9 Nuanced Ways To Optimise Your Cycling Training
Optimising training, so that you’re making the best use of your available time and energy is important for all cyclists. But it’s particularly necessary for those with fairly minimal time to train and recover, or those who have started seeing a plateau in fitness levels.
We all know that training quality can be improved through simple steps such as riding with a power meter or heart rate monitor to gauge internal and external effort level, incorporating structured sessions with specific training goals (e.g. ‘develop VO2max’), and making sure that your equipment (e.g. gearing) allows you to perform your sessions as intended.
However, once you’ve ticked off these more basic ‘must haves’, how can you optimise your training further?
In this article, we’ll cover 9 tips to help you further optimise your training and get the best results from your time and energy investment.
Pick your intervals sensibly
There are hundreds of different interval designs you can use in training. Over the course of a training year or ‘mesocycle’, it’s usually important to include a variety of different interval styles in order to work on different aspects of your fitness or physiology.
For example, at some points in the year, you may include longer, middle intensity efforts (e.g. between 75-95% FTP or 70-80% Max HR). These are thought to help develop muscular strength and promote aerobic adaptations within and around slightly higher-power muscle fibres, which can help shift threshold power upwards.
At other times in the year, you may focus on intervals that aim to develop VO2max (the maximum rate at which you can take on and process oxygen). These typically involve shorter intervals lasting between 4-8 minutes, where your power will generally be slightly above Functional Threshold Power (FTP) and you’ll see heart rate drifting up above 90% Max HR.
However, while some variety is necessary, it’s easy to take this too far, and include too many styles of interval sessions.
Here, we’re thinking particularly of different styles of session that work on the same aspects of fitness.
As an example, let’s consider intervals targeting improvements in VO2max. There are a whole host of ‘VO2max’ interval styles. We’ve shown some examples in the figure below.
Despite the various interval designs, these efforts all broadly do the same thing. More specifically, they seek to hold you an an intensity where your oxygen consumption is close to your VO2max. Physiologically there’s fairly little to differentiate between them in this regard.
That being the case, when focussing on a specific physiological goal, we think it’s better to pick just one or two styles of interval that you enjoy and find easy to execute (check out our FREE WORKOUT LIBRARY for some recommended sessions).
This has several key benefits when it comes to training optimisation.
Firstly, it helps avoid ‘failed’ sessions that arise as a result of you not being familiar with a particular interval session. This might arise as a result of bad pacing (e.g. starting too hard), or route selection (e.g. running out of road before the end of an interval). By repeating the same interval session, you will be able to iterate and finesse your pacing strategy for these intervals, and perform them at a higher quality each time. You’ll also be able to identify routes or sections of road that work particularly well for your chosen interval type.
Secondly, by performing the same interval session over again, it’s much easier to spot signs of improvement in your training. For example, it’s much easier to notice whether your perceived effort level or heart rate are now lower for a given power output, or whether you’re now able to complete your intervals at a higher power, cover more distance or complete an additional interval rep.
This latter point is key to understanding whether your training is actually having a meaningful effect on your fitness, and leads nicely onto our next tip:
2. Align your ‘key performance indicators’ with your training goals
Assessing progress is an important aspect of training, helping to keep you on the right track and to ensure that your time and energy are well-spent. However, time and again, we see athletes using FTP as their one and only marker of progress. This is often used irrespective of the time of year, training goals, and cycling discipline.
However, FTP (the maximum power you can sustain for roughly 40-60 minutes) only provides a very one-dimensional snapshot of your fitness profile, and may not be relevant for your training goals.
As a key example, during a typical ‘base’ training phase (which usually runs through the winter and early spring months), a common goal is to build general aerobic fitness. This includes aerobic efficiency, ability to use fats for fuel, and general endurance (i.e. ability to ride for longer periods of time).
During this base phase, developing FTP is not a priority, and we may, or may not see improvements in FTP. Whether we happen to see improvements in FTP will depend on your fitness level leading into that phase, and your specific physiological profile. Changes in FTP tell us very little about whether the base training phase has been effective.
Much better markers to look at through this training phase include:
Improvements in your ratio between heart rate and power output.
Improvements in your ‘ventilatory threshold’, which can be assessed via the talk test (see here)
A subjective sense that your longer rides are becoming less fatiguing and/or that you need to eat less on these.
Improvements in your ability to produce a hard effort at the end of a long ride. Oftentimes in real-world races, it’s not the person with the highest FTP when fresh who wins (we like to call this the ‘fresh-hold’ power). Instead, it’s the person who can produce the highest FTP after several hours of hard riding!
