 How much do you need to train in order to get faster? It's a question that I get pretty frequently and with good reason. After all, it's one of the primary variables in training that you can adjust. To be specific, what I'm talking about here is volume, which is the amount of time that you spend at training. How many hours per week do you need to dedicate to the bike in order to improve? If you're looking for a specific answer like you need 12 hours per week to get to a four watt per kilogram FTP and 17 hours per week to get to five watts per kilogram, then I'm sorry to disappoint, but you're not gonna get that. And that's because the optimal training volume for you depends on a long list of factors. Some will do better with a higher volume and some will do better with a lower volume and more is not always better. In this video, I'm gonna be getting into what these factors are so you can better determine what the optimal training volume is for you. Let's start first with progressive overload. If you could know just one thing about training, you would want it to be this. Hmm, this sounds pretty important. Maybe I should actually listen this time. Oh look, Strava just sent me a notification. Progressive overload is the principle that you need to stress your body more than it's already been stressed. Once your body adapts to a certain workload, then it'll stop making adaptations until you further increase that workload. The two primary ways of changing your training load is by adjusting your volume or by adjusting your intensity or how hard you're riding. You're gonna wanna increase and decrease your volume and intensity throughout a season, but one issue that we run into here is that you can only increase intensity by so much before bad things start to happen. Research has shown that there is a point at which including more high-intensity intervals into your training week is no longer effective like in this study on interval training at VO2 max, which showed no further benefit to doing these types of intervals three times per week. Studies like this have led researchers to conclude that two to three high-intensity sessions per week is optimal. Doing more than this probably won't make you any faster, but it may very well leave you over-trained. Essentially, it's far easier to overdo it with intensity than it is with volume. And although there are exceptions to this rule, generally there's a cap to how much intensity you can fit in a week and still have it be effective training. And that cap is actually lower than most people think at around two sessions per week. Now, of course, you can bump up the intensity of these particular sessions, but again, only so much. After all, there's a limit to how hard you can go. Bringing us back to progressive overload, this means that if we wanna increase our training load with intensity, it won't be long before we've hit the ceiling. Now, volume has a ceiling too, of course. There's a reason why pros who have all the time in the world to train don't train 50 to 60 hours per week, but it does give us more room to play with when trying to increase training load. So with this in mind, how many hours per week should you train? Well, more than you did the week before. This is obviously a drastic oversimplification and there are a lot of nuances which I'll get into in a minute, but it actually is a good general rule. Now, you won't wanna suddenly jump from 10 hours per week all the way up to 20 hours per week. You're gonna wanna do it gradually. Generally, about a half an hour to an hour increase in volume each week is a good amount. This is one of the reasons why how much training experience you have or how long you've been training for is one of the biggest determinants of your optimal training volume. Procyclists put in some huge volume, often doing 20 to 30 hours per week or more. And this can give us an idea of what the limit is to how much a person could ride per week and still get faster. After all, these riders at the top of the sport are there in part because of how well they respond to training, mainly due to their genetics. These riders can respond to training better than anyone and yet they're not generally pushing over 30 hours per week with few exceptions. Now, there are people that do ride more than that like for example, people who do cross-country bike touring or those who are going for the record for most number of miles ridden in a year. But it's likely that these volumes are so great that recovery and intensity are compromised to the point that these riders are not actually getting faster by doing this to themselves. Now again, this does not mean that everybody would reach their potential at 20 to 30 hours per week. In fact, this is probably too much for most individuals due to a number of factors. Genetics being one of them as we just discussed but also rider age. Research has shown that recovery time after exercise slows as we age with older athletes experiencing lower motivation, greater fatigue and muscle soreness after high intensity cycling. If you're an older athlete watching this, then I'm sure you didn't need a study to tell you that but what this means for your weekly volume is that as you age, you may have to reduce the amount that you ride. You really didn't need a study to tell me that either because the old dudes at my local group ride remind me every 15 minutes when we hit a climb. Okay, if you need to do more volume than you did the week before and 30 hours per week is probably the limit if you're extremely physically gifted, then even if you start at zero hours, you're gonna hit that in less than a year and surely that can't be right. There is a point at which your body can't handle more training volume and again, this greatly depends on how many miles you have in your legs already. Those who have been training for years can handle a lot more volume than those who haven't. The important