By My friend and RBR reader Janet wrote, “One way I monitor my level of cycling fitness is by how hard (or easy) a routine ride is. I was off my bike for only 26 days and I could not believe how hard one of my routine routes was, the climbing in particular. I am so glad I did that ride yesterday. It’s basically looking in the mirror. I will now work on getting my fitness back.
“Is there a well-known relationship between how long it takes to build a level of cycling fitness vs. how long it takes to lose it?”
This is an excellent question that applies to all older riders, and the older you are the faster you lose fitness when you stop exercising. Unfortunately it takes a long time to build fitness and you lose it fairly quickly. Your body stays just fit enough to do what you ask it to do. The less you do the more fitness you lose.
Athletic Maturity
How athletically mature a roadie is bears on how fast the rider loses fitness. In my two-part eArticle Cycling Past 60 I develop the concept of athletic maturity and explain how to evaluate your athletic maturity. Based on an individual’s athletic maturity I recommend different exercise programs.
Three factors of athletic maturity are directly relevant to how rapidly you lose fitness:
1. Years riding.
How many years have you been riding: 1-2 years; 3-5 years; 6 or more years? The more years the more athletically mature you are because of a larger endurance base.
2. Miles per year.
How many miles a year do you ride: < 3,000 miles (5,000 km); 3-5,000 miles (5-8,000km), >5,000 miles (8,000 km)? The more miles per year you ride the more consistent you probably are so you lose fitness more slowly.
3. Longest annual ride.
How long is your longest ride: <50 miles (80 km); 50-100 miles (80-160 km; >100 miles (>160 km)? The longer your big the ride the greater your endurance.
Two other factors of athletic maturity also influence how quickly a roadie’s fitness declines:
4. Leg strength?
How many step-ups can you do with your: body weight; body weight + 10%; body weight +20%? The stronger your legs are the more athletically mature you are.
5. Body weight?
Based on the Body Mass Index (BMI) how healthy is your weight? Athletically active people have more muscle. Adjusting the BMI for this are you: obese; overweight; normal? The more you have maintained a normal weight the more athletically mature.
The other factors to assess your athletic maturity are upper body strength, flexibility and balance.
How To Reverse The Loss Of Fitness
Use these principles to regain your fitness:
Work on your weakness(es).
Look at the above five factors. Where are you least athletically mature? Then spend relatively more time working on improving in that area without completely neglecting the other factors. You’ll get better results if you just try to improve one area at a time instead of trying to improve significantly in several areas at once.
Intensity and strength training.
You lose power and strength faster than you lose endurance. You have two types of muscle fibers: slow twitch fibers, which have great endurance but little power and fast twitch fibers, which have strength and power but much less endurance. The muscle fibers are recruited progressively. As you ride at an easy pace some of your slow twitch fibers are firing. When you start riding a little faster more of your slow twitch fibers start working. When you start riding hard, e.g., climbing up a tough hill, your fast twitch fibers also kick in and your slow twitch fibers keep firing. Because intensity on the bike and strength training cause your fast twitch fibers to work both intensity and strength training are so important. (Slow- and fast-twitch refer to how quickly the muscle fibers contract, not your cadence.)
Consistency throughout the year is critical.
You need to ride almost every week of the year rather than taking a month off from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Why “almost” every week? Because recovery is also very important and you need periodic breaks of about a week or so to refresh physically and mentally. It’s fine to take next mostly off for Thanksgiving with your family and to take Christmas and New Year’s off but stay active in between.
Frequency.
Frequency is more important than volume as you work to slow down the loss of fitness or to regain fitness. In other words you’ll get more benefit riding four days a week for a total of 100 miles than doing one 25-mile ride mid-week and 75 miles on the Saturday.
Activities of daily living also help.
The more generally active you are the more slowly you lose fitness, e.g., climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator and walking to the local coffee shop or market instead of driving.
Specificity.
