The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Step-by-Step Guide to Building An Annual Training Plan (#288)

• CTS • Season 6 • Episode 288

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OVERVIEW
Annual Training Plans are big-picture, long term plans that map out training phases to bring the athlete into key races, events, or time periods with peak form and freshness, which helps optimize performance. For some, these can be fun to map out, especially if you like spreadsheets and planning. Others find it boring, confusing, time-consuming. Either way, in Episode 288 of "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast", Coach Adam Pulford takes you through the steps of creating and managing your annual training plan, and also reveals tricks of the trade to speed up the process and avoid common pitfalls.

TOPICS COVERED

  • Mapping out your annual training plan
  • Understanding periodization in training
  • Utilizing TrainingPeaks for planning
  • Common pitfalls in annual training plans

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HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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SPEAKER_00:

Providing you with practical ways to get the most money for your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Annual training plans. Where to start? That's a great question from Ivy, one of our listeners, who has a big ride coming up in October of this year, but wants to know best how to map out an annual training plan, how to schedule training blocks, and how to avoid common mistakes with it all. As always, I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and this is the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast, a show created to take complex stuff and make it simple in a short, actionable episode. Ivy, what a wonderful question. Let's see if I can help guide you along the path, but just know that I'm going to focus on where to start. Additionally, I'll show you how I do this with my athletes and give examples, then provide more resources and encourage everyone listening here to use all of this information to dial in an annual plan that best suits their life, events, and goals. So let's get into it. Annual training plans, what are they? They're big picture, longer-term plans that map out training phases in order to bring the athlete into key races, events, and time periods with peak form and freshness, which will help optimize performance. For some, this can be really fun to map out, especially if you like spreadsheets and you're a bit of a nerd, okay, and you like planning. For others, it can be boring, confusing, and really time consuming. But for everyone, I encourage you to make and have a plan, but also revisit it every few months to keep you on track so that you can make adjustments if you've had some big life changes along the way and see if you've actually been hitting your goals along that journey. Just remember the best plans are the ones that are flexible, but still keep you on track toward your goals. So be open to adjustments. To start, you want to, number one, identify the big races or even event dates. So maybe just narrow it down to one, two, or three. If you're somebody that races a bunch, sure, you can you can put them all in there, but you don't need it for um some of the very like broad-term planning that I'm gonna talk about. Okay. So identify one, two, or three big ones and put a pin in that just for right now. Then you want to determine a realistic uh number of training hours that you have per week to train, along with your current fitness level. I'll get to that more here in a second, but just think like I'm weak, I'm medium, I'm strong, that type of, you know, where's your fitness at sort of thing. And in order to do this, you can look back on previous training and you just want to be honest with yourself with how much training you've actually done, how much training you can actually do uh moving on in the future. And then you can look at uh current number of CTL or chronic training load where you're sitting relative to where you were to identify uh, you know, how strong you are from a starting point. Okay, don't get bogged down too much in all of that just yet. And then thirdly, you want to use good tools to help you in the planning process. There are two tools that I encourage you to use. The first one is a good general periodization spreadsheet. This is a simple, generalized document that can help guide you through the planning phase process without getting too focused in the details. And that's really important. I'll get to that here in a second. Next, the second tool is the Training Peaks Annual Training Plan Builder. And this is a scheduling tool that can go pretty deep in detail if you want to, and it's part of the Training Peaks premium subscription software online. Okay, so let's first talk about the general spreadsheet. So this is a generalized periodization plan that I use to help guide myself in my coaching process. I've used this template to give presentations to other coaches, teams, and groups, and I've written articles using this just general layout. I'll make it available for download for all of our listeners who visit on our landing page or with the links in the podcast episode page. Now, where these concepts come from, the puritization concepts, it's it's really my coaching experience over the past 20 years, along with other coaches' knowledge, including Dean Golic, Lindsay Golich, Jim Lehman, Chris Carmichael, Tim Kusick, Dr. Stephen Seiler, Dr. Andy Coggan, Joe Freel, and of course the father of Puritization, Tudor Bampa, just to name a few. I've had a ton of great coaches in my life as mentors, and it would it would take all the time in the world to mention them here, but those are key coaches in my life that have helped guide me through uh this periodization process. So as I pull this up, if you're watching on the YouTube channel, follow along as I'll be using this