This was especially frustrating given all the effort I was putting into it: not just under the barbell, but also in studying both the science and practice of lifting, and experimenting with different training approaches.

I'd had the usual initial rapid improvements that all novices experience, when your body is learning to use the muscle it already has more effectively. In my case, this lasted for about ten weeks, after which period further gains evaporated. I spent the next five or six months in a futile effort to tweak the novice linear progression approach (low volume, high frequency, high intensity), with little to show for it.

It was obvious at this point that there was no more blood to be squeezed out of that stone, so I switched to a real training plan (higher volume and more varied intensities). This helped a little, but still I wasn't progressing anything like I wanted.

Then, almost exactly one year into my strength training, the problem finally dawned on me.

Eating! One of the few concepts that just about everyone in the resistance training world actually agrees on is that, to gain muscle and strength, you must have an energy surplus. I'd heard this scores of times, yet I'd somehow managed to convince myself that it didn't apply to me. I thought it was just for skinny ectomorphs who find it very hard to gain weight. I assumed that so long as I consumed excess protein, my body would use this to build muscle and use body fat for energy.

This was wrong; the body wants to hold on to its stored fat, ready for the next famine which could be just around the corner. It would much prefer to use protein for energy and retain fat stores than to build new muscle and burn fat.

So, in late November, I thought 'why not give eating a try?'. Since then I've been gaining about 2 kg of weight per month, almost all of which appears to be lean mass (according to both the mirror and the US Navy fat calculation methods). I'm also seeing sharp, almost linear, increases in my rep maxes on all my major lifts. Better late than never.

But even after this fantastic turn of events, I was still having a terrible time with my Squat. The Back Squat and the Overhead Press are my key lifts, and with my relatively long torso and short limbs I'm well built for them. Now that I was chomping down well over 4,000 calories each day, my Overhead Press was flying up. So was my Hex Bar Deadlift, Bent-Over Row and even the Bench Press (which is a much lower priority for me). The only major lift apart from the Back Squat that wasn't improving fast was my Chin-Up, which I put down to bodyweight gain largely offsetting strength improvements.

But the Back Squat was just not right. Constantly resetting the weight wasn't helping; even when doing light sets of 8 I was gasping for breath halfway through.

Again, there was what was in hindsight an obvious solution.

Technique! Although I was bracing myself at the start of a set, I was simply releasing all the tension (and much of the air in my lungs) on the eccentric phase of the first rep. Subsequent reps were even worse, as I wasn't even properly resetting my breathing at the top. Once, I fixed this, the improvement was immense. I also made my stance a little wider so as to only drop down just below parallel, a much more comfortable depth for me than getting really deep.

So now I'm moving again. My diet is great, and I've iterated my gym work to give me consistent, sustainable gains. I've settled on a basic plan of 4-week cycles with what I call semi-linear progression. Let's say the target is 5 sets of 8 reps. In this case I'll go for 8 reps on every set. If I get them, the weight notches up next time; if I miss any on later sets, I keep the weight the same and try to get them next time. I increase intensity between mesocycles, e.g. sets of 10, 8, 6, 4 over sixteen weeks.

I've decided to concentrate on building strength and muscle mass until I get to a decent level. I modified my sprint training plan to reflect this. I'm not far off 300 lbs for my Back Squat 1RM; if I can get to my 315 lb target (about 1.6 times bodyweight) by mid-June I'll reward myself with a 16-week cycling-focused program. Otherwise, I'll lock myself in the gym for the rest of the year.

My ultimate goal is 405 lb for the Back Squat and bodyweight for the Overhead Press. At that point I'll follow my plan as written, but until then I'll just do one cycling peak each year.

...

#cycling #training #strength

The transition from endurance to sprint training was pretty abrupt, but not difficult; my cycling volume has come down to around 6 or 7 hours per week and I'm actually spending more time in the gym than on my bike. Most of my cycling has been base training combined with short, overgeared sprinting. No group rides, no tempo or threshold work; almost everything has been either very easy or full gas. This is to ensure my cycling is as complementary as possible to my weight training.

In fact, it's so clear to me that strength is the limiting factor in my sprint performance that I've been almost exclusively focusing on it throughout this period. 6 days per week lifting weights in a garage in South Carolina wasn't the most fun way to spend the summer, but there's no disputing the results.

I've added 160, 125 and 110 Watts to my 1-, 5- and 30-second power since 2020. As this is despite spending less time than in previous years training anaerobic capacity on the bike, I'm sure this is almost entirely down to increased strength and muscle mass (as the scientific literature would predict). And since my strength is still relatively low, that means I should have plenty more potential for improvement.

My 1-rep max on the back squat is currently 1.35 times bodyweight, with my deadlift is close to 1.7. The research I've read indicates that a squat in the range of 1.5-1.6 times body weight is the minimum level of strength necessary before you even need to worry about power training. Around 2.0-2.1 x would be sufficient such that extra strength beyond this would likely be superfluous.

So at this point, after 10 months of hard work, I'm still quite a way short of the bottom of the sweet spot range, and it was with that (and my frustratingly-slow progress) in mind that, closing out the season, I also made the decision to continue focusing on strength through 2022.

Following a 1-month hypertrophy block as a lead-in (currently underway), I've decided to do two consecutive 18-week Strength blocks, then maybe as a little carrot move to a Speed Endurance cycle followed by one Taper/Event block, before closing out the training year.

When I start the Preparation phase next October, it will be the first time I actually follow a whole year of my annual plan as written. By then I expect to have got my back squat up to at least 1.6 times bodyweight, with my deadlift over 2.0 x, and these numbers should increase to over 1.7 and 2.1 after another 18-week Strength block to start the following training year. So by spring 2023 I should finally be strong enough that I'll be ready to focus squarely on my cycling again.

I addition to my quite low general strength, another thing that inclines me to believe that it's force rather than velocity that's limiting my power output is that I consistently hit my peak power numbers at ridiculously high cadences (145-155 rpm). Clearly I don't have a problem with velocity.

If, as I believe, my sprint cycling performance is indeed strength-limited, I expect my power numbers on the bike to continue to increase close to linearly in line with strength gains through this period. This will confirm that I'm on the right track with my training focus.

...

