Base training: building your season’s foundations

It’s impossible to talk about winter training without mentioning base training. For many of us, it consists of tedious and monotonous endurance work. Think again! This phase offers a variety of exercises, coordination, general fitness improvement, and recovery. Most importantly, it is crucial for laying the foundations of your upcoming season.

By Pierre-Maxime BRANCHE – Photos: 3bikes.fr and Chiara Redaschi

After the break, it’s not always easy to get back into the swing of things. Dropping temperatures, wet weather, greasy roads—the conditions for getting back on the bike are frankly not easy, and yet, it’s at this precise moment that a large part of your season is played out! We might be exaggerating a little, but clearly, the successes of spring and summer are prepared during winter. From racers to sportive riders, all cyclists and triathletes are concerned and obliged to go through the base training phase, the one that builds the foundations of your future season.

Because it is indeed about foundations that we must speak, base training being an essential phase. The objective of this preparation is to increase general physical condition and, more particularly, aerobic capacity. It is on this basis that the cyclist can then perform specific exercises to improve their other qualities: explosiveness, power, etc.

Regularity and progressivity

But for now, it’s all about regularity and progressivity. These are the two main axes of base training! You must avoid subjecting your body to efforts for which it is absolutely not prepared. Consecutive rides allow you to increase and improve the performance of your cardiovascular system. The more it strengthens between each ride, the more efficient its output becomes, meaning that the energy cost decreases for a given effort. This efficiency is to be understood in a broad sense and includes, among other things, better use of energy sources between fat reserves and glycogen, better pedaling coordination, a better position on the bike, and finally, better recovery between efforts. Incidentally, base training also helps to reduce the fat mass that appeared due to the off-season break and the aftermath of the holiday season.

High endurance

For progressivity, the principle is to start with two to three-hour rides, to reach five hours after six to eight weeks of training depending on your level, this period also remaining to be determined according to your experience. At what intensity? The idea is to ride at a high endurance pace, i.e., about 80% of your potential, depending on current possibilities, of course. Be careful, however, because base training tends to block the body, especially for higher intensity efforts. To avoid becoming too “diesel,” you can do a few small accelerations at the end of the ride or on short climbs to remind your body that cycling is an activity of changing rhythms. As soon as a little fitness returns, it is also advisable to include shorter but more intense rides, with some interval training or intensities. Finally, to avoid the monotony of rides, do not hesitate to theme all or part of a training session: high cadence uphill or downhill, specific strength training uphill, climbs out of the saddle or seated, or even a little “one-legged pedaling.” Everything is good to make your pedal stroke smooth, efficient, and powerful again, before moving on, in a few weeks, to interval exercises, the core of the discipline.

The main principles of base training: Regularity, Progressivity, High Endurance, and Cadence

Some misconceptions to combat

Between stereotypes and clichés, base training doesn’t always have a good reputation. 3Bikes.fr corrects some misconceptions about this essential training phase.

1 – “Base training is just endurance work”

Indeed, when we talk about base training, we are talking about basic endurance. Nevertheless, we are still obliged to talk about training zones. Base training does not correspond to just any endurance, but specifically to aerobic endurance. We can talk about two methods, the old and the new. With the modern version, you perform a stress test in a hospital setting, and the intensity zones are precisely determined according to different heart rate ranges. This makes it quite easy to target the desired training afterward. Unfortunately, “in other times” there were no ultra-sophisticated bike computers, heart rate monitors, or power meters, so solutions had to be found to know what type of training the cyclist was doing. The old-timers used to say: “As long as you can talk on the bike without being out of breath, you are in the aerobic zone. However, when you start to gasp for breath when you speak, you are reaching your limit and will soon switch to anaerobic lactic.” You can check with your heart rate monitor: when you have trouble talking on the bike and are gasping for breath, that corresponds to your critical endurance.

2 – “Base training is riding at 50% of your capabilities”

Not at all! We can evaluate base training work as a percentage, even if it remains a theory, and it does not correspond at all to 50% of potential. If we talk about critical endurance, it is around 90% of maximum heart rate. If we talk about basic endurance, i.e., base training, it will be more around 80% of Max HR.

