I’m very hesitant to ask this as I fear it will spiral into all kinds of who knows what but here we go.
I’m not seeing improvements and I am doing TR to improve, in fact my performance has dropped (but I’d rather not focus on the drop)
My perspective is that IF I do say 6 weeks of training Then I should see an improvement both physically to a degree as well as psychologically (feeling stronger).
Let’s remove the AMOUNT of improvement but just say a bit of improvement any improvement would be reasonable to expect.
If I do 6 weeks of working out I think some improvement would be certain … some responses might be … staying at the same place is an improvement at your age …
Assume I eat fairly healthy / I sleep fairly well / I am 6’1 and 180 lbs … so not obese but not super thin … I don’t drink much / etc …
I’m confused how doing say 3-5 rides a week for 6 weeks / completing several blocks of base/sweet spot etc … and I am actually at same spot even worse ??? over a year of following plans moderately
Also, the workouts I find to be legit, they are challenging and enjoyable and somehow mr. chad seems to know exactly the limits to push … I would even say for me that they seem to be just hard enough that I have to focus on lifestyle choices so I can finish the blocks … so lots of positives outside of performance gains
Any perspective by people who actually suck … all you genetic freaks or 4.0 watt whatever … congratulations but your input might not really relate to old tired guys …
For argument sake : If I do two blocks of Sweet Spot, take care of myself as much as busy life allows, it’s confusing why I’m not really improving, ?
I love TR, it is like my own personal shrink, doing the workouts helps my mood, and helps with structure for me, but performance improvement is frustrating but maybe that’s just unrealistic expectations.
Assuming you have the fueling, rest, recovery right… Here are some training related questions that may help hone in on your issue.
How did the Ramp/FTP testing go?
Did you feel you got accurate values that translated into proper training zones?
Are you tracking your gains/losses with FTP or any other values?
Many times we gain in areas other than pure FTP. We may see improvement in Time To Exhaustion, or gains in fitness at different levels than FTP.
Can you be more specific about how you feel before, during and after the workouts?
Are you being challenged too much, too little?
What is your prior experience with structured training?
Do you have experience and know how an Endurance, Tempo, Sweet Spot, VO2 Max, etc. workout “should feel”?
This matters in light of making sure you have a correct FTP value, with the intent of setting your training zones for the workouts appropriate to your current fitness at that time.
Are you doing notably different efforts inside / outside with this training compared to prior experience? (goes towards seeing if you have the appropriate training load / volume… not too much, not too little)
Agree with Chad McNeese. Plus a couple of possibilities that Chad did not mention are that
You could be at a plateau. These are fairly common. There are ways to break through the plateau and hit new highs. A “kitchen sink” ride is one example.
You could be nearing your genetic potential. If you’re been training for awhile, you might not experience any significant jumps in FTP any more. It could take an entire year to get a 5 watt bump.
There has been some really good advice here to try and explain what might be going on. I don’t think I saw you mention or anyone else ask about consistency. That’s a major thing especially with the amount you ride.
You mentioned no smart trainer or a power meter. You’re using a KK trainer using virtual power. Tire pressure matters with that I believe so if not set the same every time it could be off, plus it’s not “real” power so there could be other factors.
I know almost everyone wants to see improvement, but since you mentioned you’re not racing and you find the workouts your way to destress then the best thing I can say is to enjoy the journey. I went almost all of last year without seeing any real ftp gains and only recently have I noticed it going up. I just kept it consistent, enjoyed the training, and tried not to worry about have the power number always go up.
I still need to read your full post, but have to clear something first.
I am NOT Chad Timmerman (TrainerRoad’s Head Coach). I’m just an active forum member and big fan of TrainerRoad. I try to help here whenever I can. #TheOtherChad
Ok, you mention the idea of changing the work / recovery week pattern. As I said, I’m not The Coach, but have crafted and option for Sweet Spot Base timing that is different than the TR default. In spired by one from The Nate, I made a 4:1, 3:1, 3:1 pattern that I have use last year and half way through my base this year.
At 46 yo, and following Mid volume for the 5th season of TR, I find this much easier to follow and nail the workouts more consistently. Check it out if you plan to do another Base, it might work for you as well.
