9 Steps to Build a Breakthrough Training Plan in Cycling

With all the information available today, it’s easy to lose the plot around what actually matters to improve your cycling performance. Moreover, the more choices you have available, the less satisfied you feel with any choice you take.

But here’s the thing: You only have a given amount of time you can dedicate to training each day. So the last thing you want is getting tired from riding your bike but ultimately not getting faster.

But where to start? I think the best kind of advice can be found in science and elite athletes. While you may think that pro cyclists train with cutting-edge complex workouts that have to be printed on their bar stems for them to remember, according to science the opposite is true.

In this article I will provide you with 9 steps that you can implement right away to build a training plan that will improve your cycling performance in 2025 (and beyond).

1. Apply Periodisation

If there’s one question as frequently asked as “What’s your FTP” among cyclists who want to get faster, it’s “What should my training weeks look like and how does that fit into an overall training plan?”

In other words, most cyclists are talking about periodisation. Periodisation means that your training is changing over time. Because if not, your body will stop making adaptations if it’s already adapted to the stress you’re giving it. So when planning out your season, make sure that your workouts become more specific the closer you get towards your goal event.

Build your Base First

Now, while the traditional base building of easy endurance rides has been criticised in recent years, especially by time-crunched cyclists, establishing a solid volume of basic endurance still is an important precondition for future success. On the one hand, increasing training volume allows you to periodize your training and align it with weather changes. On the other hand, low-intensity training rides might be just as important as high-intensity if you want to reach peak performance.

For example, in a review on best practice for intensity and duration distribution for endurance athletes, it’s suggested that establishing an endurance base from high training volumes is an essential requirement for tolerating and responding well to an intensity increase in the short term. Additionally, according to a review on high intensity vs. high volume training, both high intensity and low-intensity training are important components of world-class endurance athletes. However, there seem to be certain adaptations occurring in easy endurance training that are not observed in high-intensity training.

Although some riders don’t see the value in doing easy endurance rides, it will and should always comprise the biggest part of your weekly volume. If not, you’re doing something wrong. And this is true whether you train 6 or 15 hours per week. Research shows that if training lacks a solid blend of low-intensity and high-intensity training, performance ability can stagnate.

Hold Back During The Offseason

Now, the reason why HIT sessions all year round are a great recipe for stagnation is that it doesn’t take long to maximize those gains from this type of work.

Of course, you should do maintenance work in the offseason, or your fitness will return to padawan level, but this should include a blend of tempo, threshold, and HIT intervals. Yet, especially HIT intervals should find their way in your training plan right before racing as they’re so taxing on the body. And not be the sole focus of winter training.

Sure we don’t have 20-30 hours to train per week like pros, but that doesn’t mean you should be smashing VO2max intervals every time you jump on the trainer to maximize your 10 hours.

This is the dark side of offseason training. And if you are not careful, it’s easy to succumb to it.

Yes training plans vary a lot depending on the person and what they’re training for, but in general you want your training to become more specific to the race as you get closer to that race. Probably the most useful way is to increase intensity because racing often is high intensity. Moreover, you want your training to have progression. Lack progression and you know what will happen. Your body is already adapted to the stress you’re giving it and you will hit a fitness plateau. Doing HIT all year long is a great example to do so.

So I suggest you use the following framework as a periodisation starting point and adapt it based on your needs. The timeline for your event can be 4-7 months before you want to be in peak shape.

Offseason: Focus on 1-2x weekly maintenance interval sessions and fill the rest of training days with easy endurance rides, strength training, and some cross-training like running.
Base Training: Base training usually lasts three months. Aim to increase your training volume and maximize your threshold and sub-threshold work with 2 or occasionally 3 weekly interval sessions while keeping up a strength routine.
Build Training: Increase training intensity with a focus on HIT intervals and race-specific sessions that mimic the demands of your goal event. Strength training becomes maintenance work with only 1-2 shorter weekly sessions or none at all.

2. Use This Simple Training Week Template

Alright, periodisation should stick now and you know that you need to change your training at certain times of the year to improve your fitness. So next I want to share a basic training week template with you that you can use and modify based on your schedule, race goals, or time of year.

Add Intensity First

What do we need to add first? The intensity or key sessions. How much intensity you add is the most important factor when planning out your week. Add too little and you won’t provide enough stress to get better. But add too much and you will end up burned out and exhausted.

So what is the right amount of intensity?

