Happy New Year greetings to you from
ErgVideo Inc.
Now that the holiday season has passed and our new
year resolutions have been broken, we're pleased to announce the first
ErgVideo Training Plans, available for free at www.intellicoach.ca.
Due to the success of our multi-disk training
packs, we've often been asked "How would I train most-effectively with
these ErgVideos?". Our best answer is to
employ a competent, technically-oriented coach like Rich Wharton . We're now presenting
the second-best answer.
Workout Designer
toolkit:
To help you and your coach, we've developed on-line
tools to design, manipulate, and pre-analyze your ErgVideo
sessions so that they match your needs and coaching philosophy. That
toolkit has been available for awhile, and can be found at http://www.intellicoach.ca/ProfileToolbox.aspx.
We've made some significant recent improvements, including a ride previewer and
an automatic zone-optimizing workout designer.
A Full Training
Program:
Nevertheless, athletes and coaches asked for more.
Some athletes are self-coached, or feel they don't need a coach given their
modest goals or means. Likewise, coaches often prefer to see the first
"template" of a program, and once it's understood, they can more easily create
their own custom programs. So our resident NCCP III certified road cycling coach
(Paul Smeulders) sat down to create programs using the cycling,
short-course tri and long-course tri ErgVideo multipacks as the basis for
the workouts over a 20-24 week period. Within each discipline, we have 2 or 3
different options for training time per week. The planner is here: http://www.intellicoach.ca/TrainingPlans.aspx
Paul developed more than 250 distinct and different
workouts from the multipack ErgVideos by exploiting the configurability of the
workouts in terms of power level, start-end framing, and repeat-loop
capability. The result is a bunch of very focused, fun and effective
variations of the ErgVideo power profiles. Note carefully that we
don't provide ergfiles, but the "lastride" plug-in. You must have a license
for the ErgVideo that the .lastride "plug-in" file is meant to
complement.
It's easy to get your
program:
At the Training Plan webpage, you enter your
current threshold power, and the date you'd like to start your program. Then
pick your discipline, and number of training hours per week you typically devote
to cycling. Select how many weeks of the program you would like to see, and they
are presented to you in a nice, compact tabular form. You can email the table to
yourself or your athletes.
The table contains the weekly workout program, with
ErgVideo titles, duration, and a workout description. It also contains a link
for each workout which will take you to the "MyProfile" page. Here, you will see
all of the ErgVideo settings for that workout, and you can DOWNLOAD the
".lastride" plug-in file so that you can autoconfigure your ErgVideo workout
session. The links are keyed to your threshold power, so you should update your
plan every time you update your threshold power. If you have different ErgVideo
Titles, you can design your own rides and substitute them.
Even though you will re-use your ErgVideos
many times in the 20-24 week period, the actual workouts are varied and changed
substantially. For example, both of these workouts use the MAP intervals
ErgVideo:
MAPIntervals 45 secs x8, 3 sets Preview
link go ahead...click it!
It's up to you or your coach to decide when each
workout can be performed within your week. That's pretty variable from person to
person, so it's best decided by each user.
Excellent tool for coach's regular
communications:
The key aspect of this system is that
the webpages linked are dyamically created based solely on the links.
You do not need an account or storage or passwords. A coach can pass the
detailed workout information ENTIRELY by copying the workout LINK into
his regular e-mail or TrainingPeaks(TM) instructions for the day. When the
athlete clicks the link, she is taken to a page that displays her workout,
including expected CyclingPeaks(TM) performance metrics. We don't send big mails
full of graphics, and we don't store anything about you at our
sites.
Start anytime, or just plunder the plan for
great variations on workouts!
While the plans span 20-24 weeks, feel free to
start the training at any point you feel you are fit enough to handle. For
example, you may have already completed 8-12 weeks of base training, so you can
choose to continue at the ErgVideo Plan's week 9 or week 13...it's all up to
you. You should consult a physician before undertaking an exercise
program...especially a high performance one, like ErgVideo's.
Feel free to just use the tables and links to
find variations on the ErgVideo workouts, and download the .lastride files to
autoconfigure your session. This saves you designing your own, and it's really
convenient.
Paul Smeulders and David Stevenson
TrainingPeaks and CyclingPeaks are trademarks of
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