Hi everyone,
Newbie to the forum here. I come from a MTB background, trail and enduro riding and got bit by the gravel bug this year. I bought a cx/gravel bike last fall to complete indoor structured training on and ended up riding it a ton this year and having a lot of fun on the gravel roads around my house. Anyway, I am looking ahead at next year at possible entering some gravel races/rides but have no real plans to race. I love the training aspect of the sport and try to structure my weeks with sweet spot/tempo rides (gravel bike) and high intensity rides (MTB/trail rides) recovery rides as well. I also do mobility/core work and some upper body/shoulder work to keep my upper body strong for the MTB. Nothing to wild and mostly body weight to maintain.
Goals are to get stronger/faster on the bike, improve endurance and improve climbing. So just overall become a better rider haha. I also want to try and enter some 60ish mile events for next year. Also hoping to lose some BF% to help all of that and have been following the winning in the kitchen tips the past few weeks and have been feeling great.
I really like strength training so I will for sure complete the 10 week program and then dive into sweet spot. I am looking at the Resistance Training plus base plan. My concern right now is I do not have a power meter. I do have a garmin 830 and HRM. For indoor training I have a kenitic trainer with a sensor that gives me power, so a dumb smart training if that makes sense. Will I be able to complete some of the workouts by just using HR? I am going to work to get a powermeter but need to decide if I am going to keep my current bike and setup.
Hey @jdr365, welcome to the FasCat Fam – we are stoked to have you!
As far as off season goes, we highly recommend the 32 week off season training plan & this is the ideal time to start. The 16 week resistance training + base is more geared towards someone who has not started off season/base training early enough.
To answer your question, yes. All of our plans can be done based on heart rate. Here is a thread where coach jake gives some tips on how to do that
I was also looking at the 32 week plan and thought it might be a good fit. I am actually starting off a rest week today after 4 weeks of hard riding so might be perfect to dive right in! The 32 weeks would put me in May of next year.
For the on the bike training, is it ok to split time on my MTB an Gravel bike if I do not have anything specific in mind? If I find an event I can commit I will complete the workouts on that specific bike.
Most definitely!
Changing it up helps to keep training from feeling repetitive. When you get closer to race season, then you can get more focused… but feel free to FtFP on whatever bike you like until then
So I did some pretty hard KOM efforts the last couple of weeks and have some pretty solid heart rate information. I am new to Training peaks but saw shows my best 20min heart rates. Is this my heart rate threshold I should use? So in this case 176 bpm, not sure if that is high or not.
I really recommend doing the field test that is included at the beginning of your plan. Here is a great training tip and podcast from the big cat on that:
This is going to give you a good starting point so you can measure your improvement throughout the plan.
here is also a helpful thread on using heart rate for setting your zones
