Originally Posted by
fstrnu
Yeah I suck at communication which is why I need the interactivity of a forum. Your summary is spot on and also your comments about the OP. I see know how that was indeed confusing. I see your post as constructive. Thank you for that. The way my thinking was going in the OP was in two parts. The "what I learned in the kitchen" or whatever part was sincere because I'm binge-ing a cooking podcast and the parallels with training are strong. Anyway the intention of the OP is to outline this first and then to apply these concepts to a generic training plan. It would probably make a lot more sense if I just titled it something like "one way to add load monitoring to your training plan" or something like that and then just explain the how's and why's as I describe what a typical training plan does.
Oh yeah and your "from there it's a question of" is spot on. So, you can take a bottom-up approach where you figure out the nuts and bolts and then expand into the overall phasing, etc. or, and what I say in this thread is, you can lean on your training plan to do the overall outline part but then fiddle a bit with the details to better understand, monitor and adjust the workouts, microcycle and progression as needed for your unique abilities.
Ok, if you suck at communication, I can share some of my insights with the few brain cells I have left after 40 years of a technical career. Engineers don't just create simulations, write code, and use computer aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE), we write to deliver and explain our work. FWIW, I don't think you suck, but you have to be conceptually tighter. Go to a resale store and get a 50 cent copy of "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White (this pdf
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...VTU4oofxXEA1-5
might help, too). Your work has to be crystal clear to everyone with a reason to have interest (so not the fifth-graders among us!) in planning and applying their own training plan.
Don't explain the same thing several times. Do it once, correctly. Repetition can cause confusion. When you do choose a point to clarify, don't just repeat what you said before.
How about trying a simple title and topic, such as: "Simplify your understanding of training plans to make one you'd like to follow." Or, "Better Training Plans through Simplicity." If
Your introduction and closing were kinda nice but too long - short and sweet if it's not core content. You want people sitting back and saying "he's a danged genius!" not ""nice closing, I feel like my hand has been shaked, but ... what did he teach me?"
Don't use words that have precise meanings outside their standard meanings unless their connotative or slang-based meanings are also crystal-clear. I'm here commenting on the thing about the word "random." Likewise "generic" in your phrase "Generic structured training plan."
Finally, when you use abbreviations in an article, the first time you want to use it, spell it out first, like this: "We use too many TLA's in our writing." This is wrong, because you have no clue how the reader understands "TLA." Should be, "We use too many three-letter acronyms (TLA) in our work." After that, use TLA without spelling it out.
If an analogy takes more than one line of text, there's too much of it. Closings rarely need to be longer than two lines, 20 or so words.
In all my technical writing (a lot of it in 40 years as an engineer), I've found examples have to be perfect. If one of my examples has loose ends, I look like I don't give a rats ass about whether my reader gets it. Some people will jump to the examples and only read them. If those are not good, my whole paper takes that reputation. My bad luck, those people are usually the seniors of the company.
So don't take any of this the wrong way. You clearly want to be understood, if you wrote it to more of a layperson's level without reducing the sophistication of your message, I might understand your point as well as Carbonfiberboy does. And we might be able to talk to each other intelligently about what I hope to do, and I could benefit from all that research and daydreaming you seem to have done on your topic. I'm not on this Forum to bust chops, I'm here to learn about training so I can get to my 60 mile with climbing event in September. If you can make use of any of my notes in this posting, I think I'll be helping us both.