I’m currently on a ‘typical’ 6x per week training plan - 3x workouts per week, 1x long ride, and 2x recovery/endurance rides between the workout days. The endurance rides are set for 60 minutes.
Recently the plan has been recommending a workout with a profile like this where you are doing alternate 10 minute intervals between 74% FTP and 55% FTP
That pushes me right up against a tempo zone for half the ride so sometimes I wonder if swapping it out for something like this where you are sitting at 65%-70% for the whole ride:
Is there any meaningful benefit or difference in doing one vs the other? The both feel ‘easy’ on the whole. Though sometimes I wonder if the 1st option where you are spending a bit of more time in tempo could be adding a little more fatigue into my legs making it harder to do the workouts the following days. Or maybe it is giving me better adaptations as well? When I have swapped out one for the other (with a similar rating) I get the same ‘predicted ftp.’
Honestly I think it’s just preference and what keeps you engaged with your Z2. Sometimes it’s nice working harder and then getting a bit of a break. Other times an unrelenting ride that only changes up or down 1 watt is what you need.
I’m sure they do develop things ever so slightly differently, but I think Z2 time in the saddle is all that matters.
In the new AI system if you just select free ride 60 and choose your own power level guided by heart rate or perceived effort or whatever does the AI learn from the resultant workout?
It was explained to me that it takes into account unstructured rides (indoor or outdoor) and adapts using that data, so Free Ride 60 should qualify. In any case, I certainly hope so as the WX has been ridiculously warm and nice here and I’ve mainly been doing unstructured outdoor rides instead of my planned workouts. I haven’t been monitoring my plan closely for any adaptations, but over the past week I did three unstructured outdoor rides instead of planned workouts and my predicted FTP has only gone down a Watt or two, and nothing seems drastically different going forward in the plan. I suspect missing three workouts in a week without doing those outdoor rides would have had a bigger effect on the plan.
