Recovery between workouts.
Just listened to podcast on training after forty and the big take away for me is taking enough recovery time for your age and type of work out.
Why isnt there the appropriate recovery incorporate into a planed workout based on your age?
I imagine that it would be mainly due to us all being unique in how much recovery we need, which will increase with age but the actual amount needed will vary. I’d use the podcast to give you the information you need to decide whether the current plan has enough recovery for you, and if not either adapt the plan, go to a 2:1 work:recovery week plan, or arrange a call with a coach.
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Hey @Marty_Ja ,
@TTDragon stated it perfectly. When you choose a plan, the 2:1 should give you plenty of recovery, theoretically. If you need more recovery, then a chat with a coach to develop a training plan strategy or template unique to you, is a good idea. Multiple factors come into play when assessing recovery needs besides age. Such factors include but not limited to: fitness level, time available to train, stress, nutrition status, hydration status, sleep quality, training/racing experience (recent and long term), etc. Having coached a wide variety of older athletes, and being one myself, there is no generalized approach for a stock plan to be based solely on age.
Cheers,
Spencer
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I’ve posted/asked about this a number of times and think SYSTM can and should do it in some manner. There is individual variability, but that’s the case at all ages. 4DP as it is characterizes performance and tailors plans around that and objectives. It does not characterize or adjust for how individuals may vary in their training response. The plans are designed (I presume) around the typical amateur athlete around 30-40 years of age. If that’s good, they could also create or adjust plans for different ages. As with the current plans, these would be good nominal plans but would require less/smaller ad hoc adjustment for age by the individual.
Also, I don’t think the suggestion of choosing 2:1 instead of 3:1 is the correct/adequate adjustment for older athletes. More recovery is needed between hard workouts during the plan, not necessarily at the end of a block.
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Hey @Saddlesaur ,
I’ve read all your posts and agree that there’s a great variation in the amount of recovery needed for each individual as they age but there is no standardization on the rate of decline in recovery rate due to aging anywhere. There are so many factors involved as I alluded to in the above comment. Your 4DP numbers, unique to you are the basis from which all workouts should/can be accomplished. When you choose a plan, you can choose how much recovery you need by replacing intense workouts for easier ones. If you want to create your own template for your training plans, have a chat with us and we can tailor it to your needs. Keep posting your challenges to us though, it’ll drive us to collect data on our older athletes, which is a considerable size right now and growing.
Cheers,
Spencer
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Thank you for looking into us “Old Age” athletes. One conversation we’ve had is that the amount of recovery can and does vary. The suggestion of moving from a HIIT ride to less intense ride is one to take seriously. I’ve found that just doing FTP level rather than MAP for Revolver, for instance, can make a rough week look possible.
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To date, what I’ve done is stick in a recovery ride/day in when I needed it, and delayed the rest of the plan by that day, so my plan gets longer by the number of added recovery days I stick in. I’ve done this rather than skip a hard workout or replace it with an easy one, so I still do all the hard workouts.
Granted , there may not be (or at least we don’t know of it) any data on the relative amount of recovery that is need as people age, but it is a very well known effect, and one that coaches will use to modify the plans they create for older riders. AFAIK, the 4DP athlete performance assessment and characterization didn’t exist before SYSTM did the work/research to come up with it. Maybe this is an opportunity for SYSTM to design an age adjustment in their plans. At the very least, it could simply be an dial a rider could adjust to change a plan wrt the amount of recovery.
I’ve mentioned in the past Trainerroad’s adaptive plans, which adjust base on performance after a workout. I’ve used Trainerroad in the past but not since they came out with this feature. I haven’t tried it yet, but I presume it would detect the need for more recovery and change the plan accordingly.
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No , unfortunately it doesn’t, I think there is a lot of sales talk when it comes to TR and AT, the plan is laid out, the Adaptive bit basically just responds to question response at the end of the workout = Easy make next V02 workout harder, Hard Make next V02 (if the current workout is a V02 workout), the same or just a little harder, and that’s about as clever as it gets, I does not look at any metric other than the result of the question you answer at the end of a workout, it doesn’t look at your total TSS for the week and go, hmm thats up on last week, lets make the next workout easy, it doesn’t say, he’s done a lot of v02 / threshold, lets change the next threshold workout to a recovery ride or a base,
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Interesting. At least it’s adapting to something. With SYSTM, I make that assessment and then have to decide what changes to make and make them on my own. I’ll have to give TR a try in the late fall/winter when I get back into training indoors. And, if it sucks, it’s an easy opportunity for SYSTM to do it better.
