Building A Cycling Training Plan: Step-by-Step
The ability to build an advanced cycling training plan in a methodical and strategic manner is a valuable skill to have. Since the topic of creating a training program has a few different components to it that can be tough to piece together, we wanted to provide a guide that outlines many of the key steps you’ll want to take when planning long-term performance development.
Whether planning an entire season or a single “macrocycle” towards a key outcome goal like an event-related performance (where there may be several macrocycles in a given calendar year), this post should help cyclists and coaches tackle this intimidating task.
It’s important to note that each stage or step in the process laid out below could warrant its own dedicated article and the finer details may be different for every athlete depending on their age, training history, aims, cycling discipline(s) and other factors. Despite this fact, we’ll look to shed light on what the process should generally include, what each step broadly involves and the important role that each step plays.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the general process laid out below serves to outline a lot of our own planning methodology as coaches. If you are considering utilising any of our services, this article should give you a look ‘under the hood’ at some of our workflow and how we approach delivering individualised training programs for athletes.
Pre-Planning
The pre-planning stage is focused on understanding where you or your athlete is currently situated and where you/they want to go. There are a number of steps and tools we can use to determine this, starting out with an initial assessment…
Conduct an initial assessment
The first step in the pre-planning phase is to understand where you or your athlete is starting from to the greatest extent possible.
At this point in the process, we’re looking to understand more than just performance data such as thresholds, economy/efficiency or peak power; we want to have a complete picture of all of the factors that contribute to and may therefore limit training ability and performance potential.
Some of these factors include:
Work and family life
Training history
Nutritional practices
Sleep quality
Psychological strengths and weaknesses
Strength and mobility
General health
And of course, physiological data and recent test results
Gathering these data typically takes the form of an assessment, whether this is a face-to-face discussion with an athlete and/or involves completing a detailed questionnaire to glean all of the key information required to understand the athlete’s entire training-related environment.
From a physiological perspective, it’s useful to perform lab-based and/or field-based testing to determine current capacities before you start planning, i.e. within this initial assessment phase if possible.
What’s important here from a testing perspective is to choose the appropriate methods and protocols to provide relevant data related to the discipline(s) of cycling you or the athlete is engaged in. For example, the use a Wingate test (a short, maximal sprint test used to measure anaerobic power) is much less appropriate for an ultra-distance cyclist compared to perhaps a determination of LT1/aerobic threshold or gross efficiency, since the latter would be some of the biggest determinants of performance for such an athlete.
Broadly speaking, some good tests for most endurance athletes to perform would be:
Critical power testing: Field-based testing to determine maximum sustainable power (CP) and your work capacity above the CP (W’) - (more info here)
Lactate profiling: Using sampled blood lactate and appropriate testing protocols to determine an overall lactate profile or to identify the first and second thresholds (sometimes referred to as the LT1/aerobic threshold and LT2/anaerobic thresholds respectively) and potentially maximal glycolytic rate
Muscle oxygen saturation: Use of a near-infrared spectroscopy device (such as a Moxy Monitor) to measure blood flow and oxygen saturation within muscle capillaries and thereby identify whether an athlete is mostly limited by central or peripheral factors (e.g. cardiac output and pulmonary diffusion versus capillary and mitochondrial density/efficiency)
VO2 analysis: Gas exchange measurement to determine cycling economy, RMR and of course VO2max
Whilst Functional Threshold Power (FTP) testing can also be used, attention should be paid to the protocol applied if the aim is to glean accurate data on your estimated power over sustained durations (i.e. the power you could sustain where fatigue will not occur due to the build up of metabolic byproducts).
We use critical power testing as a better alternative, due to the greater level of insight it can provide for only a few additional test efforts, as well as the greater mathematical and scientific underpinning.
HR-based tests may also be undertaken in this period, where you may want to establish threshold HR and maximal HR values (the latter of which can be useful when using, for example “variable power intervals” to stimulate improvements in the cardiac output to boost the VO2max).