Well, there are a million articles on the internet about how to add intensity and how much to add. And sure, I will cover some of that here.

But I want to propose something far more subtle yet far more important: Often far less high-intensity is far more important for our long term improvement than adding more intense days.

In fact, a study on runners let them perform normal training with 1 weekly VO2max session. Afterward, they overtrained them with a 4 week period of 3 weekly VO2max sessions. Surprisingly, not only didn’t the runners see any improvement during the overload period but markers for overtraining and overreaching actually increased.

Of course, recovery from running takes longer compared to cycling but numerous observational studies have noticed this trend of balanced intensity across endurance sports. For example, if we go back to the review on best practice training for endurance athletes they advocated for 2 or occasionally 3 threshold or HIT sessions per week. More intensity is not associated with improved performance and instead related to symptoms of overreaching and overtraining.

How much total intensity you add per session, depends on the type of session. For HIT sessions, for example, aim for 12-24 minutes of total intensity. For threshold sessions, a recent study that asked Norwegian world-class coaches on best practice sessions, they advocated for 45-60 minutes of total time per threshold session.

Either way, 2 or on occasion 3 interval sessions per week is what you’re shooting for. Additionally, you want to do these days when you’re well-rested, so that they can be as high-quality as possible.

In our example week let’s put the high-intensity days on Tuesday and Saturday. We also want to have at least 1 or 2 recovery rides or rest days in between. As a result, Monday and Friday make the most sense since you will be the freshest for the following day’s hard session.

Always place your intensity after easy or rest days

Fill The Rest With Zone 2 Endurance Rides (With a Wrinkle)

Ultimately, you want to fill in the rest of the week with zone 2 endurance rides. This is basically a comfortable pace that you can hold for hours.

I also suggest that you make one of these rides a long ride, where you go a couple hours longer than normal. There are certain adaptations from long rides that are harder to get from shorter ones. For example, improving your body’s ability to use fat as a fuel source. Or forcing your fast-twitch muscle fibers to do endurance work as your slow-twitch fibers fatigue toward the end of a long ride.

Both conditions will have a massive impact on your endurance performance.

Full week training example with a long ride for a rider training around 10 hours per week

Make it Race-Specific

As mentioned already, the closer you get to race day, the more you want to mimic your race demands.

For example, if you aim for podium positions in crit-races, a punchy workout like 30/30 intervals might be your go to. If, instead, your race features long climbs then something like 2×15 minute threshold repeats is what you’re looking for.

3. Increase Your Training Load

As mentioned earlier, periodisation in its core means changing your training over time. If not, you won’t change. The same is true for your training weeks.

As a result, you want your training load to increase each week by either increasing volume, intensity, or both. This is known as progressive overload. Why it may sound hard to execute at first glance, a simple increase of only 30 minutes of training volume from week to week already has a small progression.

Another factor you want to consider, especially in the discussion of durability or fatigue resistance, is combining intensity and volume. What you do is combine an interval session with a long ride. This can be as simple as a 4 hour ride with a 4×12 minute threshold interval session. The highly concentrated load isn’t only race specific to long races or providing a high training stimulus. No. It’s also another simple set of your arsenal to add progression.

4. Plan a Rest Week – This is How You Grow

Everything that goes up will come down. We have already explored that too many intervals can trigger overreaching or overtraining. Something similar can be said about progressive overload.

With a weekly increase in training load fatigue will build up over the weeks. If you keep working hard you will reach a point of diminishing returns, where fatigue far exceeds any benefits of keeping up the hard work.

Therefore, you want to include a rest week every 3 to 4 weeks. This will help your body shed off the fatigue you’ve built up during the intense training block.

But don’t panic. A rest week doesn’t mean a full training break. You will still be riding but only at about 50-60% of your regular training volume. Rest weeks offer a great opportunity to include a fitness test like a 20 minute FTP test at the end of it. You will be fresh and recovered to test your fitness and establish new training zones. However, you won’t need an FTP test every rest week as it takes time for your body to adapt to training. So testing every 8-12 weeks is usually enough.

Decreasing your training volume with a rest week to rest and recover seems logical now. But how can a decrease in training volume help you reach peak performance? Let’s talk about that now.

5. Get Your Taper Right

Tapering is one of those trend words that spread itself from the elite ranks down to the newbie while losing its meaning. I’ve seen the most insane taper-called strategies on Strava. Which, frankly, was no taper at all. I think many riders equate tapering with the specific training period right before their goal race.

