Before you start training it is essential that you are aware of the training fundamentals discussed below. You will not be able to understand how you create training plans if you don’t understand why you’re doing it.
So lets get straight into it. First, lets look at the four principles of training
The Principle of Progressive Overload:
Progressive overload is indeed a fundamental principle in cycling training. To improve your fitness, you must gradually increase the training load over time. This means challenging your body with intensities and durations that exceed your current fitness level. By doing so, you stimulate physiological adaptations that lead to improved performance. However, it’s crucial to balance this principle with adequate recovery periods. Pushing too hard without allowing proper rest can result in overtraining and hinder your progress.
It’s worth noting that progressive overload doesn’t imply making every training session harder than the previous one. Instead, it involves carefully planning and periodizing your training, incorporating a mix of high-intensity workouts, endurance rides, recovery sessions, and rest days. This structured approach allows for optimal adaptation and prevents burnout.
The Principle of Specificity:
The principle of specificity emphasizes the importance of tailoring your training to the specific demands of cycling. While cardiovascular improvements (central fitness) are important and can be developed through various endurance activities, cycling requires specific muscular adaptations (peripheral fitness) to excel on the bike.
The Principle of Reversibility:
To enhance your cycling performance, it’s essential to prioritize cycling-specific training. This involves spending a significant amount of your training time on the bike, mimicking the pedaling motion and targeting the muscles used in cycling, such as the quadriceps, glutes, hamstrings, and core. While cross-training activities like swimming or strength training can provide complementary benefits, they should not replace the majority of your cycling training.
Reversibility refers to the potential loss of fitness when training is reduced or completely stopped. Consistency is key in cycling training, and taking extended breaks or periods of inactivity can lead to detraining effects. However, rest and recovery are crucial for optimizing performance and preventing overtraining.
Strategic rest days and recovery periods should be incorporated into your training plan to allow for adaptation and minimize the risk of overuse injuries. During these periods, your body rebuilds and strengthens itself in response to the training stimulus. Additionally, tapering, which involves reducing training volume and intensity before a significant event or race, allows your body to peak and achieve optimal performance.
It’s important to strike a balance between training and recovery, understanding that occasional rest days or periods of reduced training can be beneficial for long-term progress.
The Principle of Individuality:
The principle of individuality acknowledges that every cyclist is unique and responds differently to training stimuli. Factors such as genetics, body composition, physiological characteristics, and personal preferences play a significant role in determining the most effective training approach for an individual.
As a cyclist, it’s essential to understand your strengths, weaknesses, and specific goals. This self-awareness will guide the customization of your training plan to suit your individual needs. While it can be insightful to observe training methods of professional riders or fellow cyclists, their routines may not necessarily be suitable for you.
To optimize your training, it’s advisable to undergo a comprehensive assessment or work with a qualified coach who can analyze your performance data, conduct physiological tests, and consider your individual characteristics. This information will help tailor your training program to maximize your potential and address any areas that require improvement.
Remember, these principles serve as a foundation for effective cycling training. By applying them in a structured and individualized manner, you can enhance your fitness, performance, and overall enjoyment of the sport.
Duration, Intensity and Frequency
The duration, intensity, and frequency are key factors to consider when designing a workout plan.
- Duration: Duration refers to the length of time each workout will last. It is important to focus on the duration rather than the distance covered because the body reacts to the time spent at a high intensity, not the distance covered. For example, riding the same distance into a headwind and on a calm day would require different durations and intensities. The power-duration curves illustrate the relationship between intensity and time.
- Intensity: Intensity measures how hard each workout will be. It is a complex metric that can be measured using various tools such as a speedometer, heart rate monitor, power meter, lactate analyzer, or perceived exertion. Measuring intensity accurately is crucial for training and racing progress. Advanced riders, especially, need to focus on intensity to advance their performance. However, it’s important to include recovery sessions and not have every workout at high intensity.
- Frequency: Frequency refers to how often you train and the number of workouts you do in a week. The frequency of training sessions depends on your lifestyle and time availability. It’s important to plan your training intelligently and make each session count. Having a detailed training plan helps ensure that you are doing the right workouts at the right times and maximizing your limited training time.
In summary, when designing a workout plan, consider the duration of each workout, the intensity at which you will train, and the frequency of your training sessions. These factors will vary depending on your competition level, goals, and availability, but they are essential for creating an effective and individualized training plan to reach your high-performance potential.
Volume and Intensity
Volume and intensity are two key factors in designing a training plan for athletes. Volume refers to the total amount of training, which is determined by the combination of frequency (how often you train) and duration (how long each workout lasts). It is typically measured in hours.
Intensity, on the other hand, refers to how hard each workout is. It can be measured using various metrics such as speed, heart rate, power output, or perceived exertion.
