Hi, been training with TR for over 2 years and super happy with the progress.
Done 2 rounds with SST base high vol , year one i just added a bit of Z2 to the vol 1 and 2 but this year i did 30% extra interval on both saturday and sunday and also extra Endurance (my biggest rides had 300 TSS and a total of 500 for the weekend), and total i increased TSS with around 250 each week.
for next season that starts now I’m hoping to train smarter and wondering where it is best to add TSS in these programs.
So what I’m asking is, is there any point to add more weekly sweetspot, and if so should i try add little over the whole week or all on 1 day (50% extra on saturday).
Is there any point adding a lot of endurance on 1 or more days? to get the long endurance ride (3h+ or is this ruined when you already exhausted yourself with 2-2,5 hour of sweetspot intervals).
Hopefully my question is understandable (lots of thoughts so hard to write down).
Do you have any goals/races?
yes I’m, doing allot of races, this year i got 3rd place in my countries national road race for 30-34. And my goals are races that is around 2,5-3 hours.
I won’t be traveling to camps for traditional base, but i will do as much sweetspot as i possible can on the trainer, and also increase 1 or more of the days with extra sweetspot and or endurance
That’s almost exactly how you want to do a long Z2 ride, but after 2hrs of SS you might only require only 1-2 hrs of additional Z2 to get those deep endurance adaptations. You could also run them in reverse, do the Z2 first then the SS, just to see how you do in a semi-fatigued state (and might be more race realistic).
Also, if your races are ~3hrs long, no real reason you should be doing 5hr SS+Z2 rides (5+ hours on a trainer would make me insane). That said, I know the long rides are what really boost my endurance.
Maybe alternate — do long weekend rides one week then add the extra TSS on all rides the next week. It’s Base, so you’ve got a bit more wiggle room in structure.
Good luck!
Given your events are this duration I’d suggest you add the endurance time to the end of the sweet spot intervals. Instead of doing a 2-3 hour (or more) endurance ride one or two days a week I think you’d see more benefit from doing an extra 30-45 minutes of endurance of ‘extend cooldown’ at the end of every ride (assuming you can handle the TSS of course)
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Thank you for the replies.
So extra endurance on end of 1 or more rides is good.
Since no one is recommending extra sweetspot time i assume you think the last week in vol 2 has enough?.
What I am wondering about is making the saturday ride harder and longer (more sweetspot) and doing a 3h endurance ride on sundays. Also doing extra endurance on the other days when i feel like it, do you think that is a good idea?.
If you’re doing extra SS then a stand alone Z2 ride is kind of moot.
If you’re going to make your Sat ride extra hard then why not make Sun a recovery ride?
That is also an idea. I’m trying to studying up. Sweetspot/Z2 seems to do allot of the same improvements, so the “long easy endurance ride” is not needed in the sweetspot program correct?.
Last year i did about +250TSS on every week of the vol 1 and vol 2 program, my CTL ended on 130, that was a little too much that year, most of the extra TSS i did on the weekends. This year i will try to do 1 extra hard ride (saturday) but not longer than needed and up the TSS from the original programs with about 100.
So what I’m thinking now is:
- Bonus 50 TSS on mondays (i like to spin every day)
- Little bonus endurance on tue-.thursday if i feel like it
- Harder and longer saturday (then i get one 3hour ride per week in base).
- Easier sunday (57-80% ride)
More power to you if you can handle that much - I did SSBHV last year and sitting around 100-105 CTL for that long was about all I could manage. 130 CTL for an entire block is bananas
It was the last 42 days that was 130 avg TSS (think CTL in golden cheetah showed 127,8 at the end).
I had many 4-5 hours days in the weekends since I thought i would do more long races, but this year i know my main goal(s) will be about 3 hour with a few races that might tip 4 hours. most races are 25(TTT)-120min.
This year im hoping to do a little less and have more energy and even bigger gains.
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That’s a solid plan, and I’m doing the same. I think outside of a few big volume blocks with lots of tempo/ss, the gains, for me at least, seem to be working more intensity into my training and raising the roof so to speak.
It’s pretty crazy how much TSS you can handle once you get accustomed. I’ve been bouncing around in the CTL 110-115 range for ages after peaking at 126 and that’s just riding unstructured but still 75% indoors with long weekend rides. Feeling fresh and super happy with the legs. Going to force myself to drop soon with the weather changing, but fatigue is not an issue right now.