I’m a recreational rider with a busy schedule and two young kids. In season I aim for 2 20-30km mountain bike rides and a 50-60km gravel ride a week. Realistically this usually ends up being 1 mountain bike and one gravel ride a week.
I usually shut things down in the offseason and do other things (weights and hockey mainly).
My question is around realistic expectations for the 45 minute workouts. Correct me if I’m wrong but it looks to me like you are getting the same amount of interval work in with these workouts compared to the hour with the warm up and cooldowns being cut short. Will I see gains doing your sweet spot training with these shorter rides? How much does training generally suffer by cutting out the 15 minutes?
Another question I have is regarding doing these workouts fasted. Any fitness related activities at home need to get done in the morning or they don’t happen. My alarm goes off at 4 and I have until 5am to get in whatever I can for the day. So anything I’m doing is with zero fuel. Any suggestions on how to best approach this or what even might be a good quick fuel source to ingest immediately before getting on the bike. Or is there even a point in eating at that point?
What I like to call having “tomorrow’s breakfast today" … as big as bowl of cereal as you can manage as far from (a carb heavy) dinner / as close to bed time as you can cope with.
A quick black coffee as soon as you get up if that’s your thing.
60g of carbs in a bottle to be consumed in the first 30 minutes of the workout.
In reality, 3) is totally optional if you’re not doing another workout in the next 24 hours, but many people find that necking sugar lowers RPE whether it’s “needed" or not.
I think you would get some gains up to a point. There’s only so much work you can fit into 45 minutes, but you can still fit in a good amount of work.
Under similar time constraints and training times to you. I have a shot of espresso before I get on the bike and then a bottle of 60g carbs and electrolytes for SS and Threshold workouts, 30g or just water for endurance. The carbs certainly help with the sweetspot work especially when you are pushing 94% for 20 minute plus intervals. Those short rest intervals on 45 minutes will be tough.
I also think the less time you have to train the more important structure is.
You max out a possible zone for a given amount of time. People were seeing with with adaptive training just giving them the same workout over and over. It was a flaw in the system locked between progress levels and a users input time contraints.
Locking yourself into 45 minutes is going to limit what you can do and I don’t think even the new system will have a way to suggest to you workouts where you can cut out the warmup (not a great idea) and cool down (probably fine).
The new system may react better to this since it’s not focusing on PLs or it may react very badly because it seems to be sensitive to some things.
You might end up needing to just manually selecting workouts all the time and not being able to use any of the more advanced features.
So isn’t that where the adaptive training comes into play? I work at that level, I plateau. I see an increase in FTP, and my training adjusts to the new FTP, essentially continuing to make the workouts challenging?
You won’t have reached a performance plateau if you can do 1 × 40 at sweetspot, because if you had more time you could probably do 2 × 30 or 1 × 60. You’ve just run out of workout time.
ETA: if you’re doing Threshold workouts as well, those will, I’m guessing, preferentially drive your FTP increases, because they’ll cap how fast TR can increase your FTP to make SS more challenging. Bottom line, all other things being equal, you should expect your x minute Threshold workouts to be harder than your x minute SS workouts.
… as big as bowl of cereal as you can manage as far from (a carb heavy) dinner / as close to bed time as you can cope with.
is that after that you’ll want to do VO2 Max work, and 5 × 5 fits neatly into 45 minutes 