Next year I am hoping to try my hand at crit racing properly, I have tried a few races this season with the obligatory shelling out occurring. For this reason I want to have a good winter of training to give myself the best chance of starting to be competitive next season.

My current training consists of three longish (40-60 mile) hilly rides a week on road over hilly terrain (1000-1500m climbing). one session of long hill reps, 6 x 5-10 minute climbs, and one session of 10-12x 1 minute hill reps with 1 minute recovery split into blocks of 4. I also do some basic bodyweight exercises etc. 3-4 times per week.

I currently feel like my plan although showing a little progression is not progressive enough. I am taking every fourth week as a rest week and also trying to listen to my body (I have taken the next three days off from training as I feel a bit coldy). Can anyone recommend a better way of structuring my training? I have seen the plans on british cycling website that look good, they might be pushing it slightly with the hours they require a week, but i could adapt this a bit to suit me.

sorry for the long essay. I guess the key question is where should i be looking to find a training plan or the best guide to put one together myself?
thanks

The BC ones are a pretty good starting point.
For making your own, the place to start is always Friel’s training bible – he himself admits its not always the most modern thinking, but as a starting point you really cant go wrong there.

When making your own plan you really need to evaluate both the requirements of your event and your own personal strengths and weaknesses. Then plan sessions based on generating specific physiological changes. From a training perspective, if you do a session and cant say exactly why you are doing it, its a wasted session.

For your current training, how are you measuring intensity? Power, HRM or RPE?

currently just using RPE, hill rep sessions are on the same hill though so using the time, or distance in a set time seems pretty reliable, I could use HRM though

Another vote here for the training bible. Whilst I wouldn’t take the book as being the only authority on training, I think the idea of periodisation in your training is important. For me having a specific goal to work on for a couple of months before moving on and building on what I’ve done keeps things interesting and means progress can be measured specifically.

If you’re serious about structuring your training then using your HRM along with RPE will help you to do this better. If you’ll be training indoors over the winter then something like trainerroad is a cheap way to get the benefits of a power meter without the expenditure.

I’ll take a look at the training bible
I tried trainer road last year, I was never quite convinced the readings off of my action mag rollers was consistent
What would people be emphasising as a training goal at what point in training if I want to race road/crit?

With VirtualPower, you’ll want to make sure your tire pressure and roller tension are consistent in order to get consistent data. 🙂 That way, your results will be comparable and you’ll be able to track improvements!

The type of training you’ll want to do to prepare for road will more than likely be a little different depending on the demands of the road races you’re looking at doing. For crits, you’ll want workouts that test your short-punchy power abilities and capacity to do them repeatedly. You’ll want to be prepared for the high intensity and technical demands of the sport.

For road, depending on whether you’re thinking climbing or rolling road race, you may have slightly different training goals. You may be faced with short or sustained climbs, as well as attacks and flurries. You’ll want to focus on both your aerobic and anaerobic contributions to your training.

Feel free to check out any of our training plans as well. We offer crit and road plans to gear towards your goal event.

Hope this helps!

Community Manager at TrainerRoad — Cycling’s Most Effective Training System

A few thoughts…

1) working to heart rate or virtual power in trainer road will be much better than RPE even if there are a few foibles.
2) you don’t just want to do the same each week. You might want to reduce the recovery time between intervals or increase the time/number of intervals. This will help progression without increasing the overall time
3) improvement is well documented to be possible on 5-10 hours a week.
4) it’s difficult to set a goal that will occur in training, unless perhaps you got a power meter, that will be a good indicator of your progression to being competitive……maybe find a local open road race circuit and see how your strava times stack up against the times clocked in road races on the same segments (look on BC for the actual names of races)? Bear in mind though that race pelotons will average (sometimes a lot) more than a solo rider