How do you determine your training for the winter?

Training
1

Days are getting wetter/shorter, my cycling events for the year are finished, and i’m thinking of next year.

I’m planning on formally joining the road racing scene in March/April next year after many years of enjoying local fondos and larger non-race events.

I’m 3.5w/kg at 299 tr ftp. Where do you all put training emphasis this time of year?

  • TR FTP builder with an April timeframe with 2x strength training a week?
  • Huge hours of endurance?
  • Diet and try to drop weight?
2

I have not quite finished my season yet. Got one more event this weekend. Then the plan is.

  1. A short transition period to mid October with no structured training. Have a short tour planned.
  2. From mid October start a base period at about 60% of my peak summer build hours. Include strength build in this period
  3. From late January start a build period. Reduce strength to maintenance

My main season next year kicks off in March and my current event plans run till end of August. With one A event in May and one in August. It is a long season. If I start build too early, it’d be easy to burn out. Thus a nice long winter bike base with strength build helps set a solid foundation for what is to come.

I ride ultra distance / duration. My main focus over winter is the traditional easy volume, building it back up progressively. I include a sprinkling of intensity with some sweet-spot at the end of a longer endurance session but usually just once a week, with a VO2 session being substituted in for the sweet spot once a fortnight.

3

I use plan builder to create a plan to get me through the winter choosing some performance metric improvement as the goal. As time goes on and events or future objectives change and become clearer, I edit the plan accordingly.

4

Way more ‘zone zero’.. I am going to try to keep my weekly cycling at 12-15 hours average, but increase the walking to ~1.5 hours a day-ish. I think building a base from the bottom is important. Strength twice a week, but much easier than most think - hex bar deadlift, pushups, pullups, hint of core, overhead press. Lots of breathing work, if you can’t breath properly on the bike you are lost. I also think a 4 hour hike on the weekends until 8 weeks before my A race is better than more biking. My primary focus is on what can I remove from my life..thinking about stressors here. Adding more is a silly game you can’t win.

5

I’ve stopped after my Aug event due to case where blood is outside when it should be inside so have thought a bit too much about my plans since that is all I can do right now!

I’m doing plenty of kettlebells in movements that don’t make things worse and then once I’m healthy, and hopefully a good bit stronger as a bonus, I’ll be doing some of the old base plans to really get that built up again.

After a few months of that I hope to have pinned down some events that catch my eye, at which point it’s almost Christmas so will put them in the calendar and build a plan starting either straight away if there’s a few weeks before the Xmas break, if it’s too close I’ll start in Jan and fill the Xmas time with Train Now.

6

I’ve done the BaseCamp winter group (www.joinbasecamp.com/foundation) the last 2 years and will do so again. I like the structure and the community. It’s motivating on those dark and cold winter days when you would choose not to ride the trainer otherwise.

Currently in full mtb shred mode until Nov 30.

7

I take a week or so off the bike. Just chilling.

Then I start with an extensive sweet spot block. 2-3 workouts per week. And every workout I increase time in zone. Usually can start around 45min, and don’t move on until I hit 120 minutes in zone. Some years I’ll get up to 140-150 minutes in zone. After that I’ll do an intense VO2 block of 8-9 workouts, each with 20-24min in zone. That usually lasts 3 weeks. After that I do different stuff. Either race prep or a threshold block or just maintain. This past year I got through the VO2 block and a couple weeks of Threshold before kind of giving up structure all together. But I’ve done the Sweet Spot and VO2 blocks every winter for the past 4 years and it’s really helped.

8

That doesn’t sound like much of an R&R offseason, unless I’m misunderstanding. It sounds like a pretty structured, high effort program. Something that someone might do during the actual training/racing season, aside from the specialty phase.

9

Plan=Smash

10

Lucky you . Texas it’s still 100F and dry as a bone.

11

It’s not an offseason. It’s a winter training block. OP asked for a winter training plan, not an offseason. Where are you getting that it’s an offseason?

12

Fair, I misunderstood. Many riders use the end of the year to be more of a reduction in volume/intensity before picking up another bigger training season early the following year. That wasn’t specifically asked here.

13

Gotcha. My 2027 race season training starts in November. That’s when I start the plan I stated above. We start racing in early March. Starting in January would not go well.

14

My first known event isn’t until the end of June. I started an event prep plan that goes from now until then. On top of that I am looking at slowly losing weight until the event hits. Nothing crazy just limiting food portions and being in a calorie deficit of maybe a few hundred calories at most per day. I’ve lost 6kg since January. It feels like a sustainable pace for weight loss.

15

Really interesting to see the different approaches here. We’ve got structure and the complete opposite. Good info.

Yes i’m discussing winter training - not an offseason.

16

After an off season I tend to do a pretty traditional base phase. Lots of endurance slowly adding more intensity with tempo/SST until I am hitting 90-120m of uninterrupted power at 90-95% threshold.

After that I do different stuff depending on when my first races of the season fall and what type of races they are. But it mostly involves vo2 and shorter power intervals of differing types.

17

Disclaimer: I haven’t even owned a bike for four years.

