The Masters Athlete Playbook

Do masters athletes really need more recovery, or are they simply balancing more life stress and responsibilities?

In this episode, CTS Head Cycling Coach Adam Pulford breaks down the realities of training and racing as a masters athlete. We discuss recovery, consistency, intensity, strength training, race preparation, and how training priorities should evolve with age.

The conversation explores both the physiological realities of aging and the habits that allow many athletes to continue improving well into their 40s, 50s, and beyond.

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.

​​Free Cycling Training Assessment: https://trainright.com/cycling-training-assessment-welcome/

Interested in working with a coach? Schedule a free consult: https://trainright.com/coaching/cycling/

Self-coached athlete? Check out our TrainRight Membership: https://trainright.com/membership/

Find more free resources here: https://trainright.com/blog/

Resources:

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4482301/
• https://joefrieltraining.com/
• Joe Friel: Science-Based Training Advice for Older Athletes - Part 1
• Joe Friel: Part 2 of Science-Based Training for Older Athletes
• https://trainright.com/masters-and-grand-masters-cycling-training-mistakes/

Transcript

Do Masters Need More Recovery

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do master's athletes actually need more time for recovery? Or are they just busier with work and family demands, struggling to manage their training load? This has been an ongoing debate for a long time, and it's about time we settled it. I'm Adam Pulford, head coach of cycling at CTS. Our main clientele is the master level athlete. And after countless national championships across road, track, and mountain bike disciplines, as well as Leadville belt buckles and unbound medals, and just helping our athletes stay fit until the next adventure, I know that our coaches do it better than most when working with aging

Aging Limits And Hidden Advantages

SPEAKER_00 0:36

athletes. Now, there are some very real physiological consequences of growing older. Although aging athletes are still responsive to training and can improve performance at any age, you're fighting against diminishing returns. Your maximum aerobic capacity, or BO2 max, gradually decreases. You have more trouble building and maintaining muscle mass, and bone density is likely to decrease. You might have trouble sleeping through the night without waking up to use the bathroom. You may also have accumulated injuries that limit the range of motion or joints that take longer to warm up. Trust me, I get it. Together, these challenges can compromise training and recovery, even if you have more time to train than you did when you were younger. Now, on the flip side, masters athletes have great opportunities. You're likely more stable in your career, have older kids, or you're an empty nester and have the resources to afford the equipment and the professional services to help you succeed. That's why riders over 40 or even 50 are often faster and stronger than they were in their 30s. Performance training for master cyclists is all about being smart. Focusing on good habits reduces the risk of injury, burnout, or stagnation. That's where you're training enough to be tired, but not actually getting faster from it. And that might be the worst of both worlds.

The Five Habits That Matter

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Today let's talk about the top five ways to improve your training and racing outcomes as a master's level athlete.

Recovery Ninja Basics That Work

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Number one, become a recovery ninja. Meaning become super skilled, efficient, and clever like a ninja at your recovery process. Things like hitting your recovery window after a hard workout, both with nutrition and relaxation. This is a strong habit I try to develop into my athletes as well as use myself on hard days. Once you're done with your interval session, group ride or race, hit the shower, get a recovery shake or the prepped food that you planned ahead, then lay down for 20 to 30 minutes. This could be a nap, could be the legs in the fancy pneumatic compression boots, could just be your legs elevated against a wall with your eyes closed and your mind unwinding. Focus on breathing, relaxing, and feel your body restore. Key things here are number one, good hygiene. Get out of the chamois. Number two, nutrition and recovery, that recovery window for fueling in particular. And number three, relax the body and the mind. So no phones, please. Other boring things like getting seven to eight hours of sleep per night, that's high quality sleep, by the way. This means doing things such as setting the stage for a good sleep. This includes getting to bed earlier than you think you should, shutting down work and screens at least 30 minutes before you want to crawl into bed, and make your bedroom cold and dark to stay asleep once you fall asleep. Get so routine that you don't need an alarm to wake up when you want. You just do. Good clean living, good hard training, and good old sleep and relaxation are key habits to becoming a recovery ninja. And for the record, I've never actually met a ninja in real life that I know of anyway, but I bet that we'd be pretty awesome at resting, in addition to all the other ninja stuff

