The Breakthrough Workout: Apr ‘23
Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance and welcome to this month’s In-Form newsletter.
Musings
With many athletes now building towards your their higher-priority events, we thought we’d talk about a particular type of session that might be useful to include in your next training phase…
We like to call this the ’breakthrough workout’.
This is a training session that’s notably harder than a regular workout, and is designed to create a strong adaptive stimulus and challenge you in a race-specific way.
One example could be a long-duration ride, performed at a Zone 3 intensity as much as possible ( where Zone 3 is on a 6-7 zone scale, and is harder than the Zone 2 intensity that would usually be used for this type of endurance ride).
This could be a good breakthrough session for those leading into a sportive or gran fondo.
Another example might be long duration workout that incorporates blocks of supra-threshold efforts towards the beginning and end of the ride, which could be a good specific breakthrough workout leading into a road race.
In either case, the duration can be adjusted to suit your fitness level and the length of the event you’re targeting.
Lower-priority races and events can also be used as breakthrough sessions too.
What’s important here is that the session is notably more challenging than your regular workouts, and also simulates key demands of your target race or event (such as sustained Zone 3 riding in a sportive, or supra-threshold efforts towards the end of a demanding ride in a road race).
Workouts like this can be particularly useful for time-limited athletes who complete a similar training load week-to-week, as it allows for a big adaptive stimulus and a jump up in fitness, which can be hard to achieve from a flat training load.
Other big benefits of breakthrough workouts are that they allow opportunities to (i) test and optimise race nutrition under more race-like conditions, (ii) work on mental preparedness for racing, (iii) work on pacing strategies (iv) work on technical skills at a race-like intensity, and (v) identify any remaining performance limiters.
As these sessions are very challenging, we wouldn’t recommend incorporating them more often than every 3-4 weeks, and you’ll want to make sure you have planned in adequate recovery afterwards.
We often find a breakthrough workout works well on the lead-up to a recovery week. This is a strategy we adopt when incorporating breakthrough sessions in many of our specific-preparation plans, which you can view here.
News
For those of you who use Intervals.icu to plan and analyse your training, our popular Complete Workout Library is now available in Intervals.icu format!
Intervals.icu is a fantastic platform for deeper analysis of your training data and we throughly recommend checking it out if you haven’t already.
We’ve also got 3 new articles on the website this month which we’re excited to let you know about:
10 tips to improve your ramp testing, including advice on the use of ERG mode, using appropriate protocols and recognising the limitations of testing too!
A round-up of the essential skills for the self-coached cyclist
Our advice on avoiding ‘coaches block’ (i.e. that feeling of overwhelm when faced with a blank training calendar, much like how writers describe the problem of “writers block”).
That’s all for this month.
As always you can find our Cycling Physiology Guide and Hill Climb Handbook on our website too. For those that are already customers, we thank you greatly for your support and feedback!
Thanks again!
Tom & Emma
