 At the end of the season, I took two weeks completely off the bike, and in fact took two weeks off of training in general. No riding, no running, no gym, no strenuous exercise at all. Did I get burnt out, lose all motivation, and say screw this whole cycling thing? No, I did this to ultimately get faster. Stick around to find out why. Welcome back to another video. This cyclist can be very obsessive about their training, which can be a good thing because it means that you're more likely to train consistently. However, there are times when an unwavering need to always be putting in big miles can actually hurt us. For example, rest days, which are crucial to recover from the hard work you've done to make adaptations and get fitter. If you never take a rest day, you'll find yourself in trouble very quickly. And just like you need rest days to recover during a training week, you need rest weeks or rest periods to recover from the hard work you've done over the course of a training season. This is something that almost every high-level pro implements in their own training, mostly because they've learned from experience how crucial it is. The physiological reasons for why a rest period is so effective are not entirely understood, but there are some theories. For example, this study on changes in blood values in professional cyclists found that over the course of a racing season, hematocritic and hemoglobin concentration decreased, but then returned to baseline levels during the off-season when riders typically take a break. This study on hemoglobin levels in professional cyclists found the same thing. Mean values for red blood cells, hemoglobin, and hematocritic were significantly lower during the racing season than during the non-racing periods. This reset may be important for those who do heavy training. Never take a rest period, and you may be training with chronically depressed blood values. Another potential explanation for the value of a rest period or an off-season may have to do with our hormonal response to a season of hard training. This study investigated the hormone response of two pro-cycling teams during a three-week grand tour. Looking at the riders' testosterone levels, they found that the team with more racing days leading into the event had lower testosterone levels to begin with, and that testosterone levels further decreased in both teams over the course of the three-week race. It's very possible that constantly pounding your body with hard training may have an effect on your hormone levels, particularly testosterone. That last study was an extreme example because it looked at riders who were doing a three-week grand tour, which is one of the most physically demanding events that you can do. However, that's not the only study coming to this conclusion. This study had power athletes not exercise for two weeks, and found that after this rest period, testosterone, growth hormone, and testosterone to cortisol ratio actually increased, while cortisol, or the stress hormone, decreased. These are all potential physiological explanations, but we haven't even touched on the psychological side. Constantly training year-round like your A-race is right around the corner is a good way to get burnt out. And if motivation is starting to become an issue for you, this may be the reason why. But my A-race actually is always right around the corner. It's called the Saturday morning coffee ride, and it happens every week, so I need to peak 52 times a year. Speaking of motivation, I've found that for myself and for the athletes that I coach, nothing increases motivation like taking some time off the bike. By the end of that rest period, you should be chomping at the bit to go for a ride, which is exactly what you want early in the season. Now let's differentiate here between a rest week and a recovery week. If you watch a lot of my videos, you've probably heard me talk about the importance of a recovery week. And while they do serve a similar purpose, a rest week or a season break is not the same thing. Generally, under normal training, you're going to want to have a recovery week every three to five weeks. For most riders, it's every fourth week, so they're fairly frequent. These are not weeks off the bike. They're weeks where your training volume or how much you ride and your training intensity or how hard you ride are decreased in order to bring yourself out of the valley of fatigue that you've dug yourself into with normal training. If, for example, you normally ride five days a week for a total of 10 hours with two high-intensity days, then during a recovery week, you may still ride five days, but just five or six hours and maybe just one high-intensity ride towards the latter part of the week with mostly zone one recovery rides earlier in the week. These weeks are critical for any serious cyclist training plan, and if you're not including them, it could mean one of two things. Your training isn't challenging enough, in which case you're leaving a lot of potential fitness on the table, or if your training is challenging enough but you're not taking them, you'll probably find yourself in a state of overtraining within a couple months. Okay, so what is the difference between that and a rest week, and when exactly in your season should you put these breaks? A rest week or a season break is time spent not training at all. No riding, no gym, no running, etc. Many riders like to cheat and go for a grocery store run on the cruiser or ride with the kids or show up at the local group ride, but it's fine because they went with a slow group this time. So instead of doing three Zwift races a day like I normally do, I just did one. Or two on certain days, but that counts right. While none of this is the end of the world, the best thing to do during this time is to not touch your bike and let it collect dust and cobwebs as hard as that is to hear. This is obviously not something that you're doing every fourth week like with the recovery week because if you did this that frequently the fitness loss would seriously hinder your progress. That's right, take a minute to gasp. I said you'll be losing fitness when you do this, at least in the short term. I find that this really scares serious riders because they think that taking a break will be a big step back in their progress. And while admittedly it is, think about it this way. You're taking one step back so that you can take two steps forward as opposed to staying in the same place all year because you do