Endurance Base: Is It All Z2?

This started as Road To Nationals checking in with Craig Polston, but we also had some good questions that athletes have approached him with, so it's a bit of a Cat 4 Questions as well.

Question 1: How much intensity should I maintain over the winter?

Question 2: Is it all Z2 base building?

Question 3: When do I start doing intervals?

Question 4: When should I start / stop lifting?

Email your questions to Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE

Some quotes:

And then middle ground tempo is super beneficial. And people should look back at like the old Coggan sharp, like the adaptations you make from that, when when you're doing it for 40 minutes, 60 minutes, it's not easy, but you're not killing yourself. It's a very interesting ride.

After lifting, I expected to just be, you know, not feeling good. But my legs felt totally opened up. I didn't even need to warm up, I got out and thought: man, this feels great.

You're not going to get burnt out and crush yourself and overtrain as long as you're resting.

When you prescribe training, you have to be realistic with with it. If you give somebody a tempo ride, and they go and do that, the next day, they're gonna want to keep it to endurance because they're a little tired. If you give people two endurance rides, they think: this is too easy! So They go out and smash with their buddies one day, and then they kind of do endurance the next day. They miss BOTH days optimization and then in reality, what they actually go and do too much. So tempo rides can actually help you pull things back, Whereas on paper, sometimes it might LOOK like too much at first, but if there isn't an Rx, people just go hammer; they get antsy.

He's in the gym all year long.

Thanks for listening, tell a friend!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYP_TsdWWXQ