Coach Jack usually defaults to a long outdoor ride on the weekends. It’s -15C outside with several cm of snow so it’s unlikely I’ll be biking outdoors in the foreseeable future.
Personally, I find I can’t do more than an hour of indoor riding at a time. Should I spread out my endurance time across several days, (add Friday and Monday) or does it make more sense to break it up into several sessions on Sunday?
I know that it is difficult to do very long times in the simulator but the adaptations in the resistance phase are achieved precisely in this way, spending a good amount of time on the bike in resistance zones. What I would recommend is to do as much time as you think you can hold.
It makes no sense to split the sessions into several smaller ones since the focus of the adaptation is lost.
You can start progressively, first one hour, the next 1:15, 1:30 and so on.
At least until the weather clears up and you can go outside again.
Thanks @aguti00. I guess I’ll try taking a quick break around the hour mark but keep the sessions long.
You can limit the time of your sessions. At first, Coach Jack was asking me to do a 4h ride once a week: I was unable to do it, so I modified my plan so that the max time was 2h30. Which is still hard to do, but I’m now able to finish it.
This is the way to do it. Also think of it as a mental training, where you will increase your psychological resistance, it is also very important.
One thing I only started recently to stretch to 2-3hr indoor rides is get off the bike after an hour and stretch a bit.
Outdoor rides you pretty much are going to stop somewhere and unclip at a stop sign or toilet break etc, not sure why I used to think I needed to push through indoors without a break.
I’ll do it when there’s a rest interval to give my legs the chance to get up to speed again before another harder interval.
No reason why you couldn’t do this every 30min and increase the time between these breaks as your body adapts.
@mjpuncheur that’s a good point. It’s not like I’m in the saddle pedalling 100% of the time when I ride outside. Short breaks shouldn’t be a problem.
There’s a lot more then “not being in the saddle” outdoors:
I can’t get myself to do anything longer 100-120min on the trainer before getting saddle soreness, lower back discomfort and mental fatigue. But if you can do this back2back on 2 consecutive days, I’m sure it has some nice effect on aerobic fitness.
100% agreed. My biomechanics coach expert says no more than 90 minutes indoors. Not enough movement/variation. Easy for him to say he lives in Italy 
I need to ask him what he suggests as I don’t know the best answer here. I think he will just say keep it at 90 and maybe mix in other aerobic activites but let me confirm. He tends to be a perfectionist in this regard and focused on minimizing micro-damage, so personally I think there can be more flexibility but everything should be done to minimize this micro-damage occured from too much time on a static machine.
Ok I just talked to him. He believes that although 90+90 is not the same as 180 but that 90+90 is still better than 180 in a row indoors. He suggests 90 in the morning and 90 in the evening.
He is a very science based coach and takes to documented studies when he is not 100% sure. Most of his athletes are pros or serious in Italy or globally so they do their rides outdoors for the most part. They train indoors too but it is more secondary. He personally rides indoors but is not 100% sure the best way to effectively swap indoors for long outdoors . He said he will research this more and get back to me.
He also suggested 90’ fasted in the morning and another 90’ after eating.
@s_l This is the best advice you can have. For me, more than 1:30 hours indoors is a pain and I wouldn’t do more of that. The other advice I can give you is to go live in the tropics 
always good weather
Thanks all for the forum topic and discussion. I’m doing a CJ plan, 5 days a week, with the Z2/Z3 free-ride outside scheduled on the weekend. This week calls for 3 hours. I live in Canada and certainly with the snow and cold, all rides are on the trainer. I did a 2.5 hr ride last week and found that very tough - mentally, even with Netflix, and physically, and hadn’t thought of taking a few minutes break or two, excellent ideas. So, if I’m reading correctly, suggestion to maintain the integrity of the training plan could be to break up the ride into two 90min blocks on the same day. My question is, would I just pause the workout (in the app) and restart when I hop back on later that same day? Or would the ride timeout after a certain time has elapsed? I suppose I could try and find out but thought I’d ask the forum. Thanks.
Yes just do 2 shorter sessions in whatever fashion you want as long as max is 90 minutes. If your long ride is long enough you could do 3-sessions. Even 3 60-minute sessions would be fine.
Since Jack is not monitoring your compliance to the plan it does not matter how you save the workout. If you are using our app you could just do the same workout two times (but cut each one in 1/2) and it will look reasonable in your history. But if you like to see one big workout in strava or your history then you could just stop pedalling or pause it and come back and do it again. Even if you kill the app or restart your phone it will remember where you were (although I would not do that to be extra safe :)). If you are in the middle of the workout you could switch to resistance or slope mode for your cool down or for example you can just go to the library tab free workouts and grab the warmup and use it as a cool down.
Good idea, I will try to make a short pause on next Saturday 2h30 ride
Or maybe, as I’m using BigRingVR with TD 
, I will select a ride that has some flat-ish/downhill segments to relax my legs for a few minutes, here and there. Hum, I may try “Pico de las Nieves from Maspalomas” 
Thank you Alex, appreciate the response, and the promptness of the response!!
Thanks Alex, love the app and the great advice dispensed on this forum!
@GoustiFruit I just tried using a trainerday workout with BigRing VR today. Is there any way to get the platform to use a reasonable speed? I found that while doing threshold intervals, BigRingVR calculated my speed to be very slow at times, so the video moved glacially slow.
I’ve tried structured workouts on Rouvy and BKOOL and they seemed to give somewhat more realistic speeds.
How did you configure the app (BRVR) with your power meter ?
On my side, I created a 'Direto XR-Stages-Tickr" profile on the “ANT+ Sensors” tab, so BRVR controls the HT (Direto XR), matching the power from my power meter (Stages) and uses my Tickr heart monitor. I don’t fill the cadence/speed fields, as BRVR automatically gets the cadence from my powermeter, and I don’t have a speed sensor.
Then, I use TD on my phone, not connected to the HT (no ERG mode), only to my power meter and HRM. I simply follow the instructions on the phone, but BRVR controls the HT, so I need to adapt my cadence and gears depending on the slope (that’s something you can play with, as BRVR allows you to limit the slope, from 0-25% up and down).
Another option is to download your workout from TD and put it in your “Big-Ring/Workouts” folder. Then, you select it in BigRingVR, and it will run it in ERG mode.
In both cases, I have no problem with the speed of the video, it’s fully realist (BTW: if you know that you will have loooooon steep descent, maybe you should download the video beforehand, so your internet bandwidth won’t be overloaded).
Thanks. So I run everything on a PC. I did download the workout from TD and put it in the BRVR folder - that part worked fine. BRVR controlled the trainer per the workout plan in ERG mode just fine and gets all the data from the trainer and my Ant+ sensors. (I use a wahoo kickr snap so it gets cadence from a pedal sensor). I wasn’t aware of the profile option though. I’ll check that out. Perhaps that will help with the video speed.