With my work schedule, I have 4 days a week to train. I can’t train on work days. My days off each week change. Sometimes I have all 4 off in a row, then next week it’s every other day. I did a low volume plan last year, but it was hard keeping up some weeks. Due to being all taxing intervals, when I needed to do sessions back to back to back, my body didn’t have time to recover. The plan assumes you have every other day to complete the workouts.
I want to up my weekly ride hours up to about 8 per week this year. I think long easy rides really help me as well. I can do them and feel fine the next day. Polarized training seems to be what I want to do. But I can’t seem to make a plan. I tried the masters plan of 4 rides per week, but that still only gets me to approx 5.5 hours riding each week, which is what I do now. The other plan is 6 rides per week, which I can’t do.
So what should I do? Do I use the 4 days a week masters plan and just swap the workouts? Like for my first week it shows to do a 90 min endurance, 75 minute endurance, a 1 hour threshold, and another 75 minute interval session. Should I make my endurance sessions longer to get to 8 hours?Or do I adjust each workout to longer ones and sort of spread out the time? Do I try to keep the same tss every week as well?
It seems like the algorithm doesn’t want allow this type of plan and I’m not sure how to make it work.
In a recent post on another thread, I linked to a video where a very similar question was put to one of the loudest shouters about polarised training, Stephen Seiler
Follow the interval progressions of the plan. Just fit the workouts on the days you are off even if your days change every week. Tack on an extra 30-40-60 minutes of endurance riding as needed to increase your volume. Go extra long on a weekend endurance ride if that is convenient.
Time alone is a poor measure of volume, intensity gives some sense to it. What you really want it to get faster, you happen to think 8hrs is the only way to do that.
Minimum effective dose to stimulate adaptations in your body rather than maximum training possible.
Due to this you can’t really have a template, but you can have principles to apply. Minimum effective dose, progressive overload, easy days after hard days.
How exhausted can you be on a work day, how much recovery will you get? Do you get breaks you could say take a walk? Can you optimise sleep and nutrition on those days?
I don’t think there’s an easy solution here. I’d try two potential solutions:
Route 1: Create a minimal plan and tack on workouts as needed/possible
You could create a plan with 3 workouts per week, 2 hard interval sessions and one long endurance ride. That’s what I am on now as I spend 6+ hours/week on the bike commuting and I have added 2 strength workouts per week.
In your worst-case scenario, 4 days off in a row, you could do three workouts, I’d do:
Day 1: hard intervals
Day 2: rest
Day 3: hard intervals
Day 4: long endurance ride
For any other combination, I’d base my training off of that template, plan for 3 rides per week. If you can get in extra workouts, I’d consider adding an endurance ride or strength training.
Route 2: TrainNow
Here you just use TrainNow. It won’t be as effective as a proper training plan, but it takes out the hassle of constantly having to shuffle around workouts.
As other athletes above mentioned, you should still be able to follow a training plan – it just sounds like you’ll have to manually shuffle a lot of your workouts around as your work schedule isn’t consistent.
I think choosing a Low Volume Masters or Polarized plan would be a good starting point. That way, you’ll still get some structure and progression to move your training along while maintaining some flexibility to move your workouts around each week based on your work schedule.
I also really like @JoeX’s advice on “minimum effective training dose” – I think this point gets overlooked a lot when it comes to training and that many athletes tend to adopt the mindset of “more is better” (which isn’t necessarily true). If you had some trouble keeping up on a Low Volume plan in the past, I’d be hesitant to bump your training up to 8 hours per week this year. It may be better to start off with less volume and then build up closer to 8 hours per week once you’re confident you can handle the training stress.
That said, once you get into the swing of the plan, if you find you do want to increase volume, the suggestions above are solid on how to do so. You could use your fourth day of each week (since Low Volume plans are 3 days/week) to do a Z2 ride, and tacking on extra Z2 time to your existing workouts is another good strategy to get some extra volume in. Again, though, be mindful of how your body adjusts to the extra time in the saddle, and don’t be afraid to back things off if you feel the need for some extra recovery.
Hope that helps – feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions!
If I could only train 4 days with irregularity, I’d try to couple together hard days and recover otherwise. For example,
day 1: 1hr hard interval,
day 2: 2-3hr easy endurance,
then no exercise days for working, repeat.
I used to have super good fitness riding 1hour easy on the trainer tues-Friday, then 4hr with hard efforts on Saturday, no exercise Sunday and Monday.
I now ride about 1-1.5hr per day for 5 days in a row with 1-2 days hard and the rest easy. It’s really all about recovering from riding hard, not necessarily riding hard. You pretty much get stronger from anything you do (different interval schemes don’t matter so much). It’s more about recovering and therefore getting stronger, which is eating right, resting, and riding easy enough for ‘active recovery’.
I think most people get such great fitness and become believers in training plans after they actually follow a plan. But they mistakenly credit the workouts of the plan to their success rather than the fact that they committed to a structured way of training and followed through on it.
The latest Empirical Cycling podcast was interesting. Kolie and Rory sketch out some basic 12 week build cycle plans.
short story: endurance and threshold (tempo, SS, FTP) is the peanut butter and jelly of training. Build out TTE. Sprinkle in some Vo2 and finally some 30/30s for race prep.