[Today's Podcast] Metabolic Threshold?

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

I was surprised Metabolic Threshold was treated like a little used esoteric term.

I would be very, very surprised if any athlete doing structured training for endurance sports wasn’t familiar with the term. Given Metabolic Threshold is hard to test exactly. But that’s why Coggan coined the term Functional Threshold and the method for determining it that doesn’t take a lab.

FT is loosely correlated with Metabolic Threshold, but you can test for it on your own without a lab. Structured training programs/workouts in endurance are defined in relationship to that number. Like intervals are defined with the percent of time above that metric or below it. And increasing FT is the primary objective of training. Also, you’re VO2Max is tightly predictive of your FTP (the power you produce at threshold) normalized by weight.

So, Metabolic Threshold would be a term that I’d assume almost every endurance athlete would immediately understand.

On a side, my mind is blown by the ratios for “low intensity” vs “moderate to high intensity” work. Serves as another feather in the cap for the Time Crunched training approach for endurance athletes who live normal lives.

2

I think we may be coming at this from two different perspectives. I know lots of coaches and athletes use the term metabolic threshold (often incorrectly, inconsistently, and/or nonspecifically), but it’s almost never used in research or public health guidelines.

I often use the term functional threshold and its derivatives when discussing endurance training intensity in our programs. That said, I would not use it for public health guidelines related to exercise.

I will be interested to see more controlled data on exercise intensity vs health outcomes. To my mind, it’s mostly an artifact of how intensity is being measured. On the other hand, the machine learning used in that study to further refine a sort of “exercise intent” is super interesting to me. Not sure I’m smart enough right now to quite understand how that works though!