visual to speak to the planning process. So now that you can see this document, you'll see that there's nothing too fancy about it. It's a simple spreadsheet that kind of walks us through the big picture of an annual plan. And Ivy, uh kind of back to your question, it was brilliant. You said where to start. This is a great starting point, really, for anybody, anybody who's who's never done an annual plan before, as well as somebody who's looking to make a better annual plan or a reminder of what goes into an annual plan. So let me walk you through the highlights. I won't get too far down into the details because there's a lot of nitty-gritty stuff in here. Keep in mind, thick books and uh multiple presentations have been made on periodization concepts. So this short 15, 20 minute episode won't get into the details. Okay. So let me walk you through the highlights here. Uh first, we have everything broken down into bigger cycles or mesocycles. We call that base build, peak, perform in a transition phase. Okay. Then it just repeats. Um, real briefly, base training is that base foundation where everything builds on top of that. Okay, so we're using some of this common language out there that's in multiple textbooks, training peaks, CTS, and all in many other coaching companies. Okay, so the base is the foundation. We build upon that by intensifying training into a peak phase where we start to see the peak power, peak speed, peak velocity comes through coming through in the athlete, and then that should carry over for a certain time period where we go and race our bike. Okay, and the whole goal is to win. Then we take a bit of a break, and ideally we repeat that again for a later season uh peak and race. I was just talking to one of my athletes yesterday about this. She asked, How many peaks can we have in a season? Generally, two. I mean, I think like that's a whole philosophical conversation. I generally plan on two to three sometimes in terms of like the time segments where I can really like get the most out of an athlete, but it's very individual, really depends on a lot of factors. But I'd say from a planning uh standpoint, if you focus on two, that's really good. Okay. Next, and those are the the bigger mesocycles, as I like I said, the bigger chunks of time. We take the mesocycle and break it down into a smaller cycle called a microcycle. This is the prep base one, base two, build one, peak one, and then into this perform race one uh sort of time frame. And all of this, the time periods are broken down here in the number of weeks, spend some time looking at this, but it's roughly a half a year. Okay. At some point, you take a midseason break, call it a couple weeks, and then we repeat again. Okay. A couple key words here to focus on is uh the modality of the training. So here we're talking like high volume, low intensity, that's H V L I T. Okay, so these are just some acronyms that again should be common language when you're reading this language or when you're when you're reading some of the literature out there. Okay. Um, and then kind of an even sort of pacing between volume and intensity. Pyramidal starts to shift that intensity in terms of a flow into uh zone four and five. And then we get into like polarized training, which really brings out peak performance when we intensify and increase power and we're looking to get into peak and race form. Okay, so that's what I mean by modality. It's like the rhythm or the tool that you're using in the in the rhythm of training. Okay. Some of these focus points where we're just kind of anchoring in what is the focus of the period, volume and cadence, for example, when we're just preparing the athlete to get ready to do base training. When we're in the base training, volume and volume add intensity. These there's these are two things that are really important. As we, if we do a good job in that prep phase and we get into that base one, we move from just like churning the pedals over and logging the time to it's still zone two, okay, but I'm looking at intensifying or the upper end of zone two training, and we're, but we're still having uh uh high volume occur, okay? And this is for time crunched as well as uh time-rich athletes. Then at some point, you know, we transition time and zone into zone four or five as we intensify training. Then we are increasing power again as we just want to, you know, really hit that peak and go into a performance time period. There's some transitional targets, and I talk about this with uh um Tim Cusick in past episodes, and I'll and I'll refer back to that here in a second. But the transitional targets are cues to help you know when to move on in training, okay? And that's really important. There's some testing targets that you can do in terms of like baseline and just getting uh uh your zones and your training zones ready to do um good training. And then self-determined training, this is something that I've talked about in previous episodes. It's like if you write the plan or if you have a coach and you're feeling good on the day, how do you know when to do more? Okay, in this prep in this prep and base time period, we're really looking at volume or extending the time out. When we're getting into the build and peak phases, it's not really more volume or more duration, it's better. It's intensifying the effort that is better. Okay, so these are the like the anchor points that you can use along the way to guide your decisions about training. Okay. Now, I really encourage, and I and I did this in the previous episode uh where I'm talking about setting up your year and and how to set it up. The longer I coach, the more I'm using uh uh more frequent short breaks in a training phase to just deload some of the the built-up uh fatigue, mental fatigue, and strain in the system. Okay, so one to two weeks, especially for a time-crunched athlete, it's a really good way to just to wipe out that fatigue, hit the reset button, and away you go. So that's