 How do you plan out your training season to maximize your potential? This is what we're gonna be discussing today. I'm gonna be getting into a little bit of training science and giving you guys example training weeks from each phase of the periodization cycle so you can see exactly how to plan for the upcoming season. Welcome back to another video. Now is the time to start thinking about what your training should look like for the upcoming year. I'll be giving you example weeks throughout the video from a rider who averages 10 hours of riding per week. These of course are just example weeks and they are by no means a one size fits all but they will give you an idea of how to organize your training. Let's start off at the beginning with the time of year that few riders take seriously or wanna talk about and that is the off season. Really dude? I've got quarantine, I've got the holidays, I've been drinking every night to cope with my constant Zwift race losses and now you're telling me that I shouldn't be riding at all because I need an off season? All I'm saying is that by the end of all this I'm gonna need some industrial grade livestock scale to weigh myself because I'm pretty sure that my bathroom scale doesn't go that high. I find that serious riders generally don't like to take a break from riding but having a down part of the year is crucial if you're pushing your body to the limit the rest of the year. For example, it's been shown that over the course of a season hematocrit and hemoglobin concentration can decrease but may return to baseline levels in the off season after a break. Taking a break may also have favorable effects on our hormone levels with research showing that hormones like testosterone and growth hormone decreasing after strenuous physical exercise like bike racing and increase following a break from regular training. All right, given this what exactly should you be doing in the off season? Well, it's important to start things off with some time completely off the bike. This time period may last five days to two weeks depending on how demanding your season was. After this, you'll want a month to two months where your training is fairly low in intensity, low in volume and unstructured. This is also a great time to do cross training like running, skiing, hiking, et cetera. But most importantly, it's a great time to get in the gym and getting into the gym is critical if you wanna maximize your potential on the bike. Almost every study done on how heavy leg work effects cycling performance shows favorable results likely due to improved neuromuscular efficiency and muscle fiber type conversion. The reason you wanna start lifting in the off season is because when you first start lifting you're gonna be extremely sore. Soar enough to the point that you really can't do very much high quality work on the bike. This is fine in the off season though because you shouldn't be doing high quality work on the bike anyway. After a month or two of lifting the soreness should subside and you can start increasing your volume on the bike during the base season. But before we get into that let's take a look at an example week from the off season. So in this week we only have three rides on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday and they're all relatively short and easy. We also have two runs on Tuesday and Sunday for some cross training. Again, these should be done at an easy, comfortable pace. The part of the week that you wanna be pushing yourself during the off season is during the two gym sessions each week. And you wanna have at least two days between these sessions as soreness can be the worst on the second day after a workout. All right, on to base training. This is the time of the year where your volume of training should increase to prepare yourself for the higher intensity work to come. There is some debate as to how necessary base training is. In fact, some people even suggest doing reverse periodization where high intensity work is done first and then you increase the volume later on. It's important to note though that there's hardly any evidence to support this kind of approach. Yet a more traditional base phase with high volumes of low intensity training before racing starts is something we observe in top level endurance athletes that has delivered world class performances. The majority of the riding that you do during the base phase should be done at zone two endurance or below 75% of your FTP. The goal during this phase is to increase your training volume as a means of increasing your training load. Remember that in order to see fitness gains you need to stress your body more than it's already been stressed. And you can do this by increasing training volume, training intensity or both. Increasing volume is the strategy at this point in the year and increasing intensity will become the strategy later on. This doesn't mean however that you don't do any intensity during the base phase especially towards the end of the base phase. Base training should last three months and in that first month you may stick strictly to zone two endurance riding. In the second month you may do one interval session a week and in that third month you may bring that up to two interval sessions a week. But these interval sessions are not max suffering, VO2 max efforts where you're supposed to be dizzy and nauseous by the end. Look, a wise man once said if you ain't puking, you ain't riding. And that man went on to get a top five finish at a weekday night training crit in the cat threes back in like 07. And more importantly than that he's faster than I am. So you know it must be true. The intervals that you do during base training should be lower intensity intervals like ones right at or just below FTP. For example, two by 20 minutes or three by 15 minutes at 95% of FTP. During the base phase it's also important to keep lifting although you may wanna reduce the volume of lifting that you're doing in order to make way for the higher volume that you're doing on the bike. For example, if you did 10 total sets of leg focus exercises when you went to the gym in the off season then during the base season you may just do six or seven. Timing your gym sessions around your intervals can also be tricky because you do not wanna be sore for your intervals. My recommendation is to do your gym sessions after you've done your intervals either the same day or the next day and make sure that you have at least two days between a gym session and your next interval session because the delayed onset muscle soreness that you get from going to the gym can be the worst two days after lifting. If that was a bit confusing let's go ahead and jump into an example week so I can show you exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, please do, man. You lost me all the way back at ride easy zone two. First things first, you're gonna want two recovery days. These can either be completely off or you can do a recovery ride that's an hour or less at no more than recovery pace. We have our interval days after the recovery days when we're the freshest with some steady state intervals done at 95% of FTP and the rest of the week is zone two endurance riding with a long ride on Sunday. The gym days are spaced so that there's enough recovery time between the gym session and the next interval day. After the three month base period we have the build period. This is the two months before racing starts or the time of the year that you wanna be in peak shape. And generally during this time, intensity of training increases but more importantly than that your training should become more specific to what you're training for. Even though intensity is increasing you still only want two or on occasion three intensity sessions per week during the build period. More than this likely won't help and may actually hurt your performance. Research into training intensity distribution has shown that bumping up the number of high intensity workouts done in a week not only does not improve performance but may actually be harmful to performance. Two or three high intensity or threshold intensity sessions per week may be optimal and more than this often leads to a state of overtraining. With two high intensity