Originally Posted by
Drew Eckhardt
Anecdotally my rate of power increase seems to be about the same regardless of whether I ride anaerobic intervals once or twice a week, and mix in tempo rides or not.
OTOH I'm much faster on longer rides with more rides below my aerobic threshold, and those can be harder when I'm fresher from fewer hard rides.
That did wonders for my body composition too, with those miles not making me hungry and knocking off an extra 40 pounds of fat so I can climb like a mountain goat as I did nearly 20 years ago.
Thank you for your replies, Drew. We did hardly any VT2 work. In previous seasons, we did more >VT1 work and less <VT1 work and as the summer rides grew longer and longer, I would seem to grow weaker and weaker. The few high intensity rides exhausted me so much that training volume decreased. Which is what one would expect. High intensity training is done as a lower volume.
But this year, our training volume stayed high right up to our taper weeks. We kept the volume so high that we couldn't do the VT2 work that I knew we were supposed to do. We'd go out to a favorite interval hill and try, but we just didn't have it. So I was worried that this was the wrong thing and that we should rest more and do more high end. But we held the course and it seemed to pay off. I think younger folks could have done more VT2 work, but at our age it just wasn't happening. We did do a little >Vt2 work on our Sunday group rides, but not much and not formal intervals.
In the Stoggl study to which you linked above, the HIIT study group was the only one to lose weight. I restart my training program every year in October. This year, I'm tempted to start off with HIIT for a couple of months while trying to lose more weight and then restart the polarized work in December.