Planning a year
I order for an athlete to have the best possible chance at reaching peak performance, coaches have to carefully balance training stress and recovery. To avoid guess work it’s important to have a structured plan that will help coaches always know where their athletes are and towards what goals they are working. Athletes will be able to see what lies ahead and get ready for the coming sessions.
Let’s first zoom way out and look into planning a year.
Planning a year
In our last blog post we discussed on which components need to be developed based on an athletes desires and limiters. Now it’s time to get to a high altitude and draw the contours of the coming year.
Creating an annual plan is usually best done after the last race of the season but it can be done at any point of the year.
Be realistic
The key reason why we write an annual training plan is to set our athletes up for success. It’s important to factor in as many variables as possible to give the athlete the best possible chance of success. You can write anything on paper and it will look awesome but in reality, things rarely go as planned.
Just like airplane pilots or freight ship captains plan their route before they leave the (air)port, they will make changes along the way because of different circumstances. They might go around some patch of bad weather, take a slightly longer route to avoid traffic or make any other change to the initial plan as long as it brings them closer to their destination.
Don’t be a slave to the plan
Plans are written for athletes and athletes only. Self coached athletes and new coaches sometimes like to write training programs apparently to impress others. When the athletes eventually fail to follow through they will feel like failures and lose motivation which in turn will slow down their future progress.
It’s important to keep the plan realistic and allow for changes in the plan when needed.
You are building a house
Writing an annual training plan is like building a house. Before you start building you first find a suitable plot of land, find contractors, talk to people who recently built a house, talk to banks about a loan and many more things.
Once you have most things in place, the foundations are built and the house is getting erected. Along the way some inspections will take place to make sure everything is going according the the specifications and make necessary changes if needed.
Once everything is done and you move into the house, you can think back at everything that had to be done to get the roof above you head. You will have learned a great deal, dealt with a lot of unknown things and spoken to people you didn’t even know you need.
The initial plan has probably changed but the end result should be the one you set out to create.
You have the key
Planning is the key for reaching the race season in peak condition. To get there coaches have to regularly asses their athlete’s progress and make changes as they see fit.
The purpose of a plan is for it to be useful, dynamic, and, most of all, realistic guide to training. Coaches and athletes will refer back to it during the coming months and make decisions about their training based on the plan. It will help them keep focus on the goal and prevent them from getting lost in all the training and racing.
The following six parts are part of a series and will get published along a YouTube video to accompany them.
The six steps to a great training plan
Determining the goals for the next season
Goals can be viewed as the destination you or your athletes have. What is it that they want to achieve next season? Is it improving on a previous time for a certain race, qualify for a major event like the Ironman world championship in Hawaii or a major marathon.
It’s important to start with a goal that will give you a clear target you can work towards throughout the season with your athletes. Just as a mountain climber has their sight on the peak so do athletes have one or more key races in the season they want to do well.
One thing to keep in mind here is that there has to be a clear distinction between a goal and a dream or wish. Dreams, like becoming a world champion, winning a particular race, or something similar are either achievable in the current season, and become goals, or aren’t achievable this season so the goals we set need to get them closer to it.
A goal is something that will stretch you and have you, maybe, take some risks is a healthy goal to have.
Principles of goal setting
There are many ways to set goals like SMART, SMARTER, CLEAR, PURE, WOOP, and many more but we will focus on four principles that will tell you if your goal is achievable or not in the current season.