These markers or so-called ‘key performance indicators’ all directly relate to the aspects of physiology that we’re looking to develop through the base training phase, and are much more reliable indicators that your training is having the desired effect than FTP.
Making sure your key performance indicators align with your training goals gives you the best chance of understanding which types of training are working well for you, and which aren’t. It also helps prevent you from mistakenly ditching types of training that are actually helping you and from getting demotivated by seeing an apparent lack of progress when you are actually improving.
We’ve included a summary below of common physiological attributes and suggested key performance indicators:
Endurance/Fatigue-Resistance
A subjective sense that your longer rides are becoming less fatiguing and/or that you need to eat less on these.
Improvements in your ability to produce a hard effort at the end of a long ride.
Aerobic Efficiency
Improvements in your ratio between heart rate and power output.
Improvements in your ‘ventilatory threshold’, which can be assessed via the talk test (see here)
Threshold Power/FTP
Improvement in FTP test, critical power test, or maximal lactate steady state test
Improvement in ‘threshold sensation test'
Improved power output during threshold tolerance intervals*
VO2max
Improved ‘maximal aerobic power’ in ramp test
Improved maximal power output over 3-8 minutes (or faster time on segments in this time range)
Improved power output during ‘VO2max’ interval sessions*
Anaerobic Power
Improved power output during anaerobic power* interval sessions
Improvements in maximal power over roughly 30-seconds to 120-seconds (or faster time on segments in this time range)
General subjective sensation that you’re feeling more ‘punchy’ and able to respond well to changes of pace in a group ride/race.
Increased W’ in critical power test
Anaerobic Capacity
Ability to complete higher number of anaerobic stamina intervals*, before reaching fatigue.
Increased W’ in critical power test
* Check out our FREE WORKOUT GUIDE for examples of these workout types.
3. Changing Plans is Good
It might sound strange, but a key sign of a well-executed training plan is that you didn’t stick to the plan!
Any training plan is only ever a best guess at what the appropriate training for a given day will be.
However, a whole host of factors such as work and family commitments, lack of sleep, and under-fuelling can add unplanned fatigue, which might mean that the session you had planned to do today is no longer suitable.
A key example of this is with high-intensity interval sessions (i.e. efforts that require you to ride above your threshold power). These efforts are often HARD, and you need to be at least reasonably fresh in order to hit the target intensity range, and trigger the intended physiological adaptations.
If you’re not sufficiently fresh to reach the target intensity range, then this isn’t the right day to do the session.
Cyclists are typically very motivated and hard-working individuals, and we often see people trying to persist with an interval session when they are too fatigued, just because the session was in the calendar and they don’t want a ‘failed’ session.
However, this is a bad decision, not only because the efforts won’t be performed at the right intensity (and thus won’t trigger the desired physiological response), but also because you’re not allowing the body to recover when needed. This can result in subsequent training sessions also being curtailed or reduced in intensity (and in extreme cases can even lead to overtraining!).
Ultimately, if you don’t allow flexibility in your training plan, this can actually be more disruptive to your training than simply taking an extra day of recovery and then quickly getting back on track.
If you do need to skip a training session to take some extra recovery, we’d also suggest that you don’t try to play ‘catch up’ later in the week (i.e. by trying to squeeze the missed session in at a later point). This can also be disruptive to subsequent training. For example you might then find you’re too fatigued for the long endurance ride you had planned, and may end up cutting this short.
The bottom line is that if your body needs some extra recovery, then you should be open to including this in your plan, and shouldn’t worry about any sessions that are missed in the process!
4. Don’t stick religiously to ‘standard’ training intensity zones
There are various ‘standard’ training intensity zones or ranges for different types of sessions.
A basic example is the seven zone system, which we describe in this article, where zone 1 (<60% FTP or <60% Max HR) is an intensity that supports recovery, zone 2 (60-75% FTP or 60-70% Max HR) is an intensity that develops endurance and all-round aerobic fitness, and so on.
You’ll also find structured training sessions, such as those found on platforms like Zwift or TrainerRoad, often include intensity targets based on your FTP.
However, these intensity zones and targets are based on population averages. In other words, they are prescribed based on the power or heart rate that an average cyclist needs to hold in order to elicit different metabolic or physiological responses.
In reality, depending on factors such as your genetics and the types of training you’ve done in the past, these intensities may not suit you as an individual.
That being the case, we always suggest paying close attention to how different intensities feel subjectively and iterating your effort level accordingly.
In our free workout guide, we always include a description of what a session should feel like subjectively, as well as prescribing a power and heart rate range (rather than fixed target), which should suit a broader range of people.