For advanced athletes, intensity tends to play a more significant role in their training compared to volume. While volume is still important, intensity accounts for approximately 60% of race-day fitness, while volume contributes to around 40%. This means that focusing on the intensity of workouts is crucial for improving performance.
Measuring intensity can be done using tools like power meters, heart rate monitors, or perceived exertion. Different intensity zones are used in training, and the time spent in each zone depends on the athlete’s goals, individual needs, and the current training period.
Dose and Density
Dose and density are related concepts that help determine the appropriate mix of volume and intensity in training. Dose refers to the relative difficulty of a workout in terms of duration or intensity. High-dose workouts are challenging and can include long durations, high-intensity intervals, or a combination of both. Low-dose workouts, on the other hand, are shorter and have lower intensity.
Density, on the other hand, measures how closely spaced the high-dose workouts are. High-density training means that hard workouts are scheduled close to each other, possibly with only one or two easy days in between. Low-density training involves more easy, low-dose workouts between the challenging sessions.
Dose and density are individualized and depend on the athlete’s specific needs, capabilities, and seasonal fitness. As the training year progresses, both dose and density typically increase to prepare for high-priority races. However, the progression should not be overly aggressive to avoid the risk of breakdown or overtraining.
Training Load
The combination of volume and intensity is referred to as training load. Training load varies among athletes, with some able to handle high loads of more than 20 hours per week, while others require a more conservative approach. Training load is often measured using hours spent training, but it’s important to consider the intensity as well. Training Stress Score (TSS) is a way to combine volume and intensity into a single metric. I will discuss this further in a later post.
Supercompensation
Supercompensation is the process by which the body adapts and becomes more fit after a period of training stress followed by proper rest and recovery. It is during the rest and recovery periods that the body actually improves and becomes fitter. Alternating high-dose and low-dose workouts, along with adequate recovery, is necessary to stimulate supercompensation. Pushing too hard without sufficient recovery can lead to overtraining, which can have detrimental effects on performance and overall health. Supercompensation varies among individuals, with some responding faster to training stimuli than others due to genetic factors. It’s important to pay attention to your body’s response and avoid trying to artificially accelerate the process.
Fitness, Fatigue, and Form in Cycling
I would like to provide some additional insights and knowledge regarding the concepts of fitness, fatigue, and form in cycling.
Fitness is crucial for race readiness, and there are multiple ways to determine changes in an athlete’s fitness level. While race results are the ultimate measure of fitness, they come late in the process. It’s important to have indicators of fitness progression during training. Athletes often rely on subjective measures such as how they feel during workouts, but these can be unreliable. Objective feedback can be obtained through clinic testing, where athletes undergo high-tech assessments to measure their fitness levels. Another approach is to track and measure daily training load, which combines volume and intensity. By gradually increasing training load over time, athletes can gauge their fitness improvement.
To measure training load, one method is to use an intensity-measuring device like a heart rate monitor or power meter. By assigning numeric weights to different training zones and calculating the time spent in each zone during a workout, a workout score can be generated. These scores can be accumulated over a week to determine the training load. This method, although tedious, provides a numerical representation of fitness progress.
Alternatively, software tools like TrainingPeaks can automate the calculation of training load based on the data collected from heart rate monitors or power meters. These tools simplify the process and provide an easy-to-understand training load number. Tracking training load over weeks allows athletes to monitor their fitness improvements.
Fatigue is an integral part of training, and its presence indicates that fitness is improving. When training load increases, fatigue also increases. It’s essential to embrace fatigue as a friend because it signifies that the body is adapting to the physical stress. Conversely, decreasing training load indicates a decrease in both fitness and fatigue, indicating recovery.
Form, in cycling, refers to a rider’s race readiness and freshness. It is often associated with performing well in races. Form is achieved by shedding fatigue while maintaining a high level of fitness. A rider who is fatigued cannot be on form, regardless of their fitness level. To attain form, a tapering period before a race is necessary, allowing the body to recover from fatigue while retaining fitness. The tapering process ensures that fitness loss is minimal while fatigue is reduced significantly, resulting in a feeling of increased fitness on race day. This is such an important part of preparing for races that I have created an entire section call ” The Importance Of Tapering For Optimal Race Performance“.
Understanding the relationship between fitness, fatigue, and form is crucial for effective training. While fatigue changes rapidly, fitness changes slowly. By managing training load, monitoring fatigue, and implementing tapering strategies, cyclists can optimize their race readiness and performance.
And that’s pretty much it in regards needing to know specific terms and what they mean. There are a few more that I didn’t add here as I didn’t want to bog you down in terminology just yet. You will come across them as you proceed through my other posts.
This post has just given you a good start and I will go into these concepts in much more details in other posts.
Next, I want to focus on Training Intensity as it is, in my opinion, one of the most important factors in training. Knowing what intensities to train and when to do it is crucial to creating a good training plan.
See you there.