 Is traditional high volume, low intensity base training the best thing to be doing in the winter or pre-season? As always, today we're gonna be taking a look at the science to answer this question and in the second half of the video, I'll be getting into specifics by laying out an example training plan so you can see what your training should look like in the base period, so be sure to stick around for that. Welcome back to another video. My name's Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS. Recently, some have suggested that base training may be dead or at the very least not the optimal training strategy for time crunch cyclists. Sure, if you're a prone, you've got literally all day to train it might work, but if you've got less than 10 hours a week, is packing on the zone two rides really the best use of your time? Many advocate for a different approach where high intensity is the main focus of the winter training. What does the science have to say though? The answer actually isn't super easy to find because there aren't many studies tackling this exact question, but let's dig through the available research and see what we can find. This study on the training characteristics of gold medal endurance performance looked at the training of Olympic and world champion endurance cross country skiers and by athletes. And what they found was that the training that they did that led to these incredible performance was right out of the base training handbook. They had a high volume and low intensity of training in the off season, phasing into higher intensity, lower volume right before the race season. On top of this, the frequency of high intensity sessions and the intensity of those sessions increased as they got closer to racing. They stated that high training volume has emerged as a key commonality in successful endurance training. They conclude that a very large training load during the general preparation period appears to be an important precondition for exceptional athletic performance several months later. This was echoed in this review for the best practice for training intensity and duration distribution 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. So it seems like, at least from these studies, traditional base training may be preferred. And there are a couple of studies done on triathletes that investigate the importance of doing high volume, low intensity training further. For example, this study on training intensity distribution of Ironman triathletes found an inverse correlation between total time spent training as well as time spent training in zone one and race time. Now in this study, they used a three zone model and zone one would be what we typically consider zone two or endurance training. So basically what they found was that a higher volume of training and specifically a higher volume of training at low intensity produced better race results. They conclude that while athletes perform with heart rates mainly in zone two during competition, better performances are associated with more training time spent in zone one. This was echoed in this study also on triathletes that stated that performance was only shown to improve with usual high volume training. Summarizing in order to improve running or cycling performance, high volume training programs are highly recommended. And for what it's worth, traditional base training is still the tried and true method for most of the world's best cyclists. Just take a look at Egan Bernal or most other pro Strava data from the past couple months. Kedel would just ride, he just ride his own pace, he'd go slow up the climbs, let everyone else go do their efforts, whatever whatever, and he just ride. And he said, well, it really takes me a short amount of time to get really fit and I can only hold that fitness for a certain amount of time. When we are starting, we are starting at zero. We treat it as zero. That's why we need 24 months to run around. So why exactly is this the case? I mean, there's a mountain of research out there that suggests that high intensity interval training produces superior results. Can't I just do that all year? Isn't that the best way to maximize the training time that I do have? Yeah, everyone knows that to crush races in July, you need to be the fastest one and drop everyone on the winter group ride in January. The problem is that although high intensity will improve your fitness very quickly, you'll also see a plateau from this kind of work relatively quickly as well, which is why you only wanna start focusing on it in the months before racing. The other reason is that high intensity is extremely taxing on your body and you're much more likely to over train by doing too much intensity as opposed to too much volume. You can do some maintenance intensity through the off season, but if it's the focus of your training all year long, that'll put you on the fast track to burn out or over training. I've seen this time and time again and even experienced it myself where athletes hit a mid season slump. They're in the middle of the race season and they should be peaking, but they're putting out worse numbers than they were three months ago. If this describes you, it may be due to cumulative fatigue built up over months of high intensity training. A 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. These high volume training periods may elicit the molecular signals needed to stimulate mitochondrial protein synthesis without creating undue autonomic disturbances that could lead to overtraining. An important thing to keep in mind is that seeing results from high volumes of low intensity training typically done in the base period is gonna take time, a lot more time than doing high intensity training, but doing it is still important. This of course doesn't mean that intensity isn't important. It definitely is, but it needs to be done strategically. This review sums things up nicely stating that the available evidence suggests that combining large volumes of low intensity training with careful use of high intensity interval training throughout the annual training cycle is the best practice model for development of endurance performance. The key word there being careful. One important concept of glossed over here is specificity of training. As you get closer to your race or goal, you want your training to become more specific to that goal. Going back to the study on Olympic cross country skiers, we can see that the volume of specific work increases as they approach racing and one of the main takeaways from the study was the higher specificity of training before the race period. This usually means that intensity of training increases because racing is generally high intensity, although this isn't always the case. For example, for those that race ultra endurance events that last hours, specificity requires that you maintain a high volume of training. I myself am an ultra endurance racer and my approach is generally to build volume during the base period and then maintain that volume while increasing intensity right before racing. Someone doing shorter races would be better off reducing training volume and increasing intensity before racing. All right, there's the research, but now let's get into specifics. What should base training actually look like over the course of a month or a week? Let's start with the general structure of a month and then I'll take you inside training peaks to show you how I build out a training week. One of the most common structures for a training month is to do three weeks on one week off. So basically you build up training load over three weeks and in the fourth week, you have a