How do you get more volume and less overall training?

Should have said intensity, corrected it. See what a long easy ride is doing to me :/

The most important thing Seiler is telling is consistency. This means > years of polarized training day-in-day out. A lot of us do 6 or 9 months training and than ask them selves why do I not see more impact. This is the hard part, week after week + 10 hours of training.

The answer is Intensity AND Volume

If you're endurance is poor, you need more volume. A sign that your endurance is poor is that you find it difficult to cover the target race distance.

If you're power/capacity is poor, you need more intensity (short uphills out of saddle / two to five minute intervals at full gas. A sign that your intensity is poor is that you like riding, you don't like going hard.

Many of us like to ride distance. It's harder for me to go easy and put in full gas efforts and then easy again in order to go full gas again.

Sounds like you like to ride intervals and find it hard to go the distance you want at the pace you want.

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Indoor Triathlete - I thought I was right, until I realized I was wrong.

Yeah sounds about right. For the time being I'm building on a weekly long easy ride (3h+) to build up the endurance, also a long run if I can fit it in. My gut would say that I need to do some long near threshold intervals (about sweetspot I guess) to raise the time I can sustain decent power. But seems like this gut feeling might not be quite right and still makes more sense to build vo2max (so high volume with lots of easy intensity and workouts with short hard intervals) and a few weeks before a race work on sustainability (vlamax I guess) with threshold/strength and sweetspot work.

That's my current theory at least for my future training distilled from coaches and podcasts ;-)

Still I'd be interested in how many intense and how many easy workouts you guys are doing. With 80/20 there's not much room for it with 10h of training. 1 hard bike, 1 hard run and maybe an additional brick run with some thresholdish minutes. No real intensity on the swim, just some fast 50s and 100s when I feel good.

Also I probably overthink it completely and being impatient with the actual key ingredient being consistency.

Seiler's papers talk about 80/20 being the number of "sessions" done over the season not time in zone. That is the first mistake most people make about his research. Time in zone can vary from 90/10 if the event is short and intense ie rowing to 80/15/5 if the event is longer ie ironman if I remember correctly a recent podcast I heard with him on it..

Also contrary to popular belief Seiler is very big on interval training not volume at low intensity as you infer. It's just that you have to be rested to do the high intensity properly as it comes at a high cost. Hence the next day and maybe the one after is zone 1 (3 zone scheme) which adds to the 80%.

Another important point often lost is that he advocates getting a true estimate of FTP or whatever you want to call it. Funnily enough he is a bit like Coggan in that he suggests doing an hour test rather multiplying by a fudge factor. He reckons, and I agree, doing a 20 min test overestimates your zone cut offs so you end up doing more intensity than you think when you are doing zone 1 work so that you are too tired to add more minutes at high intensity in your high intensity work outs.

If we're lucky he may post himself as he has done on ST before.
Cheers,
Mark

This is a wonderful book. It address a lot of the points above, it made me think a lot.


RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel https://www.amazon.com/..._apa_i_eZsiDbH1YCHN3

You're right, he's not simply about volume but a lot of time in easy zones. He advocates the weekly long workout though. And I definitely see this week spot for me and pretty sure it will pay off building this long weekly workout.

Time in heart rate zones should be closer to 90% easy and 10% hard, yes. Currently it's very hot here, so for me it's more like 85/15 as my hr drifts up more than it usually does.

Anyway, with TR I was only about 68% in easy zone. Looking back I wonder how I managed this even for a few weeks before the wheels came off.

I do one hard run, one css type swim, and alternate between 1 or 2 interval sessions on the bike. Hilly bike routes are still kind of hard even if trying to keep power low as you start to run out of gears the torque requirement gets rather high you will feel it the next day even if it wasn't a big metabolic cost.

There's a group of us on trainer road who are trying to use an 80:20 approach. Just search the forum with 80:20. Otherwise the weekday suprathreshold work in either the oly or him specialty plans do a good progression for longer slightly over threshold intervals which are the bread and butter workouts described by seiler and filliol, going hard but staying out of zone 5 hr unless you know you can recover quickly from it. Joe filliols interview on that triathlon show is one of the best resources ive heard in a long time and worth listening to multiple times.

Both filliol and seiler have described the killer workouts some people do, end up being so much faster than their actual abilities they end up not working as intended. Consistency is the base of seliers hierarchy of endurance athletes and the other key to filliols approach.

I'd say the answer is VOLUME and intensity

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

I'm 52 and from a running perspective I feel intensity is more important for older athletes, speed is the first thing we lose and may older athletes don't do it because running slow is easier but they never improve, same goes for swimming. At my age I do at least once a week something like 15x30 sec sprints with 1 min recovery as a fartlek workout or 10x1 minute, one I've started dong to really get the legs going are 40 seconds hard, 30 seconds easy, 15 seconds hard 1:30 easy x 10 plus you can get 5-7 miles in also, but I cold be wrong, I've only been doing triathlons since 1984.

I like to look at it as consistency and then what’s the MINIMUM amount of training I have to give an athlete to achieve peak performance.

