Morris Principles

Here are some notes drawn from the MTBR posts of a guy who goes by MTBDOC. I don't know who he is, but he apparently espouses a lot of the Dave Morris principles and has used him as a coach. The full version of his posts can be found here.

The Morris book can be found here.

My aim here is to put this in some kind of order as it pertains to a season plan. Any rough outline would be offseason, base, and season. This is very rough, but it gives you something all plans structure by. A lot of the thoughts presented in the raw link above are forum replies. So you don't get complete feel for the post he was replying to. In the end, this is one guy's perspective of a training philosophy. I think it's a good approach, since Morris essentially advocates reverse periodization as well as intervals year round, which fits in with my personal philosophy given time constraints and winter weather.

Weight Training
The details of weight training are left to the link above. I'm currently not a big believer in a rigorous weight routine at this stage. I believe my efforts are better directed at weight loss and riding through the winter right now. I do not plan to devote much time to resistance training this winter. I may do some work to help maintain weight and to switch things up. But it will not be the basis of my offseason biking plan.

An extensive description of the Morris offseason plan can be found here.

Base Training
Many of the base training concepts are old school. LSD rides are far from efficient in terms of getting the most out of your training time. Look for your base miles to be more race simulation, or at least race distance plus hard efforts. From where I'm sitting, my race distances are 24 hours. So this clearly doesn't apply. As much as I'd love to give a 24 hour winter event a shot, no such animal exists...thankfully. Having high intensity during high volume is ok as long as you can hit the duration targets. In fact, many riders compromise fitness gains by not having some intensity. Interval work is beneficial year round, short and long sessions.

In going forward with this, many of the workouts are going to be intervals. Morris preaches block training, and pure block training some of the time, specifically as his program moves from weights to the bike. The goal is to maintain your speed/effort/power throughout the interval. It will often feel easy (relative) at the start, then deadly at the end. You get the most effect this way. Your rest is easy, make that EASY. It's all about recovery. This goes for between intervals, between sets, and on your rest days. When called for, you need proper rest to make solid gains. Morris is all about hard work combined with hard rest.

The structure of your intervals is a personal thing, like the number of reps and sets, as well as the duration of the second/third day of a block. This will take some time to work out through trial and error. Truly structured intervals should probably be done on a trainer. There are so many outside variables that maintaining your environment is difficult if not impossible. Plus, on a trainer you get the most benefit in the least amount of time. Having said that, you don't want to make it harder than it needs to be. I personally find intervals much easier on the flat roads.

So the general plan is such:

• Weight/resistance training
• High power, short range intervals
• Aerobic endurance base (volume) with periodic high sustainable power for 4 weeks
• Moderate duration intervals, VO2max, 2-6min range, 20-40m of work per session, 4 weeks (early March)
• LT intervals, 8-15m range, work:rest=2:1

At a higher level, you want to do high intensity, then power, then endurance.

I doubt I will ever follow this plan. It still suffers from the problem that your aerobic endurance base will be in February. I'm not doing 3 hour rides routinely in February, neither indoors nor outdoors. Maybe I occasionally catch a break and get out on an epic ride when the weather is a balmy 40 degrees. But I'm not packing in 3+ hours when it's 8 degrees out. It should also be noted again that this is just one guy's version of how to use these methods. The following will be presented from short duration to longer duration.

Interval Notes

• Shorter intervals build VO2max power.
• For LT intervals, you don't need as much rest, maybe 2:1 work:recovery, up to 5-7 min.
• To develop the ability to make & sustain power above LT, it requires a fair amount of volume at that intensity.
• High power (anaerobic) intervals are done to develop power.
• After the high power phase, you want to sustain it for large periods (first make, then maintain).
• You can add sprints to the beginning of a workout, ME/LT to the end.

Short duration stuff.
Maximum force generation needs a lot of short efforts, on the order of 10-20 seconds. Your rest between efforts can vary between 20 and 60 seconds. Try something like this:

• 10 secs seated, as hard as possible, 60 sec rest
• Do 4 reps, with an easy 5 min between sets
• Do 3-5 sets
• Another day do 20 secs on, 20 secs rest
• This can be done along with high volume training (ie, this does not necessarily need to be done in a block)
  

Anaerobic capacity/tolerance
Anaerobic capacity/tolerance is trained by doing hard efforts with insufficient recovery to "restock" energy substrates (ATP, creatine phosphate, lactic acid). These are hard efforts at greater than 120% of LT power.

