More general POL question / discussion. I’m finishing SusPB MV and my average TSS for the last couple of weeks has been around 525 based on five rides and 8.5 hours per week. Looking at the POL plans, this level of TSS doesn’t get reached until near the end. Plus I’m close to maxed out on the training hours per week, and am not even sure I can get more than 3 hours for a long ride on the weekends. It just seems to me that I’ll lose fitness because I can’t do the long rides. Just wondering if anyone else is or has been in a similar situation, and what did you do? Try POL? Modify it somehow? Stick with the other plans? TIA!!
Yes, this is a possibility, your CTL will likely plateau or drop, but you might not lose actual fitness.
Where are you at in your season? How do you currently feel with the load you’ve been doing?
Has your FTP increased during this time?
I’m finishing SusPB MV this week and have Century Specialty MV on the calendar but no real events planned. It’s there so I can have a plan built by PB and use AT, and in case I’m able to make a fall fondo or century.
My A event is done for the season. I peaked at about 4 w/kg and am down around 3.85 right now. I had been biking 6-7 days per week but am backing down to 5 cycling days and adding 2 swim days per week (just found a pool on my way into work). At 6-7 bike days per week I was struggling to make it to the end of a 3-week loading cycle during Build. I’m feeling less fatigued at the end of this cycle and have struggled with far fewer workouts than last cycle.
500-550 cycling TSS/week seems about right. I still have little ones at home and their fall sports season has begun, so 2 hours each on Saturday and Sunday is all I can squeeze in, and that’s if I get up early (well, same time as I would during the week for work), which means no extra recovery, and sleep is definitely my limiter.
For the first time I have planned an off-season, complete with a lower body strength training program. The bike portion looks like a TB plan and I have the same concerns about being able to complete the rides longer than 2 hours. Hopefully I follow through with at least the lifting portion and kludge together something for the bike that fits within my 2-hour constraint.
Sounds similar to me with family commitments and things. What I would do is give the POL plan a try. It’s late in the season and you don’t have any priority events so there’s not much to lose. And I don’t think you’ll lose fitness like you might think as long as you’re going really hard on those two HIT days. They will carry your fitness and the low intensity rides should be a nice change.
Glad to hear you’re doing an off season with strength training. I’ve posted about this before, but in October of 2020 I purchased an olympic weight set and began a strength program. While I did hurt my knee doing squats, I was able to find other lifts that allowed me to continue building strength into February and was able to do my best ever TTE test. Some people don’t think that strength training has an impact on FTP, but I wouldn’t be so sure. It sure helped me. It was also a nice distraction from worrying about how I could do bike rides during the winter. I rode the trainer 3-4 days per week and kept the rides to tempo and below, and eventually worked in a sprint workout just to keep a little intensity in the mix.
Adaptations don’t work, if you just add the polarised plan to your calendar. But the levels are there to see, and two weeks of no VO2max work at all, and the level is unchanged. You do a recovery week where you only do z2, with much reduced volume, and my understanding is doing this probably loses some high end fitness. In particular I suspect you’ll lose plasma volume, which is known to impact VO2max. This detraining effect has been studied (abstract here) Effects of detraining on cardiovascular responses to exercise: role of blood volume - PubMed
There would have been no adaptations applied by AT as far as I can tell, I had successfully completed all workouts before the recovery week, despite having reservations about the increase in intensity. I am not alone in failing Withington - it has a >90% failure rate in public rides, as far as I can tell.
Having had two failures, and also AT incorrectly giving me full credit or the failed workout despite getting a fail survey and my selecting “intensity” as the survey response, I decided to ditch the plan and roll my own. So the first thing was to do a ramp test, and I had a 5.4% FTP increase since the start of the plan (i.e. 5 weeks previously). So I was failing despite being significantly stronger.
The new plan has the same daily structure as the TR one (i.e. hard Tuesday and Friday) but I’m starting back with a lower volume, ramping it more slowly, and trying to pick workouts which keep the z2 work lower than in the TR plan particularly in the initial stages, to try to ensure I stay below LT1. I’m also doing a more consistent amount of volume each z2 day in a week, rather than varying between 3-4h at the weekend and 1h midweek. For the Friday workout, I am doing the same workout as Tuesday of the same week, so they’re both vo2 rather than vo2 and threshold. These are only adding 0.5 level per week. I don’t see value in long threshold intervals in this stage of the season.
I’ve had to push it back a bit as I got a little bit unwell a couple of days after the ramp test, I’ve done a covid lateral flow test, which was negative. So starting properly on Tuesday if I feel 100% by then.
I’ve been trying out a polarised build with AT, I’m not sure I’d do it again, I found the Z2 stuff pretty mind numbing inside, even with things to watch etc. I think I’m going to flip back to the traditional plans.
Wondering how others found the long steady rides? I did the 2 hour one outside yesterday which was loads better, but with winter coming in the UK and other Sat sporting commitments I don’t think I’d be able to get outside much.
classic problem. time flies when you’re doing intervals
but how did you find the plans effect on your fitness
hard to say tbh, not done a ramp test as not wanting to go anywhere near max HR at the moment.
I’m continuing with my own version. My CTL is down after the first 4 weeks and FTP is up 5W. I’m going to be building up volume over the next several weeks.
