Well there’s the problem
From the macro level it looks very much like you’re getting a ton of ‘junk’ TSS - if you actually get 300 TSS on your trainer doing the precise intervals in any structured training plan you will likely be pushing yourself much harder than you are with your current 500 TSS/week approach
It is almost impossible to say with the level of granularity you’ve provided here. You can be perfectly fine for 99% of a ride and still get dropped if that one sixty second effort is way beyond your capabilities. You need to zoom in on the areas where you’re getting disconnected and see if and how deep you’re pushing yourself.
You say you were barely hanging on for the entire ‘B’ ride - but that doesn’t really equate to a specific type of training without knowing what was pushing you to your limit. It definitely doesn’t equate to any specific workout type
@mlitwin12
If those Saturday entries are your group rides, Imo you need to ride with an easier group for a while, and get more quality in your weekday training.
You’re regularly going over 400 on Saturdays, your TR sessions are a pittance by comparison.
For myself I often come back to this really simple idea which is KISS (keep it simple stupid) and I think this may be your answer too. Here it is: follow the SSB 1 medium volume plan and then do SSB 2 medium volume and see how you go after that and when I say follow I mean, really follow, don’t guess your FTP from 95% of 20 mins half way through a ride but follow the plan which means do the ramp test when it says to do it. Do all the workouts. Doing 1 group ride on the Saturday is fine but 3 smash fests with a group in the week is not fine.
Broadly, I dont use TR duing the summer, just too nice to waste the outdoor days starting at a blue bar, and I try to supplement the tues thurs interval sessions with group rides. If that will be the summer plan, what should i put in between on the other days?
@trpnhntr Agreed on the “junk TSS”. The weekends arent pure working out, there fun rides as i mentioned. So the goal wasn’t to build the TSS to any specific level, just ends up where it does based on the rides. Noted on your point regarding structure, and it may be so that the 300 trainer is better than 500 outdoor etc. Think the MV plan may be helpful for that
@JoeX On the weekends I generally lead the group since these are more casual team rides. So these rides are frequently at my pace and as mentioned, it’s the duration v intensity that amps the TSS to a rediculious number
@awoffinden i think theres a bit of misconception between winter and summer for me. Winter i’m 100% compliance for 3 days a week (which was the low volume) along with all of the FTP tests etc, but clearly it needs to be MV like everyone is saying. Not sure my life will permit the High volume plan, but will start with MV and see where that goes.
Essentially I need two approaches for winter and summer, because again, this isnt a job for me, it’s social (as i’m sure most of you can agree), so missing group rides for training by myself is not the point. I train to get fast so I can ride with people, otherwise its just training to train. For winter, no problem, but summer is a different story.
Since we only have a few weeks left before it gets brick out. Sounds like the game plan this winter (starting in a few weeks) should be to amp up the TSS at MV in order to rebuild the base with more quality volume, then once the MV base is re-built, then switch over to a short power, crit, etc, plan to get the V02 up. If this makes sense click the thumbs up! (trying to get a TR consensus) Then i’ll come back in a few weeks and let everyone know how right (or wrong?) everyone was. Happy to take bets on over under of FTP improvement 
For either of you guys if you are curious about my calendar, here’s a link. I really kicked it into gear as far as consistency in January 2019 and its paid off
No worries! We have the same problem, so we can all benefit from the advice. I’m far too familar with #1
I think in my haste I confused you with the OP! 
@JoeX you’re good! Haha seems like my TR username update finally got carried thru to the forums, how about that for confusing timing!
Different username… Same problems… If only it was so easy…
Other than raising your FTP, your best bet is to get aero.
When I first started racing crits, I was a sail. Didn’t quite understand why I was having such a hard time until I saw myself in someone else’s Youtube video. It looked like I was practically sitting upright on a beach cruiser.
Alright - I love graphs and charts and my Strava stalking is gonna pay off for you here.
I’m going to concentrate on this last image - where there seems to a be a slight grade up. I can’t quite tell the extent of it or how “rolling” it is - but I think this is the 30 minute hill you’re talking about… let me know if I’m wrong - I’m referring to this:
A couple things stick out to me:
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You’re consistently below your 238 FTP line. I’m not sure if 238 is your actual FTP or not - but for almost any given 30 minutes you should be able to push maybe 5-10% above FTP. Anytime you’re below that white line - you may be going hard, but that should technically be recovery time.
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Your HR is a dead give away that you’re not putting out a max effort. It floats up and down and meanders a bit. It moves higher over the effort which means you’re getting fatigued, but for true max efforts, you HR will jump to near max pretty quick and asymptotically approach your true max. Everytime your HR dips, that means you’re relaxing and letting off. But that means you’re recovering too.
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Your power output varies a ton here. This and my point #2 might be because you’re following wheels here a little but I seriously kinda wonder if you wouldn’t be better off just pegging your entire 30 minute effort to like 105% or 110% of FTP and ignoring their jumps. Being smooth and consistent with power delivery can get you up faster - Chris Froome style. I kinda think you might have climbed it overall faster at your own pace.
Here’s a ~30 minute effort of mine:
Albeit, I wasn’t following wheels, but kinda TTing up the hill. A) My power output is fairly consistent and above threshold B) my HR jumps and pretty much pegs to near max in the first 5 minutes of the effort and then stays there at a consistent, high level. When I stalk people on Strava, this is usually how I can tell if someone was giving max effort or not on a segment. Dips and valleys like you have, means they are resting.
