The infamous fitness plateau is a state no athlete wishes to face. We’re going to make sure you never find yourself there.
Throughout this discussion, we will introduce two foundational theories to understand what happens to our bodies when we train. By doing so, we aim to illuminate why certain practices yield results, while others achieve none. Keep these theories in mind and you’ll see humble increases in your FTP.
The way we think about training is pretty cut-and-dry: exercise, get stronger, faster. We rarely think about what’s going on behind the scenes. Unfortunately, this isn’t the best way to approach training. The more we know about what our bodies are actually doing, the better position we’ll be in to choose practices that increase fitness and avoid the ones that don’t.
The Foundational Theories
General Adaptation Syndrome theory
At the heart of it all is Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome theory. The theory supposes that the human body responds to the stress we apply in attempts to minimize disruptions made to its steady state. Training stress is simply a disruption to the body’s state of homeostasis, or in other words, disruption in the energy exchange within the body to get back to a “steady state”. This disruption also affects muscular composition and hormonal processes, all of which to help the body return to that stable state. We can chalk Selye’s contribution up as a road map to how we understand stress and its effects on the internal balance of the body.
Selye believed this process to have three stages: First, the body releases hormones to aid the completion of a task (acute stress response). Second, training stress is no longer exposed and the body allocates energy to repair damaged muscle tissue and aid other adaptations to the stimulus. Lastly — if stress persists for too long — the body’s ability to reduce its impact begins to fade because adaptive energy is running low. These three steps revealed a pattern of the body’s responsive nature, and it’s been applied to training theories ever since.
Periodization
Russian physiologist Leo Matveyev expanded on Selye’s work by creating periodic training models to understand the body’s predictive responses. By analyzing the training approach and athletic results of Olympians, Matveyev identified a common theme among athletes who were successful. From this, he built a training approach that would come to influence the entire Eastern Bloc’s 1960 Olympics and athletic training approaches today.
The traditional periodization model divides training time into distinct phases to achieve peak fitness. If you’re following a TrainerRoad training plan you know this model as the Base, Build, and Specialty phases of your training plan. Break this down even further, and you’ll see microcycles and mesocycles within this progression. The microcycle being your week of workouts, and the mesocycle being 3-4 weeks of training (the macrocycle being your entire season). Using this model, training schedules integrate periodic downturns that play on the previous weeks of training and help avoid burnout.
So how do you prevent a fitness plateau?
Am I Progressing?
The first thing you need to ask yourself is, “Am I progressing?”. To answer this question, examine your training and analyze whether your workouts are providing a progressive stimuli to keep your fitness moving in an upward direction. You’ll also want to make sure your training schedules periodic downturns to give your body a chance to absorb training stress. TrainerRoad’s training plan process takes the guesswork out of this for you.
Training progression in light of Selye’s GAS theory is really just consistent exposure to specific stressors on the body. Physiological adaptations are made in response to stress in an effort to minimize the effects on homeostasis. The body eventually gets really good at this, such that the previous level of stress is no longer recognized by the body as a stressor. As a result, your body stops spurring physiological change, and a fitness plateau is as simple as that.
Successful Completion of your Workouts
Say your training plan prescribes the right level of progression, but there are still workouts you can’t complete. Why would you move into the next week to complete harder workouts when you’re having a problem completing current ones? You wouldn’t, or at least you shouldn’t. Take this as a sign from your body to repeat the current workout in lieu of the one scheduled next week.
For example, say you’re really struggling with your Sweet Spot workout, which consists of 2×15-minute intervals this week and 3×12-minute next. Next week, repeat the 2×15-minute workout to successfully complete the workout. Then move onto what would have been the next ride. You may not be progressing at the rate prescribed by the plan, but you’re still making progress. If the same issue occurs next week, cut the ride short and reattempt it the following week.
When it comes to VO2 max specifically, the zones get pretty blurry. If you find you just can’t seem to complete workouts at the prescribed 120% of FTP, maybe your VO2 max is more in the 115% range. Dial back the intensity when doing VO2 max workouts in the future (going no lower than 110%). You’ll move forward knowing with this lower intensity as the new value for future VO2 max workouts.
Note: This approach to VO2 max doesn’t apply to sub-threshold work because the zones at these intensities have less wiggle-room.
Does every day feel like a bad day?
If every day feels like a bad day, something’s up. If all signs point toward “go” but you still feel stale and flat, some outside variable is likely the culprit. Whether you’re not eating enough (quality and/or quantity) or you’re not getting enough rest, some external factor is influencing the impact of your workouts.
Sleep is pretty basic, and you should know 5 hours isn’t going to do the trick. Food, on the other hand, isn’t always so straightforward. We try to help. We measure kilojoule expenditure in each workout, which basically equates to Calories. If you fear your diet may be a setback, pay attention to your energy balance, that is, your caloric intake versus the demands of your workouts.
Overreaching
The nature of training is overreaching. Each week we try to outreach what we could do the week before. If you don’t recover properly to absorb that stress, you can end up overreaching too far. In that case, it’s time to dial it back a bit. That can mean adding an extra day of rest, cutting a workout short, switching a VO2 max workout to a Sweet Spot workout/Sweet Spot for a tempo ride/tempo for an endurance workout.
Conclusion
To avoid a fitness plateau, we need to dial-in our individual rate of progression. That means consistently and successfully completing workouts, balancing good/bad days, and identifying fatigue beyond periodized heavy training stimulus. As we become more familiar with a new training regimen, it’s important to pay attention to that individual rate and make sure it plays nicely within the structure of your training. TrainerRoad’s Head Coach creates training plans with all these elements in mind.
