CompuTrainer(tm) users: 82 new exercise libraries with .erg files now available
November 20th, 2009
Today we are excited to announce the availability of 82 new workout libraries targeted to the indoor cycling crowd with a CompuTrainer(tm) or VeloTron. Each of the 82 new libraries have been specifically designed for cyclists with a functional threshold power between 100 and 500 watts and are available in 5W increments. Created by Association of British Cycling Coaches (ABCC) certified coach Quentin Field-Boden of VeloTraining, each library contains 32 exercises with an .erg file that has been scaled exactly for your FTP.
These libraries can be purchased for $US 49.95 by self-coached users or by coaches that would like to re-use them with their clients and in their own coaching.
The libraries are available immediately for purchase in the TrainingPeaks Exercise Library store. Simply login, click on the “plans, Pods & Store” section on the left, then click “Store”, then “Exercise Libraries” as shown below.
After purchasing a library, it will be available in your Training library within TrainingPeaks.
To use the workouts, simply drag them onto the calendar, then download the attached .erg file and use it with your CompuTrainer for your workout. After the workout, upload your data to TrainingPeaks.com or WKO+.
Quentin is available for questions by email at qfieldboden@gmail.com and you can learn more about his libraries by downloading a short descriptive .pdf by clicking here.
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Would you like to build and sell exercise libraries? Please contact us.
WKO+ Webinar from TrainingBible Coach Jim Vance: Monday, November 30th at 7:30pm EST
November 19th, 2009
TrainingBible Coach Jim Vance will be giving a webinar on how both coaches and athletes can use TrainingPeaks WKO+ desktop software to make better, more informed training decisions. Mark your calendars now for the Monday after Thanksgiving, November 30th, at 7:30pm EST, and get ready to learn how to make next season your best year yet!
Explaining more about what he will cover, Jim says, “This webinar will be covering how to track fitness patterns and prevent performance plateaus in WKO+ software, using advanced charts and graphs. Many coaches utilize WKO+ software to assess an individual session, but miss the opportunities to track overall fitness, recognize performance plateaus sooner, and make training decisions based on all the data available in a bigger picture, encompassing all sessions.”
“The webinar will show how to create alternative charts, enhance the data given in the Performance Management Chart (PMC), and how to interpret these to make better training decisions. If you are a coach or self-coached athlete, this session will help you to better understand how you or your athletes are adapting to training stresses.”
Learn more on Jim’s blog and sign up for the webinar at Performance Webinars. Coaches, let us know if you’re also planning to give a webinar by emailing us at info@trainingpeaks.com so that we can share the news!
We Can Help Build Training Plans, Organize Workouts, Upload Videos, and More
November 18th, 2009
TrainingPeaks now offers Professional Services! We have extremely knowledgeable experts who can help build your business with confidence and efficiency.
Below is a list of ways our Professional Services Experts can help you:
- Building training or nutrition plans: You provide the programming in your own format and we will turn it into a TrainingPeaks plan that you can sell or use for your own clients.
- Input all your workouts into a library: Are you currently working off an excel spreadsheet or some other format? Need to get those workouts into TrainingPeaks? We can do that for you!
- Input and organize your client list: Have a long list of people who need to be added to your account, and you just don’t have enough time to do it yourself? We can do that too!
- Video Uploading: We can upload your videos so they are there for your clients to see when you add them to an exercise or workout.
- Classic Workout Conversion to Structure: Convert your old “classic” workout templates into new Structured Workouts.
Professional Services are offered for $50 an hour. If you are interested in any of the options above, or one that you don’t see listed, contact us at services@peaksware.com! Learn more on our Support Site.
Cyclist Paul Stewart rides for fitness, charity
November 16th, 2009
Paul Stewart started riding for his own health, but now he rides for both himself and the benefit of others. “About 6 years ago I finally accepted I had put on a bit too much weight, which had shot up to 17 stone 8 lbs (246lbs), so I decided to do something about it. At the time I had an old Cannondale mountain bike in a corner of the garage gathering cobwebs and although it was winter I started out doing some rides of around 6 miles 4 -5 times a week. I then entered a 50 mile charity ride which gave me a sense of purpose and something to build up to.”
From the 50 mile charity ride, Paul has moved onto even longer events, such as a 24 hour charity ride for children he participated in last year and is looking forward to again this year. “I took part in the 24 hour event last year, riding 5 x 1 hour sessions which with the pre-event warm up meant I rode a total of 164 miles. This year I am aiming for more and what better way to raise money for Children in Need than by doing an activity that I love.”
Describing his love of cycling, Paul points out that it is a very democratic sport that gives participants unusually free access to professional riders. “There aren’t many sports or activities that a normal member of the public can follow in the footsteps of the professionals. I have ridden many of the Pyrenean Tour de France climbs and had the good fortune during last year’s 24 hour event to ride with 2 of the Great Britain Paralympics gold medal winners from Beijing. Imagine asking Jenson Button if I could go for a drive with him. It just wouldn’t happen.”
Despite his busy schedule, Paul has been able to train efficiently for his upcoming charity event through following his plan on TrainingPeaks. “I am only able to commit to around 7 hours a week to my training but have found that by following the schedule on TrainingPeaks that my training has come on especially in the last 4 weeks.”
