Long Steady Distance

[mds101]

Simple question....why? Lots of people describe benefits of LSD but I can't work out why it would be more beneficial over a period than say interval training?

[vorsprung]

If you are me and are training for riding for long distances

1) it's like training for the same intensity as the event.  The experience in listening to your body at that intensity helps

2) some physical things (like the backside toughening up) come from hours on the bike

3) prior to intensity training you need to have some kind of "base"

[mds101]

I guess tats what I was thinking but if you're already all if those things is it 'better' to focus on intensity and is that likely to see bigger gains. So if I already have a good base but want to improve say my top end speed and my climbing, is it worth worrying about LSD or better to just focus on cycles of intensity.

Or is there some other benefit from the steady stuff?

I was chatting with a time trial fella on the commute in the week and he was telling me about how much he gained from LSD this year (hence the thinking) but I couldn't get why. He was obviously already very fit, I know he rides thousands/year on the commute at a fair intensity, so what else could he be gaining that he felt had such an impact on his year?

[L CC]

Your TT guy won't be audax fit (assuming he rides mostly 10s & 25s, which is what most TT-ers do). You personally will get more gains from intervals, as you already regularly ride 100 miles at conversational pace. So it's not really that LSD isn't useful/necessary, it is, but as an audaxer you already do that. I wouldn't bother adding any to a training plan, but I'd make sure I didn't take it all out.
Whatever you do regularly, it's the stuff that pushes the envelope that has the training benefit, so if you're a TT-er who regularly pushes very hard for a short time, then LSD will lead to what appears to be a more noticeable benefit than a continued diet of what you already do.
There's more seasonality in TTs, and LSD is their winter training, something to keep the legs moving in the off season. We have RRTY for that.

[Peter]

L, I've just noticed your new strap-line.  Did you ever come across an old folk-ballad called The Outlandish Knight?

An outlandish night from the north land came
And He came a-wooing of me...

It ends badly.

P.

[Ningishzidda]

If you're not going to do LSRs, you'd better find another activity which involves holding your head up while bent over forward, for 20 hours.

[hellymedic]

Long, steady distance is good for training fat-burning, which is something high intensity riding will not do.

[L CC]

I'm sure we debated the fat-burning thing elsewhere and concluded that because you use so many more calories exercising at a high intensity the whole fat-burning-zone was a bit misleading/pointless/a red herring? Or was that only in the context of weight loss?

[LittleWheelsandBig]

Only useless for weightloss.

[ran doner]

Didn't the nice BBC TV Doctor Michael somethingorother experiment with very short, maximum effort, daily intervals and found it worked for weight loss. I think the caveat was that the system only worked on certain people but they could test for that prior to starting.

[Ningishzidda]

Long, steady distance is good for training fat-burning, which is something high intensity riding will not do.

It does if the intensity is so severe that appetite is lost for two days. 

[Ningishzidda]

Didn't the nice BBC TV Doctor Michael somethingorother experiment with very short, maximum effort, daily intervals and found it worked for weight loss. I think the caveat was that the system only worked on certain people but they could test for that prior to starting.

Yes. It was genetic.

He or someone else on a sports medical show explained that 'spicing' could be a natural performance enhancer.

Compared with our closest relative, performance had been 'spiced' out many years ago.

[uphillbothways]

Long, steady distance is good for training fat-burning, which is something high intensity riding will not do.

We used to think that. It turns out that high-intensity training substantially increases the basal metabolic rate for hours or days after the activity ends, because hypertrophy and repair are very calorically expensive. Strength athletes have similar calorie requirements to endurance athletes, even though they train far less - an olympic weightlifter might train for less than an hour a day, but still require in excess of 6,000 calories a day.

The benefits of LSD training are mostly psychological. A long run at an easy pace is fine to loosen up your legs or get your contact points used to long rides, but it won't do much for your lactate threshold or VO2Max. If you look at how roadies train, there's always a strong interval element, be it taking your turn on the front of a fast chainline or sprinting for road signs. It sounds almost tautological, but the only way to ride faster is to ride faster. It certainly isn't necessary to regularly train at or near your competition/audax distance - the front-runners in 12 and 24hr TTs rarely cover those sorts of distances in training and generally concentrate on quality rather than quantity.

As regards having the core strength and endurance to maintain an aero position over long distances, it's far better to gain that strength in the gym than on the road. Formula 1 drivers have necks like tree trunks to cope with the G forces, but they don't train by going around a racetrack all day. Most amateur cyclists don't do any gym work, which IMHO is a big mistake. A couple of sessions a week of pilates-type training make a huge difference in your comfort and control on the bike.

