It became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I’ve ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every of life, be it something to wear, something to eat … It’s all been wrong.

-George Costanza

It is an ongoing process, and although we would want it to be, things rarely go in a linear fashion. Along the road many pattern,questions and misconceptions seem to appear, therefore in this article I am going to address those common questions, misconceptions about the MAF training method.

My continuous extremely positive experience with the MAF Method can be found under the Me and MAF tag.

How many hours a week do I need to do so I get an effect?

24 hours a day, seven days a week. Whaaat?!?! Seriously, man, how many??
The whole thing (MAF method) is a lifestyle, not something that you do in your free time. In the end it is the same body that has to deal with everything that you throw (or don’t throw) at it. That includes what you eat so that you stay healthy, minimise inflammation, etc. Your job, family situation and many stresses (yes many) that we all encoutner on a daily basis all come into the picture. How you manage all that and combine it with the fact hat we as creatures are made for movement (bike, run, swim, etc), not stilness – is personal. One week it might be 4 hours, some it might be 14. You have to experiment (and yes get it wrong every once and a while).

Well that leaves me with 4 hours weekly to train. I can’t be competitive with so little training time!!!

As already metnioned it is a 24/7 type of deal that you are doing. That included minimising stress, optimising your diet, transforming your sedentary lifestyle into being more active in general. If 4h/week stress free is all you can spare for activity SPECIFIC training, so be it. I am going to put a huge disclaimer here that I am not your job/marriage/family counselor though if 4h/week is what is left after you take care of all your responsibilities and you have dreams of becoming a professional athlete, your life as it currently is not the most optimal way of going towards achieving that goal.With that out of the way, to get back to the 4hours, the only goal is to be better than the person you were before, NOT versus others. Competition is good, though the idea is to improve yourself first and afterwards go out and see how you compare with others.

But, but, but I have races next week. I want to ride with my buddies or else they will think I am a wimp! After all – If you ain’t first, you are last!!!

The only person (or one of two if you subscribe to many of the various deities) you have to answer first to is yourself. Not your team manager, training buddies, coach, girlfriend/wife, or some guy on the internet (me). If you can honestly stand in front of a mirror and say that this is what you truly want to be doing and truly feels like is the best for you, fine. Though as they say if you have to ask….

Here having children puts life in an totally different perspective. Babies as cute (and sometimes really  patience demanding) as they are, in general come into this world pretty helpless. EVERY little first time accomplishement, such as grabbing that toy, sitting upright, turning over, crawling a couple of feet , all result in the baby having a huge smile of satisfaction. Somewhere along the way we have managed to put or let others (ie media) instill (whatever unreasonable crazy) notions, goals, etc. in our heads, notions that we end up defining ourselves with and worse stuff that haunts us constantly, bordering on paranoid.

You didn’t meet your weekly mileage goal, could not beat your PR, failed to qualify for the national team, got left out of the Olympic selection, etc, etc. (I have seen and/or experienced many of these first hand) Rarely it is the end of the world, yes really. Life goes on. You had the freedom and opportunity to do some or all of the above. It was/is a PRIVILEGE, for the most part you chose to do it, nobody held a gun to your head, even in the cases of Eastern European sport talent incubators, it was considered lucky if your child got toted as an Olympic hopeful (what happened afterwards is another story). See what you could do better and move on. Past is a story and in the worlds of Joe Strummer: The future is unwritten.

“Great sport begins where good health ends” – Bertolt Brecht

Making a living as a professional competitior is hard work. The good news is that for the most part, outside of team/sport politics, which for sure are not to be ignored, the criteria  are clearly defined and results are very easily qualified objectively.  This is also the bad news; to finish first, first you must finish. While I am not going to comment of what is required in order to achieve top-performance since this is an ethical question reagrding the limits of us as humans that [amazon text=sport physiologists have pondered for centuries – ie whether it is physiological or pathological&asin=0029147654]. Without your health you have nothing. Maybe you have a job to come back to, maybe you don’t. You have put too much time that you will never get back trying to achieve something, so you have to make sure you can be at your best. Injuries (that includes overtraining, hormonal problems, depression) can literally make it or break it all.  How many people are forced to retire due to ongoing ailments? Crashes and such aside, most were entirely plain old overtraining.

In the end the evergreen ‘old guys’ are considered an exception and retiring at 26-28 is the norm. While especially when it comes to endurance we should get better as we age.  A strength coach once said, and I am paraphrasing, don’t look at the junior sensation, ask how the old guys are managing to stay in prime condition for so long. They know something.

So OK, this means I can I cheat every once and a while, right?

Let me put this in a different perspective aka put a George Costanza spin to it. So there is this thing that makes you healthy, not fat, full of energy (aka not tired), you sleep better, you feel better and you gain fitness (speed, etc.) without the constant soreness, pain and suffering AND you want to drop it for a quick fix??? Seriously??? For a cookie??? Again, seriously?!?

Yes that ‘thing’ I mentioned in the previous sentence is taking charge of your health, personal development and ultimately fitness aka the MAF method. Yes, depraving yourself of all the positive benefits is cheating, not resisting the afternoon cookies (and the ‘pleasures of food’) at work as yet again ‘popular wisdom’ seems to suggest. Hey people cheat on their super model wives….so what do I know…

Maybe it’s a case of the grass being greener on the other side, with the only difference being that almost all of us (myself included) have ALREADY been to that other side for many years…it wasn’t greener and it was more like thorns and barren, rather than grass. If you keep drawing blanks with popular wisdom and the way you used to do things, maybe it is time for a change or doing the OPPOSITE of what has not been working for you. While sometimes circumstances make it inevitable, this should be a rare exception and not a cause of major freak out obsessive compulsive episodes. And by all means do sprint to get out of the way of that runaway car, even though you might go above your MAF heartrate and you are in your base building period. Common sense goes a long way.=)

I can train at a higher heart rate every once in a while, right? Can’t be that bad…

The MAF HR represents one thing – the point at which your body burns predominantly fat as a fuel (referred to as FATMax). The best way to find that point is by doing a metabolic test. This option is currently (as of 2017) quite costly and reserved for high end (performance) research. The 180 formula is the culmination of many years of research by Dr. Phil Maffetone with good number of athletes so this is the next best thing you can do. Here is the most important thing you need to get from the so called 180 formula – your metabolism does NOT care whether you are running, swimming , cycling, uphill, downhill, etc.  It doesn’t care what your personal feelings towards it are.

But this whole thing makes me slow…dead slow

As mentioned above, your Maximum Aerobic heart rate (MAF HR) is simply a value at which your body uses predominantly fat and that is a reflection of your health and hence fitness. Endurance is a FUNDAMENTAL human feature. I don’t see speed in that picture. The fact that you go slow is just simply that you cannot burn fat efficiently YET (due to many reasons). It will get there. How fast and when, nobody can tell you that (unless they are lying or misinformed). You will be changed by the MAF method that is a fact. Therefore trying to link speed and fat metabolism is like trying to smell the color purple and see the music. It’s metaphorical at best.

Ok so where do I start? Is it gluten free? High fat? Low carb? 2 week test?

If you go and visit the Balkans and my home country Bulgaria, which I highly recommend you do, you will inadvertaendly notice that yoghurt, feta cheese and such are a staple for everything. Where I am going with this is that eating dairy has been going on for generations and lactose tolerance is more or less a positive mutation. To this day full fat raw (unpasteurised) dairy  represent a good part of what I consume on a daily basis and I lack the negative side effects that most people associate with dairy products. I am most likely different than you and a lot of people in that department. Where we are the same is that refined carbohdyrates (flour, corn starch, sugar) and hence hyper insulin secretion have no place in our bodies…PERIOD. I am not even going to give junkfood the time of day to mention that this is NOT food, it is junk though. It is taking responsibility for what you put on your plate/grocery bags and that means educating yourself so that you can make informed decisions that are best for your health, rather than because this person, advertising or govenrment/pharmaceutical agency told you to. Whatever you want to call it, hey feel free. My friends refer to it as Nikola’s theory.

I (already) am a fat burning machine! Therefore, I don’t need to eat since there is plenty of fat in my body even though I am super lean!

Ever heard the story of the farmer who finally taught his donkey to not eat and it died on him (the animal’s courage!). Well the moral is that we need energy to function and even plants don’t just rely solely on sunlight. Given human metabolism we have many metabolic pathways to overlap since it is survival of the species that is the most important we can use variety of fuels. In short I am quoting a previous article directly.

