The Full Circle Podcast
The Full Circle Podcast offers listeners insights into topics and ideas pertaining to endurance sports training and racing. Hosted by Coach Laura Henry, this podcast releases episodes weekly and discusses training best practices, effective workouts, compelling research, coaching methodologies, physiology and recovery, and the best tools to help guide you unlock your potential and achieve your best performance.
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The Full Circle Podcast
Why an Annual Training Plan Makes the Difference Between Making & Missing Goals
Athletes often consider the workouts that they do on a day-to-day basis, but they don’t necessarily consider how those workouts build up over time and how workouts completed today and this week impact other workouts six months or more in the future.
An Annual Training Plan charts this long-term path toward an athlete’s goals, and a well-developed Annual Training Plan will take an athlete further along the path to their goals than any fancy workout design, intricate interval prescription, or seemingly new-fangled ideas about training ever will.
Read this Article:
An Example of an Annual Training Plan:
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Hello, and welcome to the Full Circle Podcast, your source for insights into the science and art of endurance sports training and racing. I'm your host, Coach Laura Henry. Today is Coach Tip Tuesday.
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When considering training, athletes often think about their workouts. In fact, workouts are probably the thing that athletes think about the most. They might consider how long or how far they'll go in a given workout, what intensity they'll execute a workout at, and or what intervals to plan in a given workout.
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However, individual workouts are only one piece of the larger puzzle that athletes need to solve in order to be able to successfully reach their goals. Over my years as a coach, I've come to appreciate that one of the most significant things that I do for athletes is to think about their training in the long term. Left to their own devices, athletes, whether they are self-coached or even if they are working with a coach, often get very caught up with what is right in front of them training-wise, and they focus on the short term, and only the short term.
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Simply put, athletes get hyper-focused on what they are doing right now, and they don't often consider the long-term forecast, including how what they do now absolutely impacts what they will be able to do later. While this kind of short-term approach works okay for people who are exercising, athletes who are training for goals and races at which they expect to reach their goals need to deploy a different strategy that considers more than what they are doing in the short term. A thoughtful and well-developed annual training plan can make the difference between reaching goals and missing them.
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An annual training plan is what the name implies. It's the plan for an athlete's training over the course of an annual, yearly training cycle. It can be thought of as a roadmap.
An annual training plan forecasts the training phases that will be leveraged as an athlete progresses towards their goal races in a given season or a year. It also accounts for any major happenings in the athlete's life, such as milestones, weddings, graduations, vacations, and personal happenings, such as work travel or other personal stuff. Basically, the annual training plan gives a holistic, long-term, broad overview of all of the elements that need to be factored in when planning an athlete's training.
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Most athletes set goals, and they seek to accomplish these goals at races. Remember, races and goals are not the same thing. Races are the setting in which athletes seek to accomplish their goals, but they are rarely goals in and of themselves.
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That being said, it's important for athletes to prioritize their races. Not every race can be treated the same in terms of importance and priority from both a physiological and a psychological standpoint, as not every race can be the setting where all goals that an athlete sets can be accomplished. A-races are the most important races in a given season or year to an athlete.
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These are the races where athletes are seeking to have the highest probability of successfully reaching their goals. A-races require a lot of time and energy to prepare for, and they also require a significant amount of time to recover properly from. As such, I recommend using A-races as the main landmarks in an annual training plan.
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To get started with designing an annual training plan, plot where A-races fall temporally and then work backwards from these dates to plan the rest of the annual training plan. An annual training plan covers a year, which is otherwise known as a macrocycle in the endurance sports world. Macrocycles are further broken down into planning periods that are called mesocycles, and these are usually three to six weeks long.
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When thinking of the annual training plan as a roadmap, mesocycles are effectively the stretches in between pit stops. They are planning periods that can facilitate progress and function as checkpoints along the way to an athlete's intended destination or goals. Mesocycles are further broken down into planning periods that are called microcycles, and these are usually about a week in length.
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Microcycles are composed of an athlete's weekly training workouts, and these workouts themselves are the most granular aspect of an athlete's training. Once A-races are plotted, you work back temporally, planning out the microcycles that make up the mesocycles in the plan. In linear periodization, which is the most common, though not the only, method of annual planning deployed in endurance sports training, mesocycles fall in a particular order that builds in specificity as the athlete gets temporally closer to their A-race.
