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Comment by discreteevent | Hacker News Reader

In fact professional endurance athletes have to train at low intensity because they put out so many watts at higher intensities that they can't get enough fuel in to sustain it for the number of hours they train. If they do then they end up with chronic fatigue etc. Once an amatuer is under a certain number of hours a week (10?) and relatively low wattage it doesn't make sense for them to train at low intensity. (You could be a really fast amateur and still be putting out relatively low watts compared to a pro).

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misinfo. that has nothing to do with why athletes train the way they do. getting more calories in is not a limiting factor.

anaerobic lactic and alactic regime training just has a hard metabolic and fatigue thresholds where you won't see any improvements if you add volume.

aerobic regime training (which is by its nature low intensity) does, from what we know, not really have the same limitations. on the contrary a lot of its most important adaptions keep increasing with absdurd training volumes and only show up after accumulated years and decades of training (long distance endurance athletes can often peak or maintain near peak shape into their 40s or 50s because of this).

all of this necessitates large volumes of low intensity training.

Why is the pointing to Relative Energy Deficiency “misinfo”? It is my understanding that that is one of the factors that are used in explaining the overtraining in say ultrarunners. Eating 5k+ calories a day is near threshold for the hours in a waking day.

2 large pizzas is near the threshold for the hours in a day?

Sorry, bit late to the party. Eat a pizza and the energy will only come into your body in (as far as I've learned) a few hours. Eating a pizza is hard on your digestion. That why we usually go to sleep a few hours after are largest meal. We give our body the time to digest the energy and wake up fresh.

(from AI overview) "The human body can absorb and process about 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates (roughly 240 to 360 calories) per hour during exercise when using a single or mixed source of sugars" And that's for your 14? waking hours. With another conundrum looking around the corner - work out or basicly: burn more calories, and you need more sleep.

Your body is constantly calomaxxing. Eat two pizzas (hey, once in my 20s I could as well!) and your digestion is working for the next 10-15 hours.

And this is totally the way a lot of amateurs end up being coached in some of endurance sports.

E.x. in cycling a lot of the high volume low intensity work is targeted at the elite athletes that are putting in 20+ hours a week of training time.

I guess it's different for everyone but I still train somewhere between 7-15 hours a week and have always needed some of that to be low intensity.

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