What is your approach behind taking a recovery ride?
 

I’m a failure when it comes to recovery rides. I know I need to allow myself to recover from faster training rides or longer event rides. However, I seem to prefer to either resting for a few days or riding hard every-time I get on a bike.

Lately I’ve been training hard enough to have significant muscle pain during the ride. I also feel my body rebuilding for the next few days. I feel stiff and a have a mild throbbing pain when I’m idle. This all feels beneficial, and I know I’m building muscle and burning calories.

I’m wondering if I’m missing a training benefit and should be on the bike. I also feel that should not let more than two days go by without riding.

Please explain how recovery rides are inserted into your riding plan? How does a recovery ride not become a faster fitness ride?

Go out and ride a few easy miles. It's no more than that. Don't try to make it something any more difficult than that. It seems to me you are an over-analyzer. Just go out and ride easy for a few miles. I don't know how to make it any more plain than that.
If you can't stop yourself from hammering it, there is nothing we can tell you that will stop your behavior.

My trick for forcing myself to ride a recovery ride is to keep it in the small chain ring (34 - a compact). And no routes with challenging hills. Before I made this self-imposed rule, I would try to ride a recovery ride and then find myself hammering despite myself.

Recovery rides come either after a particularly hard ride or after a string of normal rides. I ride hard or at least seriously a maximum of 5 days/week - Saturday and Sunday, a tough hill climbing ride on Tuesday, a medium club ride Wednesday (sometimes ridden hard, sometimes ridden easy, but always fairly short), and a fast club ride Thursday. Monday and Friday are either days off or small chain ring rides of no more than 25 miles (and usually 15-20).

Plan? What plan? ;)

Find some newbs on comfort bikes and lead them on a no drop ride.

Don't have to do recovery rides often because I am either at my peak fitness and can do those century rides up mountains twice a week and the 20 mile TT's every other day.:p

Or the other reason is that I do not do the high milage at a pace that is going to push me to the limits often enough keep me fit.

But There are occasions this year where that Recovery ride has been necessary. I have tackled too many hills when I am not ready for them or have just done too many miles. I know I need that ride later in the day when the muscles start aching a bit and the next morning when I can feel I have stiffened up. So after work it is out for a 5 or 10 mile ride on a flattish route with no effort going in. Those quads that have gone stiff or the thigh muscles are just going through their movement with minimal effort going into them. I normally try to keep the cadence up to my higher level of around 95 and stay in a gear that is low enough to allow me to do that. If I feel the muscles are still taking some strain then down a couple of gears- just to keep the cadence up.

Never been certain that it aids recovery- but If I don't loosen up those legs- it will be 3 or 4 days before I can start using the stairs with ease at work.

Like Bluesdawg I enjoy mixing with a slow group of neighborhood riders. Uphills are still a temptation to turn up the power and the end of the ride still feels like it should be the beginning, but it works in terms of getting a rest day without staying off the bike.

Ride with no hands. This will slow you down and help with your balance and core strength.

I live in a hilly area so it's impossible to find a route that is easy enough for a true recovery ride. Instead, I hop on the trainer and ride for 30 minutes. Super duper easy, no pushing, no high cadence, barely breaking a sweat. Works great for me.

GG

My typical regime has 6 cycling days. Two climbing days, one endurance day, two intervals days and one recovery ride followed by a day off the bike. The recovery ride is always done on my steel bike,mtb shorts and a t-shirt (a reminder to me that I am not there to push). It is typically just 30 km or so, flat with heart rate in zone 2 or 3. Climbing or interval days can be substituted with a 2 hour single track ride on the mtb. Works for me and keeps me in good enough condition to do a hilly century any time.

A power meter or HR meter is very useful for keeping the effort in the recovery range.

This is true, but after doing a lot of them with the power meter and HRM, I now just know what recovery feels like, and am able to keep it easy. I make it different by taking my non-racing bike, and I also keep the cadence up in triple digits, working on form instead of power.

On recovery rides, I take myself to the nearby state park, a 9 mile loop from home, where inevitably there will be numerous sweet young thangs taking the sun in bathing suits. This ride insures I ride at an appropriate speed to aid recovery. Sometime, if I need a lot of recovery, I'll do two loops.

On my recovery rides, I just take it easy, since I dont have a hrm. I sometimes am surprised at how fast I rode on an easy ride.

And this controls your heart rate? ;)

You might have more self-control than me. If I start thinking about how fast I might be going, I'll step up the power a little and soon it's not a recovery ride. For me, a real recovery ride is in the range of 14-15.5 MPH.

My goal in a recovery ride is that the next day I feel like I've got fresh legs, more or less how I would feel if I had taken the day off. For that to be the case, the ride has to be SLOW.

So why not just take the day off, rather than do the recovery ride? Well, I enjoy the ride of course. And I think (but can't prove) that the slow ride is good for improving technique (high cadence, good pedaling form, etc.). Maybe it also helps dispel muscle fatigue, maybe it doesn't, but either way, I get a little bit of exercise and the enjoyment of a bicycle ride while also having fresh legs the next day.

My regular rides likely equal most of your recovery rides, so I guess my question should be the opposite. What kind of ride do you do when you don't ride a recovery ride? :p :)

For me a recovery ride results in slightly better recovery than doing nothing that day. But if my training time is limited the recovery ride is the first thing I take out.

