Trainerroad

I take everything back. On my first workout sir chris horner made an appearance!!

1 Attachment

If you set a PR @hippy rides alongside you on a Dutch bike with a dwarf in the basket

No Bollywood bangers that I'm aware of, but I like the sound track. I've even bought some of the songs on the Sufferfest soundtrack I like them so much. Deep Sea Diver by Heifervescent is a highlight of the Angels video.

Music isn’t so great, but tends to suit the tempo of the workout, so tolerable.

Got lots of value from the yoga, tempted to get it again just for that.

You are me ten years ago!

Just into penultimate week of base phase 2 mid volume. Definitely feeling fitter and appear to have lost fat but my weight is now creeping up.

Really don’t need to gain weight, what is likely to be the best way to manage this? Any particular program?

Consume fewer calories than you burn. I don’t think there’s a particular TR programme for weight loss, if there is it’d be soul crushingly boring with hours in zone 2.

Less cakes/pies etc.

Are you doing sweetspot base or traditional base?

I think I would find it much harder to eat less on sweetspot due to having to eat on the turbo due to session intensity, whereas you can probably do 1-1.5h at zone 2 fasted.

I’ve just lost 7kg in 2 months doing 8 weeks of largely sweetspot/vo2 intervals in 1h workouts 6 times a week.
The weight change has been mostly diet related, 500kcal deficit on Myfitnespal while largely maintaining intermittent fasting between 8pm-12pm (16h)
Workouts in the morning while fasted, which was pretty brutal.

Housework should help. You're already quite physically active? Clearing woods and fields, burning peasants crops, shooting game, chopping trees, demanding tribute right? Pretty functional strength.
Yoga?
Keep the hiit work going on trainer road.
Endurance stuff from dog walks.

You're fairly active if you look at what you're doing in its entirety. What do you do when you finish work/training/yoga?
How much food and what kind of food are you ramming in your face?

I wish I could lose 7 kg in 2 months.

Sounds a lot like @cjr’s approach to (successful) weight loss. 6 times a week though!? I’ve been struggling with 1:15 three times a week. I am at the pointy end of sustained power build though so probably the hardest workouts I’ll be doing all year. 1000kcal workouts straight out of bed are pretty brutal 😑

I used to teach Taekwondo (and take part) 3 times a week for 2h pre lockdown, in addition to a couple of hours cycling before lockdown so used to managing leg/body fatigue.

I decided to do 2 x 4 week FTP booster on Zwift, instead of Traineroad, due to wanting to plan for 1 month blocks rather than 6 weeks on Traineroad.

The 4w ftp booster workouts were not so hard, slightly shorter intervals than your typical 2x10, 2x20 at sweetspot/threshold, but spreading them over 6 days.
Around 1h so possible to complete fasted, but a few I planned to do post lunch and fueled if I thought they would be harder. Also Ramp tests were done fully fueled.

Typical day was 2200-2300kcals, 800-900kcals in the main meals, 400kcals in snacks in between. Had a fair few cheat days in between, probably linked to body fatigue. IF stopped monster all day cheat days.

Start: 76.7kg 253w ftp
Month 1: 72kg 273w ftp
Month 2: 69kg 295w ftp
Month 3: Hoping for 67/68 and 300w+

Off to France for a month soon, where it will be nice roads, interspersed with 1-3m climbs everywhere and bread and cheese, so don’t expect to lose any more weight, but should be good to boost anaerobic and vo2.

Built a hybrid plan for this month with some sweetspot and some days anaerobic/vo2.
I did a solid 40m at sweetspot fasted the other day at new FTP, I had to lie down next to the turbo for about 30 minutes, because didn’t have any energy to do anything until I ate lunch...

Don’t think my fat utilisation (fatMax or whatever it is) has caught up with the watts...

I do the housecleaning once a week. Am reasonably active. At the beginning of lockdown I restarted trainer road but was also building veg beds which involved digging and carting a few tons of topsoil, manure and compost. Since then the gardening has been much less physically challenging.

Do 45 minutes to 2 hours of yoga each day, and the 5 trainer road workouts each week.

A lot of my diet is vegetarian or vegan, eating meat once or twice a week. Possibly what is doing the damage is homemade bread, cakes and eating chocolates in the evening watching tv. The other harm was birthday week last week, which was spread over 3 days with my dad coming one day, friends over another and a huge steak meal another day.

What has been disappointing is as trainer road workouts have moved more into over under territory it appears I have been gaining more muscle bulk, which I don't want or need!

Really trying to work out what will be the best training plan to chose next. Is a build phase going to just encourage more muscle? Would rather focus on cardio.

As an ageing dude, muscle is good.

Muscle in legs is always good.
You’re not going to turn into Chris Hoy or Forstemann from over unders on trainerroad.

If you’re not gaining weight (which will be based on diet) any weight gained via muscle would be offset by the loss in fat somewhere where you don’t need it.

Is there a way for TraineRoad career to account for activities that add TSS but aren't rides?
I went for a rather demanding week-long hike late week and my legs are still tired, is there a way to reflect that? Can't find any manual entry.. Wouldn't even know how to estimate that TSS tbh.

You can manually add events and as such decide their TSS

On a PC: Click Calendar and click Other Activity

You can then choose Duration and Intensity and it will estimate it, but you can overwrite this value.

I was doing this when I was still serious about turbo training but had started adding long weekend rides. I use WKO though so I don't know why I cared about TP.

Done.
Not sure about the accuracy of that estimate, but my legs are in agreement, at least qualitatively.

1 Attachment

It doesn't really matter but when you look back in 3 months it might give you some insight into why event x went so shit or whatever knowledge you're trying to extract from historical data.
It's nice when comparing season to season to go "oh, maybe that's why that event was so shit compared to the year before" etc.

Don't really have any particular event lined up, but I was keen to have an idea of it to tune down the training to come and bring back the average TSS to what it was before which I found rather sustainable

Fair enough. I've not looked at TSS at all this year. Season basically started with me doing TR and then chatting to coach to outline goals and then lockdown so I just carried on with TR. I'm pretty good at knowing when I'm tired though. My next challenge is not getting angry about that fact.

I use intervals.icu to chart fitness, TSS, freshness etc. With enough data it does a very accurate job of estimating TSS from heart rate in outdoor rides with no power meter. I’ve also been swimming this week while on holiday, want to have a vague idea of TSS from that to see how it affects my recovery week - so far so good on that front too. Grabs all its data from strava so I’ve been manually adding swims.

I started looking into swim TSS and gave up. It's complicated.

Doesn’t seem that complex. Work out your minutes per 100m pace (various methods online, 400m + 200m TT etc), set it in intervals.icu then add your activity on strava. Intervals works out the TSS and adds it to your graph.

I guess using an HRM while swimming would be even better.