Structured Intervals vs Structured Training

Training
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I’ve been bouncing back and forth between TR and Xert lately and can’t make up my mind on which I like more. I love having my workouts in the calendar in TR and knowing what I have to do for the day, like seeing a crossfit workout before going to the gym. Sometimes your excited or sometimes your scared.

Xert has their new novel idea of Magic Buckets where you essentially ride and sporadically add in intervals to match up with a target for the day, basically implying that it doesn’t matter when or how long you do intervals, as long as the effort is matched.

It’s a fairly new topic so I don’t think it is really researched, but would love to hear some opinions on the importance of “intervals” vs just making sure certain energy systems are hit. I beleive both cases actually are strcutred and include progressive overload, but get to it different ways. Does it matteer?

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There is a difference between a long ride with 5x5 VO2 intervals near the start and an equally long ride with 5x5 VO2 intervals near the end, isn’t there?

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There is, but there’s also a lot of “it depends” in there! E.g. If I had 5 x 5 to do I would find it psychologically much better to get that out the way near the start and then just enjoy the rest of the ride. Having those intervals hanging over me until the end would significantly detract from my enjoyment of the ride. So even if they were marginally physiologically better for me, by making me enjoy my riding less and by using up more of my finite pool of willpower/motivation, in the bigger picture they’re probably worse for me. Because I’m less likely to do them! Or at least doing them will have a knock on effect somewhere else in my training.

I love the idea of the Magic Buckets. It’s like going out on a ride where you just do the hills at VO2 and ride everything else Z1-2. Far more enjoyable in my view accumulating ~25 minutes of VO2 spread across 4-6 hills that are fairly close together, with variable recovery times, than doing 5 minute repeats on the same hill to precisely nail a prescribed interval structure.

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4

I think if the 5x5 were treated as all out efforts there would likely be a difference. But if in both cases the 5x5 where done at 110% of FTP and in between was done at 70% FTP, I’m not convinced there would be a difference in doing it before or after.

5

Give it a go.

On a 4 hour ride.

And report back.

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There are certainly some differences in each approach!

One big one, as @ivegotabike mentioned, would be when the efforts are done within your ride. Generally speaking, you’ll be fresher at the start of the ride compared to the end.

Another thing to consider is rest periods between intervals. In some workouts, the rest duration is of equal (or even greater) importance than the actual work period itself. Recovery durations can be manipulated to help athletes train recovery between hard efforts or to get athletes working “at full capacity” more quickly toward the start of each interval as a workout progresses (think of something like 40/20s, where the first few 40 seconds “on” don’t feel too bad… but as you get deeper into a workout, they sure start to hurt and that 20 seconds of rest seems shorter and shorter!).

I think the “less specific” or “less structured” the intervals are, the better it might be to sort of do them as the terrain suits you. If you had 2x20 minutes at Sweet Spot, for example, with a big ol’ 10-minute rest period between each effort, it’d probably be “easier” to split those 2 efforts up within a longer ride.

As @cartsman said, there are a lot of “it depends” when it comes to stuff like this. :wink:

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7

I’ve seen lots of debate and studies arguing about different flavors and timing of intervals (particularly vo2 max). Opinions seem to be all over the place, but most studies show that you get similar adaptations across different approaches as long as you get the work done. One approach might be slightly better than another, but we’re talking small percentages of the overall adaptations. Better to burn mental energy figuring out the best way to get the work done rather than debating the merits of interval a vs interval b and where they should fall in the ride.

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8

I’d not expect too much from research about anything in sports tbh.
But luckily also not needed as you can just try both for yourself. 2…3 months should be plenty, the body adapts quickly.
My personal opinion (backed up by doing what I recommend above): You will improve with both as long as progressive overload is provided. And if it’s not, the other way around,

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9

This is really interesting, thanks.

I only really started doing structured training last year, but am still struggling to really see the difference between a threshold workout that, say, gives me 5 x 8 minute blocks, and being on a hard ride at home where the climbs are so steep that I could just push threshold on every climb and get the same amount of work, but maybe in 6, 12, 8, 15, 8 minute blocks instead of 5 perfect 8s

I’m quite geeky so if I am given specific work intervals to do by TR then I do them as best I can, and recover for the specific time given, as best I can, with the terrain. But this often means turning round before the top to ride back down the same hill again rather than just smashing out an extra minute or so and dropping down on a different trail to then ride back up a different way.

I know I ‘could’ just do that and ignore the workout, but then, I am trying to trust the system and get this stuff right. I’m not sure how the system would respond if I just overrun the interval into the recovery valley and then extend the valley by the same amount before starting the next interval?

In some ways it’s got me back on the indoor trainer as I’m such a geek I love a perfect graph. That is decidedly tragic, I know! It is also not doing my bike handling any good as I have been doing so little technical descending. I do sometimes do my intervals and then extend the ride with unstructured MTB so I can work on the technical stuff, but the climbs here are steep and it means that the TSS/workload is much higher than intended and I am acutely aware of how easily I overdo upper aerobic work.

I guess you could say just don’t do the workout, work the same energy system outside on the terrain you have, and delete the workout? TR is still very useful to give an idea of what zone I should be working (i.e. a threshold workout, or VO2, or sweetspot) when outside.

Anyway, appreciate this thread, I will be reading with interest :+1:

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10

I guess the more specific your goals are the more specific your training needs to be. For example it hard to increase your TTE with short and spaced out threshold work. Or improve repeatability with spaced out short intervals. For general fitness goals it doesn’t matter that much just do the work.

