Before Christmas they were more like little blocks of easy rides or an extra day off here and there. Since then it’s been 3 weeks of progressive overload followed by a week of half volume and nothing harder than mid Z2.
What I will do this week though is a few short easy spins in the week and then take next weekend by feel. If I am already fresh and raring to go, then I’ll probably do the quicker group ride again and if still tired, drop down to the easy one or ride solo.
I have been trying to do more structured training this year and have been following this thread for tips.... one of which was to try intervals.icu (thanks to whoever suggested it). My question is how to address discrepancies between how it defines Z2 for power and HR. Intervals.icu defines my top Z2 HR around 153bpm and my power around 191w. If I’m pushing 191w my HR will be around 130bpm, conversely if riding at 153bpm my power will be nearer 250w?
Maybe I need to edit my threshold HR? This has been auto populated at 172 based on my max HR of 190?
If you go to settings, you can customise your HR zones as you like. There's a list of presets (Coggan/Friel/CTS/80_20 etc) to choose from or you can pin them to ThHR or MAX HR as you wish.
Intervals will notify you of HR threshold improvements based on 98% of a 20min effort and tell you in the activity where you exceeded the current value.
I had notifications twice yesterday in the Zwift Insider Worlds Experiences trio I did yesterday morning, still feeling rough this morning, first time I've done more than one 19min+ race in a day for months... Nevermind three in under 80mins.
Just checked settings tab and it doesn't auto-update, you need to manually change it.
cheers crosshair, just finished a progressive set of 4 weeks, did 4 as half term next week so some of the days I'd fit it in I have the kids, and legs are deffo feeling like they need a rest
It sounds silly given how little training I do compared to some people, but I more like the mental break for a couple of days. Just chilling in between jobs at work rather than rushing to get 2hrs in on the bike at lunchtime. I usually take it as a good sign if I'm missing riding or get back off of a recovery week spin wishing I could do more.
My next 'breakthrough' workout is Tempo on Tuesday 21st and I'm hoping to get a nice surprise on the HR front. If I can do that session at Z2 HR, tightly coupled all the way through, I'll know recovery week went to plan. (It's at last week's wattage)
I'm more ready for a mental break from breaking bad 😂 3 episodes and 2hrs done,
In another thread I spoke about moving the turbo somewhere it was in sight, makes such a different, like a reminder to get it done rather than lock it away, still got to want to do the work, but you'll know
Another 3hr was scheduled for me today but I bailed at 2:05. I joined the ZZRC ride again, lost the pack and ended up helping to pull the chase group for an hour at a contribution of 3.2wkg average with 5 min efforts at 4.2wkg.
In summary, I was ****ed and didn't stick to plan because mentally I didn't have it within me to ride solo for 3h.
Well done Kryton 💪🏻
Still a great session and presumably you’re adding more intensity around now anyhow?
I asked on the local WhatsApp if anyone was going out but got tumbleweed in response 🤣 So I had a lie in.
Then I went to see Weeksy and Weeksy Jnr on my MTB as they were doing a photo shoot / training session just up the road and then ended up with Weeksy and his mate on e-bikes attacking me in turns on the way back to his house 🤣
A nice cup of tea at Weeksy towers and then seeing as I was there, set off into Oxfordshire on the byways and back via the Ridgeway. 3hrs at a nice 150w to round off base 3.
I found out that the power graph on the bottom of the Zwift screen is ten minutes' worth of readings. I managed to get ten perfect minutes in the blue zone without any spikes or interruptions in pedalling on Saturday.
Bloody headunit packed up this morning so no power for todays group ride.
Some cunning chap plotted a route with a couple of steep climbs so I couldn’t even stay in Z2 HR 🤣 😉
It’s actually pretty fascinating how everyone’s w/kg and raw watts shake out over varying terrain and I’d say the best thing anyone who wants to do a local group ride can do is be in the middle of the bell curve for weight in your local scene 🤣🤣
At times I had to let gaps of 20-30s open up or I wouldn’t have survived the course. A quick aero tuck and a bit of power on the flats brings it back together though.
Really enjoyed the ride- it would have been cracking views on a clear day.
A quick aero tuck and a bit of power on the flats brings it back together though
Only because I waited at the top of Coombe!! 🤪
It’s actually pretty fascinating how everyone’s w/kg and raw watts shake out over varying terrain and I’d say the best thing anyone who wants to do a local group ride can do is be in the middle of the bell curve for weight in your local scene 🤣🤣
I thought the long draggy climb was the interesting one, I started it a bit far back as I had to wait for a car at the junction at the bottom but I could not bring you back unless I went seriously into the red, on the steeper climbs I could ride away. It is a bit annoying though when on a false flat descent I'm out the saddle sprinting to catch the front guy and you come pat not even pedalling 😟😟😟😱
Lol!
