Hello,
I have a question to the “older” athletes among the Intervals.icu users. I am 64 and still relativele active (Races planned for 2026: May 1 Frankfurt-Eschborn, June Glocknerkönig). Now I want to completely restructure my training. Proper recovery, adjusted intervalls, weight lifting, Nutrition Protein!, etc.).
I liked very much the book of J Friel and the latest findings of Fascat coaching for masters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12H-rYEylo0.
The issue is that the trainingsplans and the app is very expensive for me. Is there anybody who can help me with workouts, plan structure, advice, etc.? Thank you all for your help.
Kind regards
Peter
Just build the workouts from Joe Frield’s book into your intervals.icu activities. I started with his book in the late '90s, and he lays out a great model for base, build, peak, with some examples of what workouts to do. He probably has Tempo, LT, and Vo2 Max workouts that you can model. So if he has a recommendation for a 4x 6-12 minute threshold intervals, you can easily build that as:
warmup
-15m Z1
intervals
4x
-8m Z4
-2m Z1
cooldown
-15m Z1
If you have an eFTP from recording workouts here, you’ll have a decent place to start.
A lot of the guidance you’ll get here is going to follow what Friel wrote. If you already have the book you are 80% of your way to developing your own plan.
There is also a lot of coaching services you can get through intervals.icu. I suspect those would be more expensive than the FasCat membership.
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Thank you very much for your help
Hi Peter,
I’d be more than happy to help. If you want to drop me a DM we can organise an online call or you can ask a few questions if you’ve got them.
Thanks,
Another Peter
FWIW I’m similar age and settled on StrongFirst minimalist strength programming (Simple and Sinister) as it delivers high return on investment and doesn’t interfere with cycling or recovery. Practices make me feel refreshed and body composition, strength and endurance have all improved. All you need is 1 book or a few training sessions and then it’s “repeat until strong.” Once you achieve strength standards, there are a couple other recent books with related programming.
I didn’t respond well to Friels recommendations. Ended up hiring a coach and we figured out what works well for me, which turned out to be a lot of shorter high intensity repeats -and a lot of easy riding. This year I’ve been using Xert and it really works well, for me.
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Hello, thanks a lot. I tried XERT when it came out but not for the last 2-3 years. Good idea. I will look into it again. My thinking is currently around lomger recovery (of course), but as well the structure of workouts. I found this kind of interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12H-rYEylo0
So instead of VO2 max for example 20 or 30 min in Zone only 12 or 15 min and more focus of Sweetspot training. I am not convinced to reduce total training time per week to only 6-8 hours for 60+. Maybe i will just try the fascat app but it is USD 34 per Month or EUR 17 (reasonable) but you have to sign (and pay) for 12 Month.
What do you and the community think?
Personally, I’m not sure I’ve bought into the FasCat philosophy, and after looking at his Masters stuff, yeah, he’s not big on much volume. After digging into some of his stuff it’s still closer to polarized, just that the hard work is mostly SS, rather than FTP and higher. He doesn’t exclude some of the higher interval stuff, it’s just that SS appears to be bread and butter. If you response well to SS work, it’s a great plan. Also - sounds like that higher price gets your more personalized attention? That could be valuable.
How do you know you respond to SS work? Well, you just gotta try. 
Conveniently, SS training is relatively straightforward. 2x20, even without knowing your FTP, is gonna get you pretty close. Do that 2 times a week with one long Z2 ride, and you’re pretty close to what FasCat is going to get you.
How are you measuring FTP? Are you relying on the intervals calculation? You need to put something in every so often to test things. Xert had specific “breakthrough” workouts that would put you through your paces. I found it was better than intervals for capturing “breakthroughs” on a more frequent basis. I think this can be helpful for the self-coached athlete, if you need extra motivation this is a bit of a “gamification” of your training.
That said, Xert didn’t work for me. It was way overestimating my FTP, and thus regularly asking me to do workouts that I just couldn’t finish. That doesn’t mean it might not work out well for you. I did find it liked to recommend a lot of Billat/Tabata -ish stuff, as @WindWarrior noted. I only have so much mental bandwidth for those. But it will automatically do a lot of the stuff you are asking for, and I think cheaper than FasCat.
This is a bit ( a lot? ) of a rambling answer. Unfortunately, training takes a decent amount of time to see what works, and you need to figure out what works for you. Hiring a coach could reduce that amount of time, but as a self-coached athlete you can still figure it out. The easiest way is to just figure out which workouts you “enjoy” the most. Then quit one interval earlier than you think you can do. What is going to get you the best results is stringing together months and then years of consistent training. The specific workouts are less important.
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From a physiological perspective, the types of training required to elicit the adaptations doesn’t really change. What changes the most is the dose, the response and the recovery required. You can still train across the intensity spectrum, but how much and how often will be more will be more delicately balanced. It’s a bit of a FAFO situation until you find a structure that works for you.
Depending on what you’re focusing on, you can start with a relatively lower volume of intensity and track performance across training sessions. As long as you continue to improve, the dose doesn’t need to change. When progress stalls, you might choose to increase sets/reps/power target more slowly or by a smaller increment. Rinse and repeat, until a change in training focus is required or because you want to.
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I got a chuckle for seeing FAFO used not the typical way. Love it!
Also funny, I think I just realized that I’m always trying to add a little time, a little power, an extra set, something, and this is probably causing me to accumulate too much stress, when I should just keep the same dose for longer. Thanks for helping cement it a bit more in my mind, maybe it will take!
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