I am not doing much indoors these days. It’s prime outside riding weather here, and my rides are tending to the 3+ hours even with intervals…
So…
My SST progression has been driven by my choice of where I’m training. One particular coastal segment I can do 22-23 min heading north, 17-20 heading south. So my workout might be:
22 min SST
turnaround, refill a bottle, etc (2-4 min)
17 min SST
5 min traffic turnaround
17 min SST
2 min
20 min SST
And then ride for another hour.
Or on some hillier rides, I might do an hour to the first climb, then 40min up, 8 min down, 40 min up again, or 40 min up, 3 min descent, another 10 min up, more descent 5 min up, etc.
Physiologically, if you’re keeping all the work primarily aerobic, it doesn’t matter. Mentally, being able to do 40+ min straight at that intensity is extremely beneficial. How you get that matters a lot less, IMO.
I’m facing a substantial volume reduction this season: will lose more than a half of it. So my previous z2 + long interval driven approach is no longer viable, and SST/threshold will be my staple for base building. Moreover, session length is typically limited to 70-75min. With 5min WU and CD it leaves 60-65min to play with.
The past two weeks I have worked with three day blocks where the first workout is either 2x20 (progress time to 30min) at close to 100% or 60min at 90+% SST. The second workout is simply 60min at 90% SST. The third is rest (well, I commute every day). Once a week or so I include 5-8 max in-saddle neuromuscular efforts of 10-15sec during a commute. Then repeat the 3 day block until the body signals more rest is required (performance goes down or rpe goes up).
Coming from a volume centred z2 approach, the initial gains have kinda surprised me: 20min power has become 60min power in about 2weeks. But this is probably about focus change and will soon be over of course.
The big question then is how to progress the SST? With more ride time, I would progress time spent at SST as before up to 2x45, only do it more often as I’m not doing endurance volume. But with the constraints that I have, I guess I’ll have to progress power or density (e.g. do three workouts in a row).
The problem is I don’t like watt chasing and 5w bumps feel pretty meaningless given the measurement error ranges and all that. So perhaps RPE could be my guide: for instance, bump up 10w once RPE goes down a notch. However, in this case I wonder if a more aggressive ramping would be better. With density I wonder if 3-in-a-row will be too much for a regular diet. Any ideas? - all appreciated.
How often will you be assessing (and hopefully increasing) FTP?
My thoughts are that if you assess/increase it relatively frequently your progression will largely be taken care of by the required wattage naturally increasing while the %age stays static.
Thanks. I think you’re right that the template may just take care of itself. I guess it also makes training testing as the more intense session progresses to 2x30 with minimal rest (2min or so). So I think my FTP estimate will be close enough.
In the olden days of the wattage list, Coggan often said that the half life of relevant adaptations is such that he bumped the 2x20 power by 5w every two weeks or so. Given that some threshold newbie gains may be coming my way, perhaps 10w every 3-4wks might work. But I would also like to see RPE decreasing before bumping.
I want to make sure I have this right before giving thoughts…
Are you working out in addition to your commuting or is your commuting all of your ride time?
You’re doing:
1 - Threshold (notionally 2x20 extending time)
2 - SST at 90% (60 min etc)
3 - Commuting again, sometimes with 5-8 15-20s stomp-style efforts
Rinse, repeat again each week, riding 6 days a week?
Progress the density - YES. Progress the time from 2x30 and just go 60-65 straight - YES. Progress the power? It depends… sometimes yes, sometimes probably not, sometimes hell no.
I think this is probably not a good idea. Going by RPE would be a good idea. Going by RPE with the intent of increasing threshold wattage on a predetermined periodic basis is not a good idea. It doesn’t work that way. If you said, “go by RPE and increase wattage by 10W every 3-4 MONTHS”, I’d say, yeah, OK. That’s being reasonable and maybe conservative. Planning for 10W every month is just… not.
Besides, once you do these threshold/SST progressions for a month or two, why wouldn’t you move on to training something else? You’re probably going to squeeze all the blood out of that turnip in one or two blocks… assuming you can recover from them anyway. This seems like an overcorrection of intensity substituting for volume, IMO, but I may have you completely wrong and know nothing about you.
Answer those questions above and I’ll give some more feedback.
Kurt, many thanks for the detailed reply. The overcorrection interpretation may indeed be correct - it feels kinda hard to let go of more is more, and once volume is gone, well…
So, your general advice against progressing intensity too aggressively is surely food for thought. Just goes to show how much of an uncharted territory (for me) I am in. The gut reaction has been to just mimic volume progression by doing the same or a similar thing with power.
As for context, I have been training more or less consistently 8-12hrs a week for 10yrs, mostly endurance with some intensity (usually once a week on avg). So there is some base, I guess.
I am working out on top of commuting 15min + 15min very easy every weekday. Unless there are stomps, I consider plain commuting with no workout a rest day.
The structure you quoted is more or less correct for one of the 3-day blocks I have used, but in the initial post the details were kinda lost. So, the meat has been doing two kinds of blocks indoors,
alternating them in 1-2-2 fashion:
Stomp (AM commute) + threshold, SST, rest
SST, SST, rest.
So basically 2d on, 1 off.
If legs say more rest after a number of rotations, then block 3) is 2 x z1/2 before going back to the start.
