...Learned in the Kitchen)
My friend Roger who runs the Kitchen Counter Podcast give us four tips for how to begin improvising in the kitchen:
- Start simple by learning how to (truly) master a few meals
- Begin improvising by making small changes to these meals such as decreasing spice level or changing the type of cheese
- Stock your kitchen and pantry so you can do things like lighten something savory with the acidity of a lemon or bring heat to something that might otherwise be overly sweet
The same principles can be applied to training, starting with keeping it simple by mastering a few, key concepts and eliminating unnecessary variation. One way to do this is to deconstruct your training plan.
Edit - By "training plan", I mean an existing training plan, i.e. one which already lays out so many weeks for base followed by so many weeks of build, etc. Such a training plan will also define specific workouts on specific days with progression from week to week, rest weeks between blocks, FTP tests at the beginning of a block and so on.
Plan deconstruction is the process of breaking your training plan down into its basic elements in order to remove arbitrary variability so you can better understand and monitor your training.
What's cool about it is that it allows new cyclists, who are intimated by setting up their own plan, can still lean on a generic plan for the overall structure of their training while still learning and taking progressively more control over their training from the bottom up.
The process is simple and starts with removing random variation from the plan's "interval" workouts. An example of random variation is a "3 x 12" workout in which the first interval is at 89% FTP, the second interval is at 93% FTP and the third interval is at 91% FTP. This should be converted into 3 x 12 @ 91%. Why? Because it makes sense. 91% is in the middle of sweet spot and 3 x 12 @ 91% gets you precisely 36 minutes at sweetspot, which is what this workout accomplishes; nothing more.
Until a cyclist can identify that a spade is a spade, he will never learn how to assemble things into a coherent whole.
36 minutes at sweetspot makes sense.
36 minutes at sweetspot can be related to 72 minutes of sweetspot per week and how time is prioritized across intensities at the block and phase levels as energy systems go from being the focus to being maintained or prepare the body for higher levels of intensity or "raise the ceiling", etc.
36 minutes at sweetspot can be compared to 32 minutes of sweetspot and 40 minutes of sweetspot.
Patterns such as progressing time up to a practical limit, followed by an increase in intensity, followed by progressing time again up to a practical limit become clear while the value of paying for software becomes as murky as that which it obfuscates.
Interval workouts are both easy to perform using manual ERG mode which doesn't required special software.
Manual ERG mode allows athletes to ensure adequate workout stimulus and preserve workout quality by adding, extending and splitting intervals as needed in real-time.
Interval workouts enable athletes to fully leverage faster and more reliable performance monitoring possible with the internal to external load ratio when using fixed power under controlled conditions. The ability to perform an identical workout under identical conditions with less effort is an indisputable sign of improvement. An increasing cardiac drift is an indisputable sign of fatigue accumulation. Cardiac drift can inform proper workout duration and so on. Fatigue can be balanced with rest week frequency and so on. Maximum sustainable intensity renders FTP irrelevant and so on. The scenarios are endless. None of this is possible with random, arbitrary variation.
Inevitably, and sooner than expected, cyclists will realize they need to stray from their training plans and head out on their own as they see first hand the principle of individualization in action.
Like in the kitchen, where Roger recommends:
- Start simple by learning how to (truly) master a few meals
- Begin improvising by making small changes to these meals such as decreasing spice level or changing the type of cheese
- Stock your kitchen and pantry so you can do things like lighten something savory with the acidity of a lemon or bring heat to something that might otherwise be overly sweet
Starting simple, mastering a small number of workouts, making small/RELEVANT changes to these workouts (such as meaningful progression), and stocking up on meaningful metrics and experience accumulation through education, awareness and trend analysis will dramatically accelerate rider development.
For many riders, it can all start with training plan deconstruction.