You also mention difficulty in Build, which is a real deal, since it is often the toughest phase. You also said you want to stay closer to Mid volume.
One option to consider would be to follow Low volume instead, for 3 set workouts per week. Then you can manually add 1 or 2 other workouts as you see fit. It might be appropriate to add the shorter and easier workouts like Taku, Pettit and such.
All that is mentioned with the possibility that you are overtraining now, without enough recovery to really hit the hard workouts. Totally guessing and may be off. But I know that I am seeing more consistent gains from taking small bites that I can nail, and adding easy stuff when I know I can handle more.
Build is a beast. I’m 47 (been on TR since last October, no previous structured training but I ride a fair bit) & in the second half of sustained power build mid volume & Palisade shattered me today. I had a good vo2max workout Monday, Wednesday was Stromlo +3 which I killed, yesterday Beech & Palisade today. I shut it down & changed the rest of the years training to low volume. I need more rest & psychologically just don’t want to be suffering so much.
I’ve seen an 11% improvement in FTP over base & half of build. I’ll take it. Definitely able to ride harder for longer outside too, so I’m still improving. I’ll likely add an endurance ride or two until I’m riding outside regularly again at which point I’ll be pedaling 6 days a week, most likely. In the mean time, I’m hoping a bit more recovery will help get my head back where it needs to be to nail the 3 TR workouts I’ll be doing each week.
The virtual power could be a big issue. I have a friend who has a 100 watt FTP on TR because of his virtual power setup. He was happy to learn that his FTP is 200+ when I told him we were doing 150 watts just soft pedaling along on a group ride.
Do you ever ride outside? I benchmark myself on Strava segments and comparing myself to people in my club. I can easily see if I’m improving and who in our group is getting faster or slower.
ETM,
Question? How are your real world rides ?
Are you feeling stronger, faster, better?
I am 6’ 3”, 225lbs.
In my training I am no longer focused on raising FTP, but improving endurance and increasing cadence so the gains I’m achieving are not well represented by FTP changes.
I and doing 3-5 rides per week and feeling pretty beat overall. 14 weeks total, 1/2 way through strength build. And doing strength training and mobility weekly too. And I did Tour de Zwift on top of my TR workouts.
I am squarely in the over training zone. I probably need 2 weeks of taper and reduction to feel strong again. Rest seems to always help me feel strong again.
Think about taking a week with almost no intensity. Recovery rides only, stretching, walking.
I’ve been thinking about training schedules that plan for more super compensation and adaptation. We usually think in 4-5-6 week blocks of training and many of us are loath to take a rest week. Over the course of a training block we get slower. The rest period is when we get faster through super compensation.
I read about a fast master age grouper who qualifies for Kona that does 1 week on / 1 week easy. I probably do 4 to 6 weeks before I start feeling tired and then am forced to rest. I think I might improve at a greater rate if I tried 2 week hard / 1 week easy or at the maximum 3 hard / 1 easy.
I had an unintended peak in January. I did my year end test in November - FTP 275 watts - rode at reduced volume in December - took xmas week off and then was sick new years week. Two weeks after being back on the bike I had a Strava KOM and three top 10s on climbs. WKO5 was estimating a 290 FTP and I felt like I had it.
Then I started base miles and did the following hours 6-9-11-12-13. I was cooked by that last week. This week was supposed to be an easy week and I’ve done 8 hours. I didn’t feel on form on today’s group ride so I probably still need more rest.
Long story short, I’m wondering if I’ll get more improvement on 2:1 or 3:1 blocks.
Tire pressure does matter, yes. TR also has the ability to do a spindown test, and you should do it after a 5-10 min warmup before every ride @EveryThirtyMins. That said, the data is pretty darn accurate, which is really cool:
Based on what I’ve read thus far, I’d say you’re in need of more recovery than the TR plans are offering. A kitchen sink ride is the last thing you need IMO.
FTP is not the end all be all. It’s a convenient single measure off of which we can base our training zones. There are other ways to get there, but they will invariably involve more testing or more invasive testing. So don’t hang your hat on FTP, but these GCN pieces and others start with the assumption that you think FTP is everything… and no one should actually think that. Recognize it for what it is: valuable, but not invaluable.
I’m starting to think I need to do LV build for my first build of the year, and then maybe graduate to MV for the second. Short Power is wrecking me at MV, as Sustained did last year, but I made it through GBMV as my second one last year.
