The Time in Zone (TIZ) vs Session Goal (SG) vs Hybrid question
I was thinking something along the lines of 1 session with 8x4 intervals == 32 minutes
and another session of 4x8m intervals = 64 minutes in total.
If you then do 9 hours of Z1 / Z2 / low Z3 riding you are doing 10/90. Nicely polarized.
Totally agree with your thoughts. Im older at 57 with NO natural aerobic gifts. With a weak Vo2 over the years I have trained up the intensity SS in particular to compensate. To keep up on our group rides in the past I have to put out much more of effort closer to and above my meager FTP to keep up. 3.5 hour group ride results in 240 to 275 TSS Over the years my FTP plateaus pretty quickly in season but I can hold large percentage of it for longer. Now with age decline the group rides just take too much out of me and it takes too long to recover. I am backing off the intensity ledge and going with a nice long Base season working on those damn mitochondria and leaving the glycolisis stuff for small doses. I am doing Vo2 every 7 to 10 days with very disciplined keep it in the talking range for the rest of my time in saddle.
And that approach applies well to running. I’ve been using 8020 Endurance training plans for running for some time now.
The older you get the more important it gets to maintain intensity
I told my son not to get one of these
From the little I know about this seems to be very important.
Long endurance workouts and then small amounts of very intense sessions to keep the vo2max up.
In light of all of this I’ll be reworking my cycling - the big group ride I did was too fast for me so I’ll be doing a slower one now, possibly on my own, trying to keep to 3+ hours of as constant 60% ftp or so which I think is within the ISM zone 2.
Then a couple of very intense sessions in the week and hopefully a 1-1.5 hour ISM zone 2 as well.
Will be tricky to maintain this but will see what I can manage over a 10 week period.
Any chance TR is working on polarized triathlon plans? I would be a willing guinea pig to test them. I have several triathlons scheduled for next summer.
I haven’t listened yet, but this should be interesting:
We always appreciate our willing guinea pigs!
At the moment, the focus is still on cycling. We’re analyzing the data we have from athletes that follow our polarized plans cycling plans in an effort to better understand the differences in performance outcomes between pyramidal and polarized training intensity distributions.
At the moment, the best way to prepare for your triathlon races next summer would be to go through Plan Builder. If you have any questions about preparing for those triathlons or about Plan Builder, please just let me know and I’d be happy to help!
This podcast is really good.
In the context that the older athlete has gravitated to the LSD ride. Thus there doesn’t need to be a focus on the low intensity side of the equation as that’s already there but the high intensity is missing.
Is the list from intervals.icu? How do you create those lists showing efficiency, power/hr etc?
I’ve noticed that my efficiency is always lower on rides with low HR and low power. I think that’s just because there’s not a linear relationship btwn power and HR (at least not btwn 50% FTP and 75% FTP) Efficiency is always absolutely horrible on recovery rides - to the point that it’s pretty much meaningless.
IMO, the best bet is to only compare rides (ie workouts) that are practically (or actually) identical.
And, as always, take anything HR-related with a bucket of salt
I need at least 90 minutes after eating.
You may want to play around with these Intervals settings:
and I posted one of several experiments here:
Where I found that doing 60% FTP from the start, my heart rate takes 20-30 minutes to stabilize. So my rule of thumb for decoupling is to toss out the first 30 minutes of any workout, and that set end time based on the workout (outside it varies due to traffic coming back into town).
(I don’t use Intervals much, and haven’t tweaked my default warmup time)
There are other good reference points and suggestions - but I’d add - I think to really track decoupling you should try some longer sessions. The historic number quoted has always been two hours is the real minimum for meaningful data - this likely varies per person, but try to get a 2:30 or 3:30 duration in there as a better reference
There is interesting side-question: where do you go once decoupling reaches around zero for any duration within allocated time for LSD (lets say 4x 3-6h per week)? Especially if I still want to limit only 2 intense days per week. Maybe introduce 30min Z3 blocks into those Z2 rides? Or it does not matter, long-term benefits are still happening regardless?
Hard to say without looking at some examples. It did decrease, perhaps you hadn’t been doing efforts like that and your body got used to it? So hard to say.
Sure but if there is consistent decoupling at 90 minutes… I don’t track but I do take a quick look after every ride, at least for the longer endurance portion of my 2hour mid week workouts.
Also for decoupling the rule of thumb is to get it below 3-4%. It’s only the first two that are slightly above 4%, the rest of the rides there is nothing to look at.
Yes but you have an established base. He’s looking for that consistent number still so going longer a few times to find it makes sense
Similar to you mine is consistent on shorter durations, I don’t see the high variance he is seeing. Thus my suggestion
