Yes, and I look at it another way (my point above hammer/nail analogy). You don’t need to progress everything. Endurance in particular is a game of balancing:
- endurance load against interval days
- ability to recover and hit hard on interval days
Once established, aerobic endurance shifts to maintenance work. Or looked at another way, its ongoing conditioning work to support hard interval work.
The science is pretty clear:
- you don’t need a lot of intensity
- too much intensity (above LT1) and it increases the recovery cost (nervous system)
- low intensity training improves heart’s ability to push more blood per heart beat
- low intensity training improves the (leg) muscles to work aerobically
The stuff that isn’t clear:
- how much or little maintenance aerobic endurance work you need to support interval
- at what intensity is going to drive up recovery cost, if you don’t test lactate, or have well developed perception of balancing intensity and recovery
What I’ve found:
- better performance on free rides and events, if I experiment and push up IF / %FTP on my z2 endurance rides. For example targeting 72-75% ftp later in endurance rides, versus say targeting 60% ftp.
Absolutely, same here, you posted as I was writing that last bullet. I did a 5 week low-aerobic build in Nov/Dec and I simply dialed back the % FTP / IF, and then in Jan/Feb I’ve kept endurance at 2-3 hours and pushed the % FTP / IF up. All by perception. Its not easy, because I’ve also found that longer warmups, say 40 minutes, I get stronger and then can smash intervals. So my coach usually gives me longer warmups at the expense of making mid-week workouts 2 hours.