How to Put Together a Weekly Workout Plan

!±8± How to Put Together a Weekly Workout Plan

I've told you about a bunch of types of workouts, but if you tried to do them all in one week you would put yourself in the hospital. One the most common questions I get is how do you put together a weekly plan. I usually set things up in 4 week blocks but for illustration purposes we'll just put a single week plan together.

While this will show how I put a training week together, you have to bear in mind that we cycle the loads and intensity over the course of the training season. Some blocks will have low volume (less time) and more intensity while in other periods this will be reversed. It all depends on what the goal of the block of training is. The week I'm going to show you will be aimed at increasing threshold power, anaerobic capacity and over all body conditioning. When I'm creating a monthly plan the load will increase a little each week for three weeks and the fourth week will ease off allowing the body to recover. This can vary per athlete but the 3 week build, 1 week recovery is a good place to start. An example would be 60 minutes week 1, 65 minutes week 2 and 70 minutes week 3.

Warm-up 15-20 minutes before each workout. Stretch or do Yoga after each workout.

Monday

Rest

Tuesday

60 Minute Aerobic Ride - steady pace, breathing is elevated but you should be able to talk. (75-80% of your threshold power)

Wednesday

30 Velmax Intervals - 30 seconds Hard ( 135% threshold power) / 30 seconds Easy

Cool down 10 minutes then

Cross Training Workout

3 rounds with as little rest as possible

15 Pushups

25 Bodyweight Squats

15 Sumo Deadlift High Pulls (20 lb dumbbells)

Thursday

60 Minute Aerobic Ride - steady pace, breathing is elevated but you should be able to talk. (75-80% of your threshold power)

Friday

Cross Training Workout

3 Rounds with as little rest as possible

20 Dumbbell Swings

20 Walking lunges (20 steps per leg)

20 Russian Twists

Saturday

90 Minute Aerobic Ride - steady pace, breathing is elevated but you should be able to talk. (75-80% of your threshold power)

Sunday

30 Velmax Intervals - 30 seconds Hard ( 135% threshold power) / 30 seconds Easy

Cool down 10 minutes then

Cross Training Workout

3 rounds with as little rest as possible

20 Thrusters

20 Pull ups or body rows

20 Burpees

Do a quick Google search if you don't know how to do the exercises.

This plan takes about 6 hours per week not counting warm-up and cooldown. If you need to miss a workout on this plan, cut out one of the aerobic rides rather than the Velmax or cross training workouts.

The cross training workouts take 5-15 minutes depending on how little rest you can get away with.

The layout is pretty simple with a couple of hard bike workouts that will increase power and sustainable speed. Between the hard workouts are more moderate aerobic rides that are longer. The aerobic rides provide a cardiovascular load and improve your bodies ability to access fat as a fuel source but only take 8-12 hour to recover from. The Saturday workout is stretched out a little.

And it's all topped off with three cross training workouts to build muscular endurance and balance out the body. As a bonus, workouts like these that have a lot of muscles involved with a lot of lactic acid and oxygen debt, trigger an increase in your bodies production of growth hormone and testosterone. After the age of 30, these hormones decrease so spiking them up with exercise will help with fat burning, energy and recovery.