Land ownership: a guide to sustainable progress

It’s a perennial topic, a true one. The kind of subject that tirelessly returns every winter, like dead leaves on the roadsides or debates about the best tire pressure. And yet, if we must continue to talk about it, it’s because you only have to meet cyclists on the road to see that many of them still train against all physiological logic, with their heart rate in the red from the first false flat, convinced that if it burns the legs, it’s working. While endurance training may be well-known, documented, and validated by decades of sports science, it remains poorly understood, poorly applied, and sometimes completely shunned. Wrongly so, because it still constitutes the cornerstone of any lasting progress in cycling.

By Guillaume Judas – Photos: depositphotos.com

Why endurance is the foundation of everything

Endurance training primarily aims to develop your aerobic capacities. In other words, it’s about teaching your body to sustain prolonged effort primarily using oxygen as an energy source. At these relatively low intensities, the body improves the efficiency of its cardiovascular system, increases the number and size of mitochondria, develops the muscular capillary network, and learns to better utilize fats as fuel. These are slow, profound, but fundamental adaptations. Without them, any attempt to progress through intense sessions is like building a house without foundations: it holds for a while, then it collapses.

Endurance training is therefore not reserved for beginners or occasional sportive riders. Professionals themselves dedicate a significant portion of their annual volume to it. The difference with many practitioners is that they know precisely why they do it and how to intelligently integrate it into their training sessions. For the amateur cyclist, often pressed for time and eager for sensations, the classic mistake is to turn every ride into a session that’s a little too hard, which is neither truly intensive nor genuinely beneficial aerobically.

Managing Effort: The Key to Endurance Training

Respecting intensities is undoubtedly the most delicate aspect of endurance training. It involves riding at a comfortable pace, allowing you to hold a conversation without being out of breath, typically in the fundamental endurance zone. Physiologically, this corresponds to an effort well below the first ventilatory threshold, often located around 65 to 75% of maximum heart rate, or about 55 to 70% of power at FTP (Functional Threshold Power) for those who ride with a power meter.

The trap is twofold. On the one hand, the pace can seem too easy, especially for those who are trained or motivated. On the other hand, terrain variations, wind, or group effect naturally encourage exceeding the correct intensity. However, each repeated transgression above the target zone reduces the effectiveness of the session and unnecessarily increases fatigue. Endurance training is not a test of willpower, but an exercise in discipline. Learning to ease off, to accept being overtaken, or even to return with the feeling of still having something left in the tank, is an integral part of the process.

Frequency and Duration: Patience as a Cardinal Virtue

The effectiveness of endurance training relies on regularity and volume. An isolated ride, no matter how long, is not enough to provoke lasting adaptations. Ideally, several weekly sessions at moderate intensity allow for anchoring the physiological benefits. For practitioners with little time, even rides of one to one and a half hours, repeated regularly, can be useful. When time allows, longer rides, from two to four hours, further accentuate adaptations, particularly on the metabolic and muscular levels.

The winter period and the beginning of the season are traditionally dedicated to this foundational work, but it would be reductive to confine endurance training to just a few months of the year. An aerobic base is built over the long term and maintained continuously. Even in peak season, maintaining one or two endurance rides each week helps stabilize form and better absorb more demanding sessions.

Short, Medium, and Long-Term Benefits

In the short term, endurance training improves the feeling of ease on the bike. Rides become more comfortable, recovery is faster, and daily efforts are less energetically costly. In the medium term, overall performance improves: average speed increases for the same effort, climbs are handled better, and bad patches become rarer. The cyclist develops an increased capacity to sustain prolonged effort without excessive cardiac drift.

In the long term, the benefits are even more pronounced. A solid endurance base allows for tolerating higher training loads, reducing the risk of injury, and limiting overtraining. It also constitutes a key factor in athletic longevity. Those who have taken the time to build their endurance can continue to progress, or at least perform, much longer than those who have rushed through the stages with poorly controlled intensity.

When and How to Integrate Intensity

Intensive training is obviously not to be prohibited. It even becomes indispensable once the aerobic base is sufficient. Threshold intervals, VO₂ max work, or anaerobic efforts find their full relevance when they are built upon a solid endurance foundation. The ideal is to gradually introduce these sessions, once or twice a week, while maintaining a majority volume of endurance. This combination allows for transforming the adaptations acquired through endurance training into concrete performance gains.

So yes, endurance training remains that perennial topic that we tire of talking about, but which we would be wrong to turn away from. Less spectacular than high-intensity sessions, or the miracle recipes touted by influencers on Instagram, less immediately gratifying, it nonetheless remains the essential path for anyone wishing to make lasting progress on the bike. In an era where training data and tools have never been so accessible, it would be a shame to continue pedaling against logic.

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