i‘m a little bit lost at this time, because i plateued since about 1 year. I tried much but it didn’t get better.
I train 4-5 days a week (9-12hrs) with a TSS around 450-550. My FTP stuck at around 300w. First time of the year i trained with Join, i found the planning not so bad but there where no real rest weeks, so the training burned me out over the time. So i decided to train by my own, i ride classic with 1 SST/Threshold, 1 vo2max and 1 long ride per week with 1-2 shorter endurance rides. Every 3weeks i make a rest week with about 60-70% duration. But even that didn’t really get me anywhere.
So i‘m here, a bit demotivated that the hard work over the whole year doesn’t take me anywhere. I don’t really know how to continue with my training to become a better athlete.
Do you have advices for me? Should i first take a offseason to recharge the batteries?
I’ve been thinking about giving TrainerRoad a chance and maybe getting back to a training program that will help me progress.
When you say, “become a better athlete,” do you have any specific goals in mind; Events. or rides, or specific metrics you want to hit? Having something specific and measurable to work toward is a good starting point for motivation.
Is that a general rule of thumb? 1:1 ratio of training and rest? Are there any articles on that? My rest is non existent, combined with poor fuel/sleep and high stress!
Sure, i haven’t planned a specific event but will start at 1-2 races. Maybe one mountain time trail and a gravel race with 70km.
But my main goal is to push my FTP from actually 4.1w/kg to 5w/kg. Thats the point i habe invested a lot of work this year and don’t make any progress so far.
I can’t say whats the problem is on this point, so i had the hope that a trainerroad programm could bring me back on track again.
I pay close attention to my recovery and also try to eat well most of the time. I always have problems to eat enough to hold my weight. Thats maybe a big point.
When i ride i always take 60-80g carbs per hour, depending on the intensity of the workout.
I also have big sleeping issues this summer when i trained very hard i often couldn’t fall asleep for 1-2hours, wake up serveral time a night and sometimes couln‘t fall asleep again. Maybe it was the training or the stress? But at the moment it a lot better since i startet with some mediation to calm down.
They’re a lot to this question and not an easy one to answer online without knowing you or training history. But a few questions to consider… How old are you? Have you taken a season break? How are you measuring improvement?
For instance are you doing 5 or 20 minute time trials and getting faster? Have you extended how long your endurance rides are? Have you extended how long you can hold a certain power for? Increased skills? have you set PRs on important “test segments”?
Cycling is more than FTP. Always a good metric to try to improve but what about everything else? And then there’s the fact that when we hit a ceiling it might just be that. Or that we are battling against aging and slowing the decline. many ways to improve!
I started with endurance sport at 30 years the first years i only run, get better every year. After 3,5 Years i didn’t get any better, so i take a coach. We tried a lot, and the last weeks of running where to much for me. I have a weekly TSS of 700-1000, do a 40hr/week job where i work physically. So i burned out and lost all my motivation to run. At last i ran a race with 30km and 2000m of altitude and have the same time wich i had 1 year ago in a training run. All the work i dit was useless, the weeks with 16-20hrs of training, the problems wich came from such a high load etc. From this point i never wear running shoes again.
So i startet to cycle, it makes a lot of fun and at first i get better very fast. In a Few weeks my FTP went from 215w to 280w. I could push it to 305w at highest peak and get stuck for the hole year now. I‘m 36 and think there must be still potential to increase the power with my short training historie.
My FTP test is always the 20min test with a 5min all out afford after the warm up.
I think i get better at long distances, because at first i couldn’t ride longer then 2hr because of saddle issues. Now i Ride 3-5hrs on long Weekends without any bigger problems. So yeah that point is getting better but the other things are a bit hard to analyze for me. There are some notifications of strava for a higher power at a specific duration but thats only under 5w.
I did never a real season break where i do nothing i always run or cycle the last 6 years. The only breaks i have was when i get sick, that is about 1-2 weeks a year. But then the body has other things to do as recover, so i think thats not a good recovery.
So after the last Trainerrod podcast, i thought about to take 1-2 weeks completely off but always think about thats its maybe to late for the next season, the break would be better in november.
What time do you workout at? Cortisol levels are raised after high intensity workouts and can be difficult sleep. I think the sweetspot for me is 11:30am that least interferes with my sleep and get productive workout.
One threshold, vo2max and long endurance is 3 hard workouts a week. Maybe drop one of the hard intensity sessions and replace with Z2 or reduce the long ride every second week.
