-
That's pretty much my philosophy - a good training plan is like a good diet - healthy but varied. Personally I just try to do a range of various training. Some long, fairly low effort rides, some long intervals, some shorter interval training and some HIIT work. Keep it mixed up. Mind you, I'm old, slow, and still a bit fat, so I'm not necessarily well-placed to give training advice.
Brommers-
You are spot on. Variety and consistency and you've every chance of going fast.
By all means specialise/be specific close to an event but you'll likely be faster having done a mix of training all year.
-
Good or effective? They are usually aligned, but effective would be more focused and time constrained?
An effective weight loss diet might be salmon, broccoli, brown rice every meal, but not a good one.
You could also define a good diet/training plan as one that keeps you engaged an keeps you on plan. May end up with better results than a much tougher but more effective plan due to compliance.In training, I think variety is overrated, as long as you can maintain consistency/compliance.
This might be my brain wired from spending too many hours in my youth drilling scales/arpeggios and doing 500 reps of the same Taekwondo kick in a row for practice...
onyerbike
Acliff
One of the main issues I have with the Coggan chart is that it furthers this phenotype idea of being 'a climber' or a 'pursuiter' or even "I'm really bad at 5m efforts but better at 20m efforts".
Maybe if you are at an elite level or at least lots and lots of years training and racing at a high level you can start to make that judgement.
Eg make some changes to your training and suddenly, your 5m power is 'better' than your 20m power because, hey, you're training it (properly).