The Trap of Blind Adherence: Feb ‘24

Hey, it’s Tom and Emma from High North Performance and it’s already the second In-Form newsletter of 2024!

In this edition, the topic we wanted to quickly ponder on was what we might call “the trap of blind adherence” and hopefully this little lesson can make a big positive impact on how you approach your goals for 2024…

So, in the context of training for cycling fitness and performance, ‘blind adherence’ relates to executing a plan PRECISELY as it’s laid out, without a single deviation from the instructions of the pre-planned sessions that comprise it.

On the surface, being 100% adherent to a plan that’s been carefully laid out over many weeks and months towards a clear goal may seem like exactly what you should aim to do! And this would be true in an ideal world where you could guarantee your plan is just right for every single day to come…

But there’s the rub - we simply don’t live in a training utopia! 😔

Unfortunately for us, there are countless numbers of infinitely complex systems in the wider world, our own lives and within our own bodies that are constantly influencing our ability to train and recover from training. This fact renders the training planned for several days time (especially for several weeks time) speculative and an educated guess at best, and this is an important fact to grasp no matter who has put the plan together!

Now, we often draw analogies between training and car journeys, and we’re going to do it again here! If we plot a road trip route from one location to another, we can always see a very small bit of the road ahead of us, and that’s enough to make a good decision on whether to proceed as planned or not. But, we have little to no idea what we might come to further into the journey, despite knowing what is theoretically the most direct way to go.

The important skill here is constant re-evaluation of the current situation and assessment of the suitability of the pre-planned route, whether towards a destination during a car journey or progressing towards an event or fitness goal through a training program. 

It may be that what was planned days, weeks or even months ago is spot on for you today, and in that case, it’s simple - follow the plan! But, when circumstances have changed from what was expected when the planning was done, it’s important to critically evaluate what’s in front of you and be confident and courageous enough to make the necessary changes. Sometimes, this means checking your ego at the door and doing less, and sometimes it means kicking yourself up the arse and doing more. You WILL make mistakes and poor decisions, but each one will be an opportunity to learn and optimise for the future! 

The key takeaway here is that a training plan is a general direction, not a step-by-step recipe in almost all cases, and these “best guesses” at the right workouts and training loads in the future shouldn’t be seen as gospel. Don’t beat yourself up about the fact you’ve had to deviate, and instead pat yourself on the back when you employ common sense and make informed decisions based on real-world information in the here and now. The most successful athletes and coaches have this skill down to a fine art; knowing when to stick and when to change things up. 

We hope that’s helpful 👍

News

This month’s been a quiet one for us in terms of new launches of articles, products and the like, but we are busy at work helping athletes progress through their training programs and giving nuggets of wisdom through our consultations as per usual!

Given the day of the week, we thought we’d do a throwback Thursday to an existing article you might not have seen but is one of our favourites, which is Pro Cyclist Workouts: Real Training Sessions By Real Pros Analysed - let us know what you think if you haven’t seen that one before.

It’s also worth mentioning again that we’re working hard on our sister site highnorthrunning.co.uk, which if you’re even peripherally interesting in running you should definitely check out! We have a newsletter you can sign up for there with even more training tips and info.

Finally, we will have a new article coming through soon on low cadence training too, which you’ll be able to check out on the blog when that goes live: highnorth.co.uk/articles.

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That’s a wrap, so thanks as always for your time and attention - we’ll see you next month in the same place 👋

Tom & Emma