Over-training / Volume v Intensity / Cadence

daveryanwyoming

That's one question. Another would be how much more you could raise your fitness in terms of both sustainable power and training depth(base) with additional days at appropriate intensity levels.

If you're just looking at holding on to what you've already developed, you could probably do that with three well planned days per week. But most of us need to not only hold on, but to improve both power and overall training load. A few more well planned days can help quite a bit there.

BTW, I totally agree with your point about getting good at what you do. It's why I rail pretty hard against LSD base training and long miles in easy gears. I did that for many years as a senior racer and got very good at doing long miles....slowly. Relatively intense, but sustainable efforts or IOW, SST training is the mainstay of my winter base building these days. It's not easy and not all that long but easy enough to sustain for up to an hour at a time or at the higher end in 20-30 minute intervals yet easy enough to recover from that I can do it five or sometimes six days a week for months on end.

Yes, it takes attention to managing load and keeping an eye on overall fatigue and recovery but the payoff in terms of sustainable power and overall endurance has been dramatic over the last year and a half with a schedule like that. I've achieved time trial times substantially faster than my best races 20 years ago when I trained more and was coached by well respected and certified coaches.

-Dave

edd

Okay, without breaking down individual training regimes … the "volume v intenisty" formular is going to vary for different age groups and training history.

" Volume / frequency / intensity"

if recovery is to be adequate then if you take a little out of one area, say "Intensity" and add it to anothers, say "frequency" and "volume" the training profile will change.

Regular changes to a training profile is a good thing.

Volume isn't everything as you noted.

thekgb

edd,


your on the right track. check out the trainingpeaks website for the power 411 link, which will give you better insight into the nature of the intensity/duration/volume schemata. alot of smart folks have been able to put it in a quantifiable form (TSS, ATL, CTL, IF, etc). it's sometimes hard to get a solid handle on what it means to train hard when we talk about it in terms of hours or hard rides, but if you can get comfortable with the ideas on that site it'll help you understand the idea of building that base, tapers, how to direct a peak, etc... you don't necessarily need a PM to implement the concepts, but you do need one if you want to structure the training program according to the parameters (zones, TSB, etc)...

the fact that you're asking all these questions means you're headed in at least a purposeful direction toward your goals...

Mike

Sillyoldtwit

Hello!

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