Criterium training plan, from 8 weeks

The shortest plan we build, and that is the point

The minimum length above is the shortest guided plan Nymiva will build for any event in any sport. That is not a discount, it is a statement about the race. A criterium is short, repetitive and decided inside a narrow band of abilities, and no honest reading of it needs half a year of preparation. What it needs is repeatability above threshold, cornering that does not cost you speed, and enough aerobic work underneath both that the repeating keeps working late.

The fifth surge decides it, not the first

Nobody gets dropped on the first acceleration out of a corner. People get dropped when the accelerations keep arriving and the gap between them stops being long enough to clear what the last one cost.

Your power curve describes what you can produce fresh, for any duration you have ridden hard. It says almost nothing about how fast that output decays when efforts arrive in a bunch with incomplete recovery, and that decay is the race. So repeatability is scored as its own question rather than inferred from a peak number.

In the demand vocabulary that lands on high-intensity capacity and anaerobic capacity, sitting on aerobic endurance underneath. The aerobic part is not filler. What restores you between surges is aerobic, which is why a crit plan that becomes nothing but intervals gets slower at exactly the point that matters.

Cornering is free speed

A corner you exit carrying speed is a surge you never have to make. That is the cheapest improvement available to most amateur crit riders, and the one a training document cannot sell you.

It is treated as a real demand rather than a footnote. When you upload the circuit, corner and hairpin geometry is read from the GPS line, and a tight technical loop scores higher on technical skill than a wide one with a few sweeping bends. That score changes what the season protects, because a rider losing metres at every apex is spending matches on a problem that is not fitness. Positioning is the same saving from the other side. Sitting near the back means matching every acceleration the front makes, amplified by the accordion behind it.

What a fixed crit plan cannot know

It cannot know the shape of your power curve, so it cannot tell whether your gap is peak output or decay across repeats. Those lead to different blocks, and a downloaded plan hands you the same one either way. It cannot know your circuit. And it cannot know that you race most Wednesday evenings from spring onwards, which changes how the whole week is built, because those races are the hardest sessions you will do all summer.

How your plan is built

Your riding goes in as supply, measured from efforts you actually made rather than a number typed once. The race goes in as demand, the days you can train go in as a constraint, and the season comes out laid backwards from race day through Prep, Foundation, Event shaping and Peak. Foundation is what other plans call base, Event shaping is what they call build. On a horizon this short, Foundation is brief and event-specific work arrives early.

Every session states the ability it trains, the dose approved for it and the rule deciding whether it worked, because completing a session and achieving its stimulus are different outcomes. Structures come from a vetted set rather than being improvised, covered in what the workout library holds. The bike-specific machinery underneath is in how guided bike plans are built.

What changes when your goal changes

The wizard asks what outcome you want, not only which race you entered. There are five levels, from finishing in the bunch to an excellent result, and every minimum scales with the answer. Chasing the top of that range rather than a finish means roughly twice the weekly training time and two more sessions a week, over a longer minimum length. Same race, same rider, genuinely different plan.

The minimums are destinations rather than week one. Nobody starts at the weekly hours shown above, and how fast you grow into them is bounded by your own recent training.

What a week actually looks like

At the session floor above, a crit week usually resolves to one repeatability session of short hard efforts with controlled recovery, one aerobic ride, and one easy ride that stays easy rather than drifting into a third hard day. The long session figure above is modest by cycling standards, deliberately. A crit does not reward hours, it rewards what you have left between efforts. Add sessions and the extra slots go to aerobic volume before more intensity. In race season a criterium replaces a key session instead of being stacked on top of one.

When life interferes

Missed sessions are forgiven and never redistributed, so nothing is piled onto next week to make totals balance. Illness suspends the plan and rebuilds toward the level you had actually reached. Small adjustments apply themselves, while changing your primary focus or restarting after an interruption comes to you first with what changed and why. Anything resembling pain or injury is escalated to you rather than diagnosed, because this is training guidance and not medical care.

Questions people ask

Is the minimum length really enough for a crit?

For a finishing goal, yes, and it comes from published criterium preparation rather than being invented. Higher goal tiers extend it. The horizon is short because the event is narrow, not because the plan is thin.

I also ride road races. Which plan do I want?

A road race is a longer and differently shaped demand, which the road race plan reflects. If both are on your calendar they belong in one season with priorities set, not two plans stacked on each other.

Do I need a power meter?

No. Planning works from heart rate and rated effort, and rated effort is a first-class signal here. Without power the diagnosis is less precise, and anything that genuinely needs watts is shown as unavailable rather than approximated.