Muscle Fatigue advice please

joehayes999

Just looking for some advice on why I am feeling like S**T now and what I can do about it. I started leisure cycling this spring. I am just the right side of 50 and never was much of a sportsman. 2 weekends ago I did 70k @ 23kpm (the furthest I have gone) followed by 60k @ 20 the day after and felt absolutely fine, in fact I felt the 60k was a bit short and slow.
I switched to clipless (SPD) this weekend for the first time.
This weekend I did 56k @ 20kpm on a more hilly route on Saturday. On Sunday I set out with a faster group who were doing 30kpm on flatish ground. After 10k I just couldn't keep up and I coasted the remaining 50k with a overall 22kpm average. Since yesterday, a day after the 2nd spin, my legs feel like jelly and when I walk its like I have lead in my shoes. The calfs are not sore, but feel worn out and overall I feel knackered.
Anyone got any ideas as to why this might be and what do I do. Did I just push it too far (the distances and speed are not exactly earth shatteing!!)? Do I rest or do light exercise? Any advice would be appreciated.

run_Forrest_run

I'm not an expert by any means but sounds like you could be doing too much with not enough recovery. No matter what sport you're doing you must allow recovery time, and as we get older recovery takes longer.
Recovery doesn't necessarily mean sitting on the sofa, just go out on lighter cycles, don't put it.
You could have a build up of lactic acid in those legs too, an ice bath could help that;)

I feel the same heavy legs after a few hard running sessions, light exercise and some stretches will help, also a swim for recovery would help too..it's all about recovery.

nordicb

Hiya, in my humble opinion you don't give yourself enough rest. At least a day would've helped.
The other thing, when you went SPDs, may need to adjust cleats they are in correct place. Going SPD may give slightly raised foot position, may need to adjust the seat post too. Too much bent knees will fatigue legs quickly. Proper cycling position will give you hours of pleasure, or a torture otherwise. From my own experience, 1cm may just be enough to make world of difference.

Hopefully someone experienced will come along and advise

djfattony2000

Protein shake straight after a spin.

Helps with muscle recovery. Feel great the next day.

quozl

When you say 'more hilly route', was it a lot more hilly than you're used to?

For me there's a world of difference in how my legs feel after a flat ride and a properly hilly ride. So that could be all that it is. In which case it'll go away in a day or two and should be embraced as a reminder of your efforts Following that up with a 30kph ride rather than you're usual 23kph or so is just going to further tire your legs and probably wasn't the best idea.

If it really wasn't that much of a step up in effort from your usual then maybe you're just run-down, have a mild bug, have done too much exercise in general, haven't slept well, or some other random thing. Just take it easy when you go back cycling or take an extra day or two off and put the feet up. I assume you're doing this for fun, so don't make yourself miserable.

On the other hand, my legs currently feel heavy, tired and lightly knackered and I love it It's my reward for going up some tough Wicklow climbs on Sunday and it'll be completely gone by tomorrow but I'll be very very slightly less ****e at climbing. Then I'll do it all again.

DaithiMC

joehayes999 wrote: »

Just looking for some advice on why I am feeling like S**T now and what I can do about it. I started leisure cycling this spring. I am just the right side of 50 and never was much of a sportsman. 2 weekends ago I did 70k @ 23kpm (the furthest I have gone) followed by 60k @ 20 the day after and felt absolutely fine, in fact I felt the 60k was a bit short and slow.
I switched to clipless (SPD) this weekend for the first time.
This weekend I did 56k @ 20kpm on a more hilly route on Saturday. On Sunday I set out with a faster group who were doing 30kpm on flatish ground. After 10k I just couldn't keep up and I coasted the remaining 50k with a overall 22kpm average. Since yesterday, a day after the 2nd spin, my legs feel like jelly and when I walk its like I have lead in my shoes. The calfs are not sore, but feel worn out and overall I feel knackered.
Anyone got any ideas as to why this might be and what do I do. Did I just push it too far (the distances and speed are not exactly earth shatteing!!)? Do I rest or do light exercise? Any advice would be appreciated.

