Endurance Baseline Testing; How to Choose the Right Test For You
One of the best things about technology these days is that we have plenty of data available and a host of metrics at our fingertips. But all this data is useless if we don’t have a solid, accurate benchmark with which to compare it too. This post will aim to provide you with just that; accurate and repeatable tests that will hopefully result in reliable data from which you can increase the effectiveness of your training. I will focus on tests for the three most common areas that endurance athletes reside; swimming, biking, and running.
The Swim
Many athletes who are new to swimming struggle with the technique side of this sport, at least initially. As a coach, I would argue that learning to be comfortable in the water and learning how to effectively propel yourself through the water is more important than trying to hit specific time intervals. That comes later once you have the technique down and you are ready to push yourself in training. Once you reach this point, you are ready to test yourself against the clock.
Threshold Pace Test
This test is as simple as it gets; swim 1,000m/y continuous, as fast as you can. The result is your pace per 100m/y. Using a pace chart and a percentage of your threshold pace, you can calculate what your endurance, tempo, threshold, and sprint pacing should be. If you are worried about your endurance, try an 800m/y test. Anything shorter will probably not be an accurate representation of your threshold pace for endurance racing.
Critical Velocity Test
More experienced swimmers should still complete the 1,000m/y test a few times a season to establish baselines, but if you are training based on TSS, or training stress score, you want something that will take into account the intensity of your swim workouts. That is where the CV, or critical velocity, tests come in. A CV test is based on two swims; an all-out 200m/y effort and an all-out 400m/y effort. The resulting times will give you your critical speed in meters/yards per minute. Once you have this number, you can calculate your TSS based on the intensity factor and swim speed for your specific workouts. TrainingPeaks has a specific algorithm that is very helpful, and is what most of the current swim TSS research is based on. While this method certainly does have its limitations, it is better than nothing, especially if you track training stress daily and use it to plan your season. Like all the tests I highlight in this post, repeatability is the key. As long as you can get accurate and repeatable results from a test, it is a good test.
The Bike
The two most common metrics used by athletes for cycling are heart rate and power. For heart rate, you can use the same lactate threshold test described later on in this post for the run. For any cyclist with a power meter, there are a few options for power testing which I will go into below. These tests are best performed in a controlled, indoor environment to maximize the test’s validity, but most can still be completed outdoors. Each test is meant to ascertain your functional threshold power, or FTP. Remember, as long as you keep the testing consistent, it doesn’t really matter which test you choose.
Ramp Test
The ramp test is a test designed to push you to your absolute limit. After a brief warmup, you will steadily increase your power every minute until your legs physically cannot keep turning the pedals and you stop. From the data collected, you can take 75% of your best 1-minute power and that should be your FTP. This test is great for beginners or athletes who have a hard time pacing the 20 minute test. It also is highly repeatable because it does not take as much time to recover from compared to a 20 minute, or 1-hour test. This is very useful, especially if you complete the test but feel that it did not accurately reflect your current fitness, for whatever reason. Rest up, and try it again!
20 Minute Threshold Test
This test is a great way to practice pacing over a longer period of time and can be more easily completed outdoors. For this test, you should warm-up very well and feel ready for a long, hard effort. To achieve accurate results with this method, your pacing has to be spot-on. The problem many athletes run into if it is their first time attempting this test is that they go out too hard and fade towards the end, or they hold back too much at the beginning and leave power on the table. A good gauge is at the halfway-mark. If you feel like you are completely spent and can’t even think about pushing for another minute, you probably have gone out too fast. In this case, I would recommend stopping, recovering and trying the workout again the next day. If you reach the halfway point and you feel really good, keep going and try to push more power! Upon completing the test, you should feel like you are completely spent and you left nothing in the gas tank. From this data, you can take your average power for the full 20 minutes and multiply it by 0.95. This will give you the estimated power you could theoretically sustain for 1-hour.
The Run
Once again, I will have to highlight the fact that I do not have any experience running with a power meter, so those tests will not be covered. If you are interested in that though, here is a link to an overview of what that would look like. The typical metrics used for running are heart rate and pace. Heart rate is probably the most popular while pace is helpful if you use software like training peaks or WKO5. Again, for the more serious athletes who train with TSS, using your FTP (functional threshold pace) helps to obtain a more accurate stress score across all types of running workouts. Heart rate is easier to calculate though, and for most athletes, this will suffice.
Lactate Threshold Test
The data point we are most interested in for heart rate training is known as LTHR, or lactate threshold heart rate. To find out what our LTHR is, we perform a 30 minute time trial. The average heart rate for the last 20 minutes of the time trial is your lactate threshold, give or take a few beats. What is important to remember when performing this time trial is that while you are only interested in the heart rate data from the last 20 minutes, you have to run the whole 30 minutes hard to get accurate results. The first 10 minutes serves as a buffer which gives your heart rate time to rise and settle into your test pace by the 10 minute mark. From this data, you can set your heart rate zones and begin training! Simple, easy, and effective.
Run Threshold Pace
Due to limitations with comparing heart rate data between workouts and the variability in recording heart rate data, more serious athletes will use run threshold pace, or RTP. RTP is simply whatever your best average pace was for a long, fast, workout that was 45-60 minutes long. Using this pace (in miles per hour) you can figure out what your RTSS is for a given workout by plugging it into this calculation, or by plugging it into any software that can auto-calculate for you. From this calculation, you can more effectively track TSS from your run workouts as well as keep track of intensity.
Hopefully, this article has shed some light on a few tests that will be useful for you to incorporate into your training. It is important to test often during a training season so that you are training based on the most up-to-date data available. While rarely fun, and certainly painful, these tests give you a more complete picture on how your training has gone so far, where you are at right now, and where you are headed in the future!
