You can change your stride, your stroke. How much water can you pull with one stroke, and how many of those can you do per minute. It's a same thing. We are just talking about the very same thing, no matter what the sport is, it's all the same. So it's in this case, gear size times cadence, type of workout is very fast reps-long recoveries. It's muscle recruitment, interesting subject and this is really off the topic for us, muscle recruitment. We never have to worry about this in our sport.
If you are a weightlifter, you know if you ever go to a power lifting competition or watching on TV like the Olympics are coming up here during the summer. You watch the power lifting competitions, if they show you the lifters, the athletes backstage before they come out, right before they come out to do their lift. What are they doing? They are standing back there, shouting or beating themselves in the chest and they get somebody like coach yelling at them, and hitting them on the head. They are doing all kinds of things. Why they do that? When we go for football game, American football.
American football, before the game starts, what the players are all doing? They are all bumping onto each other, heads and shoulders, bumping against each other and they are jumping up and down, they are screaming, they are carrying on. So what this all comes down to these football players and these power lifters is, how much muscle can they recruit instantaneously, to produce as much power as possible in a shorter time as possible.
So when that power-lifter comes out, if he is going to do that particular lift, he is going to do or she is going to do. They've got to make that movement very quickly. They haven't got time to like lollygag and pull it up slowly, and make the movement real slowly. It is like Bam! It's got to happen right now. Just the same as that sprinter in cycling has got to make that movement to go right now. They've got to go from 120 RPM to 180 RPM immediately. There is no pausing. If there is any pause, they can't recruit every muscle and their body to make that crank move faster, they are going to lose the race. So they are very good at recruiting muscles. That's what power is all about, muscle recruitment. How many muscle can we recruit all at the same time.
RPE is 10, you can't get any higher than this. Heart rate means absolutely nothing, CP, Critical Power is like 0.2 which is like 12 seconds, which you'll power up in for 12 seconds, and sprint pace, it's how fast can you go on a sprint. Examples, and these are examples. For cycling, it's not really apply to this what I call jumps or something like 12 times 8 seconds sprints and 3 minute recoveries. Short fast reps with very long recoveries, that's power. Again, doesn't pertain to us, don't worry about this, now back to sprints.
Okay, I hope you now understand the triad. That's the basic concept of this whole subject of periodization, you've got to understand what is training. That's what training is. As Dr. Bempah(ph), that's what he is teaching, is that concept.
Let's now look at some very basic training theory and then what we will do after that, is we will put the two pieces together. We will take the training triad, training theory together, and we've got what we call periodization. Basic concept of training, you now have this fitness level. We can measure this in any number of ways, we could say what's your VO2 max right now, or I can say, how fast can you run a 5k? These are the measures of fitness.
So right now, we've got some measure of fitness. We have got whatever it maybe. At this point in time, this represents time is moved from left to right. At some point in time, we apply an overload, physiological overload to your body. We call that a hard workout. So these are killer workouts, and because of that killer workout, we experience fatigue. Now, we call it fatigue, but we could really say what's happening is you have lost fitness. Here's our fitness level, it just dropped. Fitness level is going down.
In other words, you couldn't keep doing that same work out everyday. This killer workout, which you can do one time, you can't come back and do it again the next day, the next day, the next day. Fatigue is going to stop you from doing that. Well, if fitness is a measure of performance, if fitness is being measured by high performance rather, and you can't do it at that level anymore, you have just lost fitness by definition. So fitness is dropped.
At some point in the future, this curve is going to turn around. We are going to start to recover. We are going to begin to get our fitness back again. It's going to come back gradually over course a few hours here, and at some point theoretically, it will cross the line at the point, cross the line that we started on, this fitness level, and we will actually gain beyond the fitness level we had when we started. We call this gain here over compensation and this is why we train. We train to improve our fitness, and we do that by applying overload, allowing the body to adapt during this recovery process. Notice that we adapt during the recovery, we don't adapt during the workout, we adapt during recovery. All the workout does, is applies the potential for fitness. It does not create fitness.
The actual fitness comes during recovery. That's where fitness comes from, very important point. But, if we allow it to happen, if we allow recovery, we get this over compensation and then if we apply a new overload here, guess what? We create the same repeats, and now all these are on a higher scale. Just always keep wrapping it up. So this is what the training is all about. We just keep wrapping this thing up.
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