There are a few different sides of a coin when it comes to early season training, which maybe makes it more like a die. I like to pick two things for an athlete to work on at the same time, and not just to shore up the coin analogy. Over the winter with lots of trainer time, the obvious priority is FTP (because I don't like to assign 4 hour trainer rides). The other thing is dependent on the athlete and their goals. This will go through the process for a few athletes as well as the results. Any charts are from WKO4, build 255.
Athlete 1, CX focus. Goals: FTP and force production
The first person we'll look at has been doing road training for about two months now, and after finally having gotten a power meter in late December, his needs are exactly what I expected they would be but there's not deep historical data to compare with so I can't show you any pretty graphs illustrating progression, but here's the graph of his weekly peak values. The first set of points in the 12/28 week is the testing protocol to establish baseline maximal values. He has not done a maximal 1 minute effort since, but I doubt the anaerobic power has much increased.
This athlete's main focus is cyclocross, so with half a year before that racing starts, there's a lot of time to work on many things. His slim 70kg build and tendency to ride at high rpm indicate a lot of slow twitch fibers, so the goal is to increase his threshold and muscular power, even if it means putting on weight. These improvements will be the foundations on which we'll build his high end power for CX, but right now he needs to improve his musculature and maximal force production. For the last two months he's been doing almost entirely endurance and tempo riding with strength training on and off the bike. His training weeks are about 13 hours, plus one 20 hour week.
This training alone has been enough to bring up his FTP from 240w to 270w and raise his Pmax by 150w. In just two months the two training targets are improving dramatically, and he's on track for a great season.
Athlete 2, road/stage race focus. Goals: FTP and muscular endurance
The next athlete is a 61kg road racer who excels at climbing. She's been training since October and, like the previous athlete, has a naturally high cadence but felt a lot of muscular strain and fatigue while climbing steep grades.
The last couple months have seen her intervals build from 3x10' to 3x20' at threshold. In addition there was a lot of strength work in the gym and low cadence climbing on the bike, but it was different from Athlete 1's program. We focused on muscular endurance for climbing, but it had the benefit of increasing her anaerobic power as well since the lifting was similar in demands to a short anaerobic effort. Here's the graph of her build since October.
We can easily see that she's natural athlete, able to maintain high workloads and recover well. Whether doing endurance, sub-threshold, or threshold efforts, her FTP has built from 210w to 250w. The purple dots are 20' maximal power values, and they show steady progression upwards. Also worthy of remark is that she did no anaerobic work until December with her first 1' power test (450w) around 20 December, which was already a full 100w better than her 2015 best. After some time off in January for exams, she spent most of February maintaining the weight lifting and reestablishing her endurance, and her 1' power is still the same. In terms of meeting the goal of increased muscular endurance and power, she is able to handle VO2max hill repeats at low cadence (up to 40 minutes of climbing) and her Pmax increased from 680w to a high of 820w in December.
Athlete 3, road race focus. Goals: w/kg and endurance
This last athlete went through a real transformation in the last couple months. His goal was to excel in road racing, so his goals were increasing FTP and losing weight. In October, he was 10kg heavier, with a 1400w Pmax, 700w 1 minute power, and 280w FTP (not shown in graphic). His Pmax dropped to 1200w, but his w/kg at FTP went from 3.8w/kg to 4.7w/kg. This is the power curve not normalized to weight (the w/kg graph is a bit muddy with several lines on it, but this is clearer).
For the long road races he'll be doing, this is what I wanted to see. Would he have 10-20w greater FTP if he hadn't lost the weight? Probably, but a 345w FTP at 80kg that would only leave him at 4.3w/kg. Fortunately his Pmax hasn't suffered as terribly as I expected, and will serve him well in reduced bunch sprints. We've done some 3' VO2max work, but no anaerobic or sprint work yet. It's just been burning calories and increasing threshold, and this is reflected well in this graph. In fact, despite regular rest weeks, he spent from October through Christmas with a negative TSB, having ridden 6000 miles. There's been reduced workload since, but it's the foundation of a successful season.
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