Paying attention to your subjective feelings is particularly important in interval sessions above your threshold power, where there is much greater variability in power output between different people. As a general rule, we encourage our athletes not to use Erg mode when performing interval sessions indoors, as this can unnecessarily constrain your power output and lead to a lower-quality session.
Importantly, the ability to hold more/less power than the ‘typical’ intensity prescription doesn’t make you a better/worse cyclist.
As a specific example, a cyclist training for ultra-distance events will ideally have a fitness profile that means they find it hard to produce power above their threshold. This is because their threshold power sits very close to their VO2max, and have honed their fitness so that they are aerobically very efficient. In this example, it’s actually a very GOOD sign that this cyclist can’t hit the same power (relative to FTP) as the ‘average Joe’ in a set of VO2max intervals!
In any event, whatever your physiological profile, our key advice is to listen closely to your body when performing your training sessions, and have a good idea of what each session type should feel like subjectively.
5. Start your intervals conservatively
Most people tend to pace their intervals so that the first one is their ‘best’ in terms of power output, and then power starts to gradually drop interval-by-interval as they become fatigued. Calling on terminology used in running, we refer to this as ‘positive splitting’ your efforts. This is quite an easy pattern to fall into as you’ll usually be feeling your freshest in the first effort.
It’s pretty obvious that going super hard in the first effort is bad. This can lead to the interval session being aborted early, or an inability to hit the necessary intensity in latter intervals in order to stimulate the intended training adaptations.
However, what many people don’t know is that, even if your pacing is a better so that you’re still able to hold all intervals in the intended intensity range, there can be a benefit to intentionally starting more conservatively, and then picking the power up later so that your last interval is your strongest. We refer to this as ‘negative splitting’ your efforts.
We compare the two scenarios below.
A key reason to start conservatively is that your aerobic system will not respond as quickly in the first effort as it will in subsequent efforts. This is because the aerobic system has not been ‘primed’ for the first effort, and it will take some time for heart rate to increase, blood vessels to dilate, and for other aerobic processes to kick in.
This means that the first effort in a set of intervals will be fuelled more by anaerobic energy systems than in other subsequent efforts. Accordingly, this will produce a higher concentration of fatiguing metabolites, which can impact power output in subsequent efforts.
In contrast, by starting more conservatively, fewer fatiguing metabolites will be produced, and you should find that you actually have the capacity to complete more work (e.g. average a higher power) over the whole set of intervals than you would if you started harder.
Another benefit of starting more conservatively, is that this can take some of the mental pressure off yourself, allowing you to ease into the session. Generally, when starting more conservatively, you’ll find that the first effort doesn’t actually feel too bad, and this can give you confidence and increased motivation for the latter efforts.
In contrast, with a positive split strategy, every effort feels very hard!
In practical terms, it’s always helpful to have a range of powers or heart rates in mind for an interval session, and to start by aiming for the lower end of this range, picking your power up a bit in the latter efforts if you can. This helps both with keeping the first effort conservative, and with avoiding unnecessary disappointment if you can’t quite hit a specific target power/heart rate you had in mind.
6. Consider doing more of what you naturally avoid or find hard
In life, we can often find ourselves making decisions based on what feels easy or safe. However, when we do push ourselves outside of our comfort zones, we often reap the biggest rewards in terms of developing confidence, skills and so on.
In much the same way, we can often find ourselves avoiding types of training that we don’t feel good at.
This might be simply because those session feel hard and aren’t enjoyable.
However, even if you’re not consciously avoiding things you find hard, you may find that you tend to focus your time and energy on getting better at things you’re naturally good at, and thus unintentionally avoid working on things you’re weaker on.
As an example, if you are naturally quite a ‘punchy’ rider, you may feel this is a strength that you want to maximise, and might therefore focus a lot of your training on developing things like anaerobic power and sprint abilities. This may mean you tend to spend less time working on things like long sustained efforts that help with developing threshold power and endurance.
From time to time it can be useful to reflect on your training to identify whether there are any particular types of training that you’ve done less of. Provided that it’s relevant to your target goals or discipline, this can often present real ‘low-hanging-fruit’ in terms of performance improvements.
This is one of the key things we’ll do when we take on a new athlete, as it helps us understand where an athlete might be already operating close to their maximum potential, and where an athlete has more scope for improvement.
This is also something we tend to look at if an athlete’s fitness progression starts to slow down and is tending towards a plateau. We look critically at what we’ve been doing with the athlete and seek to identify whether there are any untapped opportunities for development.
