How to incorporate normal activities

Hello,

my Name is Michael, I live in Germany, 25 kilometers away from my company. I have 4 bikes, 2 mainly for commuting (1 Gravel, 1 Cross) and 2 for Training (Road/Gravel).

Commuting gives me 50km per day, in most weeks I ride 3 days/week. In summer even 4 days/week. This means I have a minimum of 150km without a training plan.

Because I also want to have nice rides (and not any of my daily commuting routes) I want to ride at the weekend too so I ride 1-2 times at the weekend, so another 70-120km.

To not overwhelm my body I have a whoop band and ride sometimes very slow at commuting. For functional training I use a special training app. In this app I create most of the trainings by myself and omit exercises that I dont need because of the cycling.

My plan was to get better in cycling and have some professional support in using systm. But whatever I choose in its training plans I cannot incorporate something normal into the plans. Every day or every second day another round inhouse cycling in addition to the normal riding will not work for me.
Apart from my high (perhaps) volume commuting the most friends I have on strava are also riding 150-250km/week. But they do it mostly on the weekend.

So I really do not understand the schedule and the planning in systm. Systm will also not be informed or adjusted after a demanding 120km ride at the weekend. I would just have to reschedule everything the whole time and the app will not recognize my normal plan.

Does it really work like this? I really planned to use systm because I am a big wahoo fan. I also really like the training in the app, this is by far the best way to train indoor for me. But this way I cannot incorporate it into my life…

Thanks in advance and best regards
Michael

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Welcome to our forum!

Given your volume, I don’t think the plans in SYSTM are likely to work for you. They generally assume that you ride indoors Monday through Friday and usually allow for weekend workouts to be adapted to outside. The plans are also highly structured. So if you want to ride with a group, you’ll find yourself “violating” the intended workout in the plan.

If you want highly structured training, you’ll probably have to bike commute less. If you want to incorporate the sorts of high intensity workouts that SYSTM offers into your riding, you could add 2 or 3 such workouts to your routine, but there isn’t likely to be a pre-packaged plan that will work. Perhaps you can take advantage of the Call with a Coach to come up with something that works for you.

Hi Michael
Welcome to SYSTM, I hope you find a way to incorporate some suffering into your cycling regime.

Off the bat, I assume you already doing 12 hours per week cycling (commuting 3x and a 120k fun ride), at most and with some wisdom, I would/should assume you will not be able to fit in more than another 3 and max 5 hours worth of cycling training on top of that for it to be manageable, along with the other training you do.

Do you have any cycle events on the radar that you will be competing in? Do you cycle to be fit? Why did you join SYSTM other than liking Wahoo products?

In my limited knowledge but being practical, in order to utilize SYSTM as a training platform, you will need to dial down the commuting aspect to substitute those 6 hours towards weekday training on this platform.

I hope you find a way through your maze.

Hi AkaPete,

thanks a lot for your answer and help. I think you are right. I tried to not commute and instead perform a systm workout, this worked. It even had less (whoop) strain then my standard commuting strain for one day. (Because commuting takes about 100 Minutes for both directions).
Doing a workout after commuting was too much for me, even the mild kayabike round. So you are right this is too much. Perhaps I restrict the plan to functional training.

Best regards

Hi Dan,

thanks for you warm welcome and help and suggestions.
The plan was to just get better in cycling. I think I am well in shape but have anvery unstructured and uncalculatable benefit of it.
My cycling is optimized for 25km rides, I use too much strain per week without any plan. It is just “as much effort as I can stand”. And everything is planned by myself.
I subscribed to whoop to focus more on recovery because I just don’t notice when I overwhelm my body.
I also hit a plateau with my cycling. And to my expirience (in other things like strength training) I wanted to have new impulses from outside to get another stimulation.
So my plan was to get different workouts and plans to get more FTP, be better in climbing etc.

I hope this clearifies it a little.

Hearing you want to improve, and seeing that’s not achievable currently, make a big switch from your norm (the commuting) and use those 6 hours in the week for ‘FTP’ training.

Undertake a FF (my preference but HM if you are not ready), implement a plan and get sweating. Sounds simple but without doing something radical from your current plan, you likely will not progress to your expectations.

Test wise, I heartily recommend doing one of the two 7 day test prep plans. Both have a FF at the end, and one has a HM halfway through. A big advantage of the one with the HM is it sets approximate targets for the FF at the end, which helps pace the efforts. Either plan is a week of legit workouts so shouldn’t be thought of as a throwaway or waste of time.

Okay thx. I did the Half Monty within the test period but since now not the Full Frontal. I cannot stop commuting. The car is not a good choice for the environment and using something else will take much more time.
So I will try to ride as slow as I can stand it and try some of the workouts.

Thanks for your advice.
Michael

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