mirek said:
I'm currently going to enter into SMSP intervals phase (Morris way), but still want to do some endurance work. I found the statement made by Andrew Coggan that "You'd be far more likely to achieve an increase in muscle buffering capacity if you did these (4 min) intervals in the first hour of your ride". It has to do with lower glycogen stores and difficulty with driving pH low enough.
So, is it always better to do high intensity work at the beginning of the longer workout? Does it depend on the kind of intervals (sprints, leadouts, 1 min, 3 min etc.)?
Yes, it depends on your objectives. Also depends just how hard you exert yourself in the earlier part of the ride and how well you can handle the intervals you're going to do. I think recovery between parts of your training sessions improves dramatically with good training so that even after an hour or two of riding/training you can still do some very high-quality efforts. This does depend on the amount of, and the mix of training objectives within the ride. When you're less fit you would probably want to do those harder efforts earlier in the training session.
[/QUOTE]As to specificity rule it seems better to do them at the end of the endurance ride (like finishing at the end of the race), but from the other hand when one is fresh he/she is more likely to achieve higher intensity, quality of intervals work.
What is the best approach?[/QUOTE]
Either one, it depends. When you sprint at the end of a race you don't have all the same resources available that you'd probably have at the beginning of the race, or training session. For sprinting, it would really depend on what aspect of your fitness and/or technique you're aiming at during that training session or part of the training session.
For example, at the end of a race you probably don't have much left in your fibers that can produce high peak force, 2x/2b's, so do you want to do all your sprints early in a training session when these fibers will contribute a more to the efforts, or are you more interested in training the fatigue resistant fibers to help with your sprint (like they will at the end of a race)?
If you do 30/30 intervals for improving race efforts, which fibers and enzymes do you want to train or focus on?
Also, earlier intervals can serve as a good warmup for later intervals, e.g. tempo before threshold or sprints, or tempo, then threshold, then VO2max intensity. Or the earlier intervals can serve their own objectives and to pre-fatigue some fibers so the later stresses will be even higher.