Time to set your Off-Season Goals

For some of us, moving directly from completing an “A” goal one year, into planning for the next a year later, is a strong motivator. For others, the thought of getting started training for an event some 9-12 months out is nothing more than stressful and overwhelming. But utilising off-season to improve in a specific area of your sport(s) can be a welcome change and strike an important balance between seeing improvements and being inflexible with training.

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Strengthening weaknesses

Typically, depending on you as an athlete and your goals, you would be looking to strengthen your strengths as you approach your “A” event. We would do this because it requires less time commitment to see improvements and, as you are already strong in this component of fitness, you wouldn’t necessarily need to see or expect to see great improvements here.

The most valuable use of your time - when considering the long period between one season and the next - is strengthening your weaknesses. Of course, there are exceptions to this where you might not need to strengthen at all; for those who just want to finish a Gran Fondo, sprint power training is a good example.

But taking our Gran Fondo example, what if you really struggle to ride in a group and draft others? An incredibly valuable spend of your training time would be developing your group riding skills to be both as aerodynamically efficient as possible, while also comfortable and safe. The same might go for developing your nutritional strategy or mental strength.

Identifying weaknesses

The easiest way of doing this is to review your previous race or event experience. For those lacking similar experience, simulating the event can provide valuable insight. You will very quickly identify areas where you struggle; either against your competition or in general. A classic example is descending skill. Becoming a more accomplished descender can reap huge rewards at next year's chosen Gran Fondo - obviously, weather permitting during the off-season!

Building a weakness specific training plan

The three main components to building your weakness specific training plan will be baselining the weakness, setting a target improvement, and the timeframe you have before you need to move onto other types of training.

Baselining the weakness

This may have already been identified during the ‘identification’ phase of this exercise, but, if not, it will be important to understand your current ability or capability. To do this, conduct a test that is relevant to your weakness. This could be a timed descent of a hill, counting how many times you break the aero position during an hour workout, power at intensity (for example your threshold), or how close you can comfortably draft in a group.

Setting a target

With your baseline established, you can now identify a realistic target. This needs to be challenging enough to motivate you, but not so challenging that it is unattainable. Comparable data from similar athletes can help with this. For example, what other people can descend the hill in, how competent others are in a group, or the amount of times your competitor breaks aero position during a ride or race.

Timeframe

The timeframe you will allow yourself to develop this weakness will tie into how big your improvement needs to be and how much time you have before you have to move to a different type of training. For example, it is worthless spending all your time developing your position if you don’t end up doing the actual training to help you be competitive.

How can Humango help?

Whether you are looking to see big improvements in a specific performance or skill area, want to maintain while you have fun, or just want to get started training for next year's Gran Fondo, Humango can provide you with a personalised training experience that adapts around your life, your responsiveness to training, and everything else that life will throw at you.

Maintain fitness

For a non-performance related goal, such as descending or developing group riding skills, you can already select the ‘Maintain fitness’ goal in the Humango app and ensure you get a plan that balances your performance needs with your technical needs. This will help you ensure you can focus the most amount of your training time on the most valuable gain.

Performance

Coming in October, Humango’s new performance goal setting feature can help you identify specific areas for improvement. You can also select a specific component of your fitness - such as VO2Max or Threshold - and have a hyper personalised AI driven training experience aimed at improving specific phenotypes.

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