This question is more out of academic curiosity and if it’s been posted before or is in a podcast somewhere please drop a link. I’ll start with the question and expand on the content below.
Assuming a goal of absolute peak performance for an individual, and excluding things like time constraints or individual variability in recovery, as a person increases volume at what point would it make sense to reduce the number of intense days per week?
Context:
I know trainer road is really optimized for performance vs time and for me the three intense days per week with 6 days on and one full rest day works great. I have no plans of ramping my volume above 8-12 hours per week right now so this isn’t for me.
let’s say someone wanted to target cat 1 racing and could commit to ramping to 20+ hour training weeks. Assuming normal but optimized recovery, is there some inflection point where you hit a volume threshold per week that overall you would want to only have 2 intense days and more zone 2 instead?
Gotta be. There’s probably also one where 1 intense day is enough (or even more than enough) as well.
Where those points will fall would be highly individual. My guess would be that very, very few people doing more than, say, 12 hours on their loading weeks would be doing more than 2 hard days in those weeks.
Cue half a dozen people immediately telling me they do intervals 4 days per week on 25 hours.
It also depends how sustainable you want the training to be, if you are going for an absolute peak and then recover a huge amount of intensity might be the answer (see that famous bo2 max study).
In my experience it is all dependent on your history and ability to rest/recover. If I can build a volume up over a long period of time (YEARS) then it makes it easy to go from high volume with only one key workout, to shift that Wednesday workout into a Tue/Thur key workouts… while maybe dropping volume a hair. THEN after an adjustment over a month or two you can slowly bring that volume back up over time.
Seems like most of the old training discussions on TR was that 3 key workouts was ‘best’ then you could always have that hard/easy day balance. Eventually after the 23rd 4r endurance ride at 73% on Sunday… it doesn’t leave your legs as fatigued for Tuesdays hard effort. Also doing a sunday endurance ride after a workout on a Saturday, should still be just fine normally.
Or like for me - I had to stop TR this last summer because my 20-25mi trail run on Saturday would leave me pretty shelled until Wednesday (making hard intervals on TR bad)… but by the end of the summer, I could go run another 15miler and feel just fine.
Even with more Zone 2 there are limits on the volume of it you can do before an intense day. If I do a 3-5 hour Z2 day followed by a VO2 max day, then the quality of the latter suffers. Thus my weeks I will do 1 hour Z2 days before my intense days, and at the lower end. I do two intense days a week. Thus the majority of the increased volume each week fits into the 3 remaining days. If I were doing 3 intense days a week, then I would want 3 1 hour Z2 (or recovery) days ahead of the intense days. That is 6 days used up. That only leaves one day to be a Z2 volume day. I am due to hit 14 hours 20 mins this week.