First week done in Polarized Mid Volume. Okay, not done totally, a long Z2 ride left, but I did the majority of the week, and I’m over the “intensity part”. Z2 is mind numbing indoor. I’m taking on the boredom with a couple Spotify playlist, a few podcasts, and a good few TV series, and rewatching some old goofy movies (Demolition man for example 
) The intensity part was…holy crap…My saturdays will be exciting, that’s for sure
Anyhow, looking forward for the rest of the first block
The first thing I did before this year’s base training was to restructure my days. Partly because of family schedule, partly because I’ve wanted to have at least 8 hrs bedtime during nights,and 2-4 napping possibility during the week. Needed 2 months to get used to to the new schedule.
My week characteristics on Intervals says Pyramidal right now, but my Gym routine (2x a week Muscular Endurance workout) skews it a bit. Without the gym routine,it’s closer to Base. As I do high reps with superset and 30 seconds rests (think like squats 3x15/Wide grip lateral pull down 3x15/30s rest w/ 80% of 1rep max weight) my HR is mainly in Z4/Z5.
The gym appeals to me,as I was straight up gym ratfrom 1998 to 2006. Back than I did muscular endurance focus at first to enhance MTB XC,than I went for muscle mass. Leg days and back/shoulders were my favorite. So going back to the gym is easier to me,as I already know my way around the equipments.
I’ve picked this as my basic program : Year-Round Strength Training for Cyclists
And enhanced it to my liking. It took 5 workout (2.5 weeks as doing 2 WO/week) to get from without weights (using only the barbell rods) to put the target weight for 15 reps on the rods.
My WOs in TR happens on Tue/Thur/Sat/Sun, I’ve picked Tuesday and Thursday for “two a day” day,so I do my TR WO around 9AM,and the gym around 2PM. That leaves enough rest to start backfill some glycogen if depleted. The weekly structure gives me a full day off after a double WO day,practically around 40 hours to restore the balance in the body.
I’ll see how it goes once I’m deeper into the program,but it seems doable right now.
Doing the endurance work inside and capping it at 90 minutes?
PLs are first and foremost an index into workout difficulty. So if TR doesn’t think a workout has a primary or secondary progression to support doing threshold workouts, its going to decay. You can call me captain obvious. I’d also claim that TR has not created a new fitness metric for each zone. PLs are a workout difficulty metric, organized by Coggan classic power zones.
I’m steadily increasing the volume of endurance. I’m doing endurance indoors and out, depending on day of week and weather. This week I am doing 2x1:45 midweek, another VO2 (level 6.7) on Friday, and 2h and 2h30 Saturday and Sunday. That’s the end of a 3-week loading block with a recovery week next week.
The thing with the levels is they don’t seem to be useful for making predictions. All they’re doing is telling you what I did. If you don’t do a workout in threshold for a while, then the level becomes useless.
My endurance level is wrong, because I found there weren’t the workouts at the intensity and duration that I wanted, so I created some in the workout creator, then I discovered that the levels from custom workouts bear no relation to the level of TR workouts. In reality if I allow for this, my endurance level should be more like 5. This is too high, in fact, and I’d been misled into pushing the z2 intensity too high and getting a bit fatigued last week. I took an extra rest day on Sunday and that seems to have fixed things. I’ve created a few more custom z2s and I’m using IF and TSS to track intensity there, as I can trust those metrics. Given I don’t know exactly where LT1 is, I’m erring on the side of a lower intensity and a bit longer duration. Virtually all of TR’s z2 workouts go right to the top of z2 and I suspect they’re going above LT1 for most people.
I’m continuing with this pattern to the end of the year, with increasing volume for both z2 and vo2. I’m considering replacing one of the vo2s with SS from January.
This week:
This is where I’m headed:
This is all subject to change. One thing I’m thinking about is switching the VO2 intervals to be longer/lower intensity intervals.
I think this goes against the way polarized training is supposed to work: hard days are supposed to be hard and replacing them with less intensity will mean you are losing out on the benefits.
I’m halfway through my first block of polarized training (just for the fun of it, plus, I need to work on my base), and the hard workouts are simply very hard and the ramp week-over-week quite brutal. I find the remainder of the VO2max workouts, the 20+ minutes at 50 % intensity after the intervals, bland and boring. Ditto for the other workouts. But I’ll see how effective they are. I reckon I won’t see as much gain in FTP, but improve my base (which is my main focus anyway, but harder to quantify).
Hard days in polarized training plans will still remain very hard. Replacing a short VO2max interval with a longer one at lower intensity isn’t going to make it any easier IMHO.
How do you interpret what hard days are supposed to be like? My post was in response to @sproven’s post where he was writing he was fatigued. Perhaps I misunderstood him as to why he wanted to go to longer, lower % of FTP intervals, but I inferred that it was that the current sessions are too hard. Perhaps I misunderstood him.
(For the record, I think your suggestion to replace 2 minutes at 120 % with 10 minutes at 106 % will make the workout much harder … because you’ll have to repeat that 6+ times. 
)
I just did a 2 hour endurance ride and its a custom workout (synced from TrainingPeaks). The PL is 5.3 and aligns with TR workouts like Amadeo.
Hmm, but the 90 minute custom workout has an endurance PL of 4.5 and looks more like Andrews (PL 5.4) or Phoenix -3 (PL 5.5).
so yeah, a bit of hit or miss on those two custom workout’s PLs mapping to TR workouts.