Tim

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http://www.magnoliamasters.com
http://www.snappingtortuga.com
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Just watched Selier do a TedTalk along the lines of this thread (dated December, 2019 so after this thread began).

https://www.youtube.com/...amp;feature=youtu.be

It gets interesting at about minute 5. In essence, he's saying there are three zones: Green, Yellow and Red. Where Green is easy, Yellow is hard/easy and Red is all out. World-class endurance athletes' training time falls into an 80/5/15 mix.

I think it's interesting that the Yellow zone is basically a waste of time - and a zone I spend a lot of time in - especially doing group rides. On the other hand, when I do a TR plan or Sufferfest plan, it feels like I'm in the Red zone 80% of the time.

I hope I can move toward an 80/5/15 balance - it's just really hard to be disciplined about going slow and long!

I’ve been thinking of don’t the TR triathlon plan

Have you ever done it?

If so what are your thoughts about it?

Maybe you're picking the wrong plan. ;-)

Seriously though. I know that many of the TR plans have lots of "red zone" intervals and that seems to be what most people like doing. But, I know that it really doesn't work for me to do that much intensity per week.

I limit myself to no more than two high intensity intervals per week (often just and everything else is 70% of lower. It works for me and I ride 6-7 days per week. It's not unusual for me to stretch a TR plan another 2-3 weeks to spread them all out that something more reasonable for me and how I recover.

WAIT I THOUGHT IT WAS 8020 HOW COULD IT BE 80515 THAT’S SO MUCH HARDER TO REMEMBER

Or maybe, there’s no magic ratio, intensity is a continuum and training should be based on rider needs, hitting all intensities and progressing towards event specificity.

What i got out of it is the wasted time in the Yellow zone: neither easy nor breathless efforts - just a lot of mid-range time. Seems like every group ride is like a Yellow zone session. Given that cycling is the majority of time spent training, I'm bummed that I've been wasting so much time.

With that said, the Sufferfest and TR plans have increased my FTP considerably, but done very little for my endurance.

I think the other piece of the puzzle is when most of us talk about FTP we are actually talking about our 20-minute power which has been fudged down a little bit to represent an extrapolated 60-minute power or FTP. I'm sure this has been beat to death but it seems like a lot of the indoor programs are very much focused on developing the ability to do a good 20-minute test which may not in real life translate to being able to do a good solid 60-minute effort. Live by the number die by the number.

I see that a lot in athletes coming to me from those plans. Have great "ftp" numbers but can't do 2x20 + 2.5ez or 3-4x15 @ FTP + 5ez/aerobic to save their lives. If you can't do 2x20 at your FTP it's higher than your actual FTP



It's always interesting, or amusing (depends on POV) when I get an athlete who has a training partner about the same FTP as them. Their FTP goes up maybe 5%, their buddy's FTP goes up 15% and surpasses their FTP. My athlete hardly does any training > 98% FTP their buddy hardly does any intervals <100% FTP. Their friend's 10-15 min power stomps theirs. Yet their friend can't hang onto their wheel for a 40k TT and loses 5-10min over 90k.

hardly makes all those 2-5 min intervals seem worth it

FTP is one part of the equation.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

For bike racing, that 5 minute v02 power is the winning card in so many situations. And it seems to be a pretty trainable parameter, although painful. I guess tt or tri riders could just skip it?

I wonder about the zwift races as training. They seem to hit the high notes pretty well in an unstructured format.

I think, there is a flaw in the 80/20 concept. It has been observed using heart rate data not power or pace. Elite Athletes, especially skiers, bike-riders and rowers produce medio wattege and pace on low heart rates, because the sports limitation often is not the heart, but the sceletal muscles.

The reality is, that a lot of training is done at "medio" level, which is in the yellow zone effort wise, but the highly trained hearts stay in a lower zone. When an elite bike rider trains 5 hours at 120-130 heart rate with a max of 180 for example, Seiler would see that as a "green zone" effort. But in fact it is a medio effort.

Now taking this information to a lesser trained athlete, who has not problem riding for 4 hours with a 150 heart rate, this athlete has to slow way down.

Summary: with a max of 180 HR 4 hours @ 135 HR are green for an amateur but might be yellow for a pro. And so the observations based on heart rate, won't work. And if you plug in % of Wattage @VO2, the amateur has a much smaller percentage at the same heart rate.

Michele Ferrari and Brett Sutton prescribe LOTS of yellow zone training for example. Brett Sutton has very few red zone efforts and Tons of Medio with a big gear. I train on Sutton bassed plans forever, it is like a 50-45-5 distribution but all the yellow done at a low heart rate (Seiler green) with a big gear and paddles.

This is a very useful thread

If you're using your 5 min power/vo2 power to it's fullest in a triathlon I sure hope you're racing draft legal, a sprint, or olympic or in the same long course race as me and ideally in the same age, although don't get old is my advice.

Unstructured vo2 training is probably the way to go for tri or just doing 1-2 efforts per week.

Again if you can't do a set like 2x20 @ FTP your FTP is too high. I think that's why most people like sweet spot work, it's probably closer to them working FTP than sweet spot. You can do large amounts of it on short recoveries, which sounds just like threshold training.

When I think about the demands of most people's tri racing 5 min power is pretty low on that list while being able to sustain a extremely high % of FTP is pretty high on that list.

Now bike racing....that's a different story and bike racing is more synonymous with DL racing than with any other form of triathlon.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta