 Base season has come to an end for me and in this video I'm going to show you exactly what my training has looked like over the past few months with all the highs and lows and believe me there have been highs and lows. It has not been a picture perfect base season but then again it rarely is for anybody. That being said from a pure numbers standpoint this may be one of the most successful base seasons that I've ever had. I currently sit at an estimated FTP of 370 watts which is dead even with my peak from last year and a CTL or fitness score of 134. Of course it remains to be seen whether these numbers on a screen translate into actual race results which at least for me is how I measure the success of a season. Hold on a second did you just refer to your FTP as just a number on a screen? Unbelievable. By the way I know you didn't ask but my FTP? 380. The training method that I chose over the 3 month base training period is what many would consider traditional base training which meant a ton of time at endurance zone or zone 2. This method has gotten its fair share of criticism in recent years with many opting for more intensity in the base period or even opting for reverse periodization in which intensity is high early and volume is low and then as you approach racing volume increases. I'm not saying that doing more intensity in the base season is entirely flawed but there is a reason why most elite athletes with all the time in the world to train generally go with a more traditional approach. Take the training done by Olympic and world champion gold medal winning cross country skiers that was documented in this study. These athletes reported their training every day leading to their most successful competitions and what they found was this. During the general preparation period or what we might call the base period training volume was extremely high reaching an average of almost 80 hours per month. 80 hours in a month may seem like a lot but for elite cyclists it may be even higher than this. Given the nature of bike racing and the fact that it's generally easier to recover from efforts on the bike than it is from other endurance sports, elite cyclists are often clocking in over 30 hours of training per week. All you have to do is look up any pro cyclist on Strava who regularly posts and be amazed by the crazy high volume that they're putting in on a regular basis. Back to the study though. During this general preparation period specific training was low and then as racing approaches volume goes down and specific training goes up. If we take a look at the intensity distribution we see a similar pattern. High intensity frequency and how intense these intensity sessions are goes up as racing approaches and during the base period intensity makes up a tiny portion of the overall training load. The authors state that high training volume has emerged as a key commonality in successful endurance training. Of course it varies from sport to sport. For example top international runners are reported to only train 500 to 600 hours per year while a case study of an international level triathlete reports over a thousand hours of training per year. I know that this is not the trend among many training platforms, coaching services or coaching books. Shoot I myself have a video about how to get fast on six hours per week and I sell six hour per week training plans. For many of us that's all the time in the week that we have to train and so we've got to work with what we've got. But if you are looking to bump your performance up to the next level and you do have the time gradually keyword there being gradually increasing your training volume is one of the best ways to do it. It's tempting at this point to think well I don't really feel like riding that much so maybe if I just ride harder on all of my rides that'll make up for me riding less. Seems logical right? According to research this is actually a flawed approach. A great study that demonstrates this is this one on Ironman Triathletes which found that a higher percentage of training time at zone two in a three zone model which is the intensity above endurance pace was associated with slower competition times. While athletes do perform these events with heart rates mainly in zone two better performances are associated with more training time spent in the easier endurance zone one. A high amount of cycling training at this higher intensity zone two may contribute to poorer overall performance. In this review a short term period of high intensity interval training can elicit improvements but 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 disturbance that could lead to overtraining. Basically trying to take shortcuts by bumping up the intensity and riding at a lower volume during the base season will not produce the same results as hardening up and just putting in the hours. For some of you that's not what you wanted to hear but it is what you needed to hear. You know who you are. What? Don't look at me. I'm pretty sure he was talking about you. Now that we've done a quick review of the science let's get into what I did during my 2021 base season. I followed a three week on one week off training pattern for the most part but I'll get into that. This meant that I had three hard weeks followed by one recovery week and the plan was to repeat this cycle three times. Let's kick things off with the first month. During this month other than the recovery rides that I did once per week every single ride was a zone 2 endurance ride. No intervals whatsoever. I entered the first week well rested and recovered from the off season sitting at a CTL of 73 and a TSB of 16. Now I've got to make this point. These numbers that training peaks gives you are not the end all be all. A lot of riders love to obsess about their CTL, ATL, TSB, etc. But really they should be used as a rough guide. Some of you probably have no idea what any of those acronyms stand for or what the heck I'm even talking about and that is perfectly fine too. I promise I'm not going to get too nerdy with the numbers in this video. Yeah, don't believe that for a second. During the first week I log a little over 21 hours at 854 TSS or training stress score which is a number that takes into account intensity and duration to assess how stressful a ride was. In week two I bumped that up to 24 hours although not much more TSS and then we have the third week and knowing that I have a recovery week coming up I bumped that volume dramatically up to 30 hours and over 1100 TSS and by the end of this week I hit a CTL of 100. Going from 24 hours to 30 hours may seem like a pretty extreme jump and that's because it is. I would normally not recommend making a 6 hour jump in training volume from one week to the next especially if you haven't hit that target training volume before. But given that I have done 30 hour weeks in the past I was pretty confident that my body could handle it. During the recovery week I rode 15 hours with a TSS of a little over 500 but you'll notice that in the early part of the week it's mostly one to two hour recovery or light endurance rides and then by the weekend we're back up to normal training volume with two long rides. We then move on to the second month. During this month I have two intensity days and both of them come in the first week. I was actually only planning to do one intensity day but I wasn't satisfied with how the