[mds101]

Your TT guy won't be audax fit (assuming he rides mostly 10s & 25s, which is what most TT-ers do). You personally will get more gains from intervals, as you already regularly ride 100 miles at conversational pace. So it's not really that LSD isn't useful/necessary, it is, but as an audaxer you already do that. I wouldn't bother adding any to a training plan, but I'd make sure I didn't take it all out.
Whatever you do regularly, it's the stuff that pushes the envelope that has the training benefit, so if you're a TT-er who regularly pushes very hard for a short time, then LSD will lead to what appears to be a more noticeable benefit than a continued diet of what you already do.
There's more seasonality in TTs, and LSD is their winter training, something to keep the legs moving in the off season. We have RRTY for that.

...and so upon a cold morning commute a moment of clarity did come to pass which was as above; if I feel like I need to argue with myself about LSD, I should remember that I already do shed loads of the stuff commuting and long ridin'...... Now to move from thinking about it to doing it, in many ways the hard part

[vorsprung]

As regards having the core strength and endurance to maintain an aero position over long distances, it's far better to gain that strength in the gym than on the road... Most amateur cyclists don't do any gym work, which IMHO is a big mistake. A couple of sessions a week of pilates-type training make a huge difference in your comfort and control on the bike.

What if I cycle commute to work (10 hours total, mostly LSD) do I need to go to the Gym and do Pilates??

[hellymedic]

I have very low aerobic capacity but found going to the gym with the Willesden for winter circuit training made my commuting and general cycling worse..
YMMV

I was commuting around 10 hours per week at the time, mainly LSD.

Fast commutes were a summer training exercise. They seemed to improve my general performance.

[uphillbothways]

As regards having the core strength and endurance to maintain an aero position over long distances, it's far better to gain that strength in the gym than on the road... Most amateur cyclists don't do any gym work, which IMHO is a big mistake. A couple of sessions a week of pilates-type training make a huge difference in your comfort and control on the bike.

What if I cycle commute to work (10 hours total, mostly LSD) do I need to go to the Gym and do Pilates??

You don't need to, but I think there are substantial benefits in doing so. Having a strong core allows you to push the bike around much more easily, which has manifold benefits. The kind of bike handling tricks you see in the pro peloton are vastly easier if you've got the strength and coordination to steer confidently with your backside and manhandle your bike around potholes and over bumps.

You can develop that strength on the road, but it's a relatively much slower process than doing it in the gym if you're not doing a lot of technical riding. Cyclocross is such valuable off-season training for this reason - the hurdles and loose surfaces put a lot of demand on your core and require you to actively ride your bike rather than just sit there pedalling.

So many common complaints are easily addressed by core strength training. Neck and back pain on long rides are the obvious examples, but soreness in the hands and shoulders are significantly reduced if you're not so reliant on your arms to prop you up. A strong core allows you to get lower on the bike, get rid of those stem spacers and stay in the drops for longer. You can descend more aggressively and ride with more confidence in the wet. You can clearly see the lack of core strength in a lot of riders towards the end of a long ride - they're wobbling all over the place and pedalling squares because they don't have the strength to keep themselves stable on the bike.

[Ningishzidda]

I gave up LSD. I’m on DMT now. 

[Ningishzidda]

Performance in any cycling discipline can be directly traced back to FTP. Functional Threshold Power.
David Gordon Wilson and Frank Whitt published a chart of cyclists’ power vs exercise duration. Its in Dave Wilson’s book ‘Bicycling Science’  ( MIT Press ).

As can be seen, once one’s FTP is ascertained, long term performance can be projected in ratio to the curve appertaining to UK Amateur tourist trials.

Therefore, if one’s 60 minute sustained power is up at 300 W, one can expect a 600 minute continuous effort to be at 120 – 130 Watts, which takes some strategic ‘slowing down’ in the first 590 minutes. 

There will, of course, be athletes who deviate from an exact proportional curve due to their fast and slow twitch balance. Whitt’s curve is an average of many cyclists.

PS. In the AUK world, what is 'Long' and 'Steady'. Or is Audax it?

Is a 200 BR a 'LSD' ride for a raceboy?

PPS The Golden rule for LSD rides is “At NO point on the ride should 100% FTP be exerted.”
IIRC, Coggan and Allen prescribe 85% maximum FTP exertion on LSRs, and that’s up hills for a short time span.

[uphillbothways]

I gave up LSD. I’m on DMT now.

That explains a lot.

[mrcharly-YHT]

There was a theory (I don't know if it was actually tested) that LSD stimulated growth of capillaries. This was something I read in running books, not cycling. Most cycling events are longer (in duration) than typical running events; it may be that any regular cyclist gets sufficient LSD anyway.

[Karla]

Long, steady distance is good for training fat-burning, which is something high intensity riding will not do.

We used to think that. It turns out that high-intensity training substantially increases the basal metabolic rate for hours or days after the activity ends, because hypertrophy and repair are very calorically expensive. Strength athletes have similar calorie requirements to endurance athletes, even though they train far less - an olympic weightlifter might train for less than an hour a day, but still require in excess of 6,000 calories a day.

