burnthesheep

I didn't think I posted in this.......

80/20 is # sessions. 90/10 is minutes. It doesn't work for me as I use a Trainingpeaks 6 zone setup, not "three" with the breathing thing. If I HAD to pick what that would look like for me, I'd probably get the whole concept wrong and say my 90/10 on time in zones would split at Z3.

Either way, when folks talk about doing Z2 rides..............I feel like most folks I follow around town here don't really do Z2 rides. Either they're riding tempo for less time OR riding Z1 for a long time. So either too hard or too easy. But, that's an aside. I only mention that to say if you're going to ride Z2, don't waste time barely getting there. Go ahead and do it. Also for sweetspot, go ahead and do it. Don't do the cute little 10min sets for only 30min total. Accumulate an hour of sweetspot in one workout. 3x20, 2x30, 1x60....whatever.

If you've got 6hrs a week at 10% that would be only 36min of 360min a week at Z4 and up. That sounds a little weak for me. Not enough. And 6hrs a week is a very typical "time crunched" rider. My avg below was 72min per week Z4 and above. Literally double the 10%.

Last 28 days TP says for me (I didn't bother to make those total 100%, you get the idea):

Z1: 5hrs = 22% (true Z1 recovery from intervals usually, or warmup/cooldown)
Z2: 6.75hrs = 29% (most of this is upper Z2, not lower end)
Z3: 6.6hrs = 28.6% (most of this time is mid/upper Z3.........intentional sweetspot, not lower Z3)
Z4: 3hrs = 13% (intentional Z4 interval time)
Z5: 1.3hrs = 5.7% (intentional Z5 interval time)
Z6: 0.5hrs = 2.2% (screwing around chasing Zwift sprint jerseys and hammering randomly for fun)

Last 3 weeks is more volume than that. Week 1 in that 4 week figure was an "off week" with two rides.

rubiksoval

Interesting. I just checked my last 30 days. Looks quite different from years past since there are no group rides or race prep (which drives up both Z1 and Z6).

For the classic zones
Jan 2020
Z1: 6.19%
Z2: 46.7%
Z3: 32.2%
Z4: 10.7%
Z5: 2.54%
Z6: 1.68%

Compared to Jan 2017:
Z1 at 21.3%
Z2 at 34%
Z3 at 22%
Z4 at 14.3%
Z5 at 4.6%
Z6 at 3.7%

ZHVelo

So you actually do 51/49 with about 6 hours / week.

Which is what I think is right, if you do 20+ hours, yea sure, get that volume in by doing low intensity. But if you just do 6 hours spread over 3 sessions, I do not believe 2 low 1 high is better than 1 low 2 high. Given the hours that 2nd low session will be too short (I can't find the link right now but the guideline for time spent in different zones is what at least 2 or 2.5 hours in zone 2?).

burnthesheep

I tend to be of the opinion that if you're doing Z2 it needs to be at least 90min. And 90min is if you can ride literally non-stop. No stop signs, no pauses whatsoever. So indoors. Outdoors I'd say 2 hours. Since outdoors you'll have to pause, slow, or stop at some point. I feel that continuous steady work for a long period is needed.

asgelle

I don't know if you're familiar with the normalized power algorithm, but there's a reason it uses a 30 second rolling average. The time course for changes in the controlling metabolic processes is of that order so changes in effort much less than that have minimal effect on the overall load. In other words, for a given average power, having slowed or stoped for a few seconds really doesn't matter.

burnthesheep

Never knew that, thanks!

Most of my stops on the outdoor rides are 30sec or less. I try to tailor my route that way to avoid any busy 4-lane stoplight crossings to keep it short stops.

rubiksoval

With the exception of my weekend rides, most of my weekly rides are under an hour. I typically do 30-40 minutes in the a.m. and 30-40 mins in the p.m.

I've done this for years (my commutes in the past were about 40 mins) and can easily accumulate CTLs in the 90s with this.

It's what I'm currently doing now in my quest for 10 MJ each week. Last week I did 11 rides for 11 hours total, the week before I did 10 rides and 11.5 hours. Currently at 5 rides and 3 hours for this week.

I go with the idea that consistent riding beats any specific duration for general fitness and race fitness that involves shorter duration races.

burnthesheep

That makes sense. I think I'm confusing what I'm currently doing due to necessity with effectiveness. Out of necessity right now it works better for me to do fewer but longer than 1hr workouts.

