By way of a change and an experiment I skipped my ErgVideo session today and instead returned to one of my old standbys to see how things were being affected by the addition of the very different ErgVideo work. If I am going backwards I want to know about it sooner rather than later!

Used my standard .erg file for the session which sets the VeloTron loads to deliver 2x20 @ 88-94% of FTP which would give me a direct comparison with previous similar sessions, also did a blood lactate test at the end of the session.

This went very well, this is not easy training but once I was well into the session I found that I was turning the pedals really quite comfortably at 275-285W with no problem at all and my legs were far from fresh from the previous day's session. My HR for the session was lower than it's been for a sweet spot session, power and HR distributions are shown below. As you can see the HR distribution tells a very different story in terms of training zones and suggests that all is going well and according to plan.

So, all going pretty well indeed, the final piece of the jigsaw was the blood lactate test at the end of the 2nd effort and the recorded level was 2.6mmol/l which again is encouraging and suggests that my carbohydrate stores are being used sparingly when working at this sort of load. This is not an absolute confirmation of this as blood lactate can be influenced by a number of factors but it's a guide and the signs are positive.

Back to the ErgVideos tomorrow I expect, I shall continue to use them with even greater confidence, the signs are that their use may well be having a very +ve effect on my training. It's early days but I'm certainly not going backwards using them :-)

To review the session data: click here.

ATL: 69.7 CTL: 63.2 TSB: -5.9