sessions in a week I generally go with a standard hit workout like 30-30 intervals or four minute VO2 max intervals and one more race specific workout. We have research to show that this may be the optimal strategy. For example, this study on specific intensity for peaking using 10K runners found that both specific and high intensity training increased race pace equally and stated that the combination of both high intensity training and specific training may lead to a higher training response. So a race specific workout what exactly does that look like? Let's take a cross country mountain bike racer for example a race specific workout here might be four or five, 10 minute intervals done on trail to simulate the start of a cross country mountain bike race where the first minute is close to max pace and then you settle into race pace. There are obviously endless ways to arrange a race specific workout for a wide variety of events but it's important to keep in mind what the demands of your event are and try to mimic those demands in training. For example, if the event that you're training for is long then go long with your race specific workout. If you know that your race is gonna end in a sprint then do a couple sprints. It's not uncommon for volume to go down during this period as intensity goes up and research into the relationship between volume and intensity shows that doing this allows you to preserve your fitness. These two studies done on reducing training load over 15 weeks reduced either volume or intensity in subjects training by either one third or two thirds. In the study that reduced intensity endurance was decreased significantly by 21% in the one third reduced group and by 30% in the two thirds reduced group. However, in the study that decreased volume long term endurance remained the same in the one third group and only decreased by 10% in the two third reduction group. So by reducing volume you can retain most if not all of that base fitness that you built up and make room for more high intensity training. This is the strategy that I would go with if you do shorter races like cyclocross or criteriums or cross country mountain bike racing. If however you're training for longer events I would maintain volume and increase intensity. The reason for this is that if you reduce your volume leading into a high volume event then your training is actually getting less specific. And if you show up on the line of a century ride and you've done nothing but one or two hour rides in the month leading into it then you may struggle towards the latter part of that event. As far as how much gym work you should be doing during this time, it's really gonna depend on how busy your race schedule is. If you're the kind of racer who's doing races every single weekend then you may have to simply scrap gym work during this part of the season because you're already gonna have a lot to recover from. If however your races are more spread out or perhaps you're not a racer at all and you're just training to get more fit on the bike then I would keep gym training in your program but at a maintenance level. And there's a couple of ways that you can do this. Instead of lifting twice a week you could just lift once a week. You could also further reduce the number of sets that you're doing in the gym or if your training on the bike is really taxing then you may reduce the weight that you're lifting with each set. You will likely lose some strength when you do this but remember that our goal is not to lift the most amount of weight. It's to be as fit as we can be on the bike. Maintaining gym work may be even more important if you're an older individual because research shows that older cyclists performance increased even more with the introduction of lifting than it did with younger cyclists. And this is likely due to the fact that we lose muscle mass as we age. The same rules for organizing lifting in a training week during the base season apply to the build season. Let's go ahead and jump into an example week. Same as the base week we have two recovery days that can either be completely off or recovery rides. The main difference you'll see is with the intensity that we're doing. We have our race specific session on Tuesday with MTB race start intervals and then a more traditional VO2 max interval session on Saturday. Again, the rest of the week is still zone two endurance. Increasing intensity does not mean increasing intensity on every single ride. We still have a Sunday long ride, although not as long as in the base season. And again, we have two gym sessions spaced appropriately for recovery, although at this point these are really just maintenance sessions. Okay, you've done your off season training, you've done your base training, you've done your build training and now race season is here or group rides are back or that charity century ride or Strava KOMs are ripe for stealing including Strava KOMs as an afterthought at the end of the list of things to train for. That's just straight up disrespectful, bro. This is when we get into the taper slash race period. During this time, you're gonna wanna drastically reduce volume and maintain high intensity training regardless of whether or not you're training for a long distance event or not. Again, this strategy of reducing volume but not intensity has been shown to be the most optimal tapering strategy. For example, this meta analysis looking at many studies on the effects of tapering on performance found that the optimal tapering strategy was one that reduced volume without any modifications in intensity or frequency. They also found a sweet spot for reducing training volume at 40 to 60%. So we know that we need to reduce volume and maintain intensity but exactly how long should a taper be? The optimal taper length will vary from person to person and finding what works best for you will take a little bit of experimentation. If we're classifying races into A, B and C with A being the most important races and C being the least important races then I would follow this guideline. For C races, don't taper at all. Just treat it as a normal training day. For B races, I would do a half a week taper. So if the race is on Saturday then I might start tapering around Wednesday. For A races, you want a one to two week taper. Again, some will do better with a two week taper and some will do better with a one week taper. During your taper, you wanna either be riding very hard or very easy but you don't want workouts so hard that they're gonna take days to recover from. So what exactly does a workout like this look like? Where's the fine line here? Well, for example, if during a normal VO2 max interval session you do five four minute efforts at VO2 max then perhaps during a taper week you might just do three efforts. You're still doing each individual interval very hard but because there are fewer of them this workout shouldn't completely zap you. As far as gym work goes tapering is the time that you should stop going to the gym especially if it's before an A race. All of your focus and energy should be on your on the bike work and making that as high quality as possible. Let's go ahead and jump into an example week before an A race so I can show you what a tapering week should look like. With a Sunday race we have a pre-race workout on Saturday. This is mostly done at zone two with a couple of opener efforts thrown in. The exact openers you do is not super critical. You're just trying to get your legs feeling good for the next day. For this particular opener workout there's a five minute at FTP, a two minute at 110% of FTP and a one minute at 130% of FTP. Then we have two intensity days in the week but you'll notice that these are both half of a normal workout. Three VO2 max intervals instead of five and one set of 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off sprints instead of two or three. The rest of the rides in the week are short and easy recovery rides. That's a full periodization cycle for you right there and that's it for this video. If you enjoyed this video and you learned something be sure to give it a like, subscribe for weekly cycling videos just like this one and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.