Originally Posted by
burnthesheep
Wout is paid to ride a bike a lot. The old "amateurs just need to ride more" isn't a good argument. You can't invent time. If somebody is using the hour expenditure they have to spend......you leverage other things to be faster. Like optimizing the time you have. You don't sit around and go "I guess I'll be slow since I can only ride 6 hours a week". That's both mentally and physically lazy when it comes to performance.
I didn't say 1% either. I said 5%. I can do 90% for about 2 hours. Your 100% of ftp is well, 100%.....50 to 70min. A whole hour less. 105% is probably at best going to be a duration of around 20min, done once. Or sets of 9min under/overs or 8min each.
So yeah, 5% can matter. It matters more the shorter the duration of the interval.
Saying "just finish fresher for tomorrow" just shows you don't understand how you force adaptation during a workout. "Finish for fresher tomorrow" means you failed to give the body an effective enough stimulus to adapt to what you want it to. "Fresher tomorrow" may work if you're on a diet of lots of sweetspot or tempo trying to optimize how much TSS you can cram into a week at that power level. But not for threshold and VO2 work.
Sure Wout’s a pro but plenty of non-pros have extra Time they could use for training. Machine learning and 6 hrs/wk isn’t going to beat 15hrs/wk.
And 5% might matter a little in a workout which you could possibly prove with a long enough study but in a season or training block it’s not that important. It might make the graphs look pretty but if you’re doing a set of 6 intervals they don’t all have to match. If the first few are easy pick it up a little, too hard back off. VO2Max intervals are a function of time and power and again not that precise. You need to spend time at VO2Max but there are numerous ways to get there and they don’t require a power within 5%.