Your goal must be measurable
Just like when a business person closes for the day and counts the money in the cash register or a home owners spends the first night in their new home, so do your athletes need to have a clear and measurable goal to achieve. “Get faster on the marathon” is a nice goal to have but it doesn’t mean much in terms of what needs to be achieved. “Finish the XYZ marathon in under 3 hours” is a clear goal and your athlete will know what they need to do to be in the best spot to achieve it.Your goal must be under your control
To achieve your goal you should aim for something you can control as much as possible. “Winning the age-group category in the Quickville marathon” is a nice goal to have but it depends a lot on the competition you have on race day and what shape they are in. You can certainly raise your chances by choosing races that suit your strengths but you should, again, focus on achieving certain times based on the results of previous times and give yourself the best possible chance at your goal.Your goal must stretch you
For a goal to make sense it must be something you have to really work for. Someone with years in long distance running experience “Finish the Marathon of good vibes” isn’t something that will put them to the test but “Achieving the norm to race in the national championship” is something that might have you dig deep to achieve.Your goal must be stated in the positive
Don’t think about your breathing! See that? Now you are consciously breathing in and exhaling. Telling your athletes to avoid doing something will hurt them more in their performance than it will bring them good. Have their goals defined as something they should work to execute instead of avoid.
Instead of saying “Don’t swim of course in the Super frog triathlon” it’s better to say “Do a proper races recon, find big landmarks that will help you navigate and focus on them”.
Goals we set for our athletes should focus on race-performance as much as possible because they allow your athlete to work towards a certain date and perform to the best of their abilities on race day.
Once you have defined the first goal, you may want to add one or two more goals that will support your main goal for the season and will serve as guide posts for your athlete as they go through the season.
Objectives that will support achieving the goals
Now that you have certain goals for the next season it’s important to review the assessments of your athlete’s limiters. Limiters are race specific weaknesses that are holding your athlete back from performing at their maximum.
A hilly course, for example, puts a lot of emphasis on force and endurance. Having a deficit in any of those areas will lead to poor performance on race day.
Now is the time to address those limiters and improve one or more by a certain date to enable your athlete to have the best chance at a great race.
It’s important to put these objectives in writing and assign a measure of success as well as a deadline. This will force your athlete to fully concentrate on the goal and work towards improving the limiter. A low priority race or performance test on a give date can serve as a final assessment if the limiter has been fixed or if more work is needed.
One thing to keep in mind here is that it’s not only about measurable objectives here. If an athlete is struggling with confidence or they often struggle to push on the final stretches of the race, it can be great to add some mental training and reading books on specific topics to fix some of those “soft” limiters. Here you will have to trust your gut to make the call if a particular limiter has been fixed or not.
The key thing to remember is that each objective should have deadline. I order to achieve your goal for the season certain things have to be accomplished at specific times to give your athlete the best shot at success so make sure to have a date for each objective.
Every athlete should have three to five different objectives they want to work on and if they get it right, the overarching goal for the season should be within reach.
Some example objectives
Goal: Run a sub-40 10K at the Speedville triathlon
Limiters: Running speed and muscular endurance
Training objectives:
Run easily for 90 minutes at 180 strides per minute by May 4th
Finish a road running race in 37 minutes by July 20th
Goal: Finish the bike section of a half distance triathlon in 2 hours and 20 minutes
Limiters: Muscular endurance
Training objectives:
Raise FTP to 280 watts by July 15th
Finish a session of 4 x 10 km each in 16 minutes with a 5 minute recovery between each by August 7th
Establishing the athlete’s annual training hours
The number of training hours in the coming season, which includes everything from running, cycling and swimming (for triathletes) to weights and cross training all determine the training workload an athlete has to work through.
Just like with most things in life, too much or too little is not ideal. If your athlete has high training workload, the risk overtraining and injury while too little will cause your athletes to lose fitness. For this reason it’s very important to set the right amount of training volume and help your athlete out as much as possible.
Training workload or volume is best expressed in hours rather than in distance. There are several reasons for this.
An hour and a half long run can universally be applied to your athletes at a certain period in the season. Some athletes will run 10k while other may cover 15k or 20k depending on their speed but they will all get the roughly the same stimulus.
Another reason for time over distance is that it encourages the athletes to take different routes instead of always going for the same route and then try to “beat” their previous time. If you are a cyclist or triathlete, you have a lot more variety in choosing where you want to go and this will keep training interesting throughout the season.
