The Road Cycling Performance Manual

WITHOUT STRUCTURE AND PLANNING YOU’LL NEVER PERFORM TO YOUR BEST. IN THIS CHAPTER LEARN HOW TO PLAN YOUR YEAR AROUND KEY EVENTS, INCLUDING SPECIFIC TRAINING BLOCKS AND STRUCTURING YOUR TRAINING WEEKS.

‘I inherited that calm from my father, who was a farmer. You sow, you wait for good or bad weather, you harvest, but working is something you always need to do.’
MIGUEL INDURAIN, FIVE-TIME TOUR DE FRANCE WINNER

FOR ALL PROFESSIONAL RIDERS, one of the key moments of their year is when they sit down with their directeur sportif and are handed their race schedule for the year. This will dictate their existence for the next 12 months and determine their training structure and priorities. A Classics specialist, such as Greg van Avermaet, will be looking for early season form for gruelling spring races such as the Paris–Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders. As the focus changes to the hillier Ardennes Classics (Amstel Gold, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège), punchier climbers, like Philippe Gilbert, start to appear, and the odd Grand Tour contender – especially if they have the Giro d’Italia in mind – may even make a cameo appearance, but will rarely trouble the podium.

In the modern era, genuine Tour de France contenders have focused solely on those three weeks in July. They’ll loiter at the back of the field, building up racing mileage during a few early season events, such as the Tour Down Under. They’ll then usually disappear off the racing scene and dedicate themselves to a monk-like training existence – at the top of Mount Teide on Tenerife if you’re Chris Froome – before emerging for pre-Tour final tune-up events, such as the Dauphiné Libéré, in full Tour-winning form. This approach relies on structured and methodical training, rather than chaotic and often unpredictable racing, to deliver Tour contenders to the Grand Départ in the best form possible. From the moment after crossing the finish line on the Champs Élysées at the previous year’s race, the next 11 months are meticulously planned into dedicated training blocks.

Similarly, goal focused training and planning back from key events has been one of the pillars of success of the Great Britain Cycling Team. This approach began with timed events, such as the team pursuit, kilo and team sprint, on the track. With such controlled events and environment, it was a relatively simple calculation to determine the power output needed by each rider to set a world-beating time and how long they had to get the riders there.

‘For the Rio 2016 Olympics things focused down from two years out when we sat down with our team coach, physiologist and strength/conditioning coach and they presented a plan to us called What it Takes to Win. This was the time that they thought we’d have to ride to win gold in the team pursuit at the Olympics and the power we’d have to achieve to do that. This was then broken down into smaller performance goals. These markers would be used to track improvement along the way. We’d then use a phase planner with all the competitions in the lead up to the Olympics.’
KATIE ARCHIBALD, GREAT BRITAIN CYCLING TEAM

This ‘What it Takes to Win?’ philosophy was famously applied to the far less controllable environment of road racing for Mark Cavendish’s win at the 2011 World Championships in Copenhagen. It doesn’t always go 100 per cent to plan, though. For the 2012 Olympic road race, detailed calculations were made regarding Cavendish’s required power-to-weight ratio to keep him in touch during the multiple ascents of Box Hill.

‘Planning a season is a joint effort between the directeur sportif, coaches and the rider. It’s then a case of seeing how that fits in with the other riders and working out a plan. Once the plan is in place and we’ve decided which races I’m targeting we can plan the racing blocks and when I need to peak. However, things rarely go to plan. For the last two seasons we’ve had injuries and illnesses within the team, so we’ve had to be flexible and adapt. It’s all about communication and being adaptable.’
TIFFANY CROMWELL, CANYON/SRAM

However, despite being in the form of his life, race tactics conspired to find him not part of the medal-deciding finale on the Mall. The controllables had been controlled but sometimes the vagaries and unpredictable nature of bike racing confound even the most rigorous planning, preparation and sports science. However, it’s undeniable that everything that could have been done had been done to put Mark Cavendish in with the best possible chance of winning that Olympic gold medal.

For the ultimate example of targeting and working back from a key event, you have to return to the Great British Cycling Team track riders and their four-yearly appointment with the Olympic Games. After the success of London 2012, many of the riders appeared to go into a competitive hibernation, and although there was the odd rainbow jersey or World Cup win, the dominance that had been seen at the London 2012 velodrome seemed to have vanished. Yes, notable riders such as Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton had retired but younger riders, such as double gold medallist Jason Kenny, seemed to be dwelling in the doldrums of competitive mediocrity. Even in the final World Championships, six months before the 2016 Rio Games, the Great Britain squad looked distinctly below par. To the outside observer, coming anywhere near the 2012 medal haul looked extremely unlikely. However, once the racing started in Rio, with a dominating performance in the team sprint, it was obvious that the Great Britain Cycling Team were back to their world-beating best. Much was made about new tech, equipment and marginal gains, but the main factor behind the success was single-minded focus, planning and a four-year cycle with the Olympic Games as the clear and only goal. Many other nations had chosen to try to ‘double peak’ their riders, hitting top form for both the World Championships and the Olympics. However, to achieve this would have involved a taper, a planned easing back of training before an event, which, despite meaning victories at the World Championships, also meant lost training time in that crucial final build-up to Rio. The British team trained right through the World Championships, accepting that they wouldn’t be at their peak but knowing they were banking valuable weeks of hard training that their rivals were missing out on. They’d been applying this approach, not just during the Olympic year, but throughout the preceding three years. Those weeks of not fully tapering for every World Championships or World Cup added up to maybe months of extra training. When they did finally fully taper into the Olympics, they reaped the rewards of that patience and planning.

Whether you’re targeting a big sportive, a particular time trial or the start of the race season, assessing the demands of your event, working out what it will take for you to succeed and then constructing a realistic and effective training plan is essential. Only by applying structure to your training can you ensure that your fitness is progressing, that you’re maximising your gains from the time you have and that you’ll be in peak condition for your target event.

There are three basic interrelated requirements of any structured training plan. The first is that it has to provide the body with overload to stimulate adaptation. Our bodies are hardwired by millions of years of evolution to preserve energy and not to invest our valuable reserves into costly endeavours, such as building muscle, unless we give them a good reason to. You have to keep raising the bar and that’s why, if you keep doing the same training week in and week out, you’ll eventually hit a plateau and stop improving.

The next requirement is that the overload has to be progressive. That bar has to be incrementally raised over time, not suddenly and dramatically elevated by ‘get fit quick’ or panicked crash training.

