How to start training?
 

What are the steps to go from riding to training? My FTP is currently 200 watts and of course I want to raise that! I can't currently afford to hire a coach, but I'm not against buying a plan either. I'm a stay at home dad and I can ride pretty much unlimited m,w,f while my wee one is in preschool, but other days will most likely have to be on the trainer. On Saturday's I've been doing CX races if my wife is off so that has limited my distance, but not my effort :D.

Do you guys have any plan building tips or recommended plans? I've used training peaks before for triathlons.

I would love to push it as hard as I can while my family needs me to stay home with the kids. I know this opportunity won't last forever so I want to take advantage of it while I can.

EDIT: What are junk miles? Z1?

It's difficult to advise without knowng more. How much riding have you done? Hours in the bike in a typical week? Do you have a heart rate or power meter?

Junk miles is the term usually used to decry long, lowish-intensity rides that don't accomplish much. Actually it is often a misnomer, because if you have the time, training for long hours at low intensities is an excellent idea. But keeping the "junk miles" concept in mind does at least remind you to train with a purpose, and make sure that the easy rides are easy and the hard rides hard. Constantly going medium hard, which many people do, is a poor training strategy.

Z1 is usually described as recovery ride pace.

I have a power meter on my tri bike, but not my cx (not enough frame clearance :(). For the past year I've been between 8-12 hours per month on the bike. The past three months have been closer to 14 hours. This month will probably be 15 + hours. I'm giving my time not miles since a good chunk was on the trainer w/ no distance (only power), and others are on slower but equally hard cx trails. I've just switched from a tri focus to bike focus too so I don't have to split up my training time now. My main goal would be fastest 50 mile average speed for a HIM next year. Did I leave anything out?

I'd be recommending 8-12 hours per week, not per month. About 80% of that at low intensities, zone 2 just below VT1 probably gives you the biggest aerobic bang for your buck. use the outdoor riding days for these long, steady distance rides.

Then once or twice a week I'd be using the trainer for shorter but much more intense interval sessions. If you look in the racers forum there's a sub-forum called "the 33 - road bike racing ". There's a sticky thread in there with a pretty inexhaustible menu of different types of intervals. Since you're familiar with power, you might find Friel's cyclists training bible, or Coggan's Training and racing with a power meter, a good investment.

Thanks! I learned about sweet spot training and I think I did too much of that which caused me to need more rest days the past few months. What is VT1? I know I needed to increase my time in the saddle, but because of my SST it wasn't happening. How often do you retest FTP and can you do the test in rolling hills? I did it on my trainer, but I want to do one outdoors too.

VT1 Google is your friend.

I'd suggest an FTP test every 6 or 8 weeks. Much easier to do it on the trainer, diffcult to keep the power constant on rolling hills.

You need a decent base before you start any intervals and 10 hrs/month won't really provide that. I would focus on just getting your weekly time up. Work up to 10+ hrs/wk, the more the better. Don't worry about power or intervals while building a base just make sure you get the time in.

Once your hours are up then you can start mixing in intervals but I think you have a few months of just riding at low to moderate intensity before introducing intervals. At the beginning you can take a fairly big jump in training load provided you don't add too much intensity. Once you're up past 10 hrs/wk you probably want to limit the increases to 10%/wk. Take an easier, recovery week every 4 wks.

Caught me being lazy, sorry!


Worlds stupidest question here. Full 3 weeks with 4th as recovery or full 4 weeks with 5th as recovery?


I was thinking about starting with 2 hours Monday and Friday, 3 hours on Wednesday, and 1 on Saturday (probably warmup/cx race). Where should I go from there? Should I start adding a trainer day on Tuesday/Thursday or add more time to m/w/f? If I do start to add tues/thurs should that still be z2 even though they are shorter rides? I can go up to as long as 5 hours on m/w/f. Also should I just start w/ tues/thurs rides too? I was trying to start slower and not go crazy, but that would be similar to my tri training, but just the one sport. Thanks for all of your help so far guys. I truly appreciate it.

Not stupid. Typically younger (<50) riders will build for 3 weeks and on the 4th week reduce the volume but keep the intensity of the rides the same, maybe 70% of the volume of your 3rd week.. Older riders sometimes take every 3rd week easy.

