By Ric Stern
That’s the thing you can do when you’re dead, right? Or, at least that’s what I sometimes say as a joke — usually to someone who doesn’t exercise and is marveling at how “amazing” it is that I cycle every day.
But there’s more to it than waiting until you (or I) are dead. We actually need rest when we train, because it’s during the rest periods that we adapt and recover. The training is the stressor — the strain, really — and the adaptations happen in recovery, while we rest and sometimes feel it in the muscles. If your legs are sore post-training, there may well be inflammation there, and it’s this inflammation that drives the adaptation process. Reduce the inflammatory response and you also reduce the adaptations that come from training.
Of course, taking a significant period of time off the bike means there’s no strain at all, and things unwind reasonably quickly. Research by Mujika and Padilla shows that detraining occurs both short and long term, with reductions in short-term fitness within days of stopping.
Side note: by the time this column runs, the Tour de France will already be underway. If you’ve ever wondered why the majority of riders — especially the ones aiming to win — go out and do 3 to 4 hours on the rest day, it’s because blood plasma volume starts reducing within 24 hours of stopping training. That reduction in plasma volume has a negative effect on cardiac output and VO2max. So the riders do an easy day with a few brief efforts, which helps with both glycogen restoration (the body’s carbohydrate store) and maintaining plasma volume.
So how long do you need to rest, and how often?
The honest answer is: it depends, and it’s beyond the scope of one article. It depends on your health, your relative and absolute fitness, your nutrition, the training you’re doing, and more.
Why, then, do so many people suggest 3 weeks on, 1 week off, with the “off” week actually being reduced training, not off the bike entirely? It’s an interesting story, and it originates in the former Soviet Union. Many children and young adults attended sporting schools of excellence, living there full-time. The athletes would return home roughly every fourth week to see their families and while home, away from the coach’s oversight, most of them ended up doing very little training. Separately, many of these athletes were also given performance-enhancing drugs. Rather than attribute the results to that, some research instead credited the superior performance to the macro-cycle planning — the 3-on-1-off structure — because that was a far more palatable explanation than the alternative.
Taking a day off, or having a genuinely easy day, is still important, regardless of that origin story. It’s crucial to have rest days; otherwise: (a) you simply build fatigue that never dissipates, and (b) if your muscles are heavily inflamed from training, it can be harder to replace glycogen, which further slows recovery.
Protein aids recovery; for most readers of this column, that’s likely around 1 gram per pound of bodyweight per day (2 grams per kilogram). Plants matter too: certain compounds in them take the edge off the inflammatory process without blunting the adaptations we’re actually training for. My previous article on nutrition covers this in more detail.
A note on my own approach
In my early 50s, I decided to see how long I could go without a proper recovery week. I still had easy days each week, but no full recovery week as such. I went 16 weeks, and the recovery week only happened because I went away and simply couldn’t train as normal. Over that 16-week period — because I genuinely had easy days, poking along for 30 to 45 minutes, not caring if people overtook me — my fitness actually increased.
Worth being clear about what “easy” meant there: those days weren’t corners I was cutting. They were doing the same job a full rest day does, just from the saddle rather than off it — genuinely low-strain, not training in disguise. That distinction matters. I was, for further context, several years into riding every day with no days off; I’m currently at 9.5 years without one. But the reason that hasn’t caught up with me is those easy days are real recovery, not just easier training. If you find yourself feeling guilty about taking a day off entirely, that’s a different problem, and one worth addressing rather than working around.
What does a recovery week actually look like?
When you do need one — and I’ll come to the signs shortly — aim for roughly 50–60% of your regular training volume. If you currently ride 10 hours a week, a recovery week would be 5–6 hours. I’d also suggest reducing the number of days you ride, or, if you’re a stubborn mule like me, increasing the number of very easy days instead.
If you normally include some intensity — and you should — reduce both the number of sessions and the amount of hard work within them. For example, if you usually do one session a week of 10 × 3 minutes at FTP, then 3 to 5 × 3 minutes at FTP would be a genuinely good reduction.
When should you take a recovery week?
As mentioned, this is hard to pin down precisely in an article. But reduced performance, getting angsty or short-tempered, not enjoying the bike, developing frequent niggles beyond the usual aging ones, or increased infections are all good reasons to ease up for a few days, take in more protein, and up your carbs.
Recovery need genuinely varies by individual, by fitness, training history, life stress, sleep, and plenty else that doesn’t fit a fixed rule (least of all one invented for Soviet teenagers). Working out exactly when you need to ease off, rather than guessing or waiting for a fixed date on a calendar, is exactly the kind of thing a coach helps with. If you want a proper read on your own situation, I built the Masters Recovery Resilience Calculator for precisely this — it takes your training load, sleep, stress, and recent form and gives you a resilience score showing how recoverable your current setup really is. Worth two minutes: cyclecoach.com/rbr — look for the Masters Recovery Resilience Calculator.
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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