With regards to the other factors assessed (psychology, sleep practices etc), you’ll want to glean enough information on each to assess whether any present a significant barrier to training and performance. You’ll also want to consider whether there are any factors which, if improved, could have a disproportionately large positive impact on performance.
At the same, you don’t want to overwhelm yourself or an athlete by going into too much detail unless required. If you do want to delve deeper into each factor, there are usually widely used and accepted assessment tools available to do this with, like the Test of Performance Strategies questionnaire on the psychology side, and the AASQ questionnaire for sleep, for example.
Using a scoring method (e.g. from 1-5) for many of these questions in the assessment can help you to visualise how much of a strength or limiter each is, which makes it much easier to identify which factors may need further attention.
Outline your targets
Targets are important to broadly outline what is you want to achieve and where you want to eventually arrive at with training. You can think of targets as your “desired outcomes”.
Targets can be fairly abstract, as their purpose is to help frame what the right “goals” will be, where these goals will be more clearly defined.
Here are a few examples of targets that cyclists might have:
“To become a better climber in the mountains”
“Improve as a club ride leader”
“Become a top cyclocross racer in my country”
Set performance and outcome goal(s)
Once you have decided on a general direction for your training, the next step is to create some more clearly-defined goals, as well as decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs are measurable steps along the way that will serve to inform you of whether you’re on track to realise your targets, or if you’ve strayed off the desired path and need to course-correct.
Borrowing a method from the business world, making your goals S.M.A.R.T can be really helpful.
S.M.A.R.T is a mnemonic designed to help set clearer and more useful performance goals, where the specific letters refer to:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable/Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
First, a goal has to be ‘specific’ in order to be clear and unambiguous. When goals are lacking clarity, it’s hard to know how to go about creating the right approach to achieve them.
Second, goals should to be simple to measure, so that you’re not left guessing at whether you’re making progress and you’ll know exactly when you’ve achieved the goal. The measurable aspect of your goals will act as your KPIs.
Next, you’ll want your goals to be attainable/achievable for you or the athlete as an individual. If goals are too easy, then motivation to work hard to achieve them may be lacking. On the other hand, a goal that’s unattainable can bring about dissatisfaction and a similar lack of motivation from lack of progress. Appropriate goals from an attainability point of view should be a little scary, but at the same time be energising and shouldn’t stray into the realm of being so difficult that they become unachievable given reasonable effort and the resources available.
Along a similar line, make sure your goals are relevant to the overarching aims referred to above. The goals need to matter to you or your athlete and what you/they truly want to achieve, i.e. don’t work towards other people’s goals!
Finally, goals should be time-bound so that there’s a clear deadline for when they should be achieved.
Luckily, this part of process often isn’t difficult, since race or event-based goals will have dates that dictate when the goal(s) need to be accomplished by. With performance goals related to achieving a certain physiological level and that don’t relate to a specific event, try to choose a date to achieve this by.
Putting all of that together, here’s an example goal that ticks all of the S.M.A.R.T boxes:
“Increase critical power by 5-8% by October 1st in order to set a personal best time in my local hill climb event”
Perform a needs assessment
Once you have decided on or re-affirmed your longer-term targets and your SMART goals that relate to these targets, this will then allow you to take a step back and start to understand what will be needed for the achievement of the goals to be possible.
As an example, some of the important components to consider in a needs assessment if your targets/goals revolve around events in a particular discipline of cycling could be:
Physiological factors like expected power demands (e.g. needed CP and W’) and relative energy system contribution
The energy demand (which may inform your nutritional strategy, for instance)
Terrain demands (is it a hilly course, a rolling course or mostly flat?)
Positional factors like the relative importance of aerodynamics
Technique demands and relative importance of different handling abilities e.g. cornering speed
The psychological requirements and mental approach needed before and during the event
The extent to which tactical awareness and aptitude could affect performance
If the goal is based more on achieving a certain physiological level, i.e. you want to reach a certain power output result for a certain duration but are not preparing to compete, consider demands like:
The required balance of energy system strength (i.e. aerobic to anaerobic contribution)
The intensity distribution that may be optimal in training
The necessary nutrition approach to fuel the training required (e.g. ideal macronutrient balance)
The power profile that will be most suited to producing a certain kind of effort
Now that you’ve gathered lots of data on where you or your athlete is at, where you/they want to go and what you’ll/they’ll need to have in place to achieve the desired outcomes, a final step before beginning to plan out the program is to pull all of this data together into a SWOT analysis.
