ESP and TrainingPeaks – The Process And The Why

TrainingPeaks is the tool we use together to plan, record and reflect on progress towards your short, medium and long term goals.

It is the one stop shop that gives visibility to your progress for yourself, your coaches and your wider team of professionals (teams, strength and conditioning coaches, physios etc) .

It allows you to put in place routines and strategies for developing a growth mindset to your sport that encourages reflection and learning to achieve your goals.

Done right TrainingPeaks is the window into your professionalism and success as an athlete!

To achieve these goals we have detailed the process we recommend for using TrainingPeaks for ESP athletes and what information you need to record. We then look at why we follow this process and the benefits it provides to you and your team.

The Process

Training

1. Weekly review your workouts from the previous week with your coach. Look at the week coming and how you are progressng towards your goals. Together you will make any adjustments to the sessions and / or races planned.
2. Daily review your workout planned for the next day so you know what is expected and you can be prepared with a suitable course, the correct equipment, hydration and nutrition. If you have any specific planning or goals for the session you can add these as comments.
3. Record metrics in the morning.

   

4. Upload workouts as soon as possible on completion and record the following:
   1. How you felt and how hard the workout was (while you are stretching / eating your post session food and drink).

      

   2. Review your workout and make comments.

      

Racing

1. Record your tactical, technical, mental, physical and nutrition plan for the race the day before. As part of this process review your last race notes and include anything you identified to work on in your plan. Record these in the workout comments. Ideally do this a day or two before the race so on the day before the race you can relax knowing you have a plan for the following day. If required adjust the plan after arriving at the race and team meetings.

   

2. Record metrics on the morning of the race.
3. Upload your race as soon as possible on completion and record the following:
   1. How you felt and how hard the race was.
   2. Review the race and make comments to record if you achieved your goals and what were your race limiters.  Always focus on at least 3 positive aspects and chose the key things you need to improve on in your training and or your next race.

      

The Why

Our goals is to develop you into the best you can be.  To do that you have to be continually challenging yourself and identify improvements to make. It is a team effort and visiblity for everyone involved is cirtical.  The reason why we are asking you to do the above are detailed below.  Hopefully by understanding the why it will motivate you to complete these tasks in a timely fashion and get as much out of the process as possible.

Training

1. Informs us as coaches how your training is progressing :
   1. Did you hit the sessions and have we targeted the zones correctly (file upload, comment and effort / feel)
   2. How you are coping with the session and the training load (file uploads and comments along with metrics).  With this information we can quickly adapt the program to optimise your adaptations and schedule days off etc if you are over reaching.
   3. Track TSS daily / weekly and monthly so we can overload, recover and adapt you and insure we time this in with racing you have scheduled.
2. Allows you to reflect on each session and identify your successes and reflect on what you need to work on in subsequent sessions.  An informed athlete is a winning athlete.  You will also get a much better idea of what you are capable of so by the time it comes to race you know what you are capable of.  For example when you are establishing a break you know just how hard you can go and when you need to pull back etc.
3. Provides information to third parties (eg current team, future team etc).  By showing you are a thinking and informed athlete there is more likely that you will be respected by your current team and seen as a good potential for future teams.

Racing

1. Helps you plan for your race setting tactical, technical, physical, mental and nutritional goals.
2. Helps you reflect on your race in a timely fashion so you can celebrate what went right and identify what you need to work on in your training and or next race.  By doing this ASAP you can put the race to ‘bed’ and focus on the positive actions or your next race – although if it was the perfect race you can hang on and talk about the success for a bit longer if you want!
3. Informs us as coaches how your race went so that we can adapt training to strengthen any weaknesses and work with you on any technical / tactical / mental / nutritional strategies for the following races.  This is especially important when you are racing remotely and sometimes communications across time zones is difficult.
4. As with the training above this is also very helpful for third parties (e.g current team, future team etc). By showing you are a thinking and informed athlete there is more likely that you will be respected by your current team and seen as a good potential for future teams.