I’ve done 2 VO2 blocks this year. First one in January was only 2 weeks of 3 b2b2b, and it took me from 340w > 360w FTP.
2nd one was late April/May. 3 weeks, same b2b2b format but only 2 VO2 days on the 3rd week. All workouts were 7x3 all out, and power rose very slightly through the block. I went away on a beach holiday straight after, and now building back up and seeing if there are gains on the table. Z2 HR looks quite low, and have hit some all time power PRs in the 10-15 min range. Need to get a few more long threshold workuts under my belt and rest again. Gains are looking more marginal, but predicting another 10w.
Here’s how I spread it out to accommodate an unplanned hard outdoor ride on Sunday of week 1.
Cool, thank you for input, this is very helpful. Especially pointing out 2-a-day. While on-call week is very hectic, it also leaves sufficient time-slots making it easily possible, with suggested smaller number of intervals per workout.
Now, if I have crammed all the VO2max workouts into single week to get as much as possible out of this enforced indoor period, how frequently should plan VO2max maintenance workouts until next on-call shift? It happens every 6-7 weeks. Also, is there even point to repeat such block with this frequency?
I‘m in the same spot as @4ibanez I also did 2 VO2 blocks this year with 3wks 3 back to back sessions (6x3min). I managed them quite well.
I thought about another block in August with 2 a day sessions for the first time. But I‘m not sure how to start. Would you recommend to decrease from 6x3min to 5x3min? I‘m afraid that 2 6x3min sessions per day would be too much.
I also thought about doing only 2 back to back days with 2 sessions before having some easy days.
I think this has some of the most important info. No matter if you are considering two a days, or 2-3 workouts a week, they should be done in resistance mode and not ERG mode at %FTP.
As mentioned in many places - you want to be spinning fast and breathing hard. IF you limit yourself to a specific power or a power target you are potentially missing out. If you look at my previous post th first one is 129% of FTP, then 122, 115, 113, and 115. IF I just kept myself to 115 I would be missing out on the first two intervals and probably would not have been going hard enough to ensure I was reaching “max”.
When I do these workouts at max - I am friggin cooked. 2x a days and multiple days in a row would would be really stressful - but I (hopefully, am on a rest week now so haven’t seen any “gains” yet) get adaptations from 2 of these max workouts a week in a 3 weeks block.
Try going MAX first and then consider 2x a days if you don’t get adaptations from that.
Last week I did shorter, one week VO2-block. 7 workouts (2 of which were xc-races) total and two recovery days included. Double days (2) were really hard mentally but physically surprisingly not so bad. It’s just really tough to get going again when you’re already feeling beat down.
Of those five VO2-workouts, four were hard-start-high-cadence intervals (4-6mins in length) and one workout was three sets of 40/20s. This was mostly done to add some variety, nothing scientific.
I didn’t really add any extra volume outside of warmups and cooldowns but the total volume still added up to 20 hours. Recovery was ok, but this was way harder than the 3 week block I did earlier this year. The “density” of the training really starts to add up quickly, it seems.
I did 5 minute test prior to this block and will re-test next week or week after that once I’m feeling recovered again.
Thought about this while walking around the grocery store yesterday, lol. For someone like you, I’d probably have you do two sets of 3 on back-to-back days. So like Monday: 2 sets, one AM, one PM with at least 4 hrs between them, a meal, resting as much as possible. Tuesday, AM set. Recovery or easy endurance riding Weds/Thursday. Repeat the M/T block on Friday/Saturday, then go for a long easy endurance ride on Sunday.
Now, there’s no specific reason you couldn’t roll that into a second (or third) week and make a full block out of it. That’s my preferred method because we’re looking for a large stimulus to elicit a change. I have done and coached blocks like this in the past, and they work. They are very challenging, very stressful, and you kinda resign yourself to doing nothing but the VO2max work and EASY endurance (no weights or group/MTB rides) during this time.
But if you’re resigned to trying just the one week block, you could do it a couple of times a year if you chose to. But it really just depends on how you cycle it within your periodization. I’ve never done or coached just a one week block like that, so I can’t say if it’d be effective. I think it would, but usually I’m aiming for a larger bulk stimulus.
Note that the interval sets I prescribe are of that hard start/high cadence (110+)/“max effort” style because these necessarily preserve your legs better than “highest power possible” intervals, which allows you to do more sets. I also progress the intervals from longer to shorter during those micro block, so you might start with a 4x5 in the AM, do a 5x4 in the PM, then 7x3 the next morning.
