Something I noticed while reading up on recommended literature (coggan/allen) on training with a powermeter:
Recovery valleys in their example workouts seem to be a lot higher than is usually the case with chad’s TR workouts. Something like 2x20 SweetSpot Intervals would use up to 70% FTP as “recovery” intensity, while TR defaults to 40% lots of times.
Is there a specific reasoning behind the different recovery intensities? How does this influence the desired training adaptations?
I personally find that the recoveries are too easy at 50% most of the time with the exception of the VO2 workouts. When I am in resistance mode, I recover just fine (based on HR coming down, RPE, and ability to hit my target power in all the sets) at 60-70% FTP. If I am in Erg mode and do the prescribed recovery I recover in about half the time so scrub ahead to the next interval. I am interested to hear other’s experiences with this too
The intervals are where you get the adaptations that the workout is aiming to stimulate so why bother making the recoveries anything other than a light spin? This just allows you to perform each set of intervals to the best of your ability then and gain the most benefit from the workout.
That makes perfect sense to me - its mainly about the intervals. The TSS in the recoveries is largely incidental, I think.
It depends on the workout goals I think - sure in some cases you just want to max out in the intervals, but for something like Flume, or an over-under, I think it’s important to consider that the peaks should be hard, and the valleys deliberately don’t allow for much recovery. In the case of 2x20s though, I think you’d clearly want nothing more than a light spin between efforts to get as fresh as possible for the 2nd interval.
There is a difference in the types of recovery though.
A recovery valley in an over-under is a lot different to the recovery between intervals.
In an over-under you are only allowing yourself to recover from the peak, but you are still working hard and are part of the interval.
The recovery between intervals is complete recovery where you should be barely working at all.
Agree with that - all depends on the definition of where the “interval” is and where the rest is, agree that in between structure going very light makes sense, whatever that structure may be.