In the last post, I talked about the importance of achieving overload if you want to keep improvement, and talked about “spikiness” in workouts. You can get spikiness in different ways. The first thing that springs to mind is to segment our workouts into hard days and easy days. Will this help?

Well, it will let you get some overload when you start, but my guess is that over time, you will get used to the hard days, and you will plateau again.

The answer is “specificity”, which just means that you are going to focus a specific workout on a specific area. By focusing on that area – and getting sufficient recovery between workouts in that area – you can continue to generate overload, and continue to improve. There are literally hundreds of different kind of specific workouts you can do; here are a few:

• 20 minute time trials (threshold repeats)
• Hill repeats
• Over/under intervals
• Muscle tension
• Single-leg drills
• Cadence drills

Now, we have a different problem – the problem of figuring out what areas you need to work out, what workouts are most appropriate for those areas, and how to fit them all together along with appropriate recovery so that the program is just the right intensity – not too easy, and not too hard.

The best answer to this problem is “find a coach”, but I’ll share some ideas in future posts.

Next time, I think I’ll talk about macrocycles, mesocycles, and microcycles.

The first in a series of posts on cycling training. 

Humans are quite adaptable, and we take advantage of that adaptability when we work out. Or, we *try* to take advantage of it, but we often don’t do a very good job of it, because we misunderstand how things work. It’s really quite simple:

Overload + Recovery = Improvement

Overload means applying training stress that exceeds what your body is already accustomed to.

Recovery is the time after the workout when you get better.

Improvement is when you get better.

When you first start riding, this is easy to do; you aren’t used to riding at all, so pretty much anything that you do overloads your system, and you improve. Over time, your body adapts to the way that you are working out, and your improvement plateaus. If you keep training the same way you were training in the past, you won’t see the improvements that you are looking for, since you are no longer generating any training stress.

In future posts I’ll explore ways to get more overload, and how to improve recovery.

I get the opportunity to see lots of new riders on our group rides, and there's a common thread that shows up over and over.

Nearly everybody who is new is working out too hard, and many people are working out too much. What do I mean by this?

Well, to get better at cycling, you need to focus on both your anaerobic and aerobic systems. But the way you focus on these is totally different.

Your aerobic system training is best done at a fairly light intensity - one at which you can still talk comfortably. This is sometimes known as "base miles" or "LSD (Long Steady Distance)". This sort of riding helps your body get better at getting oxygen to your muscles, better at using your stored flat, and (very importantly) builds up your muscles and ligaments to deal with increased loads. Pros and races put in 1000s of miles at these sort of intensities.

I think of this sort of riding as setting your baseline.

Once the baseline is set - which is a 6-8 week process (or more) - then you can add some intensity to the mix to work on the anaerobic system. This involves interval work - things like 1 minute all out, 1 minute recovery, repeated 6 times, or hill repeats, where you do the same hillclimb over and over. The details are a subject of another post, but these workouts increase your ability to produce power, and your ability to deal with short exertions and recover quickly. And they're very small in quantity - you might only do 2 sets of 4 intervals in a workout.

This is also the time to add in tempo rides. Tempo rides are done right below around your lactate threshold (another big subject, but where your legs start to hurt when you're out of breath is a decent starting point) and last from 15 minutes to perhaps 30 minutes. Tempo rides improve your ability to deal with lactic acid, so that you can ride at a higher heart rate but still staying aerobic.

What I see in beginning riders is working out as hard as they can for the whole ride. And that works fairly well when you start riding - frankly, pretty much anything works well when you start riding - but it has problems once you start to get some fitness. That pace is fast enough that there is a significant anaerobic component, which is much faster than optimal to train your aerobic system. And, even though it feels like you're going really hard, you are riding too fast to be able to do your intervals all out.

So, if you want to get better, you need to get in the base miles, and then you need to have focused workouts of very high intensity with limited duration.