Human metabolism is quite robust with many of the pathways overlapping, hey it is survival that we are after. While we can get by in extreme states, even when high performance is needed (the ‘classic athlete high carb diet/carbo loading, etc. come to mind and many Olympic medals to its name) The important part is that all systems must be functioning at their optimum. Each one has a niche (specific role) that it does best:

• Fat – predominant energy source for all activities
• Glucose – high bursts and/or high intensity (fight-or-flight)
• Protein – mostly during state of starvation and/or depending on diet (ie lots of meat)
• Ketones – brain fuel (keto clarity) as well as universal fuel for all cells; starvation fuel.

You want optimal rather than extreme. What is optimal for you and your (athletic) needs is for YOU to figure out, there is no formula and if anybody tries to convince you otherwise they are either lying or very very misinformed. If you have to eat below 50g of carbohydrates a day to enter ketosis – Fine. Remain in mild ketosis and eating 150-200g of carbohydrates a day – also fine – it is individual and you should be your own test monkey/lab rat.

While being metabolically efficient for a lack of better term does give you the freedom from needing to (over)eat every one or two hours and especially going wihtout food has no major effect on energy and brain clarity, that energy needs to come from somewhere (food). Starvation is interpreted as stress, which is cumulative and in modern fast paced societies it might be the straw that broke the camel’s back (animal anology yet again). Don’t be afraid to experiment within reasonable limits. If you have a 16km/10 mile hilly bike commute one way you might wanna pack a lunch at the very least.

But I have a family/wife/cat/children, do I start with diet, lowering intenisty, walking barefoot, ketosis, 2 week test AAARGHHHH!!! I just can’t do it, it’s TOO MUCH too handle!!!

Who is asking you to do it all at once? Rome was not built in a day. Goal is becoming better than you were before. Nobody said anything about you comparing your chapter one with somebody else’s chapter 15. It’s quite often a tango, two steps forward one step back. It’s the overall progress that matters. Though in my opinion cutting out refined carbohydrates, sugar and stopping being afraid of saturated fat is a very good first step.

Does it mean NEVER doing any high intensity workouts, strength training, etc.?!?

When you look annoyed all the time, people think you are busy.

-George Costanza

Today wearing stress as a badge of honor has become fashionable. If you ain’t stressed you are not trying hard enough. Therefore the accepted norm is the worn out, coffee (or other stimulant) driven person who never stops to just smell the flowers, time is money and no pain – no gain; it’s a rat race ALL the time. Unsurprisingly overtraining follows the same stages of stress (alert, resistance and exhaustion). It is after all physical stress we are inflicting when we practice and compete (not excluding the mental/motivation aspects as well). Most of us (myself included) for a good long time have existed between the second and final stage. If you ain’t sore and suffering you will never improve…so the ‘popular wisdom goes.

Going through (athletic) life in such an unsustainable manner shows its ugly face with injuries, constant fatigue, hormonal problems, inflammation and plethora of many hits against your health. This is among the prime reason while most professionals retire, quite often forced by ailments, around 26-28 years of age and/or that young sensation that gets chewed up by the PRO ranks to never come back. Therefore it is getting out of that negative pattern of overstress/overtraining that should be the priority. In 99% of cases this means slowing, down, training less (volume and intensity). Strength and interval training are both extremely taxing types of activities so if you are trying to reduce the overall stress you won’t go doing tough workouts. The term (aerobic) base gets thrown around haphazardly, and while an imperfect and incomplete definition – your health is the foundation for everything and without it you are adding strength, intensity to dysfunction. You don’t build a skyscraper on a marshland, wihtout some serious foundation work. Most people’s fitness is held (often quite literally) sports tape, willpower and/or caffeine and sugar drinks (I was the latter case for quite a while). Once you get that under control after as long as it takes, your body will be able to handle it. Don’t believe me? Ever ‘had the legs’ in a race/workout and seem to be never fatiguing? Why should that be the one time per season exception and not the rule?

But how does the whole thing relate to life and other activites ie not running and triathlon?

Metabolically limited sports aka truly fitness contests such as (marathon, ultra) running, triathlon, rowing etc. are the perfect real-life laboratory for a method like MAF since fitness is THE MAIN limiter and a direct reflection of success – how hard you can go is how hard you can go (poor running form, inefficient swimming stroke just make you use more energy for the same amount of effort). Your results do NOT depend on what others are doing, interfering with the competition (positively or negatively) is against the rules. Yes if somebody is much faster you don’t go trying to keep up if that means dropping off in 5minutes. Therefore other sports where tactics play a much higher role such as team sports (ie basketball) or in my case cycling, people treat it as an excuse to ‘cheat’ and treat training like racing – hard and fast all the time. I can see where the confusion might have originated. Fundamentally you must be prepared for the challenges that your chosen activity requires (that includes life as well).

Challenge me with what you say?

Let me explain…

Sidenote: I am in 100% agreement that the way most cycling races unfold is truly the worst way efficiency wise; like sprinting out of every corner for every hill ALL the time, even in quiet parts of the race and in the grupetto. The technique mentioned leaves most people associating road racing with suffering and most participants not making it past the halfway mark. If a move goes, you don’t know if the breakaway is going to stick so you have to follow it.  Hey don’t hate the players, hate the game.

Neuromuscular vs Metabolic

We are not headless chickens. EVERYTHING originates from the brain therefore the ability for example to pedal a bike sustainably at high cadence starts neuromuscularly FIRST. Same goes with running fast, swimming butterfly stroke, etc. I don’t have to tell you how ‘easy’ it is to follow complex instructions when you are crosseyed from fatigue. It doesn’t work. Also why a complex movmement is broken down into simple ones first and why visualisation is an extremely valuable tool.  The above works most efficiently when you are not fatigued and can pull all the stops without ill effects. This is why you only need VERY little high intensity training done WHEN 100% fit and healthy (1-2 weeks according to Dr. Maffetone himself). All you are doing is entering the basic instructions/patterns in your brain so that you can do them on autopilot when the opportunity arises (attacks, sprints, etc.). Once you literally know what to do, your metabolism will do its best to meet the demands the brain is sending. Ideally you want a muscle that is adept at burning both fat and glucose (carbohydrates), with the energy coming predominantly from fat well into the medium intensities. When it comes to human physiology this is the most efficient and least stressful way of doing things. This is where the so haphzardly thrown term (aerobic) ‘base’ really comes into play. Endurance and hence fat burning and aerobic condition is a fundamental human feature as such it is no surpise all comprise the main elements of health and fitness. It is literally a foundation with health and aerobic condition/fat burning going hand in hand.

When tired and pushed too hard we would ALWAYS revert to old (suboptimal) patterns when the base is shaky. It’s the brain that pull the emergency brakes to prevent further damage/overstress. This is the reason why strength training must incorporate only few heavy reps done not to fatigue. Everybody can win on a good day, the trick is to be able to do it on a bad day. Here winning does not always mean first place on the podium. For example, in my days as a rower most workouts (85%+) were done at 18-20 strokes per minute (spm) (the actual intensity was another story…ie not MAF) as compared to the 32-36 spm race pace. [amazon text=Somebody calculated that for an Olympic cycle&asin=0449910032] (4yrs) it takes almost a million strokes done in practice for every stroke in the final race.  My most successful season was when the only high intensity workouts were couple 3 on 10 (3 strokes to build up speed, 10 strokes at race pace) and than easy to recover for a total of 50-70 race-like strokes for the whole workout (as compared to the ~220 strokes needed to finish a typical 2k (1.25mi race). In the case of cycling this is why occasional motopacing or fast paced group riding are both very potent workouts – you go at race speed though way below race power (due to drafting).

MAF HR and training zones and numbers must always be regarded into the greater picture that is the human body and metabolism.

So after all this what should I make of this MAF method thing?

You are in charge. Your time, your body, your sport. You have your best interest and that means taking responsibility for it all; never stop being curious and constantly asking why. It’s rarely a simple answer, don’t ever let someone tell you otherwise. Don’t confuse that with it being DIFFICULT to figure out. In the words of the nobel prize winning Physicist Richard Feynman – there is a pleasure in finding things out. If you have been drawing blanks with whatever it is you have been doing (diet, bodyweight,training, life, etc), it’s time for a (major) change.

