Originally Posted by
Road Fan
So I was going to ask you why do you want to control against AET, not that I fully appreciate what it is. My winter training is going to be mainly organized around the Century Training pattern Friel gives in "Cycling Past 50." Some of my rides in that are pretty steady and spinny, I've been thinking I want to try those in a Seiler-like fashion, since Joe Friel calls formost of your time to be spent in Z2 and 3 (the "long ride," the Z1 "recovery ride," and the Z2/3 "maintenance ride" are all in or close to Seiler's lower zone, and teh single hilly ride is intended to be all zones, no cadence limits - do whatever it takes to go fast on the hills for a little while at least. Should be hitting the higher zones when you can in this one.
So I'll follow some of those clues you left about AeT. I'll be on a Wahoo with built in power, for a change.
The idea of staying below AeT for endurance rides is to train purely the aerobic system and train it a lot more. It seems to be impossible to overcook oneself while staying below Aet, so volume is only limited by your endurance and that's what endurance rides work on.
Below AeT your anaerobic system isn't providing much if any of your watts. This year, I'm trying to separate my aerobic and anaerobic work during my base work. So on hilly rides, I'll try to keep it down to AeT when not climbing and then climb as hard as I can. That's a training-only goal. On rides where I'm working against the clock, I'll push the whole time, just lots harder on the hills. One has to practice that too, or one won't know what it's supposed to feel like. Once my base and interval training had gotten results, I found the best distance training to be riding very hard 4 hour hilly rides, done to exhaustion. My hard rides are in June and July. I hope to start the hard rides in maybe March.
Seilerizing Friel, one would keep power, breathing, HR, whatever works, below Aet on the endurance rides or at least as much as possible, so no zone 3, nor the upper part of zone 2 in the 5 zone system. And thus no need for any Z1 recovery rides. Then as you say, as much zone 5 as you can handle on the hilly rides, though Seilerizing, try to keep it around 105% of FTP, so just barely into the panting zone, which will allow one to do more of it.