Thanks for the explanation! I just now (sweating on the keyboard here) finished the Muah workout and marked it hard… The first two sets were quite manageable and then at the end of the 3rd set I was in a sprint segment in Zwift, so I switched out of erg mode and sprinted to the end of the interval, but then the last FTP interval was a bit of a struggle. I am also just learning how to breathe efficiently, so that was part of it, I think. I guess I won’t need to dread the next one of these since I now saw that this was doable. P.S. I also took the advice about cooling and made sure the AC to this room was on plus my fan, the shared fan, and the one my husband uses on his bike were all running at the same time. Loud, but cooler.
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None of the training plans assign a 1hr @FTP workout, but you can do the one hour power workout if you want to test yourself.
Strictly speaking, no it’s very unusual to be genuinely able to hold FTP for an hour, for most people it’s more like the power they can hold for 45 mins some people can do an hour, some much fewer can do minutes more. If you are training for a 40km TT or an Olympic triathlon, it can be good practice to see how hard you can go for about an hour, though. I’ve done it, which probably means my FTP was actually a little bit higher than I had thought.
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It’s arguable that threshold workouts aren’t particularly efficient, if you only did one workout most people would get more from sweet spot, endurance or vo2max. But if you are doing a variety of workouts per week, they have their place in a plan.
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If you’re finding Muah hard, then I suspect either:
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Your FTP is set a bit too high, and as a result you’re actually doing a low end VO2 Max workout, so kudos for getting through it; or
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You’re new to Threshold intervals and are at an early stage of the journey of learning to manage the discomfort involved. That’ll come with practice.
“It doesn’t get any easier, you just get faster”
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Bottom line these workouts are designed to increase your FTP and ability to ride longer at hard intensities.
Your FTP is defined by muscular fitness, or metabolic fitness. While your VO2max defines cardio fitness.
When doing longer 30-70 minute sustained hard efforts, say racing up a long climb or into a headwind, or doing a 10 mile or 40km time trial, your muscular fitness comes down to 2 things:
- lactate production within the muscle
- lactate clearance out of the muscle
Doing threshold intervals around 100% of your FTP:
- focuses on lactate clearance
- improves the body’s ability to move excess lactate out of working leg muscles and blood, and to other muscles and organs like the heart, liver, and kidneys
- improves your ability to tolerate the acidic environment inside the leg muscles that comes from riding hard (due to higher lactate production)
Additionally threshold intervals help:
- increase your ability to push hard for longer and longer (“muscular endurance”), but most will see better return on investment by doing tempo and sweet spot intervals because these generate less stress vs threshold work, and therefore you recover faster
- increase your mental toughness
Again, these intervals help you both ride longer at sustained hard efforts, and increase your FTP.
A classic threshold workout is 2x20-minutes at 100% ftp.
There are other interval sessions that also focus on lactate clearance, and personally speaking I see better results and less recovery required from doing a certain type of over-unders: 1-min at 120% (produce a lot of lactate) and 3-min at 85% (clear it out). This is something you learn about yourself as you gain more experience training.
The other side of raising FTP
If you produce less excess lactate, that will also raise FTP. Workouts designed to reduce lactate production include 2-4 hour endurance rides, and upper tempo / Sweet Spot intervals.
Who benefits most from threshold intervals?
A nuance is that some people will likely see more gains from doing these intervals, and some will see fewer gains. TrainerRoad does not currently try to adapt plans based on different physiologies. Essentially the ratio of FTP to VO2max provides insight on who likely benefits more from doing threshold work. Someone with an FTP at a lower percentage of VO2max will likely see more benefits from doing threshold workouts.
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Honestly this suggest your FTP is off. With 5 min at FTP there is no muscle endurance compontent as 5 min at FTP is too short to kick up whole metabolic side of things that threshold provides.
I sound like a broken record with this thing but properly set FTP is key if you think about threshold workouts. How is your breathing during this 5 min? Is it stable and controlled or you are breathing hard, on the verge of gasping for air? How your muscle feel? Do you feel any kind of burning in the legs or just slight discomfort?
And how your SST workouts feel? Do you breath deep but comfortably and you feel you can do this for longer than the interval time? Do your muscles feel slightly challenged but nothing that causes you to stop?
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I am so looking forward to the faster part! I started training in mid February with the LV plan and my goal event set as a grand fondo at the end of August. I entered that information in the planner and am simply doing whatever workout the plan tells me to do. I absolutely love it! The workouts have always been doable, which is the important thing for me. I plan to just keep plugging on and see what happens.
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Thanks for the thorough explanation! So if I ended up toughing out the last 2 or 3 minutes of the last 5 minute interval and my heart rate was toward my upper limit, then I was probably doing a VO2 max interval (inadvertently) rather than a threshold interval at that point - as far as my heart was concerned anyway?
I can barely imagine the day when I will be able to do 2x20 minutes at FTP 
. But I started with an FTP of 112 and am now at 137, so I guess I’m slowly heading in the right direction. My husband has a significantly higher FTP and my hope is to be strong enough to ride with him (not do workouts with him) but ride so that we can go home together when we are done instead of having him tack on another 2 hours because it was all too easy.
Ahhh, this brings up a question I have been thinking about. I have never marked a workout easy. I am assuming that there is no such thing as “easy” if my FTP is set correctly. If I feel strong and controlled through the whole thing, then I mark it “moderate”, and if I am really wishing it was over by the last set, I mark it “hard” as long as I was mostly able to keep my cadence up and complete the interval. If my cadence sags and I’m just mashing though the last couple of intervals, then I mark it “very hard”.