#cycling #training #strength

It became increasingly clear to me over this period that it was time to move on from endurance riding. I discuss this in detail here.

In the meantime, the hybrid training that I was left with was a little too much for me to handle and wasn't properly focused, so once I'd finally committed to making a clean break from endurance cycling in favour of sprinting, the first thing I needed to do was come up with an entirely new training plan.

This took quite a lot of effort (due in part to the relative lack of available material on sprint cycling as compared with endurance cycling), but in due course I came up with something that seems like it might be workable. Or at least a decent starting point.

The results can be found here. I'll go through the details (which are of course still in flux) next time.

The big changes continue. My garage gym is fully operational, and I've spent the last couple of months figuring out a decent strength training regimen; finding a good balance between strength training and cycling; as well as actually working on the technical performance of each lift.

I've mentioned before that strength training is now a major component of my plan, and since (despite previous dumbbell dabbling) I'm basically a beginner, I decided to extend the off-season period to 6 months this year. I want as big a platform as possible on which to build power.

I've got to a point where I'm pretty happy with my squat technique, and have been making good progress on this most important lift. My main target is to get my squat up close to 300 pounds by the end of this phase (late May). Based on my progress so far, I think I've got a good chance of doing so.

See my Training Plan for full details, although my actual lifting remains in a state of flux as I attempt to balance it with my cycling. My main priority is building strength, but I don't want to lose too much aerobic capacity.

Although from next year onwards I'll stick to the 7-day microcycle outlined in the Plan, this year I've been experimenting with a two-week cycle, in which I lift on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday. There are rest days on Mondays, a longish Base ride on the middle Sunday, a Neuromuscular ride on the second Saturday and a mixed-intensity aerobic ride to finish the cycle on the second Sunday. The other days have easy commute rides, plus Leg Speed rides before each weights session. That's a total of about 8 hours cycling per week

This obviously devotes a lot of time and energy to strength at the expense of cycling, but as I currently have so much more to gain in the former I think it's a worthwhile trade-off. Next year I'll be at a much higher starting point with my strength, so sticking to the more balanced training detailed in the Plan will probably be the way to go.

So with 12 weeks remaining in the Off-Season, I've got 30 Squat days, 12 Deadlift days, 6 RDL days and 6 Mid-Thigh Pull Days, plus upper-body work, still ahead of me. If you want to build power (force x velocity), it makes sense to first develop a lot of force, and then later work on your speed (with explosive lifts and plyometrics). That's what I'm doing.

I'll report on the results in a more substantial update in 12 weeks time. By then I'll have some baseline power numbers (peak, 15- and 30-seconds, and 1-, 5- and 20-minutes) for you as well. Then we'll see how much I can increase these over the 8 weeks of the Pre-Season, when I ramp up the intensity both on and off the bike.

For now, patience is the necessary virtue.

UPDATE: 22nd February

Well, right after I published this I ended up making several more major changes.

Trying to juggle both strength and cycling training in the way I outlined above just wasn't working, so I bit the bullet and accepted I need to schedule both on the same days. As strength training is the priority at this time of year, that goes in the morning, with my key rides in the late afternoon. This is how track sprinters (from whose training I've borrowed heavily) do things.

So Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday are the big days of the weeks. Lifting in the early morning, maybe a recovery commute ride afterwards, then a cycling session after I get home. Tuesdays are standing starts, Thursdays are power jumps (overgeared sprints), and Saturdays feature a little high-intensity aerobic work to prevent me losing too much top-end fitness. Sundays are a nice easy base ride, Mondays are rest days, and Wednesdays/Fridays are recovery commute rides.

I also had to take a full week away from the gym and hard rides. I'd got into my thirteenth week of full-body weight training 2-3 times per week, and all my lifts had stagnated or even started regressing for a couple of weeks. I'd left it way too long to take a break. For the rest of the off-season it'll be 4 weeks on, 1 week off (and I really should know better by now).

I also spotted some bad technique creeping back into my squatting, no doubt due to increasing the load too quickly. So I've dropped back 15 pounds and installed a mirror in the garage to keep an eye on myself. No folding over, knee valgus, or stopping above parallel allowed!

Let's see how this affects things. See you in May.

#cycling #training

However, one good thing that came out of this was the chance for me to step back and get a bit more perspective on my cycling: what I was doing, what my goals are and how best I could optimize my training for them. It was great having the freedom to just train however I wanted to, without worrying about anything else.

Sunrise in Bluffton

Last year I accumulated a total of just under 900 hours of riding. This didn't turn me into a Tour contender; it merely made me exhausted and perpetually overreached. Who could have predicted that? After several months riding around 20 hours per week, at the end of the year it finally started to sink in that I was doing far too much cycling and that this wasn't good for me.

This year I backed right off over the winter, then built up a little again going into the spring. You can see a snapshot of the results in the figure below.

My VO₂max trends since I've had my power meter

I somehow managed to squeeze the occasional threshold test in between all the endurance rides; the figure shows that my returns on all that riding in 2019 didn't amount to much. And bear in mind that the graph shows my VO₂max results; my top-end power numbers went horribly downhill over that same time period.

By the end of summer 2018, when I'd been riding for one year, I was one of the stronger riders on the hardest ride in my area: the Unlimited Saturday group ride in Savannah (I certainly wasn't the fastest, but definitely well above average). The following summer, by contrast, I didn't make it all the way around once, and usually got dropped within 15 minutes. Conclusion: volume approach not working.

Springtime by the May River, Bluffton

This year, after backing off over the winter, my numbers picked up nicely through the spring (by which point I was exclusively riding solo). In May I got my highest 20-minute power (307 Watts), before tailing off in June, again due to overreaching.

Growing tired of this pattern, July was when I started making huge changes to my training plan (my actual literal training plan), progressively reducing my volume through the rest of the summer, by the end of which I was all the way down to about 8 hours per week.

This really paid off in September. I put in a few really big efforts, smashing my previous best 5-minute power by 25 Watts (from 366 to 391) and 2-minute power by 48 Watts (452 to a nice even 500).

I had my best VO₂max scores at the end of the season, but that's because I was 6 kg lighter in September than I was in May and VO₂max takes bodyweight into account — my raw power numbers on the threshold tests have stayed pretty constant.

