 How do you become a faster cyclist on a 15 hour training week? Today I'll be getting into this topic as well as discussing why bumping up your training volume if you're currently at 10 hours of training a week or less could have a huge impact on your cycling performance. At the end of the video I'll give you an example training week and show you how that fits into a training month and even a full training season so you can get a better idea of how to maximize your hours on the bike. Welcome to another video my name is Dylan and I'm a cycling coach at CTS. In this week's video, I'm going to save you a bunch of time here. Here's what your 15 hour training week should look like. On Monday you chase Strava segments, on Tuesday you go on the Weekday Night World's group ride and when you get dropped you just say that you were taking it easy. Wednesday and Thursday you want to do a Zwift race and complain about how everyone is weight doping even though you yourself set your weight 10 pounds lower than it actually is. Friday is your recovery ride but if a fellow cyclist starts to pass you you better speed up to not give them that satisfaction. Saturday and Sunday you're going to get mid-packed at a Cat5 Crit and talk about how you missed your peak even though in reality you've been over-trained for the past few months. I've made two videos for time crunch cyclists fast on 6 hours a week and fast on 10 hours a week and now it's time to bump it up a notch. At 15 hours a week we're getting into the realm of riders who really take the sport seriously and want to make big improvements. It's still not at the level of pros who might train 20 to 30 hours a week but if you're allowing yourself this much time to train each week you can really accomplish a lot. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of what a 15 hour training week should look like let's first discuss why making the jump up to a higher volume training plan could have a huge impact on your cycling performance especially if you've reached a plateau at your current volume. This study on Ironman athletes analyzed their training before an Ironman event and found a significant inverse correlation between total training time and race time meaning that a higher training volume led to better performance. Not really a big surprise there Ironman's are ultra endurance events and it would stand to reason that training for long periods of time would help you in a race that well takes a long period of time. However most of us don't race this long is it really necessary for your average XC mountain biker or crit racer to get in those extra hours every week. This study on the 4,000 meter team pursuit world record looked at the training done in the lead up to this monumental achievement. 4,000 meters is an extremely short event by cycling standards yet these riders still trained at huge volumes. They stated that aerobic performance was trained through high overall training mileage of 29,000 to 35,000 kilometers per year. In fact the riders would even use road stage races as volume training before doing specific track work right before the event. Yes this study only looked at 4 individuals for a very specific event but this concept that increased training volume leads to better performance keeps coming up in the literature. For example this review on training intensity and duration distribution stated that an established endurance base built from high volumes of training may be an important precondition for tolerating and responding well to substantial increases in training intensity over the short term. The reality is that if you're looking to improve your fitness you need to stress your body more than it's already been stressed. You can do this by increasing training volume or intensity or both but you can only increase your training intensity up to a certain point before you start pushing over training which leaves you with increasing training volume. For example research has shown that bumping up the number of high intensity workouts done in a week like VO2max interval session surprisingly does not improve performance and it's been shown that 2 or 3 high intensity or threshold intensity sessions per week may be optimal and that additional increases in high intensity frequency do not induce further improvements but instead tend to induce symptoms of overreaching or over-training. Just like with anything don't jump into a high volume training plan if you're fairly new to cycling however if you've been riding for a while and you've experienced a plateau in your fitness then trying to fit in more hours into your training week may be your best option. With that said 15 hours gets into what I would consider a high volume training for which there could be a lot of potential benefit. So when you say 15 hours of training a week can we count the time that we spend at the brewery in our chamois after the ride because if so I'm at like world tour level hours. Now let's get into what you probably clicked on this video for which is how do you arrange a 15 hour training week to maximize your performance. Let me start by saying that you can't just build out a training week and follow that exact template over and over and over again and expect to make fitness gains. Your training needs to change over time this is what's known as periodization. The change from one week to the next could be small or even unnoticeable but take a week from January and a week from July and they could look completely different. Six to seven months before you want to be in peak shape your training on the bike should be relatively low in intensity. You should also be doing the highest volume of gym work at this time. The gym is an extremely important part of your training that should not be overlooked. As a cyclist you don't go to the gym for injury prevention or improved quality of life or improved posture or whatever. Sure those are all great secondary benefits but the real reason that you go to the gym as a cyclist is to quite literally improve your cycling performance. Increase the number of watts that you can push through the pedals. This is done through a number of physiological adaptations that happen when you lift and the science on how lifting affects cycling performance is well documented. For more information on this topic I've got a whole video on lifting for cycling that I've linked down in the description if you want to check it out. When you first start lifting you shouldn't include any intensity in your on-the-bike training. Your volume should be relatively low as well certainly not 15 hours a week for most of us. Believe me you'll be plenty sore from the gym. As your body adapts to lifting you'll be able to increase your training load on the bike. Eventually though lifting will have to take a back seat to your on-the-bike work and you may have to reduce it to a maintenance level or cut it out completely. Maintenance lifting means doing the same heavy weight but reducing the total volume of lifting when you go in the gym. As you get closer to racing the intensity of your training will increase because generally racing is high intensity. However this isn't always the case and what's more important is that your training becomes more race specific as you get closer to the race. For somebody doing a Fondo with 30 minute climbs that may mean