All Off-Road Specialty training plans are improved to be more specific to your riding and racing goals.
What’s New
Each Off-Road Specialty plan includes a TSS progression in line with the improved Build training plans. To allow flexibility for varying racing schedules, training stress remains steady from week to week throughout this 8-week block bringing you to peak fitness.
Promoting increased performance for race-day, the workout selections in each Off-Road training plan have improved in terms of discipline specificity. Additionally, all mid- and high-volume options for each plan include Sunday ride alternatives (indoor/outdoor).
The Off-Road training plans that have been improved in this new update include:
The Type of Fitness You’ll Gain
Off-Road riding — Mountain biking specifically — includes efforts ranging from extremely short, explosive starts & surges to long, steady, uphill slogs and include everything in between; often times numerous times within the same event.
A combination of interval work in the Anaerobic, VO2max, and Sweet Spot power zones address the varying efforts seen in off-road riding. The emphasis on each is adjusted based on which off-road discipline you’ll be pursuing. Racing types like Short Track Cross-Country, Gravity, and Cyclocross sees more of an emphasis placed on the more explosive forms of fitness. While the training in our Cross-Country Olympic and Cross-Country Marathon training plans rounds out the focus to be more inclusive of sustained, aerobically fueled efforts.
Why the Drop in Stress from the Newly Update Build Plans?
If you started training with TrainerRoad before November 14th of 2017, you’ll notice a slight reduction in TSS from your Build plan to the Off-Road Speciality plans. This is to transition you from the Build phase into the Specialty phase at an appropriate ramp rate. If you look at your full Base, Build and Specialty training plans, Coach Chad steadily grows your TSS in the Base and Build phases. It isn’t until the Specialty phase that you’ll see TSS level off to make sure you’re as fresh as possible for your goal events or riding season.
How to Start the Off-Road Specialty Plans
If you started a Off-Road Specialty plan before November 14th (the release date of the new plans) and would like to update to one of the new plans, you must stop your current plan and reselect your Off-Road plan to access the new improvements. This is with the exception of the Cyclocross Specialty plan, which was updated on August 30th.
If you’d like to update your new plan with the completed workouts from your earlier plan, you must unassign the workouts from your past plan in order to assign them to the new plan. This will allow you to update your new plan with the rides you’ve completed from your original one.
If you’re new to structured training: Before you start the Off-Road training plans, we recommend completing Base and Build phase training plans first. The Sweet Spot Base plan, followed by the Short/General Power Build plan are great to follow before moving onto refine your abilities with any of our Off-Road Specialty plans.
Have a question about training plans? Leave it below or send our support team a message to support@trainerroad.com.