Consistency Beats Long Breaks

SPEAKER_00 3:54

that they do. Alright, the second way is to be consistent. I can't overemphasize this enough. Once you're in the mainstream workforce, you have a demanding schedule with family, community, and you're busy. If you want longevity as an athlete, you need to be consistent with your training. Otherwise, you're gonna go downhill. The biggest challenge I see in middle-aged folks are those who were athletes and they took two years, five years, 10-year break, and then they come back to sport and they want to compete again. It takes a lot of time to rebuild that fitness after all those years off. Another challenge I see is people taking too much time off in their off season, thinking that this is the best way to recover. You need time off from intervals, racing, and stressors of being an athlete. But for those of us who are training less than 700 hours per year, I'll be really honest, you don't need a month or two off. You need a couple of weeks, then back to zone two. And you need to do that a couple times per year. This means staying more consistent year-round. Staying fit is not the same as getting fit. And getting fit kind of sucks because you're doing more training than you're used to in order to have capacity for later. This makes you feel real tired in the moment, but it will make you better later. However, once you are fit, you can maintain on less total hours and wisely placed intensity sessions throughout the week. This is the age-old adage of stay ready so you don't gotta get ready, sort of thing. I've done a pretty decent job of this consistency myself over the past five to six years. Now, this is gonna come across as a bit of a humble brag as well as a sad fact. I've recently been hitting my peak all-time powers across the board with my best reported FTP FRC in modeled VO2 Max of my life. And I'm 42, going on 43. I'm no spring chicken. So that's the humble brag. But this is also because for the majority of my late 20s and 30s, I was standing around in feed zones, tech zones, and driving team cars for different professional mountain bike and road teams that I was working on. So my volume in training was much lower. My intensity was high since I was trying to chase down people like Keegan Swenson, Steven Ettinger, Max Plaxton, and Evelyn Dong when they were just children. Fast children, mind you. But despite 75-minute pre-rides on XC courses, I was just not training a lot for many years. Quick side note: mad respect to what Ev is doing now on the mountain bike national team these days, and of course, Keeg's on the gravel scene lately. Overall, I did enough training to keep a decent base of fitness, but kept consistent so that when I returned back to training and racing, it wasn't all lost. But compared to those years, I'm just doing way more riding and training now. So it makes sense that my numbers are coming back up into new

Stop Worshipping CTL Track Output

SPEAKER_00 6:58

heights. Too many people get hung up on CTL, fitness scores, stress scores, and other metrics that are helpful in guiding you along your way in this journey, but they aren't perfect and shouldn't be looked at in isolation. Fitness or CTL on training peaks is heavily driven by volume. And once you've maxed out your volume for a few months, it's not going to grow much more. CTL may plateau, and this is normal for masters and time-crunched athletes training less than 10 to 12 hours per week who are consistent. This doesn't mean fitness is not increasing or improving because there are other aspects in training that improve, though the metric may not show it. Start with kilojoules, kilojoules per hour or total kilojoules in a ride. If you start tracking that, you may notice that as you get stronger, kilojoules are going up along with FTP. But because volume doesn't change, CTL may not either. Track your peak power durations, both average power and normalized power. This is your performance outputs, especially if you're not racing. Key durations are peak 20 minute, 40 minute, 60 minute average, as well as normalized powers. Now, if you are racing and you're racing crits, road races, mountain bike races, the durations for these events are usually 45 to 90 minutes total for masters. And depending on the course, peak average and normalized powers are both really helpful to track this progress. Even though a TSS for a hard crit may only be 70 to 90 total, it's not going to nudge up your CTL much. Additionally, you'll need to track some of these shorter power durations, such as 10 second, 20 second, 1 minute, and 5 minute. But I'll be honest with you, if you're on the podium and winning races, who the hell cares what your CTL is? Other things that training peaks intervals.iciu and Vecta may not show you, if you stay consistent doing intervals, group rides, and intentional workouts, you keep improving your pacing, your timing of efforts, reading your competition and increasing your awareness on the bike. You're getting smarter and you're using deliberate practice to do that. Deliberate practice makes you a master over time, not just your age. Masters athletes who have been training and racing for years have a distinct advantage on their side wisdom. But this only happens if you keep practicing and staying consistent. Getting the experience needed to learn, try something new, and try to win or win in a different way than you've done before. This is what I'm talking about. And this is probably more important than fitness alone when it comes to racing or just enjoying your time on the bike, because it leads to increased motivation and fun. If you're motivated and you're having fun, there's really no limit to the gains that you'll have in the long run. Other things like durability, deep fitness, and toughness develop with years and years of training. We have forms and ways of measuring this, but not super easily to like display it and say, here, you are really tough now. Okay. It's kind of like, I don't know, dark matter. We know it's there, we can measure it somewhat, but we also know that it plays a huge role. You can't see it like FTP, FRC, CTL, or some other common metric, yet we see it when it's combined holistically all together in the athlete ecosystem. But it takes years to develop, and some of these are really abstract concepts, and so we don't yet have great tools to quantify them, but we know it's real. Pro tips here, you don't have to be perfect in training, just be consistent. So if your training program calls for 90 minutes with three by 10 threshold and five minute recovery between, shorten the warm-up and the cooldown, keep the main set the same, but you could also shorten the recovery down to maybe three minutes between to save on more time if needed. Maybe you only get in like 70 minutes total, but you kept the main set and you carry it on. Or maybe you save that workout for tomorrow when you have a little bit more time in your schedule and you just do a shorter 60-minute endurance ride today. One day of training won't make or break you. Be flexible. Don't aim for perfect, aim for consistent.

