As race season approaches Ive been pouring on the mileage and intensity. I usually take one full day off and have 2-3 "easy" days with the others being quick group rides, hill repeats/intervals. Last week I had a hard group ride wendsday, hill repeats thursday, longer mileage on friday. Yesterday when I got on my bike to do an easy ride and my heartrate shot up really quick and I felt dead for the first 8 miles of my ride. Took forever to feel warmed up. Suggestions for how much to rest? I think im taking 2 full days off, but want to prevent this for later. Should I rearrange how I do my rides? what do you guys do?

two words: active recovery. ride hard some days, then take a nice, eassssy spin the next day. eat a lot, drink a lot. focus on protein (if you aren't trying to lose weight, try some protein supplements, whey is best). you needs carbs and good fats too.

if you're really putting on the miles/training, you need to eat a lot to get results.

You need to establish a weekly, monthly training plan and stick to it. Seems like your training is based on random training. Every ride must have a purpose. The best results come from proper rest and recovery. Highly recoomend you read/purchase The Cyclist Training Bible by Joe Friel. you learn how to self-coach.

for starters, i would get off the bike for at least three days.

for every three to four weeks of training, have one week of recovery (easy rides). the only days on which you should hammer hard are the hard workout days. dropping people in a town-line sprint may be fun, but it may not be conducive to training. space out your hard efforts & extra long days, your muscles need time to recover. your high mileage days should be done at a low, aerobic effort. seriously, get friel's book

Not over-training, but take a few days off.

cool, thanks guys. i took today off, and im going to do the same tomorrow. what do you guys do with spare time off the bike? i look at it and it looks at me and i just want to ride the damn thing.

i think that's why some guys get girlfriends (or girls get boyfriends).....not as sexy i know but good for the days off...

bikforums... or clean it.

Non-riding days are when you shop for more bike things, adjust your stem height, saddle position, cleats, try to find that creak, clean things, etc...

All of this depends on how much base you have, how long you've been training, the training loads you are used to handling, and the stresses on your system other than riding (i.e. work family school etc.)

That said, I doubt you need to take 2-3 days off the bike because you just did 2 days with some intensity, and one day with some distance.

My typical week is riding 6 days a week, one off day, 3-4 days with either intervals, racing or a competitive group ride, and one day with a recovery ride. I would say that's a pretty typical schedule for a lot of racers.

You also want to build in some easy weeks. Thus my schedule is built around 4 weeks cycles, with an easy week, then the next 3 weeks getting progressively harder until the next easy week.

Unless you've put yourself in a serious deficit, I really doubt you need to be taking 2-3 days off the bike at this point in the season, particularly given your statement that your racing season is coming up.

Hmm. Im probably taking just these two off. I havent had a day off the bike in 2 weeks. Im not sure how big of a hole im in, if any, but on saturday's ride i just felt like a bag of smashed ass. Im jumping right back on it on tuesday. This is my first "real" year of biking and I have around 800 miles total on the bike. Not a lot by others standards but a lot for me, especially because I was sick at the beggining of this year and didnt ride until fairly recently. Im starting to get them "legs"...hells yeah.

OP.. With a total of only 800 miles in your legs... I would say you're over doing it based on what you wrote above. I'm guessing a break is a good idea.

It takes time to build a base.

Given the 14 consecutive days of riding, I think you would benefit from an easy week. That doesn't mean a week of just recovery rides though.

You might do well by cutting your volume a third, but still do some intensity, such as an hour Tuesday with 6-10 sprints, an hour or two of endurance Wednesday, An hour Thursday with 5- 6 one minute intervals, then a recovery ride Friday.

And do buy Friel's book, or one of Carmichael's.

you are absolutely right, but you probably also have years of base to back up the 3-4 days of hard workouts. OP, since you are just starting, building base is what you need, and you probably won't be able to do the stuff (3-4 hard workouts/week) that merlin could. and while you are building base, don't ever go into threshold, and heck, try not even get into low tempo as that might erode your base.

Very good advice but if you're truly training for the season's races then you won't have time. after season though invest a good 6 weeks of riding well below threshold.

For now, make sure your "easy" days really are easy - no more than 80% of your Anaerobic Threshold: able to breath through your nose and comfortably carry on a long conversation, you're holding back. FWIW I never really wear my HR monitor on my hard days, I always use it on my easy days.

fwiw, i find that the fitter i get, the longer it takes me to warm up. given that 8 miles = <30 minutes, that's a pretty typical warm up, no?

also, you dont provide any information about what you're actually doing for training in terms of volume, intensity, what is a "quick" group ride, how long are the hills you're repeating, what do you mean by "intervals".

just based on the tone of your question, i suspect you're new to riding, racing, training for racing, and are making typical noob errors. these typically are solo rides have lots of tempo or terrain based intensity riding that are too easy for real improvement but too hard to sustain and do your other workouts at optimal intensity, that your other stuff has lots of anaerobic work capacity intensity followed by low active recovery intensity/coasting. the big gap in that method of training is that you arent really doing anything that can sustainably develop your aerobic capacity (or functional threshold power).

oh, to answer your question, i really doubt overtrained, but rather under-rested. it's really hard to over train. it's not very hard to under rest.

Get a power meter and quantify your training. You'll soon learn when you've overtrained.

Overtrained?

"There's only one rule: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins. Period. Because you won't die. Even though you feel like you'll die, you don't actually die. Like when you're training, you can always do one more. Always. As tired as you might think you are, you can always, always do one more."



So there's no such thing as overtraining?

"If you overtrained, it means that you didn't train hard enough to handle that level of training," "So you weren't overtrained; you were actually undertrained to begin with. So there's the rule again: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins."

Of course Jack Daniels help with this program.

True overtraining is a reduction in power. In terms of weight lifting, what I read described overtraining as doing 2-a-days on the same muscle group for weeks until your 1-rep max actually decreases by 20%. That's over-training, and the cure at that time is 2-weeks rest, after which you will be stronger at 1rm than you were prior to the training period.

I don't think most of us get anywhere near clinical levels of over-training.

What? Overtraining is all relative, and is based on your base fitness and your recent training intensity. Someone who has never exercised can be overtrained, even with one bike ride.

Again, quantify your training. Train smart. Collect training data and use metrics to determine if YOU are over or under training.

Do yourselves a favor and read this: https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/berardi22.htm

monday, walk the bike like a tourist.
tuesday, tempo ride
wednesday tempo ride
thursday, hard intervals
friday, more walk the bike
sat & sun ride as hard as you can on either an A or B group ride.

This is 1.5 hours during the week & 3-4 hrs on weekend days.
this give you 230-250 miles in 12-14 hours.

but please listen to your body.
what are you doing with the other 20-22 hours off the bike?

Good read.

You seem to have me pinned. And I think I am just under rested as you say. I have a lot of late nights as a college kid...I just started hill repeats/intervals and do approx 1-2 min of REALLY hard efforts followed by 3 min recovery and I do them until fail pretty much. But before this my "hard" rides were 1-2 hours long. But in reality my "hard" rides and recovery rides were pretty much similiar in overall effort. I need to pick up a book on this. Need to wait to get paid though.

Also I have definitally found that my "warm-up" period has increased. I needed a full half hour before I felt good enough start hitting the repeats last week at 100%, but my heartrate didnt shoot through the roof like it did saturday when I was getting warm.

oh, and does a diet of mostly pizza and beer become detrimental to training? i need to know about diet too. not sure what I should be eating..