I agree completely. My apologies if I didn’t explain clearly. For running, I’m now six weeks into just such a “zero-to-run” program: after six weeks of work, I can now jog 2 minutes and walk 2 minutes and will probably be able to jog a 5K without stopping in another six weeks. Even these “baby steps” progressions still have a very high RPE, but that’ll drop over time.
That’s good to hear 
. Keep plugging away, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll come along.
Keep up the good work. I’m down about 70 pounds from my all time high and at 53 I’m within 15 pounds of my college weight. How did I do it - eating healthier and healthier - cutting out too frequent burgers and pizza and eating whole foods cooked at home with lots of vegetables.
Anyway, my point was that for a 60 or 90 minute ride, you shouldn’t need any special fueling at all if you have eaten within the last few hours. Avoid the sugars unless you absolutely need them. In fact reserve sugars for races, events, or at most a once a week interval session. Not every ride though.
Especially on endurance rides, if you eat sugar, it encourages glycogen burning rather than fat burning. If you do your endurance rides, which should be most of your rides, on slow burning whole foods it will encourage fat burning as long as you stay at lower intensities.
Yes. Personally I schedule endurance rides right before dinner during the week. On the weekends I do both morning and afternoon rides, if a morning ride I eat immediately after the workout. Based on experience, I’m only fueling longer rides (3+ hours endurance) or longer higher intensity rides. You’ll need to figure out your own fueling strategy.
Just wanted to mention there is nothing wrong with using power to set the intensity of your rides. Some coaches use both power and heart rate, some just power, and some just heart rate. One argument I’ve seen for using heart rate is to ensure a really low intensity to reduce stress, for example random search turned up this article: Yoga | livestrong however this may or may not apply to you. I’ve seen very good results from a lot of endurance work at 60-70% FTP and mixing in some higher intensity, but that may not work for you (and I’m only walking, strength training, and cycling). Using a low ceiling on power will achieve the same results as using MAF heart rate or Seiler polarized. Its both a personal choice, and figuring out what low intensity is for you. Everyone is different and the challenge is to figure out what’s best for you.
I think you are getting a lot of good advice here by looking at the thread. Knowing that you are training for a Sprint Tri is helpful. I’ve injured myself in ways that makes that prohibitive for me, but prior to injury, I did a sprint and it was a blast. I noted the comment on running progression. I’m not a runner or a triathlete, but that makes sense to me.
Keep up the good work. Remember that it is the journey and not the destination. I think you are well on your way to becoming the athelete that you want to be.
Let me start by saying you are doing awesome! Keep working hard and you can achieve your goals.
I don’t know how you are choosing your training since this was pre-Plan Builder but it is about consistency. Taking breaks is totally fine and likely recommended but understand there will be regression.
I don’t know what you are doing for strength work and how it relates to your runs (ie run then lift) but I would think this TSS score is not truly representative of the work you are doing since it doesn’t capture the stress caused by weight lifting.
Of course I have no idea what your schedule looks like in a week but have you looked at using TR plan builder and choosing Sprint Tri for your plan then just replace the swims with a form of Strength Work, This will spread the 300-400 TSS over the week rather than spike and recover which I think is what is wearing you out.
Point taken on fueling. I’ll gradually reduce fuel on longer endurance rides (especially fasted rides like the early weekend rides), and try no fuel on shorter ones. I’ll gradually figure it out, and thanks for that.
Agreed. I believe power is (overall) a superior way to design training stress, as it’s both precise and immediate. But in this particular discussion, to do a “traditional base” type of block I prefer to set an HR target rather than a power target. With stops, wind, and whatever else, power jumps around so much that I find it hard to set a power target and be reasonably close to it… or it requires looking at my Wahoo more often when I should be looking at the road. Setting an HR target makes it easier to manage my effort, that’s all.
This new plan is more even than it may look: the Mon-Wed block has 160 TSS (45-70-45) and the Fri-Sat block has 158 TSS (45-113). And I’ll modify it as needed to ensure that this does reduce intensity enough to help me recover better and progress. For example, I’ll test out the idea of doing three rides and two runs (instead of the current plan of three runs, two rides) because, while technically the bike adds more TSS, I’m now in better shape to handle bike TSS than run TSS. We’ll see.
Thanks to everyone’s great advice, though, I feel like have a MUCH better understanding of why my training hasn’t been working well, and how to improve my results… and most especially WHY those changes are beneficial. This whole conversation has been a great learning opportunity. Thanks again to all who’ve contributed for giving of your time and experience.
Sounds like you’re getting pretty close to a good plan. Very nice!
A few things about power / hr:
First, for this application, for you personally, HR is probably superior. You’re still building endurance, you don’t quite have a perfect handle yet on what your endurance power for a longer ride is, and as your endurance fitness is still low and growing, your aerobic endurance power is going to change through the course of the ride. As long as you’re fueling and hydrating appropriately and it’s not super hot out, your HR won’t change and when it does, that tells you that you’re getting the type of stress you want from that ride (i…e, that those aerobic slow twitch contractions are getting tired and will start rebuilding stronger). If you only looked at power you’d be missing out on all this.