The final classic requirement of a training plan is specificity. Simply put, the best training for any activity is doing that activity. To get better at cycling, you have to cycle. It sounds obvious, but often gets ignored. This fundamental of training does come with a major caveat, though, which will be covered further in Chapter 5 when we discuss ‘off the bike’ training. There’s an increasing body of evidence that off the bike conditioning, such as strength and mobility work, can benefit cycling performance. More importantly, it challenges the body outside of the very limited and fixed movement patterns of cycling. This makes you more robust and resilient, and less likely to pick up injuries in day-to-day life. Professional cycling teams have really embraced off the bike conditioning in recent years, realising the benefits to rider health, career longevity and on the bike performance.

‘I think it’s really important to do some off the bike training, such as weights, but more for health than performance. Through October to November I’d always do a lot of work in the gym and, despite sticking at 4–5 per cent body fat, would put on 5lb of muscle. I’d worry about the extra weight but it always fell off and I’d always still manage to peak too early in the spring! However, despite numerous crashes, I never really got injured and my bone density and blood values were always good. I credit that partly to luck and genetics, and partly to the gym work every off-season.’

For riders whose job isn’t riding their bike, it’s probably even more important as you’ll have more non-riding demands placed on your body. If you hurt yourself gardening, carrying shopping or lifting your children out of the car, that’s time off the bike. You have to ensure that you schedule in enough cycling but also make sure you don’t neglect off the bike training.

In addition to these three fundamentals, there are three more areas that have to be considered and factored into any training plan. The first is that both the end goal and the training plan have to be realistic. A goal should challenge you but it has to be attainable within the confines of your ability and the amount of time you can dedicate to training. The same applies to your training plan. Avoid scheduling an amount of training that’s right on the upper limit of what your life allows. It’s inevitable that you’ll end up missing sessions, which can often lead to becoming demotivated and falling completely off the training wagon.

Next is that your training has to be consistent. This is related to both progression and overload and means that you can’t be a binge or sporadic trainer. The physiological adaptations that result in improved endurance fitness take time and a consistency of training to occur. One week, one month or arguably even one year of consistent training doesn’t make a great cyclist. A study on professional cyclists found that their efficiency of pedal stroke boiled down to one simple variable: the number of pedal strokes and miles they’d performed to that point.

Finally, but arguably most importantly, is the key aspect of recovery. I’ll talk more about the importance of recovery, how to optimise it and the ramifications of neglecting it in Chapter 7 but, without adequate recovery, you’ll never progress as a cyclist. After providing a training stimulus, it’s as the body recovers that it adapts and becomes stronger. Being able to complete all of the workouts you have scheduled is only part of the training plan equation. If you’re unable to also schedule in adequate recovery time, the training plan is severely flawed. Top-level full-time cyclists are brilliant at recovery. Being able to dedicate the time they’re not riding to recovery is the factor – probably more so than the training they do – that elevates them above riders who are having to balance training with another full-time occupation. Getting out of the ‘more is more’ mindset and shifting the emphasis from quantity of training to the quality of training and recovery is probably one of the most significant positive steps you can take. If you don’t recover from a workout, you won’t reap the rewards from it and it’ll impact on the quality of the next and subsequent sessions. Neglect it in the long term and you risk not only diminishing performance but the demotivation, illness and injury risks that are associated with overtraining syndrome. Don’t forget, along with the training sessions you do, work, family life and other activities all contribute to your total ‘training load’ and have to be accounted for.

‘I was very good at resting and recovery when I was a full-time rider. If I felt as though I needed a day off, it would literally be the whole day horizontal on the sofa watching TV. It was absolute 100 per cent rest. As my career progressed, more things came into my life, house, marriage, children, and it was the recovery side of my training that suffered.’

If you’re targeting a particular event, what does it involve and do you have any specific goals or expectations? If you’re targeting a mountainous Alpine sportive such as L’Étape, your training needs will differ significantly from those of a rider who’s aiming to tackle the cobbled climbs of the Tour of Flanders. Both riders will require a solid endurance base to be able to ride for 6 hours or more but you will want to focus on longer efforts and intervals around your FTP/FTHR to prepare for the 20km-plus (12 mile) climbs you’ll face in the Alps. For the relatively short but brutally steep cobbled climbs of Flanders, the emphasis will be more on shorter but higher intensity Zone 5 efforts and the ability to recover from them. Doing some research into the demands of your chosen event and replicating those demands in training is essential if you want to meet your goals.

A great example of tailoring yourself and your training to the demands of your event can be seen if you look at the career of Sir Bradley Wiggins. When he made the transition for Olympic track rider to Tour de France winner, he dropped in the region of 10kg and focused on developing his ability on long climbs as opposed to higher octane track efforts. Then, when he targeted the 2014 time trial World Championships, he and his team realised that he needed to change his morphology and physiology significantly from the stripped-down and lightweight Tour de France winning rider of 2012. The 47km Ponferrada course required more raw power and so a block of strength work, muscle gain and higher intensity efforts followed. With a return to the track for his hour record and Rio, those new goals required even more strength and power. Throughout his career it’s been a case of identifying what it would take to win, and adapting both himself and his training to work towards that specific goal.

‘The directeur sportif decides which races the team will be doing and which riders he ideally wants at them. He’ll then come to me and check that the riders he’s selected for the races are best suited to it physiologically and will be ready for it. If there’s a key race, say the Tour of Flanders, for the riders who we want contesting that race, we’ll schedule their training and other races to ensure that they peak for that event. It’s always a three-way collaboration between the directeur sportif, the coach/physiologist and, of course, the rider.

Once the races are in place, we’ll then tend to plan training in 4-week blocks. You have to listen to your body and adapt your training accordingly. It’s a constant cycle of communication and feedback from the rider about how they’re feeling, we adjust their training based on that and then plan the next five or six days.’
ANDREAS LANG, TEAM PHYSIOLOGIST, CANYON/SRAM

Once you have identified your target events, you can start planning your year. This doesn’t mean spending hours creating a highly detailed spreadsheet with every session set in stone but rather deciding what your priorities are throughout the year.

Work back from those key events. Allow 1 or 2 weeks immediately before them as a taper and then 8–10-week focused blocks leading into them. Depending on the event, you may also want to plan some downtime afterwards where you take some time out from structured training. Avoid the temptation to pack in too many target events. You can back a couple of them up and, for shorter league-style racing such as time trials, crits, track league and cyclo-cross, compete on a weekly basis; but if you’re tackling ‘A’ category events – big sportives or multi-day rides – and want to give them your best, you’ll only be able to schedule in a few each year. If you find there are too many events that you want to do, assign ‘B’ or ‘C’ status to some of them. You’ll view these more as training events and, without tapering down fully for them, not expect to perform to your best but still get valuable miles in your legs and event day experience.

