This is interesting, because it’s the opposite of what I’ve been doing, on my own, with Join or Athletica.ai. I’ve been getting better by managing multiple progressions simultaneously.
I started doing this when the first studies appeared supporting high intensity during offseason.
As always, manage your fatigue accordingly
It’s just interesting that you pull out this card when prompted to support your statements. That’s fine, be well.
Right on Kurt 
Tim Cusick always has a slide like this in his webinars:
Like you said, it’s really as simple as that. Appealing to a higher authority doesn’t make it better.
IMHO the forum is a better place when people post their own data, from their own experiments, and some explanation of why it did or didn’t work. Or give a summary “I’ve tried this with athletes and this generally works better.”
I respect your opinion and the data you used to arrive at that opinion.
I support my statements on here all the time. As I said, this is specific to you and your choice of engagement with me in this and a couple of other threads. I have better things to do with my time.
Thats what my data suggests. I’m either doing my own plan, or modifying skeleton plans.
And my dude, nobody owes you a complete explanation of their opinion and precisely how they arrived at it. Take it, consider it, experiment with it, and learn.
Then, their opinion is worthless to me. I really don’t care about anybodies specific opinion, but the principles underlying their reasoning. If they can’t articulate it, everything said crumbles.
well he did, and you didn’t listen.
I’m done.
There’s been some great discussion in this thread – let’s keep it productive and on-topic.
Isn’t the issue with these shorter but not actually hard intervals that they don’t really target anything specifically? When doing ftp intervals the first bit of each interval has a large anaerobic contribution so you aim for longer intervals to minimize this.
Doing short intervals with long breaks between them each interval has a decent amount of time not spent targeting the adaptations you want when working on extending your ftp.
If the other goal is to improve vo2 max then wouldn’t you want to be going much harder than 105-6ish %?
Right, just like tempo. Why is this a bad thing?
You can do other work to extend your TTE, but in theory this work is to raise your FTP. I take your point about “anaerobic contribution”….misnomer, but I get what you are saying….However, the point is that you can extend intervals, OR, like this workout suggests, do more of them. I see in my calendar 2 sets of 7x4m (2m rest)….Thats 56 minutes of work at 106%, I would think this is a significant, desirable stimuli.
The goal is to work threshold not vo2
If we are talking tempo I see no reason not to do it at the right time in a plan, I just prefer to do longer tempo intervals than I would sst or ftp.
Regarding the shorter intervals at your 106% do you think you would get the same effect doing 56x 1m? Just because your accumulating a lot of time at a certain power does not necessarily mean that you are gaining a training benefit from it.
You are, that’s what the literature around 30/30’s suggests.
Idk, maybe if you scale the rest period appropriately.
I’m not an advocate of this kind of work, just find the reasons not to do it not convincing.
Aren’t 30/30 type workouts supposed to be all out?
Doesn’t everything target something?
I don’t see why everybody is so down on this workout. Maybe it’s not optimal or maybe it’s just not traditional for cycling but runners do these kinds of broken interval workouts all the time.
I’ve read that time trialists routinely do intervals in this range because it’s specific to their event. If you have a 25k TT, it’s going to be performed in this range.
(I’m not saying that it’s the greatest threshold workout just that we don’t have any data to suggest that it’s the worst.)
They are prescribed a hundred different ways depending on the goal.
Darn. you foiled my plan on taking all your coaching knowledge 1 nugget at a time and selling it to the masses!
I’m going to side-step your question a bit and present my reasoning for starting with 2x7-min or 2x8-min.
Notice I didn’t say vo2max. What about that?
The Finnish might say I don’t have sisu (fun movie btw, watched it last night). Whatever.
Here is a simple progression during a block, from a recent season:
2x8(5) min
sorry for the bonus 2 minute effort at the beginning, recaptured a 1-mile KOM at 29mph. Bonus stimulus of high % vo2max. And anaerobic battery view:
my FRC is not 8.8kJ, the model is off, so I have another curve with my estimated FRC (sFRC). On my sFRC the 2-min KOM drained the anaerobic battery, but 8-minute intervals at 106% FTP and 104% FTP did not even come close to draining the battery (in either model).
4 days later:
a 34 minute climb on variable terrain (0.98 IF), and a well paced 17+ minute jobber at 104% on the second 10% steady climb.
10 days later:
3x8-min at 105% 106% and 105%
no real draining of the anaerobic battery.
iLevels gave that 12.3 minutes at FTP and 13.5 minutes at vo2max (FTP/FRC).
At that point I could have done another block pulling up on FTP a bit further, or done the 4x3-min / 4x4-min / 4x5-min descent into “true” vo2max hell of my existence.
Anywho, those are my thoughts with some actual data. It’s not your data so don’t assume the same applies to you. Thats why I train by power, analyze in WKO5, and use it to help me make self-coaching decisions now that I’m flying solo.
For comparison, here are some 40/20s on the trainer:
10 minute sets, and IF for each set (in Zwift, ignore mph and distance):
and battery view:
Drain that battery!
and iLevels view:
Those definitely aren’t threshold, but given what I posted above an alternate threshold workout of 2x10-min at 106% would likely give ME more time at high % vo2max.
Thanks for sharing, given your physiology: How do you think you’ll do, doing 2 sets of 7x 4m @106% 2 min rest….with 4min rest between sets?
