- Morning, trainiacs.
If you've been putting together
a triathlon training plan and you're not exactly sure
how to lay out a spreadsheet or a plan in general,
today that's exactly what we're going to go through.
I'm going to tell you how to put out
a triathlon training spreadsheet,
and you know what, I might even give you said spreadsheet.
Woo, it's good stuff.
Let's go on in to the Pan Cavern.
(upbeat instrumental music)
So if you've started laying out a triathlon training plan
or you've downloaded one online,
odds are really good that it looks like this.
That's the most common format to do it with,
your days of the week going across the top
and just going week by week, one row at a time down.
That's how we laid out our beginner
triathlon training program because it's
the most simple way to do it,
but if you want to get the most out of a training plan,
there's a big aspect in that that is being overlooked.
So what I'm going to show you is how my coach,
Coach Pat, used to use spreadsheets
before he switched over to Training Peaks
to lay out a training plan that incorporates
a lot of data that that traditional training setup
is missing out on.
So what we've got here is actually my training plan
from 2017 that you can see up top left,
and a couple of the key features to this
are that over on the right there are four columns
that are a big indication of how well
you're doing in the training program,
and it's your motivation levels,
your recovery level, your sleep levels,
and your workouts, how they went
on a scale of one to 10.
And what you do is every single day,
you fill out exactly how you're feeling
with regards to all of those four key metrics,
and what that does is it tells your coach or tells you
how ready you are to keep going.
Now sure, you can lay out a coaching plan
with here's what you do every single day,
but when you're missing out on that portion
of the what your body is telling you
and being able to adjust your training day to day
based off of that, you're missing out
on a little bit of like your body response
and kind of the art of coaching.
We left this out of our training plans
because it's just that one step beyond
what just getting started involves,
and the next thing is that this also shows
the cycle of the week, so we have cycle week one,
cycle week two, cycle week three,
cycle week one, cycle week two, cycle week three,
and that allows you to remind yourself hey,
in week one I'm going to push myself,
in week two I'm going to push myself,
in week three I'm going to back off
and give my body a rest.
So I'm going to show you how to lay this out.
Start by opening up a new spreadsheet.
You can do this in Google Sheets or Excel.
Title it, I'll go triathlon training template.
In the first column, I'm going to put day of the week.
In the next column, I'm going to go training cycle week,
then I'm going to go workout one,
workout two, workout three,
and that's not to say that you need to be doing
three workouts a day, I just want to leave room
for if you choose to do three workouts a day.
Now here's where it gets really critical.
We use motivation, on a scale of one to 10.
We use recovery, on a scale of one to 10,
how good your sleep was, on a scale of one to 10,
and how good your workouts were that day,
on a scale of one to 10.
And we'll add some quick formatting here
to make it look very snazzy.
Then what I'm going to do in the first column here
is we're going to put the days of the week,
starting on a Monday.
Training cycle weeks typically start on Monday
through Sunday, add some more fancy formatting,
and I'm going to copy and paste that three times
to get three weeks worth of training,
and then here's what I'm going to do
in the training cycle week.
For the first week, I'm going to indicate
all of those days as number one
because that's the first week
of the three weeks of training.
The second week, I'm going to indicate that all as a two,
and then the third week, I'm going to indicate that
all as a three, do my fancy formatting,
and then I'm going to copy and paste this
multiple, multiple, multiple times all the way down
for the rest of the year.
Okay, now here's where we're going to get
a little bit sophisticated.
What I want to do with those last four columns
is I want to give myself a visual cue
that shows the trend of how I'm doing
with my motivation, my sleep, my recovery, and my workouts.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click bottom left
and I'm going to open up another sheet
and I'm going to insert a line chart
that is going to track how those metrics are trending,
and I'm going to do this with three day rolling averages
because you might have one bad day,
you might have two bad days in a row
if you just have back to back bad sleeps,
but if you have three bad days in a row
and you can see that your motivation is dipping
for three days in a row, that your sleep has dipped
for three days in a row,
all of the sudden it's like you know what,
you should probably start backing off.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a cell
down here at the bottom that relates back
to a three day average of the motivation,
of the recovery, of the sleep, and then of the workout.
And again, don't worry exactly about how to do this
because you can download this template
from a link that I'm going to give you
at the end of the video.
By creating that one formula,
I've created the average of the first three days
of motivation.
By dragging it across four times,
that's going to get me my motivation, my recovery,
my sleep, and my workout, and then by dragging it down
a whole bunch of times, it's going to translate
into a nice little chart as you start filling it out.
And it's showing up as an error right now
because we don't have any data in there,
so let's say that we fill that out
and we're like six and eight, and four.
(mumbling)
Then we go back,
and all of the sudden, we've got averages there,
and what we want to do is create a visual cue
with a chart here that you can go to
and see exactly how you're doing,
so we are going to insert a chart
based off of all that data.
And you can see now that it instantly created a chart
that as we start completing workouts here
and every single day we're indicating
what our motivation level is, what our recovery level is,
what our sleep level is, what our work level is,
if we have a moment like here where we dip down
in any one of those, we can go back
to either our coach or to ourself and say,
you know what, maybe for the next day,
we should back off, and there's no real rule of thumb
for when you dip under a six,
and all of the sudden you should back it off,
but if you just see a consistent downward trend
over the course of a few days,
that's when it's time to back off.
So just start filling in your workouts here
and as you start filling them in,
you can create a nice little legend for yourself that
green means you completed the workout,
red means you
missed or cut out the workout,
yellow means you had to alter the workout.
So maybe you didn't complete a certain number of intervals
or maybe you couldn't hit a certain power number.
It's basically just a warning sign that you tried it,
but you weren't quite there.
So there you go.
You can actually go and download an Excel version
of that template with that chart
and with all of the formulas already put into it
at triathlontaren.com/plantemplate,
and then you start filling out your workouts.
That's not to say that other training plans
are designed improperly.
We designed one that was much more simple.
It's just that this is another step
in training plan design.
So I hope this helps.
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