By Ric Stern
You’ve hit 40, or older, and conventional wisdom tells you it’s time to start slowing down, cut your ride duration, ease off the intensity, avoid the middle ground. You’ve probably heard it from well-meaning friends, maybe even a doctor. It sounds reasonable, right?
It’s also mostly wrong.
At CycleCoach, one of my primary jobs has always been to bust myths and chase mechanisms to understand not just what works, but the why. And while there’s always more than one way to approach training, here’s my read of the evidence and how it should actually be applied to those of us on the wrong side of 40.
Picture the typical masters rider I see: out every weekend, putting in the miles, heart rate sitting comfortably in the 130s and 140s, week after week. Feels like training. Feels responsible, even. Here’s the uncomfortable truth they’re often losing fitness faster than they need to, and the moderation they think is protecting them is part of the problem.
Counterintuitively, the research is fairly clear on this: older riders don’t inevitably lose fitness at a faster rate than younger athletes. The differences we see are largely explained by what masters cyclists choose to do, specifically, the reductions in volume and intensity that come with the belief that they should be taking it easier. Cut back because you think you should, and the decline accelerates. The age isn’t the primary cause. It’s the behavior.
The obvious conclusion: ride more, ride harder is correct in broad terms, but it needs nuance. Because as we age, recovery genuinely does slow down. Harder sessions take more out of us and take longer to absorb. That’s real, and ignoring it leads to a different kind of problem. The answer isn’t to train like a 25-year-old. It’s to train with the intensity that drives adaptation, and protect that training with smarter recovery.
Recovery: slower, but not for the reasons you think
Recovery slows as we age but the reason matters. If we accept the premise that we should ride easier and cut back, we lose fitness. And as fitness decreases, recovery slows further. It becomes self-reinforcing. I’m not suggesting that training harder will keep your recovery capacity identical to your 30-year-old self because it won’t, but detraining is making the problem considerably worse than it needs to be.
Beyond fitness itself, two factors are worth addressing directly.
Protein.
As we age we become slightly protein-resistant, meaning we need more dietary protein to achieve the same anabolic response. Sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass also accelerates without adequate protein and training stimulus. For both males and females, the evidence points to around 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body mass per day. A 70kg (154lb) rider needs roughly 140g of protein, which, if you were eating only chicken breast, would be around 350g of it. Not that I’d recommend a chicken-only diet! If you’re trying to lose fat mass, or eating a plant-based diet, your requirement is higher still, not lower.
Inflammation.
Exercise-induced inflammation is actually a necessary part of adaptation it triggers the cascade that makes you fitter. The goal isn’t to eliminate it but to support it. Foods rich in flavonoids and polyphenols, found abundantly in plants, help modulate inflammation and support recovery. A diet high in a variety of plants isn’t optional background noise for masters athletes it’s part of the training program, and has been shown to help with cardiac health.
How hard should you actually train?
Different training models produce different adaptations, and there’s been a lot written recently about zone 2 and polarised training. Zone 2 steady aerobic work, sustainable but not trivial — forms the foundation of polarised training, which essentially divides your riding between easy and very hard, with minimal time in the middle. This has been popularised by researchers like Stephen Seiler and adopted by a number of professional cyclists, though notably not all of them.
The alternative is pyramidal training: roughly 65% zone 2, around 30% at medium intensity (just below to at threshold), and about 5% above threshold. In my experience this tends to suit athletes with less available training time, though again, several professional riders train this way too. And frankly, I don’t think rigid adherence to one model is necessary; with athletes I coach we’ll move between pyramidal and polarised depending on what’s happening in their training cycle.
What matters more than the specific model is this: if you are well and healthy, you should be doing some genuinely intense training for most of the year. I include VO2max intervals in my own training almost every week, year-round. Sometimes as a specific block, sometimes just a few efforts scattered through the week, enough that my mind and body don’t forget how to go hard.
There’s also a growing body of work suggesting that zone 2 rides shouldn’t always be pure zone 2. Occasionally including harder efforts within longer rides several minutes of sustained climbing, or a handful of near-maximal 30-second efforts adds a useful intensity stimulus without turning an endurance ride into an interval session. Not every ride. But regularly.
Strength training: not optional
Strength work gets more attention than it used to, and rightly so. For cyclists it has direct performance benefits more power output over both short efforts (seconds) and longer durations (an hour or more). But the health case is at least as compelling as the performance case.
Sarcopenia begins in your mid-30s. Building and maintaining muscle mass slows or reverses it, with significant long-term health implications. Masters cyclists — male and female — are also at elevated risk of osteoporosis, for several compounding reasons: aging itself, the lack of mechanical load in cycling, and for older women, the effect of menopause on bone mineral density. I want to be clear that men are not exempt from this. I know from personal experience.
Although adding muscle may increase body mass slightly, the power gains will almost certainly outweigh any weight penalty on climbs and the improvement in durability (the ability to go hard when fatigued) is arguably more valuable. Useful when there’s a steep climb in the final third of a ride, or someone attacks late in a race or spirited group ride.
To drive meaningful adaptation, strength work needs to involve heavy loads and low repetitions. That doesn’t mean loading a barbell on day one if you haven’t lifted in years. Start light — around 10 reps, several sets — to learn correct movement patterns and avoid injury. Expect significant DOMS initially; it will temporarily affect your riding, and that’s normal. A few years ago I started squatting with a 2kg kettlebell, genuinely concerned my osteoporotic spine wouldn’t tolerate more. Within two months I was squatting 40kg. Five years on, I’m more than double that. Exercises targeting the legs — squats, deadlifts — alongside upper body work cover the bases for performance, general strength, and bone health.
Finally, don’t neglect plyometrics: box jumps, lateral hops, and similar movements train your neuromuscular system to contract rapidly. This matters for cycling explosive efforts, sprints, responding to accelerations, but it also matters for ageing more broadly. The ability to react quickly when you start to lose balance is exactly what prevents falls. And for older adults, a fall resulting in a hip fracture can be genuinely life-altering, or worse.
Where to start
If you’re uncertain where your fitness currently sits, which is more common than you’d think, especially after years of training by feel the most reliable first step is an accurate assessment of your Maximum Aerobic Power (MAP), from which precise training zones can be set. I developed the MAP Ramp Test protocol now used by Zwift, TrainerRoad, Rouvy, and MyWhoosh. For RoadBikeRider readers, I’ve put together a dedicated page at cyclecoach.com/rbr with the free MAP and power profile calculator, a Masters Recovery Resilience calculator, and details on coaching options if you want to go further.
Train with intent. Eat to support it. Lift heavy things. The decline isn’t fixed a lot of it is a choice.
Ric Stern is founder of CycleCoach and has coached athletes to World Championship gold, Commonwealth medals, and Paralympic podiums across 29 years.
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