By this logic, every cyclist is genetically preordained to be either a sprinter, a climber, or an all-arounder, and training is designed to optimize these natural strengths. Unfortunately, what’s best for full-time racers isn’t always best for amateur athletes, and the common concept of “rider type” is a perfect example. Check Out TrainerRoad Myth 4: You need to identify your natural “rider type” and use this to guide your training. But this still doesn’t require replicating your event-a 2 or 3-hour endurance ride can be all it takes to find what you need to improve, and that’s a lot less than tradition would have you believe. Fueling, hydration, and bike fit can all be significant factors in very long events, and short workouts might not fully reveal whether you’ve got them dialed in. That said, a few longer rides in training can be useful to fine-tune non-fitness aspects of your performance. This doesn’t require all-day workouts to achieve-it just takes smart, structured training that best utilizes whatever time you have available. Very long races are almost entirely aerobic with some short surges at higher intensities, so a strong aerobic energy system is the ticket to success. This is because the type of efforts you do during an event matter much more than the event’s length. In fact, low volume training with workouts of 90 minutes or less can prepare you perfectly well for very long races, as many TrainerRoad athletes have proven. But while specificity is important in training, it doesn’t mean you need to replicate your event’s duration. There’s a common belief that very long events require equally long training rides, and at face value, this seems like a reasonable assumption.
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Myth 3: You need to ride the full distance of your goal event in training. There’s a time and place for hard training, but it isn’t every workout. Make every workout hard and you’ll not only wear yourself down, but you might actually neglect developing important aspects of your fitness. Training plans are designed around this fact, and this means some workouts are intentionally easier than others. There are also important physiological differences in how easy and hard workouts affect your body. This is why the principle of minimum effective dose is so useful in training, using the smallest amount of stress possible to get the desired result. Apply too much stress or allow for too little recovery and your body won’t be able to make these improvements, and you won’t get faster. Training puts the body under stress, stimulating adaptations and subsequent improvements in fitness. To understand why, it’s important to realize that only through recovery that you get faster. Too often, athletes assume that harder is better, but in many cases, the opposite is true. But it’s easy to conflate how difficult cycling can be with how difficult training should be.
Myth 2: Training is only productive when it’s hard.Ĭycling culture celebrates the sport’s brutality, equating the ability to tolerate pain with a sign of strength.
Coupled with the personalized adjustments of Adaptive Training, modern base training is one of the most effective and important ways to improve your cycling. This approach also allows more flexibility to incorporate group rides or even early-season races, and more fun means more consistency. Sweet Spot base training is a great example of how this can work in a time-effective way. Luckily, there is a better way-by targeting the aerobic system with slightly tougher, shorter workouts. And even if you do have the time, it takes an incredible amount of discipline and self-control to train like this. This approach demands a serious investment of time, something most of us unfortunately lack.
It also directly benefits your fitness, since cycling is heavily reliant on aerobic capabilities.Īll of this to say, base training is an important part of getting faster, but it doesn’t require an old-school regimen of very long, easy workouts. It develops your aerobic system, builds muscular endurance, and reinforces good motor patterns, preparing your body for hard work later in the season. Myth 1: Base training needs to be all long, slow, easy rides.
#Trainerroad blog update
In this post, we take a look at five persistent bits of old-fashioned cycling wisdom, and update our understanding with a more modern perspective. Despite countless advances in sports science, outdated and counterproductive beliefs about training and fitness are still commonplace in the peloton.
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