Mid-Volume plan High-Volume TSS

Good morning,

just wanted to confirm a thought i had on increasing the TSS in the MV plan

Last year i was typically around 550 TSS/week. I wanted to maintain that or slightly higher into this new season.

The HV plan is right in line with the TSS i am after, however, I chose SSBI MV due to the length of the weekday rides. Typically MV week day rides are 60 minutes (75 for a few of them) long while the HV are regularly up to 90 minutes. I need to be off the bike by 6:00am so 60 minutes suits me far better.

To increase TSS i am doing 2 things:

  1. adding in Pettit on one of the off days (Friday). Pretty sure this was recommended on the pod.
  2. Swapping the weekend rides of the HV plan of the similar week in place of the recommended MV rides.

#2. is my biggest question as the MV plan is recommending to do O/U on Saturday and the HV plan is only longer Sweet spot work, these are obviously different intensities. I am assuming the O/U are only used to help reduce the time on the bike and still yield aerobic base so it should be a suitable swap.

Thoughts? Am i on the right path?

Thanks,
Mike

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You’re pretty much in the same mindset as me currently. I chose not to do the SS high volume plan due to the length of the rides on the trainer during the week - I really can’t see myself enjoying that - one hour is kind of my normal limit. My normal tss during the year is 750-950, so this is how I’ve been getting 750 or so on the MV plan.

  • zone 2 ride on Monday
  • sub in the 1 hour SS ride from the high volume plan on the Wednesday instead of the Z2 ride. This creates a nice 3 day SS block similar to the HV plan
  • zone 2 ride on Friday
  • for Saturday I did a 2 hour easy ride in the am and then did my TR workout in the pm.

I’m also open to doing a long Z2 ride on the weekend instead of a planned TR session just to break things up.

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i like the idea and have been considering a second workout in the evening like lazy mountain to get some TSS and not affect the next morinings workout but the only time i get with my wife is 7:30-bed time (which is early due to waking up at 4:30.

That’s a boat load of TSS!

i will probably have a look at the idea of subing in a Wednesday work out as well.
I do hope to get in 1 very easy outdoor ride a week on top of this all like you said, that is my only opportunity for a 2x day.

Thanks for the response!

Adding in Pettit is fine. Swapping a longer SS workout for a shorter OU/Threshold one also makes sense. As you say, the lower volume plans basically use intensity to offset the reduced time.

Other ways to add TSS are just extending the cooldown on workouts, even 10 minutes extra per day adds up over the week. Or swap to a longer version of a workout on the mornings when you do wake up early. You can also do 2 a days, but I do start to question the benefit of these if they’re just z2 riding, I know personally I would get more benefit from doing strength training or pilates than from doing something like Pettit on a day when I’ve already done a harder ride. I try to avoid the temptation to chase TSS for the sake of it!

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I’m just starting something similar. Not far enough in to recommend anything, but I only have about 1:30 during the week and 2 during the weekend which has led me to my setup.

I’m doing SSB Mid and adding in endurance in a few spots.

An extra 30 minutes of endurance after the workouts Tuesday and Thursday.

A 1:30 endurance ride Wednesday and on Friday.

The Saturday O/U workout I’ll do 30 minutes of endurance aftrwrward.

Gets me to 10 hours a week there. Just completed my first week so like I said not enough complete to tell if I’ll need to scale back or what improvements it might generate. But just an example of what someone else is doing.

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…erm, what?

100TSS is all you can possibly do in one hour.

You’re only doing one hour rides.

…750-950 in a week? There’s not going to be any Z2 in that.

Ha ha, sorry I meant to say my normal tss during the season is 750-950 but is all outside riding! I ride around 12-15 hours per week, some bigger weeks too.

This is my first experience doing an indoor training plan.

Edit: I just checked how many hours I did on my 950 tss weeks and it’s around 18-23.

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what about doing O/U one week and adding endurance the remainder of your extra time, then doing the Sweet Spot the next weekend? Best of both worlds

Brendan

The usual recommendation is to not try and get the same amount of TSS from riding indoors, as you did outdoors. The concentrated TR workouts create more fatigue than you’d think from the TSS.

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Yeah, I can see how you wouldn’t want to mimic the same outdoor tss when doing a TR plan. Not all tss is created equal! I’m hitting the low end of a typical outdoor tss on the plan. Typical outdoor tss has been 700-950, and I’ve been doing 650-675 tss on SSBMV1. So far it seems about right, even with being 5-10w higher on each interval. I may have gained fitness already after 3 weeks - I’m curious to test again after this plan.

My FTP coming into the plan was low for me, so I expect it to go up over the first few weeks.

I did SSBHV last season and it went great for me, but because I love experimenting I am planning on doing a modified version of SSBMV this season.

I intend to supplement the TSS by doing the following things.

  1. Swapping to + versions of workouts. For instance I’ll replace Taylor -2 with Taylor
  2. Adding a relatively easy Friday workout every week - possibly even easier than Pettit, something like Lazy Mountain. Will depend how I’m feeling as I progress
  3. Using extend cooldown functionality to add 20-30 minutes of endurance at the end of 2-3 rides per week (typically the harder interval sessions)

I intend to be fairly flexible with these modifications as I don’t want to overdue things. I may attempt to make things a bit closer to polarization by extending the easy rides significantly - particularly in SSBMV2 where you’re doing threshold and above work. In those weeks I want to make sure my aerobic base is strong so will be looking at things like Fletcher or Gibbs instead of Pettit on Wednesdays to really keep an eye on my aerobic decoupling

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HOw is this going for you three weeks in?

Good so far. 9, 10 and 7 hours for the last three weeks (vs. prior average of 5 over the last few years). I had to skip two workouts last week due to work but adhering to my plan quite well.

I’m not as tired and fatigued as I would have thought, and so far the one recovery day on Monday has been more than sufficient to get back in the groove.

Anecdotally my HR during endurance rides Wed/Fri has been dropping already for similar powers and the “over” portion of my O/U has seemed to get easier too. This quick improvement though is probably coming from the fact that I was just up ~280W and after a small break dropped to 267W. So I’m probably just getting back to prior fitness levels.