It is one hour session on Zwift (due bad weather). 15m WU, 5x250w with 3min 210w in between.
I need to say that i had a race last saturday, sunday 5hours endurance and tomorrow again a trainingsrace…
Honestly I’m not sure why you’d program a 5x5 like that at this point in the season unless it’s in a very long (3-4 hr) ride as part of building fatigue resistance. As others said, putting that near the end of a long ride could be very beneficial.
A one hour tempo workout of 5x5 isn’t going to force an adaptation (for most people in this thread, anyway), and it’ll just incur a bit of fatigue that you probably don’t want. I’d rather see you do a longer easier ride (if you have time) than try to force some tempo work into a mid-season short endurance ride.
But you need to ask that specific coach what they’re thinking because I (we) am (are) just cherry picking.
Everyone is looking for the magic bullet. My club mates contact me quite a bit: “hey, I’m tired of getting dropped. What workout would you recommend?” But the thing is… most of them just need to be aerobically fit so they don’t like the “Go ride for 3 hours at least once a week, maintain zone 2 and pedal the entire time” or “You need to do some sustained tempo or SST work… try this…”
I watch a lot of their training via Strava, and the guys who are getting dropped struggle through 4x8 at notional sweet spot… perhaps FTP is too high, but they just don’t have the aerobic base to be worried about staying with a 3/4 field yet. Some of them get it, most do not and want to come do a VO2max or long bomb anaerobic session with me because that’ll fix it. 
They missed the four straight months of long rides and SST I did in November-Feb.
TR guys have talked about it quite a bit: when your base is strong, the race is easier for you… unfortunately, most people look and say, “I just can’t hold high power long enough.” They have the issue correct, they’re just missing out on the “why?”
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Ideally you want to progress sweet spot into longer intervals, so yes, moving to 2x25 is a better progression than 5x10 if you are adapted to that point. You want to lengthen the intervals while decreasing the amount of rest between those intervals over time. A very effective format as you work your way up could be breaking a long interval up with a very short recovery / backpedal of a minute or less. This can be a very effective way of hitting those intervals of 25 minutes plus, it resets the legs and the brain without detracting from the efficacy of the interval in an appreciable way. That said, it is best to mix things up a bit to give the body and mind a break maybe you have 5x12s one day, 3x30 another etc.
Hi kurt, thank you for your reply.
What you say is what iam thinking and why i asking this question in this thread.
I think 5x5 with 3min rest will do nothing on adaption…
The reason why it is only one hour is because i dont have more time today, but i have to make the descision to do an extra restday. My last day off was 17th june.
edit: the original workout was outdoor 2 hours ride with 5x 10s max sprint on a hill (viaduct) with 5min rest in between. But due the weather i dont ride outdoor.
I’d rather that shorter ride be either really hard or really easy for recovery. A one hour tempo session doesn’t make sense during a race season IMO.
Not a huge deal because it’s not going to incur a lot of fatigue, but just not a choice I would personally make.
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My thoughts too.
Why can’t you do this on the trainer? The sprints won’t be “max” but you can get pretty good adaptation from 80% sprints thrown into a ride like that.
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I think it’s really really important you get an idea as to why your coach is programming each workout. Ideally this is done before you even start a block so you know the exact goal and purpose of every ride you do whilst under their guidance. Then you’re not asking those questions on a forum.
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From talking with my coach, I’d say there are reasons. Hard to say without looking at the big picture. I haven’t completely deconstructed my 2017 build that took TTE out to 65 minutes, but I can say the one key workout (2-hour sweet spot) was only done once a month. You know what they say, you only get fast during recovery… and yeah I’m of an age where more recovery is needed so take that in context.
I can’t imagine what benefit a 5x5min tempo workout would have midseason. It’s not recovery. That’s just it. And for someone like him it’s not pushing adaptation or maintaining anything. It’s just a “gray” ride.
That said, you’re right that I don’t have the whole picture.