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Working backwards ensures that the most specific, and therefore arguably the most important, time periods of training happen at the correct times relative to an athlete's goal. This in turn helps an athlete be as prepared as possible on race day to reach their goals. These mesocycles are planned with specific intentions in mind, and they're personalized for each athlete.
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The three main types of adaptations we seek in endurance sports training are neural, metabolic, and physiological. Neural adaptations are responses to training the neuromuscular system. The neuromuscular system connects muscles and nerves, which control body movements and functions.
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Examples of neural adaptations to training include improved quality of movement, such as swimming form, cycling cadence, or running mechanics. Metabolic adaptations refer to training responses and improvements to the way that our bodies produce energy. Enhanced aerobic endurance, a.k.a. the ability to sustain an activity such as running or cycling for longer periods of time, improved respiratory function, and enhanced fuel utilization are examples of metabolic adaptations.
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Finally, physiological adaptations are the adaptations that occur within our body systems and tissues. Improved tissue resilience, durability, and stronger muscles are examples of physiological adaptations. There is a cadence of up, or working weeks, where training volume and or intensity is slightly higher than the previous week or weeks.
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These up weeks are followed by a down period of recovery in each mesocycle. How many consecutive up weeks are planned is individualized to each athlete, but I've found that a ratio of two up weeks followed by one down or recovery week works well for most age group athletes. More traditional or old school models of planning used to call for three consecutive up weeks, but I have found that most age group athletes are leading busy enough lives that the third up week is not as high quality as the first two.
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And this is due to the fact that athletes are mentally and physically fatigued by the time that that third week rolls around. As such, it's more practical to plan for a recovery week at that timing so that the athlete can rest a bit before heading into another round of up weeks. Quality, not quantity, of training weeks strung together over the course of an annual training plan has the most significant impact on an athlete's adaptations and performance gains over time.
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All this being said, sometimes life events and or the timing relative to races necessitates changes to this cadence of up and down weeks. So for instance, if there's an odd number of weeks where you can't break it up into neat blocks, like say you have 13 weeks to go instead of 12, you might need to have three weeks up and then a recovery week, and then the other mesocycles would be planned as two up, one down to get to that total of 13 weeks. While an annual training plan is meant to be much less specific than individual training weeks are when they are planned, an annual training plan can and should contain the broad ideas about an outline how to build volume, intensity, and training load over the course of that annual cycle.
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Additionally, it can and should include the appropriate outlines for regressions from those elements during recovery weeks. Within the plan for each microcycle of training in an annual training plan, you can plot out your intended progressions for your key workouts each week. For many athletes, this involves planning out a solid progression to build their volume on long endurance workouts.
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For other athletes, this may include a progression for certain intervals or skills, such as completing threshold intervals or speed work. Finally, you can include notes about when you intend to complete any benchmark testing, such as functional threshold power testing on the bike or lactate threshold heart rate testing on the run. While the actual contents of individual workouts should not be planned until you see how your workouts unfold over the course of your training, you can sketch out this rough overview for them to help guide that specific workout planning when the time comes.
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Athletes and coaches all craft annual training plans differently. Some use software to generate them, while others use actual pen and paper. I've always used either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to plan out annual training plans for the athletes who I coach.
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For me, the spreadsheet medium lends itself to this, as it contains clearly delineated rows, and you can apply formulas for any calculations you want to do. In the era of Google Workspace and Google Sheets, it's great because I can easily share those documents with athletes so that we can both see this living, breathing document online. All of this being said, annual training plans are simple at their core in terms of how they are planned out and laid out.
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What we're really seeking here is a visual representation of an athlete's training year that is easy to read and understand. And there's a link to an example of an annual training plan that I crafted in the show notes of this episode. Individual workouts help athletes prepare physically and mentally for their intended goals.
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They impose a stimulus in the hope that that stimulus will, in turn, yield desired adaptations that will prepare athletes to meet their goals. Many athletes consider the physical adaptations that they will need to incur if they are to reach their goals, but the mental adaptations to training are just as important, if not more so, than the physical ones. While individual workouts are obviously important, the most significant thing about workouts is how they relate to each other and build off of each other over time, both from a mental and a physical standpoint.
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This is where an annual training plan becomes so important. An annual training plan represents the thoughtfulness of how each workout builds on each other to collectively add up to give an athlete the highest probability of success when it comes to reaching their goals. While knowledge about training science and training plan design is important when it comes to crafting an annual training plan, I've learned that this process is at least equal parts art and science.
