Ok, i admit I don’t think all z2 is for the pros but here’s my dilemma. I’m 48, been using tr for 10 years and managed to almost hit 4wt/kg the last couple years, but not quite. I have limited time to train so I do low volume plan which is usually 3 sessions a week on trainer. Usually 1-1.5 hr vo2max, sweet spot and threshold. Last year I used my weekend for one long z2 ride between 4-6 hours. I stuck with it carefully the whole ride. Problem is I don’t think it helped much. My goal is sub 9 Leadville and some 6ish hr gravel races. I’m playing with the idea of ditching the z2 weekend ride since everything I’ve read says the real benefits of z2 comes when you have larger volume training plans. So my question is do you think replacing a 4-6 hr z2 ride with a 3 hour tempo ride or even 2 hour sweet spot blocks mixed with z2 would give me better adaptations considering my time constraints? Maybe I’m at my ceiling but just trying to see if there is anything I can change to maximize potential gains.
Am I right in understanding you that you’re considering going from 3 intensity sessions + Z2 to either 3 + tempo or 3 plus another SST? Short answer is, if you can take the extra intensity and recover from it it’d theoretically work, but you probably can’t and it’ll probably blow up in your face. I do one block in the winter that’s 3 intensity sessions per week, but the rest of the year it’s generally 2 + Z2 and/or tempo depending on the time of the year.
I think if you want to do sub 9 at Leadville around 4w/Kg - you probably need a relatively high volume and durability. 9:02, 8:44, 8:42 for me the last 3 years, and I’m 48 too, but did it on 10-15 hours/week. I have a friend who was ~4.4w/kg (supposedly anyways) and based on his training he came in at 10:30 without blowing up or any mechanicals. So there’s a lot more to that race than your FTP.
My “Money” workouts during specialty phase are a 4.5 hour day netting out to 78-80% IF, followed by the 6-6.5 hour day netting out to ~72% IF. Getting in 4-6 weekends like that in the heat of the summer makes a big difference for me, and you need to work up to that.
Yeah you are prob right about it being too much. I just seem to tolerate the three weekly interval sessions on low volume plan and the long z2 ride last year well but just seemed to stall out a bit. And not from fatigue . I just wasn’t sure if I’m only doing 10 hours with 6 of those being that longer z2, if that is enough z2 to really make a difference or if I would be better off spending half that z2 ride time (3hr) doing tempo or some sweet spot and get more benefit. Tempo should create too much fatigue should it? Awesome job on multiple sub 9’s! I was suppose to do it for the first time last year and got super sick with meningitis and had to bail. I got in on deferred entry this year.
You could try it and see how you react, but part of me says if you can tolerate more than 3 intensity sessions then they’re probably not hard enough and you’re better off making those sessions longer or harder (For example, I’ve progressed Sweet Spot out to 2 hours at 90% in one workout at the end of a progression - 4 x 30 not all in one block)
I would personally try keeping the long ride, but up the intensity until it starts impacting your ability to recover.
And if there’s a time during the year where I would start trying to add more volume, it’s during the last 6-8 weeks before taper.
I would agree with this. Start adding a bit of tempo in the last hour of that long weekend ride. Progress that up. I have found great durability in working towards a goal like Leadville when I can do 60 minutes of tempo at the end of a long Z2 day.
What’s your height/weight? Part of the w/kg is the kg portion. I understand the thread is about training, but curious about that part first.
I don’t know if your intense days are intense enough. What about vo2 intervals? Until last month I don’t know that I’d ever done a single tempo or sweet spot workout. It was always threshold/vo2 (once or twice a week) and then z2, usually at .6-.65 IF, and I hit 3.99 w/kg within about 18 months of riding/training. The biggest block was 8-12 hours/wk last spring and early summer. I’ve been maintaining the same FTP now off around 6-7 hrs per week. Usually 3, 1.5 hr weekday rides. 1 vo2/anaerobic, one endurance, and the third is either endurance/tempo/sweet spot. That is new since before I never did tempo/sweet spot. Weekend ride has been around 2.5-3.5 hrs of z2 if inside or an outside ride with insane climbing that’s all over the place, but fun lol
I’m 72kg. Height is 5’10.
That impressive improvement in 18 months! Were you new to cycling prior to that? I’ve been doing it for 20 years and I understand there is a ceiling but feel like there is a little more improvement to be had. I’ve been doing 1 hr vo2, 1 hr threshold, and 1-1.5 sweet spot weekly. All indoor intervals on trainer. Then doing a 4-6 hr z2 ride on weekends in the spring. 2 hr z2 on trainer on those weekend days in the winter. The more I read about sweet spot the more I think it has maximal gains for those of us training under 10 hrs/wk. problem is recovering and making sure I do accumulate too much fatigue. Especially for master age athlete.
My advice:
I would play with more intensity and longer intensity progressions during the week.
Keep your VO2 and try to progress it harder / longer (if you can)
Keep your Threshold and try to progress it harder / longer (if you can)
Either progress your Sweet Spot Longer, or replace it with another Threshold or VO2 if you can. (If you don’t have the time to go longer, play with more intensity and see if you can recover from that) Basically more intensity, e.g. moving from SST to Threshold will give more stimulus in less time if you can recover from it. The magic of Sweet Spot is that it isn’t as hard on you as Threshold and VO2 so you can do more of it without smoking yourself.
