Adding speed and strength

Recovery… It’s simple right? Ride, recover, ride, recover… Wrong! Recovery is a hugely overlooked aspect of most people’s training. We tend to see riders fall into two groups:

Firstly, there are those who panic train. They ride until the cows come home and wear themselves into the ground. When they start to lose form they train even more, compounding the situation.

On the other side, there are those riders who completely smash themselves on the bike, then take three or four days off, and then do the same again.

So where’s the happy medium and does one even exist? We at TrainSharp tend to follow the method of polarised training. It sounds exotic, doesn’t it? It’s a pretty simple principle but it’s heavily dependent on a solid rider- coach relationship and the will power of the rider to avoid overdoing it on an ‘easy’ day. Essentially, the training follows a regular pattern, with rest days usually falling on the same day, week in-week out. These are generally low intensity (Zone 1) rides while the harder days – which are often done on the indoor trainer so they can be tightly targeted– are tough. The exact balance depends on the time of year, the training cycle and the adaptation we’re after.

One of the Procycling team told me last year, just after we started working together, that he’d never done any Z1 riding and was surprised at how much we set. A few months later he was surprised again, this time by the big gains he’d made.

The key – especially for highly motivated riders – is to commit to steady rides like you would to a sprint-interval session. If you’re supposed to go easy, then go easy. If you are not recovering properly, you cannot work to the optimum level in the sessions that count.