In practical terms back to the quote that inspired that post: whatever seems to be the ‘popular wisdom’ you should do the opposite. While a brainless method, it is a good way to begin to question a subject and being able to find out the whole story behind the big picture – for example how saturated fat got labeled the villain and how we are currently in a fat phobic culture while it is the unhelathiest we have been as species on a global term for a loooong time

As a final note, while challenging for a good number of the A-type driven individuals that most of us(endurance athletes) are, or strive to be – don’t take things too seriously and treat life in a clinical and compartmentalised manner. We don’t get out of the whole thing alive (at least not until science figures out how to infuse our consciousness in a machine, even so). Therefore it is too short of a time to obsess over the usually insignificant (such as power numbers, race results, training hours, what your neighbor is doing and you are not).

Go out there and have fun!

My continuous extremely positive experience with the MAF Method can be found under the Me and MAF tag.

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The post The Opposite: MAF Questions, Answers and Misconceptions appeared first on The Tall Cyclist.

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

-Albert Camus

This is the third ouf of a three part series of articles on my extremely positive and continuing experience with the MAF method developed by Dr. Phil Maffetone. Part 1 focused on the concepts and ideas that are the most important aspect of the whole story and ultimately lead to Part 2 and 3. Part 2 is more about my background and practical aspects of the MAF method such as diet, functional training etc., with Part 3 (this article) being “about the numbers” (MAF Tests and useful tips particularly for cyclists) and has a more concrete character. I find the numbers extremely boring and a source of stress on quite some occasions; the difficult part was making sense of it all (Part 1) and figuring out the practical aspects (Part 2)  afterwards the numbers just followed, as such I highly advise you to read the series in sequence.

PART 3: MAF Tests Improvement and Practical Tips

This is the part that most of you are eagerly waiting for. After 2 separate articles with concepts, I am sure you are asking yourself:

Does MAF work (for cycling)? Will I get faster?

Read on for more answers. This is the article for you.

To get something out of the way – yes at the beginning I was going dead slow, it doesn’t matter I had a 360-370W measured Functional Threshold Power in seasons past, before it all went south.

In my first days, even months of MAF training, as soon as the road would turn even gently up I would have to stop pedaling and coast quite a bit. That took something like 3 months. It was frustrating at times for sure.

I had to buy a 11-32 cassette (mountain bike low gears, normal road ones have 11-26  or 11-28teeth, more teeth = lower gears). The fact that I live down in the valley next to sea level, all roads lead up – that definitely did not make it easier. There is this 4km (2.5mile climb) that I must go through in order to get to the nice training roads without traffic. At the beginning about halfway up the hill there was a village and I had to go circle the city square in order to avoid my heart rate from spiking above MAF. The fist day I could (slowly) ride up the WHOLE climb without any detours, I knew the stuff was working! When I could shift out of my lowest gear (39/32) for (brief) periods of time on the same climb, I knew it was definitely working.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though….

Numbers, Numbers, Numbers

Averages are Useless.

They really are. The one thing that you must be concerned is you MAF zone HR at ALL TIMES, not the average HR. At some point you get good at feeling once you go above it so the bike computer becomes more a reassurance rather than an evil master “making you slow down.” If you do a nice long gentle warmup and a cool down it would wreak havoc on all averages that cyclists seem to put tremendous importance on – namely average speed and average power. And that is ok. It really is. I used to be the cyclist who would pause the clock before I would even start slowing down to stop at traffic lights so that the power would not drop too much. I would split my ride in two so that the cooldown would not bring down my numbers. I don’t do that anymore – I just start the clock when I leave home and stop it when I am back. Simplicity Clarice. The 15-20min road on my way out of town was perfect for warmup and the long descent into town was an awesome way to cooldown – averages be damned. I really took time to warm up and get into training as well as to gently roll home, EVERY time.

MAF Testing

The absolute best way (in theory) to do a MAF test for cycling is on a stationary trainer with a powermeter. Warmup for 15+min building to your MAF HR, ride in the zone for 30min and than cool down for another 10-15min. More power (watts) at MAF = more fitness. Your power should be decreasing throughout the interval, if it didn’t you didn’t warm up correctly….ask me how I know. Even if you have to take 30min for warmup, do it! You are ready when you are ready – you will feel it. Trust your body.

An important point about the stationary trainer – I stressed a LOT about, every time my calendar would say MAF test. “Did I get fitter, did I do everything right, etc, etc.” First, stress is like a rocking chair – gives you something to do, gets you nowhere. What you are looking for is an improvement in the long run, a trend over time, therefore daily/weekly variations are to be expected and do not be surprised that if you do your MAF test on the 10th every month sometimes you (seemingly) regress. I am not saying that you should ignore the (subtle) signs, I am telling you that there are more robust ways to track your progress.

The most practical and stress free manner (which also became my preferred method that I could trace back to my start with the MAF method) is by using a bike computer/watch with GPS. Find road segments that you ride often enough that are free from traffic and stoplights and measure your power at MAF as you ride them. Strava is perfect for that. Make a private segment and go wild. If you don’t have a power meter and/or GPS…

A slight and steady (3-6%) climb  also works wonders since you are fighting gravity rather than wind resistance so it can be a consistent way. Try not to have your cadence drop below 75rpm.

Last, you can find a loop or a segment that you can ride back and forth. Why? That way you cancel out any wind effects. Faster times = more fitness.

The beauty of training with HR is that is that it represents what your body can do ON THAT DAY given your fatigue, sleep, stress, etc. As such it would vary and after the first 3 MAF tests (3 months) I would freak out every time I would have to test so when my results plateaued I got REAL worried that that stuff wasn’t working. The weird thing is that I could feel improvement out on the road and quite noticeably so, therefore on one of my rides I got the idea to use road segments of my training routes, Strava had already automated this so this is what i did.

My MAF Numbers

At the beginning I did my MAF tests formally on the trainer, though as soon as the weather got nicer, I preferred to be out riding rather than freaking out about some number on a screen while a fan is blowing air on me.

I picked up 2 segments that I ride often enough. Thanks to Strava for making it a pretty straightforward process. You can do it yourself by just using the training file from your bike computer and highlight/select the part of the ride you are interested in. Or just use a stopwatch, though as I mentioned above make sure you can minimise variables such as wind.

To illustrate, below is the elevation profile of a typical ride.

The first segment is on a section of the first climb that I ride every training. By the time I get to the segment without even looking at the power, I can tell if I am ready to train and I have turned around at that point couple of times. This is the BLUE data in the graphs.

The next segment is a mostly flat section of road along some farm fields, with almost no traffic. I am usually an hour into the ride so for sure I am already well-warmed up. I ride this segment most days. I discovered that road in late October, hence why the data starts there. This is the ORANGE data in the graphs.

Below is a graph with my average power at my MAF heart rate for the segments on ALL rides that I did. In blue is the MAF Hill Test and in Orange is the MAF Test Strip. For the non-cycling crowd 200W is usually at the beginning of an ok endurance pace. As I was compiling it all together in a spreadsheet, I saw that for the 9months of MAF I improved more than 3minutes on the MAF Hill Test, while my bike had gotten heavier (fenders, full size frame pump, new toolkit, etc.)!!!

To make it neater, in the next graph I plotted the monthly averages of my ‘MAF tests’ for the months leading up to this post. As you see as I get fitter the pace dropoff between the two segments also gets somewhat smaller.

The thing to notice on the first graph is that from day to day there is significant variation. Powermeters are not perfect and ±2.5% difference can account for some of the differences (~10w), though the important thing is the overall trend, it should be going up. Big dips or plateaus represent red flags that need further attention..more on that in the paragraphs below.

MAF Formula

I decided to keep it simple with the 180 formula and just subtract my age (30) so my MAF HR was 150bpm. I didn’t do any adjustment (up or down) since more or less I have been training consistently for many years (10+) and I focus my season on the Bulgarian National TT championships in the end of June. I have been steadily increasing my power in the last 3 seasons with me recording the best performance (power) to date at the championship race in June 2015. Though the 180 formula is not perfect so I had to tweak it a bit…

I started at 150bpm and did a MAF test on the trainer in September 2015 to set a benchmark. I recorded 188W which to me was quite surprising, since 200W is the so called endurance zone and I wasn’t far from it and it was already the start of the off-season. The catch was that in the two weeks leading to that test, I had two time trials left to race and a once I decided to go full MAF I stopped ALL the anaerobic training have been dong all season (in retrospect-pretty much 90% of all my workouts were anaerobic). As a consequence my body had tapered down in a way and as a consequence bounced back with a nice power peak.