Write a SWOT analysis
After the various assessments and main goal-setting exercises are complete, the raw data can be organised into a framework where you can make sense of it from a high level, and a SWOT analysis can be a simple but useful tool for the job.
The specific letters in ‘SWOT’ stand for:
Strengths: What do you or does the athlete currently do well?
Weaknesses: What do you or the athlete struggle with?
Opportunities: What realistic possibilities exist that could help you or your athlete train well?
Threats: What might present barriers to executing a training program?
It is typically visualised in a simple 4-compartment grid like this:
A SWOT analysis allows you to gain great clarity on where you or your athlete may want to focus the attention of the training program and what should be given careful consideration as a potential hindrance to high quality training and thus performance potential.
Remember, these can be outside of just the daily sessions themselves and should include all factors that affect training and performance ability, including psychology, recovery capacity, dietary practices and more, as discussed above.
When you’ve taken the time to produce a comprehensive SWOT analysis from the pre-planning data, you should have a clear and sufficient understanding of where you or the athlete is currently situated from a number of important perspectives.
Now is the time to begin looking into solutions to the weaknesses you want to strengthen and/or threats you want to mitigate. This might take the form of doing some extra reading and research, or consulting with an expert in the concerned field, i.e. a sports psychologist, a strength and conditioning coach or a nutritionist/dietician.
Otherwise, you can now start to move on to constructing the macrocycle or season program.
Planning
After you’ve completed the pre-planning groundwork, the next step is to begin putting together a targeted, strategic training program that takes into account all of the information gleaned from the earlier steps.
As you start this phase of the process, it works well to broadly plan the entire training cycle by working backwards from the date(s) of your key goal(s), using broad strokes further out from present day (i.e. close to a goal date), and getting more precise and detailed as you approach the start of training program.
Using well-established periodisation methods of breaking this long period into distinct phases is a good place to start. There are a number of different approaches to this (e.g. linear periodisation, reverse periodisation etc), but we’ll outline broadly the components involved and how this process can be approached.
Plan your training phases
The first stage in periodising your training program is to segment the time period into “phases” that you will progress through. These phases exist on a level above the mesocycles we will come onto next, and group a number of these mesocycles together to help you ascribe specific goals and objectives for large components the plan.
A simple phasing system that’s widely used across endurance sports can be seen in the excellent “Road to Gold” paper by Tonnesen et al, where the complete macrocycle towards a goal event/key racing period is segmented with the following phases:
General preparation phase: This phase focuses on foundational training that doesn’t necessarily reflect competition demands, but that aims to prepare the athlete to be able to train in a more race-specific way down the line. This phase is often characterised by high training volume focused more on aerobic fitness and more supplementary training like cross-training (e.g. running) and strength work.
Specific preparation phase: In this phase, training load is often still fairly high, though may be reduced slightly to accommodate an increase in average training intensity. Workouts become more like the demands of competition and non-specific training (e.g. strength training) is reduced.
Competition phase: The phase that will include the goal competition(s) for the current macrocycle. This phase will typically include a “taper” period where overall training load is reduced (though other variables like intensity may increase) in order to bring about the freshness needed for maximal performance to be realised.
Transition phase: Once a macrocycle is complete and the goal dates(s) have passed, a transition phase allows for some extended rest and potentially time away from the bike. This could come at the end of a season before beginning to train for the next, or in the middle of a season/year, if that season includes more than one macrocycle.
Phasing isn’t always required for every plan and periodising the plan using mostly mesocycles (with identifiable goals/objectives for each) can be done. However, phases can represent a helpful planning step given that training a specific ability or set of abilities can take longer than a typical 3-5 week mesocycle.