My training software now tells me my W' (anaerobic capacity) is around 38-39 kJ, which is humongous, while my Critical Power (FTP) wattage is still mediocre, stubbornly stuck in the mid-270s (around the level it's been for the best part of a year). More evidence that I'm better suited to shorter efforts than long endurance rides.

Golden Cheetah shows where my strengths lie

Xert confirms this, and also suggests that riding around 200 W on a base ride is way too high. I've reduced the upper bound of my endurance zone accordingly.

Another revelation to me this year was learning how to properly analyze my training, by breaking down volume and intensity to look at each individually:

At least in the range of 10 to 19 hours per week, the lower the volume the greater my fitness. Maybe < 10 hours would be even better?

In contrast, higher average ride intensity produces better fitness.

There's a strong negative correlation between my VO₂max and volume, and an even stronger positive correlation between VO₂max and intensity. This confirms what's become ever clearer: I need to focus on intensity and back off the volume.

From what I've read on this subject, it appears that a big factor in determining an individual's training response is their muscle typology. Most people are fairly evenly balanced between slow- and fast-twitch fibres, but there are outliers in either direction. Those who are slow-twitchers tend to respond better to higher training loads and volume, while such training is bad for fast-twitchers, who can produce bigger power over short durations but are much more susceptible to fatigue.

New Riverside, Pritchardville

So for the last three months of the season, I reduced my riding to around 10 hours per week, and I've averaged just over 12 for the whole year. You can see how this change of direction has already benefited me, by comparing my best numbers from this year with those of last year:

Power numbers 2019 versus 2020, courtesy of intervals.icu

There was actually a small improvement in my 20-minute power, but it was over shorter durations where I really went to the next level. And that's what I want to build on in 2021; in particular, I want to see how high I can get my peak power.

Xert breaks down my profile like this:

Xert says I'm a Pursuiter (but I'd rather be a Road Sprinter!)

Last year, when I was doing huge volumes of riding, the profile was pretty flat all the way around. But now that I've adjusted things back in the direction of sanity, my true phenotype seems to be revealing itself.

I know I'm never going to be a pure sprinter, but I do think I could potentially add a couple of hundred Watts to my peak power if I specifically train to optimize it. And that's what I'm going to do: I've made even more radical modifications to my plan for next season.

The volume is going to be reduced even further. As it currently stands, my plan for 2021 adds up to 350 training hours on the bike, plus another 150 or so riding on very easy bike commutes. So either 7 or 10 hours per week, depending on how you see it. But my commute rides are very very easy — heart rate under 100 bpm the whole time — so I don't think that really adds much stress at all; in terms of training load, it's about 1/3 of a base ride, so maybe you could say I'll be doing the equivalent of 8 hours cycling training per week (400 for the year). I'll end up with 600 hours this year, I got 900 last year and 800 the year before that, so any way you look at it it's going to be much less than I've ever done previously.

I cannot ride under these conditions!

But perhaps the biggest change will be the addition of year-round weightlifting. Up to now I've been doing a modest amount of dumbbell training, generally only once per week, so I certainly haven't progressed very far yet. It's probably not a coincidence that the one period where I was lifting twice per week happened to be when I got my best peak power numbers, which tailed off again once I went back to a single weekly session.

But now I'm going to be doing two lifting sessions per week most of the year, and three each week for 12 weeks from December to February. And I'm going to have a proper setup in my garage: power rack, barbell, bench, platform and about 400 lb of weights to start with. And proper lifts: squats, deadlifts, power cleans, just like the trackies do! No more dumbbell lunges for a while.

Although I won't be copying their methods exactly — I'll need more aerobic endurance so I can make it around a tough group ride for a couple of hours without getting dropped — I've taken a lot of inspiration from how track sprinters train.

My searching somehow unearthed a PhD thesis, buried inside of which is detailed training periodization for the New Zealand track sprint team leading up to the 2012 London Olympics. This was a real eye-opener. There's also this website, which gave me a few ideas about microcycle organization, i.e. how to fit weightlifting into a cycling training plan.

So, I'll have a real strength-training program (not an afterthought like it's been up to now). The main challenge will be balancing weightlifting training load with my cycling, but that's why the volume on the bike is coming way down. If I get it right, I expect to see big improvements at the end of the power-duration curve that I care about (and actually I think improving my strength is also the best chance I've got of making significant further gains to my FTP).

Millstone Landing, Hardeeville

I originally started cycling just to try to lose a bit of weight, but that phase didn't survive the first week. I rapidly started devouring anything and everything I could get my hands on regarding cycling and training for it. I went through what I now recognize as a not-unusual phase of totally overdoing it, and now that that's hopefully behind me I think it's time to see just how far I can take this.

Ultimately, the most important reason why I ride bikes remains getting and staying healthy, but I find that taking something seriously makes it much more rewarding, and as regards cycling, this has the added benefit of being the best way to health.

That is, as long as you retain enough perspective and discipline to keep things in balance. And that's my biggest challenge for 2021.

#cycling #training #review

It worked. I added another 3 Watts to my 20-minute power, but the biggest improvements were higher up on the power curve, including 25 W on my previous best 5-minute power and 48 W on my 2-minute power.

I think all this was due to a substantial increase in my anaerobic capacity (W' in the scientific literature). This value represents the amount of energy available for continuous work above Critical Power (also known as anaerobic threshold or FTP); whenever you do a hard effort this energy depletes at a rate proportional to how far above threshold you are, and doesn't recover until you drop below threshold. Once it's used up, you will drop down below threshold, and must stay there for an extended period before you can ride hard again.

Plugging my data into analysis software suggests that my W' is around 38-39 kJ, which is a huge number, especially for a 44-year-old. Typical values, even for racers, are much lower — according to the open dataset of Golden Cheetah, the middle third ranges from 14-21 kJ; my value is above the 99th percentile.

I've been extremely cautious reaching this conclusion, because these numbers are so unusual, but in this mesocycle I've specifically gone out and got true maximal values for a range of durations (yes, this hurts a lot), and it seems it really is true.

