tl;dr - question in bold below.
Long story short, I think I know where I’ve gone wrong but not sure what to do for this weekend and possibly into my last week next week.
I’m not part of the AT beta and have been running my own AT, if you will. I’m on SSBHV2 at the moment, and have scaled my progression levels a fair bit, I’m in week 4 and up to PL 9+ for the workouts. See here. Note: the RPE’s in my calendar are my own, not allen/coggans.
On Thursday I did wright peak -5 outdoors and it killed me. I managed to basically get through the whole thing (with an extra ~1hr Z2 getting to and from places, and a ~45sec break at the end of the 2nd interval) but have never felt that cooked after a workout.
The next day (yesterday), I did 30mins of active recovery and even 130w felt incredibly heavy.
Today I have Tallac +4 on the calendar, but am not feeling it what so ever, I only feel 1-2% better than yesterday and can guarantee I will fail that workout, and probably not get that far through it.
My Q: When experiencing fatigue, do I reduce intensity to something manageable for the 2hrs? Do I swap for a much easier workout? If or when you feel like this towards the pointy end of your block, what do you do? I have been super impressed with my progressions so far, setting powercurve records every week I don’t want to back off, and want to keep getting the volume and muscular endurace adaptations I’ve been getting so far, but not sure how to keep this up in a productive manner. I really want to complete PL 10+ workouts into next week.
Sorry for the wall of text, any advice or thoughts would be awesome.
Yes.
/thread
OK, seriously……listen to your body. Sure, there are times you can gut through it, but based on what you posted, this is NOT one of those times. Your body is telling you you need to rest….listen to it.
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Blockquote
I have been super impressed with my progressions so far, setting powercurve records every week I don’t want to back off,
This sounds like the route to overtraining. A few days off won’t kill your training. Adaptions come in the recovery periods. Give yourself a day or two to recover and come back stronger.
Recovery is not a dirty word!
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This is good to know I guess. What is the ‘max’ you can ramp or expect to ramp? I’m not sure with AT if you keep clicking ‘very easy’ for a workout, how fast will it scale you up? I seem to recall people getting weeks of PL 10+ for SST, so must do it quicker than what I’ve done.
I did an hour of Z2 just before, legs still feel heavy so think I’ll take this advice, tell myself I haven’t failed entirely just yet and have 2x days off to have a strong start next week.
I couldn’t say how much you can expect to ramp, but listening to your body is key. If you’re knackered and can’t complete workouts it’s a real indicator that rest is needed.
People new to training can often ramp quickly at first and then tend to plateau and that’s the point at which overtraining is rife as people worry they are not continuing to progress. Don’t worry too much about it as fitness is rarely linear!
I’m in pretty much the same boat, was going great last week, hard weekend last weekend and tough training week, I’ve felt more and more worn out this week, yesterday was a rest day but today I feel rubbish, can’t face 120 TSS of threshold under overs, might be worn out, might be work stress, might be hay fever, but as the weather is going to rubbish here this week, i’ve brought my rest week forward a week, so my rest week should be over by next weekend and a good weekend of riding can be had
Are you then going to resume the week you’ve swapped? I wonder if this is a good idea to swap the rest week for the final week, but I feel like I wouldn’t want to go into the final week off of a rest week.
I wouldn’t even do something else for 2 hours if I was that tired, I would do a 45 minute recovery ride or something.
If you’re seriously that tired, you need to back off a bit. Bring forward a rest week and push the next training week out. I would suggest that a recovery week now will make those high PL workouts easier afterwards - you won’t lose any meaningful fitness in a rest week and you will gain a lot in recovery. If anything you’ll be going better afterwards rather than flogging yourself through some really hard workouts now and digging yourself further into a hole.
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I’m going to have a rest week, and then repeat the last few weeks of the base plan, I don’t want to have a rest week, follows by the last week of the plan, followed by a rest week, neither do I want to go last (hard) week of the plan, into the build
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Oh, and I change the first workout to be a FTP test
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Yeah I think you’re right, it’s just strange having last week of base into first week of build.
Maybe if I split the workouts across 2x weeks, so have 2x hybrid rest/effort weeks. So rest from now till Thursday, do work thursday/Sunday, the next week do work 1 day only with all other days as 'rest, following week into build.
Reason I say that is as Womble said, having rest week, work week, rest week, build week seems strange. Not sure what to do, but rest is on the cards.