Tuesday Training

Hi

VeloTron

More microintervals today. Increased the number of intervals to 7 with a 30 second recovery between intervals and did the efforts at 400W as previously, I'm increasing the number of intervals before trying to increase the wattage.

My plan is to do 2 lots of these at the beginning of each week which will give me a block of high intensity training which I'll then follow with a recovery day before moving onto the lower intensity training later in the week and over the weekend. I've no real idea whether this will deliver any improvements but I'm currently planning on doing this for a couple of months and then re-evaluating things for the rest of the Winter, now is the time to experiment!

I managed the efforts Ok, didn't feel as bad as yesterday, and did the efforts at the end of the one hour session having ridden at 200W for 40 minutes before the efforts started, I was well and truly warmed up! It's surprising during the repeated efforts how one's HR climbs quickly at first as expected but peaks at around 150BPM and then remains fairly stable. This suggests to me that the recovery periods are about right as I'm getting in some good high intensity work without completely trashing my CV system in the process, this should allow me to keep this up as long as my legs recover Ok.

The background to this is that high intensity training has the effect of increasing the muscle mitochondrial density which in theory should mean that the muscle can use more oxygen, and I'll either go faster or go at the same speed with less apparent effort. I reckon all this coupled with my ongoing "on the drops riding" training will give me the equivalent of another 20W by next year which would be great if it happened! If it doesn't happen at least I'll have tried something different as if you keep doing the same thing you get the same results.

ATL: 86.9 CTL: 89.7 TSB -0.5

[Uploaded 22/09/2009 20:51:48]