Second, that said, you still “use” power to keep the effort steady and make sure it’s not jumping around overmuch. Set the head unit to 3s power will smooth out the (unavoidable) jumps and make it easier to use for this purpose.
Finally, re: TSS, if i were you i’d be more in “listen” mode rather than “prescription” mode regarding TSS. Meaning, find out the right duration for your endurance rides and gradually push them up, do your structured interval sessions on the trainer at an intensity that’s completable for you and doesn’t leave you too shelled to train for days, do as many planned sessions as you can complete for the week (i.e., while there’s nothing wrong with failing some workouts, if you’re failing them a lot, you probably don’t quite have a baseline yet for what you can complete, and it’s generally better to do two quality sessions than fail at four) and see what the TSS is.
in other words, build it from the ground up rather than prescribing from the top down, and don’t let it become the tail that wags your dog. But you’re gathering the data, and then, once you get a handle on the training, you can use your info (TSS included) as a guide for next time. But what TSS “should” be really doesn’t matter.
Not really, its a judgement call. You bring up a good point about power / hr - use both HR and power. There are two choices for an easy aerobic endurance ride:
- Ride to a HR number and over a long ride look for power to drop
-or- - Ride to power and over a long ride look for an increase in HR
One objection to power is that it jumps around. That is why you display lap power. I ride 15-20 minutes to leave the city and its my warmup, and then hit the lap button and start working at endurance power.
My bike computer displays:
- 10-sec power
- lap power (slowly changes)
- HR (slowly changes)
- other stuff
after restarting cycling after a few months layoff, it only took a couple weeks to learn what “endurance power” (e.g. 145W) and “endurance HR” (e.g. 135bpm) feel like. That reduces the number of glances down to the bike computer. You might be surprised how easy it is to listen to your body and learn what those feel like.
Again the point is to reference your output (power) to one of the inputs, and HR is the only input you can easily/cheaply measure. So use both power and HR if you can.
Next point is which is better to use - power or HR? Where I ride, one problem with trying to use HR is large changes in temperature during a morning or evening workout. It can be 95F / 35C during the afternoon and then the fog bank pushes in and it drops to 70F / 21C during a two hour workout. The heat causes the heart to work harder, to support cooling the body via sweat production. And the opposite in the morning, at sunrise it is often 61F / 16C and on the weekends I’ll end the ride at 90F / 32C. And heat is only one of many reasons that HR can vary between two identical workouts.
Power is a more objective measure, its used to quantify workouts and compare different efforts. Therefore my personal opinion is that power should be the default for workouts. However if you want to manage the additional strain from heat or dehydration or caffeine (or …), then keep strain low by riding to a HR target. While not common I’ve been outside in 105F / 41C heat doing an aerobic endurance workout and will ride to HR in those conditions.
Power is simply what you are putting out and should be your main metric. Heart rate is how how hard your body is working to produce the work being done. Things that don’t change on the heart rate side is your threshold heart rate or your max generally. As I haven’t done a ramp test I’m not sure if it gives your threshold heart rate where a 20 minute ftp will. Once you have your power zones you use them first then when you start doing zone2 endurance training you might find over time your heart rate might go over into its zone3 at this point all you have to do is then simply ride to the lower end of zone 2 power then when your heart comes down into the correct zone then you can start increasing your power in the zone 2 range. Doing this will teach your body to be efficient. Also heart rate can be used to show if you are getting dehydrated, if you are and your heart rate rises as the blood gets thicker when dehydrated and your body has to work harder to bump the blood around your body
- HR zones will not change throughout a season (your threshold HR and max HR rarely change)
- Power zones will changes as you gain and lose fitness (FTP goes up and down)
- if power zone 2 rides show a HR zone 3, you don’t need to adjust power. Keep training and if fitness increases pretty soon you’ll see HR zone 2.
For example over the last couple of months I’ve been doing a lot of mid zone 2 (65% FTP) work, along with some sweet spot and sprint work. At 65% FTP my HR is typically 135bpm. If I look for longer segments (5+ minutes) while riding at 135bpm HR, my power has increased about 15-20W from January to mid April.
Now do some simple math on my FTP changes over that same timeframe:
- January: 65% of 220W FTP = 143W
- mid April: 65% of 250W FTP = 163W
And 163-143 = 20W which basically matches what I see in rides. You’ve heard Nate talk about raising FTP on the podcast. Raise your FTP, and you’ll raise the amount of power you do at same input (HR).
Now if you want to lower stress/strain, then by all means target a really low HR or really low power. For example long distance triathletes might do really long zone 1 or zone 2 rides to a) train the body and mind to work for long long periods of time, b) increase preference for burning fat as fuel, and c) increase performance of cardio system (stroke volume). That works for two reasons:
- you only need very low intensity work to increase the performance of your cardio system (stroke volume) AND preference to use fat as fuel
- at low stress levels you can do a handful of ~5 hour days in a row. Do 4 of those a week and you’ve logged 20 hours of work
You can get a lot of those same benefits in less time by training at higher intensity, say zone 3 / tempo and also zone 4 / sweet spot.
