TrainerRoad developed the sweet spot base plan for people like you - not enough time for long aerobic sessions. They believe this is the better approach for most cyclists.
But it’s not MAF, traditional base would be more appropriate if that’s what you want.
How’s the MAF going?! 
I’m just starting, as you can read here:
Interesting statements about cholesterol at the top of the topic…I was on a LCHF diet when I had mine tested and my doc flipped. But, looking at it now, my hdl/tri/tot:hdl were all in the desirable to very desirable range…only my total and ldl were undesirably high (on the Framingham Risk table I scored 3%). Statins do their job incredibly well, but is it a job that will ultimately prolong life?
Anyway, back to the bike…I’m doing 2-3x2hr rides on the weekdays and 2x3hr rides on the weekends. My MAF range includes the ‘major illness’ -10 and as most practitioners mention, it’s slllloooowwww. Should I even bother marrying HR to watts or simply stick with HR…because that’s the whole point of MAF?
MAF can be used surprisingly well with TrainerRoad and you can find your FTP without violating the go low go long idea in the early stages.
By the end of 2 weeks you should find that you have to do little to no adjustment and you’ll be pretty close to your an FTP that complies with your current Aerobic base. Finish out the rest of the 8 weeks in Traditional Base I & II. (stick to Low or Mid Volume). Continue to use the % adjust to stay as close to 180-age as you can. Some days might be bad day and you’ll have to dial it down quite a bit if you are in need of rest. However over the 8 weeks you should see you abilities continue to go upward week over week.
At the end of 8 weeks; you can start adding in polarized work as well as ramp test.
IF you do this correctly after 8 weeks you should find that SweetSpot workouts can be done at 180-age+5. IF you can’t then your FTP is probably an over reach for your current Aerobic base.
At the risk of annoying some people. If your FTP is correct for your abilities; on a rested day it should always be easy to do SweetSpot work at HR <= 180-age(±5). If you can’t do sweet spot at that HR level then while you are able to test at a FTP higher than this level, you have no hope of holding your FTP for the true full 1 hour out on the road. Your Time to Exhaustion will be your limiter (many people that do only sweetspot time crunched training get stuck with a TTE of around 15-25minutes). In those cases FTP is overstated, and this is what people mean when they say their aerobic base is crp even though they are “strong”. This crp aerobic based in the dirty downside of time crunched training.
The older you get the less effective the TCT training approach is. If you ride and race in the group you can hide a cr*p aerobic base but you’ll likely win rarely or never; if you ride out in the wind alone doing Time Trials you’ll be exposed as having a poser’s FTP
Stick with HR. One of the best things about MAF is it’s simplicity…off you go, keep your HR down. That’s it 
On TR look at your HR during endurance and recovery rides, I find them to be about right.
I used this method a few years ago, I still like to see my easy runs at around my MAF HR, but I’m confident it’s totally aerobic if I’m nose breathing.
I’d stick with heart rate and completely forget about power for now. Have you listened to The Endurance Planet podcast? They cover MAF like crazy. You can go back through the last couple years and gain a ton of info. My only opinion is MAF works best with volume, volume and more volume. Then intensity does have to be thrown in at some point. Just what I have noticed when experimenting.
Thanks for all the info!
(The TR community really is something special! )
My MAF HR does coincide with my very lowest Z2 power (56% FTP) so it only makes sense that volume would have to be maximized.
Will keep on keepin’ on…
p.s. – can I run my fancy high-speed equipment while doing MAF or is that just being a poseur? 
I say use all the fun gadgets you got. Your MAF pace might become faster than you think. It takes self control but when people fly by you then just remind yourself you’ve got a plan and you’re sticking to it… I use to watch my buddy run away from me at times during an occasional run we’d do together but he’s never beat me in a race. Not even close. That makes me happy 
I do not follow MAF anymore but it did help me stay in control while building volume. Phil Maffetone really encourages “healthy endurance training”. Which it sounds like is exactly what you need right now. If we are honest with ourselves, becoming as fast as you possibly can does not mean you’re healthy.
I like your idea of estimating/confirming your FTP with that method. Did you get it from anywhere or did you come up with it yourself?
We stumbled on it organically. We had to train a RAAM Relay team 2 years ago; the riders were all burned out from TT training the previous season and really had terribly low TTE’s which is not conducive to a week long 24x7 race.
So we made them all throw out their FTP value and start from scratch with long slow to rebuild their aerobic engines for a bigger base to build on top of. While writing the protocol it sort of leapt off the page that if 180-age gave you an aerobic ceiling; then riding right at that ceiling on a known aerobic ride with power tracked would give you an estimate of your FTP.
So we tested it; after week one we had an HR estimated aerobic base projection of FTP. We set FTP to that at the end of the week, then repeated each week. At the end of 8 weeks everyone did an FTP 20 min variety test; and FTP results were within 1-2% of what the HR training predicted. Then we went on to polarized training.
Here are some other aspects to consider that make this work. These are more opinion than tested/proven but they provide perspective.
HR is a slow responder as Jonathon always mentions, but on a long slow, indoors at a controlled temperature there’s nothing to respond to. So it becomes accurate over the entire workout as a measure of the cumulative stress of the effort. This removes that traditional concern over it being slow responding. If HR does fade (cardiac drift) during the ride then you know you need more time building base.
