I never had a coach but I do have 10+years of elite swimming background with a coach. So baisixally I have experimented with this cycling thing for many monthsy body best performs when I have at least 3days of zone 2 rides between workouts. So it’s like workout , recov/off, endurance, endurance, workout. If I repeat this for 3 weeks and take recov week. And keep repeating that how much progress will I see? My workouts are almost exclusively threshold (3x10, 4x10, 2x20, 3x15)some in flat, some in mountains. I never had cycling coach and I know there is build and offseason all that but I think it over complicate things especially when I’m in school with a job. I’ll attached my last 3 weeks I plan on 1 more workout and going into recovery week. So I will be cycling through 6 threshold workouts in little over 3 weeks. Is this plan viable?
I’d start by just looking for a free basic cycling training plan to get a look at how they are structured in general. One thing that jumps out right away is that most basic plans will have the rest days BEFORE the big workout, where you have it the other way around. I know you might not want to pay for long term coaching or services, but a month or two of an app like TR will help you learn the basics, or you could even just buy a cheap plan on TP.
It is a sensible structure: 2 hard workouts in a week with sufficient easier workouts so that you can hit the harder ones really well and a recovery week every 4th week.
Here’s a question: Progress towards what?
With the time available to do 10 - 17 hours per week on the bike, there is scope to make a lot of progress.
Excellent primer.
I would ask more about your overall structure as you seem to be doing the week to week well and actually listening to your body (most people take ages to figure that out lol)
If you have goal events how are you strutting your training to hit them in your best shape?
This is interesting. In the running world rest days usually follow a really big effort (thought process is you need to recover from it). Maybe that’s how it is in swimming too since that is where the OP is coming from?
with this kind of volume (if you can be consistent with it) it is next to impossible to not get massively better.
You will plateau relatively quickly with that. Here are a few basics. Any training plan will implement the following principles:
- Periodization into micro, meso and macro cycles.
- Progressive overload
- Specificity, i. e. your training plan aims to achieve a particular goal. You would give someone doing TTs a different training plan than someone doing crit races.
- Individualization since we are all individuals and we respond differently to stimuli. Moreover, our lives are different.
Your proposed plan repeats the same meso cycle over-and-over again. Not good.
In micro cycles, you want to alternate hard days with either easy or rest days. Note that a long endurance ride counts as hard, what matters is not the intensity, but the fatigue the workout incurs. In the second week of your training, you had no proper rest days where you do nothing. That should be avoided. I’d have two real rest days with no physically strenuous activities for someone new to cycling at least.
A training plan should change across meso cycles where, depending on the training phase, you mix various threshold, VO2max and sweet spot workouts. For example, threshold is not just 4 x 10 or 2 x 20, but you have over-unders as well.
You also have not clearly stated your goal: what kind of fitness are you looking for?
My advice is:
- Start small, 3 workouts per week, and built a routine. The first (few) week(s) will feel easy, but if you are new to the sport, your body will need time to adapt. Just because I have great cycling fitness doesn’t mean I could replace 5–6 days of cycling with 5–6 days of running.
- Use a training plan supported by one of the platforms. Search this forum for alternative to TR if you don’t want to do TrainerRoad. I tried using free training plans (I think I found one from British Cycling), but I am not sure how effective they will be.