Depending on the sort of events you prefer, you’ll probably find that you have an ‘off season’ where you have no events scheduled. For many riders this occurs during the winter but if, for example, you race cyclo-cross or indoor track, this might not be the case. I’d always recommend having 2–4 weeks off the bike, or at least off from structured training, at the start of your off season, probably following your final ‘A’ event of the season. You probably won’t feel like it as you’re likely to be on top form but, for longevity in the sport, avoiding boredom or burnout, firing up your energy and enthusiasm before the grind of off-season training and for family harmony, try to schedule in it. Use some of this time to look back on the season just gone and to assess what went well, what could be improved upon, your strengths and your weaknesses. How did you train during the previous off season and what could be improved on?

The off season is where you’ll be looking to focus primarily on building your endurance base. This doesn’t mean just grinding out slow miles as, especially for non-professional riders, keeping some intensity in your riding is the best way to maximise training gains from your relatively limited time on the bike. You will, however, be aiming to get some long rides in, work on longer intervals on the turbo to raise FTP and probably also including some focused off the bike work to develop mobility and strength. Your top end fitness may drop off a bit and, especially if it’s the winter, you may gain a bit of insulation. Gaining a few pounds over the winter is no bad thing as it’ll help you feel the cold less on long rides and can give your immune system a bit of a helping hand. Avoid gaining too much, though, or you’ll be forced to try and crash it off in the spring. This can be difficult and combining calorie restriction with higher intensity training can compromise your training gains. If your fitness is analogous to building a house, you’re laying the foundations for the subsequent floors of the pre-season and season to come. It’s a commonly used cliché but, in all endurance sports, winter miles mean summer smiles. Neglect your off-season foundation building and every subsequent layer of fitness is compromised. Be disciplined about your off-season training and be clear what you want to achieve. As much as getting out and riding in the cold, wet and dark, this discipline also applies to sticking to the training zones and goals of the sessions that’ll lay down solid foundations. Every club has a rider who rips up the club runs through the off season but never features when the real racing starts. Don’t be that rider. You can’t hold peak form through the entire year and, if you squander it during the off season, you’ll never perform when it really matters.

The pre-season, usually late winter and early spring, is when you start to up the intensity as you transition from training to racing and target events. Volume will generally start to come down, but not necessarily if it’s a long event you’re aiming for, and more intensity and higher-level efforts will be introduced. If you’ve been lifting weights for off the bike conditioning during the off season, you’ll probably reduce the number of sessions from two or three down to two or even one. The goal will be to maintain the strength you’ve gained rather than build more and, by removing some of the resistance training load on your legs, they should feel sharper and more capable of higher intensity efforts. You might also decide to enter some early season events to test your legs and see where you are. In the UK, ‘Hardrider’ time trials take place on hilly and technical courses through February and March and are great for seeing how your off season has gone. You’ll find similar early-season events in most other countries and, although you may not be in peak form, they’re definitely worth seeking out.

Into the season you’re really putting the roof on your house of fitness and doing general maintenance work. You should be focusing on minimising fatigue to maximise form in your build-up to target events and, if you have a significant gap between events, working on your perceived weaknesses where possible.

Deciding on the length of your training blocks comes down to a number of factors. The first is that you have to give your body enough time and consistent training for physiological changes to occur. The exact length of time will depend on your individual physiology, psychology, your resilience to training load and the goal of the training block. You’ll have to experiment with what works best for you but an average training block will generally be 8–12 weeks. I personally err towards 8 weeks. I’m a fairly fast responder and have a solid base of endurance fitness built over 16 years. I find, if I try to push on to 12 weeks, that progress will stall, I’ll lose motivation and often get ill. When it comes to the target event, I’ll be stale and will have given my best 4 or 5 weeks ago.

Once you’ve identified your block, you should then break it up into two or three smaller 4-week chunks. During each of these 4-week periods, you’ll spend 3 weeks building training load by increasing volume, intensity or both. You’ll then have a recovery week, when you’ll drop training load. These recovery weeks are vital as it’s during this time that your body adapts and you become fitter. Too many riders make the mistake of just exponentially ramping their training up week after week and not scheduling in regular recovery weeks. Although they’ll initially make good progress, especially if starting from a relatively low fitness level, they will inevitably hit a plateau and even start to regress. They certainly won’t be optimising their potential and, by driving their bodies into a state of non-functional overreaching or overtraining (concepts we’ll discuss in Chapter 7), risk illness and injury.

For planning and recording training and seeing its impact, a huge advantage of using a power meter is that, for every ride, you can get an objective number for how stressful any ride was on your body. TrainingPeak is used by the Great Britain Cycling Team to plan and track the training of its riders and, if you’re using a power meter, you should definitely consider signing up for an account. Known as Training Stress Score (TSS), your FTP is used to calculate the load of a session on your body. Duration, intensity and variability, such as during an interval session, all increase the TSS. As a reference point, an hour ridden evenly at FTP, theoretically the longest you could sustain that intensity, would score 100. By keeping a tally of your TSS, you can see exactly the training load you’ve accumulated. TrainingPeaks has a brilliant feature, its Performance Management Chart (PMC), which allows you to track and log TSS. Your TSS contributes to three lines on the chart. Acute Training Load (ATL) is the short-term effects of your workouts done in the last 7 days and is a reflection of your fatigue. Chronic Training Load (CTL) is the cumulative effect of training done in the last 42 days; this is your fitness. Training Stress Balance (TSB) is the difference between CTL and ATL from the previous day. This calculation of fitness minus fatigue is an indicator of your form. This shows why recovery weeks and tapers – easing back on training in the lead-up to a target event – are so important. Crucially, the PMC allows you to plot the TSS of future workouts, which is brilliant for optimising form for key events. Form and tapering used to be great mysteries but, with power meters and this type of analysis software, much of the guesswork is removed. Don’t forget, though, that no matter how good the data or analysis tools, we’re not machines and we all respond differently to training. Use TSS and the PMC as a guide but don’t be a slave to it or your power meter. Listen to your body and learn to use intuition as well as hard data to govern your training.

Even if you don’t use a power meter, the components of TSS are very helpful to understand training load and how your body will respond to it. The load on your body of any session, and also accumulated load, is determined by duration, intensity and variability. This allows us to see why the traditional pro approach of massive volume low intensity training did, to a certain extent, work. Their training load was supplied purely by volume. Even with the time available to put in huge volumes of training, full-time riders now realise that by also factoring in more intensity and variability, by including high end efforts and intervals throughout the off-season, they can train in a far more effective way. For riders with limited time to train, this is even more relevant.

