While I don’t use HR much, I do think about the implications of the higher HR on stress and TTE. I’m a big user of caffeine for racing or for hard training efforts. For responders, the data is pretty clear that it’s a significant (and legal) performance boost and my experience matches that. But, I don’t think the performance is “free” when it’s cranking the HR up significantly even if RPE is reduced. I don’t worry about it if I’m doing a 3-4 hour race or training session, but many of my races are 5+ hours. Is loading up on caffeine at the start of an 8+ hour race going to help when it’s pushing the HR up early or is that just making you stronger early at the cost of fading faster? I’ve done a little googling on the subject and didn’t find anything useful, would be an interesting study if there isn’t already something out there.
I still use caffeine for all racing even though I suspect there must me a cost to the higher HR. If the race is under ~4 hours, I’ll load up on ~400mg before the start and I’ll be hitting the rev limiter at the start. If it’s a long race, I’ll do 100mg at the start and then ~50mg per an hour to keep it a bit more mellow.
Ha - yes, 100%. I love caffeine and believe in its positive impact on performance. With that in mind, my heart rate is also very sensitive to caffeine so I take it in much smaller dosages than most people. I’m familiar with the mg/kg equations, but it’s also very dependent on person. If I take too much, like you mentioned, it has my heart rate bumping up against the limiter. My max HR is 190. On a longer race I may reasonably average 165-170. If I take too much caffeine I can easily be higher than that early on with a moderate effort. I’ll have maybe 75-100mg, 90 mins before the race, maybe a bit more at race start, then around 30-40 mg/hr starting 1-2 hrs in.
I also have to be mindful of caffeine during easy weekday 1-2 hr endurance sessions. I’ll usually just take 40-50mg before. If I take too much, my heart rate will bump up/over 150bpm on easier endurance sessions where it should be (and I prefer it to be) 130-140ish.
Having read now all/most of the comments from the threat opener and others advising, I’d come to the conclusion, the threat opener should cancel his TR subscription. What he wants is a tool based “torturing” of his body and health - no matter if a good history in running or not. The fact neglecting even a rest day caught my attention and let me believe - oh gosh - this won’t end well. TR is there to give us a structured approach to training with the right dosage and time invest.
I understand heat acclimation and heat training. Neither of which are substitutes for actually cycling and illicit completely different adaptations. All you are doing is supporting my point that heartrate is not indicative of the work that you are doing, or at least, likely subject to way too many variables to be able to use in an AI/ML model to make training decisions.
I have been on and off cycle training for the past couple years due to “life events”. I assume my baseline based off previous FTPs and always manually start from 300 an adjust the PL of the first couple workouts manually. Personally, I don’t really see a problem in this or what this whole thread is all about - sounds more like a rant to stir up drama. You have 4 weeks to see if you like TR. You have a good support team willing to help. You have this great forum as a resource (for free) and still it sounds like you’re a bit salty about the experience not living up to your expectations. Cancel, if you’re not happy or trust the process for those free 4 weeks and decide whether or not TR is worth your money. But to say “New user experience isn’t great” after a couple of days using TR is a bit rich imho. *TakesFanBoyHatOff
We’ve all been there at a certain point making the jump from being mister tempo all the time rider to starting structured training and finding it too easy.
Try using the trainnow function to do a couple of harder workouts when you are feeling up to it, it’s not so much that TR is unaware of your desire to throw down, it’s just not part of your progression at this time.
Feeling quite a bit better. I’ve already had a 14w ftp bump the other week and been adjusting to the new zones. Dropped a few pounds too. The new block starts next week and it looks to start at around 400 TSS which would be a big drop from the 600-700TSS that I’ve been preferring. I’ll see if it adjusts otherwise I’ll keep adjusting.
When your FTP power number goes up, your TSS goes down for same execution of a workout.
TSS will cycle up and down are you move from recovery back to build etc.
I also just signed up here and can see that my all my PL is 1.0 and future workouts in my plan really looks too easy compared to what I did prior. I was hoping that TR would analyze my workouts during onboarding and becides setting a eFTP also suggest the progression levels?
No, PL only change up by doing workouts, if “todays” workout looks to easy, use the alternatives to pick on that looks more in line with you abilities, future workouts will get harder as you PL increase
A fair estimate of your FTP is always a good thing. Initial PL will start at 1.0 regardless. If you feel like the suggested workouts are way to easy, just replace them with a harder alternative. Soon enough you will be challenged, it may take a week or two until PL catches up. Remember that not all workouts should kill you. Two or three intense workouts a week is enough of a challenge, any additional workouts are best spent in z1/z2.
The cost should be that you are burning more carbs, less fat, so you would have to compensate for that by either taking in more carbs, which can be trained, just like you are training your body to get used to the caffeine. But basically you are likely are less efficient in the sense that for longer races you would like to be able to get more energy from fat instead of carbs as these are more easily depleted.
Since you are using different doses for different length of races, it seems you have that under control, well done.
I did a Gran Fondo last weekend and at some point I could tell I was fatigued and would have needed a little caffeine boost. Well me being stupid I took my phone out to take a pic just to hit another persons back wheel and I got an adrenaline boost from crashing… that brought my attention back in no time and some road rash to remind me to bring some caffeine gels next time.
And this is only one side of the story, being more alert being one of the benefits but it seems there is more evidence out there that suggests that caffeine indeed also increases performance, I recently read that in a road bike magazine. It will be interesting to see whether more studies can proof that caffeine increases performance or by how much.
If you can find them in the podcast archives, there was a point where Nate was taking huge amounts of caffeine while racing. I’ll bet there was some research talk in those episodes, but it was quite a while back.
Just completed 7 weeks and going on the next rest week which will be a bore. 7 weeks no rest days and I’m almost maxed out on sweet spot. Looks like the highest might be 11.x I’ll probably need to up my workout time for those days to get more stimulus but that will be after this next week.
The weight has been coming off pretty quick as in these 7 weeks I’m down 10 pounds with a new w/kg at 3.83 and since I started cycling in November I’m down just over 40 lbs from a starting 2.2 w/kg. I’m probably looking at another ftp bump at the start of the specialty phase or I might do an ftp test here in the rest week after a few days.
