Your link doesn’t work, seems to be blocked. For me anyway.
All else (sleep, age, nutrition, work stress, etc) being equal, the right mix of training to stimulate improvement basically depends a lot on volume. The lower the volume you’re doing, the more intensity you need to incorporate to get sufficient training stimulus to improve or maintain fitness. 4-6 hours/week isn’t that much, and if you spend 4-5 of them in Z2 I honestly think you’re more likely to decline than improve. Also worth pointing out everybody uses different zones, what the article calls Z1 is Z2 on the TR scale.
If you’ve done a couple of years of consistently training at 4-6 hours/week then it’s no surprise that you’ve plateaued. And you’ve done so at a reasonably high level. Given limited volume I suspect further fitness gains might be few and far between, especially if your nutrition and sleep is already in a good place. I would focus more on how you can specialise to get the most out of that fitness. E.g. extending your TTE to be a good time triallist, or working on short power for crits.
Sort of. The 80/20 plan makes sense when you’ve the time to do it. That athlete did 760hrs of training during the season (9 months?) so nearly 20hrs a week. I’m not sure if anyone who holds down a full time job plus family commitments can put in that sort of time. Sweet Spot aims to get most of the benefits but in a constrained time frame but ultimately if you are aiming for Olympic podium then you need to put in the hours.
Wow I’m glad this got bumped, old thread. After 2 years of riding I’ve made some solid progress. First year I did 13 weeks of TR from January to April and went from 268 to 290w. Then I rode around for the rest of the summer setting all kinds of PRs. Dove back into TR this past winter with a ramp test of 300w and after 18 weeks finished up with 310
I’ve not made any changes to my diet or drinking or other habits. TR has been very good to me
Recovery is when you get the improvements from the work you’re doing, take recovery seriously, especially if you need a little before the prescribed recovery period.
I agree. My schedule is pretty polarized. I work 3x 12 hr days, 2 day break over weekend, and then 3x 12 hr again. I then get 6 days in a row off. Rinse and repeat. I’ll ride 1-2 times over that weekend. And during the 6 consecutive days I ride about 5 of them to “catch up.” This is what my training looks like:
Maybe you should just shoot for 30 minutes of Z2 on the trainer on work days? That will give you more consistency and keep the legs spinning over those 3 days. Even if you get 2 out of 3 days, or even 1 our 3 days it will be a lot better than nothing. And maybe some of those 30 minute sessions turn into 45 minutes or more.