Whether you’re training with power or heart rate, having accurate training zones is essential to the success of any training block. You should always schedule in an FT test at the beginning of any training block, remembering that you should have at least 24 hours of rest beforehand. I’d then recommend retesting at the beginning of Week 9 of any block, or the first week of your next block if it’s an 8-week block, having had a recovery week beforehand. You should also retest FT if you’ve had any significant time off the bike or haven’t managed to train consistently.

An example of a simple 12-week off-season training block, with an emphasis on endurance and strength, is given below (full session descriptions of the named workouts are given in Chapter 4).

Following the FT test at the start of Week 1, you can see how the endurance ride is increased over the following two weeks to add volume. The strength intervals session is a staple throughout this block, delivering on the bike strength training. One thing that you’ll probably notice is that the sessions don’t change much throughout the 12 weeks. Many riders, training plans and coaches prescribe different workouts almost on a weekly basis and, although this amount of variety can help to keep riders with a low attention span interested, it does very little for ticking the key training box of consistency. By repeating the same session for a number of weeks, you have a benchmark to ride to and hopefully improve on. Whether it’s an average power number, cadence mark or getting a certain distance up a climb, you’ll get constant feedback on your progress and real motivation to push just a bit harder.

Week 4 sees the first recovery week, during which the legs are kept spinning but are lightly loaded with high cadence workouts. Rather than a long endurance ride, some fun is prescribed with a mountain bike ride. It’s important to refresh the mind as much as the body. You’re then into another 3 weeks of build, leaving off where you finished at the end of Week 3. If it’s going to plan, you should see a noticeable kick-up in your performance in the first strength intervals session of Week 5.

After your second recovery week of the training block, the first priority of Week 9 is retesting your FT. You drop some volume initially from your endurance ride but, by adding in some tempo efforts, you add training load by increasing intensity. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to continue through to the end of the block with two Strength Intervals sessions per week but, for the sake of sanity and to get your legs turning over a bit faster, working on 2 × 20-minute sweet spot intervals is a good choice. By the end of Week 11, you’re back up to 5 hours for your endurance ride but with the tempo efforts. By the end of Week 12, your final recovery week of the block, you should have recovered from the previous three weeks, be thinking about your next block and have made significant gains.

If the block takes you up to a major target event and you want to hit your best possible form, you’d probably want to start tapering down in Week 11 rather than continuing to build. This wouldn’t be as dramatic a cut in training as a recovery week but wouldn’t have the volume or intensity of a build week. We’ll discuss tapering further later in the chapter.

‘Even for pro cyclists there’s definitely been a shift in mindset from quantity to quality. I come from Australia where we’ve been using sports science for a while and fortunately have never had to suffer under old school high volume training plans. Our training sessions mimic our races so, although only 3–4 hours long, they always contain efforts and deliver a fair amount of intensity.’
TIFFANY CROMWELL, CANYON/SRAM

One of the most common questions that’s asked about training is, how much do I need to do? Riders get intimidated by the huge volumes that pro riders do and think that if they’re not also putting in massive mileage, they won’t improve. However, although you might be training for a big sportive or multi-day ride, it won’t be anywhere near the volume of racing that the pros do. This is why they have to put in the miles they do, to be able to soak up the sheer amount of riding that full-time bike racing involves. To give you some perspective, in 2015/16, Dutch Road Race Champion Lucinda Brand averaged 1527 kilometres per month from December through to September. For the World Tour, Jonathan Vaughters, former pro and team manager of Cannondale-Drapac, has been quoted as saying that to get within spitting distance of ever riding the Tour de France requires consistent years of riding 20,000 miles a year! Even if you’re racing, your races won’t come near to the length of the events that the pros do, so you don’t need to try to match, or even come near to, their training. What you do need to do, though, is train smart, make sure every pedal stroke is focused and has a purpose and that you eliminate junk miles. Get out of the ‘more is more’ mindset; quality trumps quantity every time. A great example of this is Paul Oldham, who, despite working a full-time job and typically only training on average 7 hours per week, has consistently been one the UK’s top cyclo-cross racers.

Prioritise three focused bike workouts each week – yes, just three. These sessions are sacrosanct, have to be completed exactly as prescribed and are what you plan your week around. These will typically consist of two weekday higher intensity interval type sessions, often completed on a stationary bike. However, during the season, one of these may be an evening time trial, circuit race or track league. In the off season, one of these may also be a chain-gang type session with your club. The third session, usually reserved for the weekend, is your longer endurance ride. For the vast majority of riders, if they followed this structure consistently, adjusting the sessions to their goals and time of year, they would see considerable improvement.

The reasons this structure works so well is that it firstly provides plenty of flexibility, meaning that you’ve got some days to juggle around when life gets in the way of your riding. Secondly, you’re well rested for each workout. This means you can give them 100 per cent and the intensity and training load you can achieve isn’t compromised by fatigue. By being able to give a workout more, you’ll get more back from it. Thirdly, by making your training volume realistic, attainable and flexible, you’re far more likely to manage it week after week, which is the key to making progress. If you’re too ambitious with your training planning, scheduling a workout into every spare moment, it’s a recipe for failure. All it takes is a hard spell at work, your children not sleeping well or another of life’s little obstacles and you’re missing sessions. It’s all too easy then, once you’ve failed on your training plan, to fall into a negative all or nothing mindset and to let your training slip completely. It’s far better to give your training some breathing room, have three must-do workouts and then, if you can fit in some more without it affecting those key sessions, just see it as a bonus. You can do more than the three sessions but, if the extra riding or activity impacts negatively on the quality of your three key sessions, you have to question what you’re getting out of it.

The most important rule is to prioritise those key sessions. Make sure you have a rest day before them or, if you do schedule in some activity, that it doesn’t leave any fatigue in your legs.

Below is an example week taken from the 12-week off-season block we used when looking at planning a training block.

It might seem odd to start the week with a rest day but, chances are, you will have put in at least one big ride over the weekend and need to be recovered before the demanding session planned for Tuesday. Obviously if you’ve done your endurance ride on the Saturday and rested on the Sunday, you could do your intervals on Monday. Wednesday is another rest day. This doesn’t have to be complete inactivity (see ‘Recovery weeks’ below for suitable activities for rest days). Thursday is your second key interval session. On the Friday, you might choose to rest or, as many riders do throughout the off season, do some strength work in the gym. Although you’ve got a long ride ahead of you on the Saturday, the intensity isn’t high so a degree of fatigue or stiffness in your legs isn’t a problem. Towards the end of this example 12-week block, some higher intensity efforts are added to the endurance ride. As you transition into pre-season and season, the intensity of these efforts will increase. If you find that your ability to complete these efforts is compromised by your Friday session, you’ll have to rethink it. The weekend is when most of us have the time to get some miles in but avoid the temptation to bury yourself and ruin the quality of the following week’s training. If you are able to get out on both days, prioritise your key training ride and get that done on the Saturday. See a second weekend ride as a bonus, head out with your club or hit the trails on your mountain bike, secure in the knowledge that you’ve nailed another solid week of training.

