Let’s say you want to take your TiZ (per workout) from 40 minutes to 90 minutes (as you might if you did a 30-minute interval in each hour of your long ride)
That’s 50 minutes to add, and it’s probably sensible to add (on average) about 5 minutes per workout. I make that 11 workouts.
Depending on the training density and how you recover, you may need a slower progression. At twice a week, you’d be adding 10 minutes per week to your interval length per week. At three times a week you’d be adding 15 minutes per week and that might be rough.
Since individuals can hold FTP for different durations (seems to be accepted here it can be anywhere from 40-70 min) you may want to quantify your effort differently, or at least identify how long you you can hold your FTP. Intensity of 99% FTP is essentially race pace for that length of time. In my experience one effort per week is sufficient.
I also know that many focus on time in zone as the key metric but I think recovery should not be overlooked. Granted this was a couple of decades ago, but going from college to training/being around professionals, I was surprised how short & intense recoveries were. They literally trained their bodies to recover while maintaining tempo pace.
Another thing I noticed… the only time we broke up threshold/sweet spot/tempo efforts would be super-threshold. The longer the duration, the pace would decrease (i.e. sweet spot or tempo, though we called it differently). Ultimately it comes down to fatigue management. How many race efforts can you maintain a week before breaking down?
I used to hate threshold and sweet spot workouts, so I started focusing on longer intervals to address that weakness and eventually, I even began to look forward to them!
Because of my relatively high anaerobic capacity, AI FTP detection and ramp tests tend to overestimate my FTP, so I manually set my FTP instead. I replaced over-unders with threshold workouts and have worked my way up to doing 3x20min at threshold and 2x30min at sweet spot.
With a long MTB event coming up in May (about 9 weeks away), I’d like to reintroduce over-unders. However, I’m on a low-volume plan. How often should I continue doing these longer intervals to maintain the TTE I’ve built, while shifting back to shorter over-unders?
Thanks that looks better then the crazy 115% stuff I see in some of the TR overunder workouts, I think I should build my own workouts, since longer intervals with the type of over unders you suggest seem to be missing from TrainerRoad.
You may find that with dropping down to 90% rather than TR’s usual 95%, and with a 4:1 under to over ratio, you can actually push nearer to 115% or more on the overs.
Progress them just like sweetspot or steady-state threshold, so 3 × 15 > 2 × 20 > 4 × 15 > 3 × 20 > 3 × 25 > 1 × 45 > 2 × 30 or something like that.