Training plan - weekends, moving workouts and increasing ride intensity

Searched high and low on the forum and struggling to find answers so would appreciate your combined wisdom on a number of questions that have been sitting in my mind since starting a new plan. Sorry, it is quite long due to the contextualising.

I am current doing the All Purpose road on moderate intensity 2:1 up to Christmas to regain fitness before possibly switching to high intensity 2:1. I am 54 years old, fairly fit and two years of Wahoo/Systm/Sffrfst experience and have made great gains using the programs. Current 4DP last week of 259FTP

  1. I assume the training plans take into account the progressive load and improvements in fitness (FTP, MAP etc) in between tests? (e.g. Half Monty). I was wondering if it would be useful to increase the “Ride Intensity” in the settings of a workout be a percent or so each week in anticipation of the fitness gains made. I have generally made ±15% gains over a 12 week plan which is evenly split over the 2x6 week cycles.

On a simplistic level, this would mean I make just over 1% gain per week. With the 2:1 there are plenty of offload/recovery weeks for fitness compensation to take place. So would it be useful to anticipate the % gains and increase intensity each week and therefore gain a further training advantage or is the load of the plans taking this into account with progressive overload to compensate?

  1. For the plans, All Purpose Road 2:1 moderate intensity. If weather is good and I have time, I would take the weekend training outside but don’t have a power meter and I’m on a Garmin.
    If I have Blender for a Saturday and I want to take advantage of good weather, I don’t think I can practically do the session and follow it properly. Would 2 1/2 hours tempo be sufficient for training load? OR what should I do? Blender has a TSS of 128 and IF of 0.87, so it is a challenging session which 2 1/2 hrs on the road at tempo should also be, although with different training stresses.

  2. If I have a session like Defender on Sat 5th November and have time to ride outside for longer, should I move this to during the week and replace one of the easier sessions? (see screen shot below)?

Generally speaking I am time crunched during the week with 1 hour sessions the max and can spare 2/3 hours during the weekend for fresh air rides which are also pure meditation and getting away from it. During the week I have no qualms to switching a longer session (1hr) to a shorter one like Half is Easy, The Cure, Joyride DAYT to make sure I get a session in around family life and work commitments.

I appreciate the WahooX plans are for time crunched people like myself but would it be possible to have future training plans that take into account we may have more time at the weekend for the rides that make us feel alive and make it all worth while. I seem to remember the old Sufferfest plans had more endurance outside with the 12 week All Purpose Road

Sorry for the ramblings, but if anyone has any input, that would be gratefully received.

Cheers
Colin (aka FatSprinter)

@FatSprinter Welcome back! I have done this before. You need to be careful as you can get into a situation where you burn out quicker so go easy with this method. The 2 to 1 schedule is a solid choice as it allows more recovery.

Yes - I would probably do something similar - trying to replicate the workout where possible but also just riding where it isn’t. For outside workouts I tend to stick to endurance and also sprint work as I don’t have a power meter and RPE is sometimes tough to gauge depending on the terrain.

Given your schedule I would suggest just skipping Defender and doing a longer endurance ride with the extra time or doing it on the planned date and then some easy spinning outside.

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@JSampson Thanks Jon for the warm welcome back. Its been too long. Thanks for the advice. Looking forward to putting it into action. I figure moderate intensity and 2:1 is the way to go to get back into it and having just turned 54, not getting any younger but not ready to ease off into a big comfy armchair, pipe and slippers. The Chores was very hard but doable this evening despite the day from hell. Cheers again.

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@FatSprinter Happy to help! Also try to incorporate strength where possible. We are at the age where we are losing muscle and time on the bike can also accelerate bone loss so to the extent possible I would suggest adding in two or three sessions a week of either the SYSTM strength & mobility program or doing something on your own maybe with free weights or a combination of both. Take it slow and aim for good form and consistency.

@JSampson That is the next piece in the puzzle. Just need life/work to let up a little. It was a struggle to fit in the planned interval session yesterday. I probably need to utilise my lunch break and see what strength I can do in the work place in place of lunch.

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For future reference, I suggest asking the question first. Then the relevance and importance of the following contextualizing will be obvious to the reader. If I don’t know what the question is, I don’t know why I’m reading the background info or how it applies. It’s also more interesting if I know where it’s going.

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