Cautionary Tale Training Too Easy on Low Volume

Training and Performance Fundamentals
1

First, I want to complement Alex on an outstanding application and web site. The workout builder is fantastic, I’d say it is the best there is. The app is feature rich and stable, it works great.

I haven’t been especially nice around here lately and there’s a reason why.

I started cycling around the time of the pandemic doing Peloton power zone rides with Matt Wilpers and riding outside. The power zone workouts follow Coggan zones and there are harder workouts of course, but the endurance rides are not straight zone 2. They are zone 3 with zone 2 recovery. The rides are not easy.

The cycling bug bit me. I started off with not much performance in 2020, but improved steadily and by the end of 2022 I was much better than when I started. FTP had increased by ~ 50%.

I asked myself in 2023 how good can Peloton power zone training really be? Surely, the influencers must have a better way of training. I probably listened to too many sources and messed up the prescription, but somehow I came away from that with a zone 2 heavy approach where I’d either just ride normally outside and do some zone 2 inside or I’d mostly ride zone 2 with an occasional harder session inside, but by no means was I doing hard training. My volume in 2023 was about 235 hours so ok for an average guy, but by cyclist standards not much volume.

I plateau’d hard from 2023-2025 with this approach. There was basically zero progress beyond longer outdoor rides making me better in say hour #3 of a 3 hour ride. The indoor training sessions were completely ineffective. I thought I was the problem.

I don’t know what took me so long, but after a December deloading block I’ve been training much harder since January although still keeping volume at 4 or 4.5 hours a week.

My bread and butter workout has been 1 hour rides 2x20 at 90% of FTP. I’ve done it over and over and now I’m finally making progress. I earned an FTP increase from the first 4 week block and now in the 2nd block RPE is trending easier again and I’m confident I’ve earned another increase.

This isn’t just gaming FTP type intervals/tests either. I’m confident I’m better across the board and finally improving.

If you are a low volume cyclist like me and you want to get better then think carefully about your intensity distribution. Long zone 2 rides are fantastic, but 1 hour easy rides are unlikely to drive much improvement. Intensity is not your enemy. Doing challenging intervals will make you stronger as long as you can recover from them.

I’ve been cranky about making minimal progress for 3 years and then finding improvement comes fairly easily when you do the right work. Hopefully this post will help someone avoid the mistakes I’ve made.

I’m not interested to debate any of this. If you disagree that is ok.

I don’t think I have much else to contribute regarding training so I should check out for a while.

Dave

2

Yes, I believe everyone should think of low intensity as a base period. Even @BlackTek saw rather small gains during his recent base period, but then afterwards, as soon as he jumped into something more intensity, he saw much bigger gains than he saw in the previous year. So while the low intensity might not produce results in itself, it might lead the way to allowing your body to produce results with higher intensity later. Which is just what you saw. You were saying you did low intensity, you didn’t see much. Then you jumped into some higher intensity and you saw gains. The lower intensity might have helped in that process. Gives you a time of recovery.

2 Likes
3

I’ve been humbled by this experience. I thought I was doing things right and was a non-responder / slow-responder but that doesn’t appear to be the case. I think I was just training wrong.

I’m very reluctant to give others advice now because I think each person has a unique background and my experience isn’t going to match a lot of people. I definitely don’t want to parrot advice.

BlackTek is a different case than me because he is well trained and has higher volume. He showed his fat oxidation curve and the shape is more like a pro’s than an amateur’s curve. I think it is awesome what he has been able to achieve.

You may be right with your assessment about my situation, but I’m not sure. I think the past 3 years were basically maintenance. I can be negative about it and call it a “3-year plateau” or I can be more positive and call it “maintenance”.

I’m convinced if I just kept following Matt Wilper’s advice this whole time I would have kept improving until I had a plateau, but the plateau would have occurred at a higher FTP.

I think If you don’t have enough volume then zone 2 rides of less than X duration are maintenance / filler and X depends upon the rider in question. I would say for me 2 hours is probably the minimum to get adaptation out of it.

I’ve been frustrated / angry about this topic, but that has passed and I’ve accepted it now. Live and learn I guess. Find your own True North and live to those principals, but sometimes you pick the wrong principles. :slight_smile:

Dave

4

Yes, each person needs to experiment to find what works for them and try to understand their body. I have said this many times but I was running for two years, and ran a marathon and than after that did 100 days in a row starting at 130bpm of 15-30 minutes a day and ended at 100bpm at the same pace. This is a 30% improvement after two years of running, meaning a decent base level and this was 100 days of 99% zone 1/2. This was less than 3 hours a week. This is running, this was me following very strict Maffetone protocol. So as you said the individual person matters, their history, the exact training they are doing and likely the sport.

You will likely see a plateau, and it sounds like it will be a higher one which is super fun. When you get one, you likely need to mix it up. Most people that are consistent like yourself need some level of periodization. The most popular is going from a base period to a peak period. The peak period should be hard.

1 Like