Hi all,
I’m looking at starting a new training plan and was wondering how to approach the selection of SSB1 in terms of volume. I’ve seen two different approaches suggested: 1) Select the LV plan, complete all prescribed workouts and add all your group rides on top of that. 2) Select the plan that matches the number of hours you already ride (probably HV) and then remove workouts to allow for outdoor rides.
To give some context I’m already training 8-12 hours a week with 2 group rides (usually wednesday and one weekend ride, Z2 rides with ocassional Z4/Z5 hill effort) and I really would like to keep those two up. Any help is picking a plan would be a massive help.
Cheers, Dan
Personally I would go with the above advice of LV+
I’d say there is also an argument for MV-. It really depends on your motivation/outlook.
Would you rather see lots of completed workouts on the calendar with extra rides on top or are you okay with seeing lots of skipped/substituted rides? The latter might be very demoralising psychologically but you also might be fine.
I’d like to do around 5 hours of structured intervals a week, with an additional 5/6 hours of group riding from the two days. Also is there any way to automatically change up the structure of every week, or will I have to move around all the structured sessions manually? As I would like to leave the Wednesday and the Saturday free every week
Assuming that you add a training plan to your calendar, you can select which are the “default” days for your workouts. I think this is the “automatic” part of your question, at least for adding the plan in the first place.
Default layout for Low Vol plans is Tue, Thur, Sat:
This sets the main schedule on your calendar. After that, you are free to adjust on the fly if your schedule changes on any future week. But this will be manual and must be done each time.
I was in a similar situation a couple of months ago.
Like you, I usually ride 8-12hr/wk, so I was vacillating between the Mid and High Volume plans.
but after getting some quality advice on the forum, I decided to go with the Low-Volume, prioritize those workouts and then add sessions that fit my schedule.
This worked out great for a number of reasons and would be my recommendation to you.
With the Low-Volume plan, my ideal and pretty typical week would look like this:
Mon - Active Recovery spin
Tues - LV Plan workout
Wed - Endurance ride
Thurs - LV Plan workout
Fri - Endurance or Recovery
Sat - 3+hrs outdoors
Sun - LV Plan workout
There’s a lot of similarities between Low, Mid and High Volume, so on the days without a scheduled workout, I’d often look to one of the higher volume plans for inspiration.
SSBII LV avg’s 3.4hrs and 241TSS/wk and I ended up avg’ing ~8hrs and 500TSS/wk. This is still short of the 10-12 I’m used to but with the focused indoor sessions, my training felt considerably more productive. And the one week that I was traveling for a few days, I was still able to cram my 3 LV Plan sessions in back-to-back so I didn’t have to stress about missing a workout.
I’m having the same doubt as you, specially when trying to include the fasted weekend endurance rides my old coach used to throw at me (and got very much used to, to the point of missing them) so I too chose the MV and whenever I have a key session on Saturdays, I just add an endurance block at the beginning of my ride and start fueling around minute 45, then at the hour mark I would start the actual session I had planned.
The article mentions adding the endurance part at the end of your session but that wouldn’t have the same effect as going in fasted. Would it?
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