I think your approach is reasonable and I would just add 30 min to the long ride on wed every week. You could try adding in some SST intervals on the trainer on Tue or Thur. I contradicted my previous advice not to do any intervals but I find the trainer too boring otherwise so I usually end up doing a couple of 20min intervals. I'd give it a couple of weeks with your original plan and see how it goes. If you've got the energy you can add more hours.

Thanks.

EDIT: So I just finished writing up my plan. It has me starting at 8 hours for my first week and ending with 15 1/2 hours. I almost have a rest week every four weeks (had to spread the first one further out because of travel) and after the rest week I retest my FTP to make sure I'm staying in the right zone.

Should I try to progress faster to the 15 hour weeks or keep with a moderate progression? I start out by adding 15% per week and then drop it to 10%.

Have you read the classic, "Cyclist's Training Bible" by Joe Friel? It's a GREAT place to start a training plan -- thousands of racers and riders have started there.

There's more to this than hours in the saddle. Duration, frequency and INTENSITY all play a part. Periodization is important. Your peak training hours should almost certainly be during your base phase training -- then fewer, but more intense hours during your build phase. How to start training? I would start with Cyclist's Training Bible. Follow that prescription. There are lots of books/authors out there who can help you modify and perfect your training plan, but CTB will get you off to a great start.

Starting at 14 hours a month (3-4 hours/week) 8 hours a week is too much. Ease into it.

You want to get there slow enough to avoid over-reaching which delays starting the next mesocycle or limits what you can accomplish in it.

Over-reaching and over-training are relative to your current fitness, and while 8 hours a week isn't a lot in absolute terms that could still be enough to push you over the edge.

For example, I crashed in June, was down to 7 hours a week on the trainer plus 3 of walking, and tried 10-11 hours a week after I got back outside (some nearly sweat-free commuting miles making for a 3 TSS/week CTL ramp rate which I've historically been comfortable with).

Following the first outdoor mesocycle rest week (September 8-15) I couldn't get my power or heart rate up and my white blood cell count was down from 5.5-6.0uK/uL to 3.6.

With an extra rest week peak 10 (211) and 20 minute (202) power are flat from the last mesocycle .

For my rest week on June 1-8 although my Skiba stress balance (difference between fitness and recent activity) was zero at the end (which is typical) I had too much volume, 10 minute power (239W) was flat the next week, I couldn't maintain power after my first interval, and I needed another rest week.

http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=479833

There's some freedom to trade higher intensity at lower volume for lower intensity at higher volume. The various stress tracking systems (Coggan with Training Stress Score, Accute Training Load, and Chronic Training Load; Skiba with BikeScore, Short Term Stress, and Long Term Stress) take this into account. Unfortunately they are only approximations - the time constants vary with individual physiology, and they're just models. Take into account how you feel and adjust when things aren't right.

Tangentially extra load preceding a rest week can be good. Joe Friel calls that "crashing."

Take your rest week early or on your travel week. The big gains happen on your rest week when your body adapts and you don't gain much putting that off.

I check once every four weeks, although on a polarized plan I ride 10 minute intervals as hard as sustainable and 20 minute power is usually 5% lower (with estimated FTP 5% lower still) so that's probably redundant.

Recalibrating your zones once a mesocycle is a fine idea to get intensity right approaching and exceeding FTP - you can pick up 5-10% in a month, and that's the difference between power sustainable between 10 and 20 minutes or even 10 minutes and 1 hour.

Note however that the zones are intended to reflect physiological levels targeting different systems, and that those points may not match the average fractions used to define zones. VT1/AeT could vary from power zone 1 to 3 of 5-7, and is probably in or closer to power zone 1 without a lot of base miles in your legs.

Joe Friel has his athletes base their endurance pace off their heart rate (Z2) in the early season.

That wisdom matches my experience - when I naively added hard days and turned my easy days into tempo rides my heart rates in the lower power zones were all high and I wasn't very fast over longer distances. Switching to a polarized approach I got to the opposite situation - lower heart rates at the bottom with a speedier sustainable endurance pace.

Use Golden Cheetah to track everything - it runs on Windows/Mac/Linux and doesn't cost anything.

I prefer 3/4 weeks of riding 10-12/hr per week, then 4 days off...replenish your glycogen