Episode 193: How to Choose The Right Cycling Workouts at the Right Times

Questions/Topics Covered In This Episode:

• Strategy #1: General fitness, picking from a "workout buffet"
• Strategy #2: Performance training, specific duration/workout goals
  • Threshold workouts: ~30-60min of Time in Zone (TiZ), 8-60min interval durations, 2:1 work to rest ratios, 91-105% FTP, RPE: 7-8, extensive or intensive 
  • VO2 Max Workouts: 10-25min of Time in Zone, 1.5-5min interval durations, 1:1 work to rest ratios, 106-121% of FTP, RPE: 9
  • Extensive Anaerobic Capacity workouts: 4-12min of total time in zone ,30-60s interval durations, 1:2 and up to 1:10 work to rest, RPE: 9-10
  • Intensive Anaerobic Capacity workouts: ~1-2min TiZ, 10-20s interval durations, full rest (~7-12min), RPE: 10
• Strategy #3: Other Goals
  • Specific workouts for weight loss goals, 
  • Specific workouts for metabolic flexibility
  • Specific workouts for gaining mass

RESOURCES
- An Introduction to the New iLevels in WKO4 | TrainingPeaks
- How to determine workout targets using WKO iLevels
- Episode 168 - Zone 2: Testing to personalize your Zone 2 and improve base training
- Episode 169 - Sugar Burner vs. Fat Burner Cyclists in Lab Testing, Training, and Competition
- Episode 46: Periodization, Training Modalities with Tim Cusick
- Episode 8: Deciphering Training Methodologies with Tim Cusick

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Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Chapters

• 0:07 Optimizing Cycling Training Intensity and Goals
• 7:56 Anaerobic Workout Training Guidelines
• 18:42 Training Tips for Cyclists

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now on to our show. Welcome back, time Crunch fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford. We have a good question today.

Speaker 1: 1:02

From you seems pretty clear that training at intensity should be limited, limited to two to three days per week. How do you know what type of intensity to do, in what proportion? For example, how often should I work on vo2, max zone versus threshold versus anaerobic zones? I find intensity days. I just pick a zone or workout. I haven't done in a while, and so far, so good, any other advice and again, that's coming from Mike. Yeah, you're, you're right, mike. Typically for my time crunched athletes, I find two to three days of high intensity training is about the most I can get out of them to keep the training quality high, meaning that the result aligns with the intent of the training session. Other days are lower intensity aerobic building or skill technique driven, or maybe we go to the gym and focus on strength training. But either way, I do find that the recipe of two to three days of high intensity per week for time crunched athletes is the way to do it. So if we stick to this model or this way of thinking, the next step to answer your question is to ask yourself what's your goal? So, is your goal general fitness, is it specific performance or is it other targeted goals? Performance or is it other targeted goals? So let me take those three things and answer your question as best I can, given those kind of like three bins of goals. So if it's general fitness, what you choose may not matter as much, and that's fine for a goal. Okay. Now, assuming you've been training regularly for a year or so, meaning you have some decent level of fitness coming in, um, and you have no other particular thing that you're working on, this is a good choice to just kind of like pick from the buffet line of workouts and you should be good to go. Okay, now here's an example.

Speaker 1: 3:02

My wife actually she's been doing this lately, frustrated really by not knowing exactly what to do and how to engage with workouts. But she wants to like stay fit and try something else. So I was simply putting in three workouts per week on her training peaks stuff that I had built up and formulated beforehand and I just drag it in. What she does is she picks kind of what she wants, whether it's like a 50 minute workout or a 75 minute workout, something like that. She does that two, three times per week, nothing crazy in between. She goes for hikes with the dog, she rides her mountain bike, she does yoga, other stuff. She's been doing that for about a month and she went out hit a local hill climb here. That's no joke. It's about 1100 feet of climbing in just over three miles and she was like that's the easiest it's ever felt. But she has no goal races, no events and that sort of thing. But it's a again picking from the buffet of workouts and that's going to move the needle.

Speaker 1: 4:03

The strategy can work. The benefits to this are there's no stress in planning, you have good flexibility. You can kind of do whatever you want on the given day, as long as you're kind of sticking to the confines that we're talking about, or that two to three days of hard, and you can learn a lot about your body. In some ways, you can learn a lot about your energy. You can kind of read yourself and say am I feeling good today? Okay, I'll pick this hard intensity and go for it. Or I'm not feeling so good today, or had two days really hard, so, uh, yeah, I guess I'll just go easy today. So you have that flexibility in your learning about yourself as well. Okay, but she's also.

Speaker 1: 4:43

She's also getting workouts from me, someone who's been coaching and writing training programs for over 18 years. So I'm dosing her with what is appropriate within reason for a person who again has some decent level of fitness motivation and also kind of within the confines of human physiology, right. So we'll get to some of those boundaries here in a minute and how I build workouts. But I just want to set the stage for generalized fitness. Picking random workouts sometimes is completely appropriate.

