Miller219

I'm currently following a TR low volume plan. I'd like to participate in my local group rides (unstructured - weekly - TSS 130) and a Sunday group ride (unstructured - weekly - TSS 175) without having to worry if I'm sacrificing gains.

Am I hurting gains by taking on these rides or should I just ride my damn bike?
How do you go about integrating these with an existing training plan?
Is it better to have a coach lay this all out vs following the TR set plans to the letter?

caloso

So, 305 tss in a 48 hr period each week? How much for the rest of the week?

Dirk de Chablis

What is your current level of fitness you're coming from, if you new to cycling then just ride your bike and build up base endurance before looking at getting in to a structured plan. But what do you want to get out of it?

Miller219

The plan currently calls for 150 - 160 tss for the week (Speciality phase). I have my first Crit race coming up in 9 days and a 20-mile road race at the end of the month.

Miller219

I've been cycling for a little over 1 year. Followed a Sufferfest training plan last year and saw great gains (I was able to finish at the front of group rides). Started TR structured training in January 2021 (up 48w on FTP since then). I ride around 6 hrs a week on average (I'd like to ride more - but I'm trying to figure out how to balance unstructured rides w/structured training).

I guess you could say I'm in that part of the journey where I'm wanting to take my training more seriously than simply finishing top 3 in local group rides - not sure if that means I need to simply ride more or add a coach to really dial in my entire training schedule.

caloso

If it were me, I would go on only one of the two rides this weekend, and maybe just one intensity workout midweek. I might do some "tss fillers" on the other days, but nothing with heavy stress. Then openers (look for Pahrah) the day before. If in doubt, do too little than too much the week before your first race. Good luck!

rubiksoval

TSS is the last thing you should be worrying about then. Your skills (or lack thereof) in a group will be significantly more important in determining how (or even if) you finish an actual race. If you're new to riding, group rides are worth substantially more than any type of workout you could do (and will be a workout in and of itself, anyway). With that said, a group ride is not a race and that really needs to be understood. When you drop it hard in a group ride, you typically have opportunities to regroup and recover.

When you drop it hard in a race, you typically get attacked in turn and you'd better be very adept at efficiently riding in order to recover without getting dropped.

Dirk de Chablis

What is your base line FTP, putting 48w on a 60w base is pish, putting it on 350w a bit better. Keep going with the group rides and add to the 6hrs a week building it up to 20hrs a week. Start racing (the number goes on the back) and when you start placing in races look at getting a coach to dial in your training. As you begin the jumps are quick, the better you become the gains get smaller. My base to compete at a National level and win medals was 18hrs a week, but I've been racing since 1979 and my brain writes cheques my body can't cash

Carbonfiberboy 

I'm not and never was a racer boy, but I've done over 1000 competitive group rides. Maybe you racers here can help me out . . .Is there a scale of TSS/week according to race length? I'll do 150-160 in 2 days and I'm not racing.

rivers

I've been working with a coach for about 6 months now. I have a nice mix of structured training and fun, social rides put into my training peaks weekly. Now that I'm headed back into work, it's also being balanced with my commute (25 miles/day 3 days/week) My coach's philosophy is cycling is supposed to be fun, and if it's not fun, why are you riding. So I have on average 2-3 workouts/week (during ZRL it was 2 workouts/week as I was on a team with some of his other athletes), a social ride where the main objective is to have fun, go for coffee and enjoy a few hours out. No hard efforts, just a ride with friends (or currently friend as we're limited to riding with one other person at the minute in the UK). My commutes are supposed to be easy rides (small chain ring) with no efforts. Easier to do on my winter bike than my summer bike- and the excitement of actually leaving my house threw easy commutes out of the window this week. Occasionally I will have some sort of efforts to do, but nothing major.
Racing wise, I only TT. I'm not concerned with where I finish, just that I'm improving. And I've got some longer TTs in the diary this year (50 and 100 mile), so a lot of my training has revolved around not only pushing up my FTP, but being working towards those longer TT goals.

gregf83 

The numbers talked about here don’t really add up. Riding with an NP equal to 80% of your FTP will give you 64TSS/hr so 6 hrs should give you over 300 TSS. To get 160 TSS on 6 hrs of structured training likely means FTP is set too high or all rides are being ridden at 50% which isn’t really training.

Carbonfiberboy 

If you're finishing in the top 3 in group rides and you're thinking about racing with only a year of cycling behind you, it's time to find a faster group. You want to be with a group which drops you on every hill. It's good to have a little stimulation. I once saw a guy at my gym who was doing calf raises with 1000 lbs. I asked him why so much. "If you want to get stronger, you gotta stimulate 'em." That's the attitude.

Miller219

Base line FTP 5 Jan 2021 was 197. FTP 1Mar was 245. I should add here that I live in the Cayman Islands where we do not have a racing season - or even much of a racing scene. We have to treat the 4 charity "rides" per year as full on races. There's a single Crit race which happens annually. In other words, I have to literally get on a plane and fly overseas if I intend to do any actual racing.

Dirk de Chablis

Get a track bike and ride the Easter Carnivals in Trini, Jamaica and Barbados, I would fly over and race them in the 90s and I hear that Trini has an indoor velodrome now. The do have (or did) have a good race scene in the carribean for both road and track

Carbonfiberboy 

Ah. That is, in some ways, more interesting. You're really training for personal satisfaction rather than any particular goal. Non-goal oriented training is a bit different.

