Offseason gains

If by off season you mean general preparation (non-competitive) phase, then true.

If by off season you mean off season, this should be a short period at the end of the competitive season where you aren't really trying to build fitness. A brief period to recharge physically and mentally before you start the build for the following season.

Shane

Google was of no help, what is FTP?

Functional threshold power. It's the gold standard metric for biking fitness. It's the power you can maintain for a 1hr effort.

Here's the reason I'm asking. Let's say at the end of the season, your FTP is 270. You take a few weeks off/easy, then it's time to start a training block over. I use trainerroad. So there are 3 phases, base, build, specific, each lasting 8-12 weeks. So obviously during your few weeks easy, your FTP drops. Then, during the first few weeks of the base phase, you're just doing aerobic workouts. So would it be safe to say that it would be 2-3 months of training before you got back to that 270, then hope to go up from there?

if your plan has you doing only "aerobic" work during the winter, on the trainer, in your "base phase", you may want to look at other plans :-)

Here's what I would suggest:

Off season - approx 4 weeks after end of competitive season; try to run 3x week (easy), bike and swim as you feel. For example, if the last race was at the end of September, October would be your off season. You will lose some fitness during this time but with some sbr, you can mitigate most of the losses.

General - this will be the longest block but you can divide it up into blocks of 6-12 weeks and focus on the individual sports or different aspects of the individual sports. Since you asked about cycling, I would test and look at where your weakness lie. Then plan your training accordingly. There is little reason to do much easy riding during this phase unless you can get outside and put up huge volume; otherwise, intensity is going to be your friend. For most, I would look at a VO2max focused ride (short hard intervals with about equal rest) and 2 threshold focused rides (one short intervals ~5 minutes with 2 minutes easy spin and one longer 15-20 minutes with about 25% rest). After six weeks, test again and figure out where to go from there. This phase would continue until about 8-12 weeks out from your key race so if you had an early June A race, general would go until about the end of February. For this you may do some work above VO2max, lots of VO2max and threshold work, maybe some occasional tempo and warmups, recovery, cooldowns at an easy effort.

Specific - this phase will be the work that gets your ready for your specific event. So if you are doing short course racing, you'll have lots of threshold and VO2max along with easy riding as you prep for those races and if you were doing DL, then you would also have some harder than VO2max efforts as well. If racing HIM, then lots of tempo, some threshold but probably little in the way of VO2max during this block. If doing IM you would likely keep some threshold riding but most everything else would be easy with lots of volume. The goal here is to take the general fitness you built from Nov-Apr and prepare specifically for the event you are doing. For for our early June race, this would likely start the first of April or thereabouts. Taper would also be included in here and specific to how you best prepare for a race. Generally I would also call the week after specific phase as well although it will be easy and focused on recovery.

After that, you need to look at your next key race; if soon you will stay in the specific phase and just keep doing work specific to the next key race (although this might change depending on your season) or if you have a long period before your next race, you might go back to another more general phase before the specific phase for the next race.

If you are doing "aerobic" workouts (basically everything you do in preparation for a triathlon is aerobic in nature) where you are just riding easy early in the general phase, you probably need to rethink what you're doing.

Shane

This is where it gets confusing. It's like you guys are saying do the opposite of what trainerroad has you doing. So you are saying there should never be a time, outside of the 4 week off season where you should only do low intensity aerobic work for any extended period of time. What you are saying to do is disregard the base phase and always use the build an specific phase.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because I want to bust my tail during the winter and try to make some big gains on the bike. I just started training with power this spring and I'm starting to see some gains but it's about to late in the season for me, so I'm looking to next year. So I didn't know if the best way to do that is to just keep repeating the 3 phases of the trainerroad training plan, or just stick with the hard stuff that's working now.

a) When building fitness, load trumps all. Load is time x intensity so less time at very high intensity or more time at lower intensity
In the winter, lots of time on a trainer is not a pleasant thing. Little time at lower intensity will generate too little load. So low intensity in the winter, for me, makes no sense. (Unless you are doing a big block in another sport)

b) At one point, doing the same thing over and over and over for long periods of times has decreasing returns. You need to do something for a block of time (say 10 weeks) then mix up the stimulus.

