Building An Annual Training Plan For Cycling
Mapping out your annual training plan is arguably one of the hardest aspects of the planning process.
We’ve previously written a step-by-step guide to building a cycling training plan. However, even when following these steps, the high-level planning aspect can remain very challenging…
Deciding what types of training to do and when, how to periodise your training volume and intensity, and when to include any training breaks can appear like a complex logic puzzle with countless variables and no clear solution.
In this article, we’ll discuss what we think an annual plan should be used for and lay out our approach to the planning process. We’ll also cover some of the common pitfalls that many athletes and coaches encounter, and give some tips on how to avoid these.
Why Create An Annual Plan?
Before putting together an annual plan, it’s helpful to think about what you’re trying to achieve with it. Why bother taking the time to do this planning, and what is it that we actually want to get from the process?
Keeping these questions in mind can help to avoid getting lost in the detail of the planning process.
There are several things that an annual cycling training plan allows you to do:
1. Know Your Training Objectives
First and foremost, the main benefit of planning is to identify and articulate the key attributes that you need to develop in order to achieve your desired training or racing outcomes.
This involves honing in on the most important physiological determinants for success in your chosen discipline or goal (e.g. ‘high VO2max’). Likewise, you also need to be clear on the other performance limiters that need attention, such as technical or mental skills, nutritional practices, equipment selection etc.
It also involves assessing where your current profile (physiological, skills, mental etc.) sits relative to your desired profile, so that you can prioritise the performance factors you will look to develop the most.
The annual planning process forces you to think deeply about what it is you need to enhance and formulate some training objectives.
2. Schedule Your Key Events
Second is knowing when your key events or goal dates are.
This might sound simple, but it’s a really important step as it allows you to easily see how much time you have between now and your target events/goals to work on your performance limiters.
Knowing where your key events are can help you assess whether your training objectives are realistic. This might prompt you to narrow down your training objectives to address just the top priorities if you realise you have less time than you’d thought, for example.
3. Plan Your Performance “Check-Ins”
A very important part of annual planning is knowing how and when you’re going to evaluate your progression. This helps you assess whether you’re meeting your training objectives, or at least heading in the right direction. If you find that you’re not progressing as expected, then you can reassess and adapt the plan accordingly.
This testing and adjustment process is essential since you can never be entirely certain how you’ll respond to a given training stimulus. It’s important to recognise that any long-term planning will be speculative at best.
Many cyclists can be reluctant to adjust their plans and see doing so as a weakness on their part. We believe that the willingness to adjust a plan when needed should instead be seen as a major strength. It demonstrates a smart, considered athlete who pays attention to the evidence and reality, rather than blindly following the original plan, which was put together well before important acute evidence came to light.
You can assess progression in several ways, such as through:
formal testing (e.g. in a lab or using field-based tests),
data collected during training (such as examining trends in your power:heart rate ratio, or ability to sustain higher power outputs in a given session for the same rating of perceived exertion (RPE)), and/or
subjective sensations (such as the fact you’re feeling less tired towards the end of your long rides and/or are recovering faster from these).
It’s important to use the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to match your training goals.
For example, evaluating peak power output over 5-seconds isn’t appropriate for assessing developments in muscular endurance over several hours.
This might sound an obvious example, but many athletes use Functional Threshold Power (FTP) in a similar way - they assess progress using a single testing method when in many cases it isn’t the appropriate test to use. We talk in depth about different types of testing and other methods for tracking progress in our Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide, if you want to read more on this.
It’s worth noting that the appropriate KPIs to track, and testing protocols to perform are likely to change at different phases in the plan, as you transition your training focus to work on different things.
4. See Potential Opportunities and Obstacles
Another key purpose of an annual plan is to plan for any periods of time where your training might be higher or lower than normal.
Practical examples include pre-planned training camps or time off work. You’d also want to note down any periods where you expect your training capacity will be limited (e.g. holidays, busy periods at work, medical treatments requiring downtime from the bike).
Knowing where these training opportunities or limitations fall within your training calendar is useful so that you can make sure you program accordingly. You’d probably want to avoid planning a string of high volume weeks leading into a training camp, or planning a recovery week right before a holiday where you’ll be off the bike, for instance.
5. Know When To Get ‘Serious’
The annual plan can also be used to help periodise the ‘seriousness’ of your training. By ‘serious’ training, we refer to training where each session has a clear purpose, and where intensity control will generally be very well disciplined in all training sessions. This type of training can take a toll mentally, and will often require sacrifices to be made, such as avoiding social/group rides or other unstructured riding for fun.