High Intensity With Smarter Volume

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Number three, keep the intensity high. This doesn't mean don't do volume rides, but it means just don't do more zone two, because that's what the pros do, or it's in vogue right now. Volume has its time and place in a master's program, but more is not always better. In fact, it may be the worst option if you keep doubling down on long rides each weekend, especially when you don't have the time and the bandwidth for it. The reason again comes back to the speed of recovery. It starts going down once you hit middle age. If you have kids' soccer games to get to, friends' birthdays to host, international travel on Saturday night, or just need quality time with someone. This all takes energy, and so does riding as long as you possibly can on the weekend and skimping recovery time in order to achieve the other duties will slowly make you more and more tired where you're getting the training time in, but it doesn't mean that you're absorbing all the benefits of that time in the saddle. Big days require big recovery, so you don't always need to go big on the bike when you have big life things going on. Instead, plan your volume blocks when you have more time to ride and recover, and need the benefit of volume as well. I do this when I have athletes doing longer gravel races and need the ability to pedal for a long time, like six, eight, and ten-hour races. About four to five months out from the race, I start planning with my athletes on key weekends that they either have more time to train off from work, kids out of town, or maybe they're taking a vacation and they can bring the bike. I look for creative blocks of time to get a dense chunk of volume back to back to back, sometimes getting 10 to 15 hours on a long weekend. You'll need to take a few rest days after doing something like this if you're not used to it, and then take a few extra easy rides. But if you find three to four chunks of time in your life when you're several months out from a big race, it really adds a nice layer to the base. Then you can get back to normal intervals and moderate volume in your normal everyday life. A great coach once said, you can't have too much base. You certainly can have too much build, but you can't have too much base. And that coach was Joe Friel. He said it in context of both base season as well as the base of aerobic fitness over many, many years.