One implication of this is that typical assumptions about the results of a threshold test lead me astray. Since riding for 1 hour at maximal intensity is an extremely unpleasant undertaking, the much more common approach to determining your critical power is to ride for 20 minutes and subtract 5% from the resulting average power. This test is still horrible, but much more palatable than the alternative.

On my test yesterday I got 306 Watts for 20 minutes. Taking 5% off this gives a CP of 292 W. But if you take into account my W' value, my true CP is probably more like 278 W. This is because, just like anyone else, on a 20-minute test I go harder than I could for 1 hour, i.e. above my CP, and can use up my entire W' over the course of the test. Since my W' is much bigger than normal, this means that simply taking 5% off the average power overstates what I could do for 1 hour, because 5% is only a rough estimate and to the extent that it holds true it only does so for riders with a more typical anaerobic capacity.

The upshot of this is that although my 20-minute power is around the 70th percentile, my CP is only around the 60th.

It's important to know these values, since they show what kind of rider you are and how you respond to different types of training. As I've suspected ever since I started riding in groups, I'm clearly a rider who's strongest at making short, hard efforts. In some ways my big W' hides my lack of aerobic aptitude — it makes me look better than I really am. Where I've always come undone is in the latter stages of a long and hard ride, because anaerobic capacity is much less resilient to fatigue than aerobic endurance.

I like to think of anaerobic capacity as like a battery that lets me temporarily ride in the red zone. Once I drop back down to an easier pace, the battery can recharge so that later I can make another hard effort. But inefficiencies in the system mean that both the rate of recharging and the extent to which the battery recharges diminishes over the course of a hard ride, as fatigue sets in.

I'm guessing that if I was to have a biopsy of my thigh muscle, they'd find I was at the high end for fast-twitch fibres. Much of anaerobic capacity is derived from these fibres, which are much more powerful but much more fatiguable than slow-twitch fibres. That means that we fast-twitchers, being relatively dependent on our anaerobic ability, succumb to fatigue much earlier than our more aerobically-inclined slow-twitch brethren, whose own muscles keep chugging along like dependable diesel engines.

I think reducing my riding volume has allowed my fast-twitch fibres to become more glycolytic (anaerobic), and less oxidative (aerobic), which is why my already quite high W' went through the roof. The downside of this would be if I wanted to do a longer ride, such as the 100 km challenge I did in May. There I averaged 244 Watts for 3 hours, which no doubt would be well beyond my capabilities if I tried that again now. Obviously, the same thing would apply to a road race or hilly grand fondo like those I did in previous summers, where I'd have a much harder time now than I did then.

But the more I've thought about this, the more I've realized that I don't actually want to do these kind of efforts right now. I want to optimize my riding for speed over short durations; that's what I most enjoy and what motivates me. So I want to reconfigure my training with this in mind.

How should I go about doing this? I'll be talking about this in much more detail soon, in my annual training round-up, but basically my performance increases over the summer have confirmed that the direction I've been heading, in particular the much lower cycling volume, is the right way to go. I'm an intensity responder, so I need to train like one.

This doesn't mean going crazy every day, but it does mean working out what form my hard workouts should take, finding the optimal spacing for them, and in the interim making sure to ride at an appropriately easy intensity and duration.

That brings me onto another tweak I've made to my training, based on the realization that my base ride intensity is probably too hard. I've gradually let it creep up into a region that's probably at or above my aerobic threshold. If I'm riding at this intensity on easy days, that will work my fast-twitch fibres when they should be recovering. This could be why, although my 90-second to 5+ minute power has greatly increased, my power over the shortest durations, especially peak power, has dropped off over the last couple of months.

The same thing goes for low-cadence work: low cadence means higher force, and higher force means fast-twitch fibres come into play (that's great if you want to train them to be more oxidative, but not if, like me, you want to optimize your glycolytic power). Instead of this, I should be working at relatively high cadences on easy days, to train my slow-twitch fibres and give the fast-twitch fibres a break. Strength training on the bike has its place (see below), but not on easy days.

However, I still think that continuous pedalling is a very good thing for my aerobic fitness (provided I'm going at a low enough intensity and a high enough cadence). And I've become good at doing this, consistently hitting 99% pedalling while moving on my base rides over the last few months.

Obviously, the intensity restriction only applies to regular Base rides, not to Tempo rides, where riding around aerobic threshold is the specific goal. But now I've decided to restrict the Tempo rides to the Post-Season endurance build phase. The rest of the time, my base rides will be much easier.

Another thing I'm going to heavily focus on is strength training. I've been doing this for a while, just as a supplement to my riding, but now it's going to be a first-class component of my training plan. This means a lot of heavy weight-training and on-bike neuromuscular work (overgeared sprints, standing starts, and high-cadence leg speed drills), with plyometrics emphasized later, from the pre-season onwards.

I'm planning on setting up a barbell station in my garage, complete with platform and power rack, so I can build a lower-body-focused program based around squats and deadlifts, 2-3 times per week, from October to April, and continuing at a lower frequency through the summer. My dumbbells will now be used for assistance work. I'm going to set aside the required space; the only problem will be actually getting hold of the equipment, as it seems it's in high demand and short supply due to the ongoing pandemic.

I think there are some potentially big gains to be had from this. Although my anaerobic capacity is great, my peak power is nothing special at all, just like my critical power. I expect both of these to be improved, possibly a great deal, by increasing my strength. And I'm planning on increasing my strength a lot.

The basic (corners) and advanced (edges) abilities, courtesy of Joe Friel. Training the basic abilities to either side of an advanced ability is expected to improve that advanced ability; both sprint power and muscular endurance (the ability to work around CP) should therefore be improved by increasing muscular force (i.e. strength).

If I can add a couple of hundred Watts to my peak power, this combined with my anaerobic capacity will make me much more of a force to be reckoned with in a sprint situation. And obviously, increasing my CP would mean I start using my anaerobic capacity later, and to a lesser extent, on a hard effort.

So my training is going to become quite similar to that of a kilo rider on the track. There'll still be aerobic work, but it will be greatly deemphasized compared to what I was doing in the past, especially over the winter. I don't know if this will work, but it'll be fun finding out.

So I've now come to the end of the In-Season phase. I'll do a low-volume fun week next week, which will be followed by two rest weeks before moving into the Post-Season. The Post-Season has a lot of aerobic work, and weight training that will start off relatively light, gradually increasing in intensity, to lead into the full-on strength work of the winter.