However, if done right a taper can yield a huge performance improvement.

What you do is nothing else than shedding off the fatigue you’ve built up in the lead up to your goal race without losing fitness.

In general, when recovering from a huge training block you will also lose some fitness due to the decrease in training load. Now, what research has found is that you can preserve your fitness by reducing the training volume without any modification in your training intensity or frequency. Essentially, a taper week is like your regular training week without the volume.

Remember, though, that if you are an ultra-endurance racer, like Unbound 200 or similar, you want to maintain a high training volume right before racing, as endurance is the most decisive factor in these races.

On some occasions, however, you are not looking for a rest week but for a week of no training at all.

6. Take a Break

Up to this point I’ve only talked about what your training should look like to get faster. But one of the most important things that any serious training plan of any serious cyclist should include is not training at all at selective points of the year.

In contrast to conventional advice a break is extremely important to make progress.

Oftentimes athletes achieved their career best performance after a period of forced rest. Take Mathew Hayman or Alejandro Valverde for example. Hayman broke his arm months before Paris-Roubaix and was forced to prepare on the indoor trainer. Alejandro Valverde, on the other hand, broke his leg at the 2017 Tour de France and became world-champion a year later in Austria.

Now, the midseason and offseason break are common rest periods among pro cyclists for one simple reason: It works.

A midseason break, for example, has athletes take a complete break from training for one entire week. Funny enough it’s far easier to get athletes to do a hard interval session than to get them to take a week off from training.

Just recently I received a message from an athlete panicking that he will be on vacation with his girlfriend and is not taking his bike with him. He was worried that he will lose all his hard earned fitness and that his VO2max will equal that of a toddler once he’s back on the bike.

I reassured him that a midseason break will set him up for a strong late season and that his motivation will reach an alltime high once he’s back training.

While training breaks are not well studied there’s data to suggest that taking a complete break from training will bring your hormones as well as your blood values back to baseline.

For example, according to one study that accompanied two teams at the Vuelta a Espana Grand Tour, the riders entering the race with more race days already had lower testosterone levels and that for both teams testosterone declined week after week in the 3 week Grand Tour.

I won’t annoy you any further and just leave with the suggestion to include a one week break from training midseason, and then another one to two weeks break after the racing season is over.

7. Fuel Your Training

Your training response is only as good as your nutrition. If all you eat is processed foods like candies, chocolate bars, and refined carbs, you will never maximize your potential.

One thing that I observed with the headline-hitting high carbs trend is that it doesn’t matter what you eat, the only thing that matters is carbs. But as with everything else in life with extremes, they will backfire.

So if your nutrition lacks balance and variety, your training will follow suit and its quality will suffer. Focus on carbs only and you end up lacking protein, for example.

Protein, however, is crucial for maximizing your training adaptation in the long run. In contrast to common belief protein has no acute effect on recovery compared to carbohydrates. What matters most for proteins is hitting your daily and weekly protein needs.

Current evidence suggests a protein intake for endurance athletes of around 1.6-1.8 g/kg body weight per day. If your goal is to lose weight, protein needs might rise up to 2g/kg per day. These suggestions might be similar for males and females.

Good protein sources include chicken, beef, fish, eggs, dairy and legumes like beans, lentils or tofu.

Now while I initially complained about the high-carb trend, carbohydrates are still your most important fuel as a cyclist.

What you’re looking for on rides that extend 1-1.5 hours is a carbohydrate consumption of around 60 grams per hour of riding. 60 grams equals 83 grams of gummy bears, for example. Intense and prolonged racing might even require you to use multiple carbohydrate sources like glucose and fructose in a 2:1 ratio to get your intake up to 90 grams per hour.

Without getting too detailed about nutrition remember the following: Have a balanced diet that provides you with quality carbs, protein, and essential fats. On top of that, make sure to fuel your long endurance and interval sessions with at least 60 grams of carbs per hour of riding. And enjoy some of your favorite treats here and there.

With that simple structure bonking and failed sessions will become things of the past.

8. Establish a Basic Strength Routine

If there’s one thing that research widely agrees on, it’s the positive effect strength training has on cycling performance.

Your goal is, therefore, to establish a sustainable strength training routine you can realistically include into your weekly schedule. Regarding exercise choice, studies suggest using a combination of standard heavy lifts like squats and deadlifts combined with explosive exercises like a weighted countermovement squat jump.

