It depends.

When I was your age, I was able to swim 20K yards, bike 350 to 400 miles, and run 50 miles every week for years and I only was injured once.

As I recall, I had been riding around 150 miles per week and jumped rather quickly to 300 plus.

That's what I was thinking as well. It is going to depend from person to person. With little to no endurance background I may just have to take it slower and add volume in smaller increments so my body has time to adjust.

The run 10% thing is over-rated.

It may be a good idea for a new runner but once you have a few years of experience you know what you can handle.

If someone runs 10 miles a week , adding 1 mile a week is ridiculous
If someone runs 50 miles, adding 5 miles may be more in line with the 10% rule as that's likely 35 to 40 minutes.

Same thing with the bike. Add a 30-60 min easy ride and see how you feel.

For cycling I would not fixate on the volume so much in terms of increase week-over-week. Running is a different issue. In your particular case I have to wonder what is going on to cause you to become so injured. Two things that I would be curious about our the way your bike is set up and your pedaling technique. Maybe you could find someone who can take a look at how you are paddling and your overall setup.

I will say that by following the TR plan, this was the first time I ever did pedaling drills baked into my riding. Learned a lot about pedaling form during those rides. Having someone take a look at my pedaling definitely sounds beneficial as I am still very new to proper pedaling form.

First thing that comes to mind about my set up is that the floor is carpeted. I have a large piece of particle board in between the bike/trainer and the carpet. May be possible that the trainer isn't level due to the carpet and there are some compensations I am making by not being level. I'll have to check that out

With your achilles tendonitis, you're going to have to back off considerably and likely resort to a lot of swimming right now and some core work as well as just trying to get as lean as you can for the moment.

I have torn both of my achilles and it sucks - you just have to promote the healing process and be patient.

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I definitely plan on scaling it way back, being patient with this, and letting everything heal properly. I have been focusing a lot more on my core/yoga recently as a result. There are also more swimming opportunities now that the local covid restrictions are being loosened.

The TR plans tend to be optimistic about load progression. Their new plan builder looks to be a lot better from what I've seen.
From the sound of your injuries there is something horribly wrong with your bike setup. I'd address that as part of your rehab process.
Your load progression will need to be particularly slow when coming back from injury, otherwise you'll get into a cycle where this drags out for years.

I do all of my planning for athletes based on ramp rates for TSS, not hours. It's a much more useful way to model load.
You would likely be better to use a plan from the trainingpeaks library when you get going again - that way the load across disciplines can be tracked better.

Physical therapy is just as important as the training. Youre muscles may feel fine but theres lots of other tissue that needs to heal before you can use the muscle again. All of these issues are healed with consistent physical therapy and of course always focusing on proper form, especially for running

Increasing training volume by 10% each week is pretty unreasonable, more like 3-5% maybe. Quality of training, not length or volume, is much more important. Focus on form all the time, we are training not just running. Stimulate don't annihilate... You took yourself out of training for a good while by overreaching, be reasonable and take care of yourself

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Strava

What is pedaling form?

I think what this is really trying to say is that: There's actually no evidence that the mystic silky smooth circular pedaling "form" matters at all. Unless you have bike fit issues (e.g. seat too high / low, causing ankles / to stretch, hips to shift, knees to bowl out).

In short, if you are comfortable on your bike, just train and don't worry about it. There's really not all that much to learn about pedaling.

It's something that makes a difference in Track Cycling but not really anywhere else

No no no...you got it all wrong. The entire point of being a triathlete is to do 20 hrs per week when injured....you just rotate between sports when you have broken body parts in the others (OK Pink optional...,kind of kidding but half serious.

The jaretj's point, once we are pretty experienced, its pretty easy to double cycling or swimming volume quickly when coming off down periods. Running is a different story. On ultra low run volume a progression like 10, 20, 30 km over three weeks may be reasonable, but you would not go from 80km to 160km to 240 km in three weeks...you may be pushing it going from 80 to 90 to 100. As an example, I did a run block for 12 weeks and my min week was 75km and max was 88km. I did not feel comfortable of "breaking a good thing" and going up to 100km. It ended up being a smart thing.

Cycling, pretty easy going from 100km in a week to 200km to 300km to 400km to 500km and not ever running the risk of injury. Same thing with swimming (up to a point)...you can go from 2km, to 4Km to 6km to 8 km pretty easily. But going from 10km to 20km to 30km to 40km would probably be a stretch for most.

I just came off 12 weeks with zero swimming (that was the Covid19 run block). I am on my first week back in the water and may hit 20km, but I have done a lot of upper body work on the rowing machine and weights and was doing 20-30km per week before. I'll probalby back it off next week and then hover between 15-20km per week for the next while before I launch into any larger weeks.