Also probably hard to know how bad you’re hurting from prior efforts too or how late in the ride it is. Those are factors too - so barring that tho, on the climb you should be able to eek out more consistency. Of course, this doesn’t mean you won’t get dropped still, but I do see some optimization there based on the graphs you’re showing here for you to climb up faster.
Hope that helped.
You can see my other post to @iamholland below, but pegging the HR with that asymptotic curve can tell you about max efforts up hills. Guessing tho, you could push harder. If you’re really at 216 FTP, then you should be able to push 225-235 AVERAGE power, not NORMALIZED, for 30 minutes. If it’s really a max effort - you’ll want to get off the bike and lie down or throw up. LOL.
Ahah. Okey doke.
Well if you’re leading there’s no excuse for going too hard on those weekend rides - every podcast I know refers to group rides that turn into races. Smooth them out or drop the pace.
Then you’ll be in a position for @lebowskii98 advice, and get better structured training in your weekdays.
- Sort out weekend ride
- Proper structured training in week
- Profit!!! *
*Old, misused, totally unrelated meme that has no place here
Thanks Joe -
Fully agree with your above, on the ones I lead, its usually a nice casual ride - more about exploration/scenery/good weather. The last few have been hammerfests (shorter 40 milers, that I havent lead)… Also, seems like you solved the question of “what’s phase 2” I thought there’s only 1 and 3 
Love the reference though!
@donlee Hopefully you can use your skills to let me know your thoughts here. below is a few screenshots for your review
1 - A 30 minute climb where i “pace” my way up (trying to not blow up)
2 - A weekend “roller” ride where I cant keep the squad at the first hill (notice the break at the top/HR stabilizing) dropped on the 2nd/3rd hill and then grind up it the final but would need a little more to keep w the group.
3 - After riding #2 above. This is where I get dropped on the hammerfest return (somewhere in the middle here, but keep pushing to try to catch up toward the end)
Am i not pushing hard enough? And if that’s not it, then clearly it’s just a lack of volume and building that top end capacity that everyone is talking about. Think the plan is to increase the volume and increase the VO2 capacity like everyone mentioned. But thought i’d throw these here for color.
Go to town everyone and thanks for the overwhelming responses and advice here. Some real good feedback that should hopefully (definitely) help me this off-season!
Obviously just one opinion here but I wouldn’t do any of their plans. The single biggest driver of your improvement is more consistency riding. It really doesn’t matter what plan you follow, or if you have a coach, etc. what you really need to figure out is how to motivate yourself and get into a rhythm of riding more days per week.
I’d ask yourself what is it that caused me to ride as little as I did from August to October of this year? Were you burned out and didn’t feel like riding? Were there other priorities that you put ahead of riding? Was the weather bad? Roads bad? etc. Once you have figured that out then you can come up with strategies to get yourself on the bike more often. Maybe that is a structured plan from TR or maybe it’s buying plans from some of the coachs on TrainingPeaks or maybe it’s just being self coached.
Personally I coach myself and follow a polarized approach where I don’t do much threshold work so I don’t follow TR plans. I would make it a goal to get on the bike for 1 hour Tues/Wed/Thu/Sat/Sun every week. It almost doesn’t even matter what you do. If you can make that happen you’re going to be a fitter cyclist.
Are you eating anything on these four hour hammerfests? The end of this post shows you three hours deep into a ride and you’re feeling heavy and RPE doesn’t match up with the rest of your group. If your legs, HR, and RPE aren’t matching up you’re possibly underfueled or outmatched and the answer might be somewhere in between “both.”
I bring this up because the usual nutrition plan I see on group rides is to wait for the cafe stop. This strategy doesn’t work for anybody but the pace setters.
Hrm… on the surface I don’t see anything “wrong” with your charts.
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30 minute climb - you’re pretty much at threshold, and you’re not trying to put a max effort in, so seem reasonable. Your HR isn’t spiked, but you climbing this hard, but controlled.
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Rollers - I don’t see anything really wrong here either. The two things that stick out to me is that A) you bury yourself on the first hill to ~400 watts and B) you do a nice effort on the big climb at the end. Assume hill #1 is about a 1-2 minute effort and hill #4 is a ~5 minute effort. Depending on what you goal is here - maybe even out the effort and chill a bit on the first hill. That means letting them ride away from you, but you push to catch up on the downhills and you might be fresher for the next roller. Dunno. Could be specific to this course tho.
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Hammerfest - this one is the weirdest to me - it’s downhill, and you putting down good power here. I don’t think anyone should be able to drop you here. Just guessing here, but I see this as maybe a drafting issue where you’re not holding the wheel in front of you and using that to sit under threshold until those little kickers come in.
One last thing - I know people are always talking about increasing FTP - but I think just as good is to work on repeatable efforts. If you’re able to burst out to 400w 1 minute efforts - and then do it again and again without some recovery in-between. That’s pretty good too.
Thanks @donlee #3 it was an odd distuation, it was the typical “casual coversation ride” all separated out without the group being formed yet. I was towards the middle/back, then someone decided to chase the front group and catch up to form a pack and that’s when I lost it, couldnt close the gap on the sprint and everyone took off in the draft. So maybe it is getting up that max 1-2 min power and quicker recovery.
I also re-tested my FTP last night after 3 months of riding with these guys - Used the little ring to prevent any sort of intertia benefit from the flywheel and came out at 231, with my HR Peaking at 190. So a ~7% gain over 216, and (barely) into the 3.0w/kg club which im pretty happy with, for now, but still need to get the FTP and VO2 higher like everyone has said, since the # is meaningless if I still cant hang.
Maybe the results were a fluke, but i’ll use that in my training moving forward, assuming I can manage it, and increase the volume per everyone’s suggestion.
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