Training but not for racing

[Rob3rt]

And if you want to go far, go fast ;-)
There's a school of thought that says shorter periods of high intensity efforts give a better bang per buck than longer, lower intensity efforts - you might have heard the phrase 'junk miles'. Probably the easiest-to-find detailed description of the high intensity approach is this....

http://www.velopress.com/books/the-time-crunched-cyclist-2nd-ed/

For balance, I own a copy and while I can accept the core of the book's argument, there's an awful lot of upselling and hype in there. It might also be worth checking out the trainingpeaks website

http://home.trainingpeaks.com/

which has plenty of interesting stuff in the blog and articles as long as you're aware it's still trying to sell you stuff as well.

The thing I found most useful from reading around was the idea of applying a structure and a goal to a ride. I use turbos/rollers a lot where it's quite easy to contol how you ride. On a real ride, I'll pick hills to attack and specific stretches of road to recover, rather than just huffing around the loop as best I can. Without any objective measure, you'll have to decide for yourself what efforts equate to 'attack' and 'recover'.

If you want to get into gadgets, the gold standard is either a power meter or a trainer that measures power. Neither are cheap. It's possible to estimate power from speed on a turbo, but power estimates on a real ride a la Stava are not great. With power measurements you'll be able to estimate your Functional Threshold Power (FTP). It ain't a passport to a TdF stage win, but your FTP (or your FTP per kg) is a good way of picking up any improvements or drops in your cycling ability.

The conventional wisdom is that heart rate measurements aren't nearly as reliable a measure of 'fitness' as power, although personally my HR correlates with power quite well after the initial lag. BUT, unless you're going to understand and use the numbers properly, you might as ŵell not bother, save your cash and just go by 'feel'.

If they invent a gadget that stops you eating cake and drinking, that's the gadget to buy.

There is definitely merit doing high intensity work to make the most of what little time you have, however (I have not read this book in particular, so I am talking generally here) there are also some big drawbacks.

The main ones being that such workouts are not appropriate for all cyclists and not many authors are explicit in pointing this out, IMO it is their duty of care to do so as regardless of the intended audience, we all know who buys these books! To perform such intervals at the appropriate intensity, for the appropriate number of reps, whilst maintaining good form and being able to back days up and continue with the programme for a significant period of time requires a fairly solid level of fitness in the 1st place, this is fine if the intended audience is the budding racer with a year or two of riding experience and good general fitness, however a lot of the book sales are to people just starting out, or returning to the sport in the middle ages and with a poor level of fitness, for which said sessions are not appropriate (or if undertaken should be undertaken sparingly).

Other shortfalls are that the overall workload usually ends up being well below what you could potentially achieve in the same amount of time due to the high fatigue nature of such workouts. Personally, I have found (and while I understand everyone responds differently to training, I do not believe my findings to be a coincidence) that in the long term achieving a higher overall load is more important than having some sort of smart training scheme with loads of wonder intervals etc, i.e. it is preferable to do the training which allows you to produce the highest overall load per week, this will generally be lower intensity solid state efforts, since they will generate substantial load, but without the excessive fatigue which prevents you from training day in, day out. You could do 60-120 mins a day at tempo, 6 days a week to produce a very good training load, in 6-12 hours per week. To produce the same load with high intensity interval work, you would be on your arse! This way of training is probably more accessible to the less experienced cyclist too. On the flip side, the constant tempo approach is mentally pretty dull.

 

[Bollo]

Nice reply Rob. In fairness to Chris Carmichael's book, I think his main argument is that you should use the time you have to best effect to improve your current fitness level when targeting a specific event or goal. The whole thing only really hangs together if you can get hold of your power accurately so you can calibrate your efforts realistically, which would be a big investment for most. From memory, I think he also talks about how a high intensity approach only delivers shorter-term, step-change improvements which are not generally repeatable or sustainable unless backed up with longer-term work to improve base fitness.

You might have picked up from my initial description that I'm not completely sold myself for some of the reasons you list but, read critically, there's some interesting stuff in there and the TP site.

I have seen a lot of stuff around (usually dvds invoking Tabata in some way) that I do think are genuinely dangerous.

 

[Joshua Plumtree]

Great reply Robert. So would the majority of your riding/training be at around about tempo, or do you think it is still important to put in, for want of a better phrase, lots of base miles on top.

I think what I'm asking is, for someone who's reached a certain level of cycling fitness including lots of longer slower rides over a 2-3 year period and whose objective is now to become a little faster, do base miles still have any value or is it possible merely to train at these tempo rates, together with some higher intensity stuff at the appropriate time?

 

[starthms]

Thank you guys for the tips and help, lots to think on. Looks like its get on the bike and ride more and put more hills in the riding for a good few months see where the fitness is then. then look at maybe introducing rides with training goals in mind.

 

[Rob3rt]

Great reply Robert. So would the majority of your riding/training be at around about tempo, or do you think it is still important to put in, for want of a better phrase, lots of base miles on top.

I think what I'm asking is, for someone who's reached a certain level of cycling fitness including lots of longer slower rides over a 2-3 year period and whose objective is now to become a little faster, do base miles still have any value or is it possible merely to train at these tempo rates, together with some higher intensity stuff at the appropriate time?

@Joshua Plumtree Sorry I didn't respond to this at the time.

To answer your question, yes, most of my training (at the minute) is at tempo. Looking at my data, around 50% of my ride time has been spent at tempo or sweetspot for the last couple of months, the time not in this zone is generally accounted for by warm up and cool down, or recovery time between 'efforts' (I sometimes break things up a little to mitigate boredom), plus I have been outside a bit so would naturally drift from the zone due to undulations etc. If I stick to the turbo, I reckon I'd be at 2/3rd's of my training time spend at tempo/sweetspot. I would generally stick to the turbo. As for whether I think extra base miles on top is a good thing, I think more training will always be better, until it isn't, the thing is, if you want to do more hours a week, you need to evaluate the intensity across the board. You could also think of the tempo work as base milage, base milage for the time crunched if you want.

There is no one answer, ultimately, the idea is that you are looking to extract the highest training load possible from the time available, this means you adjust your intensity to allow you to get the most training load from the time available. It is really a case of fatigue management.

I think it is quite good that I left this so long to respond to because it has given me some more time to track the effect such training is having on me (having done a season of fumbling about with my training, then this season working with a coach - from whom I learned a lot, I am now trying this approach in preparation for next season, I can compare with past data to see if/how well the training is working). From around mid-September I dropped all "intervals" and high end work and only did tempo and sweetspot, plus some longer road rides of up to 4.5 hours. This weekend I had a festive 10 mile TT, which would mark the 2 year anniversary of my racing "career" (I did my 1st race, in this same event in 2012), so I wanted to ride as fast as possible to see how far I have come in that time. As such, being unsure of my higher end power, last week I embarked on some threshold and above threshold work, just to remind myself how it felt and to see what sort of power I could produce toward the higher end etc, my power numbers were the highest I have ever seen and as well as putting out more power, I made it through some sessions that normally have me on my knees at the end (only just making it through), with enough capacity to recover and fit in some additional efforts, so not only was I able to produce more power, I was able to do additional efforts (this is something that is not insignificant, since if/when the tempo work stops providing gains and/or I move on to race specific workouts, I have the capacity to do more of it, and thus am likely to make bigger gains at that time), I was also able to handle several days of higher intensity sessions on adjacent days (3 days in a row actually), where previously I wouldn't have been able to without the subsequent days being compromised. Come race day, I won the event.

 

[Joshua Plumtree]

Thanks Robert. Great reply!