Cheers. Turns out PhDs are busy (but also very very fun!), and grant apps and articles take even longer for me to write than blog posts 
Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance. Working more on muscle oxygenation stuff these days, not much on training prescription.
On one hand I haven’t yet encountered any hard disconfirming evidence that hard-start shouldn’t work in theory. But nor have I encountered any hard evidence that it works in practice, either.
I think my current hedged opinion would be that hard-start intervals may be too easy to go too hard, and training consistency might suffer as a result. And training consistency really is all-important. So it might be most effective in small doses, or as a ‘breakthrough’ block.
longer interval bout duration > number of bouts
interval intensity doesn’t seem to matter as long as it’s above FTP/CP/threshold. So maybe ‘maxing out’ isn’t strictly necessary, but working at an intensity where you could max out if you wanted to, is?
