 Hey what's up everyone welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS and today I'm going to be giving you guys a little bit of an update about what I've been doing in regards to my training recently. This past week was the block week in the block periodization model for me. For those unfamiliar with block periodization it's a method of training where you stack your high intensity workouts for the month in the first week of the month instead of distributing them evenly throughout the month. This somewhat unconventional training method actually has a lot of science to back it up. I'll go into a little bit of the science and then talk about how I arrange this particular block week and then at the end of the video I'll address some of the questions that you guys left me in the last block periodization video so be sure to stick around for that. If you're new to this channel I make weekly training, racing and gear related videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of training and racing experience that have gotten me to the top of the ultra endurance mountain bike game in the US and as a cycling coach at CTS. If you want to learn how to get faster or just more about the science of training in general then be sure to subscribe and if you have a training question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video be sure to leave it down in the comments section below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. For those of you unfamiliar with block periodization as I said at the beginning of the video it's a training method where you stack your high intensity days at the beginning of the month. A typical training month might have two or on occasion three high intensity interval days per week. More than this tends to cause symptoms of overreaching or overtraining. In general you don't want these hard days to be back to back either because you want to give your body a chance to recover before the next hard interval session. Block periodization ignores these basic training principles completely at least in the first week. The most common method of block periodization is to have five high intensity workouts in the first week followed by just one high intensity session per week in the following three weeks. And this unconventional way of organizing training actually looks very promising according to the science. For example in this study on block periodization on high intensity intervals they found that in the block periodization group mean power during the high intensity workouts increased with each session along with power at two millimolar lactate max power and maximal oxygen consumption. None of these changes occurred in the control group that stuck to a more traditional training pattern. That study just looked at one month of block periodization but long-term block periodization also appears to show benefits. A study looking at the effects of 12 weeks of block periodization on performance in well-trained cyclists took 18 competitive cyclists and divided them into a block periodization group and a traditional training group. The block periodization group performed five high intensity sessions every fourth week and one high intensity session per week during the other weeks while the traditional group did two sessions per week each week. The block periodization group saw a greater increase in VO2 max power at two millimolar lactate hemoglobin mass and power during a 40-minute time trial. If you regularly watch my channel that was probably all review for you but if not I made a whole video on the science of block periodization that goes into more detail and I left that in the description below if you're interested. I've employed block periodization in the preseason but once you get into the thick of race season it can be hard to pull off block periodization because you're constantly recovering from races and then trying to taper for the next one so doing an all-out training week just isn't feasible most of the time. However with my schedule free from racing in the month of august it was the perfect opportunity to do a block week especially since I'd have ample time to recover before my final race of the season the Shenandoah 100. Let's get into what this block week actually looked like. Leading into this week I had a very light week after a block of racing that included the wilderness 101 and the off-road assault on Mount Mitchell. At wilderness I felt okay given the hot conditions but at the assault my power was clearly lacking. I still managed to finish second but with significantly less power than I usually produce for a race of that duration. This indicated to me that I needed rest. Too many racers get a bad race result and assume that more training is the solution when in the majority of cases the opposite is true. That's a topic for another video though. I took two days completely off and another three days extremely easy and by the weekend I was more or less back to my normal training load with an intensity day on Saturday and a five hour mountain bike ride on Sunday. For those of you who have been asking what a recovery week should look like this is pretty typical. Short and easy rides at the beginning of the week and then as you get to the weekend and you start to get more fresh you can resume your normal training volume and intensity. The recovery week before the block week is pretty important because you don't want to go in with a lot of fatigue already built up. Remember that you're going to be playing on the edge of over training during the block week and you don't want to go in already cooked. Getting into the actual block week it included five high-intensity workouts one recovery ride and one day completely off. After the Monday rest day the first proper workout was on Tuesday with a three by ten minute threshold workout. When doing a threshold workout you want to shoot for between 30 minutes to an hour of work at threshold. 