For two months afterwards my MAF tests kept going slower and slower. To be honest I was really close to calling it quits and going back to doing things as before. Though it did make sense to me, so I must have been doing something wrong and the high fat diet was really and I mean REALLY making a huge positive difference, so I had to look for explanation elsewhere.

In addition, I got married in the end of October 2015 and we took a 2 week trip in Japan, hence the big gap/dropoff in the graphs around that time. Coming back my MAF pace was even worse than before and I was getting more and more frustrated. Though it was “off-season” so I kept telling myself some drop-off is normal…

Until February 2016 when for 2 months my MAF pace had stagnated at 150W (trainer) – dead slow no two words about it. On the second one I felt that I was not warmed up enough (15min was becoming not enough) and my splits actually got faster as the test progressed….

Something major had to be done…..

First thing to look at is the MAF zone. Since most people are aerobically deficient this translates into training slow which is frustrating and that is putting it mildly, so people make excuses that “they have naturally high heart rate” and the like and increase the zone. As a consequence they end training more or less with the unproductive intensity. So that was the first place I started. While riding i had noticed one thing. Right at 148bpm I could feel a slight change in my breathing. It is tough to describe but it was a change, so I decided to drop my MAF from 150 to 148bpm.

Sidetone: Months later, after some discussion on the MAF Training Facebook page, the scientific explanation was that this is the Ventilatory threshold (VT1) where a change occurs just below the Fat MAX point where the switch between burning fat and glucose happens. My body had told me all about it. Now I had a scientific explanation.

Diet is the next thing to look at since it influences 80% of everything – athlete or not. As I mentioned in Part 2, I do not fully agree with Dr. Maffetone’s 2 week test – you either go cold turkey without sugars/junk food/refined carbohydrates or you are fooling yourself (for 2 weeks). This new way of eating, was among the first things that gave me tremendous improvement and the newly discovered feeling of health and energy was defintely a sign that I was ok on the food front. Like anything about the MAF method, the food part made perfect sense so I didn’t even consider cheating (to be honest I did eat pizza twice in the 10months leading up to this post though both times I soaked it in olive oil and it had lots of cheese).

Next thing to consider is stress. Being on the job market (aka unemployed) for a good amount of the time, gave me all the time to do what I had always wanted – start a coaching blog/business so that wasn’t bothering me. Figuring out what you want to do in life is quite a liberating experience. I did have the occasional “Is this al worth it?” moments though don’t we all?

Most importantly I made a 7pm cutoff. At 19:00 I dropped everything, no matter what I was doing and I had absolutely NO electronics, I don’t own a TV so that made it easier. My phone goes automatically to Do Not Disturb mode everyday at 7pm until 7am the next morning. I switch the Wi-Fi and data off as well. Books/Kindle were allowed though I will read something NOT related to MAF, coaching, training etc – a novel.

What did you know…. at 20:00 I would start dozing off and there were days that I went to bed at 20:10!!! I don’t remember exactly how much sleep I was getting before but starting February 2016 I was getting 8-9 sometimes 10h of sleep per night. I just had nothing else to do. I became a bit slack on that rule in April 2016 since I had to get a job until the coaching picked up and if I want to be training and keeping the blog alive I had to do some schedule adjustments. Though I do it only before rest days.

Boy did results get better! Granted it is always a complex explanation the changes were positive!!!!

I also build an active workstation which further helped.

It was all going well until mid April when all of a sudden I felt tired and one day I even felt nauseous and without any appetite. I usually look at my data at the end of the week so I missed the slowing down of my MAF segments by a couple of days, though as I was feeling bit off, I had already starting to take it easy. I really had no explanation and still don’t have one since outside of training I felt perfectly fit and fine and I was not waking up in the middle of the night (aka cortisol and stress). I decided to play it safe and since I was about to start a new job, I took plenty of rest days and I did some walking (30-60min couple days a week) as a workout. This was the big dip towards the beginning of May.

It recovered and hopefully it doesn’t happen again. I am happy the way I handled it though. My younger and more carefree self would have pushed thorough it.

Speed and High Intensity

Your body will let you now when you are ready to pull all the stops. Let me repeat that. You will feel when you are ready to do high intensity. There really isn’t any formula to it and what type of intervals. Try it and see. Improvement over time (MAF Tests) WITHOUT injuries and colds, etc is what you re looking for (huge emphasis on the without part).  If you are barely slogging along at your MAF HR, you are not ready and the sooner you admit that to yourself, the better off you will be.

Be patient and enjoy the ride.

Once things start improving, below are some workouts that I did to add some color into my MAF endurance rides.

The terrain where I live is quite rolling so it was ideally suited for the efforts outlined below. They can be done on the flats/with the wind as well by using the gears on the bike. For example easy gear to simulate downhills and shift a couple gears up to simulate an uphill.

Coffee Grinder

As soon as the road would face down, the (lack of) resistance would cause my HR to lower as well, I would put the bike in a lowish gear (53/16ish) and just go wild with the cadence – 110-130rpm while in control(I normally ride at 85ish rpm) until I could feel going over my MAF threshold. On long descents I could do 2-3 “intervals.”

Power Up

I would soft pedal/coast on a downhill so my HR would drop way below MAF and using the momentum I have built I would try while seated to power up the climb (some downshifts were allowed). You still do not go over MAF, you can feel it. As I got better, I could crest the smaller hills all the way to the top. I am not a tiny climber, I am a rouleur 82kg/(180lbs) build; for the smaller guys/gals it would be a much faster undertaking.

Hill “Sprints”

Same as above instead of being seated just try to sprint, out of the saddle over the hill. Do not go wild. You will feel once you are (about) to go over your MAF. Sit down and coast to recover.

In addition some time in April I dedicated one day out of every couple of weeks for all out short ~1min sprints (4-6 sprints) – for workout a total of 45min including warmup (20-25min) and cooldown (~10min). I did a couple of time trial like intervals (1-2×7-8min) to get back in my aerobar position habits. I let my moods and feelings on the day be my guide. In general such true high intensity workouts are nowadays a true rarity for me. As much I enjoyed the pain and satisfaction of completing them, I do not miss those workouts.

As far as racing, as I mentioned in Part 2 of the series, this is really not something that I look forward to, there are way more fun things to do. Though, one day I will be able to pin a number and not be a pack filler like 75% (probably more) of the people I see at races, doesn’t matter PRO or amateur. I have the feeling that would be when I am around 250W @ MAF HR. I don’t know how I got to that number, it is a gut feeling.=) I am really looking forward towards me trying my hands in cyclocross this fall in October 2016. Therefore it is a good place at this point in time to put a milestone at the Me and MAF series.

Conclusion

The MAF method (for cycling) works and it does so wonderfully. Unfortunately, since we are all victims to a greater or lesser degree to ‘popular wisdom’ such as the “no pain, no gain” and quality (intensity) over quantity, we have strayed from an essential human quality that is endurance. Therefore in a culture centered around hacks, quick fixes and being faster than the next guy at all costs, we lack the patience to just enjoy the ride and take care of ourselves first before we go out an start exploring the limits of human performance. In a way, I am very thankful to all the bad coaches I have had in my long athletic career. Without all the bad stuff you “taught” me I would have never gotten to the low point that led me to Dr. Phil Maffetone’s big yellow book. The best part is that is just the beginning.

You can Follow my progress on STRAVA.

You can also check out the Me and MAF tagged articles.

Me and MAF Series

• Part 1: I Was Young and Carefree: The Concepts and Ideas Behind the MAF Method
• Part 2: Me and MAF: My Background and Practical Aspects
• Part 3: The Numbers: MAF Tests and Beyond

The Book that Started It All

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The post I Was Young and Carefree – Part 3: MAF Tests and Beyond appeared first on The Tall Cyclist.

Practical Aspects

Ideas are important, though in the end you need to go out there (on your bike) and actually do the work, fail while doing so and figure things out as you go until you come out a better person. You need some waypoints to know you are on track. So this is the more practical aspect of my experience with the MAF method that you can use as tips and tricks on your way to getting started training under the MAF method.

Me and MAF

A little bit about me – I started doing competitive sports at the young age of seven. It started with swimming, though as a taller than average kid it was always basketball. I didn’t make the cut in college and as it is usually the case with taller individuals, I was the perfect addition to the rowing (or crew for you in the US) team. This was my entry into the world of endurance sports and something I did even for 3 years after graduating from college/university. It was fun, though for reasons outlined below it wasn’t the most optimal way of doing things. In the meantime I had bought a road bike to stay in shape during the summer off-season and when i finally hung up the oars I decided to give cycling a real try.