So my question is: If my FTP is set correctly, should I be marking all of my workouts moderate?
Thank you all very much for taking the time to help me think this through!
Is there a way to go back and see what I chose for difficulty on a particular workout? My guess is that I marked the last few sweet spot workouts as very hard… But that was a couple of weeks ago, so now I’m not sure.
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Its hard to say because HR is so individual. And you said threshold intervals were new to you, so are confident about HR at threshold? Or max HR?
Possibly your FTP is set too high, or maybe your FTP is correct but you were having an off day or were a little dehydrated or over caffeinated.
If it helps I’ll give you personal examples, in general I rarely see 175bpm and its only after killing myself above threshold for 5-8 minutes followed by a hard sprint. So 175bpm is what I consider my max. And riding at threshold my HR is 158-162bpm. At the end of 3 or 4 or 5 minute VO2max intervals its around 170bpm. But those are pretty narrow ranges and they are mine, not yours.
Good work on increasing FTP!
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- Yup, one quick way is to open your Career on the TR website, then your Past Rides. The ratings are listed right there. You can scroll down and load as many as you want.
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- Your FTP is set a bit too high, and as a result you’re actually doing a low end VO2 Max workout, so kudos for getting through it; or
- You’re new to Threshold intervals and are at an early stage of the journey of learning to manage the discomfort involved. That’ll come with practice.
It’s likely the latter. If @BethK you fail the next workout don’t get upset about it but do consider dialing down the difficulty until you can complete the workout.
Do not discount how your body feels, rate of perceived exertion is more important than looking at power when you’re riding at threshold. This is when I know that I am at threshold on the bike:
- Legs are burning but not my lungs
- Breathing is deep and controlled, not gasping and ragged
- I have to focus to keep the power on point but I don’t have tunnel vision
If your lungs are burning, you’re gasping for air, or you’re starting to lose vision by the end of the interval, you’re likely going too hard. Threshold is not meant to feel like VO2 work, if you keep going without reassessing or turning things down, you will burn out after a few months.
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This is what I read:
which sheds some light on heart rate kicking up at the end, and the comment about struggling to finish the last interval. Both because of sprinting to the end of the interval instead of sticking with 100% ftp.
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No. There’s no set rule to how you should mark your workouts. From reading the rest of your post you’re doing it like the developer intended. The post ride survey is to tell the system if you need an adjustment in the progression level of the workout.
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I thought the long Z2 rides were about improving the ability (through increased mitochondria function) of your type 1 fibres to take up lactate as a fuel. Thus your type 2 are producing the lactate and the adjacent type 1 are taking it up as quickly as possible. Reducing the amount of lactate that ends up in the blood. Thus they don’t reduce the production of lactate in your type 2 fibres but improve the take up in your type 1 fibres. Why the long Z2 ride should not be seen as a filler, but essential if your ftp isn’t to plateau.
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Z2 training increases both use of fat as fuel, and the use of pyruvate which is the immediate by-product of the glycolytic energy system. If pyruvate is used as fuel, it can’t be turned into lactate.
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Whoops. What I meant to ask is if my FTP is set correctly, is it more likely that I will not need to mark any workout as more than “moderate” because that is the level of effort that is expected by the algorithm? So then if I mark something as “hard”, then the algorithm thinks “uh oh, that was too much for her, let’s dial back the next workout”?
So I’m wondering (musing, really, and not expecting that someone will have a specific and concrete answer to this) whether the correspondence is something like:
Easy = adaptation > harder
Moderate = adaptation > none/stays the same
Hard = adaptation > gets easier
I would expect workouts to be hard. Hard is not bad, right? So I am wondering whether I shouldn’t have marked the last workout hard (since it wouldn’t have been quite as hard if I hadn’t heard the siren song of the Fuego Flats sprint at the end of the 3rd interval) because now I have adaptations pending that will take my sweet spot today from Ericsson +2/ SS 4.5 to McGregor -5/SS 3.1.
I guess for me, at my level, it really doesn’t matter in the long run. I just find myself curious about how and why it works.
Moderate: took a bit of focus. Could’ve done another interval no problem
Hard: took a lot of focus and you were looking forward to it finishing. Could’ve done another interval … probably.
Very hard: took all your focus. Very difficult to complete. Could not have done another interval.
For me so far:
Sweetspot and Endurance: Easy or Moderate
Threshold: Moderate or Hard
VO2 Max: Moderate or Hard
It seems to me that Adaptive Training doesn’t make a massive change to its progression rate as long as I’m rating Hard or Moderate.
All workouts definitely shouldn’t be Hard or Very Hard if you’re doing 3 or more a week in a training plan, I don’t think.
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Thanks @Helvellyn, it helps to see how you mark your workouts. I am in the low volume plan as that was what was recommended for a beginner. I am looking forward to seeing what this coming week brings. It looks like 3 endurance workouts and I wonder whether I will find them easy. For me it had been sort of by definition that anything over an hour cannot be marked easy, but maybe I am getting better at sitting in the saddle for a little longer, so maybe it will seem easy this week.
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I’m sorry but this just isn’t true. Lactate is a necessary byproduct in generating pyruvate.
Go read up on “fates of Pyruvate” and report back. Here is one to start https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8066905/#!po=3.30396 and there are a lot more. The simplified ones only show 3 fates. They all show Pyruvate being the immediate byproduct of glycolysis.
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