3 – “Base training is from December to January”

There isn’t really a specific date. Let’s say that, generally, it naturally corresponds to the winter months, after the traditional off-season break. But it is absolutely essential to take into account personal history: whether the cyclist has completed an entire season, for example from February to September with regular training and numerous competitions or sportives, whether they have been injured, whether they stopped during the summer, etc. Because base training can be done at any time of the season: obviously for a return to activity, but it can also be a return after an accident or tendinitis.

4 – “Base training is a series of easy rides”

In fact, after targeting the base training zone, which is about 80% of your Max HR, you realize that these are not easy rides at all. Depending on the profile, a pro will ride at 35 km/h while the average person will ride at 25 km/h. Consequently, this also means that it is better to avoid traditional winter group rides or, at least, only ride with people who have the same potential, at the risk of riding either too fast or not fast enough, and thus neglecting your base training period, with the consequences that one can imagine for the rest of the season.

=> SEE ALSO : Sunday morning rides: what to do and what not to do

5 – “Base training is riding in the small chainring on flat terrain”

That’s not really the point. During base training, you can do all types of courses, flat obviously, but also hills or even small accessible passes if there’s no snow. There’s no ideal course when doing base training; the important thing is to stay within the appropriate heart rate zone. You can very well climb hills at 80%, it won’t hinder the training at all. It’s the same for gears, there’s no rule. The old-timers recommended, at first, to use the small chainring to start again and then gradually switch to the large chainring as the rides progressed. But that also depends on your intrinsic qualities and your other activities: if you combine cycling with weight training, strength training, or other activities, you will naturally tend to find it easier to switch to the large chainring quite quickly, compared to someone who has taken several weeks off and does nothing special outside of cycling. By force of circumstances, they will stay on the small chainring.

6 – “For good base training, you need to use a fixed gear”

Don’t get the wrong idea. Fixed gear is not essential for base training. The benefit of fixed gear, in the context of returning to training, is to rediscover the sensation of a smooth pedal stroke as opposed to a jerky one. Because often, after a more or less long break, you have the sensation of a square, unrounded pedal stroke. Fixed gear allows you to regain that roundness in your pedal stroke. It’s somewhat similar with Powercranks or the Thoreau Cycles Concepts pedaling improvement system. These tools allow you to work on pedaling smoothness, thanks to the two independent cranks, but also to correct muscular deficiencies in the thighs, which can have several origins such as an injury, a fall, or a difference in leg length. These cranks can compensate for the lack of power in one leg compared to the other. But in no case are these systems indispensable for base training. They are interesting to use during this period depending on individual needs, they can prevent monotony in consecutive rides, but they remain specific training aids outside of base training.

=> SEE ALSO : How to improve your pedal stroke and Review of the Thoreau Cycles Concepts pedaling improvement bike

7 – “Base training is monotonous”

At first glance, one might say that it’s not necessarily a very exciting period: you’re out of shape, you’re not riding particularly fast, if it’s winter, the weather conditions are difficult, etc. However, it’s important to keep in mind that, on the one hand, it’s part of the fundamental basics of training, like the foundations of a house, and on the other hand, you can absolutely spice up base training rides with different exercises, as long as you stay in the aerobic zone. Some can work on cadence, others on power by doing strength training on climbs, since, as explained above, gearing doesn’t matter. Be careful, however, because a cyclist who is not used to pedaling at a high cadence, and who starts to specifically work on this quality, will tend to have a very high heart rate and therefore not stay in the base training zone.

8 – “Cross-country skiing is base training’s best friend”

If the question is whether other sports activities can be practiced for base training, the answer is yes. You can vary the pleasures. Regarding cross-country skiing, even if you hear every winter that it’s the best corresponding discipline to benefit from physical fitness, the question arises because you just need to put on a heart rate monitor to realize that this practice quickly raises the heart rate, especially to quite high frequencies, and that it is thus very difficult to target the aerobic zone. It’s not impossible for those who know themselves very well, but it’s difficult because cross-country skiing involves all four limbs in a swinging motion, on sometimes quite uneven courses, and thus places a very significant demand on cardiac capacity. You can very quickly find yourself no longer in base training, but in anaerobic lactic, the 90% of Max HR zone.

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