# Distributing intensity with rest?



## Alkan (Jun 30, 2011)

I've been trying to figure this one out.

-I want to train as if I'm going to be doing time trials and long hills. I'll find this specialization out later when I join my school's cycling team (which takes anyone with a road bike).
-I need to get the right types of short and long workouts, and need to learn to distribute them.
-I need to include a couple longer, easier rides so I can keep the weight coming off quickly (I was 197 on Jan. 6, I'm 181 right now, guessing at a final stopping point of 160, or 155 if I'm in super good shape. To clue you into my body type, I'm 5'9.5". I could potentially go lower if I am carrying more weight than there appears to be.)
*-Mainly, I don't know quite how to distribute 4 days of intense exercise in a 7 day period with a proper rest/recovery cycle.*

I've got great hills around here in Tucson, by the way, and plenty of routes for continuous loops.


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## ESTrainSmartBlog (Feb 25, 2013)

Hi Alkan, I'm a Kinesiologist specializing in Exercise Physiology and cycling training for the Olympic and beginner levels. Since you still have a good amount of weight to lose, caloric expenditure should be the primary training focus. This means lower intensity rides, but longer duration so that you can get more workouts in within a week (higher training volume). If you prefer not to significantly increase the duration of your cycling workouts, I highly recommend adding a core strengthening and cycling specific weight lifting program to your training program. This will increase your muscle mass and as a result, increase your metabolism and assist in weight loss. The core strength will improve your climbing ability and your ability to hold the aero position comfortably- all important factors for time trial performance.


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## hrumpole (Jun 17, 2008)

Why are you wedded to only four days? How many hours do you have to train per week? What's your long ride now? How long are the events that you're training for (Eg the team races?) Are the four days back to back only b/c of work or other obigations or is it 2 weekdays plus a weekend? (you get the idea). 

I know opinions vary on core work, but it really helps me (but I'm a lot older than you). Look into kettlebell swings and turkish get ups. If you can do those WITH GOOD FORM, those and pull ups/push ups are pretty much all you need.


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## Alkan (Jun 30, 2011)

ESTrainSmartBlog said:


> Hi Alkan, I'm a Kinesiologist specializing in Exercise Physiology and cycling training for the Olympic and beginner levels. Since you still have a good amount of weight to lose, caloric expenditure should be the primary training focus. This m...


Increasing the duration of workouts is quite alright. I've been lifting and going out on long rides when I can, usually not below 26 miles, and now getting more along the lines of 40+ miles quite frequently.

Now I've got another 20 or so pounds to take off (maybe 30). I cannot tell how much fat is really there, but the way I've been eating has actually been taking plenty of weight off. I'm eating a lot of protein with an overall caloric restriction so that I can maintain muscle and drop fat fairly quickly.

Likewise, I want to be able to train intensely for four of the six days I plan on using to ride, but I don't know which types of rides I should do twice in a row. Maybe I need to wait for this phase.


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## ESTrainSmartBlog (Feb 25, 2013)

Alkan said:


> Increasing the duration of workouts is quite alright. I've been lifting and going out on long rides when I can, usually not below 26 miles, and now getting more along the lines of 40+ miles quite frequently.
> 
> Now I've got another 20 or so pounds to take off (maybe 30). I cannot tell how much fat is really there, but the way I've been eating has actually been taking plenty of weight off. I'm eating a lot of protein with an overall caloric restriction so that I can maintain muscle and drop fat fairly quickly.
> 
> Likewise, I want to be able to train intensely for four of the six days I plan on using to ride, but I don't know which types of rides I should do twice in a row. Maybe I need to wait for this phase.


hrumpole Hit the nail about stressing good form. If core exercises are done with poor form, the core musculature will become trained to hold the wrong posture. This is a bad bad thing.

