I’ve just started into another year of Sweet Spot base training + this season I plan to adapt my workouts slightly by adding 15-20 mins endurance work to the end of the weekday sessions to increase TSS.
I understand that endurance zone is 56 - 75% FTP and I’ve seen some topics within the forum discussing this. What I’d like to know is what end of the endurance scale people use when adding this kinda work to the end of say a threshold workout?
I was gonna play it safe by going right in the middle at 65% but I’d really appreciate advice from anyone with experience so that I can get the most benefit. Thanks in advance.
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if you can hold 70-75%, by all means, do it. For 20m it won’t crush you at all. Your legs may be tired after hard workouts but this will definitely make you stronger in the LONG term.
Just watched one of the podcast video clips yesterday that had some info on this! They said sticking to 60 to 65% FTP is good enough and that going to 70 or higher is too high for the adaption you’re looking for. The idea is to fatigue a different muscle group with additional stress in a more digestible way to garner adaptation. Here’s the clip for the full dump of info: How Short and Easy Workouts Can Make You Faster – Ask a Cycling Coach 196 - YouTube
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It sounds sensible. My target last year was long Time trials: 100miles and 12hr. When I went out with the club fast boys on a group ride I would be blown out of the back around 30-40 miles in. So I would continue riding by doing a tempo/endurance ride at what seemed a sustainable 100m TT effort (on my road bike of course) for the next 30 odd miles. The thinking was that 30-40miles at their pace would simulate the kind of tiredness I had 60-70miles into a 100 mile TT. The effort for me would be around 160-180W which was around 65-70% of my FTP (at the time) or 230W or so. So your 65% sounds sensible as a starting point and see how it goes. My judge was “What is a sensible pace I am sure I can maintain for the next 2 hrs or so…?”
It worked for me, if only to give me confidence that I was finding the right sort of pace and effort. With TR sessions I would occasionally add 10-15 mins on the end as an extended warm down, but not in the same way.
I was adding TSS, but with a specific purpose though, and not for the sake of TSS, but in pursuit of a specific training goal. I hope this helps.
For short duration extra Z2 work (20min), is there any benefit to flipping the order and adding it to the start of your workout? If it’s all about building TSS, will doing short Z2 sessions deliver radically different adaptations depending on level of freshness or fatigue?
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Interesting thought. Personal experience is that I do feel it at the end of a (hard) workout but not when I expand the warmup
I’ve been tacking an extra 15 minutes of fairly easy work, mostly just to burn a few extra calories and bump the volume a bit. I do it at the end to be sure the quality work is “in the bag,” because life happens and the extra 15 minutes might vanish with a phone call.
I usually end up doing around 55% or so. It’s a guess to get the target power kind of right, since you have to put in a factor relative to the ending target power of the cool-down prior to extending it, but I’m on a dumb trainer so this doesn’t prevent me from just pedalling a bit harder.
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Thanks for the replies. I should have said that it’s more to target what I think is my Endurance weakness rather than just boosting TSS but hopefully the 2 will work together. It’s only my 2nd year of structured training. I did SSB 1 + 2 (twice) last year followed by General Build but I always skipped the midweek endurance workout.
Still I worked pretty hard work but I noticed 2 areas for improvement for next season. Maybe you guys can weigh in on this.
- I feel that I got so used to intervals where I am going 90 + % for some minutes then resting that I wasn’t very comfortable with long periods of time spent at Endurance / Tempo pace.
Would adding the endurance steady state work help to address this? - This might make my whole point about adding minutes to my workouts sound counterproductive but I found myself feeling a bit burnt out as I approached my season ending trip to the Alps in September. It was all going well until late July then I felt like I was hitting a brick wall during workouts. Every workout I did was minimum 90 minutes + the usual progression of VO2, Threshold, Sweetspot work.
I don’t think I was far off especially since it was my 1st year but I would like to know how I can put in a similar level of work this year but perhaps adjust the intensity so that I can be fresher for longer into the season?
I’d like to start doing this too. I am sure end of workout is better but I was thinking about doing 30min at night during the days of my more challenging workouts. My biggest fear is I don’t know if it would be too much volume as the MV plans already leave me pretty shot.
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Quick question.
How do you add endurance inside the android app
I am not sure about the Android app but on IOS there is a block that pops up that says extend cool once you click on it, it pops up with another screen that shows options as of time to extend. Then once you do that you change the percentage button at the bottom of the screen to get the percent you want of your FTP.
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Assuming I’m still up to date on my android device, an “extend cooldown” rectangle is displayed in the workout graph which you click to extend. Then you adjust the workout intensity along the bottom.
Full extend instructions.
Here is the intensity adjustment, because you likely want to increase from the cool down percentage to a proper Endurance wattage.
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What about doing the opposite and starting the workout with a longer block of endurance in hopes of fatiguing the muscles a bit prior to doing intervals? Instead of back-loading the workout with endurance, perhaps there are some nice benefits to front loading it.
If you look at the pro-training thread here you’ll notice almost every ride begins with a long bout of Z2 work prior to getting into the real tough stuff.
There’s a great article from Will Barta’s coach that touches on some specifics…
“My ultimate goal was to come up with a few simple rules for successful performances the European U23 races.”
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20 minutes at 5.5 to 5.8 W/Kg after 3000 kJ was a minimum for a top-10 on a summit finish
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The ability to be dynamic under fatigue was also important. I didn’t do a good job of quantifying this one, but one sentiment was clear – many of our athletes had the peak power values to be competitive in the top 10, but they lacked the fatigue resistance to access power over threshold past 2500 kJ. This was a key area to work, top-end power, but after 2500 kJ of work.
THE “TIRED 20” METRIC:
In contributing to our data portfolio, the Beauce summit finish was a big data point for us. It fed perfectly into one of the metrics I love to track, the “Tired 20,” also known as the peak 20-minute power produced after 2500 kJ of work have been completed.
Granted, getting to 2500 KJ of work prior to doing intervals would require a LONG ride, I think us time-crunched cyclists could possibly emulate this by loading up an interval session with 30 minutes of Z2 prior.
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Before the extend the warm-up I had a custom 30 minute ride of about 270 kJ that I would do before the plan’s interval workout.
I call them Fatigue Sweets albeit some are over/unders at threshold. TR workouts examples Cloudripper, Wheel, Hooper and Log In to TrainerRoad
Adding endurance volume works.
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I always do the workout as prescribed and then either have a set custom workout or pick one suitable to do before or after. That way it’s easy and all my rides are the same length for easy comparison. If you do varying length warm ups and cool downs I find it annoying not having the same data from the ‘same’ rides that I do.
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I’ve been adding 15 minutes to the end of my SSB1 workouts. I tweak the end of the TR workout in the Builder App. I set the intensity to 62% percent and then increase the intensity by 3% every 3 minutes during the 15 minute block.
Personally I’ve found this additional endurance block to be really beneficial.
I’m definitely going to do this with all 1h workouts for ssb2. I always feel like my endurance is lacking.
I do some Sprint Interval Training (SIT) before an hour of endurance. I don’t know if it’s beneficial, but I like to think that my SIT deplete my sugar stores by some degree. And that my aerobic engine is taxed a little bit more with the endurance training.
I don’t know if this is true, but I like the combination.
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What about adding low-end tempo instead of endurance?