I used to believe that time off was detrimental but I no longer ascribe to that. I have took 2 weeks off this feb (planned break) and regained the same fitness level within 6 weeks. I took 1 week off (unplanned but sore back) and regain fitness in 2 weeks. I was probably like 80-90% back in 1 week each time.
I watch MVDP Strava a lot and he will take full week or 2 off the bike and be in race shape quickly after as well.
Consistency is important, but a short break doesn’t hold you back. I could see how taking multiple days or a week off several times in a few months is a big problem, but it shouldnt be misinterpreted to thinking your going to lose huge fitness of you don’t ride for 1-2 weeks every few months
As an absolute measure (liters/minute) you can’t change it much. As a relative measure (liters/minute/kg), which is the more common measure, you can potentially change your weight quite a bit.
I understand and agree with your point, but if you’re looking to get to 5, losing 8 weeks just getting back to where you were has an impact.
To wit: I got COVID in December at 285W. Not much training for about three weeks, was back to 285 by March. Started to push up by May but crashed and ended my season. Three weeks off the bike, 260W. I’ll get to 285 by October or November, and then hopefully be able to push up and past 305 again, but the time off is certainly detrimental when you get sick or injured.
If you keep doing that year after year, you’re hampering your development, without question. 2021 I got to 305, 4.3W/kg, my peak… and it was largely because I was able to train from October through August without any unplanned multi-week breaks.
Totally agree. Yes you can still progress when you have to take breaks every 8 weeks, but it completely slows things down. I am a picture perfect example of this. Nov through January I was having bike fit issues / knee problems. It was a combination of fit and me needing to do mobility work on my quads, hips etc. But it held me back for 3 months. Then in Feb I started having multifidus pain in my back, did PT from Apr to Aug for that and it’s almost solved. Then April, I both got sick and then broke my toe. Most recently, I have an inflamed posterior tibal tendon, still training but it’s really limited.
I have still gained since last fall, but it was much slower than it should have been. Most recently, May to August was the first time I strung 12 consecutive weeks of training together with 0 injuries and I had immediate results. It felt amazing, but the whole time I was thinking “when is this going to end” lol.
Long story short is, I was able to continue training more or less, but these injuries were the limiting factor in me upping training volume. It is very frustrating to know you can train more and harder but are limited by injuries. Part of this is being new to riding (knee and low back), mobility work and better position on the bike were large factors.
Is it hard to change VO2 utilization because it’s hard to change muscle mass?
IE, if you put on muscle and cut fat, your body will use more oxygen. However, it’s not as easy as people think to put on muscle. Make it stronger, lose weight, sure. But legitimately adding muscle is difficult.
But it is not that hard to change muscle mass. I am not a big guy at all, but when I start lifting, I can gain muscle over the course of a few weeks. This adds weight and “lowers” my VO2max.
But the limiter of VO2max isn’t usually at the end of the line (muscle), it’s almost always at the beginning (lung capacity, stroke volume, max HR).
VO2max is limited by O2 delivery, not utilization.
Are you actually gaining muscle mass or are your muscles holding onto more water and your strength is going up because of other reasons? I’m not saying you are wrong, you know yourself much better than I do, but I have seen a lot of people think they are gaining muscle when they really aren’t.
In any case, you are right about VO2 max limiters… it took just a few seconds of googling to find a great article!
I put on more than 40lbs when I was younger through my strength training. Now, I’ve dropped about 10-15 of that when doing endurance sports but when I get in the gym for hypertrophy and max strength work, my weight and physical muscle size all go sustainably up. I usually gain 2 lbs that doesn’t fluctuate day to day like water retention from sugar on a long ride. Once I drop the upper body work, I go back to having a bird chest and drop the weight again.
But It’s kind of moot anyway since that doesn’t limit VO2max.
This inspired me to check my 2020 stats as that’s basically my all time high W/kg as well. Looks like I averaged a little over 7.5 hours/week, put in what appears to be a pretty intense MV SSB plan starting in Dec 2019, and Covid closed the offiice so I saw plenty of opportunities to over reach that year! Lots of big weeks followed by illness. ha! I was on a build plan when a local virtual gravel hill climb race series started and I went all in on that and achieved my best 8 minute effort of 350 watts during one of the race segments.
That put me at 4.3 W/Kg, to push past that mark I would really need to understand and be able to improve consistency and really get into a progressive volume building plan. I think one of my biggest limiters is recovery, it seems that when I try to get to and maintain double digit weeks I get sick or injured.
2022 couldn’t have been any different than '20 - I’m averaging 3-4 hours a week, tried dabbling in running and haven’t used any plan until very recently. Shouldn’t be a surprise that my FTP is as low as it’s ever been!
Still, even though 5 W/kg is probably out of my lifestyle range, (perhaps genetically achievable?), this is a very interesting thread. Thanks for humoring my reply…
Covid allowed for a really consistent training period with good health for me. Back to work last September, as I am a teacher, and the school was a disease pit. Lots of bugs and colds flying around, training was compromised every 3-4 weeks and no progress. April things settled down and with more consistency came more watts.
I’ve not given myself any week or two planned periods off bike but I think they would be beneficial.
I’ll put your theory to test as I’ve planned my first week off in a couple of years. Well actually, it will be 4.5 weeks off and I didn’t have a week off since I broke my arm 7 years ago. My cycling during summer wasn’t going great so it was a good time to plan some extended vacations without a bike.
