The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

How To Level Up With Volume, Recovery, Strength, And Community (#290)

• CTS • Season 6 • Episode 290

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OVERVIEW
Although this is "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast", we recognize that not everyone is time-crunched. In particular, we hear from lots of older cyclists who have more time to train now that they've retired or cut back their work hours, or their children have flown the nest. So, how do we apply some of the TCC methodologies for athletes who have some more time available? Coach Adam Pulford coaches lots of athletes in this exact scenario, and he has the techniques and information you need.

TOPICS COVERED

  • How to deepen your long ride
  • How to become A Recovery Hero 
  • How to add in Strength Training
  • Finding Your Tribe

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HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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SPEAKER_00:

From the team at CTS, this is the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance, even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches, and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now, on to our show. Living a time crunched lifestyle is tricky when you're trying to figure out the right balance of training and recovery to get your fitness on point, which is why we've created this podcast. However, not everyone is as crunched as the other. In fact, today we have a question from one of you, our listeners, asking how to level up their training when they now have more time in their lives. Let's listen to the original question and I'll provide some ideas on how to help out. So here it is the original question. I'm not a time-crunched cyclist. I'm 63, recently retired, and have plenty of time available for training. Many CTS tips focus on athletes with limited hours. What guidance or training recommendations would you offer for cyclists like me who have more flexible schedules and want to continue improving? And that's coming from KJothy. Excellent question. So let's provide you with some advice. And uh, you know, I really think that a ton of other listeners can benefit from this as well. Because uh, like I said, and when I hear from our listeners, I think a lot of them are time crunched in some ways and they kind of move in and out of uh time-crunched uh time periods in their life. So I I hope all this advice really hits. Let's get into it.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