I can't wait to get started, although I'm definitely ready for a break before I do.

#cycling #training

I've reduced my training time, averaging around 12 hours per week on the bike throughout this period, and upped the average intensity (although much of this intensity increase is a consequence of the reduced base load).

Analyzing my ride data over the past year or so that I've had my power meter showed that I appear to respond much better to intensity compared with volume. The two graphs below show my VO₂max, first versus volume and then versus intensity. The trends are clear:

You can see that higher volume hasn't lead to increased VO₂max values, whilst higher intensity has. There are other factors involved that could possibly confound the data (especially my lack of recovery during my highest volume phase last year), and VO₂max isn't the only important aspect of performance (more on this below), but nevertheless I judged it prudent to at least try completing the remainder of the season with a lower-volume-and-higher-intensity period to see what effect this has on my performance.

What this means in practice is knocking a few hours off my endurance-pace riding, while increasing its speed a little — still low intensity, but closer to my aerobic threshold than previously.

Furthermore, I've also been thinking quite a lot about my strengths and weaknesses and the kind of riding I enjoy the most, and therefore what goals I want to focus on.

My power numbers, and comparison with other intervals.icu users

My numbers have increased across the board this season, and it's now even clearer that my strength is over relatively short durations. I'm still not so much a pure sprinter as a kilo-type rider; I'd make a decent leadout man as I'm pretty good going flat out from about 400 metres all the way up to a mile or so. My 30-second power should be higher. I added 132 Watts to my 5-second power and a whopping 92 Watts to my 60-second power; 30-second power should logically be somewhere in between. I think I just haven't got it right technically, and also my bike hasn't been changing gears very cleanly under load so there's a big drop-off when I shift. One thing I can try is starting in a bigger gear with no shifting for the full 30 seconds and see what that gets me (and this is something I want to start doing for training purposes anyway).

There's a notable drop-off over extended aerobic efforts, and indeed I find these a bit of a slog. I've remarked previously that by far my least favourite duration on a profile test is 5 minutes, and it does look like I've under-performed on them relative to 20 minutes (I'd expect my 5-minute percentile to be closer to half way between 3 minutes and 20 minutes, given the relative anaerobic:aerobic contributions).

So, other than possible cumulative year-on-year increases, what's changed in my training since last season that's lead to these improvements? A big factor must be reduced volume. I'm on target to hit 700 hours this year, compared with 900 last year. And if I maintain the recent changes I'll be down around 600 hours next year. So it really does seem like this volume reduction at least doesn't hurt my performance, and may in fact be actively beneficial.

I think the main benefit of this has simply been due to much more focus on recovery: rather than grinding out an endless string of big weeks I'm incorporating regular periods of reduced load. High volume itself might not be bad, and could even help, but of course it has to be balanced with recovery, which was something I was awful at last year. Any future increases in volume will be approached with caution.

The other big factor in my improvement is likely my much bigger focus on strength and power. All year I've been much more consistent with my weight training and plyometrics, in addition to which I've regularly been incorporating maximal sprints into my training rides. From the research I've studied, it's clear that strength training has substantial beneficial effects on peak power, anaerobic ability and cycling economy.

Despite this, it's often neglected by amateur riders, even serious ones who want to be racers. It's their loss; I'll be renewing this focus over the off-season period that goes from November all the way through to early March. That's when I do twice-weekly lower body sessions, whereas right now I'm only doing one per week because I found that that's all I can handle alongside the harder rides of the summer.

The good news for me is my strengths are what I enjoy. I like short, hard efforts on the bike: I respond well to — and have great compliance with — my Sprint Repeats workout; I relish 30-60 second blowouts at the end of a run-in to a sprint point on a group ride; I do best on short segments on Strava.

So for next season I want to maintain working on 1-minute power as a primary focus. It could be argued that I've got relatively less to gain here, but I think that this isn't necessarily true; I won't know until I try.

In any case, this doesn't mean just hammering out anaerobic repeats and neglecting aerobic work: a 60-second effort is the point at which there's a roughly 50:50 balance between anaerobic and aerobic energy supply (it's actually about 10 percent phosphagen, 40 percent anaerobic glycolytic, and 50 percent oxidative), so in fact aerobic ability is equally important for this duration, and given my numbers it does look like this is where I've got more potential for improvement.

Another important reason to work on my aerobic ability is to increase my Critical Power, so that I can preserve more of my anaerobic energy for when it's really needed. In other words, work on my weakness to preserve my strength. At the moment my best estimates are that my CP is around 290 Watts and my W' about 30.5 kJ. This latter number is very high for a 44-year old, while the CP is nothing special. It might even be that my CP is a bit lower than this, and my W' even higher.

If I can get my CP up over 300, this would have a huge impact on preserving my W' balance until the sharp end of a competitive situation, and every additional Watt is important. The question is, what's the best way of doing this?

That brings me back to my training modifications. As I seem to be an intensity responder as opposed to a volume responder, I've reduced my easy ride durations whilst increasing their intensity close to and around my aerobic threshold, as well as maintaining the amount of higher-intensity work. This reorganization has led to modifications to some existing rides, and the addition of a new ride.

In particular, my Base and Endurance rides are now more focused; instead of just noodling around for many hours at a time, I've made pedaling time and sticking to the target HR/power the key goals, rather than duration (which has been reduced in accordance with the experiment).

I've named the new ride Base+; it's a Base ride with the addition of significant time spent just above aerobic threshold. So I'll spend most of the ride with my heart rate in the high 120s-mid 130s, below aerobic threshold (like any other Base ride), but also do a few blocks in the low 140s, at and just above aerobic threshold, still trying to maintain close to 100% pedalling time. The idea is to increase the time I can ride at aerobic threshold until the onset of aerobic decoupling.

These changes were made in an effort to boost my aerobic power and endurance in a more efficient (and hopefully more effective) way than just going for big, easy volume. This may work better for an intensity-responder like me, in contrast to a volume-responder who would thrive more on lots of long easy riding.

My latest Threshold Test was okay; just a 3 Watt gain in my 20-minute power, but combined with continued weight loss and considering the smaller training load, this is a decent improvement over six weeks.

