touche. I’d guess that middle aged men (or 33 y/o’s like me) want to listen about intricate race strategies and imagine dominating, even though they (I) only train 4-8hr/wk on average.
I do speak to the performance benefit of additional volume in some of the replies. I think some people read this thread as if I (and many others) are asking “permission” to ride more. I know that happens, people who are new to the sport follow a plan because they think it is the right thing to do and wonder if it is “ok” for them to ride for fun sometimes. I am perfectly content with doing what I want riding and the implications both positive and negative on overall performance.
This thread is speaking more to getting faster. There is a point at which a high volume and/or high performance athlete will plateau on the high volume plans without some augmentation. Those of us with years of experience and research that had to come before the ubiquity of YouTube videos, forums and social media shorts had to get this information from books like the Cyclist’s Training Bible in the like have become adept at those augmentations. I could write my own periodized training plan, but that is a part of my routine that I have decided that in the interest of time and temperament that I would farm out to an outside source. I like the periodization of the TR plans for build and specialty and would like to see them scaled up to true high volume to meet my current state of fitness. It is not as simple as 50% more volume = 50% more intensity. There is a point of diminishing returns where one won’t get faster. I would like TR to manage that breakpoint and take some of the guess work out. It comes down to functional overreaching, for those of us whose baseline of training volume is head and shoulders above the HV plans, we need a little more to drive continuous improvement but not so much that we are overtraining.
I think that is more or less what I am alluding to. I think it will need boundaries, someone might plug in goal events, number of hours they can train per day around work/responsibilities and AT would do the rest. I would not be surprised to see that in a year. In the interim, could we get a few more volume options and allow it to learn? I’m not trying to undermine the work being done at TR, but I don’t think creating the plans would be as difficult with the lion’s share of work already done with the existing framework.
I get your point, but there is a quality component too. Z2 miles can very easily become “junk” miles. Garbage in, garbage out. I think there are some deliverables that can be prescribed in those Z2 days that could benefit a ton of athletes, especially those who are bright eyed and bushy tailed ready to take the racing world by storm lol. I’ve been around long enough to maybe take those long rides and introduce some pedal technique drills, or introduce a couple intervals at SS for instance.
You know where I am really getting jammed up, I’d be fine with the HV plan defaulting where it but I would like to go into the variants section and plug in a higher volume and have it populate a workout that will make sense, maybe I had VO2 on the docket for one hour and I have 2 hours. Maybe the suggestion is an extra set, or maybe it is a high Z2 extension, but what I have found often is that I can’t pick another duration. The variants are not populated, but I know the workouts exist, I can do a workout search and find a couple dozen workouts that are 2 hours and at the appropriate VO2 max level. I want AT to serve up the ones that are best rather than locking me out. I don’t know if this is just limitations of the beta or if this is done purposefully.
Essentially AT is going to tell me “nope, you can’t ride more than 45 minutes today” and I just do it anyway. Let me choose my own adventure so to speak and put the disclaimer in there, “we don’t recommend this” that’s fine, but then AT were learn from my adherence that it is within my capacity and apply it to future workouts. I essentially don’t get level progression against my manual augmentations.
Absolutely! I think a lot of TR users get the lion’s share of their value out of the free podcasts! I think more people are using those fundamentals and right-sizing the TR plans for them. With that said, not everyone out there has the time to invest in listening to long form podcasting, it is a matter of priorities. Do I think everyone who trains should make an effort to understand this stuff? Yep! But the reality is some people can’t or simply won’t leverage the time. They are the workhorses, they want to execute. They don’t want to screw around with plans and workout selection, they want an out of the box experience to check the boxes. I think there needs to be a wider net of boxes.
But, even for those of us who do listen to every podcast, read the literature, and otherwise make the effort to understand, sometimes our judgment can’t be trusted. Our pride or enthusiasm can become our enemy. No one is going to tell me that more than 10 hours a week is not valuable, that is a baseless assertion, but I know there is a breakpoint and an intensity mix that can be the distinction between getting faster and digging a hole. I’d like AT to find it if for nothing else, as a sanity check for my own intuitions.
Thanks for the thoughtful conversations in the thread, @Sarah
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… hence my comment on other training companies. In some respects its felt like Waiting for Godot since joining TR, although I do think the recent plan updates were a step in the right direction. I’m not holding my breath for a lot of what Sarah is asking for, and stuff that I don’t recall reading like figuring out strengths/weaknesses and building a plan around those. Would love to be proven wrong in the next 6-12 months. Until then I’m learning more from my coach, and what I did before TR.
What makes you think they wouldn’t? Periodization is periodization. As many people have mentioned here, there is a distinct difference between the market share/ interest from their subscriber base. It is more likely that they have chosen not to pursue those insights rather than lack the capacity. These are no dullards here. We aren’t talking about of team of strictly developers that are just throwing spaghetti at a wall, there is a lot of knowledge surrounding training on the TR team that would be more than suitable to include higher volume. They also have the data. Everything synced to TR is included in their wide data collection which is a huge market advantage for them. It’s not a function of “special insight” we are talking about periodization at scale.