In my 40s and 50s, my winter training was, to the best of my 60-year-old recollection:

2 long rides on the weekends – 4-5 hours

2 sweet spot or threshold sessions

1 day of :15 to :30 sprints

1 day of low zone 2

1 day off

M – off

Tues – sprints

Wed – sweet spot/threshold

Thurs – zone 2

Fri – sweet spot/threshold

Sat-Sun – long

that worked well. My sprint was terrible from 1980 to 2020. I’d work on it to say I worked on it, but the work didn’t do much.

Some years I ignored the sprint and just did two zone 2 days a week instead.

12-15 hours a week, and this worked to get me to 4.7 w/kg if I was 75kg, 5 if I dieted down to 70kg for my peak in June.

Prior to 2020 and 2021, I went all in on building a zone 2 base with two doses of threshold/sweet spot. 300 miles a week from Oct to Jan (season started in Feb, and my goal race/second peak was in June). 16-18 hours a week, which was ridiculous with a full time job and a marriage. I hit close to 5 w/kg at 75kg by putting Vo2 work on top off all that base.

  • use the winter to train your weakness
  • if you can make the time for it, a huge mileage base will get you close to your natural limite
  • if you can’t do big miles, then sweet spot and threshold

Now I just do vinyasa yoga and weight training. I’m too old for bike races!

18

Does anyone mix in riding outside during the winter? (snow ice & all that)

Outdoors I’m planning to do my usual fat-biking throughout the winter weekends. Maybe try to fit in even more of short intensity VO2max anaerobic efforts in those rides. Avoid long tempo/ss/thresh = sweat buildup = risky kind of cold.

Indoors will be whatever I can mentally handle. Probably long medium-high Z2. And try to sprinkle in the other intensities from time to time.

19

If you’ve got weight to lose then now is the best time to lose it. I wouldn’t combine a big step up in training with trying to run a calorie deficit though.

Personally what hasn’t worked for me is going too hard too soon and then losing motivation either before race season even starts or after a month or two of racing so that I’m done by end of May.

What has worked well:

  • couple of weeks after last race (normally around now) of pretty much time off the bike. I won’t completely not touch it, but I’m only getting on it if I really want to because the weather is nice, some friends are out, it’s a chilled coffee ride, etc
  • October through December. Strength training is a high priority. I try to keep some level of strength training year round, but this is the period when I target strength gains instead of maintenance, and will drop a ride before I drop a strength session. Riding I keep mostly unstructured and Z2-3. I actually enjoy that kind of riding and normally end up doing a fairly high volume due to personal preference not any particular goals. When weather is bad i do enjoy watching a movie or binging a TV series while spinning the legs at z2 on the trainer for a couple of hours.
  • depending on family Christmas plans, at some point between boxing day and January 1st I’ll start structured training on the bike again and move strength to more maintenance instead of gains. Typically do 3 x 4 week blocks of Base training so that takes me to middle of March or so. Usually ease into the first block with tempo intervals or at least lower end of sweet spot, 2nd and 3rd blocks more in line with TR recommendations. I’m a masters athlete so 2 interval sessions a week with a long weekend ride works well. Long ride length tends to naturally progress as the days get longer and hopefully a bit warmer. Will usually finish up with a training camp somewhere warm with a big block of volume before moving into Build
  • From middle to late March. Normally do a full structured block of Build which takes me into middle of April, and then will be incorporating some racing into the next Build block. At which point it’s a little bit of a juggling act between racing and training. But I’ve found if I do a full Build and Specialise I do at some point get bored or demotivated (I train to race, it’s the racing that I really enjoy) so I’ve found it’s better to start racing when I have a decent amount of form but not yet peaked, rather than getting to peak form before I race for the first time. Also peaking before I race for the first time puts a lot more internal pressure on me to perform well when I do race which can be counterproductive and take away from the enjoyment. Racing when you know you’re still building form is great fun as there’s less pressure and you can take more risks or experiment with tactics.
  • May-June. Mix of racing and Build/Specialise workouts. I tend to go more by feel and less by TR plan at this point. Let the race calendar dictate when my hard and easy weeks fall rather than sticking to 3 weeks on, 1 week easy.
  • July-August. Tends to be a quieter period for racing plus there’s normally a 2 week family holiday for me (with bike!). So I usually do a bit of a mid season rebuild where I’ll go back to a block of Base and then a block of Build. Targeting some late season form as there are some good races in September (and often get good results at this time as some of the strong early season racers have either catted up or burned out by this point!)
  • in the past I’ve been much more focused on one big A event - long distance triathlons at one point, then big gran fondo or destination type events, also did a season a few years ago focused primarily on a big gravel race (though still with quite a bit of road racing around it, just very much treated those races as C events and didn’t allow them to disrupt the plan structure and key workouts). For those seasons I pretty much put the race in the diary then worked backwards through Specialise, Build and Base to determine when to start the structured training. Just don’t think that approach works well for me when I’m looking to race quite a bit so maintain good form and motivation across an extended period instead of peaking for a particular big goal event
20

I am starting a 2 month TR Plan to get faster for Zwift racing, then go into a TR plan for Rolling Road Race with a “dummy” first race of March 21st.

As a Masters athlete (65) TR will give me 2 hard sessions a week. I plan to mix up swapping one hard session a week for a Zwift Race, OR doing the 2 hard sessions plus a Zwift Race depending how I am feeling.

I plan to do a couple of sessions of strength training a week - but keep them short.