Not gonna hang or shame you. Really if you’re doing it for fitness and general health, then things start with riding your bike and enjoying it while being safe. Do intervals if you want to. And do basically whatever intervals you like.
I’d recommend as much easy volume as you want. Do some sprints like once a week. Go from there.
If you want to do intervals above threshold, I’d recommend just going essentially “max effort” for whatever time period you choose. The world is your oyster. I don’t think you need to be very specific about it at all. Go find that hill in your area and climb it as hard as you can 4 times.
I know, I know. This is what I would recommend myself to a lot of people.
For context: In my 20s, I trained up to 6 hours per day with 2-4 sessions per day (A mix of general conditioning aka the OG of “CrossFit” and various martial arts). So, I’ll have to slowly change my mindset.
Let me get a bit existential here: Whatever you do, you do in a particular manner and as both a positive decision (I will do this) and negative decisions (I don’t do this and that and…).
Manner I like to be serious about everything that I do, since I think this is the correct way to conduct yourself. When I train, I train to the best of my ability (not all out hardcore, but aiming for the perfect and desired stimulus). When I spend time with my daughter (2y), I try my best to be positive (fun, providing sense of security and calm, etc.) and demanding (I always try to merge positive emotions with learning and training with her). When I talk with my wife, I try to hyperfocus on what she says and use my complete brain (yes, I know the 10%-usage-myth) to engage with her.
Decision It is Sunday morning. I woke up early, my family is sleeping. What do I do? Chill and watch some meaningless series? Or: Do I listen to empirical cycling, cross-reference the studies and work in the learnings into my training schedule? I do the later. I don’t stress about it, I just think it makes more sense and I have a better time like it.
Based on this, I don’t think “just do whatever” is a good way to engage with anything, unless you just have to get going. It is rather style of low-living instead of high-living.
So, right now, I am building “the perfect” cardio regimen and therefore try to learn as much as I can from the most numbers-based endurance domain that I could find: Cycling.
In the end, I agree: Get the volume in with easy sessions (endurance, zone 2, whatever you want to call it) and have 1-3 hard sessions per week to top it off. So, I only have to gain by going unnecessarily deep.
I don’t think any of us were advocating for “just do whatever”, quite the contrary. I think most of us are trying to tell you you are approaching this wrong, by focussing on details first.
The first thing you should focus on are learning the basic principles of structured training and how they are implemented. Start with a bog-standard training plan, don’t waste time by trying to optimize, because you don’t have the prerequisite knowledge and experience to tell what you should optimize for. This doesn’t just include text book knowledge, but things like “What does my body feel like at this power level?”, “Should I push through today’s hard workout or do an endurance workout instead?” and “Is the limiter today mental or physical?” Don’t get sucked down the “What is FTP?” rabbit hole. Don’t think about “What if the relationship between my FTP and my VO2max power is 122 % FTP and not 119 %?” If you cannot nail the basics, these won’t matter.
One of the most important — probably the most important — factor in endurance training is consistency. Doing less consistently > Doing more inconsistently. The latter is also often a sign that your training volume and intensity are incompatible with your lifestyle and life circumstances. If you cannot commit to a training plan, then just start by riding regularly.
Once you nail the basics, try to experiment, but focus on one thing at a time. If you change your nutrition and you replace a sweet spot block with a polarized block and change volume, you will have no way of knowing why your body responded differently to stimulus.
That’s exactly the wrong way around!
You should focus on nailing 2 interval sessions per week, add one longer endurance ride (all of them are classified as hard!) and add easy endurance rides in between if you can recover in time for the intervals. Nailing the intervals should be your focus, and if you can’t, it is a sure sign you are doing too much and not investing enough time in recovery (first and foremost quality sleep).
“Whatever” was a bit hyperbolic and refers to: If aren’t after performance, don’t worry about details.
I like worrying about details.
Thinking about details doesn’t detract me from getting started.
I don’t want to come across ovely arrogant, but I train in a structured manner for 15 years now and for 10 years I accounted for each repetition, interval, calorie etc. (and trained up to 6 hours per day – just not cycling)
I get that I come across as somebody who never trained in a structured manner because of the style of my questions. But I try to come from a very generalist perspective and try to apprecciate each domain with a beginner’s mindset.
All of my thinking is guided by triangulation between the different domains (e.g. currently I am applying the norwegian threshold intervals with lower lactate to mixed modality training like CrossFit-esque) to actually develop a more generalised model of endurance and training, independent of the applied movement.
Here, I have to disagree. If I were a beginner I’d put the zone 2 sessions on a higher priority as long as I can progress with them. At least, this is how you start to train in any domain, being it endurance, strength or athletics. (Exeption: Martial arts which benefits from babtising by fire to weed out people)
I can only respond to what you write and how you respond to questions. You haven’t come across as someone who has internalized the tenets of structured endurance training to be honest.
Then take the advice you were given here, do a bog-standard training plan for one season and learn how your body behaves. The latter is not something you can learn from text books. Diving into details without understanding how they fit into the bigger picture are not useful.
Thing is that you’d need a lot more volume to have a significant impact. The stimulus you get from intense sessions is much higher if you only have very few hours to train. You tack on endurance once a person has gotten used to training for a certain amount of time. The thought of training 3 times a week is alien to most non-athletes. As is intensity. When my wife (a veritable gym rat) tried workouts on the bike, when she was going hard, her heart beat was 140. These are the things that IMHO are much more relevant to beginners.
I don’t use a bike to bike, but a bike for endurance. A “bog-standard training plan” would likely kill both my schedule and myself.
The hypothetical example is aimed at a beginner. The heart of a beginner would be optimally preloaded even with lower intensities. Only after your heart is sufficiently adapted, it makes sense to start with higher intensities.
In addition: Intensity in any endavour needs to be earned and build.
Exactly. Seduction is the name of the game.
On Topic: It seems that the above approach is used by Olaf Alexander Bu. In the latest podcast of Attia, he said that it is more important to keep the tests consistent than to marry yourself to a specific test. Obviously, he has vast amounts of data and is a professional.