Sounds like you would find the workouts my coach prescribes truly bizarre, 24 minutes of tempo here, 20 minutes there, another 21 minutes over yonder. And I keep getting stronger and stronger 
Sincerely can’t make sense of it myself, so I mumble “minimum effective dose” and “advanced aerobic” and occasionally repeat those phrases on this forum. My renewal is coming up, and I’m going to keep paying Coach Isaiah to work his magic.
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Definitely sounds as though you should! If I recall you don’t race and are just interested in progressing fitness, right? So different prescriptions for different folks. I’m eight races deep into my season, tempo isn’t a thing I should do much of or any, but tempo is great off race season because it builds aerobic fitness.
Trust me, I’m sensitive to critiquing any other coach’s work because I’m no expert at all. I know what I have been doing has worked well for my situation. I’m just interested in what PattyP finds out.
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My goal is to race again in masters 55+/45+ fields, once I can keep up with the A group on Wed night worlds. I’m taking the slow and steady approach to building fitness. Tempo during racing season? I’ve got some off-the-shelf plans for road racing (not base/build) from respected coaches and they have tempo intervals sprinkled in them, hmmm…
Glad to hear it. I disagree with that approach unless you’re working fatigue resistance in longer rides. Lots of respected coaches agree with that, too.
Re: being old… I did two relatively short crits on Saturday and still have heavy legs today. Now, I raced them pretty hard, but still. Old kinda sucks.
Give it another 15 years LOL
Also I think there is something to learn versus dismissing it. Think Kolie Moore’s article on training to hard for crits. Maybe it’s to simply keep training from getting stale.
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good point. I dont like sprinting on a fixed indoor bike, so i ask for a alternative.
Thnx @anthonylane i will ask my coach about his plan and why…
Lots of “maybe”… I’m hoping PattyP can just get his coach to explain his thought process. But again, I’m not looking at the entire overall picture when I’m critiquing this so there’s a big void in information.
Here’s what Kolie said:
I began coaching an athlete mid-cyclocross season whose coach had him doing HIIT work during race blocks. He typically had no more than two days of recovery between his high-intensity interval training and races (which were twice per weekend and sometimes during the week). This had gone on for six weeks . Unsurprisingly, his power outputs were dropping for both workouts and races; and his finishing place and ranking points were falling too. I was shocked that his coach was continuing to push hard workouts through goal races instead of allowing recovery.
We salvaged his form by first giving him rest, then getting him doing steady state sweetspot workouts during the week, 2x20min or 3x15min, and getting him to ride his weekly cyclocross practice session as technique work and not for digging deep.
I definitely get pushing recovery and easing up. That’s exactly why I question the use of “Tempo” specifically, and especially in a 5x5 format. That’s neither recovery nor pushing much (if any) metabolic adaptation for someone like PattyP.
As a side note, I’ve done about 4 weeks of HIIT leading into my races the last couple of weeks. (Worked, I got a 2nd and a 1st in large fields!) But now I’m pretty trashed. So definitely backing off the HIIT and probably revisiting my sweet spot/FTP training for a while leading into the second half of my season.
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Allow myself to quote… myself…
Thanks to @bbarrera for the gentle reminder about training too hard for crits, a really good blog by Kolie a while ago. I did as stated above. After thrashing myself for three weeks of anaerobic work, I backed off and re-introduced sweet spot and FTP training the last two weeks. Had two crits this past weekend, one win and one fifth, and felt great (earned my upgrade, too).
Rested Monday, easy on Tuesday. 3x25@90% on Wednesday. Did a training TT/assessment tonight (TR workout Lola is a pretty good proxy for the 30min KM FTP/TTE test, by the way). I &%$#ing crushed it. Set all-time power PRs from 11:10 out to 41 minutes. Crazy! Held 315W for 26min, 310 for 30min.
New mFTP is 304W, bump in VO2max up to 64. I’ve been aiming for a 300W FTP for three years now, and this is the first time up over that milestone. At 44 years old, now hanging out at almost 4.3 W/kg when just 10 months ago I’d never been over 4.0.
Much shorter TTE now at 35+ min, but we know how to push that out around here, don’t we? That’ll be my focus for the next training block. Sustained work to push TTE out a bit, and as I work on my next category upgrade the races will provide the intensity.
This works.
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