I'll specify that there are two ways to go about it: short-term results and long-term results. Trying to get ready for some specific performance goal within say, 2 years, is a short-term goal. You'll achieve quick, measurable performance increases. Trying to train in only 6 hours/week is a special case of short-term goal seeking. There's probably not a better way to go about that than using the book The Time Crunched Cyclist (TCC): https://www.amazon.com/Time-Crunched.../dp/193403083X
It's a well tested method and it works. The reason that it's a short-term plan is that after following that plan for a couple years, you'll plateau. This plan works very quickly (a year is very quickly in this game) because it stimulates the anaerobic system at the expense of the aerobic system.

The long term plan is to spend more time developing the aerobic system. That plan is more along the lines of what's known as Polarized Training (PT), where by far the greatest amount of time using only one's aerobic system and a much smaller amount of time is spent using the anaerobic system. The aerobic system takes a long time to develop, years, but then laying the anaerobic system on top of it, bang, you're strong. Starting from scratch, PT will also deliver short-term results, but not on the scale of TCC. There's a thread about time-crunched PT in this forum: https://www.bikeforums.net/training-...ume-rider.html

Riders just starting out make huge progress to start with, to the extent that it almost doesn't matter what you do as long as you're on the bike, but then that slows down with time and continued riding. That's what's meant by the comments above about "just ride your bike," because you will get results. But after a while, riding won't produce results, only specific training will, specific to the desired result.

Here's a random week of aerobic training of 7 hours I did in December, part of an endurance block, total TSS 317 counting the hrTSS from the walk. All "VT1" rides are below aerobic threshold, IOW breathing through your nose is possible, as is easily reciting the alphabet in one breath, and no heart rate drift during the last half of the ride. A good goal is to be able to stay below VT1 at 75% of FTP. Recovery rides are at 50-55% FTP. All the rides could be done at VT1 rather than recovery pace, just depends on leg comfort.
Monday: 1 hour brisk walk
Tuesday: 2 hours VT1
Wednesday: 30' recovery
Thursday: 1 hour VT1
Friday: 30' recovery
Saturday: 45' recovery
Sunday: 1:20 VT1

Iride01 

Did you steer clear of the Puncheon when you were in Trinidad? My daughter-in-law brought me some and it's a killer if you have too many shots. Probably better suited to cleaning discs and pads. <grin>

Dirk de Chablis

Ah Rum Puncheon, I may have had a few, my first introduction to Trini hot sauce, took me the rest of the year to feel my teeth. Bake & Shark on the beach with a Carib or twelve after riding over to Marracas. Now I look back on it I have a funny story about voodoo dolls.

Iride01 

Oh yeah, that's another thing my D-I-L keeps me stocked up on. And I'm the only person in my house that will use hot sauce. So I got a back log to work through. Would like to go down there and visit, but COVID has them locked up tight too.

rubiksoval

Like everything, it's super-highly dependent on what you're doing. Stage racing requires substantially higher TSS/CTL than crit racing, and longer road races will require the ability to hit high acute TSS loads much more so than crits, again.

As a 1, I've had my most consistent and best crits and shorter road races (up to 80 miles, ~3.5 hours) with a CTL in the 90s (so around 650ish TSS a week average). I've successfully raced with a CTL in the 70s and 80s before, too, however. I do very few road races that go much over 270 TSS. However, for example, national championship road races I've done have been well over 300 TSS as they're longer and the courses were very lumpy and required much higher normalized power.

60 minute crits are rarely over 90-100 TSS, but 75-100 minute crits can be over 150.

Since TSS is dependent on normalized power relative to FTP, you can get skewed numbers with lots of short efforts.

Anyway, it's not something I worry about. At the end of the day, if you're planning on racing for 2 hours, in training you'd better be able to do 2.5 hours really hard and have some real punch at the end. Same for 3.5 hours, or 4.5 hours. Then you rely on race craft to maximize energy savings during the race.

Carbonfiberboy 

I didn't realize that about the TSS calculation. Thanks for speaking to my question. I worry about this sort of thing a lot because I'm not a strong rider and have to train smart to be able to do what I want to do, which is have fun doing what I like to do, and not be the guy who had to get in the car. So far, so good, but every year is another challenge.

adamrice 

As I understand it, there are two ways you might be "hurting gains": by overtraining and burning out/getting injured, or by sloughing off and detraining. If you do rides that aren't precisely as prescribed by your training plan, then you might be "slowing gains" relative to sticking with the plan but by itself, that shouldn't really reduce your fitness, unless it results in overtraining or detraining. Also from what I've read, Trainer Road plans don't make enough allowance for recovery, so if anything, I'd be more worried about overtraining than detraining.

My own training plan (which I slapped together myself, and can't recommend to anyone else) has four structured days/week (which are pretty monotonous), and one "ride my damn bike" day/week because if it's not fun, what's the point?

burnthesheep

The further from an event you are, the less specific the training needs to be. The closer to the event you are, the more specific it should be. Goes for both fitness and skills.

Further from an event, maybe more random volume. Just riding. Long rides, random rides, volume. With a few intense things tossed in once in a while to keep you fresh. Then, close to the event.............ride hammer group rides, do hard intervals, less "random" stuff, work on skills.

When cross season is "coming", I start riding the cross bike on gravel alone for a few hours rides. Tempo, z2, chase a KOM. Closer to it I start joining the weekly team cross practice on the local course and doing cross race specific intervals. Just as an example.

I'd suggest similar.

Don't do both long group rides. Do one, as group rides is good bike handling skills. Just mind your manners.

guachi

I always wondered how TSS was calculated and your example of NP of 80% FTP for one hour = 64 TSS made me think that it was calculated as %FTP^2 *100 = TSS/hr and from what I can see that's correct. Although the web site that showed the calculation doesn't exactly state it like that.

gregf83 

TSS = IF^2 * 100 * T where T is the time in hours and IF = NP/FTP