Bike Forums - Intervals for getting faster

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Quote:

Originally Posted by achoo (Post 14640595)

If you can get your power up to 700W for 15 sec, you should be able to up it 20-30W and hold it for several minutes, at least.

I can only tell you what I did & why. I don't understand the relevance of you stating what I should have been able to do. I can state what I will try & do next time, and I've already stated that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by achoo (Post 14640595)

If you can't hold that, you need to work on aerobic and/or muscular endurance. Short intervals don't do that. Long intervals with no breaks do. Look at your rides - how often do you stop pedaling, or let your power drop below 125W, say? Even for 1 sec? Those little breaks really do kill your endurance workouts.

Here's last Saturday's workout:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/211996665

There are 4 instances where my cadence dropped for seconds because of lights or slowing down for brutal railroad tracks over a span of 2 hours 54 minutes, average wattage 247w, NP 273w, average HR 153, overall max HR 180, max HR during ride 169. You tell me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by achoo (Post 14640628)

Yeah, but in this case I'd venture to say the OP is OD'ing on short intervals - from his posting he doesn't seem to hold constant power for his 20-min tests.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DaveWC (Post 14637931)

I'm doing recovery rides on Mon/Fri, short intervals (10-20 seconds) on Tue, fast tempo ride Wed, longer intervals on Thu (1 minute) and 80-100km endurance rides on Sat/Sun.

I ride on average 300km per week. Of that I do two days of riding intervals totalling 48km per week. Is that ODing on intervals? Today's ride included the 20 minute FTP test which was not intended to be a ride with intervals, nor have any of my previous 20 minute tests been done that way. The fact that I ended up jacking it up & down in the last 5 minutes was not planned, nor recommended. It just happened.

Maybe everyone posting here knows a lot more than I do. That wouldn't be shocking at all. But Chris Carmichael's "Time Crunched Cyclist" program has cyclists doing only an 8 minute test. I assume he knows what he's talking about, and that the info is useful.

I was out with a cycling friend of mine & told him about this thread. He laughed & said that it sounded like people were too focused on FTP, how to determine it etc (because I put the focus on FTP) and were ignoring the ride that I detailed. He said that if I was able to go at above my best 20 minute wattage for 15 minutes & then pull off 15 intervals that peaked at 700 watts in 5 minutes and increase my overall average wattage on the ride, I was doing something pretty good. He said I should skip worrying about FTP and just ride with that kind of power & variability in my shortened rides during the week and concentrate on long pulls of high power zone/high HR zone rides on the weekend.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DaveWC (Post 14640640)

I can only tell you what I did & why. I don't understand the relevance of you stating what I should have been able to do. I can state what I will try & do next time, and I've already stated that.

Here's last Saturday's workout:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/211996665

There are 4 instances where my cadence dropped for seconds because of lights or slowing down for brutal railroad tracks over a span of 2 hours 54 minutes, average wattage 247w, NP 273w, average HR 153, overall max HR 180, max HR during ride 169. You tell me.

That ride looks nothing like what I expected from the way you described your FTP test.

From that, I'd think that you wouldn't have had any problems holding steady power in your test, although to be complete, connect.garmin.com really isn't detailed enough to look at really short data intervals. For that, ridewithgps.com is better IMO - you can zoom down to as short a segment as your device records - usually 1 sec.

As stated by another poster, if you really want to get deeper into this, get a coach.