Hey gang, because I’m old (47) and, ostensibly, sick I’m not recovering that well between workouts. It seems I need 2 days recovery to really smash my workouts. So, tues/ thurs works haven’t really been a reality for me recently. The Thursday workout usually goes really badly for me and I end up abandoning it in favor of an early ride.
However, If I smash it on the weekend, take monday and tuesday easy, and then go hard on weds I usually can get the work done.
Now that we’re in racing season and in racing roughly every other weekend, what do y’all think about going easy money and tuesday, hard wednesday, and then easy thursday and friday before racing at least one day if not 2 on the weekend? Can I still improve week to week on a schedule like this?
As a general rule of thumb, if you think you need the rest, you probably do.
You probably won’t improve per se if you are in a racing block, but managing your fatigue and form is generally higher ROI if you goal is to race well.
An alternative is to keep the schedule the same but lower your FTP by 10-15W. It’s possible that your ftp is too high and you’re over exerting. But let’s say you have a real ftp, even then I think lowering the ftp a bit and making the workouts just a touch easier will yield better gains than drastic schedule changes.
Another approach to look at is keeping the day to day schedule but having an easy week more often. So instead of 3 hard weeks 1 easy, swap to 2 hard weeks 1 easy. I guess it depends on if you feel things getting harder as the weeks progress, or if the first hard week after a rest week is too much right away.
Lol! @JoeX “smashing” a workout for me means completing it successfully without having to drop intervals or lower the intensity. @stevemz, this is what I’m thinking. More rest by doing a day or two of racing in the weekend, then one high intensity ride, one maybe sweet spot ride and the rest slow and easy.
@stevemz – wow, that’s a great article. Really interesting. As noted on a different thread, I showed up to a crit yesterday with burned legs, and didn’t really know why.
After reading that article, I now know exactly why. It actually seems simple in retrospect.
Here was my last week before the ‘burned leg’ crit yesterday - btw, I’m 44 so hopefully this pertains to the OP’s thread.
Sunday - Ramp Test
Monday - Mills +1 (Vo2 workout)
Tuesday - 2 practice crit races (20 mins each)
Wednesday - off
Thursday - 4 mile run
Friday - Spanish Needle -3 (couldn’t complete it)
Saturday - off
Sunday - legs were burned doing a crit.
I feel dumb. Sometimes you have to write this stuff down and look at it to make sense of it.