first one went. Here in the first week I set out to do a tempo workout on Tuesday which are efforts at 85-90% of FTP. As you can see I was able to do 20 minute efforts at this intensity and then I was done which for me at this intensity is what I would basically consider a failed workout. I didn't let this get to me though because I hadn't done this sort of intensity in over three months and at this point in the season often times all it takes is one hard session to get you back in the game. Sure enough I go back out on Saturday and manage to accumulate two hours at tempo intensity which for me is right at 300 watts. The rest of the riding in the week was easy zone two and the total time ended up being 24 and a half hours and just a bit under a thousand TSS. Now that I had wet my whistle with some tempo it was time to go back to straight zone two but really ramping up the training volume as a means of increasing my training load. For those with less time to train I usually opt for keeping one intensity session per week during the remainder of base two but fortunately I had the time to go big. The next two weeks are both right at 30 hours and over 1100 TSS. I also go a bit crazy with my long rides this month logging a 7 hour and 45 minute ride on week two and a 10 hour ride on week three and as you can see from the following days that took quite a bit to recover from and in hindsight was perhaps not the best training decision but I survived and finished off the week with a solid Saturday and Sunday and ending base two with a CTL of 121. The recovery week after this one looked very similar to the first one 15 hours and around 500 TSS. The third and final month is far from picture perfect in fact halfway through I have to scrap the month and start over after a bit of rest. This is the first week and no complaints here with 25 hours and 1100 TSS. I had a tempo workout on Tuesday where I managed three hours at just over 300 watts. Week two also starts off great with my most successful tempo workout to date on Tuesday where I was able to accumulate five hours at 300 watts during that ride. Basically this told me that my FTP has gone up and I need to increase my tempo wattage for the next workout. By Saturday though disaster strikes and I come down with a cold. The symptoms were not severe just a sore throat and a runny nose and it can be very tempting to just keep on training when this happens. However when you do this you're only delaying the recovery time. In my younger years I've literally had a cold that has lasted over a month because I was too stubborn to stop training. Younger years? Isn't it cute when he tries to sound old and experienced? I did no riding on Saturday and Sunday and most of the next week was just short easy rides trying to get back to full health. By the weekend I was feeling better and I essentially had two options continue where I left off with base three or start base three over again and considering that I had basically just had a recovery week I opted for the latter. Now I start the next block on a Saturday instead of a Monday which will make tallying up the numbers for the week a little less straightforward. The first day back I decided to do something that I almost never do and then I haven't talked about at all in this video yet and that is an FTP test. The reason I don't test is because I use a training app called Exert. A lot of you are already familiar with it but one of its key features is that it estimates your FTP. I won't get into exactly how it does it here that may be a topic for a future video but basically I use this number as a rough estimate of where I'm at instead of testing every month or every other month. That being said sometimes it's good to double check or even give Exert a good number to work with and that's exactly what I did on Saturday to kick off the block. And to my surprise I hit 370 watts for 20 minutes which is even with my highest 20 minute power that I've ever recorded. Mind you that this is after doing almost nothing but zone 2 for the past two months just at a sufficiently high volume to create enough training stress. I then followed that up with another great tempo workout on Tuesday bumping up the power to 320 watts and accumulating three hours at that intensity over the course of the ride. The rest of the week was zone 2 totaling 28 hours and over 1200 TSS. The next week though trouble strikes again. After a solid threshold interval session on Tuesday with 5 by 10 minutes at 360 watts I suffer a crash on Wednesday and feeling a little out of it decide to cut the ride short. Over the next couple days my head hurt making me think that I may have gotten a minor concussion. Now I had no other symptoms. No memory loss. No light or noise sensitivity and no changes in sleeping patterns. So if it was a concussion it was a very minor one. That being said I still kept the riding short and light over the next three days to see how I felt. Making the second week just 21 hours and around 800 TSS. Not optimal but at this point I simply don't have time to start base three over again because racing is right around the corner. So I decide to keep chugging and make the last week of the base season as big as I could. The week was supposed to start with a gravel race on Saturday but I didn't want to risk crashing again with a possible concussion and my hands were pretty torn up from the crash which means that anything but road riding was going to be difficult. So I stuck to the road for this week. I started things off with a four day block of big rides back to back totaling 22 and a half hours in four days. By the last day of that block I was absolutely cooked and the next day on Wednesday we can see that I attempt to do a recovery ride, get eight minutes in and say nope this is a bad idea and turn around and come back. I finish off the week with a three hour ride on Thursday and then a monster seven plus hour ride on Friday. In this ride I attempt to do some intensity at both tempo and threshold to finish out the month but I'm really just too fatigued at this point and it ends up becoming an endurance ride for the most part. All right, totals for the week. 33 hours of riding and over 1300 TSS and being that I was on my road bike the whole week I was able to keep the speed high and manage just over 600 miles over the seven day period which is by far the most number of miles I've ever done in a week. As it stands right now on the first day of my third recovery week my CTL is 134 and exert is estimating my FTP at 370 watts. So for those of you who dozed off during the last part of the video which let's be honest is probably most of us at this point, let me summarize for you. He got sick and then he crashed and he thinks that those are good reasons to not ride. Lame. One thing that I also need to mention is that over this three month period I've been maintaining weightlifting twice a week although at a reduced volume and intensity to make way for a higher training load on the bike. I'll probably do a video in the near future about how to do this properly. Thanks for watching. If you liked hearing about my own training, let me know down in the comments. Maybe I'll make more training updates in the future. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like. Subscribe for weekly science based cycling videos just like this one and share this video with your cycling friends. See you in the next one.