Hi all, I spent the winter doing tons of z2 70%ftp training, I sit at around 3.9w/kg, now as a spring approaches I wonder what intervals to do, I do not plan to do any races, just want to improve my hour power through the year, give me an advice, what will be best to do in the fitst months of spring: treshold? VO2? sweetspot maybe? or something else entirely? advice on what to do next in also welcome, thanks and sorry for my english
It really depends on where you are coming from and what you level of commitment is, Iâve seen young guys that are committed jump straight into 3x15m threshold intervals using erg mode and cruise straight through the plateau of 4-4.5 w/kg, other people with less durability and less hard efforts under their belt should start smaller with workouts like Tweed, Frissel, where the durations are shorter and you do many smaller intervals as a stepping stone to eventually being able to do 10+ minutes at âftpâ.
Itâs a bit of a balancing act because âftpâ as detected by TRâs ai or intervals.icu as eFTP is often suitable for planning intervals but not a true power target for a 1 hour TT due to not having the durability (yet) to actually ride for 1 hour at that power. Getting up to longer expressions of your true FTP should be a seasonal goal, but itâs really common to see people with an effective âftpâ of say 350w but they have never done that for 1 hour straight because there is no testing ride or race or parcours in their life where it is possible.
So you build up to it with the so called fractional utilization exercises as listed above, as well as stuff like over unders 30/30s 45/45s to which some people respond to very well.
The key is to build up your skill on the trainer in your setup and continue to leverage your process (and maybe more importantly the ability to line up bottles next to your trainer) to do some very difficult intervals interlaced with the roughly the same kind of volume you have been doing.
In adaptation terms you have trained the central factors quite a lot with the volume base of zone 2 as well as built some peripheral vascular framework, but what you need to then do is leverage all of that to really reach out and grab PR power and challenge yourself and your ability to drink lots of bottles and just keep dumping power onto the bike. In doing lots of z2 you have likely not experienced much riding in which lactate levels are high and are being constantly managed by your body systems, the z2 has given you good base to begin building this back up but itâs up to you to reach out and take it and really prove to yourself that you can drink enough bottles and suffer enough intervals to the point at which the body can be both excellent at managing at low lactate levels and at high lactate levels.
Trainerroad is really good for building you up with progressive overload and prescribing intervals that are achievable enough to build up that confidence such that you feel you can always do the work prescribed, If you start a TR build plan give it a few weeks for progression levels to catch up and eventually the adaptive training will be able to give you great progressions which will keep you growing steadily and ideally never hit you with anything that feels impossible.
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Interesting! thanks for your ansver
IMO, a pretty tried and true progression would be something like this (simplified):
Block 1: SS â SS bursts and longer Time in Zone
Block 2: Threshold progressing TiZ â maybe throwing in some intro VO2 workouts
Block 3: VO2s (classic 3-5m intervals, high cadence)
Block 4: Threshold progression again (hopefully at a higher FTP after VO2) and throwing in any riding/race specific intervals or rides
This is generally what has worked best for me the past several years. I mostly race crits so some things like 30/30s might not matter to you if your goal is just âto be more fitâ but things like that can be fun and make you faster in ways that might not be obvious.
Let me know if you want more details or if you give more details about your riding and goals I can be more specific but I think thatâs a decent framework.
No need to apologize, I wouldnât have noticed anything off if you hadnât mentioned it.
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Hey there,
Weâd recommend firing up a Plan Builder plan. You can enter what your fitness goals are, the time you have available to train each week, and Plan Builder will take care of the rest of the details for you. 
You got some ideas here. What you are looking for is a basic âbuildâ phase. Look up plans for base-build-peak. You could consult Greg Lemondâs 1985 book, any of Joe Frielâs books, or the Time Crunched book. You could do a basic sweetspot - threshold - vo2 build as outlined in this topic.
Honestly, just do the basics and it will get you 98% of the way there. If you research too many fancy options and intervals scenarios, you can get lost in the details.
Personally, I hit my best numbers so far just building out my TTE (time to exhaustion) at 90-95% of FTP. I built it out to 4x20. Personally, I donât seem to get a big boost from VO2max intervals.