Most riders are limited to the constraints of a working week and the weekends are the only real option for longer rides. Pro cyclists will tend to follow a different structure, often working in 3-day ‘mini-blocks’. On Day 1, they’ll do their most demanding session, often a long ride that includes some hard efforts to mimic the demands of a race. Day 2 will be shorter, interval based and fairly intense. Day 3 will be a long but fairly low-intensity endurance-style ride. They’ll rest up on the fourth day but this will often involve a very light recovery ride and then they’ll begin the cycle again. Some days may also be split with either two rides or with one session devoted to off the bike conditioning. If you’re not normally constrained to a traditional working week or are heading to a training camp, you could try this type of structure. However, remember, when the pros aren’t riding, they’re resting, not having to go to work, pick the kids up from school or mow the lawn.

We’ve already discussed the importance of scheduling in regular recovery weeks as it’s during these weeks of reduced training load that your body adapts and you become stronger. You’ll still do some riding during a recovery week but the focus will be on easier, low load workouts, restorative cross training activities such as mobilisation work, yoga or Pilates (see Chapter 5) and some stress-free, enjoyable and social riding. Suitable midweek workouts include recovery ride, pre-event ride and high cadence (see Chapter 4). For your longer weekend ride, you should either perform a low volume endurance ride (approximately 50 per cent of the length of your last build-week long ride) or simply head out for an easy club/social ride or do something a bit different, such as hitting the trails on your mountain bike.

Where you fit your training into a day is more than likely to be governed by non-cycling demands on your time. During the week, this will often mean getting out on the bike or onto your indoor trainer after work. Think about timing your eating so you have the energy for the session (see Chapter 6) and, as much as possible, have everything set up and ready to go with minimum time wasted or will power sapping procrastination. Getting up early to fit in a session can seem like a solution but if you choose to try this, carefully monitor your tiredness levels and the quality of your workouts. Also, without any breakfast inside you, as you won’t have time to digest it, you’ll be limited to lower-intensity workouts.

Many riders balancing cycling with a full-time job find that commuting is a time effective way to get their training in. A really good approach is to use the morning commute as an easy paced recovery ride or as a carbohydrate-fasted ride (see Chapter 4) and then, on two of your rides home, to do your interval efforts. It’s fairly straightforward to find a suitable hill or stretch of road and to adapt the interval workouts to it. If you do try this approach, it’s essential that on the other evenings you ride at strict recovery pace. Getting sucked into commuter racing or trying to beat your PB every night will just be junk miles, building unnecessary fatigue and reducing the quality and effectiveness of your key workouts.

Commuting, if you do it both ways, effectively means you’re training split days (i.e. training twice per day). Even if you don’t commute, this can be an option but, as ever, ask why you’re doing it, is it benefitting you and is it impacting on your key sessions? I’m a big fan of split days, when I’ll do 45–60 minutes of carbohydrate-fasted riding before breakfast and then a more intense interval session or gym work in the evening. I find I get a good physiological benefit from the morning ride, developing my fat burning ability and riding economy, and getting out first thing sets me up for the day and lifts my mood. However, because it’s strictly low intensity, the training load is very low and it doesn’t affect my evening session.

At the weekend, although the temptation can be to have a bit of a lie in, my advice is to get up and get the ride done. If you put it off for the sake of an extra hour in bed or waiting for a weather window, you can guarantee that something will come up and you’ll end up having to cut it short or even abandon it completely. It’s hard in winter, when it’s cold and dark, but bed to shed or snore to door is the tough bit. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, once you’re out and riding it’s fine. Get all your kit ready the night before to reduce excuse-forming hurdles and ideally arrange to meet a friend to ride with.

During a training block, you use build weeks to develop fitness and recovery weeks to allow for adaptation to this overload stimulus to occur. It’s not unusual, during the final week of a 3-week build, to start to see your performance or form drop off as you’ll have accumulated significant fatigue. If you’re using TrainingPeaks and their Performance Management Chart, you’ll be able to track this process. As you head into a target event, you’ll want to minimise fatigue and, in doing so, maximise form and event day performance. Unfortunately, if you simply stopped training and rested up completely, your fatigue would drop but so would your fitness. The solution is a progressive reduction in training, which reduces fatigue, maintains fitness and maximises form. This progressive reduction in training is known as tapering. Although power meter data and analysis tools such as the Performance Management Chart allow for tapers to be planned and predicted more accurately, like all aspects of performance, we all respond differently.

In general, you should look to end your final build week 14 days before an event that you wish to peak for. Your event will probably be on a weekend, so your final endurance focused ride would be on the Saturday or Sunday 2 weeks before your event. During the following week, you can still afford to work fairly hard during your midweek sessions but would be better focusing more on higher intensity work rather than longer intervals. Minute on/minute off (see Chapter 4) sessions would work well. For your longer weekend ride, you should be looking to cut volume by approximately 50 per cent, so if your final long ride the weekend before was 4 hours, head out for just a couple of steady Zone 2 hours this weekend. You don’t want to be putting in any significant efforts but some sprints thrown into the final hour can help keep your legs feeling fresh. Any cross training activity should be fairly gentle and restorative; maybe even consider dedicating the time to getting a massage. Definitely avoid any heavy strength training and anything else that would add unnecessary fatigue to your legs. Any bonus or additional rides you’ve been doing on top of your three core rides should be cut completely this week.

The week leading into your event should largely resemble a recovery week but will include a pre-event ride on the day before your event.

It’s perfectly normal during a taper to feel sluggish, tired or even slightly depressed. The reason for this is that you’re not getting the hormonal high you normally get from your hard workouts and are literally going cold turkey. Stick with it, though, have faith in the weeks of consistent training you have done and don’t be tempted to ‘panic train’ with any additional workouts. At this stage, you’re not going to gain anything from additional training, you’ll just add unnecessary fatigue. Take advantage of the additional time you’ll have during a taper to ensure that your bike is running perfectly, all your kit and nutritional requirements are sorted and that your logistics for your event, such as travel and accommodation, are all finalised.

The week following a big event, especially if you’ve pushed really hard, should be a full recovery week. You might want to head out for a recovery ride (see Chapter 4) on the Monday but ensure you’re extremely disciplined about keeping the intensity really low. If your event has gone really well, you may well feel super buoyed up, motivated and wanting to crack on with hard training. Avoid giving in to these euphoric feelings as, although your mind may be telling you to push on, you’re likely to be extremely physically depleted and in need of full recovery.

