Background: 50 year old that through age and training volume may just becoming more diesel than punchy like I used to be. Also, I use ERG mode for most of my trainer workouts.
Issue: I’m having troubles with short VO2 efforts (like 30/30’s) and hard start Threshold because what TR wants me to hold for those is literally too hard. The other day I did Clouds Rest +6 which is 5 sets of 12 30/30s so 60 total over a 1.5 hour workout. The wattage it wanted me to do was like 371 watts for each hard 30 seconds. I can do that…a few times. But there’s no way I can do it 60 times. So I set the workout percentage at 92%, which was like 351 watts and banged out the whole thing in erg mode. Today I am going to do a hard starts workout that begins with 30 seconds at 400-something watts then settling in at 8 minutes just under threshold. I physically cannot do that for more than one of the intervals. I think that my VO2/Anaerobic and threshold are just much closer together than TR is assuming it is. For the last hard starts workout I did, I would flip erg off, go as hard as I could for the 30 seconds, then flip it back on and do the Threshold interval.
So, am I being too literal with the VO2 stuff and I should just be turning off erg and going as hard as I can? Or do I need to worry that I cannot hit those power targets? I have become much better at the diesel stuff and can ride pretty hard for a very long time, but I also still like doing XC races so I don’t want to just ignore VO2 and Anaerobic work.
It prescribed all the workouts I do. And part of the reason I don’t like this is because I then have to explain to it afterwards why I turned down the intensity. I almost never touch the intensity percentage during a workout, I just do everything as is. After the recent release of everything (I’m in the beta), AI gave me a 15 watt ftp bump that set it higher than I have ever been. I was super skeptical, but tried it. Did a couple workouts and it was way too hard for threshold so I manually set the FTP back to where it was for now. I’m hoping with more time that next time it won’t try to bump me up so high. All the workouts have had plenty of time to refresh and update based on that manual FTP setting because it has been almost two weeks since I set it. It seems there is a mixture of things happening between my VO2 weakness, TR thinking I am stronger than I am in general, and that I probably shouldn’t use ERG for anything over Threshold. But that’s why I wanted to ask others what they thought.
With that being the case, check you don’t have any pinned workouts that haven’t been adapted to the new FTP.
If not, it may be just a personal weakness that the AI hasn’t picked up on. I used to seriously struggle with this kind of workout, mainly because it wasn’t a zone I trained that often (I had a habit of repeating base and early build, but then bailing and never hitting the hard VO2 work in build or specialty over and over again. It’s still not a strength, but better now I have powered through a few sessions where I had to turn it down.
Now at least you can tweak training approach by zones. I would consider setting VO2 a step below whatever you have everything else set at and see if that helps
FWIW I do all workouts in erg, including these, but this will depend on your trainer as to how it behaves
The TrainerRoad way - leave the power at target, if you fail you fail, but rate the post workout survey accurately and your VO2 levels should adjust. If you can’t complete the prescribed workout at the prescribed powers - that’s an All Out Effort / Workout Failure in the Survey. Erg or Resistance doesn’t matter here if you can execute the workout as intended, but sometimes people find Resistance easier - but power will fluctuate a lot more.
The other option - ignore your progressions in TR, Load up workouts that you can do, put it in resistance (NOT Erg) and go for max effort across the entire workout, focusing on a higher cadence and spinning fast. Think about it this way, you have to be able to finish the workout so you can’t really go all out on the first. But at the same time, power levels are more of a recommendation, and you can expect to see power drop across the workout. You’re trying to get your heart rate up fast and spend as much time as possible across the workout at/near your physiological VO2 Max. You want to be gassed at the end of the last VO2 Effort. With that said - how you rate the workouts is going to be trickier. If you’re not completing what TR Prescribed, you still have to treat that workout as a “failure” in the TR system even though you weren’t trying to execute the workout totally as prescribed.
Both methods have their place - and get beat to death in the VO2 Progression Thread.
