I am very tempted to acquire the highnorth workout library and create my plan only with it and intervals.icu calendar. Looks expensive at first glance, but after a few months it pays off, compared with TrainerRoad pricing, for instance. So my questions here:
Has anyone tried out? Is it worth the price? Are the workouts categorized as ‘base’, ‘build’, ‘taper’, etc… So I can more or less design a plan out of it? (I am very newbie on this)
The format is TrainingPeaks-based library. I guess it is possible to import it in intervals.icu Calendar, right?
The standard reply would be “it depends”, and is a valid response. It depends on:
What are your goals?
Are you able to follow it strictly?
What happens if you have an off day, and struggle. Did you waste your time doing the workout, or would it have been better to tap off the intensity?
As a newbie, do you know what to look for in the data?
Do you have the time to analyze the data, and get through the rest of your daily life?
One of the biggest problems with generic plans, is they can work, but aren’t tailor-made to you. They differ to prevent you from being bored on the trainer.
While these plans aren’t bad, a coach can do the same, better. But it depends… on your goals and objectives.
Hi @Gerald , thanks for your response. But it seems to me that the workout library is just a bunch of standalone workouts, not an entire plan.
My question was more: how hard do you think it could be to create a plan combining those workouts? I have some notion of trainings (keep learning), but I am far from being an expert.
In the base season you don’t need those fancy plans, you should be riding (mostly) endurance to low tempo zones. Low intensity.
Build phase is all about progression. A good workout (once per week) is 3x8m, then 4x8min then 5x8min before a recovery week to finish the block. Another good workout is 5x5min at VO2 power. The next block you do the same steps but increase the power by 10W or whatever you can hold for those 3-5 sets. Stephen Seiler explains these workouts better (assuming you want to follow a polarised approach).
Speciality/Race phase is done on how you would race, assuming your goal is to race. Shorter (duration), harder (intensity) efforts, more often.
If you just want to build fitness and endurance then the build phase is good enough, I guess.
It’s not super easy to do that unfortunately. Assuming you train with power you might be able to download them in zwo format and import those. Intervals.icu can bulk import workouts now but I don’t know if TP will let you download all of them at once.
@devvesa Highnorth also have articles about planning training and a book on training [including planning]. I think that the book is a good read.
I do my own planning. You must be prepared to invest the time into learning how to plan and how to adapt a plan for your goals and then for your day-to-day and week-to-week progress and feelings. I started planning by following a method outlined by Tim Cusick. He has a seminar available on Youtube in which he discusses the phases of training and the kinds of workouts that should go into each phase. One nice thing about Cusick’s method is that it progression from one phase to another depends on your ability to hit targets rather than depending simply on time. Whatever plan you decide to embark on, be prepared for the fact that this will take significant time – learning appropriate planning principles, reading around planning, working out your goals, identifying areas that you need to improve in order to reach your goals, making the plan, assessing your progress, evaluating the plan in the light of your progress, and adapting the plan.
Finding the appropriate workouts is not difficult. A simple library like Highnorth’s would work. TrainingPeaks also has a lot of free workouts that you can copy.
One thing that you will notice is that TP does not control your trainer if you are indoors; nor record your ride, indoors or out. So you will need a device to record the ride, which could be your headunit. In addition, if you want to do some rides in erg mode [eg: I often do endurance rides in erg mode, so that I can pedal away and think about something else / watch a video, etc], then you will need a device that can control the trainer. This could be an app on your phone.
Finally, intervals.icu takes the records of your workout / ride and analyses them in the usual way. I don’t bother to download my workouts to intervals.icu, but simply keep my calendar on TrainingPeaks. So intervals.icu does not act as my calendar, which is a pity.
Possibly not that difficult. But again, the saying goes “it depends”.
If you have bunch of workouts, you can just load them into intervals and put them such that you can create a training (load) ramp for a week to week basis.
(I screenshot-ted this from somewhere in this forum, it’s also somewhat written in TR’s website)
I have no idea how / what format is TP’s workout library in. (zwo? MRC? ERG?) I think it’s best if you are able to get clarification and whether you can download the entire library. (if you have a TP account, and will be using that then it possibly makes no difference except that you will need to figure out how to execute those workouts either indoors on trainer or outdoors)
@Michael_Webber Yes, my goal is to do my own planning, too. It will be far from perfect, and I’ll do silly stuff for sure, but I am sure I’ll enjoy the learnings.
However, it sounds like a lot to do, this is why I wanted to skip the build my own workouts part.
I’ll take a look at Tim Cusick’s seminar. Sounds interesting, thanks!
