Performance Wildly Fluctuating

Training
1

Hi all,
I know I should ask a doctor, and to an extent I already did and will do it again in the near future. However, I’d like to pick your brains too regarding something that is leaving me puzzled.
I’ve been training quite regularly since February, with volume progressively increasing. Mostly indoors until March, and then mostly outdoors. At the end of March I know I was doing quite well because I could tag along with an A- group. Then it’s since mid-April I’m feeling “empty” when going out. I thought it was the diet (I was trying to trim some weight), but I got back to regular eating and nothing changed. Then I thought it was the weight lifting once a week, but I stopped, and nothing changed. I feel my medications (ACE inhibitors and Beta-blockers) in combination with the heat has something to do with it, but then last Thursday I went on an easy ride after a night of celebrations for a wedding, with lots of alcohol and food and poor sleep, and unexpectedly crushed it on the hills. Thoughts?

1 Like
2

If you have plateaued and even started losing fitness despite continuing to ride regularly, the highest yield questions to ask yourself are all about whether you are recovering or not:

  1. Are you sleeping enough?

  2. Are you eating enough? You say you are “regular eating.” What does that involve? Are you eating enough carbs? (for me at my weight and activity level it’s around 500g/d) Is your weight stable?

  3. When was the last time you had a proper recovery week? Or even took a week off completely?

  4. What is the non-training stress in your life doing? Is work and family taking a lot mentally from you, because if it is, that 100% eats into your physical performance, even if there isn’t a physical component to your work.

The final question is what your training looks like, rather than things impacting recovery. Are you doing too much high-intensity work, so that you can’t recover adequately? Are you periodizing your training at all? etc.

3

Are you simply tired and burnt out from all the building? Do you use a Performance Manger chart? When was the last time you were totally fresh?

4

Thank you for reading and taking the time to respond.

I’m not training much at all: twice a week, one 50-60km ride on Wednesday, one 80km ride on the weekend, and that’s it.

5

I have found, the better my fitness, the bigger the difference between good and bad days. When my fitness is good and I have am having a bad day, it can be brutal, but when things are good, I can pull off some great numbers. To me it would be the difference of doing threshold over and over vs a few efforts and totally cooked.

Your meds and the heat would be something to look into as well, sometimes that can cripple guys.