I’ve recently chosen a maintenance plan and I am surprised to see a lot of anaerobic work. When I chose maintenance, I was thinking maintain relative fitness in the off-season, not maintain peak fitness during racing season… So have I chosen incorrectly? I’m basically looking to just not lose a ton of fitness through January.
My guess is that TR is aiming to maintain your personal level of fitness, so you can step back into similar training without having lost much. From https://support.trainerroad.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037923191-Plan-Builder-Overview we have this:
How can I make a plan for maintaining fitness?
When you start building a plan, you will be asked if you want to build a plan for an event or fitness goals. If you would like to build a plan to maintain fitness, select fitness goals, then select your discipline and choose “Maintaining Fitness” as your goal. This will build a plan focused on maintaining your specific level of fitness.
My “maintain fitness” plan includes no anaerobic work, but I was on a Gran Fondo plan, and TR never wasn’t giving me anaerobic workouts on that plan either.
Jonathan Lee, on the podcast recently, suggested the “maintain fitness” as an option for reducing training load for a month or so, I think in the context of a discussion of someone who might have been over training (I don’t remember the specifics).
It might or might not be the best generic “off season” training plan. I’d be curious to learn more about this.
1 Like
The maintenance plan for MTB training is different than what we’d prescribe for road or gravel, since the demands of that type of riding are different.
I’d still say that it’s a good plan for maintaining fitness on the MTB, but if you’re looking for more sustained work, the MTB FTP plan might be more in line with that.
Let me know if this helps!
1 Like
Yeah, when you read the description of the Maintenance plans, it says, “The Maintenance specialty plans use high-intensity workouts to maintain your existing hard-earned fitness. These plans are excellent for filling in time between training blocks, as well as for when you want to stay fit and fast without targeting specific events or goals.”
It doesn’t sound like that’s your goal.
You picked the right plan conceptually, but the intensity might not match your goal. The maintenance plan in TrainerRoad often includes anaerobic work to preserve top-end power. If your goal is simply to hold general fitness through winter, switch to a low-volume endurance or traditional base plan instead. It keeps aerobic capacity without the stress of high-intensity intervals.
1 Like