Keen to hear other people’s experiences with more wide ranging over unders for lactate clearing e.g. 120% / 85%.
How did you progress the intervals? Go longer, change intensity, reduce rest?
Also, did you narrow the intensity range to more traditional 105% / 95% or similar?
I created an 8 week plan same workout twice a week with an endurance on the weekend over on TD.
Week 1 starts 10 seconds over @ 120% and 1.50 under @ 90% 3 set 10 minutes long with 5 minutes recovery. Each week the over add 10 seconds the under minus 10 second so week 7 will end up being 1 minute on 1 minute off. weeks 4 and 8 are rest weeks.
some good stuff in this thread
Duration of unders. 5min/3min/2,5min/2min
And time of whole interval - similar to threshold and sst - depends on the duration between overs. 2min I progress as threshold and 2,5-5min similar as sst.
30s overs I always do by feel so no power target there.
I do these regularly in the winter bc I find trainer riding so boring. I do stuff like this where I go continuously until a certain time has elapsed:
4min 85% → 1min 115% x however many
3-4min 85% → 30sec 150%
4min 85% → 2min 110%
Sometimes I’ll do a ladder like this:
4min 85% → (1min, 2min, 3min, 2min, 1min)
When I start these OU workouts, I’ll usually do the repeats to go 20-25min continuously. I’ll add another 5min or so per week working up to 45-60min. I’ve never done beyond 50 inside, but transitioned these outside and did 60 on for like a month or two.
I watch my HR during the drift downwards on the ‘off’ section (85%). When it stops coming down below a certain mark within those 4mins, that’s when I know I have one rep left in me. I could go longer, but I’m not trying to go ‘all out’, so I shut it down.
All of that is ok and can be used as progression. I’d suggest increasing length of overs and/or adding another O/U step per interval (increase length of intervals).
No. Never understood why most prescribed TR O/U are so narrow. Might use these as threshold training but if you want better lactate clearance stimulus go more like 120/90%. I think it was Kolie Moore on a podcast suggesting to go even more extreme (especially below).
Maybe have a look here for some inspiration and direct use inside TR (I see you’re not a member)…Team Over Unders:
When bored in mid winter you can also do some ‘fartlek’ style less structured stuff for a bit of fun.
Select a playlist of tunes and make some rules up - go 150% for 30 secs at the start of each song and 85% the rest, or whatever. You can also hit random play and every time the song of a particular artist comes up then you do a different (harder or a rest) effort etc.
Messing around like this can be a lot of fun.
a nice tweak is adding one longer over to start, like 3m or 4m in duration at 110%; it’s quite fun to be ripping and then fall into the normal under/over sequence!
zoom zoom, good luck!
by nice tweak, you mean evil coach sadistic fun right 
haha! it’s not thaaaaat bad…but really works wonders. They do take a few sessions to get used to, but has really helped me out in the past year. highly recommend!!!
Thanks for the link. From what I have seen, it looks like lots of modified 95/105 workouts. Odd.
Ooh I like that shout. Also, very race specific — practicing starting hard/getting up to speed without overdoing it. Thanks!
modified to be stuff like 120+% over, which is sort fo what you were talking about isn’t it?
The Fascat stuff referenced also gives multiple variations that are a bit different to the usual TR stuff as well.
