I’m not following any training plans… I do have the British Cycling advanced plan printed out for reference, which I’m loosely using as a guide to measure what kind of efforts I should be doing. However, I note lots and lots of rest.

I mean, to begin with, it’s talking about doing 2 or 3 days a week, with a lot of low intensity stuff. Even further on into the plan, , it’s maybe 3 or 4 days a week with many low t medium intensity sessions. And I understand the need for rest. But really…is that how you achieve the pinnacle of your fitness? I’m not fully convinced.

Now, a couple of things strike a chord with me…

Many of us follow pro cycling, and are familiar with things like big names doing 4 hour sessions on rest days in Grand Tours. In his biography, Chris Froome talks about getting a power meter as a teenager and simply trying to mimic the power effort of pros for several hours at a time – that was his training. And whilst the science has changed a lot, we hear stories of guys like Eddie Mercx doing as much training as possible: six day races in the winter, separate morning and afternoon training sessions before doing the evening prologue in the TdF..!! The other week I was reading in Cycling Weekly about a British time-trialist in days gone by, finding his best form by commuting 80 miles a day.

Of course, there are several things to note here. It’s not 1967 any more. But then again, if rest was so important, why didn’t anyone with less time on their hands come along and smash Mercx and co with their less intensive training regime? Sure, Grand Tour riders are aiming for different goals than your average cyclist, and I guess you need to train for being on your limit day after day… But the time-trialist? Is the need for rest over-stated?

I ask this, because I’m genuinely unsure about how to improve fitness. I know how to get to a good level. A level where I may be above the average weekend warrior, and even mildly competitive (at the lower end of the spectrum). But let’s say I want to actually be competitive. My mind says I need to ride more. I’m conditioned to believe it requires hard work. But I look at the BC training plan and it looks a doddle! That can’t be right? Do people become champions in their field, training 6 or 7 hours a week with 4 or 5 of those hours being low intensity sessions??

Interested in a general discussion on this. About peoples thoughts on the need for rest and the right balance. But I’d also be interested in what kind of training plans people follow. What resources they use, and any great insights into how to squeeze out our true potential.

It’s sort of my standard response on this forum, but really suggest you buy a Joe Friel book and start with that…

@butcher – as above, start with a copy of friels training bible, some of it is a bit old, and he’s in the process of re-writing it, but a great amount of basic training theory in there.

Then you can move onto googling polarised training, which advocates large volumes of low intensity work, and is widely used by pro’s across all endurance sports.

My take on it is that with less than 8hrs a week to train, you can add more intensity, but accept your focus will be on shorter events.
For those with more hours available targetting longer events, then two HARD sessions a week and the rest made up of z1/2 and skills work.

Edit: If you can find a pro to follow on strava that doesn’t strip out their power data it gives an interesting insight. I was following Steven Kruijswijg for a while before he started stripping his data out, and he spent the vast majority of his time rolling round in z1.

you don’t need books to tell you when to rest. If you’re body is sore, tired or you don’t feel to good then have a day off and if you feel good then crack on.

When I was a coached athlete (giggles) training 12-16 hours per week, I asked my coach if it would be beneficial if I found another 4-6 hours per week to train.

He told me all he would have me do is extra recovery work. Longish, easy/steady rides.

Especially with a non weight bearing exercise like cycling, there’s not much need for real rest days, just go for an easy ride. More miles = more fitnes. Pretty much.

Don’t forget Cycling pays the bills for pros. Tyler Hamilton speaks about the pressure it put on his relationship when she wanted to go on scenic hikes and he just wanted / had to to lay on the couch with his feet up.
So your job and lifestyle will also have a bearing on the amount of training you can benefit from.
Training only creates the potential for fitness- it is realised when your body rebuilds itself a little stronger.

Volume and intensity are a fine line to tread but if you look at your week and how much Cycling you can fit in, it’s actually pretty obvious that the harder you train generally, the less energy you’ll have for the hard intervals where the significant gains are made. Hence polarised training theory as Fifeandy mentions.