How much should you train?
If this is not your first season, you can analyze your previous season and add 10 to 15 percent, especially if you start training for longer distances. If you have trained and raced successfully, you don’t really have reason to increase your workload. You might even start thinking about lowering it if you had the occasional injury from overtraining.
If you have trained before but didn’t have particularly paid attention to keeping track of your workload, roughly estimate how much you trained per week and extrapolate to an annual training workload to start with and then adjust as needed.
The more data points (seasons) you have, the better. You can start analyzing the correlation between your annual training workload and performance and get an idea for your next season’s workload.
There are also some general rules that you can try sticking to, which you can see below.
Annual training workload - running
Annual training hours - triathlon
The key thing to remember here is to use the training hours initially to build endurance and once it has been established to a sufficient degree start working on on speed by increasing intensity.
Another thing, which has also been mentioned before, is to stick to a realistic training schedule instead of blindly following some guidelines that aren’t feasible for a certain athlete.
You can put anything on paper and it can look great but at the end of the day, the athletes have to put in the work.
Look into the limiters of your athletes, both directly tied to sport as well as in their personal life and try making educated guesses on how much work they can handle. Base your annual training workload and what is available and try to fill it with as much work as you can that makes sense for your athlete.
Race prioritization
Now it’s time to plan the next racing season. This is one of the most exciting parts of your annual plan because it will directly shape how your athletes season will be split up. One thing that is important here is that not all races are equally important to each of your athletes. That’s why you are going to assign them priorities A, B, and C.
Let’s dive right in and create the best possible schedule for your athletes.
Chances are that most of the races don’t have their schedule published yet but you can make an educated guess based on previous seasons and when those races have take places in previous years. Here you can give your athletes free rein to include any race they want into the annual plan.
A races
They will, however, have to choose two to three top priority races that will be the focus of the season. Those A races are the most important races of the season for your athlete and your club. Those don’t have to be the most prestigious or high profile races, those are just the races your athlete wants to perform at their best. They want to be in peak physical shape when they get to the start line and along the way have a good time.
One of the biggest mistakes is to assign too many A races.
“When everything is important, nothing is important.”
The goal is to have a proper build up and peak phase before the race to get all the benefits of the previous months of training. Here it’s very important to keep them either clumped together in a two or three week window or separated by some eight or more weeks.
If they are very close together you can have a quick recovery period and just go into the next one while the more spaced out races allow for a proper increase in intensity to regain racing fitness and reap the rewards with another peak phase before the next race.
For novice athletes it’s advisable to have a single A priority race in the season and focus everything else around it. Once they gain more experience they can start experimenting with multiple A races in various configurations but it’s important to keep in mind that non-ideal spacing between A races requires a delicate approach for building fitness and getting fresh to the start line.
B races
Just as with the A races, your athletes are focusing on having a good result on B races but the results here aren’t that critical. That’s why the rest period is quite short and often is just a couple of days long. It’s important to get to the races as well rested as possible but they will not have dedicated peak phases like A races.
An athlete can have up to six B races spread throughout the season.
C races
So far we have up to 9 weekends booked for racing, that’s quite a lot and you are more likely than not that you will not be racing in all those races you have mapped out.
That’s why you should always treat your calendar as a guide rather then law.
When it comes to C races, these are the races that you “train through”. These are your regular training days just with a lot more people around you. There won’t be any dedicated rest before those races, so if your athlete doesn’t feel like racing, it’s best to skip the race and have just a regular training session.
It’s important to make sure that athletes are aware that their racing performance might not be as they are used to from A and B races for the very simple fact that they had no dedicated peak phase for those races and they come into those races fatigued from all the other training they have been doing.
In these kind of races you should be looking at evaluating their performance like you would during any other performance check session. The more unexperienced an athlete is the more they will benefit from having a lot of those C races.
They will get used to having a pre-race routine, as well as getting into the right mindset once the gun goes off.