The original poster is doing a lot of work (cycling, running, strength), and so lowering cycling stress by doing low intensity (power or HR) sounds like a good thing to do.
I think we’re arguing semantics here. I don’t disagree that it’s possible to do both. But for someone who is still nailing down what is actually their aerobic power, i’d almost always recommend your option #1.
scratches head, under controlled conditions I’ve got less than 3% decoupling on 2+ hour tempo and endurance workouts. And less than 3% decoupling up to 1 hour efforts at threshold. So where would you draw the aerobic power line for somebody like me?
Last week I pulled up a 3-hour 13.1 mile half-marathon that I walked at 4.4mph and a short jog at the end, and decoupling was essentially 0 for the middle 2.5 hours.
If you’ve already established some level aerobic endurance, like the original poster appears to have, isn’t choosing HR for aerobic power basically the same as deciding to base it on % FTP? I mean there are some nuances, but without giving explicit instructions on how to use aerobic decoupling my gut reaction is that recommending HR is just as arbitrary as recommending % FTP.
I don’t know about you, you might be totally different. I’d recommend HR for OP because he’s failing workouts. You haven’t mentioned that you’re failing workouts. Obv one potential issue is that FTP is set too high, another is that on his longer rides, he’s going harder than he thinks, or harder than he intends, and that’s something that using hr can help solve. In addition, if you e.g. did a hard interval session the day before, your power at aerobic level might be lower. People are like “oh HR is subjective” but that’s exactly teh beautify of it. Barring dehydration or extreme heat, for the long steady rides, it sets you at exactly the level you want to be at (assumign of course that you want to).
and apologies if i missed that he thinks he’s established some level of aerobic endurance, I thougth he was pretty new to this and that it wasn’t clear that he had done so. Is that not true? I could be mixing up threads 
He no ught a bike a year ago. Progressed from 6 miles to 50 miles at 16mph. Added strength training and now 2-3 jogs a week. There is clearly some level of aerobic endurance. How much? Don’t know.
SSB LV has 3 days of intensity. Failing workouts. Could be muscular endurance issue, or doing too much (cycling + running + strenght). My first suggestion was two months of Traditional Base 1 (repeat it twice), in other words completely drop the cycling intensity and go with easy aerobic endurance. You can do that on power or HR.
p.s. and I’ve failed workouts, completely crashed and burned every time I tried build. Too much intensity for the base I established using SSB MV. I’m doing base differently this year - 8-11 hours per week with a heavy weighting on aerobic endurance. Already seeing very good short power numbers, on par with 3 years ago.
I think the points made by both @devolikewhoa83 and @bbarrera apply to my particular case: I’ve established some level of aerobic endurance, but I don’t know clearly what that level is and it’s not really all that high yet, plus I’m doing more work than what I can sustainably handle. Plus the runs feel REALLY hard right now since I’m just getting started.
I’ve found both comments to be very useful. My feeling right now is to take the TB approach and do lots of cycling at endurance power – which, for now, I’m defining as 140 HR (75% of max) and 130W NP (67% of FTP). As I “listen” to what the workouts say to me, I’ll experiment with 2-run/3-ride weeks and 3-run/2-ride weeks to see what works best. I’ll also tinker with fueling and with adding endurance bike hours.
Since my fatigue levels change so much, and I’m improving from such a low base, for this next “endurance” phase I feel more comfortable using HR as my target metric: it jumps around less and it’ll subjectively adjust to fatigue, heat, etc. This is Miami, after all… two hours before sunset today, it’s 94F with strong sun. My power does often vary during a ride (on Sunday, power was 140W NP for the first half and 117W NP for the second), but I don’t know whether it’s fatigue, or wind, or the butt/hand pain I still get after about an hour, or what.
@AgingCannon you are doing the right thing dialing cycling back, you are getting intensity in gym and run. About 10 years ago I was your age and at 245lbs (4" taller), didn’t have fun skiing anymore and realized that 25 years of working at a desk had taken its toll and it was time for a change. So I set a goal of “50 by 50” which was to lose 50lbs by 50th bday, missed it by a couple years. Bought a heart rate monitor in 2014 and the weight really came off after I combined fast walking with 2x weekly spin classes. Can still remember suffering and epic fails in spin class! Picked up the road bike just over 4 years ago, and power meter a year later because of the wind and heat. Got serious about strength training two years ago. Big believer in using both power and heart rate. Miami heat and humidity? I’d start with HR too and switch to power at some point to make it easier to track progress within and across seasons. My heart rate zones haven’t changed since completing first on bike tests in early 2016.
Best and congrats on the progress so far!
I haven’t read anyone’s response but my opinion is that your #2 point is correct. TR is very demanding. Keep at it and don’t worry about anyone else’s gains!