Volume v's intensity

Below is a comment I have pulled straight from slowtitch, as I think this is good and worth sharing. For me personally to get better at IM racing you need to focus firstly on getting in the minimal amount of volume. This is the hardest thing to achieve in a single week. You then need to back this up week in, week out, for at least 3-5 yrs before you could even consider coming close to your potential. So what is the minimum amount of volume required each week to start moving towards your athletic potential. I think it starts by at least riding 2 IM's (approx 12hrs) spread over 3-4 sessions every week, running 2 marathons spread over 5-6 sessions(approx 7hrs) every week and then swimming at least 20k PW. If you can do that consistently and all, in and around your Aet, then you'll be well on your way to achieving your potential. Remember this is the minimum, this is where you actually start to train for the IM. This is hard to achieve for the working athlete as it will put you at around 20-24 hrs PW. Thats not easy and it will be near impossible if you start inserting periods of high intensity work. The recovery costs will impede your ability to get the minimum volume in each week to develop your long term endurance capabilites. Try it for a while, it will work for around 8-10 weeks before you'll start to burn out both physically and mentally. There is a time and place for intensity and the best time for that is during the peak period of 3-7 weeks where you get to reduce the volume and ramp up the intensity. Don't attempt to do both and definitely don't try to substitute volume with intensity, That one really mess up how your body adapts and grows. Think about it, you are putting in some consistent weeks of volume and then you miss a few sessions and need to cut some sessions short. You decide that inside you doing your regular medium run of 1.5 hrs you do a shorter 50min run and harder. All that will do is start the peaking process. No need for that during the base phase. Don't mess with you body by chopping and changing the sessions you do. Find a basic week that will maximise your bodies ability to make steady long lasting gains. Avoid hammer sessions. They will only confuse your body and give you little long terms benefits. That is why the peak period is so much shorter then the base period. High itensity sessions give you a quick fix that doesn't really last. It's the base endurance work that will have you working towards your true potential.

Slowtiwitch.

Cycling is a dumb sport. You have your feet tied to the pedals and those go in circles.

Because injury risk is low, training approaches that emphasize intensity can be as successful as those that emphasize volume. If you take the concept of IF and TSS, you can think of two different weekly routines with the same weekly training load (sum of TSS'), but one using training sessions with higher IF's (more intensity) and another using sessions with lower IF's (more volume).

While the results of these two approaches would be very similar, the long-term impact of them will be different based on the characteristics of each athlete, as the "mental load' of these approaches is clearly not the same. While it is easy to mantain Zn2, the concentration you need to mantain higher intensities grows exponentionally. The long-term mental impact of these approaches is very different, with the low-intensity approach being easier to sustain on the long term. While most athletes have difficult with either the extreme intensity or the extreme volume approaches, the great majority of athletes handles better a training approach that is definitely closer to having more volume.

I have important news for some people out there. Not every athlete looks forward to do a 2x20min Zn4 every week, trying to beat the power levels from last week. Some of them, I would even venture to say a lot of them, absolutely DREAD these sessions. This doesn't make them worse athletes without "what it takes" to realize their full potential. Some of the most talented athletes that I coach are like that.

Very often the approaches that emphasize intensity are termed more "efficient". However, if you follow the path that will lead you to mental burnout and posterior cycles of coming back to what "worked" before and burning out AGAIN, where's the efficiency there? Where's the long-term development?

So in order to get faster on the bike, the principle I stated some weeks still stands: More is MORE. But YOU (or your coach) have to find the balance between volume and intensity that both will increase your training load, and that can be mantained consistently on the long-term. The answer to this is obviously individual, as athletes' mental characteristics are far more diverse than their physical characteristics.

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Paulo Sousa