i would expect that consistent week to week total hours will be the primary driver of fitness. with a long weekend ride in place, 2 x shorter during the week rides will work fine vs 1 longer ride. the % difference in benefit will be impossible to gauge. whatever works for your schedule. although a little extra rest will help.
At some point I’m going to send you a bill for repairing my monitor because I spit coffee all over it.
Lets say it wasn’t estimated. Lets say I rode 300w for 60min.
Am I overloading by doing 2 workouts the following week of lower Tiz per workout?
I reached out to GCN and had them quick put out a video to settle this discussion.
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Is GCN following the TR forums and making videos to answer our most pressing questions???
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Honestly, they didn’t dive far enough into the scientific literature to make this forum happy. I am curious about what the science does and does not say in depth.
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Here is DJ’s old one that may be related (took me a bit to find after remembering he did one long ago):
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What did I say? What did I say?
I have no idea.
I remember that video from when it came out. I just rewatched it and of course like a lot of research no definitive answer.
His points about two a days if you’re stuck riding inside and dread one long ride or your rides are limited because of time constraints make sense from the getting in the volume standpoint.
I did 2 a days for Rapha 500 with a morning ride in the am outside and evening ride outside due to some time constraints. It wasn’t my favorite thing but it worked.
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As someone with a regular 1-hour-each-way commute, I really hope 2 is better than 1. But my slowness makes me think it probably doesn’t make a huge positive difference.
Like most choices, I’d bet there are physiological advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. I’m in the “more is better” camp, so whatever allows you to maximize your training stress. If you can ride harder for 4 hours by breaking things up into a couple 2 hour sessions (given the rest in between), that’s almost certainly better than a longer/easier 4 hour ride. All that said, my schedule is flexible enough these days that I would rather do a smaller number of longer rides rather than a bunch of shorter ones. The “overhead” of each ride (filling bottles, getting dressed, charge lights, etc.) is basically the same whether I’m riding for 1 hour or 6, so I’d rather do less rides to get to the same training stress (especially if riding outside and having to prep/dress for different temps). I also might have to ride for an hour to get to a good place to train, so it can be tough to do certain intervals on a 2 hour ride (again, not an issue if we are talking about indoor trainer). My target races are also typically long events, so even if there isn’t any physiological benefit to longer/fewer rides, long rides are good for training nutrition, holding position for extended time, and the mental side of pedaling hard forever.
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Don’t think it matters. I have done rides of just under 5 hours at an IF of 0.86. Thus if doing a 2 hour ride I’d think IF 0.9 is achievable.
I work of the basis that if I’m getting better at the type of riding and events I enjoy then my training mix is working. Who knows what has happened under my hood? No one precisely.
Luckily I had five continuous hours to ride today, so I took advantage of it. =)
I have been slowly ramping up my weekly volume the last year from 3-4 hours to 15 hours. Nutrition on and off the bike was for sure the biggest mystery to solve in getting there. Longer rides and bigger weekly volume definitely exposed that weakness. I suspect there’s some work to do to figure out how to fuel and recover from the 2x2-2.5 hour rides as well, since I’ll be finishing the second ride in the evening and likely riding early the next morning, so there isn’t much of a window to restore glycogen. Sadly I made it to cat 2 without much volume, so I never was forced to learn how to fuel properly…
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Depends on how hard you are working. For 2 to 2.5 hours at endurance pace (IF 0.73 say) you can do those just with water if you want. You’re not going to exhaust your glycogen unless you have a super high FTP I guess. Where as for 4 to 4.5 you will almost certainly need to consider carbohydrate intake at same effort. That’s the danger if you only do short outings like 2 to 2.5 hours, you get into bad fuelling habits for when you do ride longer durations.
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Well, two .73 IF rides in a day for a total of 5 hours will end up with around 4000 kJ give or take. Based on my nutritionists plan, I would need around 6000 calories and a minimum of 800 grams of carbs for the day to maximize recovery. For me, 6000 calories is hard to eat in a day, even when I’m fueling with 60g carbs / hr. And even if I eat 800-1000g carbs, my body has to process it and store it, which takes some time. I find 24 hours is no problem, but I’ve struggled before on early AM rides after a longer evening ride. This is especially true if I get “behind the curve” and have lower glycogen on the evening ride, I need even more carbs and have less time to process and store them, so I get into a low glycogen state and it makes it difficult to train hard the next morning.
Also, while a 2000 kJ ride may be doable on its own without anything but water, if I attempt that for multiple days in a row without replenishing that energy consistently, I for sure will run out of gas within a few days. I find it easier to go ahead and have some of those calories on the bike so I don’t have quite as much to eat later on. That’s just my own experience so far, I’m by no means an expert at this yet lol.
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Oh you replenish each day alright , just not whilst riding. Remember that ultra endurance riders may ride 16 hours a day for one or two weeks straight. Some only eat off the bike, and they do just fine.
get in the time when you can. Theres a difference between a fast age grouper and a pro. Youve got other life responsibilities.
This is kinda where TSS doesnt tell the whole story though. Its the exact same training stress as far as TSS is concerned, but anyone thats ever done a long ride knows 300w 3 hours in feels a hell of a lot harder than 300w in the first hour. Bro math says the former is harder, TSS says its exactly the same.
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Totally agree. That said, the longer rides build a ton of fatigue resistance, and now I’m not really seeing a ton of a drop off until 3-4 hours more often than not. I don’t even feel my best until I’m about 45 mins in. In fact, if I do a 2x20’ and start 15’ in to the ride, I almost always do better on the second effort. I think that’s not only why a linear TSS doesn’t work, but a weighted TSS based on duration doesn’t work either, because everyone fatigues at different rates.
I think a better measure of endurance or fitness (better than CTL anyway) would be an FTP ratio between the first hour and say fourth hour of an endurance ride. Or maybe come up with a FTP1 through FTP4, that shows FTP at each hour on the hour. That would technically show not only your best FTP, but fatigue resistance as well. The problem is nobody wants to do hard efforts anymore and just let AI guess for them, so I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t catch on.
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Obviously @The_Cog is the authority on physiological adaptations that promote fitness. But beyond those, it’s definitely the case that riding long trains (or maybe tests) other aspects of riding. Bike fit, saddle/shoe choice, neck/back/arm/wrist fitness and comfort, how much and what to eat etc. If your goal event is long, learning what it feels like to go long, and getting comfortable with that process, is pretty important!
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