Plateau in Build - every time

What I’m curious about is that you keep starting from the same point (250-270w FTP) doing Base then Build and then allowing yourself to detrain to where you started and beginning again.

This is something I don’t know yet how to properly handle. Last year I did structured training until the beginning of September but followed that with random SS and Endurance workouts coupled with longer weekend rides outside. The load wasn’t minimal but I did feel fresh the whole time. That brought my FTP down to a point just above my starting FTP in the beginning of the training season. I did add two weeks of almost complete rest (only one VO2Max workout per week). The result was that my FTP was down additional 10w. That test was in November when I started my current training season. To conclude, I had to start from scratch – or actually below my numbers that I had for the training season of 2018.

I saw a plateau myself during GBHV (at similar fitness to you) and have since improved dramatically, but it took a fairly large increase in volume and TSS.

How did you @Tanner1280 actually accomplish this increase in training? I expect that you just didn’t add huge amounts of extra training to the HV at once? Did you start adding TSS from year to year or did you increase the load heavily already in Base? My hunch is that I could do quite a lot of TSS in form of Z2 and SS but I’m not sure if that could help me handle the huge amount of high intensity in the Build plan.

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I’m actually very interested to hear what the TrainerRoad people, especially coach @chad, has to say to this: Is the point in the Build plans that most riders can get big gains from the large amount of high intensity; but for some riders the plans are not a good idea since the level of intensity is so high? In other words, is it expected that not all riders can go from Mid Volume Base to Mid Volume Build and expect that things go smoothly? My question is also, what would be the first adjustment that should be made to those plans to lower the risk of burning out with minimal reduction in the benefits. I guess General Build is a bit better option than Short Power Build because of the Thursday over-unders instead of VO2Max work. Also, I’m very much interested in understanding if I could get my adaptations from increasing the volume of SS and Z2 work while avoiding multiple high intensity workouts per week. The point in that would be that my training volume is higher but there’s less of those workouts that run the risk of burning me out.

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My opinion may not be shared by the tr team so take this with a grain of salt. The build plans are a big jump in tss from base with much of it from high intensity intervals. You should probably ease in to the mid vol builds. I personally have struggled to keep up with the workload during build, and compliance suffered.

This year i replaced the medium intensity rides with zone 2 rides (.7 to .75 so still decent workload) and my compliance has really gotten better. I’ll need to work in more medium intensity work as i get closer to my goal events but my only focus right now during the build is vo2 and anaerobic capacity, everything else is secondary because ssb was already heavy on the medium intensity and threshold. As long as the unders are still allowing me to recover I’m still getting some stress at that intensity level. As a result my current tss is higher than its been since i joined tr. I will also say, in my experience z2 work really helps my repeatability of the reality hard stuff.

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This is something I’m looking for: could there be a small tweak that enables me to handle the stress to the extent that things would go up instead of going down. Switching the Sunday from SS to Endurance could be a solution, since I have had the feeling that sunday rides feel ”unnaturally” hard for SS workouts.

Here is something that Chad pointed out:

Additionally @MI-XC gave some good advice here.

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Were You still tracking TSS during this time? It’s very easy to spend a lot of time on the bike without it being productive training. How long were your SS sessions and what was the intensity? If you were feeling fresh the entire time you were losing fitness. You shouldn’t feel fresh every day/week. The whole point of training is to over stress the body, allow it to recover and adapt, increase the stress, rinse and repeat.

I consider general build to be very near a race prep plan. If you removed the threshold work for some sprint intervals it would basically be that. In general it’s a lot of intensity and if you aren’t very sound aerobically it’s goingbto cause issues. It should be “harder” than base, significantly.

I increased TSS slowly and steadily with a high volume (12-15 hrs/wk 700-900TSS) of SS and Z2. If you work up to it, you can spend 2-3hrs at SS intensity and build a lot of muscular endurance and aerobic fitness that drive up threshold power and make high end work more manageable.

If you don’t have the time for more volume I’d recommend using a lower volume TR build next time and add some Z2 riding, or possibly even repeat SSBMV2 and add some Z2. That plan has a good bit of intensity but shouldn’t burn you out.

Whatever you do I’d recommend sticking to a 3:1 work rest ratio. I’ve found I can really bury myself without getting in to trouble as long as I have a rest week regularly. And be aware that the intensity work requires close attention to sleep and fueling.

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I think that some of the issue is that you’re using FTP as your metric for being faster. While the Build phase may not increase your measured FTP as much as you’d like, I’d be willing to bet you can recover from near FTP and VO2 max efforts quicker.

