Fitness, and form

Ride easy…
How long is your commute? If it’s less then 20km, the difference in time is max 5-10min.
Enjoy going easy, ‘smell the roses’, and tell yourself: I’m doing great, because I give my body time to recover and adapt from the past work. Iso ‘This is to easy, it isn’t going to make me better’.
Set your long term goal and do what is needed to reach it! Focus on the correct goal makes everything easier!

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Ride easy on the recovery weeks and harder on the other weeks, right?

I will try. Thing is I find it hard to ride below FTP on climbs.

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You can rev your 1.4l engine and make a lot of noise and you can build proper 5.0l engine and after that rev it up. It is up to you. With z2 rides you work mostly on the size of you engine, with hard works you learn to rev it up. Cycling is an endurance sport, it will be hard to practice an endurance sport without much endurance. Or in other words if you really enjoy working above 70%, you can make it much much more enjoyable but you will need to spend more time at lower intensity. And if you like group rides and you see someone really strong in the group most of the time it will be a person with much more time @z2 than you and not a person who did some amazing and complicated and hard workouts, he/she just did a lot of the boring work (mostly z2) to have really fun riding with others and being strong.

Climbs below FTP can be just a wrong cassette or chainrings or both.On top of that if you climb below ftp you can push same watts when going down which will make the whole ride faster and more constant

PS. I just looked at the picture from TR workouts and as much I love their podcasts: a week of VO2 max and a Threshold session is enough for 99% of athletes (1% for some yetis of cycling), not sure how you can complete a week of 2x vo2max, 1x thrsh, and sweet spot on top of that. And even more not sure how you can ever recover from that (even if by some miracle all workouts were performed correctly but again only 2x vo2max can destroy you completely if done correctly) and no idea how your body can utilise that training stress signal in any other way than chronic fatigue.

edit: actually only way to complete such a week would be to have incorrectly set hr/pwr zones in a way that vo2 would be thrsh (5x5m thrsh is managable), thrsh would be sweet sport , and sweet spot would be tempo. That way maybe you could have an impression that you did a lot of hard work, but in reality all you have done is you just start with a little lie at the beginning. To stay in a real world (if you want that ofc) would be to just agree that such 4 hard days are impossible to ride in one week, to set your zones correctly (ftp/lthr tests) and accept that you ride much lower intensity rides like tempo etc. or stay with those vo2max intesities but gave up on 2 of 4 workouts and change them to something like easy ride (z2).

edit2: there is a difference between training and fatiguing yourself. Question would be if you like to train hard or fatigue yourself hard and which gives you more fun. To train hard you need patience and you even can get really strong without feeling huge fatigue at all, just some consistency in boring training is needed. Fatiguing yourself is very easy, you can even be very weak, all you have to do is just push yourself much beyond your manageable stress level (like those TR workouts where a 3rd hard workout is pointless to perform without recovering form prev ones). All I am trying to say is you can be very fast and kind of bored and you can be very slow and enjoying (feeling fatigue) all the time. But trust me, riding with huge engine, and high FTP at higher speeds with stronger groups can be really enjoyable too . Ofc I’m not bashing you, just trying to give you a diffrent point of view. Byuying a power meter is a great move, coming here is a great move, writing about your concerns is a great move, you have some good qualities to be a very good cyclist :slight_smile:

“I started training seriously at the beginning of April” - seriously should not be hard for whatever a reason at all the time. Seriously means wise, hard where you want but easier most of the time. That way your hard will be 5x harder than the other hard , and if you rise your FTP your new Z2 will be much higher than your current sweet spots anyways.

Ps2. Recheck your power/hr zones. Z2 rides when zones are set correctly should not be that boring, maybe you just mix z1 with z2?

Ps3. People here are trying to help mostly bc you have a very positive energy (at least I think so) and when you are scared of being overtrained (which is very wise) you should know that it will not come with a huge sign “I’m overtrained!!!”. It manifests itself with a lil bit worse sleep, a lil bit less energy, but what is worse you could just lose all your positive attitude towards cycling and then much longer pause is needed to recover and not all of cyclists have enought energy to start anew. The whole point of z2 rides and much less amount of hard workouts is partly to be much more safe and enjoy rides just as you like to enjoy them. But as with any good cakes it is better to eat one every week and not all at once.

last edit: setting a goal like a time of a climb nearby, a KOM you want to beat in like 5 months, riding with a stronger group nearby etc. can be a great idea and it is much easier to train towards a goal (while seeing small incremental boosts in form etc.) than just riding

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Great explanations!

To answer your questions:

  1. you can’t stay in the green (ie gaining fitness) forever, at some point you will start to plateau.

  2. It is perfectly fine to be in the gray (you are still gaining on other levels).

  3. Overtraining: Symptoms, Recovery, and Avoidance of Overtraining - TrainerRoad Blog

You have to take rest weeks:

hi,
I am resurrecting this thread to tell you I listened to your advice and I took it easier, possibly even too easy during the summer because of vacation. I recently finished a specialty phase on TrainerRoad that got me to my first 300km ride last Saturday. Now I am doing a recovery week with low intensity rides.

I have two questions:

  1. how should I tell if a ride is Z2? Should I consider the heart rate only (as suggested by some) or power only or both. I am asking because my commutes this week I easily managed to stay with a low enough heart rate (if my LT is set correctly) but my power occasionally spiked out of Z2.

  2. I checked my form graph today (attached) and I am at the top of the green zone and I am only halfway through the recovery weeek. Am I taking it too easy? Should I keep doing Z2 for the rest of the week (like until Saturday or Sunday) or should I go back to more intensity now since my form is high enough?

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ad1.
Both. You can ride by power and focus on constant pressure on your pedals. Ofc it is tricky when in traffic, city etc. And you can look at your HR (just as you did) to check if it has not spiked too much. With long steady rides, riding by power and looking at hr can give you some hints of your form (decoupling, how fast your hr reacts, what part of Z2 it stays on compared to power zones etc).
Overall it sounds like a pretty good z2 ride.

ad2.
Recovery week should be around half of the load of your last normal training week. It is very hard to measure your recovery week by feel just bc you can feel fine for now but keep in mind it is preparing you for next 2/3 weeks of hard training and shorter reco week can make your next 3rd workout week impossible to finish correctly.
Your graph is hard to read without a pic of your calendar but maybe just put all your planned workouts for 2 months ahead on your calendar (with recovery weeks) and show your graph then? :slight_smile: or just see for yourself where your from will be on a 3rd training week etc.

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