An endurance athlete should never stop training in zone 2. The ideal training plan should include 3-4 days a week of zone 2 training in the first 2-3 months of pre-season training, followed by 2-3 days a week as the season gets closer and 2 days of maintenance once the season is in full blown.
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I’d schedule the threshold earlier in the week, and the pure aerobic focused workout towards the end, before the weekend, since you’ll have some fatigue from the threshold, but they’re still manageable.
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I’ll throw this in – as Chad noted, it is possible to increase VO2 max even if one had many years of solid training behind them. But, if you can’t increase overall training volume (jumping from 10 hrs/week to 16 or 18, say), then the VO2 improvement may be in the form of being able to hold your maximum aerobic power for longer durations – not necessarily in the form of raising the watts you generate at maximum aerobic power.
My personal n=1 : when I look at the “flatline” on my 4min intervals, it’s usually at 385-390w, depending on motivation and freshness. At the start of the year, I can hold that ~385 for about 4 minutes – there’s no spike at the start of end of my efforts up that 1 mile, 6% hill.
The 4min power goes up as I do more :30 and 1:00 power work, in addition to some VO2 – and the times up that hill drop, and the average watts go up, but only because now I’m getting these twin peak intervals (which is not a bad thing because that’s how hills tend to play out in races). The flatline I can repeat for 4-5 intervals is still 385, though.
But, the duration that I can hold that 385 steadily goes up – now, in the last few weeks of my last Build, I can hold 385w for 10min. If I did a tapered and fresh 4min, the flatline would probably be a few watts higher than early in the year, but I know from previous years it won’t be much.
Yes, FTP has gone up – but it hasn’t pushed up VO2, it has just risen as a percentage of VO2.
Like SST intervals in Base, sometimes those VO2 intervals are not about “more power in 3-5 min” but about “how can I keep stretching how long I can hold this power.”
I just listened to a recent podcast with jan olbrecht on scientific triathlon. While some of his ideas are older they are contrary to some of the prevailing ideas out there now with regards to how much volume and specificity one needs for peak performance.
In a nutshell, we should be focusing on aerobic capacity for the majority of the year, with 3 to 4 weeks of training race pace before an event. Basically the idea is that ss and threshold work does not raise aerobic capacity and can lower it (based on his data) yet will increase the percentage of your capacity you can utilize. If you do too much of this “power” work, eventually capacity gets too low and performance suffers. Power work can be too stressful to be performed for extended periods unless you have a high aerobic capacity. In my experience extending duration of desired race pace works really well for about 3 to 4 weeks, then plateau.
Where his statements get a bit awry is saying that vo2max sets are about power and not capacity, yet we have a fair amount of studies showing not just power at vo2max increases, but so does the raw physiological value. He was also saying you can’t increase capacity and utilization at the same time, which is probably more true for elites who are already at a high level of both capacity and utilization. Makes a bit of sense that dr coggan’s own vo2 never really changed much and he does not believe it can increase much with training. He is pretty adamant that the best way to increase performance is through increasing utilization through ss and threshold work.