 What is up guys? Welcome to another video. My name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS, and today we're going to be talking about how to get fast if you have only six hours a week to train. If you struggle to find time in the week to train and you're severely time crunched and you want to maximize every minute that you do have, then stick around because this video is for you. You can actually get extremely fit with limited time if you know what you're doing, and in fact a properly written six-hour week plan can be more effective than double the hours with absolutely no structure to it. I'll also go over where to add hours if you have more time and what to do if you have less time, so be sure to stick around for that. If you're new to this channel, I make weekly training topic videos going over tips and tricks that I've learned in my 12 years of racing and training experience that have gotten me to the top of the ultra endurance mountain bike game in the US and as a coach at CTS. I also go into the science on your training questions, so if you want to learn how to get faster or just more about sports science in general, be sure to subscribe and if you have a training question, be sure to leave it in the comments section down below and I'll either answer it down there or do some more research and make a whole video about it. This video is a follow-up to my fast and under 10 hours a week video. If you want to check that out, I'll leave the link in the description below. For most of the athletes I coach, 10 hours a week is a pretty reasonable amount of time for someone who has a full-time job, but by far the most common question I got out of that video is what about a training plan for me who only has three hours a week or 10 hours a month or inserts some other unreasonably low amount of time? 10 hours a week? I wish. I get it, you guys have busy schedules, but the good news is that you don't have to sacrifice your fitness if you know what you're doing and you arrange your training week in the right way. For the purposes of this video, I'm going to skip over the weightlifting phase of training, but that doesn't mean it's not important. Even scrawny cyclists can benefit from getting in the gym and the science shows that weightlifting actually will make you faster. If you want to see me go further in depth on this subject, I made two videos, one about the science behind why weightlifting makes you faster and how to incorporate lifting into your training program, and I'll link those videos in the description below. So the next logical step after making a 10 hour a week training video would be to cut that time in half and make a five hour a week training video. So why did I make it six hours? Well, that's six hours actually extremely important to add on to one of your rides to make it a long ride. If you can get in at least one long ride during the week, there are certain adaptations that your body makes that you just don't see with shorter rides. For example, as you fatigue your slow twitch muscle fibers on a long ride, your body is forced to use fast twitch muscle fibers to do endurance work, which they don't like to do. This will have positive effects on your endurance ability. A longer ride will also teach your body to use fat as a fuel source instead of carbohydrates, as your body gets glycogen depleted towards the latter part of a long ride. These are adaptations that'll benefit you even if you're training for shorter races, but are especially important if you're training for longer events that might last longer than two hours. Let's get into what your week should look like and we'll start with the frequency of your rides. Now, it's just six hours a week, you're pretty time crunched. So is it better to do shorter rides and spread that out and ride every single day or ride fewer days and ride longer on those days? The answer is a little bit of both. Now you shouldn't be riding every single day because you want rest days. Even if somebody was doing 30 hours a week, I would recommend that they have at least one day where they don't touch the bike or at the very least do a very short, very easy recovery spin. This is a pretty common conversation that I have with certain athletes. They just don't ever want to take a rest day. No pain, no gain, right? Well, I guess after the pain, let yourself gain by taking a rest day just doesn't have the same ring to it. Now there are a couple ways to structure the six hours that we have and you may want to manipulate this structure to achieve different goals and I'll get into that. The most obvious structure would be to ride five days a week for an hour each day with one day being a two hour day when you have more time. This works great and it allows for two rest days a week, which is fairly standard. It's best that these rest days alternate between two and three days apart. So a Monday and Friday rest day are perfect examples of this. This way you have a three day block on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and a two day block on Saturday and Sunday. But the volume for both of these blocks is similar at three hours. This sort of plan works great if you're training for short events like crits or cyclocross or short mountain bike races. But what if you're training for an ultra endurance event or just an event that's going to last longer than an hour or two? You're going to need some longer miles in there somewhere. So we're going to have to sacrifice ride frequency to increase the duration of your ride on certain days. In our example week, we may ride Tuesday and Thursday for an hour and then do a one hour and a three hour ride on the weekend when we have more time. You may even want to cut those weekday rides down to 45 minutes if it'll give you more time to ride longer on the weekend because that long weekend ride is so important. This schedule of doing two days during the week and two days during the weekend also works great for people who really struggle to find time to ride during the week. Tuesdays and Thursdays are optimal because they're surrounded by rest days, which means these days can be really high quality. But of course, life happens. The car needs to go to the shop. The kids get sick. Work gets crazy. Whatever it is, this schedule can be somewhat flexible and we can move days around if need be. If your weekdays are absolutely insane and finding even one hour is a chore, then you could do a three day per week model where you ride one hour on a weekday and then longer on the weekend. But this is only if you absolutely cannot fit in another day because ideally we would like the ride frequency to be higher. Now that we have the basic structure of the week, what should each day look like? I would start by planning out two or three interval days. When the volume is this low, it can be tempting to do more than that. But the science doesn't support this as an effective practice. A study done on interval training at VO2 Max took eight runners and had them perform