I just went from 650 babby shoes to deep carbon 30mm tires and oh man it spins so much quicker. The weight is +30g overall because I was on some stupid light stans podiums to Ti hub thing.
Get an aero helmet, too. None of those high vent things, one of the smooth boys. And some aero rims matched to your tire width. And some shoe covers.
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Best advice.
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About the worst length of interval one can do.
Assuming you’re riding all out for 10m, that’s too little intensity to stimulate zone 5 adaptations and too little time to stimulate zone 4 adaptations.
Typical interval lengths are 5m and 20m respectively.
All y’all “gimme some intervals” bros oughta go out and get a 6x5 in. That’s 5m in zone 5, so supra-threshold with a 1m rest between each. It’ll do wonders for your VO2Max (which will fall off quickly), make you wanna puke, and yield surprisingly little training stress.
@halbritt why increase fitness? Throw some money at the problem! (An aero helmet will help more than one thinks. So will lifting weights and doing interval training)
I would rather die before commuting in an aero helmet. I hope that’s not what you are saying. Hill intervals are great and you can use time very effectively. Either set a watch timer to beep after a preset period or pick a place on the hill and try to match it each time. If you are doing it correctly your second and last intervals should achieve the same distance. No use being fast on your first one but progressively slower on each subsequent effort. Pick a medium grade hill that lets you pick your pace. For commuter-training tho, doing efforts, say sprinting from one lamp-post to another is a pretty good use of time.
It’s a piss take, but there’s multiple approaches to going faster.
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My whole diatribe in this thread is that stuff like interval training and weight training are all ancillary to building fitness which only comes from accumulating training stress.
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You can accumulate training stress while doing intervals.
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Telling someone without a power meter to ride in Zone 4 or Zone 5 is not helpful. That workout is VO2 for 2 minutes followed by threshold for 8 minutes. The idea is that you dig into your W’bal before going to threshold.
Any amount of stimulus over the level of JRA is going to cause an adaptation. Or to quote Merckx, “Don’t buy upgrades, ride up grades."
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Thread needs an acronym/initialism glossary. (AIG)
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I can make the first post a wiki so anyone can edit it
Bullshit.
Ride as hard as you can for 5m, if you can’t make it to 6m at the same intensity, that’s zone 5. If you can make it to 20m, that’s zone 4.
Cheers.
PE - Perceived Exertion
CTL/LTS - Chronic Training Load / Long Term Stress (fitness)
ATL/STS - Acute Training Load / Short Term Stress (fatigue)
TSS - Training Stress Score
IF - Intensity Factor
TSB - Training Stress Balance
FTP - Functional Threshold Power
CP - Critical Power
PMC - Performance Manager Chart
TRIMP - Banister Training Impulse
Many of these terms were invented by Coggan who eventually trademarked some of them and got really mad when the Golden Cheetah folks basically took his formulas and replicated their functionality in their software. There was a pretty big row and they came up with their own terms that are either functionally identical or very similar.
Coggan has an academic bent and a world of papers to his name, but very little about power:
All of his work on power training is pretty well documented in his book, “Racing and Training with a Power Meter” and is all built upon prior research like Banister’s TRIMP. He (reasonably, imho) sought to profit from his research by partnering with Hunter Allen and creating the Training Peaks software in addition to the book.
The row occurred at some point with his book published and the software “finished” power meters became more widely available and others looked to build upon what he’d done. Training Peaks was pretty stagnant feature-wise when GC came along. He was and still is pretty butthurt about folks leveraging his “discoveries” but he continues to be pretty generous with information. At times, I’ve seen him call the GC guys outright thiefs and then jump on their mailing list and point out mistakes in their implementation.
Anyway, all this is pretty well documented on the Wattage list and a few twitter feuds if one wanted to rehash the history. I’ve not been paying much attention the last few years. More recently I’ve started messing about again evaluating what exists on Strava, Cycling Analytics, as well as GC.
The Strava performance manager is okay, easy to use, but imprecise. Cycling Analytics is surprisingly good. GC still has a terrible UI, but works the best for deep analysis. There’s a hell of a learning curve, though.
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I used Cycling Peaks for years but they tried to screw me each time I upgraded my PC so I just let it die and now use Golden Cheetah for the odd time that I look at something.
Many, many people had this experience. The mac version was coming “any day now” for two years, the PC version was languishing and Golden Cheetah was gaining ground very quickly.
IIRC version 4.x slipped its release date by more than a year. I haven’t bothered to check it or the web version out since I started messing around with power again.
Guess I would be better off in the “meh, not very involved bicycle training thread”
Bought the ticket, took the ride.
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Sorry.
Want to casually get faster? Do “training” rides, that is, anything beyond JRA, put on some kit, and the only metric you really need to track is hours on the bike. Try to make it go up.
Naw man,
Response appropriate to forum and thread. I’m just recognizing myself as not the target demo of this thread is all.
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STOP SHITTIN UP MY THRED THEN
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