If you're looking for a way to kickstart your fitness this year, or you want to try something different, Zwift might be the thing for you. If you don't know what it is, Zwift is an online social media style cycling platform. You ride through virtual worlds, tackling KOMs, sprint points, chasing your friends and completing mileage goals to unlock virtual gear and new routes.
One of the most valuable aspects of the Zwift experience is their workout builder. This allows you to complete pre-built workouts in the game environment. During these workouts, it provides you guidelines for power, time, heart rate, cadence and all other data you'll need to know to target specific fitness parameters. And while Zwift comes loaded with its own sets of workouts, you can easily add your own workout files to the program and create your own workouts.
Just like my previous Zwift Workouts, you can download this one and add it to your library to use any time. Click through the jump to get the details and grab the new Early Base Grab Bag workout!
Base Building with Zwift
Zwift is an awesome tool to use during the base phase. When it's cold, wet, snowy and windy outside, you can escape to a virtual world of sunshine and blue skies any time you want. You can also control every aspect of your indoor training experience. Temperature, humidity, trainer resistance, and airflow, to name a few, are variables you can account for. You can also set very specific interval goals and very specific intensity goals inside that you may not be able to perform outdoors.
The workout builder is the perfect way to set up any number of different specific workouts. If you're not sure how to use it, check out the link to my previous post on the workout builder and get started with it.
If you're looking to accomplish some base building, Zwift offers you a ton of options. You can free-ride any of the available courses, keeping your intensity around sweetspot intensity. You can ride the Watopia mountain or Alpe climbs at a low cadence to get muscular endurance work. Perhaps you feel like cranking up the pedal revs on the sprint sections for some neuromuscular training. No matter what you choose, free-riding requires a certain amount of attention to detail in order to get the right benefits. It's not a whole lot different from riding outside, actually.
Where Zwift really shines in terms of training is the workout builder. With custom workouts like the ones on my Zwift Workout Page, you can build specific fitness in a very short period of time.
The Early Base Grab Bag
Because Zwift is such a great option for building specific workouts, you can really use it to jumpstart base phase fitness. I've written a lot about how Zwift can be used to build fitness all throughout your training program. In this case, I'm giving you a specific workout to help get you back into the swing of things.
The Early Base Grab Bag is a simple mix of the two concepts I talk about in my podcast “Two Keys To Building Functional Threshold Power“. The basic concept here is to raise your VO2 max capacity and to improve your threshold power as a percentage of your VO2 max.
VO2 max capacity is simply the ceiling on your aerobic fitness. While partially genetically determined, VO2 max is a function of how trained the body is. If you have a genetic VO2 max of 60 ml/kg/min, but you only train your body up to 40 ml/kg/min, you've got a lot of headroom to utilize. By raising that usable percentage, you improve your overall aerobic capacity.
Functional threshold power is simply a percentage of VO2 max. If your threshold is 80% of your VO2 max, that's 80% of 40 ml/kg/min. Obviously, raising your VO2 max will allow you to raise your FTP.
So the Early Base Grab Bag takes both of those concepts and throws them together.
What's in the workout?
You'll start with a ramped warmup that will bring you right up to your first challenge, a 10-minute sweetspot interval. The challenge comes with the 1-minute kicker at the end of the interval, which will drive your body into that VO2 max zone. It also forces you to tap into energy reserves and push through after a longer steady state effort.
After a couple of those blocks, you'll shift gears (literally) and work through a few 3 minute VO2 lactate shuttling efforts. These intervals will force you to work hard and then recover quickly. They have the effect of pushing your body into the red zone and forcing it to clear the metabolic byproducts of that anaerobic push during the recoveries.
Finally, you'll shift back into sweetspot mode (without any rest from the last VO2 interval) for one final steady-state effort. The lack of a recovery period will challenge your body to produce aerobic power while clearing the byproducts of your anaerobic interval.
If you're at all familiar with my training programs, you'll see a lot of similarities between this workout and some of my other sessions. The difference here is a workout that bundles everything together and gets you a little bit of everything.
It's the perfect option for a time crunched early season when you don't want to sit on the trainer for hours on end!
Download it here (Right click, “Save As”) or check out my Zwift Workout Page for this and all my other Zwift workouts!
