Stick to a training plan or make my own?

Before lockdown eased and group rides resumed I was hammering away at TR on a LV plan and saw decent gains 226>262 FTP over the space of a few months.

I’ve not really done any indoor training recently, done the occasional outdoor workout but I think I prefer doing structured workouts indoors.

With my current schedule I do a fast group training ride every Tuesday and Saturday so I’m thinking about potentially doing a high intense indoor structured ride every Thursday and perhaps a less intense one on Mondays…?

I’m fairly young (29) and feel my body can cope with 4 hard(ISH) rides per week so my main question is how if you were in my shoes would you facilitate this?

A/ Use the “Train Now” feature and just pick workouts based on how I’m feeling

Or

B/ Go back onto a LV plan and remove 1 workout per week? If so which workout?

Cheers guys and girls :facepunch:

I would set myself up for success as much as I can. Based on what you’ve said, I would add an easy ride on Mondays first. Assuming you’re compliant and your Tuesday and Saturday still feel good, add Thursdays with TrainNow. If you start falling off on Tuesday or Saturday, you know to adjust.

The risk here is that you are not following any structure so it’ll be difficult to plan for progress. Although, I still think you’ll make gains but the zones that’ll be in will be random (anaerobic, vo2, ss, endurance, etc).

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Thank you, sounds solid advice :+1:

If you can only go “Hard-ish”, that could be an issue with doing too many harder sessions. Likely better doing two VERY HARD, and changing the other two.

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With the schedule of the group rides, I think it is difficult to fit in quality sessions around those. I don’t know what your full week is like, but if you do a Tues->Thurs, Sat/Sun schedule like a lot of people, the only other day in there for a high quality interval session is Thursday. You could do something like a Tempo → SS interval progression, then threshold interval progression, etc. just on Thursdays and roll that until you plateau.

If you don’t mind going into a group ride with residual fatigue from a workout that opens up Monday, but you might want rest on Sunday then. That also open up Friday, but you’re probably just moving the Thursday workout to Friday at that point.

Since cycling is a hobby I think we should all make sure we do something we love about cycling at least once a week and build it into our plans. If that is group rides for you, then I would make sure you have at least one group ride in your weekly plans. But I think at some point, especially once you plateau, a decision needs to be made about the utility of the second group ride and whether passing on the second group ride most of the time in order to add additional structure and targeted workouts that enable future growth is worth it to you.

I’d recommend taking a look at your power files for the group rides. I find mine are pretty much useless from the perspective of driving fitness gains (for me.). I’m frequently up to 40% in zone 1 and then have unstructured higher intensity sections that aren’t long enough or don’t have enough time in zone to drive further fitness gains. When I do group rides I consider them to be more about developing group riding skills and things like that, rather than something that is contributing to my fitness.