Joe Friel Style Week Patterns

SPEAKER_00 13:40

So let's talk about some key concepts about the aging athlete from the goat of a coach like Joe, who has shared over the years in his books, blogs, and interviews, of which I've had the honor of doing several times over the past few years. He's always been a big advocate of when things change, you need to change with him. And a big part of this change is the change in pattern of your hard and easy days when it comes to doing a training program. If you're used to doing hard workouts on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday with a rest day on Monday, but you're having trouble hitting your targets as prescribed, or just you're saying super tired, simply try moving one of the hard days and slot in another easy day or endurance day. Here you see a fairly classic example of six days of riding, one day off with three hard days, which would be probably two interval days and one group ride if you're into group rides. Here is the same 10-hour total week, but with one less interval day, allowing for more time to recover, which works well for many of my master's athletes who still have a job and need or want to stick to a seven-day per week rhythm or cycle. If you're a retired master's athlete or have some pretty solid flexibility in your schedule, you could take a page from the Joe Friel book and apply a nine-day quote week plan where you have two easy days between all of the hard days and have a nine-day total rolling cycle. The example I have here shows the rest days not happening on any consistent one day of the week, but specifically slotting in for a good rest after hard days or blocks, allowing someone to still hit a group ride on the weekend and get their intervals done too. Note that all examples are around 10 hours per week. The three times will have more TSS as the density of work is higher there. The nine-day training week will have slight variants of TSS each week, but you can customize how hard each day of the week is according to your own needs in your training program. The biggest thing is don't skimp on the intensity as you age. Simply add more recovery or easy days between the hard days. If you want more detail about this slight shift in weekly patterning, check out Coach Joe's latest book that dropped earlier this year. I've got links to that below, as well as a few fun interviews I've done with him in the past year. I was super honored to get his new book with a personal note from a legendary coach like him and someone who I got inspiration from when I was a young coach and still do today. Joe paved the way for coaches like myself and to have a career in this sport, as well as athletes like yourself who want to train smarter, better, and do it later in your years with a high success

Strength Training To Fight Decline

SPEAKER_00 16:27

rate. Number four, prioritize strength training. If you're over the age of 35 and are not lifting weights, doing Pilates, yoga, or something other than riding your bike, I suggest you start. Strength training and using heavier weights for part of the year may be the best solution to the loss of muscle mass that masters' athletes face. If grunting and longer rest periods aren't your cup of tea, try Pilates. I've had even the most busy of busy athletes start a Pilates practice in their late 40s, and he said it is the best thing he's ever done for his body. Pilates can help develop strength through a range of motion and balance out the over-trained and over-developed muscles and posture that we get from riding a bike around a bunch, realigning your body to be less tight, less hunched over, sort of Tyrannosaurus Rex arms that we get. Yoga does something similar, but incorporates movement with breath, sometimes heat, and does a great job of using isometrics with a full range of motion to help our bodies realign. Pilates in yoga won't increase strength as much as weights in the gym, but can help build and maintain from a starting point and maybe better if your goals are more related to mobility versus just stronger muscles. Basically, if all you do is sit in your chair and ride your bike and you're in your late 30s, start doing something different now, or it'll be, I told you so, coming up here in a few years.

Taper Right And Race Fresh

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Lastly, my advice is arrive fresh to your races and important events. This may be the best advice come the week of your race. Do less and you will have a better day on the bike. Once you're about seven to ten days out from an event, you can't really do more training that's going to help improve your fitness on race day, but you can do a lot to mess it up. Mainly trying to fit in that last workout that you missed or try to like jam in that last group ride or push a little bit more because you think it's going to help you on race day, you're just lying to yourself. The key thing on race week is less is more when it comes to literally everything except sleep. So, in summary, research makes it clear that at some point in aging, VO2 Max and other performance markers start to decline due to hormonal changes and other factors from aging. This may start as early as 35 years old for men and women, or start to happen later. Those with good genetics and strong training habits will decline less. You can't do much about the genetics, but you can do a hell of a lot about your habits. So, do masters athletes require more recovery? Or are they just so busy they need to change a few habits and stay on top of it? Yes. Both. Maybe more busy and less

Wrap Up And Share Your Hacks

SPEAKER_00 19:16

aging in your mid-30s than less busy and more aging in your 50s, but either way, it's a combination of both as your body and lifestyle demands evolve and change over time. My advice is accept it and in all that it has to offer, but change training habits to specifically slow the impact of aging, and you will become more successful in your grandmasters and beyond. So that's it for today. I hope you liked it. If you have any recovery or training hacks that you have found to be helpful in your aging journey, let's hear about them below. Maybe they're different than some of the ones that I offered here, but that's awesome. Hopefully, others on the same journey could benefit from hearing uh from others like you about this topic. And of course, if anyone wants to keep learning, please check out the links to the articles that other CTS coaches have written about the aging athlete, a few research articles I pulled from to make this video, and of course, my interviews from Coach Joe Friel. See you back here soon for the next one.