Coach jack issue? (Add more anaerobic work)

First of all, sorry for my bad English.
I am following an 8 week training plan established with Coach Jack. Crunched Power mode, intensity 10.
I have the feeling of lacking anaerobic work, Garmin also indicates to me a lack of anaerobia. My FTP was established with a good test before starting the plan, but I finish all the workouts without having the feeling of pushing my effort, it’s too simple. I have endless low intensity sessions (Z1 Z2 Z3), I know that it must represent a large volume of a good training plan, but here I find it too much. Apart from the V02 Max session and the sprints of the HIt session there is no work at intensity higher than my FTP.

1 Like

Hi there your English seems great. This is not easy to answer in a short answer but I will do my best.

My first advice would be to completly ignore your Garmin’s advice. :slight_smile: Garmin is known to giving terrible training advice. Secondly you have to decide do you want to train how you like to train or do you want to try to train efficiencly and for the long term. If you love lots of intensity all the time and it does not cause you any problems then you can do it and enjoy yourself, but if you do a lot of training or as you age it has risks. It’s generally not recommended for maximum performance because high intensity requires lots of recovery and so to train effectively you would need to cut back your training, if you are limited to less than 5 hours a week or so then you might want a little more intensity.

High intensity work primarily benefits your anerobic capacity or W’. This type of work can be done for 4-8 weeks usually once or twice a year to hit your peak anerobic performance and not increase your risk. Remember it is mostly your aerobic performance that will cause you to be a fast rider. They say in a 30-minute race it is like 95% aerobic and 5% anerobic.

Small amounts of high intensity can be done all year but large amounts only for short periods of time. Now many platforms and coaches do prescribe a lot of very hard work but as I said it is risky and has been shown not to provide the best results. High intensity is great for marketing. Look at Nike commercials.

So that is one part. The second part is an important part of improvement is to go through a build period, starting out more easy and ending hard. This brings grandul changes over a longer period of time and results in hitting a peak period and still feeling good. If you do 16 weeks with lots of high intensity and the end you will be exhausted and will not be at your peak performance.

If you for example had an MTB race in 8 weeks from now then doing a very hard period of lots of anerobic might make sense.

Anyway, some people go crazy doing lower intensity like Jack recommends and if that is you in that case you should build a custom plan and choose the (Hard) sequences and raise your starting intensity level to 6-10. This will start hard and get much harder.

I hope that helps. I think after you go for about 6 weeks or so you will see it starts getting harder but it should not feel super hard, at the end of 16 weeks it can be pretty hard. At the minimum if you started with intensity level of 1 you can change it to 3 or 4 and that might be a good compromise :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thank you for this long response. I understand the value of training mostly at “low” intensity, but shouldn’t this plan involve a little more work at higher intensity? A few% or even a complete additional work block (a dedicated session on anaerobic work) which could be optional?
I built my plan with an intensity of 10 and I am missing that to I think to build a very complete and sustainable program over time

Ok I think I am starting to understand now, thanks for explaining more. You are saying you would like to be able to add more anaerobic during the peak period for example. So we have VO2max sequence now and VO2max crunched as well as HIIT workouts, you can create a custom block for your peak period for example.

But you are saying at level 10 you personally want something with time in anerobic then the below? So harder workouts?

So in this example 24 30s @ 130% is not enough?
image

Or are you looking for something different? For sure I can add a “hard” anerobic sequence for you that you (and others) that you can use in custom blocks.

Would that give you what you want? Jack is not recommending super hard sequences but we surely don’t mind providing them for people that want them or feel they need them.

Or maybe you want to create your own “periodization” meaning throw in small blocks when you feel like it? Or maybe you are asking for both harder and small blocks?

Thanks again Alex for you reply. I did not noticed the “edit custom” button wich, after some tests, make the difference. It seems very easy to customize a plan (i love crunched power) and add 1 or 2 session that pull the trigger.

Nevertheless i think you should add a (maybe more) “hard” anaerobic sequences that everybody can use in custom blocks. the more I use the Coach Jack plan generator, the more interesting I find it. And the more we can customize it, the more I want to use it.

Super cool :slight_smile: Yes I will do that.