Been toying with moving to a HV plan (probably starting over with Base I or II), but I’m just not sure I’ll have time for 120 minute rides during the week. But I’d like to increase my load to something more than the mid-volume plan and get the TSS above 500 weekly. Currently I’ve just been adding Taku to every day, which increases the load while giving me a bit more spinning time, but I’d like to give it more of a bump than just that.
So I was thinking about taking the MV plan and pulling some ideas from HV by adding a similar format (and still adding Taku daily)—see the image below. Thoughts on this? Is there a better way? Open to pretty much all suggestions here.
This is what I am going to do. Do a +1,+2 version of the workouts where there are one that extend out to 90 minutes on Tues and Thur and to 2 hours+ on weekends. Wednesday will be an aerobic ride for 90 minutes closer to .70 IF and Friday. Saturday I may push out the ride longer with aerobic miles after intervals. Some of the workouts do not have +1/+2 versions so I made a few custom ones in the workout creator. and just copied the intervals I wanted to repeat.
I don’t like adding more intensity on Wednesday just because I think the Tuesday rides will put enough load in my legs and I want to nail Tues and Thursday rides.
Here’s is what I have planned out so far.
Totally agree with the original point. I’d like to see a plan in between mid and high volume. Not all of the workouts in the plans have +1 versions so doing this more systematically would be ideal.
You could try the HV plan and use a minus workout when they start going over 90 minutes? That seems like it’d approach what you’re aiming at. Most of the workouts in HV seem to have more alternates than many of the MV (read: overunders) workouts do.
I’m partway through the first week of SSB HV2 and getting into the 1:45-2 hour workouts now. Will see how that goes.
I went the opposite direction with TSS and chopping the friday ride, typically though.
This is what I did for my base 1, and what I’m continuing into my base 2. For base 1, I took the ssbhv1 plan and substituted longer endurance rides in on my two days off work (Wednesday and Sunday). I kept the sweet spot workouts on the other days, and did Pettit on Friday.
Going into base 2, I’m same as you in that I can’t really do more than 90 minute workout on the days I have to work. So I’m taking ssbmv2 and modifying it. Keeping the vo2 on Tuesday (and add endurance at the end), and threshold on Saturday. Wednesday will be 2.5-3 hour endurance, Thursday I’ll drop the threshold for 1.5 hour sweet spot, Friday will be off or low active recovery, and Sunday will be 4-5 hour endurance. I’ll have to play with this most likely as races start and I’m not sure how I’ll react with the increased intensity. This has been more volume than I’ve ever done, but it’s been going okay.
I did some adjusting based on @thebigbadox’s suggestion and this is what I came up with. Not all workouts have a + variant (as previously discussed) so I ended up having to jump into the workout creator to make some modifications, but overall I’m pretty happy with how the block turned out. I was also going to modify the Saturday workouts to be 120 minutes, but ultimately decided against it.
Wayyyyyy more trouble than just adding a plan and going with it, but hopefully it’ll be worthwhile in the long run.
I do the MV plan and swap out the Tue/Thr sessions and do 90 mins SS or +2 versions of Ebbetts etc - add in Whorl or Andrews/Fletcher plus keep the o/u on Saturday - plus add 2 hours SS Sunday or do a 3-4 hours Z2 ride with friends. Still have Friday off and go to the gym Monday - although that has stopped now I’m on build.
Yeah, that sounds a lot like what I just did for my next training block. I have some work travel coming up in Feb, so I’m hoping to really kick this off at the beginning of March to see how it goes.
Oops. I see. Personally this skews too heavy on Sweet Spot for my liking. Too much intensity too soon. This approach would burn me out fast. Because I like a slower progression I would aim for 80% of your time in Z2 (endurance) and then the other 20% split between Sweet Spot and higher. In other words, I’d only be doing 2, maybe 3 intense rides per week.
Yeah, I could see that. And honestly, that may be the case for me too! The only way I’m going to know is to give it a shot. I used to do about 700 TSS per week with most of the bigger stuff outdoors and I feel like I’ve gotten weaker over the last couple of years with less intensity, so I want to try something different.
