Low volume plans

I am currently doing low volume short power build. I have a question regarding low volume plans.

Due to my schedule I wake up between 3 and 3:30am and attempt to get on the bike sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 depending on the days workout because I work at 5:45 6 days/week. I also have races most weekends and require 1-2 days/ wk in the gym.

With these constraints in mind would I be better off waking up at 3am on days where I am scheduled for 1.5 hr workout (thus losing 30min of sleep) or am I better off adjusting the schedule so I am doing 1hr variants from the low volume plan and cherry picking an additional 1hr workout from the mid volume plan per week to make up the tss. Would I be leaving any adaptations on the table that are only gained during the last 30 min of a 1.5 hr workout?

I have done a search on the FB page and in the forum and have not found an answer that satisfies my requirements. Any insights or recollections from past episodes would be very useful.

Cheers

Yes, but we train when we can - if you can’t do the LV plans as prescribed, you can’t do ‘em. I wouldn’t beat myself up about it. If you can’t go to bed earlier or slot them in at another point in the day, go ahead and reduce the time with a -1, -2 or select a similar workout with a shorter time allocated.

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Something is sometimes better than nothing, like said above. Doing -1 or -2 is better than sleeping in.
If you really want to get it in you will, I have mornings I would rather sleep til 6 but I’m up at 4 am to get a 90 minute ride in.

I suppose the real question is:

the basic question is:

  1. 4 workouts 1 hr each at 377 tss
    Or
  2. 3 workouts ranging from 1-1.5hr at 377 tss

What are the adaptive differences

Same intensity

Do whatever you can do consistently, that’s your best option. Because, the hair you are trying to split, I suspect is fairly small from the perspective of your overall training. If you can only do 4 x 1 hr do it, but if you can do the plan as it is laid out, well there is a reason the plan is structured the way it is, so do that.

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If you are doing races on weekends, you are not going to be short on TSS. So don’t worry too much about that.

The minus variants are designed to hit the same energy systems as the programmed workout, so you should be OK overall.

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TSS isn’t like that, it levels all cycling activity for broad comparison.

The specific adaptations depend on the workout format and time in zones, and vary accordingly.

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I just wanted to echo this, you’re training, doing gym work and racing, I wouldn’t worry too much about losing 30 mins on the trainer, you need to recover too remember!

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You might want to have a look at this thread where some of the same things are discussed:

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