Does performing the 3-minute all-out CV test pretty regularly chip away at the aerobic base?

overthinking wrote:

I am now overthinking. I hear talk of the diminishing returns of VO2max work. Mitochondria getting eaten away and you need to rebuild your base, blah blah.

Do you believe anything you hear? If so, don’t do any more hard VO2Max workouts because every minute of VO2Max work takes away a month of your life coz mitochondria get squished into jelly goo.

bluhbber wrote:

overthinking wrote:

I am now overthinking. I hear talk of the diminishing returns of VO2max work. Mitochondria getting eaten away and you need to rebuild your base, blah blah.

Do you believe anything you hear? If so, don’t do any more hard VO2Max workouts because every minute of VO2Max work takes away a month of your life coz mitochondria get squished into jelly goo.

No, I hear things and I want to follow up with a more thoughtful evaluation and discussion. Would you like to engage in that?

overthinking wrote:

I am now overthinking. I hear talk of the diminishing returns of VO2max work. Mitochondria getting eaten away and you need to rebuild your base, blah blah.

Not sure what this means.

Running fast never decreases your aerobic fitness. Aerobic fitness may suffer if you are increasing intensity at the expense of mileage, but it's the decreased mileage (not the increased intensity) that is causing the decrease in aerobic fitness. If training plan A and training plan B are 100% identical except that A has a monthly 3 minute CV test like the one you describe while B does not, there is no reason that A would harm your aerobic fitness relative to B.

I was prompted by discussions like this thread:https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=10995322 I might be misinterpreting, but it's quotes like this that got my gears turning:

And then there are other things floating around in my head, like advice to avoid accumulating too much lactate in workouts at the beginning of the season.

In general I just have this impression that you cannot be hitting these hard VO2max intervals all year round, even with sufficient mileage to compensate (I am not trying to act like I have a real understanding, I'm trying to put the pieces together in this thread). If that were true, I was just wondering if there would be a similar argument against doing an all-out CV test every month. I figured it doesn't matter much if at all, but like to discus

I'm no exercise physiologist. But I think people are overthinking this "mitochondrial damage" thing. Sure, we feel like crap if we workout too hard. That's probably a sign something is damaged. And we have a name for it now; "mitochondrial damage." Okay? So what. We used to call it "recovery." Now we call it "waiting for our mitochondria to repair and multiply."

That damage is temporary. We recover and the body repairs itself (and mitochodria) to pre-workout levels and then some, making us stronger. I could be wrong, but that's the way I see it.

Running all out one day a month isn't going to hard your fitness. It's likely to help.

GettingFasterDude wrote:

I'm no exercise physiologist. But I think people are overthinking this "mitochondrial damage" thing. Sure, we feel like crap if we workout too hard. That's probably a sign something is damaged. And we have a name for it now; "mitochondrial damage." Okay? So what. We used to call it "recovery." Now we call it "waiting for our mitochondria to repair and multiply."

That damage is temporary. We recover and the body repairs itself (and mitochodria) to pre-workout levels and then some, making us stronger. I could be wrong, but that's the way I see it.

Running all out one day a month isn't going to hard your fitness. It's likely to help.

That's exactly where I started out haha. Then I started over thinking and adopted this anonymous handle out of shame to see if I was missing something.

overthinking (on the phone) wrote:

GettingFasterDude wrote:

I'm no exercise physiologist. But I think people are overthinking this "mitochondrial damage" thing. Sure, we feel like crap if we workout too hard. That's probably a sign something is damaged. And we have a name for it now; "mitochondrial damage." Okay? So what. We used to call it "recovery." Now we call it "waiting for our mitochondria to repair and multiply."

That damage is temporary. We recover and the body repairs itself (and mitochodria) to pre-workout levels and then some, making us stronger. I could be wrong, but that's the way I see it.

Running all out one day a month isn't going to hard your fitness. It's likely to help.

That's exactly where I started out haha. Then I started over thinking and adopted this anonymous handle out of shame to see if I was missing something.

