I’m coming up on one year with the bike and wanted to share a bit of my experience with Power Zone training as well as seek some feedback from others who use Power Zone rides as the backbone of their training.
As for my training history, I’ve always been active but have never been focused on endurance. My 2nd & 3rd rides on the bike were a FTP warmup and test, and I came off the couch with a FTP result of 174w on 1/31/21. I didn’t ride regularly at first but retested on 4/21/21 anyway and was at 181w. After that I started to train more consistently, doing mostly a mix of regular Power Zone and HIIT & Hills classes for 1.5-2.5 hours per week. On 6/1/21 my result was 202w, and then on 6/18/21 I averaged 220w in a 20 minute HIIT class, equivalent to a 209w FTP. On 7/6/21 I started the Build Your Power Zones program, but from the beginning I thought the classes were way too easy. I decided to try to “trust the process” and stick to the programing, but at the end of the 5 weeks my FTP result was a disappointing 212w on 8/8/21 – an increase of only 1.4%.
Discouraged, I took some time away from the bike and when I came back I stuck with mostly the Power Zone Pack programming, but have continued to make only modest improvements. PZE classes especially feel way too easy to produce any kind of training effect.
This feeling led me to start reading about the science behind Power Zone training, specifically on the TrainerRoad blog. Here’s what it has to say about Zone 2:
https://www.trainerroad.com/blog/endura ... ning-plan/
Training effects come quite slowly through Endurance riding. Since Zone 2 is so low-intensity, you need to do a whole lot of it to create a meaningful amount of productive stimulus.
…low-volume athletes should prioritize training at more productive workloads that can bring the same adaptations in less time.
I don’t know about all you, but I don’t have 25 hours per week to train. I’m lucky to get 3. Which leads to what TrainerRoad calls “Sweet Spot” training:…pros that train as much as 25 hours a week actually spend most of their time riding at Endurance pace.
https://www.trainerroad.com/blog/sweet- ... d-to-know/
Sweet Spot training is completing workouts that contain intervals at 88-94% of your Functional Threshold Power (FTP). This type of work achieves positive physiological adaptations because it is the optimal balance of difficulty (intensity) and amount (volume).
This power zone rests between 88% and 94% of your FTP. This is a gray area between the Tempo and Threshold zones.
This makes way more sense. This approach stays below threshold, but comes close enough to have an impact on it, while not leading to overtraining in a lower volume athlete. A typical 1 hour workout using this approach appears to have 4x 8-minute efforts, so 32 minutes total from 88-94% of FTP. Zone 3 only goes up to 87% of FTP, so a Power Zone Endurance ride never gets into this “Sweet Spot” of training, especially if you do as told and target the middle of Zone 3, which would be 81.5% of FTP. Yet PZE classes are the backbone of all of the Power Zone programming I’ve seen.Sweet Spot training is effective because it increases your aerobic capacity and muscular endurance, while balancing your ability to do it multiple times per week.
What I’ve done for this challenge is manually adjust my FTP setting to 230w – 10w above my actual. That puts the top of my Zone 3 at 208w, which is 94.5% of my FTP. I completed the Week 2, Ride 2 class this morning and for all Zone 3 efforts I targeted the top of that zone. The longest Zone 3 effort was only 5 minutes – still shorter than TrainerRoad programs – but it at least felt productive. I had no trouble completing the workout at this intensity despite targeting a Zone 3 output 29w higher than the middle of my true Zone 3.
In any case, I’ve come to the conclusion that a Power Zone Endurance ride isn’t enough training stress to produce much of an adaptation with 2.5-3 hours per week of riding. I found the W2R1 session doable as well, but I guess we’ll see how I keep up with the prescribed rides as the challenge progresses.
Has anyone else had similar experiences? I like the idea of Power Zone programming, but the approach the Peloton classes take seems way too conservative to produce significant results.