Why You Should Stop Riding Your Bike to Get Faster

Consistency is key if you want to become a faster cyclist. From time to time, however, it can be smart to cut your cycling routine and take a complete break from your training. Think one step back and two steps forward.

Now, the simple word break causes most serious cyclists to panic, as they can be very obsessive about their training. Even a little less volume in a week leaves them with beads of sweat on their forehead already. But a complete break is as important for long term progress as a rest week.

So let’s look at what science has to say about it, what pros do, and what I know about my experience as a coach and an athlete myself.

Why You Need a Break From Cycling

Beating yourself up with long rides and intervals week after week across a season is similar to avoiding rest days completely.

If you train consistently you need a rest day every week or every couple of days to recover from the training load and adapt to the work you did. Similarly, on a bigger scale you need a rest week at the end of a mesocycle or training month to get rid of the fatigue you accumulated in the previous weeks. Almost every high level pro implements a complete break in their program, mostly because they learned how crucial it is.

While the physiological reasons for the benefits from a break are not entirely understood, there are some theories around it…

The Physiological Reasons of Taking a Break

Studies looking at the effect of training and racing on physiological data in elite and pro cyclists across a tough racing period or full season, found that blood values and hormone levels show a downswing as the season progresses.

Changes in Blood Values

For example, a study on changes in blood values in elite cyclists has shown that Hematocrit and Hemoglobin concentration decreased as the season progressed, but returned to baseline in the offseason when riders typically take a break.

Another study looking at Hemoglobin levels in professional cyclists during the racing season showed the same pattern: “Mean values for red blood cells (RBC), hemoglobin (Hb), and hematocrit (Ht) were significantly lower during the racing season (RS) than during the non racing periods.”

It seems like this reset is crucial for cyclists on heavy training; Never take a rest period and you will ride with chronically low blood values.

Beside blood values, hormone levels also show a certain tendency toward hard training periods.

Changes in Hormone Levels

An interesting study by Garcia and colleagues followed two pro teams at the three week Vuelta a Espana Grand Tour.

They measured hormone levels like testosterone. What they found was that the teams entering the Vuelta with more racing days started the race with lower testosterone levels. Furthermore, during the three week Grand Tour they saw a significant decrease in testosterone in both teams.

As you may know testosterone is the main hormone in males responsible for normal sexual development and functions like muscle strength.

So, it looks like constantly pounding yourself with hard training and racing may have an effect on your hormone levels. Obviously, a three week Grand Tour is an extreme example and might be one of the most physically demanding things you can get yourself up to, but a study on power lifting athletes came to a similar conclusion.

This study took 12 powerlifting athletes and gave them 14 days of detraining. Researchers found that growth hormone, testosterone, and testosterone-to-cortisol ratio increased at 58.3%, 19.2%, and 67.6% respectively, while levels of the stress hormone cortisol decreased by -21.5%.

Now, the physiological argument seems convincing already and we haven’t touched on the psychological side yet.

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The Psychological Reasons of Taking a Break

When you have to peak every week from spring till fall for the Monday 100k train and the Thursday night training crit, burn out is right on the way eating away your motivation.

And while motivation is the result of action rather than the cause of it, too much will drain on it.

Considering motivation, I found that for myself and the athletes that I coach, nothing is more motivating than taking some time off the bike. Reaching the end of your training break you should find yourself begging to get back on the bike. By break, however, I am not talking about a week of less or easy unstructured riding.

Rest Week or Rest Period What’s The Big Deal?

Regular readers of my blog know that I often write about rest weeks. While rest weeks and rest periods serve a similar purpose they are not the same thing. Depending on the level of cyclist you are and the training you do you want to have a rest week every 3-5 weeks. Most often every 4th week fits the majority of riders. As you can see, rest weeks are quite frequent.

During a rest week you want to decrease your training volume, or how much you ride, and the intensity, or how hard you ride. This is done to climb out of the hole of fatigue you fall into because of your past tough training.

For example, if you ride 10 hours a week for five times with two HIT sessions, during a rest week you may only do one HIT session toward the end of the week and ride easier and fewer hours during those five times.

Here are two examples of a regular training week compared to a rest week:

On white background it shows a training week calendar in TrainingPeaks with a 10 hour training week example with sutrcutred workouts. — A typical training week involving key interval sessions with mostly zone 2 endurance rides

On white background it shows a training week calendar in TrainingPeaks with rest training week example with sutrcutred workouts for a cyclist training 10 hours weekly. — During the rest week you might still ride 5x but with far less volume and intensity

A rest week is crucial for every serious cyclist. If you miss rest weeks in your plan, it could mean one of the two things: Either your training is too easy to challenge your capabilities, or you are on the edge of slipping into overtraining because your training load is appropriate.

In comparison, a rest period means having a time you spend not training at all. No riding. No running. No strength work. No other activities.

Instead, you want your bike to collect dust and turn into decoration at this time.

Apparently, this won’t happen as frequently as a rest week, because if so, the fitness loss would hinder your progress. That’s a hard pill for most cyclists to swallow. You will lose fitness when you take a complete rest but this is on purpose. Think of your fitness like a stock chart. As well as a stock falling and reaching a new high afterwards, you lose fitness and reach a new high afterwards.

Yet, this is really hard for serious riders to accept.

But as mentioned at the beginning: It’s better to sacrifice short term fitness for long term gains, instead of staying in the same place all year long as if you would do the exact same training all year long.

Patterns of The Best Endurance Athletes in The World

You need to change your training from time to time to make progress. Similar to ebb and flow, you need different patterns in your training program.

This is exactly what a study found that looked at the training characteristics of world class endurance athletes prior to winning a gold medal at the olympics. What clearly stands out is that volume and intensity changed during the course of the year.

While there’s many lessons to learn from this study we will focus on the offseason period here. What researchers observed was that after peaking the athletes performed a regeneration month where they trained very little at all compared to all other months. But this pattern is not exclusive for cross-country skiers. By no means. Pro cyclists, runners, or triathletes all take a break to recover and review their seasons.

Now, the question remains what a break should look like.

Doing a Break The Right Way

There are two times of the year where you want to take a break. One is the season ending before starting your offseason. After your last race you should, depending on your season, take 7-14 days of complete rest. Highly trained cyclists or pros might even consider a 3-4 week break. During this time period you want to avoid any activity.

The other opportunity is a mid-season break. This break can last from 4-7 days again depending on your racing season. I have always included a midseason break and felt amazing after it. I usually took a 7 day break on vacation before enjoying two weeks of great training in the south of france.

So, an additional benefit is that you can go on vacation with your family without the need to think about cycling in the first place.

Keep in mind though that a break might be a sort of shock to your body because your body is not used to it. And as we have seen with block periodization, shocking your body with a completely different stimulus can be a good thing.

The famous adage “Have a break, have a Kit Kat,” isn’t just marketing mastery but there’s a lot of truth in there as well.

Because from time to time everyone should take a break.

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