Forgot one other note. Some athletes have a very strong anaerobic engine and a weak aerobic engine. Those athletes aren’t going to get the nice level heart rate you see above. In every interval, their heart rate is going to slowly ramp up. For those athletes, I’m a more liberal about letting them go over the heart rate limit because otherwise, the intervals just aren’t going to be hard enough.
But it’s a tricky balance because you want their intervals to be primarily aerobic in nature and to get that effect the intervals are going to feel too easy for them even when done right.
Hi. I’ve read through the thread, but I’m still puzzled about progression and load. It was mentioned that 4x8 could be a progression from 5x5. Isn’t threshold (LT2) closely related to 1 hour power? Having that in mind, both 5x5 and 4x8 shouldn’t be sufficient to force adaptations as we’re not doing more work that we could already do for 1 hour. Also, in the 80/20 model, it doesn’t even accumulate to 10% of Z3 if done 2 times a week in 10+ hour week. Would it make sense to progress to, for example, 6x5, 7x5 or do 2 sets of 4x5? Would that just create additional stress without any gain?
Peeta,
While I have not read this thread work for work, I thik much of the conversation is arounf the 80/20 or poliarized approach. If we are talking polarized it is my understanding and I also coach intervals this way as to go as hard as you can for the prescibed duration, the adaptations usually occur as an athlete can hold the power for longer durations, whcih is one of the key compenets to overload, stress and adaptation. Too often we want more power and we should look to increase same power for longer durations before we add raw power. So, it does depend on where the athlete is at regarding thier fitness and physio, how durable they are etc. My standard progression on polarized intervals is : 5x5, 4x8, 4x10, 4x15, then I start to manipluate the recovery time down to as low as 1M between efforts in order to get a bigger anaerobic contribution to the workout. 1M on 5x5 and 4x8, 2M on 4x10 and 4x15. We must remmeber HR is a critical part of 80/20 so I coach athletes to get to 88-90% max HR and then give me as much power as they can across the interval. This also helps a rider pace the effort and learns for themselves just how long they can hold the harderst and highest power they can. When I look at intervals acorss several weeks I will see more consistent hard power as well as less decay acorss the interval, which again is progression! For example in week 1 I might see 20% decrase in from start to finish of each interval and after several weeks that number improves to 12-15%, still decay but less of it. My technical prescribtion is threshold into VO2 power, but like I said I want the highest power you can produce across the interval.
There is always next winter.)