How to Plan Your Cycling Training for Ongoing Improvement

In 1965, Russian physiologist Leo Matveyev discovered a pattern in Soviet athletes preparing for the 1952 and 1956 summer olympics. He found that top level athletes structure their training in a linear manner: From broad and easy to specific. 

Based on this, how do you plan out your training to maximize your potential in cycling? I will get into the training science and give you example training weeks from each phase of the periodisation cycle to answer this question. The example weeks will be based on a rider training 10 hours weekly and are by no means absolutes.

This will give you an idea of what exactly your training should look like to make this your best season ever. 

Let’s start with the hardest part of the season.

1. The Offseason 

Serious cyclists get a panic attack already by doing less weekly training hours. But what makes them really lose their cool is taking a break. 

A break, however, is crucial if you push your body to the limit during the season…

Start Off With a Break 

That’s right. If you want to have your best season ever, you should start by not training at all. Research indicates that hard training and racing periods impact your blood values and hormone levels. A return to baseline in both blood and hormone levels was observed in studies when athletes went into the offseason. 

A break is so important that I dedicated a whole article to it. 

Anyway, the message is clear here. Start the offseason with a period of no training, once the racing and training season is done. This is typically done in October and should last from 5-14 days, depending on the amount of racing and training you did. Pros and elite cyclists might even consider a longer break of 3-4 weeks. Focus really on no activity at all and use the extra time for other important tasks in life.

Take It Easy (But Not Too Easy)

After you’ve done your break, you want your offseason training to consist of 1-2 months of low volume, low intensity, and fairly unstructured training. 

For most cyclists, the off-season typically lasts from November to December. 

By low intensity, however, I don’t mean no intensity. A study from Rønnestad, looking at the effect of high intensity training in the offseason in cyclists, found that just one interval session every 7-10 days was enough to maintain performance compared to a low-intensity only group. Furthermore, the LIT only group was unable to catch back up with the HIT group after 16 weeks of  the same pre-season training. In fact, the HIT + LIT group showed a 12.1% better lactate threshold. This gap is substantial, considering the LIT group performed the same weekly volume and pre-season training as the other group. 

Another study from Almquist looking at one weekly sprint interval training session in cyclists, found similar results compared on performance maintenance. Read more about approaching the offseason here.

As we can see at least from research, endurance capacity is short lived.

So the key during the offseason is that you want to have weekly intensity sessions, where you add stress to your body. There’s no need for structured only sessions though. Some KOM hunting, or a fast group ride will get the job done. 

Furthermore, Mathieu Heijboer, head of performance from Visma Lease a Bike, adressed that the biggest change in the last 10 years is adding more intensity from November to February. This, as seen in the upper studies, will lead to a higher baseline fitness. So it won’t hinder your progress or make you peak to early. On the contrary. If you keep recovery and intensity in check it will only make you faster.

Additionally, during the offseason you also want to add some variety to your sessions with cross training like running, swimming, rowing, or skiing. It’s a great time to give your body a different stimulus and try other sports. 

Besides, due to the calm nature of the offseason it’s a great time to build a strength routine.

Include Strength Training

Due to the low training load on the bike, the offseason is the perfect time to get into the gym. 

Almost every study on heavy leg work on cycling performance shows benefits and improvements. These effects are likely attributed to postponed activation of type 2 fibers, improved neuromuscular efficiency, and conversion of type 2x fibers into more fatigue resistant type 2a fibers.

Furthermore, there’s research to suggest that you also want to include plyometric jump exercises into your routine. For example, try countermovement squat jumps as muscle fiber recruitment is similar to that in all-out sprints found by studies. If you build momentum into your routine you can also add weights to your squat jumps. Remember, however, by squat jumps I don’t mean consecutive jumps but rather maximal jumps restarting every jump from the initial start position to maximize jump height.

Since you will be extremely sore when you first start lifting, you want to start in the offseason, when high-quality work on the bike isn’t necessary anyway. 

Yet, after a month or two the soreness should subside and it’s time to increase the training load on the bike. But before we look at base training, here’s an example week for the offseason and structured training plans below:

2. Proper Base Training 

Base training has a long tradition in endurance sports like cycling. The debate on how necessary base training is, however, went to the point that some suggest reverse periodisation, meaning you do the most intense work first and volume later during the season. 

But how does this advice holds itself in the literature.

Apply Basic Periodisation 

There’s hardly any evidence supporting reversed periodisation, though. On the other hand, the more traditional periodisation that Matveyev discovered is something observed in top level endurance athletes and also noticed by a review looking at training of world class endurance athletes prior to achieving a gold medal in the olympics. 

Moreover, this exact pattern is also observed in the best long distance runners like Eliud Kipchoge, as well as in a study comparing intensity distribution in runners for 16 weeks. In this study they split runners in four groups where group 1 did pyramidal training only, 2 did polarized training only, 3 did 8 weeks of pyramidal followed by 8 weeks of polarized training, and 4 did the opposite of group 3. What they found was that the group switching from pyramidal to polarized saw the biggest improvement in 5k running performance, once again showing that an increase in intensity seems to be a good approach.