VO2 Max intervals once a week and then overtrain 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. Now, if you're doing lower intensity intervals, you can fit in more interval days, but you still don't want to hammer yourself every time you get on the bike. A review on the best practices for training intensity and duration distribution in endurance athletes 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. You may have heard that you want your intervals to get higher in intensity as you get closer to your race and this is generally true just because racing is generally high intensity, but there are exceptions to this. What's more important is that your intervals become increasingly more specific to the demands of your race as you get closer. I don't have time to map out what that means for each discipline of cycling, but let's take crits for example. Crits are very punchy with short power spikes, so a workout that you might want to do leading into an important crit might be 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off for 10 to 15 reps. Let's go to the other end of the spectrum and say you're training for a 100 mile mountain bike race and you know this race is going to have long climbs in it. Then a specific workout might be four by 10 minutes steady state efforts and then over a few weeks build up to two by 20 steady state and then get to the point where you are comfortable holding steady state for 30 minutes or longer at a time. These are just two wildly different examples, but the point is you want to evaluate what the demands of your race are and then mimic that in training in the month or two leading up to that goal event. You also want to have a progression to your training plan so each week should have a little more training load than the previous one. Now you want to put your interval sessions in when you're fresh and well rested so you can get the most out of them. For the five day week plan this would be right after a rest day and then you could put a lower intensity interval session in on a following day. For our example week that would be Tuesday and Saturday since Monday and Friday rest days. Wednesday and Sunday may be lower intensity intervals or just endurance or zone two rides depending on the time of year and then Thursday would be a zone two as well. Although it's tempting to push harder on your non-interval days I advise against it because it'll take away from your high intensity work because you won't be as fresh. Remember that at a certain point more hard days will not equal more fitness. If the four days per week model suits you better then I would do a high intensity interval day on Tuesday and Thursday since you've got plenty of rest surrounding those days and then less intense intervals on Saturday and make Sunday your long ride. If weekdays are really tight for you try to find at least one day during the week that you can get in an hour and make that a very high intensity session. Then Saturday can be high intensity as well and hopefully Sunday you're able to block out some time to get in some quality miles on the bike. You also want to have a rest week every three to four weeks to rid your body of the fatigue that you've built up. Typically with a rider who's doing more hours we would cut the volume by 40 to 50 percent but with just six hours a week we don't need to cut the volume that drastically. Four or five hours for a rest week is fine just make sure that those rides are easy so you give your body a chance to recover. What if you've got a little more time than six hours per week or your schedule opens up? Where should you add time? It can be tempting to add it to your rest day but ideally you want to keep those rest days. My advice is to add it to one or two rides to make those rides significantly longer. As I said there are certain benefits that you get from a long ride that you just don't get from shorter rides and these adaptations will help you even if you don't do long races. If you're severely time crunch during the week but you can do a two, three or four hour ride on the weekend this will help you immensely. Let's talk about if you have less than six hours per week. This is where the conversation starts to shift from let's work with the hours you do have to you just need to open up your schedule if cycling is a priority for you. I get that there are people who do not have six extra hours in the week but you just watched a 10 plus minute YouTube video and let me guess you're probably about to watch another one or scroll through Facebook or Strabo or Instagram etc. No but seriously if you're struggling to get in six hours in the week then I would take a step back and take a look at your schedule and ask yourself if cycling is a priority for you and beyond that is getting in shape losing weight or your own personal well-being aided through cycling is that a priority for you. If it's not then honestly I'm surprised you made it this far into this video but if it is then I want you to take a look at what you spend your time doing because if it's truly a priority then everybody has at least six hours a week to spare if not for your cycling career then for your own personal health and longevity. This little pep talk was aimed at the time crunch guys but same goes for people who are trying to get to 10, 15 or 20 plus hours a week. If it really matters to you and it's really a priority you have the time in your schedule I promise. All right quick recap you can divide your week into five days per week four days a week with the hopes that one of those rides will be longer or three days a week if you're really time crunch but that's kind of a last resort you want to have at least one longer ride in the week because there are certain adaptations that you make during a longer ride that you just don't see in shorter rides. You want to have two or three interval days a week more than this won't necessarily make you fitter and could lead to burnout. You want your intervals to get increasingly more specific to the demands of your race as you get closer to your race and you want to schedule your interval days after a rest day so that you can be fresh for them. If you've got more time in the week to train then add it to one or maybe two of your rides to make those rides even longer. Don't add it to your rest days. If you've got less time then take a good hard look at your schedule and decide is cycling and your own personal health and well-being aided through cycling a priority for you. If it is then I guarantee you have the time in there. Thanks for watching I hope you guys found this information helpful. If you like this video be sure to give it a like share it with a friend and subscribe for more training tips. If you want to see more coaching content be sure to follow me on Instagram Twitter and Facebook and if you want to follow my training leading into this season be sure to check me out in Strava. Finally if you're looking for a coach shoot me an email at djohnson at trainright.com