 So you want to learn how to become a faster cyclist. This video will tell you everything you need to know in 15 minutes. This channel has just turned one year old and I thought it'd be a great opportunity to condense all my best pieces of advice from the past year into one video. We'll be discussing building a training plan, how to achieve peak form, the importance of taking a break and lifting for cycling. And at the end of the video, I'll even address some of the common questions I got on my last lifting video, so be sure to stick around for that. Welcome to another video. My name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CCS. And if you're new to this channel, I make weekly science based training, racing and gear related videos. If you want to learn how to get faster or just more about the science of training in general, then be sure to subscribe. And if you have a training question or a topic you'd like to see me cover in a future video, be sure to leave it down in the comments section below. I do my best to get to all the questions in the comments. Let's get right into it by addressing probably the most important question when it comes to getting faster as a cyclist, which is what should your training weeks look like and how does that fit into an overall training plan? Periodization means that your training is changing over time, which we want because if you keep giving your body the same stimulus it's already adapted to, then it'll stop making adaptations. When planning out a season, it's important that your workouts become more specific to your goal event as you get closer to that event. And although the tradition of building a base of long endurance miles over the winter has drawn some critics, especially for time crunch cyclists, this method is still extremely effective, allows you to periodize your training to get more specific and may even be necessary. This review on the best practices for training 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. Some riders don't see the value in doing lower intensity work, especially not dedicating a whole part of the season to it. But high volumes of endurance work may be just as important as higher intensity intervals if you want to reach peak performance. This review on high intensity versus high volume training stated that both high intensity and low intensity training are important components of the training program. They went on to say that short term periods of high intensity interval training can elicit improvements, but also that important adaptations appear to occur with low intensity continuous training that are not observed with mixed or high intensity training. When training does not have an appropriate blend of both high intensity training and high volume training inserted into the program, performance ability can stagnate. The reason why performance stagnates when you're constantly doing high intensity training all year is because it doesn't take very along at all to maximize the gains that you get from this kind of work. This doesn't mean that you can't do some maintenance intensity work throughout the off season. In fact, in many cases, this may be a good idea. However, you don't want intensity to be the focus of your training until right before racing. In fact, many pros don't start focusing on intensity until right before they race. A couple of really big weeks and then, but I wasn't doing intervals. I was just riding. I only did one intensity session before the tour. Now, of course, we don't all have 20 to 30 hours a week to put in massive miles in the winter like pros. This doesn't mean that you should be smashing VO2 max intervals every time you get on the trainer in December to maximize your 10 hours. Training plans will vary a lot depending on the person and what they're training for. But in general, you want your training to become more specific to your race as you get closer to the race. This usually means that training intensity will increase because racing is usually high intensity. Another reason for this is because you want your training to have progression. As I said, if you keep giving your body the same stimulus that's already adapted to, then it'll stop making adaptations and you'll hit a fitness plateau and doing intensity all year long is a perfect way to do this. After the off season, I suggest taking some time to just ride. Don't do any intervals. Just focus on getting miles in on the bike. And then as your season approaches, increase the intensity of your workouts. But even more important than that, increase the specificity of your workouts. The timeline for all of this could be four to seven months before you want to be in peak shape. With that, let's get into what your training week should look like. I'm going to lay out a basic template that you can modify based on your schedule, your racing goals, time of year, etc. First, we want to start by adding in the intensity for the week and how much intensity to add is critically important because if you don't add enough, then you're not giving your body enough training stimulus but add too much and you're on the path to overtraining. So what is the right amount of intensity? Well, it's important to remember that there's a point of diminishing return with high intensity and more is not always better. In fact, most of the time it's not. A study done on interval training at VO2 Max took eight runners and had them perform VO2 Max intervals once a week and then overtrained them by having them perform the intervals three times a week. The results showed that surprisingly, the subjects did not improve after the overtraining period. And the study concluded that performance did not increase after four weeks of VO2 Max intensive training. Of course, this study was done on runners and recovery from running takes longer than it does from cycling. However, across endurance sports, this idea seems to hold true that you only want to do intensity a couple of times a week. Going back to the review on the best practices for