Originally Posted by
procrit
For me, I can start to “feel” my legs develop some fatigue after about 90 minutes of Z2 and assume that’s about my minimum. My coach has given me 90-120 min z2 rides during the week and I usually just do the 120 if I have the time / start early enough in the morning.
I also seem to have my endurance days after a day of intervals, not the other way around. Like 3-4 hours of z2 would after a big vo2 max interval day. My vo2 intervals would be really difficult to do full gas after 80-90 miles the day before. Something to think about.
I think I feel the same, some of the shorter z2 stuff seems to serve as a bridge to the next workout to prevent going stale more than anything. I try to get the most out of the shorter z2 stuff by trying to get the sessions in before breakfast when I can, and doing them on the trainer or Fiesta Island to maximize quality. Sometimes I'll do them at low cadence as well (theory being more muscle fibers are recruited and stimulated this way, iirc some of the adaptations from longer rides come from your slow twitch fibers being fatigued later in the ride so, you end up recruiting more of the intermediate/fast twitch ones. I think the low cadence stuff is an attempt to sort of hack that. Not sure if related, but rowers seem to do a lot their steady state at fairly low stroke rates and tend to be aerobic monsters from my experience, so I have a suspicion that there's a similar effect going on)
Vo2 would definitely be super tough after a long day. Threshold work is doable - I did a lot of weekends similar to this setup when I was being coached, with the weight training on Sunday night as well. But, it was only weights once a week then. Hopefully twice a week isn't overdoing it. I would have done the vo2 stuff on Thursday, but from my experience it would definitely compromise the amount I could lift after. I tried to schedule the lifting after the hard sessions and before a rest day. I believe it's PGC1 alpha (edit: sorry, nope, it's AMPK) that inhibits mTOR, but not vice versa, so my understanding is that doing weights after should not hinder aerobic adaptations from the earlier session, and by not doing cardio work after weights, it allows the muscular adaptations to continue as well.
There's a good chance I'm way off on some of this, so pardon my kooky hypothesizing. A bit is from reading a bunch of stuff online, a bit is from things I picked up from my coach that seemed to be effective but that he never gave me an adequate explanation for. Hopefully I'll find out in a few months if it's effective! Another one is that I'm taking a PQQ + CoQ10 supplement, because I suspect that lack of mitochondrial density and/or quality is an issue for me.