I’m conflicted on it. I guess the TR ethos is to chase a slightly out of reach FTP with shorter intervals and work up.
Perhaps that’s what I should do to move passed my plateau. Currently I have resisted doing that as the over threshold (105% etc) was kicking my butt. Perhaps if I inflate my FTP and let my PL drop down the intervals will be short enough to manage.
My strength and targets are both aligned to long sustained efforts though.
It’s definitely something I should investigate. And follow the TR plan without additional riding again as I had great success with SusPBMV during winter when I was doing minimal extra to save my legs for the hard stuff.
I tend to agree. I think SS is still slightly over stated in terms of Level to match compliance. Some of us enjoy SS more than others though and I don’t begrudge the Levels as they are.
I do need to work out where to set my training though after this specialty phase
I recently switched from a planbuilder plan to SSBHV1 partly because of those workouts. Didn’t see the point in hard start intervals at the beginning of base season.
It doesn’t stop my occasional self inflicted hard starts though; ie daydreaming and realizing that interval started 20-30 seconds ago and surging to get the average power in line for that part of the interval (which for workouts like Monitor can be quite short).
Are you saying that if you use a dedicated plan instead of plan builder, then AT simply won’t work there(and hence there will be no hard start intervals)? I thought that new plans are supported with AT, but I might be wrong
The Tue/Thur/Sat workouts look like good ones if focusing on muscular endurance. I did the previous SSB-1 HV in Dec 2017 / Jan 2018, the second week looked like this:
Wright Peak -2 packs a 90-minute interval punch after Tuesday-Thursday’s 152 minutes of SS! At the end of SSB-1 HV I got a small but decent bump in FTP, and perhaps more importantly did an HC climb the Saturday of week 5 and achieved 2nd highest VAM ever. However the prior year I was able to achieve similar HC VAMs with only a couple long SS rides a week, and 5 days/week of sweet spot work was a bit of a grind. So for me SSB HV became a question of return on training investment.
The new 2021 SSB HV plan makes Wed another endurance day (vs previous plan’s SS workout), which I think is an improvement. Depending on the rider, I could see dropping those long sweet spot workouts down to twice a week. Or if you are hard core and recover like an 18 year old, do all 4 SS workouts as prescribed.
I agree, the sunday should be definitely replaced with Z2. But doing this 5 weeks straight would be quite “challenging”. But maybe I have become a wimp with Z2 and 1-2 hard days at the moment.
From my experience extending threshold over an hour, and therefore VAM for 1-3 hour HC climbs, can be done by doing a) twice a week muscular endurance intervals, b) some short but focused above threshold work, and c) once a month doing a really long 1-3 hour session. Do that over three or four months. Roughly the same timeframe as SSB 1 and SSB 2. At my age and ability to recover, that seems like a better return on training investment as it leaves some energy budget for strength training and time for recovery/adapations.
My understanding is that AT will suggest substitutions of like for like so if you have a steady SS interval workout than it’d give you another slightly different one. As opposed to a hard start SS interval.
