Cycling Fitness / Training Advice

Oh, go on then, everything comes in threes right?

20min warmup
5 x 4min (5min) @ 130% threshold
15min warm down

Ha. Cheaper than training peaks

I'm clearly having a joke here but my point is it's pretty damn easy to build up a progressive VO2 workout schedule. You might want to start at threshold though and work from there, depending on where you're at, 120% might kill you or be a piece of piss. That's the problem with just grabbing training plans.

I'm clearly having a joke here

Yeah, who bothers warming down for that long before eating?

Yeah I get your point, I guess what I don't have as much of a feel for is the benefits of having a more rounded training program vs just doing quite targeted (and repetitive) efforts at similar workouts. But maybe that's also a question of "how do I react" and everyone's different in terms of how much variation they need in the training diet too

Who gets on a turbo trainer without food?!

2 to 3 VO2 sessions per week. The rest easy stuff. If you hit your targets easily - bump duration or intensity. If you struggle, check your recovery days aren't too much and if that's not the cause reduce duration (typically, if you reduce intensity too much you're training different energy systems)

Sounds like a good rough outline - will try and base something around that. I think I need to write a plan just so I have that structure and feel I need to hit the training targets, which is probably why I thought a pre-written plan made sense as well - but as long as I set myself a target should achieve the same thing.

You mentioned trainerroad at the start, why not just load the Short Power Build plan? It's pretty much what hippy has prescribed but with the structure you want written down.

I'm an idiot, I meant training peaks, for some reason I always get the two confused....

I mean, yeah, if you've got £10 a month, TR takes out a lot of the planning aspects. If you like their VO2 stuff. Every time I got to their VO2s I'd just bumped my FTP and then failed to hit any of their targets so just went back to sweet spot stuff. I'm not racing HCs though.

I'm an idiot, I meant training peaks, for some reason I always get the two confused....

ah ok, well as hippy says, it's £10 p/m but if you want a free month, happy to send you one. The plan runs over 8 weeks which means you have the choice of subbing for 1 month only or carrying on in TP.

Cool, thanks - yeah I'll give a month a try if that's alright, much appreciated!

20min warmup
5 x 4min (5min) @ 130% threshold out the saddle 60rpm
15min warm down

VO2max is about getting lots of O2 in yer ASAP so there is a school of thought which says you just need to be breathing as hard as you can for as long as you can and short intervals and short rests can do that.

There was a session I saw that made you do a 1 min effort at 30 sec pace to get HR way up then 30/30 for as long as you can manage. They tested someone whose HR stayed in VO2 zone for an hour doing this.

I've not done it for a few years but block periodisation worked a treat. 1 week of 5 sessions at varying interval length (it's hell). Then 3 weeks of just one session a week at target duration, done really hard. Everything else easy.

Recently I've been doing mine on HR not power. Start harder than you can sustain then knock it down in power (5-10% above threshold) but keep adjust power so HR is within 5-10bpm of my max, for 5+ mins or however long I feel like.

It's awful but weirdly seems more sustainable.

I've also seen studies about breath-holding intervals which kinda had the same effect and which I replicate very effectively during sweetspot efforts while singing anything from Metallica, Pantera, Queen to some disco classics or humming along to Sky's Toccata...

Is this table in anyway accurate??

1 Attachment

This should help you understand its limitations:
https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/power-profiling/

depends, which team has given you a contract?

Thanks. I think long stuff will be hard for me over the next few years with the little ones. So thinking about what I might do. Seems sensible to consider what I might be reasonable at first haha
Given I have little experience my fitness is possibly considerably ahead of other vital skills.

My current numbers (assuming they’re are accurate) are all over the place on that graph.
5s is 13.8wpkg
1 min is 8.8wpkg
5 min is 5.7wpkg
FTP which is admittedly probably out of date is ~290

I'd be thinking about what you like doing, not trying to pick an event based on some current tested values. ie. I might have a 2000W peak but I have no interest in spending most of my time in the gym and wondering when the next match sprint might actually happen.

5 x 4min (5min) @ 130% threshold

How do I read this? My guess:
5 of

 4 mins @ 130% threshold
 1 min off

Of course but I’m also not going to go by 5 different bikes and try each discipline equally. I’m not expecting to win anything but I also don’t want to come last every time