training, they advocated for 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. With few exceptions, having just two or on occasion three high intensity days per week is what you're shooting for. And you want to do these days when you're well rested so that they can be as high quality as possible. In our example week, let's put the high intensity days on Tuesday and Saturday. We also want to rest or recovery ride days in there. So Monday and Friday would make the most sense since you'll be nice and rested for the following day's hard session. After this, you want to fill in the rest of week with zone two endurance rides, which is essentially a comfortable pace that you can hold for hours. Make at least one of these rides a long ride where you go for a couple hours more than normal. There are certain adaptations that you get during a long ride that are harder to get from doing shorter rides. For example, increasing your body's ability to use fat as a fuel source as opposed to carbohydrates and forcing your fast twitch muscle fibers to do endurance work as your slow twitch muscle fibers fatigue towards the end of a long ride, both of which will have a huge impact on your endurance performance. As we've discussed, as you get closer to racing, your high intensity days should become more race specific. For example, if you're training for crits, then punchy workouts like 30 30s would be great. If your race has long climbs, then more threshold style workouts like two by 20 minutes at 100 percent of FTP is what you're looking for. You want your training load to increase each week by either increasing volume or intensity or both. This is what is known as progressive overload. However, don't forget to throw in a rest week every three to four weeks to rid your body of the fatigue you've built up. During a rest week, you're still riding, but at about 40 to 60 percent of your normal volume. If your races are lower in volume, like cross country mountain bikes, cyclocross crits, etc., then you can lower the volume of your training once you get into race season without seeing a decrease in performance as long as you keep the intensity up. In this deep training study that reduced intensity long term, endurance was decreased significantly by 21 percent in a one-third reduced group and 30 percent in a two-thirds reduced group. However, in a similar study that decreased volume long term, endurance remained the same in a one-third reduced group and only decreased by 10 percent in the two-thirds reduction group. And further research confirms these findings. A 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. Coming in your best form requires decreasing your training load and you want to do this by decreasing your volume and not your intensity. However, it is important to note that if you're an ultra endurance racer, volume is extremely important because endurance is often the limiting factor in those races. For these reasons, you want to maintain a high volume into the season until right before racing. Up to this point, I've been talking about how to train, but one of the most important things you can do to improve your cycling performance is to not train at selective points in the year. Hear me out. Taking a break is extremely important to progress and oftentimes athletes will find that they get their best results after a period of forced rest. The off season and mid season break are commonplace amongst pro cyclists for one simple reason, it works. A mid season break might entail taking a complete week off the bike during a lull in the racing season. Funny enough, it's often harder to get athletes to take a week off the bike than it is to get them to do a hard interval session. Hey, what's up, coach? Look, I know I wasn't supposed to ride this week, but this guy stole my KOM on the bike path. So, you know, what was I supposed to do? Also, I went to the gym and did a few spin classes and lifted a little and did a run here or there, but that doesn't count. Right. The week off will set you up for a strong late season, as opposed to pressing on with training and potentially hitting a fitness plateau or even seeing a decline in fitness. The same applies to the off season break. After your last race of the season, you want to take one or two weeks completely off the bike. Once you get back on the bike, motivation will be at an all time high and your body will feel well recovered. You may lose a little bit of fitness, but you'll be surprised at how quickly it comes back. And the goal here is to come back stronger than you previously were. Unfortunately, this isn't an area that's very well studied, but there could be some potential reasons why taking a break is so effective. This study on hormone response of pro cyclists during competition looked at nine riders from two teams during the Vuelta. What they found was that starting testosterone levels were lower in the team that had more racing days in the previous month and testosterone further decreased in both teams each week throughout the race. Granted, this was during a grand tour stage race, but even non-cycling athletes may see their hormone suppressed by hard training. This study on the effect of detraining on power athletes found that after 14 days of detraining, levels of growth hormone and testosterone significantly increased while cortisol and creatine kinase levels decreased. Another explanation could be changes in blood values. This study looking at blood parameters of top level cyclists over the course of a year found that hematocrit and hemoglobin concentration decreased throughout the season and then returned to baseline level in the off season. After the off season break, take some time to let go of structure and just enjoy riding your bike. Don't worry too much about what zone you're in or how many hours you need to do. You may even need to leave the cycling computer at home during this time. This is also the time of year when you want to introduce weight training into your program since your training load