These phases should be organised in such a way as to make the next phase possible for the athlete, the former putting in place the groundwork for the following phase, a process of planning called “phase potentiation”.
When the phases are laid out, it’s time to go a level deeper and schedule in the mesocycles, i.e blocks of multiple microcycles that work together to elicit identified changes.
Plan your training mesocycles
Mesocycles, or what are sometimes simply called “blocks” are a collection of microcycles (often 7-day training weeks for convenience’s sake) designed around stimulating specific adaptations or achieving some main objectives.
As an example, you might have 3-6 week period where the principal physiological aim of a block would be to improve the aerobic capacity/VO2max. This would then inform which individual sessions and organisational approaches would make up the microcycles, and what the objectives of each constituent week would be.
You’d then have some way of monitoring whether the intended adaptations have been realised as you complete the mesocycle or more often a series of mesocycles. In the case above, the appropriate testing method might be to head to a lab to perform a VO2max test or execute a ramp test on your indoor trainer to make some estimations of your VO2max based on the step reached (as long as the same protocol is used each test).
In this way, you can routinely check that you/the athlete is on the right track and if not, make the necessary changes to the relevant training variables to get back on track before you stray too far from it.
In a traditional linear periodisation model, mesocycles are typically designed in such a way as to induce a progressive overload as the athlete moves through the microcycles/weeks (typically over 3-4 weeks) before then having a dedicated period of recovery within that block to allow you to adapt to the training load from the previous weeks. This strategy may or may not be the right approach to take for your/your athlete, where this decision will largely depend on the amount of time the athlete has available to train and their capacity to recover from high-load training weeks.
More generally, the length of the mesocycle, the ramp rate from microcycle to microcycle, and the amount of time you’ll dedicate for recovery at the end of the block will have to be individualised, and this can take some time to accurately gauge. This is where working with an objective body like a coach can be particularly helpful, as is being patient and allowing sufficient time for the necessary stimulus to be created and the adaptations to occur.
Plan your training microcycles
Once you have planned out the main blocks of training and what each will look like, you can drill down to the current block to plan out the microcycles that make it up. Factors to consider at the microcycle level include the training stress for the cycle, which sessions to include and the sequencing of these sessions, to name a few.
For each microcycle, you’ll want to lay out a number of what are called “process goals”, i.e. behaviour goals that relate to completing a task or action, rather than seeking to see a certain performances achieved. These process goals ensure that the short-term steps that ultimately lead towards the performance and outcome goals get done, i.e. you ensure the cart isn’t put before the horse. Process goals are also important for providing motivation and a sense of achievement, because the short-term nature of microcycles mean that performance measures may struggle to reveal the progress made.
With these process goals laid out, it’s then a case of including the appropriate sessions to help you best achieve the objectives of the mesocycle and organise them in an optimal way.
In most microcycles, there wants to be a balance of higher intensity and lower intensity training, where for most athletes the majority of the week’s training time will want to be at a low, comfortable effort level (see our article on polarised training intensity distribution for more information on this).
You'll also want to add in recovery days, whether these are full days off or include a short, very light ride to facilitate faster recovery. Even though you’ll likely have a dedicated string of days at the end of a mesocycle devoted to recuperation (aka a ‘recovery week’), regular days for rest will still be required in most microcycles. If not, you risk injury and overtraining, which will impair the supercompensatory response to training and lead to inconsistent training. This is far from ideal given that consistency is one of the key factors of long-term improvement!
In order to structure your phase, mesocycle and microcycle planning in a clear and concise way, it’s helpful to create a training plan spreadsheet that might look something like this:
Before wrapping up, we’ll first look at some useful post-planning tips and considerations that may still prove useful in the scope of this article…
Post-Planning
Generally speaking, the steps up to this point will complete most of the planning stage, where training with the program can now begin. Although not strictly in the domain of “planning”, we’ve decided to include a few points on monitoring, which relates to the idea espoused above, i.e. the importance of i) knowing where you are, ii) where you want to go and iii) if you’re making the right progress on the right track towards that destination.