In my only 4th season of cycling, as a newcomer to the sport, now in the land of the Tour de France, where kids start racing bikes shortly after they learn to walk, I was convinced that I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole so I had lots of rough edges to smooth.

Not a stranger to endurance sports, I was figuring things out as I went and I was doing it all ‘by the books’ quite literally and the good ones at it…supposedly. I kept a ridiculously detailed diary, I slept enough, I kept my feet up, I took recovery days and weeks, I ate my pasta and my powermeter was my god. I did my base training, I built up to a peak. I sucked at climbing, I practiced in the mountains. I was still not better so I dropped further 4-5kg (8-10lbs)down to 83kg (185lbs) for my 2m (6’7″) frame. I sucked at fast accelerations, I practiced sprinting and riding ‘on the rivet.’ In the last 2 years though one trend became obvious, I was not even close to that day where I laid it all on the road and while I kept contributing that to the whole ‘square peg, round hole’ phenomenon aka lack of experience, even my ability to make the clock tick slower for me and not for others (TTing) started to slow down.

Something had to change right at the fundamentals – this is how I got to Dr. Phil Maffetone’s book and decided to give it my best and a whole new world opened for me and to this day there are so many things that I can work on and stay busy for life.

Unfortunately the human body is not like a machine where you can just press the reset button and start from scratch. There were a lot of things to address bad habits to break and already caused damage to fix.

I was what is wrongly called a person with ‘high natural heart rate’ and I could train for hours at 170-190bpm (my max to this day is still close to 200bpm at 31years of age), I had enough willpower to push me through the pain. I had coaches actually do a Maximum Aerobic Power (MAP) ramp test for the whole team where they came up with what was actually quite close to my MAF hr at the time (155bpm at 24yrs of age). Though as soon as they saw how slow the whole team was, I can still vividly remember them saying.

Just focus on the output (pace), the heart rate would eventually come to the correct zone.

I had some successful dabbles with a low carb diet, though at the end I decided that the typical athlete diet of pasta and the like is what I should follow if I would have any chance of going somewhere.

Looking back it was all a load of dogshit (excuse my French), mostly because I thought I had a good grasp on things, though in retrospect I didn’t know what the hell was going on and I had let others (who were even more clueless) tell me what must be good for me.

Granted after a couple of metaphorical crashes, I realized that recovery is actually important, and with some careful planning I could periodize things, though it the end any little deviation would throw a huge monkey wrench into everything and I had to stick to the T to a predefined schedule – I couldn’t just go out and just do it and enjoy things. I was missing something much more fundamental.

This is where I had to look at myself and honestly say – something is really, really wrong.

I decided to take charge. Granted being laid off my job in August 2015, gave me quite some free time, I fully immersed myself and the ever growing reading list represents that.

So How Did I and How Do You Take Charge?

First of all MAF is a way of life, a lifelong pursuit, it is not ‘just a training method’ at this or that heart rate while eating X, Y, and Z so you burn fat. It is a much bigger concept, though the absolute first step to take towards improved health and performance (and yes fat burning) is….

The Diet

Athlete or not 80+%!!! of what happens is direct result of what we eat. This is where I have a bit of a disagreement with Dr. Maffetone’s preferred method. If you are so set in your eating ways, the two week test represents just that – 2 weeks that you have to “sacrifice” and than afterwards you can just go back to doing whatever you were doing – it is like a weight loss diet. Granted when done correctly I am sure the results would be amazing and you will be a convert, I just don’t like the wording of it and most ‘low-carb’ proponents highly advise the cold turkey method. The take away point is that carbohydrates are the only macronutritet that can directly influence our metabolism and as such refined ones (made out of grain, corn – most processed food) have ABSOLUTELY NO PLACE in the human diet – ZERO. Yes there are carbohydrates in vegetables and fruits, though amounts are really small (7g in an avocado for example) and it comes with fiber.

The insulin that is released by the pancreas as a response (to eating refined carbohydrates such as breads, pastas, sports drinks, etc.), stops fat burning dead in it’s tracks, therefore you are really and I mean really putting the stops on improving your health and developing endurance.

Instead of relying on the tens of thousands of calories of fat, you continue to rely on the extremely limited (~2000kcal) glucose.

In September 2015 I went cold turkey straight into the below 50g of carbohydrates a day as outlined by [amazon text=Dr. Timothy Noakes&asin=1472135695]. I had cut sugar months before and I was in the ‘starvation/race weight’ part if the season. Though as anybody who has to ‘cut weight’ for one reason or another can attest – it is really not fun, frankly it sucks.

The energy levels I was having with this new way of eating, throughout THE WHOLE day were through the roof! I kept waiting for the crash, thought it never came. The mental clarity was the biggest revelation of all – I read 1-2 books on various topics (functional training, low carbohydrate living, etc.) a week and not just read them, but made sense, took notes that I later reviewed and organized to make sense of it and than came here to write about it. There is some serious lag between me reading something and sharing my experiences with it on the blog, though it is coming.

Furthermore, the abdominal cramps and the monthly, yes they were so regular, bouts of diarrhea that I had accepted as normal disappeared. It yo-yoed a bit between constipation and not, just that was enough to never ever turn back to the ‘modern western diet.’ I was having THE BEST bowel movements that I can remember. I had always liked cheese and cream, now I can eat them all I want. I eat about 2 pieces of fruit a day sometimes a bit more in order to keep overall carbs low, though whether I am in ketosis I really don’t know with any hard and fast numbers, I let my feelings be my guide.

It bears repeating here, that your body knows best what it needs; you should trust your feelings/cravings. With a side note that sugar and grain/wheat products are known to have quite negative addictive properties and those type of foods have no place in a human diet anyway. For example, I was craving pickles like crazy. As mentioned by [amazon text=Drs. Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney&asin=0983490708], a low carbohydrate diet leads to the kidneys losing salt more readily and as such taking some additional amounts through food (i.e. broth)  might avoid some negative consequences such as lightheadedness, fatigue, constipation, etc. Second, for a couple of day I had been feeling a bit lousy and I was really and I mean REALLY craving a particular brand of mayonnaise (made with sunflower oil rather than rapeseed). ALL store bought mayonnaise is made with seed oils – Omega 6 – which we need really tiny amounts since they are highly pro-inflammatory. I caved in and within a couple of hours, yes that quick, I felt like a new person and my gut distress disappeared…

In addition, previously any ride above 2h would leave me first in deep discussion in what I can take with me that won’t give me gut problems and afterwards, post ride inhaling any food in sight – usually baked goods of ‘healthy whole grains.’ Now, I could ride for 5h!!!! with no food and since it was winter, most of the times without water! Also after 12h with no food going for a 3+h hour ride was no problem.

The weight loss wasn’t dramatic if at all, though, when I started the MAF method, I was in the peak of race season and if you ask anybody who is into power to weight ratio sports they have their own routine of cutting weight – I won’t bore you with the details. For me to this day, and through the winter off-season, I am at 83.4kg (183.9lbs); (I weighed 85kg (187lbs) when I was 18 for my army physical); I added the decimal because it is so consistent it is scary! There are normal deviations though I don’t count calories or weigh my meals anymore. I eat when hungry! I am the closest to having a six-pack in my life and after the winter in the tradition of cycling when I shaved my legs I could see a web of veins that I have never seen before. This used to be my indicator that I was leaning out.

Training

As much as we try to make the calendars and agendas run our lives, for as long as I can remember, I have always and to this day make fun of people who try to control the uncontrollable – or in more layman terms set appointments, meetings and the like and expecting everything to work out as planned and than stress when it doesn’t as it never does. In the end no matter how many times you confirm something you always have to wait at least 15min anyway, if they even remember you at all. So in the chaos that is our daily existence, I lived by the mantra “If it is important they will find me, if I forget it, it wasn’t worth it.” Somehow I thought that a training schedule can be something rigid. Boy was I mistaken…

This was probably the thing I had to really work hard at – or more precisely train by how I feel and not force it. Rather than trying to keep in mind endless streams of splits/intervals etc, there is only HR to keep in check so you can actually look around at nature than keeping your nose focused on the computer screen. Deciding to turn around 30min into a training was certainly challenging, though EVERY SINGLE TIME the times that I felt like I should have gone home and rode further, I paid for dearly the next days. I got into a rhythm of training Tuesday through Thursday with Friday as a recovery so I am fresh for a big weekend of riding and than recover on Monday. That varied as well and if I had to take an extra day off or even two, I wasn’t freaking out. My training volume varied form 6-12h/week on the bike not including an hour or two of mobilization functional training – whatever I felt like. As you can see it is a big range and I let my mood be a guide. For example in flu season my wife was sick and although I was feeling fine, I just wasn’t 100% – my immune system must have been fighting off the viruses, not leaving enough energy to train. The tale away point is:

Listen to your body and learn to trust it!