Cycling is a sport of efficiency. Metering out your maximal efforts when they are going to be most effective.
Starting your training with the ‘what’s the least amount of volume I can do to get the adaptation I desire’ ethos probably helps with that mindset.

So yeah- buy Friel’s book 🙂

Edit- more volume equals more chance of injury and illness too- another reason why ‘just enough’ is often better.

Overload and adaptation are the principles for “training” too much overload and not enough adaptation means you just get tired.

Read Faster by Michael Hutchinson.

Read Faster by Michael Hutchinson.

Have read both of his books. Quite enjoyed them, and they give a good insight, but I don’t remember anything that really gives a thorough insight on training regimes (my memory is not a trustworthy source though).

Read a little on polarised training today, and it all makes complete sense. A little reluctant to follow such plans… I once did a winter of LSD training and didn’t feel any benefit from it whatsoever. In fact I think my fitness was pretty poor by the end!

thecaptain – Member
More miles = more fitnes. Pretty much.

I think this is a slightly old fashioned train of thought.

Quality over quantity (and appropriate to your goals) is where it is at (along with sufficient rest/recovery).

butcher – Member
I once did a winter of LSD training

😯

Read a little on polarised training today, and it all makes complete sense. A little reluctant to follow such plans… I once did a winter of LSD training and didn’t feel any benefit from it whatsoever. In fact I think my fitness was pretty poor by the end!

The thing with polarised is the easy has to be really easy because the hard is supposed to be brutally hard

What @greentricky said. If you’ve gone properly hard you wont be able to do anything but easy for a few days anyway.

@eskay, it may be old fashioned, but only slightly outdated, and it still forms the bulk of what pro cyclists, runners and rowers do. There was an interview with one of the GB womens rowing crews at the last Olympics, and they basically said they knew exactly what the coach was going to prescribe every morning – long easy row. And thats targetting an event that lasts less than 10mins.

@OP, if you are dead set against that type of training you could check out ‘The time crunched cyclist’. It’s worked well for many cyclists, and is largely responsible for the ‘sweetspot’ craze, but doesn’t scale well to those with a higher training volume, and there’s a few horror stories floating round the web of people burning out after trying to scale it up.

as everyone said above plus just need to look for signs of over training – not something I understood when younger and wish i had – one way to check on recovery is to use waking heart rate – I’m not disciplined enough to do it unless been unwell but some people swear by it

[random article]https://runnersconnect.net/coach-corner/using-heart-rate-to-measure-fatigue-monitor-recovery-and-to-know-when-to-train-hard-again/[butok]

The slow stuff is for building mitochondrial density in your working muscles. Takes hours and hours of repetition to grow the numbers but your muscles become better adapted to be efficient so you can go further and harder in lower heart rates.

You can build a decent aerobic system that’s good for shorter rides doing time crunched stuff where the majority of your work is intense but without the low and slow base work you are a very carb dependent athlete and that WILL catch you out on 4hr+ rides.

The other thing to consider is that if you are training hard you can’t maintain your peak fitness all year round. You get fatigued and you start to go backwards after about 20 weeks of training really hard. This is why a lot of riders do a base phase through the winter, it gets the body prepped and primed with a great level of mitochondrial density ready for the training onslaught the spring brings and the race season has on the body. These athletes then come out of the end of race season totally mashed and ready for a break before starting another base phase.

You want any tips on resting, I’m your man.

Training – not so much….

Look at the TDF, media saying Quintana is weak as he did the Giro but other riders high up on GC did do the Giro. Domestiques that do all grand tours. So not as easy at it sounds.

Nutrition and ‘feel’.

I quite like the 80:20 rule, where on average you spend 80% of you time/training doing low intensity, and 20% high. I think it needs a couple caveats:
– that you need to be doing more than 6-8 hours a week,
– a proper plan is more nuanced and will shift emphasis depending on objectives,

but as a broad starting point that’s what I keep in mind.

