Why bother? Why not?
You might find you will see some improvement or not. It's easy to say it's waste of time unless you have tried? All your doing is repeating those guys opinions.
Time will tell we are all different...
How would you train at a cadence of 120/130bpm?
Specificity specificity specificity? Ah yes Mr Coggan saying...Know it very well...
I'm following this idea from Juerg to see if it works or not, got nothing to loose :-
FaCT idea - Find possible limitation & work on it
Find possible limitation / work on it and use Fit Mate as a feed back or other simpler methods and then see after a certain a mount of time , whether the efficiency really kicks in and you have a benefit of it.
Problem with this is :
When ever you change and you work on your weakness your physical performance may actually drop by the same HR or the same breathing frequency. This means your wattage out put is actually worse because you are not yet so efficient. Now if you train with wattage you never will accept that (Toks?), because your goal is to push higher wattage because this is the only "real ' value of improved performance.Small question here now, could it be , that because you learn to be more efficient you may push more wattage , which is great for racing .
Is it as well the goal in a workout? Small simple example with equipment and then you move this thoughts over to physiological systems. I take my super light TT bike and I go and work out and yes I improve my wattage immediately. Is that because I am physiological better ? Hmmm , well I push higher wattage so I am better.. Do I improve with this step something in my body ? And is that improvement really a gain in performance. So if I workout in a very efficient way I may improve wattage , but I may miss a chance to use a very specific Stressor to have a better improvement over the long term.
Again 60 RPM may be effective for the moment but perhaps 90RPM may be more beneficial due to other reasons I may have to consider. So the key is to actually train or workout with specific stressors in a not very efficient situation , improve this so that I can benefit later, and as soon I see I am getting more efficient change again if possible to add another stimulus to it.
This does as you can see not always means harder or longer workout but different workouts. Last very simple example to make my point clear:
You start with biceps curls and you never did them before. You use a 10 p weight and it feels heavy. After 2 - 3 times it feels much easier. No you did not gained strength that fast. Your body learned to kick the butt from some other muscles, who can help bending the elbow like for ex. the brachioradialis. Now you have the main Biceps , who has a small helper brachioradialis and the weight seems lighter because 2 workers share the work.
Now you keep 10 pounds you actually "loose' the stimulation for your biceps and the initial 10 pounds stressor is now in fact less stressor ( 8 pounds ) and you may loose the chance to adapt very fast. Now you have accordingly add some weights so the 10 p stressor is at least still 10 pounds or perhaps take some more. So because you adapted ( made progress and got more efficient ) you stop making progress. The key is to find the moment where this is happening and chance accordingly to avoid efficiency as long you see you later can use it when it is needed.
So you may breath very deep and inefficient in the training but in the race you may breath less deep but now efficient but still more than you were breathing prior to this specific training. So you may workout with RPM 100 but you are only efficient for the moment on 80RPM , but this may be still better than the previous 60RPM you had first. So workout check efficiency , check inefficiency and see positive adapatation once you compare a bit later with your original situation . Be patient as Rome was not built in one day as well.
Author :- Juerg Feldman