40 to 45 minutes is pretty common with workouts like 2 by 20 or 3 by 15. If you do 60 minutes of total work that's a real killer and you'll definitely be feeling it the next day and 30 minutes is more on the lighter side. I stuck to the lower end of the range for this workout because I didn't want to blow myself out in the first workout and I had plenty of high intensity coming up later in the week. I think this is important to keep in mind during a block periodization week. No one single workout should be an absolute killer but the workouts strung together back-to-back throughout the week definitely should be. The next day on Wednesday I did an easy morning spin and that night I did a weekday night training crit. The goal for me with this race was just to get a good workout in so I attacked as much as I could and pulled a lot and just generally rode like you don't want to if you actually want to win a race. Are you saying pulling on the front isn't how you win races? I mean how am I supposed to let everyone know how strong I am though? It got the job done though because I ended up with an intensity factor of 1.0 for the 40 minute race. On Thursday I essentially did a 40 minute time trial of one of the big climbs that we have in the area. I had tired legs so it was far from my best time but it wasn't bad and I was still able to hold about 95% of threshold. The next day was just an easy act of recovery ride and I was definitely feeling the previous three days. Recovery rides are supposed to be slow but 86 watts for an hour is particularly slow. However there's nothing wrong with that. You almost can't do a recovery ride too easy but you can and most people do do their recovery rides way too hard and that's vastly more detrimental. Yeah but when someone passes me on the bike path I can speed up right? I just need people to know that they're not faster than me. I've got a whole video talking about how to properly do a recovery ride and I'll link that down in the description below if you want to check it out. As we get into the weekend on Saturday I did another threshold workout this time with about 37 minutes of work split into three separate chunks at 15 minutes 12 minutes and 10 minutes. The reason for this decreasing interval length was more psychological than anything. Remember that the most important thing is getting your time in at that intensity. Sunday was the last day of the block and I finished things off with a mountain bike workout where I essentially did a 30 minute time trial up a climb that was almost all on trail. Because it was on trail it was a much less steady effort with large power spikes but because it went uphill the whole time I had to constantly put out power. The total volume for the week was just under 18 hours with 766 TSS. This is a little bit lower than my normal training volume and the reason for this is because the focus of this week was on intensity and not volume. Reducing the volume a bit allows those high intensity workouts to be just a little bit higher quality and hopefully the recovery after this week won't take quite as long. Another interesting thing to note about block periodization or for anyone who's ever done a stage race is that during the block week or the race you don't seem to feel that tired even though you're doing back-to-back hard days. Then give it a couple days of recovery after the week and your body seems to realize what you've just put it through. I like to call it the stage race effect where the fatigue doesn't seem to set in until a couple days of rest and I'm definitely starting to feel that now. So that's block periodization put into practice for you guys and with that I want to get into some of your questions that you left me on my last block periodization video because there were some good ones that I definitely want to address. Aviar Cordero asked, do you think this would be the best option for someone who has plateaued their FTP gains? Yes, if you watched my video on how much can you raise your FTP, I talked about it at the end of that video. Everyone will experience a fitness plateau at some point and breaking through that fitness plateau requires that you stress your body more than you previously had. Constantly training at the same volume and intensity is a recipe for stagnating performance and if you haven't seen your FTP go up in a while, it may be time to mix things up. Block periodization is a perfect way to do that. Felix Schneider asks, is there a form of mini block periodization? Let's say if your A target race is three weeks away. Yes, in fact, it's quite common during a taper to overload your training before the taper in order to get a little bit of a fitness bump. However, you want to make sure that you do this far enough out from your race so that you aren't still fatigued when you get on the starting line. From this article on tapering for triathlon, greater training volume and or intensity before the taper may increase performance gains but would require a longer taper. Two or three weeks out is a great time to do this and one way of overloading your training so that you're doing a sort of mini block periodization is doing three high-intensity days back to back. I talk more about this and how to taper properly in my tapering video so if you want to check that out, I've left the link in the description below. Kitsing Marko asks, I just wanted to know what you consider a well-trained athlete. Is someone with an FTP of 270 well-trained enough for block periodization? For those of you that didn't watch my previous block periodization video, I talk about how block periodization is an advanced training technique that should only be used by well-trained athletes and this is a great question because I didn't specify exactly what I meant by well-trained in that video. Being well-trained doesn't have anything to do with what your FTP is, rather it has to do with how many years you've been training and how much of a base of fitness you already have. If you're in your first or second year of serious training, you may want to hold off on block periodization because your body may not quite be ready for it yet. However, if you've got three or more years of training under your belt, then I would go ahead and give block periodization a try. Just make sure you have a good base fitness built up. You don't want to jump straight into block periodization right after the off season, for example. Alright, that's it for today's video. Thanks for watching and I hope you guys found this information helpful. If you like this video, be sure to give it a like, share it with a friend, and subscribe. If you want to see more training and racing content, be sure to follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. And if you want to check out my own personal training, be sure to check me out on Strava. If you're interested in getting a coach, if you sign up through CTS, be sure to use my code CTSDJ to save $40 by waving the registration fee. Details are down in the description.