 How do you improve your power on the bike? In one way or another, this is the goal of almost every competitive cyclist. And today I'm going to show you what your training should look like across a full season all the way down to key individual workouts in order to accomplish this. Welcome back to another video. My name is Dylan, and for weekly science-based cycling videos just like this one, be sure to subscribe. As a cycling coach, the question of how do I increase the power I can produce comes up in some form or another all the time. Now it's a pretty broad question. Are we talking about the power you can produce in a 10-second sprint or the power you can average over a five-hour ride? When most people talk about increasing their power, they're talking about one of two things. Increasing their FTP, which is the power that you can hold for one hour and the number that you probably get asked about the most at the Saturday morning group ride or increasing your power at all durations. Fortunately, the two go hand in hand. Raise your one hour power and your five minute power and your five hour power will go up with it. Now, of course, you can train specifically for certain durations and specificity is super important and I'll get into that in a minute. But with few exceptions, the same basic training principles apply no matter what type of riding you're doing. This is what's important to realize about building power. Despite what some online cycling news sources may tell you, increasing your power goes beyond just adding some special power building workout to your current plan. Every ride you do from the easy endurance rides to the VO2max interval sessions contributes to your fitness and training needs to be arranged appropriately both over the long-term and the short-term in order to see the biggest gains. Because of this, I wanna get into what a plan to build power should look like over the course of a season, a training month, a training week and individual workouts. We'll start at the season level. In general, the training season is gonna be separated into the off season, the base season, the build season and the race season. Now, you don't have to be a racer in order to follow this pattern. Even for recreational riders, this will produce better fitness gains than just doing the same thing all year. These changes in training throughout the year will be done by manipulating volume or the amount of time you spend riding and intensity or how hard you ride. Let's start with the off season, which is incredibly unpopular and no one wants to hear about. My least viewed video on this channel is titled, Why You Need An Off Season. Yeah, no sure lock. Nothing says I'm getting slow, fat and softer than a bunny in a pillow store to all your Strava followers, like taking an off season. You think anyone's gonna wanna watch that? Having time off is extremely important for building fitness and is one of the most overlooked aspects of training. Many riders train all year full steam as if their peak is constantly right around the corner. This is a recipe for stagnating performance and there may be a couple reasons for this. One explanation may be changes in blood values. This study on pro cyclists found that hematocrit and hemoglobin concentration decreased throughout the season and then returned to baseline level in the off season. Another explanation may be hormonal changes. Pro cyclists have been shown to have lower testosterone levels when they've had more racing days in the previous month and testosterone further decreases throughout a three week stage race. This has also been shown in power athletes that saw growth hormone and testosterone increase after two weeks of not training. Regardless of the underlying reason, taking an off season seems to be extremely effective and is a tactic used by almost every high level pro cyclist. It may seem counterintuitive, but you'll develop more power if at some point in the year you take a break than if you just continuously train all year. In the off season, you're gonna wanna take some time completely off the bike. The typical time period for this is one to two weeks. This doesn't mean do a lot of running or do a massive cross country hike or still ride but only easy and on the weekends. This means rest. You're gonna feel antsy and that's fine. Go read a book or watch Netflix or watch more of my YouTube videos. Whatever you do, resist the urge to do strenuous exercise. Once you get back on the bike, take a month or two to ease back into it. Only do fun rides and don't pay attention to power or heart rate. This is the one time a year where this is advantageous so soak it up. It may also be worth not checking Strava this time if you're a certified Strava addict. This is also a great time to start incorporating gym work into your training. Gym work is another aspect of training that cyclists frequently ignore but if your goal is to build power, then it shouldn't be. Study after study on how strength training affects cycling performance comes to the same conclusion. Lifting increases work efficiency, power production and time to exhaustion. What lifting doesn't do is increase your VO2 max and that's because it's not an aerobic activity but it appears that the same adaptations that your body makes while lifting in order to lift more weight such as postpone activation of less efficient