If I can score a dedicated Zwift device, I could gain 40min 3x per week before work. Right now I share a computer with the kid's remote school needs. So can't bump into that.

Carbonfiberboy 

Being a current practitioner of the thread topic, I'll also post my times and percentages, following other's examples:
The bike work is all on my resistance rollers, no outdoor riding, following a structured plan.

Last 28 days TP says for me:

Power, thus bike only:
Z1: 5:13, 32% (I did no recovery rides. This is cool-downs and warm-ups)
Z2: 7:09, 43.7% (most of this is mid to upper Z2, not lower end)
Z3: 1:19. 8.01% (most of this time is moving between zones or warmup)
Z4: 2:15. 13.7% (intentional Z5 interval time, plus see discussion below)
Z5: 0:27, 2.73% (intentional Z5 interval time was 0:48 @105% - since Coggan has the 4-5 limit right there, about half winds up in Z4, half in Z5)

HR, what Seiler originally investigated. I record HR for everything, so this includes bike + walking, strength, and snowshoeing.
Z1: 7:53, 33%
Z2: 12:25, 51.9% (most of this is upper Z2, not lower end)
Z3: 2:42. 11.3% (some of this time is moving between zones or warmup, most is lower end, doing my 94% muscle tension intervals)
Z4: 0:43. 3.22% (intentional interval time, mostly in power Z5)
Z5: 0.09.= .6% (4 X 4' X 2' intervals, so HR lags power quite a bit)

Discussion of the 2:15 of bike zone 4 work:
:23 of this Z4 time is working at about my putative FTP and about 0:21 while doing Z5 intervals. The rest is while riding at 94% FTP at 52 cadence with breathing and HR in upper HR Z2, lower Z3, but breathing below VT1. What to count this as? I do this once a week during Build 1, January and February. It does build climbing endurance. I note that Basso, back in the Lance days, did this at 386w and 45 cadence. He rode OK. At the watts I use, I'll work up to doing 2 X 25-30 X 10-15, once a week. The day after, I usually do ordinary Z5 intervals. Basso was about at FTP, so I'm taking my cues from him, having found no one else with equivalent experience.

rubiksoval

What Basso was doing was likely pointless.,.

https://www.velonews.com/training/do...ke-you-faster/

And...doper...

Aerobic, aerobic, aerobic.

My favorite pithy adage:

Carbonfiberboy 

I understand the reasoning. The problem is that it works. The other problem is researcher and sales bias. VeloNews like to go against the grain a bit. Though the article text minimized it, there are two studies, one which shows a positive effect of low cadence intervals, and one of which does not.

I'll discuss the positive one first, though it's the second study to which the article refers. In the positive study:
https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ng_Performance
researchers had the subjects perform a series of explosive sprints, either at high or low cadence. Performance improved more among the low cadence subjects. The reason performance improved more among the low cadence subjects was that this was done on an erg, not on the road, so the low cadence subjects experienced maximal muscle loading during their entire effort, though the abstract doesn't say how long these efforts were. I give these researchers some credit, because these low cadence sprint drills are exactly what track cyclists do after several weeks of strength training.

The study with negative results:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907705/
showed that the low cadence subjects performance decreased during the 12 week study period while the group performing 90' of moderate cycling at their freely chosen cadence had a performance increase. The study doesn't mention what the 2 groups of riders did for training, other than the studied efforts. It does not say that their training was the same. In fact, looking at the results not mentioned in the abstract, one sees that the major difference between the two groups was that the low cadence group trained at a lower HR intensity than did the freely chosen cadence group. This anomaly is not discussed. The study goes on to mention previous studies by other researchers which showed a positive result from low cadence training:
https://edzo.info.hu/images/TTcycling.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ng_time-trials
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25542416/

My take on these two studies, looking at my own experience is that what works for low cadence training is to work the leg muscles to near exhaustion on the last interval. The sprint intervals in the positive study would do that, but the 6' intervals in the negative study would not. Low cadence intervals at moderate HR effort need to be long enough to exhaust the muscles, i.e. over that 12 week program working up from 2 X 15 to at least 2 X 30 or even 2 X 45, whatever the individual subject could handle. Hence Bosso on the Volterra.

I would note that low cadence work is aeobic, totally aerobic. I'd like to see someone get their HR to Z5 at 50 cadence. I am below AeT, as were the subjects in the negative trial.