Nestor said once “ooo there he goes, divebombing the descents!” yet doing the opposite UP the hills is deemed one of the most impressive feats in cycling 🤷🏻♂️ 🤣
Yeah, I wish I’d had power up Vernham Dean. I averaged under Threshold HR so perhaps 320w or 3.3w/kg?
Edit- Strava actually guesses 322w so not far off.
Latest GCN vid says 7w extra per kg on grades above 7% so that means when I try and match Rich, I have to do 140w more!!!
So then downhill, provided I close most of the Aero disadvantage of being built like a bus, I can use all of that potential energy to go fast for almost zero cost.
My biggest enemy is having to brake 😱 🤣
doing the opposite UP the hills is deemed one of the most impressive feats in cycling
The biggest problem with cycling is that if I get dropped on the flat I get get dropped but then I have to wait for a re grouping at the top of the hills
when I try and match Rich, I have to do 140w more!!!
He is very strong and pretty light though
I got on the Z2 on a turbo bus in December... mostly because I didn’t think I could do Z2 on my local hills (the Quantocks). Have done a solid 8 weeks of Z2 with the occasional VO2 max session (Gorby or a race) and numbers seemed encouraging. I couldn’t resist the sunshine this morning and was surprised to be able to do a 2+ hour ride in Z2 despite >800m of climbing. If I can get up my local stuff in Z2 then the turbo stuff was definitely worth it
Yes! I do wonder if just concentrating on drafting and weight loss wouldn’t be a better strategy for me to keep up on local group rides. It would be interesting to give everyone a long hilly loop and set off together and see how it shakes out with nobody waiting for anyone.
Today, the 8am lot dropped me at Baydon. A ten second gap at the top of the climb took me over twenty minutes at 290w (all the way to Aldbourne!) to close back again solo!
Yeah Rich is a beast, he very very rarely lets it all out though- he’s too nice 😇 🤣
@Sheck Well done! It’s definitely a very rewarding form of fitness. I just like getting back from rides that used to leave me on the sofa all afternoon and feeling as fresh as a daisy.
Today, the 8am lot dropped me at Baydon. A ten second gap at the top of the climb took me over twenty minutes at 290w (all the way to Aldbourne!) to close back again solo!
Look on the bright side, I could hardly walk this morning😄😄😄
Not enough recovery doughnuts 🤣🤣
Not enough recovery doughnuts
Yeah, that must have been it!!
Actually my calf's were twanging right from the off yesterday, I think it was riding that bike for the first time in ages, it felt all wrong from the start. Saddle felt too low so I raised it a bit at the shop before we left.
First ride back after recovery week today. Picked up the tempo progressions but back at 260w.
I was going to just repeat the process but then I suddenly realised, I could add time to the power levels I’ve done before.
So instead of doing 120mins @ 260w again, I shot for 150mins @ 260w instead.
The first five minutes felt horrendous, with a short warm up, but soon I settled in and after a while, I’m not so sure I wasn’t under the talk test 🧐
I’d have loved to have known the lactate level.
The effort ended up at really consistent 267w for 150mins at 20.8mph, 51.8 miles, 2200ft climbing. Even better, I didn’t even drink a whole bottle of carbs!
I’d also love to know my fat/carb ratio! Just not enough to pay to go to a lab 🤣
I know Tempo is a bit out of fashion but I’d highly recommend it as a way of of taking your Z2 once it hits a plateau and moving things forward once more.
I feel awesome on it 😀
Seeing as this is becoming my un-official training blog, I'll post here 😀
Nice hillier group ride today with the birthday boy @anagallis_arvensis 🥳. Things are progressing into Base 3 now and instead of mainly 'intense' upper Z2, I had a 'form sprint' day on Thursday which was just an hour spin with 10x sprints done on downhills so there wasn't too much torque.
Then today was the 1h easy Z2 I skipped from yesterday (the time spent riding to town and back) and "Moderate Hills (Force)" as Friel calls them- which was the group ride itself.
I was just looking to ride steady on the flats (although I did press on a bit here and there too) and then aim for Threshold up the climbs.
I don't actually know my Threshold so I kind of guessed it at 350w. I rode Hungerford Hill for 5 mins at 375w and my HR went out of Threshold by the top so I definitely don't think it's 375...
Another hill was 348w for 4m30 and that did feel pretty stable HR wise. It doesn't really matter I don't think and I'm still determined not to test my FTP, just in case I'm disappointed 🤣
Time to chill and eat lots of food to do it all again tomorrow morning.