The issue with “the other option” is that the OP is talking about 30/30s. What you’re referencing here is what some prefer to do for longer “traditional” VO2 intervals.
That’s a good point. I lowered the intensity and then answered the survey on how THAT felt, not how the prescribed workout was, which was too hard to do…so basically All Out/Fail. I’ll update that survey and hope it helps in the future. For my next block, I have also used the ‘set training approach by zone’ thing to make VO2 and Anaerobic balanced while my other zones stay aggressive.
True that it’s more often the longer intervals, but the approach still holds. No reason you can’t just go for your “max effort” across blocks of 30/30’s too to the point where you’re gassed at the end, without specifically trying to hit a certain power level. The issue there does become how you rate it, if you “failed” from a TR perspective it should still be rated as such so the system can adjust.
maybe we can have @eddie confirm this. But I’m pretty certain I’ve had TR Staff say this (although wondering if that’s old v. new functionality). Rate it based on your ability to complete the prescribed workout, not how you adjusted (e.g. - if you couldn’t do it at 100% and lowered to 92% - that’s an All Out / Failure from a survey perspective)
That’s really confusing. I would have never done it that way.
This essentially means no workout would ever be a fail. This means if you stopped in the middle of a VO2 interval and took a long break, then completed the workout, you rate it as “hard” not a fail, right, because you rate the workout you did not the workout you were assigned? I’m totally confused.
Agree, I am assuming TR wants us to answer the survey based on my turned down workout now, but you can easily see it going either way. So not intuitive at all if both ways could make perfect sense.
I thought the same about one of the hard start sweet spots. But then when I did the workout it wasn’t that bad. There is a small recovery right after the hard start. So basically you accelerate hold a little then get 15 seconds to ramp from recovery back to the 8 minute effort. I was convinced TR was trying to kill me before I did it.
The rate how it felt, not how you think it should be mantra has been discussed on a few threads, I think. If you blew up and stopped altogether it would be a fail.; or struggling on at a genuine maximal effort and not hitting power targets will also be a fail. But taking breaks to make it less hard degrades the PL awarded ‘big time’ for a workout (the new system highlights this more than the old I think), so I don’t think you should ‘double whammy’ yourself; the system has already done the appropriate ‘whammy’.
Yeah, I can do it fine if I go all out for 30 seconds then settle in. I mean, it sucks but I can do that. What I can’t do is hold the exact amount of watts it prescribes and then do the interval, even with the rest.
In your example you did fail. You couldn’t do the work and had to stop. The fact that you got going again doesn’t change the fact that you had to stop.
The way I see it, the rate what you did not what was prescribed discussion is more for the instances when you do part of a ride and realize that you can’t do more of it at that intensity and turn it down. Or if you turn it down from the start as was suggested as a possibility here.
Thanks for explaining. I see someone marked your comment TR Approved, but I’m going to need TR to chime in and say more because this makes no sense to me at all. Is the rule “you only failed if we give you a failure survey”? This kind of destroys everything I think I know about people “taking breaks” or turning down the percentages in workouts. @eddie maybe?
@eddie It’s this whole thread. My tldr version is that someone felt they couldn’t do a VO2 workout as prescribed, so they did the workout, but lowered the percentages so they could complete it rather than select an easier alternative. We then discussed if that is a failure because you didn’t do the workout as prescribed or if you just rate the work you did, not the workout as it was designed. There is a TR Approved on “just rate the work you did”, but that’s really confusing because, especially when it’s a VO2 workout, if you’re lowering the targets of the intervals, it sounds to me like you failed the VO2 workout that was planned. If every workout is “just rate the work you did”, then is any workout truly a “fail”? I could start a VO2 workout with 4 intervals, do the first 2, then quit. I could do 2 intervals, then stop half way through the 3rd interval for a 60 second break, and then complete it. Should I only rate the work I did? In both cases, I would think I failed, but if I’m only rating the work I did, I would rate it hard or very hard, not fail.
