Fatigue-dependent idea is one of my favorite things about FasCat plans. The concept (not the name) is something that is in every plan I mentioned (expect TR, which is more hard-easy). Also, the sample week you’re showing must either be from very late phase Sweet Spot plan or from a Race Plan. You’re definitely not doing 18 weeks of that. Make no mistake, you’ll slam intervals with FasCat, but it is a more “standard/traditional” buildup of time and intensity.
Fatigue-dependent (tues hard, wed medium, thur zone2, rest, then saturday hard/longish, sun zone 2) is also very flexible. I have taken the concept out to a 9-10 day cycle.
The exact opposite of how you wrote it for me. I found that approach a lot easier to do the plan to expectations. That week you posted is a hard one like @tshortt alluded to. Generally in SS Base it’s SS, Tempo, then Z2 during the week and sweet spot group ride Saturday and maybe Sunday or Sunday is a longer Z2 ride. As base goes on its more varied with over-unders, bursts like in the picture, z4, etc.
@bbarrera can speak to this as well, but it’s just progressing this structure that @Trippy posted. So the progression becomes either
more TiZ for SS
more TiZ for Tempo
more TiZ for SS Saturday (or a simulation ride…another smart way to “sell” Sweet Spot but not actually have ppl train too hard…clever)
just more zone 2. overton always says if you can do more zone 2, do more zone 2…,on whatever day you want, just be ready for the tougher sessions when needed.
And then toward the end he will introduce those classic VO2max session or Tabatas.
I only made it to SS4, and that looks like a week from racing intervals. If you add it up from beginning, there is 3 weeks fall foundation, 10 weeks resistance (mostly z2 on the bike), then 18 weeks sweet spot (SS1-SS3), then 6 weeks SS4. Or about 37 weeks of building aerobic engine before hitting a week like the one you posted. Or don’t start from the beginning, and just do say SS1-SS4 which is 24 weeks of aerobic engine development before hitting it hard.
in SS2 and SS3 these are gold IMHO, love these. Did them pandemic solo styling and its fantastic puzzle solving you are given a mission “go out and do 4 hours at 240 TSS and think in terms of doing 20-60 minute sustained sweet spot efforts” - and on that one I front loaded with basically 3x20-min sweet spot and ended up 7 minutes short of 4 hours / 216 TSS a bit under target. Or the flip side 3 hours / 170 TSS and I went out and front loaded with a 65 minute SS/threshold and ended up 2 minutes short of 3 hours / 201 TSS a bit above target.
I’ve played around with it myself through modifying TR plans, but I find that if I’m in a VO2 block I cannot recovery in time for a threshold workout the following day and often resort back to hard > easy > hard.
Right, I was just pulling an example week from one his blog posts that discusses the fatigue-dependent model.
From my memory the TR workouts during the week seemed harder to get through compared to the Fascat stuff, not to say the Fascat workouts are easy. Just that the method they use works better for me. It’s the Saturdays (and some Sundays) that wreck my legs with Fascat but it’s also when I have the time to rest properly.
Mon: Off
Tues: SST
Wed: Tempo
Thurs: z1/2 endurance
Fri: Off
I tried it out on the road last year and while doable was a little bit too much for me. I probably did too much. I gather that you start with less time in zone and add in a little bit each week.
Yep, understood. It’s definitely the exception to the rule for his stuff. One thing that he is building into the plan is simply to be able to handle more (be it TiZ or intensity) toward the end. What he is really messing with there is density. We usually talk about frequency, duration, and intensity as the trifecta, but the fourth thing you can manipulate is density. As has been said, it’s rare in a FasCat plan to go hard - hard, but if you’re limited on time (duration) and it’s late in the plan (already gained some fitness), you really can’t add more intensity. Frequency is set (4-5 days/week). All you have left to muck around with is density. Had I come upon that in my plan I would’ve picked either VO2max or Threshold on Tues, do Baxter/Phoenix/medio stuff on Wed, Zone 2 on Thurs.
