Hi All, have had a fairly decent search and can’t seem to find an answers,
while not new to cycling, I have had a decent lay off due to a knee injury and have been riding for fun/social for the last year or so. I have just started riding with the local bunch ride and am getting dropped as soon as the road climbs or the gas comes on. I need to get faster! My goal is that by the end of the year I can to stick with the pack.
So I have signed up to Sweet Spot Base Low Volume. My question is, the plan calls for 3 sessions a week with the “difficult” one on Saturdays. I really want to continue my bunch ride on Saturdays so if i push the difficult session to Thursday to get its benefit and then substitute one of the short ones for the bunch ride, is that the best approach?
It also seems like one of the weekly shorter sessions in SSB is more technique based while one is power based, any recommendations on which ones to replace.
Chappo, i am new to cycling - stated this year commuting to work. I have just completed the Sweet Spot Base low volume and found the same issues. The hard workouts are usually on a Saturday when most people have time to work out and recover. With the new calendar feature, you can move the the workouts around. This is what I have now started doing. It takes my body at least two days to recover from hard work outs. So i have moved my hard sessions to Monday or Tuesday. This way by Sat I have recovered and ready for a bunch ride - others may have different ideas.
I was just using Saturday bunch rides as my ‘difficult’ ride. Pace line riding so I imagined it working as an over / under type session, plus a couple of hills in the route for a bit of VO2 max. Generally ending up with about 200 TSS so more training load than anything during the week.
As @Fkidenya says - I think if you want to do a challenging outside ride on the weekend your best bet is to move the challenging ride to Tuesday or Wednesday so you aren’t doing your two hard rides so close together.
I would recommend still doing the challenging TR workout each week though - the strength endurance you get from sweet spot base workouts won’t be replicated on your outdoor rides and simply replacing approximate TSS scores does not mean you’re getting the same training stimulus and thus you’ll miss some or much of the benefit of the base period
You could move all the rides by two or three days in Calendar in your web browser. That would give you three TR sessions and one ride with a group.
I treat Sunday club rides as social easy rides - not training.
Fast bunch rides can be training but load can be difficult to monitor. It depends who you’re riding with.
Does your club have a slower group you could join until you’re stronger?
Thanks All for the comments, I have rearranged it numerous ways and am going to try the following for the SSB1 and then assess before kicking off SSB2
Monday morning and Tuesday night for the 2x 1hr long sessions. if needed i will reduce a session to a -1 options to shorten it but keep the consistency
Thursday (AM or PM) completed the 90min/higher TSS session - will aim to complete in the morning giving me a full 48hrs before the weekend ride
Saturday - Bunch Ride,
If this all gets a bit to much i will probably drop the Tuesday ride and shift Thursday to Wednesday to give more time between the 90min session and the bunch ride but agree with @Fkidenya, i want to try and complete all the sessions - pride
@magooesbe, unfortunately there isn’t a slower group. it is a smaller club. Fair to say though they are all super supportive and wait for me at designated spots, i just don’t like slowing them down too much as it’s their time to ride as well.
I looked at the route again and have found an option though, as it happens they get to the base of a hill and then do a loop (across the bottom, up, across the top, down). I’m thinking I will just go up the route they are riding down so when i see them i can turn around and not hold them up until i improve to stay with them.