We often find it’s useful to have periods of time where the training is less serious, allowing yourself to include sessions where the goal might simply be directed towards enjoyment rather than working on a specific aspect of fitness or skill. This can help with maintaining motivation through the whole of the training season.
As an example, after the off-season (where many activities would be directed towards enjoyment rather than development), you might want to begin with a mixture of ‘serious’ and ‘less serious’ sessions (e.g. group rides, or unstructured MTB rides), and then gradually phase out the ‘less serious’ sessions out as you get closer to your first training goal.
If transitioning between two intensive blocks of racing (e.g. moving from the road season to the CX season) then you might also plan a short period of ‘less serious’ training between these two race seasons. This would provide a short mental break, which would probably coincide with a recovery week with low overall training load to also facilitate physical recovery.
6. Avoid “Cramming”
An annual plan also allows an opportunity for you to include reminders to work on skills and abilities that can otherwise be easily forgotten or left to the last minute…
A key example would be making sure you spend time training on your race bike over the month or so prior to a race, as opposed to exclusively riding your training bike.
Another example would be to set aside time to test out your planned race nutrition strategy. These more practical elements of training can often be easily overlooked or forgotten without an annual plan.
7. Train Logically
Whilst there usually isn't a ‘correct’ order, there’s quite often a logical ordering when it comes to training focus. The annual planning process can help you think this through and decide on a logical or pragmatic sequence in which to work on different abilities.
As an example, if your training objective is to raise your VO2max, but you determine that your ‘fractional utilisation’ appears quite low (meaning that your threshold sits at a fairly low percentage of your VO2max), it may be logical to spend some time working on raising this before working on VO2max. You should then be able to spend more time training close to your VO2max when you move to working on this specific ability.
As another example, if your objective is to raise your threshold power, but you find that your fractional utilisation appears to be quite high (meaning that your threshold sits at a fairly high percentage of your VO2max), then it would probably be logical to work on developing VO2max, in order to ‘make space’ for further improvements in your threshold power, before then working on other physiological aspects that impact threshold power (such as fat oxidation ability and lactate transport).
In both of these examples, we’re doing some groundwork early on in the annual calendar that will lay the foundations for more successful training later in the year. Some coaches refer to this as ‘training to train’.
Another factor to consider when thinking about the logical ordering of training is how quickly different aspects of fitness progress and regress. These timescales are known as ‘training residuals’. As an example of how you might want to consider training residuals in your planning, let’s consider your ability to produce power via anaerobic pathways (namely the phosphocreatine system, and the anaerobic glycolytic pathway). These abilities generally train and detrain quite quickly (i.e. within a matter of weeks), so in many cases, it may not be logical to include training to specifically develop these abilities until close to your target events or competitions, although this might not always be the case, as sometimes training to develop these abilities might help with subsequent training.
We talk more about training residuals and how they can be considered in annual planning in our Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide.
It’s worth noting that in a great many cases, there’s no truly logical order in which to perform certain training modalities. Often there can be arguments for a variety of different approaches, so it’s not worth getting too bogged down with sequencing. This is why we include regular progress evaluation, so you can intervene if the approach you’ve chosen doesn’t seem to be working for any reason.
We’ve previously written a step-by-step guide to building a cycling training plan.
However, even when following these guidelines, we find that many people (very understandably!) still struggle with the annual planning process, and can sometimes find it hard to see the wood for the trees. Annual planning is certainly one of the top areas we are asked about in our consultation service.
In this two-part article, we provide some additional higher-level guidance to help keep you on track through the planning process and avoid getting bogged down in the details.
In our previous article (Part 1) we reviewed the key things that you should be trying to achieve through the annual planning process. We find it’s really helpful to have these goals in mind when planning, so that you can avoid getting side-tracked by details that shouldn’t really be considered in the annual plan.
Common Mistakes
In this article, we follow on to look at some common pitfalls that many people encounter, and give some tips on how to avoid these.
Mistake 1: Being Too Granular
A very common pitfall is trying to plan the whole year in detail. Examples include trying to plan weekly training load or specifics of how interval sessions will progress many months into the future.
