A question of consistency

ali_baba said:

Anyone have any thoughts or facts about the outcome of a consistent training schedule vs. one that varies a lot in consistency. Most programs I've seen specify very regular patterns of training eg monday rest, tuesday to thursday sessions, friday easy, race etc on weekends and repeat with various changes to the sessions. I travel for work and so often have to resort to dodgy hotel excercise bikes to get in a little time on a bike and don't have the desire to spend hours in a hotel gym on a poorly fitting bike to get in a long ride. The result is I'll try to get in everything in my program but the long rides often end up shorter in the gym and the order that things are achieved will vary from week to week so trying to periodize my training can be very difficult.

Is this costing me in terms of results? My TSS certainly has variations downwards during the weeks that I travel(the scores have to be guessed so it's hard to be exact here, using time/heart rate and comparing to previous sessions with actual scores).

Consistency of training is very important. Nevertheless, excellent results can still be achieved by planning workouts to allow for enforced days off due to work/family/study/travel etc or other commitments.

In general, if you know you have a day off, or have to cut a ride short, you can always up the intensity of shorter workouts (providing it is sustainable for you to do so) or rescheule longer workouts to other days if time permits - kind of depends on where you are in your training. It's one of the things coaches regularly deal with.

However, what you want to avoid is becoming a "weekend warrior" where most of your weekly training is crammed into a couple of days. Also, there is little value trying to cram a missed workout on top of tomorrow's or another day's workout. It is typically not a sustainable approach.

Since you have TSS at your disposal, maybe look to reshape other rides so that TSS varies less on a week by week basis. If you are regularly finding weekly TSS drops (CTL becomes static or falls during a build phase), then you most likely won't attain the overload necessary to stimulate improvements.

You sound like a great candidate for block training.

Alex Simmons said:

...However, what you want to avoid is becoming a "weekend warrior" where most of your weekly training is crammed into a couple of days. Also, there is little value trying to cram a missed workout on top of tomorrow's or another day's workout. It is typically not a sustainable approach....

+1 on Alex's post(as usual) but particularly this section.

You can definitely vary things around a bit but you can't cram for fitness either by just riding weekends or by stacking workouts to make up for lost time. If you can't ride the same schedule each week, at least try to ride a minimum number of days like 4 or 5 and make some of those shorter and harder if necessary to keep CTL up on a limited schedule.

Good luck,
Dave