- Good morning Trainiacs.
I am what you would call stoked,
psyched, pumped up
about the recent FTP test that I did last week.
Things are on the up and up.
So I did an FTP test,
probably about like three four months ago
in October, November, it didn't go great.
Like it was aggressively average.
And then I figured last week
you know what things have been kind of trending
in the right direction.
Been feeling healthier,
been able to execute decent workouts with decent power.
Let's see how we end up doing with a new FTP test.
It went well, I got up to 275 watt FTP
which is pretty close to my all time best indoor FTP.
Now the plan is because it's, this is not a joke.
We are in a polar vortex in Winnipeg.
It means right now at the moment,
it's I believe minus 46 with the wind chill Celsius
which is minus 50 Fahrenheit just see you don't go outside.
And it's also what we call on our team training app,
strength and speed season.
This is like getting us ready to be in race season
even though we don't know if there's going to be any races
might as well try to build up that power.
So we can then later in the season refine that power
into really good sustained race efforts.
So I'm just doing a little one hour 45 minute
spin right now,
but I wanna share how to design workouts
and how to progress workouts over the course
of let's call it an eight week FTP building process
so that you can basically guarantee
that over the course of eight weeks
coming into the race season,
that you're building up that FTP.
Now, as I've said before, your FTP
your functional threshold power,
the maximum amount of power that you can theoretically hold
for 60 minutes is not the be all end all for racing.
But it's a really good way just to design workouts
to end up improving your top end power.
But what we'll get into is like actually giving you
the exact workout that you can do
over the course of the next eight weeks
leading into your races.
I've been watching a lot of golf videos on the trainer here.
I am gonna be so good at golf just by osmosis
by the time golf season rolls around.
That's how it works, right?
Let's plan out this FTP building plan
with regards to how a week is going to look,
how the workouts are going to look
and how to progress it
throughout the course of the eight week period.
So what I've done is I've laid out a week
and what I've talked about
in my "Triathlon Bike Foundations" book is that
you can improve and train for a triathlon
with just two workouts a week.
One intense ride, and one long ride.
Now that is in the context of doing a triathlon
where you have to fit in running,
you have to fit in strength,
you have to fit in swimming.
Now, if we're just taking a backseat
with everything besides cycling,
what I like to do
is step that amount of rides up to four times a week.
That's where you really start making improvement.
So what I'm going to put in here is
I'm gonna put in four rides throughout the week.
And that is going to really really like
almost supercharge the ability to make progress
because you're not going any more than a day
without actually doing a ride.
So it's keeping that muscle memory fresh.
Also, you'll notice that I indicated strength here.
Now you've heard me talk a lot about
how strength is really key to overall endurance training.
Well, this study here is a really good example of why.
It's called the effects of resistance training
on road cycling performance among highly trained cyclists,
a systematic review.
What the gist of it is is that
if you took a highly trained cyclist
and you just added strength training in,
it wasn't quite clear if that helped their performance.
But if you actually substituted some of their cycling
with strength training,
it was clear that it did improve their performance.
And the theory is that that additional strength training
without an offset in reducing the cycling,
actually creates more fatigue
than the athletes could handle.
So what this is actually telling us is A,
strength training is important,
but B this study actually showed
that you could train less in cycling
and actually improve your performance
by substituting cycling for some strength.
So in our case, me wanting to focus on strength and mobility
a whole lot right now,
I am going to include,
we're gonna do three dedicated strength sessions
because I'm already doing yoga every single day
and a lot of mobility.
So I don't wanna really load up too much on this.
What I wanna actually do is space them out.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to space them evenly
throughout the week.
So that means that I'm going to do my first ride on Tuesday.
I'm going to do my second ride on Thursday.
I'm gonna do my third ride on Saturday
and then I'm going to do my next ride on Sunday
and why I'm going to do the Saturday Sunday back to back
as opposed to another time is because
I wanna have longer workouts grouped together
to build that endurance.
So what should all of these workouts be?
Well, I know as a default
I am going to do the Team Trainiac group ride on the Zwift.
This is open to all you can come join.
We tend to do it Thursday mornings 9:00 AM Central Time.
I lead it, you can ask questions
and I tell bad dad jokes in that.
So that's going to be a ride
that I'm definitely going to do.
This is going to be about a 30 minute ride typically
and it's going to be slightly intense
but that's not a ton of intensity
for increasing your FTP.
To build up for more intensity,
I'm going to add another longer intense ride here
on Tuesday.
So between those two things,
I'm gonna probably end up getting somewhere
between about 20 and 40 minutes at high power.
Now ride number three.
This is going to be my long ride.
And it's important to keep a long ride with low intensity
because you don't want to sacrifice
all of your aerobic capabilities for nothing but high power
because what happens then is your fat metabolism,
isn't getting exercised.
And what will happen is at those lower intensity levels
you're gonna be burning through
a lot of your easy access glycogen stores
that you wanna save for the higher intensity levels.
Then finally, the fourth ride is going to be
a strength-based ride.
So this is building up the muscular endurance
essentially making our legs stronger
transferring that actual strength
from the strength training into biking.
I'll explain what that's going to look like in a second.
Then let's put in these strength workouts
and essentially I am at the whim of joining NTK
for some kettlebell workouts.
We do one on Saturday.
I like to group my intense workouts together, actually.
So I'm not gonna take say a rest day being Friday
and add in intense strength
because I'm not doing intensity and swim bike run.
I actually wanna let rest be rest.
So a Friday is gonna be easy, it's gonna be really easy.
If Monday is gonna be easy, it's gonna be really easy.
That's why I'm going to actually insert my strength workouts
into other key days.
And then the third strength workout,
this is going to be a heavier, dedicated day
with heavier strength.
