Recovery Time is important part of interval design and depends always what the goal of the session is.
First of all to set it up properly you have to know where you are metabollicly otherwise you have no chance to define it in the right way.
Then you have to know where you want to go.
Pro or not doesn’t matter it depends on the capacity of your engines / energy systems & how much / good you use them. In general the way you should train can be perfectly extrapolated from pro’s to amateurs if you want to seperate it like this but also pro’s are not pro’s and amateurs are not amateurs, it’s all individual and this is where proper testing & setting up the right zones for each athlete gets important.
Easy example to make it more clear:
Let’s say your Goal is in this session today to improve your Sprint Power so you want to trigger your IIx Fibers and your anaerobic system ATP / CP and your “anaerobic glycolosis” to the fullest. You want to max out both enery systems by going ~20seconds fullgas. You are planning to do this 4 times.
How would you set up the recovery time & intensity between this sprints? Just by feeling you would probably not set it to 10 seconds at your Lactate Threshold or? Obviously this would be way too short & way too intense for the goal of the session, to recover from this effort, to recover the energy systems and to be able to hit it with full power again.
As a track sprinter you would maybe even stop cycling and wait for 20 minutes or the propriate time until you go again to get no aerobic training stimulus. Different story maybe when you are a sprinter for stage races for example. Or a maratona type of rider who wants to get a certain stimulus maybe in the preperation phase.
And of course as a sprinter you maybe don’t want to do 20 or more submax sprints cause this would probably even lower your “sprinting capacity”. Different story for a maratona.
And this you can translate to all other interval types, lengths, intensitys basically. You really have to know what you want to do and what is the individual profile of an athlete. Yes, it is very individual and it needs a very good understanding of the whole picture to do it properly. Are you a not very well endurance adepted rider or a sprinter who wants to become a maratona? Are you up for TTs or for race across america? and so on…
And of course then periodisation / load in micro macro, fueling, testing, setting training intensitys / zones right, monitoring, recovery and so on is also a necessery part of it.
In the case of Pogi, well if he does a 15’ interval at this intensitys it is not very far away probably of his power@vo2max so the glycolytic contribution is huge and he is triggering his glycolytic system as also his aerobic system very strong and for a pretty long time. This is a super tough effort for sure and to hit it again you really want to get rid of all the hydrogen ions / lactate accumulated in the muscle enviroment. And there would be absolutley no benefit to shorten the recovery time. The reason why he’s doing in one session a 30’ break and in the other one only a 15’ break is probably just determined by the exact intensity & duration of the z2 work he is doing in these sessions to fine tune the sessions a bit more. In the 15’ break variant the overall session length is shorter & therefore the z2 duration is shorter too but closer to the upper end of his zone which in his case is pretty close to his MLSS probably too. In both variants he probably “fully” recovers from the effort so it makes no difference on the glycolytic / high aerobic effort itself.
The more interesting question woulde be why choosing 15 minutes, why choosing this intensity for it. Why not going 8 minutes and therefore harder of course to end up where you probably want to be? The answer again is in your individual metabolic profile and where you want to go. A sprinter guy would probably not have the best time of his life if you prescribe him an interval session of 15 minutes this close to his power@vo2max, there are better ways to improve his “aerobic power” by choosing a different interval design (if improving his areobic power is the goal…) or even worse if you would base the intensity on his FTP. And there is always also the balance with the “low intensity” work & volume you do.
I would be very careful like you say too by just listening to this recommendations ala go very easy & on the other hand at “crush your eye’s out” intervals. it says nothing and you end up everywhere and nowhere.
Rather do it very right but then you have to know a lot or hire somebody who can help or otherwise i would recommend really to just go by feel, (learn to) listen to your sensations, do what you like, fuel properly, never go hard or long with depleted glycogen storages, always be a bit conservative with intensitys, train “a lot” but recover “more” and if you want it a bit structured don’t mix different intensitys too much, either long or either hard or either a little bit of both, whatever this means in your individual case.
