This is really a question for one of the coaches but, perhaps another coach or someone who has studied Kinesiology/Physiology could chime in…
Many workouts have 2 minutes at 50% FTP followed by 2 minutes at 70% then 2 minutes at something close to threshold. Then a couple jumps and a few minutes at 40% for a total of about 10 minutes.
To me, this feels too hard too quick, but maybe it’s mental or most likely my age which is 50. Specifically the first 6 minutes. Physiologically, is there an optimal warm up for the majority of cyclist?
I think they are aiming for 60, 75, 90 minute workouts and that makes many of them with too short warmup/cooldown periods. But also it works better for planing these workouts and putting them into the plan. Imagine, if you want to do a morning workout expecting it to be 1h hour but it turns out to be 1h 9m and you somehow miss your morning bus
You are always welcome to extend warmup/cooldown and there is this new feature which allows doing this on the fly.
Im 51 and not crazy about their warm ups either…I made my own 10 min warm up that I do before every workout. On the opposite side Im not crazy about hour long workouts that you get a 2 minute cool down…then other 2 hour endurance workouts give you a 10 minute cool down.
You can now extend warmup and cooldown on TR workouts. Currently only on Android I think, but coming to all devices soon. It’s a great feature. Some workouts have to cram a lot into a short time, so being able to tailor them yourself is excellent.
I’m 65, soon 66, and these short warm-ups worried me at first, before I actually did the passes. When I am out with a group, I need significantly more warm-up than the 40-year-olds. Once I started doing the workouts, I was pleasantly surprized to find that the TR warm-ups worked out just fine.
I do prefer a longer cool-down occasionally. I just keep pedalling even though the workout is over. Sometimes I think the cooldowns are way too long … I just want off that $€I# bike, but I do them anyway.
At 47 i need a couple of minutes of ticking the legs over at 100w before i start the warm up at 150-160w. i go into the spindown mode and noodle along for a bit just to give me a gentle start.
I ride Zwift and TR at the same time. I start the ride in Zwift on my PC and start the iPad TR app around the 10 minute mark. Mostly because I also need the extra warm-up and cool-down, but also for the Strava mileage and elevation stats to be included for my yearly numbers
I prioritise finding extra time to add time to my warm up, I normally only need an extra 5-10mins, but my workouts are a lot better for it. Will sometimes use zwift for my warm up and just ride around. For cooldowns I might add a couple mins depending on the workout, more likely on vo2max type workouts.
I would like to add the extra time to the warmup before I start. I am working out on rollers and I have to get off the bike to hit the +5/+10 which I find a bit annoying but it is better than not having the extended WU.