I hit 5w/kg for 1 hour power in early September. I’d been around 360-370W (for an hour) and 77-78kg for a lot of summer, but was travelling and not riding consistently. After getting back from holidays I had a really solid 3 weeks of riding (12-14hrs/week) which both dropped weight and improved fitness, and I hit 375W @ 75kg for about 1 week of peak fitness. Mostly, my fitness came from riding my MTB hard on a regular basis.
I started riding MTB in 2020 after about 20 years of not riding, though I had good strength and fitness from weights, running, rowing, misc sports. Strava suggests I rode ~100 hrs in 2020, and ~250hrs in 2021 and 2022. We got a good spin bike (with power meter, if it’s to be believed) around Christmas of 2020, and I’d ride it semi-regularly through winters but with no structure or plan.
One thing I’m good at is suffering. Before riding, indoor rowing had been my focus, and in 2020 I had the top age-class 10000m time in my country on the concept2 database. I certainly didn’t hop into cycling without a good base of fitness.
That really does not seem a huge amount of riding time to hit 5w/kg. For comparison it took me circa 500hrs riding time a year to hit 5w/kg (1hr at 325w)…then I read this…
Seems genetics and previous sporting background helps… who knew nice work!
I accidentally deleted a reply when I went to edit it and saw a typoe.
I think you guys may be discounting the fitness and leg strength I had from rowing. In fact, I suspect most of my W/kg gains have been weight loss and adaptations to cycling from rowing, rather than improvements in fitness. I’ll give specifics to show what i mean. In 2020 at age 39 and approx 180lbs, I had Concept2 times of 6:40.X (never got under 6:40 ) for 2000m and slightly over 36:30 for 10000m. While these are not world class, they are pretty competitive. One thing to note is that indoor rowing times are independent of weight - the more power you put into the machine, the faster it goes. Most high-level rowers are 6’4 or taller and well over 200lbs. Concept2 has a weight-adjustment calculator to help lighter people compare themselves with people who are rowing size, and it suggests my 10000m time was “worth” about 33:30. If you look at the Concept2 ranking database for 2022, 33:30 would have been around the 5th fastest verified time in the world. Obviously the weight-adjustment needs to be taken with several handfuls of large salt grains, but it does suggest my aerobic rowing fitness may have been at or near world class.
kpedal - I don’t think 5.5W/kg is realistic for me as I don’t have the training time necessary. I’m hoping to get about 400 hrs in for this offseason+season, and I’ve started to learn/research cycling training. Thanks for the note about the intensity trap; I’d definitely been doing a large proportion of intensity. I do want to make small improvements before next season as I plan to race some gravel/XC.
Last week I did 42 minutes indoors at 397 W avg with Kolie Moores test protocol, TTE is at about 42-45 minutes (50 if my life would depend on it). Power meter in the smart trainer reads inline with the power meter spiders on my other bikes. Body weight with all fluid retention from hard workouts was 85 kilos in the time of the test. Just had two weeks of threshold intervals and long Z2 rides before this as I had my off season so I have very good start for the training season. I try to do a threshold block which will last to Christmas, but I assume that I will get my FTP during winter to 405-410 W. I think my 5 min max is now at 500 W.
I try to chase that high W/kg with just doing quality training and eating healthy so that I recover well. I am a former strength athlete so I have still a lot of upper body muscle mass to lose, but my body fat % is quite ok as veins and muscles are somewhat defined already. I think that a couple of kilos of body fat will get burnt during training this winter as I train 15 to 20 hours per week on “on-weeks”. Last winter I lost 15 kilos as I was 98 kilos (FTP at maybe 360 W) when I began structured training after being just riding hard for fun a couple of years. So I assume that it wouldn’t be smart to just try to get the weight down as the power has been increasing very well all the time. I race gravel and I haven’t lost any races in the uphills yet. I have more to work in race starts and technical parts as sketchy downhills.
I think the best bet will still be to work on power. So far it has been fun to chase groups during races and don’t get as tired as others.
Glad it was of use! I might update it to reflect the end of my 22/23 season. Managed to continue to progress, at least from a TTE perspective hitting 5w/kg for 60m in a road bike TT towards end of Aug and then made a breakthrough in my 5m power (400w) in Hill Climb season.
I use intervals.icu to do this. Go to the Totals page on the left hand side and then at the top select a time period (eg. Jan 1st 2022 to todays date) then look at total Load and divide it by the number of Weeks, then divide it by 7. This gives an average for both weekly and daily. Obviously a little higher for daily if you take a rest day etc.
Seems genetics and previous sporting background helps… who knew 
nice work!
) for 2000m and slightly over 36:30 for 10000m. While these are not world class, they are pretty competitive. One thing to note is that indoor rowing times are independent of weight - the more power you put into the machine, the faster it goes. Most high-level rowers are 6’4 or taller and well over 200lbs. Concept2 has a weight-adjustment calculator to help lighter people compare themselves with people who are rowing size, and it suggests my 10000m time was “worth” about 33:30. If you look at the Concept2 ranking database for 2022, 33:30 would have been around the 5th fastest verified time in the world. Obviously the weight-adjustment needs to be taken with several handfuls of large salt grains, but it does suggest my aerobic rowing fitness may have been at or near world class.