c) the closer you get to race, the more you want to be training as you will race. So if you are doing IM, lots of aerobic closer to race. This coincides well with being able to get outdoor and doing a ton of time at lower intensity. Coming back to point A, you don't want to do that on a trainer. So keep that for the spring or summer as you get closer to race day.

so how do you get the appropriate load in the winter, while keeping the number of hours reasonable because you're on a trainer ? VO2max !! You are getting the intenisty, you are doing something for a reasonable period of time, it's not race specific....perfect. Raise your VO2max. Then you can focus on maintaining a good % of VO2max for longer periods of time. BTW, studies have shown that polarized training with VO2max and aerobic mix, increases FTP as well.

this is the general gist of it. Figure out your weakness. Work your weakness. Do it at the time of the year that makes sense given ability to workout, and changes you are trying to accomplish

BTW, the higher your FTP gets, the harder the improvements come and the smarter you have to be about your training. Training at the proper levels, durations....is more and more important. Bad estimates of FTP, training at the wrong levels will slow down your potential progress.


Edited by marcag 2015-07-27 7:20 PM

Marcag that sounds great to me. I noticed that the base phase of the trainerroad plan is very long hours at low intensity. But that leads me to this thought. If I am training for sprint/Olympic distance, are you saying there is no reason to do much low intensity aerobic work? I know I would MUCH rather spend less hours/high intensity on my trainer. And I think most people would be the same. So if I spent the winter doing shorter/high intensity sessions, and then closer to race I get more specific, then it sounds like there is no place for low intensity, besides recovery rides of course. Would that be right? I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me.

Yes and no.

But I would argue critical power is a better metric/tool/measurement.

Agree? Disagree?

personal opinions :

aerobic rides are important for all distances.

There are different forms of training adaptations that we need and they come at different levels of training. Aerobic, Z2...call it what you want, is critical. But it doesn't have to come "first" in January.

We pick and time them according to our strength/weakness and calendar : when the race is, the time we have available to workout in general, the time we have to work on the bike.

When I say strength and weakness, can you do a megawatts of power for 30s but can't hold decent power for 20min ? Do you blow away the 20' test but can't hold 70% of FTP on a HIM ? If you did a lactate test what would the curve/profile look like ? These are indications of your strengths and weakness.

Do you need to focus on your swim or run in January and ajust your bike accordingly ? These are all considerations.

But Z2 work at one point is critical for everyone.

I would say : theoritical discussion

- reality is that 99% of web sites (TP, TR....) and 99% of tools (Garmins...) use FTP. It is the gold standard
- most people do such a poor job of measuring either that they introduce more error than the actual difference between the two.

My personal belief is that power and pace at MLSS is the metric to use. But FTP or CP are good proxies for that and can fit into the real world where they can be captured and tracked.

I prefer CP as you draw a number from a couple of data points with the monod formula. FTP is a term that has been miscalculated and often doen wrong or not tested accurately or poorly., IMO.

Between racing seasons I like to do tests or collect training data and plug it into the monod formula to find your true CP, in racing season I just like to take data from races since the best prediction of racing, is racing itself.

Just my .02

I'm a big Trainer Road user as well. You should notice that they actually have two different base plans. What you're describing is their "Traditional Base" which it says is for experienced riders who have lots of training time available. Generally this is the opposite of a triathlete. Then there's the Sweet Spot Base which is a combination of everything from a little Z2 to a little VO2, but mostly in between where the biggest gains are made whilst still working on an aerobic base. FWIW, I'd stick with the Sweet Spot plans as a triathlete.

Trainerroad has you doing only lower intensity aerobic work for the first 4 weeks of the base phase. After that they start incorporating some higher intensity stuff. If you were training for sprint distance, would you ever have a 4 week block where you only did low intensity? I personally feel like if I spent the winter doing shorter sessions trying to increase my VO2 max, then closer to race time I did a 4 week block of lower intensity longer rides, I would lose a lot of speed leading up to race.

Just because you're going out to do some L2 work (which everyone should spend some time) doesn't mean you're not also doing L4/L5 work to maintain/build top end speed or that your long ride needs to be all easy.

Shane