What are Five by Fives? Amber mentioned dreading them in the last two podcasts

Maybe nothing. But improving your ability to aerobically generate power gives you more head room to improve sustainable power (FTP) and high power@vo2max has plenty of uses in a variety of situation.

Increased plasma volume, increased heart stroke volume (i.e. moves more blood per heart beat), and increased power@VO2max.

Kind of. High volume aerobic endurance / z2 riding increases mitochondrial enzyme production, increased capillaries, etc. which all increase aerobic power generation. But if you want to increase cardiac output and other things, vo2max workouts help in those areas.

The standard proscription for 5x5s or similar intervals is to do it at that highest power that can be maintained across all intervals. Obv, there’s a bit of practice / trial and error there. I aim for 90-95% of my MAP / 5min power.

Ref: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/power-training-levels/

Yeah, its a thing for some of us. I can hold 90-92% HRmax for 30-40+ minutes when doing a long threshold effort.

Throwing around HR targets can be confusing and possibly misleading.

On things like 5x5, the prescription is simply go as hard as you can repeatably do, preferably at high cadence. Your breathing and heart rate should be very high. After the workout if you look and power and cadence are dropping on the last interval, you probably did them correctly.

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That’s why I always do my VO2 max intervals “hard start” style. In a 5x5 setup I would start each 5’ VO2 effort with 30 seconds of 125-130% then settle right into your target power (95-100% of pVO2max or around 110-120% ftp) for the remaining 4:30. Doing them this way I generally achieve 90% HR max within the first 45 seconds to 1 minute therefor maximizing my time @ VO2 max. If done right you will probably see a power drop-off somewhere in interval 4 or 5 as it starts to feel like an “all out” effort but you’ll still be collecting the benefit from a physiological standpoint

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They were rhetorical questions but thanks :wink:

I will have to go back and look up my average HR for the last time I did some hard start VO2 intervals.

Here’s an example. I just did a Kolie Moore Baseline FTP test. It was 41 minutes. My average HR was 151 and I hit 168 at the very end.

My maxHR is 188. 90% would be 169.

I do have to say that I think my chief limiter is muscular endurance or at least not cardiovascular. When I reach failure, it’s never because I’m gasping for air.

Here’s an example. I’ve been doing a sweet spot / tempo block and typically I’m about 135-144bpm - only reaching 144bpm at the very end of my 3rd 20 minute interval. When you look at typical zones, my power is in tempo zone but my HR is in aerobic zone.

Wow this thread went deep into the weeds fast! What I was referring to on the podcast is a pretty classic VO2max workout: 5x [5’ on / 5’ off]. Honestly, nothing complex.

I will describe what I was doing in my training. To be clear, this was heavily context dependent and specific to my situation, so I’m not making any recommendations here! When I did these, I was training to hit power targets, aiming for roughly 120% of FTP and not worrying about heart rate. I would aim to hold 120% looking at wattage on the first four efforts, then go all-out on the last effort and see if I could beat the previous efforts. By the time I was doing these, I would have built up to this workout, by doing variations of sets of 40/20s, 3’, and 4’ between 110-130% in the weeks/months previous. By the time I could properly execute this workout, I was usually pretty fit and looking to stabilize top end fitness in the early part of the race season. Which frankly made the workout harder, because the power targets were pretty high (for me), around 360-390w depending on the timing.

These efforts are just plain hard. Each effort starts out feeling very manageable, but by the end is extremely uncomfortable. Despite this, the first couple of efforts still feel “paced” rather than all out. By the third and fourth, though, “paced” starts to feel pretty dang near max, even though I’m still restraining myself at the start of each effort to maintain targets without blowing up. Then I would “let myself” go as hard as possible on the last effort, but even that one I would try to build into so that I didn’t go all out for 30s and die. Instead, I’d start really hard, and see how much more I could give and how strong I could finish through the full five minutes.

These efforts were as much about learning how much I could get out of my body over a specific span of time (5 minutes) as they were about training my VO2max zone. This helped me train RPE and enabled me to go by sensation (not powermeter) when I raced.

These were really effective sessions for me, but they were just really, really hard – physically and mentally.