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The art side of designing an annual training plan accounts for the fact that an athlete's training needs to be as simple as possible, while still addressing all of the complexities of endurance sports training. One of the most significant complexities of training is perhaps a surprising one. The most complex aspect of endurance sports training is that humans are, well, humans.
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Each individual athlete is unique. While there are certainly best practices that can be deployed in training for every athlete, how those practices are planned for, leveraged, and applied manifests at least slightly, if not entirely, differently for each athlete. Every athlete has a different history in sport, different injury history, different motivations for training, different goals, different strengths, different limiters, and most importantly, a different life.
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No two athletes will ever live the same day-to-day existence, so it's impractical to think that applying the exact same strategy or training plan to two different athletes will be practical, let alone successful. As such, two athletes training for the exact same race may very well have, and realistically should have, two different annual training plans. Their training phases and mesocycles will likely be different lengths.
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The rate at which their volume, intensity, or skill work builds may be different. For example, one athlete may have a three-hour long ride in one week, while a different athlete has a two-hour long ride in that same week. Their life happenings will not be the same.
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So one athlete may not be training one week while they have a family wedding out of state, while another athlete who is home and on their normal routine has a full week of normal training. You get my point. Finally, an annual training plan is a highly individualized, highly personalized roadmap for each athlete who it is designed for.
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An annual training plan is a living document, meaning that it is not quote-unquote done once it is planned out, nor is it meant to be a rigid approach to one's training. Instead, it should be monitored, maintained, and modified throughout the year to account for what actually unfolds in an athlete's training and in their life. There are basically three ways training can go.
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As expected, better than expected, or worse than expected. While every athlete I've ever met anticipates that their training will go as expected, and they often hope that it will go better than expected, my experience has shown me that things rarely go as expected. Life happenings happen.
Family needs change. You can get sick. Work projects come up.
You get an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. You get it. Because of all this, training happenings happen.
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Impacts to training happen. Training unfolds differently than you expect. The most important thing an athlete can do in their own training is to assess where they currently are, see how training actually unfolds, and chart their future course in training accordingly.
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And they need to do this on an ongoing basis, not just at the beginning of when they're starting to train for something. But this is an ongoing process. This, planning for training based on how things actually go versus how one predicts or hopes that they might is the main difference between true coaching and a training plan.
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When it comes to an annual training plan, this may mean extending some training phases, such as base phase or build phase, altering the cadence and ratio of up and down training weeks, or revising goals and or races that were originally accounted for in the annual training plan. As you move through the year, you may discover that you have different training strengths and limiters than you originally thought. For instance, you may have thought that your hill climbing skills were proficient, but find yourself struggling on climbs.
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Or you may find that long workouts take a lot out of you and require a bit more recovery time than you expected. As you learn more about what is going well and what you may need to spend additional time working on, you can revise your annual training plan to reflect these things so that you are continually working towards being as prepared as possible for what you are actually seeking to accomplish on race day. Your annual training plan should always be a reflection of what you need most in training and what will serve you best in training as you pursue your goals.
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The willingness to have an open mind and to be flexible about modifying things along the way, even if they are significantly different than what you originally anticipated, is one of the most profound things you can do to help set yourself up for success over the long term. When seeking to solve any complex problem, the answer almost always lies in the fundamentals. Training can absolutely appear to be a complex problem, especially when an athlete is deeply invested in it and their goals.
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However, the answer to the question, what is the best training, doesn't lie in a complex formula, a catchy video short, or a glitzy, quote-unquote, new approach. The fundamental approach of planning out an annual training plan helps transform training from being a complex problem into a manageable one. Doing this, taking the time to thoughtfully plan out your long-term path to your goals, will take you much further than any other fancy or complicated sounding approach you might hear about.
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Having an appreciation for how each piece of your training fits into the larger puzzle, and understanding the path forward that you are taking will help you proceed towards your goals with confidence. That was another episode of the Full Circle Podcast. Subscribe to the Full Circle Podcast wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
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Please send us an email at podcast at fullcircleendurance.com or visit us at fullcircleendurance.com backslash podcast. To find training plans, see what other coaching services we offer, or to join our community, please visit fullcircleendurance.com. I'm Coach Laura Henry. Thanks for listening.