Tapering fully for an event effectively rules out structured progressive training for at least 3 weeks, 2 weeks of taper and 1 week of recovery, so is a big commitment. We’ve previously discussed how, in an Olympic year, the Great Britain Cycling Team wouldn’t go through a full taper prior to the Track Cycling World Championships. They’d train through, banking the extra training, accepting a reduced performance at the Worlds but reaping the rewards later at the Olympics.

If you’re wanting to ride a number of events during the year, it’s probably not realistic to follow a full taper for each one. Commit to a couple of full tapers for your ‘A’ events, but for less important events, ‘B’ priority, a mini taper of 1 week, following the pre-event week structure, would be more appropriate. You would still probably push yourself hard for a ‘B’ priority event and it would therefore be advisable to take a recovery week afterwards.

‘C’ priority events are effectively ‘training events’, being ridden in place of your regular long weekend ride. You wouldn’t taper at all for these; you would incorporate them into build weeks but wouldn’t expect a stellar performance. The ideal would be to schedule a ‘C’ event at the end of a 3-week build so that it was followed by a recovery week but, as long as you fuel, hydrate and pace well and don’t go too deep, one could be ridden mid build. As with all aspects of performance, recovery rates and the ability to bounce back from hard rides vary massively from one rider to another. Follow the advice in Chapter 7 to optimise your recovery and experiment to find how well you recover but remember, if riding a ‘C’ event compromises the quality of your training for the following week, was it really worth doing?

If you’re competing in weekly racing, such as your club 10-mile time trials, track league, local criterium/crit or cyclo-cross, you obviously can’t taper down every week. Again, there will be a certain amount of personal experimentation to find what works best for you, but try the following guidelines.

•All these weekly types of event tend to be of fairly short duration and, although high in intensity, the training stress they’ll develop won’t be too different from a hard midweek workout. The simplest approach, therefore, is to substitute it for one of your midweek sessions.

•Schedule your week to allow for a recovery day afterwards, maybe with a recovery ride, and an easy day beforehand, with a pre-event ride or high-cadence session (see Chapter 4 for specific sessions).

•Allow as much time as possible between your second midweek workout and your race.

•Consider dropping the duration of your weekend endurance ride for the ‘race season’. You should already have developed a solid endurance base during the off and pre-season and can afford to just maintain this.

•Continue to work on the basis of 3 build weeks followed by a recovery week. If you find your race performance improves significantly during the recovery week or during the week following it, consider backing off your build week training and allowing more recovery during each week.

•Racing every week is a balancing act between performing at your best and keeping up training to at least maintain your fitness level. If you’re committing to a period of racing, such as a two-month-long track league, you have to make a decision. Either race performance is your priority and you’ll sacrifice some training gains during that period or you’ll accept not performing to your peak every week and continue building fitness.

PRO TRAINING DIARIES

Below are three real excerpts for the training plans of riders on the Canyon/SRAM team. They’re taken from the team’s training camp in Majorca, from Lisa Brennauer’s off season and from Barbara Guarischi’s season.

TEAM TRAINING CAMP SCHEDULE, MAJORCA, DECEMBER 2016

This was the first opportunity the team had to all get together at the start of the off season. The main thing to take from this excerpt is that, even though it’s very early in the off season, there’s still some intensity with ‘Medio’* efforts, sprints and race pace work behind the car. Also, that every ride has focus and structure to it. The 3 days on followed by a rest day is fairly standard for pros who aren’t constrained by the working week and, if you get the chance to go on a training camp, is definitely worth trying.

*Medio is a zone description used by team physiologist Andreas Lang. It covers up to FTP and equates to sweet spot and lower Zone 4.

LISA BRENNAUER, OFF SEASON, JANUARY 2017

Again, despite it being the off season, there’s plenty of intensity scheduled in and it’s definitely not just a case of Lisa grinding out long and slow kilometres. There are two pure ‘Base Rides’ but even these have some focus/aims and follow either one or two harder days (see chart below).

BARBARA GUARISCHI, IN SEASON

With a tough race starting this training block, it’s no surprise to see Barbara taking a couple of days off the bike. She might have only had one rest day planned but it’s important to listen to your body, especially after a big event, and be flexible with your training. With another race at the end of the block, it’s no surprise that the training load is fairly light and, for in-season training, it’s more about maintenance of form and management of fatigue rather than trying to build fitness. There’s a bit of intensity, motor paced work, short ‘Medio’ efforts and some sprints. These are important to maintain race form.

Whether it’s illness, injury, work, family or just having a bad day, things will go wrong and impact your cycling. Your training has to be adaptive to this.

When it goes wrong

No matter how well you plan your training, illness, work or other factors often mean that you just don’t manage to stick to your plan. This is one of the main reasons for making a rough year plan based around key events but only planning 8–12-week blocks in detail.

If you find you are consistently struggling to do the sessions you’ve planned, it’s likely you’ve been overly ambitious and need to dial back the demands you’re placing on yourself.

The odd missed session here and there is no big deal but if you miss two of your key sessions in a week, you should repeat that week. If you miss all three key sessions, go back and repeat the previous week.

If you lose more than a week of training, restart your training block at the last recovery week that you successfully completed. For example, if you were working through the 12-week block that we’ve been looking at, completed Week 6 but then got ill and were off your bike for two weeks, you should go back and restart the block with Week 4. The recovery week will be a relatively gentle reintroduction to structured training and, by going back, you’ll take into account lost fitness and be able to rebuild it.

For more than a few weeks of lost training, you’d probably be looking to restart the whole training block.

Obviously, if you’re planning a training block towards a key event on a set date, losing or repeating weeks is a problem. The solution to this is to give yourself a ‘buffer block’. If your planned block towards an event is 12 weeks, schedule it to start 16 weeks out from the event. If it all goes without a hitch, simply repeat the final 4 weeks of your block, remembering that you’ll probably be following a 2-week taper. If you do lose some time, hopefully your buffer will mean that you’re still in the shape you want to be for your event.

