bike racing: the penultimate guide

Is more always better than less? Up to a point, sure. Ride LOTS! But yes, there is a limit. It's hard to say what's too much but listen to your body. If you feel bad, especially if you are putting in the miles and not improving, or if your heart rate is staying up when it should go down (at rest, say), take a break, lower the intensity and see if that helps. Another clue is when you can't get the heart rate up - like you used to hit 192bpm but now a maximum effort still feels like a max effort but you only hit 182. It would be nice to correlate that with workload - maybe you aren't actually working as hard as you thought- but if true then you may indeed have overtrained.

But don't kid yourself. If you have built up a base level of miles over a few months - say at least 100-200km a week - and then do some hard interval sessions on top, it is unlikely you have overtrained. Maybe. But not likely. Sudden intensity without base miles may injure you, but not overtrain you. However if you were doing 500-700km a week and laid on more on top of that then yes, overtraining is a possibility. Take a break, just in case. A week of slow riding won't hurt you!

To be a bit more scientific about it - and I'm not a coach, this is just my somewhat informed opinion - optimum training intensity varies by just a few percent between individuals, so there are some rules of thumb we can all follow to keep us improving. Such as:

• It is generally believed for example, and we have ample evidence to justify this belief, that maximum aerobic improvement occurs at around 85% VO2 max, give or take a few percent
• That's about 90% of your max. heart rate. So regular training above this level will increase the potential for injury without a corresponding lift in your cardiovascular adaptation - which is to say you are trying too hard, could become overtrained or injured - so back off a bit
• Now lower levels of exercise - say 55% max HR for 60 minutes or even 65% max HR for 45 minutes - may modestly improve, and at least maintain, your overall conditioning... but...
  
• Whilst that may be enough for you to stay in C grade, what if you want to get better, faster? Long steady distance training, say 50 to 70% of max HR for hours on end, will do little more than maintain status quo. Yes, it could burn off fat - a good thing. Yes, it will build endurance...
• But if you are looking to increase your top end (maybe to avoid being dropped in your frenzied local crit, or to attack and break away, win and go up a grade) you need to hit the high notes. That's the 85-90% max HR mark.
• It's finding a balance between too much high-intensity training and not enough that's hard. And why you pay big bucks to the experienced coaches to get that sort of result.
  

Of course we don't want to spend big bucks, so it's down to YOU. Hopefully in the above are some clues to improving your condition without injury.

Labels: training