If you're improving so much and hitting 19+ MPH on your rides, why are you (still) riding with the slow group?

Also your rides with your "wife" are recovery rides, whether you want them to be or not.

Because I enjoy riding with them. Great people. It's fun.

Yo-yoing off the front is not only riding with them but it's also great fun? Cool.

This sport isn't supposed to be fun. There's your problem.

When did I say I spent the whole ride doing that?

Now I know where I've been going wrong.

The way you dole out and/or manufacture info to suit your narrative, I figured I'd take a stab at which way you'd go on this one. I thought that you were still leaning on these rides as your "I don't do intervals, but I do do intervals" activity, much like your, "I don't do recovery rides, but oh, I do ride slowly with my family" activities?

I don't know if his wife is like mine, probably not since I can't really identify with much else, but (since you don't know either) would a 30 minute 5 mile ride really be a "recovery ride"?

Yeah, I'm manufacturing my narrative.

My family rides with me once a month maybe. My boys are in sports and times where we all have free time are rare.

My wife likes riding and used to be pretty fast but hasn't been on the bike much this year since she's been so busy.

She usually watches the boys while I ride and I watch them while she runs.

Are recovery rides usually done when you get home from group rides?

I appreciate you trying so hard to discredit everything I say, but sorry to disappoint, I'm not manufacturing a story here.

Oh, I'm not trying hard. It's pretty clear that you've been trollin' out of the gate.

I don't "train" the way you do, so I'm a troll...


Why I'm Not Into Cycling Training | Bicycling-------


Is he a troll too?

Perhaps he should have supplied you with an hourly log of his activity for the past year?
Dude, grow up and learn how to read. We all have lives here. Stop trying to make ours as miserable as yours. :thumb:

If I were to subscribe to one of these training plans that people are very passionate about, would I have to wear shoes, lycra shorts, and get an expensive bike? I don't like those options much better than I like structured training plans. :p

I'm trying to be a little silly btw, though there is some truth there. If you want to maximize your training than a structured plan makes sense. If you can't commit or are happy with where you're at then don't worry about it. That's the boat I am in. Heck it isn't impossible that what you are doing pretty closely mimics some plan out there.

Training plans, nutrition, equipment... it's all over the place. Sure there are some generalities but plenty of assumptions and misinformation too. For example everyone has talked about doing hard intervals to get better, but I don't think a single person has mentioned the opposite... going slower to get faster. Train your aerobic system. Allow your heart rate to get lower for the same amount of effort. There is extensive plans out there for this method that have supposedly done very well with many athletes. https://philmaffetone.com/want-speed-slow-down/

Despite what some forum members claim, there is more than one way to skin a cat, if you really need to skin it in the first place anyhow.

yeah well, good luck with that...
the 180 formula - uh uh
"The 180 Formula
To find your maximum aerobic heart rate:
Subtract your age from 180 (180 – age).
Modify this number by selecting a category below..."

that would put me at 112 - LOL !
I mean, I fart and my HR is 112...
I don;t know nor like running - so it may, somehow, work for them.
But would never work for a competitive cyclist, unless like the saying goes... "how do you make a small fortune? start with a big one..."
I have because of health issues (not fitness related) been advised to 'slow' about 2+ yrs ago. Started riding more at the HR where we all know nothing happens 120-140. Guess what, something does happen , you get extremely slower on the bike...
In June I said "screw this" and started ramping up to where I can get my AT (LTHR) back up to a reasonable better level. Rides with the HR in the mid140s to high 150s. Guess what, I'm startin to get faster again and better aerobically and hangin with the younger riders more.

Yeah, you do the 180 program... do an honest benchmark test upfront and then do it again in 3 mos. report back...

cycling fast has been my pain in the ass since 1969 - I'm happy it again making me hurt a little... screw the other stuff :crash:

There's also a whole lot of ways to cut your hand off while the cat sits and looks at you like the idiot you are.






Not sayin you're an idiot. But not sayin you aint neither. However, time does have a way of bringing clarity on that eventually.

I think this article is the opposite of what you've been saying. Your thesis has been that structured training plans are pseudo science and that you do just as well riding how you feel. The author you cite acknowledges that structured training would make him faster and a better racer, but states that these benefits are just not worth the loss of enjoyment he gets from less structured riding ("For the little bit closer that training would nudge me toward my middling limits, I’d rather go ahead and day-by-day decide to ride my bike when I want to, and where, and with whom, and on which roads.").

There is nothing wrong with this position and it is pretty much how I feel. Whether the marginal gains to be realized from structured training are worth adhering to the structure is a legitimate question that can only be answered by each individual; the issue of whether a well designed training program works and is necessary for a rider to reach his or her potential is not a legitimate question. It does and is.

I'm not saying the author and I are on the same page, just pointing out that the author is happy riding and not "training" every time he gets on the bike.

Develop a good base before doing harder training. Big revelation!

Not true. Many have mentioned the value and necessity of recovery rides. One of the values of structured training plans is that they build in easy recovery days. Too many who ride as they feel ride too hard to ever recover but not hard enough to reach their potential. As I said above, there are other less tangible benefits to riding how you feel, but getting maximum performance is not one of them.

I don't think anyone is saying this is "wrong," only that there are trade-offs involved in however one chooses to ride.

For sure.

Maybe once I plateau, I will look more into training plans.