This is a tough data set to tease out. We are rare as compared to the general population. Anyone who has thrown their leg over a sand cruiser with a Vivoactive is included in this set and those using Wahoo, Apple, or platform direct recording are not, So, yes you are inevitably going to be off the chart. Without being able to slice that data between what I will term as “competitive cyclists” and that would include racers, serious group / segment riders and the like, your mean and the distribution around it would like quite different. What that looks like, well that’s another question. I suspect TR has that data. I would look at a two sigma limit analysis of individuals who are invested enough in training to own an indoor trainer and pay for a platform that is not gamified and get an appraisal of volume by season or quarter. That doesn’t mean that all of those folks want that time to be structured or periodized, I get that, but speaking to the “rarity” of high volume riders, in this market, observation would lead me to hypothesize that 12 hours or more weekly would not fall outside of those two sigma limits.
Sometimes I wish they catered to us high volume/ultra-endurance riders more. On the other hand, if they offered such plans I can’t honestly say I’d do them even close to as prescribed. The 8-10hrs of additional time vs a typical HV plan will be endurance/tempo (or lower), since you can’t continue to add intensity and not get burnt out/destroyed.
I don’t want to do another 8-10hrs of TR structure in z2/z3. It’s simply mentally too taxing to do a ride outside and constantly be checking the wattage against the current interval, and doing routes that cater to whichever workout is scheduled. It’d be worse to do all those hours inside unless that’s your only option and/or you’re the worlds greatest masochist. Much easier to simply add on long z2 rides to any TR plan, and be a little less vigilant with zone strictness and/or pick some long stretches of friendly road to work some tempo into. Might not be 100% as good as perfect structure, but it’s close…and it allows the mind to continue to enjoy cycling instead of being tied into specificity for 20-25hrs a week.
I’m also one of only a few people in my area who does a bunch of volume (1k+hrs, 12k+ miles a year), and probably the only one that does 15+ hrs of volume with a significant amount of intensity. Doubt there’d be many people who have the time/motivation/base/energy to consistently sustain that.
I do understand what you would want from AT, to suggest appropriate workouts in case you have more time.
However, I don’t agree that z2 miles can become junk miles. I don’t think there is such a thing as junk miles, and I don’t think there need to be ‘exercises’ in z2 rides to make them worth it. The volume alone is what makes it worth.
I think this is a valid point, I think what I thought I had in mind would be that long endurance ride would push to your Garmin or otherwise with a healthy range and let it run in the background. It could give you an alert if you are too high or too low, but it wouldn’t be a tight 20 range that would create hyperfocus to maintain. The notes for the ride might have some technique deliverables, or maybe at the one hour mark and the three hour mark it calls out a 20 minute interval at 90%. And you might think why? And the idea is that it would connect the workout to your plan and work with AT. Right now those “fluff” rides, to my knowledge, are ultimately ignored (The current issue with outdoor rides not populating surveys notwithstanding). My endurance right now has me at a level of 4, and this is based on the two “recovery” workouts I get in my plan per week. Based on my volume and endurance miles, my level is not a 4. Not that I care so much about the level attributed to Z2, but it points to a hole in a rider’s utilization of AT. Now maybe there is a middle ground that would pick up these rides and understand what to do with them, but a lot of my “beef” if you will is not the plan on its own, its wanting to really test the legs of Adaptive Training.
I don’t misinterpret your sentiment here, but zone 2 miles become junk miles very often. People go out with the idea that they “ride easy” because that’s zone 2 and that volume has a default value, but common pitfalls that qualify those miles as “junk” include:
Excessive coasting
Not really being in zone 2 but living in zone 1 or 3 for an appreciable portion of the ride - purposeless Z3 being especially egregious
Riding those miles when you truly need recovery or rest, those miles become counterproductive
If you’re truly riding Z2, then no, you don’t need to have a focused exercise with every ride, but including them to be used at the discretion of the rider certainly does not hurt.
Ok, actually I don’t think you need to be in z2 - I think you need to ride ‘endurance’, but whether that’s z1, z2, or z3 depends on your LT1. I also think that if you ride by feel, you’ll land there anyway, even if the power varies a bit. But that’s a debate for another thread.
Apart from that, I don’t actually think you can go too easy - you just get less adaptions if you go easier, and it might no longer be worth the time.
And let’s not go towards “excessive z2 when you need recovery instead”. The whole purpose of this thread was to increase volume. Even AT will never be able to tell you when you’re doing too much, because there’s no fatigue measurement.
Your LT1 by definition is not zone 3. Endurance is not zone 3.
The whole purpose of this thread is NOT volume for volume’s sake, it volume with periodization i.e. not junk miles
By definition? The power zones are not aligned to lactate measurents. It can be z3, it depends.
Anyway, I’ll leave you to it.
For estimated LT1, 70-75% of CP is not Z3 in the standard 5 or 7 zone models. If you make custom zones based on lab measured LT1 it’s still not Z3. Anything above LT1 leads to a gradual increase in type 2 muscle fiber recruitment and glycolysis and by definition indicates tempo level work. Z1 and Z2 fall into Z1 in a 3 zone model. Z1 is recovery, Z2 is endurance and Z3 is tempo. This is widely accepted.
Enjoy your day.
I’m so jealous you have so much time to train - I hate you all.
Love you too lol! It’s ebbs and flows 
watch next year work and life will have me by the throat and I will be begging to find 4 hours.