my place of training currently experiences a bit of a minor heat wave, with temperatures jumping from below 20°C to more than 30 about a week ago and the weather now mixing in increased humidity as well.
As expected, this completely killed my training sessions. I finished a plan three weeks ago after the first A event of the year and a week of recovery and was planning to now ease back into a new plan after a month of TrainNow and mental rest, but over the last week week pretty much any training session felt way harder than it should have been and this got me thinking:
Is there a rule of thumb on how to manually adapt the workouts in TR during such weather events? Something along the lines of : for every 1° above the average temperature of the past 3 weeks, lower your FTP for a workout by 1%? Does the TR team have any guidance on how to best adapt a plan? The normal AI adaptation is unfortunately a bit slow, as FTP as guiding metric is only changing every 4 weeks, at which point the heat wave might be over again, and there’s no way to tell the app upfront „Today is very hot" or „high humidity" so it can make sensible changes by itself.
There isn’t any rule or formula that helps you know exactly how to adjust your workouts based on air temperature.
What I’d recommend doing is getting really in tune with your current HR zones (re-calculate them with a LTHR test on a day that’s not too hot if you haven’t done so in over a year) as well as RPE, and simply adjust the workout intensity on the fly to try to keep your effort in line with how it would feel on a less hot day.
For instance, if you’re doing a threshold workout, you’ll want to feel some fatigue in your legs when you’re pedaling, but you shouldn’t be gasping for air and feeling like you’re absolutely on the limit the entire time. If it feels really hard, dial the intensity back 1-2% at a time until your effort feels right.
The same goes for easy/endurance rides. HR works really well for Z2 workouts, but a lot of athletes do really well with RPE as well. These are really good skills to have and are arguably the best metrics for solid training. Power is, of course, the objective king, but only in scenarios where your power zones are valid, and they change when your core temp gets really high.
On the days when it’s really, really hot and you aren’t going to be able to keep yourself cool, it might be best to stick to easy riding and focus on HR or RPE. You’ll likely be getting some good heat stimulus on those days, which is sort of the holy grail of aerobic adaptation, so it’s not all a loss!
Thanks for the suggestions. Guess it really comes back to manually tweaking the intensity to HR/RPE to reflect the challenges of a given day.
And I guess it also works the other way around if cold days feel „too easy" after a while. So whatever I may „loose" in watts during the heat will return with the cold as adaptation happens anyway, just the numbers don’t always match a given days performance. I don’t even want to think about all those threads appearing in the forum once summer really kicks in and folks complain about their FTP prediction dropping due to the changes the heat made necessary. Stay strong, eddie!
Heat can really get in the way of training. It will prevent you from hitting your normal power targets and if that continues for long enough, make you get weaker. I’ve personally always found this effect to be larger than the benefits I get from heat adaptation.
If you had an event coming up, I’d say move inside for your hard/intensity days so you still nail them, and keep the endurance rides outside, but using HR and RPE and accepting slightly lower power targets if needed. Also eating lots and lots of salt. So much salt.
Conversely if you have nothing on the horizon and were just planning on noodling around outside… go for it. Noodle around outside but use HR and RPE and accept slightly lower power targets if needed.
Also eat lots and lots of salt. So much salt.
I’m currently enjoying a similar heat wave. I eat a few grams a salt after each ride outside. Otherwise I start passing out whenever I stand up.
Part of the issue is that I am already training inside for the hard days as there are no roads well suited for intervals around, and it’s hot inside as well (apartment right under a slate roof). Guess I should just skip intensity for most days and ride endurance outside trying to preserve the form somehow.