If you want to try the two-a-days, I kind of described how I prescribe it above (though it does vary from athlete to athlete based on several factors).
But the first thing I would have you do is get comfortable doing 4, 5, 6(?) minute VO2max intervals before you try two-a-days. You’ve got some room to grow before you need to do crazy stuff.
Bingo.
The overarching consideration with a lot of this and how I prescribe it based on athlete history and fitness is (1) what do they NEED to elicit a stimulus… do the minimum required to achieve that; (2) what can they recover from? (2) factors in not only fitness and training history, but also lifestyle.
So the example I give to the poster above who’s done blocks of 3-minute intervals, IMO there’s no reason to do crazy training density adjustments, just start with longer intervals and higher TiZ on the stacked back to back workouts and see how that goes first. Odds are good you’d get a good stimulus just from doing back-to-back days of 4x5 then 5x4 (or something like that) for three weeks, with the other riding days just being easy endurance.
100%, and most of what we’re doing with some of this discussion is manipulating training density, which is something that is often overlooked when talking about periodization and building out training blocks.
I have also heard, “the intensity is the stimulus”. So keeping blocks with relatively similar time can also be effective - rather than stressing about TiZ and doing 3 minute, then 4, etc… Get at least 15 minutes TiZ and go from there
Thanks, will try next time (around middle of July) as you described, will report back how it goes. Seems like my last “kitchen sink” week did not dig me hole big enough, I already feel eager to try it out
Nevertheless, have to curb my enthusiasm, in 3 weeks will have this year 1st 24h attempt, need to stick to plan.
Depends on the goal. When you’re doing back to backs sometimes it’s more about the time and “survival” than the intensity because whether you’re doing 115% or 125% on VO2max intervals doesn’t matter all that much.
Like the opening premise, and all follow up posts. But I’m not here to criticise, maybe you’ll discover something through this experiment and we’ll all learn something.
I’m still seeing gains simply by slowly pushing more volume, and in my humble opinion given all the tradeoffs there is no good reason to do such a hard block.
One of the interesting things about this podcast:
was hearing Kolie Moore talk about when he would assign a hard block, and when he would not. I did recently push my estimated vo2max back up to previous high (4.3L/min, from 2017!), told my coach and he gave me a handful of really hard workouts and said “congrats, you’ve earned it” LOL. And then a month or two later we saw some gains.
IMHO, I’m still not at the point where I need to do any form of block periodization.
You think doing a block of concentrated VO2max work is an experiment?
If you’re making good steady progress without it, no, you don’t need VO2max. If you’ve plateaued and VO2max is a limiter (as it is for many), then carefully scheduling a block works really well depending on athlete history and age. At your age, I probably wouldn’t do a block either.
So he kind of gave you a “block” but it was a small one.
VO2max blocks are very common in all sorts of guises. You’re right that it’s just another method of achieving overload. Different strokes and all that.
I was taking a little liberty with the word “handful” - to be clear:
One killer workout the week of March 13, and one killer workout the week of March 20th.
Then in early May, more than 6 weeks later, I called an audible during long 8-min AT (above threshold) workout because it felt like I was on EPO. And he gave me another one of those long AT workouts. And my power jumped on endurance rides. The #gainz are crystal clear on all that endurance riding I do.
So I wouldn’t call it a block, or even close to a block. However right or wrong I’ll credit the two killer workouts in March for pushing me over a tipping point in fitness. Its been a long time coming (about a year).
And my aerobic ceiling is a huge limiter because my threshold is already very high % of vo2max. But I’m making slow and steady progress year over year, since switching my approach and hiring a coach to help navigate turning sixty.
Also I opened twitter at lunch and this was thought provoking
99% of the things that Couzens says seems to be stuff that he just makes up. This claim is a perfect example, as the scientific literature indicates that the exact opposite is true. That is, numerous physiological adaptations to training have been demonstrated to be first order processes, i.e., to be well-described by a mono-exponential rise to plateau. It therefore follows that the bigger the increase in training load, the larger and more rapid (in absolute terms) is the response.
Glenn McConell (who is presently doing another stint working with Erik Richter at the University of Copenhagen) would never say it so bluntly, but his Inside Exercise podcast exists entirely to try to counteract the misinformation spread by non-scientist “influencers” like Couzens.