As a result of this training, Paul has noticed a significant improvement in his fitness. “An example of how my fitness has improved since this time last year is that during the Tuesday track sessions we do an exercise where we take laps on the group. Usually by the end of the season around March I am able to do 6 repetitions of 2 laps. This year on every session I have done 6 repetitions of 2 laps with the exception of one week where I only managed 5 repetitions of 2 laps and 1 of 1 lap. The laps are taken at around 30mph. Massive improvement.”
Paul first began by using the free version of TrainingPeaks but soon switched to the paid subscription services so that he could take advantage of more advanced features, such as the Annual Training Plan. “I started out by using the free version of the TrainingPeaks web site but quickly changed to the subscription service which for me offered the advantage of creating the Annual Training Plan (ATP). I particularly like the flexibility of the ATP and have reduced my weekly hours since the summer and the plan just sorted everything out. The ATP takes out the complexity of deciding which training routines to do during each week leaving me more time to get out and ride my bike.”
In addition to the Annual Training Plan, Paul enjoys the fact that with TrainingPeaks he can record data from many different training devices. “Another very useful thing for me is the ability to upload data from multiple devices. I have Polar and Garmin devices and having the ability to see workouts from the 3 devices in one console is invaluable.”
“I am now enjoying my cycling more than ever before and even after having some injuries early last year feel that I am as fit now as I was 2 years ago. This is backed up by a 50 mile ride I did at the weekend which was the first time in 2 years that I have ridden this route and my time was almost 5 minutes quicker this year with similar conditions. TrainingPeaks has helped me to reach this level of fitness again and without it I would spend most of my time just riding my bike rather than training.”
Get a TrainingPeaks account and start achieving your own fitness goals like Paul did.
Triathlon Coaches: Get Organized!
November 13th, 2009
By Mike Ricci, Level III USA Triathlon Certified Coach and founder of D3 Multisport
Triathlon coaching in the modern hi-tech world of the internet has created its own challenges for coaches and athletes alike. The key to being a successful coach is being organized. Coaches typically take on more than they can handle and the athletes get less attention than they want. Many times as a coach, you’ll feel overwhelmed with how many phone calls you need to return or how many emails are in your in-box. In addition, you have schedules due to your athletes and training logs to review. If you aren’t careful this can turn into a vicious circle of always playing ‘catch up’.
Depending on how many athletes you coach (more on this below), you can break your athletes into three groups. For example I coach 12 athletes and I break these athletes into 3 groups of 4 athletes and the maximum number of schedules I write is 4 schedules per week. I like to create my athlete schedules in 3 week blocks and go through the cycle every three weeks.
Knowing how many athletes you can coach is usually different than how many athletes you can coach well. What you think you can do and what is reality is usually very different. It took me a number of years to realize that I couldn’t coach 30, 20 or even 15 athletes at a time. I know my ‘sweet spot’ in the number of athletes I can coach and I set a limit. Quality coaching is in high demand, even in these economic times – if you can do a superior job, typically you will get rewarded quite well for it. Trying to coach 20 athletes at $150/month can be much harder than coaching 12 athletes at $250/month. Once you can establish yourself as a high quality coach, you will be able to cut back on the number of athletes you coach and ultimately charge more for your services.
Why is this important to your success? Organizing and managing how many schedules you write keeps your stress in check and allows you more time to meet with and to actually do the all too forgotten ‘in person’ coaching.
Since we’ve started the internet coaching era, coaches do less ‘coaching’ than ever before. One of the best ways to actually see how your athletes are faring in their workouts is to actually ‘see them’ training – even if it’s just once per month. Setting up a weekly or monthly training session goes a long way to keeping multiple athletes happy and on track to their goals. A group session let’s you view multiple athletes at once, and it allows your athletes see you coaching which will create a lot of credibility with your athletes.
The internet is an easy way to keep in touch with remote athletes and believe it or not you can actually see and converse with your athletes live with web cams. If your athletes can get videotaped while swimming, biking or running, you can also see how they are training and make adjustments without actually being there. Nothing will ever take the place of actual in person coaching, but there are ways to successfully coach from a distance.
At D3 Multiport, we use an incredible training program system from www.TrainingPeaks.com – this system allows us to load our plans quickly, keep track of our athlete’s progress and to know when an athlete has completed a workout. On top of that we have access to food logs, as well as downloaded power and heart rate monitor files. I know when an athlete has completed and logged a workout on TrainingPeaks when a simple email is delivered to my inbox, with the athlete’s comments. I can check this rather quickly and if action is needed I can email or call the athlete immediately.
This makes managing my athletes quite easy. I typically set aside Mondays to look over the training week to see how the actual time spent training compares to what was scheduled. On Tuesday and Wednesday I have my scheduled phone calls taken care of and on Thursday morning I write my next block of training. This leaves me with Friday to either follow up on athlete questions or make changes to schedules if needed. Once again, there is no perfect week, but I try to stick to this schedule as best I can and if something comes up unexpectedly I have the time to take care of it. Being able to have the time to be accessible to your athletes will go a long way towards promoting yourself as a high quality coaching service that delivers the goods that your athletes expect.
Coaches: get started with a free trial TrainingPeaks account today!
About the author:
Mike Ricci is a Level III USA Triathlon Certified Coach and has been coaching endurance athletes since 1989. Mike founded D3 in 2000, and has slowly added top-notch, USAT certified coaches each year to handle the demand for high quality triathlon coaching. In the past five years, D3 Coaches have coached hundreds of athletes to their first triathlon and hundreds more to become Ironman Finishers. In 2009, D3 was awarded the job of writing the training programs for the USA World Championship Teams for the seventh consecutive year.
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