Consistently making training progress is the only way to keep getting stronger. Integrated into that are specific workouts and recovery techniques aimed at achieving a particular set of physiological adaptations that translate into being a better athlete. Use this knowledge to make sure your training is helping you make progress, not keeping you from getting faster.
Share this Post
To be clear, when you say “do the workout you failed next week”, it’s just the workout, and not the entire week of workouts, correct?
I ask mostly because the TSS of all the other workouts in the following week will likely be higher (unless you’ve hit a rest week), so there’s a reasonable chance you’re more tired going into it, assuming it wasn’t the first workout of the week. I’m sure this is potentially offset by the increased fitness from the week before, but I still figured it was worth questioning!
Hi Richard,
That’s correct. Complete the individual workout you had issues with—rest of the workouts should be the regularly scheduled week’s worth of workouts.
Considering your ability to complete the other workouts, your rate of progression for those types of rides should make the following week’s rides doable. The other workout is being isolated to make sure you can complete it before moving onto the next progressed workout. 🙂
Really enjoyed this article, hope to see more.
Some more discussions around the microcycles and mesocycles (3+1) cycles and how to pick workouts to fit them would be appreciated. in conjunction with recently read a article by Joe Friel about Low, Medium and High TSS workouts based on CTL.
Thanks for the article. This is not new info but it’s always good to be reminded of the basic concepts. Yet this article didn’t hit on the one issue I’ve been struggling with over the past base phase; a mental plateau. I have been training for several years now and have raced for a few too. I”ve put myself in the pain cave many times and have come out the other side smiling and stronger. I’m just not making it through every hard workout this year in the base phase. How do you deal with a motivation plateau? I feel like I have the motivation. I want to push but this year I’m having trouble when the bear gets on my back. I’ve never back pedaled this much before during the parts of the workouts where the crunch is on. Its messing with my head. How do you break through the mental challenge?
@ Russ – this is a great question. I had this issue myself. I went through SS base fine, then moved on to Short Power build, got to half way through, and then week 5 it just didn’t happen for me. I couldn’t get to hit the target power, some sessions I barely made it through, others I couldn’t finish. Like you it messed with my head; I racked my brain trying to figure out what the issue could be. In the end I found somewhere someone had mentioned the difference between the 8 min test and the 20 min test, that if you had a higher lactate tolerance the 8 min test gave a false higher reading. I had been using the 8 min test all through base and into build. Finally I decided to have 4 days rest then re-start build but using the sustained build plan and the 20 min test. The test gave a 12 watt decrease over the 8 min test, and so far I’m at week 3 and all is ok, although looking forward to the recovery week next week! The point is mentally it feels right now, the sessions are still hard and I am suitably fatigued at 3 weeks in, but I don’t have that mental block of whether I can finish a session like I did initially. So really dealing with the mental side is more about re-evaluating the training side? Hope this helps
Andrew, thank you for the reply. The truth is you’re right. The hard issue to swallow is that I’m not where I want to be. I am where I am. I finished last season with an FTP of 285 and I was confident in that number with my workouts and final testing. I took some time off training but kept riding. I then started a kind of extended SS base in the early winter since I won’t be racing until July at the earliest; I’m military overseas and I am finally coming home in June. When I restarted the SS base to begin my actual training season I tested but didn’t want to believe the number. I thought that it couldn’t be right. I had continued to ride in my off season and I felt like I wouldn’t have been back to where I had started the prior year. I guess the truth is the test numbers were right and I really had lost that top end. I’ve got endurance for days but my lactate tolerance must really drop off when I stop with the VO2 max and supra threshold work. All along I was refusing to admit that I just need to accept reality and work from where I actually am to get back to where I was in the fall and hopefully surpass it this year. I just hate the idea of working so hard to only have it slip away so easily. I want to continue to climb each year. I’ve wanted to crack 300 watts FTP and I’ve been getting closer. Ending last year at 285 I really hoped to build upon that and maybe crack my goal. Truth is that the only way that’s going to happen is if I accept reality now and train where I truly am. Thanks for helping me accept what I already knew but didn’t want to accept. Good luck this season.
… think you need to take a Kickr+TR along on your next deployment.
G
In The part about finishing workouts successfully, you advise to repeat workouts until we can finish them. But how will this affect the training plan progression? Will an 8 week plan extend up to several weeks because we repeat entire weeks, or is it just about e.g. shuffling workouts within the allotted weeks?
This could be a bit more clear, sorry for any confusion.
An example of this could be that you were unable to complete a Tuesday V02max effort and have another scheduled for the following Tuesday. When that next Tuesday workout rolls around, choose the ride you were unable to complete. This doesn’t mean you have to extend your training plan an extra week just to complete that one extra workout. Even if the workout(s) get left out, you’ll still be progressing your training and successfully completing workouts.
This applies more to single workouts, but definitely can apply to an entire week of workouts as well. However, if you are failing every workout within your week, it’d probably be best to take some time to recover and recalculate what may be causing you to fail (e.g. time-off, illness, outside stress, potentially inflated FTP). That doesn’t have to mean extending an 8 week plan, but if you have the time availability it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
If you have the time availability and are failing entire weeks of workouts, extend your plan to get back on track and successfully complete the entire week of workouts. If you have an event that constrains your time availability, we’d recommend progressing through your training plan as far as you can leading up to your event. Even if that means you have to end up repeating entire weeks and only get partially through it.
Hope this makes things a bit more clear! Let us know if not. 🙂
I’ll be making use of this tomorrow. So far I’ve been unable to get through any of my Thursday rides without a backpedal or two, so rather than going onto the hardest version (which I probably wont get through either), I’m going to see if I can get through last weeks at 100% with no easing off.
I was close last time, so hopefully I can gut it out this time.