It feels pretty hard. Actually it looks like threshold training to me
I feel no room nor energy to update my fitness signature via breakthrough effort.
Should I discard recomended workouts and add lower intensity?
Should I alter my improvement rate from Moderate 2 to Slow?
Should I use form feedback more agressively?
I am thinking of this:
Day 1 Easy Long Endurance (max 75% FTP/HR) 90-180
Day 2 Rest
Day 3 HIT 60-90 (30/30’s etc.)
Day 4 Rest
Day 5 Endurance with some efforts depending on my form
Day 6 Rest
REPEAT
I really appreciate your points of view!
BTW I’m keen on my sleep, food, vitamins, whey proteine, BCAA etc.
Longer focus duration athletes like Climber and Sprint Time Triallist, will see a lot of workouts like you have shown. These are mostly Low XSS strain activities so it isn’t uncommon to see these repeat like you see here. More threshold training than polarized. You’d see this also at the beginning of a Build phase for more athlete types.
For shorter duration athlete types like Breakaway Specialist, you’ll likely see greater polarization take effect during the mid/latter part of Build and in the Peak phase of your Training Program. However, if you’re in a Slow or Maintenance mode improvement, you may not see much polarization with greater repetitive higher intensity workouts. Polarization comes more into play when you’re training with higher volume, greater frequency and/or higher improvement rates. Your status goes yellow more frequently and endurance/easier rides will become recommended more, often following an 80/20 rule as you’d expect.
You’ll see more Threshold/Sweet Spot recommended in base training, since those workouts will accrue XSS at a faster rate (75-90 XSS/hr) than very low-intensity base workouts (~60 XSS/hr). If you prefer not to do these types of workouts, you can manually increase the polarity of the system by filtering by workout difficulty. On your easier/endurance days, you can filter workouts by <= 2.0 difficulty, which does eliminate many of the threshold(ish) workouts and leaves you with easier recommended workouts.
As Armando mentioned, you’ll see increasing polarity as you progress deeper into the Build & Peak phases, where a hard training session (starting from blue star status) will leave you in yellow star status for a few days, which will result in generally easier (<2.5 difficulty) endurance workouts being recommended.
I don’t find this improvement rate long term sustainable. I tend to be mostly slow (true twice ) and sometimes I whill have a week or two at Moderate-1 to spice it up just a tinny bit.
Always keep in mind that the advice is based on your training history and not on some pre-defined plan. For example, if your training loads have been declining, you’ll likely see more high-intensity workouts recommended. Why? Because you’re training less than before (TLs are dropping) so you should be fresher more often (by definition). This indeed may end up feeling harder if they are Threshold-ish workouts. These tend to feel harder and more tiring than similar workouts that are pure endurance or have a higher Focus power.
If your High and Peak systems are well trained, it may be hard to get them into a yellow status with threshold focus workouts and hence you’ll end up see more due to having blue status. Experiment with different amounts of XSS and Focus in your planner to see what it would take to reach yellow using something with a Climber focus, for example. If it takes more than you’re expecting, you likely already have your HIE and PP well-trained and could probably move closer to your target Athlete Type in your training.
) and sometimes I whill have a week or two at Moderate-1 to spice it up just a tinny bit.