Strength training is essential for high-level athletic performance across all sports. As Intervals.icu gains more integrations for power-endurance sports (for example, Concept2 integrations for rowing), the importance of managing strength training effectively increases as well.
I want to look at the workflow for programming and completing strength training work, address what needs to be done with some initial ideas, and hopefully take a step towards Intervals.icu becoming a platform where strength training can be managed efficiently alongside an athlete’s other work.
1. Building Strength Workouts
Intervals.icu has one of the best workout builders I have ever used. It is far superior to most alternatives I have come across. I am confident that a similar syntax for weight training would work well, although it would benefit from a different visualisation and presentation compared to aerobic workouts.
This could just be custom text fields where whatever we call a workout become a unique item but it could also be tied to a pre-existing list of all resistance training movements from somewhere like ExRx (https://exrx.net/Lists/Directory).
2. Adding to Training Calendars
This should be fairly straightforward, as we can already add strength workouts to the calendar, and they are tracked separately from cycling and running workouts.
3. Athletes Completing Plans
This is where I think most of the challenges lie and where progress may have stalled in the past. The key issue is enabling athletes to export or log workout plans in some form.
The landscape for strength training apps is quite large. I know of Strong and Hevy, but I would love for others to suggest additional platforms, especially any that support export or import of strength workouts using a shared file type. I know Hevy can sync workout text data to Strava (Explore Hevy's Strava Integration & How to Enable It - Hevy App), which might be something we can use. However, the free version of Hevy has some serious limitations, so I am hesitant to suggest it as our first strength integration.
Alternatively, could these workouts be completed directly within Intervals.icu? The interface could include editable fields and checkboxes that allow athletes to log their sessions in the same way most strength apps operate. While this might extend beyond the current scope of Intervals.icu, which usually relies on other apps for workout execution, implementing this feature might actually be simpler than dealing with the changing landscape and business models of third-party strength apps.
4. Reporting and Analysis of Strength Training
For individual workouts, the key metrics are straightforward: plan-versus-completion compliance and total kilograms lifted per session. Over the long term, it would be valuable to track progression on specific lifts. This could be analysed after each workout or displayed on a dedicated screen similar to the current power and pace analysis tools.
This is my first stab and trying to bring this together. I hope it starts a discussion on how Intervals can support this part of athletic performance and gets us a bit closer to an answer.
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