Best bang per buck

johncp

So I have just over a month until the Autumn Epic - 96 miles, 3000 metres climbing. Had a fairly good season. Although not structured training I've done a good mileage and some of it very hard and all of it hilly :roll: . What would be the best type of training to do for the next four weeks to hopefully make a bit of a difference in the Epic? Should I concentrate on FTP sessions, VO2 max stuff or what? I'm not expecting miracles, just want to make the most of the time and hopefully finish the season well.

Herbsman

I bet most people will say 'get a coach'.

ut_och_cykla

FTP on hills...and get a coach?

StorckSpeed

Have you done a century (ish) ride before?
Hopefully you've put in enough miles over the summer, so your endurance shouldn't be a problem.
I'd concentrate on Hill repeats, and 5, 10 and 15 minute sprints now to try and improve your speed and power.
Check your weight and if you can try to lose 2Kg before the event, it'll make a huge difference on the hills.
Rest 3-4 days before the event.

mac220

Training schedules are commonly split into 4 week cycles with increasing volume of training throughout the first 3 weeks and then a recovery week with a lower overall intensity to allow for adaptations as a result of the training to take place and to allow the body to be ready for the next 3 weeks of hard training. Therefore in 4 weeks only 1 training period could be completed.

If you take the 7 training levels which are now becoming very common for setting the different types of training sessions with:
Level 1 being the lowest intensity/longest duration
Level 7 being the highest intensity/shortest duration

The longer the required session the more training/recovery time it takes to achieve the physiological change.

For example it is possible to improve Vo2 Max (Level 5) to within a small proportion of the maximum possible within 6-8 weeks (Vo2 Max sessions are between 3-8 minutes, however they are commonly 3-5 mins and should only be done when fully recovered (V02Max sessions aren't performed on consecutive days). Because V02 Max is relatively quick to train and requires relatively small volumes of training general riding which involves high intensity sections should result in a relatively well trained V02Max, so improvements possible here are likely to be quite small.

The amount of time required to improve Functional threshold power (level 4) is much longer. FTP session can be anything from 2 x 20 mins @ 100-105% or FTP or up to 6 x 20 mins @ 85-95% of FTP doing sweet spot training. A general rule is that for each hour spent in the level you can expect to improve functional threshold power by 1-3 watts. So if you are able to 2-3 sets of 2x20 a week assuming that you want to be well recovered the week before your ride and to allow for the adaptions to take place (so not much hard training on the 4th week) It would be possible to do 4-6 hours of FTP training in 4 weeks giving between ~4-18 watts increase in FTP. Obviously this is very rough estimate but the main point is that the amount of improvement you can expect to get within 4 weeks is small. It is possible to continue to improve FTP by training in level 4 year on year and continue to see improvements in FTP, although the improvements will start to diminish at somepoint, which is different for everyone.

Also, Be careful about losing weight too quickly, this can have a negative impact on overall performance.

I've not really answered your question directly, but hopefully you will get a picture of what you might expect over the 4 weeks even if you changed to a very structured way of training.

Kind Regards,

Mark

johncp

Thanks all for the replies.
I've done this type of ride many times so completing is not a problem, I just thought I'd do what I could to get the best performance I could. From what Mark says, my VO2 is probably fairly well developed from the various club rides and sportives I've done, so will maybe go with the hill repeats