Every race should be equally hard
The main difference between A, B, and C races is in how you prepare for them and how well rested you come into them. As for the effort, it should be as close to equal as possible. The results will be very different because of your form but the effort you should put out should be the same.
Defining the season’s training periods
Now that you have established the race priorities for your athletes it’s important to divide up the training season into different periods. Each of them serves a different purpose and is aiming to improve one aspect of your athletes performance. The earlier the season is the more we are focusing on basic abilities while at the same time keep an eye out down the road when it’s time to get more race specific as the first A race of the season gets closer.
Let’s have a look at a sample periodization and how to divide up the season.
Training periods
Find your first A race and move backwards
Periodization for the first A race is pretty straight forward. We mark the race in the calendar and start working backwards. It doesn’t matter here if it’s a single A race or a cluster of A and B races within a two or three week period. We mark this as the Race period in our calendar.
Now it’s time to count one to two weeks back and mark the period as the Peak period. This is the time where your athlete will drastically decrease their training volume but still keep a relatively high intensity. This will allow them to slowly recover from all the training done in the months before and get ready for the race.
Let’s now define the Build period. This is the most intense period of the season because the athletes are really dialing up training intensity and training race specifically while the volume is kept quite high. This period, which lasts around six to eight weeks is broken up into Build 1 and Build 2 where the former has a little more emphasis on volume while the latter is a little more about (race) intensity.
Still moving back in time we will define the Base period. This one is eight to twelve weeks long as is divided up into Base 1, Base 2, and Base 3. Each of those sub-periods adds more volume and increases the intensity by a little.
Depending on your athletes needs and current fitness you will also add three to four weeks of Preparation and one to six weeks to Transition.
All in all, you can look at around 20 to 35 weeks or more for your athlete. It all depends on their fitness level and goals they have for their first A race of the season.
Going into the second half of the season
With the first race done it can start getting a little tricky.
Ideally, your athlete will again have a Transition period followed by a Build 1 and Build 2 or Base 2 and Base 3 period and a Peak phase in the end before their next race.
Choosing Build or Base periods comes down on what aspect athletes need to work on. If it’s basic endurance, they should go for Base 2 and 3, otherwise they can repeat a Build 1 and 2 phase.
This is all if they have the ideal eleven weeks between their races. If it gets shorter, you should still have have the Transition period as well as a shortened Peak period but you will certainly have to select a shortened period for those Build and Base periods as well.
Here it’s important to make educated guesses and see what your athlete needs to work on most. Novice athlete and long distance athletes will benefit more from Base work to build up endurance while experienced athletes can jump into Build training to get as race ready as possible.
This is probably the most confusing step of the entire process and it requires some guess work but over time coaches and athletes will find what best works for them and will be able to tweak this to their liking.
Assigning hours to each week of the season
Now that you know your goals, have the objectives in places to reach them and have decided on the top priority races, it's time to assign weekly training hours your training schedule. Don't worry, this is as easy drawing by connecting numbered dots.
The first thing that we have to look at is our realistic availability for the upcoming season. Once we have this in place we just need to look up one of the many tables available that will tell you how much work you need to put in to achieve the desired training numbers for the season.
Annual training hours breakdown - The triathlon training bible by Joe Friel
Once you added all the numbers into your training plan you will end up with something like this.
Annual training plan - TrainingPeaks
You can see a step like approach to volume in the base phase of the training where the main goal is to increase endurance while also adding a little more intensity throughout every phase.
Once the base phase is over, we can lower the training volume slightly to a level that will help us maintain our endurance but we will now go deep with intensity to achieve race fitness for our first race of the season.
And that’s pretty much it! You have your plan, you know your limiters, and each phase defines what to work on so you just need to put in the work.
Don’t overthink it!
This might sound like a lot of work but it can be accomplished quite quickly and the key point to remember here is that we are not looking for the perfect plan but one that is realistic and will get you as close as possible to your goal.
