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.
Can I bump up the intensity of my last threshold workout tomorrow without much detriment?
How high before I’m shooting myself in the foot and deviating from intent of training & recovery designed/suggested by TR?
I’m feeling froggy and like I can successfully finish a slightly harder workout.
Originally scheduled:
Creise (level 3.5) consists of 4 sets of short efforts lasting between 1-4 minutes at 95-110% FTP with very short, 30-second recoveries between intervals.
Recoveries between sets of intervals last 5 minutes each.
I’m considering bumping up to one of these two, instead:
Heng Shan (level 4.5) consists of 4 sets of short efforts lasting between 1-4 minutes at 96-117% FTP with very short, 30-second recoveries between intervals.
Recoveries between sets of intervals last 5 minutes each.
Calhoun (level 5.2) consists of 4 sets of short efforts lasting between 1-4 minutes at 100-123% FTP with very short, 30-second recoveries between intervals.
Recoveries between sets of intervals last 5 minutes each.
Those three are all basically the same workout. None of them are going to train you differently or force a different adaptation than the original, but the last two will definitely make you more tired. Go for Heng Shan if you must increase it, IMO, but Creise would be just fine as well.
What about increasing the frequency of low difficulty threshold workouts rather than increasing the difficulty of just one weekly threshold workout?
According to the Norwegian method that’s the best formula to raise your threshold.
I wonder how the TR ftp prediction is affected by using this method.
What’s the upper end of TiZ that people are doing threshold?
I have this progression I’ve been doing, 10 mins @95%+ with a minute standing butt break. Then repeat. The butt break is necessary to not hate my life on the trainer. I just keep tacking more of these on, up to 8x10 last season. When to stop?
I don’t need threshold much at all in my racing (ultra distance), this is more to help raise the ceiling and I guess push out TTE. Need more Z3 TTE than Z4 for races but the hours spent on the trainer chasing Z3 to near failure would be untenable.
I think the highest I’ve ever gotten was 5x15m (I might have done 4x20 before but I can’t remember). But that was with like 10-15m rests during a much longer ride, doing only 1 minute rests would have changed that a bit I’m sure. I might have been able to go longer but usually the season’s plan necessitates that I move along at that point and it wouldn’t be worth it to squeeze out every last minute.
Could you just do a standing and pedaling butt break during a longer interval? I do this both inside and out during anything over like 15 minutes.
going into indoor season: main priority on increasing FTP; TTE not important → 7x10 is enough, start new progression round with first increasing ceiling (VO2max) and then again into SS/Z4 work
preparing for event: extend TTE and fatigue resistance with longer intervals (but 70min in total is still more than plenty)
EDIT: with response above, I assumed you are using reverse periodisation i.e. shorter intense intervals indoor during winter and long endurance work outdoors. If not, you can still take it into consideration.
My season is inverted (my A race is end of Feb). Summer is base and fall is build. I am indoors, mostly. I don’t really fret about endurance mileage though I have a few C events to get some long hours in.
I am going to start throwing in some VO2 two-a-days I like one day VO2 and one day Thres.
That is the point of the 1 min rest programmed in. Standing and pedalling. HR doesn’t drop too much but the watts do. I could try to keep the wattage up? I’m just not sure if that’s better than what I’m doing.
Is it? That’s what I’m trying to understand. Could it be worthwhile pushing this to 1h30 or even 2h? The ultimate goal is to raise Z2 and get more fatigue resistance in Z3. I thought I could do that just by raising the ceiling last season but looking at my data, I’m not sure that’s the case over very long distances.
This seems more like a sweetspot/threshold hybrid. Probably a really good workout, and if you can get that to 9x10 seems pretty much sufficient.
obviously if you were to increase to 100-105% it would be again a different workout more focused on threshold, maybe something like 4-6 x 8’ on 2’ off at 105%.
Does it? I don’t use ERG. I program the target at 95% but it’s 95-100% in practice (most recent was 97%). It’s a psychological hack; I get more of a boost from seeing myself exceeding the target. Seems like I’m kinda between the “intensive/extensive” aerobic range:
I’m less interested in over-100% FTP because that really starts bleeding to VO2Max territory. I have separate VO2Max workouts I do. The decoupling over the course of the existing 6x10, 7x10, etc, already puts my HR into 95+% max towards the end.
EDIT: I guess I’m looking for the rationale behind TiZ for threshold, as opposed to “this is convention.” I’d like to figure out how to progress this. I know how to raise the ceiling but I’m looking for more fatigue durability in the mid/lower zones. I bumped my FTP up last season by 20% but it didn’t result in a proportional increase in speed over long events. Just feels like there’s something missing between “raise the ceiling” and “lots of Z2 endurance.” My hope is stretching out TTE is the missing piece but I really don’t know.
Yeah, fair enough. I guess if you maintain it between 95-100 it is a good threshold progression.
The reason I reckon it might be a SS/THR hybrid is because of the total set duration of 90 minutes is seems very hard so close to FTP so you would almost automatically end up in SS territory (unless these workouts are true breaktrough workouts).
The reason I mentioned the 4x8 at 100-105 is as a progression in to VO2max, considering you basically seem to be at the max with 7-8x10, in my opinion.
I wonder how you would combine these threshold workouts with VO2max.
I don’t know rationale. But for me, it was dead end: while recovering from injury, I did lot of Z2 and when got better, also SS/Z4, reaching Z4/1x70 and Z4/2x40 at 97% (AI FTP, validated with KM test). All good, except after that I could not raise my FTP until bumped volume considerably. Even focused 3-week VO2max block did not help, although it is possible I did not push hard/smart enough
I did this last season. Mid week VO2 two-a-day (morning and evening) with this sort of threshold workout on the weekend. Almost no endurance volume. Just hit the high intensity hard when that day rolls around. EDIT: Typical week:
Last year I didn’t seem to have an issue gaining FTP on low volume (~4h/week last year). Not beginner gains either. Two possible variables beyond individual biology: 1) I do 20-30mins of sauna immediately following my turbo sessions, 2) my “endurance adaptations” are already at a pretty high percentile. The long distance endurance is very slow to de-train. #1 will help maximize blood volume, which will happen naturally with a lot of training volume. I treat it as a shortcut to training volume and it seems to have that effect (given #2).
I might try the 7x10 or 6x10 as close to FTP as possible, no food, and then finish out with some long tempo/SS. Try to simulate Z3 in low glycogen state without having to take a super long ride.
What’s the point of this? Low-glycogen ride may improve fat oxidization marginally but you can recover faster after sufficiently fueled workout and therefore schedule next hard workout sooner. Frequency/consistency trumps everything else.
If you really want to incorporate low-glycogen workouts into your routine, then better split it into two: sufficiently fueled hard workout on day 1, sleep low, easy unfueled or little-fueled workout next morning.
