With a few days out of the office, it’s time to get back in the saddle as I play catchup – already – on this year’s Zwift Academy Road workouts.
Session four focuses on anerobic resilience and to be fair, there’s only ten or fifteen minutes of hard graft across the course of the hour, so it’s a nice change of direction.
The idea, as I see it, is to develop repeatability across short explosive bursts when it comes to climbs or quick sprints. By the time you hit the final stretch, a six minute aerobic effort, there’s some tiredness there with the lack of anerobic energy and the bursts in the legs from the heavy sprints.
It’s high cadence for the climb simulation, breaking to 154 at one point with my heart peaking at 181 which was a nice jolt. But across the other 50 minutes or so, it’s slow and steady as you’ll see from the average power distribution.
After a week off, it’s a nice way to ease back into things.
The plan for the rest of the week now is to press on and try rope in workouts five through eight and organise the group events before the 25 November deadline.
The official word
“We are stressing your maximal glycolytic system today with some BIG anaerobic power efforts. We start with a solid warm-up, incorporating high-force efforts that require lots of muscular strength. These short efforts will have you primed and ready for action”, this according to Zwift.
The last three anaerobic efforts are aimed at stressing your anaerobic endurance. We do this by starting at a high power output in the first rep and gradually increasing the duration of efforts while decreasing the wattage target. All these efforts will max out your anaerobic energy pathways with high lactate concentrations.”
