Seriously, who does these? What kind of athlete are you if you do - are you pro? Is your FTP by any chance too low?
I am regularly browsing the vast library of TrainerRoad workouts, planning what I will attempt for the following week or two. Currently I am somewhere between PL range of 4 to 7 in SS, TH, VO2.
Every once in a while I take a peek at the PL 10 workouts and just think to myself that there is no chance in hell that I could ever complete such workouts. They look totally batsh*t insane. I can take an educated guess that it’s for the folks whose FTP isn’t going up for some reason and they’ve simply worked their way up to that level. But holy crap, this must be a super low percentage of the population accomplishing such a thing.
Not entirely sure which workouts you’re singling out as batshit insane, but towards the end of a 3-week phase, it’s not that uncommon for me to be assigned 9.5-10.5s.
And no, I’m not a pro. Mid volume home gamer, <3w/kg.
If you read the descriptions, they do in fact say successful completion is perhaps an indication that your FTP has improved.
Are you saying if you were to update your FTP, start a 3 week build block and starting from a say, level 3 threshold… You will be hitting level 9 by the end of the three week block?
If you were regularly doing level 10 workouts and regularly updating your FTP, then it is unlikely that your next FTP change would knock a PL down from 10 to 3.
Example, I am experimenting with reverse periodization (intense winter, long distance summer):
during typical summer training (4xZ2 + 2xSS/Z4) I’ll become time triallist and I am literally unable to go below PL9.5 for Sweetspot – FTP increases slowly and whenever PL drops immediately after detection, with next workout it is again above 10 and adaptive training can’t guide me
during winter with more VO2max/anaerobic centric training, I’ll become puncheur and yet highest VO2max PL is around 8-9 and more typically in 5-7 ballpark.
For context, I am average cyclist. Maybe strong at steady low-intense efforts but still average.
I’d say it depends on how accurate your FTP is and your current FTP relative to what you consider your peak fitness.
I top out in the 290-300 range and might hit those numbers if really good consistency over a long period of time with no sickness.
In my experience I have only hit 8 - 10 range in endurance, tempo SS when I was working off 250 - 260 and plenty of scope for improvement. Threshold I’ve never really got close to 10.
So a newbie or person who has lost fitness and rebuilding stands a better chance of topping out the PL.
So yes, doing like 5-6x20-30min @ SS is something I do a number of times a year in my training. And a 6h endurance or 3-5h long tempo ride could even be a weekly thing.
My FTP is not set too low. I ride 12+ hours a week when I’m training. I am not a professional rider.
Remember that FTP is the power you can hold for ~40-70min. Doing something like 3x25min@94% of that value should be a difficult but doable workout based on that, as long as you are doing enough volume that the fatigue from the length of the workout alone isnt causing the problem.
I suppose one can cherry-pick some PL 10 workouts that don’t look so bad, and can be accomplished by not so exceptional cyclists, like me. E.g. Wright Peak 3x30 SS looks somewhat doable as a near/mid-term goal.
But then I see Redondo +4 which is an hour long, and that just looks insane to me and unrealistic.
I guess TrainerRoad hasn’t shared data on this - or have they? - but I would expect there’s a bell curve situation going on where people will mostly fall into a PL 4-7 range.
Anyone want to share a pic of their calendar full of 9’s and 10’s?
It probably depends on the plan, and on the power zone. I’m on a half-distance high-volume triathlon plan, and my hard workouts on Tuesdays were sweet spot for the base phase, VO2 max for the build phase, and threshold for the specialty phase, so I never got to a very high PL on any of those because by the time I got to 5 or so, I moved on to the next phase. But every phase had weekly tempo workouts, so it didn’t take too long to get to PL 10 on those. Accepting an FTP increase doesn’t knock down the PLs all that much, just enough to make the PL 10 workout “productive” again instead of “achievable”. I’ve done Polar Bear like six weeks in a row at this point.
I haven’t done many other plans, but if another plan had, for example, sweet spot workouts in every phase, then I imagine it wouldn’t be impossible to hit PL 10 naturally in that zone.
5x10m under ftp with 2x30s accelerations is not an insane workout imo. It’s a hard workout but if one has an accurate FTP and has done some work at extending their TTE a bit it’s very achievable.
I’m with you. At the very end of my noob-gains period I knocked off Three Fools -1 at L9.2 (I joked that it had been done by two-fools-minus-one… very hard but doable without bailouts), but then six weeks later I was brought to my knees by Caldwell at L5.6. Obviously the ability to actually get any recovery in a 15-second valley is a special kind of superpower, & for me at least the workouts that use them have their PLs underrated. TR dropped my sweetspot level by about 3 points because of that failure, but later that week I got some retribution by dropping in Antelope +2 & easily passing it.
Obviously the ability to actually get any recovery in a 15-second valley is a special kind of superpower, & for me at least the workouts that use them have their PLs underrated. TR dropped my sweetspot level by about 3 points because of that failure, but later that week I got some retribution by dropping in Antelope +2 & easily passing it. 