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Dynamic Training

Discover how dynamic training can help protect you from injury and illness and maximise the gains you can make within the time you have available to train.

Summary

The training you do should change in line with your goals, body’s capabilities (fitness), capacities (fatigue), anytime life changes and what you feel like doing (depending on your approach to your training). This will protect you from injury and illness and maximise the gains you can make with the time you have available
We’ve built some new capabilities in Pillar that enable this for you
Pillar will re-optimise the amount of training, the type of training, and the difficulty of the training it asks of you, in line with these changes in your body and your life

Why should you should care about 'dynamic training'?

We mentioned here that personalising the training you do for things like (i) the targets you’re aiming for, (ii) your body’s capabilities and capacity, can maximise your fitness gains, and enable you to avoid illness and injury. This involves doing enough training, but not too much, as well as ensuring the type of riding you do is a great fit with these factors.

Your body should be “on the move” as a result of your training. For example:

It should be adapting every week, with meaningful increases in your performance every 6 weeks
Your body will be getting fatigued as a result of the training you’re doing. Fatigue is part of the process - you have to stress your body to drive “adaptation” or progress in your fitness. This fatigues the body. You’ll probably have different levels (and possibly different types) of fatigue each day - depending on your training

Your life will likely also be on the move - changing work, family and other personal commitments, a social ride that you get out for, etc. This also impacts your body’s capacity to train.

You might just want to get out and ride how you feel like - regardless of what is planned. This is normal, and great - most of us aren’t pro athletes and will do this to greater or lesser extents.

To ensure the training you do fits these needs like a glove, it needs to adapt with the above factors. This might seem trivial, but if you’ve ever wondered why you or others around you stagnate as opposed to improve, or get ill/ injured, then a lack of attention to these changing factors is probably why.

We've built 3 new capabilities for Pillar:

Anchor sessions
Weekly update of your plan
Continuous update of the difficulty of sessions Pilar sets

1. Anchor Sessions

You can add social or other personal rides into your week, and Pillar will instantly re-optimise the rest of your training for that week, to make sure you’re doing:

the right amount of training but not too much
the right type of training to stimulate your body in the right way to give you the fitness “profile” you need
that your week is “periodised” (arranged) to enable enough “in week” recovery, so you come fresh enough to each session to get the right results from that session (different for each depending on the session goals)

You can add recurring sessions or add them ad hoc. We call these “anchor” as they become the immovable object that week, around which your training is structured or anchored (because most of us are looking to have fun as well as improve our fitness). Putting these social rides in your calendar isn’t universally “bad”. It’s important to consider “why” we ride, and make sure we reflect that in our activity. For most of us amateurs - fun and social are somewhere in that mix.

2. Weekly Evaluation + 'update' of your training for the week to come.

On Sunday evening, we’ll have a look at your ride data for the week, and see how you did
We’ll tell you how we think you did and ask for your feedback on the week
We’ll combine all of this into an updated set of training recommendations for the week to come
This will make sure you progress by the right amount each week. You get fitter primarily progressively stimulating your body more and more over time. So most weeks you should expect an uplift in what Pillar asks you to do. But it needs to know where you are today to do that - and that’s what tends to change with most of us. How much we have been able to do that week, is important.

How it looks in Pillar:

3. Difficulty levels

In the Evaluation section of Pillar you’ll see that you have difficulty levels for each energy zone that you train through Pillar.These indicate the level of difficulty of the sessions you are doing that we give you to stimulate that “system” in your body (more on this here). This denotes how difficult that session is within certain power targets (e.g. if your VO2 max power is 200 Watts, it’s easier to hold that for 3 min intervals than 5 min intervals. The latter is an interval that would be found in a more session of a higher difficulty level than the former. So for as long as your VO2 max power remains 200 Watts, we’ll progress the difficultly sessions you do, when you successfully complete a session at each level
We also do this where you use heart rate as an indicator of intensity for your rides. The difficulty levels will progress as fast as you do to keep you challenged.