However, we can also look at periodisation from a logical standpoint: Therefore, it’s completely different to plan training from the least specific to the most specific, like doing strength work far from competition and more intense and specific work close to competition, as it is the other way around. 

It sounds pointless to place strength work and easy training with little intensity leading up to your race season, doesn’t it?

Increase Your Training Volume 

With all the points made already the goal in base training is to increase our training volume and make the bulk of it zone 2 endurance rides at 50-60% of FTP and up to 75% of FTP. 

The base phase should last 3 months, usually ranging from January through March. 

Now, to further improve you need to stress your body more than it has been before. To achieve this, you can either increase volume, or how much you ride, intensity, or how hard you ride, or both. 

During base our focus should be on achieving adaptations through long low intensity and intense aerobic sessions below our FTP. Therefore, your on the bike work is priority number one while gym work should be reduced and placed after your interval training sessions, on either the same day or the next day. We will look at how to solve this in the example training week further down.

Manage Your Training Intensity

As you move along your base training you want to increase the weekly interval sessions and your goal should be to maximize time-at-intensity below and up to FTP. 

Rather than lung searing VO2max sessions, your focus should be Tempo training at around 85-90% of your FTP and threshold intervals at 95-100% of your FTP with some occasional sprint work. Following this, research from Burnley and colleagues found that riding above your FTP builds up four to five times more muscle fatigue than riding at 80-90% of  FTP. Or in other words you want to stick to aerobic intervals because you can accumulate more time at that intensity, while keeping your fatigue in check. This is likely an argument to why Norwegian threshold training works well. You can simply stress your body more often.

Now, while you only did one weekly HIT session in the offseason you might start the first month of base with 1-2 weekly interval session but get back to 2 or occasionally 3 weekly sessions from the second month of base on. 

What you want to avoid is having more than two or on occasion three weekly interval sessions. Instead, try to focus on increasing your training density by increasing the dose or amount of intervals you do in one session. 

Research from Rønnestad has found that by doing 2x weekly sessions of threshold intervals at a higher dose, like 1x 8×8 minutes and 1x 6×12 minutes, compared to 4x weekly sessions at a lower dose, 2x 4×8 minutes and 2x 3×12 minutes, the low frequency group of cross-country skiers improved time trial performance while the 4x interval group stagnated.

The authors conclude that a higher daily stimulus is needed to achieve improvements in elite endurance athletes as well as that the hard day-easy day pattern observed in world class endurance athletes plays a crucial role too, as it allows for more recovery time between key training sessions. 

Accordingly, I suggest you keep away from sweet spot heavy plans. They might feel great in the beginning but you will pay the price for it later.

Also, you can read more about the importance of training density here. 

To give you an idea of what I mean, you can start with 3×15 minutes of Tempo and extend that to 3×20 minutes and 5×15 minutes as you progress during the base phase. Note however, that from time to time you also want to include some higher intensity work during base. For example, include a shorter HIT session at the end of a rest week.

Here’s the example base training week and detailed base training plans:

3. The Build Period

The build period is the time of the year, where you want to be in peak shape. It lasts two months and usually takes place in April and May for most riders. 

On the one hand you want your training intensity to increase during build. On the other hand, you also want your training to become more specific to what you’re training for. Therefore, we will focus on these two key things in the next sections.

High Intensity Training

While your intensity should increase during the build period, you still want to limit yourself to two, or occasionally three, weekly interval sessions. 

The reason is found in research from French Physiologist Billat, who discovered that three weekly HIT sessions + one weekly threshold session didn’t improve endurance in runners but increased overtraining markers compared to 1x HIT + 1x threshold weekly. She notes, however, that “1x weekly HIT session in a 4-week block already improved VO2max, further questioning the necessity for more sessions.”

Therefore, I advise you to go with one tabata style or standard HIIT workout and add another race specific workout as we have research that this might be the optimal strategy to maximize your potential.

If, however, you aim for more intensity you can try block periodisation as an experienced bike racer. Block periodisation means overloading the initial week of a training month with 5x HIT sessions to induce a huge training load that you recover from in the following weeks. This can help you step up your fitness level and acts as a solid alternative or addition to regular build training.

Race Specific Workouts

No other than Dr. Stephen Seiler found that peak training for runners at either race pace or HIT improved performance equally and stated that “the combination of both strategies might lead to a higher training response.” 

You might ask yourself what a race specific workout should look like. Well, that depends on the demands of your race. As an XC racer you might perform all-out starts on trail and settle into race-pace afterward. On the other hand, as a crit-racer you want to include a repeated sprint session like a 10/30 workout, meaning you sprint for 10 seconds and recover for 30 seconds and repeat it a couple times and sets. As an ultra endurance racer, however, a long tempo workout will be more specific. 