question now is how do you know when you've hit that point? How do you know when you're riding too much? Well, let's not forget that both high intensity, short duration training and low intensity, high volume training are important components of the training program. While the metabolic adaptations that occur with high volume training and high intensity training show considerable overlap, the molecular events that signal for these adaptations may be different. Both volume and intensity are important if you wanna make improvements. If you did nothing but long hours or you just did short hard rides, then you wouldn't be as fast as if you combined the two together appropriately in your training. That being said, there is a point at which volume will start to interfere with intensity. You'll simply be too tired from riding so much that you won't be able to ride hard and that's the point at which your volume is too high. But calling it a point is a bit misleading because there's actually a volume range where training can be maximized. On the low end of this range, you can prioritize intensity because you won't be overly tired from riding more miles than you're used to. Therefore, when you do have an intensity day, you can go deeper. On the other end of the range, you're riding enough that your intensity does take a hit, but not so much so that it starts to become unproductive. Where you fall in this volume range will depend on which phase of the season you're in. Studies on how the world's best endurance athletes train show that volume is high in the preseason and then as racing approaches, volume drops and intensity increases. This may be because an endurance base built from high volumes of training may be important for tolerating and responding well to a substantial increase in intensity. Periodization is achieved with modest reductions in total volume and a careful increase in the volume of training performed above lactate threshold as athletes transition from the preparation phase to competition. Early in the season it's okay for your intensity to be a bit lower to make way for higher training volume. That extra volume will likely increase the quality of your intensity sessions and how well you recover from those sessions later in the season. As you approach race season though, you'll want to increase intensity and have your training become more specific to your goal. This increase in intensity will require you to reduce your volume a bit so that you can hit those hard sessions as hard as possible. Lowering volume can often make competitive cyclists nervous about losing fitness, but it's been demonstrated that if you maintain your intensity or even increase your intensity, then reducing volume shouldn't lead to significant fitness loss. This is one of the reasons why the optimal tapering method for a race is to reduce volume and maintain intensity. Your volume should vary depending on where in the season you are, but it should also vary depending on what kind of event you're training for. Remember that while training intensity increases as you approach race season, so too does how specific your training is to the demands of those races. The longer that the races that you're training for are, the less that you're gonna wanna decrease volume. This will compromise your intensity a bit, but you're gonna need that high volume in your legs for a high volume event in order to maintain endurance. For racers who focus on ultra endurance events lasting five plus hours, I often recommend not reducing volume very much at all, unless of course you have a busy season with lots of back-to-back races, in which case recovery between races needs to be prioritized. You'll know that you're getting close to your volume ceiling when you can't hit your numbers during your interval sessions. Again, this may not be such a big deal early in the season with lower intensity interval sessions, but as the intensity increases, then you're gonna need to be in a fresher state going into these sessions. This will require a lower overall volume. Also, be sure to keep an eye out for symptoms of overtraining, like decreased motivation, irritability, trouble sleeping, decreased appetite, increase in resting heart rate, chronic fatigue, and of course plateauing or loss of performance. While it is easier to overtrain yourself with intensity, you can do it with volume, especially if you're combining volume with intensity, like you should be doing if you wanna get faster. Start to experience these symptoms and your volume may be too high. So to sum things up, the biggest factors determining your optimal training volume is your training experience and your genetics. The longer you've been training seriously, the more training load you'll be able to handle and hence the more training volume you'll be able to handle, but not only handle, but actually need in order to see improvement. And then of course, some of us are genetically gifted with the ability to handle more volume than others. Okay, cool, I'm adding that one to the list. At least I got something out of this video. Progressive overload should be applied, especially early in the season. Let's say you're at eight hours per week. Making a goal of getting to 10 hours per week by the end of the month and 12 hours per week by the end of the next month is pretty reasonable. As racing approaches, your volume will need to come down to make way for intensity. And finally, you'll know you're hitting your volume ceiling when you struggle to perform your intervals or when you start to experience symptoms of overtraining. Thanks for watching. I have training plans linked below available in different volumes that use the principles I talked about here that you can follow if you're interested. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe for more science-based cycling content just like this and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.