Tempo
240 min
Medium intensity
Hold a relatively high power for a long time with limited metabolic fatigue: three sets of five minutes at 75-80% of CP and five at 90-95%, twice through, inside a four-hour ride.
Team TotalEnergies
UCI ProTeam
Tempo
240 min
Medium
6 / 10
Intermediate
Outdoors
INTERVAL BY INTERVAL
The workout
Written as a share of critical power, so it fits every rider. In Vekta it becomes your watts, with the W′ cost shown before you ride.
Team TotalEnergies
Why this workout
The breakdown
Inside the workout
Aerobic endurance, and the ability to hold a relatively high power for a long time with limited metabolic fatigue.
Each set alternates five minutes at 75–80% of CP with five at 90–95%, twice through: twenty minutes of steady work that never goes above CP. The lower block is not a recovery. At 75–80% of CP the pressure stays on for the full twenty minutes.
Three sets, with 20 minutes at 50–60% between them, an hour of warm-up and 80 minutes of cool-down. Four hours all told, an hour of it in the sets. Team TotalEnergies use it at any point in the season, and most at the start of the preparation phase.
In Vekta, both targets follow the rider's current CP, which updates daily.
Tempo
Stimulus
Intermediate
Workout level
Outdoors
Best ridden
Road,
DISCIPLINE
The stimulus
Tempo, explained
Steady work in the sweet spot, with cadence and torque as the second job.
Blocks of ten to thirty minutes at 76–90% of critical power, the range often called sweet spot, frequently with a cadence or torque constraint. Hard enough to build threshold, easy enough to repeat.
Tempo is the most time-efficient stimulus for riders with limited hours: it raises critical power with less recovery cost than threshold work, and it teaches the body to hold a working intensity for a long time.
These should feel like sustained concentration rather than suffering. Cadence targets are part of the session: low-cadence tempo builds torque, high-cadence tempo builds economy. Do not turn tempo into threshold.
The workhorse of a build phase, and the easiest session to overcook. Vekta's intensity score keeps it honest: a tempo session that scores like a threshold session was ridden too hard.
Written in % of CP with cadence targets in the structure, personalised on the athlete's device. The zones tab afterwards shows whether the block stayed in the intended range.
Free for coaches. Test with your whole roster during the trial.