For those who don't know, your heart functions in zones. It'll stay in a zone until something physiological changes (for example, you demand too much muscle activation, and the oxygen supply can't keep up with the demand) and the heart needs to jump into the next zone. In order to design a user-specific training plan, a coach needs to know how hard he can push you before you leave the "this hurts, but I'm okay" zone and enter the "I'm going to pop like a mucous-filled baloon" zone.
To find the threshold (FT) between these zones, Mike and I got together to run the Conconi test. Essentially, this is the same as a stress-test, like you'd see on House or Scrubs... with the big difference being that we're not at risk of heart failure, but we're inflicting this torture on ourselves. We start riding easy, increasing speed every minute and recording heart rate until you can't ride any more. Where your heart plateaus is where your threshold is; even though you're working harder and harder, your heart really doesn't want to beat any faster, lest it get into the aforementioned "mucous-filled baloon explosion" zone.
Unfortunately, Mike's test got screwed up by the tension on his trainer. Basically, he couldn't get enough resistance to actually induce "failure", so we never got a plateau... plus now there's shredded rubber all over my couch.
Me, I definitely reached failure. After seeing Mike's tire-destroying, 43 minute suffer-fest, I cranked my trainer's resistance way up. That definitely did the trick. Within 17 minutes, I went KABOOM.
For those keeping score, my FT is 178 bpm. And now you know. Oh, and I plotted my results via Matlab, because I might as well do something useful with years of Post-Bacc education (right, Mark?)
Next time, on Unnecessary Self-Torture: Don beats himself with nunchuks, and Mike covers himself in honey and then lies down on an ant-hill.
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