Keep the Weekend ride, play with making it harder - higher in the endurance zone to lower in Tempo. Throw in a SST interval in the workout, etc. Basically - goal is to progressively still increase stimulus here and still be able to execute a high quality Interval workout when it comes a couple days later. If it’s only 2 hours in winter, make it harder than if it were 4-6. (e.g. Try 90 minutes of Tempo / SST intervals with the balance being warmup / Z2)
I’d keep the 3 weeks on / 1 off cadence. Basically by the end of that last weekend ride on week 3, you want to feel like you need a recovery week.
Recovery weeks aren’t weeks off. Basically - go down to mostly Z2, 60% of normal volume. Maybe some short / sharp intensity intervals as the week goes on.
If you ever get to the point you start failing or not completing workouts, you need to back off as you’ve gone too far.
Keep in mind, most Masters athletes are at 2 intensity sessions a week, and being able to handle 3 is more rare.
So I guess my questions/points would be:
Why not?
I think this might be a misunderstanding. When people say Z2 only works at higher volumes, they’re talking about blocks of basically only Z2, not extra Z2 in a lower volume plan that includes intensity.
Maybe? If you can recover from it then likely yes but very very few people would be able to recover from 4 intensity sessions a week for longer than like 3-4 weeks. Also why lower the volume. If you have the time and it isn’t too much of a stress in your life then keep it 4+ hours but add intensity.
So if you’re time limited here I would probably not do SS (except maybe at the beginning of a cycle after a break) since once you’re decently trained you’ll struggle to get a long enough SS session into an hour an a half. Basically you’d be getting extra fatigue than endurance but without pushing TTE which is where most of the benefits come from.
Do you always do mixed blocks (like TR likes to do) with a VO2 and Threshold workouts in the same week? I think that can work for a while but if you start to bump up against your time/genetic limits you might need to play around with the intensity distribution.
- VO2 blocks
- Try doing 2-3 weeks of 2-3 VO2 workouts followed by rest.
- Extending your threshold/SS intervals
- I’d use your long ride for this. In this case I’d swap one existing intensity for endurance and then each week extend the SS or threshold intervals each week in the long ride
Basically play with how the intensity is distributed through your season and cycles. 8 VO2s over 2 months won’t be the same stimulus as 8 VO2s over 3 weeks. But I would be very careful with just outright replacing Z2 with tempo or SS. Even if you normalize TSS Z2 will have much less stress and cause less fatigue than higher intensities. So even though the stimulus is theoretically higher you might have less adaptations in the end because fatigue builds too high.
One simple thing you may want to consider is simply mixing in some Tempo on your long Z2 rides. For example, each hour you can start with 20 min Z2, then 20 min Tempo, then another 20 min Z2. Repeat that each hour. It will feel easy the first hour or two, but progressively get more challenging. The will impart some additional fatigue on your muscle fibers, but also be useful training for an event like Leadville where you will need to push above Z2 deep into the day.
If there are days where you are too fatigued to do the 20 min Tempo intervals each hour, then you can always drop back to Z2.
really good advice, appreciate you taking the time to respond. For my shorter weekday interval rides are you saying there is more benefit from a shorter one hour threshold ride than a 1.5 hr SS ride?
Thanks for the response! Sounds like the consensus is not to cut out the longer recovery z2 rides for many reasons. One thing you mentioned tho is not doing SS if limited on time. It seems everything I read say SS is very beneficial when you are indeed short on time because you can get much of the same adaptation as longer z2 rides in much less time?
There will be more benefit from 1 hour time in zone at Threshold than 1 hour time in zone Sweet Spot, at a higher fatigue cost. If you have limited time and can recover from threshold - it’s probably the better pick. If you have more time, that changes.
Don’t cut them out, but Z2 is not recovery, that would be Z1. Z2 should still be work. The suggestion was to progressively increase intensity within Z2, adding in some Tempo, SST, or even Threshold IF you can handle it.
Depends on what you mean by limited time. If you have an hour - Threshold will probably be a better bang for your buck than Sweet Spot. But, you might be able to do 2 hours of sweet spot Time in Zone, for the same fatigue cost as 50 minutes Time in Zone Threshold. There are times I’d pick one or the other. But, I’d start with the time you’re willing to devote, and then see how much intensity you can handle within that time.
Thanks!!
I was new prior to 18 months ago. I’m 37 and had ridden maybe 200-300 miles casually in the previous… 20 years. I ran for about 5 years but never more than 5 hrs a week. Usually 3-4.
In my experience, I’ve found best gains in 2 vo2/threshold workouts, and the rest zone 2.
right now is my “off season” and I recently swapped a higher intensity with a sweet spot or tempo. Jury is still out but I wanted more TSS in my shorter time. I feel like with your 3 workouts above Z2, that’s too much.
Yeah this is what I meant. Some people get into a place where they feel time limited and that they can’t do enough Z2 volume so they turn every endurance ride into an easy SS ride (easy meaning your fitness would allow you to do 3x30SS but you do 2x20 in an hour ride) sorta like the old TR high volume SS plans where you’d just do SS like 5 times a week. But I think it would be much more beneficial to instead do threshold because the adaptations are like 95% the same but you can actually reach and push out TTE in a shorter workout.
So it’s a trade off where you’re time limited so you think you want to put in more and more intensity but more intensity is only better if it results in more adaptation. But many people who are time limited don’t have the aerobic development to handle all that intensity. So just don’t get sucked into the fallacy of more stimulus = more adaptation many times it just turns into more fatigue.
When you say most masters tolerate 2 intensity days a week, do you consider sweet spot intensity day?
Yes.
Edit - keep in mind a productive sweet spot workout is most likely going to take at least 90 minutes though. As you get more well trained - you could be approaching 2.5 hours with warm up / cool down and time between intervals. That’s why threshold is a better bang for the buck if you don’t have that much time.