doing more long rides and threshold workouts. For somebody doing cyclocross that may mean doing more 30-30 workouts. The higher the intensity of work the less time it takes to develop and the sooner you'll hit a plateau. This is why you really don't want to start doing race specific high intensity efforts until the month or two before racing starts. With all that in mind let's now get into specifics and I'll lay out an example training week and show you how that fits into a training month. The most common setup for a training month is to have three hard weeks of training followed by a rest week. That rest week is important because over the course of the previous three weeks you're going to be building up fatigue and you need to give your body time to recoup. You'll be shocked at how good you feel on the bike after a week of rest with a much reduced level of fatigue. That being said a rest week is not a week off the bike but rather a week of reduced training load. Most of the time the volume for these weeks is 40 to 60 percent of your normal training volume. The end of a rest week is also a good time to do an FTP test or a training race. The other three weeks of the month should increase in training load with each successive week. Again this can be done by increasing training volume or intensity or both. Once you have the basic structure of your month it's time to start planning out your individual training weeks. I like to start with the intensity for the week. As I stated earlier two or on occasion three intensity days is optimal. More than this and you'll see marginal to no benefit but you will be risking over training. You want these high intensity days to be done when you're well rested so you can do them at the highest quality possible and get the most out of them. This usually means doing intensity after a rest or recovery ride day but not always. Some find that they can perform intensity better after a light endurance day. This might take some experimenting on your part. For the purposes of this example we're going to have the intensity days right after the rest recovery days which are Monday and Friday making our intensity days Tuesday and Saturday. The types of intervals you do on these days is going to depend where in your training you are and what you're training for. Remember that the closer you get to racing generally the higher intensity these days are going to get but more important than that the more race specific they'll get. 15 hours of training a week is a relatively high volume so sometimes these high intensity days will turn into long days and this may even be beneficial if it's specific to your goal. For example the events that I train for last over six hours so I'll often include workouts that look something like this that have high intensity at the beginning and the end of a very long ride to simulate a race scenario. This is one of the main differences between a 15 hour training week versus a six or a ten. Because you've got more hours to play with you don't necessarily have to compartmentalize into long ride days and intense days if that's specific to what you're training for. If you are training for shorter events though I would make your intense days short and high quality. Once you have the intensity for the week the rest of the rides you do should be at zone two or below. There's really no need to push any harder than this and in fact doing so will only take away from the quality of your intense rides. Going back to the study on Ironman triathletes while increased training time was inversely correlated with race time that was only when this increased time was done at zone one in a three zone model which is what we would typically think of as endurance or below. More time at zone two in a three zone model actually led to slower race times and the study concluded that a high amount of cycling training in zone two may contribute to poorer overall performance. The reason may be that both high intensity and low intensity training are important components of the training program. This review stated that these high volume low intensity training periods may elicit the molecular signals needed to simulate mitochondrial protein synthesis without creating undue autonomic disturbance that could lead to overtraining. Basically adaptations are still happening when you ride at a lower intensity but without overstressing your body allowing you to properly recover between hard interval sessions. Going back to our example week the next workouts I'll put in are the long rides. These long rides are crucial for endurance and another big difference between a 15 hour training week and a lower volume one is that you can actually do more than one long ride in the week. I usually like to arrange them based on what I'm training for. For example for a stage race where I'm trying to handle many hard days back to back I may block the long rides together so that I'd have a high intensity day and then two long rides making for a big three day block. If I'm training for a one day ultra endurance event I may put in just one long ride in the week but make that ride very long significantly longer than any other ride in the week. For most people though what usually works best is spacing them evenly throughout the week after the high intensity. So in this example week we've got two long ride days one on Wednesday and one on Sunday and to finish things off we've got a shorter zone two ride on Thursday. After this I put in the gym work for the week. As I said some of us may choose to cut gym workout completely when we get into our season but for the majority of us especially masters athletes maintaining lifting is important. The placement of these gym sessions is important because you don't want soreness from the gym to interfere with your high intensity workouts. For this reason it's best to hit the gym after a high intensity session either the same day or the next day. Oftentimes soreness from lifting can linger two days after a session so I like to have at least two days between a weight training day and a high intensity day. All right to recap real quick let's start at the season level and then work down. Generally training should be lower in intensity in the off season and then increase in intensity as you approach racing but more important than this is that training should become more specific to your race as you approach racing. A training month is usually set up with three hard weeks followed by a rest week. Your training load should increase over the course of the three weeks and then during the rest week it's still important to ride but at a reduced training load which is usually done by decreasing volume. During your week you want to do two or on occasion three high intensity days per week which are done when you're the freshest. You also want to do one or two long rides per week and the rest of the rides in the week should either be short zone two rides or recovery rides. Weight training should be done after high intensity training either the same day or the next day. I like my plan better. Thanks for watching I hope you guys found this information helpful. Be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don't miss any uploads and if you like this video be sure to give it a like and share with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.