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Some update to my situations:
As I was planning to, I had almost a week of the bike, after which I redid the Ramp Test. So, as the disappointing test was on Tuesday, I only did Pettit +1 on Sunday on tested again on the next Tuesday. As mentioned in the comments, this week of rest likely caused my fitness to drop a bit - but it also helped me to make sure that there is not issues with possible illness.

When it comes to my feeling on the Sunday and on the Tuesday of the Ramp Test, I’m fairly sure that I was indeed ok, and I had got rid of the possible illness.

My Ramp Test result: I lost one watt more compared to the first disappointing test result. Thus, I went from 272w to 271w - which basically means that there was no difference. To analyse, what this result tells me, I’d say that I needed that rest a bit. This is because, after all, I had a recovery week followed by a rest week, and the later week would have decreased my fitness more if I had come to it properly recovered from the first recovery week. I believe that the added rest negated some of the fitness improvements I had gained and thus my test result didn’t go to either direction.

What should I take away from this for the future? My interpretation is that the Build was so hard for me that I needed something like 1.5 weeks of recovery to bounce back. This doesn’t sound optimal for me and thus I don’t consider that the Build is a very good fit for me at the moment. I would expect that shortening the Build to 2 weeks of hard training before one week of recovery (repeated twice) could be optimal for me.

When looking at the bigger picture about my training, I’d say that this changes my approach a bit: As mentioned in the comments, if I get some gains in the Build, they come in the form of high end power. Combine that with the fact that I want my best racing fitness to be somewhere near the end of Specialty. The result seems to me that with these Build plans I turn my attention to high end stuff too early (about 8 weeks before my first race and +12 weeks before my most important races). This is, of course, somewhat specific to me since somebody else could definitely benefit from better high end fitness already during the earlier months of training season.

How am I going to change my training in the future? I’ll most likely reduce the Build to 3-4 weeks and maybe combine it with the Specialty. To address the more pressing issue - my will to increase my FTP - I’ll add a third Base block. Since the Sweet Spot Base 2 already has quite a lot of intensity, there’s no point in adding a block of training after my current setup. Thus, I’m considering adding more endurance like stuff in the beginning of my base training: 6 weeks of Traditional Base (ish) Mid Vol, 6 weeks of SSB1 Mid Vol and 6 weeks of SSB2 Mid Vol with the SSB1 and SSB2 with added volume.

I was thinking of this thread as I was going through week 5 of my build. The first day or two, and nothing special in my workouts just about as expected with how they should feel after a 5 watt bump. But starting on Wed, Thursday I could really feel the fitness bump from the first 3 weeks of work, so in my experience I also noticed the qualitative effect about 1.5 weeks afterwards. This doesn’t mean that the build is too long in my opinion, just that we need to be a little patient. The 2nd half of the build is even more TSS, and I have said before that after the build I haven’t really felt good until almost taper time for the specialty phase as that is when you’ll really get the first real rebound in stress balance.

What you are describing is pretty common, the build phase is a big jump in TSS, so it will probably take more than the standard week to really reap the benefits of the extra stress. Sometimes you’ll only really see it a month or so down the road. Back when I first started racing I realized this… I needed to have a really good month, about a month out (for cycling) to really come in to an event in good shape.

Are you using a Performance Management Chart of some sort? The most common ones are Strava Premium and TraininPeaks. If you want to know if you are getting proper rest and training in the right zone, you’ll need a PMC. (And I’m hopeful that @Nate_Pearson and crew are secretly working on one within TR) This article explains it: Managing Training Using TSB - Joe Friel

Here is another great article that can help explain what the lines of a PMC mean and how they can sometimes be misinterpreted: Strava Fitness Score & CTL - What Cyclists Need To Know | EVOQ.BIKE

Sounds like you’ve done General and Short Power, but not Sustained Power Build? Maybe try that after your next SSB2. The structure is very much like SSB2, but the threshold workouts become supra-threshold (108% or 102% of FTP).

I just finished Sustained Power Build MV. By the end I felt burnt enough to take a week off, but I did have some FTP gains. Though less than SSBMV2. It could be confirmation bias on my part, but it seems like most people who didn’t see FTP bumps in Build phase did General or Short Power. Makes some sense as they work on other systems.

