More or less the question in the title, I’m curious if on days when I just want to go for a ride or if I’m doing something sort of structured in my head but that wasn’t a pre-planned workout that I’m following, are there certain features of the program I’ll be missing out on?
After doing TrainerRoad for a year I’m a little burned out on feeling like every time I ride I must do exactly what my prescribed workout is and I’m thinking maybe just using intervals.icu to track fitness across structured or unstructured rides would be a little bit less constraining way of doing that. Seems like the main thing the fitness chart uses is just the TSS/Load of a ride so I think whether the ride was a planned/structured workout or not shouldn’t matter as much for that, right?
That’s how I use Intervals. For very similar reasons to your thoughts, I don’t do ‘official’ structured workouts…but i have a rough mental tracking on what types of riding i’ll do through a week and different parts of the year. And then i use intervals to track the numbers from those rides.
I think cycling plans depend entirely on individual choices and my choice is the correct one for me in the moment I make it. I haven’t missed anything.
Some prefer structure and approach cycling as an engineer approaches designing the torque and horsepower curves of a finely tuned engine and then mating that with a the perfect transmission’s shifting characteristics. No lie. There’s been some recent studies on Norwegian endurance training and what they’ve found. They take dozens of lactate blood samples and test them during every individual training session. “During” as in stop, take blood sample, test, start back up, go, stop, repeat, and they do that outside.
For me personally, I’m not going anywhere. There’s no races in my future. I’m training for good health and so I can go on 2-4 hour rides with friends and have a good time enjoying the scenery. That’s endurance on the trainer with a high intensity session of some type thrown in once a week.
In other words, what are you after? And it’s ok for us to change our goals and make different choices when we wish to.
That is correct. The fitness chart only depends on the load. I do my training pretty much the same as @Tommy_Bal . I look at the load, the intensity and the skyline charts and try do 1-2 hard sessions a week depending on how I feel, adding intensity and reducing volume a bit as races approach. In winter I just do whatever I feel like.
I have followed a program from a coach in the past, adjusted at least weekly. That worked very well (got my best ever results) but also came with a lot of stress. I need cycling to reduce stress, not add to it.
Yeah I understand there’s fitness benefits to doing intervals and I actually kind of like going down the rabbit hole of understanding the nuance that can be put into that kind of training. But after a year of TR and having very limited ride time with an 18 month old at home I found that the preset plan was just stressing me out. Having to choose or not choose to ride in a certain way/route so I can compete my workout isn’t a great feeling when you’re hoping to find the time for one maybe two short outdoor rides a week!
I like the ‘try to do 1-2 hard workouts a week’ idea and that’s pretty much what I plan on too. I was just curious if I’d be missing out on any major features if I don’t always have a structured workout loaded up before I go! (I guess that’s something TrainerRoad sort of drills into your head since they really don’t have any way of assessing your rides if you didn’t load up a TR workout ahead of time).
I found this information a while back in a Training Peaks article and found it really helpful to “plan” in an unplanned way.
Hard workout: Add 50 to 100 percent to Fitness
Moderate workout: Add 25 percent to Fitness
Easy workout: Subtract 25 percent from Fitness
Feel good and only have that short window to ride, go hard and strive for 50-100% in TSS of whatever your current “Fitness” is. Feel tired and dragging, ride easy and don’t do more than -25% of fitness.
Young kids are an interesting mix to the equation. I’m on the back side, with kids leaving the nest. Wish I had found those bullets years ago. I would’ve taken a lot of stress out of my life (and marriage!). Hang in there and keep making the riding the thing that helps relieve stress rather than adding it.
Since the most common approach is to do a lot of easy riding it makes no real sense to meticulously schedule a multi hour endurance ride. Just go out and enjoy riding.
However, to make sure those few hard sessions are actually hard enough, it does help me to see a clock counting down. That might not really be a feature you’re missing out on, but more of a training tactic that could benefit you.
