I figure this has been covered but my searching didn’t turn anything up.
I’ve started doing SSBHV and looking forward I can see I’m going to run into issues not with the weekly volume, but with the 1h45m and 2h rides on weekdays. With my schedule, even the 1h30m rides are difficult to fit in M-F.
That said, I have all the time in the world on Saturday and Sunday, when the rides are also still capped at only 2h.
Any advice on how to go about trimming down weekday workouts and adding equivalent work onto the weekend workouts?
I don’t know if it’s 1-for-1 TSS replacements so I come out whole on the week, or if I should try to cut entire intervals and just do them before/after the scheduled weekend work, or if I should be upping the intensity of the weekday workouts to make up for making them shorter, or, or …
Thanks!
Stephen
I would make the plan fit your life. Just go for a minus version of the workout that fits your available time.
You can leave the rest as it is until you’ve settled into the plan. You’ll still get plenty fit, doing most of the prescribed work.
Then consider to use a plus version in the weekend workouts, or adding a second aerobic or recovery workout on that day (Dans/Lazy Mountain/Pettit)
That said, if you can consistently not hit the volume, a MV plan may give you more fitness due to the higher intensity by design
Do the @Jonathan plan: SSBMV during the week, Monday to Friday, perhaps eliminating one day for a day off. Then you could add a complementary outdoor workout or two on the weekend. Make these structured with TR outdoor workouts, or just ride, your choice.
I have the exact issue, the 2 hour workouts in SSBHV are killer during the week. I have Monday’s off, so shift my whole plan to start on Wednesday, but still end up waking up at 4am Wednesday and Friday to get the time in. If you continue with 2 hour workouts during the week, DO NOT SHORT CHANGE YOUR SLEEP! I have made that mistake too many times.
I’m also trying SSBHV for the first time and definitely plan to shuffle things to stack not so much for day of week, but for weather. The nice thing is they are all so similar and interchangeable that I don’t think you have the same worries as with MV where it may be quite hard to stack Tues/Thurs back-to-back, for example.
My thoughts on rain day options: (maybe call it weekday options for you when you run out of time)
- First choice - take rest day if I have one coming +/- a day of where it would normally be due in the plan
- Second choice - pull a 90 min workout indoors, preferably the easy weekly Z2 ride - push 2 hr rides to an outside day as much as possible
- Third choice - cut down a workout to a minus version and make it up later outside with an extra interval and/or Z2 TSS
- Fourth choice - skip a workout and make it up by adding mix of Z2 TSS and maybe extra intervals to a 2hr wkd SS interval workout
I keep the plan sitting in my calendar with an empty week buffer between today and the plan. Then for the next few days, I look at weather and start dragging stuff into the near-term 3-4 days window drawing from the next 3-4 workouts in the plan, so I’m generally following the progression week-to-week, even though the order is mixed up a lot. If this approach gets me doing work that I know I won’t do indoors, i figure it’s a win.
I think most people would also say that if you have to cut down those intervals 30-60 mins a couple times within a week, and you make that up doing an extra 30-60 mins of intervals, or 1-2 hours of Z2 added to your 2 hr interval rides, you will probably be coming out ahead assuming you can handle it, and have any interest in long distance endurance.
Coming into this plan, I have recently been trying metric centuries where I stick a long SS interval workout in the middle of it, for example, and have been regularly hitting 1.5-3 hr power PRs doing that - they feel like productive rides. Remains to be seen if I can do that and then followup with 2 hrs of 0.8IF SS the next day, but we’ll see… sounds like this is something you’d be doing a good bit of with your proposed approach!