Shoutout to Trainerroad for their Progression Levels! Everything from tempo to threshold I really like them and think they are a great feature! But whenever I encounter them in endurance rides, I wonder if they make sense. I question them (or the way they are structured for the following reasons:
Basic Problem: Endurance rides should be measured more by total volume (e.g per week/block), not intensity. The tendency at the moment is to just make them more intense in the hour or two allocated to them. That just leads to doing all Endurance rides at 75% FTP and adding sprints. Is that really best practice? If so, why?
What are PLs even meant to measure regarding endurance rides? TTE? Not in that short amount of time. Nobody with a correctly set FTP will “fail” a regular 1-2 hour endurance ride. So they will just progress to the above scenario. Also, if I do a proper long ride, lets say Excelsior (4:15, PL 7.4, IF 0.64) my PLs are also sky high for any shorter endurance rides.Which leads to the following question:
Why would we want to do all shorter endurance rides at a high percentage? Whenever I listen to coaches (e.g. @empiricalcycling, just to name one) they are pretty clear, that endurance riding should add volume at low intensity and kept at EASY intensity. Unless you are really time crunched, it seems like bad practice increasing intensity here to the top of a generalized endurance zone.
Wouldn’t it be better to:
Increase total endurance volume week to week (or block to block)
Increase a long ride to 3-4 hours instead of raising intensity
Maybe even add the possibility to do endurance rides to RPE. Maybe with a power ceiling, so athletes can’t (completely) overdo it.
But if a user has told TR she only has one hour available three times per week, then the only way it can deliver progressive overload is to increase intensity.
Same applies to all zones really. If more training time is available, the workouts are different to those proscribed where the available time is less.
TR endurance rides are a carry over from the “before PL” times. I don’t believe many of them fit or are best training practice. The workouts love to push .75 IF at some point and then drag the overall workout IF down with the warmup, cooldown or a few lower “baservals”. I very much dislike and don’t agree with most of TR’s z2 workouts and they are in dire need of an overhaul. However, that is low priority and I won’t hold my breath.
The easy button would be just to ride in Resistance mode but for my sanity I do enjoy splitting up z2 into intervals every 15-30 minutes and standing for 1-2 minutes between these transitions. Because just sitting at 65% for 3+ hours makes me want to put my head into the drivetrain. So I keep the z2 interval type workouts and adjust power via the % button up/down when it’s outside my desired range.
This is my current go to workout for Wednesdays and Fridays endurance and how I adjust.
I agree, I wish they had a few more 60-65% 3+ hour workouts.
I have a found a few that are in rotation if I am riding inside from 2:30 mins down to 60 mins. Apikuni, Gabriel, tomyhoi, sidole and homers nose.
I pretty much ignore endurance PLs and focus on progressing time for “endurance”.
Annoyingly the latest plans have the 30 mins endurance at .70 / .75 ramps which wouldn’t be described as easy in between the hard Vo2max previous day and following sweetspot day.
Also the recovery weeks can be pretty rough if your endurance PL are high.
I did follow the plan with the allocated endurance but since decided to riding on feel for endurance ignoring PL and TR endurance allocated workouts.
Some weekends can be .70 for 3.5 hour rides when feeling good and others .50 if not feeling it.
I agree, if you are truly time constraint, replacing some volume with a bit more intensity can work.
But at the moment I can’t tell Trainerroad my maximum training time per day. If I increase my training time on the weekends to 5 hours in plan builder, it “warns” me of the change, rather than slowly building up into the 5 hours. And gives me long workouts from the get go.
I also often replace the endurance rides with some custom ones, that are basically just 60-70% with some minor intensity changes and end at 50% FTP so I can easily extend the ride without doing a lot of math in my head to get to 60 or 65%
If the limitation is time then intensity will go up. If time is not a limiter then we would have a lot more longer rides. The mix is the balance of the two for the individual. The current structure is still more time focused.
As is always mentioned, if you have more time, nothing stops you from selecting an alternate with a longer time.
As to what do PLs give you. The really do let you pick an appropriate workout if you are doing your own plan or you want to change a workout. The levels themselves are relatively meaningless as time really is more a function to a higher PL. If you just go out and do an easy 3 hour ride it will be higher then I think(havent checked recently) any 1 hour endurance ride .
Overall TR has built a lot of flexibility into the system. Yes there are still many possible tweaks. We all have our own preferences though.
The problem as I see it, is that some people want custom, adaptive plans to look like old style static plans. If they did that, and you could see your ride length progress over six months you’d be happy. Then when you didn’t complete the rides or TR determines that shorter ones are more beneficial and adapted shorter , you’d complain or ignore it. So you get what you want but not what’s good for you, and you aren’t trained optimally. Which is what they want to avoid.
Progressing duration and intensity is the foundation of good training, focusing on only one of these (either intensity or duration) will not result in optimal training.
You can only push intensity so much before it becomes counterproductive, however if one has time for it duration can be pushed out far more before it becomes an issue.
I don’t really think it is a question of new/old style. I also don’t believe that “old” meant “static” if you had a good coach or were in tune with your body and training. I like the adaptive plan, that tells me to rest or take it easy on some days. But I also think volume is an important factor and would love for the plan to build it up until a certain, predefined, limit. And tune it down of course, if I needed some extra rest or entered a block where it was suitable.
Then the only thing we disagree on is that you want it predefined, which is what I mean by the old, static . The question remaining is why would TR want to give an athlete, for example, a four hour endurance ride when they know a two hour endurance ride is a better fit for them?
Especially when athletes already have the ability to override whenever they want anyway.
I think where a lot of us disagree with you is that we don’t think TR “KNOWS” a 2 hour ride is a better fit than longer easier rides. We think that’s just how TR works.
We see TR giving people progressively harder 2 hour rides instead of a 2, then a 2:30, then a 3:00, etc., and we see all of the popular coaches talking about/prescribing progressively longer easy rides, not progressively harder ones; promoting volume over intensity. This is why the original question of “Are PL’s for Endurance rides nonsensical?” was posted and why others have said they think it makes sense to eliminate PL’s for the lower zones.
. The question remaining is why would TR want to give an athlete, for example, a four hour endurance ride when they know a two hour endurance ride is a better fit for them?