Training With an ErgVideo Plan - Week 05

I'm rather late with this post for reasons I won't bore you with but week five on the ErgVideo Plan went just fine, not easy, but fine. To view the usual graphs of the intensity distributions, TSS etc. for the plan so far follow this link.

As you can see the weekly TSS and work done (kJ) are back up again and my average weekly HR remains higher than it was at the start of the programme and this simply reflects the ongoing increased time in training zones L4 (threshold) and above.

I've made a decision about the plan and that is that I'm not going to complete it "as is" for the full 20 weeks but I'm going to start using it as a guide and will tailor it to suit my own requirements. The reason for my choosing to do this is that I feel that the plan as it stands "off the shelf" is making me spend too much time at the higher intensities at the present time and definitely too much time at these intensities for this stage of a twenty week plan, for me at any rate.

As you can see from the above distribution charts for the week I've spent 21% of my training time this week in L4 and a further 27 minutes in L5 and above and I feel that this is just too intense for this stage of the plan, falling as it does in late October. I would normally be reserving significant volumes of higher intensity training for the later stages of a training cycle.

So, I'll use next week as a sort of transition week and I'll achieve this just by knocking the AT setting back on some of the higher intensity sessions and I'll also be rescheduling things to ensure that I don't end up doing 2 threshold sessions (long intervals) a week with just one day between them which is the scheduling that the Training Advisor Tool has produced for me.

I suspect that the issues I'm finding are related to the Training Advisor Tool generating the programme based on TSS, perhaps with less emphasis on the overall IF of the schedule and the actual time spent in the various training zones. That is pure speculation as I've got no idea how the tool actually does what it does, but it's still damned clever!

On with the plan...