I've decided to ride steady upper Z2 regardless of the dick-swingers who may or not turn up so it could be a solo podcast ride 🤣
I rode Hungerford Hill for 5 mins at 375w and my HR went out of Threshold by the top so I definitely don’t think it’s 375…
Which one was Hungerford Hill? Was that the one I was on your wheel trying to fathom how you were in the small chainring and I was in my 53 pedalling like the clappers to keep up 🤔🤔
Nice hillier group ride today
I thought it was flat 😄😄😄
Did a gentle post donut 25km to try and help my legs recover a bit better than last week.
Yes that’s the kiddy ⛰️ 😮💨 🤣
Ah nice one- yes it can be a bit of an abrupt stop 🤣🤣
Nice, and happy birthday AA, exactly a week before mine.
A steady 3hr for me today https://www.strava.com/activities/8619497875
Well done Kryton 💪🏻 A cracking dose of Z2 that 😎
All the sharp stuff is in the week. Combo of threshold, sweet spot, Zwift racing and 40/20’s leading up to the Southern XC.
Another 3h z2 on the race MTB tomorrow for specificity. Just spent an hour revitalising it from being left in the shed from last October 😀
Nice!! That’s a tough old week 👍🏻 Fingers crossed you’ll notice the payoff for all your hard work.
Had a really nice group ride today. Started with the expectation of joining the 15’s for a long one. But the fast lads were riding the same route initially. So I decided to loiter at the back of their ride for a tow and then double back for the long route gang when the two courses diverged.
But as it was, another chap had the same idea. So we carried on along the long route together. 3 others had since decided to do the same and caught us up.
So then we were 5-up for the rest of the entire route. After feeling awful all week with a bad toe and nausea from the pain, I was pleasantly surprised with my legs. The route helped as it was only 3000’ climbing in 73 miles.
We ended up at 18.7mph including the dawdle to town and power was 227w/265np for 4 hours.
This is where genuinely lifting your actual Z2 (as opposed to raising your ftp and imagining your lower zones have scaled concurrently) pays off because as long as the hard efforts even out to Z2, you can still cope with the workload.
Now to eat and recover for the 8am smashfest tomorrow 😴
Swapped the Sunday ride for a 3hr Z2 gravel bike spin so I could ride later in the day and have a cheeky lay-in 🤣 Then Monday was recovery day.
Back to tempo today. I was aiming for accruing 2hrs at 280w. Had I gone outdoors I’d have probably split it up into 4x30 as finding enough road gets stressful 🤣
But with the forecast as it was, I made the decision early to go indoors. But my motivation wasn’t really there for intervals so I decided to just keep doing Zwift races until I hit my goal 🤣
2.5 races later and we made it. It wasn’t remotely high quality as it was vo2 up the hills, threshold chasing back attacks and Z2 in the bunch but meh, let’s not let perfect get in the way of good hey.
What’s depressing is how little these rides nudge my fitness score on now 🤣 But cool how a 2500kcal session is now just pretty standard.
That's not bad Crosshair.
I did 2hrs z2 on Saturday and a 3.5hr very hilly road ride on Sunday. And I felt pretty good. It works.
Nice one @molgrips 👌🏻
It’s funny, I’m not less busy than when I used to train 7hrs a week on TR but riding lots of endurance has made me crave riding my bike more 🤷🏻♂️
Doing lots of centuries last year makes 2hrs seem short too.
I had 2hrs endurance on the plan tonight but I wasn’t recovered enough from yesterday.
Did 1h at 201w on a Zwift C group ride and pulled the plug.
That’s the dilemma I find myself struggling with self coaching- at what point does a “Breakthrough” ride become too hard? I guess if you can’t recover in 48hrs before it’s time for the next ‘breakthrough’ ride 🤔
I’ve now bumped tomorrow up to 2.5hrs low endurance with 10 form sprints in the first hour but I’m going to monitor how I feel and pull the plug again if I’m still fatigued. I wanted to hit 14h this week if possible but will cut myself some slack as it’s all looking like being indoors 😴
I want to make sure I “absorb” Tuesday’s effort too- otherwise it was a waste of energy.
A question, which I'm sure has been answered at some point over the last 12 pages, but, is it favourable to train to Z2 heartrate or Z2 power? I find that if I'm Z2 power, then I'm mostly Z1 HR.
Having done no official testing to work out my max HR or whatever, I'm sure these are comparatively arbitrary factors, but just wondered.
Z1 HR, 3 zone model…roughly no higher than 70-75% of max HR
Z2 power will help you pace it, but you may need to pace down a tad if your HR is elevated (due to various reasons]
Early season, pace by Z2 HR and measure power. Later, once you’ve hit your target longest ride without power dropping off at this HR, target a power number for your same target longest ride and keep doing it until your HR doesn’t go up.
(Google aerobic decoupling https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/aerobic-endurance-and-decoupling/)
Or, if trying to follow dr ISM’s method, push right up against “the talk test” which will likely be high z2 or low z3 power 😀
To elaborate on that a little, here's a really good example from Georgio Copolla's Strava.
