Hey ya’ll. With road season in limbo and looking pretty pessimistic, I’m thinking I’ll tackle some sort of hill climb plan once my SS3 is over in two/three weeks. If the climbs I have in mind are 15-30 minutes and my goal is really to put in my best maximal effort once or twice on each of them, which plan is better?
Part two, I went from an intermediate 16 week base to an advanced 6 week SS3, if I go back to intermediate, will it give me enough TSS/CTL to improve meaningfully?
I would recommend our hill climbing interval plan. I mean you couldn’t go wrong with either, but the hill climb interval plan really hones on in on that 15 - 30 minute range. Lots of full gas effort and threshold efforts that equate to a total of 15 - 40 minute of interval time. Plus there are few weekend opportunities to test and hit the climb.
Thanks, Jake. Any thoughts on the part two of that question?
You will have less TSS overall in the intermediate plan compared to the advance plan. So your CTL will be lower. But that does not mean you will not see improvements. Those are just one metric to track training. Also we suggest that most of our athletes do the intermediate plan. This allows for you to carry on with life and also recover better. Recovery is important in actually getting better as much as training hard. So don’t just go chasing numbers to chase numbers. Go with the intermediate and you will still see improvements.