I have a 6 months Crunched Power plan, progressing from 7 to 10 hours per week. There seems to be a problem with Z2 progression near the end of the plan (interestingly, not the very last few weeks but a little before that) - e.g. see below, 120m Fard Endurance workout which contains 88% blocks and three times more time in Tempo zone than Endurance. This makes the Z2 workout harder than actual SS workout in the same week.
Iâm just a user, but which intensity did you pick? Fard is the hardest of the Z2 ride types, but 88% sounds high. Did you pick âTried the above options and need moreâ?
Dave
I chose starting intensity level 2 and âI could do more than thatâ
Yes, the term âenduranceâ is actually based on the default settings, but you have pointed out something else that should be improved.
If someone does not pick the default ride feel and because we keep increasing intensity through the block it can definitely jump out of endurance as you have pointed out. We need to put more limits in place such as this or make it more clear some how.
Also if you increase the starting intensity to higher then it ramps up harder. So if you set your block to be hard (intensity and ride feel above defaults) in the beginning it will hard but it will be brutal at the end especially if it is a longer block.
See below with our default âzone 2â setting after 13 weeks it peaks at about 72%.
Thanks again for being so transparent. This really helps us improve our product to better match peoples expectations.
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So the starting interval intensity does not only âquick progressâ the plan, i.e. starts the plan at week 2-10 instead of 1, but also changes the ramp up for all workouts?
I just did some more tests, even with intensity level 1 and âmostly easyâ setting, the same problem occurs. It seems the problem is not with the level but rather with the âblock start/end hoursâ setting when the plan is long enough (6 months). I chose to progress from 7 to 10 hours/week with 4 workouts/week, as I donât want to start too easy with 60 min workouts and I donât want to finish too hard with workouts over 3 hours. It seems that near the end of the plan CJ cannot progress hours anymore due to the set limit, so it chooses to progress intensity into high tempo instead. Would be nice to have an intensity limit which prevents Z2 workouts from becoming high tempo 
Hmmm, even when I have 6 months I donât see this high unless I increase ride feel and still struggle to get it to that high of intensity but yes we will get some limits in place.
Just to re-ignite this thread, I am seeing similar things. I did pick a high intensity to start off my plan, but that was only to get the VO2Max intervals to an appropriate duration. However, it seems that my Z2 workouts are getting large sections up to 84% in only the second week. Interval workouts are also being followed with sweet spot work, instead of Z2. I assume it is best just to lower the workout % down to get into the correct zone for Z2 segments until this is fixed?
Hmm⌠I am not seeing this. Did you make sure you have ride feel of zone 2? I do see if it is really long plan like 6 months it is a problem but not for shorter plans.
Generally I see about 72%, but their is a brief 77% in this example below.
We should add one more option, which is âZone 2 - no intensity progressionâ meaning it truly stays zone 2 and does not increase intensity.
Actually I just realized when someone selects this Zone 2 option, it should not increase the intensity like it does with the other options. It should just stay zone 2 the entire time⌠That solves all of the issues in this thread and should have been how it was in the first place⌠Just never had the right perspective here. We will try to do that soon but still you should not be having this problem if you select z2 or I donât anyway.
You are right Alex, I hadnât selected the polarised button. That fixes it. On a side note, do you know if there is any benefit to doing higher intensity Z2 or lower Z3? Does Andrea have any thoughts on this?
Oh, cool. I am going to be brutally honest here Itâs a character flaw⌠The way we designed coach jack, and really I would say more âI designedâ in this case, is that I really wanted to ignore a TSS focus as I feel that is a flaw in other platforms and by many coaches is too much emphasis on something that is very loosely connect to physiology (requires more info to prove this point). But at the same time I know that a lot of people feel that TSS progressions are so critical. So we knew we wanted to design our main work very specific intervals that were very based on logical difficulty progressions not based on TSS increases. You can have two different workouts with the same TSS and one can be impossible and the other could be easy.
So anyway, what I did is built all our secondary work to slowly increase in a logical increase that matches peoples expectations regarding TSS increases. Secondly and generally as you progress through your plan, more intensity makes sense as people reach the end of their plan the workouts can be much harder and match more real world race or performance goals. So I ran this idea by Andrea and he thought it was fine/good. Andrea is not a zone 2 purist. He has prescribed a lot of zone 2/3 power but let the cyclist define the actual intensity level based on feel/rpe. He would say go try to spend 2 hours of your ride just climbing today in z2/z3âŚ
So to answer your question I think the secondary work or endurance work can be very much by feel in our workouts. We partially manage TSS which gives some safe guard to over training but this stuff is very subjective and their is no proof as to what is perfect regarding fine tuning z2/z3 work for max performance. Itâs mostly about not doing too much intensity to dig yourself into a hole.