type 2 fibers and improved neuromuscular efficiency, et cetera, also translate into more power being produced on the bike. Going to the gym as a cyclist and doing leg focus exercises quite literally increases the amount of power you can produce on the bike. Great, sign me up, right? Here's where the issue lies. Going to the gym, especially as a new lifter is extremely taxing on your body and if you just add lifting onto your normal training routine, you're gonna be overtrained. Oh, this is an easy problem to fix. When you go to the gym, only do bicep curls. That way you still have the legs to smash threads on the bike path. There's nothing girls love more than huge biceps and a man who can drop a grandpa in cargo shorts on a $500 hybrid enjoying a leisurely Sunday ride. This is why you wanna start doing cycling specific lifting in the off season. It doesn't matter that you're so sore that you can't go hard on the bike because you shouldn't be going hard on the bike during this time of year anyway. After a month or two of doing this, gym work will become easier to recover from to the point that you hardly get sore anymore. It's at this point that you can start adding in big miles on the bike, which is called the base season. Now, before I get into the base season for anybody who wants to know more about what specifically to do in the gym as a cyclist, I left my video on it down in the description section. Now to base training. This is traditionally done by doing two to three months of training in which the goal is to get in a large volume of low intensity training. You can do intervals at this time, but most of your training load should come from increasing training volume. Studies looking at how the best endurance athletes train find a high volume and low intensity of training in the off season, phasing into higher intensity, lower volume right before the race season. This was confirmed in this review that stated that an established endurance base built from high volumes of training may be an important precondition for tolerating and responding well to a substantial increase in training intensity over the short term. Basically, base training is exactly what the name suggests. You're building a high volume of low intensity training as a base for the harder work to come. After the base period, we move on to the build phase, which should begin about two months before racing, or if you're not a racer, the time of year that you want to be in peak shape. During this period, typically intensity goes up and to compensate for this increasing intensity, volume goes down, although not always. For instance, ultra endurance racers may choose to increase their intensity and maintain their volume. This is where training specificity comes in, and in general, your training should get more specific to your race during this period. Training specificity might look like doing more 30 second efforts or more hard road group rides if you're a crit racer. Conversely, if you're a 100 mile mountain bike racer, maybe it might mean doing more five or six hour mountain bike rides with threshold efforts on the climbs. About half your high intensity days on the bike should be race specific, and the other half should be general high intensity training aimed at improving your VO2 max and your lactate threshold. This study tested high intensity training versus race-paced interval training. The HIT group did intervals at 105% of maximal aerobic velocity, while the race-paced group did intervals at 90% or closer to race pace. They found that both methods equally increased race 10K time, but the HIT group saw a greater increase in VO2 max. This suggests that race specific work to get you used to the demands of racing and focused high intensity interval training to see the maximum physiological benefit are both important during this training period. Finally, when you get into racing or the time you wanna peak, you wanna reduce your volume of training but maintain your intensity. Why reduce volume and not intensity? Training studies looking into volume reduction and intensity reduction find that fitness decreases substantially when subjects decrease intensity but not when they decrease volume. This meta analysis looking at many studies on the effects of tapering on performance found that the optimal tapering strategy was one that reduced volume without any modifications in intensity or frequency. They also found a sweet spot for reducing training volume at 40 to 60%. Reducing volume and maintaining intensity will ensure that you're well rested and still maintaining your fitness. And it'll prevent that my legs feel like a block of wood feeling that you get when you haven't gone hard in a while. Exactly, dude, that's why I got dropped today. Damn wooden legs. Just like in the off season, it's important to take a mid season break either when you have time between racing or you start to feel burnt out, overtrained or your fitness starts to stagnate. The mid season break is a week off the bike and just like with the off season, it's not a week to do some other form of physical exertion, it's a week of rest. After the mid season break, repeat the build period until you hit the off season. That's the basic structure of a training season and following the structure will have a huge impact on your fitness and therefore your power, especially if you're