I’m having trouble with sustained power (SS and threshold), and in particular seeing a big drop in ability after taking a recovery week. Having just failed a 12m SS workout after a recovery week again I think I’m doing something wrong so I’m here to ask for help.
As an example, this is the last SS workout I did immediately before a recovery week.
3 x 12m at ~237w. My HR during the last interval was 175avg, max 180 and I rated it very hard. While the max HR is only slightly higher, RPE was very very much higher.
My most recent failure was 3x12m at ~93%, again immediately after a recovery week and I couldn’t finish it - I had to stop part way through the second interval. In both cases what made me stop was burning in the legs. I was breathing hard but it didn’t feel like I was tapped out cardiovascularly - it was always the muscle fatigue. However when I look at the expected power numbers and duration, it seems logical and a reasonable progression after a rest week (ie: I do not believe the artificial intelligence was acting artifically stupid)
I’m looking for some guidance from the forum wizards - do you have any suggestions? Is my recovery week too.. recovery-y? For what it’s worth, the VO2 progressions before/after the recovery week are no problem - numbers are going up and they feel the correct amount of hard but doable and I never have trouble finishing the workout.
It definitely might be worth throwing in a 10 minute sweetspot interval during your last ride before the first interval workout of your next block. It looks like you might be one of those riders who needs a little foreplay.
I almost always come back from a recovery week a little flat and the first ride back is tough. You can either accept it, or do as Helvellyn suggested and pre-empt it by trying to do something essentially as an opener at the end of recovery week (I go for the former).
One other consideration - how’s your nutrition during recover week? Some people cut intake because of less intensity on the bike, and then come into the next block under fuelled, or have a week of beer and pizza and suffer when the work starts again
I thought we agreed to let this discussion stay about training lol
That’s an interesting idea. The difficulty of SS/threshold workouts after my rest week do get easier albeit slowly. I’ll try adding a work block opener and see what it does. Thanks for the idea.
I think I’m pretty consistent with my nutrition during work and recovery - I take extra carbs in during work blocks but otherwise eat similarly.
I would take the recoveries, including yellow as advisory and do what you need to do in order to perform better. If you know some hard sessions at the end of the rest week will help the next active week, I would go for it.
Im the same with some yellow days, as my aches, pains & fatigue from hard sessions dont tend to appear for 48 hours so the yellow day I had off, feel great, I could have done something, but the following days recovered workout feels much harder than it should.
Maybe? It’s true that the failed SS workout I showed above was the second workout after returning to a build block. The first workout was a vo2 that I felt really good about - hard but not that hard with a day off between workouts.
I pedaled a little too long and TR automatically extended my cooldown by 10 minutes. It wasn’t part of the original workout and my HR was very well recovered so I decided to stop the workout.
