Increasing peak 5-min power

see how long you can ride at 440. start repeating those intervals. increase duration.

watts is the driver here, so ride above where you’re at and over time you should be able to hold it longer.

hard starts also elicit good responses in people, meaning start a bit too hard and let the power fade into low vo2 for a 3m session. Bunch of those bangers will feel good in a different way than just staring down the barrel of a 5 x 5 session which is brutal

Good luck Anthony!

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Thanks again, Brendan. I’m kicking off a 6-week polarized block on Monday with a bunch of VO2 work. I’m excited to ramp it up.

Awesome, thanks. I’ve built my next block. Here’s the gist of it. 7 weeks total (two 3-week blocks w/1 recovery week between them) and a race week following. 75 min rolling road race, IF of around .95-1.0. Very hard.

Each week features 2 hard workouts per week, the first is a longer-duration VO2 max workout (3,4,5 min interval length) the second is a short-short workout to keep things interesting. The rest is either Seiler Z1/Coggan Z2 miles with one active recovery day and one day of complete rest.

Here’s the VO2 max progression over the entire block

Week 1: 5x3 min (15 min/TiZ:9)
Week 2: 6x3 min (18 min/TiZ:10.8)
Week 3: 5x4 min (20 min/TiZ:12)
Week 4: Rest
Week 5: 7x3 min (21 min/TiZ:12.6)
Week 6: 6x4 min (24 min/TiZ:14.4)
Week 7: 5x5 min (25 min/TiZ:15)
Week 8: Race

Block 1
Screen Shot 2020-08-28 at 4.06.20 PM

Block 2

This leads into my only race of the year which is a 20-mile road/CX race that ends up being around 1hr 15min. I’ve finished in the top 4 3 consecutive years–hoping some time spent sharpening the 3-5 min power will pay off with a late solo attack. :smile:

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15 TSS active recovery? FWIW my recommendation is to take the Thursday active recovery even lower… this is a recent coach prescribed 30-min active recovery that I did outside:
image

Target is both “spin to win!” and “how low can you go?” on HR/power LOL, instructions were <90W and <120bpm which I exceeded because it was 98F outside.

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A little high, eh?

This is just using TR’s “other activity” feature and using their intensity estimate. It’ll likely be around 10 TSS or in other words, a ride with my kids. Usually this would be a complete rest day for me, but I’m experimenting with an active recovery day in order to keep the legs spinning.

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Looks solid! Good luck and let us know how the race goes

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I’m also interested to hear how these blocks go. I am curious about your weekly schedule. I have tended to do intervals during the week and long Coggan/Z2 rides on the weekends but am considering changing things up. If you kept the weekly hours the same but had the flexibility to shift days around, would you keep this schedule or shuffle things around?

FWIW, I am on a second block of a ‘vo2 booster’ build with the intent to give me some headroom to increase FTP. This morning I went off plan, did a zwift race, and put down a power PR for the reverse KOM and an all time 5min power PR. Like you I am doing 2 hard (coggan/z5) workouts during the week and the rest Coggan/Z2 if I behave myself.

Block 1 Progression:

  • Tuesday (@120%): 30s → 60s → 90s long intervals
  • Thursday (@105%): 7x4m → 8x4m → 5x5m

Block 2 Progression (currently in week 2):

  • Tuesday: 9x2.5m (@118%) → off plan → 9x3m (@115) → 9x3m (@118%)
  • Thursday (@105%): 5x6 ->5x7 → 5x8 → 5x9

I extended block two because of some planned travel changes. I may scrap the last week depending on how next week goes.

Wonder how much your FTP/aerobic endurance will increase by working on your 5min peak?