Typically really compound movements like dead lifts.
So this is how I'm gonna break out the week.
On Monday and Friday, I'm gonna continue to run.
And if I'm feeling okay
and I need to feel like I need to loosen up
I'm gonna also insert a 30 minute swim into these days
or maybe even Wednesday
but that's what my week is going to look like.
Then the question is,
what are these rides going to look like?
Well, we've got this group ride taken care of.
That's gonna be a little bit intense.
This long ride, in my case,
when I say a long ride, whatever a long ride is for you
as soon as it starts getting into just feeling long,
maybe if you're a new sprint athlete
that is going to be 45 minutes, that's okay.
If you're an iron man athlete
and a long ride is actually four hours, do four hours.
In my case, two hours and I'm happy.
Then the two workouts here
that are gonna be the question is
a longer intense ride and the strength based ride.
How do we do those?
Well build here a Zwift ride
that you can actually duplicate for the longer intense ride.
What I like to use is ZWOfactory.com.
And we're gonna start with the FTP building intense.
If I can spell.
What I'm shooting for here is about 60 minutes
I always like to start with a 10 minute easy warmup.
And I usually start somewhere around 33% of FTP,
growing to about 45% of FTP.
Then to turn on the connection
between the brain and the legs,
I like to do really short bursts
that aren't tremendously intense, but with high cadence.
So what I typically build for our Team Trainiac athletes is
a ten second surge
at 100% percent of your FTP
with a 50 second rest in between.
Now we're gonna do the easy section
of the 50 seconds between at about 40% of FTP.
Now, the thing that I build in here
is that we set the cadence for those ten second faster burst
to 105 RPM.
It's that quick RPM that's going to turn on the connection
between the brain and the legs.
So then comes the intervals.
This is what's really going to increase the FTP.
What I'm looking to do here
is I'm looking to accumulate enough intensity
and time at that intensity that it's more than 20 minutes.
So this is more than the theoretical FTP 20 minute test
at a power that is higher than our FTP.
And what this is going to do is adding in the rest.
We are going to then start adapting
to being at an FTP that is higher than our FTP.
It's going to pull our FTP up.
So what I'm going to end up doing here
is I'm gonna do eight repeats of one minute at 105% of FTP.
And then one minute rest at 40% of FTP.
For key intervals like this,
you do whatever cadence is most comfortable to you.
So I'm not going to set the cadence on this.
And a one-to-one ratio is usually pretty easy
to actually absorb.
So then we are going to do a three minute,
easy spin to recover from that.
And then I'm just gonna repeat that.
So I'm gonna add that once,
I'm gonna add the recovery,
I'm going to add that again.
And then I'm going to add a cool-down of,
we'll just do three minutes.
I'm not a big believer in big, massive cooldowns.
So with that, we've got an hour and 12 minute ride.
Now, how do you adjust this as you go?
You can upload this workout,
and I'll show you how in a second,
to Zwift, and then as you're progressing
you just increase the bias on the workout.
So you are absolutely going to get stronger.
Like your body just literally has no choice
but to figure out how to get faster.
What I'll do is I'll save this to my workouts.
I'll download the ZWO file
and then let's create the strength building workout.
So I've deleted everything there.
I'm going to change this
to the FTP buildings, strength ride.
I like to just do a 10 minute gradual build.
I'm gonna add all of the intervals.
It's going to be roughly about an hour long
maybe just a little bit longer
and these are longer, low cadence intervals.
So the duration, we're gonna do this as four minutes.
We're then going to do it as 80% of FTP.
And because the intensity isn't super, super intense,
we can actually make the restoration a little bit shorter.
So we're gonna make that two minutes there.
Now I wanna extend this enough
so that I get roughly around 40 minutes or so
of intensity here.
So I've got nine minutes here already.
I'm gonna increase that then to nine repeats of that.
I'm then going to add a cool-down 40 minutes,
40% of FTP down to 33% of FTP.
It's gonna be a three minute cool-down
and this is the same sort of thing.
You can gradually increase the bias as you go.
And then I'm going to set the cadence on this.
We're gonna go down to 65.
That's where leg strength is really good.
You can still put out high power
and you're really working on leg strength.
Save that workout, download the ZWO file.
And you might look at this and say,
"Well, geez these workouts really
aren't that interesting Taren."
Workouts when you have a purpose of something
that you were working on
shouldn't be interesting.
The idea of constant muscle confusion,
doesn't quite work the way that you think it does.
It's not like you're constantly changing things up
and it's going to adapt quicker.
You're actually just bouncing around all over the place
and the body then doesn't have any reason
to actually get faster.
Final thing is that
we've gotta get these workouts into Zwift.
And what do is we go into our documents.
There's gonna be a folder there.
If you have Zwift downloaded onto your laptop,
it's called Zwift.
You go to Zwift, you go to workouts.
There's gonna be some weird number there.
And then you go and just drag and drop those ZWO files
that you created into Zwift.
Now, when you end up going into Zwift,
you go to the ride type, you go to training
and in your custom workouts it'll be a dropdown here.
Those FTP tests are going to be in there.
So we've got the FTP building intense ride.
We've got the FTP building strength ride
and then it's in there for us to use.
And we can repeat that for the first four weeks.
And then we'll come back here at midway
and I'll create two new workouts.
And we'll share that with you then.
So Trainiacs that is the FTP builder plan
that I'm going to be doing.
If you wanna see the first video that I did
in this step just to understand why I'm doing this,
how I'm thinking about it,
why do it at this point in the year,
you can go check that video out right there.
And if you aren't already subscribed,
hit the subscribe button below.
If you're following me on Zwift, go check me out.
First name is T last name is riathlon Taren.
And hopefully we ride together
on some Thursday morning rides.
Later Trainiacs.