Speaker 1: 5:18

So now let's talk about when you have specific performance or timing as your goal, okay. So if you have a goal race or an event where you need high fitness with performance of some kind, then it actually does matter, right, and this is what we talk about on the podcast quite a bit. This is also where traditional periodization concepts come into play. Now, I've taken full semesters in college about this, so we don't need to do like that big of a deep dive, especially on this episode. But in past episodes I have talked about this at length. Check out episode number 46, which is called Periodization and Training Modalities with Tim Cusick, and also episode number eight, which is called deciphering training methodologies. So the benefits of a specific goal when you want performance and all this kind of stuff is you in using periodization concepts to get there, is you have a systematic approach in a roadmap to attain that desired goal in the future. And so for those who love following a plan and they love to see their progression, this system works really well for them, and I would say that's the majority of my athletes most of the time.

Speaker 1: 6:36

Now let me talk real quick about performance and fitness, and I've talked about it on the podcast a little bit before. But think about fitness and performance in two different ways. It's my view that fitness and performance are not the same thing. You can have fitness without having performance, but you can't get performance without some level of fitness. Now, maybe there's some semantics there, but my point is that performance is more specific and should be defined as such to to talk about it in this context. Now, performance to me generally has concepts of high intensity, repeated high intensity or high intensity demands. After long periods of lower or mixed intensity, work is done. Think about a long road race or a long gravel race with a hard hill climb at the very end, or maybe there's a breakaway and there's the group of five or six. You got to sprint for the finish after working your butt off all day. That's the performance that I'm talking about. In cycling, we can talk about power durations as targeted performances, meaning how much power you can push for how long, and that when I'm framing up a performance driven sort of training program. That's the way I think about it.

Speaker 1: 7:56

So now, mike, let's talk about how to form some anaerobic workouts. So I'm going to give you some anaerobic training targets that I stick to when I'm building workouts for performance. I'm going to run through kind of like bullet points of what I stick to when I'm doing this. So feel free to take notes and write them down, but we'll also have them in our show notes. Okay, so here we go.

Speaker 1: 8:21

So, within a workout, I generally aim for these wide targets to hit For threshold. I'm going to start with a goal of 30 to 60 minutes of time and zone per interval session or per workout, and I'm going to use interval durations that are 8 to 60 minutes. The work to rest ratio is 2 to 1, meaning if I use a 10 minute interval, I'm going to use about a 5 minute recovery period, meaning if I use a 10-minute interval, I'm going to use about a five-minute recovery period. The intensity that I use is 91 to 105% of FTP and the rate of perceived effort is somewhere between a seven or an eight out of 10, assuming 10 is a max effort. Now I think about this in two different ways, and I've talked about this on the podcast as extensive training or intensive training. If it's intensive training, I'm just going to aim for that perceived effort of eight or the 105% of FTP and then the shorter interval duration. If it's extensive interval training that I'm doing, I'm going to use the 91% of FTP, make it feel more like a seven out of 10 because I'm going for the long haul. So I'm going to use longer interval durations, maybe 15, 20, 25 minutes, that sort of thing, but I'm still going to try to accumulate a total of that 30 to 60 minutes of time in zone in order to train that glycolytic energy system and train FTP power. For VO2 max workouts I'm looking for 10 to 25 minutes of total time in zone. I'm going to use 1.5 to 5 minute interval durations and I'm going to use a one-to-one work-to-rest ratio, meaning if I do a three-minute interval, I'm going to take at least a three minute rest. For some athletes I might bump that to four minutes, maybe even five minutes, because I want them to produce high quality intervals. So adding a little bit more rest beyond one-to-one, completely fine, but I don't ever go full because there's some repeatability that I want out of these workouts. Okay, some durability that holds up over the whole interval set. Okay. Now the intensity that I use here scale of one to 10, it's a nine, okay. So nearly all out, probably probably feeling like a 10 on the final interval, and I'm using 106 to 121% of FTP for the most part.

Speaker 1: 10:45

Now let's talk about anaerobic training, again coming back to this extensive and intensive way of thinking. Extensive meaning I'm going longer. But now this is hard because it's still anaerobic. For extensive anaerobic capacity training I'm aiming for 4 to 12 minutes of total time in zone. I'm using 30 to 60 second interval durations and for the work to rest periods I'm using at least a one to two and up to a one to 10 ratio, meaning if I'm using a 30 second interval I could go up to five minutes of rest in between. So very short, very high intensity and very long recovery time periods. Perceived effort 9.5 to 10. These are hard, nearly all out, maybe a touch because we're trying to accumulate that time and zone kind of depends on the athlete what the actual goal is for the interval session. And then finally, we have intensive anaerobic capacity training. Total time in zone not a ton here, but it's one to two minutes.

