I found this post showing some training method which I term as “evil” mode. Essentially, I’m thinking this is akin to Crit Style/ HIIT Style Riding but unlike the HIIT/CRIT type of riding, the idea here is to also cater for individual recovery periods before cranking the target power up again.
I’m not sure how or if this has any relationship w/ using W’Bal instead of HR(HR is a Lag measure) as a measure to determine how “recovered” you are before cranking the target power up again.
Most times when we do a HIIT style workout like 30on30off, we don’t recover enough and possibly cant finish the session (pacing issue - but in a race/event, sometimes you just light the match anyways). But by using this logic, we can tune the recovery to just the right “stable low HR” and then crank it up again.
One thing I am experimenting with is somehow similar.
For instance there is the traditional 5 by 5s which typically has 2:00 or 2:30 rest periods and I have one athlete doing those with just 1:30 on the fst rest, 2 on the second and 2:30 on the final two.
By doing so I am trying to make sure the workout has some manageability but gets a very good Z5 stimulus.
Having an individual metric for that would be better. Maybe I will use HR in the future to trigger the start of the next interval.
We do but imho to be used properly we also need to be able to estimate the critical power very precisely and, last but not least, be quite knowledgeable of how the W’ recharges.
This article is a must read for that purpose:
So I am not that sure that we can be so reliant on CP/W’ in “real life” workouts but it is worth a try.
In more real life we could use a HR value to trigger the begining next interval. Not as subtle but maybe better than fixed time recovery.