Barrettscv, It seems like your training and events are progressing. Others have touched on the "recovery" aspect. I want to touch on a couple of other items.

Typical recovery after a measured but hard interval workout is about 72 hours. One should be able to back to back endurance rides that are 2 to 3 hours long and recover. So doing a recovery ride (45 minutes) after a hard interval workout is good and you can practice other aspects of cycling that may be a limiter such as cadence and pedaling form. A great recovery ride is on the rollers with no resistance. This is a double benefit since it is high cadence, easy, requires great balance and core strength and you learn to steer the bike from the core. 45 minutes is plenty of time. The self image I try to create is that this focused recovery is advancing me closer to my next goal. Also, on the rollers, it is not about riding the bike. People, including yours truly, love to ride our bikes. This is about riding less.

A couple of other points on unmeasured extremely hard workouts such as races, camps and long event rides. We have a rule that if one wants to do well at our state 40K TT championships, then one cannot compete in another popular 30K ITT the week before. The 30K will remain in your legs and impact the following weekend with a poorer performance. And this is for highly trained amateur higher category racers.

A stage race of 2 to 3 days will hang around in your legs for 10 days.

A four day training camp, will hang around for 7 to 10 days and the BENEFIT takes 10 to 14 days to cause a bump in fitness.

So what is the takeaway? There is a huge lag from the time a training effort is done until it impacts the body fully. So the goal is to stack up efforts while trying to rest. Riding easy expedites recovery even from days long gone.

Finally, why not just rest. Well, for cyclists that are looking for recreation and fitness then complete rest for a couple of days is okay. If one is trying to peak for an event then total rest for more than 24 hours is not great. Simplistically, the body changes state and thinks that cycling has stopped and changes how certain hormones and systems function. So once again, a recovery ride promotes recovery and you body stays in the cycling mode.

Hermes,

As always, it's an education to read your posts. But I still wonder how the real pros get prepared for very long stage races (e.g., TdF). And for us mortals, I wonder about the relationship between hard efforts, recovery, rest and building mulitiple-day endurance.

For the UCI pros, according to Johanne Bruyneel, they are the top 1% of the 1% of the best cyclists. So they are genetically selected to a large extent. However, then they have long hours in the saddle 600 miles per week, sleep at altitude and train at lower elevation. And then there is the training camps that are a week to 10 days where they work as a team and punish each other. That is followed up by early season racing to race themselves into shape by doing select races. It is a very hard life.

For us, Training Peaks is a good program used in conjunction with a power meter. It calculates a training stress score and tracks a 14 day moving average and 7 day moving average. These averages are then used to calculate a state of fatigue. I think it works well. However, one can get into a program and use HR and perceived effort as well. I always take Monday as a total rest day. I have to off the bike. I also like Fridays as a rest day but I do many 6 day weeks. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I use as interval days and may throw in a recovery day. When I was getting ready for the Madera Stage Race, I would come off or a tough weekend with a rest day on Monday. I would then back to back Tuesday and Wednesday as hard efforts and go easier on Thursday. The idea was to get ready for two races on Saturday and a long road race on Sunday. In this case, one is going to be tired on Wednesday. The training goal is to overcome the fatigue and break through it. So once again the goal is the driver of the training and the suffering supports the end goal. If that were not the case, no one would do it. It is too hard.

The other aspect of training and recovery is the concept of what to do when you cannot do the work. You go out for the intervals and it is just not happening. The default is to complete the time. If you cannot ride hard, ride easy for 2 hours. Time in the saddle is good and so the effort was bad... so what.... live to fight another day. This happens to everyone at all levels. Finally, if nothing is working, rest. Rest is never bad, It is at worst, not the best, but it is always good.

Recovery ride = 10 mile neighborhood ride on the hybrid or a 15 mile MUP ride on the hybrid.

The amount of time required for recovery, as outlined by Hermes, sounds right to me. Recovery is a topic of considerable interest to me even though I have no interest in racing. It was instructive to me to see that Contador, after the Giro, was not certain about full recovery for Le Tour about a month later. It's clear that recovery and rest is as important as the training. Without the recovery phase, we are losing fitness.

I've "evolved" to the point that I don't have to ride faster each ride. Since I got a computer with cadence this year my recovery rides are measured in terms of spinning instead of focusing on mph.

My approach is consistent with my general riding these days. That is, I'm not training to compete, and I ride enough miles I can complete century rides without having to train for them. My ideal of a personal best when it comes to time is more related to how much of the ride I enjoyed vs. how quickly it ended. On days when I push really hard, which I do because it's fun to challenge yourself, I ride recovery the next day. This means I watch how labored my breathing is and how high my heart rate goes. If my breathing becomes labored or heart rate climbs, I back off. I know it's not rocket science, but it works for me.

For me it's pretty easy. I have a 10 mi round trip to pick up my 8 y/o grandson at school 3 or 4 x per week. I take the tandem, weather permitting. I ride road on the way up, and take the sidewalk on the way home. I try to keep the cadence up, and leave plenty of time so I can keep the effort at a minimum.

Starting in October when the weather starts to moderate I'll be adding a bike trailer to the tandem so I can carry my 5 mo old grandson too. Pretty soon my 8 y/o will be big enough to pedal. That will make it a little easier.