And by the way, they were all dopers back then. As Anquetil said: “You can't ride the Tour de France on mineral water.” Those who felt they had a chance to increase their income by placing higher or getting more salary made investments in drugging. Merckx was high a kite on amphetamines when he rode his hour record, etc.

Yeah, it's a long response, but humans are complicated. Aerobic work so far this week on the rollers + a walk:
Sunday: 4 X 4' X 2" 105% + Z1 1:01
Monday: 13 ea. 2' one-legged intervals 50%, alternating 50-55, 80-85 + Z1 1:01
Tuesday: 2 X 15' X 8' MT 94% 52 cadence + Z2 1:00
Wednesday: 4 X 4' X 2' 105% + Z1 1:00
Thursday: Neighborhood walk Z1 1:05

burnthesheep

Forgive me if any of this is BS, but I'm throwing out some random guesses here. I don't know any of this to be fact.

-Back in the day folks rode 53/39 with like 5 cogs in the back, none of them a 28, often not a 25 or a 23..........maybe a 21???? If that's the tool you've got you're going to have to use it. Nobody rode 50t fronts with a 28 or even 30 in the back.

-I thought the dope of choice back in the day was anabolics and strychnine? Those I thought tended towards more muscular stuff? So, low cadence would work? Those the days before EPO.

-EPO and blood doping working on the heart/lung engine and seems to me it would have driven more cadence to optimize usage of those cheats. Did folks spin at those high of cadences pre-Lance?

Personally for cadence I avg about 85 to 90 for Z3 and below. Z4 and 5 I'll avg 95 to 100. VO2/sprint, always 100+ rpm. Often over 110.

The matchbook analogy comes into play. If you don't spend time training (building up the matchbook) you won't have many to burn in the race. And different races need different matches (or candles). A solo time trial needs a hot and long burning flare and maybe a pair of matches for a start, turnaround, and finish. A crit needs quite a few matches and a couple firecrackers, but no long burn flares. Triathlon needs three steady reliable candles.

Time crunched people don't have time for both the big aerobic base for more matches, and the matches themselves. So, choose the matches.

asgelle

Given the complexity of human physiology, it shouldn't surprise you that a collection of random, uninformed guesses is uniformly incorrect.

burnthesheep

Spitballing sometimes fails on the spitballer.

Carbonfiberboy 

Back to PT training . . .
My wife and I got our 1st Moderna shot on Thursday, so 3 days ago! This afternoon we went out in the shop to do our long moderate rides on our rollers and trainer. Warmup didn't go well and we wound up quitting after about 20 minutes or so. Our HRs and power were normal, but our breathing was not. Our lungs just didn't feel right, like we weren't getting enough air. I put it down to minor inflammation, a normal reaction to the vaccine. I think it's stupid to put additional stress on an organism that's having a strong immune response. We'll go out and have a go at it every day and see how we're doing.

Being my usual paranoid self, I sat down with my pulse oximeter. Oxygenation at 98%, no worries, it's just the vaccine.

So after you get your vaccine, you have to sit down under observation for 15' before they let you go. There were several people in the hallway, all of us waiting for clearance to go. I called it Happy Hallway. I may have never before been in the presence of that many extremely happy people in my life. My doctor said he cried in the car on the way home after his. As far as we know, no one has died of the virus after they've had their first shot.

rubiksoval

To clarify this quote since I can't in the other thread...

I assert that strength is not a limiter in cycling. I'm sure just about everyone that "trains" can do 500 watts. But why can hardly anyone not paid to ride a bike not do so for more than a few minutes? It's not a matter of strength.

Furthermore, while there are most certainly benefits to strength training, I also assert for those whose primary goal is cycling performance but do not have adequate time to both implement and recover from both, that on the bike training will give you more benefit.

I have never seen, read, or heard of anything that actually refutes either of those two.

For those purely chasing performance on the bike, it's disingenuous to assert that it will improve cycling more than actually working on specific intensities on the bike. Where's the evidence for that?

And I pointed this out years ago in one of these threads.... if strength training is so beneficial to performance, why is it only done in the offseason?

Give me Rider X doing 10-12 hours of on the bike work compared to Rider X doing 10-12 hours of strength training and on the bike work... I'll pick the former for performance every single day.

rubiksoval

Here's a 10 year old Slowtwitch thread you may enjoy. Has quite a few people in it who know what they're talking about, with quite a few who don't.