how we could um break the whole season up into two or three segments. And when you take that mid-season break or whatever break, you then just repeat the build peak and perform uh time periods. Some point toward the end of the year, there'll be a transition phase, which can be a little bit longer, call it four weeks if you want, of training to really just, you know, nuke the system and and uh reset the brain so that you can come back the next year and start to build that foundation again. Now, a couple, a couple aspects here. Uh, if you want to put some structure behind this, um Ivy mentioned that her uh event was in October. So, what you can do is just denote that October time period, that's like a key, and this is not how I do it entirely, but this is just kind of a visual cue, okay, for a late season sort of peak. I'd still set it up as a two uh time period peak. And for other people listening, maybe like a master's level uh racer, maybe they want to uh target masters national championships, which happen in July this year, and then they take a little bit of a break, and then they have this uh late season October break. Okay. And that could be a really good example of um, like I said, the kind of the two-peak season. Um, if you're doing uh Masters Nats, and let's just say it's uh uh big sugar in in Bentonville later on in the year, and you use this general structure then to start to build your training or go to the second tool that I talked about, which is the annual training plan builder on training peaks. And we'll look at that next. But before we do, my my bigger kind of vision with uh knowing that I was going to do an annual training plan episode was actually doing the four episodes with Tim Cusick in the month of December. And those are the time course of adaptation uh uh episodes where we really guide you through that base, build, peak, and race time period where we give examples of what uh how to train, uh, what to look for in training, how to structure the training itself, and maybe some things to avoid and some complications in there. So I'll again I'll just really encourage you in this annual training process, whether it's Ivy or anyone listening, as you're building your plan, go back and listen to those four episodes in particular. Again, I just I just did them and they went the whole month of December, but that's really gonna help guide you through the annual training plan process in terms of uh putting what workouts or what focus in when on these time segments. So now let's take a look at the training peaks annual training plan builder. Here's an example of what it could look like. Okay, now uh spoiler alert, this is actually uh my annual plan from last year. I did a big race early on in the season, then had uh a big race kind of later on the season, big meaning just like long, okay, um eight-ish hours um for each one, lots of feet of climbing and all this kind of stuff. I use it though as a decent example where I put some stuff in, somewhat followed it, okay. I didn't want to share any of my athletes' data um without asking them first. So I figured that this would be pretty decent. Okay. And again, there's a ton of detail here. The goal is not the ton of detail. Okay. The goal here is for you to have a starting point and tools of where to begin, learn, and start to kind of roll the roll the sleeves up and get in there and build your own annual training plan. Okay. So again, in order to do this, you'll need your key events, estimated average training hours, and you know, uh roughly your current fitness uh ability. Okay. When I'm building an annual training plan on training peaks, I do this for most of my athletes that are racing or doing events and have multiple races and events throughout the year. However, honestly, it takes me maybe five minutes to build if they have only a few events, maybe longer if I have to plug in a bunch of data uh if they're racing, you know, 20 times throughout the year. But again, I do this really fast because I've done it a ton of times. But also I have learned not to spend a ton of time in there because uh things change. Okay. And I really encourage you to not get bogged down on the details, etch it out. And training peaks does a really good job of um populating the estimated CTL or fitness where you need to be when for these key events. Okay. And on those key events, you want to rank them as A, B, and C categories. A just meaning the most important, B, medium important, and C are training races or uh things that you sign up for to kind of hold you accountable to your training, but they're not overly like emotionally important. That's how to think about the prior prioritization of these events. So if you put in the data on training peaks and you automatically populate uh the annual training plan, what you'll see is some common terminology that I just showed you in that general periodization um spreadsheet where there's the the preparation, the base one, base two, and it goes in a little bit more granular, right? Base three, and then into the build, peak, and race time periods. Okay. So again, this is more detailed and granular than the spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet is meant to just get more big picture to not bog you down. Okay. Then once you start to do the training, let's just say you get halfway through the year and you're checking in on things, you've got the actual versus the planned going on. And if we just check in and see, you know, where I was relative uh last year, fitness was a little bit ahead of schedule uh leading into the main event. The main event rent really well, in my opinion, um, felt good throughout and um had good legs in the final hour. So, here again, you you just check in on yourself and make sure that you're checking the boxes along the way. And that's and this is a great way to do it. Very simple for uh self-coach athletes and people who don't have a coach that um have somebody checking on this for them. Now, one