Jägerhaus im Schneeregen

Polarized training 2

Polarized training 1

Recovery

ROUVY - Heat

In this post on my training, i want to explain one of my key workout i have been doing this winter, which is longer tempo/LT1 type work: I started with doing 20 min efforts and now progressed to longer efforts between 1 and 3 h. 

My idea behind this type of training is twofold:
I) prepare for race demands and II) elicit specific physiological adaptations

In this post i want to focus on reason number one. For that i looked at all my races last year and made a power histogram, where time in 20 W bins is displayed (Fig. 1). You can see the highest bar for 0-20 W, which summarizes all the time coasting, quite a lot in racing (26 h total). Besides that, the power distribution looks pyramidal with the peak occurring at 300-320 W. So most time in all of last years races i spend at 300-320 W, which is roughly 80 % of FTP and close to LT1 for me and therefore lies inside the tempo zone in classic Coggan 7 zone model. Its a pace that is not hard in the beginning but definitely tiring after a couple of hours.

To prepare for those race demands, it makes sense to target this zone in training, as the rule of specificity means that you will good at things you are frequently exposed to. I will do a separate post on the specific physiological adaptations that might occur with that kind of training, but basically you try to increase tolerance to fatigue and exercise efficiency at this power. 

You might wonder why to do race specific training in winter during base training. Usually specificity should be low during base training and increase towards race goals. But from last year i know that as a conti rider its hard to implement this kind of training in summer because of the high frequency of races, difficulty in planning due to uncertainty in race program and just not enough time. Pushing 300 W for a couple of hours is nothing that i can easily do in a week between two races where recovery is the main subjective. And also with high frequency of racing one can argue that this is already enough specificity so therefore training should not focus on things that are already done in racing. And lastly, i think this training is best done in block periodization which makes it even more difficult to do when time is limited. 

So thats why i already implemented one weekly tempo session this winter and so far i see good results. Efficiency at this power was all time high during my last lab test and also threshold power looked good during my last sessions.

Besides the conditioning for pure race demands, those sessions provide a potent stimulus for the body, but more on the physiology in the next post ;)

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Anton Schiffer

Training recap part 3

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Jägerhaus im Schneeregen

Polarized training 2

Polarized training 1

Recovery

ROUVY - Heat

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