Monitoring your training
In order to make the right adjustments as training progresses, there should be a system in place to monitor the athlete. The topic of athlete monitoring could easily be a whole article (or series of articles) in and of itself to explain the fitness-fatigue model, how to quantify training load etc. However, we’ll highlight a few basic steps that the monitoring process might involve:
Objective session data analysis: Sessions want to analysed regularly to determine from the objective data level if the session has been completed as planned. Here, we are broadly looking at “compliance" and we’re looking to assess whether the training sessions are being completed to a high quality. Typical objective metrics to look at would be planned duration vs completed duration, time in zones, TSS, average power/normalised power and (when relevant) power-heart rate decoupling.
Subjective feedback analysis: Much like how the data from a power meter is supported and strengthened by data from a heart rate monitor, it is incredibly important to also consider an athlete’s sensations and impressions of sessions alongside the objective data from power meters and heart rate monitors. Analysing this subjective feedback should focus on understanding how challenging the session was and gleaning the sentiment of the feedback as much as possible. Athletes should be encouraged to be detailed in their feedback, as this can provide helpful context both immediately after the session is completed and also when analysing data longer into the future.
Other training readiness markers: Other metrics that can be examined pertaining to training readiness include those related to sleep, heart rate variability (HRV), resting HR and menstruation.
Testing/KPIs: We discussed the use of process goals to ensure that the small steps that ultimately lead to success are completed. However, over a longer time period, it’s important to test whether your training goals are being met. Appropriate testing should be scheduled routinely to assess the level of progress made and reveal what (if any) adjustments should be made to the training program. Testing may be field and/or laboratory based and may relate to bike-specific assessments, strength training assessments and more. Importantly though, the testing should employ methods and protocols that are relevant to the athlete’s specific training goals for the particular training phase.
SWOT review: The SWOT analysis conducted in the pre-planning stage should be revisited as you or the athlete progresses through the plan. This provides a reminder of the areas of focus and concern, and indicates whether the training program is still appropriate. It also helps to identify whether the current plan is tackling the right things and doing a good job of overcoming weaknesses, keeping threats at bay etc.
Additional notes
Finally, here a few considerations to keep in mind in the planning process:
While there are a lot of details involved in the planning process, we would encourage athletes not to get too bogged down in minor details and marginal trivialities and to focus mostly on doing the basics right, like fuelling well, getting good sleep and relaxation, training on a consistent basis and ensuring that training intensity distribution is optimised.
The start of a training plan is an exciting time and it’s easy to go out all guns blazing for the first month. However, an over-zealous approach will be very difficult to maintain over the long-term. It is much like starting a marathon off by sprinting the first 400 meters. It’s generally always better to hold something back and feel like you have lots to give down the line closer to your goal dates.
At the risk of over-generalising and lacking individualisation, there are some approaches to training organisation that appear to work well for a wide variety of athletes. One of those is a polarised or pyramidal training model where the vast majority of training time is spent at a low intensity, with comparatively little (but still meaningful) amounts of time spent at middle and high intensities. This is a framework we recommend starting out with and you can find out more on polarised training intensity distribution here.
Summary
With that, we hope you’ve found this step-wise guide useful and practically-applicable, whether you’re a coach or a self-coached cyclist.
Whilst there are quite a few steps outlined here which may seem quite laborious at first, it’s worth spending time upfront to strategise your program, as this will undoubtably save lots of time, energy and stress down the line, and allow you to make better and faster decisions in the moment. By using the tools and methods discussed above, you should have much greater clarity around where you are in the process at any given time and be able to recognise when changes need to be made to keep your training on the right track.
We wish you good luck as you plan and execute the training towards your or your athlete’s goals. If you have any thoughts or questions on the subject of annual planning, please leave a comment below this post.
Free Workout Handbook
Be sure to grab our Key Workouts Guide, a short and practical PDF download that outlines 10 effective training sessions to develop the major components of high cycling performance:
References
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