Should you progress your VO2 workouts?

You have decided to do a VO2 block. Awesome. You will notice that the workouts in the block progress week over week - the power stays the same but the time spent at that power progresses. This is called an extensive progression.

As always, we want to personalize the program for you as much as we can. The question then is should you progress your workouts each week? Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of 85% workouts to make a decision.

There are three metrics we want to consider in analysing our workout: wattage, heart rate and cadence.

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Wattage

When looking at wattage you should consider both the absolute wattage you managed to push across the workout, and how you applied that wattage.

In a very easy way we can look at the graph in Training Peaks and see how you did at managing the wattage prescription for the workout - did the wattage you pushed on each step match the target? In this example one of the 2-minute intervals is highlighted, then we can hover the cursor to see the target wattage and look on the right hand side at the lap data. Yes, the rider was able to match the wattage. And we can see that they were able to do it across the workout.

We can also see by highlighting with our cursor and then zooming in that the rider had good control of their wattage - there were no big spikes or fluctuations in the wattage as they applied the power within each interval.

Looking at the recovery can also be informative. The workout called for 1-minute easy, and then 1-minute applying a bit of wattage within each 2-minute recovery, which the rider did repeatedly.

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Heart Rate

Our second metric to look at is heart rate. We can see that the peak heart rate for each interval built across the workout. This is normal. More important is to look at what the recovery heart rate between intervals was doing across the workout. We can turn off all the other metrics and just have the heart rate visible.

We can see that the recovery heart rate builds over the first few intervals and then stabilizes across the remainder of the workout.

We can also look at the “Heart rate by zones” graph. Ideally, a VO2 workout should have about 10-15-minutes of time in the VO2 heart rate zone. This rider has the majority of time in VO2, but also some time at their anaerobic heart rate. Does this mean that the workout was too hard? Given that the power and cadence (as we will see) are good, probably not. But the rider does have to be aware that too much anaerobic heart rate is not the goal, one reason why we don’t always want to push more wattage.

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Cadence

Our final metric to look at is cadence. Was the rider able to maintain their cadence across the workout? Or did the workout grind them down and they couldn’t keep the cadence stable? This will be related to the rider’s ability to control the wattage.

We can see quite clearly that this rider did a great job of holding their cadence consistently across the workout.

In this example we have a rider that did a great job across all three metrics. They should progress this workout.

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Each week you should take a look at your workout and make a decision whether you should progress again. As you progress you may find that things change. Your wattage may start to look more like this, where you aren’t able to hit the target for the day. If this is the case you are not ready to progress the effort. You should try the same workout again and see if you are able to do a better job.

The training programs are the starting point of your training. Doing a bit of analysis and making a decision on how to proceed will make the programs your own, and ultimately lead to your success in developing as a rider.