My experience is RPE on efforts higher than FTP but not ‘sprint’ goes through the floor. Efforts right at or below FTP stay the same/suck. I’ve made notes in over/under workouts of ‘it almost felt better during the over’.
Finished a v02 block end of January that had me working about +10% over last year, popped about 6 sessions in. Took about a week and a half before I could get back to consistency (Mid February) and last week I did 2x30 at last years FTP (from last September) that had a TTE of ~70 min but it sucked a bit. I haven’t tested FTP yet this year.
I’m about 12 days removed from my last VO2max workout - I did seven in about 18 days. Felt pretty good Monday and waited till today. Tried a TTE test and definitely higher RPE at my past FTP. Held it for about 20 minutes and then started pulling off. About 5-7W lower than last test felt right today. But last sustained effort was four weeks ago, so today definitely sucked. Seems like that should be normal - short term step back for longer term benefit.
I had a similar experience last year with a 8 week block of vo2max (incl. 2 restweeks). Must say I lost my mojo after 4 weeks. This year I will only do a 4 week block (incl. Rest week). In total 8 workouts. I think that is enough to have most of the gains.
this seems weird as your aerobic capacity (extensive and intensive work) should not degrade that quickly compared to short power which, which very much is use it or lose it.
It’s all relative/individual. I don’t have a huge training history and seem to be constantly coming and going from injury… but that might give some additional context.
I felt pretty good Monday. Rode easy and did my sprint residual test (20s). Rode easy again yesterday. That was after a week of nothing but Z1/Z2 and lower volume at that.
In context, I felt probably a 5W decrease from my last test. mFTP before my VO2max block was 279. Now it’s 273. I started the test at 275 and progressed up to 282, then backed back down to 277. 275-277 felt about right. So I’m setting FTP to 275 and going, down from 280 entering the block.
We aren’t talking a big decrease, more of a stagnation or a 2% drop and probably a bit higher RPE. Seems like that’s normal given not having done any kind of sustained effort for about four weeks. Could just be one of those days, too. Either way, I’m not really concerned, just curious about others’ experiences so I’m not learning from just my n=1.
I think my way ahead is to conduct my SST intervals at 250-255W and start at 60min TiZ. Last block I was doing 75-90min at 247. I’ve done 2x30 at 252 once, so in the spirit of progression agnostic of FTP, a small bump up in power and working back out to 90min+ TiZ over the next few weeks should do the trick. Plan to add an over/under session every 10 days or so to get some of those bursts up at 5min power to keep that sharp while working the sustained progression.
Next block after that will focus again on FTP intervals and over unders again.
here’s a question;
Did mFTP drop because you cant do long power efforts, or did it decrease because you yanked up the front of the curve?
I suffer from the latter any time I touch my sprint, as (humble brag) any time you throw a 1500+w 5s sprint into your curve it destroys the back end of the curve and you wind up with a lower mFTP and extremely high TTE (my n=1 experience)
mFTP went down before the sprint effort, probably due to lack of long residual testing the last few weeks. Sprint didn’t impact it at all, really. 20s sprint at 840W up from 778 on the PDC didn’t make a dramatic difference either way, I don’t think.
Regarding Intensive aerobic, what else are you guys doing besides Over/Unders and FTP work? And I apologize, as I’m quite certain this has been covered before… 1680 comments are a lot to sift through I’ve pushed my TTE out to 60min @ threshold and 100min at SS, and now looking to do an intensive aerobic block. I had a good idea in mind a few weeks back, but can’t recall what my plan was now…
I’ve got the scaffolding (still a work in progress here – just have some workouts in without really planning how long and where) of 2 weeks planned so far, but not really sure what else to add in, especially for the 3rd week. Are you guys making the Threshold workouts at a progressively higher % of threshold, ie 102% → 105%, or just getting the intensity in through over/under workouts while continuing to push out threshold TTE?
While it might not true in your case, some mFTP changes happen because a strong effort from 90 days ago just fell out of the 90 day window. Here is a fun one from last year:
Increase in mFTP when a strong effort from 7 to 28 seconds fell out of the 90-day PDC window. That one effort caused Pmax to drop 19W and mFTP to increase 8W. Interestingly at the time, the April 12th workout didn’t even set a 90-day best. Fun with PDC.
Actually no. Last summer I did a nice little VO2/Z2 Polarized block that was around 6-7 weeks long and then smashed threshold intervals for a while. I was strong coming out of that POL experiment with my best ever ramp test that netted me a 344w FTP.
Galena was a good benchmark for how high SS felt…numbers were the best I’ve ever seen:
Then I was doing 2x50 and 1x75 Sweet Spot rides that felt amazing
My takeaway is that the polarized block netted me a TON of aerobic fitness and the VO2 workouts just piled on the ability to ride hard.
Dude… you smash vo2max for weeks then you do a test that is directly correlated with your vo2max (ramp test is more correlated to pVO2max than it is ftp) and then you are surprised when you get your best ever result. Of course you would.
What would be interesting is to see the effect on your hour power
In terms of what effect this would have on my “hour power”. I think it would have had zero negative effects as I was diligent about throwing in a Sweet Spot ride every 10 days or so to keep that system simmering.
I did two polarized blocks and one Sweet Spot block between June and September. There wasn’t a single point during last season when I thought any sustained effort between 20-60 min was difficult other than early in the season. The point I’m making is that I saw no ill effects from doing VO2 or Z2 work.
Now, had I completely ignored that for ~6 weeks. Who knows.
After every vo2 max block first week of threshold is hard. First two workouts are usually bad, elevated HR, higher RPE, then there is some kind of “shift” and threshold starts to feel amazingly good, HR under LTHR, 80 min TiZ workouts etc.
Edit - my vo2 max blocks are two weeks long, 3x per week and rest is shorter Z2 to provide some context. This is also the reason I have a feeling that going fully polarized will still require some threshold for me so I will end with pyramidal. On the other hand workouts like SST with bursts always feel amazing after vo2 the same O/U and I agree that overs feel great.
While it might not be “the best” that’s where people overthink things. To me there was zero reason to do a TTE test after a polarized block, I did a ramp test for quick validation and got what I was looking for. Shrug.
I went back and looked at my subsequent rides post-Polarized experiment and everything got a lift. I think the problem is that folks ignore staying touched up on other energy systems. I mean no offense, but @kurt.braeckel is a prime example of this.
I had a worry about how my extensive aerobic engine would be compromised during my first polarized experiment and reached out to @brendanhousler and got some good insight which helped me adjust my approach.
I’ve pushed my TTE out to 60min @ threshold and 100min at SS, and now looking to do an intensive aerobic block. I had a good idea in mind a few weeks back, but can’t recall what my plan was now…
