I actually felt good enough one day a couple of weeks ago to do the ramp test. I thought it was a piece of cake compared to the 20 min. test. As suspected, my FTP is way down from it’s peak in 2017. Boo. Anyway, I decided to give SST another try. I chose the high volume and felt so strong last week. I did 4 days of SST, a high cadence day and a recovery day. I ended up with a total of 228 minutes of SST for the week. I felt so strong! This week, different story. The past few days have been horrible…especially today. Staying at recovery pace was tough, and I should have just killed it quickly, but being a not so smart and a bit too stubborn cyclist, I stayed on and did a 2 hour workout. Duh. So, question I guess is: Am I expecting too much from this 59 year old body? Is a high volume plan too aggressive? I usually ride 10-12 hours a week, so thought this would be the wtg. Yes, no, maybe so? Any thoughts are appreciated.
There are many discussions on the forum and also on the podcast related to plan volume, quick search around and you can find others’ experience and advice.
Does sound like the HV is a bit much, at this moment in time, a lot of very fast cyclists train with the MV plans. Also keep in mind the gap between 10-12 hours of outside riding (with breaks, not sustained efforts, etc) vs comparable hours indoors, the whole “all TSS is not created equal” thing.
If you’re just getting into structured training once again, from experience I can suggest that it might be worth putting together a couple weeks worth of workouts ramping up the stress and see how you feel.
HV is generally a bit too much for me, unless my entire schedule revolves around train/eat/rest. What I do is go with the MV plan and then either add in more aerobic riding or swap out some workouts for the +1/+2/etc versions to ramp up TSS.
‘Riding’ and structured indoor training are NOT the same. You are seeing that in full force.
At most, you should do Mid Vol. For your age, and if your indoor training history is limited, Low Vol may be more appropriate.
The smart play is to start Low, then add rides after you establish that you can handle the workouts AND have appropriate recovery.
You are smashed because you bit off too much and are not recovering, which lead to your crash in a mere week.
Cut back to Mid immediately at the very least. Do that for a week or two and really see how you do. Also recognize that if you are starting with Sweet Spot Base 1, that the Sweet Spot Base 2 only gets more demanding.
Point being, don’t underestimate the future demand just because you think the current point is too easy. It all progresses to be harder and you will likely be good and worked over at the end of the 5 week work segment.
As already mentioned, riding and structured training are two separate animals.
I am 56 years old and would never be able to manage any of the High volume plans in TR, I know that from experience.
Go down Low volume, that will give you three hard workouts per week. Then add an endurance ride or tack it on at the end of each session. This is what I have done. Created an “LV + plan” which consists of LV with 20 minutes of volume tacked on to every workout (60% of FTP) and an endurance ride of choice Sundays.
I should have said that I train 10-12 hours each week. (Most of those hours, with the exception of charity/group rides, is done indoors.) I have followed training plans for many years, but the last sweet spot I did was not a TR plan. I was actually surprised at how many back to back sweet spot days there were. Guess I’ll have a go at mid volume and see how that goes. Strange thing is, I rarely get sore and don’t feel overtrained. But performance is sometimes lacking and not sure what else to blame it on. Thanks all.