the kind of rider who does the same workouts and the same number of miles every week all year long. But all of this can be completely undermined if you don't have your training months and weeks set up properly. Let's start with your training month. A typical training month with a few exceptions should have three hard weeks and one recovery week. The recovery week isn't a week off the bike, but just a week of reduced volume and intensity so you can rid your body of the fatigue that you've built up over the previous three weeks. The three hard weeks should increase in training load. This is what's known as progressive overload and is the key to preventing a fitness plateau. Give your body the same stimulus that it's already adapted to and it'll stop making adaptations. You can increase your training load by increasing your volume or intensity or both. For example, during the base period, training load might increase by increasing training volume. During the build period, training load might increase by increasing training intensity, although not always. Once you've got the basic structure for your training month, it's time to arrange your training week. This is where a lot of cyclists get overly ambitious and mess up. It's tempting to do intervals or hard group rides or training races or chase Strava KOMs at every opportunity, but research actually suggests a less is more approach when it comes to intensity. For example, this study on runners showed that spending more time training at low intensity actually produced greater gains. In this review on the best practices for training, advocated for just two or three high intensity or threshold intensity sessions per week, and that additional increases in high intensity frequency do not induce further improvements and tend to induce symptoms of overreaching or overtraining. Keeping high intensity to twice a week or occasionally, keyword there being occasionally, three times a week will ensure that you're well recovered between your high intensity sessions and those sessions can be done with higher quality. The rest of your rides during the week should be zone two endurance rides or recovery rides, basically under 75% of your FTP or a steady but conversational pace. Going harder than this on these days isn't beneficial and in fact is likely detrimental to building power over the long term. Let's take a look at an example week so I can show you what I'm talking about. First we put in our high intensity days which we'll have on Tuesday and Saturday during this week. Before these days we'll either have a rest day or a recovery ride so that we'll be well recovered for the interval session the next day. Wednesday and Thursday will be shorter zone two rides and Sunday will be a longer zone two day. Finally, we'll put in our lifting for the week. It's important that you lift after your high intensity ride either the same day or the next day so that you can be well rested for your intervals, training race, high intensity session, et cetera. In our example, we'll lift on Wednesday and Saturday after the ride. Setting up your training weeks right is crucial to building power. Try to go too hard too often or at the wrong times and you'll never get in any quality work. Again, this week is just an example and the setup can vary dramatically based on the time of year, your own personal schedule or your goals but it's a good basic template to use. Finally, let's take it to the individual workout level. What should you be doing on those high intensity days? This will change throughout the year. For example, during the base season you may be focused specifically on intervals that target your FTP. These would be workouts done at 95 to 100% of your FTP in which you try to get in 30 minutes to an hour of intense work done. Examples include two or three by 20 minutes, three or four by 15 minutes or four to six by 10 minutes. As you get closer to racing, these workouts should get higher in intensity and research suggests that workouts done right around VO2max intensity and substantially above can be particularly effective at increasing power output. Specifically, four minute intervals and 30 second intervals. What do these workouts look like? A 30, 30 or Tabata style workout might include two or three sets of 10 to 15 all out 30 second efforts with 30 seconds of recovery and about 10 minutes between sets. A four minute workout might include four to eight all out four minute efforts with two to four minutes of recovery between efforts. These workouts can also be catered to meet the specific demands of your racing. For example, for a cross country mountain bike racer instead of doing 30 30s on the road, they might choose a 10 minute race loop that has 30 second climbs and 30 second descents and then do that race loop as hard as they can to simulate a cross country race. The work and rest period doesn't have to be perfect when you do this. The goal of this kind of workout is specificity. That's how to improve your power on the bike. Again, it's not as simple as adding some magical workout to your plan. It's a season long endeavor. This video covered a lot in a short period of time. So if you still have questions down in the description, I left links to videos where I talk about everything I talked about in this video in further detail. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.