Block periodisation - Pete Plan / Low Rate Steady State ...?

[aussieluke]

Been doing low rate steady state work almost exclusively for a few months now. I enjoy it, and it is improving my aerobic fitness, and great for fat loss and body comp improvement, as well as improving my rowing stroke. But as my failed 2k test showed me yesterday, I still have terrible fitness when it comes to faster work longer than 1000m.

Was thinking about starting maybe a couple of 3-week cycles of the Pete Plan to change things up and have some structure to follow. But wonder if ditching the low rate ss work altogether is a good idea. If I come back to it after a few weeks will I have lost all my aerobic fitness?

Which led me to thinking about some sort of block periodisation method - like alternating two weeks of ss followed by two weeks of Pete Plan faster, higher rate work.

Anyone tried anything like this?

Bear in mind I'm not an OTW rower, just erging for fitness, which has of course led me to secretly dream of smashing the magical 7:00 2k time.

[hjs]

You worry to much.

Anaerobic fitness is "easy" to train, in a week or six you be pretty sharp. Twice a session a week is plenty, think the 8x500, 5x750, 4x1k, 250..1k and back. Longer interval is not so much needed.
Start out at paces you know you can and you will progress every week.
Keel doing the long low rate work, for rowing thats always the backbone. Some people don,t use it, but they are missing out.

[aussieluke]

You worry to much.

Yeah probably.

I just fancied some structure for a while. And the workouts are all set within a limited timeframe. When left to my own devices I find it hard to choose when to do a fast interval workout instead of just more ss work.

But I read the bit about doing even the long pieces at no less than r22 and thought that was madness. Why not just do those as true long, low rate steady state sessions ...3 x 20' etc

[hjs]

You worry to much.

Yeah probably.

I just fancied some structure for a while. And the workouts are all set within a limited timeframe. When left to my own devices I find it hard to choose when to do a fast interval workout instead of just more ss work.

But I read the bit about doing even the long pieces at no less than r22 and thought that was madness. Why not just do those as true long, low rate steady state sessions ...3 x 20' etc

To reach a peak you need to work all energy systems, atm your anaerobic system seems to be undertrained. So work on that, you will find out pretty soon how it works. Upping the rate a bit on the longer work could be a bit easier. You won,t loose a thing in of what you build. Really a worry about nothing.
I have done a good bit of races, and only during the winter look at the 2k stuff. Have faith, it will work! Get your mindset right and have a bit of patience. But.... Told you before if I am correct, aerobic work is easy relative to hard 2k work. If not you don,t try enough on the speedstuff.

[gooseflight]

You have already taken some time to study the literature.

We know that for endurance athletes the most beneficial form of training by far is long duration, steady state activity at 75-85% of HR max, equivalent to 1.5 to 2.5 mmol/l lactate. (Whatever you may think of HR monitoring it >is< widely used by: a) national teams; and b) researchers as a useful proxy for blood lactate, i.e., training intensity.)

AT/AN threshold training is of little benefit but high-intensity interval training (HIT) is of benefit in >already trained< athletes:

http://www.humankinetics.com/acucustom/ ... /16466.pdf

If you have reached the point where you want to reduce your 2K time I would continue with some of your steady work but introduce one or two high-intensity interval sessions to your weekly programme for the next four weeks. (The danger with flipping to the Pete Plan is that you could introduce unnecessary threshold work to your regime.)

Essentially, consider yourself to be in a pre-competition training phase by introducing high intensity (and higher rating!) interval sessions.

(Incidentally, structure is no more than writing down the sessions you intend to do in advance!)

[Gammmmo]

If you have reached the point where you want to reduce your 2K time I would continue with some of your steady work but introduce one or two high-intensity interval sessions to your weekly programme for the next four weeks.

