So today my wife came home from work to a letter from the Welsh National Health Service stating that because of underlying health issues she must stay at home until the end of June. Up until now I’ve only had time to train (childcare + lockdown = pants) 3 times per week. This however has changed things so is it ok( I am only starting my 3rd week of SSBLV1 but have many years of experience of interval training but only just started with TrainerRoad ) to jump straight to mid volume or should I consider something else? Thank you and I am absolutely loving the structure TrainerRoad has given me.
The peace of mind knowing that coach chad is behind all these workouts (love the podcast!) and the fact that I can no longer procrastinate thinking about what workouts to do this week and when has freed up more of my time to procrastinate about other thing, excellent.
Why not try? I guess if you were planning on sticking to lv but potentially adding outdoor rides, it is better to just go mv instead, unless you know pretty well what you are doing in regards of intensity and tss
Do it! And if it starts to be too much, you can dial things back a couple of ways:
- Ditch the Wednesday endurance ride (Carter/Pettit)
- Reduce intensity on the Sunday ride and go the long/slow route. This won’t change the TSS, but can help manage intensity.
I’m doing the latter right now through SSB2MV, not to manage intensity, but just because I want to start working on longer times in the saddle to further my aerobic base since I don’t have any events near term. Side benefit is I’m less trashed for time with my kids, and I feel fresher going into the first workout of the next week.
I might suggest adding volume to your current plan. Either will work, but if you put a couple Mokelumune +1’s in between your workouts and add another ride of intensity, you effectively get to a mid-volume plan. You can also extend your workouts by as much time as you need. I generally add 20-30 minutes to each for added volume. This could ease the transition to a formal mid-volume plan.
I’m currently trying out SSBMV1 at the moment to see if I can handle that load and so far it’s working out fine even with an all time high ftp following completion of the SSBLV and GBLV plans but modified. By modified I did these every other day instead of 3x a week so was able to finish them all (total of 20 weeks planned in 17.5-18weeks or so…got sick in there a bit so took some time off).
That helped me feel more confident to handle the higher load of MV as last year I tried to jump from SSBLV to GBMV and it was too big a jump (we’re talking 3.5hr weeks to nearly 7hr weeks immediatly). Didn’t work out so well with that and life kind of happened where I had to stop after week 5 (didn’t fully complete all 5 workouts throughout those 5 weeks either and skipped quite a bit actually).
Something else to consider or just add an extra workout like others have suggested to the LV plan and see how you respond to the extra volume.