Finding a Training Plan
This year is the first year I am able to follow a training plan more or less strictly. This is is also the first year I created a training plan by myself. During the last years I tried many different training platforms.
Training Platforms
First 2Peak beacuse it offered dynamic traing plans which promised to automatically adapt when you don’t hit a training goal. The did adapt, but not very well. I still felt overtrained all the time. There also was no way to customise the adapting.
Then I tried Todays Plan beacuse it was compitible with wahoo and it looked more modern that other platforms. Todays Plan doesn’t have a dynamic adaption feature but it creates a training plan based on your goals and time you have for training. The result was the same. I still felt over trained.
Next in line was TrainerRoad. I heard many praises for Training peaks before. In General it works exactly the same as Todays Plan. TrainerRoad creates a training plan based on your goals and time. You can also add your races and it created tapering phases for those based on the prority of the race. I stuck a little bit longer with TrainerRoad compared to the other solutions. TrainerRoad traing calender is very user friendly and looks like 2021 in contrary to the other solutions. But the result für my body was the same: I felt over trained when I followed TrainerRoad recommondation. Interestingly my favourite cycling traing YouTuber Dylan Johnson released a video about that problem just when I was sure TrainerRoad is not for me. In the meantime TrainerRoad announced a new feature called Adaptive Training. It sounds like the same waht 2Peak is offering bit TrainerRoad says it’s really good because it used machine learning. Yeah, we’ll see about that. I still cancelled my subsciption. If reviews turn out to be acually good I might go back to TrainerRoad and give adaptive training a go.
Trainingpeaks
Last in the line is Trainingpeaks. Litteraly for me because you stumble over Trainingspeaks all the time when you look for training plans and information obout cycling training in general. In seems to have been there for ever. I never liked it very much because the interface looked very outdated and it didn’t have an assistant to generate a traing plan. You just can buy training plans and there are also a few free plans.
Nevertheless I ended up with trainingpeaks now and I’m more happy than with all the other traing softwares. This is because I finally spent some time to really understand for myself how training in cycling works. I watched countless videos of Dylan Johnson explaining certain training principles backed by science. I read the training bible by Joe Friel and I read a ton of other cycling training articles. In the end I felt comfortable to create a training plan for myself. So I’m now my own cycling coach. I planned a base phase, build phase and my race phase. Let’s see if there is a race phase at all but if there are races this year, I’m prepared.
I have to say Dylans videos did help me the most in accumulation the knowledge for creating my training plan. Especially his video about planning a whole season was crucial.
That said Trainingspeaks is just a software for creating my plan for me. I don’t buy any trainings plans. I just created a set of workouts for each phase. When creating a training weeks I choose from those workouts created by myself. Mybe you can have the same functionality with one of the other platforms mentioned above. But Trainingpeaks is the most common and it hast all the analytics tools you might need.
I’m now 12 weeks into my plan and I didn’t have to correct it very much. At the end of April there was planned a race that was cancelled. I had to remove the tapering for that race and juggle around some recovery weeks, but apart from that it seems to work. I don’t feel overtrained. Sometimes I feel pretty done after a hard interval session but because I thought of enough recovery time I’m fit enough when the next training session is due.
Conclusion
If you really want to do structured training and don’t want to spend money on a personal cycling coach I can recomonned to invest some time for reasearching and understanding how the sience behind training really works. It’s not extremely complicated and you don’t have to learn microbiological processes happening in your body in detail. But when you lernt once how to create a training plan you can always make adaptions in the way it’s best for you. That prevents frustration and overtraining and keeps the motivation up beacause it is more likely that you set realistic goals for yourself and keep achieving most of them.