I can’t believe I’m already thinking about what next year’s training will look like again. I’m going to try and do an even better job of sticking to Xert’s recommendations this year and see what happens. My thinking is that I’ll match my ramp rate to the phase I’m in. For example, I’ll use maybe +2 for Base, then +1 or 0 for Build, etc… Is it still the consensus that ramp rate should go down on a macro level as you get to your targeted events?
That’s interesting… I hadn’t thought about it that much before. For the event just passed I kept it at Moderate-1 (+2 ramp rate) until the week before the target date then switched improvement rate to Taper. But I’m not sure that was optimal, as I became “blue” only the day prior to the event. Although I must say I was subjectively feeling very fresh for it.
What’s the reasoning for incrementally reducing RR? I can think of a few reasons to reduce RR (again, not having thought much about it before). To bring freshness, because of an injury, and to avoid overtraining (e.g. if RR was increased temporarily for a block of training, like a training camp). To my uneducated thinking, if training is going well we would only need to reduce RR to bring freshness in the week or 10 days before the target event date. But I’m no coach!
Not sure there is a great reason for it. My thought came from older plans I’d seen where you hog on the load in base and then as you up the intensity (build) you drop the load a bit.
Also depends a bit how load is measured… the TSS approach doesn’t give as high a weighting to high intensity efforts, so in that model it’s probably not advisable to ramp and do a hard build phase with high intensity… Xert’s XSS seems to give a lot more weight / load to those high intensity efforts, plus, Xert polarisation will mean you won’t be doing big high intensity blocks (you’ll pretty much always have a chunk of endurance in there each week), so a ramp may be more sustainable even during build…
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