There are a lot of similar overtraining posts in this thread, so hopefully this isn’t too redundant. That said, I tend to think there are three viable options that you should consider. They are (in order of increasing difficulty for me to explain):
Change to low volume. Relatively easy to implement, just an across the board reduction
Change your rest week cycle. Slightly more complex to implement, but this is what @mcneese.chad was getting at with the change from three weeks on one week off to two weeks on one week off. You can do this by copying his plans or by dragging weeks around in the calendar. Not too bad, and honestly a really good way to experiment
Decrease intensity but maintain volume. One of the often overlooked ‘problems’ with the TR plans, particularly as relates to masters athletes, is that they often have three days of higher intensity work per week. This can lead to fatigue and burnout. I think more people, particularly those in your shoes who get a lot of satisfaction out of riding 5+ days a week, should consider the approach of decreasing intensity but maintaining volume. This is achieved in a number of ways, but most simply you can take a TR plan and replace one day of intensity each week with a similar, or longer, endurance ride. More complex, and as you learn your body better, you can start putting in higher intensity workouts to replace those suggested by TR, but only two per week.
I think it’s in one of the podcasts where it’s mentioned that for us older athletes (I’m 60) training can be as much about preventing the decline as it is about improving.
I started with TR about five years ago for a couple of years then suspended my account before starting again last October. Originally I used virtual power but now have a power meter, my FTP supposedly dropped from 258W to 241W but the figures aren’t really comparable - anyway I’ve clawed my way back to 253W with another ramp test tomorrow.
As above it’s just a figure on which to scale the effort needed for the workouts. Perhaps not 100% accurate in all cases - see the various threads about VO2 max efforts “killing” people - but with a bit of self-awareness you can adjust things yourself for those. It’s also possible that while your FTP might not improve you are actually improving in other areas, a sort of “levelling up” as it were where your weak spots aren’t quite so weak.
Also a common theme in threads is the amount of TR work you should do, indoor workouts are hard. It’s important to realise that rest and recovery is just as important as the workouts, you can’t have one without the other. As you get older those recoveries become ever more vital. I do the LV plans, this gives me the flexibility at the weekends to ride outside or do another workout if the weather’s bad. The MV & HV plans would be too much (for me) and I’d end up skipping workouts with the subsequent feeling of “failure”. The opposite of that is that I’m more likely to do and succeed at the workouts in the LV plan.
Sort of allied to the above are the concepts of Minimum Effective Volume and Maximum Recoverable Volume, i.e. the least amount of work needed to improve and the most amount of work you can recover from. As you get older MEV increases whilst MRV decreases. At some point in time MRV drops below MEV. At this point you can’t do enough work to improve because you can’t recover from it, essentially age enforced overtraining. In TR terms you could use TSS, for example: you might have a weekly TSS of 200 for MEV and 300 for MRV. So long as your weekly load adds up to between these values you should improve.
I know how you feel. 51 with a fairly consistent low volume block since Christmas and I just went from 195 to 184 in a ramp test this week. Very disappointing. I think there is a wider benefit I can feel when on the MTB each week with someone faster (and 10yrs younger) on a 7 mile loop, 1000ft off road climb but the figures don’t show it. I had a build week towards the end and it was indeed very hard. I calibrate my kickr snap each time and whilst the power may not be absolute it should be relative so change should still be seen. In the end i’m just going to plug away and hope for improvement. I am pretty sure I am not already at my top limit but cycling just doesn’t seem to respond like my running does. Background is marathons, iron man and bit of ultra (MdS) and always been bottom half at best!
If your not weight training I would dive into that. I backed off to a LV plan and added 2 strength days a week. Coming from not doing any strength work at all. Made a huge difference for me. I started to see my gains slow down and knew I needed to look elsewhere. After 3 months of consistent strength work I started seeing some big gains again. Especially at 5 minute power and time to exhaustion. I instituted 4 exercises and it’s all single leg work. Squats, RDL, lunge, reverse lunge. Started with no weight and moved up from there. My reps stay in the 6-10 range. When I can hit 10 I move up weight. Hope some of that helps. And for upper body I do some core, pull-ups, pushups, and military press.