I don't know if this has the specific bit asgelle is referring to as I haven't read through this entire thread yet, but there's a lot in there that goes along with stuff that's been posted on this site for a few years. The stuff from Alex Simmons is very interesting.

https://forum.slowtwitch.com/forum/S...61939/?page=-1

asgelle

I hear multigear bicycles are the latest rage now. They let the rider choose an appropriate gear ratio as the road gradient changes.

ZHVelo

How has this thread also turned into a strength training thread?

I have seen some YouTube videos of talks/lectures on this topic via the algorithm, and my conclusion supports what I said above - if you have time to train 20+ hours like a pro in a week, yea sure, polarized is great. If you don't, HIIT is superior and if you do just 3 sessions a week or maybe 4, then 2 of those should be interval ones.

This also makes sense by simple logic, if you just do 3 sessions a week, then if you go for a 4:1 ratio that means every other week is a week without any intense session. There is no progressive overload at all.

ZHVelo

Quickly had a gander at that, the following caught my eye -

"'Stronger' is not the correct term.

Unless she can produce 1400W, I am stronger/more powerful than her.

The thing is, she can produce higher w/kg (as I probably still produce more total watts at FTP) than I can over a sustained period. And the limiting factor in that is not strength or power.

The limiting factor (non ex phys degree speaking) is the body's ability to deliver oxygen to the muscles and do so aerobically."

I think most people here seem to agree with that if I understand the comments right, but there is one part that is missing. "ability to deliver oxygen to the muscles" is not the entire picture. What if your limiting factor is not how much O2 your heart and lung can get to the muscles, but how much they can use / take up. And strength training may or may not help with that. That was my hypothesis in the other thread when I created it.

rubiksoval

Capillary density, plasma volume, hematocrit...probably more.

But why do you think strength training would help that more than on-the-bike training? If it did, wouldn't people (those paid to do it and those spending considerable time, energy, and money to do it) do that instead of on-the-bike training? Or, at the least, wouldn't they continue to do it along with on-the-bike training year-round?

That they don't is clearly evidence of a declining cost-to-benefit ratio, no?

I think a big component that gets touted around here is fatigue resistance and somehow combatting that with 30-60 minute gym sessions and lifting to failure rather than a 3-5 hour ride. And that I don't understand, because again, on-the-bike training is what is actually done by said above people getting paid to do it or paying a lot to do it.

And I don't think a single person arguing for strength training has the gumption to assert that strength training could somehow replace that.

And that is the crux of my position: When choosing bike or strength training, bike will always prevail. When doing both, bike will again prevail and strength may be detrimental to performance (due to time, recovery, etc), or may be done well enough to provide general strength and ancillary benefits. And while strength may have ancillary benefits, replacing strength with bike will yield more specific performance benefits.

rubiksoval

Stop responding to me.

Please stop interjecting yourself into every otherwise worthwhile discussion we're having. You're on my ignore list and yet you keep quoting me. Stop doing that.

rubiksoval

Because I made a comment about EDITED: "stuff" in another thread and was told by the mods to stop posting in it.

But now we're back to square one. There's no escaping it.

ZHVelo

I don't think bike training doesn't do this. I would like to know two things.

1) Strength training with no bike training can help, especially what I am talking about that your muscles catch up with your cardio if your cardio is better, and
2) that potentially strength training can do it better than bike training.

This latter is pure speculation on my part, would be interesting if experiments could determine this. And regarding 1), I wonder if, had I done gym instead of zero exercise for 6 weeks and then slowly starting cycling once I got my indoor trainer, that then I would already be a lot further than I am now.

rubiksoval

I maintain that any fitness is better than no fitness. I don't think that's really an issue. When faced with anything versus nothing, I'd always choose something: strength training, running, swimming, anything. Just that general fitness is worth a lot. The blood plasma volume, the capillary density, lower body fat, stronger connective tissue, etc., etc.

And if you're talking about a low enough performance level, it really and truly just doesn't matter. There are simply too many other variables that come into play that affect mediocre performances (either general or specific to an individual). When you talk about higher levels of performance, however, cost-benefit has to be carefully weighed.

For 2, I think experiments have determined this. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of elite cyclists over the last 100 years were the experiment. Again, the higher levels of performance necessitate maximum efficiency and effectiveness.