What I believe Helly was saying is that LSD trains the body to extract energy from fat stores rather than from glycogen during  exercise, which is something other than what you're talking about and is rather useful for endurance sport.

[LEE]

A mixture of all the above is best I think, it all helps.

Intervals are a very effective way of gaining speed/fitness in a short time.

Mile-munching is an effective way of training your body to deal with the calorie deficit thing and the comfort thing.  I went from a novice Audaxer eating machine (really I was starving all the time) to pre-PBP being able to get round a 200 with a light snack for lunch.

I also find that knowing I can ride a long distance makes it a lot easier to ride a long distance.  I learnt that I can ride through bad patches and come through the other side if I hang in there (Did anyone see me on the final night of PBP?)

[Ningishzidda]

[EGO-Maniac]

It's a good discussion here.

I think the main thing is training to meet your actual goals. The question on LSD that was posed has no goal-specific context, which is why so many different perspectives are being thrown at it.

To put it into goal-specific context - if you do not train for long distance events there is absolutely no need to do long slow distance training. You can do easy rides and hard rides in your training cycle, but no need specifically for long and slow rides.

However, if you do significantly long distance events, then longer slower rides become a necessity - for many of the metabolic and physiological reasons already outlined above, but also because you need to get the body accustomed to a comfortable and sustainable posture which will allow you to get through very long rides. If you don't have that acclimatisation you could easily have the fitness to ride the distances, but you will not be able to last in the actual event, due to 'comfort issues' and possibly even injuries.

There's a 3rd possibility, which is that an individual rides regularly and often, but never particularly long distances. However, the total number of hours spent riding are significant. In such instances a person could well be spending enough time practising sustainable posture that the need for lots of long slow rides to establish this postural efficiency becomes unnecessary. In such cases sticking to intense training can probably do the job of preparing such athletes even for a very long event. However, there will still be a requirement for a small number of long distance 'practice runs' so that you know what your actual long distance pacing and riding strategy is.

One last thing: that popular "fat burning" issue is worth addressing. Physiological studies clearly show that a higher PERCENTAGE of your energy is derived from fat burning when you ride at an easier and more sustainable pace. However, MORE TOTAL CALORIES are burned when you train intensely and although the percentage derived from fat burning is lower - the TOTAL AMOUNT OF FAT burned is higher for intense training.

Basically, fat is harder for the body to access than carbohydrates and cannot be accessed fast enough to sustain very vigorous activities. Fat burning is useful only for slow-burn activities. But intense activities need as much TOTAL energy as possible and will draw on all available energy sources in order to keep the body going.

Here's a totally hypothetical example to demonstrate the calculations being described above: If your body can access, say for argument's sake, 100 calories per hour from fat during slow riding then it will possibly be drawing about 200 calories per hour from the fat stores under very intense exercise. THAT'S DOUBLE. But for the slow riding 100 calories per hour may be over half of the total calories burned. For the intense riding 200 calories of fat burning may only be one fifth of the total energy burned.

In the above scenario, there is a greater PERCENTAGE of the energy derived from fat in the slow ride - but MORE TOTAL ENERGY derived from fat in the fast ride. That is the reality of how the human body works.

There is still one more important aspect to the 'fat burning question' - that being the so-called "after burn" effect mentioned, which is a raised metabolic level causing more calories to be used by the body when at rest (and often for more than a day after the intense training session has ended). Compare this after-burn effect to a 5 hour ride. In a 5 hour ride you will need to eat regularly in order to keep going. That makes the ride somewhat CALORIE-NEUTRAL - because you put in as much energy as you are burning (or else you will 'bonk'). So long rides are not the best way to train if you want to burn fat, they are calorie neutral and you make up for the energy burned by eating more as you burn that energy. You do not need to eat as much to sustain a really intense session and most people wont eat at all during a very intense session, only before and after. Compare that to the amount of food eaten in a long slow ride.

So long slow riding is essential for training for endurance events - and will allow you to become more efficient in burning fat for slow-burn energy - but intense training is better for losing fat from your body and getting leaner. It also gives you better fitness per hour of training time. This logic applies to EVERYONE (and that anecdote about the BBC documentary stating that intense training only works for specific genetics is not accurate). Specific genetics allow you to continue to improve your ability to use oxygen though interval training but everyone burns more fat by doing intense intervals.

Because the BBC guy is more of an academic than an experienced fitness trainer he didn't contextualise the genetic information for athletes to understand and rather just focused on his personal interest and scope. The actual "genetic" concept being referred to in "athlete language" is the same as saying "some people are sprinters and others are endurance athletes". If you have those genetic traits you cannot change them. This does not mean sprinters cannot train successfully for a marathon - it just means they will not respond to the training as well as the endurance athletes will. Everyone can burn more fat by training specifically to do so - and everyone can become fitter through appropriate training - it's just that genetics determine to what extremes these developments can eventually go.

I hope that's a useful perspective?