Structured vs Unstructured: Finding the right mix

Training
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In the past I’ve done a mix of unstructured and structured riding. Like you, unstructured was outdoor hard group ride, structured work was indoor and outdoor.

Depending on how hard the group ride is, you will get varying levels of “anaerobic work”. What I mean is group rides are inevitable “smash then coast”, “push then ease up”. No way around it. That means you need to primarily account for three things (off the top of my head):

  1. coasting/near coasting (basically 0w + <.45 IF, technically .55 IF but I think a lot of that .45-.55 can still be “counted”). Subtract this duration from total time. TSS accounts for much of this but not all (and can be inflated for these type of rides). Note kJ expended as well. So total duration pedaling, total kJ, and TSS will allow you to make an apples to apples comparison to other rides.

  2. take a look at Zone 6 Time in Zone. It will be surprisingly high. You are potentially getting a fair bit of “anaerobic capacity” (FRC) training from that, albeit not as effectively and with as much precision as structured training. But group rides are fun. Tradeoffs :man_shrugging:

  3. general/approximate Time in Zone for other areas. How much time did I spend doing sustained sweetspot or threshold intensity on this ride? Make sure you dig in and don’t just trust time in zone distribution charts. They do not account for the idea that you could do 60 x 30sec sweetspot power “efforts”, which simply means you pedaled your bike for 30sec at that intensity, then did something else in terms of intensity (likely coasting or smashing). It’s stochastic and you need to watch out for power charts “lying” to you with (for example) “20% - 30:45mins in SweetSpot”. So were those a bunch of effort of a few seconds or mins that just added up to 30:45mins. Account for the sustained efforts (>5mins), ignore the rest.

Sooo, what’s my point? I would do one more “hard/mid-intensity” session that week. Because of #2, I would leave out spikey sessions (like any workout under the “VO2max” and/or “Anaerobic” filter under TR → Workouts). You’ve done that work in the group ride, provided it is hard and not a social coffee ride (in which case it’s Z1/Z2/Z3, just not as efficient in terms of time).

I would leave in anything that is threshold/SST/tempo.

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