I’ve now been using Athletica for a few months. While the indications I see on form via intervals.icu are nothing but positive, I reckon the proof will be in performance on the ground in the New Year’s Day ’10’ - about 6 weeks away. Here's a banner from Athletica, proclaiming "Train Smarter, not Harder". Does the app live up to that billing? Read on...

The whole training plan seems rooted in science - every so often I see a link to a publication or at the least an athletica blog article. This makes the app seem much less of a black box than, for example, TrainerRoad. There is a regularity about the training plan: each week has a recovery session; a 30:30 short HIIT session; a Threshold session of 4m intervals set at several watts above threshold; two tempo/sweetspot sessions, one of which is at higher gear/lower cadence as a strength training session. Interspersed are endurance sessions, often long enough that I’d prefer to do them outdoors. I’ve also noted that while I sometimes struggle to complete sessions (particularly the Threshold sessions), I am more able to do so than I was with TrainerRoad. Every few weeks, there are threshold and power profile tests scheduled. I’m unsure how these play out in terms of fine-tuning the various parameters, but as far as I understand it, the system looks at the power profile graph as a whole (or maybe specific points along the chart).

Well, I’m about 6 weeks in to my Athletica.ai subscription. So far it’s been pretty impressive, and here are some observations.

I’m seeing a kind of regularity between each week’s workouts. Generally speaking, there’s a sweetspot workout, a strength/endurance trainer workout, a short interval HIIT workout and a threshold workout. These are supplemented by one or two longer endurance workouts, which I generally try to do outdoors.

Since the beginning of 2024 I've been increasingly using the Rouvy app in my indoor bike training (see Indoor Training - Part 3 Rouvy vs Zwift and Fulgaz). Until the other day I'd only been using this to enliven my indoor cycling on otherwise very dull interval sessions, but I thought I ought to give Rouvy's workouts a bit of a try. And I'm rather impressed.

The Rouvy website has a very clear description of how this all works. So I needn't offer more than a few comments, based largely on using Rouvy on the AppleTV.

Recently I'd become interested to see how the power reported by my ageing Tacx Neo smart trainer (first generation) compares with my Assioma pedals (i have the dual set). My initial investigations involved fitting the Assiomas to the bike mounted on the turbo and comparing the reported power by eye. This seemed to have a significant different at least at some power levers, so I felt some further investigations were merited.

I came across intervals.icu a couple of years ago, via an article written about 2021 Olympic road race winner Anna Keisenhofer. In the article she noted the complex and adaptable graphics that intervals.icu delivers, based on data drawn in from a number of sources.

Part 3 of this series is somewhat delayed by Christmas and associated shenanigans such as the traditional Christmas Cold, which really flattened me for a couple of weeks.

In Part 1 I described the hardware I use for cycle training indoors. In Part 2 I’ll describe the principal software package I use for indoor training, TrainerRoad. Part 3 will cover the other software I use, and Part4 the software I use for monitoring my progress (with some hardware comments).

There's a wide variety of apps out there for use with smart trainers. For some of these I'll only give a brief description in Part 3, while others I'll keep my comments very brief as I haven't used them extensively enough to form a valuable opinion.

This is the first in a short series of posts in which I discuss my approach to training for cycle time trials. I find road cycling to be unsuitable for structured training sessions other than extended endurance sessions, due to a combination of climbs and descents (albeit pretty small around here), junctions, traffic lights and of course motor traffic. The exception to that would be the evening 10 mile time trials the club offers through the season, which provided an opportunity for riding at a high sustained pace for 20+ minutes.

In part 1, I’ll give a bit of background to the kit I use.