the exact same training all year. You see your training needs to have an ebb and flow to it in order to make progress. For example, this study looking at the training that led to gold medal endurance performances in cross country skiers showed clearly that volume and intensity changed dramatically throughout the season. There are many lessons to be learned from this study, but what we're concerned about here is the off season. Right after the athletes peak, they had a regeneration month where they trained very little at all. This pattern is not confined to cross country skiers. Top level runners, swimmers, and cyclists all have a time of the year where a break from training is taken. Okay, so what should this look like? For an example, let's take a look at the end of my season this year. My last race of 2020 was the Belgian Waffle Ride Cedar City, which I peaked for. This race was on Saturday, October 17th, and I didn't touch the bike again until Friday, October 30th, which is 12 days of no riding. Essentially a seven day week plus another five day week without the bike. During this time, I also didn't go to the gym or run. I embraced what most of my fellow Americans do and became a temporary couch potato. Although with the extra time that week, I was able to crank out two videos. Is that supposed to be impressive or something? If you actually let me run this channel, I'd be posting every time I got a KOM, which is, you know, every day. The point though is that during that two week period, I was completely resting. Now, two weeks is on the longer side for an off season break. This complete rest period at the end of the season should range from as little as five days to as many as 14 days. And exactly how long it is should depend on a couple of factors. Taking into account how demanding your season was, if you did a lot of racing or training, then take a longer break. If, however, you didn't do very much racing or training, particularly this year because of lockdowns and races getting canceled, then a shorter break is probably all you need. Another important factor is your motivation levels or how close to burnout you are. Feeling burnt out is pretty common towards the end of a long season. And if you're feeling that way, then taking an off season break may be the cure. In which case, I would opt for a longer one. However, if your motivation levels are still sky high, then you may be able to get away with a shorter one. The last factor has to do with your training experience. The longer you've been training, the more likely you are to hit a fitness plateau, making a longer break more necessary. Because your body will stop adapting to training stimulus that it's already adapted to, higher and higher training loads are needed in order to continually make progress. However, there's only so much that you can do in a week, which is why training methods that shock the body, like block periodization where you might have five high-intensity days in a week followed by a rest period, have shown promising results. Now, you may not think that taking a rest period is shocking your body at all, but in a way it is because it's something that your body is not used to. The hope is that by taking a rest, you're setting yourself up to train harder or for more hours than you otherwise could had you not taken the rest. This will allow you to break through that fitness plateau. For more experienced riders who've been training for a couple of years, I recommend a longer break. However, if you're newer to cycling, maybe you've just been training for a year or two, a shorter break is probably fine. There's one other time of the year where you may want to take a break from training and that's the mid-season break. If you have a demanding racing or riding schedule, I'd pick a time about halfway through the season where you can take four to seven days completely off. This may seem like fitness suicide in the middle of the season, but it can actually be the best way to save your late season. Again, burnout and fitness plateaus are common towards the end of the year, and this can be the best way to avoid that. I've used this method myself and with the athletes I coach, and they're often shocked to find that they're putting out better numbers and getting better race results in the month after taking the break. For me personally, taking a mid-season break in 2019 completely saved a deteriorating season. In April, my race results started to suffer and my power numbers were lower than they should have been, and my motivation was starting to dwindle as well. Rather than panic and try to train more to compensate like so many riders do, I took a break and two weeks after came back to win the Mohican 100 and set a new course PR, and two weeks after that win the Lumberjack 100. The lesson here is that if you start to see your fitness and motivation suffer mid-season, the answer is almost never more training, but actually the exact opposite. Alright, you've taken your mid-season break. What do you do now? Jump straight back into hard training? Mmmmm...yes. No, depending on how soon you need to be in peak shape again, take a one to two month off season where your riding is fairly unstructured and you're doing relatively low volume and intensity. This is the one time of the year where forgetting the cycling computer at home may actually be a good thing. This is also a great time of the year to do a little bit of cross-training like running or hiking or skiing, but in particular, it's a great time to get back into the gym. Gym work has been shown in study after study to have a positive effect on cycling performance. Riders and coaches alike like to imagine that there's a debate about whether or not cyclists should be lifting, but if you look at the science, there is no debate. Lifting makes you faster. That being said, if you're a new lifter or you haven't lifted in a while because of a busy race season, then getting back in the gym is going to make you very sore, like barely able to walk down the stairs sore. This will obviously affect your ability to ride long or hard, which is why you want to do it in the off season. Your riding volume and intensity is already low during this time, so it doesn't really matter. After about a month or two of lifting, the soreness that you feel after each lifting session will subside, meaning that you can start adding in higher volumes of training as you enter the base period. Thanks for watching. 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