Interval Placement During a Workout

RipVanCommittee said:

As I'm beginning my 'base period', I'm beginning to do 2 days of TH intervals (2x15-25:00), twice a week (Tues and Thurs), and a mid-tempo ride on the weekend.

However, as I do the mid-tempo ride solo, I've decided to incorporate a small amt of AWC intervals (4-8 minutes total work, once a week), into one of my weekday rides (if I did a group ride, I'd just count a couple of hard, unstructured efforts and call it good). As I have pretty low AWC, I figure I should some some hard efforts so I don't totally de-train this energy system.

My question is this: last year I did this same thing, doing 2-4 2 minute efforts at roughly 150% of FTP, resting 15 minutes, then doing my TH intervals. The quality of the ensuing TH intervals seemed to suffer, going back and looking at last year's power data. I did this workout on Tuesday, then Thursday just did 2x20:00--the power on Thursday's intervals was roughly 5% higher--and in quite a few instances (about 30% of the time), I ended up skipping or cutting short Tuesday's intervals. Since my primary focus is building my TH power, would it make more sense to do the shorter, harder intervals AFTER my TH intervals, even though this goes against the often-touted principle of 'shorter intervals first'??

Thanks for any useful input!

I would say yes, since it sounds like they are more for maintenance than improvement, but why not put them early in one of your weekend rides?

RipVanCommittee said:

I've decided to incorporate a small amt of AWC intervals (4-8 minutes total work, once a week), into one of my weekday rides...<snip>

AWC = Ana- Woe-bic Capacity?? 😕

whoawhoa said:

I would say yes, since it sounds like they are more for maintenance than improvement, but why not put them early in one of your weekend rides?

Well, I typically end up doing about 4-6 minutes on Saturday as well, so in reality I guess I'm trying to do a little bit at the higher intensity twice a week.

Still, that's a good point, and I could probably work some into Sunday's easy ride.

RipVanCommittee said:

Since my primary focus is building my TH power, would it make more sense to do the shorter, harder intervals AFTER my TH intervals, even though this goes against the often-touted principle of 'shorter intervals first'??

Personally, I'd do the set of short intervals at the beginning of the mid-tempo ride on the weekend. They're less likely to affect the overall quality of that longer ride than the shorter TH intervals.

frenchyge said:

Personally, I'd do the set of short intervals at the beginning of the mid-tempo ride on the weekend. They're less likely to affect the overall quality of that longer ride than the shorter TH intervals.

Hmm...I think you're probably right on this one.

Thanks for the suggestion.

frenchyge said:

AWC = Ana- Woe-bic Capacity?? 😕

I believe AWC: Anaerobic Work Capacity (Monod power model)
🙂