But as a coach I know what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for others… which is why I am interested in a different approach. I personally know some elite runners that go VERY slow on their training runs, however most do a pace that was borderline uncomfortable.
I am interested if you do minutes or distance? Riding at 50% will be less distance than compared to a higher intensity… or do you put in more time and are on the bike longer? Do you do higher intensity on your hard days? More intervals?
Depends on the time. If your riding is limited to 1h sessions - maybe. If you are doing 5-6h rides - not so much. Calcium signaling, number of muscle contractions and stuff.
In principle hard to agree that doing vo2 max work 5 days a week will get you great results in terms of numbers - Hickson has shown that it will elicit amazing results.
I think the key here is riding so easy that you still find it easy. And it’s immensely important to know what easy feels like. I think a lot of people lie a bit what feels easy.
My FTP is 315w, and LT1 at around 250w.
For me 180w doesn’t feel like anything most 9/10 days, it’s just spinning the legs. Go up to 200w on the other hand and I feel a big difference and now I actually feel like I am riding. Bump that up to 220w and it’s not “easy” anymore. It’s not hard, but it’s not easy.
So I tend to try to ride at around 180-200w when I do my endurance rides, and that keeps me fresh for the hard days.
But this takes time, last fall I would say that 160w felt as easy as 180w feels this year. So definitely some progress there.
Last year I was at about 300w FTP and 235w LT1, so it’s not linear feeling when it comes to endurance “easy” I believe at least.
And again, some days 200w is easy, some days I have to go as low as 160w. Varies from day to day, fuelling, previous training that week etc.
Yes, you will - just study the science, vs. repeating the popular mantra of influencers.
When it comes to training, there is no such thing as a free lunch. More is always more, and less is always less. Sometimes you want more and sometimes you want less, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re getting more from less.
Thank you for pointing that out. I was wrongly remembering that rest of the training days was also running at vo2 max and it was running as far as participants could in 40 min.
Reached the same raw FTP number, but back in 16-17 could repeatedly hold FTP for 45-65 minutes, versus about 30-40 minutes this past season. Anaerobic repeatability was higher back then versus last season. Back then was my second season training, mid fifties. Trying to do ‘more structure’ the TR way in 2018-2019 just made me tired and slower, plus I dropped down to ~5 hours/week because ‘more structure on a trainer’ was suppose to be better
So it is possible to do crazy hard workouts for a “long” time. Without getting too tired. For me that was doing short 20-min above-threshold (anaerobic) efforts in the morning, and afternoons doing longer and longer threshold work. And taking breaks whenever I needed them, which inevitably would lead to another fitness bump from letting the body recover/adapt.
IMHO the art of coaching yourself, or others, is figuring that out. And as I discovered, if you are patient enough, there is some merit in consistently doing less but I had to make those challenging (55-60% was a waste, but negative splitting 66-79% for 100 minutes plus warmup/cooldown turned into my personal sweet spot)
Lower pic has a lot of yellow lines = more workouts in the 100-150 TSS range vs '16-17 season. Got ‘lazy’ this past season and didn’t do any long/hard rides (red lines)… and my coach did encourage me to do them.
And a single >=.9 IF workout versus a sea of red triangle high intensity workouts in 16-17.
Doesn’t time horizon matter in relation to this statement? Or are you just speaking about the effect a single training session has on a person’s body from a physiological/biological perspective?
For instance, if you ran a study where you gave a person 5 one-hour vo2max workouts over the course of 1 week vs 5 one hour Z2 rides I would agree that more = more
But if you tried to administer that same protocol over 6 months and I would think you’d have an athlete in a hole, who likely couldn’t recover, probably wouldn’t/couldn’t ride, and would likely have less TSS over a 6 month window than a rider that dosed their intensity appropriately. So in this case, wouldn’t less = more?
I get the literal interpretation of your words, but most of us here are trying to figure out a practical application of all the science … which can often seem contradictory to the lay-person.
You’re arguing a different point. It was suggested there was no difference between ~50% and ~70% in terms of fitness benefit. As @The_Cog points out, that’s not true.
He isn’t saying there isn’t merit in riding recovery pace, or very low endurance (at least not here), just that you can’t claim to be getting the same adaptive stimulus out of it.
IMHO the art of coaching yourself, or others, is figuring that out. And as I discovered, if you are patient enough, there is some merit in consistently doing less but I had to make those challenging (55-60% was a waste, but negative splitting 66-79% for 100 minutes plus warmup/cooldown turned into my personal sweet spot)