He's riding what looks like ERG mode 195w for 210 minutes but if you look, his HR goes up considerably in the second half of the ride even though the power hasn't changed.
By contrast, if he had followed his HR, then the power would have had to drop off to compensate.
So you do more work by riding Z2 to power but it is also a more stressful ride.
And here's one of my drISM "talk test" rides. HR starts low Z2 and hits high Z2 after 2hrs. Power was (probably, I don't really bother testing FTP at the minute) low tempo start to finish.
Had I carried on longer, no doubt my HR would have gone up exponentially.
Because I wanted to ride these using ERG mode, I made a couple of educated guesses as to where my "talk test" wattage would be. The first go at 220 was too easy but this was spot on.
(I think the Strava Sauce pw:hr number is your decoupling score. So Georgio was working 5% harder by the end of his 3.5hrs for the same watts which is actually vey good given the hours he's been training lately and not far off of Friel's under 5% guideline. )
Cheers Crosshair. Clears things up a bit. I tend to ride to power, as I do any kind of focussed work inside on the trainer, and found that generally my HR was lower than I'd expected. Still, like your examples, the other day I did 2 hrs and found that by the end my HR was increasing. Decoupling seems to be vaguely around 5%, but it's rare I ride with both power and HR (turbo) for more than 2 hours.
If you are still in base, you can kind of use it to reverse-engineer your training sessions too. So if 2hrs is your session time limit, and you're at 4% decoupling, then you can up the watts over a couple of goes until you find the point at which it's up to say 6 or 7% again. That way you can avoid stagnating. Then hold the new power for a couple of weeks until decoupling gets under 5% at the new higher power.
my hr decoupling varies, on 2hr zone 2 rides, a quick look back from as little as 0.5% over 2hrs, to 6%+ on 1 hour rides, (assume the 1hr is skewed by stabilisation of HR?)
random selection from the last 2 weeks here, and the last one is clear decoupling, which is the first ride of "block 2" after reducing intensity and duration by about 50% (to 3/4 hours) for a week
(Intervals also has this as an option in the fields drop down box on the ride analysis charts)
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should I take that as a sign I should nudge the Z2 a bit higher, my Z2 is apparently 141-192w and these were all done at 180 or 185w, so "upper"
I guess it depends how you are structuring your week. I like to have clear 'Easy endurance' days that are often high Z1 average outdoors but when I'm actually pushing on the pedals are low to mid Z2.
Then I like to have one crisp breakthrough ride each week. Because time is limited to 3hrs max, they're the ones I've had to progress up through into Tempo and now Sweetspot to make sure the progressive overload is there.
Looking at those 2x two hour rides in the middle, they're obviously still great training so I guess it depends what else you are doing in the week. If you want to be fresh for some HIIT then maybe leave them the same or if you want to try and nudge your LT1 up then maybe add 10w and see what happens??
I'm not really structuring it, just doing a lot of Z2 with either a Zwift race or effort after a z2 session once a week,
I'm very much "on the fly" 1000 things could come up a day, just switching between 1/2hrs on what time I have available, take this week, I have 2 days at uni, 2 meetings at the kids schools, a coffee morning, 1 kid off school because of strikes and 2 night shifts, thats without fitting in "life" around everything else, I've tried to plan in advance, it always ends in failure and non concordance with sessions, 2/3 hours is certainly my max duration for turbo, lighter nights/better weather will allow me to stretch that
Wee bump, I had possibly one of the best indoor sessions I've had this lunchtime, 1hr20minute Z2 on the rollers.
I think I'm getting over some of my discomfort issues on the bikes (off-bike physio) and pumped the tyres up a wee bit harder which on the rollers makes it easier for a given speed but also smoother.
Then I plugged in my favourite mix off YouTube (below) which gets crazy upbeat and euphoric at around about the 45 minute mark, and zoned out to some helmet cam footage of the Tour of Flanders that someone recorded.
I don't know if it was the intensity, the tunes, the nose breathing or the (sort of, to a cobble fetishist) inspiring footage, but I was struggling not to launch into a full gas effort in the latter half of the workout, the old endorphins seemed to be kicking in and I just felt amazing! Would be curious if that sort of feel-good rush is just luck, the music choice or something to do with the nice smooth easy intensity.
Anyway, will repeat the experiment next chance I get with my SAD lamp beside the laptop as well, I'll be off my tits on endorphins! 🤣
I ride the classics on my rollers in Z2/3 depending on gearing of the fixed wheel. Then I take a mental break when the adverts come and ease down the power. When the pros go hard, it’s time to push a little harder. Three hours on the rollers is OK. I now have some powered Elite rollers too. The effect is subtle and the onboard power meter is hopelessly optimistic. It will, however pass through my Assioma power to Zwift instead.
Rollers are just great. And you will pedal like a god.