I generated a 6 week structured plan using the Joe Friel spreadsheet linked in the intertools thread and imported it.
I chose progressive overload.
What I’ve read is it’s recommended to target an 80/20 ratio where 80% is “easy” and 20% is “hard” days. Z1-Z2 is easy, Z3 is ‘comfortably hard’, z4+ is hard.
Now to the question: The plan that’s generated doesn’t seem to adhere to that heuristic. Why? Is this going to burn me out?
Example Week 1:
Day 1: Recovery, Z2, easy, 1.5h
Day 2: Over/Unders. hard, Z4/Z3, 1.5h
Day 3: Rest
Day 4: Z5, hard, 1.25h
Day 5: Z3 hard, 1.75h
Day 6: Z2, 4.75h
Day 7: Rest
Ok, so that’s 3 out of 5 days hard. IF you count the 5h endurance as easy. . . but it’ll take a bit to recover from such a long ride…z2 or not.
When I was using Garmin DSW or my own plan it usually worked out to 3 days of Z1/2, 1 day of some kind of interval / intensity, and one long ride in z2.
I thought maybe the 80/20 split was on hours in the saddle. But if you tally up the hours, it’s still closer to a 60/40.
The way Friel talks about it on podcasts and such is that it’s by days. He says things like (paraphrased) “Most days should be easy, but you have that one day. That day should be really hard. You should feel that day coming and be thinking about it the whole week.”
Which implies 4 easy days and 1 hard one.
Here’s a screenshot of week 1 from the spreadsheet. It has 2 clearly hard days. The endurance ride imported as “90% z3” which seems leaning towards hard to me