The final six-week mesocycle of the season will be similar to this past one, with a few further modifications: a reduction in target intensity on the weekend Free Rides (i.e. more severe-domain and less extreme-domain work, especially power zone 6; this should make these rides more similar to the Group Rides that they're currently standing in for); a little more aerobic threshold work on the Base+ rides; and a more distinct volume pyramid (rather than doing the same hours each week).

These modifications are all aimed at improving my aerobic ability at both ends of the spectrum — a more robust aerobic base combined with higher VO₂max and CP.

There will also be a new focus on torque work. This will take several forms: lower-cadence blocks on base rides, the aforementioned bigger-gear-with-no-shifting on 15-30 second anaerobic efforts, and also using bigger gears on some of my short sprint drills.

I really think that strength building — both on and off the bike — is the biggest potential source of improvement that's still out there for me.

I want to see if this new approach will continue to give good results over a more extended period; if my numbers go up again on the next Test, I'll have good reason to believe I'm on the right track.

The latest version of my ever-changing In-Season schedule

I'm starting to get excited about my training again. Hopefully next year will be better for a whole number of reasons, and I'm optimistic that as long as I stay agile with my approach to training, my cycling will be one of them.

#cycling #training

I've remarked a few times about how my fitness has been consistently improving all year, and I still think that's the case. My heart rate variability (HRV, an indicator of autonomic stress) has been steadily increasing, my resting HR trending downwards, and my best efforts at a wide range of durations regularly improving. All that is good.

But, almost from the moment I published the May update saying how great everything was going, my form sharply declined. It took most of June for me to start feeling good again; over the last few weeks I haven't been able to perform to the level I'd expect on longer-duration efforts (around threshold).

During this time my volume and intensity distribution have stayed the same, I've been taking regular recovery periods, and my HRV and resting HR have remained great, so there's no reason to think my fitness has significantly declined. I think that the likely explanation for my decline in performance is fatigue, and because my heart analysis numbers are good, the fatigue's got to be peripheral (muscular).

I've mentioned before that I've been very consistent with my weight lifting over the last six months. From all the research I've done, it's clear that for endurance athletes, the best way to go about strength training is to lift heavy weights (80%+ 1 rep max) for few reps per set, with plenty of recovery between sets. This is the opposite to what many actually do, but it works to build neuromuscular strength and power, which is what's generally lacking in cyclists (there's no need to lift light weights for tons of reps — you're already building muscular endurance on the bike!).

But anyway, I'm confident that my weight sessions are good, but the problem is they do generate a lot of muscular fatigue. I've previously been doing these sessions on the same day as hard rides (rides in the morning, weights in the early evening), so what's been happening is I've been smashing my legs twice in the space of a few hours. It seems like I got away with this for a while, but eventually it caught up with me.

When I first realized this, I reduced the amount of anaerobic and neuromuscular efforts (Z6-Z7) I did on the bike on weight training days, but it's become apparent that this isn't enough, so now I'm going to try moving weight lifting days to coincide with easy days on the bike and see how that goes.

The reason I didn't do this earlier is that I was worried about having too many hard days (whether bike or weights) in a week. If the new schedule proves to be a problem, I'll have to switch the weights back to hard ride days, but further reduce the workload of the rides.

But the first thing I did was take a couple of weeks off weight lifting as a reset, and within a few days I could feel my legs beginning to come back to me. It was such a relief not to have to do any lifting on weekend evenings, when I do my toughest rides. Whatever schedule I eventually settle on, it's clear that I shouldn't be doing a tough 100 km ride and a heavy weights session on the same day (that sounds obvious now that I've written it down, but then again I am pretty stupid for a smart guy)!

I've also made a more fundamental overhaul to my training plan: I've always emphasized the importance of flexibility, but now it's explicit within the plan itself.

I've read research articles that compared traditional pre-programmed plans with training that was adaptive based on daily HRV values, with the adaptive plans showing better results. You can see the general scheme of one of these below.

https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2018-0122

The general idea is that, after leading into a block with a low-intensity day followed by a high-intensity day, what you do thereafter is based on whether your morning heart rate variability score increases or not. If it does, you should be good to handle a relatively hard session; if not, you move to an easier session or rest day.

This has an obvious advantage over a fixed program: adjusting the training based on feedback from your body. But a significant disadvantage is that it's less able to adapt to time constraints (e.g. group rides or lack of time on specific days).

Therefore, my new plan takes a hybrid approach: flexibility with limitations. I generally reserve Mondays for rest and Fridays for short easy rides, to act as a buffer between the weekend and the midweek period. But the weekend rides can be swapped, as can the rides during the middle of the week. This is indicated by the dashed borders and two-way arrows in the ride table from the In-Season plan, shown below.

Note: blue shading indicates a lower-body weights & plyometrics day, pink is upper body, and purple is a reduced load whole-body day. There are also generally several consecutive Prep weeks before the Taper week.

I'll now use a combination of HRV and resting HR plus subjective feelings (energy, mood, legs) to decide which ride (if any) to do on a given day, and also modify a session during the ride itself based on how well HR and perceived exertion match up with my power output on the warm-up.

This should allow me to train much more effectively, ramping up my effort when I can best handle it, and reining things in when I need to.

The other thing I've resolved is to lose my remaining excess weight. Three years ago, before I started cycling, I weighed around 115 kg (over 250 lb). I'm 180 cm (5' 11”) with a middling build. After I started cycling I lost over 30 kg within about 10 months, getting as low as 83 kg. Since then, I've fluctuated from there up to about 87 kg, but I think I could and should get a little lower.

I've arbitrarily set a goal to get under 80 kg, and the process is underway. I want to lose enough to achieve a lean torso. Once that happens, I'll take off another kilo and use that as a buffer zone.

It's really ridiculous that, as someone burning 8,000-10,000 calories per week just from cycling, I've never lost that last 10% or so. So I'm taking advantage of my fitness tracker (Fitbit Inspire HR, about $60) with its adaptive calorie monitoring, staying in the moderate weight loss zone each day. This allows me to lose half a kilo each week, which I've done for the last three weeks so far. I should hit my goal by the end of the summer.