As for periodization, the idea was to do this kind of structure for 2 x two month cycles when I’m stuck indoors and then move onto more vo2 and anaerobic capacity kinda intensity as races approach. The first A race is a very hilly 90+min race in April. The second one is a long road race in July. For that I was planning to up the volume somewhat (and probably polarize intensity too).
I really think you’re overcorrecting intensity for volume. You weren’t doing THAT much volume before. If I have this right, you’re still getting in 6-8 hours of riding per week. Where you were doing intensity 1x per week previously on that volume, now you’re reducing volume a little bit and adding 4x intensity. That seems like quite a bit. Essentially you’re doing a TR mid-volume plan, and, well… let’s just not go there in this thread.
I think if you could find a way to squeeze in a 3-4 hour endurance ride someplace, you’d see your overall volume wouldn’t take a dip at all, and you might even progress. Not sure what your time limitations really are… but one day a week with a long steady endurance ride if you’re time limited can keep the volume about where you had it before.
As long as you keep the commutes very easy, then yeah, I think this is OK. The problem with many people’s commutes is they are anything BUT easy. I have an athlete who I tell to do no more than Z2 on his commute, but he usually leaves late, ends up hammering the whole 40-minute run on-off with stops and such and then can’t do his workouts, so he’s not getting a meaningful progression.
The commutes for you can serve as just additional recovery time, OR, as you’re doing, some neuromuscular training time. You could do cadence ramps (1-min at 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130, etc. as fast as you can sustain without bouncing and back down), too, which are less fatiguing but can pay dividends if you struggle to spin at higher cadences.
Still not super clear on the rotation, but either way, it sounds like you’re doing 4 SST/threshold workouts per week, stacking them 2x2 with rest days in between. That’s a lot. I’d feel better if one of those SST or threshold days was z2 volume riding, you could even do it at LT1… if you don’t know that, say 70-75% of FTP as a proxy… or consider some low-cadence tempo/torque sets as well.
That could be:
SST, Tempo/Torque, rest
or
Threshold, high Z2, rest
Something like that.
4 months of that seems like a lot, and I would guess you won’t see much progress after about 2 months of it considering you won’t be able to progress duration, and progressing intensity is a recipe for overcooking yourself pretty quickly.
Why not 2 months of your SST/threshold plan and then hit VO2max, then revisit some threshold work? VO2max doesn’t HAVE to be race prep training… it can serve to give you the aerobic boost you need to be able to do higher power at threshold, particularly if you’ve never done a focused block of it.
Sorry for the delayed reply, Kurt, and thanks for the suggestions you made above. Long story short, life happened and our family has enjoyed a combo of sinusitis-influenza-sinusitis. So riding hasn’t been the first thing in my mind the past month or so.
Once I regroup and start training again, I’ll try out some of the pointers you suggested above.
Guess I can be positive that the consensus is don’t progress power!
Heartrate during block stable around 94% from FTHR.
Do i need to build it further to 100-110-120min? Or is it better to move on to 95% FTP and O/U etc?
I find it mentally tough indoors when the blocks are so long. FTP and O/U are easier to maintain.
When does your build phase start? If you still have a long way to go until build, you could try and do a short VO2-block (4 weeks for example). After that, move back to sweetspot / threshold and start building that TTE again with slightly higher power.
You should focus on your goal (endurance and tte) not your means. If you prefer shorter time on your bike, threshold does the same as sst and even bit more, so go for it.
Personally I have a problem with pure sst because I do not see relation to threshold workouts - i can build 120min tiz sst but still find 60 min tiz in threshold hard. When I focus on threshold work it relates directly to tte in threshold and sst. It’s probably anegdotal but I observe it as a pattern. So personally I like 1 threshold workout and one sst o/u style workout. That works the best for me.
Hopefully this is a relevant question here. A friend of mine recently shared one of his favourite workouts with me, which he calls ‘progressive sweetspot’, and it’s 20mins @c.88%, straight into 20 mins @90%, into 20 mins @92%. That struck me as (on paper) a tough but doable workout designed to improve tte and general power endurance. Has anyone seen or prescribed a workout like this before?
Seems like a reasonable workout to me, but I think this thread would say, progress duration, not power. If you can do 20 minutes at 92% after doing the prior two intervals, could you do 90 minutes at 90% instead?
My goals for 2023 are 3 grandfondo’s. (GF Vosges, GF Schleck and La Marmotte) So events with long and shorters climbs. For now i will raise my TTE before i move on to Vo2. That i have planned from week 3 for about 3 weeks.
Yes i will do a vo2 block for 3 weeks…but you called a short vo2 block 4 weeks? Thats quit long for vo2 in my opinion…
Yes i can handle for now 90min SST, but i now that i dont have every week the motivation to do that long blocks on the trainer. For me is it mental easier to do FTP and SST O/U.
I think it’s better to do something that is slightly less efficient but can be mentally sustained longer and to be performed more often per week than too long blocks that I will look up to.
Yes, 4 weeks is a short period. That’s about 8 vo2-workouts total. It usually takes a couple of workouts to get used to the pain and dial the intensity, so that’s more like 6 proper high-quality vo2 workouts overall. I wouldn’t go any fewer than that.
Though, I don’t know why you picked on that. This wasn’t the point.