My feeling as a aging athlete (I’m only 52) , is that it’s the wrong thing and focus solely rest is the wrong thing as well, Sufferfest tailers your workout zones, TR progresses your workout zones until you can’t do it any more
I’ve been wearing a Whoop for the last year, and after 30 years of racing (podiuming at national mtb events) I feel that my fitness is probably at it’s highest, and the thing that I have learned (the whoop is basically a recovery analyzer) is that increasing intensity is not the path to follow, if you listen to Seiner (the recent Dylan Johnson videos are good) talk about the 80:20, it’s not that 80:20 is a great ration, its about riding (training) as much as you can, and getting a enough intensity into it that you can recover, not increasing your time off the bike so that you can recover from increasing intensity.
I’m still at 2 rest days a week, but also only 2 intense days a week, the rest is zone 2 and just riding, I listern to my body a lot more, if TR / SF was today is a intense day, and I am tired, it’s not a intense day, and that works the other way round, if they say today is a rest day, and I am feeling great, I will do my intense workout, but I never lose the rest day, just move/swap it, after all a web app isn’t going to know about that other stuff going on in your life, can’t see your resting HR, can’t see you HRV
The other thing that I have learned from the Whoop is that just following a plan is selling myself short if I am feeling good, and the workout is 70TSS, i probably have another 1.5 / 2 hours of zone 2 in me, and feel ok the next day, but if i double the intensity I will be tired and burn’t out, and also work can have just as big an effect on my recovery as training
I think the thing I am trying too say (and I am sorry if this has been a little bit all over the place) is the a training plan is just a guide to to the work and recovery that you need, and only you will ever be able to tell exactly how much you need (and don’t look a TR to do anything but burn you out)
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@PedalMonkey Agreed - I am a similar age and have found the same works for me. Generally I am doing one or two intense days with the rest Z2 and fitting in extra Z2 where my body allows.
On the TR boards the thread reacting to Dylan Johnson’s critique of TR has been going on for a long time now and the threads on the new adaptive stuff are mixed as well. Frankly I don’t see any magic formula over there.
As you noted, success in training includes knowing one’s own limits and making a point of consistently tracking them (and/or working with a coach to do the same). Whether it is work stress or doing an outside ride with friends where i head into the red more than planned, I am the one that needs to make the adjustments based on the data, how I feel and what I know is coming up on the schedule. Sometimes it is more art than science.
I would highlight three other areas that are really helpful to the aging athlete - yoga, strength and warm-ups.
For me, yoga really helps the recovery process by keeping my muscles more flexible and in a ready state for training. I pay the price when I train hard and skip the yoga.
Strength sometimes has the same effect as yoga depending on the workout and sometimes is counter to yoga but overall it helps to better condition muscles - hitting a bit more range than what is achieved on the bike.
Warmups also make a difference - that extra 10 or 15 minutes can really pay dividends before an intense ride or even a longe Z2 ride.
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One thing that I will say is that at 54 I was able to do several HIIT workouts a week. Now, it maybe one or two at 62 with several very serious incidents. I think the incidents did more than aging. The hard/soft/recovery cycle is particular to each individual and using HRV or a Whoop definitely advises you to take it easy or even add a rest day.
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Or go harder, I feel that people following a plan blindly follow it, and yes you need to follow the intention of the plan, but you also have to question it, obviously you have to take everything in context, there is no point increasing you recovery rides, or adding 5 hours to your zone 2 if you have The Shovel then next day
For me going harder on the hard days has meant that I can only do 2 HIT a week, but this also means you have more days to recover, without having to add more days off the bike, which when you listen to Steiner (or is at least what I hear) quantity is king, but like you say it’s all individual, but like I said earlier, I don’t feel that it’s a just a case of Systm adding more rest days for older individuals
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Thanks all who gave there thought on my post, certainly room for thought.
Regards
Martin Jones FWCC.
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The view from “62” - Completely agree with the assessment of TR. I ran a little winter experiment, to see if raising my Z2 base would improve my ability to add a second hard interval session during the week, by the time summer hit. Conclusion so far? NOPE!
This is the case, at least for me. Being retired, cycling is also important for me, socially. It’s hard to keep the discipline during group rides. This is particularly so, when I ride in a mountainous area with people 10-20 years younger. Most people my age have scaled back, for their own reasons.
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I am in my 70s, and I find the number of rides is more important than the intensity. Choosing an easy week over an intense week would give me very little extra recovery. I could take the chain off the bike and pedal with zero watts and my legs would still know they were working. It works well for me if I choose a building block, get two or maybe three key workouts a week, then pad the week out with easy rides, or days off as I feel fit. Other plans I have checked, would have me riding most days a week.
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