I am 100% with you. I feel like I am in the twilight zone reading this thread.
Team Sky - Did he go back to the future?
Meanwhile in the Evoq article we have VO2 and tempo for the over / under!
âA great place to start is 30s VO2max overs and 2m tempo unders, then play with things from there.â
This isnât true at all. Recovery at 95% of FTP is a whole lot different than recovery at 50% of FTP. I donât even think this is up for debate?
This is literally what they did. From the article:
âDuring the rest periods participants either stopped pedalling or pedalled backwards, and this remained consistent for every training session.â
More broadly, the paper is comparing a POL training plan to a THR training plan.
How one can conclude anything about a workout type that wasnât done in a study that compared different training plans truly boggles the mind.
This thread has better legs than Tadej! 
^^^
forum fun!
Thatâs actually my point (or was supposed to be).
So basically, I donât think 95% / 105% over unders are worth anything. I never have. Just ride at threshold if youâre going to do that.
Going to, for example, 120% and then down to maybe 70-85% FTP, yeah.
This might be a case where a bunch of ppl are talking/thinking 95%/105% O / U and others (like me) are thinking "WAY over and then tempo under" as an O / U. If so, we should straighten that out. Otherwise someone will start asking about âZone 2â. And we donât want that.
threshold outside, in perfect conditions, my power is basically fluctuating between 95-105%. That was one of my points above, its basically a threshold workout.
EVOQ bike, one of the most criminally underrated youtube channels there is.
From the cited studyâŚ
1.) Go hard enough in the âoverâ to generate sufficient lactate (in this case if you had a 300W FTP, the âoverâ portion would be 5 minutes @ 340WâŚand still would not have generated a blood lactate concentration that many physiologists would consider OBLA)
2.) Go easy enough in the âunderâ portion to generate actual lactate clearance (in this case change in lactate concentration was highest during recovery at a sweet spot or tempo work rate)
3.) What have I been saying?
Exactly! Thatâs not an O / U (except in TR plans). Itâs justâŚhuman.
Exactly. But that article, I dunno, thought OG Frank the Big Cat named 'em before Landon. Rook intervals? Castles! And they even have an emoji - 
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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A pandemic of literacy!
@voldemort Now, having said that. I do think that a good discussion is more like: âok, do I fully rest? Ride tempo? 50% FTP?â As in, how low should the âunderâ be? Because to
cnidos point (I think), no one literally did exactly what some of us think of as an âO/Uâ in these studies. But they did go hard enough to generate higher lactate and then low enough that it went down 
Anyone know if TR has workouts like this in the library (30â VO2, 85% recovery)? I havenât seen them yet, but Iâd like to try them if they have them.
You asked, and from the same Evoq article linked
âI usually set the overs at 105 to 110% FTP, and the under is at endurance pace, and we slowly reduce the duration of the underâ
that was for one specific variant.
Exactly, an over under with the under in your Z2.
just received my weekly email from Mikael Eriksson (Scientific Triathlon). A few weeks ago he promised to share some thoughts on HR. I donât believe there is a webpage for weekly emails, so Iâll quote a few interesting thoughts he shared:
âFinally, a point on the perceived variability of HR, a recent study found that âThe mean day-to-day variability for the maximal value of VO2 was 2.8%, 1.1% for HR, 18.1% for blood lactate concentration, 2.1% for RER, 1.1% for RPE and 5.0% for TTE. The values for the corresponding submaximal variables were 3.8% for VO2 , 2.1% for HR, 15.6% for blood lactate concentration, 2.6% for RER and 6.0% for RPEâ.â
Study:
Back to Mikaelâs thoughts:
âImagine that you have tested your lactate threshold and found it to be at 300W, 150 bpm and 3.0 mmol/l. Based on these data, you could set your threshold HR range to 144-156 bpm (as the test results might be as much as 4.2% too high/low on a high/low HR day).â
hmm without looking at study wouldnât that be +/- 2.1% for 147-153bpm?
and
âBut if you decide that you want to test lactate in your workouts to confirm that you are in the threshold range, you would similarly have to create a range of 31.2% above and below the tested 3.0 mmol/l, so the range would be 2.1-3.9 mmol/l.â
hmm, similarly +/- 15.6% or a range of 2.5-3.5mmol/l which is still pretty wide.
and
âIâm not saying this as a point against in-training lactate sampling (although itâs not something I would really recommend) but more so to illustrate that the whole heart rate being too variable is a bit of a myth, and when it varies, that is information we could and should use and listen to.â
thought about throwing that into the lactate testing thread, but decided to toss a brief detour into this active thread instead. Enjoy!
Havenât really read through this thread here, just here to share this 2008 study on runners. Cont vs 3min over-unders
Yes, but brennus is proving some of our points⌠in the separate study, the recovery periods closest to lt showed the most lactate clearance. I donât think we can make any other conclusions about that graph, but it clearly shows a more active recovery is different than passive.