John: endurance power doubled across the season

what does it take for an everyday cyclist to break through a plateau let's take a look at one Rider's complete season to find out meet John like many cyclists John has to juggle being a new father working full-time and having a life outside of cycling he had being self- coaching and using standard training plans putting them together himself but he really wanted to make sure that each session counted towards something bigger so there was an overall strategy in his training and he wanted to perform well in Road and gravel Racers he wanted to increase his endurance power and raise his threshold and to get there he needed a better way to train so he made one decision that changed everything but what was that decision I'm biased here but of course he joined semipro cycling and he started using an Adaptive training system to hit his goals for the 2024 season and in this video I'll break down the exact training system he used the progress he made and whether he hit his ambitious goals or not before I get into the details of John's Journey let me quickly explain the different levels of cyclist that I've come across in my 12 years of coaching and what kind of development and Progressive elements that they each need to maximize each level and reach performance at every stage of the journey level one is beginner obvious yes but the experience it really is the first year of the sport so your goal here is to build a consistent habit of training and it really is you just want to find out how you can train regularly at this stage any form of writing helps you improve impr and the focus should be getting out consistently and learning how your body feels during different rides the development here as you build a routine you can start adding in extra sessions or extending sessions slightly but the key is to stay consistent for example if you're a bent like John was in his first year almost any ride will help you get stronger it's all about building that habit of showing up and level two is intermediate and the experience here really it's 2 to 3 years in the sport and the goal is to improve endurance and power and your training approach as you gain experience it's time to focus on increasing the duration of your rides you'll want to work on building the endurance and learning to pace yourself more effectively during longer efforts the development here is where you start to incorporate more specific training like adaptive intervals adjusting intensity or duration based on how you're feeling on that day so for example John in here is 2 years plus into his cycling Journey which puts him into the intermediate category and this means his training was more focused on extending broad duration and learning how to Pace intervals to maximize time spent on the bike level three Advanced and this is where your experiences three plus years in the sport your goal is to improve specificity and intensity and your training approach is where you need to focus on high quality intense training volume matters here a lot but improvements come from specific and intense sessions you have more flexibility overall on how you progress but it's important to tailor your intervals and training sessions based on realtime feedback from your body John being just over 2 years into his cycling is classified by me as an intermediate writer he needed a more personalized plan one that wasn't quite one-on-one coaching but gave him enough structure to keep improving and one of the key areas we focused on was learning how to Pace intervals based on how we felt each day and some days he could push harder and the other days he pulled back to allow for more recovery here's how his 24 season progressed in phase one we focused on building power and endurance so we started in the end of January before that he had done November December and January as a buildup period where he was extending his urance capacity knowing that he had his first race on the 30th of March and then his first big race on April 20 I wanted to step through the process and continue building intensity through that period moving into the first Focus block of training which was V2 Max training in February over the next 4 weeks we worked his V2 Max and neuromuscular power increasing his V2 Max from 4.9 L per minute to 5.02 L per minute so a 2.45 increase a mini win here was that his pmax his maximum power output also increased slightly showing small but steady progress now sub threshold work was in March and by the end of March John's time to exhaustion is tte the time in theory that he could sit at his threshold improved by nearly 6% and his stamina per for performance Beyond 1 hour increased from 73 to 80% in Phase 2 he did racing and Anor robic power so from April to June but really at this point you want to make a decision as to what isn't working for you meaning where are you lacking in Fitness what do you need to work on and what's going to be useful for the race that you're going to be doing these opening races were gravel races and he hadn't done a lot of neuromuscular work and he hadn't done a lot of short-term power work and that's where I felt he needed that in order to do things in a race like attacking chasing on after someone attacks hitting small heels with strength but being able to recover from them as well he and John entered his first race of the Season despite losing a water bottle early on and battling cramps he finished second out of 150 Riders which is a huge Improvement considering the circumstances he hit a peak 1 minute a peak 1 hour and a peak 1 and 1 half hours so the mini win for John here was John saw his TT e increase again during training hitting new PRS in his weekly rides and then we did an anerobic block so in April we focused on increasing his functional Reserve capacity and after 3 weeks his functional Reserve capacity Rose by nearly 2% not massive gains but enough to give him an edge in Sprint finishes we moved into a muscular endurance Block in May here he worked on improving his torque and he saw a 14% Improvement in his 10minute talk numbers helping him power through tough climbs and longer efforts in phase three he peaking and refining from July through to September we worked on lactate clearance starting in July and John's main goal was to increase his threshold but after a tough block of lactate clearance training we only saw a slight Improvement where his threshold peaked for the season at 356 Watts his VO2 max focus in August we returned to V2 Max training for 4 weeks where he reached his Peak V2 Max of 73 m per minute per kilog a 1.96% increase though the gains were small it showed that now he was starting to reach his season peak and a mini win here in mid August John set a new 5minute PR pushing 439 Watts for an 8% improvement from earlier on in the year so did John reach his goals yes he did so let's recap critical power John saw a solid Improvement jumping from 321 watts to 356 Watts that's a 10.9% increase for the season and this was a significant boost for his longer rides urance power John improved his durability in races especially in longer Ur events so his 5 minute power after 22,000 K of work increased from 4.5 W per kg to 5.9 wat per kg that's a 31% jump and his 4-Hour endurance power doubled from 1.6 WS per kg to 3.2 wats per kgr that's a 100% Improvement in summary John's Journey from a self-coached cyclist to a more structured system-driven athlete was filled with ups and downs he faced tough races a new baby and a busy life but by staying consistent and making small adjustments he was able to hit some major personal Milestones it's writers like John that inspired me to put my best thinking together and build a system that anyone can access it's called team semipro and you can join team semipro for $32 every 4 weeks or 1658 a month if you pay yearly where you'll access 53 training plans 307 instruction workouts and training Peaks premium with email support and a one time coach consultation to get you all set up and ready to go click on the link in the description and make every session count