I was a bit time constrained during the week, so I had to save the big sweetspot rides for the weekend. I’m not saying this is the right way to do it but I worked for me, and threshold/sweetspot should be working toward similar adaptations.
I came off a 2 week VO2 block, and tried to get in as much endurance as I could. Ending up around 10 hrs/wk. The harder workouts were:
Wk 1: 3x10 Threshold, 4x25 SS 90%
Wk 2: 3x12 Threshold, big endurance day because of suprise nice weather
Wk 3: 2x20 Threshold, 3x30 SS 94%
Wk 4: poorly timed recovery and outdoor endurance
Wk 5: bit of rest early in the week, 3x40 SS 90%
And 1 “MMNP” (mean max normalized power) curve for early May.
March I pushed UP threshold power under 30 minutes. April I pushed OUT threshold power to around an hour.
You don’t need to get caught up on the details of progressions. It’s a lot easier that way, yet still requires a lot of hard work and more importantly REST to drive super compensation and ADAPTATIONS. I literally went from 2x20-ish directly to ~60 minutes and beyond.
yes, “mean max power” is MMP. Those are 90-day curves, so within each 90 day window it finds the max power at every duration.
The movement of the April and May curves are from longer TT efforts. The actual work to build up capacity were under those TT efforts.
My basic summary is:
build a base of fitness by focusing on longer aerobic efforts
build up capacity within a week to repeat “longer” efforts and balance with recovery, and don’t overdo the interval work its possible to increase capacity without always doing intervals
when FTP goes up, don’t reduce time-in-zone (basically the opposite of what TR does with workout levels when your ftp goes up)
after establishing a strong base of fitness, push up (intensive) and then out again (extensive)
threshold efforts (I’d include 92-94% “sweet spot” here) are potent when combined with just riding around
Yeah, i’ve noticed that with TR. As FTP increases, PLs go down. PLs going down makes sense but it appears to be correlated with less time in zone. I’m sure they are optimizing towards compliance and consistency.
Maybe not a real SS progression message, but as I am training for a Granfondo with long climbs (175k, 4300m+) I tried to simulate some climb training in a training ride. I rode for 4h40 and did 8 climbs (for a total of 2h30 climing). Most climbs between 15-25 minutes.
I tried to stay above 90%FTP on all climbs (one I did at 97% for 16min. I managed to keep the carbs in and did not fall back in performance, even on the last climb of 30min I could go over 90%.
So this gave me 2h30 of SST TIZ. I am sure I can build this further towards 3h00. Maybe more. But in my event, I will be climbing 4h15-4h30. So I can not do all at SST tempo.
How long can you ride at SST when you have some downhills and Z2/Z3 in between? Maybe dependend on fueling?
Haven’t read the entire 3000+ thread so sorry if this has been brought up already… but does anyone prefer just “getting it done” rather than splitting up Tempo/SS/Threshold into intervals?
My progression is usually just starting somewhere (depending on intensity… tempo is maybe 45 min starting point, threshold maybe 20-30) and building up from there. Then I bump up time.
IF of 0.7 to 0.75 is stated as pretty solid for the Ötztaler Radmarathon. Generally the better a rider the higher the IF you can hold for longer. So you calculate the IF you would have by plotting time and % FTP for your event and play around with it to see what you should target. And then in the event adjust as you feel necessary.
I would probably target 80-85% of FTP on the Climbs depending on how you are feeling, it is a bit different to do 1h+ climbs then sub 30 min climbs, sure you get more time to recover on the downhils but you also put a lot more stress into you. Also on that length fueling becomes super importeant since it can easily happen to run low on glycosen if you do that much r4iding in Tempo/SST. Also consider the altitude of the climbs, at 2000m+ you will not be able to put out the same power as on climb that that only goes to 1000-1500m. Id also say targeting an overal IF of 0.70 -0.75 is sensible. i’m not sure if mywindsock still has a free period or free tier, but it’s pretty nice to play around with to see how long you can expect to climb at which power and how that impacts your average and NP.
Been following this thread for a while (years, too be honest) and it (combined with the Empirical Cycling podcasts) inspired me to stop avoiding longer intervals at just below threshold.
Just a few months ago I started with 3x15m at about 95%, but yesterday I did 1x100m at that same power, although my FTP has gone up slightly since then. I’m so stoked about how comparatively easy that felt!
Honestly, doing threshold / SST progression vs. misinterpreting all the gospel around polarized training and only riding either Z2 or VO2Max or above has been the biggest improvement to my fitness, esp. in terms of durability. It’s very motivating to see how fast the needle moves when you start looking at TTE!