@matiassaarinen. Your post echos nearly the exact same things I’ve experienced and am working through now. Twice I’ve had a message typed wanting to ask the same questions you’ve stated above but wasn’t sure where to begin. Please keep us updated on your progress and findings as you move forward. Best wishes and keep at it!
-Lance

I wonder to what extent there is some confusion about the speed of adaptation underlying much of what has been said throughout the thread. I remember @chad saying on the AACC Podcast that any training stimulus takes about six weeks to bring about the desired adaptation. But that means that by the time the specialty ramp test comes around, we’re essentially reaping the benefits of the first two weeks of build (I might be getting this totally wrong, in which case, please correct me). In other words, I am not sure if the @matiassaarinen’s issues are really so much with the training in build.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t improve much in the second build block either (+7w in the mid-build ramp test, +1w at the beginning of specialty).

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I don’t want to write a book here but maybe a few short comments:

  1. I think many of us lose the forest for the trees. After one trains well, or properly, for a few cycles on a good program like TR, the gains per cycle or per program are not going to be huge. You need to think macrocycles and longer term goals.

  2. There is an almost maniacal focus and fixation on FTP. There is a lot more to riding a bike than FTP. It is very much worthwhile to do power tests which look at your power output for different durations and follow your MAP curve with real data not just approximations of FTP based on a RAMP test.

  3. The mid-volume BUILD programs are a large amount of very hard work. There is basically no junk time in there. There is a reason it’s not advised to stack multiple builds in a row.

It is absolutely fine to modify these programs. Possible suggestions include:

2:1 vs 3:1
Substitute the Z2 workout for a recovery workout (e.g. Pettit, Fletcher, Beech become Recess)
Substitute one of the weekend rides to a long Z2 ride
Do all three if you need to

  1. Listen to your body. If you are reasonably strong mentally but are beat down and tired you need more time between workouts or less overall volume and/or intensity. It’s not a sign of personal weakness to recover and then crush the next workout. It’s a very bad idea to struggle on while losing fitness, overworking, building up fatigue and losing confidence. I’d rather complete two strong workouts a week than suffer through 4 mediocre ones. Note, that isn’t to say some days you don’t need to suck it up and ride the bike or lift the weights. But you should be able to tell the difference between chronic fatigue indicating a break or change to plan is needed vs just having an off day and not wanting to ride.

Finally, there is more to life than FTP. If you are racing, or group riding, or solo riding your FTP might not change but your PRs can still drop, your ability to hold the wheel, make the break, create the break, or just to ride a bit faster and longer and stronger can all come even if your FTP metric is not moving much or at all. By analogy, a fixation on FTP is like a fixation on body weight. You can be super skinny and not strong or even be very sick. The metric of body weight in absence of other factors is not useful.

Personal data - I did Sustained Power Build Mid-Volume last year after Sweet Spot Base Mid-Volume and felt it was great. I’m a 52 year old rider who races 12-15 TTs a year and has been training / racing seriously for last 15 years and riding bikes seriously for 40+ years. Take home is I have a deep base or foundation on which to build. I couldn’t handle 3:1 Sustained Power BUILD mid-vol. Just wasn’t recovering. When I moved to a 2:1 cycle it was excellent.

Hope that helps. Been watching this thread and willing to bet there are a lot of people with similar question. Kudos for putting it out there.

-Mark

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@DarthShivious. Mark, AWESOME information! Well thought out, to the point and so relevant. Thank you for taking the time to share with us and adding valuable content to this thread.

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I’m thinking this is me as well, that I need a large load of TSS to progress. Midway through SSB2HV and feeling fresh and wanting more has me somewhat skeptical about the volume/TSS of GBHV. I’ll have to evaluate after I’m done with base if I’m going to be padding the weeks in build a bit.

Is this your first time through GBHV or a build phase?

this blog post may help you out, let me know! How to Overcome a Cycling Plateau | EVOQ.BIKE

As others have mentioned, I think the focus needs to shift away from FTP and more towards the specialization component of getting faster. Especially for well-trained athletes (like the OP).

@matiassaarinen, I’m curious if you’ve tracked any improvements in other forms of performance after doing the full base/build/specialty cycle? For example, after the tough build phase, even if your FTP has dropped 5 watts, are you able to hold V02 max intervals for longer durations? Or, has your muscular endurance improved so you can more easily hold threshold/SS powers after putting out V02 efforts?

I’m also curious if you’re training for an A race or just following the plans to improve your fitness overall?

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Yep, first time with structured training. Looking back at previous seasons (4 years ago mind you, picked up cycling again this year) I did 700-900tss weeks with good results.