Functional Aspects

Among one of the many revelations of me starting with the MAF method was getting acquainted with a long forgotten friend – my body. We always focus on fast and fit and functional is largely ignored. As such I never really asked the right questions of my body. I realized I had some serious muscle imbalances that needed attention badly. I never knew about them because the human body is amazing at compensating at the cost of efficiency and eventually overuse injuries. Michael Boyle’s – [amazon text=Advances in Functional Training&asin=1931046018] was the first book I read that helped me take care of my weak and inactive gluteal (butt muscles) and completely REMOVE my low back pain. In addition, modifying my bike fit according to the principles outlined by Steve Hogg and ultimately culminating with my Visit at the Bike Whisperer was among the biggest highlights on the functional training front. Of course not to forget Kelly Starrett’s mobilisations – they really showed serious areas of improvement. I built an active workstation to minimize sitting and it took a good week to feel normal and get rid of the most obvious muscle imbalances. There is an ever increasing section in the Bookshelf page and a series of articles on functional Training, be sure to check them out afterwards.

Racing

Among the most unexpected things, to me at least, in the first months with the MAF method was that I really wasn’t looking towards the racing in the warmer months – I really wasn’t. Learning more about my body, functional training, strength and conditioning, low carbohydrate living, the brain, stress and tension, progressive relaxation and oh so many other topics and being my own lab experiment was infinitely so much more fulfilling that trying to beat that other guy by going in circles in some country roads on a random Sunday.

In the end you have to be better than the person you were before – this is all that matters.

Once I realized that the freedom and inner peace I achieved was astonishing/amazing. I have the privilege of not having my life depend on my race results. Also I have had the awesome opportunity to win races at all of my chosen sports and while fun it is very short-lived, trust me on that, rather than being left with the “now what” feeling, making personal (athletic) improvement a lifelong goal was empowering and extremely fulfilling.

Racing was and still is something that got in the way of me wanting to do something new functional development program and such and being stuck in traffic coming back from a race, rather than enjoying the nice weather. I did 2 group rides in November/December and usual they were the expected hammerfests, though I still knew the MAF thing was starting to work, I just wasn’t at the level to do that intensity sustainably (i.e. not at 190+bpm for hours). And i don’t buy it that me putting out 300w sitting second wheel, means I was unfit, it means the guys at the front were ‘racing’ rather than working on endurance. So I kept riding/training by myself and I really enjoyed it, getting lost on some occasions and finding new roads. I signed up for a race a month starting in April – I am part of a team and I have to show my face every once and a while. How did I do? Absolutely fucking terrible, I got dropped like a bad habit in all three of them. Does that mean the MAF is not working. HELL NO!

First for those who don’t know a cycling race is all out from the gun, even though the effort would leave more than half the field in the DNF category quite early on. If you want to do well you need to follow, no other option, even though this is not the most productive way to do things. I had done almost no higher intensity training, which brings me to the next point.

There is this thing as not being fit/ready to race. Those races were tests and a very clear way to confirm my gut feelings – I don’t have what it takes to do this in a healthy and as a consequence FUN way (more on the numbers in part 3). Having spent many years suffering through high intensity training and eating a high carbohydrate diet had left me aerobically deficient. One day, whether it is this or the seasons to follow, I will be able to pin a number and know I will be able to rip someone’s legs off and feel like I can do it again 20min after the finish. Though one night while lying in bed I had…

Visions of Mud

Road racing was never really my thing, I had a road bike and that seemed like a logical choice once I stopped with rowing, for the reasons outlined above – there is far too much playing games, bluffing and in the end you have to depend on others, even if they do stupid stuff, especially when it comes crashes…ask me how I know… It’s part of the sport, I understand, though I prefer to watch it on TV. Maybe once I am fit enough to not just be a pack filler, I would enjoy it more. Though time trialling was something I was really good at from the get go. It’s a niche of cycling though it is called the race of truth for a reason – there is no hiding and it is a strong man forte. At the end you don’t depend on what others are doing. So as I was lying in bed not looking forward to the race the coming day I had a vision. Cyclocross – you, the bike the mud and whole lots of fun. It is something I thought about trying long time ago, so I will get the lowest category license the fall and give it a serious go, more details of course will follow in the blog. As well I should be fitter by the end of September, which brings me to the final part of the Me and MAF Series…Part 3: Numbers, MAF Tests and such.

Stay tuned for the last part of the Me and MAF Series.

Me and MAF Series

• Part 1: I Was Young and Carefree: The Concepts and Ideas Behind the MAF Method
• Part 2: Me and MAF: My Background and Practical Aspects
• Part 3: The Numbers: MAF Tests and Beyond

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The post I Was Young and Carefree – Part 2: Me and MAF appeared first on The Tall Cyclist.

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it.

I hope you make the best of it.

I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.

-Eric Roth

This is the first out of a three part series of articles on my extremely positive and continuing experience with the MAF method developed by Dr. Phil Maffetone. Part 1 focuses on the concepts and ideas that are the most important aspect of the whole story and ultimately lead to Part 2 and 3. Part 2 is more about my background and practical aspects of the MAF method such as diet, functional training etc., with Part 3 being “about the numbers” (MAF Tests and practical tips particularly for cyclists) and has a more concrete character. I find the numbers extremely boring and a source of stress on quite some occasions; the difficult part was making sense of it all (Part 1) and figuring out the practical aspects (Part 2)  afterwards the numbers just followed, as such I highly advise you to read the series in sequence.

In the 23+years I have been involved in sports (currently cycling) and by far and I mean by a HUGE margin the greatest ‘Wow!’ moment can be summarised by (paraphrasing) the opening paragraphs in Dr. Phil Maffetone’s [amazon text=Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing&asin=1616080655].

Having two feet to run and walk and the ability to burn fat to fuel our long journeys and a complex brain and nervous system to govern it all as well as highly robust ability of our bodies to naturally heal themselves – it all crystallises in one word – endurance. It is something we as humans ALL have. Only recently we have made it a competitive endeavor and started calling it triathlon, cycling, etc.

Unfortunately with boundless skill and creativity we make it all too complicated and have strayed and largely lost our connection with this very unifying human feature.

What the MAF Method Is About

For me, the MAF method represented and to this day exemplifies the missing link that put everything into place and resulted in tremendous enlightenment. It was my real and total entry into what is wrong not just with endurance sports and in particular with the coaching establishment, however with what is extremely misguided in our society and the world in general.

We have vast impatience to get things done, though at the cost of personal health and well-being. We love quick fixes, band aids and patches that cover our wounds – mental and physical. Yet for reasons aplenty we do not go to the root the cause so the problem(s) keep coming back, until no patch is big enough.

We put tremendous importance competing with others in all spheres of life, while largely ignoring ourselves in the process. We do it on a daily, if not hourly basis, urged on by the constant onslaught of notifications and reminders from (social) media coupled with ‘motivating’ slogans such as the infamous “no pain, no gain.” We are led to believe that it is only through extreme suffering we can achieve any goals worth attaining. Day in and day out we push at it, while the goal slips further and further away, adding frustration to discomfort and in the end we are left a broken mess. While in all truth, goals and aspirations should make your PRESENT better – they should inspire, motivate and drive you. When that goal actually has the possibility to become real, that big event comes, whether you make it or not or have an amazing performance or not – it is just 1 day, maybe a week – you would have had the positive experiences all the other days. It should be fun, otherwise why are you doing it????

Comparison is the worst form of violence against yourself.

In the end we have given all of our powers to others and had become abysmally feeble, weak, uncertain and co-dependent. Not to ignore that the power you have given is quite often to others that value profits rather than your wellbeing. Just remember that half truths are still lies. In the end, you have your best interests, nobody else. I believe knowing ‘Why?’ rather than ‘What?’ deeply motivates you to search for the pure essence of everything and reach true health and wellbeing. To get most out of (athletic), it takes complete awareness of your actions.

