Most racers and high-performance cyclists think of the base period as ‘endurance’ time. They do hours of zone 2 and 3 miles on the trainer to build an ‘aerobic base’ to prepare them for the coming high-intensity workouts. The problem is, your body gets good at what you train it to be good at. If you train it to be good at doing zone 2 and zone 3 intensity, it will be good at that. It won’t be very good at doing anything else.
In order to mix it up, I like to do a day of higher intensity work during the week. It keeps your body on its toes and adds additional benefits to your training. In fact, high-intensity interval training creates many of the same adaptations as low intensity, high volume training. That’s right, doing that short, super hard workout gives you similar benefits as that 2 hour zone 3 workout (Read more here…)
Workout Summary
Ride it once and you’ll see why this is a workout I like to include every so often when I need to get my butt kicked for an hour. In 58 minutes of work, you should be cranking out around 93 training stress score points. For those of you who track your power and training stress, you’ll know what this means. For those who don’t, let me say this: it’s hard. Really hard.
As shown above, this workout consists of a fairly standard warmup and cooldown, with three sets of this in between:
- 3 minutes @ 105%, 1 minute @ 125%, 1 minute @ 150%
- 3 minute rest @ 75%
- 2 minutes @ 125%, 30s @ 150%, 30s @ 175%
- 5 minute rest @ 75%
Get Training!
To use this custom workout file, click the link below and save the .zwo file to your computer’s /Documents/Zwift/Workouts directory. Now when you start up Zwift you will see this workout (called “3+2 and 2+1s”) under the Custom Workouts category in the workout picker.
Download Workout
I use a high intensity, short duration workout like this once per week to shake up my training and keep me interested. If you’ve never done a high intensity day during your base period before, start with one day every 10 calendar days and increase it to a max of one per week.
Once you do try it, post a comment and let me know what you think!