However, staying active throughout the day isn’t sufficient. When you are riding your muscle fibers fire in a specific pattern. Even if you maintain some fitness through activities of daily living but don’t ride much you start to lose your muscle memory. Simply running errands on your bike instead of driving helps to maintain your muscle memory.
Bottom Line
The bad news is that the older you are the faster you lose fitness. The good news is that with an exercise program using the above principles you can reverse that!
Happy Thanksgiving! I appreciate the time all of you take to read my columns and to ask good questions. Each of my clients is doing a short Thanksgiving ride next week without the computer and just thinking about all that he or she has to be thankful for. I suggest you do something like that next week for Thanksgiving too.
My wife and I are avid cross-country skiers and two of our ski areas have a few kilometers of trails open so we’re going to the mountains for Thanksgiving. We’ll take our rock skis, old skis that we don’t mind skiing over the occasional rock.
Resources
My two-article bundle Cycling Past 60 includes:
Part 1: For Health shows you how to measure your Athletic Maturity to assess your relative fitness in terms of all aspects of good health. The article then gives you six different health maintenance objectives for different components of your physiology, including comprehensive fitness programs that address these objectives. This eArticle includes three balanced, full-body exercise programs for different cyclists of different athletic maturities. 24 pages
Part 2: For Recreation uses the concept of Athletic Maturity to design programs for riders of different athletic maturity. It includes six different structured workout programs, three each for Endurance and Performance cyclists, based on levels of athletic maturity. 23 pages
The Cycling Past 60 bundle is only $8.98 ($7.64 for premium members using the coupon code).
Coach John Hughes earned coaching certifications from USA Cycling and the National Strength and Conditioning Association. John’s cycling career includes course records in the Boston-Montreal-Boston 1200-km randonnée and the Furnace Creek 508, a Race Across AMerica (RAAM) qualifier. He has ridden solo RAAM twice and is a 5-time finisher of the 1200-km Paris-Brest-Paris. He has written over 40 eBooks and eArticles on cycling training and nutrition, available in RBR’s eBookstore at Coach John Hughes. Click to read John’s full bio.
You touched on a number of quite relevant issues in your discourse on losing fitness.
And don’t we know how quickly we do so when we have a break from riding?
I am 71 years old and recently had a break of 7 – 8 weeks off the bike while travelling.. Fortunately I ticked the boxes on your questions reasonably well.
Now I did know that I would lose fitness during my lay-off but thought that with all the walking I would be doing, including the Inca Trail, that my loss of leg strength and stamina would be minimal. Not so! It still took me about the same amount of time to regain the fitness that I had lost – and it is a rule of thumb that I have noticed that it takes me about as long to get back as the lay-off I have had. So I had just enough time to get back to where I was before my second holiday for the year – this time cycling in Mallorca and the Pyrenees.
The question I always ask myself is “How long to regain my fitness?”. But maybe that raises another topic for discussion another time – “How to avoid losing fitness when you aren’t cycling”
Off topic a little question. I started riding in 2001 doing century rides for Leukemia Society in2001. I fell in love with riding. I had to put everything on hold In May of last year. On May 25 I was diagnosed with brain cancer. The tumor was a Glio Blastoma located behind my right eye. The surgeon took it out on June 2. That part is all better now..No side effects except from all the drugs. 3 more rounds of oral chemo to go. Then wait and see. Yes I look at my bikes wanting to get back on the road. In addition to a good helmet, what other precautions are in order? Most days balance is good, Unless I skip eating. Add some food and I’m OK.
Hi Clyde,
I think in this case, you’d probably want to get the OK and specific guidance directly from your doctors.
I’m glad to hear your surgery went well and you’re almost done with the chemo rounds. My dad had a glioblastoma and had surgery, chemo and radiation treatment for his. I remember his doctors were very adamant about avoiding any kind of head trauma. I wish you continued success with your treatment!
Lars