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I personally like more than one rest or easy day between my two hard days. I want to maximize recovery between the two hard sessions. Therefore, I prefer something like what I listed above:

Day 1: HARD + LSD (if time permits)
Day 2: LSD (~2 hr)
Day 3: LSD (~90min - 2 hr)
Day 4: Rest
Day 5: HARD + LSD
Day 6: LSD (no less than 3hr)
Day 7: Rest

“aerobic” is so much more descriptive of the intent and mapping to Coggan classic level, plus it will quit making me have flashbacks every time I read your posts :wink:

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I blame too much reading about polarized training, threshold training, etc. Just trying to be clear about which zones I am talking about.

just my humble opinion, I think “aerobic” is better than “LSD” as it:

  • describes the intent, an “aerobic” workout where you are breathing easy
  • maps directly to Coggan level 2 which is named “aerobic endurance”
  • maps to polarized zone1 green/easy

and then think of tempo and sweet spot as “advanced aerobic”

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Thank you for your thoughts on the schedule. I am contemplating moving to a weekly split like that, or at least testing it out. If I can recover to smash the hard sessions while increasing aerobic ride volume over the course of a week, that seems like a win.

I guess saying ‘aerobic’ is a little more concise than saying “Coggan-Z2 / Seiler-Z1” every time. :rofl: Its probably a good thing I don’t use WKO as I would add another layer of equivalent terminology that describes the same underlying concept.

“Aerobic endurance” is the same name for Coggan classic/iLevels level 2 and WKO :+1:t3:

I have a hunch FTP won’t drop. Will it increase? I don’t know, but I seem to respond well to VO2 max work. I’m super conflicted on what the best approach is to increase FTP, so I’m not super worried about that metric right now. I’m sitting in a comfortable spot at around 4 w/kg, but I haven’t done much work on my 2-5 min power, which I find is essential for targeting Strava segments, which is all I can do now since racing is kaput.

Yep. I used to follow a more classic Hard / Easy / Hard approach, but I found that one day of easy in between the two hard sessions left me at 80% for the second hard session, and if we want to maximize our time, I’d rather be more rested and hit it hard later in the week. Another thing I’m going to experiment with is coupling a VO2 max session with an LSD ride in order to be more efficient. That would like like 30 min warm up, 5x3 (for example), then 60 minutes of aerobic endurance. All in the span of about 2-2.5 hours.

Spencer in the books. I tried to hit these with a higher than normal cadence to drive HR quicker. Searching for that 90% of HRmax coupled with an elevated respiration rate–this would tell me that I’m likely operating at or very close to VO2 max. My power gradually faded toward the end, but I was still within a couple of percentage points of the power target. With ~10.5 minutes @ or near VO2 max (to my estimation), I’d consider this a well-executed workout.

W/O the fast starts I don’t think 120% would have been hard enough to get me into VO2 max, save for maybe the last minute of the interval. I really like doing these with ERG OFF.

Screen Shot 2020-09-02 at 11.16.15 AM

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After 2 week block of vo2 max (hard-hard-hard–z2) my ftp went up, combined with 2 weeks threshold after that it was definitely my best training block in terms of gains (288->305 with TTE 50->60 min (the time of the test has ended and I still have more in the tank). Recently Kolie Moore mentioned in the podcast that he usually sees the slight FTP increase during these blocks (as far as I remember it was around 2%) and usually it do not causes FTP decline at all.

Ditto, doppelgänger. :grin:

I want to use strava to promote the Bahati Foundation and snagging KOMs is an easy(?) way to do that. I was considering longer FTP-ish segs but there are way more 1-3mins locally, so…no pain, no gain! Will be doing a 2-3 week block of short power stuff. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll have a good string of crowns.

First one yesterday was Wynne. Guh. Training anaerobic power is so different than anything else, including VO2. And forget about repeatable max! I was barely sweating by the end but was wasted, slept like a baby!

I was looking at doing 3 days in a row but I think maybe 1 every 3 days would be more productive. I can already feel my legs giving out on the first interval if I tried tonight.

Awesome. My thinking for my current state is to avoid that dreaded SS/THR plateau. Coming off Polarized and SS blocks, I’m looking to throw in some new stimulus, just to see what happens. Hopefully, as above, September will be a real ripper.

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