quick thing, too, if you're looking at this on YouTube and you're like, wow, that's a lot of stuff going on. Lucky for you. Uh Training Peaks has a bunch of videos and articles of how-to on this. So, what I'll do is I'll link to that in our landing page and our show notes. Be sure to go through that if if you're gonna start to uh roll up your sleeves and build your own ATP annual training plan, is what that means. And that will guide you along the way. But I wanted to give you the visual of what it looks like to build one and then to do all the training throughout a season and what to look for um throughout the year, because this is a pretty decent visual on that. So now let's just briefly go through some common pitfalls since Ivy uh asked about that as well. So, first one I kind of uh already alluded to it. If you spend too much time building the annual training plan, now what is too much time? Hours and hours, right? Days and days mulling over this. Okay. I don't know. I think the first time you're gonna have to spend more time just to like learn the content. Anytime that you do something new for the first time, it'll it'll take more time, okay? But perfection here is not the goal. Direction is the goal. Okay, so hopefully I'm providing you with information and tools to where it can speed things up. Another pitfall is following the annual training plan religiously. Okay. It's just a guide, it's it's a model to help you on your training path, okay? And stuff will change. So you need to change with it, okay? And that's both good and bad. Sometimes you're ahead of the game plan, ahead of the fitness, maybe ahead of the FTPs higher than you thought. Those are good things. Or what is more common is you get even more constrained in time and in life, and CTL's a little further behind, okay? But you need to check in and maybe you just maybe you need to tuck in another long ride and boot that CTL up and keep the ramp rate going a little bit more before the main event. But all these things, it's just the annual training plan, is the roadmap. Another common pitfall is using only one metric or one focus to guide your decisions on training. Now, this one gets into a lot of art of it all, okay. But if you just focus on one of the modalities or the intensity only or whatever is the one thing to guide you, it's not as good as all of these aspects that I showed you that's on that general planning sheet. When you use them together, okay, to help build your training and modify your training over time. As Tim and I talked about in a recent episode, at some point though, you just need to move on in training. Okay. You need to intensify the training, is what we mean by that, and move on because your event date is coming up and you're going to need some intensity for that, more than likely. Because you general strategy is not just do a bunch of zone two, show up to the start line, and away you go. Okay. Now, more on that in episodes 285 and 286 in particular. Finally, one common pitfall that comes to mind is um people who just said it and never return back to it. Okay. You want to revisit this annual plan at least quarterly, okay? Just to check in and make sure you're checking the boxes along the way. And this helps with uh reminding you of what you need to work on when, especially when the training cycles maybe just uh start to meld with each other or you miss some days here and there. It's a really good to keep you on track. Now, I see athletes spend a ton of time, like I said, on the annual training plan in January and then just forget about it by March. And that's a silly thing to do. Strength training, where does all this fit in there? We don't have time for that. Uh, that's a whole other separate podcast. And in fact, that is the next podcast. So be sure to come back next week for more details on how to incorporate strength training into an endurance annual training plan. Final word on this is if you fail to plan, you're planning to fail. Thanks to Ben Franklin for that one. And it's and it's not to say that you can't just ride your bike and do group rides and get fit. It's more about can you get fit at the right time and can you be fresh at the right time to enjoy yourself for your key events, races, and hit your goals. That's really what we're talking about in terms of the planning process. Okay. Now, another thing is even an okay plan is better than no plan when it comes to endurance training. And that's because as humans, we tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. What I mean by that is I often see athletes who tend to think that if they just have one more epic day in training, they're going to really improve their outcomes. And they think this almost daily. If you have a plan for the year, it helps you to focus on smaller, consistent efforts, good habits, and routines, which help build to bigger achievements over time. And this is really the key in a good annual training process for all athletes, especially time-crunched athletes who don't have the luxury of time for those huge epic days. That's it. That's our show for today. Be sure to come back next week to learn how to weave in strength training into the endurance annual plan to optimize performance when you need it most. And if you like what you heard today, please share it with a friend or a training partner as this is the best way to help grow the show and share the knowledge. Special thanks to all the coaches that I mentioned earlier for their knowledge and mentorship over the years. And of course, to our listener Ivy, whose questions inspire the content for today's show. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you back here again next week. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainwright.com backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast that'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

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Adam Pulford

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