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image

:joy:

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LOLOLOL Touché @mcneese.chad and @iamholland :joy:

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The thread I linked goes into a long discussion of long vs short intervals.

I’ll only say my interpretation of the workouts and personal experiences: the whole goal is “time in zone,” but this doesn’t tell the whole story. In my personal experience, the time in zone shouldn’t be considered the power zone. It’s how long you spend at your maximum ventilatory effort. For instance, I don’t start really huffing and puffing until minute 3/4/5 of the longer intervals. Breaking that into a larger number of intervals with the same time-in-power-zone (10 x 1 min vs 2 x 5 min) eliminates the progress I see.

Again, see bolded above. This is for me, I am not saying it will work for others or is somehow based on more sound physiologic principles. It is just my own experience and interpretation/observations.

Is this part of a “train for what you race” type of approach? I remember hearing on the pod at one point a recommendation around focusing in on a “time in zone” that gets you what you need for what matters most in your racing/riding…

Where I ride, most climbs are in the 5-15min range, and most of goals around beating personal PRs center on those efforts, so being able to lift my ability to hold higher outputs for 3-, 4-, then 5-min, then longer, seems to make sense as a good training approach for me within a general structured plan.

What are Five by Fives?

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Subtle flex, and I Freaking Love it!

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I hit it a few times per year - the usual scenario is a race simulation group ride that culminates in a sprint or final all out effort. I see max HR a few times per year.

I just did a Kolie Moore baseline FTP test. 42 minutes - Over the last 30 minutes my average HR was 155. I ended the test at 168bpm. Based on the effort intervals.icu actually recalculated my LTHR to 155 which is about what I would have thought it was.

I’m 56 this year. The heart doesn’t rev like it used to.

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Sure but even without considering age, HR is highly individual.

Maybe instead of FTP being too low, it’s just a case of having an FTP that’s a lower % of VO2 Max. That’s just a guess though.

I think I’m similar to @AJS914. I’d guess my max HR is about 180 (I’m usually in the high 170s when I finish a ramp test). For Sweet Spot, I run between 145 and 155. For sustained threshold stuff, I’m usually in the 155-165 range with the higher end during hard over/unders.

Going back through all of the VO2 workouts in Sustained Power Build (MV) that I did last year, most of those had a max reported HR of 160-164, so I’d just barely be hitting the 90% of max HR at the end of a 5 min interval. I wasn’t doing AT back then so I don’t have any of the survey results to check RPE, but my guess is that 5 min @ 110-112% FTP is too low to get me into the proper VO2 max range.

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I hit my max HR relatively often on Zwift races, in the ZRL (team-based points league) which are pretty much the only races I do these days - I really hate getting dropped at the best of times, and because you are working for points for the team that also gives me a bit extra (don’t want to let the team down).

This is usually due to multiple efforts well over FTP and hardly any recovery time - I find once I’ve “popped” my HR doesn’t come back down well and basically stays high after that. I’ve done 50 minutes at 183 average before. I don’t usually feel good afterwards/the next day though.

I’m relatively bad at shorter efforts (1-5 mins), I can do a good 20 or 30 minutes no bother (race in B and could do a race winning 20 mins i.e. right on the B boundary), but I always get dropped on the short climbs and sprints.

I think my FTP must just be a very high % of my VO2 max HR, as I don’t seem to have a big HR ceiling when I get above FTP.

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Only time I have ever hit my max HR, I blacked out.

But I have hit a high number a lot, but rarely my actual max. I avoid that out of fear of dying.

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#MentalWeakness I blow up before blacking out. Usually a 5-10 minute over threshold effort and finishing with a sprint. Sometimes sprintervals. One ramp test (out of >10 total). Consistently hit the same 174-175bpm.

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That’s how I understand it, but I had a coach who wrote these as 5 x (5’ + 5’), which makes a little more sense to me from a math perspective.

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Two minutes is pretty typical for me. I did 6x5min of VO2 (110%) yesterday - it was 3;30 to get above 90% on the first one, and 1:45 by the last.

I wonder if this is also influenced by at what percentage LTHR is of max HR - my LTHR is somewhere between 90 and 91.5% of my max heart rate.