Adding volume to high volume recovery weeks

[bhrylski]

Hi Sarah,
Awesome job doing an HV plan, there is a thread dedicated to HV plans you should check out.

High Volume Training Plan Mega-Thread

As someone new to HV plans I thought it would be nice to have a place where people can share their strategies for attacking those long trainer rides and tough weeks. Feel free to share: Entertainment choices Nutrition strategies Recovery optimizations How you cope when life gets in the way of your training plan Anything else that you have found useful in your experience

The whole point of rest weeks is to allow your body a break from training stress and allow for a process called super-compensation or adaptation.

@Sarah

To be clear, I’m not looking to increase fitness this week

So that’s exactly it, your body is adapting and getting faster on this rest week. By adding extra volume, no matter how low intensity, you are adding more stress to the equation. Considering that this is the base phase and you are working to improve endurance (aerobic) you won’t be losing anything by backing off for one week. If you really want to add volume you could do it by adding Z2 after sweetspot intervals.

I just asked a question related to this on a thread about Traditional Base vs. Sweet Spot Base.

@bhrylski

Question for anyone who has done TB->SSB progression (HV in my case):

• Did you skip ahead in SSB1 at all? If so, how many weeks?
• Did you add any Z2 (endurance) hours after the SS intervals to up the volume?
  or
• Did you replace any SS days with Endurance or Tempo to create a more smooth transition from TB / get a more polarized or pyramidal training distribution?

In my case, there are many months before racing begins and I am attempting a double base period. I am thinking about trimming the SSB portion of my cycle to allow for more of a build period and probably foregoing the specialty period in favor of racing.