if you have workouts on back to back days and say day 1 the workout was sweet spot with some 100% ftp bursts and the workout was done in the evening. day 2 is just steady state of 70% ftp for an hour.
would 12 hours between those workouts be enough recovery time?
I’m just curious what others typically do. situation I described is my scenario but also not day 1 included speed workout in the am. I really wanted to get up and knock out my day 2 workout in the am but was just too tired so delaying it until the evening.
As a general rule I’d say sweet spot followed by endurance should be fine, but there’s a lot we don’t know; how quickly you personally recover, what you have coming up in the following days, what your rest and nutrition between days 1 and 2 was like, etc.
It depends on a lot of things: quality of sleep, diet, other stress in your life, age, how fast you personally recover.
At 42, I typically need about 24 hours between workouts of any intensity. I can get away with Hard → Endurance in 12 hours or Endurance → Hard in 12 hours, but I generally try to give myself the full day if I can swing it. I can tell in the morning after a hard afternoon session that I’m fatigued, and that generally eases throughout the day.
The thing about increasing recovery between workouts (e.g. Monday morning to Tuesday afternooon) is that I find I’m far less likely to get my workout in in the afternoon if I planned it for the morning. Life often gets in the way for me. If you need the extra 8-10 hours to the afternoon and you still get the work in, there’s nothing wrong with that. Listen to your body.
agree. most of the time the thought of an hour long 70% ftp workout wouldn’t bother me. This morning I was tired and the thought of pushing through that didn’t feel like something my body was interested in. I think the other factor was my workout yesterday was a bit of a struggle for me. If I had just easily done then that might be different.
I think in this case I was a little run down prior to day 1 workouts due to less sleep than I normally get and I think going into day 2 my body was still wanting more sleep/rest. I think I was surprised (now thinking about it) I shouldn’t be that I was so tired and just not motivated to do the am workout. Most times I am but today not so much.