New handle suggestion: "HopelesslyBurnedOutMitochondria"

bluhbber wrote:

overthinking wrote:

I am now overthinking. I hear talk of the diminishing returns of VO2max work. Mitochondria getting eaten away and you need to rebuild your base, blah blah.

Do you believe anything you hear? If so, don’t do any more hard VO2Max workouts because every minute of VO2Max work takes away a month of your life coz mitochondria get squished into jelly goo.

Mitochondria are the junior symbiote in the human cell, inferior and servile to the nucleus. If they would just shut up and do their damn job of producing energy, they wouldn't have to be destroyed every now and then.

CV test is fine every month. My only criticism would be why not just do a race instead? A hard 5K race with solid competition is probably a better indicator of fitness than a 3-min test and will get you closer to all-out than a solo effort would.

Zante wrote:

CV test is fine every month. My only criticism would be why not just do a race instead? A hard 5K race with solid competition is probably a better indicator of fitness than a 3-min test and will get you closer to all-out than a solo effort would.

Just my preference. Like to have the freedom to assess my fitness on a whim, and I'm not a huge fan of racing. Might jump in some 5ks this next year though, it's been a while. Thanks for the suggestion. Also I like that the CV test is unpaced, so I get a more solid sense of what my actual CV is. I kind of suck at pacing in races, so I often don't have a great answer when I'm done. I'm always like wow if I didn't go out so hard, I probably could have done better. CV test lets me be me.

GettingFasterDude wrote:

overthinking (on the phone) wrote:

That's exactly where I started out haha. Then I started over thinking and adopted this anonymous handle out of shame to see if I was missing something.

New handle suggestion: "HopelesslyBurnedOutMitochondria"

Mitochondria Worm infestation. It's serious, but not well known. You are most susceptible when you run fast for 3 minutes.

Wtf is a cv

Cape Verde. It's more like a hotel at Cape Verde.

goodjob wrote:

Wtf is a cv

Critical velocity. Perhaps the only clear "threshold" value that exists in running physiology.

overthinking (on the phone) wrote:

goodjob wrote:

Wtf is a cv

Critical velocity. Perhaps the only clear "threshold" value that exists in running physiology.

1,What's Critical about it?

2, What is it a threshold of?

3, How much more nonsense are you going to believe?

ya better watch out wrote:

overthinking (on the phone) wrote:

Critical velocity. Perhaps the only clear "threshold" value that exists in running physiology.

1,What's Critical about it?

2, What is it a threshold of?

3, How much more nonsense are you going to believe?

Now this is something I'm sure of. It's analogous to critical power on the bike. It's the boundary between the heavy domain (where a steady, non maximum VO2 is attainable) and the severe domain (where VO2 will eventually reach max after enough time).

If you run faster than your critical velocity for long enough, you'll eventually start slowing down. If you can manage to keep running, you'll be running at critical velocity. After a rest, you'll be able to exceed critical velocity again.

overthinking wrote:

ya better watch out wrote:

1,What's Critical about it?

2, What is it a threshold of?

3, How much more nonsense are you going to believe?

Now this is something I'm sure of. It's analogous to critical power on the bike. It's the boundary between the heavy domain (where a steady, non maximum VO2 is attainable) and the severe domain (where VO2 will eventually reach max after enough time).

If you run faster than your critical velocity for long enough, you'll eventually start slowing down. If you can manage to keep running, you'll be running at critical velocity. After a rest, you'll be able to exceed critical velocity again.

Yup. Nonsense. But you believe it.

Obviously if I try to run 15k at my 10k pace I will fail. Just as I will if I try to run 11k at my 10k pace or 10k at my 9k pace or any such impossible scenario of poor pace judgement.

There are no such threshholds. And no true steady state. Fatigue, glycogen depletion and dehydration are inevitable at any pace.

To suggest that there are demarcation zones between one type of effort and another is nonsense.

How exciting! You get to learn something today!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5371646/

Just a word of advice…

There’s no such thing as training too hard, but rather not recovering enough.

Some things are inherently impossible to recover from. You can’t race every single day. You can’t do workouts every single day.

Just make sure you’re eating enough and sleeping enough. Burnout is almost always more mental than physical.