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)

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