Furthermore, the definition of normal has changed – being on medications (yes plural) and falling apart as you grow old is the new black, a part of life, something that everybody has to accept. Just look around and see the number of hunched over, limping and overall dysfunctionally walking people. Gut problems like diarrhea and constipation are ‘what everybody is having’ and no worries “there is a pill for that.” Being hangry (angry because-hungry) is so common and as a consequence people pound coffee after coffee just to make it through the day and when flu season rolls around everybody gets 2-3 bouts of it. It’s the way things are. Where the hell did it all go wrong?!?!?!?

This is where the real tragedy begins. Like a Fitzgeraldian character we fool ourselves it is all fine; we put on a mask of well-being and happiness while a horrid tragedy boils inside…until it is often too late and it all comes crashing down. We don’t have the courage to stand in front of mirror and honestly and objectively say – this is not okay and it must change. Instead of having an (athletic) life worth of a 9-10/10 we keep giving everything a seven at best – a phony rating – a one in disguise.

The MAF method is the constant search for truth and conscious self-improvement and taking charge of yourself. If that happens to include athletic pursuits and even better great victories, it is an added bonus. It is a process that takes place in every hour of every day until you leave this world, hopefully with a smile on your face. Because in the end the truest and one of the most challenging of all pursuits:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.

-Seneca

With that being said,

What the MAF method is NOT About

The MAF method is not training at 180-X heart rate for a Y number of hours while eating Z for any number of weeks. It also is not building an aerobic base for 3 to 6months and at 3-6months and one day you pull all the stops and you blow away the competition. No, it really isn’t.

It most definitely is not about training slow and staying completely away from high intensity workouts. You are slow and you should avoid anaerobic training mainly because if you have been following the popular “no pain, no gain” approach as well as eating the currently (as of 2015) typical western diet based on carbohydrates – your body has simply become aerobically deficient – it doesn’t know how to burn fat efficiently yet so you have to start slow – you have to learn to walk before you can run.

I hear you thinking that the above ‘prescriptions’ indeed work wonders. However, by doing all of the things I just mentioned in the previous paragraphs, you are just very good at following instructions, you become a living robot. It is the equivalent for showing up to a job you despise and don’t care for, so you get a paycheck at the end of the month. All of the numbers, are an absolutely great place to start, a guideline – something you can fall back on. Blindly following them and just clocking the hours/miles (because “that is what somebody did with good results”), is not a conscious way of doing things, and as soon as something deviates from the outlined path/number you end up in a stupor, freaking out what to do, instead of being able to search for solutions and eventually figure out the answers – in short you know what you are doing, however, you don’t know why you are doing it. Which is not to say you should give up, quite the opposite, you should constantly question and search until things make sense – it is a lifelong pursuit. This is how Dr. Maffetone got to it all – it was a process in search of health and wellbeing for himself and other athletes and yes that eventually crystalized in the 180 formula, fat burning, etc.

In short you have to become student of yourself and your sport, understand the big picture, you need to be….

Making Sense of it All

Personally, it took me some time to put it all together, thought in the end the best way to summarize it all is via a fundamental training and coaching model. You can read the full details about it in my article. Below I have included the condensed version

The three primary elements are : Mind, Body and Environment. Together they create the principle of Awareness.

The Mind

Probably the most ignored aspect of training and totally dismissed by 99.9% of the coaches out there. I separate it from the brain (more on that below). Paraphrasing Sir. Kenneth Robinson, all mammals have a brain, yet we are the only ones that have the Olympic games, write literature, compose music. The mind possesses boundless creative ability. Unfortunately this multi-layered complexity represents some of the greatest roadblocks for a good number of people. This is where the ego resides. Too often it is the ego gets in the way; for example by equating good results to happiness, one cannot help but sway between the extremes of elation and more often depression.

The Mind, would not exist without…

The Body

The body is the physical expression of how we carry ourselves in the world. The structural foundation that is the skeleton, fascia, muscles, etc. depend on the many biochemical processes that constantly go on and are responsible for everything from breathing to the billions of neural transmissions that even are responsible for the wide array of emotions and conscious human function.

Since ultimately it is the body that we have to use in the various (athletic) activities, it is the most obvious choice on what to improve by training; and that is perfectly fine. However, there are two very important aspects that rarely get a mention – health and functionality. Without addressing them, you are possibly losing 75% or even more from your training benefits in the long run.

The Environment

Quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

We are not separate from the environment and we evolved to deal with it in the best way possible. Evolution is a slow and steady process since when survival is on the table, quick fixes and hastily patched up solutions rarely represent sustainable solutions.

Another quite important aspect is that adapting to your environment as well as changing it to better suit your living and athletic needs requires both mental and physical energy. The current highly technological and fast pace society is vastly different than the African savannah where ‘we grew up’ and as such you should be overly vigilant not to let it overcome your extremely robust adaptation capabilities. This is one of the reasons why top level professional athletes can train at high volume and intensity (whether that is productive it another story…), while the aspiring ones of you are sometimes all too painfully familiar with overtraining. The highly debated field of diet and nutrition falls into our environment.

Awareness

The culmination of the above principles of The Mind, The Body, and The Environment is in the principles of awareness. I strongly believe total and complete awareness is paramount for successful (athletic) life. Therefore I conclude this article with a quote from Moshe Feldenkrais’s book Awareness Through Movement

We act in accordance with our self-image.

This self-image—which, in turn, governs our every act—is conditioned in varying degree by three factors: heritage, education, and self-education.

The part that is inherited is the most immutable. The biological endowment of the individual—the form and capacity of his nervous system, his bone structure, muscles, tissue, glands, skin, senses—are all determined by his physical heritage long before he has any established identity. His self-image develops from his actions and reactions in the normal course of experience.

Education determines one’s language and establishes a pattern of concepts and reactions common to a specific society. These concepts and reactions will vary according to the environment into which a person is born; they are not characteristic of mankind as a species, but only of certain groups or individuals. Education largely determines the direction of our self-education, which is the most active element in our development and in more frequent use socially than elements of biological origin.

Our self education influences the manner in which external education is acquired, as well as the selection of the material to be learned and the rejection of that which we cannot assimilate.

…

Of the three active factors in the establishment of our self-image, self-education alone is to some extent in our own hands.

Stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3 of my Experience with the MAF method and cycling.

[amazon text=The title of this post&asin=B003SNJYQ2] was inspired by one of cycling’s greats – Laurent Fignon.

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Me and MAF Series

• Part 1: I Was Young and Carefree: The Concepts and Ideas Behind the MAF Method
• Part 2: Me and MAF: My Background and Practical Aspects
• Part 3: The Numbers: MAF Tests and Beyond

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My continuous extremely positive experience with the MAF Method can be found under the Me and MAF tag.

You have to start with ‘Wow!’ One of the biggest wow moments as far as cycling and probably training in general for me to this date was being introduced to The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing by Dr. Phil Maffetone. After many seasons of going harder and doing more and more, I had gotten to the point where even something I was good at, time trialling, was becoming slower and slower, I knew I had to change from the ground up if I wanted to get somewhere with the sport I have grown to love so much. To say that Dr. Maffetone goes completely against the grain of everything that is out there as far as endurance training, utilising fat (fat burning for energy rather than carbohydrates), healthy living, balanced nutrition, injury prevention, body balance, mental focus and such, would be a huge huge understatement. In simple terms he goes down to the bare bone fundamentals that are behind endurance – from physiology, to muscle function to psychology.

Dr. Maffetone is not without his critiques, particularly because his methods are the polar opposite of the ‘no pain, no gain.’ and the ‘do more…faster!!!’ slogans that scream at you from virtually everywhere as well as against the hugely popular cookbook and formula approaches that are now the mainstream norm for ‘successful training/coaching.’ A modest person himself he doesn’t have to go and showcase his successes. The most famous of his athletes was Mark Allen. Mark who you say? For those not familiar with the Ironman Hawaii Triathlon (2.4-mile (3.86 km)swim, a 112-mile (180.25 km) bicycle ride and a marathon 26.2-mile (42.2 km) run, raced in that order and without a break). Mark Allen won it, SIX times. Before that he was a swimmer in college and had gotten himself injured and burned out before starting his successful collaboration with Dr. Maffetone. Long haul bomber pilots, race car drivers, runners, music stars (Johnny Cash) all have nothing but praise to say for Dr. Phil Maffetone.

