New Book: The Self-Coached Cyclist - Training with Power Now Available!

Training
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Hi everyone,

After years of self-coaching and training with a power meter, I’m excited to announce the release of my new book, The Self-Coached Cyclist - Training with Power, now available on Gumroad!

This book is designed to simplify the complex world of power-based training, making it accessible for serious amateur and recreational cyclists who want to improve their performance without being overwhelmed by technical jargon or spending countless hours on research. Whether you’re new to power meters or have been tracking your data for years, this guide will provide you with practical insights and tools to optimize your training.

For those of you familiar with Intervals.icu, you’ll be pleased to know that this platform plays a central role in the book. I walk through how to use Intervals.icu for effective training planning and performance tracking, offering clear examples of how you can leverage its features to improve your performance, even if you don’t have a coach.

What’s Inside:

  • Practical guidance on using power meters with tools like Garmin, Wahoo, and, of course, Intervals.icu.
  • Clear explanations of power-based metrics and how to apply them to your training.
  • Strategies for creating training plans that align with your goals, no matter your level of experience.
  • Advice on maintaining consistency and adaptability in your training for long-term success.

While the primary audience is non-professional and recreational riders, I believe the book also offers value to professional cyclists and coaches. If you coach athletes who are new to power training or need help making sense of their data, this guide can serve as a useful resource to simplify the concepts and ensure athletes are training smarter.

Thank you to everyone in this community for contributing to the incredible knowledge base that is Intervals.icu. I hope you find my book helpful, whether you’re using it for yourself or to support others in their training journey.

If you’re interested, you can find The Self-Coached Cyclist - Training with Power on Gumroad The Self-Coached Cyclist - Training with Power.

Feel free to ask any questions here! I’d love to hear your feedback.

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I’ll give my feedback, which I feel is overdue at this point.

We have a facility here thanks to @David and the many contributors on this forum where we can both ask for and offer advice on basically any activity you can think of. It’s all done willingly without the expectation of monetary compensation. People are just willing to share what they know, offer advice when sought, which helps both the forum and the site flourish.

Use of the Intervals.icu site is offered free of charge and those of us that ‘support’ it help ensure that it will remain available for all, including those who don’t support. We are getting a truly exceptional facility for an incredibly low price when compared to other sites offering a similar product.

You have been a member since March 2022 and have posted links to paid user/training guides. In effect you are making some money from this facility, yet you don’t support it. I think a minimum expectation for someone seeking monetary gain from this platform would be a recurring quarterly contribution of €10.

Further to the above, you claim to have “years of self-coaching and training with a power meter”, which I have no doubt is true. However in this post here from July you tell us your FTP was just fair compared to others in your age category. Your CTL was just 24. Your delf coaching doesn’t really seem to have gone so well. Maybe you have had a very steep learning curve since July and maybe there is valuable advice in your book, but forgive my skepticism to the claim the the book offers " value to professional cyclists and coaches."

Apologies from me, but I won’t buy a book or a guide made off the back of the help freely offered on here, produced by someone who doesn’t offer the small sum of €10 each 3 months to help keep this site up and running.

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Hello all,

The book should be free to download but, my apologies for a mistake I made while loading it and did not set that up correctly.

It has been fixed and may be downloaded for free now.

My cycling fitness has improved a lot by using the information I share in the book and I hope it does the same for other users. My current Fitness is now in the high sixties, my FTP got to 206 and I have made several personal records in my training loop and rides as tracked by Garmin Connect.

Again, apologies for the misunderstanding

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Thank you for sharing your effort. Your book is great for start using Intervals.icu with a power meter.

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I have not read the book, though may try it soon. However, I think it grossly unfair that you should criticize an author and coach for his relatively low level of personal fitness! There are lots of very fine coaches in all sort of sports who are not themselves high level players, but knowledgeable in their field.

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@CaseyB23, thank you for your comments.

There are several reasons for a “low” fitness value, which are not necessarily “bad”, so having context is very important. I can think of 3 scenarios, maybe there are more:

New to Tracking Long Term Fitness

First time using this approach even if you have been active in the sport before or you are just starting. Welcome !!!

Planned Decreased Fitness Values

Competitive riders often plan an off season with no riding at all aimed at recovery, both physical and mental. They also have a detailed plan to get it back in the next season with a solid Base and Build training plan.

You will go on a Family vacation where priority is to spend time with your spouse and kids so training is out of the question and you are aware of the impact it will have on your fitnesss.

Unplanned Fitness Decrease

Sickness, injury or random life events.
For example, those of us who were fortunate to overcome COVID, know the impact that it had in our fitness due to the impossibility to train during the sickness and the several rest and health recovery weeks after that as indicated by your doctor. And, when you got the green light to go back to riding, fitness recovery took a long, long time to get back to pre-COVID status, following a specially developed training plan, that also tracked health parameters, to overcome these special circumstances.

If you stop training at all, the fitness/CTL values will decrease faster than you can build them back, from a ramp up perspective, as you can see in this image taken from the Fitness/CTL Planning worksheet I created to plan my training.

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Supposing that starting next Monday I will not be able to train for any reason, for two weeks. In the first week of no training the impact would be -12 in the ramp up, decreasing CTL from 76 to 64 and in the second week it will go down 10 points more to 54. So, a loss of 22 Fitness/CTL points in just two weeks.
To get back to 76 considering a weekly ramp up of 5, would take just over 4 weeks to be at the fitness level before the break or 5 weeks with a ramp up of 4.

By understanding training principles, knowing how your fitness tracking device works as well as using a fitness tracking application such as Intervals, you have the tools that will let you plan and get the fitness needed to achieve your goals, competitive or not.

Cheers

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Dont forget genetics! I am convinced some folks are born with a higher level of strength or endurance, and for them it is easier to get to those high FTP and MAP values. Even if the off season, they maintain higher values than average.

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Yes, you are correct. Thanks for adding this to the cause list. The opposite is true as well. Some people have no favorable genetics and have to train way harder to get results.

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For those of you who may be interested, I updated the worksheet shown above adapting it to a normal training plan structure including Base, Build and Taper periods. It is a free download and the details are in this post in another thread:

TSS estimate to get “in the green” - Feature Requests - Intervals.icu Forum