My power Progression on threshold intervals looks as follows atm:
Week 1: 310’@96%FTP + few days later 215’96%FTP
Week 2: 315’ @96%FT+ + few days later 220’ @96% FTP
Week 3: 225’ 96%FTP
Week 4: 230’
Week 1 (again) power +5W
After 12 weeks FTP Test.
Especially the long ones really hurt, and are difficult to get motivated for. Whenever I can’t do them outside, I try to involve Zwift stuff, sometimes even leaving out the break.
The last thing I really had a hard time getting motivated for was 2*30’@340W. Instead I did a TT up Mont Ventoux on Zwift, which took my 1:02 and I averaged exactly 340W.
Although this should be harder than doing the same with a break in the middle the purpose of a KOM jersey on Ventoux kinda kept me a lot more motivated than just doing it riding around…
Just checked this…for the final 5 minutes of the last 15 minute interval of Mount Goode my average heart rate was 94% of max heart rate. For the last 5 minutes of the 2nd 15 minute interval my average heart rate was 92% of max. So, obviously, I had my FTP set above what my actual physiologic FTP during that workout! Ha! Those were VO2max intervals.
in the podcast they showed that AT lets one select alternate workouts with similar difficulty. seems like one of the main points of that feature is to let one switch to whatever interval format they prefer (e.g., shorter at 100% v longer at 96%) with AT’s blessing.
can’t speak for nate, but i’d guess he only provided an example to illustrate how progressions work.
Yeah the work during that session looks just about perfect. If I was doing that workout and had perfect information I’d try to do it just a skosh (~1%?) over what I could hold for an hour.
Re: HR & just for reference I did a continuous effort a few weeks ago at what I guessed was about my FTP…by the 15 minute mark I was at 90% max HR. By the 30 minute mark I was at 93%. Doubt I would have made it an hour. Maybe not even 40 minutes!
The week before that I held an hour at 7 watts less, no problem. So…just to give you a feel. Don’t know if that’s useful info or not.
I purposefully wanted to do it a little under threshold – a lot of guys on the SS Prog thread do their threshold work @ 97% like Kolie Moore recommends so you’re not going over threshold.
That might have been your FTP, but you don’t have a very long TTE.
It’s definitely a tight range of power to get right in my experience
Sorry this last exchange has made me laugh. I do think you have a lot to bring to the discussion OBNDY, but sometimes you really do define the expression “could start an argument in an empty room”…
yes, i was responding to martin’s response to nate’s example, particularly this part:
I agree w/ martin, i’d also rather do 3x12 at 95-98%. and based on the podcast, i think AT would let one choose which format they prefer. hope so anyway
I NEVER look ahead. I you are dreading a workout for three days and doubting yourself for that amount of time, it is going to be hard to get it out of your head. When I open up the work for the day it is one of those “oh crap” workouts, I always just say “This will be interesting.”
what would be really cool is that if it offers up 4x7 at 100% and you switch to 3x12 at 95-98%, then it will take that into account in the future for that progression.
That depends on whether the former and the latter are categorized under the same “system” in their model. If so, then indeed it can do that; if not, the AT model won’t consider it, no more than it would consider a VO2Max workout.
In other words - they have created a number of buckets, and the model treats each of these buckets separately.
Totally agree. 8 min@40% is so long that you every interval is start from the beginning basically, and my observation is that anything longer than 5 min causes me to get out of “zone”. Not to mention I do not see any difference between 5 min and longer recovery in terms of physical performance. Sometimes even 5 minutes seems too long.
