Agile Training – You too can do your training with it

Agile training is the training method with which every racing cyclist and every other athlete manages to achieve his or her training workload. Plan your workouts, analyze what you are really doing and find out what you can really do. Optimize each of your training phases and get the maximum out of you!

If you start Google now after reading the article, you will not find any useful results on agile training. To the agile methodology however all the more. Most is the agile method mainly known from software development, scrum and Kanban have now become extremely popular. I don't want to create a big pamphlet about agile processes here, but rather outline the topic roughly and I'm sure that every intelligent person will immediately understand what it's all about. At the same time, I will describe the known methods in a way that is suitable for sports. So you get this description from the inventor himself: I couldn't find anything on the internet about trying to translate these methods to sport. But I bet that the agile training method fits the sport like a glove.

Im agile training the athlete - or his trainer - puts together a series of exercises/training units and saves them in the training pool. The trainee can then decide which length of training phases makes sense for him (1 week, 2 weeks, ...). At the beginning of a training phase, the athlete puts together his training phase, in cycling this could look like this:

Training phases Length: 2 weeks

I now drag these exercises into the Planned column and can then move them into my desired order. As you can see, the workflow is very simple. From now on, I just slide the individual units through the swimlanes. If I do something, I push the unit into I'm doing it and when I'm done into done. After two weeks, when my training cycle is over, I move the units to the archive. I can retrieve the training sessions from the archive at any time training plan move.

The agile training method is like this because it is easy to use. There are many training plans, but they are far too rigid. Last season I tried to train according to a training plan from a racing bike magazine, the big problem was that the training sessions were divided up into the training weeks and even into the individual training days right from the start. Not only did I realize right from the start that the training days and rest days did not fit into my everyday life, these training sessions also did not correspond to my level of performance. I ended up dropping one unit and adding others and just ended up dropping some without replacement. The most powerful tool of the agile training concept is the retrospective!

After you complete your first training cycle, you go into retrospective. In the retrospective you ask yourself the following questions:

The rule of thumb is: If I didn't do all of them in my last training cycle, I'll skip a unit in the next cycle.

Little by little you will notice that you are achieving what you have set out to do more and more often and that you are increasing and achieving more and more - due to the training. You could also work with an intensity point system, but I'm not there yet either.

For this purpose I have built a small piece of software (see pictures), as soon as I consider it mature I am happy about testers. So if you find this method exciting, please let us know! This software is web-based and definitely needs to be expanded. For example, I would like to be able to save my Strava trackings in it in the future and also see a development curve. coming!

Transferring agile project management methods to sport makes perfect sense, for every sport! It will be really exciting when the season is 100% running again. At that moment, my agile training board will help me to keep an eye on everything.