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When developing riders want to improve, the natural focus falls on their training. Riders usually take the "more is better" approach, piling on the hours, miles, and intensity. To a point, those are the basic ingredients for getting stronger - you train hard, you get better. But while that may be somewhat true, it's only half the story.
The most important part of any training program is proper rest. In previous articles, I've written about the cyclical nature of training. It's a process of stressing a system, then allowing it to heal and adapt to the stress, and then stressing it again at a higher level. The hard training you do is the stress you place on your body. However the improvement doesn't come in the training, it comes in the adaptation to the training. And adaptation doesn't happen without rest - rest is where the actual growth and increase in your fitness takes place.
So then what does it mean to rest, and what is the difference between rest and recovery? I see many riders with that far-away look in their eyes. They are struggling to finish races they should be winning, they can't sleep at night, and maybe they've even got a cold sore. The usual response when a rider gets dropped is, of course, to go home and do more training. Fortunately, sometimes someone close to that rider will have enough sense to say, "hey, man, you need a rest week." But what does a rest week or even just a rest day entail?
Training in cycles means a 3-on, 1-off structure, both in terms of days and in weeks. Three days in a row of training, followed by a day of rest, or three weeks in a row of training, followed by a week of rest. In previous articles I detailed the training part; here I'll detail the recovery.
Single days of rest can take on two different forms: rest or recovery. After a week of hard training and a weekend of racing, Monday is an easy day for most people. I like to call Monday a recovery day rather than a rest day. Recovery implies you're trying to heal from what you've just done, rather than thinking ahead and resting to be fresh for what's coming up. It's a matter of semantics, but I feel it helps clients understand the true goal for the day.
The best way to recover (and clear away lactic acid from a hard weekend) is ideally to ride, but life can often get in the way of your perfect training plans. Monday's recovery day can be a day completely off the bike for both mental and physical healing. If you've got limited training time, it might be the day you get caught up on sleep, school, work, or skip your ride in lieu of a weekly massage.
If you can ride, 1-2 hours easy in a light gear at a high cadence will help you clear your legs, recover more quickly, and keep your muscles open and ready to train again on Tuesday. In some cases, you might find that you need two days to recover, and won't be ready to train until Wednesday. For many of my clients who have stressful full-time jobs, or for anyone who had a weekend of extraordinarily intense racing, this is often the case.
The second easy day of the week is more of a rest day than a recovery day, and should come two days before an important weekend event. If you have races on both Saturday and Sunday, you'll ideally sacrifice a day of training during the week by taking your rest day on Thursday, and then doing some light training on Friday to open up for the race. If the race on Saturday isn't a priority, then you can continue to train through Thursday, rest on Friday, and then race both days. If the race is only on Sunday, you can again train normally during the week, rest on Friday, and then simply open up on Saturday with a light workout.
On a larger scale, entire weeks of recovery serve the same purposes. After 3-5 weeks of progressive training where the workload is increasing each week, your body will reach a point where it has to have some extended time to heal. If you don't give your body that time, it will force you to take it by getting you sick, or at the very least by allowing some staleness to creep into your form. This is where most riders make the mistake of going back and training more, which of course only digs their whole deeper.
After 2-3 weeks of training, your body will begin to adapt to the stresses you place upon it. Sometimes you can push that adaptation with a 4th or 5th week of training, but overtraining is a risk, so always proceed with caution. As a general guide, an easy week of training should consist of 25-50% of the volume of duration and intensity of the heavy training week that proceeded it. If you got in 14 hours as your longest week, 6-7 hours will be sufficient as a rest week. If you got in 30 hours, then 10-15 is more appropriate. If you did an hour at threshold on your interval day, 15 minutes on your rest week is more than enough.
If a client finishes their last week of training with very good form and feeling strong, then I'll typically allow them to have Monday as a recovery day, and then proceed with a typical training week but with greatly reduced intensity and volume. This then works as more of a rest and taper than a complete recovery week, and will leave them open and still riding well in the races that weekend without any interruption in their good form.
However, if they finish somewhat overdone I'll have them take a day off, and then ride 1-2 hours easy each day until the first day they can ride without soreness or pain. It's also important for them to regain enough mental freshness to be ready again for structured training. That may happen as soon as Wednesday, as late as Friday, or in a worst case scenario, not at all. With deep recovery weeks like this one, the body goes into full healing mode, and the first week of training that follows is often painful, as you force the body to open again. Typically though, by the end of the first or second week back, you'll feel on top of things again and should be racing well.
It can be difficult to rest properly--much more difficult than training. Paradoxically, training hard is just about the easiest thing a rider can do. Anyone can go out and bang their head against a wall to get better, and riders often let their egos get the best of them by thinking "more means better." Resting takes discipline, patience, and intelligence; because it's actually more difficult to do than training hard, it naturally will yield the biggest results.
There are many effective adages out there that will help you remember how important it is to rest. "Train harder and rest easier." "Put the same emphasis on resting as you do on training." "Be as intense about resting as you are about training." I feel as if I've said those words in every possible form to make the point. While they might be clichés, they get repeated often for a reason. Take the advice to heart - rest with same discipline, dedication and self-control you put into your training, and you'll see the effects for yourself.
Adam Hodges Myerson is a cycling coach, race promoter, team manager, and USCF category 1 racer. His company is called Cycle-Smart, and he can be reached at amyerson@aol.com. He lives in Northampton, Mass. with his wife, Allison, and their two cats Birdie and Marie.