Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Try T-Max Intervals

I've been pretty busy recently with my home life and my training has taken a turn for the worse. Finding any kind of consistency has really been a challenge. Then yesterday on an easy recovery ride I was involved in a crash with a teenager goofing off. (perhaps that story will appear on another post in the future) Needless to say, I've continued to see my CTL drop on the Performance Management Chart.

So... all that said, tomorrow morning I'm going to fire up the Cycleops trainer and see where my Peak Power Output (PPO) sits. This is found by riding at 100 watts and increasing power by 30 watts every minute until you can't take it up any more for a full minute. My guess is that I'll end up somewhere around 500-600 watts based on a fairly recent Time Trial on the CompuTrainer.

I hope to get a day or two of rest, then fire up the trainer again to find my T-Max. The duration at which I can hold my PPO.

From there it's pretty simple math. Do intervals of .6 of your T-Max time at PPO. Double your work phase to find your recovery time.

So let's plot this out. If I push 500 watts tomorrow for my PPO and I hold my PPO for 6 minutes on Friday; then my "Ultimate Interval" will be 3.6 minutes at 500 watts followed by 7.2 minutes recovery. Then repeat as many times as I can! They say most people vomit and die after 5 or 6.

We'll see what happens!

2 comments:

Deep Throat said...

Old blog...but you can hold 500 watts for 6 minutes? I don't think Lance could hold that for 6 minutes (5 minutes, yeah).

That's not really the protocol. You first determine the minimum velocity or power that elicits maximum VO2 uptake. Then, in a separate test, you do a timed effort at that velocity or power. That's your Tmax. You then do intervals at 60-75% of that time.

Matt said...

DT - Thanks for the comment. This was a few years ago when I didn't fully grasp power output! If you read the next blog post, you will see my shock and awe as I eeked out well under 300w.

On a side note - check out http://www.wheeltags.com for some cool wheel bling!

~matt