Hi all - last season I tried the TR sprint triathlon plan but wasn’t overly impressed.
What I liked:
Good tapering/sharpening in the week or two leading up to a race.
Good balancing of training load between the 3 disciplines
What I didn’t like:
Too many swim sessions - I only swim once a week
Lack of specificity - different athletes need to focus on different things. E.g. I might want 4 rides and only 2 runs per week.
I wasn’t confident the run sessions were that productive.
This year I have been trying out the “Increasing FTP” option in Plan Builder and have made some good progress. I feel it pushes me closer to my limit than the rides in the tri plan, and so far the body has been responding. So I am inclined to stick with that through my racing season, and fit run and swim sessions around it.
Has anyone else had similar thoughts or tried some other alternative to the TR tri plans?
i get the impression more than a few folks use the bike workouts from the tri plans and fiddle with the rest themselves. I do this. I’m hoping the new stuff on the horizon involves some of the triathlon features of TR.
That’s what I do. I have two 90 minute bikes on my calendar each week, which are programmed through the ‘Zwift • Getting Faster for Zwift Races’ plan on plan builder. I manually add in 3 runs, 1 swim, and 4 weights sessions (I have a home gym so they’re quick) as well. I went with the Zwift • Getting Faster for Zwift Races just because it had a nice distribution of mostly threshold work, some sweet spot and VO2 max.
That raises an interesting question I hadn’t thought about too much: are the bike workouts in the triathlon plan more “suitable’ than those in other plans like the Increasing FTP one? Tbh I haven’t noticed much difference, they all seem to be a combination of threshold, VO2 and sweet spot workouts, but I expect there could be some nuance in there!
Ah I hadn’t seen the Zwift section in Plan Builder. Just had a peek - looks like in the speciality phase they have some pretty spiky starts to the intervals!
4 strength sessions is impressive. That means you do two of them on consecutive days, how do you manage that?
You can do it both directions. i’m currently doing FTP build and adding in swim/bike/strength around it. Its ‘off season’ though, i’ll get pickier about sustained intervals after the first of the year (more long course specific).