With the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no racing or events taking place, at least in the real world (there’s plenty in the virtual world). So, is there a need to train hard, and, should you even be training hard at this point in time?

By this point in time you’ll have been hard pressed to not see articles on exercise and health and how exercise can help your immune system, and in some cases weaken it. In fact, in a previous blog even I’ve suggested that very heavy exercise can be detrimental to your immune system, see https://www.cyclecoach.com/blog/2017/10/2/illness. So, surely, the answer is to not train too hard, and just do moderate amounts. But is this really the case?

Does heavy exercise impair immune function?
Substantial evidence has previously been presented within the sports and medicine community showing that there was a ‘J’ shaped curve for how exercise improves immune function at moderate levels (i.e., you are likely to have less respiratory infections such as cold or flu) compared to a sedentary person, but at very heavy levels of training you’re more likely to have more respiratory illness. The evidence for this seemed rather compelling, and it wasn’t until the current pandemic started that I felt the need to trawl the literature and see what, if anything had changed.

Recent research from the last few years has in fact cast doubt on the suggestion that very heavy exercise impairs immune health. New technology has led to new ways of testing health, and some of the previous research was done by athletes who had to self-report whether they were ill or not. This is different to if you’re actually ill or not. The upshot of all this is that current consensus is that heavy exercise is either beneficial, or neutral (does nothing to your immune system). Additionally, other research looking at the antioxidant capacity of skeletal muscle and various other tissues shows that prolonged and intense endurance training improves these antioxidants, especially a substance called extracellular superoxide dismutase (EcSOD) - I know, it’s a bit of a mouthful!!

Is EcSOD Important?
Multiple data shows that EcSOD and other antioxidants produced by the body during exercise help prevent, or reduce the likelihood of developing a variety of diseases, from muscle wasting, cardiac disease, respiratory diseases through to a variety of other conditions. It seems that these antioxidants are extremely important to health, and that greater amounts of them are developed with harder exercise.

There are no races. There’s no need to train hard.
Apart from the above points about EcSOD etc, should we be doing FTP efforts or MAP/VO2max work? These heavier training intensities are often used to add final touches to performance (especially when it comes to MAP/VO2max work). They’re often hated by athletes, as it’s painful training at such intensities (but, oh so worth it). With no ‘real world’ races on the horizon for the foreseeable future do we need to do these efforts? For most trained and well-trained athletes, especially those over 30 years of age, the old adage of “use it or lose it” is very much a part of MAP/VO2max training and also FTP work. If you were to leave doing VO2max work until say spring 2021 (when the next race season might start?) then there is a strong likelihood that it will take a very long time to regain your top end (that final few % that makes a difference). In fact it may take all of the race season, and longer to get it back to where it should have been.

Often, when I’m coaching athletes I’ll make sure that they do some intense efforts for most of the year. Yes, there may be some recovery points at the end of season where they don’t do any VO2max work for a few weeks, but at other times it’s generally worth doing some.

Suggested Sessions
Doing FTP work (the power you can maintain maximally for about 1-hour) needs work at about that intensity (95-105% of FTP) that has a sufficiently long enough duration to stress the body. This can vary from seconds repeated many times (with very short recovery periods) through to the classic 20-min efforts at FTP, with a couple of minutes recovery between efforts. I’ll often give my athletes TTI (threshold tolerance intervals) work on a regular basis.

MAP/VO2max is more heavy going and painful and does require that you have more rest/less hard days in your training so that you can go ‘full-gas’ when needed. Efforts of this nature need to be in the region of at least several minutes through to about five minutes, with equal rest periods and performed at about 85 to 100% of MAP. My athletes will know these efforts as API (aerobic power intervals).

Both endurance training, and intensive endurance work has been shown to be beneficial to health, and can help prevent or reduce the likelihood of various diseases and conditions and improve immune system health. Top end endurance training plays a part in this, and neglecting this important component can take an extremely long time to reverse and get back to where you should have been. Just because there are no real world races (at present) isn’t a reason to not train well. You can work on improving these parameters (e.g., FTP and MAP) as well as working on other physiological type goals such as fatigue resistance and sprint power.

Further reading
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.redox.2020.101508
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-016-0566-1
https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/1999/07000/Exercise_training_induced_alterations_in_skeletal.11.aspx
https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.22849
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180420122807.htm