We’re always talking about progression in terms of watts, duration, and performing these deep in the ride (KJ deep mentioned above). Rest reduction is rarely talked about, and when it is, it’s presented as: I’m doing 3 x 15m FTP intervals. To make them harder, I’ll reduce rest from 10m to 5m.

We’re using the reduced rest to perform under fatigue, but if you flip it, you can use reduced rest over a block to increase watts! Here’s how:

6 X 6 REDUCED REST FOR A 30 MINUTE POWER INCREASE
You can manipulate the numbers to go after a 20m increase, 40m, etc! I’ll use 30 because it was personal to my example and increasing 30 minute power is a great idea.

After a few blocks of VO2Max and getting myself race ready for a big race, I noticed my mFTP had dropped and I had a harder time railing long efforts. Hey, I turned that dial.

I really wanted to dig more back into this, but with the southern heat, longer cycling intervals were hard. I started waking up earlier to beat the heat, but also decided to remove rest.

I would ride 6 x 6m below my 6m 90 day best power with 4 minutes “rest” at 75% FTP. My 6m best was 469W, so I took 85% of that, because remember, we aren’t really getting rest between these intervals.

The next week I would reduce the rest to 2 minutes.

Then, I’d do 1 x 30m, hopefully at a new max wattage. I was hoping for a 20W increase

I increased my 30 minute power by 38W, and mFTP went up to 403W!

Check out the video below for full details, but removing rest helped me mentally get accustomed to riding hard, above my current FTP, getting a little recovery at endurance pace (not really true recovery, and hitting it again!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXfF2pzrJDg