To know your actual lactate threshold you'd need to do a ramped test with blood lactate draws and then the results probably wouldn't match your expectations. The problem is there are several technical definitions for LT and then there's many ways the term is used by coaches, in magazine articles like training guides and in general the various uses of the term don't line up. If you can sustain 300 watts for a full hour for your best effort then your "golden hour" is what we'd typically call FTP. Well that power is 10-15% higher than the power that most folks generate at what physiologists call LT or LT1 which is where your blood lactate concentration rises a fixed amount above your resting or low intensity baseline value. Yeah I know folks always talk about LT or even worse AT as approximately your 1 hour pace. That's where the confusion comes in. FTP or Functional Threshold Power was coined to avoid those sorts of confusion, it doesn't attempt to tie the power to hard to measure underlying processes, it's just what you can sustain for approximately an hour when well rested and highly motivated. Your Golden Hour power is effectively the same thing a good functional description of what you can do regardless of what's happening in your body at the time.

So anyway you can base your workout levels off of Andy Coggan's system based on percentages of FTP but just substitute your Golden Hour power in where you see FTP. Here's a link that describes some power training concepts including those levels: cyclingpeakssoftware.compower411Open ↗

Hope that helps,
-Dave