Avoiding and recovering from injury

‘I tore my posterior cruciate ligament in December 2015, so not ideal with the Olympics the following year. I wasn’t coached by the team coach anymore but was handed over to be put through a rehab process initially by the team doctor and then the physiotherapist and physiologist. It’d be initially injury-specific rehab exercises, it was fairly slow progress and, for a couple of weeks at least, it was just a case of practising walking. I wasn’t allowed outside on a bike for two months. It was the physiologists and physiotherapist’s jobs to be inventive and creative with finding ways we could cheat the recovery. That included things like single-legged turbo sessions with a weight on one side of the crank and altitude chamber work where I can stress my cardiovascular system with low power loads. I had to push but also be sensible and honest about where I was. I guess there was some luck involved but it worked.’ KATIE ARCHIBALD, GREAT BRITAIN CYCLING TEAM

When it comes to developing chronic overuse injuries, cycling, compared with impact sports such as running, has an extremely low incidence rate. In fact, as such a joint-friendly activity, it’s frequently prescribed for rehabilitation. Most forms of pain and discomfort on the bike (hand, wrist, neck, knee and lower back pain being the most common) can usually be corrected by a proper bike fit, remedial exercises or, most commonly, a combination of the two. The most important thing, if you do suffer from any unusual pain or discomfort on the bike, is to immediately seek qualified professional advice, a physiotherapist led bike fit being your best option. Don’t just ignore pain and think it’ll go away, and don’t just seek the advice of clubmates or internet forums. You’ll waste time trying a number of supposed cures, randomly fiddling with your bike set-up, losing quality riding time and potentially making the issue worse. An experienced physiotherapist will be able to identify the problem by taking a detailed history, conducting a physical examination and looking at your position on the bike. Without a doubt, this will be the most time efficient and effective route back to pain free cycling.

Acute injuries in cycling are usually the result of crashes and, if you choose to race, are almost inevitable. At the less severe (but still painful) end of the spectrum is road rash. Basically a burn caused by heat generated from friction when sliding along the road or track, the priority when treating it is cleaning the wound. This can be extremely painful, especially if grit is embedded, and, for bad cases, doctors on pro teams will often administer a local anaesthetic for the cleaning process. It’s usually a case of just gritting your teeth though and using a slightly abrasive sponge in the shower. Once clean, let the air get to it as much as possible but, during the night or if wearing clothes, apply a non-adhesive dressing to avoid the wound sticking to fabric. For more serious injuries, such as a broken collarbone, again the priority is getting a professional diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation plan that you’re confident in.

‘The annual team training camp in December is really important as it’s pretty much the only time of year that the whole team is together. Because of the races we do, it’s only normally six riders at them and some of the support team. At camp, everyone is there. At my first Canyon SRAM camp in December 2015 I was in a cast and on crutches. I asked the team management if it was still okay for me to come out for a couple of days but they insisted on me coming out for the whole 12-day camp. This meant I could meet the team and really get to know them, which is essential if you’re going to be spending half the year on the road with them trying to win bike races.’
HANNAH BARNES, CANYON/SRAM

Getting a professional diagnosis that you trust and believe in is the key to a successful return from injury.

Some pro stories of recovery from injures are simply staggering. In the women’s road race at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Dutch rider Annemiek van Vleuten, while leading the race, suffered a horrendous crash which resulted in facial injuries, severe concussion and three lumbar spinal fractures. However, in just ten days she was back on the bike, won the Lotto Belisol Belgium Tour a month later and then, in 2017, took the rainbow jersey in the time trial. Although inspirational, it’s important to remember that it’s a pro cyclist’s job to recover fast, they’ll have the very best medical care and it’ll be their only focus. If you are unfortunate enough to suffer a serious injury, whether from cycling or not, that keeps you off the bike, don’t rush your recovery but do seek out and follow the professional advice and support that will ensure as quick a return as possible. Consult with your doctor and physiotherapist and, in the same way as you’d produce a training plan, make a structured rehabilitation plan with key goals along the way to your full recovery.

I speak from experience as, in the summer of 2015, I ruptured my patella tendon and, with a month in plaster, another two in a brace and then a further month working on getting my leg to bend again, was off my bike for over four months. I was lucky enough to be guided through my rehabilitation by former Great Britain Cycling Team physiotherapist Phil Burt, and having the confidence in his expertise and the plan we put together, was key to my successful recovery. It definitely worked and I was back on a bike in November, training properly in January and went on to win gold in the team pursuit at the World Masters track cycling championships in October 2016.

Training camps

Many riders take some time off, especially during the winter months, and head for a warm weather training camp. For pro riders, their main team training camp takes place fairly early in the off season and is a chance for testing, bike fitting, season planning and getting to know any new teammates and support staff. The actual training, while not quite secondary to these other goals, is often fairly relaxed and social.

If you’re lucky enough to be able to take some time out and go on a training camp, it’s an opportunity not just to get some decent riding in but, because you won’t have the demands of work and family life, you’ll be able to complement the riding with optimum professional-quality recovery.

There are so many great locations for a training camp. Look for a location that offers both flat and hilly rides, has good roads and, most importantly, a stable and pleasant climate. You don’t need palatial accommodation but you want somewhere where you’re happy chilling out when you’re not riding and where you can source nutritious meals. It’s also handy to have a decent bike shop nearby for spares and dealing with any mechanical issues.

‘It’s essential to pick somewhere with a mild climate so you don’t have to go out in the rain or snow. Nutrition is key to staying healthy on a training camp. You’ve got the double stress of training and travel so your body needs all the nutritional support it can get. As well as fuelling your training and recovery with the macronutrients, carbohydrates, protein and fat, the micronutrients, vitamins and minerals are also really important. So, you can’t just eat bread, pasta and meat, fruit and vegetables are essential.’
JULIA SCHULZE, TEAM DOCTOR, CANYON/SRAM

Because you’ll have more time to devote to recovery on the camp, you can afford to push the volume of your training. We talked earlier about the 3 days on and 1 day off structure that many pros use, and this can work really well. Do your longest ride with the hardest efforts on the first day of 3, back off the duration/intensity a bit on day 2 and then, on day 3, you can still get out for a decent ride but keep the intensity low. On your mid-camp day off, you could go out for a light recovery ride but you’d probably gain more from just relaxing by the pool. Repeat the cycle for the next 3 days. Avoid the temptation to just mindlessly cram in as much riding as you possibly can – quality still trumps quantity.

It’s also important to be aware, especially if temperatures are significantly higher than you’re used to, that you may have to adjust your pacing and training zones accordingly. Whereas you might be able to complete an endurance ride predominately in mid to high Zone 2 at home, in higher temperatures you may have to ride at the lower end of the zone. As the camp goes on you will slowly acclimatise but this takes time and, if very high temperatures are forecast, you should ride early in the day to avoid them. This adjustment of training zones due to temperature is also something to be aware of if you’re competing in an event abroad.

Because of the higher volume of training you’ll be putting in and the stress of travelling, it’s wise to schedule in a recovery week to effectively taper you into the camp. You should also schedule in a post-camp recovery week. Fired up by the riding that they did on their camp, many riders come home and try to maintain a similar level of training. Invariably they end up getting ill and probably negating all of the benefits from the camp. The training you did on the camp would have stressed and lowered your immune system, plus, when travelling, you’re exposed to unfamiliar germs and infections. A recovery week post-camp will give your immune system a helping hand and will also maximise your adaptations to the training load you accumulated on camp.