This. Lots of long, steady work helps build the engine but you are asking it to do something quite different at the 2k distance. You are missing the HIT part of the classic polarized training regime. For one or ideally two sessions a week you need to prioritise Vo2max style work or IMO at the very least start training alot right around where you think you ought to be at the 2k distance average. I have seen lots of training slightly above long, steady intensity (without HIT) work quite well in cycling, but that wouldn't even be at the 5K distance let alone 2K distance equivalents.

[aussieluke]

So essentially if I follow the Pete Plan, but do the steady distance sessions at a lower rate than Pete recommends, and keep them around UT2/low end UT1, then I won't be too far off.

[Bob S.]

Was thinking about starting maybe a couple of 3-week cycles of the Pete Plan to change things up and have some structure to follow. But wonder if ditching the low rate ss work altogether is a good idea. If I come back to it after a few weeks will I have lost all my aerobic fitness?

As I remember, the Pete Plan included 3 days of ss, a day of short intervals, a day of endurance intervals, and a day of hard distance - so still 50% ss. Drop the hard distance to a 4th day of ss and you have it made - a good structure, plenty of SS to maintain your aerobic fitness quite well, and enough intense work to improve your speed. What could be wrong with that? I don't remember anything about rate recommendations in the PP, but the best guide is to use a rate appropriate to the pace of whatever the of workout you are doing. To me that means maintaining a constant work per stroke (watt-minute/stroke) at any pace. Where did you get the figure of 22spm or higher?

Bob S.

I see that you have sent another post while I was writing this. Since when does the PP recommend stroke rates? They vary too much between individuals to have one fits all type of recommendation. Body conformation alone makes a lot of difference.

[aussieluke]

Distance / endurance work:

The final group of sessions is the distance, or endurance work. The main concept behind the Pete Plan is that you do one speed interval session, and one endurance interval session per week, and then as much distance work as you have time for. Where this plan diverges from many of the other plans out there is with the stroke rate I advise to do this distance work at. I recommend a minimum of 22spm, and for general “steady” distance work a maximum of 25spm. On this document I have simply put the “steady distance” sessions as approximately 8 to 15k in distance. That is just a recommendation of a good distance to go for, but if you’re new to indoor rowing you might like to start out much shorter, or if you have the time and inclination you might like to go longer. Resist the temptation to row these too hard though, save that for the other three days. One day each week is devoted to a hard distance piece. You might like to rotate this through the ranking distances, or do the same distance for a few weeks at a time. Hard distance doesn’t have to mean flat out every week, just that you can go faster than the steady distance days, and over the 25spm limit.

[Bob S.]

OK, thanks for the clarification. I certainly disagree with Marston on that point. I stick by the concept of matching pace and rate to maintain a constant work/stroke. It doesn't have to be exactly the same, but should have a narrow range, like +/- 0.5 watt-minutes/stroke. I find that I fall short of the goal at higher stroke rates.

Bob S.

[G-dub]

Luke, we kick this around too much in the PP threads, at least I do (much to the boredom of my teammates). Bob is right, you can shape it to fit your current needs a bit. The Hard Distance day, in my opinion, would be a good day to swap for a long distance piece. The other two interval days have big pay offs. The SS days can be anything you want - like you I enjoy 3 x 20 and have done it about once a week while on the plan. The challenge is that we tend to enjoy taking on the hard distance days though and manage to PB mid distance pieces while doing it, so it would take some discipline not to get caught up in that. Come join us. We are having fun. and people are really improving on all fronts.

[mdpfirrman]

Distance / endurance work:

The final group of sessions is the distance, or endurance work. The main concept behind the Pete Plan is that you do one speed interval session, and one endurance interval session per week, and then as much distance work as you have time for. Where this plan diverges from many of the other plans out there is with the stroke rate I advise to do this distance work at. I recommend a minimum of 22spm, and for general “steady” distance work a maximum of 25spm. On this document I have simply put the “steady distance” sessions as approximately 8 to 15k in distance. That is just a recommendation of a good distance to go for, but if you’re new to indoor rowing you might like to start out much shorter, or if you have the time and inclination you might like to go longer. Resist the temptation to row these too hard though, save that for the other three days. One day each week is devoted to a hard distance piece. You might like to rotate this through the ranking distances, or do the same distance for a few weeks at a time. Hard distance doesn’t have to mean flat out every week, just that you can go faster than the steady distance days, and over the 25spm limit.

