Building up SS-work after injury

Training
1

Hi,

In february 2018 I had to undergo surgery to fix a chronic ITB injury, after which I spent about 6 months on regaining strength / flexibility / stability with very limited running or cycling. I kept swimming 3 times a week to maintain my fitness. Since september 2018 I gradually started running and cycling again (outside + fletcher/whorl/pettit). Since beginning of this year I wanted to pick up sweet spot work, but I was not confident enough to do a FTP test so I started at 75% of my pre-injury FTP (280) to stay at the safe side.

I’ve completed SSB1 low-volume this way, which was not too challenging but got me sweating. Now I was wondering what the best strategy would be to continue progressing gradually:

  • Increase effort to 85-90% of my old FTP and redo SSB1 (after that I guess I’m sufficiently recovered to do a FTP test and do the SS training plans properly)
  • Stay at 75% of my old FTP and move on to SSB2 instead of redoing SSB1

I’ve got a couple of triathlons planned in june (olympic distance), but my main goal is to finish them injury-free. Any advice on how to build up SS-work in a gradual way would be highly appreciated!

Best regards,

Bart

2

To be honest I’d just try and do an FTP test to get a better measure of where your baseline is. The ramp test is short and progressive, so if you start to feel any worrying sensations it’s easy to bail out of (so very little chance of injury), but it also doesn’t leave you destroyed for the next few days if you do go right to your max on it.
I would then re-do SSB1 at the new FTP. If the Sweet spot workouts feel a bit too easy then bump up your FTP by 5 watts, and keep doing so until they feel at the right level (sweet spot work should be pretty hard cumulatively, but not to the point where you can’t recover well from it quickly). You’ve got time to go through the whole of the base, build and specialty phases, so spending the extra time doing more base is only going to be of benefit.

3

I agree with @paulrattew in doing an FTP test. You might as well be working to the correct FTP and the ramp test is not going to take that much out of you.

You have the challenge of June not being that far away in terms of training weeks but I think it is much more impoartant of you to get base right before moving forward and SSB 2 is a different beast to SSB1. I would redo at least some of SSB 1 and give yourself chance of a proper base.

You still have 4 months (20 weeks) of good training time available so you can get maybe the last 2-3 weeks of SSB1 followed by SSB2 followed by speciality in.

Good luck wioth the ongoing recovery from injury.

4

Thanks both for your feedback! I’ll follow your advice and give the test a try next week

Best regards,

Bart