Heat Adaptation Block
– The Sweating Continues
Heat Training has a lot of benefits to athletes, whether you want to race in the heat or not, there are some benefits that will help all athletes. This post is mid-heat training block and is my own experiences of carrying it out and what I learned on the way.
This is the final stretch of heat sessions before I try some testing and we can see what effect we’ve had.
Heat Session 7
Sweat, Sweat, Sweat!
The sweat however seems to be getting increasingly more!! It looks a lot on the picture…but trust me it looked way worse in real life 🙂
The HR to Watts didn’t seem quite as good today. The time in the heat training zone the HR was 147 and Watts were 139. HR seemed high from the off today. Was a hard day yesterday, so maybe that had something to do with it?? Yesterday was 2 sessions, one heat training session in the morning and a track session in the evening, which included some tough efforts behind the motorbike…so I was pretty tired!
All was going fine again, until I think I knocked the sensor!! I was getting the live data, but for some reason it didn’t record on the app, so only half the session recorded….little bit frustrating! However, I kept the temp in the mid 38.3’s for another half an hour and all was good.
Heat Session 8
My ability to sweat now surpassed all expectations. It’s incredible…and quite smelly!!!!!!!!! My advice…rinse everything straight after. The trickiest thing is you continue to sweat for a fairly long time after…so it’s logistically not easy and you have to take your time and be organised.
The feeling of progress today was that during the session I felt fairly in control the watts didn’t feel forced down today. I did the whole 90 minutes with a Zwift pace group at 2.2 W/kg. Also, if I wanted to go harder I could, which I had to to get over the hill in the course. There’s no way I could have done that in most of the previous sessions.
For the hour in the heat training zone my HR was 146 and power was 161 Watts.
Heat Session 9
Tempo Session – Experiment time 🙂
Coming to the end of the initial heat training block, I wanted to do a few little experiments and to see what happened. So today I decided to just push on a little bit and just see what happened.
A week ago, I couldn’t have done this. Even at lower core temps than this my power would just drop and there wasn’t anything I can do about it. As you can see below, I did start to struggle a bit just after the hour mark and my core temp was the highest I’ve seen. I put a fan on low, aimed across my hands and that stabilised the temp from rising more and after about 20 mins it started dipping down again.
The last hour I did 168 Watts with HR at 156 bpm. Zero chance I would have been able to do that last week!
- Heat Ramp Test
- Heat Sessions – Sessions 1 – 3
- Heat Sessions – Sessions 4-6
- Finishing off the Heat Block – Re-Testing
Summary
I’ve been finding it tougher to get motivated for these sessions around the 7 day mark. It’s not the actually riding or being hot…it’s the mess it causes!!
I was also getting a little tired training wise. So I took a day off after day 7 as HR was high and I was definitely tired. The day off made quite the difference, as I felt much more motivated into session 8. HR and Watts seemed to come back into line and the small signs of gains are still in there, so we keep going 🙂
Though it’s a bit rubbish dealing with all the sweat all the time, it’s been really productive and I’m certainly coping with the heat better than I was.
The experiment at the end of the week showed I can continue to push even when my temperature went well above even what I did in the ramp test.
I think for a final experiment in this block I’ll repeat the heat ramp test as a way of comparing the changes.
