EVOQ.BIKE Cycling Podcast Do We Really Need Intervals Longer Than 20 Minutes?!
https://www.evoq.bike/blog/cycling-interval-workout-guide
Of course, the answer is it depends but a lot of people have now downloaded wko5 or messing around with it and they see optimized intervals.
They see extensive aerobic or intensive aerobic and they look at it like “3 by 30 something minutes, do I have to do that?”
Yes, it’s really helpful!
But the true, race specific answer is: yes for some and no for others. Race specificity is one big thing, but we'll get into that.
But first, think about when or where are you in your training Cycle?
If you're doing base miles and you're looking to do some extensive aerobic work and you're riding below FTP, you're pushing your time out towards your time to exhaustion, or TTE. In this case, you want to be doing those longer intervals, especially if you're only
Riding tempo wattage.
There's really no reason to make tempo rides into intervals like 4 x 10 minutes unless you’re new to cycling, or in your first year of real training.
Instead, just go out and ride Tempo, and you're going to see yourself doing 45 minute "intervals" very soon.
If you're riding with your friends during base miles, just really try to be that person who says, "Hey, let's really pedal this time,” even if we're chatting. Let's ride.
As you do sweet spot intervals, those are going to be harder, and while you might be able to just go out and crush some long ones, I’d recommend that you build up to that, and make sure your execution is spot on.
Start with 4 x 10m, 2 x 20m, and move out towards 1 x 40m. Those are big jumps but ou get the point. You want to try to get close to around 150- 200% of your TTE, but that's definitely category dependent. Tim Cusick from WKO put out some good guides as to where you want to be duration-wise for sweet spot intervals.
If you're trying to build FTP and you're doing 2 x 20m or 2 x 25m, you still want to go out to 40 minutes, 50 minutes, and even an hour! That is just really building aerobic power.
If you're going to spend the time going through an FTP block, do it the right way and really do those intervals; you have to muster up the motivation and we'll talk about that. If you're not motivated to do it, you're not going to do it well, so don't spend your time doing it.
If you want to build your FTP and you want a bigger engine, which is a good thing to have, then say "hey, in this block when I have these longer intervals scheduled I'm going to Buck up and I'm going to do it!!!"
So yes, you do need to go longer than 20 minutes.
If you're coaching yourself or working with a coach that uses wko, the algorithms that run the Power Duration curve need to be healthy, and there's a whole WKO webinar on how to maintain a Power Durations curve.
It needs longer duration efforts (up to 40 minutes minimum) to provide you with accurate output data, so if you're basing your training on any WKO metrics (FTP, FRC, optimized intervals, etc etc), you need a healthy curve.
My last video a couple times ago talking about that you still need to double-check the work of the computer because you don't necessarily want to base your intervals off of just optimized
Intervals because you may have already beat the Power Duration curve; we won't go into that in this one.
But yeah, you need a healthy curves so do longer intervals.
Then you can ask yourself: Why? Or what type of racer am I?
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