The steps for building an effective cycling training plan are like the steps for making the perfect loaf of bread …
Kneading the dough helps create gluten, making the dough elastic and stretchy. Your daily workouts knead your “dough” — your muscles.
But if you want a perfect loaf, one that’s light and fluffy, the dough must rest, recover and have time to rise. It’s only during this rest and recovery that the dough gets ready to become a great loaf of bread when fired in the oven.
So too, you need to let your muscles have time to rest and recover before facing the fire of your next workout or competition.
And just like too much kneading creates a dense, unappetizing loaf … too much training will leave you unable to perform at your best.
2 Planning Steps in Every Cycling Workout Plan
There are two basic steps to planning your training:
- Progressively increase training load, allowing for adequate rest and recovery.
- Over time revise workouts to look more like your goal event.
Increasing training load has two components. An increase in training volume and an increase in training intensity.
The Basics of Training Volume
What does “volume” look like?
Volume comes from the duration of your workouts – the raw amount of time you spend riding. Volume also comes from frequency of workouts — the number of riding days per week, even the number of workouts within one day. Elite riders sometimes have two workouts in a day: a morning workout and an evening one.
Riding once a week for 5 hours is a low volume bike training plan. In comparison, riding 5 times a week, for 1 hour each time, is a higher volume plan. Both have the same weekly hours of training. Daily training (almost without regard to session length) is a higher volume approach because of the frequency component. It’ll lead to better fitness too.
The Basics of Training Intensity
What does intensity look like?
Intensity creates higher heart rates and higher power outputs in your workouts. Any way you create higher heart rates and/or power outputs will result in a high intensity workout.
Let’s look again at the 5 hour example. You’ll be able to have a higher intensity workout in a 1 hour session than in a 5 hour session. So, 5 days of intense one hour sessions create more adaptations than a single 5 hour session.
High Dose, Low Dose, Minimum Effective Dose
When thinking about medications, dosage means the concentration of medicine.
Training has a dosage angle too. Workout intensity and duration combine to create dose. The higher you make either of these, the higher is your training dose.
You will need high dose training from time-to-time to improve. But you cannot be doing high dose training all the time. Like an actual drug over-dose, continual high dose training is maladaptive. It will leave you more broken down than feeling stronger.
A key job of your coach is to manage your training dose, making it appropriate to you and the time of your training year. A coach will help you find your minimum effective training dose.
Without a coach, you’ll need to experiment with blending high dose and low dose training. It’ll take some time to discover what works best for you over days of the week, and across full weeks in a month. It’s not a one-size-fits-all world.
For simple events, a prepackaged cycling training plan will get you onto the right path. Elite athletes will find higher training gains under the watchful eyes of a coach.
What’s a Serious But Non-elite Rider To Do?
Ok, you’re not yet “elite.” Without the full benefits of a coach, here are the basic principles you should follow.
You’ll apply frequency, duration and intensity to build your training plan.
Novice and intermediate riders need to focus on their training frequency and duration. How many times you train each week (also referred to as a microcycle) is frequency. The length of each training session is duration.
Training frequency will develop your daily habits to become a successful athlete. Every day, you need to decide if you should be training or resting. You’ll only deserve a complete rest day if you’ve trained the day before.
The serious bike racer trains six days a week, with one recovery day. In the beginning, your recovery day should be completely off the bike. You could do a yoga session, or a stretching routine.
As you advance, a recovery day can become a simple, very easy recovery ride. You will pedal by turning your legs over, being mindful to keep very little pressure in your legs. You only want to stimulate blood flow in your legs. You’re not working them out.
Training duration – how long you ride – will build the endurance you need as an athlete. All your high-end power will eventually grow on top of your base endurance.
Build a Base Then Build High Intensity Power
As you get started in your training career, you only need to be a rider. Ride lots. An hour to two hours each day. Three to four hours when you’ve got more time, like on weekends if you’ve got a five day workweek to juggle.
For advanced riders, training intensity will build your race performance – not raw volume. Once you’ve got the basic stamina to ride four hours at a time, you’ve then got to build upper end power with short high intensity interval training (HIIT).
Short and powerful attacks will separate you from the field. The fewer opponents around you at the finish line, the better winning chances you have. Whether it’s joining a breakaway with a small group of riders, a solo effort, or a finishing sprint kick, winners develop quick sharp powerful efforts to leap to victory.
How To Measure Training Intensity
Intensity is measured three ways: using Rate of Perceived Effort, Heart Rate, and Power. Advanced riders use all three. Each has a time and place in your training.
Take wind and hills out of the picture, and you can also use a fourth way: Speed.
On a stationary trainer, speed is an excellent proxy for power. That’s why companies like TrainerRoad and Zwift have built speed versus power curves for most stationary trainers on the market. These curves will take your speed and display the corresponding power output.
So, when training indoors, and you don’t have a power meter, then use speed as a substitute. Without a power meter indoors, aiming for a particular speed during an interval is exactly like aiming for a power.
The Borg 10-Point Scale for Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE)
- Nothing at all
- Very light
- Light
- Moderate
- Somewhat hard
- Hard
- Hard
- Very Hard
- Very Hard – FULL GAS!
- Very, very hard (nearly maximal)- NEARLY GASSED!
- Maximal – NOTHING LEFT…
RPE is subjective. You need to make vital race decisions based on feel. It’s often hard to look at your Heart Rate (HR) of Power numbers in the heat of competition. While executing your workouts, learn your own sensations and relate those to RPE.
Objective measuring tools are HR monitors and Power Meters.
HR measures your effort going INTO a workout. It’s an input.
