Post Covid recovery plan

Sorry I don’t, as I always use HR zones and aerobic rides when coming back after an off season, break, or illness. But if I had to guess, I went from 260+ ftp down below 200, maybe 180? It was the same as a couple years ago when my wife and I spent 2 weeks in Europe and then I had to travel for work. I’m not going to bother doing a fitness test when I have perfectly reasonable HR zones and getting back on the bike, for me, is more about warming up the cardio system. After easy riding around for a week or two the ftp is back in the 200-220 range, when looking at power-to-HR data. And two months later I’m back to training at same power (all zones) as at my peak 2021 fitness (six months earlier in May).

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Honestly the best advice would be to go by feel and maybe heart rate. after I had covid it took all i had to just get outside and spin for 30 minutes. Over the course of the next month or 2 I increased the time i road but not the intensity. Only once I felt relatively normal did i finally do a ftp test and continued training. After maybe 3-4 months I regained all my lost fitness and felt great!

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I am going to go by HR (this is what the GRTP chart is based on) but still want to collect the data so to have any modicum of accuracy I’ll need a rough FTP estimate. I know it’s an almost impossible question to answer.

I’ve been a student of my power to HR data for 5 years, so I have some good guesstimates. More importantly watched my power increase at same HR. Leaving FTP as-is, my IF on easy HR rides went from something like 0.25 IF up to 0.55 IF over 2 weeks. And as I gained fitness, in the second week I ratcheted HR up from upper z1 to lower z2. Seeing 55% of pre-C19 FTP was a signal that made me feel (and my coach) that it was ok to resume lower intensity “base training” and then it progressed quickly and we added tempo and a few (short) sprint intervals. Its now been almost exactly two months since returning to normal training, and on Wednesday I just did my first real intervals above threshold.

That’s very interesting thanks, now that I think about it 3 years ago I had an enforced 3 month period off the bike so I can look at the relative drop from then as I did an FTP test fairly early into my journey back (wasn’t a respiratory problem so no issues with doing some intensity then).
I know that it’s going to be a few months before I get to do anything remotely hard.

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Hi all,

Thanks @WindWarrior for posting the infographic and TP article. I’m curious as to what others think a coach should actually do with athletes that are recovering from COVID? Do you think it’s part of the coach’s job to guide you through the recovery process, as in the TP article, or should they leave that up to the doctor and let you decide when to start training again?

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Oh boy this is so tedious, I returned to work on Monday but still haven’t returned to the bike yet, last rode on 23rd November. I’m kind of resigned to recovering properly and tbh we’re moving house next week so the focus has been elsewhere so in that respect it’s been quite good timing but even so, I’m still missing the routine of training. First ride back is planned for 23rd December, hopefully will have the pain cave set up at the new gaffe by then.