For the past month with fall/winter upon us, I’ve been guiding my workouts based on where my progression levels are at and the TrainNow recommendations that pop up the 3 or 4 times a week I ride.
I’m not training for any races or anything, just general all around cycling fitness/strength. I’ve focused on making progress under Endurance, Sweet Spot, Threshold and VO2 Max and used the TrainNow suggested workouts to do that. I’ve noticed TrainNow does a pretty good job of not over working me and I also like the flexibility it offers with a hectic life.
Last winter, despite not training for anything specific I used the custom builder and went with a SS base, build, specialty plan (rolling road race) and made decent progress with that.
All that said, I’m wondering if just training by TrainNow and watching my Progression levels is a feasible long term plan for the winter or would I be better off to do a SSB, Build, and Specialty plan? Again, I have no goals other than building my overall cycling strength.
I mainly just use TrainNow these days and it seems to work for me. I don’t need to follow a plan as I’m not racing or doing any events this year and it allows me to pick the sort of ride i want to do based on my mood: Sometimes i really don’t fancy sprint intervals and i’ll rarely do easy endurance, for instance. But keeping an eye on broadly what my training mix contains allows me to keep moving forwards. It’s almost certainly not as good as strictly following plans but the only good training plan is one that you actually follow, and if i was doing SSB i’d probably keep going “Nah, don’t fancy that i’ll do this one instead” so TrainNow allows me to do that without feeling bad about it.
I’m training for some events right now and I’m just following TrainNow/picking a few workouts based on levels as life is really random and unpredictable right now for me. Probably not as good as following a plan but probably better than sticking a plan in there and missing half the workouts or having to adjust/reschedule them all the time. Plus allows for more flexibility doing outdoor unstructured XC rides when I have time.