Try to mimic the demands of your event as closely as possible. Your race finishes in a sprint? Then do a couple sprints at the end of a hard ride, for example.

Also, to allow for enough quality work on the bike you can further reduce your gym work by reducing frequency to once weekly, for example.

Check out this build training week example and plans below:

4. Racing Season 

You’ve done your base training, you’ve done your build training, and now it’s time to get that icing of the cake for your main event. 

If you want to peak at the right time, research is pretty clear. 

How to Peak at The Right Time

You should reduce your volume but maintain your intensity resulting in reducing your training load while maintaining fitness. We’ve seen in the offseason how crucial intensity is to achieve that. 

Studies also found a sweet spot at reducing volume. This reduction should be between 40-60% of general training volume and a taper should last from one to two weeks. An exception are long endurance events, where you want to have one longer weekly ride as going too low on volume would be less specific to your event. 

Now, the exact execution of a taper is pretty individual and requires some experimentation but you will find your optimal taper with some trial and error. 

Regarding gym work you either want to skip it completely if you race weekly, or keep maintenance if not. For master athletes research has shown that strength training is even more beneficial compared to younger athletes. This underpins the fact that we lose muscle as we age.

Here’s a taper week example: 

Training During The Season

Concerning other riders, you won’t usually only have one race, so how do you decide where to taper and where not? 

I suggest you categorize your races into A, B, and C races, where A races are your highest priority and C your lowest priority races. Consequently, avoid tapering for C-races. For B-races you can taper half a week; So for example, if your B-race is Sunday start tapering Thursday. And for your A-race you might find tapering for one week is optimal for you. 

In between the racing season you want to apply a compromised periodisation cycle with a mix of base, build and peak to change your training stress, allow for recovery, and be in peak shape when you should be. 

Where Did This Leave Us All?

That was a lot of information. To give you a little reminder on what have been written so far, here is a short break down of the whole training process:

1. Take a complete break after the season
2. Enjoy some unstructured freedom during the offseason but include some intensity for maintenance, and strength training for real gains
3. Increase training volume during base and limit intervals mostly up to FTP
4. Increase intensity with HIT during the build period and implement race specific workouts, while reducing or maintaining gym work 
5. Maintain intensity but reduce volume in your taper to peak for your main races
6. Apply a compromised periodisation cycle during racing season for other important races

That in a nutshell is the full periodization cycle for a whole training season you can use to build your own training plan. I hope that by now you have a better idea of how to plan out your cycling season.

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Studies used in this Article

1. Changes in Blood Values in Elite Cyclist
2. Reduction of Hb Levels During the Racing Season in Nonsideropenic Professional Cyclists*
3. The Response of Sexual and Stress Hormones of Male Pro-Cyclists During Continuous Intense Competition
4. The Effects of Detraining on Power Athletes
5. HIT maintains performance during the transition period and improves next season performance in well-trained cyclists
6. Effects of Including Sprints in One Weekly Low-Intensity Training Session During the Transition Period of Elite Cyclists
7. Strength training improves cycling performance, fractional utilization of VO_2max and cycling economy in female cyclists
8. Maximal Strength Training Improves Cycling Economy in Competitive Cyclists
9. Strength training improves cycling efficiency in master endurance athletes
10. The Road to Gold: Training and Peaking Characteristics in the Year Prior to a Gold Medal Endurance Performance
11. The Effect of Different High-Intensity Periodization Models on Endurance Adaptations
12. The Training Characteristics of World-Class Distance Runners: An Integration of Scientific Literature and Results-Proven Practice
13. Influence of Interval Training Frequency on Time-Trial Performance in Elite Endurance Athletes 
14. Effects of 16 weeks of pyramidal and polarized training intensity distributions in well-trained endurance runners
15. What is best practice for training intensity and duration distribution in endurance athletes?
16. Critical Power: An Important Fatigue Threshold in Exercise Physiology
17. Interval training at VO2max: Effects on aerobic training and overtraining markers
18. Training Periodization, Methods, Intensity Distribution, and Volume in Highly Trained and Elite Distance Runners: A Systematic Review
19. Training for intense exercise performance: high-intensity or high-volume training?
20. Adaptations to training at the individual anaerobic threshold
21. Skeletal muscle buffering capacity and endurance performance after high-intensity interval training by well-trained cyclists
22. Specific Intensity for Peaking: Is Race Pace the Best Option?
23. How do world class top 5 Giro d’Italia finishers train? A qualitative multiple case study
24. Reduced training intensities and loss of aerobic power, endurance, and cardiac growth
25. Reduced training duration effects on aerobic power, endurance, and cardiac growth
26. Effects of tapering on performance: a meta-analysis
27. A Scientific Approach to Improve Physiological Capacity of an Elite Cyclist
28. Short-term performance peaking in an elite cross-country mountain biker
29. Effects of 12 weeks of block periodization on performance and performance indices in well-trained cyclists
30. The effects of plyometric training on sprint performance: a meta-analysis