Hi I’m new to trainer road but not new to cycling.
I have just got my introductory coach emails. Today this is what it said
‘This is because at three interval workouts a week, you’ll hit your peak training stress.’
But my TR programme has me down for 5 sessions a week, not 3. I’m confused?
Can anyone explain? Thank you
Are three interval sessions and the others endurance / recovery maybe?
What plan are we talking about?
Assuming the intervals are hard, you would only do 3 sessions of interval training per week, but without knowing the workouts it’s hard to say for sure.
Think it’s just a terminology thing. You typically don’t do more than 3 hard workouts per week, where “hard” is threshold or above. Because High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is so popular a term these days, the term “interval workout” sometimes gets used synonymously to mean a “hard workout”.
Where it gets confusing is that on the days where you’re not doing a hard workout, you might still be doing a workout which includes intervals, such as Sweetspot or Tempo. But these intervals are below threshold. Which means you can recover more quickly from them and can do more than 3 of them per week.
I don’t think there are any TR plans that include more than 3 sessions/week where you do intervals at Threshold or above (happy to be corrected if I’m wrong! And I’m not including endurance workouts with a couple of short 30 second bursts thrown in). There are plenty of TR plans where you’ll do more than 3 sessions per week with structured intervals though, just that some of those sessions will be below threshold.
Thanks folks that makes sense. I’m doing the base training and therefore I understand now that when the coach talked of 3 interval workouts he meant high intensity. My workouts areas you explained high and lower intensities 