Turning a LV plan into a MV one in terms of TSS

Has anyone adjusted their LV plan to be more like a MV / HV one? The LV plan works well for me, because of the 3 sessions, plus gym plus outdoor rides. Having said that my mornings are free, so I could do a 3hr turbo (if i got up early enough) - I am doing the LV plan and my weekly TSS is 350 / 450 (this includes outdoor rides)

I have been playing around with my schedules sessions, but moving towards the longer ones to bring up the TSS to a more similar MV plan.

Has anyone done this, (kept the 3 sessions, but increased the time to bring up the TSS) if so how has it effected you? Or is the MV plan medium due the the extra sessions and not just the TSS?

You can pile on a TON of low end z2 if you have the time and inclination. Keep an eye on how you feel and don’t let it impact your hard days. Just ramp up the volume over a couple of weeks.

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I’m doing this right now. Ride six days a week and averaging around 530 TSS/9 hrs a week. Pretty much all my non SSBLV1 workouts are Zone 2 group rides on Zwift. Coming back to bike after a hiatus from regular training but I am progressing faster than I ever have before. Did Warlow at 110% this morning and wasn’t that bad. I’m planning on sticking with the LV plans and supplementing with Zone 2 as I progress through base > build > speciality.

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For a while I did the SSB LV rides Tues/Wed/Thurs, z1 Mon/Fri and long z2 on Saturday/Sunday. Probably 12-14hrs/week and normally around 650TSS, but varying between 600-700.

A little too late into Sustained Power Build I realized this schedule did not work for me due to the intensity of the workouts and time I needed to recover from the VO2Max workouts. And the long intervals @105% that pop up out of nowhere crushed me. I switched to prioritizing 2 of the workouts and doing them Tues/Thurs and doing the lowed pri as an optional one on Friday. What works for you for SSB might not work in builds and you may need to adjust your schedule or cut down on extra volume if you want to be fully recovered for the priority workouts.

I haven’t done specialty. Mostly because I love riding and don’t want to cut back to 45min/day towards the end of the phase. So no advice from me there.

I’m actually planning on doing sustained power build. I’ll definitely keep an eye on that and listen to my body.

I made the switch in week 6, so basically 2 weeks into the second block. It was a bit too late for me at that point, I mean, I got though the rest, but it wasn’t pretty and I was carrying a ton of fatigue exiting it. I had also never done long intervals above threshold and I crushed myself on those.

Next time through I will probably do one of the following:

  • Do two highest pri workouts on Tues/Thurs and low pri as optional on Friday.
  • Do the lowest TSS workout (but not the vo2 one) on Saturday morning and do a bunch of z2 after, and do the other two workouts on Tues/Thurs. Saturday would probably not be a 3-4hr day though as I’m sure I would be feeling a little toasty after the workout.

I think my FTP stayed the same coming out of SusPB, which is probably a decent outcome considering how I felt. But I feel like it really payed off later in the year with better fatigue resistance, sustained super threshold efforts, decreased RPE around threshold, and handling sustained high power and surges in zwift races.

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Yeah sustained power is definitely my weakness so wanna work on that. It does look pretty beastly tho lol.

With this, when I was mentioning bringing up the TSS I was talking about increasing the workout lengths, for example Monday i was scheduled Rogers for 60mins which is 67 tss with 3x7 min @ 105% so increased the workout for an 90mins which is 6x7min @ 102% which is 111 tss. Which is an increase of 44 tss to my week.

I havent really thought about adding more z2 rides, but as work starts to wind down i may slot in 45/60mins of z2 in the afternoon.

How I am increasing the TSS for my weeks is simply increasing the workout times. With proper fuelling and recovery so far I havent blown out. I guess if i want to increase it even more…adding z2 is the way forward??

Even with trying to stretch the scheduled workouts. Better to tag z2 onto the end then add more intensity.

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Why is that though? I know an endurance base is key, but surely spending more time at higher intensity is going to make you stronger (if you don’t burn out)

I have just started a new plan for Jan, and switched it to MV. The extra volume I am doing currently is just for the remainder of the year

Because it is easy to dig a deep hole with high intensity and a little bit goes a long way.

You can do too much high intensity easily. It is hard to do too much z2. More high intensity isn’t always good. More z2 is rarely bad.

Basically the risk/reward is way off for piling on extra z4+.

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