So here is my main advice. Yes, increase your total training volume if you have more time, and your goals are to increase performance and fitness so that you can enjoy cycling and life even more. Remember, when you're fit, everything is more fun. But more should come with some caveats. First, I would look back on the past year of training and really the past three years, if you have that data, I would increase your total training volume by maybe 10 to 20% total. For example, if you've been doing, say, around 500 hours of total training each year for the past year or years, an increase of 10% goes up to 550 hours. That's what that would be the goal for the next year. 20% would be an increase up to 600 hours. For masters and grandmaster athletes, that's plenty of time in my experience. That's 10 to 15 hours per week on average, factoring in rest days, midseason breaks, vacations, holidays, and a bit of an off-season too. This 10 to 20% increase includes uh both on-the-bike and off-the-bike training. And I encourage you to think of your training as both total and separate when you're racking and stracking the total uh training hours. I'll unpack that a little bit more here in a minute, but my main point is don't just go full send every single weekend or think that you need to increase uh volume by 50% or more just because you have that time. The progressive overload principle says to keep loading the system, the system meaning your body, gradually with enough recovery time to improve and move the needle forward. And I think 10 to 20% increase in volume should do that based on my experience, especially when you add it to the right days on the bike and then factor in a little bump up in the off-the-bike training as well. So let's dive into the specifics. Here's four ways how I think your total training volume should increase and how to do it. Number one, deepen your long ride. Number two, become a recovery hero. Number three, add in strength training. Number four, find your tribe. Let's uh unlock the specifics of each of those. All right, uh, number one, deepen your long ride. What I mean by this is add volume to your longest ride of the week or your long ride of the week to really increase the depth of your aerobic ability. This will help for any race, event, or goal that you have, of which, you know, okay, Jothy, I don't really know the specifics of your goals, but I will tell you that if you do this in the first quarter or the first half of the year, it'll it'll benefit everything. Okay. So do this in your base and build one phases, uh, uh assuming you're kind of following a traditional uh uh periodization concept like I've done in past episodes. And once you really want to make the push on increasing CTL and aerobic capacity, um, start to add 20 to 30 percent onto that long ride every other week. And so what I really mean by that is like make the push on CTL and build aerobic capacity. When you're in the base phase and you're just kind of like chasing hours and kind of um steadily getting the training impulses in, build one phase when you're kind of up it just a little bit and up the training volume and you're chasing CTL and ramp rates. That's really what I mean by um, you know, uh make the push. Okay. And every other week is I don't think that you need to progress the long ride every single week. In fact, sometimes weather and life plays into that. So I think 20 to 30 percent, which is a realistic but aggressive, and every other week is good. Now, you can add more volume to like each ride or or every day, just say by going, you know, from two hours every day to three hours every day, and you just do it seven days in a row, right? But we start to get into the space of, you know, does this really move the needle on performance, or does it hinder recovery for the next day? Let's come back to the idea of keep the hard days hard, easy days easy, and you'll get it. Bigger TSS on the long rides and hard interval days with good rest or low TSS on the easy days brings variety, stress, rest, contrast, all needed to adapt in order to increase your performance over time. So I'd start to shape up your increased volume goal like this versus just adding more time to every single ride each day, uh, which will increase volume, but it will limit the potential of performance gains because it lacks the contrast in the stress and rest and therefore hinders recovery. Once you've increased your volume on that long ride, you will then want to aim to increase the intensity of the long ride in a build to phase. Sometimes I call this increasing the quality of rides. Oftentimes, you know, coaches will talk about it like that. And I've done a couple podcasts on what quality means, and it's actually pretty interesting. Usually that means intensity, but this also means a few other things to me by increasing the quality. It's like, yeah, you're increasing the time at intensity. And yeah, you're like you're nailing your nutrition, you're nailing your fueling, you're feeling good in the final hours as well as in the first hours. That's really increasing the quality of the ride. Okay, so uh one way you can do this is by tracking normalized power production on these rides. Let's just say, for example, your long ride, your normalized power is I'm just gonna use some random numbers here, but say it's 180 watts, right, on some of your volume rides. The goal should be to increase this, okay? Increase it up to 190, maybe 200 watts. Okay, you're just looking at the normalized power over a four or five-hour ride, something like this. Okay. And basically more is better by this point. And you're gonna do that by hitting the hills a little harder, pedaling more uh over the top of the hills, maybe on some of the downhills, the flats, and the rolling terrain, just pedaling more, okay, versus coasting on every downhill or you know, spending time in the in the back of the group. You want to spend more time at the front of the group when we're trying to increase that normalized power on the long rides. If you get a big engine built up, okay, and you have these goals like uh long gravel races, long road races, uh heli road races, the longer stuff out there. Being able to hold a normalized power at the upper end of zone two or middle of the tempo range or zone three for three to five hours, that's a that's a good sign of increased fitness, durability, and stamina. And that's something that you should chase if your goals are in some of those like longer gravel, like hilly road races. Okay, so that that is a something that I track with my athletes. Um, high normalized power and that normalized power, top end of zone two, mid to maybe even upper end of zone three, depending on your rider phenotype. So that is a good little uh uh good little non-time crunched uh hack for you there. How long should the long ride be? I'd say maximum of six hours. Like if you got all the time in the world, uh I would still go maximum of six hours for that longest ride. It unless you're doing something like unbound or Leadville or something like that. Okay, but for most people, especially Grandmasters, this is long enough. After five to six hours, for most people, the time it takes to recover versus the time spent training is not really worth it, in my opinion. So it's a cost-benefit thing. Get good at four to six hours on your long ride, and you'll deepen the aerobic fitness for sure. Number two, become a recovery hero. Recovery time is perhaps your biggest asset when you just have more time in your life. Anyone can do the hard training, but you need to be able to recover from it in order to benefit from it. And as you age, recovery can actually slow down. I've covered this on multiple uh podcasts in the past. So my advice to really anyone, including grandmasters athletes, is to