Doing 100 TSS/week of intervals and then suddenly adding in 300 TSS/week of unstructured group rides is not something Fascat or others will deal with. Look at the alternatives - they all deal with it to varying degrees but none are going to work for you if you want to do 2-3 of them a week. You need a person to make those decisions
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Fair enough. You’ve solidified my decision then. The library it is 
.
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Really? I thought the FasCat in-season plans have two days of unstructured riding. Right now my coach has 275-325 TSS of unstructured group riding (Wed and Sat) on the calendar, plus another 3 days of workouts for roughly another 225-275 TSS. And I’m at grand masters+ age. Looks similar to what I saw with the FC in-season road plan.
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Insee the value in this…but I will say I took multiple weeks as an offseason almost completey off the bike around new years, and slowly ramped back up. Also mid summer I was feeling a little worn down and took almost a full two weeks rest/easy riding. I’ve tried to be very good about taking every rest week as scheduled as well…if’s not like I’ve been smashing for 12 months without a break.
Just to give everyone an example, I just loaded up my FasCat “16 Weeks of SS” plan. It’s 7-9hrs/wk and (with a few exceptions here and there) it looks like:
M: Yoga
T: SS/Threshold
W: Tempo/SS
TH: Z2
F: Yoga
Sa: SS
Su: Z2/Group Ride
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I haven’t looked at their off the shelf plans in a couple years so they may have changed. But…they didn’t used to have that type of sudden volume increase and the vast preponderance of volume coming in group rides
And just to be clear, having a coach design it in is what I’m suggesting he needs. Exactly as your coach has done for you. An off the shelf plan will be hard pressed to work with his schedule
This, actually…is not far off from what I do nearly every week.
My schedule is normally:
Tue: TR workout
Wed: TR workout (or fast group ride, deleting either tue or wed workout)
Thurs: TR workout
Sat: Group ride resembling the TR threshold workout…try to spend a lot of time sitting on the front at threshold
Sun: Zone 2 day
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From the beginning (2016) I followed rules like these (https://www.joinbasecamp.com/training-plans):
and then age adjusting stuff.
For example here is FasCat week7 of the 18 weeks of sweet spot:
and ended up doing this:
Edits:
- move Sunday to Tuesday
- move Tue to Wed and do ~45 minutes of sweet spot as hero pulls on a group ride
- drop the Thur 55 TSS endurance ride
- do the big 274 TSS group ride on Sunday morning
All outside. After 3 months of doing stuff like that I broke thru my plateau. Preserve most of the progressions, do longer rides on the weekends. Cut back on endurance if I need additional recovery.
It was base, where TSS progression is a pretty good guide. Week before was 505 TSS, that week 563 TSS, the week after 577 TSS with a 7 hour group ride. I’ve seen results from one big ride a month.
Thats what I meant by treating the off-the-shelf plan as guardrails. Its pretty easy. I hired a coach because of integrating weight lifting and cycling, in order to minimize making mistakes while working on long-term development of my aerobic engine.
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Duration x intensity x frequency
Are you saying that you kept yourself capped to two days of intensity per week (meaning those TR workouts were mainly lower intensity), kept the hours in check and substituted easier rides anytime you weren’t feeling good?
I don’t believe that you did.
Also, you can’t have a rapid 80% plus jump in weekly TSS over your base training and have most of that added TSS be intense. Your body isn’t going to adapt to that well, at least not without including lots of rest after 2-3 weeks to let it get used to the higher load.
every week
That’s no bueno.
To borrow (and butcher) a phrase from @empiricalcycling, you sound like someone that uses a fatigue security blanket. You seem to think that you need to keep your TSS high most of the time. That reduces your adaptations. And taking a few weeks off the bike per year isn’t enough. You need to use micro and meso cycles to give your body periodic energy to adapt to your training.
Please give this episode a listen. You Are Not Your CTL.
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No, definitely not. TR plans are 4 days of intensity for mid volume. I HAVE kept it to that, or less depending on how I feel.
Yeah but perhaps that’s too much intensity for you, especially long term?
Also, again, all intensity is not equal and the duration of the intensity matters. You were far exceeding the TSS goals of your TR plans. If you could only handle or did ~300 TSS during winter then kept the same volume of plan and added a bunch of TSS on top (another ~200).
TR plans, especially at anything other than high volume, already have lots of intensity. Adding more on top, plus more stress to your body through other training, ain’t helping. And you can’t just look at the time at the upper zones in your group ride. If you had a VO2 workout scheduled with 20 minutes in zone, and instead did a group ride with 20 min VO2 you can’t cash those equal. This is because your group ride was longer than 20 minutes. You might have had an hour near threshold as well in there, plus another hour plus in lower zones. So it really should replace two workouts.
And even if the training was right, if the recovery wasn’t super on point, your lack of regularly occurring easy weeks means you’re not really going to improve.
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Do you need to have a paid subscription to TP to load these plans or can you do them with the free version?
Thanks
Load em with free TP. Limitations on moving things around beyond a day or two.
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Thanks
Yea this is in line with what I’m thinking…I really shouldnt be attempting to do any of the TR workouts. Maybe one a week max.
A weekend day of intensity, and 1 mid week day of intensity.
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Agree, but I think he might benefit from some of Join’s features. When he puts in that he going to be doing a 3 hour hard ride at the weekend, I think he is going to be surprised how much my rest before and after (In Join not only can you tell it your availability, but also when you have a ride planned and the intensity, and as Join adapts the plan and workout, rather than just the workouts intensity, so the it will remove a V02 session from the day before a planned ride (if it’s long and hard) and put it a few days before and after, if that workout is important)
Also I think he’d benefit from the Guard rails that Join provides … “your doing to much, have some rest” comes up, I had this for a few days after a 10 hour gravel bike race, as the race was harder than expected, it adjusted the plan and gave me more rest (which was ok as I was injured) but reminded me that I was doing to much
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I don’t know if you listen Empirical Cycling’s podcast but he does one-off consults to point people in the right direction. You could try doing that to see if he can spot something in your data and suggest some changes.
@Abe_Froman - This is an expansion on what I was trying to explain earlier too. As @WombleHunter noted - I think Join could help you by setting those guard rails. You just need to be sure you’re entering in those planned rides well in advance so Join knows how to adjust the days before and after, and you’ll have to listen to the advice it gives. Sometimes that’s the hardest part!
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Ok so I’m officially on Join. I have garmin/strava connected…does anyone know if there is a way to import previous workouts for it to account for?
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