Luke - I think you're confusing the hard distance day with steady state work. "Steady state" work as defined by Wolverine and here in the PP is entirely different than the 3 recovery days of the PP. This is the "hard distance day" - the third hard workout of the week on the PP. Here, Marston is defining the hard distance day, not the 3 recovery days - for which Marston just says work at a rate comfortable to you and when in doubt, row easier. What Glenn (and Bob) were saying is just take this hard 3rd day out of the PP and you have a great plan to work with - 4 days of SS work and two days of intervals. I think that's a great idea. You don't lose your speed and roughly 80% of your work would be SS work. Don't forget too on the PP, you should warmup and cool down on all interval days. Especially the speed interval days.

[gooseflight]

Distance / endurance work:

The final group of sessions is the distance, or endurance work. The main concept behind the Pete Plan is that you do one speed interval session, and one endurance interval session per week, and then as much distance work as you have time for. Where this plan diverges from many of the other plans out there is with the stroke rate I advise to do this distance work at. I recommend a minimum of 22spm, and for general “steady” distance work a maximum of 25spm. On this document I have simply put the “steady distance” sessions as approximately 8 to 15k in distance. That is just a recommendation of a good distance to go for, but if you’re new to indoor rowing you might like to start out much shorter, or if you have the time and inclination you might like to go longer. Resist the temptation to row these too hard though, save that for the other three days. One day each week is devoted to a hard distance piece. You might like to rotate this through the ranking distances, or do the same distance for a few weeks at a time. Hard distance doesn’t have to mean flat out every week, just that you can go faster than the steady distance days, and over the 25spm limit.

Luke - I think you're confusing the hard distance day with steady state work. "Steady state" work as defined by Wolverine and here in the PP is entirely different than the 3 recovery days of the PP. This is the "hard distance day" - the third hard workout of the week on the PP. Here, Marston is defining the hard distance day, not the 3 recovery days - for which Marston just says work at a rate comfortable to you and when in doubt, row easier. What Glenn (and Bob) were saying is just take this hard 3rd day out of the PP and you have a great plan to work with - 4 days of SS work and two days of intervals. I think that's a great idea. You don't lose your speed and roughly 80% of your work would be SS work. Don't forget too on the PP, you should warmup and cool down on all interval days. Especially the speed interval days.

"Steady state" or "continuous rowing" is already well-defined in terms of HR (as a proxy for lactate levels) outside of plans. It doesn't require further qualification beyond a bit of adjustment for the time one has available, i.e., gym rowers are probably not going to devote two to three hours per day to steady state. It's therefore acceptable to do more work at the lower end of "zone 2" intensity.

[G-dub]

Gooseflight, I think you mean, in the context of the IP training bands, that most of us can get away with more UT1 work given that we probably don't have enough volume to need to stay in UT2 for all of our continuous rows. If so, and someone else opened my eyes to this recently in another post, it makes a ton of sense. In the context of Pete Plan, what I am saying (or exploring in my head) is that the "Hard Distance" can be extended longer than the typical 5-6K and done at UT1 pacing rather than the AT pacing we tend to do. In that context Luke, you would, in my opinion based only on being on a similar path as you, add to your aerobic fitness and not ruin it. In fact, I think most of the folks in the plan currently are adding rather than ruining mostly because we had more slack in the system than we might have thought when we started!

[G-dub]

Paul, it would be nice if you had the finesse to explore things other than Pete Marston taught you. I happen to be doing the Pete Plan according to the prescription at the moment, so don't need your lecture on that. But just like he interpreted a plan to fit his needs, it would seem logical that others might consider that as well, especially considering current thinking as it relates to polarized training.