So in your case, I would say do what you like, what resonates with you. I also would say âZone 2â focus should be merged with periodization for optimum training and more in the context of easy and hard. Take note that as you progress through your season it might start at 100/0 and later turn to 80/20 (Time in zone, Seiler suggests 90/10), but ultimately seasonally you might be 90/10. Seiler is not suggesting anything related to periodization in his training advice so adding in periodization you have more flexibility to work much harder later in the season⌠wow long answer
Hope that helpsâŚ
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Awesome answer Alex, thanks so much!
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Alex,
Regarding TSS, some of the workout types (specifically Sweet Spot A / Sweet Spot B / Threshold Progression) ramp up very slowly and still are not that challenging once they max out if the workouts are not long.
For example, even at workout level 21 Iâm finding for a 1-hour workout the actual workout periods at the specified intensities are:
Sweet Spot A 2x6 at 90%
Sweet Spot B 2x4 at 95%
Threshold Progression 2x6 at 100%
If I change this to 3 hours Iâm getting:
Sweet Spot A - 6x6 at 90%
Sweet Spot B - 6x4 at 95%
Threshold Progression 4x6 at 100
It appears the time limitation is what is making the 1-hour workouts easier.
I appreciate Trainer Dayâs perspective that you donât want to burn the athlete out, but I think these particular blocks are not building enough time in zone if youâre limited to just an hour.
I appreciate you also have Sweet Blocks and Threshold Blocks that will end up with hard workouts, but it would be nice to have something between the two extremes.
Dave
I like it You are right⌠Itâs also is highly dependent on how a person sets their FTP⌠so many of us have over inflated FTPâs then SS_A and SS_B are not so easy
So it sounds like you are saying you would like an SS_A+ and SS_B+? Meaning just a bit harder than then itâs cousins.
I am happy to work with Andrea and design these and add them to the custom sequences. Hopefully could do that rather soon, but we are in the process of updating the technology on Coach Jack now (no user changes just better for some mobile devices and stuffâŚ) so once that is done I will have a bunch of CJ improvements coming and I can add this.
What Iâm guessing is that Andreaâs real intention was the 2-hour plus workouts where the intensity is appropriate. Iâm guessing he would look at the 1-hour workouts and say that isnât his intent.
This is a very challenging workout:
This isnât nearly as challenging a workout because it is missing the duration and 2 extra sets:
Personally, Iâm working on a self-coaching approach now and not using CJ, but if these workout types were more inline with what I thought I needed I would consider using them.
Dave
Yes, I get it. No, really Andrea does recommend the lower end of the spectrum here. He would have never had me create more than #1-16 of these workouts so there would not be a #21 if it was not for me knowing people would want more intensity (and to adjust the start intensity). And adding this additional intervals for longer workouts was something additional too. He really felt the 1 hour workouts were reasonable.
His feeling is more that itâs un-necessary to do such hard work in workouts like this. Most people serious about cycling do very hard work outside of structured workouts⌠Fast group rides, races⌠steep climbs⌠So this is more of the âfunâ and âenoughâ approach but his default approach is missing out on those that just love hard intensity during workouts in shorter durations and may not get intensity outside of these workoutsâŚ
From a recommendation stand point their is no sense/real benefit in giving super hard workouts like this other than thatâs what people want Itâs not super healthy to work so hard, unless possibly because itâs more fun and keeps you more consistent. It brings more risk, and most people that need top performance have outside ways of getting this intensity and outdoors nothing is ever perfect and has a stronger element of pushing based on how it feels. 4 minute intervals can turn into 5 if it feels rightâŚ
So Andrea wants progressive overload to come from time then right?
What do you do when you canât progress time?
Dave
I was going to try to answer for him but realized, any answer I gave was kind of going to suck⌠and just be my opinion⌠Let me ask him is probably the right answer!!!
Ok it should have been obvious to me the answer but I was thinking slightly wrong, so glad I did not respond It did turn into a very interesting conversations⌠It hit on a few points that were important.
If you are doing your âplanâ or sequence like this and feeling good and it is just feeling âeasyâ then itâs likely your FTP is improving but it also could just be your time to exhaustion (TTE) without an FTP increase⌠either way, it sounds like these workouts are causing adaption so continuing to increase them makes total sense. So that increase in difficulty could come in the method of decreasing the Z2, Z3 and increasing the Z4 length like you wanted. He really feels 8 minutes of threshold is the maximum that is needed. So you can alternatively just increase the intensity a bit to like 104% of FTP⌠So it could be a mix of either. In this case you could just press + in our app for example.
So ultimately I agree with you that we should just add a harder variant of this.
Secondly the part I had wrong is their is no reason to switch to another block unless you feel you have stopped improving and feel a bit stuck or are time constrained with some specific workouts that are closer related to a specific goal/event.