Basically my running + swim hours per week is roughly a constant. If I swim more, I run less, if I run more, I swim less (between only so many hours per week and so much energy, I tend to have an upper limit of 12 hrs max of those two sports).

Generally, what i am finding is if I have water access I just run less, because running is just higher risk and generally the cardio intensity is super low (on average) relative to swimming. Swimming, I get way more cardio fitness. Biking, if its nice and I have time, I bike a lot. If the weather sucks or I am time limited, I just hit the trainer and do intervals or do high intensity on bike commutes. Between the intensity trainer and commutes, it seems to work well to literally go to 5x the volume (going from 100km per week of mainly intensity to 500km during a training camp in a nice place)

It is the style/method you use to rotate the crank, and it is not just for track cycling as noted below.

Most people mash the pedals down only and never pull up or do the "foot scrape," and there is some data that suggest for steady state low to moderate power output mashing is just as efficient as a smooth rotation with even power application, so many triathletes scoff at people that grew up racing and think perfect circles are the only way to go.

If you road race or group ride a lot you will find that there are many times when shifting does not make sense but you need to slow down or speed up a lot quickly. That is best done by changing your cadence and if you are a masher you will become very "jerky" and inefficient when you try to suddenly jump to a high cadence.

I'm showing my age, but when I stated out a bike with 10 or 12 total gears was the norm and the shifters were on the down tube. Back then we used to run around for hours in the smallest gear we had spinning as fast as we could (no cadence meters back then) to create muscle memory for perfect circles. In today's world of STI and DI I suppose you can get away with shifting often and quickly, but the skill is still useful, especially if you are inches off wheels and have a lot of other things to think about beside finding the correct gear.

I will end with it is probably the one of the last things you should worry about when improving biking skills.

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"...the street finds its own uses for things"

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

One thing about indoor cycling is that you are pretty much fixed in the same spot. None of the little movements from side-to-side, micro-coasts, etc that you get in riding outdoors that just relieve the tension in any one muscle/tendon. 2.5 hours on the trainer can be a miserable experience.

TR is awesome for the intense work, but for the longer Z2 rides, I'd suggest switching those to outdoor rides (you can use the TR Outdoor ride export feature, or just go ride it anyway).

Given it seems to have given you issues all the way up the muscle chain, it may also be worth investing in a proper bike fit (local COVID restrictions permitting).

You rode 18k+ miles and ran 2500+ miles for years and didn't get hurt?

If we give you a generous average of 20mph riding, sub 8min mile runs, and 4k/hr swim....that's an average of 30 hours a week. For years.

Yeah, I was going to note this... Going from mostly outdoor to all trainer could be your issue more so than building volume too fast. Indoor riding is no-impact but about as repetitive motion as you can get.

I didn't read that he did all of that in a week every week. I read that he was doing that type of volume in any given sport at any given time. Personally I can swim 20km and run 80km in a week with really low biking or bike 500km-600km with almost no swim and run.

I find a really nice formula is 6 hrs swim, 6 hrs run, 1-3 hrs bike on one week and 2 hrs swim, 2 hrs run, and 11-15 hrs biking on the other week. At the end of the day energy is finite. Trying to do high volume swim or run when also biking high volume kind of sucks because you end up doing those two technical sports carrying all this fatigue and they are both just less enjoyable doing fatigued. Bike we can do fatigued as it does not change form.

My average pace on the bike was around 23 to 25 mph. I was really lucky to be living in San Luis Obispo at the time and I could head north or south on Highway 1 and not have to stop at any lights or stop signs for five or six hours. One time, I rode 120 miles down to Santa Barbara and did it in 5 hours flat.

Most of my run training was done at around 7:15 per mile. Speed work would generally be 20 quarter miles coming in at 75 seconds and starting the next one 15 seconds later.

I'll be honest, I don't really know what pedaling form is. Before TR I would just go out, have fun riding my bike, and never thought about if I my pedaling was correct... I just pedaled. TR was the first time pedaling drills were ever brought to my attention while riding and I thought why not I'll do them. The smooth circular pedaling was mentioned a lot in those workouts.

I was most likely overthinking those drills while doing them once they were introduced haha. Thanks for the tips bloody!

This is definitely something that I didn't think about when I switched to indoor riding. I did not account for all of the things that you mentioned above while riding outdoors. Moving forward once I am healthy I think I am going to move my longer Z2 rides back outside. Listening to 40+ spotify songs while looking at my blue bar graph was pretty mind numbing hah.

Thanks for the insight!

If you are currently riding eighty miles per week and increase by 10% per week, in a year you'll be riding over ten thousand miles per week.

10K miles in a week riding is pretty impressive though - I think he should go for it.

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https://www.strava.com/...tes/zachary_mckinney