How many weeks until ideal peak?

Ask Joe Rubio, he's a pro.

I say indefinitely as long as you’re giving yourself ample time to recover from workouts.

fkonfkoff wrote:

I say indefinitely as long as you’re giving yourself ample time to recover from workouts.

But you can't maintain peak shape indefinitely...

Rubio wrote:

fkonfkoff wrote:

I say indefinitely as long as you’re giving yourself ample time to recover from workouts.

But you can't maintain peak shape indefinitely...

You can if you keep hitting new peaks...

Cuckoldistan wrote:

Rubio wrote:

But you can't maintain peak shape indefinitely...

You can if you keep hitting new peaks...

Oh, absolutely. When you finish a cycle and take your foot off the pedal to let your body absorb it, you can build up to another cycle on top of the fitness you've already gained.

My question is about the ideal/optimal duration of a cycle 8).

Thks!

Rubio wrote:

Cuckoldistan wrote:

You can if you keep hitting new peaks...

Oh, absolutely. When you finish a cycle and take your foot off the pedal to let your body absorb it, you can build up to another cycle on top of the fitness you've already gained.

My question is about the ideal/optimal duration of a cycle 8).

Thks!

If the point of a training cycle is to make you more fit and you keep increasing fitness month after month, why does there need to be an expiration date?

Peaking is about accepting your level of fitness at a point (as in for a certain race date) and freshening your legs from the mileage while keeping the intensity in the picture. If there is no race, what’s the point? Maybe I’m wrong.

fkonfkoff wrote:

Peaking is about accepting your level of fitness at a point (as in for a certain race date) and freshening your legs from the mileage while keeping the intensity in the picture. If there is no race, what’s the point? Maybe I’m wrong.

Because you simply cannot linearly increase your fitness forever. At a certain point, your shape will start to get worse.

Someone (not me) with some knowledge in the science behind performance could elaborate on this subject?

Rubio wrote:

fkonfkoff wrote:

Peaking is about accepting your level of fitness at a point (as in for a certain race date) and freshening your legs from the mileage while keeping the intensity in the picture. If there is no race, what’s the point? Maybe I’m wrong.

Because you simply cannot linearly increase your fitness forever. At a certain point, your shape will start to get worse.

Someone (not me) with some knowledge in the science behind performance could elaborate on this subject?

If you are dealing with minor injuries appropriately and recovering between workouts I’m not sure why not. Seems like duration of phases and cycles is mostly based on a concrete racing ‘season’. Take that out of the equation and why shouldn’t you be able to slowly and indefinitely spiral *upward*?

fkonfkoff wrote:

If you are dealing with minor injuries appropriately and recovering between workouts I’m not sure why not. Seems like duration of phases and cycles is mostly based on a concrete racing ‘season’. Take that out of the equation and why shouldn’t you be able to slowly and indefinitely spiral *upward*?

You can't increase fitness indefinitely, or even hold a peak indefinitely, because the costs of doing so become unsustainable.

As your fitness increases, the stimulus required for additional fitness gains must become larger. If you ran 6 miles at 6:00/mile to get where you are today, you'll need to run 7 miles, or at 5:50/mile, to get a bit more fit. Meanwhile the gains you are making become smaller, and the time required to recover and absorb the fitness is becoming longer. So: bigger efforts, slower gains, and decreasing gains. That sounds like you can hit a nice high-level plateau, but...

As Canova says, getting to peak fitness requires high modulation. When you're in good shape, to push yourself forward requires some really big efforts. If you can do 10 x 400 at mile pace comfortably, doing it again won't do anything for you. You've got to move up to 12 x 400, or 16 x 100, or run them faster. Or you push your long run out from 20 miles to 23. Or you go from 12 miles at MP to 14. It's always the last few reps or miles where you do the key work, and each time you move up to more volume or a faster pace, you have to do a serious workout (12 miles at MP) just to get in a position to do the key part of the workout (the last 2 miles at MP) that will give you a new stimulus.

So if you're pushing to reach a new level in a buildup for a goal race, you're running pretty close to the edge in the last few big workouts. Injury risks rise. Eventually you get injured because every workout trades some degree of structural health for additional fitness. The length of the macrocycle becomes very, very long. Even if you aren't racing, at some point you hit a level where the next step is essentially a race effort requiring longer to recover than the period over which you can sustain fitness.

If you take it slow and steady then you can probably continuously increase fitness until your mid to late 30's. Question is how fast do you want to reach a peak fitness and how "good" do you want that fitness to be?

You can take your current level of fitness, hit it hard for 6 weeks and be in peak shape for a month or so. But is that a peak when you can do the same thing and be even faster 4 months later?

Wow.

Great exposition, really appreciate it.

In your experience, how much time can an athlete sustain a continuous shape improvement before hitting that "event horizon" (the point where the stimulus required takes longer to recover than the period over which you can sustain fitness)?

I don't see the "event horizon" being a point where recovery period gets longer. It is where you've run out of time available to you in a day to continue to increase stimulus. If you gradually increase stimulus then your recovery time should stay the same.

hgcshhff wrote:

If you take it slow and steady then you can probably continuously increase fitness until your mid to late 30's. Question is how fast do you want to reach a peak fitness and how "good" do you want that fitness to be?

You can take your current level of fitness, hit it hard for 6 weeks and be in peak shape for a month or so. But is that a peak when you can do the same thing and be even faster 4 months later?

This is my point...I think.

About..

20-25 weeks for aerobic

10 weeks for vo2 max

6 weeks for anaerobic

To peak.

What we call "fitness" is a combination of many different factors, which are taking very different timelines to peak. Additional complexity comes from the fact that these factors depend on each other.

- For example, mitochondria and capillaries are taking about 6 weeks to max out at any given workload. This is the main source of beginner's dramatic aerobic gains.

- High lactate threshold is another component of "fitness", which also depends on amount of mitochondria eating lactate, so the more mitochondria, the higher the ceiling, but maxing out the lactate threshold might take months.

- Running efficiency is another major factor that takes years to develop and it also depends on your workload.

- Your body structure is improving (getting stronger) steadily if the workload is just right. This in time will lead to you being able to handle more workload - and boom! - you now can stimulate your body enough to support a bigger mitochondrial mass, which in turn leads to better lactate threshold ceiling and better efficiency, and so on and so forth.

Of course, there's always a law of diminishing returns and there's always a soft ceiling on this process. For someone, it's injury, for someone it's age, for someone it's lack of motivation or other responsibilities in life. From what I see, it takes about 3-5 years for average runner to come close enough to his/her potential.