@ butcher

When you did your winter of long stead distance, were you disciplined in staying in your Z2, and did you do intensity work in conjunction with it? I’ve found I can’t ride in a group if doing Z2 work as my pace varies too much compared to everyone else to keep it cohesive…

I’ve had a successful year using Z2 training, and put some thoughts into a post here:
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/heart-rate-question-2

What Fifeandy says.

I mean, to begin with, it’s talking about doing 2 or 3 days a week, with a lot of low intensity stuff. Even further on into the plan, , it’s maybe 3 or 4 days a week with many low t medium intensity sessions. And I understand the need for rest. But really…is that how you achieve the pinnacle of your fitness? I’m not fully convinced.

It really depends on where you are currently. If you try to increase your volume and intensity too fast, then your body may struggle to adapt and you’ll start to get niggling injuries. Pros may be doing 4 or 5 hard days a week at some points in their training. But your average amateur would probably do maybe 3 *hard* sessions a week out of 5 or 6 days riding (for me, that’s normally about 12-15 hours).

Ate you working between training sessions? Uni? Etc?

For a full time athlete, rest means feet up, not even going shopping (as I think Pendleton complained/explained once). Fair chance your ‘rest’ is doing a full days work regardless of if it’s brucklaying or pushing a mouse round a desk.

Here’s an interesting article on the subject

Easy days and hard days

When the subject of training & resting comes up in a thread then it’s usually the difference between the two levels of effort that’s the problem. On a “hard day” a professional athlete will train at a level of maybe 9 out of 10 but their rest days are 1 or 2 out of 10. Compare that with many people whose “hard day” might be 6 or 7 out of 10 but their “rest” is up at 5/10. Basically the workout isn’t hard enough and the rest isn’t easy enough.

Add in the points about pros not having to do daily life such as fit in a normal job around their training and you soon realise that for most of us a “rest day” is anything but. Generally being a professional athlete is about giving you time to rest rather than time to train.

When you did your winter of long stead distance, were you disciplined in staying in your Z2, and did you do intensity work in conjunction with it?

Was very disciplined with it. Remember it well, because living in a very hilly area, it was bloody hard. Like a snail up climbs. No high intensity stuff at all. To be fair though, the long and distance parts of it were perhaps not as long as they should be – partly because it was too difficult to do a long ride staying in the zones.

Ate you working between training sessions? Uni? Etc?

Office. I get plenty of rest off the bike…

Everyone is different, and has different powers of recovery, but office work is not really rest.
I can tolerate about 5 hours a week more training when on holiday and resting properly compared to being at work. (I’m a software engineer, so not what would be described as an active job).

Here’s an interesting article on the subject

Easy days and hard days

Thanks. Answers a few things for me – not that I’m really training, more of a commuter trying to strike a balance for the ocassional XC race.

I think the principle of steady miles is that it will still improve your baseline but not make your body break down so much. Have a look at MAF training. Its running specific but I imagine the principles being the same.

Theory being riding at a lower heart rate makes you more efficient and therefore faster at a lower heart rate. Kind of the opposite of intervals which make your max speed faster, this makes your cruising speed you can maintain faster….in theory.

Got a heart rate monitor or power meter and Google Chrome browser?

Stravistix has “Multisport fitness trend” among the masses of data it gives you for rides.

http://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stravistix-for-strava/dhiaggccakkgdfcadnklkbljcgicpckn?hl=en

ajf
I think the principle of steady miles is that it will still improve your baseline but not make your body break down so much. Have a look at MAF training. Its running specific but I imagine the principles being the same.

I’m a big fan of the MAF idea and train (for running) using this way of thinking. Build, then maintain a big wide base fitness without adding training stress / increasing the risk of injury / inflammation / being ill, then pick up on race specifics near the time if you have something coming up.

I find it’s a great way to get back to peak pretty quickly if you’ve slackened off a bit too.

I train purely to HR, and don’t worry about anything else, and yeah, it’s weird at first, the whole going-slow-to-speed-up thing is counter-intuitive, but when I focus in properly on pre-race training, it’s worked a treat every time.

Rest isn’t doing nothing either, it’s doing something at an easy, safe pace. I’m also big on decent, regular sleep.