Yeah most of mine are the latter. I think some coaches (and some coaching companies out there) get carried away thinking workouts need to be complex to be worth money. I tend to align more with guys like Tim Kusick and Kolie who are pretty well the opposite.
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And as an athlete, I appreciate the simplicity! Though I can see how people may look at a complicated workout and feel it is superior to something like “3x20 @ FTP”, but to each their own I suppose.
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Overcomplicating intervals is absolutely a thing. Coaches and apps have to justify their cost. In their defence, the variation probably does lead to less boredom and perhaps increases adherence. But they are probably not significantly more effective than just the simple classic sessions.
One of the advantages of having such few different intervals sessions is you really don’t even need an accurate FTP. 2*20min and 4min/4min * 5 are my normal threshold and vo2 sessions. I’ve done them so much, and regularly enough, that I know what numbers to aim for. Also beauty of doing the same sessions regularly is that it’s really easy to track progress.
Self training really doesn’t have to be complicated. Pick whichever one classic interval session you most like for; threshold, vo2, sweet spot, and over/under. Then each week do 2 interval sessions, 1 long ride, then as much easy riding as you can fit in/recover from. That will get you the vast majority of the gains a coaching program will.
Of course if you are looking to get the marginal gains, and are racing where a few watts makes a different, personal coaching may make sense.
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After having a coach for seven months earlier this year, I just appreciated the simplicity of what training could be. I did pretty well with it and decided to just self coach. I wrote my plan down on a piece of paper and have been following it. Simple workouts 2-3 times a week, the rest just endurance.
While I still have an active TR account, I don’t really see myself going back to any of the training plans - I haven’t even used the player since I’ve been riding outside 100% since early spring.
If were truly time crunched, I’d be using the TR plans though, I think they would be really useful in that case.
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Accountability is another big topic - my partner is a triathlete, and will follow her training plan to a fault. She needs a coach to make that happen … there’s no way she’d be nearly as compliant or successful self-coached. Some people really require that push. Rest/recovery is similar, some people will bury themselves without realizing the need for rest, and really need someone to tell them otherwise.
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The reasons I see for having a coach (if you don’t know, I am one… not doing it to send my kids to college… it’s a passion project and I just ask fair compensation for my time each month/consult):
- Accountability. Some people do need this, but this isn’t quite as common a reason as I would’ve guessed. I would put one of my group of clients in this category.
- Plateau. Many clients I’ve worked with over time simply hit a plateau with another program or coach or self-coached and need some help busting through it.
- Time. When I had a coach, this was why. Even knowing what I know, I could spend hours on my own training each week, and I just didn’t want to think about it. This is a huge benefit of any coaching/training program like TR, the ability to set it and forget it.
- Knowledge. Not as common as you might think because most people who are paying for coaching have been doing it for a while, but some people really don’t know how to train and just need that guidance to get them on the right track. I get a lot of contacts for consults/ongoing consults just to give people direction, and then many already kind of know what to do and how to do it. Sometimes it just helps to hear it from someone else.
That last one is where I would love to see more novice riders get a coach (vs. buy an online training plan or something like mostly self-guided Zwift or TR plans) because you can save yourself YEARS of wasting time, injury, etc., by simply learning how to train, and more importantly how, when and WHY to recover. That said, what I always appreciated about TR as far back as ten years ago, they focused on trying to educate athletes as well, instead of just collecting money for a plan.
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Out of the 4 you named, Plateau and Time would be my biggest benefits. No matter how simple of an approach you take, it does still take mental effort to come up with! No matter how simple your workouts are, you still should have a general idea of when to do them, and still need to put in the time to properly plan, and adjust when the rest of your life changes. It becomes twice as important when I am too busy/stressed to create my plan, as I’m also extra motivated to skip workouts then 
As for the plateau, I do feel I’ve hit one, almost entirely based on how I train. Perhaps it is time to consider a winter coach 
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Yeah, those are the two most common ones I get. I coach a couple of inexperienced/novice athletes here locally, so that “knowledge” bit comes into play sometimes for me. I’m just teaching and telling people what to do. But I would say 85% of my current clients COULD self coach if they wanted to with some success, but they’re in it for the time savings (set and forget) and continual upwards progress.
The good news, for me anyway, is that the vast, vast majority of my clients have progressed year over year and I’ve been lucky enough to retain the majority of my clients for more than one season. That’s been really fun watching people not just improve short term, but keep getting better the next year and following too.
That year-over-year progression was tougher for me as an athlete when I was self-coached because sometimes what I needed was rest/recovery, let some fitness go, and then build back up and bust through. That’s as common as needing some kind of plateau-buster plan/workout.
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I should add one more thing to the difference in having a coach:
- Mindset. We are extremely hard on ourselves, and the vast, vast majority of dedicated endurance athletes are more likely to overtrain than undertrain. One thing that I really, really appreciated about my coaches was the help with focusing my mindset on the proper things, and then even talking to them for mentorship both as an athlete and eventually as a coach as well. Being able to glean mindset from guys who were elite and better than me at my sports was very helpful in my development as both an athlete and a coach.
Sometimes, they taught me to give myself a little grace with how critical I could be of myself. Other times, a little kick in the pants helped. And then a key bit could be “are my goals realistic?”
Man, that last one is a big thing… if you can find a coach who will shoot it to you straight about your goals/desires without making you feel bad about yourself… OR who will push you to try for bigger things than you might think you’re capable of… that’s golden too. I often struggled as an athlete with “imposter syndrome”, and I probably limited myself artificially just from a lack of REAL confidence sometimes. I had some coaches over time that would tell me things like “you need to be thinking podium or win here”, when I was going in thinking “I hope I can compete with these guys!”
On the flip side, I have a 28 year old client who is in his third year of racing bikes, made Cat 3 this year, and has made tremendous progress in our time together (really stunning, actually). But he’s talked about wanting to “go pro” and I’ve had to kind of talk him off that ledge. So, it goes both ways.
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Sometimes you have to (gently) crush dreams that’ll stand in way of real progression.
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This is likely the biggest thing I have learned from having a coach.
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