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You hear it everywhere: “To improve, you need to ride more.” So you add a ride, you extend your weekend rides, you increase to 16, 18, 20 hours a week. Yes, we see you triathletes and amateur cyclists who want to improve! You come home tired, with heavy legs, stinging eyes, proud of having “worked hard.” And yet… your times aren’t improving, your FTP is stagnating, and your sensations remain average. You tell yourself that you still need a little more volume, that you need to “maintain the pace” longer. What if it was exactly the opposite?
By Guillaume Judas – Photos: depositphotos.com
The real problem is almost never a lack of willpower. It’s a targeting error. We all know that cyclist or triathlete friend who always does more, but does it wrong. Yes, you there, we see you, we know you, and we’d really like to help you. Like most amateurs (and quite a few good regional riders), you spend most of your training time in what can be called a gray zone: a little too fast to truly recover, a little too slow to create a powerful stimulus.
The result: you pay the physiological price of a hard ride every day (residual fatigue, inflammation, less energy, worn-out nervous system) without ever reaping the maximum benefits for VO2max, threshold power, or anaerobic capacity. You’re already dulled on Tuesday after Sunday’s ride. On Thursday, you’re still dragging your heavy legs during the essential VO2max session, and you ease off without daring to admit it to yourself. Then you compensate by adding a long endurance ride on Sunday “because you have to get in the volume.” The cycle is complete, stagnation guaranteed.
Faster and shorter
Science, for its part, has been clear for over twenty years. The athletes who improve the fastest, from WorldTour pros to top masters, are not those who train the longest. They are those who polarize their training load best, with about 80% of the time at very low intensity (Zone 1, completely fluid conversation, calm heart rate) and 20% at truly high intensity (Zone 3 and above, short or long intervals near maximum). In between, they avoid this gray zone as much as possible, this metabolic no man’s land that wears out the body without transforming it.
In short: easy days must be ridiculously easy. Yes, that means riding very, very easy on some climbs rather than pushing with the large chainring at 300 watts and 160 beats just to “stay in rhythm.” It means accepting to see your name drop a few places on a Strava segment because you’re riding at 28 km/h instead of 33. It means coming back from a four-hour ride feeling like you could do the same ride again immediately. It’s unsettling for the ego, but it’s exactly what allows you, two days later, to handle 6×5′ at threshold or 8×30”/30” all-out with legs that finally respond.
Don’t just look at the TSS (Training Stress Score) or the normalized power displayed by your bike computer / head unit. The same number can hide two totally different realities depending on the accumulated fatigue level. This is why the perceived effort of the session compared to the actual heart rate usually observed for this type of effort is important and should also serve as an indicator. When your heart rate is ten beats higher than usual at the same pace, or when an easy ride is rated 4/10 instead of 1 or 2, it’s not a lack of mental fortitude: it’s a clear signal that the internal load is too high and that you need to ease off before your body does it for you.
Hit the brakes and plan
The golden rule is simple to understand, difficult to apply: easy days must be truly easy so that hard days can be truly hard… and genuinely productive. When this rule is respected, the total necessary volume often drops by 20 to 30% and performance explodes. It’s counter-intuitive, almost annoying for someone who has built their legitimacy on “I ride more than others,” but the data doesn’t lie.
So, what kind of cyclist or triathlete are you really? The one who stacks up hours hoping that quantity will eventually pay off, or the one who starts to properly structure their training load and rediscover what it means to be fresh and ready?
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