Training camps can be a brilliant boost for both mind and body but avoid the temptation to ramp up your training too dramatically.

Another reason that many pros go on a training camp is to reap the physiological benefits of altitude. There are two main reasons for doing this. The first, if the riders are going to be taking part in a race that climbs high mountains, is to acclimatise the riders to functioning at altitude. The second is to use altitude to boost their red blood cell count and, in doing so, enhance their performance. Although not nearly as effective or predictable as using the banned drug EPO or blood transfusions, this is a legal way of increasing their blood’s ability to carry oxygen. In order to get the most out of their training and obtain the blood boosting effects of altitude, the riders will live and sleep high but train low. One of the most popular pro altitude training locations is Mount Teide on Tenerife. Sited at over 2000 m, the Hotel Parador definitely ticks the ‘sleep high’ box, but with a 35km climb from sea-level to that point, training low is easily achieved too. At the 2010 Tour de France, Sir Bradley Wiggins struggled with long high-altitude climbs and, to remedy this, coach Tim Kerrison identified Teide as the perfect location. Since then the Teide training camp has been a Team Sky pre-Tour staple and many other top teams have followed their lead. Obviously this live high/train low approach can be costly and logistically difficult, and some pros will sleep in hypoxic (low oxygen) rooms or tents in an attempt to mimic the effect of sleeping at altitude. However, like many aspects of training and performance, individual athletes’ responses to altitude and the most effective protocol for them varies massively. Considerable research is still being undertaken in this area and there’s no doubt that the recommendations and protocols will continue to evolve. For now, if you’re considering booking time in an altitude chamber or even hiring a hypoxic tent to sleep in, there are definitely better ways to spend your money.

‘Response to altitude is very much an individual thing and all the teams and riders will have their own protocols. It’s really hard to do it properly though as you need to do constant blood testing and only big teams like Sky can really afford it. When I was racing in the US, for races at altitude, such as anything out of Boulder or the Tour of Gila, I knew I had to acclimatise beforehand for at least 2.5 weeks or I’d be at a big disadvantage to the locals.’

PHIL GAIMON, EX-PRO WITH GARMIN-SHARP AND CANNONDALE-DRAPAC

By planning and training smart you can ensure that you leave it all on the road when it really matters.

How to improve your cycling performance

Remember the fundamentals of training

When planning your training, always remember the three fundamentals of training. These are: providing your body with an overload stimulus to stimulate adaptation, progression of the training load, and the specificity of training to your sport. In addition to these fundamentals, your training has to be realistic and consistent, and must contain adequate recovery.

You’re not a machine

It’s vital to remember that we’re all individuals and all respond differently to training. Don’t mindlessly follow the same training plan as your mate and expect the same results, but listen to your body and adapt it accordingly. Monitoring training data is brilliant but don’t let it dominate you and, if something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.

Think about your event

Plan your training based on the demands of your target event and try to mimic these demands in training. If your main goal is a mountainous sportive then you’ll need to put in long rides and focus on longer intervals around threshold. If you’re targeting circuit races or cyclo-cross, where race durations are typically 45–60 minutes, you’ll need far less volume but more intensity.

Add power to your training

A power meter doesn’t just allow you to pace accurately, it provides an objective score of how stressful a session was on your body. Combined with software such as TrainingPeaks, you can track this load, see how it’s affecting form, fitness and fatigue, plan tapers and even see the possible results of future training blocks. If you have some money to spend on an upgrade, forget those carbon wheels and get yourself a power meter.

Plan your year, blocks, weeks and days

Having an idea of how your riding year is going to work out, when you target events are and what training blocks you can fit in allows you to plan to train methodically. However, you shouldn’t waste time planning every session in detail months ahead as, more often than not, life will throw a spanner in the works. Set goals for your training blocks and try to plan your sessions for the next 4–12 weeks. Remember to factor in non-cycling variables. You don’t want a big training block to coincide with a busy time at work or to schedule in a big ride on the day of a friend’s wedding, for example.

Be realistic and be flexible

When planning your training, don’t pack every spare minute with workouts. A plan that is conservative but which you follow consistently will always yield better results than an overly ambitious plan followed sporadically. Remember, quality trumps quantity and recovery is as important as the workouts. By being realistic with your planning and giving yourself days off during the week and buffer weeks during training blocks, you can be more flexible and adaptable when your non-cycling life gets in the way of your riding.

Week	Focus	Notes/Key sessions
1	Build 1	FT test at start of week, strength intervals and 3-hour endurance ride
2	Build 2	Strength intervals x2 and 3:30 endurance ride
3	Build 3	Strength intervals x2 and 4:00 endurance ride
4	Recovery	High cadence on rollers x2 and fun 2-hour MTB ride
5	Build 1	Strength intervals x2 and 4:00 endurance ride
6	Build 2	Strength intervals x2 and 4:30 endurance ride
7	Build 3	Strength intervals x2 and 5:00 endurance ride
8	Recovery	Strength intervals x2 and fun 2-hour MTB ride
9	Build 1	FT test at start of week, strength intervals and 4-hour endurance ride with tempo efforts
10	Build 2	Strength intervals x1, 2 x 20 mins sweet spot x1 and 4:30 endurance ride with tempo efforts
11	Build 3	Strength intervals x1, 2 x 20 mins sweet spot x1 and 5:00 endurance ride with tempo efforts
12	Recovery	High cadence on rollers x2 and fun MTB ride

Monday	Rest
Tuesday	Big gear/low cadence
Wednesday	Rest
Thursday	Big gear/low cadence
Friday	Gym/rest
Saturday	Endurance ride
Sunday	Club ride

Monday	Rest
Tuesday	Recovery ride
Wednesday	Rest
Thursday	High cadence
Friday	Restorative cross training/rest
Saturday	Rest
Sunday	Endurance ride 50% volume of last weekend’s long ride or ‘fun/social’ ride/MTB

Monday	Rest (following final long ride)
Tuesday	Minute on/minute off
Wednesday	Rest
Thursday	Minute on/minute off
Friday	Rest
Saturday	Restorative cross training, rest or massage
Sunday	Endurance Ride 50% volume of last weekend’s long ride. Predominately Zone 2 but can include some short sprints in final hour

Monday	Rest
Tuesday	High cadence or pre-event
Wednesday	Rest
Thursday	High cadence or pre-event
Friday	Rest
Saturday	Pre-event
Sunday	Event

Monday	Rest/recovery ride
Tuesday	Midweek workout
Wednesday	Gym/rest
Thursday	Endurance ride (reduced volume)
Friday	Rest
Saturday	Pre-event
Sunday	Cyclo-cross race