increase recovery time between hard days. Okay. For master athletes, let's just say 50 plus, uh, I find greater success in training when I give them at least 36 to 48 hours between hard interval days or the race-pace group rides. That means you're basically doing Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays hard, and the other days are your easy or off days or lower TSS days. Okay. So keep it simple if you have the time and dial, but you know, still dial it in based on what works for you as an individual. And maybe the group rides are Tuesday, Wednesday. So maybe you stack it there, but then Thursday is easy. Okay. But just keep in mind, I generally find that bringing uh, you know, increased recovery time, 36 to 48 hours, so you know, at least a day, if not two days in between, really provides uh better recovery time for the hard days. Active recovery is still recovery, and easy spins and walks are great when you are retired because sometimes you don't have the natural uh steps or movement in your day, like someone adhering to a normal seven-day work schedule. So sometimes I'll I'll have more active recovery rides or walks for uh 50 plus masters riders with more time in their lives. Thus, you may not having to have a pure rest day each week. Okay. So that rest day may come every 10 to 12 days. I did a podcast about this with Joe Freel, just Google time crunched uh Joe Freel and you'll find it. So play around with that, and but just be careful not to cook not to cook yourself, okay, uh, on the uh uh doing too much or going too hard on the on the recovery days. Those active recovery days, they're they're pretty darn easy. But what you're doing is you're just adding in some good natural movement to help in recovery, to help uh keep going, and that can um really benefit somebody with a little bit more time. Finally, to become a recovery hero, sleep more. Sleep is the king or queen for recovery and adaptation. If you lack good sleep habits or you're getting less than six hours of sleep per night, go to bed earlier or add in a nap in the afternoon to increase recovery and you will find benefits there for sure. Number three, add in strength training. KJ, you may or may not be doing strength training already, but if you are not, add it in now. And I would add this in first before increasing training volume drastically. If you asked me if I had a choice between one or the other, I would add in strength training first. The reason is we lose lean body mass over time as we age. But anyone, again, at any age, can make gains in strength and mitigate the loss of lean body tissue with properly done strength training. Not to mention uh bone loss and increasing bone density, really at any age. Strength training has been shown to drastically improve all this. So since you're already a non-time crunched athlete, you're likely riding longer already. Adding in strength training or better strength training strategies could really benefit you here. Okay. But you do both, right, and track the progress in hours separately is the way I would approach it. So maybe you are increasing 10 to 15% uh total cycling volume, and maybe you do five to 10% increase in strength training by starting a new or different routine. Okay. And maybe that new or different routine comes from uh working with a strength professional like a personal trainer, or just changing up the routine if you've already been doing something already. Now, if you already have been doing some strength training, perhaps you could add in another day. So if you've been doing two times a week, add in one more. If you've been doing three, maybe all you need to do is add in more mobility and movement training, like I discussed briefly in a previous episode, or in multiple episodes with Aaron Carson, who is a certified strength and conditioning specialist for endurance athletes living in Boulder. Check out those episodes uh number 41 and number 123. Finally, a complete how-to of strength training for endurance athletes can be found in one of my episodes, number 166, where I talk about how best to incorporate strength training with concurrent endurance cycling, or with my conversation with a lovely CTS coach, Sarah Scazzaro, in episode number 273. So I've talked a lot about strength training, um, but I wanted to provide those uh resources, the good ones uh for you uh to level up the strength training game. Finally, number four uh to take this thing home is find your tribe. What I mean by this is if you now have more time, spend it with a community of like-minded riders versus just going solo, long rides, and doing everything on your own. Why? Well, these will become your training partners. But also, endurance training gets monotonous, and that's the nature of hive of a high volume sport. How to get around the doldrum of this training is to make it social, but keep doing the work. Find a group that has similar goals and abilities to help log the miles and hold you accountable to getting in those hours. A group that takes it serious enough to get the work done, but not so serious that they think that they're just a bunch of super pros. It needs to be a group where you're not the fastest rider by a lot, nor the slowest. It needs to be a group that pushes you, but it doesn't blow you out of the water each time. It needs to be a group that is accepting of others, but you still got to do the work, and you won't be held back by those who won't or can't do the work. All that may sound harsh, but in a strong endurance community, it exists and it's effective and it's healthy. So I don't know where you live or even if uh you do this already, but it's a game changer for increasing the volume long rides and enjoying the process. So if you already have this group, perhaps you can maybe streamline it more by organizing the ride to be more zone two focused in the base and build phases, and then get a little bit more racy or you know, mix of intensities in the build and peak phases to match the annual training plan and in progression. This can be both cycling and gym people, by the way. So maybe you you get two tribes. Either way, longevity in this sport comes from a mix of dedication to the goals and engaging with a community that brings variety and the fun factor to it all. Finding that tribe of people can help with both if you don't have it already. All right, finally, just to summarize everything that we talked about today, if you have more time to train, do it, because it will increase your aerobic capacity and performance when done properly. Think of those increases both on and off the bike, but aim to deepen your long ride first with volume and keep contrast to your training days. Additionally, adding in time at the gym is where I'd probably put my money for a grandmaster. If you are older than 50 plus, I suggest giving yourself extra recovery time between the hard group rides or the interval days and think about where to put your best pure rest day. As it doesn't need to be every Monday, like those of us with Monday through Friday jobs and going wild on the weekends. Thanks for writing in today, KJothy. And for any other listener who has a question, head over to trainright.com backslash podcast and click on ask a training question. Fill it out, send it over, and we'll do our best to answer it on a future episode. That's it. That's our show for today. Hope you liked it. If you want more or you want to take it to the next level yourself, you know where to find us. Trainwrite.com. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainwright.com backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast that'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

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Adam Pulford

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