HR is responsive to stress, it can be elevated for other reasons. So it’s said you can’t trust it. This is partially true but, really IMO, is only a problem when you are time crunched and trying to squeeze out the max at race season. The closer you are to “go day” the more you can take the limits off. My thoughts on this are that it’s ok to limit your training based on HR exactly because it’s a feedback mechanism. If you are always bathing in stress hormones from a hectic life, then your HR will be high, but perhaps you shouldn’t ignore that indicator of stress. You might be able to obtain an FTP of XX in a stress free world but, if you can never get to stress free because of lifestyle choices, then can you really obtain/claim that higher FTP and train without getting burnout or injury? Probably not; doubly so after age 35.
The key though is to remember where on the calendar these are effective techniques to deploy. It’s specifically for base building. It’s also go for the rec rider that just wants to breath and talk while everyone else is panting.
Technically you can just keep repeating Traditional base Block two; using the HR Trick; Keep raising your estimated FTP based on staying under your MAF HR until you plateau. Some people will plateau at 8 weeks some at 12, 16 or higher. IF you keep getting better, then keep getting better.
Eventually when you plateau, you will have to go hard to get faster, but if the base is good it’s not nearly as painful as when the base is weak. I can tell without a doubt that Sweet Spot workouts are FUN on a good base and a correct FTP; they suck on a small base and an over estimated FTP.
The one barrier for most people is you have to have the time do the long slow stuff; not everyone has the luxury to do 2.5 hour slow rides… well until you point out to them that they watch more than 2.5 hours of tv a day and convince them to put a bike in front of the TV. The other barrier is ego. FTP is how you program your training for consistency, it’s not how you compare yourself to others. The finish line is for comparing racers, and the size of the smile is for comparing recreational riders.
I keep a HR cap of 130 during my endurance rides, so that is similar to your MAF -10. I’ve noticed that for me 140 bpm is tempo for sure. Keeping under 130 for me is a true conversational pace and I’ll average somewhere between 115 and 125 depending on how well I am at keeping my cap a true cap. MAF -10 HR for me is ~75% FTP though so maybe you can use some modifying to your power curve through some good LT1 work.
Thats brilliant - thanks. Did you take any note of the Maffetone method of adding beats on if you were trained or older (not that that would have applied in your case). I did 18 mths of MAF riding and saw a massive leap in my endurance and have a lot of time for the method particularly as the primary reason for me riding is for my health.
I didn’t adjust the plan, but I did adjust the feedback about how people were progressing. We had a former female solo winner of RAAM on the team so she’s a special athlete. “I don’t coast, my feet are on the pedals and pedals are made to go around” WKO4 is great for this stuff as we just built graphs that monitor the base levels and the polarized time periods. So build it once; overlay the athlete data and then review and provide goals for the next week. Probably spent more time saying “Trust the plan, Trust the protocol” than anything else, performance-narcissism is strong with this crowd
I have used the MAF method for the majority of my off season training for the last 3 years. The results came slow but I have witnessed my power at my MAF heart rate go from 150 to 200 watts (2.9 w/kg).
Read (Joe Friel’s blog) that Ironman legend Mark Allen did 30-40 hours/week of low HR training (run & bike) for a year and lowered his mile run time by 35%.
Guess I’ll have to quit mah jawb! 
That’s a lot of volume! Full time job for sure. Mark Allen hired Phil Maffetone at some point. I’ve heard them both talk about his training and the are very vague about the type of intensity they introduced. I do know at some point they introduced it.
Question for those following MAF and HFLC…do you fuel your rides/runs at all?
Or is this such low intensity work that no special/extra requirements outside daily diet are necessary?
And if you do fuel the workout, what’s your food program?
Thanks!
When I was doing MAF rides when I was on a HFLC diet just water and electrolytes on the rides. ( I always carried a gel just in case and out of force of habit but rarely if ever used it). At any cafe stops I’d just have whatever I wanted really. Now I’m not on that diet I do most of my rides fasted and have a banana or something similar after a couple of hours. Becoming fat adapted for riding is far more about long slow/steady distance at the correct intensity rather than the diet bit. The diet is just the icing on the cake (pun intended).
I only trained using MAF as a runner and I did not fuel before any runs. I always ran first thing in the morning, but daily runs were about 1 hour and only one longer run on Sunday’s. So time spent training was no where near the time a cyclist puts in the saddle. Honestly I really didn’t start fueling before or during workouts until I started cycling. I never realized how much difference it makes. The problem I had with HFLC was my cholesterol went through the roof just like yours did @Captain_Doughnutman. I was eating eggs, coconut oil, olive oil probably to the extreme. That’s my problem, when I do something I go overboard to the point it becomes a problem. I’ll probably never learn…
Didn’t follow MAF strictly, but was doing something very similar in 2017-18 - did nearly all my high intensity work on the bike (roughly following TR plans), and lots and lots of easy running. Averaged 6 runs per week for 18 months, almost all at an easy pace apart from the last couple of months where I introduced 1 run a week with some longish tempo intervals. Wouldn’t call it MAF because I went by RPE rather than working out HR zones, but I suspect if I had it would have worked out similar.
I found it a really good approach. I’ve had issues with running injuries previously but running easy and consistently enabled me to build up a really solid base. Very simple approach to follow which made it easy to just get out the door and run. And results were good - my self-selected easy running pace dropped from ~9:30 to ~8:00 per mile, HR stayed about the same. Race performances were up there with my PRs
If its something like a group century on saturday, then bullet proof coffee before and a couple packets of justines almond butter so i can eat on the bike for tomorrow.
if its a <= 1 hr sprint its usually just fasted. once you adapted (9-12months) if you eat you greens there is enough glycogen in the muscle and you simply don’t need the glycogen until you really drop the hammer because your fat power ceiling is higher.
if its > 1 hr fast and furious or Track race. then 1/2 strength UCANN in the turbo bottle and 33shake chia gels to keep variety