In between working on all these changes, I've continued to hit some record power numbers and also to persevere with solo riding. Some group rides have started back up now, but I'm continuing to steer clear of them as I live in a high-risk household.

So I'll just be working on refining my training and losing weight, which serves both as good motivation and a distraction from everything else that's going on.

#cycling #training

My build weeks were 14, 16 and 18 hours, and I've now definitively moved to only two hard sessions per week. Wednesday and Saturday works well and allows me to go deep and recover enough to go again next time out. Trying to squeeze in a third hard ride just reduces their quality and builds too much fatigue. That's not going to happen anymore.

Now the basic weekly structure consists of rest/recovery on Mondays, base training on Tuesdays and Thursdays, hard intervals on Wednesdays, leg speed on Fridays, a tough group ride (or solo free ride at the moment) on Saturdays, and an endurance ride on Sundays. This with a progressive increase in volume over the mesocycle, followed by a recovery week with reduced volume and only one hard ride (more on this below). Simple, but it's been very effective for me.

I've also been consistent with weight training on the evenings of my hard ride days; I've noticeably bulked up my lower body and am lifting much heavier weights than even a few months ago. I feel much more powerful on the bike, and this is translating into my numbers, which are up across the board (from 1 second to 3 hours).

So stringing together several months of consistent training really works! No overtraining, no chopping and changing, just going out and sticking to the plan. Hard rides are hard, easy rides are easy, with rest whenever I need it. It just took a couple of years of screwing up for it to sink in.

But I didn't get the mesocycle perfect; I started to run out of steam just before the final weekend. This was probably mostly down to riding a continuously hard 3 hours on the middle Saturday; the kind of ride that should be reserved for the final weekend due to the large amounts of fatigue it generates. I've just been feeling so good that I couldn't resist it, but for the next block I'll be more patient.

Basically, I went out and decided to do a metric century as fast as I could. I averaged 244 Watts (83% FTP) and 154 bpm (82% HR_max). I judged it pretty well; there was very little heart rate drift and aerobic decoupling of just 5.5%. But anyone who's done that kind of effort will know that it takes a lot out of you.

You can see what I mean here: Strava's excellent Relative Effort score shows the ride making up 55% of the weekly training load, despite being only 3 hours out of 16. Incidentally, this is much closer to reality than the typical power-based metric of Training Stress Balance that a lot of people use, which gave the ride a TSS of just 218 out of a weekly total of 774 (28%). Clearly nonsense.

Also, compare the 4-hour endurance ride I did the next day: Strava gives 52 Relative Effort (10% of the weekly load), whereas for TSS it gets 163 (21% of weekly load). This was a very easy ride, with an average HR of just 118 bpm. It wasn't hard for me at all. Strava gets this, the TrainingPeaks boys don't. Of course, both metrics are just approximations, but in my experience Relative Effort is much the more accurate.

My rides over the mesocycle, courtesy of intervals.icu

In any case, you can see (from the Strava screenshot) how I tailed off a bit the following week, due to quite high levels of fatigue. Not a disaster, but clearly it will be better to save that kind of ride for the end of a training block rather than sticking it in the middle.

Notice from the intervals.icu screenshot that I've been getting a lot of lightning bolts! These happen when you achieve season's best power numbers, one bolt per duration (the ones on the base training rides this past recovery week were for sprints from 1 second to 10 seconds, a few of which I add to these rides to keep myself sharp). Like I said, I've been in good form lately.

Here's how I'm doing relative to other 40-something-year-old intervals.icu users:

And below is my current power curve. In the top right corner are values for Critical Power (CP), Anerobic Capacity (W') and Max Power (Pmax), with a comparison with all Golden Cheetah users:

Both charts show that my strength is my anaerobic-glycolytic system; my peak power has increased quite a lot this year but is still not great, my critical power (close to FTP) is pretty good, but my anaerobic capacity — as manifested in 15-60 second efforts — is the best weapon at my disposal. So I'm neither a pure sprinter nor a time trialist, more of an all-rounder with a decent kick.

My plan is to continue working on both my peak power and my critical power. Any improvements in peak power translate into gains over longer durations, and of course the higher my lactate threshold, the more of my kick I'll have available at the end of a fast lead-up to a sprint. A high threshold will also mean I'll be able to get into and stay in more breakaways, and hopefully be the best sprinter who makes the selection. That's got to be my game-plan.

I'm not sure there's much value in targeting specific numbers, but currently my CP stands at about 77% of my VO₂max power (which is approximately equal to 4-minute power). Elite riders can have values over 90%, but they've got huge cardiovascular capacity plus mostly slow-twitch muscle fibres. I don't have those things, so there's no way I could get close to 90%, but maybe I can still squeeze out a little more.

I'd obviously like to reach 300 Watts for CP (or let's say 320 W for 20 minutes — I don't have any plans to do a 60 minute effort any time soon!), which seems plausible for me to hit this summer, and I think I'll get close to 1250 W for peak power. I'm also targeting 400 W for 4 minutes (tough), 650 W for 1 minute (also tough), 825 W for 30 seconds (confident), and 1000 W for 15 seconds (also confident, provided I can at least hit 1200 W peak power).

That's the best thing about having a power meter: using it to track progress (or it's absence). I don't pay much attention to it when I'm on the bike, and like I said I'm not a fan of using it to track training status, but it's undoubtedly the best and most ruthlessly honest arbiter of performance.

How can I work on my anaerobic and aerobic systems at the same time? By continuing to do what I've been doing — a mixture of mostly long mostly easy rides and a couple of very high intensity (anaerobic and neuromuscular) sessions each week, with relatively little work in between (threshold-VO₂max).

The problem with peak aerobic work is that it trains the type-IIa muscle fibres to be more aerobic, and hence less glycolytic. This could add a few Watts to my threshold and VO₂max values, but at the expense of my top-end power. So I'd be sacrificing much of my anaerobic ability for a relatively small amount of extra aerobic capacity. For a triathlete, say, this would be a good trade-off, but not for me.

So I improve my aerobic ability mostly through endurance riding, targeting the type-I fibres whilst sparing the type-II fibres for the hard days. My high-intensity work is mostly sub 60-second anaerobic efforts and 5-10 second pure sprints, manifested in my Anaerobic and Sprint Repeats workouts.

