Originally Posted by
rubiksoval
If you're only ever riding at two speeds (4 sessions easy, one session hard), there's a lot in between and above you're not working on.
Yes, quite so. We'll see. As I age, I have to keep experimenting because what worked last year won't necessarily work as well the next year. This year, I'm starting off with PT to improve my aerobic ability, which is usually not very good. We'll see. When we took the tandem out yesterday for the first time since May, I was very pleased to feel us climbing at 90 cadence, much faster than we we've used before. I think that's from all the 70-75% trainer time. We had our usual HR distribution - mostly in Z3 (out of 5). No power on the tandem, too expensive, but we certainly had some Z4-5 power in there, just not for long periods. Went better than I thought it would. Still crappy, though.
My understanding of PT is that there are two ways to make power: aerobic and anaerobic. The idea is to maximally train both those power sources, separately. Everything in between, the "zones," are simply varying mixes of those 2 power sources.