Comment by asdfman123
6 hours ago
You probably spent all that time training your cardiovascular base, which takes a long time to do. Then, you capped them off with anaerobic gains that were only possible with that prior work.
For optimum gain you should mix moderate exercise with intense exercise, but the time you put in likely made your later success possible.
Exactly.
I did this on purpose this spring.
I had a shitty winter in terms of endurance and was pretty much starting from the gutter in February. Spring and early summer we're stressful so I did mostly Z1/LSD cycling in the form of extended commuting from work to home. Nothing excessive though as stress was plentiful.
The estimated fitness or the Garmin estimate didn't budge much.
Once vacation started I kept this on for few weeks to recover and after that added few harder sessions in a two week period. Few weeks after this I felt the change and Garmin also estimated 6 mil's of added VO2MAX in a week.
Don't care about the metrics, but the added QOL from this and now I hopefully have a structure for the coming winter not to lose as much of this as the previous.
To be competitive in the sport, you need the pyramid method with the high volume base of light effort, middle of volume of sold effort (e.g. lactate threshold work) and a peak of intensity (e.g. interval training).
This is about health.
High volume of exercise is damaging via oxidative stress and other ways. Weekly training volume is the most reliable predictor for injuries.
If health and basic fitness is the goal, rather than bringing home the gold, you can add intensity to just a fairly small volume of moderate exercise, or perhaps even none at all, other than a warmup and cooldown.