Yes, you can almost certainly bias things toward improving cardiovascular vs. muscular metabolic fitness to some degree by manipulating your training. The thing is, there is considerable overlap, and you need both, so at the end of the day, it’s all good.
Far and away the most important factor is mitochondrial respiratory capacity.
ETA: Re. point #1: once upon a time, I reasoned that since I could maintain ~90% of VO2max for >1 h, I should focus on raising my “ceiling”. 18 wk of 3 d/wk Hickson intervals later, I hit my highest VO2max ever (5.45 L/min at 67.5-68 kg). I then raced the Texas state TT, and got my butt kicked.
Moral of the story? Train for performance, and let your physiology sort itself out. In particular, don’t underestimate the importance of specificity (specificity, specificity, specificity, specificity…is there an echo in here?).
True! But for a 40k TT or a crit race, it is maybe easier to ‘find’ the specific workouts you want to do to improve your performance. What if you do very long gravel or granfondo events (5-8h events with A LOT of climbing). What do you want to specify their? Endurance? Climbing? And even those climbs could be 60-90min climbs or 5-10min over FTP climbs. What do you focus for those races? Build an aerobic engine and then 8weeks of specific intervals that mimic the hills/mountains in that race?
If so, in no particular order my general recommendations would be 1) just try different things and see what works, 2) find something or somebody trustworthy to help guide you, and/or 3) develop sufficient understanding of exercise physiology principles that you can guide yourself.
What I would definitely not recommend is continually jumping on the next bandwagon that comes along (“Maffetone”…“40/20s”…“sweetspot”…“polarized”…“lactate testing”…“zone 2”…“Norwegian double threshold”…etc.) and/or expecting miracles, as there none.
Yes, that is more correcly what I was trying to say! Thx for the good answer @The_Cog, seems some good advice. My goal is to use some insights I have collected from different sources and guide myself in my own planning. A-event is still 6 months away.
I also have some plans already from the past in my trainingpeaks. Even a base/build (Epic Build your base/foundation 20 weeks) by Hunter Allen, but never used it. Still in doubt to start this one, although it seems good, maybe to much intensity. And by ‘self’ coaching it is maybe easier to develop a weekly schedule based on time available then follow a rigid plan.
First 4-6 weeks is base build. Use Z2 rides (low, mid, or Lt1) depending on time available). And then incorporate after a few weeks some tempo work, later on sweetspot.
Goal is also to do every 8-10 days a more intensive rides (structured, or zwift race). I will use WKO5 to track my TSS, Tis, TTE on when to decide when to go to a more intensive aerobic block to start working on FTP work. Or even before a 3 week vo2max block…