recovery week to rig your body of the fatigue that you've built up. Some may also choose to do four weeks on one week off. It doesn't really matter, but make sure you have that recovery week in there. That week is extremely important for making sure you don't tip over the edge of overtraining. Recovery week, sounds like you're just soft, dude. The recovery week isn't a week off the bike, rather it's a week of reduced volume and intensity while maintaining ride frequency. Because you'll be relatively fresh, this is also a good time to do an FTP test for a low priority race to get some numbers to see how you're progressing. As far as the other three weeks of the month go, you wanna make sure that you're employing progressive overload or increasing the training stress. This is necessary to avoid a fitness plateau. Give your body the same stimulus that it's already adapted to and it'll stop making adaptations. You can do this by increasing volume or intensity or both, but in the base period, this is usually done by increasing volume. For example, in week one, you might do eight hours, then 10, then 11 or 12, and then in the rest week, you might reduce that down to five or six hours. Traditionally, a base period lasts about three months, but it could go longer or shorter depending on when racing starts for you. Generally, you want about two months after base training to build intensity before racing starts. With that, let's get into what a training week during the base period should look like. I'll use the example of a 10-hour training week. Now, this is critical. Many riders with tight schedules assume that because they have less time to train, if they just bump up the intensity of all of their rides, that should make up for it. This is not the case. For example, going back to the study on Ironman triathletes, they found that in a three-zone model, a high amount of cycling training in zone two may contribute to poorer overall performance. And from this study on the impact of training intensity distribution, again using a three-zone model, accumulating more time at moderately high intensities does not necessarily develop a faster racing pace. A take-home message may be that sport training sessions should also attempt to avoid making every session the same intensity to avoid stagnation and staleness. That's the trap that many cyclists fall into, making every ride kind of hard but never easy and certainly not hard enough. Hmm, what should I do for a ride today? I don't really want to do intervals because those really hurt, but I also don't want to do an endurance ride because I want to feel like I'm actually getting in a workout. I've got it. I've tried kind of hard the whole time. Unless someone passes me on the bike path, in which case I'll sprint to stay ahead of them. Nailed it. During the base season, you may want to start with only zone two rides, but as you start incorporating intensity, you still only want to do it two or on occasionally three times a week. And that should mostly be done at threshold or steady state intensity, since that takes longer to develop than higher intensity. All right, let me show you how I build out a training week. We want to start by adding in our intensity for the week. At first, there won't be very much intensity at all as your body gets used to the higher volume of training, but after a couple of weeks, you want to start incorporating steady state or threshold intensity intervals. Let's say we decide our interval days are going to be Tuesday and Saturday, both of which are going to be steady state intervals done at 95 to 100% of threshold, and we're trying to accumulate 30 minutes to an hour of intense work depending on your ability level. These intervals don't have to be complicated. In fact, it's better if they're not at this time of year. What's important is accumulating time at these intensities. The next step is to add in your weight training. Now, if you haven't seen my weight training video, I highly recommend you go watch it to understand how important weight training is for cycling, and I'll leave it linked in the description, but basically here are the cliff notes. While coaches and athletes may argue about whether or not weight training is beneficial, the research couldn't be more clear. Weight training has a huge impact on cycling performance and should be a part of any serious cyclist training program. Once you get to the base season, hopefully you've already been doing some lifting in your off season, because being a newbie in the gym while trying to do a high volume of training on the bike won't mix well. During the base season, you may choose to reduce the training load of gym work to account for the increased training load of on the bike work. You wanna do this not by decreasing the weight, but by decreasing the volume of lifting. So the total number of reps you do when you go into the gym. This study on the comparison of recovery from resistance training tested high-intensity versus high volume resistance training and found that high volume resistance exercise results in greater performance deficits and a greater extent of muscle damage than about a high-intensity resistance exercise. So how do we put this into practice? Basically, you wanna be doing the same high-weight, low-rep work, but reduce the total number of sets you do. For example, if you worked your way up to 10 total sets in the off season, then you may wanna reduce that down to four to six total sets during the base season. This, of course, will depend on how demanding your on the bike training is that week. Once you get into race season, some may choose to cut weight training down to once a week or cut it out completely to allow for adequate recovery. Okay, so where in the week do we place these gym sessions? You wanna make sure you do them after the intervals, either the same day or the next day. In this example, I've got gym work on Wednesday after Tuesday's intervals, and then gym work again after Saturday's workout, which will give me two days to recover from the gym before doing intervals again the following Tuesday. The rest of the rides should all be zone two or below, and if you can get in at least one long ride in the week, that'll be extremely helpful for your endurance. For example, in this week, we've got an hour endurance on Wednesday, an hour and a half on Thursday, and a four and a half hour long ride on Sunday, with Monday and Friday being rest days. And if you like, you can include an hour active recovery ride on one of those days. This is a pretty good template of what a base training week should look like. If you got more or less time than this, then you can adjust the length of the endurance rides. You may also choose to up the difficulty of the intervals as you go. For example, you may start with four by 10 minutes at steady state, so you're doing 40 minutes of intense work, and then work up to four by 15 minutes of steady state, so you're doing 60 minutes of intense work. The main takeaway from this video should be this. If you wanna maximize your performance, don't take shortcuts. High volumes of zone two work will produce results slowly over time, and the base season or pre-season is the perfect time to focus on that. And then as you get closer to the race season, you can increase the intensity of your workouts, but more important than that, make sure your workouts are becoming more race-specific. Thanks for watching for weekly science-based training, racing, and gear-related videos. Be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell. If you found this information useful, be sure to give the video a like and share it with your cycling friends.