Yeah, that I can’t comment on…i’ll leave that to the experts. I guess some of it could depend on how short the rest intervals are?
My “VO2 Max” workouts seem pretty achievable as well but I think it’s because my PL is still relatively low. Like it’s trying to get me used to doing that type of work. I really like doing them which is a pretty good indication that they aren’t as hard as you would expect them to be.
Absolutely. Doing that for an hour with 1-2 minutes rest will probably get you there, but rest intervals here are longer than the actual interval.
I used to love VO2 max. Until I figured out how hard they have to be to get the maximum out of them. Now I dread them.
Yeah @pnzr has the right idea on this.
V02 work should NOT be tied to FTP and also, the zones are descriptive - not prescriptive. doing 5 minutes at 106% means NOTHING for a v02 workout. It’s about maximum oxygen uptake. No wonder you could do more intervals OP - because its basically just harder threshold - and you could hold that longer than 5 minutes for sure. 30/30s also do not elicit the same thing as sustained work at max repeatable power for 3-6 minute efforts. 106-110% should be hard - but no one should struggle with this for 5 minutes if their FTP is set accurately IMO
TRs use of % of FTP anything over threshold is something they have to do - but is a very suboptimal way of performing workouts above threshold - so these PLs and what they “tell you” is pretty much nothing. Do a 5 minute effort maximally and then look at the power after to gauge improvements for MAP. Only way to truly look at your V02max is a step test with breath analysis, etc…
So neither of these workouts tell you anything about you or you fitness in my opinion.
Your misunderstanding is a common one, due to the way textbooks typically present things. Yes, a single, all-out, 30 s effort from complete rest (e.g., 500 m TT on the track) would be predominantly non-aerobic in nature. However, you only have so much PCr, you can only accumulate so many H+, etc., so you won’t be able to go that hard over and over again. At the same time, blood flow/O2 delivery will be greater and your mitochondria will “spool up” more quickly during subsequent efforts. The net-net is that what is initially a predominantly non-aerobic effort quickly becomes an aerobic one.
As I mentioned, even with 4 min of complete rest between efforts, by the time you do a 3rd Wingate about 2/3rd of the ATP will be provided via oxidative phosphorylation…with only 30 s between efforts, you will obviously recover less them, meaning that your ability to generate additional ATP via the phosphagen system and glycogenolysis will also recover less, and your power (and hence demand for ATP) will be even lower. AFAIK, no one has attempted to quantify the relative contribution of aerobic and non-aerobic ATP supply during 30 s on/off intervals, but it’s going to skew aerobically even more quickly than what has been studied (via biopsies).
Here’s the reference I always used to illustrate these points when giving the basic exercise physiology lecture to coaches for USA Cycling.
I might be the only person on this thread that actually looked at the workouts. But, since I did, I’ll tell you exactly why Gendarme was so much tougher for you: because you way overpaced it.
For all intervals in snowshoe fire you overpaced by ~1.5%.
For the first 20 or so intervals in gendarme you overpaced by ~8.5%.
Go back and do snowshoe fire at 108% and see if it still feels that easy.
Look, I know that it’s kind of a fad these days to turn erg off. It doesn’t matter that much. Definitely, for you, turn it back on if you can. net-net it’s not helping you to turn it off in this context.
This would be similar to the Burgomaster training protocol I kicked around on this forum way back in the day. I will say that even with 4.5m of rest between serial Wingate efforts it is true that I was just hanging on by the skin of my teeth. But it feels much, much worse than just saying those last few Wingates are ‘mostly aerobic’. Yikes.
(that’s Burgomaster not to be confused with BurgerMaster)
To add to that, I think he said he tried to pace as hard as he could go for 30sec. My goal whether it’s 20x 30s or 5x 4min is to pace to finish the whole set, not just the first interval.
I’ll see your 6 Wingate tests in a row and raise you 2:
(I was one of the endurance trained cyclists in this study.)
Yeah. That makes the musing:
Maybe a little absurd. 
Dans is a level 1.0 endurance workout, but I’m sure if we all ride the 2nd interval AS HARD AS WE CAN it will make Dans seem like it’s much harder than a level 1.0. If you don’t do the workout as prescribed it sort of obviates the ranking.
I’d rather do 50 Wingate tests sequentially than one circa 1986 muscle biopsy. So, SALUTE! 
This makes perfect sense, and is actually pretty obvious. Obviously, the 3.0 workout level is based on the prescribed watts, not what I actually performed. Duh. Kudos to you for seeing the obvious answer in the photos that I missed.
That was my first thought after looking at the screenshot in the first post (all I have without a TR subscription), and I said something about insisting on completing the workout at some arbitrary power target.
The reply was:
I’m not a coach, but that seems somewhat arbitrary reason to pull the plug. Erg or not.
I dunno, IMHO “prescribed watts” are overrated.
Repeatability is as much a factor in performance as power levels. i suspect you and I are very different types of riders. I can do 30/30s all day long, but holding VO2Max much over 90 seconds is an all out effort. I’d need a good nights rest and tons of carbs to feel confident of completing Snowshoe Fire, but Gendarme would be a moderate workout for me.
Ultimately, though, the algorithm has done a great job of consistently throwing me workouts that are hard, but not impossible. When it occasionally gives me a workout that is perfectly suited to my strength, I just revel in having a relatively easy day and save up a little for the next workout that is perfectly suited to my weaknesses.
Maybe they are, and I think I agree … but the workout levels TR assigns are based on the prescribed watts, not what I performed.
My original question was what does “failing” a 30/30 workout at a 3.0 workout level vs. ace-ing a 4.8 workout level of 4x5s say (if anything) about me?
Turns out, I performed the first set of 20 intervals of Gendarme at an average of 362.6 watts (vs a target of 346). Interestingly enough, Gendarme +1 prescribes intervals of 361 watts and has a workout level of 3.8 … so I guess I could ask the same questions with a slightly different reference point … but I won’t 
Like most everything else on this board, simple questions have a propensity turn into pedantic arguments and intellectual grandstanding.
I’m going to go ride my bike 
Thanks to those of you who were helpful.
Biopsies aren’t that bad (and the procedure hasn’t really changed since Duchenne invented the approach in the late 1800s).
I have an irrational fear about removing a meat noodle from my leg. Not saying it’s rational, just there it is.
Aren’t there new, fancy pants less invasive ‘biopsy’ methods that do a better job of measuring across the whole muscle? Probably not for lactate and creatine phosphate, I guess. Only for muscle fibre type.
Yeah, it will be interesting to see if “failing” remains the same after workout levels v2 rolls out. Few on the forum are qualified to answer your physiology question. FWIW I also find longer tempo and longer vo2 work easier. However for the type of fast group riding out here, I see a fair amount of benefit from doing what I loosely refer to as ‘glycolytic’ work (anaerobic / HIIT / short-short vo2). Even if that benefit is purely mental.
Attempting to estimate fiber type via magnetic resonance spectroscopy is the newer “fancy pants” approach. Measurement of PCr in muscle via MRS has been around for 50 y or so.
Lactate is also possible, at least theoretically, but only via use of hyperpolarization or 13C tracer administration. (Only nuclei with an odd number of protons and neutrons provide an MR signal…so 31P, yes, but 12C, no.)
Far more interesting than fiber type or lactate are the few studies that have measured deoxymyoglobin.