7. Perform an 80/20 training audit
We often find that athletes get the majority of training benefits from just a small proportion of their training. We call this the 80/20 rule, based on the (very!) rough approximation that 80% of training benefits are derived from just 20% of training sessions.
It’s useful to review your training to try to identify which sessions are your real ‘heavy hitters’.
This allows you to understand where you should be focussing your training time and energy.
You can look for subjective or measurable signs of improvement or stagnation to understand whether the training you’re doing is resulting in noticeable improvements in performance or markers of fitness. The key performance indicators described above are good indicators to look at. It’s also helpful to look at what training you were doing when you had your best race performances).
This obviously won’t tell you which specific sessions are beneficial for you. However, over the longer term (i.e. several years) you can start to spot patterns.
For example, you might notice that whenever you regularly include rides longer then 4-hours you see a sizeable increase in markers of endurance, efficiency and threshold power. This is a good indicator that these longer rides work well for you.
Likewise, you might notice that you tend to have your best race performances off the back of a phase where you’ve focussed on a particular style of interval session. This might suggest these intervals are ‘potent’ sessions for you.
In order to do this type of review, it’s good practice to keep an accurate record of training. If you use platforms like Strava, Garmin or TrainingPeaks to record your training, we recommend naming your rides as something meaningful (e.g. ‘hard-start VO2max intervals’ or ‘steady Zone 2 ride’), and keep notes on when different phases of training begin and end, so that you can see patterns more easily.
8. Create route a ‘menu’ or ‘bank’.
This tip helps save time when planning training, and also helps to ensure your ride quality isn’t compromised by the terrain or route selection.
More specifically, we’d suggest creating a look-up table that aligns the types of training sessions you regularly do with training routes or locations that are well suited to these sessions.
We’ve included an example below:
As a general rule, endurance rides are best done on flat or rolling terrain, which will help you stay in the target intensity range and make the most of your training time by minimising time spent coasting/soft-pedalling on descents.
Many people will find that interval sessions - particularly those that require you to ride above your threshold - are best done on gentle to moderate incline. This will give you something to push against, and also allow you to coast back to the start of the climb quite quickly (which can be important if the recovery interval between efforts is relatively short).
When performing intervals, it’s best to pick sections of road that are fairly quiet, free from junctions, sharp corners and gradient changes that will require you to change gears often. You can time yourself up different suitable climbs at different intensities (e.g. slightly below threshold, and slightly above threshold) to get an idea of how long the climb will take you and thus what types of efforts can be done on the climb.
You can also include suitable locations for performing more race-specific training. For example, if you race off-road, you may include locations for technical skills practice, or off-road hill repeats.
9. Don’t overlook the mental side of training
Your mental state can play a really big part in how you perform both in training and racing.
Simply listening to music can help reduce perception of effort as well as various physiological parameters such as heart rate and lactate levels (Szmedra & Bacharach, 1998). Smiling while exercising has been shown to have similar effects too (Brick et al., 2018).
If you’re regularly going into a training session feeling negative or doubting your abilities, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If this sounds like you, take a look at what you can do to help change your mindset. Some of the tips above can help, such as starting your efforts conservatively, using power or heart rate ranges rather than fixed targets so that you’re not immediately ‘failing’ if you don’t hit a specific intensity, and making sure you evaluate progress with relevant performance indicators, to avoid you feeling demoralised if you don’t see progress in markers that aren’t relevant!
You can also consider using strategies such as reflection (i.e. recalling times where you’ve produced a strong performance) and positive affirmations or mantras (such as telling yourself you’re strong or that you will perform well today).
In our view, it’s also good to push yourself from time to time to do something that’s a little outside your comfort zone. This might mean riding for a little longer than you usually would, or at a slightly higher power. It might also mean riding on roads or trails that you usually find intimidating for whatever reason (perhaps the steepness of the gradient or the technical nature).
Group rides can also be good opportunities to push yourself, and can also provide useful indication of progress (e.g. if you find that you’re now keeping up with people who used to be faster than you).
These situations where you’ve pushed yourself outside of your comfort zone, and come through the other side, can be good memories to reflect upon in the future if you ever feel low on confidence.
References
Brick, N. E., McElhinney, M. J., & Metcalfe, R. S. (2018). The effects of facial expression and relaxation cues on movement economy, physiological, and perceptual responses during running. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 34, 20-28.
Szmedra, L., & Bacharach, D. W. (1998). Effect of music on perceived exertion, plasma lactate, norepinephrine and cardiovascular hemodynamics during treadmill running. International journal of sports medicine, 19(01), 32-37.
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