Is there a good example of the weekly hours a pro or elite does for a full year round?
I’ve seen long base periods of 20 to 30 hours, but haven’t seen anything for the full 12 months.
800-1200 (have seen as high as 1400) hours a year.
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What about the distribution? Heavily weighted towards winter or more flat? If we took 1000 hours as an average, over 11 months… still over 20 hours a week, pretty much year round…
Weekly hours (as usual, total hours includes plenty of coasting/descending/“breaking” … 25-30%! … these are not erg-mode-basement-hours)
Thomas De Gendt
Sepp Kuss
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Class seeing it like that cheers!
That would make sense with the coasting and easy riding, would really need to see TSS alongside this to understand it better, but seems like even during race season the volume is huge. Was kinda expecting it to drop off with occasional spikes caused by longer events.
Very interesting to see this, what stands out for me is that not as many weeks as expected are above 21 hours… for both de Gendt and Kuss I counted roughly 22/52, and if up to 25 or 30 % are coasting is a lot but not as much as I personally was expecting.
Must be trainer rides in there too. Do pros really train full time on the road these days still?
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Plenty are active on Zwift and would imagine proportion of outdoor:indoor would vary with domestic arrangements, injury, race schedule etc.
I don’t see much indoor riding with the WT pros I check. Some in winter with the Northern based pros but most spend significant time in more comfortable climates. I don’t really see it as a significant training tool for WT pros.
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Trainers are good for pre-race warm ups and post-race cool downs.
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I think indoor sessions are likely to be highly specific and maybe not the sort of thing that they’d share.
Not sure of course, but that would be my general intimation.
scan thru this thread at the workouts, and you’ll see a lot of highly specific work as part of an overall outdoor session.
AFAIK a trainer is primarily a backup training tool if you can’t execute an outside workout in a location hand picked for access to great training routes and weather.
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Not surprised as pros are not time crunched 
and when someone lives in girona, Monaco etc and your only job is riding a bike and recovering after- why would you do your work on the trainer?
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You can’t beat training outside!
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That’s my TDF training sorted then 
So you think they noodle around outside for 6 hours getting in “junk miles”. Then secretly hop on TrainerRoad to bust out a Mount Goode +2 or something?
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While listening to the podcast 
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I recall some mentions this years of pros doing specific trainer workouts.
Specifically I remember a story about Roglic doing two sessions per day in a training camp. It sounded brutal - like 2x3 hours. Possibly it was at altitude.
The other one was a podcast interview with Kevin Poulton. He was talking about riders doing some indoor trainer sessions just prior to a big race in order to get a blood plasma volume boost. I think they were also using the swiss body core temperature sensor. It’s marginal gains but meaningful for pros looking for an edge.
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Pretty bizarre comment this.
They may well do all kinds of training outdoors with occasional interval work indoors. That sounds sensible, and I’m not sure how anyone would say any different.
I put it in here as there are many references to elite training.
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