• Shoot for a pace that gets hard in 1 minute
• Recover 1 minute
• Do 6 reps
• For the next set try 30 secs of rest

Moderate Length Intervals, VO2max
The best way to build power output is to focus on moderate length intervals in the 2-6 minute range with a 1:1 work:rest ratio, say 6x4:4. These are most beneficial in 2 day blocks, with the second day often being a lower duration that the first day, say 6x3:3 or 8x2:2. This is essentially the first step "in season" for the typical Morris Plan user and is what I plan on starting with in January 2007. The overall structure (macrocycle) is going to be something like this:

• week1: 2on, 2off, 2on, 1off
• week2: 2on, 2off, 1on, 2off
• week3: repeat week1
• week4: 2off, spin, 5x1:2, 3off

You'll note here that this is pure block training, and that there are no weekend rides in this mix. This is going to be in the January time frame, when temperature is often measured in the single digits. At the end of this pure block, you will (theoretically) see huge power gains. After this Morris suggests another pure block of LT intervals in the 8-12 minute range.

Moderate Length, VO2max, in season
The above is a pure block which is how the Morris Plan season starts. When in season - usually March or later - you're not going to forsake all other training for a single energy system. So you need to work in race simulation rides or endurance rides on the weekend. Here is a sample guide for how to work that into a mixed schedule.

• Mon: 5x3:3
• Tue: rest
• Wed: 6x3:3
• Thu: 6x2:2 (slightly faster than 3:3)
• Fri: rest
• Sat: Race simulation/endurance
• Sun: Race simulation/endurance

It's not required to ride on both weekend days, but you should be riding one or the other. Monday will hurt more if you ride on Sunday. Saturday will probably hurt a bit if you pull a race simulation that day. Keep the total workout time under 30 min, and as usual, keep the workout at a speed where you can barely finish the last one. Over time, you can bump these times up to 4-5-6 minutes, though that begs the question about what energy system you're actually working. At times I think a lot of this gets caught up in too much terminology and levels and whatnot, which leads the potential training rider to throw it all out the window and just go ride.

The following 2 weeks, add a rep to each of the interval days, if you can. On the 4th week - or the rest week - do something like this:

• Mon: rest
• Tue: rest
• Wed: 5x1:2
• Thu: rest
• Fri: rest

Then you can pick it up from there. This is one sample recovery week, which I don't specifically use. I would do an easy hour ride on Tuesday and the 5x1:2 ride on Thursday, then on Saturday I would do a 1-2 hour ride with some intensity to get myself ready for a harder ride on Sunday. I would also up the carb intake a little on Saturday to make sure the muscles are ready to go the following day. This overall scheme can be used for any in-season block training.

LT work
For either a pure or in-season block, you can use the guides as outlined above. The duration of these intervals is much higher than the higher power intervals. In the Morris Plan, a pure block of this follows the initial pure block of VO2max work. Then you get into more mixed work in March. These intervals are at a lower power, and they need less recovery. As the season winds on, you'll be doing 20+ minute reps, where a 1:1 work:rest isn't necessary. In general, 5-7 min rest should be sufficient.

To start, shoot for intervals in the 8 minute range, and do 2-3 reps. You probably want to keep the early season stuff around 20-30 min of total work. After that, you can progress to 8-10-12-15-20 min reps. Ultimately you'll be doing 2x20:5 sessions as your LT work later in season.

Conclusion
There is no conclusion, this is just a way to separate the final comments from the last section. These are snippets of the Morris Plan as yanked from some guy's postings on a message board. You may or not may agree with them. They may or may not work for you. You may or may not be better off getting the book from Morris. Mine is on order, so I'll see what I think of all of this after I read it. Essentially, there's a lot of information out there, and this is one of many ways to approach your training. Coggan is another, as is Friel, Burke, and Carmichael. If you put them all in a pot and boil them down, you'll probably have one hell of a confused view of things. I know I do. That's the main reason I've put together these pages at all, so I can make heads or tails of all of this.