PMC and not peaking

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The above link interested me, because like some other posters, I did a fair bit of L4 work in the last off season, only to get a small improvement this season just gone. Too much and too hard is basically what I did, and I've learned from that.

The link is to a sweet spot training thread, and there is one particular post by rmur, that inspired me to use SST fairly extensively over winter.

I would also be interested to hear some response from the 'gurus', about training without a major peak, as I think regular racing throughout any given season is what a lot of people do.

Anyway, I hope the above link helps.

Monastero said:

Has anyone on the forum experimented using the PMC to plan a season in which they wanted to perform consistently at a high level throughout with no peak?
I know Andy had discussed on Topica a season in which he planned to "not peak".

Andy, would you share what looking at that season now through the PMC reveals? Specifically, does it indicate that there should have been no peak and was there, in fact, a consistent high level of fitness yet no true peak for that time period?

I would, but I've never found the time to wade back that far through my files to estimate missing TSS, make certain that the functional threshold power was correct, etc.

What I can say is that although I attempted not to peak, I had great form about 6 wk after I started racing regularly, then fell back from that slightly but still managed to keep it together for the rest of the year.

the figure depicting SST seems to show it ranging from upper l2 to l4, correct?
is the best indicator of a sst work out an IF in the level 3 range? my SST rides often average a power in upper L2 but normalised power and IF is in the L3 area i think these are SST workouts (3-4 hours IF between .75 and .85) am i right or are they too low an intensity?

I am pretty sure this is correct but am just making sure of the terminology!

tk_bike said:

the figure depicting SST seems to show it ranging from upper l2 to l4, correct?
is the best indicator of a sst work out an IF in the level 3 range? my SST rides often average a power in upper L2 but normalised power and IF is in the L3 area i think these are SST workouts (3-4 hours IF between .75 and .85) am i right or are they too low an intensity?

I am pretty sure this is correct but am just making sure of the terminology!

i think you're okay but .. over time I found that I could handle more for longer than I ever thought at the start. I'm not too precise about it but was hitting IF's of 0.85 to 0.95 regularly (2-5 hrs). My VI was typically 1.10 or less so the AP was well up there too (more a function of terrain than anything else).

Basically ride as hard & long as you can without drastic fade in the last hour with a view to hitting tempo power for your entire core ride (minus warmup/cooldown) . Rinse, lather, repeat 🙂

When I started out, I also found I had to use perhaps one gear higher than was comfortable in order to keep the power up. That also went away over time.

Dang, I wish I could ride outside all winter and build up a whopping big ole CTL base but I can't control the weather.

rmur

Weather here's not too bad and at the moment i can get out quite a bit so i'm trying to build a big base.

My SST rides I would say are hard enough to feel but i can keep the pace all the way through and I am recovered enough to do them frequently, eg back to back 4 hours at weekends, I could push the pace a bit more i'm sure like you suggest, but a IF of 0.85-0.95 sounds pretty hard to recover from?? i thought the main advantage of SST training is you get the benefit of a fairly high intensity that you can recovery from day in day out which if it was 4 hours on the border of level 4 sounds more like a race!? whereas 4 hours in low level 3 is pretty easy to recover from and repeat?

tk_bike said:

Weather here's not too bad and at the moment i can get out quite a bit so i'm trying to build a big base.

My SST rides I would say are hard enough to feel but i can keep the pace all the way through and I am recovered enough to do them frequently, eg back to back 4 hours at weekends, I could push the pace a bit more i'm sure like you suggest, but a IF of 0.85-0.95 sounds pretty hard to recover from?? i thought the main advantage of SST training is you get the benefit of a fairly high intensity that you can recovery from day in day out which if it was 4 hours on the border of level 4 sounds more like a race!? whereas 4 hours in low level 3 is pretty easy to recover from and repeat?

okay if you have the time available then you can trade-off intensity .. and yes I'd agree that repeatability is a big bonus of SST training. Not much point in performing say a 300TSS ride if you can't effectively train the next day.

But over time you should still strive increase your load/power - otherwise I don't believe it'll have the desired impact on FT. I tend to push to ~ 95% of my power PB for the duration. 90% would be a bad day and over 100% would be another PB.

My last real block of SST was two weeks in August and I 'magically' increased my FT 4% over that month. That was sweet 🙂

rmur

tk_bike said:

the figure depicting SST seems to show it ranging from upper l2 to l4, correct?

It's important to realize that the concept that Frank Overton termed "sweet spot" is really just my opinion*, and isn't based on any direct scientific evidence. That makes it a bit hard to define precisely where said "sweet spot" lies. Nonetheless, I would put it as ranging from ~75% to ~100% of functional threshold power, or about what you've concluded based on the figure (which is really meant to be conceptual in nature, and is a bit distorted due to the limitations of Excel).

*Actually, plenty of others - including, notably, Lydiard - seem to ascribe to the same notion. Thus, all I've really done is taken a common idea and expressed it in a more modern, quantitative manner.

acoggan said:

It's important to realize that the concept that Frank Overton termed "sweet spot" is really just my opinion*, and isn't based on any direct scientific evidence. That makes it a bit hard to define precisely where said "sweet spot" lies. Nonetheless, I would put it as ranging from ~75% to ~100% of functional threshold power, or about what you've concluded based on the figure (which is really meant to be conceptual in nature, and is a bit distorted due to the limitations of Excel).

*Actually, plenty of others - including, notably, Lydiard - seem to ascribe to the same notion. Thus, all I've really done is taken a common idea and expressed it in a more modern, quantitative manner.

Thanks, would a fair summary of the above posts be that SST can be broadly defined as an IF of 0.75-1.00 (ie 75-100% FTP) but, as with zone 2-4 work there can be a trade of in intensity and time such that a longer session (ie several hours) at an IF of 0.75-0.85 is SST and a shorter session, say 1-2 hours at an IF of 0.90-1.00 (which again would have the time/intensity trade off since by definition you can't do 2 hours at an IF of 1.00) would also be a SST workout but would be obviously be a shorter duration.

The choice of workout would be influenced by time avaialble amongst other things so, since I have the time and weather to train outdoors for several hours I could to SST as a longer, less intense ride, or as a shorter more intense one but if i was limited to the trainer I would probable choose the shorter, more intense session for my sanity's sake!

tk_bike said:

Thanks, would a fair summary of the above posts be that SST can be broadly defined as an IF of 0.75-1.00 (ie 75-100% FTP)

With respect to the "sweet spot", I think it is better to think in terms of average power/training levels, and not normalized power/IF. I say that because a high degree of "stochasticity" (i.e., a high variability index) may impact the effects such training may have.

tk_bike said:

but, as with zone 2-4 work there can be a trade of in intensity and time such that a longer session (ie several hours) at an IF of 0.75-0.85 is SST and a shorter session, say 1-2 hours at an IF of 0.90-1.00 (which again would have the time/intensity trade off since by definition you can't do 2 hours at an IF of 1.00) would also be a SST workout but would be obviously be a shorter duration.

Indeed, this is essentially the "sweet spot" concept: in terms of the type of adaptations that are induced, levels 2 through 5 are really all the same. However, within that broad continuum over which you are simply trading volume for intensity and intensity for volume, there seems to be a narrower range over which an optimal combination of volume and intensity can be achieved, i.e., a "sweet spot". As we've been kicking around, that plateau seems to be from around the border of level 2 and level 3 as I've defined them, up to functional threshold power itself. I'm not sure, though, that it is possible to narrow it down any more than that.