I usually start with explosive exercises like 3×5 countermovement squat jumps with dumbbells of 5 kg each. Then I go over to standard lifts before finishing my strength sessions with core workouts like push ups, crunches, and reverse planks.

You will be surprised how much progress you can achieve with a 30 minute strength session.

Nowadays, there is a massive amount of content out there, where you can learn basic lifts as well as complex exercises. I suggest you start with this one from British Cycling.

Adaptations you can expect from strength training are postponed activation of less efficient fast twitch muscle fibers, improved neuromuscular efficiency, and a conversion of type 2x fibers into more fatigue resistant type 2a fibers. In other words, you will sprint better and you will be able to ride your bike faster for longer.

A question many ask is “when is the best time to do strength training?”

This again depends on your schedule. However, I see the best results if your strength workout is done after your cycling session. On the one hand, strength work won’t interrupt your training quality on the bike. On the other hand, the fatigue you build on the bike won’t affect your lifting performance as much compared to vice versa.

A full training with added strength training

9. Make Progress Measurable

You can only improve what you can measure. In this regard, I suggest you use a few simple variables that will help you get the most out of your training analysis.

Complete Basic Field Testing

First and foremost, you should have a basic format of performance testing. And if you don’t have a lab available, where you can get an accurate blood lactate test, the best alternative is still doing a 20 minute FTP test.

I tried them all. And I let my athletes try them all. 8 minute FTP tests, 10 minute FTP tests, comprehensive critical power testing of 3, 5, and 12 minute max efforts. Compared that to a simple blood lactate step test.

Among all these tests a simple 20 minute test preceded by a simple warm-up gives you the closest estimation of your second lactate threshold. Because after all we just want to find a point at which it’s sustainable, below which it’s definitely sustainable, above which it’s not sustainable for long. On top of that, you can use your FTP to set your training zones. And research is backing this up. A 20 minute test is a reliable and reproducible performance test to assess your fitness.

All you have to do is warm up, ride max for 20 minutes, and multiply your average power by .95 to get your FTP. While there’s evidence suggesting lower correction factors, from a training prescription it won’t make too much a difference. After all, studies confirm that most individuals fall into a similar correction factor regarding their second lactate threshold.

Use What You Already Have

Now, apart from field testing, advice from Norwegian top coaches suggests to use a small set of repeatable workouts within each zone that make each key session act as a test, where blood lactate concentration, heart rate, speed or power output, and perceived fatigue or exertion can be compared from week to week.

If you would perform completely different interval sessions from week to week you would only compare apples with oranges. But by keeping the structure similar you can look at how your heart rate compares to your power, or what your RPE during threshold intervals of similar length says this week compared to last week.

Even at the highest level of performance Norwegian world-class athletes show again and again, that simplicity trumps complexity in terms of progression measurements.

If you collect these simple variables you will notice huge improvements over time that seemed absent when not taken into account.

Putting it all together

Alright, that was a lot of information. Let’s repeat the most useful information you can use right now to start building your training plan for ongoing progress.

Apply periodisation: Remember training needs to change over time to get faster. The closer your race, the more specific you need to train.
Use my training week template: Start by adding intensity. Aim for 2 or occasionally 3 weekly threshold or HIT sessions. Fill the rest with easy rides and make one a long ride.
Utilise progressive overload: Increase your training load from week to week by either increasing volume, intensity, or both.
Rest and recover: Include a rest week every 3 to 4 weeks by decreasing your regular volume.
Include Tapering: Use tapering to induce a peak performance by reducing training volume without any change in training intensity and frequency.
Take a break: Progress is not linear. If you want to get faster you need to include a midseason and offseason break to allow for complete recovery.
Fuel Your Training: Follow a balanced diet that provides you with all macro and micronutrients. On the bike, carbs are king so hit the right amount on intense days.
Include strength training: Create a balanced strength routine with explosive exercises, regular and single leg lifts.
Make progress measurable: Use simple field testing to track fitness and set training zones and compare simple measures like heart rate, power output, perceived exertion, and blood lactate on similar interval sessions from week to week.

I hope you found this short guide on building a training plan for continuous progress useful. If you’re looking for more ideas on cycling training and endurance performance, then check out my full list of articles here.

Ready to Put These 9 Steps into Action?

Cycling performance is about applying the fundamentals consistently, not chasing fads. If you’re looking for simple and proven ways to train smarter, I’ve built easy-to-follow TrainingPeaks plans based on these principles. Check them out below if you’re ready to simplify your training and get results:

RV Cycling Training Plans