The two rides that can be done back to back are the ATP-PC (pure anaerobic) and LT intervals. Since I don't have data about your fitness level, etc, I can't make a specific exercise recommendation for you, but in order to train the ATP-PC system, the intervals should be designed like the following:
10 sec (3 min) x 3 min (off)

To train the lactic acid system, beginners should start with the following type of interval:
1.25 min x 2.5 min

Before you start doing back to back intense workouts, try starting with one intense workout for the first week, two the second week, three the third week followed by a recovery week. For the second training cycle, two, three, four, and then another recovery week. This will help you prevent overuse injuries by progressively stressing your body. Hope this helps!


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## AndrwSwitch (May 28, 2009)

I still think you should just go join your school's team now. Like, today. Email the captain and figure out what you've got to do - probably just show up on the next ride, honestly - and do it.

When I was in my middle twenties, I found that the best way to distribute four days of intense exercise in a week was not to. It was too many for me. As the season wore on, I started feeling tired all the time. Three hard days was my real training tolerance at the time. Still is, I think, but I'm in an engineering grad. program, so I haven't been able to train as much or as consistently as I could when I was just working.

Since you're very young, you can probably ride five or six days a week. (Just not high-intensity workouts.)

Here's how I might distribute my rides if I were to train five days a week, during the part of the season when I'm really hitting the high-intensity workouts. Which is not this part of the season, for me, but I know collegiate cycling needs to git 'er done in the Spring, before everyone goes on vacation. Did you get a race calendar yet, btw?

Monday: Off
Tuesday: Short intervals. Could be blasting rolling hills, power intervals, whatever.
Wednesday: Longer intervals. Since you mentioned time trial, there are actually protocols specific to being good at a 40k TT. You could scale for whatever the TTs in your calendar look like, or just do them as written.
Thursday: Medium-long ride.
Friday: Off
Saturday: Hills
Sunday: Long ride

Have you read The Literature yet? While I think that most of the structured plans are a bit much for someone who hasn't pinned a number on yet, since you're insisting on trying to assemble one anyway, you'd probably find it useful. I have a copy of _The Mountain Biker's Training Bible,_ by Joe Friel. His road book (the MTB book is really just a modification anyway) is very popular and addresses planning a week.

You can shuffle the schedule I just posted as you see fit. If you want to ride six days a week, I'd add a shortish endurance-paced ride on Friday and exchange the longer ride on Thursday for the interval ride on Wednesday. (But that's just me.)

Duration, for me, would be about an hour to an hour and a half for the intervals workouts, including warming up and riding home, an hour and half to two for the medium-long ride, and about three hours for the long ride. An additional ride would be an hour or so. Scale up or cut rides to hit your target number of hours. If you find that doing high-intensity rides stops making sense as you scale up, consider substituting lower-intensity workouts, for now. I prefer to adjust duration in weeks before races but keep things resembling intervals workouts in my schedule. Especially if there's a race the week following, and the week after that...

Do you have a heart rate monitor yet? They're a great tool for people who refuse to pace themselves. :wink5: Not that I'd know anything about that... Power meters are supposed to be even better, but it's too expensive for me right now. Another handy thing about power meters is that they can tell you when a ride is not the ride you think it was. For example, mountain biking can be near-impossible to do at an endurance pace because of the surfaces and terrain changes. Which is probably part of middle-aged men who just bought their mountain bikes stopping so much. I would do well to consider MTB a high-intensity ride in terms of training tolerance. Group rides can also be tremendously variable, depending on how one fits in with the group.

Seriously, though - all this stuff has been collected into cohesive, coherent packages by some of the better-known coaches. So you're better off buying a copy of Friel, reading him, and then asking questions than letting some guy on the Internet design a training plan for you off the cuff. His chapters have pretty extensive bibliographies too, so since you have access to an academic library and sometimes have questions about what sports scientists have been able to find out from experimentation, those may be a really good starting point to gaining some real insight.

EDIT: Oops, stumbled into the coaching forum. I know better; I think I clicked on "Latest Posts" or something. Well, I'm not a coach, just a guy who rides bikes and sometimes competes, with varying degrees of structure, seriousness and success. So there you go. I still think you should buy the book.


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