My training isn't completely polarized though: typically I do a tough mixed-intensity group ride on Saturdays which includes plenty of hard aerobic work in addition to endurance and anaerobic work (at the moment I'm trying to replicate this riding on my own). But one day per week is enough; the rest of the time is very hard on Wednesdays and everything else easy (with a bit of wiggle room on Sundays; if I'm feeling good I might do a little more than on a pure endurance ride, and still have 72 hours before the next hard ride). And as I've shown, this has been working well for me.

For a while now I've scheduled a threshold test at the end of each Recovery week. These generally haven't gone all that well, and I think I finally realized why: I'm too fresh!

Though having formerly shunned it, this year you could set your watch by my scrupulous adherence to recovery. Monday-Friday of each Recovery week is completely void of all high-intensity work; just rest, recovery rides and base training. While necessary, I think this has the unfortunate consequence of reducing my blood volume, meaning that my first hard ride following a recovery period isn't reflective of my true fitness. My heart rate tends to be elevated and my performance consequently reduced.

This cycle was no different. I went out yesterday and my legs felt great, but already on the warm-up my heart rate was much higher than normal. I did go out a little too hard on the planned 30-minute effort (which was abandoned before the halfway point), but the only way I could have made it through would have been to drop well below what I know I'm capable of. You can see on the monthly training chart above that did my best long effort at the end of Build 1, so I'm going to try again this time at the same point in the cycle.

So on to the next cycle, where I'm going to be Building from 16-20 hours over three weeks. If all goes well, I'll try the full 4 Build weeks for the following cycle. There have also been a few more tweaks to the plan, in particular cementing the 'two hard rides per week' rule, moving the Profile Test to the Saturday of the first Build week, and eliminating the Taper week before the Event week.

Right now I'm delighted that my progression is continuing so strongly. It's a shame I'm only riding solo at the moment, but as long as I stay healthy and keep improving I'll have no complaints whatsoever.

#cycling #training

I just completed the first In-Season mesocycle, which went very well. The timing seemed to be spot on — by the final weekend I was feeling a little overloaded but not terribly so: exactly what I aim for at the start of a cycle. My physiological markers were also in agreement with my subjective feelings of fatigue. Through the four weeks of the cycle, as stress accumulated, my resting heart rate increased by about 10 bpm, my heart rate variability decreased more than 15 ms, and even my resting blood pressure increased significantly (from low to normal). So everything seems to be in sync.

As ever, I've continued to tweak my training. The biggest modification was the addition of a fourth Build week, adding extra flexibility to the plan.

What spurred this adjustment was a feeling over the last couple of months that I was getting into better form in the latter part of a cycle versus earlier on, so maybe I'll be able to tolerate or preferably even thrive with a fourth Build week. We'll see; certainly I felt a little flat this time in Build 1, but great from the Build 2 weekend through to the end of the cycle, and got the numbers to match.

I've also added an optional Free Ride to the middle of the Recovery week. I think that maybe I'm coming out flat because my Recovery week is now a little too easy, although it could just be a hangover from the Profile Test (more on that later).

I finished strong this time: on the Wednesday of Build 3 (the final Build week this cycle) I focused on anaerobic work: a lot of 10-30 second intervals plus a set of 10/20s and another of 15/30s. I got a 95-minute normalized power of 287 Watts. That evening I did some heavy weight lifting with plyometrics, before going out the next morning for a 4-hour endurance ride. Following a recovery-oriented Leg Speed ride on Friday, I did another anaerobic-focused Free Ride on Saturday, this time getting 272 Watts for 2.5 hours, then more weight lifting & plyometrics in the evening. Another 4-hour moderate (215 W normalized power) Free Ride finished off the block on Sunday. On Monday morning I definitely felt like I could do with taking it easy for a couple of days, but even by this morning (Tuesday) my numbers were already looking much better again. So I'm recovering well and clearly tolerating the current level of training.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I going to try to break 300 Watts normalized power for 60 minutes. I think I'll do it, but that's not to say I could maintain anywhere close to 300 W for a 1 hour steady time trial. Like I've said before, anaerobic power is where I'm best, so by riding at a steady endurance pace interspersed with maximal 20 to 30-second efforts every few minutes I can generate a large divergence between normalized and mean power.

Aerobic intervals are a different story; another possible explanation for why I was flat early in this cycle was the extended hard aerobic work on the Profile Test (on the Saturday of the Recovery week) followed by some Long Intervals I did the following Tuesday, in Build 1.

My Profile Test now consists of a flat-out 5 minute effort, followed by recovery then a 30 minute effort. The Long Intervals are 6-8 2.5 minute reps at my best 4 minute power. This kind of work seems to drain me much more than higher-intensity anaerobic and neuromuscular work. That's why I just switched the Long Intervals from Build 1 to Build 4.

So I'm feeling ever more confident that I've figured out the whole training thing. No more overreaching! From the figure above, you can see that my basic approach is a 3-day microcycle, as follows:

Day 1 = hard (high intensity) ride Day 2 = long, low-intensity ride Day 3 = recovery

Obviously, this isn't a rigid structure, but it's the basic idea. Riding hard roughly every third day gives me plenty of stimulus for improvement without building up excessive fatigue. There are also variations, so the hard ride could consist of short intervals or a medium-long Group Ride or Free Ride. The duration of the long easy ride varies, and is normally longer at the weekend than during the week. The recovery day could consist of Active Recovery, or instead be a Rest day or Leg Speed ride. I also like to do harder rides back to back at the end of a mesocycle, as after this I go into a Recovery week so it's okay to overload.

For this cycle I did Builds 1, 2 and 3. The next cycle will consist of Builds 2, 3 and 4, increasing both the volume and the intensity, then if that goes well I'll try all four Build weeks on the following cycle, extending the training stress by an extra week. We'll see how I tolerate that.

Since I rebooted my training at the end of last year, I've gradually built up the volume and intensity to a level where I now think I'm approaching my long term tolerable threshold. If things continue to go well through the summer, I may gradually increase the volume even more, to see where my limits are. There won't be much else for me to do to challenge myself this year, I'm afraid.

#cycling #training