Athlete Exclusive: How I Build Training
As most of you know, I build training week-by-week in the vast majority of cases. Importantly, that doesn't mean that there is no larger plan – I have outlines ranging from 3 months to 5 years for each of you! What it means is that the details are planned week-by-week.
Why do it like this?
The effectiveness of this sort of adaptive training has been proven by research, and is one reason coaching is more effective than a training plan. Periodization is a real and useful concept, and it shows up in your training in several key ways, particularly on longer time-scales. Even when we are adapting the quantity of training, we usually will keep the same focus such as Vo2max work, threshold work, etc.
What doesn't hold up as well is the assumption that a fixed, generic pattern of build weeks and down weeks is the right way to load that training for every athlete. What the research shows clearly is individual variation: two athletes doing an identical block of training can come out the other side with meaningfully different fitness gains, different fatigue, and different injury risk. Some of that is genetics, some is training history, some is how a given week of life stress interacts with a week of workouts.
The principle behind this is called autoregulation in the training-science literature: adjusting training based on real, current feedback rather than a static schedule written in advance. Studies comparing autoregulated training to fixed, pre-planned progressions have found the autoregulated approach can produce better results, because it responds to the fitness and fatigue you actually have in a given week rather than the fitness and fatigue a plan assumed you'd have when it was made. Your readiness on any given week is shaped by sleep, life stress, how recovery is going, how the last workout actually landed, and a pre-written plan can't see any of that.
So the bottom line is: I need to know how your previous/current week went in order to create ideal training for the next one!
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