Back to Blog
Training

Why You Should Care About Dynamic Training

By Dan Wakerley 2022-08-30
Why You Should Care About Dynamic Training

Why should you should care about 'dynamic training'?

  • We mentioned here

  • Your body should be “on the move” as a result of your training. For example:(i) It should be adapting every week, with meaningful increases in your performance every 6 weeks(ii) Your body will be getting fatigued as a result of the training you’re doing. Fatigue is part of the process - you have to stress your body to drive “adaptation” or progress in your fitness. This fatigues the body. You’ll probably have different levels (and possibly different types) of fatigue each day - depending on your training

  • Your life will likely also be on the move - changing work, family and other personal commitments, a social ride that you get out for, etc. This also impacts your body’s capacity to train.

  • You might just want to get out and ride how you feel like - regardless of what is planned. This is normal, and great - most of us aren’t pro athletes and will do this to greater or lesser extents.

  • To ensure the training you do fits these needs like a glove, it needs to adapt with the above factors

  • This might seem trivial, but if you’ve ever wondered why you or others around you stagnate as opposed to improve, or get ill/ injured, then a lack of attention to these changing factors is probably why.

We've built 3 new capabilities for Pillar:

1. Anchor sessions

2. Weekly update of your plan

3. Continuous update of the difficulty of sessions Pilar sets

1. Anchor sessions

You can add social or other personal rides into your week, and Pillar will instantly

  • You can add recurring sessions or add them ad hoc

  • We call these “anchor” as they become the immovable object that week, around which your training is structured or anchored (because most of us are looking to have fun as well as improve our fitness)

  • Putting these social rides in your calendar isn’t universally “bad”. It’s important to consider “why” we ride, and make sure we reflect that in our activity. For most of us amateurs - fun and social are somewhere in that mix!

2. Weekly Evaluation + 'update' of your training for the week to come

On Sunday evening, we’ll have a look at your ride data for the week, and see how you did

  • We’ll tell you how we think you did and ask for your feedback on the week

  • We’ll combine all of this into an updated

  • This will make sure you progress by the right amount each week. You get fitter primarily progressively stimulating your body more and more over time. So most weeks you should expect an uplift in what Pillar asks you to do. But it needs to know where you are today to do that - and that’s what tends to change with most of us. How much we have been able to do that week, is important.

3. Difficulty Levels

In the Evaluation section of Pillar you’ll see that you have difficulty levels for each energy zone that you train through Pillar.

  • These indicate the level of difficulty of the sessions you are doing that we give you to stimulate that “system” in your body (more on this here

  • We also do this where you use heart rate as an indicator of intensity for your rides.

  • The difficulty levels will progress as fast as you do to keep you challenged

Do get in touch if you’re interested in being part of what we are building, or with feedback on Pillar (dan@pillar-app.com)

Dan Wakerley

Dan Wakerley

Pillar Team

How to use Pillar

Cycling training plans: Why they’re important to understand for endurance cyclists

Want to train with the best?

Download Pillar and experience cycling training plans built on pro coach science.

App Store Google Play

Related Articles

VDB Cycling
Training

VDB Cycling

By Imogen Wakerley 2024-04-08
Simon Jones: My Best Season
Training

Simon Jones: My Best Season

By Imogen Wakerley 2024-04-08
Absolute Motion
Training

Absolute Motion

By Imogen Wakerley 2024-04-08