I want to thank you for making the platform work so amazingly for those of us who do want to use it for planning everything even though you don’t do that yourself these days.
More great advice, thanks all!
I’m definitely not looking to totally remove structure from my riding, just think I’d like to have it feel a little less constraining than the TR plans did. (Which honestly is probably more an issue with me than with TR since my perfectionism would kick in and I always felt like I had to do exactly what was on my plan versus go ride how/where I wanted to on a given day).
There was a good point made about how planning a little allows you to ‘see into the future’ on the training charts which I like the idea of so I may get around to doing some planning at some point. I really like to idea of being able to look at my own calendar and make my own plan rather than try to arrange a pre-existing plan to fit my weird/limited schedule.
As was just said above, thanks for creating such a great and flexible platform, really loving it so far!
Struggled with that for years to. Until I self-reflected and came to the conclusion that I was doing this for fun…
I’m now at a point where I do have a lot more time available, but didn’t change much since that conclusion.
The general rule for me was:
do 1 hard
do 1 long
get out and have fun when you have time available
The first day in the week where I only had 45-60 min available, would be the short-hard one. The long-easy ride was almost surely on Sunday morning. Any other day where I had 1-2 hours time would be a ‘just ride’ day and I went mostly by feel, but erring on the lower intensity side most of the time. Some exceptions, where you come home from your day job like a Duracell rabbit, get out on the bike and smash yourself just because you needed to blow of some steam.
Nowadays, I have 1.5 - 2 hours a day for myself and do a lot of low intensity, both running and cycling, with some higher intensity (tempo/threshold) sprinkled in. Anything higher then that only happens on group rides.
Exactly. Been riding for a long time and only started doing the ‘training’ thing in the last year or so. I have been surprised how much I enjoy that side of it, but I think finding a way to sprinkle that in while also being able to ride how/when/where I want to is what will make me the most happy. I’m more of a mountain biker than anything but the main thing I noticed recently was I’d be opting for a road/gravel ride sometimes because I know it’s easier to do structure that way. Or if I did ride my mtb sometimes I would go to the easy trails because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing a hard ride on a given day.
So I’m really loving the idea of one or two hard days a week mixed in because it’ll be easy to make those mtb days if I want, or go try to get some PRs on the skinny tires or really whatever, looking forward to having some more flexibility!
Structure is still the way for improvement.
But like the ppl here, I rarely do structure anymore. Just workouts by HR indoors mostly and then FullGaz group rides outdoor. (That’s my interval workouts lol)
I like using MTB rides as purely skill-building/maintaining training and use the road and trainer for working on the pedaling side.
With a trainer, anything stricter than “this intensity for that section” on the road seems suboptimal and trying to structure a MTB ride sounds a bit silly.
When you try to concentrate on the pedaling side on a MTB you’re going to usually limit yourself to easier terrain which raises the question of why you’re doing it that way. Pick challenging trails to sharpen your technique and you’ll know why you’re on a MTB.
Everyone’s technique needs work, the biggest issue i see is people with big motors figuring that (non-technical) climbing is all they need to be able to do well. If you’re going to climb to the top of the hill, might as well be good at going down it too…it’s free speed.
Like many others, my structure is “by feel”; however, I spent a decade coaching reasonably competitive middle-distance runners (up to and include Junior National team members) and I like to read scientific journal papers for fun, so my understanding of training principles probably allows me to do a better job by feel than if I didn’t have that experience and background.
(Context: my current intervals fitness is 99.) I try for 2-3 quality sessions a week. Usually one sustained threshold (45+minutes) or two threshold reps totaling an hour, one VO2 intervals, and one long ride (3+hrs) with a significant volume of tempo included. When I’m feeling tired, I’ll drop any of those sessions, but usually I bail on the highest intensity first, then threshold second. The rest is generally all endurance pace.
I was new to Zwift in the fall, and I fell into the over-racing trap and definitely burned myself out. There’s now a lot more green in my activities than in the fall!