Zone 2, 65-75% FTP, max 80% FTP.

The goal of these rides is to keep the pedals moving in Zone 2; avoid zone 1 as much as possible; ideally less than 15% of the ride.

If you live near mountains, use common sense and don't kill yourself on descents worrying about Z1 time! If it's rolling hills, 20% is more common, and mountain riding will be around 25% Z1, purely because of all of the descending.

Why endurance?
https://youtu.be/4uld9mAlF7Y

https://www.evoq.bike/blog/2019/1/11/using-cycling-endurance-rides-to-make-massive-gains

Really try to avoid surges going over 80% FTP, aka into Zone 3. Zone 3 is okay on steeper climbs if you have no other choice.

These rides improve your aerobic endurance and are a massive building block to becoming a stronger cyclist.

Tempo 4 x 10m @ 85-90%, recover 5m between.

Try to avoid surging above FTP.

Purpose:

To develop greater fatigue resistance or muscular endurance through a higher force demand on the muscle fibers.

Consistent Pressure on the Pedals: this sounds insanely basic, but you’d be surprised how many athletes struggle to continuously pedal for more than 60 minutes at a time. The strength gained from tempo riding (described below) will definitely help with this. Once your events come around, and the pedaling becomes much more demanding, part of this strength will be utilized to increase the endurance of your muscles. Tempo training is a great way to build strength with a relatively low cost of fatigue (versus something like Threshold training).

Muscle Fiber Utilization: Utilize other muscle fibers that are not recruited during endurance (zone 2) riding. This can occur especially on a longer ride, where your anaerobic fibers get recruited to help with the more aerobic focused work. This is a great way to improve your capabilities as a cyclist, as the sport is mainly aerobic!

Muscular Endurance: the ability to preserve functioning muscle fibers for improved performance later in a race (adding some slightly harder efforts once in a while to long endurance rides are a great stimulus). Clearly it would be beneficial to have muscle fibers that are resistant to fatigue for all aspects of cycling, especially road cycling, gravel cycling, and mountain biking. The longer you are able to stay fresh, the better you will perform at the end of the race.

Aerobic Efficiency: allow these fibers to become more aerobically efficient so that they consume less oxygen when producing power. Producing power with as little cost on the body as possible is a great way to conserve energy.

Muscle Fiber Strength: when combined with climbing or high torque, you can increase the strength of these fibers, which will make them more resistant to fatigue and increase the force with which they can perform (beneficial to mountain biking, hill climbing, and even moderate pace changes in road or cyclocross).

When muscle fibers (especially slow twitch or Type I fibers) become fatigued because of a relatively high sustained workload, they have to call upon the far less aerobically-efficient Type II fibers (more anaerobic fibers) to help maintain a consistent power output. This has the effect of reducing what's called your cycling economy, which essentially means you need to supply more oxygen (and fuel) for the same power output.

This is one of the reasons you can see heart rate drift for a given power as you become fatigued in a race or long training session; the heart is required to pump more oxygen to sustain the workload once the muscles become fatigued.

By improving your exercise economy via greater resistance to fatigue, you're able to improve your endurance at a broad range of intensities.

These intervals are good for reducing VLamax, and thus improving lactate threshold.

1H @ 45-55% FTP, or feel free to take the day off the bike if needed.

This ride AT LOW INTENSITY allows the body to adapt from the previous workouts; this is when you actually get stronger.

This ride also maintains the rhythm of training without adding any further stress to the body.

Circulating oxygenated blood around the body and removal of any metabolic waste products that may be lingering in the muscles from these previous workouts takes place today.

More lactate is combusted as a fuel at a low power output than when completely resting, so there is some great recovery benefit from this easy ride.

Try to take a stress free route!

3 sets:
5 x (30S @ 120-125% FTP, 2M @ 75-85% FTP)

So three 12.5m blocks.

4-5M recovery (easy spinning) between interval blocks.

After this main set is complete, ride steadily for remaining time available (a further 30M-1.5H).

Purpose:

This workout targets lactate clearance, by accumulating lactate during the over-threshold portions of each block, and then training the body to clear them by dropping just below the lactate threshold for short periods.

This will help to improve your lactate threshold, as you will be able to clear more lactate, and also ride longer at threshold, since the mmoL that will create the "oh crap i can't pedal hard anymore feeling!" will happen later on.

This workout is also effective for aerobic capacity (VO2Max training too), given the heart rate quickly rises and stays elevated throughout.

From a power perspective, accumulating time at 85% VO2Max which has been shown to be enough of a stimulus to create a noticeable improvement.

Learn more about this here:

https://www.evoq.bike/blog/over-under-cycling-workouts-for-increasing-your-ftp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8l3pdLTpM8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcebZWFYy5k

Zone 2, 65-75% FTP

The goal of these rides is to keep the pedals moving in Zone 2; avoid zone 1 as much as possible; ideally less than 10% of the ride (if you live near mountains, use common sense and don't kill yourself on descents worrying about Z1 time!

https://www.evoq.bike/blog/2019/1/11/using-cycling-endurance-rides-to-make-massive-gains

Really try to avoid surges going over 90% FTP, aka above Zone 3. Zone 3 is okay on steeper climbs.

These rides improve your aerobic endurance and are a massive building block to becoming a stronger cyclist.