I’m just curious what you would think would happen over say a 3 month period of doing just that.
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You would be insanely fit but it’s unlikely your body can handle it imo.
Well I guess ‘it depends’…
If you have a very good base from a large training volume (in this particular case probably >20 hours/week - and I think you have that given your former posts), you may be able to sustain that intensity for a number of weeks. But it is indeed very unlikely that you will reach 3 months.
If you are time constrained for a period, you could try it out but keep a close look on performance. As soon as performance stagnates or decreases, dial down intensity and or volume at that intensity. Avoid reaching a state of overtraining!
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I tried something like that. A long period of mostly fairly high-intensity training during my self-coached 2nd season:
7 months of that, from November to May.
Almost all high IF (>=0.9) and a little over 7 hours/week average. Polarized time-in-zone (HR) it was 32% / 52% / 16% distribution.
Lots of 20-30 minute commutes in the morning, full-gas. Then either the reverse ride home, or a longer 75-90 minute ride with a lot of threshold/SS riding. On both rides there were one or two 30-90 second max/near-max efforts.
Listened to my body and took time off when needed. By early April my TTE was over 1 hour. Didn’t stagnate, kept getting faster until I started my traditional off-season in June/July/August when it gets really really hot. Hit a high of 280W ftp in April, and restarted in September with some intensity and 260W ftp.
Listened to my body and didn’t burn out. Rode smart. You might be surprised how much quality threshold and one or two short efforts you can do with 2-a-days like that. And I was fifty-five at the time, with a stressful job and family life. Probably not the best approach for heart health. But I had incredible durability and repeatability.
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Interesting. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing since late November. Riding twice per day doing zwift races only.
No mater what I do on the trainer I cannot get my NP over 300 watts for 40+ minutes. Easy to do on hill climbs but cannot do that on the trainer for some reason. Not sure why.
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I’ve assumed you mean 90-99% of FTP not intensity like in intensity factor.
I haven’t thought how much load 90-99% intensity factor provides or if it’s even possible to calculate from the description (maybe it’s easy to balloon it with VO2max sprints).
Huh? Im talking about Intensity. Like NP/FTP.
Yeah I am saying I misunderstood your post and didn’t realize you are talking about IF.
I assumed you mean riding at 90%-99% of FTP when I have written my first answer. I have no idea what he answer to your original question is.
I mean are they really that far off? They could potentially be like a few percent of each other.
or not. Here is a 30 minutes from last night’s “back on bike after 3 weeks” workout with average power at 53% FTP, and intensity factor of 0.97:
So there could potentially be a huge difference between IF and AvgPower as % FTP.
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You would get sick, injured and probably slower.
Exactly. You can get IF of 90%-100% by doing some threshold/subthreshold intervals or by a lot of slow riding + some sprints.
If you could manage 10 hours a week of the former consistently you would be insanely fit but your body is very unlikely to be able to sustain it (some World Tour riders focusing on threshold work manage only 2-3 hours of it per week).
Look up the 1973 study “Effect of training on enzyme activity and fiber composition of human skeletal muscle” by P.D. Gollnick et al.
Basic summary:
- 4 days per week
- 1 hour/day
- 75-90% Maximal Aerobic Power
- 5 months
- Progression to keep up with fitness increases
At the end of the training program, most subject were working for 1 hour at 85-90% of VO2max. And that %vo2max is really high.
Dial down threshold training from 10 hours to 4 hours, and we know it’s possible. Not fun, but possible.
World Tour riders are coached and training for performance and racing most of the year. They are not training to answer “what’s possible” questions.
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Thank you that’s a very interesting study!
I was about to bring Renato Canova writings about his experience with 800m runners (focusing on VO2max training whole year round resulted in lowering of FTP which pushed Canova to change his approach to more aerobic base even for an event that lasted less than 2 minutes).
Anyway, is seems like a lot of threshold/subthreshold will result in higher threshold and a lot of VO2max will result in higher top end. Both can be had at IF of 0.9-1.
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Thats why I said potentially… and “could”. Yes there are cases where thats true, hence the use of word “potentially”
I burned out doing exactly this during the months of covid lockdown.
I think there are 2 answers, one for if you don’t race, and one for if you do.
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if you don’t race, this is probably a great way to be very fit and feel like you’re working really hard.
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If you race, you’ll probably show up race day full of confidence, but your actual performance is going to be all over the place. You might be off the front, you might be off the back, you might be pack fodder, and you’ll have no good way of knowing which of these is going to show up.
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Idk. I did this for 4 months leading up to a 8000 foot hill climb and got 11th out of 870, hitting my best ever 2 hour power and 90 minute power.
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Right. That would be the “you might be off the front” part of my answer.
How were your other performances around that time? Consistently like this?
I’ll be honest, I feel pretty fresh every day. Im not sure why. My ctl between 100-109