Monday Training

Hi

VeloTron

Normally today I would have an easy recovery spin but today there were a couple of things I wanted to use today's training time for. One objective was to burn a few calories and the other was to establish a rough intensity level at which to do some L6 work, which I intend to start soon and to continue with throughout the Winter.

This may sound odd but based on quite a bit of reading I've been doing this is something I want to try this Winter. The main purpose is that I believe, particularly as one ages, that adaptations take a long time. With this in mind I think it may well not be a good thing to leave a lot of higher intensity work to be introduced in the Spring and early Summer as it is very fatiguing if one isn't used to it, I intend to be used to it!

I decided to do some 30 second L6 intervals with 30 seconds recovery between them after a lengthy calorie consuming ride at 175-200W and see how it went. Opted to do the efforts at around 128% of FTP as 400W is a nice round number to start at!

All went well but was amazed how short a recovery time 30 seconds is, hardly any time at all! I think if I can get used to them these sessions should prove to be a powerful training stimulus.

Did 5x30 second efforts and the plan is to increase this in a stepwise fashion until I'm completing 10 of them in the set. Once I get to this point I'll start nudging the wattage up by maybe 5W at a time and see where I get to, and see what effect regular training like this has on FTP etc.

In the longer term, maybe by the Spring, I'll be doing 2 sets of these (10 efforts per set) at a decent wattage which should set me up really well for the stochastic nature of road cycling. Fun experiment anyway!

ATL: 91.1 CTL: 90.6 TSB: -4.7

[Uploaded 22/09/2009 09:16:31]