So to get this straight, two weeks ago you did the 70k and 60k back to back and then nothing for the following two weeks until this weekend and did 56k then a faster 30kph cycle?

If that's correct I think you need to consider two things. First, what's said already, recovery time was low between the cycles and secondly, sounds like you hit "the wall" or your threshold in the second spin. Operating at a higher speed will use your aerobic system and glycogen stores more quickly pushing you into the anaerobic cycle, this is better for endurance but a time comes when muscle fatigue sets in as lactate rises and is not cleared as quickly as its generated, so byproducts, acids, are formed which lead to muscle discomfort and fatigue. High lactate levels in muscles after shock are sometimes used by ER docs to assess if someone is at further risk of infection due to inflammation in the muscles.

To be clear, you can push to higher levels of effort in sprints, intervals, etc. as lactate levels clear after a few minutes of recovery but operating beyond your threshold for a long time will lead to the effects you describe. From what you state above, stick to the speeds in your first two cycles and now and again push it to eventually build up your experience on how you feel. You can get these things measured but as a leisure cyclist it probably goes up and down with your ability to put time into training so its best to assess it from how you feel on the bike.

joehayes999

DaithiMC wrote: »

So to get this straight, two weeks ago you did the 70k and 60k back to back and then nothing for the following two weeks until this weekend and did 56k then a faster 30kph cycle?

If that's correct I think you need to consider two things. First, what's said already, recovery time was low between the cycles and secondly, sounds like you hit "the wall" or your threshold in the second spin. Operating at a higher speed will use your aerobic system and glycogen stores more quickly pushing you into the anaerobic cycle, this is better for endurance but a time comes when muscle fatigue sets in as lactate rises and is not cleared as quickly as its generated, so byproducts, acids, are formed which lead to muscle discomfort and fatigue. High lactate levels in muscles after shock are sometimes used by ER docs to assess if someone is at further risk of infection due to inflammation in the muscles.

To be clear, you can push to higher levels of effort in sprints, intervals, etc. as lactate levels clear after a few minutes of recovery but operating beyond your threshold for a long time will lead to the effects you describe. From what you state above, stick to the speeds in your first two cycles and now and again push it to eventually build up your experience on how you feel. You can get these things measured but as a leisure cyclist it probably goes up and down with your ability to put time into training so its best to assess it from how you feel on the bike.

Tks for the reply. Just to correct you there was just one week between the 70k+60k and the second 2 cycles and in between I did an hour on the exercise bike (damn dark evenings). It seems that I just tried to bite off too much this weekend and need to build it up a bit more gradually. Considering I went over 50k for the fist time a month ago I guess I am doing ok. What threw me was the difference between the 2 weekends. The 70k cycle had 3 x cat5 climbs (per mapmyide) while this weekend the 56k had 4 x cat5 and 1 cat3. Probably I am not up to the speed the others were going at and that combined with the exertions of the previous day had me hitting my limits.

Recovery time and having reasonable expectations seems to be the best plan.

Lumen

Be patient, don't fuss over details. It gets easier.

Brian?

Food and rest. Take a some time off, eat a high protein diet and go easy on yourself.

ZiabR

djfattony2000 wrote: »

Protein shake straight after a spin.

Helps with muscle recovery. Feel great the next day.

I do this aswell and my legs are great the next day.

yop

Protein or even chocolate drink will help you recover. Though its sounds like too much too soon!

DaithiMC

joehayes999 wrote: »

Tks for the reply. Just to correct you there was just one week between the 70k+60k and the second 2 cycles and in between I did an hour on the exercise bike (damn dark evenings). It seems that I just tried to bite off too much this weekend and need to build it up a bit more gradually. Considering I went over 50k for the fist time a month ago I guess I am doing ok. What threw me was the difference between the 2 weekends. The 70k cycle had 3 x cat5 climbs (per mapmyide) while this weekend the 56k had 4 x cat5 and 1 cat3. Probably I am not up to the speed the others were going at and that combined with the exertions of the previous day had me hitting my limits.

Recovery time and having reasonable expectations seems to be the best plan.

Yes, it is a bit trial and error for those of us who can't afford the personal trainers. Though there's nothing to stop us keeping up with the latest debates on training and applying them in a reasonable way to our own situation. Here's a couple of links if your interested....

http://www.sportsci.org/2009/ss.htm

This can get complicated..... re lactate, it seems contradictory in places but if you know at what level you will fatigue perhaps based on a regular loop you can do at a set average kph, from time to time you can "reference" where you are and then train below that level....

http://www.lactate.com/triathlon/lactate_triathlon_training_paces.html

Hmmzis

Lumen wrote: »

Be patient, don't fuss over details. It gets easier.

Or faster.

Rambling Man

I'm of similar vintage Joe and reasonably new to cycling. About 70k under the belt too. I would say the 30kph pace in the subsequent spin is a bit beyond you as of yet and your body reacted accordingly. As others have said, more gradual steps at realistic pace will get you there.

pelevin

As someone who got glandular fever a few years back, this never clearing up a whole lot, slowly managing to build up a decent bike fitness after last autumn, but then crashing completely health-wise after a bad flu or flu like bug last April, my advice is coming from a bit of an extreme end of things, but a few thoughts anyway.
Remember if lactic acid is getting released in your body, this is yr body telling you to back off. If you try to fight it, though generally maybe not for someone whose health & fitness is strong, then this lactic acid will do as an acid does and act as a corrosive, potentially anyway actually doing significant damage to the tissues of your muscles at a molecular level so to speak. Thus perhaps the legs like jelly, which through very unwisely trying to fight such big releases of lactic acid after the flu bout, I ended up bad with for several months anyway as a basically constant state.

Definitely I'd be erring on the side of doing less rather than more, & building up fitness solidly, & not considering shorter distances a wimp's option. An hour spin every day I'd say is far more beneficial than occasional much longer spins. Not everyone is alike obviously enough, & for some pushing too hard will have pretty long-term crappy results.

Lumen

pelevin wrote: »

Remember if lactic acid is getting released in your body, this is yr body telling you to back off. If you try to fight it, though generally maybe not for someone whose health & fitness is strong, then this lactic acid will do as an acid does and act as a corrosive, potentially anyway actually doing significant damage to the tissues of your muscles at a molecular level so to speak. Thus perhaps the legs like jelly, which through very unwisely trying to fight such big releases of lactic acid after the flu bout, I ended up bad with for several months anyway as a basically constant state

Hard exercise whilst fighting/recovering from a viral infection is a bad idea, but it has nothing to do with lactic acid.

http://www.eatmoveimprove.com/2009/11/the-truth-about-lactic-acid/#LA2

munuus

joehayes999 taking it easy for some short time, focusing on rest/ sleep, massage/foam rolling and plenty of good food will bring it back fast.
It is quite normal to feel weaker after longer/harder workout.
training makes you weaker->subsequent recovery stronger...

I would try to invest into something like ithlete (hrv monitor) which is nice way to see how you recovering from workouts. Not just guess work. Also taking 1 minute morning heart rate is useful and doesn't need anything.

hope it helps

DaithiMC

Lumen wrote: »

Hard exercise whilst fighting/recovering from a viral infection is a bad idea, but it has nothing to do with lactic acid.

http://www.eatmoveimprove.com/2009/11/the-truth-about-lactic-acid/#LA2

The terms lactate and lactic acid are separate in the mind of anyone who understands physiology. The articles are correct in describing those cycles. LACTATE measurements are used to assess the state of hypoxia (oxygen deficiency) in the system and a high lactate measurement indicates it is building up because it is not being used up in the "energy creation" cycle, due to a lack of oxygen.

High lactate is positively correlated with high levels of acidic species which is where the confusion often arises, i.e., if a high lactate measurement is recorded, the pH (acidity) is also likely to be low (low pH = high H+ concentration). While the article states these are not involved with the long-term damage to tissues they are "indicators" that damage may occur as the tissue is deemed to be oxygen deficient.

As mentioned earlier, lactate is also measured in the assessment of risk of patients that may progress to sepsis in the ER or ICU. Lactate rising and pH lowering have also been observed to track during the delivery process of newborns when oxygen deficiency is a risk. Lactate is deemed a better indication of metabolic status than pH but either may potentially be used to as an aid to understand the situation.

Measuring and understanding the point at which Lactate rises quickly versus some performance metric like power output or in the past, heart rate, is a way for an athlete to understand where they specifically "go into the red" and so they can adjust their performance - or put up with the pain and suffering which is more a mental attribute at very high lactate levels!

Smith614

I did a 100 km at weekend and find the "break" the biggest problem . Food stop after 50 km and was flying until then and felt great . Then on the restart legs felt like lead and I struggled badly. This is regular enough occurrence for me and if I don't stop I feel great. What's the prob?

pelevin

Lumen wrote: »

Hard exercise whilst fighting/recovering from a viral infection is a bad idea, but it has nothing to do with lactic acid.

http://www.eatmoveimprove.com/2009/11/the-truth-about-lactic-acid/#LA2

Well, it's far from simple but below from a Doctor Myhill, one of the leading experts in treating chronic fatigue related stuff:

"If the blood supply to muscles is impaired, then muscles quickly run out of oxygen when one starts to exercise. With no oxygen in the muscles the cells switch over to anaerobic metabolism, which produces lactic acid and it is this that makes muscles ache so much."

Much more detail below :


Chronic fatigue syndrome is the symptom caused by mitochondrial failure
The job of mitochondria is to supply energy in the form of ATP (adenosine triphosphate). This is the universal currency of energy. It can be used for all sorts of biochemical jobs from muscle contraction to hormone production. When mitochondria fail, this results in poor supply of ATP, so cells go slow because they do not have the energy supply to function at a normal speed. This means that all bodily functions go slow.

The following explains what happens inside each cell:
ATP (3 phosphates) is converted to ADP (2 phosphates) with the release of energy for work. ADP passes into the mitochondria where ATP is remade by oxidative phosphorylation (ie a phosphate group is stuck on). ATP recycles approximately every 10 seconds in a normal person - if this goes slow, then the cell goes slow and so the person goes slow and clinically has poor stamina ie CFS.
Problems arise when the system is stressed. If the CFS sufferer asks for energy faster than he can supply it, (and actually most CFS sufferers are doing this most of the time!) ATP is converted to ADP faster than it can be recycled. This means there is a build up of ADP. Some ADP is inevitably shunted into adenosine monophosphate (AMP -1 phosphate). But this creates a real problem, indeed a metabolic disaster, because AMP, largely speaking, cannot be recycled and is lost in urine.
Indeed this is the biological basis of poor stamina. One can only go at the rate at which mitochondria can produce ATP. If mitochondria go slow, stamina is poor.
If ATP levels drop as a result of leakage of AMP, the body then has to make brand new ATP. ATP can be made very quickly from a sugar D-ribose, but D-ribose is only slowly made from glucose (via the pentose phosphate shunt for those clever biochemists out there!). This takes anything from one to four days. So this is the biological basis for delayed fatigue.
However there is another problem. If the body is very short of ATP, it can make a very small amount of ATP directly from glucose by converting it into lactic acid. This is exactly what many CFS sufferers do and indeed we know that CFS sufferers readily switch into anaerobic metabolism. However this results in two serious problems - lactic acid quickly builds up especially in muscles to cause pain, heaviness, aching and soreness ("lactic acid burn"), secondly no glucose is available in order to make D-ribose! So new ATP cannot be easily made when you are really run down. Recovery takes days!
When mitochondria function well, as the person rests following exertion, lactic acid is quickly converted back to glucose (via-pyruvate) and the lactic burn disappears. But this is an energy requiring process! Glucose to lactic acid produces two molecules of ATP for the body to use, but the reverse process requires six molecules of ATP. If there is no ATP available, and this is of course what happens as mitochondria fail, then the lactic acid may persist for many minutes, or indeed hours causing great pain. (for the biochemists, this reverse process takes place in the liver and is called the Cori cycle).

