by Robh » Tue Oct 07, 2008 7:22 pm
And Juerg's response :-
1. Andrew , thanks to his english, made a very nice short summary on FaCT philosophy.
Here some very short additional thoughts..
An athlete , who trains over years and years LSD and changes now to a higher intensity will change the stimmulation to his system and will have a nice fast responds ( also thanks to a nice base he set over years. )
An athlete, who trains hard and intense and now suddently changes to LSD will see a nice relative fast change in performance thanks to the change in the stimmulus.
Remember adaptation is a dialectic contradiction. You make progress thanks to adapatation, you stop progress thanks to adaptation.
The FaCT idea is nothing others as a simple assessment system , to find out how long adapatation works as progress , and when adapatation starts to hinder further progress.
So there is a very simple system here , where we use simple testing ideas and check the main systems like cardio , respiratory, CNS and metabolic system to name the most common one and compare the adaptation in each of them and how they interact to each other.
Using wattage (power ) is testing the overall performance of all this system together. So less power means one or 2 or all of the above system changed the respond on adaptation . Which one of them.?
Improving wattage tells you , that one of the above system, perhaps 2 , or all of them improved thanks to a positive adaptation. well perhaps 3 improved and one got worse ? how do we know ?. Perhaps one is getting so bad that it is just a question of time till the rest has to follow or visa versa.
In a relatively balanced body we will find ideas like VT ( ventilatory threshold ) LT ( lactate threshold ) true O2 utilization and so on close together , and they fail close together.( this is why some people beleive LT and VT are the same.) I can show you interesting case studies, where we fatigued the respiratory system very hard, and the VT and LT where very far apart , resp. there was no LT at all.
Not just because there is no LT anyway , there is no anaerobic situation during a step test , the PO2 is always perfect. )
Because of very specific training ideas, one or the other system may be a head of the rest and if we not adjust the rest the benefit you gained on the strongest one will be lost soon again due to negative adapatation.