What you have described with sleep issues suggests you might doing too much intensity or volume.
Critique both your plan and your actual riding for progressive overload.
Threshold: are you progressing time in zone and interval length?
VO2 Max: are you doing an amount of work at sufficient intensity that you would reasonably expect to induce adaptations once you back off to allow supercompensation to occur?
TL;DR - what have you done to make you think you should be getting fitter?
I usally ride after Work at 16:00pm an on the weekends i start at 10:00pm.
Yeah i think so. I have “talket” to ChatGPT and it confirms the opinion that i trained hard, with good workouts, but with the wrong strukture. Means the workouts at the wrong time, with a bad progression over the weeks and the biggest point with not enough rest.
So my CTL (Chronic Training Load) was negative almost the whole year and so i couldn´t recover an build strengh.
I have often tried to plan my training by myself, read a lot of books about training and know what to do to increase the fitness but i always have one big problem: The progression of the plan. I always struggle with that one thing and don´t know why.
So I’ve been considering giving TrainerRoad a chance, but there are some reviews that report overtraining with TrainerRoad, so I’m a bit undecided, in case it ends up like Join where I’m totally burned out.
Does Trainerroad plan with a 3:1 cycle or are there no real rest weeks planned an i must plan them by myself?
Yeah this is the biggest point for me. Like i write in the other post: I read a lot about training and i know what it need to get better, but i always struggle with the progressive overload. I don´t know how i could solve this problem, so maybe give Trainerroad a try.
This is my Trainingload over the last year. At the beginning you can see the build with join. The Problem was that there were no deload weeks so it works for 3 months and then i came to overreachning.
The rest of the year i try to make my own training, but theres not enough progression and to nuch intensity at rest wekkes i think.
TR does a 3 week on 1 week off cycle, and not sure but I think masters might even do 2 on 1 off. It may just be 2 intensity days vs 3. Im sure someone on one of those plans could chime in.
If you do sign up for TR I’d reccomend following the guidance on red/yellow days. They try to stop you from burning yourself out. Also I’d trust the process even if your volume or ftp are lower than what you are used to.
You have very lofty goals, you are currently at 4.1 W/kg and aim at 5.0 W/kg at age 36. That’s, hmmm, very ambitious. That’s a goal you most likely won’t reach.
You have trouble sleeping with your training, which means you are not fully recovered.
You wrote you have a physically demanding job.
Taking in 60–80 g/h is on the very low end of the spectrum, especially for someone your weight and with your (absolute) power output.
You wrote that “even with rest weeks” you did not get “anywhere”. You also did not write whether you changed your workout types (as opposed to duration).
You did “classic” 1 SST/threshold, 1 VO2max, 1 long ride per week with 1–2 shorter endurance rides. That’s classic training, that’s a recipe for stagnation.
Me thinks you are under recovered (i. e. you are training too much), you are under fueled and you do not follow a (properly) classic periodization with rest weeks. If I were your coach, my goal for the first season would be to make sure you have shed your long-term fatigue while maintaining your fitness levels. I’d prescribe the following:
I’d cut your training time to 8 hours and see if you actually recover. If you cannot, I’d cut your hours even further. Training more only helps if you can recover.
I’d put you on a proper training plan with different training phases and different goals for the phases.
I’d make sure you up your carb intake during workouts from 60–80 g/h to 80–120 g/h.
I’d pay very close attention to whether you take rest weeks seriously. I’d have you noodle around in Z1 or low Z2 and cut the time to 60 %.
Ideally, I’d have you start strength train. You are nearing your 40s and that’s really a must. It is a big unlock.
It sounds like you already recognize it, but building fitness is not a linear path. That’s true at the micro level (3-4 weeks blocks) and at the macro level (over the course of the season and multiple years). If you want to get stronger long term (over multiple years), the proven approach is to target peaks during the season, but then allow your training stress (and fitness) to drop for a bit before starting to work toward another peak. This gives your body the chance to reboot, particularly hormone levels and things that are affected by long term accumulated stress.
