Good start, bad end

I had good intentions this week to do 4 workouts since a week before I only could do 2. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I could actually do my workouts but I had to skip my longer weekend endurance ride, because from Friday (late) evening onwards I felt rather ill (stomach cramps and sore muscles). Just to make sure I did not overdo it I chose not to ride this weekend and maybe (if I feel good) give it a try tomorrow.

Monday I had TR Donner. 1 hour with basically 3 12 minute intervals @ 307 watts average. I was able to keep cadence at 103 which is good for me. HR went from 150, 155 to 158 in the last interval with decoupling rate below 5%. Total workout was 275W NP and 245W AP.

On Wednesday I thought I try a Billat workout. I have not done these workouts before but they are intend to improve Vo2max. Now this may sound easy but basically there are a number of diffent versions wrt intensity and duration at which you can do these (also wrt the intensity of the recovery intervals). The first thing you need to do (and excuse me, I have not done that) is to determine your power at VO2max. You can do that by doing a solid warmup and after that to do a ramp test. Start at approximately 50% of your FTP and increase the watts every 2 minutes untill you cannot maintain that anymore. Your power at VO2max will be the power of the last fully sustained two minutes.

Next you determine how long you can ride at your power at Vo2max. You can do this by doing a test a day or so later by again doing a solid warmup and then (by a rolling start) see how long you can ride at your power at Vo2max which you have determined a day before.

Another possibility is to do a 5 minute all out. This can also give you an approximation. The first minute will typically show the spike of acceleration but after that you will see a sort of balancing off of the wattage on a fairly straight line (if you didn't blow up yourself in the first minute). The average of the balancing of of the watts you can use as proxy for power at Vo2max. In general riders will be able to sustain 4 minutes at Vo2max (mind you the pros will be able to hold it longer). There are also other possibilities but maybe I write about them later.

Well then. Considering I have not done the above, but I chose the default setting of Trainerroads Clouds rest -which are 3 sets of 12 30 second Billats @ 130% of FTP on and @ 40 % of FTP off. As you can see the amount of time spend at power at Vo2max is 6 minutes per set (12*30 sec) and 18 minutes in total. Now doing them properly would mean an average power of 268 over each of the 12 minute sets which would approximately be 290 watts NP. So...to be honest. This kind of workout should not be too stressful. It becomes a different story if you would do the rest intervals at for example 60% of FTP (for me now 63%) and I would end up at approximately 330watts NP.

Now considering Vo2max (Coggan) power level goes from approx 106%-120% you could question the Vo2max stress capability of the workout as specified by TR. (mind you, 268 / 315 FTP actually is less then 100% of FTP!).

Now let's look at the three intervals because I did not quite keep myself to the TR protocol.

I should have kept 410 at max for each interval, but I tried to exceed it the first time, less the second time and 'tried' to go to 410 the last time.

1) 325 AP, (351 NP)

2) 309 AP, (334 NP)

3) 300 AP, (325 NP)

NP over the whole periode of interval 1 to end of interval 3 (including 2 rest periods of 5 minutes) was 316 W over a period of 3x 12 min + 10 min = 46 min. So basically FTP.

Look below at the 30 second smoothed lines for interval 1:

The dashed lines you see that all intervals actually crossed the 120% (upper) and 100% FTP line. Actually the upper limit actually goes a bit too high above the 120% line and in that respect taps into anaerobic capacity. However, not very long though. Also it is clear that the off periods were kind of deep as well. Too deep as far as I'm concerned. W.r.t the quadrant analysis. 50% of each set was in Quandrant I. Meaning high force and high velocity.

My conclusion is that this training was kind of a 'stuck in the middle' one. No real Vo2max (only the first one could qualify) and no anaerobic one either. Next time if I want to focus I should stick to a range of around 410 on the on and around 250 watts for the off periods which puts me in a better range. If I am wrong let me know ;)

"Rectification": Because I had a doubt wrt the trainingload to stimulate Vo2max adaption I decided to contact Trainerroad. I got an answer from their head coach Chad Timmerman and he did point out the workout is a 'really forgiving way to work at a high output level. Idea is to keep breathing at a high rate with short recoveries such that you start each successive repeat in an already aerobically-elevated state. In addition the short work intervals prevent accumulation of lactate and acid (and high muscle fatigue) so you're not completely gutting yourself".

Well thanks Chad / Trainerroad for the response. To be honest my doubt came because my legs did not feel so trashed afterwards. Did not feel so trashed? No. Because I was used to do 6x3 minutes. And at the end of such intervals your legs do feel trashed........

They also gave me a site to read more about it: http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/veronique-billat-exercise-research-377

End of the day this is a nice workout and I am trying to put the Billat ''trainingplan'' somewhere in my schedule.

O yes. to conclude. My third training was TR Haeckel. 3 times 4 ramp ups of 3 minutes each (between 95% and 105% FTP). NP 275 and AP 250. For the ramp up times it was 290 NP for 47 minutes. No problems with that one.