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11

This is one of the things I was hoping for with “Workout Levels V2”

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12

It’s better because you’re getting an additional 9 minutes TiZ. :blush:

My only comment would be that 8 minutes is probably too short for truly effective threshold work. By the time your physiology is getting to threshold, it’s almost time for your recovery interval.

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13

It might help for you to think beyond any particular workout, and look to the generally agreed principles of consistency and progressive overload.

Debate over the structure of a particular session is philosophically interesting, but in terms of getting faster what’s really interesting is the next workout and the workout after that, and so on.

Progressive overload is easy to define in simple terms, 5x8 becomes 5x9 becomes 5x10 let’s say, but ‘go for a hard ride’, then ‘go for a ride a little bit harder’, well that’s more difficult. Typically hill reps make it a bit easier 1x, 2x, 3x etc. or outdoor workouts on the same hill.

Then there is consistency which has many factors affecting it, not least availability of time and simplicity of doing the workout.

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14

Thanks for starting this topic and appreciate the great comments so far. Like @ivegotabike mentions, if you do the workout at the end of a ride, it’ll be different than at the beginning. @cartsman, we’re hoping that others like the idea too and benefit from more flexibility in getting their training done when they might find it challenging to follow precise interval structure all the time. Since the method accounts for what you did previously on the ride, you can do a hard group ride for example and the top off what’s left afterwards with the semi-structure you get from Magic Buckets. That makes adhering to a plan especially during the season a whole lot easier.

Progressive overload is the key and quantifying what that actually is, without resorting to a rigid structure in your workouts is the hard part. Xert does this in a new way by quantifying training stress into buckets, low, high and peak corresponding essentially with aerobic, vo2 and neuromuscular. The daily bucket targets are defined in a way to provide progressive overload across all three towards a specific goal.

It’s a pretty novel idea and we hope to hear from athletes in the coming months on their successes and challenges with using it as part their training.

Note, for those that use both TR and Xert, you can do your TR workouts with Magic Buckets. Recreate the same workout in Xert and it will get converted into low, high and peak buckets that you can then do using the Magic Buckets Garmin datafield. This could be a unique way to augment the great training benefits you get by following your TR plan with the flexibility offered with Magic Buckets.

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So you’re using “time in zone” and slowly increasing that for progressive overload?

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Yeah, that’s basically it. @baronbiosys correct me I’m wrong here - You get three buckets to fill for each ride: low (which is basically anything below threshold), high is basically VO2 Max, and peak is neuromuscular/anaerobic.

The VO2 Max progression will look something like 5.6 for one ride, 7.5 for the next, and 9.8 for the one after that. I have no idea how the scores are weighted, but working out at 4 minute power or 6 minute power or anything in the range adds points to the bucket. It updates in real time so you get a decent sense of progress. Also, it looks like there’s a new Garmin data field to help track it all better, but I haven’t tinkered with it yet.

Here’s a screenshot of a workout’s points section.

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I used it last summer and I think it was a big help for hitting an all time high FTP. I live in a very hilly area and it’s great for using the terrain for intervals. I can push hard on hills, rest on flats, and it keeps track of everything.

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Time in zone isn’t a bad approach to use but Xert uses a strain calculation to better account for fatigue. To understand why, you can consider a couple of workouts: Workout A is a 20 minute all-out effort (like an FTP test) and Workout B is 20 by one-minute intervals with one-minute full rest in between at the same intensity as A. Both have the exact same amount of work done and the exact same time in zones, but A is far more potent in terms of training stimulus than B is. This has been well-established in the scientific literature and intuitively you’ll appreciate that the exertion to do A is far more than B even though they have the exact same time-in-zone. The strain score (XSS) is almost double in A as it is in B which would be reasonable. Interestingly and notably, the TSS for B is actually higher than A (35 TSS for A and 42 TSS for B) which is the opposiite of what you need. Using TSS for progressive overload could actually backfire.

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18

Structured lets you precisely dose the stress, limit the recovery, target a desired energy system. Great for progression and avoiding over and under training.

But real world reps are needed since real world results are the point, and it’s invaluable to learn how to handle that climb that goes longer that your vo2 max intervals, the insufficient recovery before the next effort, the longer duration event.

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19

For me at least this doesn’t particularly hold true. I don’t train TTE specifically with long sustained efforts, because I find they’re too taxing both mentally and physically. In structured training I don’t think I ever do threshold for longer than 10 minutes at a time, or SS for longer than 20. But I do sporadically get the opportunity to test TTE over a variety of timeframes and when I’m in good general shape with decent volume and consistency then that translates into good TTE. E.g. Got in an early break in a road race and ended up doing the whole race in a 2up which translated to AP at 91% of AI FTP for just over 2 hours. Decided to do a maximal effort up a well known climb while on a cycling trip and did 40 minutes at 105% AI FTP. Same thing on a different climb another year did 102% AI FTP for 55 minutes. I also tend to go better the longer a race is.

Possible we’re talking different definitions of TTE, it does seem to be a rather vague term! I think it’s a really hard thing to measure though because pacing and motivation play such a huge part, and because it can be impacted by so many things other than fitness. Such as fueling, comfort, ability to hold a good position for such a long time (particularly if trying to maintain an aero position for a TT or triathlon), etc. I’ve also had efforts on longer climbs like Galibier where I’ve just been been unable to maintain high power because I’ve overheated, or my lower back muscles get too tight, or my knee starts to hurt. I guess if your target event is one like a TT where you know that success requires holding a high sustained power then at minimum you need to do some training efforts close to that time and intensity just to validate that you don’t have any positional or biomechanical issues that are going to derail your race. Though for the motivational reasons I think I’d still prefer to do that validation by entering a lower key race rather than doing it in training!

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