Metabolic Efficiency

in the science behind training I will give you an eye into what our nutritionist is currently working on and what I’m able to take a part in.  The thought is based off of some work done by Bob Seebohar, however, the goal is to see if there is (and if so what is) the result of doing work at threshold on our Metabolic efficiency.  For those of you that don’t know/understand what metabolic efficiency is: roughly it is the amount of work, or in this instance power, that your body is capable of doing while still burning fat as your predominant source of fuel.  The purpose behind this is because we have a nearly unlimited amount of fat stores to fuel our body but carbohydrate stores are

limited and we can only eat so much in a day.  So…the graph below is mine… Apparently right now I’m not super efficient and weird because there shouldn’t be 2 crossover points.So, “What are we doing to try to increase metabolic efficiency?” you ask.  Well here’s a quick screen shot of it: So, this is 4x10min at threshold with 5 minutes of recovery in between.  Seebohar’s research focused on low intensity work (no tempo or threshold) to get the resulting improvements in efficiency.  The problem with this is that if you have minimal time to train you may see gains in metabolic efficiency but you may actually see decreases in fitness.  This is why we are putting focus on threshold work for those of us who are less fortunate and don’t have 20hrs/wk to ride our bikes.I will keep you posted as we are going through the next several weeks of training as well as the results of the final efficiency test.  So keep your eyes posted.