Lumen

pelevin wrote: »

Well, it's far from simple but below from a Doctor Myhill, one of the leading experts in treating chronic fatigue related stuff

This Dr Myhill?

http://www.gmc-uk.org/static/documents/content/Myhill.pdf

pelevin

Lumen wrote: »

This Dr Myhill?

http://www.gmc-uk.org/static/documents/content/Myhill.pdf

I know she's had issues over giving out advice, and tobh I'm not in search of anyone to bow down to so I couldn't care much on that front. She doesn't personally mean anything to me. All I care about is finding information that makes sense, and her analysis of what's happening in chronic fatigue seems to make perfect sense in terms of correlating with my own experiences.
If you don't like Myhill, I suggest Dr Jacob Tietelbaum in the US who offers more or less the same analysis of what goes on in the body with chronic fatigue.
Alternatively I could have been satisfied with my doctors telling me there's nothing they could tell me.

outfox

Smith614 wrote: »

I did a 100 km at weekend and find the "break" the biggest problem . Food stop after 50 km and was flying until then and felt great . Then on the restart legs felt like lead and I struggled badly. This is regular enough occurrence for me and if I don't stop I feel great. What's the prob?

I find the same. I don't know much about energy management and glycogen burning v fat burning etc., but I think maybe it's because before the break, your body is burning fat, while after the foodstop it's working on glycogen. Burning fat seems to be better. I know several boardsies are going to correct me. I've been cutting back the amount I eat during rides for the last few weeks, and I find a big improvement. When I try to read articles about it, my eyes glaze over.
Anyway OP, I think you should ease yourself into cycling. Frequent shorter cycles, with only small increases in intensity.

killalanerr

Lumen wrote: »

Be patient, don't fuss over details. It gets easier.

"It never gets easier you just go faster"
Sounds like a bit of to much to soon to me,as a fellow 50 something-er i have found out over the last few years that i can mix it with the young bucks but it takes a bit more time to recover,you should increase your mileage by only 10%to 15% per year other wise you risk braking down
So slow down a bit maybe go with a slower group and build up slowly even at our age with proper training we can still see some big improvements,so have a read up on some good training plans for masters to include rest and diet and above all enjoy yourself

cdaly_

joehayes999 wrote: »

I am just the right side of 50.

Congratulations on making it to the right side of 50. Remember that it's all downhill from here so no more climbing required...

DaithiMC

pelevin wrote: »

I know she's had issues over giving out advice, and tobh I'm not in search of anyone to bow down to so I couldn't care much on that front. She doesn't personally mean anything to me. All I care about is finding information that makes sense, and her analysis of what's happening in chronic fatigue seems to make perfect sense in terms of correlating with my own experiences.
If you don't like Myhill, I suggest Dr Jacob Tietelbaum in the US who offers more or less the same analysis of what goes on in the body with chronic fatigue.
Alternatively I could have been satisfied with my doctors telling me there's nothing they could tell me.

What she wrote is largely correct but you can see that she uses the term "Lactic Acid" build up in relation to cramping, which is now outmoded thinking. There are a whole lot of complex processes going on but I can guarantee you (unless you are an alien) that Lactate will clear from your system once you stop. The pain is caused, in part by concentrations of ions (H+ being the acidic type and others) building up, and in part from other physical phenomena, stretch, small tears, etc.

Also, the term "switching over to anaerobic" is problematic, it suggests the aerobic system is not in use which would mean you are no longer breathing! the reality is both are in use and are modulated depending on what resources, oxygen carriers (hemaglobin), glycogen, etc.. are available at any one point in time.

If you follow some of the pros recovery and training methods, most these days are based on up to date research, you will get a good sense. Obviously us mere mortals can't afford the massages and equipment, but there are good proxies, foam rollers, swiss balls etc. Personally I find a good stretching session after the longer cycles leaves me less in pain the next day or later in that day, not too mention the long hot shower!