Sorry, but I’m not watching a video…
As for fatigue, as I tell my students, it is always multi-factorial.
Out of curiosity, I did a backloaded workout with intervals after I had hit 1,000 kJ of work. The idea came from this thread and another one in the past discussing doing intervals at the end. So I did some Z2 up front until I hit the kJ goal, then did 3x10. Here are my thoughts.
RPE was way higher. Probably not surprising. But it was way higher than even I expected. By the 9th minute I was counting down the seconds. HR was maybe a bit higher but not far off from my normal HR for those zones. I am at the end of a block so it could just be accumulating fatigue.
So a question for the folks smarter than I. Is this an effective workout? Or just stupid? Any additional benefits over doing the intervals first?
One other note: My Kickr is doing some weird things. I used Trainerday to control the trainer, and was reading the power from my pedals. The 3x10 intervals were actually all set to the same erg target. Any ideas on how to fix this?
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1000 kJ isn’t a lot really. I usually don’t start intervals until I’m at minimum 600-800 kJ in, often 1000-1200. The other day I did an interval block starting around 2000 kJ. I’ve also snooped some pros on strava, and saw them doing intervals deep (3000+ kJ) into rides. I’ve seen them do variations where they also spread out 10-20’ intervals evenly on a 3-5 hour ride. I’m not sure if there are any additional benefits over doing them all at once, or at the beginning of a ride vs at the end. The only thing I would question for us amateurs is quality. If you start intervals at 2000 kJ and you fail to hit your target power or time goals, it probably would’ve been better to do them earlier in the ride. But if you are nailing the intervals without issue, then who’s to say it’s a bad idea? You’ll certainly be doing those whether you want to or not come race day.
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800+kJ is a good warmup for myself. Here is one of my best paced 20 minute field tests after 900kJ
The other best 20 minute effort was after 1000kJ warmup. A lot of my best efforts are after 1000kJ.
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My personal experience is very simple.
Increased durability = increased volume.
With the proviso this increased volume is fuelled correctly and you are able to recover from it etc.
I suspect this is same for all humans.
More volume, more training, harder training = greater durability.
No real surprises here 
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The important question that needs to be answered for every workout is: “what am I trying to achieve with this workout?” and consequently “what is the most important part of this workout?” The most important should be done when you are most fresh and can execute it with high fidelity.
If the answer to this just question is “put out power after putting in some work,” then yeah, it was effective. If the answer were instead “do s sweetspot/threshold workout,” then no, it was not as effective as it couldn’t been.
Doing workouts like you described are not going to be a silver bullet for “durability.” There is no secret. The miles of trials, the trials of miles.
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Love that book!
In another book “Train hard, win easy” it was outlined how many Kenyan runner start easy and progress the speed throughout the run and finish at a good clip. Call it durability or just running… but this stuff has been done a long time.
That really depends on your FTP, or more exactly on the power you ride at for a long time. It makes no sense to see this as a fixed number. Typically, the higher your FTP, the higher the average power you ride at, and the more kJ you burn. 1000kJ might be the right amount for the poster before.
It might be slightly different when talking about pros, because there is some sort of “entry ticket” power you need to be able to ride at to make it to pro-level.
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I’m also really glad to see this called out. TTE and FTP being separate “dials” you can tweak makes zero sense in the context of a power duration curve. If your “TTE” is longer your FTP necessarily increased too.
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i can tell you from experience this is not true, I can very much improve my time at threshold without increasing it, and I test using long efforts.
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Not to mention the basic range considered for FTP is “around 40 to 70 minutes…”
Which I take to mean that people might be capable on the shorter end to start and then stretch to the other end with training, all while still having essentially the same FTP. Seems at least close to TTE to me.
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Bottom line: 3/4 hrs rides putting the hammer down for a few minutes every once in a while is good.
Does it smell like group rides + halfwhelling?
Edited: Is TiZ/Progression really that important?
Should I rigorously follow 3x15/2x20/4x12/2x30… with 10/15min warmup, or ride a tempo for 1hr or more and then put 2x10? (Tempo-W4 for T. R. with PM) I lean towards the latter.
This may be me exploring more what FTP really is. But, as a possible contrary scenario, say one currently has an FTP of 300, and they can do that for 40 minutes. After a block of training they can now do 300 watts for 60 minutes. Is it not possible/likely that they could do a little more, say, 305 watts, for 40 minutes? Someone may tell me this scenario is not physiologically likely, or they may have counter examples but, assuming it’s something that could happen, they they raised their FTP or their TTE?
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maybe, the only way to know is go out and test it. I’m in a TTE block and as an experiment I tried doing intervals a bit over the FTP i’ve been using, in my case 310w with ftp of 305. I could definitely do shorter intervals of 10-15mins at 310 and I could do up to 20 at 310 but I really don’t think I can do much more than that. Needless to say, as I’ve done 20-35min intervals I’ve settled on 305 as my target. FTP is def a tipping point and I know for me I’m pretty sensitive about going over and being able to sustain
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Sure it’s possible, perhaps even likely. I figured someone would point to that and it all hinges on the “definition of FTP”.
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This just shows how wishy-washy “FTP” really is (a range of 30 minutes!… where the top 70m duration is 175% of the 40m bottom) which points to the fact that it is definitely NOT a singular value (no matter how much we’d prefer it to be that way). We can move the goal posts to indicated changes in FTP and/or TTE purely by where we set the limits.
We don’t need a perfect definition of FTP to improve it. Nor do we need one to set an adequate power level for endurance rides, tempo, or even sweet spot. FTP is not even super useful for setting zones above ftp, such as vo2 or sprint work either. So why is there so much debate on what it is exactly? We already know adaptations gained by doing intervals around ftp are largely the same, so who cares if you’re 10 watts off? The whole thing is blown way out of proportion.
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FYPFY.
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Love it! 
if FTP is off by say, 5%, that can really be a lot. With my currently set FTP of 305, 5% would be 15w, so a sweet spot workout (using 90% as the standard) at 288 would be a bit harder than doing sweet spot 90% at 275w. And there’d be no way I could do anything sort of extensive FTP work even if I were to do it at 315w vs 305. In my view, it does matter quite a bit, I def agree that it’s less necessary to ride at a percent for endurance and vo2 but I think subthreshold and threshold work does require a better approximation, especially as you try and build out the time doing that work
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It is well-accepted in the scientific literature that the duration that maximal metabolic steady state can be maintained 1) varies between individuals, and 2) is higher in trained athletes vs. untrained individuals. This conclusion, however, is indeed at odds with the concept of a continuous decay in maximal intensity as a function of duration.
I believe that these seemingly opposing ideas can be reconciled by recognizing that although a true “threshold” doesn’t really exist, the range of intensities over which metabolism transitions from a quasi-steady state to a non-steady state is in fact quite narrow.* Thus, both hypotheses may be “true”, at least to the best of our ability to test them, even though they are logically incompatible.
*Using a Moxy NIRS monitor, I was once able to narrow this range down to only 2.5 W. That is, at the lower power my O2Hb, etc., were constant over time, whereas at a power output just 2.5 W higher, they exhibited a statistically-significant temporal drift.
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