Originally Posted by
fstrnu
You're overthinking it. Your reading too many different things. Start with the Training Bible. Just do what Joe tells you to do. Building a training plan does not require experience. I don't blame you at all for thinking it's overwhelming the way some people present things. Stick with Joe. He's the best teacher out there. He's also recommends interval repeats.
Also, you probably noticed the focus of research on interval repeats. Ever thought about why that is?
I disagree with that. I think you are wrong about your whole list of "simple to understand." IME, none of that is simple to understand. When I first started serious training, I did exactly what you say, building a lovely periodized training plan straight out of the Bible, starting with where I was and taking me to where I wanted to be. Total failure. I must have taken the training load up too fast, because I could't stay with the plan. I was constantly overreaching so that I had to take days off, which left me even further behind the plan. It does take experience to draft a plan, whether it's your own or your coach's. In that way, it might be better to start with a canned plan. At least then someone in the loop has some experience with training, because it's not the trainee who does.
I think the best teacher for developing a training plan for the self-coached is a premium membership at TrainingPeaks or one of its analogues. There's really no way to be immediately successful at this without data and a coach or experience. The very first thing is to get an uploading heart rate monitor or Garmin or a power meter. Then at least you have data you can plug into TrainingPeaks or one of its analogues. Without data you're out in the boonies, hacking at blackberries with a machete. Sure you can get strong doing that, but it's nasty work.
All that said, I have used the same structured training plan for many years, maybe 15. It's a piece of old Windows software from a company that went out of business long ago. It still runs on my Win7 machine and I have data on there going back all those years. I don't do exactly what the program says because my goals are not the exact goals of that program. Rather I use it as a framework for progressive periodized workouts in a year-long training plan. I've also tried the usual 12-week canned plans, but found them unsatisfactory. 12 weeks is just way too short a time to get from A to Z, at least it is for me. Every year, I need to go from doing 20 mile rides to 400k, from squatting with the bar to half squats with 240. You don't do that in 12 weeks. The average beginning trainee needs to understand that the ideal training plan is about 7 years long. There are no canned plans like that.
Experience is the best teacher and it starts when you begin. None of this is simple, not diet, not the training, not the progression, none of it. I've been training and researching for over 20 years and I'm still a beginner, really. It's been interesting, but a personal coach who's coached 100s of athletes = 100s of lifetimes of learning to train. Personally, I have valued the control, interest level, intellectual satisfaction, and low cost of self-coaching over the certainly better progress I could have obtained through a coach. BTW, "self-coached" is a better descriptor than "independent athlete," describing process rather than relationship.
Trying to take my rant back to your original point, I think experience is the key, no matter how it's obtained: from a canned training plan, Zwift, TrainerRoad, Friel's or other training books, wherever. We are all different and the same thing doesn't work for everyone. Experience starts when you begin. Grab something and have at it.