In the mean time I'm happy with the speed I've gained this year just cranking hard, having fun, and not sweating the details.

newb. :)

how long have you been riding [MENTION=409489]69chevy[/MENTION]?

if you're new to cycling, or just new to riding regularly with significantly increased volume, you'll continue to see gains. after that, optimization may or may not be interesting to you. but the fact is, I'm sure you have a full time job, so if you want to be as fit as you can with the time that you're willing to spend, those details may become interesting to you.

I've been riding hard and competing for about 10 years.

After the first few, "training", or prescribing rides and training plans has become a real pleasure of mine :). But I'm a bit of a jock and a nerd in that sense; I enjoy learning about physiology and quantifying my performance with a powermeter, and just working out in general.

The interesting thing for me was that once upon a time, I only knew how to "train" by adding volume. I kind of rode some HR-based intervals twice a week, but I thought I couldn't do back-to-back interval workouts and that I had to take a day off in between to recover, so interval workouts seemed to hold me bacl volume-wise. And I didn't realize at the time how influenced I was by Strava- which is mostly about counting miles and elevation gain and time on the bike. It was just hard for me as a newby to really prioritize what I needed to work on to improve my cycling. I realize now that the Stravafication of my cycling was holding me back. Even though endurance is my forte, it's no problem for me to ride 100-200 mile rides, too much volume just leaves me fatigued. I didn't feel fatigued, but it would make me ride slower when I'd go out to do my next epic thing.

Then I got a power meter because I wanted to understand training. Then I got a coach because I wanted to understand the power data. Then I learned what an interval workout was really like, lol.

I remember when coach first looked at my data he commented that I had surprisingly poor aerobic conditioning for someone who rode as much as me. I thought, "how could that be? I ride 150-200 mile per week, 10k+ ft climbing? I'm still going strong when other people fade.". But I eventually came to understand it- it's that high-end aerobic conditioning, the ability to ride around threshold that I was lacking. It's been an interesting process. I kind of imagined previously that going fast would involve developing a top-end short-duration speed and that would drag speed at all the other durations up as well. But improving speed for me has been all about being able to sustain hard efforts longer and longer. This used to confuse me when it was happening because I'd be out riding with friends and something would happen that picked up our pace. Eventually maybe 10 minutes would go by and I'd realize I was the only one still riding hard and my friends were back at the last stop light.

So now I get the "poor aerobic conditioning comment". It's that ability to not just produce speed but to sustain it.

Anyway, OP, training is not pseudo-science by any means. I do all the standard training things- interval workouts, long rides, recovery rides, rest days. I ride less volume & greater intensity than I did previously. No way does everyone need to train like this, but it's helpful if you're racing. You really do in that scenario want to start to be pretty focused about your cycling, less haphazard. The younger you are, the more wiggle room you have to survive a sub-optimal training plan. But still, having an optimized training plan makes it more fun because you get results more efficiently.

Thanks for the discussion fellas, I'm learning a lot.

I don't do training plans remember? I'm just showing there is a lot of variation in plans out there, things many people might not even realize. Or maybe it's pseudo science like the op suggests. Is every training plan right? I have adapted many of his methods and have used his formula in the past as well as nutritional information. There is a ton of nutritional information in his Big Book. My MAF times have improved greatly even with applying it only half assed. I don't have my records of my MAF tests they were probably ~5 years ago or so. But just by memory... Initially when I did my 'benchmark' test I was struggling to stay at my MAF HR doing a 10:30-11:00 minute/mile. For my most recent MAF test, I haven't used a hrm since last fall but even then I was able to do a mile into the upper 7's at my MAF HR. What is impossible to prove though is where would I have been if I hadn't taken some of his methods and incorporate MAF off an on for a few years?

Would I have been better off doing interval training instead of all the slow running? Maybe I would have been faster, but maybe I couldn't have run as far. Maybe my heart rate would be higher? What is more important?

A recovery ride and the Maffetone method are not the same thing at all. And he does stress recovery times, including both days and recovery weeks. Even including recovery rides, doing any kind of interval work is completely out of his plans until you plateau aerobically.

I agree many who ride as they feel ride too hard etc, maybe not recover enough, etc, but that isn't necessarily always the case. When I first started into endurance running, I went by a simple rule of thumb not to do more than 10% more mileage one week than the previous week, to keep from doing too much too soon. I'm not sure if you would call that a comprehensive plan, but more like a good idea. I take plenty of days off and I don't need a plan to tell me this. Most of the time it's forced days off because of work. But this kind of furthers what I was saying about misinformation... in running there has been lots of talk that a recovery run does absolutely nothing to aid in recovery despite so many that believe it does. But it is often useful for training (not recovering) by running when your body is already spent to train it a bit in depleted mode - similar to what you would have to endure on an ultramarathon. Though I am not sure if this is true for cycling or not, perhaps there is scientific proof a recovery ride helps cyclists. But this seems to be pseudo science in the running world.

I'll point out again or if I didn't mention it, I really can't subscribe to any plan due to my rotating shiftwork, and being a single parent. I also put all my 'training' efforts into running, and have progressed quite well since I started running seriously in 2011. I ride just to aid in fitness, on my off days from running, and to have fun. I do like to ride hard and fast too from time to time, but I have no interest in bike specific racing, but perhaps duathlon some day. I know I am no where near where I could be with one of these training plans (I don't disagree with many of you) and if I didn't run so much, but I like what I am doing and very happy with where I am at.

As I have said before we are all unique, we are not machines nor programs that can respond exactly as something predicts. Generalizations in training can certainly be made, but we are quite variable biological organisms. Pseudo science might be to strong of a word, but I am sure there are things/plans/strategies that work for some and not others, and vice versa.