The way I would’ve differentiated which one to do is know myself. Do I recover from classic VO2max session quicker/better than Threshold, or other way around? (phenotype, etc). Pick the one you recover from best (in my case, Threshold). Another school of thought is “depends on the race”, but I’m more of a train the engine guy, even when it comes to intervals.
The intermediate 8-12 hour per week 18-week plan tops out at 80 CTL and as we discussed earlier it’s a tough call on that or the higher volume plan. Always hard to put on someone else’s shoes, but some kind of mods were needed in your case. You clearly weren’t getting pushed enough on the stock SS1-SS3 plan, while I was with pretty simple mods (just adding time on mid-week workouts).
There are 0 weekday workouts over 2 hours for the intermediate plan that they recommend for most athletes unless they’re younger. There are some 2 hour weekday workouts I’m sure you could try to condense if you wanted to stray from what they designed.
^ this is the explanation I’ve heard a few times from Fascat. There isn’t much for longer VO2 efforts at all in the SS1-3 plans so they wanted a way to introduce it before the interval plans so it’s not a complete shock to the system.
Starting with a CTL of 50, the peak CTL throughout SS1-4 is 86 and ends SS4 around 78 depending on the TSS you can achieve during the z2 by HR workouts. By the end of their Road Racing interval plan, CTL would be around 72 which has been explained as the design to keep the athlete fresh to give them the best chance to be successful with the workouts as well as leading into an A race. Numerically, it appears to be a bit of a drop and I haven’t gotten that far to share my experience.
I’ve really enjoyed him on the various training podcasts and find his insight to be translatable to the amateur. Like a few of you here I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of looking into other training platforms and coaching services, mainly looking for some alternatives to the sweet spot approach. One thing I’ve noticed between FasCat and TR is their preference to sweet spot. I can’t cut through the fat and determine if this is based on an optimal way of training for the amateur or because it’s an easier sell.
When I listen to other coaches (who aren’t selling cookie cutter plans) talk they really tend to gravitate toward polarized training. This makes me wonder if there is a correlation between the coaches/services that push sweet spot.
agree about the stock plans, and now having a coach for over a month (shout out to FasCat’s Isaiah) I can tell you my custom plan looks different and in a very good way And with all the forest fire smoke plan interruptions I’m really thankful having gone the coached athlete route a week or two before the fires started.
Even though mid-week workouts are 2 hours or less, you are encouraged to do more zone2 work if you have the time and it doesn’t impact power on downstream workouts.
My wife spends about 1200/year on the gym membership, to take group strength classes and a few others (Barre, Yoga, etc). I tried and gave up trying to self-coach both strength and cycling. Getting a coach was more than 1200 but it is not that far off. After thinking about it I’m the pool boy, plumbing repair guy, gutter cleaner, sold my car, and generally do a lot of things that save piles of $$$.
Also in the “too old to rock and roll, too young to die” () demographic and not winning any races, but decided to give it a go and commit for a year. So far so good. I plan to kick ass and take names going into my 6th decade, its only 18 months away so no time to waste.
well I don’t usually do that, usually working on how to save $$$ but “it comes down to a simple choice really, get busy living or get busy dying” and the self-coaching path wasn’t working for various reasons.
Agreed, I swim competitively in my youth. I had 5 different lead coaches (not counting assistants) of varying technical ability over my 8 prime years - ranging from local guys who swam in high school to my college coach who got a couple assignments to coach US international teams.
I got faster every year. The basics of getting a lot of work in, going hard on the hard stuff and never missing practice trumps any plan nuance assuming there is some base level of coaching ability. And by basic ability I mean the coach can read and has some sort of network so as to be minimally tuned in. Anyone can rely on someone else’s science.
I blogged my favourite podcasts a few weeks ago.
Some have been mentioned already.
Fast Labs have a survey out now and that lists a lot of podcasts and asks you to select which ones you listen to. There were some new to me ones in that list which I have bookmarked for checking out
And with all the forest fire smoke plan interruptions I’m really thankful having gone the coached athlete route a week or two before the fires started.
) demographic and not winning any races, but decided to give it a go and commit for a year. So far so good. I plan to kick ass and take names going into my 6th decade, its only 18 months away so no time to waste.