However, it’s impossible to know exactly what the right type of training will be for you many months in advance. There will almost certainly be changes to the plan as you assess progress and iterate the plan based on this new information. There will also be unexpected things that crop up, such as a spate of bad weather that impacts your plans for a high-volume training week, or an illness or injury requiring unexpected time off the bike.
Planning in any great detail beyond the next 6-8 weeks is, in our view, a waste of time.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t have a rough plan for what you’ll be doing beyond that time-point.
Having an idea for where you might want to include some key high-volume training (e.g. a few weeks out from a key event), or where you might want to plan a low-volume recovery week (e.g. during a period where you know you’ll be busy with work), is useful.
But you don’t need to plan every single week, or know exactly what TSS or volume you should be hitting in those weeks, as this will very much depend on what you’ve managed to achieve over the months and weeks before.
Mistake 2: Don’t Do “One-Size-Fits-All”
A second mistake is trying to fit your annual plan to a standard periodisation paradigm or model without considering how this model fits with your training needs and goals.
Some common training models are ‘linear periodisation’ and ‘reverse periodisation’.
There are many subtly different ways that these models can be defined, but in a linear model training volume is usually very high early on in the training year, with minimal intensity. Then through the training year, training volume is usually decreased gradually, and interval sessions become increasingly high-intensity (e.g. moving from Zone 4 to 5 and onto 6 in a classic Coggan zoning system).
A reverse periodisation model is the opposite of this, where volume begins low, and training is very high-intensity, and then volume gradually increases through the year, while intensity decreases (for a whole chapter discussing these different training models, check out our Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide).
While it’s good to be aware of these models, and you can draw some useful principles from them, it’s important to understand that these periodisation approaches may or may not work for you as an individual.
For example, if your training volume is constrained by work and family commitments, then a traditional linear periodisation model, where volume is high at the start of the year, and is gradually reduced as you approach your target event might not work well for you. Instead, you might benefit from having a more consistent training volume through the year, in order to maximise the amount of time you’re training overall.
Similarly, if you have an area that you know is a key performance limiter, then you may want to dedicate more time to working on this limiter than you would do within a generic periodisation approach.
Ultimately, we believe that to get the most out of your training, you need to plan your training based on your own training objectives, physiological profile, and capacity to train, paying close attention to any markers of progress along the way.
Mistake 3: Stubborness
A final common mistake we see very often is sticking rigidly to a plan. As mentioned above, it’s impossible to know how you’re going to respond to a particular training stimulus, so it’s important to evaluate progress and adapt your plan accordingly in order to keep yourself progressing towards your training goals.
It’s common to think that training is going well when you’re sticking closely to the plan, and that it’s going badly if you’re having to make lots of changes. However, the best results are to be had when you’re able to be flexible with your plan; adapting this based on how your past training has gone, how you feel on a given day, and how you appear to be responding to different types of training.
In other words, a change of plan is often a positive, and is certainly not a sign of failure or a poorly-executed training plan!
Auto-generated training plans?
It’s worth noting that platforms such as TrainingPeaks include functionality to automatically generate a high-level Annual Training Plan.
In our view, these are best avoided, as they encourage each of the three pitfalls above.
In particular, these systems automatically plan various weekly training parameters (e.g. weekly volume/TSS, and session focus) many months in advance. These plans are also not adapted based on how training is progressing. Moreover, these plans apply a one-size-fits-all periodisation approach that doesn’t consider individual needs.
We’d strongly recommend putting together your own annual plan from scratch. This doesn’t need to be fancy. We find a basic spreadsheet is a great tool for mapping things out, and it’s super easy to make adjustments when needed.
Summary
It can be very easy to get bogged down in the details of high-level planning, but ultimately, if you feel happy that you’ve given some thought to each of the 7 points above, then you should be most of the way towards having a solid annual plan.
It’s important to accept that there’s a fairly sizeable(!) level of uncertainty when putting together an annual plan, so you shouldn’t worry that you have planned everything perfectly (if there is such a thing). There really is no need to have everything mapped out to the finest detail.
As long as you have a good understanding of where you are now and where you’re going, and you’ve got points throughout the journey that you’re going to check in to evaluate progress, you don’t always need to see really far ahead to move forward.
If you take one thing from this article, we hope it’s an appreciation that annual planning is an iterative process, and that it’s perfectly fine to keep the plan fairly loose when planning more than 6-8 weeks in advance. You should be open to changes of plan, and should try to pay attention to how you’re responding to training, incorporating some formal testing in order to make sure things are progressing in the right direction.
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