The following chart shows my training load and stress balance over the course of the season. And I’m not saying this is the right approach for anyone else, just what has worked well for me. I targeted peaks in late May and early August. The only time of the year I was aggressively ramping training stress was January through early May. Between May and August was more about shedding fatigue and then a small rebuild to hit the highest performance possible for the 2 peaks. The rest of the year, I’ll still race, but not at peak fitness and certainly not ramping up training stress. I could certainly try to do a 3rd ramp/build later in the year, but I’ve burned most of my mental and physical motivation once August rolls around. I’m a big believer in “make the hard stuff really hard, make the easy stuff really easy. For me, that’s not just an approach for workout to workout or block to block, but also how I treat the entire year. Throwing everything I have into a really aggressive 4-5 month plan results in better race performance than going “sort of hard” for 9 months of the year. But that also means that I’m not fighting for podiums in my fall races when my fitness is lower and I’m basically de-training (so I can start strong/fresh again in January). Again, not an approach that’s right for everyone, but has worked for me. I turned 57 this year and hit power PR’s for everything 1 hour or longer. FTP peaked around 315 (which I’ve hit in the past), but my ability to hold a high percentage of that for long durations is what I’ve seen continue to improve year over year.
If I were you, I’d try adjusting your plans to take more aggressive CTL swings up and down over the course of the season and see how you respond. A slow and steady ramp isn’t wrong and can be very effective for a time, but at some point it’s just more of the same and you need to interrupt the pattern and introduce a novel stimulus to drive more/different adaptations. A big part of this approach is putting the ego in check for much of the year when you aren’t in top shape.
I know its a high picket goal with 5w/kg but its a long term goal. I also know that it could take years, maybe i never get there.
The eating and fueling is a good part where i could get better. At the moment i eat around 4000-4500kcal a day and its not easy to eat that amount every day clean and healthy, i have every 3hours a meal with around 800kcal. With this i hold my weight, at hard phases i lost 1-3kg.
Maybe more carbs during the ride is a good chance to get more calories in. Is there a formula how much carbs at wich power are recommended? As example at endurance ride with 180-200w?
I will take 2 weeks complete off training and look how it feels. Then start a build phase at 7-8hours a week and look how my body responds.
The bigger thing will be to get this in my head. Train less, take recovery serious. I enjoy pushing myself to the limit in training. Sport is a big part of my life so i‘m very motivated… as you see sometimes a bit to much.
At this point thank you all for your responses this help me to reflect myself better!
Hey @Endevour Reading the thread and what you have mentioned, at first glance I can’t help but think you’re overtrained because of these signs:
I also have big sleeping issues this summer when i trained very hard i often couldn’t fall asleep for 1-2hours, wake up serveral time a night and sometimes couldn‘t fall asleep again.
I did never a real season break where i do nothing i always run or cycle the last 6 years. The only breaks i have was when i get sick, that is about 1-2 weeks a year.
Here is an article explaining what overtraining is and symptoms:
As well as a quick blog post that goes over FTP plateaus:
After what it sounds like a much needed recovery period to reset, I would encourage you to try TrainerRoad because I think it will give you a consistent training structure that sounds like you need instead of figuring it all out by yourself and overdoing it.
We have a 3:1 ratio training weeks, plus fatigue management (to prevent long term fatigue) and a system that adapts as you go so get a training that adapts to you instead of being fixed.
More info on how TR works:
It looks like you’d be a new athlete with us, so you can take advantage of our 30-Day money back guarantee as well as the free onboarding call with one of our expert support agents
I had my annual check-up today and discussed everything with my doctor. My health stats are perfect but i‘m burned out.
He thinks I’m overreaching and should definitely take a complete break without any sport until Christmas, or even until New Year, depending on how things develop. I should also gain 2-3kg to have a bit more reserves for hard weeks.
I’ll follow that advice for now and then slowly get back into training with TrainerRoad. Of course, with a proper work-rest cycle. I need to learn that more isn’t always better.
Sometimes motivation can also become a problem. So, for now, I’m just going for a walk the next days.
Glad to hear you got to see your doctor and are taking a much-needed time off
This is also a great time to do the other things you love but sometimes can’t get to because of time. So enjoy! We’ll be here on your return and are happy to help answer any questions along the way.
A short feedback from me, maybe it helps someone who‘s at the same situation.
I feel how good the time off is for my body. It‘s the first time since year where I feel no fatigue in my legs and no pain when tensing them. I‘m also very relaxed, theres no stress about the training, a lot of time to reflect. I also think my sleep is better now and i sleep linger to recover well. It was definitely the right way.
So slowly i think about the way back on the bike. I think i‘ll start after christmas. Do you have a advice wich Trainerroad Plan i should start at the beginning?
My Weekly time is the same as before i can train 10-15hrs a week but it’s certainly not good to jump right back in so hard. I thought about 6-8 hours?
Reading the thread and what you have mentioned, at first glance I can’t help but think you’re overtrained because of these signs:
