How to make your own training plan

The reason you're writing a training plan is to achieve a goal. That could be to complete an event, to prepare for a race season, or to crack a personal time goal on a climb. Whatever your goal is, identify it and put it in writing.

As well as giving you a clear focus for the weeks and months ahead, that goal will determine the type of sessions you do.

They might not be a lot of fun, but it’s wise to get in a fitness test before you write your training plan. This will give you a clear idea of your current fitness and highlight the areas where you need to improve. There are loads of tests you can carry out, but if you want to keep things simple, just find a climb or a stretch of road near you that you can time yourself on. Make sure you keep a record of all your results!

If you want to make a training plan you will actually stick to, it has to work around the rest of your life. Fill your calendar with all your work, family and social commitments, then look at the time left. These are the gaps that your training will slot into.

Find a day when you can do a longer ride. For example, every Sunday, you could go out for a long road ride with your local cycling club. Then, it’s a case of slotting in some shorter training sessions throughout the week.

If you do the same set of sessions for months on end, your training will plateau and you’ll probably get pretty bored. To keep progressing, split your training into phases. If you’re writing a plan for the next few months, split it into monthly zones, with a different focus for each month.

That’s not to say that you should only do one type of training in each month, but each month can be ‘weighted’ towards a certain skill or type of fitness. So one month could be about developing top end power, another could be about developing base fitness, or another could be about recovery and conditioning.

As you move through the weeks towards your goals, add progression into your training by gradually increasing the duration or the intensity of each session, perhaps every week or two.

Schedule in a fitness test every two to three weeks to see how things are going. Try to complete it under similar conditions, so plan some rest days before each test so you are fresh.

If you have a power meter or a static trainer, an FTP (functional threshold power) test every couple of weeks is a good idea.

If you are training 'analogue', find a local climb or stretch of road you know well and make a full-gas attempt up it every couple of weeks. Note that the effort should reflect your training goals – if you're training to do long time-trials, a blast up a two-minute climb won't tell you much.

Recovery, sleep, stretching, and injury prevention exercises, such as core workouts, are a vital part of training. Do not underestimate their importance. If you're struggling to fit these in, have a look at your training planner and carve out some time for them. If this means taking a bike session out, then so be it. It's important to get the balance right between training and rest. Use your training planner as a tool to get this right. Find what works for you.