If your goal is to improve your cycling performance, then you must have a purpose in your daily training. In other words, what is the objective of your ride each day?
You have three essential options to consider before your clip into your pedals. You are either Training, Recovering, or Performing. TRP, that’s it!
TRAINING
Includes high-intensity intervals, hard group ride, time trials, etc. The purpose of training is to work hard with specific intensity and duration intervals that will cause your body to overreach and to add stress to your muscles and aerobic system. These workouts must be done in moderation to avoid overtraining.
RECOVERING:
These are very light, easy spinning rides with only one purpose, allowing your body to properly recover and rebuild from high-intensity training and races/events.
PERFORMING
These are the events and races that you compete in to test your fitness, performance, and training progress. This is why you train.
FIND THE RIGHT BALANCE FOR YOU!
The key is to have the right mix and balance of all three categories to maximize your cycling fitness and improve performance. Too much of any of the three will diminish your performance. For example, too much intensity/racing without recovery can lead to overtraining, diminished power, illness, and injury. Too much easy spinning miles with little stress and your fitness will most likely decline.
Training properly is tough stuff; even with all the advance data and software, we still can miss our mark. That's when a coach can help fine tune your training to maximize your results!
REST AND RECOVER MORE
If I had to pick one thing that most of us get wrong in training, it would be the lack of proper recovery. Riding too hard on our easy day is very common, and it prevents us from performing at our best on those hard training days! Remember next time you are spinning home and have that urge, like me, to sprint up that last hill. The rest is best!
So what would be a good training guide to follow?
Below is a popular 7-DAY training mixture of TRC. (You can modify the intensity and duration of intervals and based on your fitness level)
Two hard training and/or race days (Tues-Sat)
Two recovery days (Monday- Friday)
One long group endurance ride 2+ hours (Sat)
One medium-long sweet-spot ride (Thursday)
One relaxed fun Sunday ride 1-2 hours. Repeat!