My experiment with primarily using XATA has led to some very interesting observations even just a week in, with the most striking being how much recovery I should take.
In the past my training was highly inconsistent, huge blocks of quality work over a few days and then struggling to maintain / build on it after that, both bad legs and lack of mental motivation. I always thought the driver was poor nutrition, but stuffing myself to try to reset my legs only ended up with weight gain and frustration as my legs failed to retain their snap. Recently I had a race that was hard but not extreme, that took a little under 2 hours. My typical plan would have been a single day off, and then back to the hard intervals two days post race. XATA is given me a very different recommendation - something like 4-5 days of mellow recovery in order to get back to form! It's hard to predict the results from this, but it has encouraged me to really listen to where my body is at post race, and the truth is my legs are still recovering and I need to let that happen to truly build any strength gains on top of that key race. Looks like I'll get back to intensity over the weekend, which will be great to build out of this epic XSS debt I've build up this week...
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I had originally titled this "putting my season in the hands of Xert"; but that's a bit dramatic regarding how much control I actually have over my results. That is - while I think Xert can help me manage my workouts and load a bit better, it's still up to me to make the work happen to get stronger, there's no magic pill here.
While in my last update I noted that I was going to go back to a more rigid training plan with TrainerRoad's structured plans, I then realized that quite frequently "life happens" (ride cut short due to family duties, happen to have extra time for a longer ride one day) and having a more flexible / adaptive training plan would really benefit me. So I'm going to dive in to the Xert Adaptive Training Advisor (XATA) with the hopes of having a much more fluid plan that responds to my changing requirements and the workouts I can actually do, not just what I had planned to do. Only a few days in so far and hard to tell how the process will play out from here, but excited to see how the recommendations adapt to necessary changes in my schedule. Hopefully I can document my weekly progress and help provide quality feedback for the Xert team to continue to evolve the product, and also very excited to see what kind of gains I can make with this approach! For some reason I've always been overly willing to ditch my current plan and switch over to the latest fad / trend in an effort to fully maximize the results I'm getting. I don't think it's due to a desire to strictly take a shortcut - mostly if I'm going to be spending the time training and eating right, then I want to really make sure I'm getting the most out of it.
What does that look like? Over the past couple of years I've wavered frequently between different eating habits and training modalities, super low carb, super high carb, nothing but long endurance training, nothing but high intensity intervals; you get the picture. I've certainly had some successes with each of these - but have failed to actually implement the one strategy that EVERYONE agrees on - consistency. Training and eating actually aren't likely all that complicated, at least, in order to get 95% of the benefit out of each it's mostly about consistent quality in each space. While nutrition will likely still be a harder nut to crack (am I hungry or just bored...) training should be an easier nut to crack. I'm a monster fan of the TrainerRoad product in general, and while I've stopped and started their plans about 100x I'm going to actually make them stick this time. 20 weeks out from my A race, lines up basically perfectly with 12 weeks of sweet spot base and 8 weeks of general build. While I could drive myself crazy optimizing the choices at this point - given my inability to hit consistency in the past I'm just going to make a pick and go with it, sticking to the plan rather than frequently jumping around. |
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