will be low and lifting can be extremely taxing on your body. This is a great segue into the next topic I want to talk about, which is lifting for cycling. Dude, honestly, I didn't want to say anything, but you are way too scrawny to be talking this much about lifting on your channel. Maybe you should try hypergain beast. If you saw my recent lifting for cycling video, I'll be covering a lot of that information, but I'll also be addressing some of the questions I got on that video. There's a debate amongst athletes and coaches alike about whether or not cyclists should be hitting the gym. However, when you take a look at the science, there is no debate. The answer is clear as day. This study on the effect of strength training on cycling performance took well-trained and competitive road cyclists and separated them into two groups, one that incorporated strength training into their normal endurance training and one that did not. What they found was that work efficiency and power significantly increased in the lifting group and time to exhaustion at 70% of maximal oxygen uptake increased by 17.2% while the control group did not see significant improvements. And it's not just one study coming to this conclusion. This review of many studies on strength training for running and cycling endurance performance found a positive effect on exercise economy, anaerobic capacity, lactate threshold, reduced fatigue and endurance performance. The reason? Adaptations within the strength train muscles, including postpone activation of less efficient type two fibers, improve neuromuscular efficiency, conversion of fast switch type two X fibers into more fatigue resistant type two A fibers and improve musculotendinous stiffness. The research really couldn't be more clear. Lifting will make you a faster cyclist. In fact, in all my research on this topic, I've yet to find a single study that showed that lifting did not increase cycling performance. So with that being said, how do you incorporate lifting into your training? You want to start lifting in the off season when your training load is low, just like with intervals to or on occasion, three lifting sessions per week is optimal. And since you aren't doing intervals at this time, you can think of your gym sessions as your high intensity days. You want to start off with low weight, high reps. So that might be 20 reps for a given weight and work your way down to high weight, low reps, increase the weight and decrease the reps by one or two reps per session until you get down to around the four to six rep range. You also want to increase the number of leg focus sets per session. Start off with just two or three sets per session and then work your way up till you're around 10 sets per session. As far as choosing how much weight to lift, choose an amount that's close to your max for that rep range. A typical workout might look something like this. Start with a five minute warmup on a stationary bike or treadmill, then four sets of squats at four to 10 reps, three sets of deadlifts at four to 10 reps, a set of 15 weighted lunges, a set of 15 weighted box steps, and a set of 15 box jumps. And be sure to rest for about two minutes between sets. Core and upper body work can be performed using simple body weight exercises at the end of a workout. Remember, we're not trying to bulk up our upper body. You want to lift for at least two months before reducing lifting to a maintenance level or cutting it out completely, which will depend on how busy your race schedule is. The most common question that I got on my lifting video is what should this maintenance phase look like? Just like with maintaining cycling fitness heading into the race season, you want to reduce the volume of your lifts, not the intensity. So still lift the same heavy weight, but do less total sets. For example, if you worked your way up to 10 total sets during the off season, then you may just do five total sets in season. Adjust the number of sets up or down based on how fresh you want to be. You also may opt to just lift once a week instead of two or three times a week. It was also pointed out that during my lifts, the eccentric or down phase of the lift was fast and the concentric or up phase was slow and doing this in reverse could be more effective. The reason why I do this and why you should too, if you're lifting for the purpose of getting faster on your bike, is that the end goal isn't to put on muscle, it's to increase the power to the pedal. Given that cycling is a completely concentric activity, there's less of a need to maximize the eccentric part of the lift. Also, I did talk about this in the lifting video, but the question kept coming up about at home or body weight exercises. The reason why these aren't nearly as effective is because you need a large amount of weight to sufficiently tax a large muscle like the quads. Squatting your body weight or just riding in a hard gear on your bike simply won't produce the same results. Yeah, whatever, bro. I just skip leg day and ride my single speed. Where's my beer at? Obviously my whole channel is about becoming a faster cyclist, but if you follow these key points that I laid out in this video, that'll get you 90% of the way there. The next biggest component is probably your nutrition. And I do plan on doing a comprehensive nutrition video like this one in the near future. If you want to see me go deeper on any of the topics that I talked about in this video, I left links to the full videos in the description. I also wanted to say that I've been thoroughly enjoying my first year here on YouTube. It really feels like I found a second passion, the first being cycling, of course. Sincerely, thanks to everyone who subscribed, likes, comments and shares the videos. All that activity really helps out the channel. If you made it this far into the video, welcome to the 20% club. And hopefully you got a piece of information here at the end that your competitors missed. Thanks again, and I'll see you in the next video.