Power measures the force coming OUT of a workout. It’s an output.
Important Training Intensity Thresholds
You have two key intensity thresholds: Aerobic Threshold (AeT) and Anaerobic Threshold (AnT).
AeT is the low-end effort where training begins to produce basic endurance benefits. AnT is the start of the high-end efforts needed to win races.
AeT is approximated by: the Maffetone HR (180-your age); or 65% of your maxHR; or AnT – (20 to 40bpm: use about -30 and you’ll be close); or RPE of 3 to 4, but closer to 3.
AnT starts at RPE 8. Any full gas effort lasting less than about five minutes, down to 15 seconds will be above your AnT.
Ride low intensity training sessions around your AeT. Ride high intensity sessions around your AnT. Avoid too much time spent between these thresholds.
Now Let’s Put It All Together
Your basic day-to-day workout pattern in one microcycle (or week) should look like this:
- 3-day block of long endurance activities or high intensity intervals. But don’t make them 3 days of the same kind of activity.
- One day of a low intensity long endurance ride. This should have an RPE of nothing harder than 3.
- Another 2 days of long endurance or high intensity, or back-to-back of the same kind.
- One day of complete rest for beginners and intermediate athletes. Advanced athletes can make this day no more than 1 hour of riding at an RPE of 1-2.
This pattern will give you a microcycle of 6 days riding that has a specific training focus, with one day of rest. Often riders will build the rest day into a Monday or a Friday.
Each microcycle should have 1 to 3 higher intensity days. Your other days should focus on endurance development rides.
Early in the training year you should have about 1 to 2 higher intensity rides in a microcyle.
Later, as you get closer to your goal event, you should kick up the intensity. Have more microcycles approaching the limit of 3 higher intensity riding days.
Revise Workouts to Look Like Your Goal Event
And finally, in the last month before your goal, make more of your riding days look like your event day.
For example, if you’ll be riding a gran fondo that’s 122km long, you should be including at least one weekly ride at least 100km long in the month prior to your event. That long ride should approach about 150km long the week before your event (but not the day before!!). A little over-distance training is a good thing.
On these long rides you’ll practice your on-bike eating and nutrition strategies to ensure you know what will work for you on event day. You’ll also discover a riding pace you can hold for the event, over terrain similar to what you expect to face.
Keeping Balance Between Life and Your Cycling Training Plan
You must also balance your training days with how much your lifestyle can handle. With a stressful job, especially one centred on manual labour, you need more days between high intensity workouts.
If riding is basically your full-time job, then you’ll have the freedom to ride more than 20 hours a week. But much research supports an 80-20 focus to these workouts. 70-80 percent of your workout sessions (not raw time but number of individual workout sessions) should focus on RPE 3 endurance riding. 20-30 percent of your workouts should be built around higher intensity interval sessions.
So, over a 10-day sliding window, you’d have 7 or 8 endurance days, and 2 or 3 interval days.
Early Season Base Training
The pattern of early season base training is no more than one interval training session per week. Make the rest of your rides endurance riding. These endurance sessions should range from one hour up to 5 or 6 hours on the high side (but only once a week at that length for amateurs).
You’ll progress fastest as a cyclist if you make all this training on the bike. This is what we call Specific training – a primary principle of athletic training. Specific training develops Peripheral fitness.
This means it develops the peripheral muscle groups needed to move the bike forward with skill, speed and power. It’s all about your cycling legs.
But you’ve also got Central fitness needs, which trains your heart, lungs and blood. These changes don’t need the specificity of cycling.
Non-specific cross-training like running and cross-country skiing will support your Central fitness training. It doesn’t need to be all cycling. During base training it’s fine to include much cross-training. It still develops Central fitness.
An effective base training session is combining cross country skiing and riding.
Spend about 2 to 3 hours of cross-country skiing followed by about 20 to 30 minutes of riding on a trainer or rollers. The cross-country skiing gets your mind and body outdoors. It targets the Central fitness work.
The ending short bike ride reminds the Peripheral fitness muscles that you are training to be a cyclist, not a cross-country skier.
Remember to Rest
Keep in mind, you can’t be training all the time. Training only increases your potential fitness. Rest and recovery will solidify your fitness.
Muscles need time to heal on a microscopic level. New mitochondria (the energy factories inside muscles) don’t materialize overnight. It takes about 48 hours for the body’s systems to grow stronger from a tough workout.
The Difference Between Recovery and Adaptation
Recovery is more of a feeling. Adaptation is rooted in physiology.
Recovery is a return to normal training function, putting out the power you always have been able to muster. You feel good to go.
Greater muscle strength, improved oxygen transfer, and muscle capillary growth are all adaptations. These develop from immune system responses. You can’t make them happen faster than your body allows.
Research shows that ice baths and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs like ibuprofen) inhibit your immune system. They make you feel good to go – recovered. But they block full muscle adaptations. Avoid them during regular training.
Ignore recovery too long and your genetics will trigger the maladaptive overtraining response. That’s a deep-seated hormonal problem. It can take months, even years, to recover from. Perhaps you can ignore full recovery by using performance enhancing drugs … which I hope you won’t do!
Pay attention to how your moods and how your body feels from day-to-day, week-to-week. Get 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night. In fact, sleep is probably your one recovery superpower.
Are you not feeling refreshed when waking up? Getting grouchy? Then you need more low intensity training days. Or take time off the bike completely. Unplanned days off are fine if you need them.
Your ultimate cycling success goal is not feeling less tired. It’s becoming more fit. Give it time while following a balanced cycling training plan!