Speaker 1: 11:52

Typically I'm using 10 to 20 second interval durations. I'm doing full recovery periods in between, so that could be five, seven, up to 12 minutes. Okay, seven to 12 minutes is probably the best range of recovery. So you want full recovery before you go full out again. Intensity to 10 out of 10 and actual power that I prescribe. I mean I basically don't even use a percentage, I make it high on training peaks. I even make it high, and I say the intent here is, you know it's probably over prescribed in the way of what you've done before, but the goal is max. So just full on out. You're not looking, you're not pacing, you're just going all out. So I hope, mike, that helps you to choose, to orchestrate and choose workouts and maybe create workouts that you want to play around with those combinations of intensities and interval durations. But that's how I do it, no secret, and I'll link to some articles that will help with that.

Speaker 1: 12:54

It's all Training Peaks and WKO5, and thanks to Tim Cusick as well. He's jumped on the podcast several times and I'm using a lot of stuff that he and his team put out in the way of building workouts, stuff that he and his team put out in the way of building workouts. Now there's another bin of goals that I talked about and I just call them other targeted goals, and these are things like body composition goals, like weight loss or even weight gain. Also metabolic flexibility, which I've talked about on the podcast before, which I've talked about on the podcast before. But basically all of this matters when it comes down to choosing what to do when in training. Now, the benefits here are that you might be able to influence the way that your body operates by taking a specific block of time and working on some of these underlying challenges in order to improve your overall health or performance down the road. So let's talk about some of these weight loss goals.

Speaker 1: 13:52

When I've got an athlete pursuing weight loss, I'm going to choose workouts that are endurance and tempo. So zone two, zone three, high zone three, maybe sweet spot, some people call it, and those are great for burning calories and doing work, but not going so hard that you induce a ton of fatigue and can't go hard the next day or or maybe have to miss a day because you're just kind of like um zapped, you know. So if you combine this with calorie restriction, you'll stay on track to lose weight and not if you're doing efforts like VO2 max, hard threshold stuff, sprints, you're burning up a lot of muscle glycogen, you're adding a ton of fatigue and that could lead to inconsistent training patterns. The need to take, you know, full rest days or rest block. And when I've got athletes that are losing weight, I want my athletes to be consistent, I want their habits to be dialed, I want their energy to be predictable and that's why I stay away from super high intensity when we're trying to do some weight loss goals.

Speaker 1: 15:00

Metabolic flexibility Again, I covered this with CTS coach Renee Eastman in episodes 168 and 169. And the titles of those I think are called zone two testing and sugar burner versus fat burner respectively. What we're really talking about here is, if you're burning glycogen at lower intensities instead of burning fat AKA you're a sugar burner you can change that in your training so that it doesn't happen. What we want is to burn fat as a primary fuel source when we're riding at lower intensities is what we're saying. Okay, so riding at the lower end of zone two is one of the ways of getting there. Not consuming carbohydrates in the first 30 to 45 minutes of your ride is another good way to help with that.

Speaker 1: 15:49

So if you're hitting all the training zones all the time, your body won't have enough time or sessions in aerobic training zones to make this shift from a sugar burner to a fat burner. Check out those episodes if you want to learn more about that. And finally, weight gain yeah, I've got some athletes that actually do want to increase his strength gain or even some size like in their legs, and you may have to reduce your volume and intensity on the bike so that your body has enough calories and positive nitrogen balance to get strong and grow muscle. If you're randomly grabbing workouts each week and going hard all the time, you won't be able to make as much progress in the strength development as you otherwise could. So finally, in summary, and to take this thing home knowing what to do when really comes down to your overarching goals, if you have a specific and targeted goal, then having a good plan with feedback and a solid process to help you get there is best.

Speaker 1: 16:55

If you don't have specific goals, you don't have to be as targeted in your approach. Taking the pressure off yourself to perform or do specific workouts offers flexibility and variety, for sure, but at some point I do encourage all athletes to enter in a specific phase of training so that they can take their training to the next level. You don't have to be there forever, but that will help you make bigger gains over the long run. When you pick workouts, use my guidelines that I gave you in this episode for prescriptive anaerobic interval training, and that'll help you keep on the right track too. Finally, if you have some other body composition goals or curiosities of improving your physiology. Hopefully, some of the information I covered today inspires you to hone in on that training so you can see bigger improvements in your overall performance. So thank you again, mike, for writing in with a great question. We could make a whole episode out of it. That was awesome.

Speaker 1: 17:57

Now, for the rest of our audience, if you've been inspired to write in with your own question on training, fueling recovery, really anything that has to do with endurance, simply head over to train rightcom backslash podcast and click on the ask a training question button that you can fill that out and it gets sent sent directly to me and our staff on the podcast and we'll do our best to answer it on a future episode. That's it. That's our show for today. I hope you can take away a few pieces of wisdom and apply it to your own training right away. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and listen each week for more episodes and actionable advice, and we'll make sure that you keep on training right.

Speaker 1: 18:42

Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.