So last week I hit 500 tss and this week 700tss unstructured (taken some time off TR plans to ride outside a lot).
I know not all tss is equal, but am I ready for high volume? I feel I am…
+1 to this, as well as needing a lot less food for the same watts. I used to have to eat a ton and now I can just cruise along at a consistent pace with one bottle of skratch and a banana per hour (around 40g per hour) or less at times.
Yes - it’s tough - I did HV last year - go through SSB2 but as you say on Tue/Thr I wasn’t getting off the turbo until 8:30 - 9 pm - then trying to eat etc before bed was difficult - I lost lots of weight - which I couldn’t afford to - down below 59kg at 5’7" and it made me ill when I started build - this year back at 61kg - doing some gym work - much healthy - and FTP is still climbing 
This was in one of the WKO5 Educational Webinars by Tim Cusick also. Too many sit on the top of Z2 in Z2 rides as they think it will be better for them, but better to just ride mid zone. Any additional benefit is not worth the extra cost. I’ll update this with the link if i recall which webinar it was
I think it’s here.
Yeah, this has been a good switch for me last year. Starting doing a lot of the -1 endurance rides to keep more in the mid zone.
Yes and no. I did HV with no (recent) training or racing but found most definitely the key to both success and survival is having sleep and nutrition totally dialed in.
Yes for one reason, in two different flavours — lack of variety. First, it’s 100% sweet spot; you’ll be riding in a very narrow intensity for a lot of hours. Second, if you repeat a HV Base phase, you’ll be doing the exact same workouts the second time in (albeit presumably at a higher FTP). Not a bad thing, inherently, but definitely something to think about and ponder so you don’t go off the deep end like I did. 
it’s funny both of you think MV has too much intensity, i find HV has too much SS and not enough endurance (z2) rides in there.
I’ve built a bastardized MV/HV plan that upgrades all of the Tues/Thurs rides to the +1 options making them 75min minimum, swapped out the wednesday for Baxter-1 which increases the tempo time, and tack 60min of Z2 onto the back end of the weekend rides to add endurance timing.
All in all the TSS and hours are similar to HV, but the makeup of the TSS is much different.
I could have gotten similar had i removed the Wednesday HV SS workout and replaced with tempo work and done the Sunday ride as the Endurance one instead, both get to the same place basically.
Yep, that’s the one. Relevant bit starts at 29:30
Baxter, tempo? None of them are above 0.67 IF.
Question for you high volume guys.
What do you think about doing the following. Doing a MV plan, but also doing petit 6 days a week in the morning fasted. Basically I don’t always have 2 hours in the evening to get it all done, but I can definitely squeeze in a trainer ride each and every morning for an hour).
It’s an extra 234 TSS a week on top of MV and commuting which should bring up my total time at zone 2 massively. Which I feel is missing, I rarely actually do any zone 2, and I think a lot more would be beneficial.
Less than 0.75 recovery rides
So should not ride at top of zone 2, but below it is recovery… Hmm? (ok article is from 2016, youtubevideo 2017)
@Nate_Pearson and @stevemz stumbled on this today Endurance Physiology 101 | Alan Couzens and it is a fascinating story involving endurance physiology, a bucket of chicken, and how to turn white meat into more dark meat 
- Do you plan on getting better?
If you ever plan on pushing 300 watts aerobically, training day in and day out using your 250W fibers isn’t going to get the job done. A sprinkling of training done at your long term goal pace (with more and more as your metabolic tolerance to this training improves) is going to be necessary.
This is the point I’m always trying to get across. I think riders try to optimize fat burning while they still have low hanging fruit for FTP increases.
IE your wattage at 70% Vo2 max could change to be 50% Vo2 max with training.
This is a rule of thumb, but here’s the order I’d prioritize it for most people (non-obese).
- Raise FTP
- Improve body comp
- Improve fat burning
So if you’re at 2.5 watts/kg and you’re a healthy 30 year old male work on getting that FTP up up up before you worry about fat burning.
On the flip side if you’re at like 5 watts/kg, you’re lean and you’re going to do Dirty Kanza that would be a great time to prioritize fat burning.
It really depends on your goals though. Getting fatmax from say 50% up to FTP would be better for a 3w/kg 240 FTP rider than adding 20W of FTP if they are a long TT specialist or do 8 or 10 hour events.
I really think your Leadville ride would have been better if you had gone this route tbh.
Edited to add: I think my greater point is that the order of those bullet points is different for every rider as you mention, but more than that is actually a blend of those things they aren’t exclusive.
I felt that article concurred with your position on fat burning optimization:
The Aerobic Threshold
Not surprisingly, this transition between using your “dark meat” and your “white meat” is a critical training intensity.
Also unsurprisingly, there is limited upside in making your dark meat more dark. There is a lot more benefit to spending your precious training time devoted to turning your white meat (fast glycolytic fibers) into dark meat (fast oxidative glycolytic fibers).
How you go about doing that - for example more or less sweet spot in base - makes for interesting discussions on the forum.
A lot of the blog entries on Alan Couzens website are written in the context of a 8-12 hour Ironman events, where glycogen stores are a limiting factor. So keep that in mind as many of Couzens’ blog articles (rightfully) place a lot of emphasis on long-term aerobic adaptations to become a better fat burner. Which as you point out is a good goal if you already have a lot of power and are going to do a long event like Dirty Kanza.
Has anyone seen any science of what determines muscle fiber recruitment in combination with what energy system is used. Like what is the determining factor for type 1 vs 2 fibers being used. And I understand in this question that it’s not always all or nothing, but a mixture. I see many people talk about it in terms of power, but my thinking says it’s not power, but torque. My thinking tells me it is power that determines the main source of energy used. So if I do low cadence below threshold, would that make my type IIa fibers work aerobically. Whereas a higher cadence with same torque resulting in higher power would use the same type IIa fibers but they may also work anaerobically as well. And this is why we see pros doing low cadence tempo work?
What I posted above is just me spitballing. I know there’s enough folks on here with knowledge to set me straight.
can you share your TR profile?
Came across similar concepts when watching an Alex Dowsett vlog. He’s just done a ramp test and is talking about how felt like he ran out of gears at the end as to increase cadence towards the end of a ramp test is basically a sprint. Not sure if there’s science to back this theory up, however.
To be fair if you go to 12:50 in the video you will see the setup they are on; rollers.
So depending on the gearing and resistance setting of the rollers it is very possible to “run out of gears” when you have a high power output they are talking about, and therefore having to lift cadence due to hitting the resistance ceiling.
If they were using a kickr or ERG type setup it’s unlikely they would have that type of problem.