Needless to say, if you look for them though, you will come across a number of quite unhappy people who tried Dr. Maffetone’s methods and were quite unsuccessful or worse they critiqued him without even trying to make sense of his ideas.  By briefly reading quite a number of those ‘negative experiences’ I couldn’t help but notice that every single one of those people missed one or more of the following, I would call them commandments of the Maffetone method. I absolutely recommend that you go and read his work, since putting decades of hands on clinical and coaching experience in just a blog post is impossible, however, I will get you started. In addition the Maffetone crowd seems to be mostly runners and triathletes so I want to put a ‘cycling spin’ on it. Here we go.

The Commandments of Maffetone Training for Cycling

1. Understand the Big Picture

Having two legs for walking and running, the ability to sweat and regulate our body temperature allowed us as species to cover vast amounts of land in search for food and water as well as provided an advantage versus the large predators in the African savannah who had to rest in the shade during the day. In short – we have endured, so it is safe to say endurance is hardwired into every human. Fast forward to the recent past and we have started doing all of the above (minus escaping saber-toothed tigers) in an organised fashion and we have called in running, cycling, triathlon, swimming etc.

Therefore, as ‘something we all have,’ endurance is the culmination of the whole complexity that is the human body. As described by Dr. Maffetone the best way to illustrate it is an equilateral triangle.

Structure – the muscles and bones and neurons that make up the body. The constant wear and tear we put on our body also falls into this category.

Chemistry – the body functions due to cascades of highly regulated biochemical processes. Any changes due to prescription drugs, inadequate diet, etc. all contribute to changes in the chemical part of the endurance triangle.

Mental and emotional – as mentioned above the brain is the most important and yet often overlooked part when it comes to training and racing. Sensations, perceptions, emotions, pain, motivation just to name a few.

All three are interrelated and cannot be viewed entirely in isolation. A very general example: Entirely neglecting the pain signals your body is sending you as you keep ‘giving it all’ day after day (mental emotional) would lead to increasing levels of inflammation (chemical) and ultimately an injury due to the the incomplete recovery (structure).

In addition developing our fat burning as a primary energy system is an ability that allows us to use the 40.000+kcal available even to the leanest athletes rather than the limited ~2000kcal of carbohydrates.

2. Take Control

African hunters chase antelopes for hours in the midday desert heat. No highly sophisticated coaching, heart rate monitors, power meters or the ‘latest and greatest’ equipment. Also no time to stop and drink water since one thing that antelopes are good at is running fast…very fast. Yet the hunters survive and manage remarkable feats of strength.  Why? They are in tune to their bodies. The brain is the best governor we have and everything we do starts there. The way we sense our environment and the feedback that comes from the brain is very important.  In addition continuously asking why and educating yourself about training, nutrition etc., is a significant part of the mental and emotional part of endurance. Take control and listen to your body.

3. MAF, the 180 Formula and Fat Burning

The 180 formula is pretty much the only formula that Dr. Maffetone mentions. My aside here is that most athletes only focus on this point of Maffetone training while ignoring points 1 and 2 and hence get suboptimal results.

I am probably repeating myself and I whole heartedly agree with him that the best schedule is the one not written down and no formula can suit everybody. Though through his experience by examining a LOT of athletes he has come up with a formula which in his words represents your maximum aerobic function (MAF) heart rate where you are developing your fat burning, or utilising the virtually endless fuel your body has at its disposal.

How to calculate your MAF

Subtract your age from 180 and further adjust that number by the following 4 conditions (quoted directly)

a. If you have or are recovering from a major illness (heart disease, operations, hospital stays) or are on any regular medication – subtract 10.

b. If you are injured, have regressed in training or competition, get more than two colds or bouts of flu per year, have allergies or asthma, or if you have been inconsistent or are just getting back into training – subtract additional 5.

c. If you have been training consistently (at least four times weekly) for up to two years without any kind of the problems mentioned in a and b, keep the number (180-age) the same

d. If you have been training for more than two years without any of the problems listed above, and have made progress in competition without injury, add 5.

If you have any questions, look at points 1 and 2 again. Good.

Better be 5bpm lower rather than too high. No but’s, no if’s, no I know better and this zone does not correspond to my zone, etc. Ideally Dr. Maffetone would test you on a treadmill/track, however, this is the next best thing. Your fat burning/MAF/training zone is 10bpm from that.

For example if you are 30 years old and have no injuries/conditions/prescription medications and are just starting training you get 180-30-5 = 145bpm. Your training zone is the 10bpm range 135-145bpm.

Bike, swim, run or walk, 1h, 45min, 100hours, uphill, downhill, flats, rolling terrain of training this is the maximum heart rate you should be training at any time (ie not the average over the whole workout). No but’s, no if’s. Period.

Why heart rate when we have all this advances, power meters, etc.? It’s quite simple really. The common ‘wisdom’ is that heart rate is too variable to be a reliable training metric. It gets affected by (lack of) sleep, stress, coffee, etc. This is exactly why it is the most important metric – it is the biofeedback you are receiving from your body. With the current state, stress, fatigue you are experiencing this is what you are capable of achieving aerobically while burning fat rather than sugar (glucose). How would you know if you are improving? More on that a bit later.

4. Commit and Reduce Stress

To the whole idea and give it 3-6months. You will go sloooooow at first, I mean dead slow. Another misconception is that Maffetone training is about training slow. No, it isn’t, you are slow because if you have been following the popular “no pain, no gain” approach as well as eating the currently (as of 2015) typical western diet based on carbohydrates – your body has simply become aerobically deficient – it doesn’t know how to burn fat efficiently yet so you have to start slow – you have to learn to walk before you can run.

Rumor has it Mark Allen ran an 11 minute mile pace (2x slower than a competitive pace) as he was starting and he was not out of shape. That being said for cycling you will have to avoid hills and if not possible, get a compact crankset and a wide gearing cassette – 11/28, 11/32 and (gasp!) even triple chainrings. Hills will be even slower, be patient. Joining the weekly group ride (hammer fest) and racing is out of the question. You will have to get used to the company of only your bike and heart rate monitor. The positive is that since you are not redlining it all the time and all you have to keep in check is your HR you can actually start to enjoy riding, find new roads, notice things you were too busy to see before. It’s all wonderful stimulation for your brain as well.

In addition although stress sometimes is labeled as a badge of honour in our modern fast paced lifestyles, mother nature put it there as our ‘fight-or-flight’ response and was never intended as a long term state. Therefore chronic stress is counter-productive towards endurance. Stress can affect each three parts of the triangle in point 1 such as: physical/structural stress – poorly fitting bike, chemical stress – caffeine, prescription and/or over the counter drugs, mental and emotional stress – job deadlines, relationship problems, etc. Write down all the stressors you feel are having and start reducing/eliminating the ones that you can control.

5. Test

Every month if possible and keep a diary. Test what? Your MAF or how fast/how much power are you producing at your MAF heart rate. Find a course with no traffic that takes 30ish min to ride and record your times/speed. Having a power meter and/or indoor trainer is the best in my opinion; simply warm up building to your MAF (12-15min), ride at it for 30min and cooldown (12-15min). More watts/speed at the same MAF HR = improved aerobic fitness. If you are progressing you are on the right track, if you are stagnating or regressing shortly after beginning (1-2months) you have to re evaluate your MAF HR (usually set too high), stress, diet – check your diary. Once your MAF tests plateau you are ready to add some intensity and/or racing. Once they start regressing, it is time to continue building your aerobic base again.

Conclusion

Endurance is something that is part of being human and as such is no simple task to put into a single blog post. However, if nothing else the take away points from this article are that you should take charge of your training and keep educating yourself and ignore the ‘no pain no gain’ mentality that has sadly become the norm of athletic endeavour. You cannot reach your full athletic potential by focusing on the training alone, it requires a full holistic approach starting with your body as the combination of the structural, chemical, mental and emotional aspects of it. Last but not least reducing stress as well training your body to utilize fat as fuel/developing your maximum aerobic function (MAF).

My continuous experience with the MAF Method can be found under the Me and MAF tag.

For further information check the ever-increasing Reading List

I welcome comments, however, before asking a question please visit the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.

A drop of support means an ocean of gratitude.

If you find motivation and value in the content of TheTallCyclist, consider making a donation.

 

The post Maffetone Training for Cycling appeared first on The Tall Cyclist.